Inspired by Idanthyrsus' thread regarding Honor , I'm working to codify some thoughts I've had for a while about revisions to the Honor chart. I've felt for ages now that there are some glaring omissions in the 4e chart as written (you gain Honor for fulfilling a promise, but you don't lose any for failing to fulfill one?), plus spots where the phrasing for a given act is unclear (there's no "committing a crime," only "being an accomplice," which I think was intended to mean participating in general rather than being a side element to somebody else's crime). In particular, I think every Virtue needs to be represented in the chart by both gains and losses, ideally to varying degrees in both directions.

Here's the chart in progress. I really do mean "in progress" -- as you can see, I haven't put numbers on anything yet. There are also two major alterations I should explain:

1) I've added a column listing which Virtues are at stake with a given act. Initially I did this for my own benefit, so I could see whether anything had only honor-gaining/honor-losing acts associated with it, but I'm inclined to leave it in there just for the sake of clarity; it helps show how a given action engages certain Virtues, possibly losing on one front but gaining on another. It doesn't mean I'm attempting to track each Virtue with a separate number.

2) The Virtues mentioned there are not the canonical set. This came about because I was trying to think up gains or losses for some of the under-represented Virtues, and also trying to decide which Virtues were involved in certain acts from the chart (are criminal acts violations of . . . Duty? . . . Honesty? . . . Courtesy?). As anybody who's looked up Bushido on Wikipedia knows, one of the more codified version of Bushido lists eight virtues, rather than seven. I'm guessing the game designers went with seven because it's a repeated number in L5R (Great Fortunes, Great Clans, etc); the one that got cut from the list was Self-Control. But that fit in very well with some of the acts I thought were missing, like "openly displaying emotion" and "giving in to desire." Sure, you could class the former as Courtesy and the latter as Duty -- but if you take Self-Control as a Virtue on its own, then you can remove Honor, which is already hard to define or list acts for. And hey, if you eliminate Honor as a Virtue, then you get rid of the linguistic confusion between Honor-the-stat-you-get-by-following-Bushido and Honor-I-mean- meiyo -which-contributes-to-the-stat!

So here are the seven Virtues I'm operating off of, and why I made the alterations:

* Courage, Duty -- no change.

* Compassion -> Benevolence -- the latter just sounds more appropriate to me, as it's less squishy-pacifist in connotation. But if you don't like the change, it's easy enough to run a find-and-replace. :-)

* Courtesy -> Respect -- I feel like many of the items that should fall under this banner become much clearer if you think of them in terms of respect. But again, easy to find-and-replace.

* Self-Control -- new to the list, and takes under its wing some of the things that previously would have been called part of the excessively-broad Courtesy.

* Sincerity -- name stays the same, but it now incorporates some of what used to be classed as Honesty, i.e. telling the truth. Those two Virtues have always stepped on one another's toes; this reduces that problem, and makes space for . . .

* Honesty -> Righteousness -- this could also be called "justice," but I like this name better. It takes on some of the things that used to belong to the badly-defined Honor Virtue (e.g. following a dishonorable command), plus stuff like criminal acts that didn't have any clear association, and it makes a proper space for acts of justice to be things that can gain you Honor.

But let me stress that the second column of that chart is purely informative, not mechanical in any fashion. If you don't like me rearranging the Virtues, all you have to do is ignore Column B. Everything on the chart will still be the kind of thing I think ought to either gain or lose Honor, according to the norms of the setting.

Which brings me to the reason I'm posting this already: can you suggest further alterations to the list of acts? Things that ought to be there which aren't, or ways to phrase a given act that will make its meaning clearer? I feel like some of what's there ought to have levels, the way things like criminal acts or breaches of etiquette do, so that fulfilling a minor promise will gain you Honor at the very bottom of the chart but have no effect at 4 and above, but fulfilling a difficult promise would still bring benefit at higher levels (to choose but one example). I'd definitely like input on stuff that's just straight-up absent, though. A number of the elements there are, of course, still open to interpretation (what constitutes a major breach of etiquette vs. minor? how much difficulty or personal cost is needed for fulfilling that promise to matter?) -- but there's always going to be some interpretation, and further info doesn't belong in the chart proper anyway. I may write up supplementary notes at some point, though.