Moral Leanings and Self

This is my first post about game design.

So, story consequences are my favorite kind of consequences. Piss off the right people without confronting them and your hometown gets slaughtered. Retire your character to settle down with your new spouse or else they'll get killed trying to join you on your adventures. These kind of things don't have an effect on your character sheet, most of the time. They're aimed more at the player.

But that doesn't mean the story the game's wrapped in can't have gameplay consequences.

Death is the biggest gameplay consequence most of the time. You don't get to keep playing your character - roll up a new one, and lose all of your sweet gear as a result. Start from scratch.

But, as some other D&D blogs I read have pointed out, death isn't the only way to accomplish that. What if your character just gets sick of being an adventurer?

Here's a rough draft of some mechanics based around that.

Moral Leanings

When you roll up a new character, give them up to four Moral Leanings. These are rules that they, as characters, follow strictly. Breaking them would go against what they stand for as people.

Try to keep proper nouns out of them - usually, kicking in the teeth of the lich that killed your father is its own reward. It doesn't need gameplay to motivate it.

EXAMPLES:

"Provide medical aid to injured innocents."

"Do not strike down an enemy who surrenders."

"Bury the religious with their belongings."

Self

Self is a stat. It's how much your character is comfortable having their actions controlled by you, the player.

They aren't necessarily aware that they're being puppeteered, of course. But if they act against their own moral compass, they will begin to question themselves. Have I lost myself as a person while pursuing gold and glory? Is the adventuring life really for me? What would my mother, may she rest easy, think of me now?

When you roll up a new character, you have an amount of Self equal to 1d6 + however many Moral Leanings you have. Your maximum Self is 10.

At 10 self, you may give yourself advantage on one d20 roll per day. (This is like a less shitty version of 5e's inspiration, or at least I like to think so. It doesn't really need to be there, if you don't want.)

At 2 self or lower, you stop wanting to take so many risks. You must roll a Save vs Fear whenever you fall under half health (once per combat). If you fail, your character is only able to run away.

At 1 self, you fall into a deep apathy. You automatically lose initiative, and cannot gain initiative-based benefits in any way.

At 0 self, you lose control of your character. They probably just retire, but it's also possible they become an antagonist.

You lose one self whenever you act in a way that is contradictory to one of your Moral Leanings. You gain one self whenever you act in accordance with one of them. 

Discussion

So, this mechanic was almost entirely inspired by Deltarune's ending (that link is spoilers and contains a mild jumpscare, btw). The idea of fictional characters getting fed up with the player is really interesting to me, and I think it's a cool way to "enforce" roleplay, if that kind of thing is your cup of tea. Especially since the smartest thing to do is to start with at least two Moral Leanings, since that way you can't start off with either of the debuffs. 

This obviously isn't going to be a good thing to implement into every game. I'd stay away from this in one-shots. And sometimes players just want their characters to be mechanics-on-legs. But in longer-term games with a focus on roleplay? I feel like this works nicely (though it could probably benefit from some tuning).