So I know that there are various way that we all use the Obligation and Motivation.

The following is how I am using them in my game. Please let me know what you think about it and tell me how you are using them in your games.

I use the Obligation roll, at the beginning of the session, by-the-book. Essentially the obligation roll has the potential of temporarily reducing all of the player character's Strain Thresholds. The CRB says "A character’s strain threshold represents how much duress a character can withstand before he is stunned, dazed, or otherwise incapacitated. Strain represents psychologica l or mental “damage” to the character." In many situations you see that strain represents intense focus on the part of the acting character. So a reduction in your strain threshold means they are under more duress than normal and you cannot take as much stress or focus as hard.

The way I see Obligation, is that the number doesn’t so much represent the hard and fast of the specific obligation, as it does the effect that the obligation has on the character. For instance, compare Bob, with a Debt of 5, to Dan with a Debt of 10. These Obligation scores don't specifically mean that Bob owes less money than Dan does. It means that Bob is less concerned about the Debt than Dan is. Maybe Bob borrowed 120,000 from his grandfather to buy a ship but Dan borrowed 500 from Jabba the Hutt to buy his sister out of slavery. Essentially, I view Obligation as a measure of how much the character is stressed out by the particulars of the Obligation. This makes a bit more sense for when the obligation triggers. The characters are simply reminded of their stress and it affects their Strain Threshold.

To that end, I have offered my players two opportunities to reduce their obligation scores. During play, if they do something that would cause the stress to resolve to a degree, their score could go down by one point. Between sessions, if they send me a cool story of what their character is doing to resolve the story of their Obligation, their score will go down by one point. To encourage them to do this I added the caveat that if two of the characters work together in one of these stories, both characters will get the reduction and it will be doubled to 2 points.

Motivation I have placed in the hands of my players to implement. Should they decide that their character's motivation calls for it, they can add a narrative setback to the story, in order to earn the group an additional 5 XP. For instance, the group is hiding out on a deserted planet. They have successfully hidden from the imperial scouts in orbit and are planning on waiting a few days for them to leave. A player with the Relationship - Family motivation could tell me they turn on the ship's systems to sent a message back home, thus giving the scouts another chance to find them.

What do you all think?

As an example,

I had a group of cops bust in and attempt to arrest the players while they were at the bar waiting for their contact to get there. I had narratively set up the situation that they were playing a friendly game of Sabbak with each other to get a better handle of the game. The Cops show up, demand that they get their hands on the wall and move forward with binders. As you can expect the Wookie decided to resist arrest. Initiative is rolled and we come to the end of the initiative order and only the Nautolan Bounty hunter has yet to take any actions. She has her character, a combat focused bounty hunter survivalist, stand up and reach over the table to flip over the cards of the other players and declares "Well thats why I lost, the wookie was cheating". We had established that her Freedom motivation represented her naivete` and her desire to go out and experience the galaxy after having been essentially a slave on a pirate ship her whole life. Because she played her character's motivation instead of joining the fight (where she was needed) she earned the group an extra 5 xp

Another character a Bothan Scoundrel, has the Dutybound Obligation. He decided that the duty was to the Spynet. The reason it is an obligation is because he feels that he has yet to live up to the duty he feels towards the net. He sent me a story of how his character was sprung out of jail by the net because they thought he was another Bothan. The operatives that broke him out set him up with some equipment and a clean slate so he decided he wanted to be a part of the net. His character made initial contacts with the spynet and is awaiting further correspondence so his obligation has gone down by 1.

Your observations about Obligation seem spot-on. Your plan for how to let your players use their Motivations sounds cool.

Sounds like you and your group are having a lot of fun with the system so great job on that!

Giving the entire group 5 bonus XP for one person using their Motivation may add up faster than you'd expect over time. Especially if multiple players manage to call their Motivations in a single session. If you cap it then you'll only end up discouraging the rest of the party from doing it after the first one succeeds for the session. I'd suggest either reducing how much xp a Motivation call is worth if you're awarding it to everyone or sticking to the book recommendation of the reward going to the player whose character Motivation it is.

The Obligation set up with the story submissions is a nice touch for running with a creative group of players. Just make sure you have events that will give them more Obligation from time to time or you may find them flat-lining it to the minimum 5 per PC after a few sessions of active between-session writing submissions. If it is too easy for them to flatline their Obligation level and keep it down then it can trivialize the impact it has on your campaign.

Sounds like you're getting some great stories out of it in play though. Just make sure you can keep getting stories out of them by not letting them discharge their Obligations too quickly.