When GMing, there are certain times when you flip a Destiny Point according to the rules. Things like "Helping Hand" and "Raising the Stakes" are listed on p. 26, as well as various talent uses and so on.

Infrequently a GM might use a Destiny Point as a narrative aid, but this seems a bit unclear to me. I mean, the GM can say that the weather is bad and have people take disadvantage, or roll vs. Fear, and so on, without having to spend Destiny Points.

In the game I ran last weekend, the players were using Destiny Points very quickly, and I couldn't find any reason to use any to add to the pool. They spent down to 1 Light Destiny Point remaining, and then held it "for an emergency".

Do you ever just flip a Destiny Point? Without doing or saying anything, and just let the players think something major has just happened, something they missed? I could see doing that, but haven't.

So, when the players have spent themselves dry, how do you keep those Destiny Points flowing?

When GMing, there are certain times when you flip a Destiny Point according to the rules. Things like "Helping Hand" and "Raising the Stakes" are listed on p. 26, as well as various talent uses and so on.

Infrequently a GM might use a Destiny Point as a narrative aid, but this seems a bit unclear to me. I mean, the GM can say that the weather is bad and have people take disadvantage, or roll vs. Fear, and so on, without having to spend Destiny Points.

In the game I ran last weekend, the players were using Destiny Points very quickly, and I couldn't find any reason to use any to add to the pool. They spent down to 1 Light Destiny Point remaining, and then held it "for an emergency".

Do you ever just flip a Destiny Point? Without doing or saying anything, and just let the players think something major has just happened, something they missed? I could see doing that, but haven't.

So, when the players have spent themselves dry, how do you keep those Destiny Points flowing?

Honestly, I struggle with the whole idea of Destiny Points. I'm fine with players using them - lots of games have Karma or Fate Points or whatever. What I'm totally bemused by is the idea that I, as GM, require permission to make something nasty happen. I do it all the time. It's pretty much what I consider my job description to be. PCs exist in a sunny void as far as I'm concerned until the GM brings the conflict and the rain.

So why do I have to flip cardboard counters to do this? I've kind of settled to the view with them that if there's a bunch of Dark Side points to spend, it's telling me I'm supposed to be adding nasty twists of fate and making opponents tougher. Flip a couple and that guard they thought was dead manages to gasp out an alert on his communicator or rise to shoot someone in the back one last time. That Storm Trooper minion? Well now he's a former sergeant busted back down for his nasty temper and habit of brawling and he's determined to pummel one of the PCs whilst laughing horribly.

Sometimes I'll flip a point just to make it really rain on the PCs whilst they're walking home from a successful mission.

If you can't tell, I don't hold much with this modern namby-pamby the players are your friends coddling.

When GMing I generally use them just to upgrade the difficulty on a players check, or upgrade the skill use of one of my NPC's. For example, if a player is trying to climb the wall of a warehouse (as happened in our last game). I could add a black to simulate rain, or darkness. Blacks make it harder, so failure is more likely, but don't add a real chance for disaster. Mechanically there's no reason to add a red, but I want to add a chance of disaster, so I flip a destiny point to upgrade a purple to a red. Now they have a possibility of a despair, not just falling off, but falling off and yelling out, alerting the guards just around the corner.

Sometimes I also want to just upgrade one of My NPC's chance to do something. If that Mook only has a one skill in shooting, upgrading his skill with a destiny point gives him a better chance of doing some damage before the teams Marauder does something unpleasant to him.

According to the game rules, to make something harder for environmental reasons, you add blacks. As best I understand it, you generally only put reds into the difficulty if there's a very obvious strong and/or disastrous consequence of failure without modifying the situation at all (your climbing a wall above a blazing inferno perhaps). Using a destiny point lets you throw that red in just because you feel like it, or want a little chance of random chaos. Sometimes I'll also just upgrade difficulties because I see the players are low and know they'll need some soon. A random trading roll doesn't generally need a red, but what the heck, throw one on to make it extra interesting. Maybe they'll get a despair, and try to sell those stolen stormtrooper guns to an Imperial agent.

One of the ideas I took home from Gen Con came from a game I was in with Katrina Ostrander.

It was a Force and Destiny game and we were all Force users of some sort. We were at some ruins which came under attack by a group of individuals. If I recall, we weren't really hurting for Destiny Points at that time. When the opponents attacked, one of the individuals in our group stepped in and put himself between the bad guys and our NPC friend, and did not attack but became a human shield for the unarmed NPC.

The GM thought that was a brilliant and noble idea that she flipped a dark side Destiny Point to Light as a reward, and potentially as way to represent the force being with us.

I thought this was a great idea, especially for a con game where XP and credits rewards were meaningless.

SUre.

What our GM would sometimes do is (if the Light Side was low) flip one at the start of Combat and "contrive" some manner in which the characters took a Setback for that round (dust cloud from the dropship, ambush!, etc).

He did this a few times in other scenes (like the Barkeep would suddenly be racist and hate non-humans, giving us a Setback die when socializing him, etc). Basically he took it as "freely add more Setback to the scene".

A few times it was the contrivance that split the party just before combat (so he could run a challenging fight for the Soak Beast).

But really he only did this if the balance was mostly Dark Destiny, otherwise he'd start fights without piling on the black dice.

I see Destiny points as having two purposes for the gm.

First, it gives you cover to have nasty twists of fate happen to the players. If you just straight-up say "you dive into the turbolift and slap the controls, but you see to your dismay that the controls were damaged in the last firefight" that can seem like arbitrary screw-age to players. But if you hand them a destiny point when you say "but to your dismay" then they feel like there is a mechanical reason for what is happening and they are still getting something out of it, so probably won't feel quite so put out.

Secondly, as others have said, by upgrading dice it introduces the potential for triumph for the bad guys or despair for the heroes. It's an opportunity to give the narrative dice a greater chance to make the story more interesting.

As gm, you are going to be doing those things anyway, so just make sure when you are doing it to remember to pass the destiny points back; especially if you feel like you are sitting on too many of them.

From hearing Jay Little discuss the idea of the Destiny Point mechanic, the dark side side of it is akin to how Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds handles GM fiat.

In M&M (2nd and 3rd editin), if the GM is going to do something outside the rules that is determental to the players or their goals (such as allowing the bad guy to escape the scene), this is deemed "GM Fiat" and each character involved gets a free Hero Point, which allows the hero to do some fairly assume stuff later in the story. To use a comic book example, Batman often has a number of "GM fiats" put in his path until the final encounter, when he spends them like candy to be utterly awesome in taking down the villain of that particular story arc. Superman gets them as well, but tends to spend them right away so that he can do something awesome in that same scene. Spider-Man earns them by the handful because his GM is generally a capricious d***, and when he finally gets a chance to spend them, like Bats you see Spidey do some pretty amazing (spectacular even) things and taking on guys that are way outside his weight class.

That's a part of what the Dark Side tokens in the Destiny Pool represent, is the GM's ability to twist the story in ways that don't favor the players, but also giving them a reward for "playing along" now so that they have the chance to do something really cool later, be it influence the narrative themselves, trigger a talent, or simply just upgrade a future skill check.

I use them mostly just for upgrades (difficulties for the PCs, skill checks for the NPCs). My issue is getting the players to spend them, they tend to horde them, even if they really should consider them. They seem to be more afraid of the negative impact than they value the positive, even though I've been pretty lenient and sticking pretty much with the charts. I find this a bit frustrating, and I've been tempted to say "use them or lose them" and if more than an hour goes by, just flip the pool over to dark and start again. But that probably wouldn't go over very well...

In one Edge of Empire game, we used it to "Compell" an obligation of Addiction to keep a gambling addicted charcer from leaving the game when he was winning.

I've struggled with this as well.

I tend to set the difficulties of the various challenges the heroes face to be pretty tough for them, and sometimes they'll find it a big challenge or they'll have a run of bad luck with the dice.

At this point I often feel like it'd be kinda mean to flip Destiny Points to upgrade checks to make things MORE difficult.

One thing I had intended to do in our latest session, but I forgot, was to scale down the difficulties but use Destiny Points to upgrade them. So, instead of a Hard check, it might be an Average check with an upgraded difficulty.

At one point a player did some inspired roleplaying and I flipped over two of the dark side Destiny Points so they had SOME available.

I use them mostly just for upgrades (difficulties for the PCs, skill checks for the NPCs). My issue is getting the players to spend them, they tend to horde them, even if they really should consider them. They seem to be more afraid of the negative impact than they value the positive, even though I've been pretty lenient and sticking pretty much with the charts. I find this a bit frustrating, and I've been tempted to say "use them or lose them" and if more than an hour goes by, just flip the pool over to dark and start again. But that probably wouldn't go over very well...

If your players are actively hording the Light Side pool to intentionally deprive you of points to spend for an expended period of time... Yes, you should totally start stealing them back. They're trying to "game" the Force.

I use them mostly just for upgrades (difficulties for the PCs, skill checks for the NPCs). My issue is getting the players to spend them, they tend to horde them, even if they really should consider them. They seem to be more afraid of the negative impact than they value the positive, even though I've been pretty lenient and sticking pretty much with the charts. I find this a bit frustrating, and I've been tempted to say "use them or lose them" and if more than an hour goes by, just flip the pool over to dark and start again. But that probably wouldn't go over very well...

If your players are actively hording the Light Side pool to intentionally deprive you of points to spend for an expended period of time... Yes, you should totally start stealing them back. They're trying to "game" the Force.

Just "spend" the dark DP anyway, even if there's no dark DP to flip over -- GM fiat.

Let them know that DP are a limited resource for the players , but not the GM and they'll stop trying to game the system.

Yeah, that's essentially what I mean. It's a limited resource for both the players and GM, but if it's being abused... well, as the GM you're free to break the rules , AKA Gm fiat.

I have yet to bring it up with them, I just noticed a trend towards the "save them" mentality since a new player joined last couple of games. So I'll bring it up, and if they don't understand the purpose, or continue to hoard then...my goodness, look at all those reds!

As Dono said, flip one when you want to introduce a twist to the story that hinders the PCs in some way. You can even do it for dramatic effect when the twist was planned ahead of time. The players won't know the difference, and they'll think you're awesome for thinking on your feet and throwing the perfect obstacle at them, even though you had it planned all along

As a GM I often use them in the game when a baddie needs to get away, or use cover. Like above comments Making it a game mechanic instead of GM fiat seems to go over better.

last game we started with 5 Light, and 1 dark. Over the game session it went to 5 Dark and 1 light, and then back. to 5 light and 1 Dark by the end. Most of the players used them to upgrade thier pool.

I have yet to bring it up with them, I just noticed a trend towards the "save them" mentality since a new player joined last couple of games. So I'll bring it up, and if they don't understand the purpose, or continue to hoard then...my goodness, look at all those reds!

Yes, definitely bring it up. Especially if your group is used to something like Pathfinder's Hero Points or something, that represent a small pool of very powerful points that are hoarded and used very infrequently. You may need to explain that Destiny Points are intended to flow back and forth fairly regularly, affecting many actions in subtle, and sometimes less subtle, ways.