This is related to my post about Conflict by Surprise, but it's more general.

In the F&D game I run, we now have three out of four Light Side Paragons, because they've been incredibly vigilant about avoiding Conflict whenever possible. They do the right thing even if the alternative is much more difficult or dangerous.

Has anyone else come across this?

I'm interested in brainstorming ways to challenge them by providing them with difficult choices to make. Ideally situations where there are no "right" choices, only a choice between two bad options.

Have you come up with any interesting ways to challenge your PCs who might be reluctant to take on any Conflict?

Give them tougher decisions, where they have to choose the lesser of two evils. That'd leave anyone conflicted.

Just take the classic "better of two evils" scenario and apply to any situation. For example: a train is headed towards three innocent people, let's say they are your allies and all good people, who are tied up on the track. There is no time to stop the train, but you do have the ability to throw a switch on the train track and send the train the other way, to its doom by way of a collapsed bridge.

The train is full of dozens of innocent people, none of whom you know personally, but also contains the bad guy responsible for tying up your three allies.

What do you do?

OR

How about a situation where a not-evil, but mentally-distraught, man threatens a group of innocent people as some sort of last-ditch effort to...

feed his starving children,

draw attention to a corrupt government,

get justice for an unresolved crime,

etc?

You have the choice of whether to kill him or let him kill the innocents. Or you enter negotiations with him, you calm him down, and then he turns his gun on himself before you can react. That leaves emotional scarring that can be hard to deal with.

"To a deep and dark place, your role-playing must go."

To add to Away's suggestions, here are a few of my own:

In a crowded city fight, the bad guys miss but with a triumph as the player swings their light-sabre to deflect heavy blaster bolts. Using the triumph, one of the deflected blaster bolts blows out a major support of a crowded pedestrian foot bridge above. With a creaking and groaning of metal, it begins to fall, dooming many innocents to their deaths or gruesome injury. The next player to act has a chance to use the move power to save them. It's a big object, they may need to tap into those dark side pips to arrest the bridges fall and save those innocent bystanders.

The party is escorting a high ranking almost legendary diplomat to deal with a war between two neighbouring worlds that has already cost millions of lives. Some scum-bags have shot down their transport in the dune seas of Tatooine. Suffering dehydration and heat exhaustion, and with the diplomat almost dead in their arms, they stumble across the home of a moisture farmer. Unfortunately he is a full-blown survivalist nut-job and the party need the one functional speeder he has to get to the star-port to get back on track with the mission. The farmer needs that speeder for his very survival so he refuses to part with it under any circumstances.

Mind you, if your players are going out of their way to make the right choices to the extent of facing much greater challenge and difficulties, I think that they deserve to be light side paragons.

Oh, I agree they deserve what they've got, I just don't want to make it easy on them

Ok.... dumb idea but....

If they have their hearts set on being paragons, they are gonna be paragons. That's just how the system is built. To favor the good guys and make bad guys have to be REALLY bad guys to get the bottom of the morality chart.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

Ok.... so.... as Paragons... they've gone out and helped a lot of people right? They've made promises, they've helped people that couldn't help themselves, they've stood up for the little guys, right?

Probably just a little too much....right?

Ok, so they've licked morality, now it's time to keep all those promises they made desperately avoiding that Conflict.

Sounds to me like all they've done is traded their conflict for obligation.

After all, that's the true burden of the Jedi. Not the force, or the darkside, or the limited wardrobe options, but the expectation that you'll be able to fix everything.

You can always play into their strength and weaknesses too. If they avoid taking out a big bad make that have repercussions in the story, place them in real dire situations where even saving others will result in gaining conflict due to measures taken to solve the issue at hand. Threaten their associates, friends, etc....force them to make a meaningful moral choice.

In my game I have a Jedi character with compassion/hatred. For the story his Mentor was captured and the party formed a rescue operation with the help of some associates. The group sidestepped all the moral traps laid out (although he was the only player with a morality scale) until we reached the climax. His Mentor was being tortured throughout so he made fear checks to represent this and to drive home the evil being done though he passed each check, barely. At the end he had the opportunity to not kill the Enemy who had done the deed, knowing if he did not take care of them now he would put others at risk later...even though it was a conflicting choice he ended the threat and what they represented for his kind, giving in to a moment of hatred over compassion. I gave him 6 conflict points.

Finding the right moral hook will allow for conflict to be harder to avoid and enrich their personal story.

The party's nemesis kidnaps a ship of refugees escaping from a war torn planet. He demands the party assassinate a political figure or else he will kill the hostages. The demands are on a holo disk so no way to trace where they are now. They are given 48 hours to succeed, and only after HoloNet news confirmation will they release the hostages.

Perhaps as they are chasing a thug, the enemy starts a fire trapping everyone inside, including innocent people (say a hotel). They only have time to save the people or defeat the enemy. If they go for the enemy the people die in the fire, else if they save the people have the thug die in the fire. Give them a clue that leads them to the thug's family of 10. Depending on how long it takes them there may be less.

They have met a village (of a very short alien species) suffering from a rare disease. They are told that the only cure comes from some vital organ of a creature they dare not cross. Play up the creature as a huge monster. After the party makes promises to the village they reach the area where the animals lives only to find out that it's a sentient living species with close ties to the light side of the force.

I think Ghostofman is on to something.

Trying to enforce "really hard choices" on the Paragons in your party can come across to the players as punishing them for playing the type of character they wanted to play. It has traces of the "D&D Paladin Screw Job" scenario where the DM sets the player up in a no-win scenario that no matter how they react, their Paladin PC winds up falling from grace (so glad they've pretty much deep-sixed the ultra-strict requirements for 5e).

Given that many of the suggested Conflict penalties are for doing things that would standard operating procedure in most other RPGs (D&D and Edge of the Empire coming immediately to mind), being able to keep walking the straight and narrow can be a lot tougher than it might seem at first glance. And it gets tougher if there are other PCs that are more willing to get their hands dirty and do the sort of unsavory things that a Paragon would avoid... such as snuffing out a generally innocent life to prevent a greater evil from rearing it's ugly head (think Giles and what he did to prevent Glory's return at the end of BtVS Season 5), which the Paragon might gain Conflict for anyway simply for "guilt by association" (i.e. an ally commits an act that would generate 6 or more Conflict without doing anything to stop it).

Also, I'd suggest speaking with the players of these Paragons, and ask them if they want their PCs to be "morally challenged" every session. Some players might welcome the chance to wrestle with those types of moral dilemmas on a regular basis, while others would prefer it to be something that comes up only occasionally instead of every time they walk out their front door.

Very good points, Donovan.

I don't personally want to get so deep into the 'moral dilemma' type of story that we're roleplaying challenges against an enemy who's going to poison schools full or orphans or drop a bunch grandmothers off a cliff and the player has to decide which they do. That just sounds unpleasant to me.

One thing I realize I've had trouble with is getting the players into more of the roleplaying aspects. Because of the nature of the adventures we're playing (I didn't write it specifically with these characters in mind), we don't have a lot of personal connections to the PCs like friends, family or allies, and they're in places where it could be implausible to introduce such connections.

I think there's also a sense in which the two players who've been the most 'morally vigilant' are looking at it more in technical terms. "If I do that action I'll take some Conflict and this score could go down, so I won't do that" rather than "my character's response to this dilemma would be _____".

In our first adventure one of the PCs voluntarily took 10 points of Conflict to sabotage the ship of some bounty hunters who the party had decided to allow to leave. The party decided the moral thing to do was not to strand these bounty hunters in space to die, but to leave them to go on their way. One PC secretly sabotaged their ship because his character's personality and his Emotional Weakness was Anger, and he didn't want the bounty hunters to be able to hurt people in the future.

That was a great bit of roleplaying on his part rather than a technical analysis of how he could make this specific number go up from session to session. That PC had to drop out of the game unfortunately, and there hasn't been much RP like that since.

I'm finding myself challenged at dealing with the Emotional Strengths and Weaknesses of these characters, I guess.

Here's a great one that I use time and again in those situations: Personal interest vs. the greater good.

One of your player characters' good friends is in debt, and the Hutt he owes to chooses to make of him an example, imprisoning him in carbonite only to await a gruesome execution shortly thereafter (sound familiar, right?). Only your players can save him. At the same time, however, the Empire has obtained a droid whose encrypted memory banks hold the location and schematics of a Rebel base, and Imperial agents are transporting it to the headquarters of the Imperial punitive fleet, where the data can be decoded and then an assault on the Rebel base mounted. Your players are tasked with intercepting the Imperial agents and stealing back or destroying the droid pronto.

What will your players' characters do? Will they have to choose between their friend and the Rebel cause? Will there be time to do both, and if so, what immoral shortcuts will they have to employ? Do they kill the Hutt and his entourage of innocent thugs? Do they blow the undefended passenger transport which the Imperial agent and the droid are on out of the sky, destroying the plans but killing innocent passengers? Perhaps the Rebel High Command entrusts them with a sum of money to bribe the agent. Do they steal the credits to pay back their friend's debt? And so on and so forth.

Also, as a last piece of advice, trip them up whenever you can and force them to make morality decisions, but reward them for embracing their inner conflict to do the right thing (whatever that is, only their characters know). Perhaps their roguish friend knows a way to sneak into the Imperial base to steal the droid. Perhaps the Hutt, pleased with the sum they give him, provides a false encryption key that will give the wrong information to the Imperials. Perhaps they can slice the data themselves and change the location of the Rebel base to the Hutt's home planet, so that the Imperial punitive fleet arrives there instead, and they can then save their friend in the confusion of the battle as the Hutts defend themselves from what they think is an Imperial attack on their territory.

They will end up with some conflict, but the reward for that will be having accomplished what they set out to do. In other words, if, from your players' perspectives, the ends must justify the means, have them achieve those ends.

Just do what bane would do.

I think key is to communicate to your players that this is about conflict, not dark side points. You are conflicted when you are facing hard choices, where there's no right answer.

Tell them that even Yoda and Obi-Wan accrued some conflict, probably more than just a little, precisely because they wanted to do the right thing. But what if doing the right thing means a coup against a democratically elected leader just because he happens to belong to a religious sect whose members you are to kill on sight, no questions asked? Conflict!

What if doing the right thing means stretching the definition of "defender of peace" so far that you bring war to systems that just want to secede from the central government, and throw countless "cheap" (=cloned) lives away for some arbitrary strategic advantage? Conflict!

The die roll determines whether you can live with your choices, or whether they bother you. It should never be easy to be at peace with yourself when the galaxy around you is going to the crapper.