So I've been running a game group with a bunch of my friends/family for a couple months now, but something keeps nagging at me with one of the player's characters. Everyone else has obligation but this one character and I feel like it's all positive while everyone else is dealing with negatives (from a game mechanics point of view).

The character is a Givin and his backstory, basically, is that he was working on tech for The Body Calculus (the dudes in charge) when The Empire shut down his experiments. Like any good mad scientist type, he went and continued his work regardless to prove that his theories were right all along. To facilitate his research, he took money from a local hutt lord who he eventually betrayed and had locked up (this was playing into the beginner game and the follow up scenario with Teemo the Hutt).

I rather liked his backstory and honestly it's one of the more thought out backgrounds in the group. The problem that I have now is that once the group eliminated Teemo as a threat at the end of the second adventure this player has no more obligation and is the only player in the group with duty. I don't necessarily have a problem with this for the most part, but it seems like everyone else in the group has this negative thing they're dealing with (obligation) while he only has positives. That, and his duty is tech procurement for The Body Calculus, which means every time they get near a computer he's scanning for anything he can use to send back to get more duty points. Actually, since he purchased a handheld scanner at character creation he scans pretty much anything and everything looking for "stuff".

I just don't know how to deal with it at this point and honestly, when we started I was mostly unfamiliar with the duty mechanic and that's only compounded by the fact that his duty isn't to the rebellion, which most things that talk about dealing with duty refer to, it's to something else. I'm just not sure how to deal with this, especially with consideration to other players and what could happen down the road. What if someone wants to join the rebellion or for some reason wants to have a duty to something else? Do I do two separate duty ranks or combine them as it says in the AoR rulebook? Again, that's all referring to everyone's duty being to the rebellion and doesn't at all discuss dealing with players with duties to different factions in the same group.

Eh, maybe I'm just fundamentally not understanding how to use duty as a GM. Maybe I'm letting a player munchkin up a bit but I don't feel like he's doing it to min/max but because it fits his idea of his character more.

Anyway, what do you guys think? Am I just over reacting because I just don't get it? How do you handle duty in groups where not everyone has it or has it to different factions from other players in the group? Thanks ahead of time for any assistance.

It sounds like you're working the Duty aspect in just fine. If they join the Rebellion down the line, you could always give that character a choice - continue to serve the Body Calculus, or stay with your friends and help them. I seriously doubt the Rebellion would be okay with a character constantly mining computers for data and sending it off in the middle of their missions.

As for the Obligation issue, you could always give out more. Putting the character in a position to take on more obligation in order to gain something unique regarding his duty could work, and would get him on more even footing with the rest of his party.

Generally speaking if a character starts with obligation, he should always have obligation. Every person in an campiagn that uses obligation should always have at least 5 points of obilgation since theres always someone or something to worry about in this universe. Killing Teemo shouldn't have been the end; as Hutts are a naturally vengeful species and thus the obiligation is likely to be replaced by something directly relating to that.

As for his duty, thats being handled well. The thing I would factor in that scanning tech isn't just waving a handscanner over it and saying job done; that should earn 1 or 2 points of duty. The player should sit down with the computer, get into it and obtain the data directly off the hard drive as well; it doesn't have to be a difficult check but the most importent factor is that proquiring this tech should take time. If he can't hack into the computer then he needs someone else to hack into the computer, consuming not only his time but other peoples time that are spending off task. My GM ensures that I always know how long my activities are taking; which is largely because from the moment we go into a base the clock starts ticking; when the timer counts down thats when overwheming renforcements, a star destoryer or some other mc-guffin arrives and the situation begins to become complicated. Make it a matter of proritising time as time is limited in this world

Time can be used to pressurise people and raise the stacks of a task that should otherwise be considered mundane; after all, most large crime or millitry empires would look to protect their assets quite vigoriously; and if they can't protect it they will ensure that who ever gets it doesn't make it out alive; or they simply start liquidifying the base with high grade explosives.

Obligation 5: bounty. The character is being hunted by bounty hunters hired to get revenge for some piece of tech/data that the character took from the wrong person.

Thanks for the inspiration. I definitely need to make it harder for him to get info, or at least nail down exactly what sort of "tech" he's looking for.

I'm also really liking the idea of him accidentally finding some information that causes him some problems for just for finding it. I'm sort of upset at myself for not thinking of it earlier. I actually think I might be able to use something that he's already carrying around with him he found and hasn't turned in yet. If I do that, now or later, would you just tell the player right away they got bounty (or whatever obligation fits) and why so they know, or wait a little while and sort of say "Remember that schematic for the MacGuffin you found? Well, it turns out..." I'm still figuring my way around this system and there are times where in other games I would have kept something a secret but I don't feel like that works as well in this one, in a good way.

Also, just for the record, they didn't kill Teemo. Well, not for lack of trying. The did manage to blow a sizable hole in his palace. They set him up and had Jabba take him prisoner, so I've got him sort of saved for a ways down the road to start showing back up or at least mucking up the player's day through third parties still loyal to him or something. We'll see what the players are up to by then.

I'd keep him in the dark until it first triggers and then maybe he sees a bounty board or a low level hunter shows up

Eh, maybe I'm just fundamentally not understanding how to use duty as a GM.

Obligation, Duty and Morality are all there to make your PC's lives more complicated, but in a way that lets the player inform the content of those complications. They answer the GM's unspoken question, "how is your life going to be more complicated as the party moves from point A to point B?"

With Obligation and Morality, these are rather obvious, but Duty is no different. If a PC is raising his Duty just by doing whatever comes the party's way or he's learned to check every 5' dungeon tile for tech, you're doing it wrong, and it's up to you to correct those rewards and expectations.

Opportunities to raise Duty should really be presented as "side quests" -- additional reward for additional challenge. It can also be posed as a dilemma, thus: the party discovers the BBEG in a lab, and they can either chase after the BBEG or hang around in the lab long enough to loot it before reinforcements arrive. If they give chase, Duty Dude gets to shed a tear at the missed opportunity. If they stay, they get the goods (and Duty bump) and get to fight the reinforcements, but BBEG lives another day. If Duty Dude stays behind (i.e.: the party splits) then you get two simultaneous action scenes in different locations -- very cinematic and appropriate for Star Wars.

Thanks, Lorne. That makes a lot of sense and is how I've been doing obligation, but with the other players I have to really remind them of their character sometimes. Morality is a whole other can of worms that I'm having to deal with with one of my players, but I know what I want to do there. Most of the people I'm playing with have never played a tabletop RPG before and are coming at it from a more "board game" mindset and aren't really getting the whole role-playing aspect I think. I'm trying to work on them seeing their characters as more than just stats, but it's difficult at times. With this guy I'm having to deal with the opposite to an extent (or maybe just more obvious dose of the same) and it's thrown me for a loop I guess. I'll definitely have a sit down and discuss how we're going to deal with it going forward.

My players have the Teemo threat on their horizon too, though they haven't properly dealt with it yet (and it's going to turn into something much bigger than a single adventure, since they have 30-40 obligation to Teemo between them), but I'm already planning for what happens after.

I doubt Teemo has many friends, but what about his former associates? You know, the guys who are further down the totem pole who got muscled out of their lucrative work now that someone has filled the vacuum left behind by the jailed Hutt.

Don't i seem to recall in the book somewhere that by default, obligation can't go lower than 5 per player?

Well, that doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if all you're playing with is obligation I understand the need to keep it around and I've done that with other players who have reduced obligation (usually finding a way to have them get more obligation with something else). If you have duty instead of (or as well as) obligation I don't see why you would need to keep obligation forever. I can totally see players eventually dropping their obligation to Jabba (for example) as they fully commit to the rebellion. That seems to me to be pretty standard Star Warsian character advancement.

I mean, basically, this character had an obligation to Teemo because Teemo was backing the character's research. Once Teemo was dealt with, the character recommitted themselves to The Body Calculus. That's the way we looked at it anyway.

I did sit down and talk with the player in question and he understands where I'm coming from so that was good. I think, after last nights session, my biggest issue is that there is only one person on the duty table so the number looks totally different than the other players. I mean, he's TRYING to get his duty to 100 and he's the only one with duty, so having a duty of 40 makes sense in that light. The other players all have obligation around five (except one guy with 20, but that's a different story all together). It's just something that I'm going to keep an eye on. I mean, if I just give him a couple points every time his duty activates, it'll take him forever to gain ranks and he'll spend a lot of time with his duty in the higher numbers which means it'll activate all the time. Maybe I should find a way to get everyone else to commit to something pick up duty, but I just hate to force them to do something like that with their characters if they don't want to.

The only other thing I'm thinking about is destroying the Givin. The character has a sealed vial of virus they found on a derelict star destroyer (I totally ripped off Death Troopers for an adventure hook) that he wants to turn in to the body calculus. I don't know if that falls under tech procurement or not, but considering the amount of work that he put into getting that sample and the fact I'm making him turn it in personally I'm allowing it. Plus, if I can't eventually wrap my head around this duty thing I can just kill them off and blame it on the player. I'm joking, of course...

...mostly.