Preamble

So after what I would consider a pretty good discussion on the nature of Good vs. Evil as it pertains to Light Side Force Users vs. Dark Side Force Users, a thought struck me and rather than hijack another thread, I decided to spin my thoughts off into a separate thread. These thoughts are purely a hypothetical thought exercise combining the morality system as it relates to the dice mechanics of Force and Destiny. This is NOT something I am considering needing a house rule for, but merely wishing to discuss in a thoughtful and courteous way if a house rule were needed to represent a slightly more fluid early game morality and make the Dark Side slightly more in line with a couple lines of dialog from the films. I will reiterate this is not something I am planning on implementing now or ever, but the thought experiment interests me and I think input from the community could be valuable in shaping this hypothetical scenario. While I will formally structure this first post, please feel free to get comfortable. Take your shoes and socks off. Fiddle with your toes a bit before wading in to what I hope will be a satisfying look into how mechanical rules interact with the concepts of moral slippery slopes and destiny.

What We Know and What the Rules as Written Represent

1) Per RAW, Force and Destiny characters who have not yet achieved a paragon status either way roll Force Dice to activate powers. Light Side Pips may be used freely and without cost to activate powers. Dark Side Pips may be used if and only if the player flips a destiny point from the Light Side Pool to the Dark Side Pool, accumulates strain equal to the number of Dark Side Pips used, and accumulates conflict equal to the number of Dark Side Pips used as a minimum with the possibility of additional conflict being garnered if the act is also "evil."

Example: A character rolls their Force Rating to activate move, generating a result of 2 Dark Side Pips. The player must flip a destiny point, increment their strain by 2, and gain two conflict. The player then uses those pips to activate the base power and a magnitude upgrade to push a silhouette 1 NPC off a cliff to their death. For the purpose of this example, the action will be considered evil and is adjudicated to garner an additional 10 conflict. The end result is the character gains 2 strain and 12 conflict.

2) "Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force, but beware of the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice." - Master Yoda on the nature of the Dark Side

Conjecture

As it is the nature of the Dark Side to be the "path of least resistance" and tempting to those who lack the discipline and self control extolled as a signature virtue of a trained Jedi, for those without the benefit of training or the benefit of experience of one who has attained the status of a Light Side Paragon, requiring the expenditure of a Destiny Point and the accumulation of strain mechanically seems contradictory to the seductive allure of the easy way to power. At it's heart, Star Wars is a morality play, and mechanically this is in place to represent that the Player Characters are destined to be the "good guys."

Hypothetical Alteration of Base Assumption of Game Mechanics

To better portray the Dark Side of the Force as a tempting option and assume that on some level the Dark Side of the Force has a will of it's own of an unknown level of personification but certainly on the "diabolical" end of the spectrum, and the fact that until a character has chosen a path, either light or dark, all characters have the potential to fall to the Dark Side as much as they have to ascend to the Light Side, a change in mechanics may be required if this is the story you wish to either play or tell.

Suggested Hypothetical Mechanical Alteration of Game Mechanics to Better Represent the Altered Assumption

1) This will ONLY affect characters who are created with a starting Morality of 50, and will stop affecting them once they have reached EITHER Morality 71 OR Morality 29 because by attaining a Paragon status, they have in effect "chosen a path." If a character's Morality goes above 71 or below 29 at any point and then returns to the range of 30 to 70, they will use the Rules as Written.

2) To make the Dark Side more tempting for these characters who have not "chosen a path," when rolling their Force Rating to activate Force Powers or Talents, either Dark Side Pips or Light Side Pips may be used. If a Dark Side Pip is used, deviating from the Rules as Written, a player will accumulate Conflict equal to the number of Dark Side Pips used and any subsequent conflict generated by the action, but will not accumulate Strain or flip a Destiny Point.

3) OPTIONAL: If at any time before a Path is chosen by reaching either Morality 71 or 29, becoming the student of a Master who has attained either Light Side or Dark Side Paragon (or a Holocron made by a Master who had attained a Paragon Status), the nature of entering a formal training environment constitutes the "Choosing of a Path."

OUTRO

I open the floor to discussion on the potential merits/pitfalls of such a system, as well as general feelings on the substance of this issue at the heart of what makes Star Wars such a compelling story (at least to me). I would ask that you remember this is done as a thought experiment and as such does not constitute a belief on my part that the rules should be changed, or need changing, or anything of the nature. I would like to thank you all for your time in reading this and contributing to what I hope will be an interesting, enlightening, and friendly discussion.

Cheers,

The Gentleman Scoundrel

Hohum!

I foresee a lot more dark side players ... not necessarily a bad thing.

I like your idea, that's about as constructive as I can get...

If I may point out a "flaw", for lack of a better term, in your argument: you're viewing temptation as solely a mechanical thing - Dark side pips, Destiny points and strain. The primary source of temptation for the players should not come from either of these things; they are merely mechanical effects that supplement temptation. The real, tangible temptations should be provided by the GM as in-game choices and consequences.

Your players need to break into an Imperial facility? That would involve a lot of climbing, sneaking, lockpicking and computer-slicing, with the possibility of a dangerous firefight if something goes wrong. Or they could just, you know, torture the access codes out of the Imperial officer they mugged in an alley. Same result for much less work.

Or your players defeat a bunch of thugs who have been extorting the poor locals of the money they badly need to survive? The players can be good guys and give the cash back to the impoverished locals, or they can keep it themselves and afford to buy all sorts of goodies.

That's where temptation should come from, in my opinion. Not from whether or not you can use Dark side pips without having to flip a Destiny point.

Is it in fact RAW that you gain 1 conflict per dark side pip spent? Sheesh, having to flip a destiny point and gain strain is bad enough. I see that as the Dark Side "personified" working against you, rather than you giving in to the Dark Side, which as Krieger22 noted should be about the morality of what you are doing with the power.

I do like the proposed house rule, though as a GM I think I wouldn't allow it to be used for just any roll, only rolls where the morality of the power's use is at least in doubt. For example, if you're using Influence to inflict strain on someone, it would be appropriate, but if you're using Heal to fix up someone you don't stand to gain anything from it would not.

I might even offer extra dark side pips once in a while to truly tempt players with power for doing bad things! Like, say a PC is tossing an object at one of a group of storm troopers, and they generate one light and two dark pips. I might offer to double the dark side pips to 4 in exchange for the character taking 4 conflict so they can take out all the storm troopers by activating Magnitude (even if they don't have it unlocked yet)! That's how you get them to fall, mwuhaha!

Indeed it is. After all, you never HAVE to spend those dark pips. Nobody's holding a lightsaber to your skull...but if you choose to do so, you too can find yourself cackling about UNLIMITED POWER!

The strain and DP expenditure are mostly a layover from pre-morality versions of the mechanic. It exists for balancing reasons, and although morality lessens their neccecity, I still feel they're needed.

Conflict may be enough of a balancing agent for some players, but there are some oddities introduced when a player reaches the dark side threshold without the DP mechanic in place. If we leave it out then we have a player that can use every single pip on their roll with no drawback aside from increasingly meaningless conflict. Alternatively we use RAW and require a DP to be flipped and strain spend to use white pips, but then we have the issue of the player going from able to use all pips to being restricted. The morally "neutral" player would be getting more out of the dark side than the dark sider.

If I may point out a "flaw", for lack of a better term, in your argument: you're viewing temptation as solely a mechanical thing - Dark side pips, Destiny points and strain. The primary source of temptation for the players should not come from either of these things; they are merely mechanical effects that supplement temptation. The real, tangible temptations should be provided by the GM as in-game choices and consequences.

Your players need to break into an Imperial facility? That would involve a lot of climbing, sneaking, lockpicking and computer-slicing, with the possibility of a dangerous firefight if something goes wrong. Or they could just, you know, torture the access codes out of the Imperial officer they mugged in an alley. Same result for much less work.

Or your players defeat a bunch of thugs who have been extorting the poor locals of the money they badly need to survive? The players can be good guys and give the cash back to the impoverished locals, or they can keep it themselves and afford to buy all sorts of goodies.

That's where temptation should come from, in my opinion. Not from whether or not you can use Dark side pips without having to flip a Destiny point.

Krieger22, great point on where the temptation should come from.

In the game I have been running, that has been where about 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the conflict generated, with the remaining conflict being generated either through the Dark Siders goading into rash actions (which was -really- shocking to me as how much the "Irritating Corporate Survey Taker" disguise was evidently -really- irritating), a confusion related to the definition of "Street Urchin," and one of my player swears the others suck all the luck out of his Force dice. Seriously, he may be on to something though, as I think he's maybe rolled a total of 6 of the white pips over the course of the campaign thus far while one of my other players can drop 6 white pips on the first round of every encounter it seems.

The strain and DP expenditure are mostly a layover from pre-morality versions of the mechanic. It exists for balancing reasons, and although morality lessens their neccecity, I still feel they're needed.

Conflict may be enough of a balancing agent for some players, but there are some oddities introduced when a player reaches the dark side threshold without the DP mechanic in place. If we leave it out then we have a player that can use every single pip on their roll with no drawback aside from increasingly meaningless conflict. Alternatively we use RAW and require a DP to be flipped and strain spend to use white pips, but then we have the issue of the player going from able to use all pips to being restricted. The morally "neutral" player would be getting more out of the dark side than the dark sider.

I figured this particular mechanic was either evidence of a "time before Morality" or as I postulated originally, a safety net designed to ensure that all PCs are basically "the good guys," though I do have to ask for clarification on why you feel conflict is "increasingly meaningless"? To my mind in a "single core book" campaign, Morality is probably the single most important thing to a Force and Destiny character. Morality, more so than any other number on the sheet seems to influence the trajectory of a character's destiny. Are they the hero, or will they live long enough to become the villain?

As food for thought in regards to your last sentence, I would ask you to consider the following:

As several characters through out the films have mentioned "the Will of the Force," this implies some level of personification. While there is no hard evidence (if you stick to the movies and only the movies, though the Clone Wars season 3, episodes 15 - 17 seem to come out and say, "here are the personifications of the Force. Also, they are shape-shifters.") that the personification is nothing more than the fact that people tend to ascribe to things that aren't people the qualities of people, if the Light Side of the Force has a will, then so to must the Dark Side. It would then stand to reason that both the Light Side and the Dark Side would want agents to feel it's will and act upon it. In this scenario the benefit given to the morally neutral character becomes sort of a "signing bonus" or method of recruitment, sort of like Faust's bargain. "Anything you want for the low, low cost of your soul!" to egregiously paraphrase a classical work. As Faust found out, that bargain wasn't exactly all it was cracked up to be. Once Faust's devil had Faust's soul, or the Dark Side has scored the shiny new recruit, the nature of the corruption means retention isn't an issue, and why give the tempting cookies to someone you already have in your pocket? You get more return on investment to hand those cookies out to the next schmuck willing to trade their "soul" for a quick gain. A similar case without the religious overtones can be found in the marketing methods of narcotics dealers. "The first one's free..." Give someone a taste, get them hooked, then take all their money.

That's an interesting way of justifying the narrative side of the issue, but I think there's more dissonance between the mechanics and narrative from the dark sider being mechanically worse than there is from the dark side not being tempting enough. It's pretty tempting enough, although I enjoy FuriousGuy's suggestions quite a bit. Changing the mechanics around at the most optimal time is sometimes less messy than removing them completely.

As for the depreciating value of morality, I meant that in the context of a player going to the dark side of the force. If that is the path a player has chosen or accepted, conflict eventually loses a lot of its meaning. At morality 7 you're not gonna care much that torturing this guy might give you some conflict.

That's an interesting way of justifying the narrative side of the issue, but I think there's more dissonance between the mechanics and narrative from the dark sider being mechanically worse than there is from the dark side not being tempting enough. It's pretty tempting enough, although I enjoy FuriousGuy's suggestions quite a bit. Changing the mechanics around at the most optimal time is sometimes less messy than removing them completely.

As for the depreciating value of morality, I meant that in the context of a player going to the dark side of the force. If that is the path a player has chosen or accepted, conflict eventually loses a lot of its meaning. At morality 7 you're not gonna care much that torturing this guy might give you some conflict.

First off, thanks for the clarification! Your first post makes much more sense to me in the light of context. By that same token, Morality also becomes less of an issue at 93 because you have pretty deeply committed to a philosophical course of action and there is little difference between morality once you are inside the highest and lowest morality bands. The biggest changes occur when you are somewhat in the middle of the scale until you cross over the threshold for Paragon one way or the other.

I also liked FuriousGuy's suggestion, as I was notorious when running the old D6 Star Wars to offer up "free" force points that very obviously had some dark side strings attached, and have been trying to figure out a way to get a similar sort of tangible and quantifiable temptation to stray from the path of the light, especially when a player makes it known that "oh, out of character, I would so just fry this jerk on principal.... but I'm a Jedi, so instead, I will take many deep breaths."

At morality 7 you're not gonna care much that torturing this guy might give you some conflict.

Actually, at morality 7, you want to make sure you torture some people (or do other conflict-gaining things) every session! Otherwise your morality will slowly slip upwards and you'll lose those tasty dark side paragon benefits! Kinda nifty, that. Almost like the dark side will forever dominate your destiny...

I think it would be very fitting to offer a similar mechanic to dark-side users w/r/t light side pips, only instead of gaining conflict for using them, you lose it. Again, I think it would work best when the character is doing something that could at least possibly be construed as good, such as using Heal on an ally or defending someone weaker-than-thou. Even Vader was redeemed!

If you are a dark side user and you use Force powers a lot, it can be very difficult to redeem yourself. By default, a dark side user uses black pips, and the character generates conflict for every black pip he or she uses. That's a slow climb back to 71.

Oh, derp, I forgot.

If you are a dark side user and you use Force powers a lot, it can be very difficult to redeem yourself. By default, a dark side user uses black pips, and the character generates conflict for every black pip he or she uses. That's a slow climb back to 71.

I thought that Conflict (and by extenstion strain and destiny point costs) for using dark side pips went away when the character became a dark side user. Once they drop below 30, they just treat the dark side pips the same way a non-DS character would treat light side pips.

But yeah, since once you go dark side you stay there until your Morality goes above a 70, it's not too hard for a dark sider to stay on the dark side; the only thing they run the risk of losing are the modifications to their wound and strain thresholds.

If you are a dark side user and you use Force powers a lot, it can be very difficult to redeem yourself. By default, a dark side user uses black pips, and the character generates conflict for every black pip he or she uses. That's a slow climb back to 71.

I thought that Conflict (and by extenstion strain and destiny point costs) for using dark side pips went away when the character became a dark side user. Once they drop below 30, they just treat the dark side pips the same way a non-DS character would treat light side pips.

But yeah, since once you go dark side you stay there until your Morality goes above a 70, it's not too hard for a dark sider to stay on the dark side; the only thing they run the risk of losing are the modifications to their wound and strain thresholds.

Not exactly. When you fall to the darkside the rules flip. You flip destiny points and spend strain to use Lightside points. At least that is my understanding.

Indeed the rules do flip, but as far as I can tell, you still suffer conflict for using the dark side pips. I think any alternative would be... illogical.

I'm AFB, but I'll make a point of double checking when I get a chance.

You're right, kaosoe. The destiny flip and the strain are tied to using the "wrong" kind of pips, but the conflict gain is tied to using dark pips no matter what your Morality is.

Yeah, that means it is basically impossible to be redeemed. I mean, I guess you could swear off using the Force for a long time, but Vader didn't do that and he still flipped back to the light side. Kinda of a cruddy mechanic if you ask me. It does make what Yoda said true, for sure, but I always assumed he was just being dramatic to keep Luke from going dark.

It makes redemption incredibly difficult. Which is more fitting.

Mechanically, if you are dark side user who uses a lot of Force powers, you're redemption is going to be similar to your fall. Full of destiny point flips and strain suffered.

Yeah, that means it is basically impossible to be redeemed. I mean, I guess you could swear off using the Force for a long time, but Vader didn't do that and he still flipped back to the light side. Kinda of a cruddy mechanic if you ask me. It does make what Yoda said true, for sure, but I always assumed he was just being dramatic to keep Luke from going dark.

I don't think vader flipped completely to the light side. He put himself on the right path then died. It likely would have taken a while to switch completely to a lightside user.

I always figured that the easier/more tempting aspect of the Dark Side was already covered by the dice. There are more faces on the die with dark side points than light side points, although the light side faces tend to be more powerful (i.e.: more 2 pip results).

Ergo, there is a higher probability of generating a DS point than a light side point (higher probability that you will roll a face with DS points), but if you do roll LS points there is a higher probability that the effect will be more powerful (the average number of points generated by a LS face is higher than the average number of points generated by a DS face on the die). Overall, the average number of LS/DS points generated is equal, but this slight weighting is one of the things I love about the system. It's a subtle mechanic which ties well into the "light side is stronger, dark side is easier" theme.

Vader did completely flip light. Somehow. You don't get to be a glowing blue force ghost chilling with Obi Wan and Yoda if the Force hasn't completely forgiven you.

Then again...

If a Lightsider gets conflict for flipping dark pips...does a Dark Sider get negative conflict for flipping light pips? Are there other deeds you can do that grant 'negative conflict' to explain something dramatic like Vader->Anakin?

Are there other deeds you can do that grant 'negative conflict' to explain something dramatic like Vader->Anakin?

Easy. Sacrifice self to save others: +100 morality (briefly).

Are there other deeds you can do that grant 'negative conflict' to explain something dramatic like Vader->Anakin?

Easy. Sacrifice self to save others: +100 morality (briefly).

Not just self sacrifice to save others, Papa Bear wasn't going to let the Emperor kill his cub!

Seriously, though, acts of self sacrifice have usually been depicted to be in some way shape or form to be incredibly redemptive in this sort of genre, so if a Dark Sider throws themselves on a grenade to save the squad, or dives into the radiation laced reactor room to get the hyperdrive back online just in time to escape the bigger, nastier explosion, as long as they are willingly laying down their life, BOOM! Instant redemption.

Even with the strain cost, my players are still pretty tempted to dip their feet in the dark pip pool. Plus their actions generate conflict too.

If you want to run a game that has more morality issues, this seems like a good change.

Vader did completely flip light. Somehow.

Anakin turned dark quickly so it makes sense he would turn light just as quickly....