I have a character that is an Aggressor/Politico. As you might imagine that means that my character solves nearly every problem with causing some form of emotional stress in who he is dealing with. I mean this character is going to be a darksider and I've come to terms with that, but it's lead me down the road of wondering if maybe I am being too liberal with my reading of the conflict rules. At this point he is earning 8 to 14 per four hour session with light combat and mostly social encounters, and that's with a GM who isn't applying extra conflict for overtly selfish or evil actions.

Can you guys think of a way of using coercion that isn't going to result in conflict? I'm guessing that we can't.

Does nearly every use of Influence create conflict? I mean your basically making them do something against their will every time you use it which is a 2 conflict hit, assuming that it's entirely non-malevolent. (Obi-wan makes the Deathstick dealer go home and rethink his life, that is against the dealer's will and should result in a 2 conflict hit despite the benevolence of the act)

I'm about to be a GM for the game I am in and I need a barometer from the community. I tend to be fairly liberal about giving out conflict and honestly believe that there probably wasn't a light side paragon left at the end of the third movie. But I would like to hear from all of you. What is conflict looking like at your tables?

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback guys! I can definitely tell there are two schools of thought here and it was good to read both sides. At this point, after reading this thread and others, I feel my interpretation is correct given that it appears as those who have taken a lighter hand with conflict end up with Light Side Paragons far too easily. If I were to rewrite it, I would increase the difficulty to go lighter and darker as a force user approaches the morality horizons for something a bit more fun to play with but this will do for now. Thanks again for your help!

I've always thought light side/dark side stuff come from a source of emotion.

Jedi kill people...like, all the time. But it is not darkside if they are resolving a conflict, or fighting in a war or whatever, unless they are killing for anger or revenge.

So, telling someone to leave the bar, while being against their will, does not come from a source of evil. Qui-Gon also "cheats" Watto out of a slave.

I think motive and intentions matter more than outcome (this can be debatable as some dark siders don't consider what they are doing to be evil, but I think an outside eye is sometimes necessary in these cases)

I am in the mind set that all jedi get Conflict. They are always in conflict of feelings, ideals ans struggle against the natural order of things. However, they manage using various methods... so eventually, anything "bad/evil" done by jedi in the media, is healed off screen by meditation, talks with master, psyc healing, etc.

My players were too in a mind set that any Conflict makes you dark side, and that killing someone or using Influance, dose not give you Conflict, or else all clone wars jedi would be dark side. That is untrue, they just have constant Conflict to deal with, which is obvious strain on any man, not just jedi.

Jeeze - 14 conflict for talking bad guys down? That's WAY too heavy handed.

When handing out the conflict, I tend to consider where the action is coming from, what's the emotional state of the person doing the action. Are they getting worked up and actually angry? is this them lashing out at the target? Are they frustrated? Yes, that's probably conflict worthy.

Or are they trying to talk the person into backing down so they don't have to whip out their laser sword and pop off their head, taking the high road of using words instead of violence. That's a way more desirable solution.

Jedi are not vulcans. Acting upon their emotions and letting it rule them is conflict worthy. Simply having them? Not conflict worthy.

RusakRakesh brings up a good point. Arguably, if you run with "anytime the PC makes an NPC do something against their will" as a rule for assigning conflict, then a Jedi could never use Influence without incurring conflict, but if they're only getting 2-4 conflict a session, they will still trend towards the light side overall. Certainly it could be argued that it should not be too easy for Jedi to come out of a session with no conflict. On the other hand, this sets up a wonky interaction with the 1 conflict "Resorting to Violence as the First Solution," where a Jedi who uses Influence to try to avoid violence gets more conflict than a Jedi who immediately jumps into the fray.

With that in mind, it might be better to soften the "against their will" standard, with the idea that a Jedi who is exerting the briefest and lightest influence, with the least liklihood of putting the victim in a bad spot later, as possible can avoid conflict. Take Obi-Wan's "These are not the droids you are looking for" mind trick. He first waits to see if Luke can talk them past the stormtroopers without incident. Then, instead of saying "don't stop us, don't report us," which would go against the stormtrooper's orders, he merely convinces them that they don't fit the description (If the troopers were dead set on pinning this on them, this might be trickier). This is also less likely to cause others trouble than if he had tried to use the mind trick to set up a distraction. It is unlikely that the Imperials would discover that these particular stormtroopers let the droids slip into Mos Eisley, but if he had set them on another group (i.e. "not these droids, those droids") or had them raise a false alarm ("you just saw the droids fleeing towards Toshe Station"), then it's more likely that a superior officer will later inquire what the hell they were doing and perhaps even suspect them of treason. And most of all, he is doing it to avoid a physical confrontation, rather than out of convenience.

Note that by that standard, Obi-Wan's influence on the deathstick dealer could arguably incur conflict, as he is using a heavy-handed approach out of the impatient desire to be rid of a distraction, as opposed to considering the least intrusive means to disentangle himself. Note also that this puts the GM in the position of having to judge the sincerity of the player's explanation for using the power, which I'm not a big fan of, but probably can't be helped in a setting where the difference between a moral and immoral killing literally comes down to how you feel about the matter.

As for non-conflict inducing uses of Coercion. It's tricky, and a lot of the examples I can think of are cases where arguably another skill is more appropriate. That said, the table on 324 does specify threatening someone with violence, so if the PC relies on other kinds of threats, they might get a past. For instance, when dealing with a smuggler, threatening to tell the authorities they have contraband, especially if it's not actually true, could be a permissible, since the threat there is a lot of hassle, inconvenience, and maybe fines, rather than a beating.

The example I always give for "Non-Conflict" Coercion.

Arguably, you could call this Leadership, but it definitely seems more based on Jake's Willpower than his Presence.

No threats of violence, just an "I'm not gonna blink on this one, but I know you are" kind of interaction.

Maybe the difference between "I'll kill you!" and "get out before you get hurt", especially if the latter is actually trying to warn them away for their own sake.

Scathing Tirade is pretty brutal though. Just look up the definition of it's name.

Jeeze - 14 conflict for talking bad guys down? That's WAY too heavy handed.

When handing out the conflict, I tend to consider where the action is coming from, what's the emotional state of the person doing the action. Are they getting worked up and actually angry? is this them lashing out at the target? Are they frustrated? Yes, that's probably conflict worthy.

Or are they trying to talk the person into backing down so they don't have to whip out their laser sword and pop off their head, taking the high road of using words instead of violence. That's a way more desirable solution.

Jedi are not vulcans. Acting upon their emotions and letting it rule them is conflict worthy. Simply having them? Not conflict worthy.

I tend more towards this style in my GMing, honestly; looking at why the players chose this. I am generally of the opinion that Charm and, to a degree, Deception make for more "Light side" social tools, but I think there are some people that just respond best to threats and I don't generally throw Conflict at a player just for identifying that. Notably, last session I had a PC respond to a number of local guards shaking down a farmer for more than she had by menacingly striding up the guard (flanked by the group's Zabrak Hunter making his modded blaster rifle pretty clear) and informing him that the "refuse and this ends badly" situation they were trying to set up had just turned around on them. These were guards who were used to abusing their power, though, so convincing them it was somehow in their best interest to up and leave was going to be **** near impossible, and there wasn't a lie anyone could think of that would save the poor farmer.

Also, Coercion as a skill should be used for more than physical threats, and as long as the end result is avoiding bloodshed, I'd say it's fine. That same player (after a series of Deception checks to an Imperial vessel accosting them convinced its captain that they were an Imperial mining crew) attempted to end the situation by threatening to report any delays of their strict timetable to "the Moff in charge of their operation". That's definitely a clear threat; it could even be a threat of death if it were reasonable Vader would be around and kill this poor captain for holding things up... but since the alternative was to submit to a boarding inspection and have it be revealed they were Force-sensitives fugitives, I figured it was a fine option. Of course, that's when I revealed the vessel was serving an Imperial Inquisitor and didn't much care for the timetables of Moffs. XD

Oh, and as for mind controlling people... well, I'd say that depends on how much distress the resulting action causes them and if they get injured because of it. I don't generally see it as a problem.

Then again, my PCs are all Morality 100 at this point, and isn't just because they're stubbornly refusing to call on the Dark Side.

I'm gonna join the general consensus that your group is being too heavy handed with conflict. Coercion is not always going to earn conflict. When the gunslinger's hand start's moving toward his blaster, there's abolutely nothing wrong with the hard-bitten Jedi glaring at him and telling him, "You really, really don't want to do that." That's a Coercion roll, and it probably just saved the guy's life. If your force-user goes through the adventure bullying and intimidating his way through people, that's certainly Dark Side, but it shouldn't earn more conflict than, I dunno, killing someone who got in your way and ticked you off.

Also, regarding Obi-Wan's "Go home and think about your life." He didn't really take away duder's free will. Eh, maybe he inconvenienced him for a couple hours. But he didn't make the person change anything about himself. He didn't say, "Give up your life of crime." He said "Think about what you're doing." This is a guy who's probably been on autopilot for years. Obi-Wan is getting him to step back and look at himself, see if he's proud of what he sees, and if there's something else he could do. If he goes home and thinks about it, and decides, "You know, I really do like dealing death sticks. I'm gonna stick with this," he is free to do so. Obi-Wan hasn't taken that from him. I would not give conflict for that.

Can you guys think of a way of using coercion that isn't going to result in conflict? I'm guessing that we can't.

This is from The Power of the Jedi Sourcebook from WoTC's old Star Wars d20, but it's the perfect example of pro-active Coercion leading to a peaceful resolution.

"One popular story in the Jedi Temple related how Master Windu was surrounded by a cadre of Gank killers—some of the galaxy's most formidable warriors—all of whom had blasters drawn and pointed at him. Master Windu never drew his lightsaber. He only laid his hand on it, and one by one, looked into the eyes of his opponents. Finally, he said three words: 'It's your decision.' One after another, the Gank killers laid down their weapons and quietly surrendered."

In fact, it might be better to think of Coercion as "Intimidation" when you're trying to come up with ways to talk your enemies down without being selfish about it.

No doubt, a lot of the uses of Coercion would end up being self-serving, so if you want to effectively use Coercion and try to keep it on the side of Light, then you'll have to focus on "unforeseen and/or undesirable consequences" as your weapon of choice, one most commonly used in hostage negotiations.

Don't say, "If you kill her, we will put you down like an insignificant mynock!"

Instead, say, "If you kill her, my allies here are going to shoot you, and they're going to make sure you're dead, right here, right now. When that happens, what would you like me to tell your family? How am I to explain to your children that their father died a murderer?"

Or, "If you shoot her, we will chase you all over the galaxy as a matter of honor. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life looking over shoulder, waiting for that one day today's mistake finally comes back to haunt you?"

A similar tale to the above can be used for those not sensitive to the Force:

One legend in CorSec related how Officer Releto was accosted by a trio of Tokala the Hutt's hired muscle, preventing him and his partner from entering the cantina to serve the warrant of arrest for Tokala's top lieutenant. They leveled their blasters at him, while all he did was draw out his badge. He scrubbed the badge clean with the collar of his uniform and proudly displayed it.

He said, "I'm not here for you, so stand aside. Consider this fair warning: if you shoot, we will shoot back. More officers will arrive, and they're going to want to know what happened to me and my partner. If I'm alive, you'll either be dead or arrested, and Tokala will throw you under the speeder like he's done for all the guys who came before you. But if I'm dead, you'll be bringing Tokala the kind of attention only CorSec can bring to anyone who's ever killed one of their own; for you, life imprisonment for my murder would be the best outcome of this mistake you're about to make."

He took a step forward and practically dared them to keep blocking his path. "So, what'll be it, boys?"

Coercion is also the way of laying down the truth in a heavy manner that, unlike any other kind of conversation the character isn't trying to butter them up socially, but is forcing them to accept a truth that they are denying. Some characters might deny something out of a sense of pride or a dillusion, and it's only frank talking that can bring them back to the table. I wouldn't give conflict for that as your simply forcing them to accept reality, rather then some path of thought that would end up with both parties being worse off.