I have a problem deciding if I should award a force-sensitive character in my game conflict for an action he took at the end of our last session. Warning, wall of text to paint the picture before asking what you would do!

The game is an EotE game, but I've been using the morality rules for the pair of force-sensitive characters. The PCs got caught in a clash between Imperials and pirates at a shadowport. Long story short, there is a space battle going on between an Imperial II-Class Frigate and TIEs on one side vs a pair of pirate corvettes, blast boats and fighters (headhunters and cloakshapes).

The PCs fought a running battle with both Imperials and the pirates in the shadowport and then escaped in their freighter, which they borrowed for this mission and is carrying a very important cargo for their Hutt employer. The freighter was undamaged, and they wanted only to escape into hyperspace and needed a few rounds to get out of the gravity well of the huge gas giant the shadowport orbits.

At this point in time, the pirates are winning the space battle (the actions the PCs took in the shadowport influenced this, that's an even longer story). Only a few TIEs remain, and the frigate is taking heavy damage. As the PCs are detected the pirates send a handful (6) fighters to intercept. The characters are fairly experienced, the ship had a couple of laser cannons. They were in very little danger, and could escape soon.

Now the possible conflict. The frigate is damaged so badly that the crew abandons ship in escape pods and a single shuttle. As that is happening the force-sensitive PC gets on the comm, using a comlink stolen from an imperial officer in the shadowport. Seeing the incoming pirate fighters he contacts the TIEs, pretends to be the officer and orders them to make sure the PCs freighter escapes, and that nothing else matters.

Of course he rolls a difficult Deception check, with several setback dice (but also a boost for having an imperial comlink and the name of the officer). And rolls really well. The TIEs set course to pursue the fighters, and they break to attack the TIES rather than letting them engage them from the rear. The PCs escape, the TIEs die rather than having the chance to surrender or keep the escape pods safe until backup arrives (it was, unknown the the characters, who never bothered to ask about that, on it's way). And the pirates blast several escape pods out of spite.

I hope I have painted the picture in an adequate way. My question is, is this a morally ambiguous act? Would you give a PC who does this any conflict, and if so, how much? I am torn on the subject. He did get people killed through a needless and quite selfish action. But the people were soldiers, some in fighters, others in escape pods. What would you do in a situation like this?

Definitely conflict!

He could have had them insure the safety of the Escape pods or just have them engage any fighters near enough to them to draw off enough pursuit to make their escape easier but deliberately and cold bloodedly order them to defend them only when it wasn't necessary?

Owch let us know how much you awarded him as there's no way that's anything but a darkside choice!

Now I need to reread that because I do not believe they did that!

Conflict, and lots. There was no need to do it. Sounds like the PCs could have easily held off the pirates until they were clear. You can't deceive people into throwing their lives away ever and not get Conflict. The ends may even be for good intentions but our ends never can justify all of our means.

In this particular instance you are probably going to need to be lenient since the Player didn't receive warning this would cause major conflict. If i was to be pre-warning the player i would have said "3 conflict for putting them in harms way deliberately and deceptively, another 5 if they die" so they would have received 8 in this instance. But since the player is going to feel blindsided in this instance i would tell him what it should have been, then knock a couple off so they don't feel screwed over, so probably just give them the 5 for the unnecessary deaths. then warn them you wont be so lenient next time.

If your including Morality in an EotE game you need everyone at the table to be aware of the narrative story consequences. Its almost like having a Law/Good paladin in a party of Neutral thieves, not quite as bad, but close. The non Force Users can get away with cold blooded murder and not have any personal problems with it at all (although a Criminal or Bounty Obligation could be gained for that). But the Force Users are going to gain conflict just for standing by and watching it happen! and if they get involved its a lot worse. none of this should be seen as bad, being a Dark Sider isn't the end of a characters life, they get to have lots of fun but the conflict should be part of the story, the unease of one PC over the actions of another should be a recurring minor theme. Be sure it doesn't take over, and let there be times where the Force User genuinely has no clue something bad went down. But its there, and the Players should be prepared to play it out.

I gave conflicts to my players for blowing up the rebel base in Onslaught at Arda 1 with the imperial invasion force in so yes I think the situation you described deserve it.

Defenitivly!

It is one thing if he deceived the Impereal just so they would´nt attack the freighter, but is is a whole other Story to use them and send them into death (like some certain Sithlords did with their subordinates...)

I would let him receive some (3-6) conflict points while telling him the story how he sees how all the impereals that already had lost now are blwn into oblivian... and then I would ask him to describe the feelings of his char as he watches upon the destruction he put into his action:

Does he suffer while realizing he did something bad? just add 1 more conflict to represent the suffering. is he neutral... well 3 more conflict... is he happy that those tie bastards die while not know they help their enemys to escape...10+

if you play standard and you are giving warning in advance, but didn´t this time, you should reduce the points a little bit since he had no warning to change his mind.

But if you play (like me and my table) with out these warnings than you should let him feel the full call of the darkside (giving him all those conflicts ^^)

I would say conflict is deserved - the second they ordered the TIEs away from the pods they were taking responsibility for the lives of those in the escape pods the TIEs were protecting. This assumed responsibility is the nature of the need for conflict. Even if it were necessary (such as in the case that the freighter had no hyperdrive and was weaponless) the decision to divert the fighters for their own protection was the character choosing life or death for the people in the pods.

Keep in mind, the conflict system in Force and Destiny provide and ebb and flow for Morality - only consistent behavior will show in the long run. The occasional selfish act like the one above won't doom a character to falling to the Dark Side, but it might (and should) give her nightmares the evening after and cause her to question the purity of her actions in the future.

In this particular instance you are probably going to need to be lenient since the Player didn't receive warning this would cause major conflict. If i was to be pre-warning the player i would have said "3 conflict for putting them in harms way deliberately and deceptively, another 5 if they die" so they would have received 8 in this instance. But since the player is going to feel blindsided in this instance i would tell him what it should have been, then knock a couple off so they don't feel screwed over, so probably just give them the 5 for the unnecessary deaths. then warn them you wont be so lenient next time.

If your including Morality in an EotE game you need everyone at the table to be aware of the narrative story consequences. Its almost like having a Law/Good paladin in a party of Neutral thieves, not quite as bad, but close. The non Force Users can get away with cold blooded murder and not have any personal problems with it at all (although a Criminal or Bounty Obligation could be gained for that). But the Force Users are going to gain conflict just for standing by and watching it happen! and if they get involved its a lot worse. none of this should be seen as bad, being a Dark Sider isn't the end of a characters life, they get to have lots of fun but the conflict should be part of the story, the unease of one PC over the actions of another should be a recurring minor theme. Be sure it doesn't take over, and let there be times where the Force User genuinely has no clue something bad went down. But its there, and the Players should be prepared to play it out.

I completely and whole heartedly agree with this!

This seems very unanimous! Thanks for the assistance people, conflict it is. I'll just have to decide just how much conflict, but I'm thinking in the 5-8 region.

This seems very unanimous! Thanks for the assistance people, conflict it is. I'll just have to decide just how much conflict, but I'm thinking in the 5-8 region.

IMO, I think the thing you want to do is to figure out how much it should have been had he been properly warned. Then think about how much you want to reduce that because he did take the action and he should have known better, but he wasn’t properly warned.

I believe that you do want to make it clear to him that you’re not just randomly punishing him, that you are instead correcting an error that was made at the time, and so you want to take your share of the responsibility for that confusion.

Don't worry about it, we are all very mature players. He's been a pretty good boy so far and was getting worried he was going to end up as a light side paragon, which doesn't exactly fit the type! The character is a Chadra-Fan thief and a liar on a path to redemption.

As a GM, one of the things that I am proudest of is that I’ve been able to describe certain things that resulted from PC actions in a way that made the players go “Ewwww. Now I don’t feel so good.”

The PCs didn’t cause these things directly or intentionally, so I didn’t feel like I could hand out conflict for them. But I apparently did do a pretty good job of narrating the outcome. And I do think that has had a significant impact on the choices that the players make for their PCs, and altered the path of those PCs.

Maybe I should have given them conflict, but I think that these were definitely cases where narrative triumphed over game mechanics.

EDIT: I realized that I should probably give an example.

The one that stands out best for me is when the Force Wizard of the party decided that he was going to grab the spear of one of their captors and then use it as a weapon on someone else.

This was an opposed roll, which meant a fair number of red dice. Of course, he failed, and he rolled a despair.

So, I decided that what happened was that he grabbed the spear, the Captain of the Guard holding the spear pulled back, and then the Force Move power snapped. So, the spear then went into the face of the guy who had been standing next to the Captain.

Then I remembered about the fact that this tribe frequently uses various poisons on their spears, and so I gave him a seriously nasty acid/poison that didn’t just kill the guy, but melted his whole head with massive quantities of blood spurting out, and garbled screams as he writhed in agony before he actually died.

You should have seen the looks on the players faces. I must have done a pretty good job of describing and acting out that scene, because they seemed honestly horrified by what had happened.

Well now I have a similar problem:

the two glowstick wielders caused me some trouble, or well better said to an city...

Background:

One of them play a girlish pacifistic Healer, the other a Shadow with an ... well more grey personality.

When a riot in a City broke out, the two players handled the situation quit diferrently:

the shadow helped the resitance to get away from the Empereal Troops and want to join theire fight, the healer decided that she has to "talk this out" with the Impereal gouverner, an brutal and cruel man known for his orders beeing lethal to all that opposes the empire.

she went to the first guardpost told the captain she was a jedi showed her traininglightsaber as proof and... well got captured instantly. Durring interrogation she told that Impereal Monster "This has to stop! Forever!" (no mindtricks!!) after a short moment of thinking he answerd "Yes your right! My reputation will go down if I let those riots keep rising. As you suggest I will now put an End to this situation. Forever!"

The next thing he does while leaving the room is to order his leutnant to call the Victory II destroyer and start the bombardement of the city, "Bring down total annihilation as soon as the staff is evacuatet."

The shadow now convinced the resitance to help him in rescueing the healer. All participating rebels are dieing during this operation.

In the End: The City is destroyed by the Star Destroyer, The Rebel Taskforce is whiped out, an inquisitor got a little bit hurt and the two wannabe jedi were able to escape with a lot of wounds.

So while the shadow of course createt conflict by leading the rebels into oblivion,

the question is what to do with the blue-eyed naive healer for causing the destruction of a whole city (without intension to something like that) by taking to a tyrannic psychopath hoe turned her Words around...

what would you do...?

Nothing. I dont see what your PCs did wrong. Maybe you can give them 1 conflict for witnessing the horror of war.

To be fair, the healer had a daft plan as prisoners generally don't have any rights. but she hadn't any intention of trying to escalate the situation and it was very clear what was intended. "Take me, just please stop the conflict", he very clearly spurned her offer and did something else entirely.

Same with the shadow, naither of them had done anything particularly close minded or selfish. One conflict at the very most, but to be honest I wouldn't give either of them conflict, but rather focus on the narrative implifications of the big bad and renew their drive to kill him.

Well now I have a similar problem:

the two glowstick wielders caused me some trouble, or well better said to an city...

Background:

One of them play a girlish pacifistic Healer, the other a Shadow with an ... well more grey personality.

When a riot in a City broke out, the two players handled the situation quit diferrently:

the shadow helped the resitance to get away from the Empereal Troops and want to join theire fight, the healer decided that she has to "talk this out" with the Impereal gouverner, an brutal and cruel man known for his orders beeing lethal to all that opposes the empire.

she went to the first guardpost told the captain she was a jedi showed her traininglightsaber as proof and... well got captured instantly. Durring interrogation she told that Impereal Monster "This has to stop! Forever!" (no mindtricks!!) after a short moment of thinking he answerd "Yes your right! My reputation will go down if I let those riots keep rising. As you suggest I will now put an End to this situation. Forever!"

The next thing he does while leaving the room is to order his leutnant to call the Victory II destroyer and start the bombardement of the city, "Bring down total annihilation as soon as the staff is evacuatet."

The shadow now convinced the resitance to help him in rescueing the healer. All participating rebels are dieing during this operation.

In the End: The City is destroyed by the Star Destroyer, The Rebel Taskforce is whiped out, an inquisitor got a little bit hurt and the two wannabe jedi were able to escape with a lot of wounds.

So while the shadow of course createt conflict by leading the rebels into oblivion,

the question is what to do with the blue-eyed naive healer for causing the destruction of a whole city (without intension to something like that) by taking to a tyrannic psychopath hoe turned her Words around...

what would you do...?

Roll a fear check and award 1 conflict if they fail... as someone else said, horrors of war... just a thought

Just as an aside, The one Jedi player in our group and I decided that I would not tell him when he would possibly gain conflict, and instead just award it as necessary. We came to this conclusion because whenever I would mention his character was about to gain conflict the game ground to a halt as he endlessly debated his possible course of actions. He now just runs his character as he sees fit and I keep a running tally of conflict, roll a d10 at the end of the session, adjust his Morality score as needed then tell him his new score before the next game. Several sessions of doing this and it is working just fine.

This is how I do it as well.

I remember the time my Jedi player who'd been stuck in Jedi prison for ages and ages flat out murdered an unarmed captive because he was a Jedi hunter back in the Clone Wars. Ahh... he was on the verge of becoming a dark sider after that stunt (50 to mid-30s)