1 hour ago, Tramp Graphics said:

So, how much Conflict per session was he getting in total? 4? 5? More? Less? The only way you're going to guarantee Morality dropping is to earn more than 10 Conflict per session . Any less and there is always the chance of his Morality either staying the same or going up.

I don't recall specifically session to session what he was getting, but I'm going to guess that he probably averaged 4-6 a go. Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was much higher (I think the torture session bagged him 15-ish. It was way more than the top end 10+ for straight up murder). I guess I was just rolling well.

But even leaning in hard on the morality, it still felt like unnecessary trolling and/or bookwork - admittedly that I was encouraging (self-inflicted trolling?). I think from this point moving forward, removing the randomness of the roll and arbitrarily assigning a morality gain/loss is the smart way to go.

13 minutes ago, Desslok said:

I don't recall specifically session to session what he was getting, but I'm going to guess that he probably averaged 4-6 a go. Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was much higher (I think the torture session bagged him 15-ish. It was way more than the top end 10+ for straight up murder). I guess I was just rolling well.

But even leaning in hard on the morality, it still felt like unnecessary trolling and/or bookwork - admittedly that I was encouraging (self-inflicted trolling?). I think from this point moving forward, removing the randomness of the roll and arbitrarily assigning a morality gain/loss is the smart way to go.

Only if you're trying to force a character down that vector. Personally, I feel the Morality system works fine as designed. IF you want a character to fall to the Dark Side, he simply has to dedicate himself to earning 10 Conflict or more per session. That means doing a lot of bad things.

1 hour ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

And this is generally fitting with the setting in that unless you're actively doing evil deeds, most beings tend to skew more towards the "light" even if it's a light shade of grey.

Ventriss is a good example of this. When she stopped trying to win Sith Apprentice (it's a holonet show), she started to show what could be indicative of increasing Morality even while operating as a bounty hunter . So yes, the system does reflect the sources, and it makes it pretty clear that all that Conflict-worthy crap Anakin did prior to becoming Vader could have easily washed away...until he just went too darn far.

5 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

until he just went too darn far. 

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

Morality is as broken as it is in the Star Wars films.

53 minutes ago, GroggyGolem said:

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

Morality is as broken as it is in the Star Wars films.

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that makes me not believe people when they say "The Force has an objective morality that it actively enforces," because Anakin's Force abilities didn't suffer at all for killing that village. Nor did the Jedi's for participating in the Clone Wars in general. At the end of the day, the only consistent thing about the Force as it relates to morality is that it's a mystical energy that has multiple methods of accessing it. How you choose to access it does not determine whether you're a good or bad person, but instead good or bad people tend to gravitate towards particular methods of accessing it based on preference.

2 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

Morality is as broken as it is in the Star Wars films.

Come on now, every PC gets one "and don't do that again" warning.

7 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

While the movies never really displayed it due to compressed time frame, the Clone Wars as I understand it (never watched the series) did a much better job of handling Anakin's more maverick attitudes which kept him on the lower end of the Morality scale; not low enough to fall to the dark side, but still low enough that it'd just take one major act of betrayal for him to well and truly fall to the dark side. Contrast his attitudes and actions as a Padawan in AotC with Obi-Wan's in TPM, and it's pretty clear that Anakin was already skirting the edge long before he went about carving up Sand People, which to some extent could be partially justified as they weren't entirely helpless (that kind of tribal society, the women and even the older children would probably have been able to defend themselves alongside the menfolk), though it was still excessive but not quite to the point of 10+ points of Conflict. Plus, with Padme to help talk him down that could have been just enough to pull him back from the edge, reflected by him getting a high roll when checking Morality at the end of the session and thus keeping him from dropping below 30.

It could also be argued that Anakin hadn't fully embraced the dark side until after his defeat at Mustafar, and that his actions after saving Palps' from being executed by Windu was simply him deciding to grab a sled and zip down the slippery slope as opposed to the gradual walking pace he'd previously been traveling at. After Palps gives him his dramatic rebranding, Anakin pretty goes all-in on being evil, from butchering children to slaughtering helpless members of the Separatist leadership (which is actually worse in the RotS novelization as the chapter shows Vader actively toying with and taunting his victims as he murders them).

Could also be that the point where Anakin finally went dark side wasn't when he saved Palps, but instead when he executed the literally disarmed and helpless Count Dooku in the opening of RotS, and that the scenes between that and disarming Windu is him struggling to come to grips with his action (quite possibly due to his Morality being triggered) and then rolling horribly low on his die roll, so that for the next action sequence he was involved in (battle in the Chancellor's office), he had a Morality that was under 30 and his player decided to full on embrace being the bad guy, finally hitting Morality 0 at the end of RotS.

10 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Come on now, every PC gets one "and don't do that again" warning.

Funny enough I did have that situation in one group I ran, mainly because I didn't think about the massive amount of conflict the player would have acquired for that action (used Influence to convince a pack of wild large space cats to slaughter what seemed to be mercenaries as a first resort). After that I was more conscious of conflict moments, while I still used the Morality rules as RAW.

23 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

While the movies never really displayed it due to compressed time frame, the Clone Wars as I understand it (never watched the series) did a much better job of handling Anakin's more maverick attitudes which kept him on the lower end of the Morality scale; not low enough to fall to the dark side, but still low enough that it'd just take one major act of betrayal for him to well and truly fall to the dark side. Contrast his attitudes and actions as a Padawan in AotC with Obi-Wan's in TPM, and it's pretty clear that Anakin was already skirting the edge long before he went about carving up Sand People, which to some extent could be partially justified as they weren't entirely helpless (that kind of tribal society, the women and even the older children would probably have been able to defend themselves alongside the menfolk), though it was still excessive but not quite to the point of 10+ points of Conflict. Plus, with Padme to help talk him down that could have been just enough to pull him back from the edge, reflected by him getting a high roll when checking Morality at the end of the session and thus keeping him from dropping below 30.

It could also be argued that Anakin hadn't fully embraced the dark side until after his defeat at Mustafar, and that his actions after saving Palps' from being executed by Windu was simply him deciding to grab a sled and zip down the slippery slope as opposed to the gradual walking pace he'd previously been traveling at. After Palps gives him his dramatic rebranding, Anakin pretty goes all-in on being evil, from butchering children to slaughtering helpless members of the Separatist leadership (which is actually worse in the RotS novelization as the chapter shows Vader actively toying with and taunting his victims as he murders them).

Could also be that the point where Anakin finally went dark side wasn't when he saved Palps, but instead when he executed the literally disarmed and helpless Count Dooku in the opening of RotS, and that the scenes between that and disarming Windu is him struggling to come to grips with his action (quite possibly due to his Morality being triggered) and then rolling horribly low on his die roll, so that for the next action sequence he was involved in (battle in the Chancellor's office), he had a Morality that was under 30 and his player decided to full on embrace being the bad guy, finally hitting Morality 0 at the end of RotS.

Or indeed; my opinion was that he didn't fall even when he saved the Emperor; his state of mind of that point was "oh no, I just assisted in killing one of the heads of my order. Morality or not, there is no coming back from this?" "No young skywalker, the only way for you now is to become fully of the dark side by marching on the Jedi temple with my army and destroy everyone you find. Only when you have fully embraced the Darkside will I have anything to teach you." Which was why he marched on the table, then slaughtered the Separatist leaders and even then; he cried after doing that because he was aware just how far he had fallen; but he had made his choice and had little recourse but to hold firm; even if it meant killing Padme in a moment of anger.

One firm thing I do believe is someone who becomes part of the dark side becomes a fundamentally different person then he was before; who they were becomes buried under their emotions; under hate, under loathing. Their goals in life become a twisted parody of themselves; a healer might become an living avatar of life and death who cruelly kill someone, only to execute a slave to bring them back to life just because they can and plant that cold seed of corruption in the frame of the tormented. In a sense Obi-Wan was right; Anakin was dead, Vader had killed him and if it wasn't for someone like Luke who reached through the Layers of cold hate, anger and so much more, it would have stayed that way forever. The key thing to decide, when that threshold is reached is to decide one thing; does the player want the character to become that twisted avatar or actively resist that nature?

Hello everyone,

I've been reading all of this thread, and I must say I am a big fan of the idea of dropping the DP cost for using dark side pips, in order to make it make it more attractive (i would have quoted the post, but I can't seem to figure out how the quote tool works)

However, it is true that it gives an advantage to lightsiders in terms of pure game mechanics, and even if that makes sense to the lore, it is not very enjoyable for players who want to play a darksider, and IMO that should be our first concern.

The way I'm seeing it, the DP cost stand for "converting the pip to your color" (wololoooo) : you're not really using the dark side when you pay that cost (I can't remember if I got that idea from anther thraed here or from the french forums)

Anyway, my point is, let the DP cost as it is, but create an alternative for both sides of the force : the lightsider can directly tap into the dark side (without DP) at the cost of 3 conflicts point (plus the strain), and the darksiders can take 3 strain to force themselves to use light side

This needs balancing of course, especially for the number of conflits or strain given, and the idea of taking strain to remain calm feels akward to me

Or (thinking while writing here), we could consider that for the darksiders, you are converting the pip at the cost of 3 strain, and actuallly using LS when spending a DP

What are your toughts about this ?

Also sorry for my ...approximative...english

7 hours ago, AbsatSolo said:

What   are your  tough  ts about this   ?  

I think you should read some of the other threads discussing the Morality mechanic.

This necrotic thread is particularly old, and the community's understanding of what the mechanic is and how to implement it has evolved well beyond the discussions here, which started any way as:

"Hi, I'm an end-user, and your product does not work for me. Therefore it does not work."

Which any one who deals with product development and end-users can tell you with 100% certainty, is a 100% false statement.

On 11/21/2018 at 6:56 PM, GroggyGolem said:

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

Morality is as broken as it is in the Star Wars films.

Jedi are still warriors, warriors kill. Did Yoda loose morality for impaling that Clone Trooper in ROTS?

On ‎11‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 7:56 PM, GroggyGolem said:

You mean, the 2nd time he went to darn far, right? Because he slaughtered an entire village of living, breathing, sentient beings for revenge. For years after that he was still a "hero" on the side of the light.

Morality is as broken as it is in the Star Wars films.

Also depends on deployment.

The Sandpeople village looks like an Activated Morality event over a series of individual murders.

What whole encounter chain is like, 3, 4 checks max? The entire encounter can be played out in a few minutes so as not to bore the other players, and it basically plays out like so:

- Talk to Watto, find out where Shmi went.

-Talk to Lars, find out where Shmi went.

-Go to Tusken Camp (Survival, Seek, or GM Fiat)

- Sneak into camp (Stealth or GM fiat)

- Shmi dies

GM: Ok, Hayden.... what does Anakin do?

Hayden: ohhhh....... well I'm leaning toward "murder everyone" I mean, that's probably a lot of conflict, but it fits his Emotional weakness... but this is gonna be a slog...

GM: Actually... lets say 20 Conflict, and this will be a single check resolution. Lightsaber vs. 2P1Blk, and give yourself a boost for the sandpeople totally not expecting a Jedi to just bust out in the middle of their camp.

Hayden: ... Ouch, well I ain't a darksider yet, but I'm on my way... 5 success and two threat.

GM: Ok, you kill the entire camp. Everyone. Also you take two strain since you're kinda broken up about all this.

Hayden: Well... I guess I'll take Shmi's body back to the Lar's place to bury it properly.

GM: OK... you gonna tell Padme?

Natalie: Yeah, are you? I mean that strain means I probably can tell you aren't right.

GM: If you do I'll let it count as an assist on your strain recovery...

58 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Also depends on deployment.

The Sandpeople village looks like an Activated Morality event over a series of individual murders.

What whole encounter chain is like, 3, 4 checks max? The entire encounter can be played out in a few minutes so as not to bore the other players, and it basically plays out like so:

- Talk to Watto, find out where Shmi went.

-Talk to Lars, find out where Shmi went.

-Go to Tusken Camp (Survival, Seek, or GM Fiat)

- Sneak into camp (Stealth or GM fiat)

- Shmi dies

GM: Ok, Hayden.... what does Anakin do?

Hayden: ohhhh....... well I'm leaning toward "murder everyone" I mean, that's probably a lot of conflict, but it fits his Emotional weakness... but this is gonna be a slog...

GM: Actually... lets say 20 Conflict, and this will be a single check resolution. Lightsaber vs. 2P1Blk, and give yourself a boost for the sandpeople totally not expecting a Jedi to just bust out in the middle of their camp.

Hayden: ... Ouch, well I ain't a darksider yet, but I'm on my way... 5 success and two threat.

GM: Ok, you kill the entire camp. Everyone. Also you take two strain since you're kinda broken up about all this.

Hayden: Well... I guess I'll take Shmi's body back to the Lar's place to bury it properly.

GM: OK... you gonna tell Padme?

Natalie: Yeah, are you? I mean that strain means I probably can tell you aren't right.

GM: If you do I'll let it count as an assist on your strain recovery...

It also depends upon what his Morality was at the start of the "session", and what his roll is at the end of the session.

On 11/21/2018 at 2:19 PM, Desslok said:

I don't recall specifically session to session what he was getting, but I'm going to guess that he probably averaged 4-6 a go. Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was much higher (I think the torture session bagged him 15-ish. It was way more than the top end 10+ for straight up murder). I guess I was just rolling well.

But even leaning in hard on the morality, it still felt like unnecessary trolling and/or bookwork - admittedly that I was encouraging (self-inflicted trolling?). I think from this point moving forward, removing the randomness of the roll and arbitrarily assigning a morality gain/loss is the smart way to go.

The Morality system is designed so that going to the darkside is a conscious decision. As a major complaint of previous systems was unintentional loss of characters to the darkside. So you not actively trying to be darkside is going to result in you being right in the middle.

27 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

The Morality system is designed so that going to the darkside is a conscious decision. As a major complaint of previous systems was unintentional loss of characters to the darkside. So you not actively trying to be darkside is going to result in you being right in the middle.

Basically, no one falls to the dark side, but some do decide to jump right in.

It doesn't really feel right to me though. Yoda and Qui-Gon never suggest it's OK to flirt with the dark side as long as you don't let it get to third base, but that's certainly what this system encourages.

5 hours ago, Daeglan said:

The Morality system is designed so that going to the darkside is a conscious decision. As a major complaint of previous systems was unintentional loss of characters to the dark side.

WEG's 1st edition was probably the worst offender in this regard, as you could very likely loose your character to a random die roll after earning your second dark side point. Granted, that system was written when there really wasn't much in the way of lore about the setting, so they pretty much had to go by the movies and what was said by Obi-Wan and especially Yoda, who to be honest both had a rather dogmatic view of things as result of their upbringing within the Jedi Order, which the prequels show had become very rigid and dogmatic.

WotC's OCR/RCR had penalties for when the character crossed certain thresholds to reflect being "tainted" and "fallen/corrupt," with the later category including a very stiff penalty in the form of potential and permanent ability score drain in a system where boosting up ability scores was a very slow process.

And just about every homebrew system hack that I've seen for Star Wars (and I've seen a lot) generally go with the WEG approach of "dark side = BAD!" if they don't treat it as some form of corruption or just handwave it away entirely (saw a 5e system hack recently that simply didn't bother with tracking dark side effects).

As for "flirting" with the dark side, we see Luke doing it throughout RotJ in spite of Yoda's admonishing in ESB to not do that one bit. Plus, it's been a long-standing tradition of Star Wars RPGs to have players that "flirt" with the dark side, even from the WEG days which held to Yoda's dogmatic belief that dark side automatically equals bad and should be avoided at all costs. There was a live-play podcast that I listened to way back that ran a Saga Edition Star Wars game, and the 'Jedi' (using that term very loosely) was played by a player who manipulated and cheesed the bloody blue blazes out of the dark side atonement mechanics to stay just on the cusp of falling to the dark side all while spamming dark side powers as much as he could.

FFG's approach is actually fairly novel in that tapping into the 'dark side' (using black pips) doesn't automatically equate to being evil, especially as the setting's lore has been expanded by other voices to include Force traditions (such as the Aing-Ti Monks) who don't necessarily see the Force in terms of "dark and light." Now it might fly in the face of Lucas' original vision, but then again his "original vision" seems to have changed a fair bit over the years.

Of course, it's also an instance of handing players just enough rope to hang themselves, offering an enticement that if not managed very carefully could very well blow up in the player's face if they only garner a few points of Conflict a session, but then constantly roll 1s and 2s when rolling for Morality at the session's end.

15 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

It doesn't   really feel right to me thoug  h  .

This is what kills me about the Morality mechanic debate.

People say they want it to be out of their control whether their PC falls to the Darkside or not - that's "how it really works" ( 🙄 ), but then it happens (and this mechanic can be used in this way) and they rage-quit their game, or say the mechanic is broken in the other direction, or argue over every action where the GM arbitrates conflict ( 🤮 ).

The Morality mechanic is a storytelling mechanic, it facilitates the telling of a story. It is not meant by default to be the arbiter of WHO your PC is. That's supposed to be you. This is clear in RAW by the fact that you're allowed by RAW to immediately retcon your actions when they would cause Conflict.

However the Morality mechanic can be used to be this arbiter, that just requires a session zero discussion/agreement (so that everyone knows that's how it's gonna be - no retconning and GM word is final) AND it requires a mindful engagement of the system on everyone's part, as you're demanding more of it than it was designed for AND perhaps a maturity of the players to accept the requisite GM fiat of this non-standard process.

I'm OK with the system but it is the hardest of the three systems I think, from a GMs perspective. I just remind my players every few sessions: "Remember, Conflict is not a penalty. This is a barometer of how your character interacts with the force. If anything, you should be asking for conflict when your character is conflicted about something they have done. It's a storytelling aid".

After that, they generally come to terms for a session or three until I have to remind them again:) It really is a system for mature role players and is very hard concept for meta-gamers.

12 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Basically, no one falls to the dark side, but some do decide to jump right in.

It doesn't really feel right to me though. Yoda and Qui-Gon never suggest it's OK to flirt with the dark side as long as you don't let it get to third base, but that's certainly what this system encourages.

You seem to be conflating player decisions with character decisions. If the player has the character do darkside actions their character will fall. But the key is it is a player decision. Because it is about Player fun. And a character falling to the darkside because of a mechanic against their will is for most people NOT fun. And this is a game so it is supposed to be fun. The other thing is their is a hierarchy of conflict inducing actions the GM should be taking into account as well. But again a character falling to the darkside is explicitly a player decision. Not a game mechanic decision. Because a Donovan noted the mechanical methods used in the past were...well not fun for most players.

4 hours ago, VadersMarchKazoo said:

I'm OK with the system but it is the hardest of the three systems I think, from a GMs perspective. I just remind my players every few sessions: "Remember, Conflict is not a penalty. This is a barometer of how your character interacts with the force. If anything, you should be asking for conflict when your character is conflicted about something they have done. It's a storytelling aid".

After that, they generally come to terms for a session or three until I have to remind them again:) It really is a system for mature role players and is very hard concept for meta-gamers.

As I've said in the past, the Morality mechanic is the one that requires buy-in from both the players and the GMs, were Duty and Obligation don't really require all that much from the player. In contrast, Morality requires the players to more actively track how much they have on a session-by-session.

I think a lot of the player disconnect with Morality, more specifically the "dark side" aspect of it is that we've had years of Star Wars media saying "dark side = bad" so even those players with little to no prior experience with other Star Wars RPGs will shy away from Conflict as it gets conflated with being of the dark side, and thus "bad" in terms of the larger Star Wars mythos that this RPG is seeking to emulate. And those players with prior Star Wars RPG experience have had it pounded into their head that dark side points are indeed bad/unfun for the reasons I noted in my earlier post.

Once players get over the hurdle of "Conflict doesn't fully equate to going dark side" and that Conflict isn't necessarily something to be entirely avoided, I've found the system works a good deal better. As you've said, it's generally once the meta-gamers start embracing the idea that Conflict and Morality are partially storytelling aids that it works smoother.

21 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

As I've said in the past, the Morality mechanic is the one that requires buy-in from both the players and the GMs, were Duty and Obligation don't really require all that much from the player. In contrast, Morality requires the players to more actively track how much they have on a session-by-session.

Duty doesn't require much, but Obligation requires a whole lot if you want it to be used as the player-controlled meta-resource it is supposed to be. Without that buy-in, it quickly becomes a GM-controlled hindrance.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Duty doesn't require much, but Obligation requires a whole lot if you want it to be used as the player-controlled meta-resource it is supposed to be. Without that buy-in, it quickly becomes a GM-controlled hindrance.

Still, incorporating an Obligation encounter, or encounter string, or entire Adventure catalyst or element. is usually not especially hard.

By comparison dropping in a Morality event is little a bit harder, and the player playing that event to their character instead of a meta-oriented calculated advantage/benefit does require the player to roll it.

Anakin massacring a Tusken camp is the kind of decision the player has to take knowing darn well he's getting a dufflebag full of conflict for it, and might even go Dark as a result.

Considering how many people think going Dark is a punishment of some kind (Kudos to FFG for it not BTW) there's plenty of people out there that would have tried to have Anakin slink away and just be grumpy about it while waiting to hit Paragon under the assumption a D-point and some extra Strain somehow makes them equal to an FR 6...

1 hour ago, Ghostofman said:

Still, incorporating an Obligation encounter, or encounter string, or entire Adventure catalyst or element. is usually not especially hard.

By comparison dropping in a Morality event is little a bit harder, and the player playing that event to their character instead of a meta-oriented calculated advantage/benefit does require the player to roll it.

Anakin massacring a Tusken camp is the kind of decision the player has to take knowing darn well he's getting a dufflebag full of conflict for it, and might even go Dark as a result.

Considering how many people think going Dark is a punishment of some kind (Kudos to FFG for it not BTW) there's plenty of people out there that would have tried to have Anakin slink away and just be grumpy about it while waiting to hit Paragon under the assumption a D-point and some extra Strain somehow makes them equal to an FR 6...

Yeah, but that act of wanton violence was what got Anakin through Padme's defenses. Apparently her lizard brain likes bad boys.

5 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Yeah, but that act of wanton violence was what got Anakin through Padme's defenses. Apparently her lizard brain likes bad boys.

So you are going to ignore the rest of the movie? He was already through those defenses.