I understand what the book says about starting morality being 50 unless you take the choice to change it by 21 points.

My question is simply, are the only options for starting morality 29, 50, or 71? I recognize that choosing to take the +/- 21 puts the character beyond the threshold for Dark or Light Side.

I need my character just slightly tainted to start. Is there no option to put the PC at say 35 or 40?

Thanks all!

Your character isn't slightly tainted. He is lightsider until he drops to 29, and he's paragon when he gets to 71 (or he is redeemed from the darkside if he'se ver got below 29). The closest thing to slightly tainted is probably 30.

But i don't think it unbalnces the game to start at 35-40 morality if your GM agrees. But that level does not require any redemption because the charcter is still a lightside character. Anakin was still considered a fully fledged and reasonably trustworthy jedi even when he was at 35 morality.

Ok, that helps. I'm actually the GM, so I'm good with it (I'm running a game for my guild and we use pre-generated characters for the tables to make it easier for people to try new to them games).

The idea is to have a group of Jedi who were removed from the Temple around their Initiate Trials because "something" had tainted them and they'd shown too much potentiality to go dark. This picks up a few years later, so they would've had some time (& guidance) to get back towards the light, but I want the inclination to be there, just not full blown Dark Side user.

This helps, thank you!

The morality system in this game really doesn't work very well as a spectrum of morality. A character who kills a child for fun once per year but doesn't do anything else that's evil would easily sit at 100 points paragon level for most of the time, a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0.

1 hour ago, Aetrion said:

The morality system in this game really doesn't work very well as a spectrum of morality. A character who kills a child for fun once per year but doesn't do anything else that's evil would easily sit at 100 points paragon level for most of the time, a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0.

Hey! Keep your real life examples out of here!

1 hour ago, Aetrion said:

The morality system in this game really doesn't work very well as a spectrum of morality. A character who kills a child for fun once per year but doesn't do anything else that's evil would easily sit at 100 points paragon level for most of the time, a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0.

It's true, the system doesn't readily account for psychopaths or holonet trolls. But remember, page 324, "The GM can and should adjust the penalties to account for unusual actions or situations." Behavior like the above is certainly unusual.

If I had a PC who killed a child for fun, you better believe he'd hit 0 morality real fast.

Edit: Come to think of it, if I had a PC who killed a child for fun, I'd probably ask the player not to come back.

Also, I agree that the GM can allow a PC to start at whatever morality score deemed appropriate.

Yeah,

IIRC Anakin was doing 'pretty good' with his morality rating right up until he started slaughtering children. His GM turned him to a dark side user instantly too.

11 hours ago, Aetrion said:

. . . a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0.

As well they should!

6 minutes ago, Mark Caliber said:

Yeah,

IIRC Anakin was doing 'pretty good' with his morality rating right up until he started slaughtering children. His GM turned him to a dark side user instantly too.

Well, 10 conflict per murder, a classroom full of children... He should have just murdered one every other session instead of all at once and he'd have been fine.

Seriously though, it's way too easy to fall and way too easy to redeem yourself in this system. There are some things that shouldn't drop just your morality score, but that should flat out drop your maximum morality.

11 hours ago, Aetrion said:

The morality system in this game really doesn't work very well as a spectrum of morality. A character who kills a child for fun once per year but doesn't do anything else that's evil would easily sit at 100 points paragon level for most of the time, a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0.

Are you arguing that internet trolls ARENT worse than child murderers?

j/k

1 minute ago, Aetrion said:

There are some things that shouldn't drop just your morality score, but that should flat out drop your maximum morality.

Interesting!!

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny..."

Two suggestions:

1. What if you introduced a form of "Dark Side" Obligation, where it never really goes away completely, and it acts as a negative cap to your morality...in other words, normally Morality rating is capped at 100, but if you have this "Dark Side" Obligation of 5, then your Morality is capped at 95. And if your "Dark Side" Obligation is 15, your Morality is capped at 85, etc. It accumulates through heinous acts, and it is extremely difficult to reduce.
2. Or you could have a "Duty" to the Dark Side, which can't be reduced and can only accumulate, and goes up to 100, with the same effect as the proposed "Obligation" rule above. So it's possible for you to eventually become stuck at Morality 0.

This would have no hard and fast effect on your roleplaying, of course...you could, for example, play a character that's trying his best to be heroic, but just can't escape the hold that the dark side has on his destiny...

8 minutes ago, awayputurwpn said:

Interesting!!

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny..."

Two suggestions:

1. What if you introduced a form of "Dark Side" Obligation, where it never really goes away completely, and it acts as a negative cap to your morality...in other words, normally Morality rating is capped at 100, but if you have this "Dark Side" Obligation of 5, then your Morality is capped at 95. And if your "Dark Side" Obligation is 15, your Morality is capped at 85, etc. It accumulates through heinous acts, and it is extremely difficult to reduce.
2. Or you could have a "Duty" to the Dark Side, which can't be reduced and can only accumulate, and goes up to 100, with the same effect as the proposed "Obligation" rule above. So it's possible for you to eventually become stuck at Morality 0.

This would have no hard and fast effect on your roleplaying, of course...you could, for example, play a character that's trying his best to be heroic, but just can't escape the hold that the dark side has on his destiny...

I really like this! It fits with what I'm trying to do in this campaign.

The main reason I wanted to be able to mark that these characters are below 50 is because my players are used to playing SWD20 Revised. So they're used to looking at Dark Side points to see how they should approach situations. So I wanted something to trigger that response without affecting game mechanics too much.

9 minutes ago, awayputurwpn said:

Two suggestions:

1. What if you introduced a form of "Dark Side" Obligation, where it never really goes away completely, and it acts as a negative cap to your morality...in other words, normally Morality rating is capped at 100, but if you have this "Dark Side" Obligation of 5, then your Morality is capped at 95. And if your "Dark Side" Obligation is 15, your Morality is capped at 85, etc. It accumulates through heinous acts, and it is extremely difficult to reduce.
2. Or you could have a "Duty" to the Dark Side, which can't be reduced and can only accumulate, and goes up to 100, with the same effect as the proposed "Obligation" rule above. So it's possible for you to eventually become stuck at Morality 0.

This would have no hard and fast effect on your roleplaying, of course...you could, for example, play a character that's trying his best to be heroic, but just can't escape the hold that the dark side has on his destiny...

Yea, I think a system like that would be pretty solid.

Maybe have your morality cap set up similar to obligation from the start, and use similar criteria for modifying the maximum. It takes specific adventures or sacrifices to increase your max morality, and if you do things that would give you obligation your morality goes down similarly. I mean, if you play the obligation system straight murdering people can very easily give you criminal obligation because you suddenly have an investigator after you.

Let's say players start out with a max morality of 70, so it actually takes some serious good deeds to get to saintly levels. Doing things that would generally be considered unforgivable, like murdering people would then drop your max morality by 5-10 points every time. Raising your morality cap would be a struggle, and largely base off sacrifices. Like, giving away all your wealth would yield you something like +1 max morality, and you could only do that once per session. Doing something on the scale of what it takes to reduce obligation for others at no significant gain to yourself might grant you +5. The only express way to redemption would be sacrificing your own life to save others, which might get you +100 max morality on the spot, so a redemption like Vader is possible, but ends that character's story.

1 hour ago, Mark Caliber said:

Yeah,

IIRC Anakin was doing 'pretty good' with his morality rating right up until he started slaughtering children. His GM turned him to a dark side user instantly too.

He goes on a murder spree in Episode 2, and doesn't go dark-side until Episode 3, which is set years later. Anakin, as portrayed in the Clone Wars show, and at the beginning of Episode 3, is already a child killer.

If your character is a Dark Side Force Witch, redemption becomes very difficult. When have to flip a DP and use strain just to avoid conflict, that uphill slope suddenly becomes even steeper.

3 minutes ago, kaosoe said:

If your character is a Dark Side Force Witch, redemption becomes very difficult. When have to flip a DP and use strain just to avoid conflict, that uphill slope suddenly becomes even steeper.

You could always forgo using the Force for a short time. You likely still have skills and talents you can rely on.

12 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

You could always forgo using the Force for a short time. You likely still have skills and talents you can rely on.

True. Though the character who was trying to redeem herself wasn't very skilled outside of her Force powers. But I didn't have a problem with that. That was part of what made the character interesting.

What do you mean by slightly tainted anyway? It's not like characters can actually see the Morality score. It's just a mechanic for the GM and player. In game characters really have no way of knowing if someone at 29, 50, or 71 was ever slightly tainted. Slightly tainted, thus, is more how you play the character than what Morality score you sit him at. Even at 50 you can claim he is slightly tainted since Morality is meant to be in constant flux. Just because it's 50 now doesn't mean that it wasn't higher at some point and his taint caused him to drop to 50 or that it wasn't lower at some point and recent actions just pushed him up to 50.

So since no one can see their score being tainted is an aspect of how the character is played and less a function of where he sits on the Morality scale.

On 2/7/2017 at 1:07 AM, Aetrion said:

The morality system in this game really doesn't work very well as a spectrum of morality. A character who kills a child for fun once per year but doesn't do anything else that's evil would easily sit at 100 points paragon level for most of the time, a character who trolls people on the holonet every day would quickly end up at 0

I've always hated this kind of response about the Morality system because I see it as a failure of the GM that he is letting a character get away with killing a child once per year in the first place and not having other repercussions crop up. I also see it as a failure of the player as it is highly inconsistent to play a character that just randomly kills a child once per year. The character you describe is unrealistic in application and as such any such game where you have a character that ritualistically kills a child once a year but is somehow at 100 Morality is really adding up in a way that real people work.

7 hours ago, Kael said:

What do you mean by slightly tainted anyway? It's not like characters can actually see the Morality score. It's just a mechanic for the GM and player. In game characters really have no way of knowing if someone at 29, 50, or 71 was ever slightly tainted. Slightly tainted, thus, is more how you play the character than what Morality score you sit him at. Even at 50 you can claim he is slightly tainted since Morality is meant to be in constant flux. Just because it's 50 now doesn't mean that it wasn't higher at some point and his taint caused him to drop to 50 or that it wasn't lower at some point and recent actions just pushed him up to 50.

So since no one can see their score being tainted is an aspect of how the character is played and less a function of where he sits on the Morality scale.

The character sheet I'm using does show their morality on it. So, my players would see it.

A thing to remember for this, is that I'm running a game in a convention style. Which means I have to provide all the characters as pre-generated by me, the GM. So having that morality score is more of a clue to each individual player that there is something kind of "off" with their character. I'm also providing background info for them to explain why they are sitting where they are on the morality scale. However, these are players who are used to looking for a numerical representation via Dark Side Points in Star Wars D20 Revised to know if they have certain tendencies.

For now, I've planned to slide them down on the scale a bit, to make my point about their backgrounds, and go from there. These characters, by virtue of their shared background, are running at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to morality. I liked the idea of the caps and I may use that as well.

On 07/02/2017 at 6:57 PM, Stan Fresh said:

He goes on a murder spree in Episode 2, and doesn't go dark-side until Episode 3, which is set years later. Anakin, as portrayed in the Clone Wars show, and at the beginning of Episode 3, is already a child killer.

The darkside does have some positive perks on sex appeal though; he went from "won't court" to "marry me!" with padme after slaughtering a village. No wonder palpatine gets the entire republic singing his praises... XD

4 hours ago, LordBritish said:

The darkside does have some positive perks on sex appeal though; he went from "won't court" to "marry me!" with padme after slaughtering a village.

Exactly. It's because she thought, "I can fix him!"

7 hours ago, TarynRaan said:

The character sheet I'm using does show their morality on it. So, my players would see it.

A thing to remember for this, is that I'm running a game in a convention style. Which means I have to provide all the characters as pre-generated by me, the GM. So having that morality score is more of a clue to each individual player that there is something kind of "off" with their character. I'm also providing background info for them to explain why they are sitting where they are on the morality scale. However, these are players who are used to looking for a numerical representation via Dark Side Points in Star Wars D20 Revised to know if they have certain tendencies.

For now, I've planned to slide them down on the scale a bit, to make my point about their backgrounds, and go from there. These characters, by virtue of their shared background, are running at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to morality. I liked the idea of the caps and I may use that as well.

Your best bet is to leave their Morality scores at 50 and just note their "slightly tainted" in their character backgrounds. This is because, while such a character is still considered a "Light Side" character and not a Dark Sider (unless he or she had previously gone below 30 Morality and is now trying to redeem him/herself), the character is essentially half-way between the Light and Dark on the Morality scale. Thus, they're not wholly Light Side Paragons nor Dark Siders.

On 2/3/2017 at 8:06 PM, TarynRaan said:

I need my character just slightly tainted to start. Is there no option to put the PC at say 35 or 40?

Another question: what specialization are you starting with? There are some that offer "conflict-generating" talents, so that might be a good mechanical way of representing your "taintedness."

5 hours ago, awayputurwpn said:

Another question: what specialization are you starting with? There are some that offer "conflict-generating" talents, so that might be a good mechanical way of representing your "taintedness."

Not sure yet. Just started building characters this week in down time. Right now I have a Soresu Defender. I still have at least 4 more characters to build.

On 2/9/2017 at 8:18 AM, TarynRaan said:

The character sheet I'm using does show their morality on it. So, my players would see it.

So don't show them. Nothing says you need to show them all the details.

On 2/9/2017 at 8:18 AM, TarynRaan said:

However, these are players who are used to looking for a numerical representation via Dark Side Points in Star Wars D20 Revised to know if they have certain tendencies.

It's best to break them earlier of that. If you don't you are going to have a lot of problems using this system. If you and them approach this game as you would d20 Revised you are likely to have less fun. In my experience with this system and my basic observation is that a clean break is needed or you and your players will continually be frustrated with how loose this game plays with hard and secure concepts you're accustomed to from d20.

There have been far far too many threads where the central problem was the GM and the players trying to approach this game as if it were WotC or WEG. Toss all of that out the window and embrace the newness.