Hi all, I have a group where everyone started with Obligation. One player however wanted to join the Rebellion and started getting duty. I have no real problem mixing Obligation and Duty per se, however I'm curious on what to grant for duty awards for 1 player. My perception is that duty is a slower mechanic than obligation, but the other players simply have no desire to join the Rebellion. What might be a proper reward in this case? 5 points per session maybe by giving him smaller chunks of information (his duty) to discover each session? 10 points per session? A greater amount on completion of the mission? I want it to be small enough that it makes working for it meaningful yet not so small that he gets frustrated by feeling he's not advancing enough. Thanks for any advice.

Well it depends on what you want to do with the duty.

A big part of duty is to provide a method for military and other "sponsored" charaters to get new and better gear and opportunities without having to do some wierd thing where they spend their own paychecks on it. Soldiers don't have to buy thier tank out of thier own pocket.

With Obligation in play as well this may or may not be a thing. Mercs, smugglers and other neer do well are expected to pay off a lot of things out of pocket, that's why the really hard jobs are pricey and require an advance, and why Obligation can be upped on a whim to "call in a favor from someone."

So you need to figure out where these two things meet.

Is Duty going to be a key to unlocking access to alliance leadership and Intel, or a way to get high end Military hardware, or just a representation of where the rebel player stands in relation to the Rebellion at large?

Thanks for the response Ghostofman. So the player who wants to join the Rebellion wants to play it 'shiny'. The noble soldier and all that. The rest of the group will most likely be mercs being paid by the Rebellion. The soldier 's duty is intelligence. The most likely scenario is he will be liaison for the Rebellion to the other group members. While the soldier will eventually get perks from the Rebellion, the rest will use more underworld resources. This will cause most of the groups obligation coming in the form of Imperial retribution. They will be on relatively separate tracks. And while the soldier player will most pick up some obligation in this regard, he wants to focus on climbing the Rebellion rank structure. So my question remains I guess. We play roughly every other week. I'm thinking 1 rank every 2 to 3 months of play time. But I'm flying a bit blind here. I've been GMing for 30 years but am relatively new to this system. I just don't want to penalize him for being the only one wanting to join the Rebellion, officially as it were.

Ok, so here's just my opinion on things and how they work:

Obligation, duty, and even morality are supposed to be a kind of mechanical way for a player to talk to a GM about what he wants his character to do and be about. The bonuses and penalties it kicks out are collateral of that Character information.

So, the Alliance guy is telling you he wants to be a spy or something. Cool, that works. He can be a Cassian Andor type and we know that'll work and even a bit about what you can do with it. The fact it's super flexible is even better. He can go all over running jobs for the Alliance and maybe even be the "quest giver" for the rest of the crew who might not even know they are alliance.

Next let's talk about the mercs. What are thier Obligation? Not just "well the Empire doesn't like them" that's a given. What keeps them up at night? What things are they thinking about instead of the mission? Who are they sending part of thier paycheck to and why?

Find those out because then you can work it into the story and do more. So like Jyn Erso had Obligation:Family. Her daddy was a big Imperial scientist and when it popped it turned out he was a turncoat and she had to clear his name and/or rescue him, and the rest of the adventure uses that as a fulcrum. (Pun not intended)

So see what kind of stuff the other players kick out and work with it. Working in the famed Bounty Hunter Rin-rin Doof whose not happy the charmer player stole from him and then took that vacation with his daughter....and his sister...and his wife... Brings in a lot more interesting, personal interactions than just another Imperial entanglement, even if the end result is essentially the same.

So coming back to duty. For this you can use this as a kind of payoff with bonus options. So like the Alliance gives him an assignment... It'll pay out cash with the intent of that funding the mercs. But it will also kick out duty to help advance him within the alliance. So like yeah 20 or so per mission since he's the only one. But then the player can also do things to to get more on the fly or in accordance with any random opportunity or activated Duty. So like let's say the mission is to steal plans from the Hydrospeare plant on Agian Prime. And his duty pops. Now you can also give him an opportunity to do something more. Like steal the plans to the waveskimmer for 5 extra. Or the Prototype itself for another five, or the lead developmental engineer for 5 more... So a possibility of 15 more Duty on one job...

And that also allows you to work in the Obligation in the same way. Maybe Col. Halbret shows up to observe an operational test and low and behold hes hired Rin-rin Doof to work his personal security detail... Now the player has to worry both about being recognized, and when the epic escape goes into effect there's likely going to be a heavily modified gunship on their butts instead of just the handful of TIEs The players initially expected...