So, in a current campaign the PCs are fledgling (or wannabe, if you prefer) Jedis in a EotE-style campaign, meaning that they are saddled with both morality and obligation and the twin goals of finding some way to learn about the force and scraping together enough credits to get by.

Naturally, it was just a matter of time before we attracted the attention the Empire and the Inquisition, which is I guess is more or less an inevitability in most F&D campaigns prompting the discussion if this should count as an Obligation?

Pros:
Being hunted by any other organization in EotE would probably count as an obligation, like Bounty or Criminal.
The Obligation system is a fairly decent way to represent the stress of being hunted, as well as giving the GM a non-arbitrary way of deciding when the pursuers catch up.

Cons:
The Obligation systems feels like it's supposed to be a way to handle side plots (that may or may not tie into the main plot). Being hunted for being Jedi/force users seems like a given in a F&D campaign, and F&D doesn't include the obligation system to handle it.
It feels a bit like it would easily overshadow the PCs existing, more personal and character defining obligations.
If a growing enmity with the main antagonist(s) counts as an obligation, raisining the stakes of the campaign should also raise that obligation score, meaning it's just a matter of time before the obligation score almost irreversibly passes 100 total, completely shutting down advancement.

I'd love to hear people's opinions about it as the entire group (GM and players) are pretty much on the fence about it .

Most people, players and GM's, feel that if you are playing a Force User during the age of the Empire, you are pretty much guaranteed to be hunted by their enforcers. This is handled mechanically by giving them some appropriate kind of Obligation. Criminal, Bounty, are two very common, and very appropriate ones to pick, though honestly the wording is irrelevant. As long as everyone knows the Obligation is referring to their status as Force users being hunted by the Empire, you could call it Puppy Tax and it wouldn't matter.

As to feeling this would over shadow their story, that's totally up to the GM on how much of an intrusion it is for each episode.

You can take a page from the tv show Rebels if you want, as it's a great example of an ongoing campaign, where some members of the party have a Hunted Obligation, in the form of the Inquisitors that would frequently show up.

They didn't show up every episode, but they would rear their heads as a recurring villain multiple times during the various seasons. Some episodes would be entirely about dealing with the Inquisitors (you could read this as a session where the Obligation was rolled at the start of the session (or end of the previous session, but more on that in a minute), or got the double effect. Then, despite the fact that the Rebels were spending the episode trying to secure some fuel cells for the Rebel fighters, they are now having to escape the Inquisitor as well, ramping up the tension.

A GREAT suggestion that popped up a while back about this, is to roll the next sessions Obligation at the end of the current session. This way, the GM has time to find a way to work it into the next session, and the players have some anticipation about just what will happen. This helps the GM from having to resort to "Ugh, crap the Obligation triggered....um...there really isn't any way I can think of in 2 minutes to work them into the session so you guys just suffer some Strain, ok moving on!" That's not fun, at least not every time. Sometimes the strain is perfectly fitting.

There were episodes of the show, where the Inquisitors didn't show up directly, but they were at the forefront of the thoughts of the various members of the crew. Ezra and Kannen would argue multiple times, about how they should go find the Inquisitor, and take him out, and the other one arguing for caution. That would be a GREAT example of the Strain effect, if the Obligation triggers, even if you don't have the Inquisitors directly show up to attack the party. And, if the Obligation keeps rising, because they aren't dealing with it, then you can have a little mini-arc when the PC's decide to directly deal with the problem in the hopes of lowering the amount some. This would translate, in Rebels terms, to when the story focuses entirely on the Inquisitors, and the Rebels trying to stop them.

Other ways they can influence the game, without forcing the party to deal with them directly, is perhaps they end up in a town where there are wanted posters of them up all over the place, and they now have to tread carefully around town, in case someone decides to drop a call to the local Imperial presence. Or, that can equally be a great way to have an encounter, that doesn't directly involve the Inquisitor. If the GM can't come up with a way for the Inquisitor to know they are there right then, have someone else notice who they are, and call the Imperial Hotline to drop an anonymous tip. They can then simply deal with a Stormtrooper minion group or two, but after the dust settles, and they are flying away, they see the outline of the Inquisitor watching them leave, fresh on their trail once again.

Bottom line, there are a bajillion ways to have this Obligation weave into your narrative in fun and interesting ways, without it being a...well an Obligation to the players and GM.

Seriously, as a group, if you haven't already, watch the first 2 seasons or so of Rebels for inspiration on dealing with the constant threat of Imperial pursuit, due to the Force nature of the PC's. I think you will find it most enlightening.

I can see the appeal of using Obligation to reflect that a Force user PC is in some way, shape, or form being actively pursued by the Empire, but I don't suggest going through with it.

One of the elements of Obligation is that on top of being a "side plot" element to a character, it's also something that is generally meant to be resolved and thus lessened over the span of a campaign. How a PC goes about reducing their Obligation can vary; Han's method of 'resolving' his Debt Obligation to Jabba is certainly one approach, but not something that can really be done with regards to the Empire as a whole. If your PC keeps killing off the Empire's hunters, including Inquisitors, they're eventually going to draw the attention of Darth Vader, and a fight with him pretty much equates to flee for your life or die fighting.

While there's a standing bounty on Jedi as well as an Imperial institution that's dedicated to their pursuit and capture/elimination, it really shouldn't be a "random" thing (i.e. triggering of Obligation) that one of the Empire's various Jedi hunters, especially something like an Inquisitor, comes hunting for the PC. If/when something like an Inquisitor shows up to face the party, that should be a story in and of itself, not the side effect of a random between-session dice roll.

While Rebels was brought up as an example, note that Kanan and Ezra weren't being actively pursued by the Empire for being Jedi until after Kanan had outed himself as a Jedi to Agent Kallus in the first season premier, which resulted in the Grand Inquisitor being contacted to handle the situation. And even then, the Grand Inquisitor didn't just suddenly drop in on the Ghost crew, but instead laid a rather effective trap that the Rebels only escaped through sheer good fortune.

If anything, use that standing bounty as a consequence for if the PCs are too blatant or obvious about them being Force users and/or having lightsabers. If they go about openly brandishing their powers or slicing up opponents with lightsabers, then word is going to eventually reach the Empire and they'll react by sending a powerful someone with a lot of resources to call upon to go investigate and "deal" with these law-breaking renegades.

14 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

While Rebels was brought up as an example, note that Kanan and Ezra weren't being actively pursued by the Empire for being Jedi until after Kanan had outed himself as a Jedi to Agent Kallus in the first season premier, which resulted in the Grand Inquisitor being contacted to handle the situation. And even then, the Grand Inquisitor didn't just suddenly drop in on the Ghost crew, but instead laid a rather effective trap that the Rebels only escaped through sheer good fortune.

But there were also several examples of that Inquisitor not being an issue for several episodes in a stretch, only to show back up, sometimes literally out of nowhere. Same thing for the duo of Inquisitors during season 2. Yes, they set traps, but they also simply showed up at a previous action of the Rebels, and then simply followed the trail. Your typical bloodhound investigator kind of thing. They would be gone for a bit, and then jump out like the Spanish Inquisition, they even had the appropriate color theme.

And I never suggested they just drop on them out of nowhere, but Rebels had plenty of times where all of the hunting happened in a screen wipe, or between episodes. One episode would end with the very obvious location that the Rebels just GTFO'd from, and you see an Inquisitor there. They would say something like "Oh would you be a dear and tell me just who was it that did this to your base?" *Malicious smile, ominous music, cut to credits* And then the next episode, the Inquisitors show up to harass them. To me that seems like a perfectly valid method to have the Inq's show up as plot, or Obligation dictates. Unless the PC's are the most scrupulous crime scene cleaners, there is always some bit of evidence that could lead back to them. The limitation is only that of the GM's imagination.

Though I am curious, since just about everyone else I've heard speak on this, encourages the use of Obligation, including many of the devs, what is your take on it? What should be used? If anything? Should it just be left up to the whim of the GM? Because yes, Obligation can go down due to the players involvement, but it can also go up again. Just like in Rebels. But there were times when they got a breather from the constant hunt, usually after they took direct action to deal with the Inq's. Sure, later, Vader shows up, but that doesn't mean the Obligation amount increased (but it could, increasing from say the 5 the players reduced it to, up to 15+ or so), just that the results of the Obligation got upgraded.

KungFuFerret,
The Grand Inquisitor wasn't used as a constant threat in the series because Filoni and the other writers wanted to avoid the 80's cartoon cliche of a major villain such as Megatron, Skeletor, Cobra Commander, and even Mumm-Ra being hard to view as a legitimate threat when the good guys kept beating them week after week. Instead, they wrote the series so that when the Grand Inquisitor showed up, the Rebels knew that things just got real serious and their success was no longer quite as assured as it'd be against more ordinary Imperial foes. Fifth Brother and Seventh Sister towards the end of the second season started running afoul of the "hard to consider a serious threat" trope, since we'd seen the Rebels outsmart or even outfight them on multiple occasions; Ahsoka proved them to be zero threat to her, and even in his dotage Maul was likely capable of dispatching them with ease, only pretending to be less capable than he was in order to further his own agenda.

And each time the Grand Inquisitor showed up, he did so as part of a very deliberate plan, starting out with a well-laid trap in the fifth episode. By the time the first season started winding down, he showed up more often because it was almost a guarantee that Kanan (his primary target) would be present, and even then he didn't engage until Kanan had made his immediate presence known.

As for how to handle when an Inquisitor shows up, see the last paragraph of my prior post. I'm fully of the opinion that "random encounters" are a thing to be avoided like the plague, even in a system like this one where coming up with enemy stats is a cinch. Something like an Inquisitor should be the result of the PCs' actions and their lack of secrecy with regards to their Force abilities. If the PCs are indeed smart and clever enough to avoid outing themselves as Force users, then they should be rewarded for that cleverness by staying under the Empire's radar and thus never having an Inquisitor lay eyes on them. After all, Kanan was able to operate as a Rebel in tandem with Hera for some time before the Inquisitors took an interest in him, simply because he was smart and avoided outing himself as a Jedi until he had no other option but to do so; it's possible that had Kallus not been saved by the plot in Spark of Rebellion and instead plunged to his doom, that the Grand Inquisitor wouldn't have been notified of Kanan's existence.

By immediately saddling a PC with an Obligation that says "the Empire is hunting you because you're a Force user," all the GM has done is ensure that no matter what the PC does or how clever or cautious they are with concealing their Force abilities, they're going to eventually have the Empire come down on them simply because of a roll of the dice, and it's an Obligation that can't really be bought down, since apart from turning your coat and joining the Empire, there's not really anything a PC can do to get the Empire to stop hunting them and still be an active character in the session, thus any attempts to reduce that Obligation (something that should be capable of being done with any Obligation) come across as stretching credibility.

Now, the primary reason that Kanan and Ezra haven't been dodging Inquisitors in the third season is that Filoni wanted to phase that group out so as to not draw attention away from major new villain Grand Admiral Thrawn. The Empire still knows about their existence (at the very least Vader saw them flee in the Phantom), but they're no longer sending dedicated resources to hunt the pair down in the way that having an Obligation would reflect; if anything Thrawn considers the two Jedi to be an after-thought with regards to his larger goal of defeating the Rebellion, given that they are merely two soldiers in the scope of the larger Rebellion, albeit highly capable ones, but then so are Sabine, Zeb, and Rex, all three of whom have no Force abilities whatsoever, and so Thrawn's focus is more on the Rebellion's leaders such as Hera and Sato than on the elite mooks they command.

I'm just going to highlight a couple points from above:

- Can you and your group come up with fun/interesting ways to pay down this kind of obligation? (E.g., is there a corrupt imperial (maybe who doesnt believe in all that force stuff anyway) they can run smuggling type missions for, who can lose some of the more alarming reports about their activity)

- Can you and your group come up with interesting rewards for buying up this kind of of obligation?

If you have fun and interesting ways to increase or decrease obligation when it suits the pcs to do so (in addition to those times it goes up or down as a normal consequence of activity), then I'd say go for it and enjoy.

8 hours ago, downlobot said:

I'm just going to highlight a couple points from above:

- Can you and your group come up with fun/interesting ways to pay down this kind of obligation? (E.g., is there a corrupt imperial (maybe who doesnt believe in all that force stuff anyway) they can run smuggling type missions for, who can lose some of the more alarming reports about their activity)

- Can you and your group come up with interesting rewards for buying up this kind of of obligation?

If you have fun and interesting ways to increase or decrease obligation when it suits the pcs to do so (in addition to those times it goes up or down as a normal consequence of activity), then I'd say go for it and enjoy.

This is definitely an issue. If it's an obligation it isn't something that you can reduce short of faking your death and/or going into exile, both which are options generally more suited to campaign endings rather than middles.

1 hour ago, penpenpen said:

This is definitely an issue. If it's an obligation it isn't something that you can reduce short of faking your death and/or going into exile, both which are options generally more suited to campaign endings rather than middles.

Actually there are a lot of things PC's could do to lower this kind of obligation.

1. Slice into Imperial databases and alter records about their last known location and whereabouts.
2. Pay other groups to plant false leads and trails .
3. Sell off their very distinct and signature ship *cough Falcon* *cough Ghost* and get a very run of the mill looking ship with new transponder codes.
4. Kill the Inquisitors chasing them. Rebels did this and for a LONG time, after killing that first Inquisitor, they didn't have any others to deal with. You could read this as a significant drop in their Obligation, that took a while to go back up.
5. Fake their deaths, which you did mention, just listing it here along the others.
6. Travel to the **** end of the galaxy, taking circuitous routes, uncharted systems, etc to throw off the trail as much as possible. (Allowing your Pilot character a chance to show their stuff perhaps, using Astrogation checks to find obscure but dangerous routes, and then having to navigate those dangerous paths with their awesome stick skills.

And I'm sure other people can come up with a lot of other examples, but those are the ones I can think of offhand.

And for a boatload of conflict, they can point their pursuers in the direction of other force sensitives to take the heat off for a time.

Edit: or when it's time to buy up obligation, the could discover that all those false leads they've been planting haven't been so false afterall.