I use morality a little different and rarely "warn" my players of anything. I expect them to play out what their characters would do and reward/add consequences appropriately and the rolls come into play somewhat....but whilst I put challenges in the way and some set pieces I try to mask them and not make them obvious.
One of the things I hate about SWTOR and as i've gotten older Is one of the few detraction from the first KOTOR game is how at certain points its quite obvious where the line is.

Kill the kids anakin! They -might- grow up to be dangerous..Don't kill the kids anakin! They're kids.

Maybe that's a GM style thing but one of the triumphs of KOTOR2 is how it talks about the fall being subtle and difficult to resist if you're not careful even if you believe you're doing the right thing. I like the reveal and silent messages to players where they realise that what they've done might well have been the sensible option but not the right one. I often feel like as GM it;s my job to blur that line not lay it out for them.

The morality in RAW feels too easy to "Sleepwalk to Paragon" as mentioned and I prefer this. It should be very difficult to maintain that balance even when doing the right things and even harder as you form attachments and the like.

I like this Golem and I showed it to my group, some 10 strong, and it was something that once they read and felt was a good idea or at least something that with some amendments would be worthwhile.

10 hours ago, Luahk said:

I use  morality a little different and rarely "warn"  my players of an  ything  .  

This sabotages the vanilla Morality system.

It creates the adversarial relationship between GM and Player, "Conflict is a punishment", dynamic that seeks to take a Players control over their PCs story away from them.

As "realistic" as that method may seem (Just do what you do, and see what happens.), the Morality mechanic isn't meant to be "realistic". It's meant to be a mechanical tool with which players can explore "Jedi" Morality. A way to "show" players (mechanically) the choices a "Jedi" has to make at times (easy power or the easy path or indulging your emotions - and the Darkside, or harmony with the Force and doing things "the hard way" not striking down your unarmed enemy, etc.).

Im not posting this to try and change your mind Luahk, I'm merely posting this to illustrate to the community at large how the vanilla Morality system works.

And it does work if you don't do things that break it's basic design, and use Conflict most often as a choice between "the easy way" (by allowing Force Powers to accomplish great things and thereby tempt dark pip use, by making Conflict-worthy actions accomplish goals easier) and "the hard way".

1 hour ago, emsquared said:

This sabotages the vanilla Morality system.

It creates the adversarial relationship between GM and Player, "Conflict is a punishment", dynamic that seeks to take a Players control over their PCs story away from them.

Not always, especially if the GM advises their players up front before the campaign begins that they are going to be doing this. Of course, this also assumes you have a reasonably mature group of players; trying this with a group of pre-teens is not going to go well, as they don't have quite as firm a grasp of "right and wrong" as most adults have.

I actually run my games where I don't tell my players "hey, this action is going to earn you Conflict if you proceed," but then my group are all adults and I told them I was going to do this at the campaign's outset. Given how many of them are begging me to resume the campaign, I'd say there's a succinct lack of adversarial relationship between me and them.

And in a very real sense, Conflict is a mechanical "punishment" for most characters because it can pull them away from LS Paragon status (which overall is generally beneficial) or at worse pushes them to dark sider status (which apart from slightly easier Force use has a number of negatives if you drop too far). This backed by the films and other Star Wars media where falling to the dark side is presented as a very bad thing to do. It's really only the wannabe edge-lords that see going fully dark side as being an entirely beneficial outcome.

46 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Not always, especially if the GM advises their players up front before the campaign begins that they are going to be doing this. Of course, this also assumes you have a reasonably mature group of players; trying this with a group of pre-teens is not going to go well, as they don't have quite as firm a grasp of "right and wrong" as most adults have.

I actually run my games where I don't tell my players "hey, this action is going to earn you Conflict if you proceed," but then my group are all adults and I told them I was going to do this at the campaign's outset. Given how many of them are begging me to resume the campaign, I'd say there's a succinct lack of adversarial relationship between me and them.

And in a very real sense, Conflict is a mechanical "punishment" for most characters because it can pull them away from LS Paragon status (which overall is generally beneficial) or at worse pushes them to dark sider status (which apart from slightly easier Force use has a number of negatives if you drop too far). This backed by the films and other Star Wars media where falling to the dark side is presented as a very bad thing to do. It's really only the wannabe edge-lords that see going fully dark side as being an entirely beneficial outcome.

Most of us are in our mid-late twenties by now and so I do it this way.

Much as it might seem weird @emsquared the whole point to us is a semi-realistic portrayal of the universe we are literally playing a role in. So it feels real and the consequences the same. Punishment and consequences for actions, especially if they aren't pre warned, means my players think harder about what to do and what not to do. They take the game more seriously and invest more heavily into it and feel more rewarded when they select the correct path.
We do have lighter note campaigns or missions but in general that's the style we go with.

50 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Not always, especially if the GM advises their players up front before the campaign begins that they are going to be doing this. Of course, this also assumes you have a reasonably mature group of players; trying this with a group of pre-teens is not going to go well, as they don't have quite as firm a grasp of "right and wrong" as most adults have.

This mirrors my experience. Far more often than not, my players tell me they are going to take some conflict because of their actions and ask me to adjudicate how much is appropriate.

Explaining right off the bat, in session zero, the purpose of conflict as a narrative mechanic, instead of punishment for naughtiness, seems to have provided me a different experience than many posters here. I have never felt like someone is coasting to paragon.

My playgroup is made up of experienced, mature players, though, so that may account for it.

Couple things going on here:

Even if you tell players in advance - even if they say, "ok, I'm on board." - it's still creating an adversarial dynamic.

This is because adversarial here does not mean animosity, or disagreement, or even obfuscation, but just that it creates "two sides" trying to achieve the same thing. The player dictating what they see as the PCs nature, and the GM dictating what that nature actually is.

Which may be exciting to some players and desirable for a campaigns tone, and that's great, but it's not how the Morality system was designed to be used. So you can't very well be surprised, or claim it's a problem with the mechanic, when it plays differently than it was designed cuz you're using it differently than it was designed.

It also matters how players view Conflict. They may not view it a bad thing at all. That's not saying they will seek it out, but they may not seek to avoid it either. They really might want to just make their choices and see how that shifts the Morality needle without predetermining that they want to avoid or accumulate Conflict in a planned journey towards light or dark.

Struggled with whether I was going to weigh in on this one, people seem pretty incensed and getting vicious.... but the conversation is definitely one that needs to be had. Morality is the most complicated of the systems, as many here have mentioned, and I think it's important to remember a few things when discussing it;

1) Any system, like a process or procedure at your place of employment, is only useful if it can be understood and applied appropriately. A lot of time is being discussed about the proper understanding and application of the system RAW and RAI, and while these may be valid points that the system is not mechanically bereft of value, it also speaks to the fact that the system may be too complicated or nuanced for average acceptance in play. To shift the blame of a complicated or inefficient system to the GM and players trying to incorporate it is insulting, and ultimately defeatist - if the system can't be easily incorporated to the average audience, then no matter how big the payoff of using the system properly is, the system isn't a good one. From all the conversations on Morality, I've come to accept that while I personally like the system, the deep nuances and difficulty in explaining the finer details of running it (as evidenced not only by the repeated returns to the topic in multiple different source books, but also the many threads and posts used to further clarify) mean that the system is not a good one for most players and GMs.

2) In light of the first point, it is necessary to remember that when a GM is forced to admit defeat in administering the Morality system as written, it is not always because they don't personally understand it, nor even that they are "lazy" or undisciplined in their application of it. By it's nature, it requires their players to have as mature and nuanced understanding of it as the GM, and not all players are (in point of fact, I would say even most aren't) able to fully grasp the rule set. Most players of the RPG are still trying to understand the changes in moving from merely a player to becoming a "mini-GM" and having a role in rules arbitration that narrative systems like this employ, and as most players have never personally run games, that is a steep learning curve. To add to that learning curve the pitfalls of story creation in addition to rules arbitration can cause players to "check out" and get lost ... impeding their acceptance and learning ability. When this happens, a GM needs to look to alternatives to get everyone back to enjoying the game, and those alternatives start with abandoning the system, and end with adding subtle house rules and vary a great deal in between.

3) In light of the second point, if everyone who struggled with the nuance abandoned the game, it would be the death of the game. To employ "you don't need to change anything, you just need to do it right" arguments leads to the idea of elitism, regardless of intention. To imply that difficulty in implementation of the system is the fault of the table invariably leads to the implication that the table is inferior, and pushes naturally towards the option to abandon the game or ignore the speaker, and in both cases, further discourse is pointless. The alternative, that of house rules, will keep a table engaged in the game and therefore further the health of the game. Thus, valuable discussion can only occur by direct focus on the house rules in question and not on the decision to employ house rules itself. The statement "the Serenity points seem high - when using the system as it is written the awards of Conflict are to moderate in value, with some cases of extreme awards for extreme actions, while your awards are escalating faster than the negatives do" is a valuable critique and can lead to discussion about how the RAW system can work in relation to the House Rule (thereby teaching the RAW system), to disregard the award of positive points in a Serenity system is a non-starter and adds no value to the conversation. From what I see, the implication of a Serenity system is doing nothing more than removing the random variable from the d10 Morality die at the end of the session, at the cost of more tracking and paperwork on the part of the GM. In the RAW system, what does it matter if the d10 Morality at the session's end is a random roll or a factored value, provided the outcome is analogous?

4) To the third point, Emsquared, Donovan, and myself are all proponents of the RAW system, but you can see that even Donovan and Emsquared disagree over the allowable deviance from that system before working against it. This is illustrated in the exchange about implicitly telling players when they are going to gain Conflict (if anyone cares, I personally don't tell my players - they're fellow writers and long time improv actors, so they are experienced enough to root motivations, but will do so with newer players or those not as experienced as my usual group), with Emsquared believing it undercuts the system and Donovan believing it can be allowed provided it is established clearly. This disagreement in itself a house rule, though very minor in construction, and brings my first three points into perspective. As Donovan himself said, "you can do what you want at your table" and while often this is used as a dismissive statement, it's important to remember it's a "golden rule" and so it sacrosanct to gaming.

To end with, I will give some feedback on the system that GroggyGolem provided. First, I think the Serenity awards are a bit high, the goal should be to pace them with Conflict awards, so that "a little bit of good and a little bit of bad" is a wash, as opposed to slightly balancing someone to one side or the other. The awards of value should key in to the likelihood of the choice - so if you have a chance to earn a given reward more often than another, then the more common award should be lower in value, despite it being more "important" than the other. Also, you might want to consider a "secret record" approach - don't award Conflict or Serenity on a case by case basis, but instead on an impact basis. A way to do this is don't total them as they occur, instead, at the end of the session, see what you remember. This inherently means that the awards (both Conflict and Serenity) came at story significant moments and had an impact on the events (evidenced by there notability). This way, impactful events will inherently tell the characters story instead of it being a bank ledger of checks and balances.

As for the awards for dark side and light side pip use, I think that overall it's unnecessary. Conflict earned in this fashion is more about dice probability and economy than necessarily Morality. The Strain award and Conflict is meant to reflect the exertion of using the Force, and the flipping of the Destiny Point is an functionary of keeping the pool alternating during the course of play. These are aspects that range more towards the function of the game than really the Morality of the player, and I would warn you that it might be scope creep to play with this aspect of things.

Aside from all that, I'm interested to keep hearing about how your table likes rule change and how you evolve it as you use it!

You make great points but, wow, that gave me a headache reading that much text in purple on black.

On 4/25/2019 at 11:55 AM, Kyla said:

To end  with, I will give some feedback on the system that Groggy  Gol  em provided. First, I think the Serenity awards are a bit high  , the goal s  hou  ld be   t  o pace them with Conflict awards, so that "a little bit of go  od and a little bit of bad" is a wash, as opposed to sligh  tly balancing someone to one side or the other.   T  he awards of value should key in to the likelihoo  d of the choice - so if you have a chance to earn a giv  en reward more often than another, then the more co  m  mon award should be lower in value, despite it b  eing more "important" than the other. Also, you migh   t  want to consider a "secret record" approach - don  '  t award Conflict or Serenity on a case by case ba  sis, but instead on an impact basis. A way to d  o this is don't total them as they occur, instead, at  the end of the session, see what you remember  . This inherently means that the awards (both  Conflict and Serenity) came at story significant moments and had an impact on the events (evidenced by there notability). This way, impactful  events will inherently tell the characters story instead   of it being a bank ledger of checks and balances.

Thanks for the feedback Kyla! I hope it helps anyone that decides to improve upon my initial concept.

As of last June, I abandoned the morality and conflict mechanics entirely and it has been a good change for my table.

On 4/25/2019 at 1:29 PM, Varlie said:

You make great points but, wow, that gave me a headache reading that much text in purple on black.

Yeah, I can never read Kyla's posts. Would love to but I just can't do that to my eyes.

On 6/3/2018 at 3:57 PM, GroggyGolem said:

IIRC the rules state that as long as there was the possibility of gaining Conflict then a Morality roll at the end of the session should be made.

Going with the RAW, that means a single dark side point used with a Force Power is enough to get a Morality roll.

Beyond that, there's no clear definition of what is considered "adequate moral quandries", nor are they a requirement for the Morality roll.

actually there is. There is a whole chart of actions that cause conflict. so presenting situations where those things are possible options is worthy of a roll.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

actually there is. There is a whole chart of actions that cause conflict. so presenting situations where those things are possible options is worthy of a roll.

This is an RPG, so every sentient being offers your the choice of whether or not to murder them. Therefore, anytime you interact with any other character (PC or NPC) you have the opportunity to earn Conflict.

3 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

This is an RPG, so every sentient being offers your the choice of whether or not to murder them. Therefore, anytime you interact with any other character (PC or NPC) you have the opportunity to earn Conflict.

exactly. And you have a nice chart of actions that cause conflict. if you do any of them you get conflict and roll a die. If you don't do any of them you roll a die. A good GM will set up situations where the conflict worthy choice is the easier faster way to solve a problem

I don't warn players about conflict or consequences. They tend to self regulate and they know that moral dilemmas are a large part of my games. A few of them embrace that ideal and ride the edge, others play it safe and always make safe choices. my youngest player tends to go for the darkest options, but she's relatively young and new to gaming in general, so it's a learning process for her, and she still gets that thrill of being "bad" in a game.

At the end of each session we go over earned conflict, and roll morality. There has been a few times when players have argued with me that they should get more conflict, and I have always let them take it. Led to a 20 pt drop in morality once. And a really cool story and a change in the emotional strength and weakness for that pc.

Go with what works for your games.