Yes. I know. I KNOW! We've been through this a million times, with as many half-baked ideas. I know.

But I'm half-baking anyway!

For some groups, Conflict works just fine as-is. While I mostly like how it works, my group suffers from that "Skate to Paragon" issue. Mostly, i'm not very good at keeping on top of how much Conflict is earned, and we don't usually have time at the end of a session to tally it up, so my group earns it more slowly than it should.

Back in the Edge of the Empire days, before Morality was a thing, someone suggested a Dark Side obligation. This could be earned through the use of Dark Pips, and doing naughty things. If you only have one Force-User, this can work pretty well, as the penalties can easily reflect the hardships of working with someone who's got pure hatred coursing through him.

So I started thinking of using something similar. Track Conflict as usual. Tally up all those Dark pips and aggressive actions, but don't roll a d10 at the end of each session (or two). For the most part, it just keeps building. But each session, the GM rolls d100. If it rolls under a character's Conflict, that character will have a Crisis in the session (yeah, I know. Roll ahead of time so you can plan it). Pretty much like triggering Morality as usual, the character needs to face some sort of real challenge to his Emotional Strength and Weakness. If he succeeds, he greatly reduces his Conflict. If he fails, he increases it.

That's the basic idea. I'm still monkeying with the numbers in my head. Part of the puzzle is choosing which character triggers the crisis, as I think only one should be triggered per session. Let's say you have two Jedi, Goofus and Gallant. Goofus makes a lot of bad choices, and has Conflict 60. Gallant makes much better choices, and has Conflict 15. Naturally, if the GM rolls 40, Goofus has a crisis. But let's say the GM rolls 14. Who has a crisis? Should it be the character with the highest Conflict? This would mean that low-conflict characters would very rarely have that spotlight, and Light Side Paragon would be a very temporary condition, as such a character would slide slowly toward the Dark until they had enough Conflict to exceed their compatriots. While I like the idea of a character being dragged down by nasty friends, I think it would be better to trigger the Lowest Conflict Character that can still trigger.

The other question would be: how much Conflict is wiped away on a successful Crisis? I'm thinking half the d100 roll?

Anyway. of the general idea, whaddyall think? Terrible? I did think of it at like 2 am.

So short take is that you're in effect changing Conflict to be a form of Obligation, except that when it triggers the PC has a customized plot event rather than suffer a strain penalty.

It's an interesting approach, but one thing that you don't seem to currently account for is a way for a PC to lower the current Conflict, similar to how prior SWRPGs had a means for PCs to reduce their dark side score, generally involving peaceful meditation and abstaining from calling upon the dark side along with a mechanical expenditure of a Force point.

After all, not every PC is going to be walking the Anakin path, so PCs should have the option to be able to willingly reduce their Conflict. Probably best to have such a method require that the PC not earn any Conflict (while of course requiring that the PC be faced with choices that could earn them Conflict) and if successful, they get to reduce it by a token amount (more than 1 point, but no higher than 10 points; random d10 roll maybe?)

19 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Probably best to have such a method require that the PC not earn any Conflict (while of course requiring that the PC be faced with choices that could earn them Conflict) and if successful, they get to reduce it by a token amount (more than 1 point, but no higher than 10 points; random d10 roll maybe?)

So they auto-fail at redemption as soon as they learn even a single Conflict-generating talent?

As per usual, I fail to see how merely shifting the spot where the gamesmanship occurs is a better option than just handling Dark/Lightsidedness 100% narratively, if the vanilla Morality system isn't working for you.

I killed morality in my game. It started being reacted to as punishment and unfortunately highlighted each players unique beliefs regarding how their own morality interacted with "force morality". So I just nixed it and now I'm going to handle it narratively by letting them know when the Darkside is calling them to action. All "conflict" generation will be strain generation (except for using Darkside pips which already cause strain). I'll handle Juyo stuff if/when it comes up.