So this houserule increases the temptation of the darkside for light force users, potentially making the force more reliable and making Paragon a little less inevitable.

When a lightside force user rolls force dice, the entire pool is available, but any dark pips rolled WILL generate conflict... unless you take 1 strain per pip to resist the darkside, removing those pips from the force roll. (Or use a destiny point to use all pips with no conflict penalty)

Someone who has fallen to the dark side inverts the mechanic- When they roll Force dice, they must spend a strain OR WOUND to bend each light pip to their will, but get dark pips with only conflict. (Destiny point allows the use of all pips, with no strain or conflict penalty)

You may ALWAYS, of course, choose to roll LESS force dice than your force rating. At the end of each session, get d10 morality back as usual.

This makes the strongest force users the ones reveling in their power as they fall to darkness, which I feel is well represented in the lore, but may be an issue for short-run campaigns. The Fallen strain themselves to become the force's master, while the disciples of light must resist the darkness. And Once You enter the Dark Path, it is exceptionally difficult to reverse your Destiny.

I see some nice narrative possibilities with that system, and you have explained the pro's very well.

However, one downside that to my players would be simply unacceptable, is that it unless you're a Mystic who can re-roll his force 4 times a session, it makes it practically impossible to have extremely powerful light side users. (Cause if you're powerful and trying to stick to the light, after 2 or 3 rolls you'd be knocked out by the strain.)

It seems like you'd be penalizing players who spend months or years of their life getting enough EXP to get a high force rating, and who happen to be nice people who want to stick to the light side.

The pull of the dark is already strong as so many of the force points rolled are dark, and to activate powerful abilities you need a lot of them, or if you're trying to use Ebb/Flow to give you 2 success and 2 advantage to each roll, then you'll rack up conflict without a problem.

If your worry is about Paragons being "inevitable" I'd say they need to be using more Force. At my table only 1 player became a paragon. Why? She has a force rating of 1, and never uses any force powers, so she gets no conflict. The others with ratings of +3 are all hovering around the 40-50 morality area because they're force power intensive. If you want to come up with a system to combat the "inevitably" of Paragons, come up with something that gives more conflict to those who aren't using force powers. (This could be done narratively, for example the character rolls their force die, sees they got hardly any light side points, or none at all, and decide not to use dark side points, and therefore don't activate the force power. Then you could say " Since you know you had the power to act, and did not, you feel very guilty. Take 1 conflict.")

But overall I think that the writers came up with a more balanced solution in the books.

(Just my opinion, take with a pinch of salt.) ?

Honestly, I've found the easiest way to increase the temptation using dark side pips is to just get rid of the "must flip a Destiny Point" to use. Unless you've got players that are a bunch of wannabe Lawful Good paladins, that alone makes using dark side pips a lot more tempting, and subsequently slows down the progression to Light Side Paragon. Other big change that helps slow the PCs down from hitting LS Paragon too quickly is to roll the d10 at the end of each adventure instead of each session; it's a house rule I've been employing since the Beta (with players informed of this at session zero), and it works out quite well.

The problem with doing an "either take Conflict or strain to use those dark side pips" approach is that you're going to wind up ramping up how much more effecting the Force users in the party are, as their powers are now going to be far more reliable, and it can be pretty easy to micro-manage whether to take strain or Conflict at any given moment in the session, especially for those PCs who don't care about hitting LS Paragon.

54 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Just get rid of the "must flip a Destiny Point" to use.

Roll the d10 at the end of each adventure instead of each session; it's a house rule

I can't agree more! I've used this as well, and it works beautifully.

11 hours ago, Vanahemir said:

I see some nice narrative possibilities with that system, and you have explained the pro's very well.

However, one downside that to my players would be simply unacceptable, is that it unless you're a Mystic who can re-roll his force 4 times a session, it makes it practically impossible to have extremely powerful light side users. (Cause if you're powerful and trying to stick to the light, after 2 or 3 rolls you'd be knocked out by the strain.)

It seems like you'd be penalizing players who spend months or years of their life getting enough EXP to get a high force rating, and who happen to be nice people who want to stick to the light side.

The pull of the dark is already strong as so many of the force points rolled are dark, and to activate powerful abilities you need a lot of them, or if you're trying to use Ebb/Flow to give you 2 success and 2 advantage to each roll, then you'll rack up conflict without a problem.

If your worry is about Paragons being "inevitable" I'd say they need to be using more Force. At my table only 1 player became a paragon. Why? She has a force rating of 1, and never uses any force powers, so she gets no conflict. The others with ratings of +3 are all hovering around the 40-50 morality area because they're force power intensive. If you want to come up with a system to combat the "inevitably" of Paragons, come up with something that gives more conflict to those who aren't using force powers. (This could be done narratively, for example the character rolls their force die, sees they got hardly any light side points, or none at all, and decide not to use dark side points, and therefore don't activate the force power. Then you could say " Since you know you had the power to act, and did not, you feel very guilty. Take 1 conflict.")

But overall I think that the writers came up with a more balanced solution in the books.

(Just my opinion, take with a pinch of salt.) ?

Yes, this wouldn't be something to throw into a high level campaign in progress. It fundamentally changes a Jedis relationship with strain, which can invalidate mature character builds.

It is, however, something I think would be interesting to play or run, given knowledge of this houserule at character creation.

I leave an open offer to all my Force users that they may forgo the Destiny Point flip if they willingly take double the Conflict. They often go for it since it's usually only 2 or 4 compared to 1 or 2. It slows the jump to Paragon and helps add a little more story fuel to their narrative while not sapping the party resource.

Unofficial poll, are ppl just having troubles with players "not getting enough Conflict" at low xp-levels/low Force Ratings or is it all the way up to high XP/high FR?

It just boggles my mind how my tables' experience seems to be so different from so many others.

But also we're at like 3-4 FR (and heavily upgraded Powers), so maybe that's part of what goes on? It's an interesting dynamic we've found that the more powerful in the Force someone is, the harder it is to "advance" Morality.

12 hours ago, emsquared said:

Unofficial poll, are ppl just having troubles with players "not getting enough Conflict" at low xp-levels/low Force Ratings or is it all the way up to high XP/high FR?

It just boggles my mind how my tables' experience seems to be so different from so many others.

But also we're at like 3-4 FR (and heavily upgraded Powers), so maybe that's part of what goes on? It's an interesting dynamic we've found that the more powerful in the Force someone is, the harder it is to "advance" Morality.

Part of it (and just speaking from my own experiences) might be how folks Force dice rolls are turning out.

I've got a couple PCs in my F&D campaign who are at FR3, and one of them can't seem to roll anything by black pips when she uses her powers, which means she either needs to suffer a few points of conflict to get her desired Force effect to happen (usually the Move power with associated upgrades for Strength and Magnitude) or simply let the effect fail. As she's trying to play a "holier than thou" wannabe Jedi, she's almost pathologically allergic to gaining conflict, with the PC seeing it as a moral failing on their part if they call upon the dark side. Thus far, she's not been put into a situation where it's either take a couple conflict to make a Force effect happen or let someone suffer horribly for her inaction, but that might just be a matter of time.

The other PC with FR3 has no such issue, and will gladly take Conflict to get his effects to go off... except that his dice luck is generally better and he tends to roll enough white pips to get the effect he wants.

I've been noted by a number of my friends to have abnormally good dice luck (I'm in a Mutants & Masterminds game and we can count on one hand the number of times I've had a d20 roll that was less than a 10), and my Force user PCs tend to roll double whites even on a single Force die, so they don't earn a lot of conflict. The various times they have rolled dark pips, I've weighed how much do I want/need the desired effect to occur, and accepting the conflict if I think it's important enough. Granted, it took me a little while to get there, as being a veteran of Star Wars RPGs I've had to break out of the "dark side points = automatically bad!" that'd been ingrained from years of the D6 and even the various d20 systems.

With Conflict, I honestly think the biggest problem is that with the d10 roll occurring at the end of every session, it becomes a lot harder for those GMs and players that want their characters to suffer longer-term consequences (i.e. Conflict) for making the "hard choices" and doing things that folks with mindsets not unlike those of Captain American and Superman would frown upon, as a single d10 roll at the end of the session could wipe away their "hard work" in making a slow, gradual fall to the dark side, or having the threat of that fall be a lingering one. Best solution I've found is to simply roll at the end of each adventure rather than session, though I've seen folks posit using a smaller die for the rolls (d8 or even d6) if one wants a "grittier" feel to their space opera romps.

I'm very new to F&D so I don't have any experience with game play. From reading the posts here though, I think I'll also be doing the Morality roll at the end of the adventure. I think it'll give more time to build up conflict (and therefore cause it to be more dangerous) while also slowing down progression in either direction.

As to a player who has very poor luck with dice rolling, I've found that using a dice rolling app can often resolve that. Whatever dice god luck or curse affects people doesn't seem to be as effective with rolling apps in my experience.

Am I the only person that just trusts people to handle things narratively?

I'm blessed to have a table wherein everyone understands/knows the lore that we're in pretty well. They understand that using the darkside too much will have consequences. Not just lines on their faces or..sudden yellow eyes. They understand, Yuthura Ban style, that this will lead to a change in them fundamentally and that they're meant to RP like that.

The only thing we use conflict for is for a vague bar of how far someone has gone in general. Sort of a reminder of how much further from your goal you should be. As a LS paragon I imagine that by the end your personal ends have been sidelined by trying to save everyone and as a DS avatar I imagine you're at a point where your goal has been pushed aside and dirtied to become an excuse to further your desire for domination of everyone.

I see a lot of theses posts and I think this might even be the third this week! But Its not a problem I run into because its the part of the system that my table uses most as a guideline and furthest from a rule.