6 minutes ago, c__beck said:

And? That doesn't change the fact that I would prefer to use Favours then either Duty or Obligation.

I am well aware of the differences between each game line and what Duty/Obligation/Morality represent. I just think they are clunky and the advice given on how to use them are not clear enough for me. Favours are a lot more "solid" to me. If a player owes a Big Favour to Black Sun I know exactly what that means. What does a 28-point Obligation to Black Sun mean? Nothing, really, unless the dice say so? That…doesn't work for me.

I can let that favour sit there on the player's sheet until I, the GM, deem it best for the story without the dice having to tell me to do so. Heck, any one of my players can suggest when a Favour gets called in.

As for Duty, being a member of the Alliance allows the player to, once per session, flip a Destiny Point (Story Point in Genesys parlance) to call in a small or normal Favour from someone in the Alliance, and the GM can do the same, calling in a Favour from the PC. That sounds like a good Duty replacement.

At the end of the day, it doesn't have to be different mechanics to have a different feel.

We're all playing a narrative game but GMs are turning around and fighting the narrative structure. I don't get why, though I have some educated guesses. At any rate, pre-planning what's going to happen in the campaign or even in a said adventure is a lot of extra energy that can go into other areas of prep. The randomness of the Obligation/Duty/Morality dice mechanics are there to make the GM's life easier and to help fill in the broad strokes of the story beats.

That's not how Obligation works. An Obligation means there's a whatever-percentage chance that said Obligation is going to negatively affect a PC. It can mean as little as two points of strain loss up to a PC/NPC conflict in the adventure.

In role-playing games, mechanics always dictate the feel of play. Otherwise, every game would be the same D20 or D100 system since those are the easiest ways to determine probability. There's a pretty big difference in feel between the investigative cyberpunk noir of Android and the cowboy/WW2/samurai space fantasy of Star Wars .

10 minutes ago, Bellona said:

I am more interested in type 1 answers - I think that our tabletop GM is worried about the players getting their hands on non-core rulebooks and then being able to exploit the h*** out of some sub-system because there's a loophole with which he's not familiar. (Like endless crafting checks, from the look of some early replies and other threads which I've seen.)

And I know from personal experience that it's no fun to be in a game where a player has gone all munchkin/power-gamer with every last option (never mind the fact that they don't even fit together flavour-wise!) and left the rest of us in his dust. The "Great, shall I hold your cape while you one-shot the demon lord's avatar?" kind of thing. (Translated to the GFFA, of course!)

Which is not to say that type 2 answers aren't interesting to read as well. Our tabletop group are system noobs to FFG SW, so it's good to hear where there could be simple rules confusion (and possible streamlining fixes of one sort or the other).

Tell your GM not to worry about that. All of the dice mechanics in the various career books are directly reflected in other career books, just with different names. There's nothing to exploit unless your GM isn't capable of telling a player who says "well, there's nothing in the rules that says I CAN'T do it" to put a sock in it. The best skills a GM can have aren't rules mastery (though that's very important) but being able to say "Yes, and..." or "No, but...".

At the end of the day, your table needs to accept that a trusted someone - in this case, the GM who is working to keep the game moving along - is going to be the final arbiter and that rules-lawyering/munchikin power-gaming is both a quick way to kill the fun of a game and is a waste of everyone's time.

If you're coming from D&D/Pathfinder, this game is going to be a very, very different experience from what you're used to.

11 minutes ago, Concise Locket said:

We're all playing a narrative game but GMs are turning around and fighting the narrative structure. I don't get why, though I have some educated guesses. At any rate, pre-planning what's going to happen in the campaign or even in a said adventure is a lot of extra energy that can go into other areas of prep. The randomness of the Obligation/Duty/Morality dice mechanics are there to make the GM's life easier and to help fill in the broad strokes of the story beats.

That may be how you play the game, but there are plenty of GMs out there who prefer to plan more and improv less. There is no One True Way to GM. Hêll, the most common house rules I hear about is rolling Obligation at the end of the session so the GM can plan on how to incorporate it well into the next adventure.

12 minutes ago, Concise Locket said:

That's not how Obligation works. An Obligation means there's a whatever-percentage chance that said Obligation is going to negatively affect a PC. It can mean as little as two points of strain loss up to a PC/NPC conflict in the adventure.

And a -2 ST is an important narrative beat? No to me. In my experience 2 strain one way or the other doesn't mean the character will drop any sooner. I prefer to have the Obligation (Favour) matter . I am the GM, so it's my decision to call in the marker, it's not up to some random die roll.

14 minutes ago, Concise Locket said:

In role-playing games, mechanics always dictate the feel of play. Otherwise, every game would be the same D20 or D100 system since those are the easiest ways to determine probability. There's a pretty big difference in feel between the investigative cyberpunk noir of Android and the cowboy/WW2/samurai space fantasy of Star Wars .

Not necessarily. I've had some pretty good play with d20 games in the past, even when interacting with the rules. It's been my experience that it's the people you're playing with and the story you want to tell that dictates the feel more than any game mechanic can.

But at the end of the day, I'm just giving my opinion on the matter. You obviously don't agree, which is fine. But please don't try to convince me that my opinion is wrong, that's honestly rude.

You play your games how you enjoy and let me play mine how I enjoy, OK?

27 minutes ago, c__beck said:

In my experience 2 strain one way or the other doesn't mean the character will drop any sooner. I prefer to have the Obligation (Favour) matter .

Exactly. -2ST because of a random die roll is so much less meaningful than a story beat, an encounter, or a problem to solve.

28 minutes ago, c__beck said:

But please don't try to convince me that my opinion is wrong, that's honestly rude.

...helped along by misrepresenting the points he disagrees with.

C-Beck & Concise Locket reminded me that I also don't use the Obligation or Duty under the RAW.

My use of Obligation is more similar to how C-Beck describes his "Favor" mechanic.

I do use Morality under the RAW but I agree that it's another broken mechanic. I haven't come up with anything better so far.

The other thing that I'm toying with is adding a "Shields" mechanic for Starship combat that should allow for greater endurance in combat (except for Tie Figthers. They need to be very fragile. However, I've been having most TIE pilots come in using the "Evasive Maneuvers" maneuver which makes them harder to hit . . . but I digress).

And due to the game breaking nature of some of the supplemental rules, I do not permit items or rules from the supplements (with rare exception).

I'm not sure why everyone is screaming at each other. I think Obligation, Duty, and Morality can be perfectly fine, especially for new players to the system. But I also agree that the game is perfectly playable without them. They're hardly "broken" as some are claiming. They just don't gel well with all play styles, so a lot of folks do away with them.

1 hour ago, Bellona said:

I am more interested in type 1 answers - I think that our tabletop GM is worried about the players getting their hands on non-core rulebooks and then being able to exploit the h*** out of some sub-system because there's a loophole with which he's not familiar. (Like endless crafting checks, from the look of some early replies and other threads which I've seen.)

And I know from personal experience that it's no fun to be in a game where a player has gone all munchkin/power-gamer with every last option (never mind the fact that they don't even fit together flavour-wise!) and left the rest of us in his dust. The "Great, shall I hold your cape while you one-shot the demon lord's avatar?" kind of thing. (Translated to the GFFA, of course!)

Which is not to say that type 2 answers aren't interesting to read as well. Our tabletop group are system noobs to FFG SW, so it's good to hear where there could be simple rules confusion (and possible streamlining fixes of one sort or the other).

In that case, it's a moot point to argue over Duty/Morality/Obligation. Hopefully that debate dies soon.

1 hour ago, SavageBob said:

I'm not sure why everyone is screaming at each other. I think Obligation, Duty, and Morality can be perfectly fine, especially for new players to the system.

Fair enough, I just don't like being misrepresented.

1 hour ago, SavageBob said:

They're hardly "broken" as some are claiming.

I have a fundamental disagreement with the Conflict/dark pip mechanic because it encourages the narrative that Force wielders are psychotic and have to suffer raging swings of emotion between one die roll and the next. The media makes "drawing on your anger" only a thing when the narrative stakes are high. FFG makes drawing on your anger a risk with each die roll. I call it broken because it's not true to the feel of the SW universe.

I have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the Morality mechanic, which essentially distills down to the idea that you can make up for terrible actions through a lot of little good deeds. That's not broken if you like to bean-count your ethics score...plenty of systems do this, so if it works for you, fine. But I don't find that very compelling, so I replaced it with a system of "moral hits", like critical hits, but harder to resolve.

4 hours ago, Bellona said:

I am more interested in type 1 answers - I think that our tabletop GM is worried about the players getting their hands on non-core rulebooks and then being able to exploit the h*** out of some sub-system because there's a loophole with which he's not familiar. (Like endless crafting checks, from the look of some early replies and other threads which I've seen.)

And I know from personal experience that it's no fun to be in a game where a player has gone all munchkin/power-gamer with every last option (never mind the fact that they don't even fit together flavour-wise!) and left the rest of us in his dust. The "Great, shall I hold your cape while you one-shot the demon lord's avatar?" kind of thing. (Translated to the GFFA, of course!)

Which is not to say that type 2 answers aren't interesting to read as well. Our tabletop group are system noobs to FFG SW, so it's good to hear where there could be simple rules confusion (and possible streamlining fixes of one sort or the other).

That reminds me of a new anime over on Crunchyroll. It's called Do you Love Your Mom and her Two-Hit Multi-target Attacks.

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

I have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the Morality mechanic, which essentially distills down to the idea that you can make up for terrible actions through a lot of little good deeds. That's not broken if you like to bean-count your ethics score...plenty of systems do this, so if it works for you, fine. But I don't find that very compelling, so I replaced it with a system of "moral hits", like critical hits, but harder to resolve.

Like I said, it works well for groups who may be new to roleplaying or to the system. But your system sounds really cool. Have you written it up and posted it here before?

1 hour ago, SavageBob said:

Have you written it up and posted it here before?

Yes, it's made its way into a few threads, but...quite the chore to dig through all that. I believe Desslok started a thread called "Morality Sucks" which discussed it.

The gist is evil acts, or even continuous small acts of dickery, or using dark pips without spending Strain and/or DP, give PCs a moral hit, ranked like critical hits. These hits have game effects, eg: making Charm harder (but perhaps Coercion easier...), etc. The more severe the hit, the more a dramatic selfless act is required to redeem it.

Since I've done more than my fair share of derailing this thread, I'll leave it at that.

The thing with morality is that it, more so then any machanic prompted by these line of games requires both the player and the GM to buy into it. Otherwise the player could simply attempt to engage as little as possible so they are never in a position to make difficult choices. Doesn’t bother me, I see morality more as a sanity meter, with people who fall to the dark side being fundamentally flawed in some such way, but the GM must be prepared to force situations upon them if moral conflict is a core tenet. Can be like pulling teeth from a healthy mouth.

Going back to discussion about additional rules. personally I would (because I am not a gm) would disallow all supplemental tools unless that information is of direct relevance to your party. No machanically inclined gunsmiths? No crafting guns or blades, not even shipwrights should intrude on this. No diplomats? Well until someone steps up to the mantle we will be keeping social checks pretty basic. Likewise with hacking would be kept straightforward e.c.t. Unless a character has some investment in a skill, I won’t be trawling supplementary material for odd rules.

which isn’t all that strict or restrictive; a party of 5 can reasonably cover a lot of bases and have a niche, it would just be stopping noble born diplomat suddenly taking a uncharacteristic interest in crafting only because they acquired 6 Dum droids to substitute their own lack of skill, likewise I wouldn’t expect a grease monkey to come straight from the workshop to represent their own planet in a high stakes political debate. Specialisation is a valuable aspect of characterisation and I believe every character should at least have one specific thing that not just anyone can attempt. For most part the supplement material is meant to cater toward a class of individual that most others might simply lack the experience to even attempt uneducated. Which isn’t to say that impromptu slicing or having to step up into a role is impossible, it would just be difficult unless the character had some experience in that field. E.g at least some skill ranks to indicate they have some experience in that area.

20 hours ago, c__beck said:

And? That doesn't change the fact that I would prefer to use Favours then either Duty or Obligation.

I am well aware of the differences between each game line and what Duty/Obligation/Morality represent. I just think they are clunky and the advice given on how to use them are not clear enough for me. Favours are a lot more "solid" to me. If a player owes a Big Favour to Black Sun I know exactly what that means. What does a 28-point Obligation to Black Sun mean? Nothing, really, unless the dice say so? That…doesn't work for me.

I can let that favour sit there on the player's sheet until I, the GM, deem it best for the story without the dice having to tell me to do so. Heck, any one of my players can suggest when a Favour gets called in.

As for Duty, being a member of the Alliance allows the player to, once per session, flip a Destiny Point (Story Point in Genesys parlance) to call in a small or normal Favour from someone in the Alliance, and the GM can do the same, calling in a Favour from the PC. That sounds like a good Duty replacement.

At the end of the day, it doesn't have to be different mechanics to have a different feel.

As far as I see many GM's interpret Obligation that it only comes up when you roll it, but it's a misconception.

Obligation is a narratove tool to implement a PCs personal story into the mainplot, and the book explicitly says each session at least 1 of the PCs should have the opportunity to lose some of it.

It's totally independent from the diceroll, which only means that the PC is concerned with his burden or not at that moment. 28 obligation means that it's not a huge deal, but every now and thn the PC is concerned someone is in his back. That is a tool for the PC to help the immersion and play on the characters goals and fears.

Haven't read the thread but sensors/comms are a mess and starship crafting needed work but

Is a good alternative.