Okay, I'm going to preface this by saying that I (really, REALLY ) don't want to get into an argument over the nature of the force, I simply want a mechanical solution. However, I feel I must give an explanation for where I'm coming from:
In my opinion, the Jedi pretty much eschewed emotion, even the "good" ones, while the Sith embraced all the "bad" ones. I have a player who wants to play a (gray side?) force user, neither light nor dark. The way I'm seeing it is as not doing away with emotion, while at the same time not "embracing her hatred" or what-not and traveling down the path to the Dark Side. I want to sort of use the Morality system, but I'm not sure how to go about it.

If we were to use the RAW Morality system, it would end up with a perverse incentive to do bad stuff and garner conflict to avoid getting too light side, so here is what I'm thinking:

For now, I'm going to ignore the standard conflict system where you gain conflict for "bad" actions, but I'm not scrapping it entirely. I'll probably come back to it.

I'm going to use 2 Morality charts: the standard one (1-100, 50 is the middle) to determine where they sit on the light-dark scale, and a custom one (1-100, 85+ means that they are centered).

For the force dice I have a(n at least slightly) broken idea. I do not have a lot of experience with the force mechanic, so I leave it to you to tell me just how broken or not it is: When the character is within the "balanced" range on the custom chart, she gets an additional force die (which does not increase Force Rating). When she drops out of that range, she looses the additional force die. When she makes a force power check, she spends pips like usual, but instead of spending only light, or only dark, she has to spend them equally. In order to spend excess pips, she has to flip a DP, suffer Strain equal to the "adopted" pips, and take "Tipping Points" on the custom morality chart which push her farther down. If she flips to use Dark Side, she takes Conflict equal to Dark Side pips spent, as per usual, but she only takes Conflict when flipping a DP to spend excess Dark Side pips.
Since she starts out as FR1, the extra die is imperative for the system to work at all, but here is some reasoning behind it from a story perspective: She meditates periodically to recover balance. When she gets the chance to do so properly, she climbs back up the custom Morality chart. Since when she is below the "balanced" range, she looses the extra die, it then becomes very hard for her to climb back up without having a chance to meditate. Said meditation also pushes her to the middle of the regular Morality chart, so that she can't be a Dark Sider and be balanced at the same time. When perfectly balanced, she'd be at 100 on the custom scale and 50 on the regular Morality chart. If she were to drop below 30 or above 70 on the RAW Morality chart, sh'ed become Dark Side or Light Side, using the standard rules for those sorts of force-wielders until she is able to balance herself again (once she reaches 85+ on the custom chart, she achieves balance).

At the end of the session, roll a d10 as per RAW to counteract both Conflict and Tipping Points.

What do you think? Again, I'm really only interested in the mechanical side of things. I know how fraught debates over how the force works can get.

Have him just play a "normal dude" that does whatever seems appropriate to the situation without worrying about the Conflict. This uses the system in place and doesn't require you to reinvent the wheel. In all likelihood, such a character will gain enough Conflict not to rocket up their Morality score nor so much that it takes a dive.

OTOH, if you want to hack the system and make your own way, go for it. I don't care enough to comment on it further.

I'm confused.

Can you explain, without using game terms, what you mean by "balanced" in this system?

Yea, this is a ridiculously complicated "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist, and in fact that just creates more problems.

The benefit of being a "gray" Force User, is the moral latitude to do more of what you want, when you want, it is not to become stronger in the Force.

If you're going to do away with the vanilla Conflict/Morality system, the best answer after that - always - is to just handle it in a narrative, "we know the Darkside when we see it"-fashion.

No tracking Conflict. No d10 rolls. No bookkeeping. Just: "If you want to play a Gray Jedi, then do it. And we'll work together to determine/talk about it when one or the other of us feels that you've strayed too far outside the bounds of that."

If you MUST confer some mechanical bonus, then just remove the requirement to flip a Destiny to use the Darkside, when you feel they are really embodying "the gray" (which is complete nonsense, but I know you don't want to talk about that).

That all said, I've had numerous players want to portray "gray Jedi"over the years, and have never used anything other than the vanilla mechanics, and it worked out just fine. Because if you're doing your job as GM (making Force use worth it), they should have no problems "gaming" the Morality odds to stay gray, purely through Force Use (choosing to use Darkside pips) alone. Not to mention the low-level "sins" like striking first, lying, stealing, or coercing here and there. It does not encourage bad behavior, you're just assuming that, having self-admittedly limited experience with the vanilla Morality system.

17 minutes ago, micheldebruyn said:

I'm confused.

Can you explain, without using game terms, what you mean by "balanced" in this system?

I'm talking about achieving balance between the light and dark sides of the force. In my interpretation, balance is not eschewing emotion like the Jedi do, yet at the same time not giving into rage or hatred the way Sith do.

1 hour ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

I'm going to preface this by saying that I (really, REALLY ) don't want to get into an argument over the nature of the force,

Good luck with that in this place.

20 minutes ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

I'm talking about achieving balance between the light and dark sides of the force. In my interpretation, balance is not eschewing emotion like the Jedi do, yet at the same time not giving into rage or hatred the way Sith do.

I think you are looking at the force wrong. And if you consider The Jedi to be lightsiders I think you missed the lesson. Quigon was a lightsider but he wasnt on the council because he was even keeled about his emotions. One of the Mistakes of the Jedi was trying to be too detached and divorced from society.

Just now, Daeglan said:

I think you are looking at the force wrong. And if you consider The Jedi to be lightsiders I think you missed the lesson. Quigon was a lightsider but he wasnt on the council because he was even keeled about his emotions. One of the Mistakes of the Jedi was trying to be too detached and divorced from society.

Which was sort of my point. Also, here we go...

Like I said, I'm just looking for a mechanical solution, I don't want to argue about the nature of the force. If the proposed solution is to just use the normal Morality chart and treat the character as a standard light-sider while trying to stay around the middle of the chart, that's fine, and something I would certainly consider, but I'm looking for something a little bit more tailor made.

In order to get something tailor made you are going to have to consider the nature of the force. A big reason so many are against the concept of the Grey Jedi is because it just ends up being a power gamer thing where the player wants to be able to use force lightning but not have any of the downsides. But you dont really need a new mechanic to be "Grey" you just need to follow the chart. being pragmatic is going to result in your character getting conflict. Which is intentional I believe.

The mechanical solution to a light-side character that has normal emotions is the system exactly as it is. The Jedi were WRONG about a lot of stuff, especially by the time of the prequel movies when they'd become hidebound. In fact, I'd peg the fact that they kept trying to pretend that they could set all emotions aside as one of their biggest screw-ups. On one hand, it meant that they pretty much met the definition of 'Apathy' as an emotional weakness in the Consular book, and on the other, it meant that they didn't know how to cope when those emotions inevitably surfaced; it was really only a matter of time before they ended up pulling a collective Anakin that way.

So-called negative emotions aren't necessarily a problem for a light side character either. Feeling them is fine. Letting them rule you is when you start going down the dark side drain.

2 minutes ago, Garran said:

The mechanical solution to a light-side character that has normal emotions is the system exactly as it is. The Jedi were WRONG about a lot of stuff, especially by the time of the prequel movies when they'd become hidebound. In fact, I'd peg the fact that they kept trying to pretend that they could set all emotions aside as one of their biggest screw-ups. On one hand, it meant that they pretty much met the definition of 'Apathy' as an emotional weakness in the Consular book, and on the other, it meant that they didn't know how to cope when those emotions inevitably surfaced; it was really only a matter of time before they ended up pulling a collective Anakin that way.

So-called negative emotions aren't necessarily a problem for a light side character either. Feeling them is fine. Letting them rule you is when you start going down the dark side drain.

And because they tried to get Anakin to divorce himself from his emotions is part of what pushed him to the darkside. He was old enough that training the emotions out of him wouldnt take and he did not have the tools to cope with his emotions. Add to that that People like Yoda gave him exactly the wrong advice. What the Jedi instead needed to do was learn how to channel their emotions into positive things. Like channeling the anger over slavery into channels that help end the slavery.

1 minute ago, Daeglan said:

A big reason so many are against the concept of the Grey Jedi is because it just ends up being a power gamer thing where the player wants to be able to use force lightning but not have any of the downsides.

Yeah, I understand that, but that isn't an issue in this case.

2 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

But you dont really need a new mechanic to be "Grey" you just need to follow the chart. being pragmatic is going to result in your character getting conflict. Which is intentional I believe.

So you are saying that it ought to balance itself out? The character can just act like they normally would and should end up about in the middle?

Because of how important it is to the character to meditate under specific circumstances, I want to have some sort of mechanical manifestation. That is why I wanted the second chart. The idea of balancing through meditation could be done through the regular chart, but I'm not sure...

I like the idea of having to use pips equally, though, but certainly not putting the Dark Side pips off-limits. Do you think it makes sense to run it as per RAW, but simply remove the conflict penalty for utilizing Dark Side pips? Perhaps not penalizing their use as long as you use more Light than Dark pips?

After thinking about it some more, I can see that the additional force die definitely is broken. I think I'll scrap this entirely and just use the normal Morality system, and just come up with some sort of bonus for when the character is between 45-55. If it doesn't work out how we need it to, I can always reconsider.

(note that I am the GM in this case, not the player)

1 minute ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Yeah, I understand that, but that isn't an issue in this case.

So you are saying that it ought to balance itself out? The character can just act like they normally would and should end up about in the middle?

Because of how important it is to the character to meditate under specific circumstances, I want to have some sort of mechanical manifestation. That is why I wanted the second chart. The idea of balancing through meditation could be done through the regular chart, but I'm not sure...

I like the idea of having to use pips equally, though, but certainly not putting the Dark Side pips off-limits. Do you think it makes sense to run it as per RAW, but simply remove the conflict penalty for utilizing Dark Side pips? Perhaps not penalizing their use as long as you use more Light than Dark pips?

After thinking about it some more, I can see that the additional force die definitely is broken. I think I'll scrap this entirely and just use the normal Morality system, and just come up with some sort of bonus for when the character is between 45-55. If it doesn't work out how we need it to, I can always reconsider.

(note that I am the GM in this case, not the player)

Why would you remove the conflict penalty? the idea is that dark side pips is when our character is acting on the force using negative emotions.

As to the bonus for 45-55 i see no need for it.

You say it's not a power gamer issue but the first thing you are offering them is an additional free force dice. Paragons and true Dark siders get an additional Destiny Point in their favor at the beginning of the game.

The easiest way to play a "Gray" Force User is to use the system as it is. Don't be afraid to use Darkside points and take the conflict but do tasks that counter it. It is easy to get to Paragon or work your way to the Dark Side, it's a bit more difficult to truly play neutral but if that's what you are going for, work at. No need to change the rules for it. IMO, there should not be any bonuses for playing it neutral.

1 minute ago, Varlie said:

You say it's not a power gamer issue but the first thing you are offering them is an additional free force dice.

Yeah, changed my mind on that one. I hadn't fully thought through just how powerful that actually is. The point though was for it to only apply when they were within a certain range on the scale to represent being truly in touch with the force, similar to Bendu or Ahsoka, rather than a Jedi or a Sith.

It's still sitting in the back of my mind, but I've pretty much dropped it.

5 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Why would you remove the conflict penalty? the idea is that dark side pips is when our character is acting on the force using negative emotions.

Like above, to represent that they are more in touch with the force, rather than using the force to do their will. That is more a matter of role-play than anything else, though, and would be hard to pin down as far as mechanics go.

The thing is, the reason I wanted to drop/change the RAW Morality chart and add a second one is because it was intended to be more a measure of how attuned to the force the character is, rather than where they fall on the scale. It isn't really about being in-between light and dark, but being something beyond the Jedi and the Sith.

As far as whether or not there should be a bonus? Because we like it. We think it makes sense for each force-user to have some sort of benefit from being within their target range, and we think that it is thematically appropriate for someone whose whole point is to be in touch with the force.

Now I'm thinking that perhaps the bonus should be that she can use Dark Side pips without taking Strain and/or flipping a DP (though she'd still take Conflict), as long as she takes an equal or greater amount of Light Side pips. Or perhaps just scratch the penalties altogether as long as she is within the range. The point in this case is not so much to remove penalties or encourage the use of the Dark Side, but to make the character more powerful by giving them more pips to spend. This is where I feel that a vertical chart would be better suited to the situation, but I'm really not sure.
As to Varlie's point about Dark Siders and Paragons getting an extra DP, I didn't know that. I'm not sure if that is quite what I'm looking for though.

Grr. I've been contemplating this issue for over a month now, and I'm still not sure how to work it.

I would suggest the strict orthodoxy of the latter-day Jedi council was a doctrinal perversion rooted in fear .

And fear leads to the Dark Side.

You can't feel the force, or experience connection to others, without emotion and attachment. .

The issue, from where I sit, isn't emotions or attachment, per se. The issue is passions warring with inner peace.

The big question a Jedi must answer is: do you rule your passions or do your passions rule you?

To quote Yoda: Control! Control! You must learn Control!"

Another question a Jedi has to ask is: do you know what is driving you to act to begin with?

Jedi must develop an acute awareness of their own emotions and tho emotions of those around them.

They should be intensely self-aware and act out of a desire for peace and harmony and increasing weal.

My Jedi's mentor quote goes like this: "We Jedi do not destroy evil. We preserve good."

His other quote is: "A Jedi who is not at peace can only make war."

1 hour ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

Which was sort of my point. Also, here we go...

Like I said, I'm just looking for a mechanical solution, I don't want to argue about the nature of the force. If the proposed solution is to just use the normal Morality chart and treat the character as a standard light-sider while trying to stay around the middle of the chart, that's fine, and something I would certainly consider, but I'm looking for something a little bit more tailor made.

Well the big issue is that the Jedi are never actually depicted as being emotionless. I know you don't want to debate the Force, but you describe the Jedi in a way that I think is inaccurate, and is directly impacting how you want to do this mechanically. Jedi have emotions. Just watch the films, you see them get annoyed, angry, laugh, make smart *** comments and jokes at people. Yoda would prank people all the time, and then giggle his little froggy butt off. The key is they don't let their emotions dictate their actions.

So I don't think you need to have your player do some balance of "not emotions vs emotions" in some light/dark comparison, because it's just flawed.

If they are not playing a Jedi, or a Sith, then they don't have the teachings about emotional control, or emotional indulgence, depending on the faction in question. So just have them do their thing on a case by case basis, and assign Conflict accordingly.

At most, I would ask them what the PC's motivation/reasoning is for an action, and then determine Conflict accordingly. Because motivation tends to dictate Conflict a lot. For example "Why are you stealing this credit stick?" "So I can buy myself a new blaster!" or "So I can buy some food rations for myself." or "So I can buy some food rations for my little sister." All of those should have different amounts of Conflict assigned.

I think adopting this as a metric will give you more insight on how and when to assign, and how much.

As far as balance, well that's up to the player/PC to actually maintain, based on their actions. From the mechanics of the system, a reasonably nice person is mechanically inclined to slowly creep up in Morality score, towards a higher Light side rating. The occasional Conflict-worthy action generally isn't enough, in the long term, to make them fall to the Dark. It usually takes a concerted effort on the part of the player to make this happen. Going out of their way to do Dark sidey things.

So if they aren't trying to play Lord Edgey Edgington the Bloody, Third of his Edgelord Name, they will probably be ok to just do stuff as needed, without much in the way of issue.

I use the Serenity Table found on this forum with the Conflict Table from the Corebook. It works very well without changing to much the Morality system.

Using darkside pips makes you gain conflict and using lightside pips makes you gain serenity. At the end of the session you substract the total amount of conflict to the total amount of serenity and add the result to your Morality. So if you earned more serenity than conflict your morality raises and if it's more conflict than serenity your morality decreases.

I removed the need to flip a Destiny point to use either dark or light side pîps if the character's morality is between 30 and 70. The character still takes 1conflict or 1serenity per pips used, and 1 strain per pips used IF he / she uses both dark and light pips on the same roll. Something that happens only after a character has a FR2+.

I made many tries with different morality systems and this one is what works the best in our game. Characters can still slip to the Darkside if they aren't careful with the conflict they earn. And they can still "sleepwalk to Paragon" if they aren't careful the serenity they earn. The characters are not Jedi because they exists at a time frame where Jedis were all exterminated or hiding. At the start they didn't knew anything about the Jedi except some legends and not much more about the Force. Now after having done the F&D starting kit's scenario and its follow-up, they know a few more things about Jedi and they learned many things about the Force. But they still aren't Jedi. They don't need to be Jedi or Sith to understand how the Force can be fuelled by emotions and why it makes it so important to learn how to control them.

5 hours ago, Vondy said:

My Jedi's mentor quote goes like this: "We Jedi do not destroy evil. We preserve good."

His other quote is: "A Jedi who is not at peace can only make war."

Good lines, and quite fitting for a Jedi.

+1 for using the standard system. The benefits which the "Grey Jedi" receive is the larger band of mobility on the standard scale.

In one of the PbFP on this site I have a Jedi Healer character who is definitely not the "ivory tower hermit" type. She has worked with refugees and rescued slaves, and knows how horrible life in the galaxy can be. Therefore she's not afraid to use whatever means are necessary - including using DS pips - to pull off special Heal power moves. If need be, she will use DS pips to pull someone back from the brink of death (Heal's Mastery upgrade costs 4 pips).

For example, she was part of the Jedi rescue group at the arena on Geonosis (it was a Clone Wars AU campaign), and she was not afraid to use DS pips for an abstract post-battle combined Medicine skill/Heal power check to perform triage to save as many fallen Jedi as possible. Her goal was saving as many lives as possible, not being a virtuous saint about it. OOC, I called it "the Dark Side Triage" afterwards. Of course, she got a lecture from Yoda back on Coruscant. (Ironically, after racking up 7 Conflict I still rolled a net gain of +2 Morality when the time came to settle the accounts at the end of that "session".)

ETA:

I should clarify one point about that Jedi Healer character. Aside from her habit of using DS Force pips to heal/whatever when desperation requires it, she does her best to avoid evil/anti-social actions (as much as is possible during the Clone Wars). From a meta point of view, I have no plan to get her to LS paragon status (nor to let her slide to the DS). She just exists in the middle, in the "grey area", due to being a generally good person who just happens to use the DS if pressed by circumstances.

On 12/23/2019 at 10:52 AM, P-47 Thunderbolt said:

I'm talking about achieving balance between the light and dark sides of the force.

I would argue that the Light Side is balance, and the Dark Side is imbalance. I think one of the great disservices that D&D gave us with their alignment system and related stories is the idea that there can be too much good, and this is somehow an imbalance. Obviously, good groups that take control can become complacent and dogmatic, even corrupt. But you know what? That's when they become not good. Dragonlance 's Kingpriest of Istar wasn't too good . He was an evil, corrupt, megalomaniac, and somehow the writers couldn't reconcile that with him being a cleric of "good" gods.

So the "weakness" of the Jedi Order isn't that they were too far towards the light, it's that they had become complacent and dogmatic, and hadn't been truly tested in a long time (and also, they shouldn't have been so closely tied to the Galactic Republic). Most of them were decent, and tended toward the high side of the Morality scale, but they were unprepared for conflict on the scale of the Clone Wars.

That all said, I've recently sidelined the entire Morality system in my game. At the moment, I only have 2 regular players, and their Morality footing is pretty solid. The would-be Jedi Niman Disciple makes a lot of hard choices and places a lot of limits on himself, rarely even spending Dark Side pips. The Sentinel/Shadow enjoys being a troublemaker, but this is the best behavior I've gotten out of him in 25 years of gaming together (he used to love playing murderous halfling rogues). He lies, he sneaks, he hacks computers, he strikes from the shadows, and he loves using the illusions from the Misdirect power, but he's pretty conscientious about his targets, and uses non-lethal force whenever reasonable. Unless their behavior takes a drastic turn, I'm comfortable with the Niman Disciple sitting on that first Light Side Paragon perk, and the Shadow right in the middle. I get real tired of bookkeeping and nitpicking Conflict points. I have a few challenges I'll be throwing at them and we'll see how they go, but I don't find the numbers helpful. I might enjoy the system a bit more if I had a player who said, "I want to play the guy who risks falling to the Dark Side. He's going to try to be a good guy, but there will be times when he loses control. If he falls, I want you to go ahead and hit me with it."

Now for my big blanket stereotype. When I hear "I want to be a Grey Jedi," I tend to interpret that as " I want to be able to get away with doing bad things without falling to the Dark Side." I feel like such characters tend to swing rather wildly back and forth between Dark and Light actions, and they want that to balance out. To me, that's a Dark Side character.

Obviously, that's not what everyone means by "Grey Jedi." But I see a lot of folks sharing the "Grey Jedi Code," and I think, 'that's a false path, and will lead rather quickly to the Dark Side.'

5 hours ago, The Grand Falloon said:

Now for my big blanket stereotype. When I hear "I want to be a Grey Jedi," I tend to interpret that as " I want to be able to get away with doing bad things without falling to the Dark Side." I feel like such characters tend to swing rather wildly back and forth between Dark and Light actions, and they want that to balance out. To me, that's a Dark Side character.

I would say Anakin is an example of this in action. He swung wildly from light to dark and back until he finally completely fell.

9 hours ago, The Grand Falloon said:

When I hear "I want to be a Grey Jedi," I tend to interpret that as " I want to be able to get away with doing bad things without falling to the Dark Side."

I've read that many times on this forum. Personally I never had such player, but I never played or GMed a Star Wars RPG before the FFG one. I've a strong experience with D&D, starting with Ad&D nearly 40 years ago, and it's alignment. I never see a player choosing one the five Neutral alignments with the idea to alternate between Good / Lawful and Evil / Chaotic behaviour. Actually playing a Pure Neutral character, which is imo what should be a "Grey Jedi", is the most difficult alignment to play because of the need to keep the balance between good and evil and between law and chaos. Something that you can never achieve by alternating between acting evil / chaotic then good / lawful. Doing good deeds never compensate fully for anything evil you've done.

I use the same logic for the Force. You'll never balance it by switching between the darkside and the lightside. Quite the opposite. It's a sure way to unbalance the Force even more et to end being a darkside character.

3 minutes ago, WolfRider said:

Actually playing a Pure Neutral character, which is imo what should be a "Grey Jedi", is the most difficult alignment to play because of the need to keep the balance between good and evil and between law and chaos.

In this case, that is sort of what the player is aiming for. The force isn't my preferred method of play, but the story idea linked to it is interesting, so I'm trying to accommodate.

What I was shooting for with the original idea was to have to use the pips equally, or you slide away from balance regardless which you use. If you use 2 extra LS pips, you slide 2 points down the scale. If you then use 2 extra DS pips, you slide down the scale another 2 points.

Do you have any recommendation?

What I'm thinking right now: Try to use pips evenly, the idea behind it being that the black pips (intentionally not calling them dark side) are the players emotions/passions, and the white pips (intentionally not calling them light side) are the control. In order to use more black than white or vice versa, she has to suffer Strain equal to the difference and lose an equal number of balance points. If she is between 85-100, she is "balanced" and (this is very tentative) receives a second force die. I had decided against this, but I'm starting to come back to it. It would make it suitably easier to maintain balance while in touch with the force (seeing as how she's an FR1 character), and yet significantly harder to regain balance without finding a suitable* spot to meditate.
Alternatively, scratch the additional force die, and instead make it so that she only takes Strain/loses balance points when the difference is 2 or more (basically, Strain/balance points equals difference-1).

As for the Conflict chart, I'm thinking of more-or-less discarding it, but using it as a reference for dealing with certain situations, removing balance points similarly to how you grant conflict points, though not as much because you don't roll a d10 to recover balance points.

Optional: If she drops below 50, she switches over to using the normal morality rules until she can find a suitable spot to meditate and recover.

*she has specific criteria for where is an appropriate spot to meditate. This isn't something that she can do during a long hyperspace journey.