Star Wars: Force and Destiny

[Longes]

the morality rules definitely have some issues, and some of the examples in üublished adventures seem to be silly, but your claim that killing always causes conflict is not true. killing an opponent in a fight is totally ok, but if you want to play a "good" force user, you are simply not allowed to make violence your primary problem solver.

killing several of jabba's guards during a fight for your life - no morality issues

killing a tribe of tusken to avenge your mother - your morality will suffer

The character can also accumulate Conflict for performing immoral actions, as determined by the GM. Extreme actions, including taking lives, can give a PC a significant amount of Conflict.

Now, "immoral actions" are defined by GM, so it's all basically undefined, but I don't see how you can argue that "taking lives gives you conflict" doesn't mean "taking lives gives you conflict" and that you can totally kill people in self-defence.

your chance to activate basic powers is of course a lot higher than 42%, even for a starting character. as long as you don't use any upgrades and are prepared to suffer small strain and morality hits for using dark side blips your chances to succeed are exactly 100%. some powers don't need to generate light side pips at all (like sense or seek), so they are also guaranteed to work (and also safe to use). you distorted the truth to score points in an elfgame argument - gain 2 conflict!

Using dark side gives you strain, conflict, and uses a highly limited communal resource. While it's possible to improve your chances, it's undesirable and unreliable.

you have to realise that a starting character in most of the force sensitive "careers" can be compared to luke before he started training with yoda. he could do some minor stuff and even a "mundane" task might be beyond him sometimes. think of luke in the cave on hoth, trying to grab his lightsaber with the force. thatÄs force rating 1 and the basic move power. the system models stuff like that pretty accurately. once you reach force rating 2, which is still very low (considering it goes up to 7, if i am not mistaken), you can pull off some impressive stuff. some argue that you can do too much one you reach that point.

The problem here is that Luke struggles with his force pull once, and is then fine for the remaining two movies. PCs have to struggle with their powers every session.

ps: "majority of your career"? it takes 95xp to reach force rating 2. if you wanted, you could do so at character creation.

Well, if you want to gimp your character and fail every roll ever with your two stat dice and no skills...

[shlominus]

yes, "immoral actions" are defined by the gm. to create anything more than guidelines for such a subject in a game book would be impossible (the attempt would probably be hilarious though). some of the examples provided might be bad, but that's about it. care to give an example of a working system dealing with "morality" that doesn't boil down to gm fiat and has more than guidelines and a few examples? i am not aware of such a system, maybe you are.

here's what force&destiny does:

http://s22.postimg.org/ifeao0ewx/conflict.jpg

i think that is sufficient. do you?

look, here's what you said:

Oh, and another great thing about FFG jedi. For the majority of your career you have a 42% chance of activating your force powers.

all of that is still wrong. you know that.

yes, resources are a factor. i am aware of that, that's why i mentioned each and every one involved. i don't see how that is a problem.

your claim that luke struggles once and then never again is also wrong. he struggles and fails when levitating rocks and he fails to get the x-wing out of the swamp on dagobah, despite the fact that by this time he had increased his powers to even have a chance of doing those things, as there are either several objects, or a single, much larger one. he also fails to mind trick jabba. there might be other instances i am not not recalling right now. even with increased power the force is not 100% reliable. the system models what we see in the films.

please don't try to misrepresent what i am saying. i am not advocating gimping a character at creation, i was simply providing proof that your statement about "the majority of a character's career" was not true. it isn't, unless you only play mini-campaigns or one-shots featuring starting characters.

force users that start with standard xp are not "jedi". they are much weaker. not as weak as you claim, but still weak, if you were expecting to play a jedi. think kanan from rebels or luke until his trainig from yoda. that is intentional. you know that as well. like others have said, you hate the system. do so, there's plenty of stuff not to like. just stop making stuff up, that's silly.

[Username17]

here's what force&destiny does:

http://s22.postimg.org/ifeao0ewx/conflict.jpg

i think that is sufficient. do you?

Wow. That's terribad.



We start with the fact that you are "knowingly inactive" about atrocities in Islamic State and Nigeria right now, and that inaction is a thing that happens an infinite number of times continuously every day of your fucking life. What it actually is is a rather crude MC-prod where every time you're reluctant to pick up some adventure seed the MC wants you to follow you get conflict dumped on you until you agree. Fuck that shit. And that's the first entry.

I've certainly seen worse morality systems. But "the MC punishes you when he doesn't like your choices" is always going to feel more arbitrary, dickish, and unfair than "the MC gives you rewards for liking your choices" because it is. And handing out ten points of conflict (or more) for killing someone under arguable auspices is just a huge fucking argument waiting to happen. I'm totally getting flashbacks to 2nd edition AD&D and the "lose a level if the character is behaving in a manner deemed insufficiently Chaotic by the Dungeon Master."

-Username17

[Longes]

That table isn't in the beta PDF I have, so that's the first time I see it. "Stealing from the rich is okay" is pretty weird to me.

But overall, I don't think a morality system is needed at all in the Star Wars game. Falling to the dark side is a character ark that should happen if GM and player want to play it out, not because of the character actions. Obi-Wan is a general in a civil war, and Luke is a freaking terrorist, but they are not being tormented by the possibility of falling to the dark side. Okay, Luke is, but for different reasons. Yoda didn't fall to the dark side despite sitting in a cave in a swam actively being inactive for the last fifty years.
I think strict morality scale just gets in the way of swashbuckling adventures of space wizards and dastardly scoundrels.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The two big things Star Wars has going for it as a setting for a TTRPG are:

1. Lightsaber fights in exotic locations with lots of jumping and terrain hazards.
2. Fighter-plane dogfights... IN SPACE!

Any game mechanic or system that discourages players from doing these things is a bad game mechanic for a Star Wars TTRPG.

[Fucks]

But... but... morality!

[shlominus]

I think strict morality scale just gets in the way of swashbuckling adventures of space wizards and dastardly scoundrels.

that might be true and the subsystem is easily ignored if you don't like that aspect of the game. considering the fact that "the dark side" and it's dangers are central elements of star wars i think they had to include some sort of morality rules.

[Fucks]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

[Kaelik]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

Oh good, I missed obviously shitty rules being justified on the assumption that your DM will ignore them.

[Longes]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

I primarily play via Roll20, so I can't rely on "My GM won't follow the shitty rules in the book and will only follow the good ones."

[silva]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

They bring their lawyers to the table with pre-made contracts against GM fiat. Just in case, you know.

[Chamomile]

I primarily play via Roll20, so I can't rely on "My GM won't follow the shitty rules in the book and will only follow the good ones."

This is a non-sequitir. The implications - that Roll20 can only be used for pick-up games and/or that all Roll20 GMs must suck - are obviously false. I'm legit not sure what you meant to say here, but I hope it's not any of the things you appear to be saying.

[erik]

You get luck of the draw with your Roll20 GMs if you're using that as your means of finding games, and you cannot count on them only using the good rules in books and ignoring the bad ones.
What's the confusion?

There's no implication that people must use Roll20. He was talking about himself because he was specifically called out regarding his gaming group dynamics.

[Fucks]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

Oh good, I missed obviously shitty rules being justified on the assumption that your DM will ignore them.

No, more like good group dynamics make it possible to use rules in a way that is not fucking anyone over.

[Fucks]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

I primarily play via Roll20, so I can't rely on "My GM won't follow the shitty rules in the book and will only follow the good ones."

Ok. And you can't talk/ discuss rules and their implications with a GM over Roll20? Amazing.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I don't like those morality rules. It's not so much that they don't fit in with Star Wars (they don't), it's that those morality rules don't make sense anywhere.

It could be me, but I've heard the only component that differs light side and dark side powers was emotion. You could fuel dark side powers with happiness and love but it is just easier to pull from feelings of rage or sadness when you're in a lasersword fight with someone. Someone on 4chan said that lightsiders are guided by the force and give up control (because the slightest emotion can alter the flow of the force around them) whereas darksiders are in control (which causes their bodies to burn out faster because they're basically making the force their bitch and making it do things it's not really meant to do). That's why it's easy to go to the dark side and almost impossible to go back to the light.

Then I read that in the EU all the force comes from a magic force planet at the galactic core and stopped reading Wookiepedia for a while. Learning that there was something even stupider than midichlorians made me feel very sad.

[OgreBattle]

This morality system feels like a good framework for playing as Church inquisitors, crusaders, or a biblical setting where inactivity towards putting YHWH's word forward leads to damnation.

...which suits Star Wars's black/white view of morality.

[Kaelik]

Then I read that in the EU all the force comes from a magic force planet at the galactic core and stopped reading Wookiepedia for a while. Learning that there was something even stupider than midichlorians made me feel very sad.

At first I thought this was the dumbest possible misunderstanding about Zomona Sekot. But just to check, I looked for that on wookieepedia, and what do you know, the clone wars cartoon show introduced a fucking planet from which midichlorins originate.

[Chamomile]

You get luck of the draw with your Roll20 GMs if you're using that as your means of finding games, and you cannot count on them only using the good rules in books and ignoring the bad ones.

But not anymore than using any other method other than referral, and if you are using referral the GM that doesn't especially stop the GM you're being referred to from being a guy on Roll20. Roll20 is actually better than methods other than referral (or just having an established group already) because the number of options is much larger. That's the principle advantage of Roll20, it's much easier to walk away from a bad game because you know there's a dozen more to apply to.

Which, to be clear, is not to say that the Stormwind Fallacy or any of its cousins have suddenly been legitimized because your odds of finding a GM who will fix the rules has gone up slightly. Whether you find a good GM on Roll20 or not, you aren't paying them and you are paying FFG, so obviously the burden of making the game work falls on FFG.

[Hadanelith]

Yeah, Mortis is among the dumbest things in Star Wars. It's really frustrating that it's canon even with the new stuff. We have to lose a bunch of well-written stuff, but Mortis stays in? Madness.

[Wiseman]

I didn't think mortis was the source of the force. I never got that implication from watching the episodes. The Ones were just really powerful force users.

[Aryxbez]

Longes and FT dislike the whole "your GM has a saying in this too". Seems like they never had a nice, relaxed gaming group or don't have any gaming group at all.

That is not an excuse for bad mechanics that could be taken in unreliable directions. the Point of rules is the structure to deliver a consistent experience as intended by the stories its trying to tell. So if you have a strict Morality system, then that system needs to be consistent. Much like if you're going to have a "strict" combat system, and an Iron Giant's AC is 28, neither should that fluctuate against a typical attack roll (barring any outside factors).

So don't make dumb@$$ points, that are unrelated to the cause. DM-fiat does not excuse design, but we can fill in the patches when needed.

[Longes]

I didn't think mortis was the source of the force. I never got that implication from watching the episodes. The Ones were just really powerful force users.

Mortis is the origin of midichlorians. Midichlorians are the source of the Force. Ergo, Mortis is the birthplace of the Force.

[Fucks]

Aryxbez, I don't think the morality rules in F&D are broken or depend on GM fiat alone. There may be issues with dickish GMs, but I don't game with such people, so I don't care.

[silva]

Does anyone actually game with dickish GMs ? It seems to me the kind of panic some folks here have regarding GM fiat is akin to phobias (Fiatphobia ? GMphobia ?). In other words, they visualize potential problems whose actual frequency or probability of hapenning is remote at best.