Changing Morality rules a little?

[Daeglan 5,950]

2 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

I simply don't agree. There is a spectrum of morality that people fall into depending on how they live their life.  Most people will stand up to injustice when it happens right in front of their eyes and it poses no danger to them to speak out against it. Much fewer people will stand up to it even if it costs them the respect of their peers, and even fewer people will stand up to it when it presents a real danger to their body or livelihood to do so. Even fewer people than that actually go out to look for injustices in the world, and leave forego living a peaceful life themselves to fight against them. None of the people in this example are evil, but that doesn't mean they are all equally good either. Being a saint requires sacrifice. Most saints are martyrs.

And most people do not have hard decisions put in front of them so most people wont go up or down in morality per the devs. You only roll when you have had the opportunity to make moral choices. So we are not playing most people. We are playing the extraordinary people who do have hard choices put in front of them. So yeah the system works well and as intended. If you think it is too easy to make it to saint... ask your self how many hard choices that dont have any good answers did I put in front of the players? if they aren't getting 3 or 4 conflict from choices maybe you need to put harder choices in front of them. 

[rogue_09 443]

I definitely abide by "No Conflict earned = No Morality roll"

If your character has gained no Conflict, his Morality wouldn't change. Conflict is calling your worldview into question and your Morality shift is based on that Conflict. If you act in a way that garners you 0 Conflict, your Morality wouldn't change as you have resolved the situation in a way that has not shifted your worldview. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Now, this may show some of the weakness of the d10 roll as you are still relying on chance. Then again, as a tabletop RPG, aren't most things left to chance?

[Tramp Graphics 2,328]

19 minutes ago, rogue_09 said:

I definitely abide by "No Conflict earned = No Morality roll"

If your character has gained no Conflict, his Morality wouldn't change. Conflict is calling your worldview into question and your Morality shift is based on that Conflict. If you act in a way that garners you 0 Conflict, your Morality wouldn't change as you have resolved the situation in a way that has not shifted your worldview. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Now, this may show some of the weakness of the d10 roll as you are still relying on chance. Then again, as a tabletop RPG, aren't most things left to chance?

Wel, by RAW, the rule is not "no Conflict Earned", no morality rolled. It's "No chance of Conflict earned", no Morality roll. That's a key difference. You don't have to actually earn Conflict, you simply have to actively participate in the session, and thus be put into situations where earning Conflict is a possibility. 

[Aetrion 441]

43 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

And most people do not have hard decisions put in front of them so most people wont go up or down in morality per the devs. You only roll when you have had the opportunity to make moral choices. So we are not playing most people. We are playing the extraordinary people who do have hard choices put in front of them. So yeah the system works well and as intended. If you think it is too easy to make it to saint... ask your self how many hard choices that dont have any good answers did I put in front of the players? if they aren't getting 3 or 4 conflict from choices maybe you need to put harder choices in front of them. 

A choice that is actually hard doesn't have a no-conflict option though. Something like, you know where a terrorist lives, but you also know he has a wife and children. What do you do? There is simply no way to resolve the situation in a perfectly good no conflict way. No matter what you do someone will get hurt, and you have people who are innocent now who might come to seek revenge later if you let them live, and all sorts of things like that. That's what a hard choice is, it doesn't have a perfect answer, and the moral dilemma that grows out of it isn't whether you pick the good or the evil option, but whether you lose your faith that a good outcome is even possible. If you're actually playing with hard choices and moral gray areas everyone is just going to take huge amounts of conflict, and what the player actually does becomes irrelevant, only the die roll determines if their character deals with it well or not. 

That's exactly the flaw of the system. What the player does only matters if you set up a dumbed down binary choice. In a real ethical dilemma where there is no correct answer and conflict is inevitable the player loses their agency to a die roll in a stupid way. 

If you give players choices where there is an obvious no conflict resolution they aren't really hard choices, the no conflict choice might have a personal cost, but if that's what you're going for you're not going to think hard about what to do. 

39 minutes ago, rogue_09 said:

I definitely abide by "No Conflict earned = No Morality roll"

If your character has gained no Conflict, his Morality wouldn't change. Conflict is calling your worldview into question and your Morality shift is based on that Conflict. If you act in a way that garners you 0 Conflict, your Morality wouldn't change as you have resolved the situation in a way that has not shifted your worldview. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

That doesn't make it harder to gain morality, you can always game the system to just take exactly one point of conflict. Besides, if someone encountered a lot of opportunities to take conflict and instead risked life and limb to avoid them they should definitely gain morality, not be denied the roll because they didn't take any conflict at all.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Aetrion

[HappyDaze 10,108]

You can have hard choices where one produces no Conflict, but it's instead made unattractive for other reasons. For example, you can leave the a group of slaves behind or give them the ship you just took from the slaving bad guys. Giving them the ships is very unlikely to grant Conflict, but you may have other intentions with that ship. The choice here might be Loot vs Conflict. Other times is might be Success w/ Conflict vs Failure w/o Conflict. The trick to a hard choice is to make both require some sort of sacrifice, but that doesn't always have to be Conflict. In fact,.Conflict is often the result when the characters are entirely unwilling to give up anything else (like loot or success).

[rogue_09 443]

9 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

That doesn't make it harder to gain morality, you can always game the system to just take exactly one point of conflict. Besides, if someone encountered a lot of opportunities to take conflict and instead risked life and limb to avoid them they should definitely gain morality, not be denied the roll because they didn't take any conflict at all.

Sure. But the chances of gaining 0 Conflict in the service of risking life and limb are fairly slim. Using dark pips is very often necessary, especially for low XP characters. If one of my players gives everything to take the high road in a scenario, I'll still find a way for them to earn 1 or 2 Conflict, which all but guarantees a positive Morality shift.

[HappyDaze 10,108]

15 minutes ago, rogue_09 said:

Sure. But the chances of gaining 0 Conflict in the service of risking life and limb are fairly slim. Using dark pips is very often necessary, especially for low XP characters. If one of my players gives everything to take the high road in a scenario, I'll still find a way for them to earn 1 or 2 Conflict, which all but guarantees a positive Morality shift.

You don't have to earn Conflict to increase Morality; you just need to have faced choices where you could have gained Conflict. For those that want to play their Force-users as paladins, this is a significant difference.

[rogue_09 443]

3 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

You don't have to earn Conflict to increase Morality; you just need to have faced choices where you could have gained Conflict. For those that want to play their Force-users as paladins, this is a significant difference.

My only thesis here is earning 0 Conflict is pretty difficult, or at least should be.

I guess as a GM, having players who refuse to earn a little Conflict boring. As a player, I would find a GM who allowed a 100% white result in every scenario equally boring.

[DaverWattra 535]

To be honest, the thing I find silliest about the RAW is that at the end of a session in which a PC performs a dramatic act of heroism or self-sacrifice, or redeems a darksider from the brink, that same PC can roll a 1 on their d10.

Just as evil actions should be punished in proportion to their severity, good acts should be rewarded in proportion with their significance.  And sure, throw in a random element to prevent gaming the system.  But don't make the reward of being good 100 percent random like it is now.

[AnomalousAuthor 506]

I think for this system to work as intended the gm has to sprinkle conflict around fairly liberally and in a consistent manner.

Edited March 10, 2017 by ghatt

[DaverWattra 535]

Just now, ghatt said:

I think for this system to work as intended the gm has to sprinkle conflict around fairly liberally, but in a consistent manner.

Indeed.  In other words, the system as written puts gratuitous and unnecessary constraints on the GM's storytelling options.

[AnomalousAuthor 506]

Just now, DaverWattra said:

Indeed.  In other words, the system as written puts gratuitous and unnecessary constraints on the GM's storytelling options.

I don't think those things are mutually exclusive concepts. It just adds a mechanical element to the storytelling. That doesn't mean it has to detract from it.

[HappyDaze 10,108]

7 minutes ago, rogue_09 said:

My only thesis here is earning 0 Conflict is pretty difficult, or at least should be.

I guess as a GM, having players who refuse to earn a little Conflict boring. As a player, I would find a GM who allowed a 100% white result in every scenario equally boring.

Boring? Not hardly. Do you know how clever and creative one has to be to solve situations without earning any Conflict? These guys are taking a hard road.

Also, see my previous post on why not every option's cost is measured in Conflict. Often it is measured in time and/or money, but also in other opportunities gained or lost.

[Kael 1,865]

3 hours ago, Aetrion said:

I simply don't agree. There is a spectrum of morality that people fall into depending on how they live their life.

See the inherent problem here isn't that you're wrong, people do exist on a spectrum, but that it doesn't apply to this world. A lot of people come at Morality as if it's supposed to represent real world moral choices and real world moral behavior. But it's not meant to. In actuality the Morality scale drags you one way or the other because for Force users there is this stark reality where you are either good or evil. Star Wars has a very black and white, good vs evil, saint or sinner moral outlook. 

Now, is that how real people work? No. But fictional settings don't have to work morality the way it really does with real human beings. Fictional settings can enforce this artificial choice in which people either are good or are evil. Real people exist on a spectrum. Force users in Star Wars however, don't. 

I'm ok with that. When I want to worry about the moral spectrum of my characters choices I start playing WoD. 

[Aetrion 441]

The morality system doesn't effectively convey the duality of the force either though, because you will inevitably fall to the dark side if you say mean things to people three times a session, but let you recover your morality in 3-4 sessions after you've gruesomely murdered someone out of pure malice.

It's just too easy to game the system. You don't have to play a consistently light side character to be sitting at 90+ morality, you just have to treat morality like a resource you can spend on evil acts and the game keeps pegging you as a good guy. Likewise it's very difficult to play a dark sided character who fights for good, but is driven by anger and vengeance, because the automatic trend toward the light forces you to once again game the system to intentionally create conflict to retain that alignment in adventures where nothing happened where you would have naturally suffered conflict with that type of character.

At the end of the day it's just not a good system. It is simply too easy to wind up with a morality score that is not consistent with the character you're playing, either because you're manipulating it, or because you're not manipulating it enough. 

[AnomalousAuthor 506]

6 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

The morality system doesn't effectively convey the duality of the force either though, because you will inevitably fall to the dark side if you say mean things to people three times a session, but let you recover your morality in 3-4 sessions after you've gruesomely murdered someone out of pure malice.

It's just too easy to game the system. You don't have to play a consistently light side character to be sitting at 90+ morality, you just have to treat morality like a resource you can spend on evil acts and the game keeps pegging you as a good guy. Likewise it's very difficult to play a dark sided character who fights for good, but is driven by anger and vengeance, because the automatic trend toward the light forces you to once again game the system to intentionally create conflict to retain that alignment in adventures where nothing happened where you would have naturally suffered conflict with that type of character.

At the end of the day it's just not a good system. It is simply too easy to wind up with a morality score that is not consistent with the character you're playing, either because you're manipulating it, or because you're not manipulating it enough. 

I personally view it as a guide for GMs who are relatively new to the system. Once a GM gets some experience and sees how it's affecting his game he should feel free to tweak it to his hearts content in order to get the kind of results he's looking for.

Rules in RPGs are simply guides to follow, not be slavishly held to.

[Aetrion 441]

Sure, but my argument isn't that the morality system has to be strictly adhered to, my argument is that it's not a very good system, and calling on people to ignore it kind of proves my point I think. 

[Daeglan 5,950]

9 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

The morality system doesn't effectively convey the duality of the force either though, because you will inevitably fall to the dark side if you say mean things to people three times a session, but let you recover your morality in 3-4 sessions after you've gruesomely murdered someone out of pure malice.

It's just too easy to game the system. You don't have to play a consistently light side character to be sitting at 90+ morality, you just have to treat morality like a resource you can spend on evil acts and the game keeps pegging you as a good guy. Likewise it's very difficult to play a dark sided character who fights for good, but is driven by anger and vengeance, because the automatic trend toward the light forces you to once again game the system to intentionally create conflict to retain that alignment in adventures where nothing happened where you would have naturally suffered conflict with that type of character.

At the end of the day it's just not a good system. It is simply too easy to wind up with a morality score that is not consistent with the character you're playing, either because you're manipulating it, or because you're not manipulating it enough. 

Saying mean this may or may not cause 1 conflict. So if you do that consistantly you wont fall. Unless ypu do other conflict worthy things.

[Daeglan 5,950]

Your point is flawed because i have yet to see your claims actually happen in a game.

[AnomalousAuthor 506]

2 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Sure, but my argument isn't that the morality system has to be strictly adhered to, my argument is that it's not a very good system, and calling on people to ignore it kind of proves my point I think. 

Eh, I don't think it should be ignored, just customized to each table. The conflict system is designed to be used in conjunction with the force powers within the game. It's important.

[Daeglan 5,950]

You also should be using the chart as a guideline. 

[Kael 1,865]

Just now, Aetrion said:

The morality system doesn't effectively convey the duality of the force either though, because you will inevitably fall to the dark side if you say mean things to people three times a session, but let you recover your morality in 3-4 sessions after you've gruesomely murdered someone out of pure malice.

 

I honestly want to sit at the table where this level of nonsense happens with regularity so I can smack the players and then the GM. This scenario just does not seem to happen in actual play. 

 

Just now, Aetrion said:

You don't have to play a consistently light side character to be sitting at 90+ morality, you just have to treat morality like a resource you can spend on evil acts and the game keeps pegging you as a good guy.

 

This sounds like an end user problem, IE something the GM and his players are doing wrong. 

 

Just now, Aetrion said:

Likewise it's very difficult to play a dark sided character who fights for good, but is driven by anger and vengeance, because the automatic trend toward the light forces you to once again game the system to intentionally create conflict to retain that alignment in adventures where nothing happened where you would have naturally suffered conflict with that type of character.

 

Darksided characters don't do good. This isn't D&D wherein the bad guys go out and do good things and remain the bad guys. If you're a darksider and you're doing good things you are going to become a lightsider. Star Wars, as a setting, doesn't accept that good comes from evil actions. 

Although it should be noted, once you hit darksider status you can have a Morality of 100 and still be a darksider. You only lose darksider status past 70 after the GM runs a redemption story arc. No redemption story arc and it doesn't matter how far past 70 you are, you are still a darksider. So in theory ..... your character that is a darksider doing good deeds ...... he's still a darksider. If he's fueling his path to good via anger and vengeance then he hasn't redeemed himself and no amount of being past 70 Morality will change that. 

 

Just now, Aetrion said:

At the end of the day it's just not a good system. It is simply too easy to wind up with a morality score that is not consistent with the character you're playing, either because you're manipulating it, or because you're not manipulating it enough. 

 

I honestly don't see this in play.

[Daeglan 5,950]

3 minutes ago, Kael said:

I honestly want to sit at the table where this level of nonsense happens with regularity so I can smack the players and then the GM. This scenario just does not seem to happen in actual play. 

 

This sounds like an end user problem, IE something the GM and his players are doing wrong. 

 

Darksided characters don't do good. This isn't D&D wherein the bad guys go out and do good things and remain the bad guys. If you're a darksider and you're doing good things you are going to become a lightsider. Star Wars, as a setting, doesn't accept that good comes from evil actions. 

Although it should be noted, once you hit darksider status you can have a Morality of 100 and still be a darksider. You only lose darksider status past 70 after the GM runs a redemption story arc. No redemption story arc and it doesn't matter how far past 70 you are, you are still a darksider. So in theory ..... your character that is a darksider doing good deeds ...... he's still a darksider. If he's fueling his path to good via anger and vengeance then he hasn't redeemed himself and no amount of being past 70 Morality will change that. 

 

I honestly don't see this in play.

No. Once you get up to 70 mority you are redeemed and a lightsider again. Per the redenption rules.

[Kael 1,865]

Just now, Daeglan said:

No. Once you get up to 70 mority you are redeemed and a lightsider again. Per the redenption rules.

The redemption rules say you have to narratively go through a redemption story. The threshold for that story is 70 morality. Redemption seems to be both mechanical (reach 70) and story (GM runs an adventure designed to make you a lightsider again).

As a GM I wouldn't let a character who still goes about anger and vengeance claim the mantlehood of lightsider. 

 

Granted ....... in any game I ran ..... you wouldn't be at 70 Morality if your MO was vengeance and anger. 

Edited March 10, 2017 by Kael

[Space Monkey 124]

Edit: My mistake. Ignore...

Edited March 10, 2017 by Space Monkey