“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” – Yoda
The morality system of Force and Destiny, mechanically, is fine – it fills a purpose. You track what the character does throughout the course of a game session and then check a list of activities that create “conflict,” then you roll a d10 and subtract your conflict from the die result – if the number is positive your character gains morality – negative – that’s how much morality you lose on a scale of 1 to 100. Close to 100 you become a paragon of the light side of the force – fall too low and you fall to the dark side. The system is a bit random and a bit shallow – but it works.
My problem with the Force and Destiny morality system is that you generate conflict by being evil. (See, Force and Destiny, p. 322 “Using Morality”). Good and evil are too subjective and personal to serve as the measure for a concept that universally crosses all extant cultures and known species in the Star Wars universe – apply concepts of property ownership and the moral rectitude of stealing from the wealthy (an actual example from the conflict table) is a terrible fit for determining whether a character remains a servant of the light side of the force or falls to the darkness.
So I’m going to re-write the rules. I have two main goals here: (1) to emphasize a focus on emotion leading to the dark side; and, (2) to remove some of the randomness by replacing the d10 roll at the end of the night with a skill check that relies on a classic jedi theme – discipline.
Continue reading Rules Lawyering: Rethinking the rules from Force and Destiny’s Morality system.