Jedi in the Vineyard

[Nev the Deranged]

what kinds of changes aside from Lightsabers instead of guns did you make? What kind of principles are the Jedi sworn to uphold, and what authority do they act under, etc?

Questions for another thread, I think.  You start it and I'm there.

Charles

Uh... okay... ^_^  I'm just interested how you remapped the tenets and background of the Faith to the Star Wars universe.

[Charles Nicholls]

For the details of the Jedi "faith", I took the same approach as scripture in the standard game.  We have a very broad understanding from the movies of what's "good and bad".  The details are left to players to come up with during play.  The details can be unclear, contradictory and troublesome, just like scripture in real life.

For the game, the only real responsibility of the players' Jedi is to be keepers of the peace. I want to leave that as undefined as possible.

For my first "town", I used the something's wrong progression as written.  I just didn't pick anything that seemed out of place for Star Wars.  This seemed to work fine for my preparation.  I can post a write up if you're interested.

For Lightsabres, I used "Lightsabres equal guns and blasters equal fighting".  This means that generally no one but Jedi can escalate to Lightsabres.  When they do however (say, snatching one away and igniting it against the Jedi), its about the rejecting the authority of the Jedi and fighting for the right to judge themselves, which strikes me as pretty cool.

Did that answer your questions?

Charles

[Nev the Deranged]

Somewhat. I guess I had trouble seeing how the Jedi "religion" maps to the Faith as portrayed in the book. The Jedi were pretty much the only ones following their "rules", there was no body of "faithful" outside the Jedi themselves. Sure, they had a lot of political influence, and most folks were probably afraid of them to a degree. But it just seems like you'd have to do a lot of twisting to get it to work.

I'm not saying it's not possible, clearly it is. And I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was a neat idea. I'm just interested in how you made it happen.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Dave, it doesn't have to map.

The Jedi have moral authority to act and their authority is respected. When it's not respected, the Jedi are allowed to use violence.

The interest of the Jedi is in keeping peace. The interest of the Faith is in keeping social order. It's not that big a leap.

[Nev the Deranged]

Mm. Fair enough I guess.

I guess, ultimately, moral authority is pretty tenuous no matter what it supposedly derives from.

[lumpley]

The purpose of the Faith and the whole Dogs thing is to create characters who won't just ditch out on a town and go home - to create characters for whom it'd be out of character to ditch out.

You can throw Dogs' religious authority away, throw the faith away, throw the whole institutional and organizational framework away, if you have some other plan to make characters who won't ditch out.

As long as your group understands Jedis to be the kind of people who don't ditch out, just snap off the Faith and make 'em Jedis instead.

Let's see, I wrote about this about Firefly recently... here: Re: Dogs in the Black: brainstormin' required

-Vincent

[John Harper]

Yup. It's working for us with Firefly. Instead of Faith, we have "I do the job, I get paid." Works like a charm. For Jedi, you've got non-ditchiness in spades already.

[Nev the Deranged]

Non-ditchy. Check ^_^

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

You can throw Dogs' religious authority away, throw the faith away, throw the whole institutional and organizational framework away, if you have some other plan to make characters who won't ditch out.

This touches on a disagreement I think we had before and I was unable to articulate: to me, moral authority and religious authority are orthogonal. Sanjuro has moral authority in Yojimbo, for instance, even though he lacks money, formal authority, or respect. Watchdogs have moral authority in a Faithless town. Ann and Saxifrage have moral authority in the Mars trilogy.

Moral authority is taken, not given.

Also, I don't know if it exists in the real world, but it sure does in fiction.

[lumpley]

I disagreed with that, J? Yikes, I'm dumb.

-Vincent

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Ah, well, no, you're not, and I didn't articulate it effectively. So chalk up one more for miscoummunication!