Star Wars The Old Republic

[Belle Hibiki]

I'm pleasantly surprised at what a big jerk you can be as a Jedi, though so far it seems to be just fairly dumb evil stuff as opposed to 'for the greater good' evil. But so far my Consular is basically following no Jedi rules and my master is like "That's really bad! Now here is your next high-risk mission:"

I'm usually ALL LIGHT SIDE and ALL PARAGON in BioWare games, but playing Consular has made me break that rule. The snapping point was when the Jedi were going to EXPEL some dude because he'd made a completely natural "mistake" in his training.

His master had told him to go and lift a giant boulder far beyond his abilities, and he'd been at it for hours and hours, even using the Jedi New Age power-up technique of finding inner peace through meditation. His master said there was something under the boulder that he needed for training or whatever, and he asked me to move it, not so that he could take whatever was under the boulder, but just to make sure that it could be done.

Naturally, me being a badass, I lifted it with no problem, and the dude's master comes into the scene complaining up a shitstorm and saying that he's going to toss the guy out of the entire Academy, wasting over a decade of the guy's life, because apparently persevering against a hopeless situation was the point of the exercise.

Well EXCUSE ME, but fuck that. He hadn't been told that he couldn't accept help, and he wasn't even doing it to cheat - maybe it would just give him the kind of confidence he needed. And sorry, we aren't freaking Sith - we're supposed to work together - and given that the master hinted NOTHING about what the message was supposed to be, one could have EASILY thought it was a lesson about cooperation.

I mean, I get that Jedi are terrified of 'shortcuts' and all, but how is using the tools and opportunities available indicative of some great personal failure on his part? Being resourceful is not evil.

Yeah, I got some dark side points lying for the student to save his ass, but fuck it. The only thing that could have satisfied me more was being able to punch the master a la Shepard punching news reporters.