I played in a game of Star Wars D6, a pretty easy and simple, but incredibly swingy system (fumbles and crits happen ALL the time, with a 17% chance for either!). We had a rusty old space freighter bought on debt and ferried cargo from one planet to another out near the rim.

My problem: I was playing a bounty hunter. Mun Rae, former cop on Coruscant, threw the career in the empire down and was now on a second career out on the dusty planetoids near the rim. You can take a girl out of law enforcement, but you cannot take law enforcement out of the girl. Now Mun Rae did security for the freighter and hunted fugitives to speed up repayment of the debt.

Being a bounty hunter was not a problem in and of itself – it only became an issue in the party dynamics. I had a bunch of shipmates played by male players, and wouldn’t you know, the bounty was a young, pretty, female Twi’lek serial thief with purple skin. It was a massive headache from the start, with a chorus of protests rising right in the moment I zapped her with a stun baton.

Half the time she was trying to wriggle out of her cuffs aiming to mess up stuff in our ship or outright stealing  it – the other half of the time my fellow players were white-knighting and tripped over themselves bringing her food and drink and listening to her sob-stories and wondering if the cuffs were really necessary and if they were not too tight. They all  felt that such a pretty little thing with such long eyelashes and deep purple eyes to lose oneself in had to be either pure and innocent or a secret robin hood.

Only: I was a bounty hunter, and capturing runners to bring them back to the law is my central character premise. I was not in the business of letting my captives go just because they look at me with puppy eyes. And I was not going to start with it now.

Every time the GM mentioned my captive, the other players dropped whatever they were holding and mused that we should investigate her side of the story and let her go – and wasn’t robbing department stores on Vendini actually super brave, given that Vendini was part of the Empire? The GM was playing it to the hilt, always making sure that her deeds very pretty straightforward theft and robbery in normal stores, nothing actually brave and heroic, while pulling the emotional strings of our simp-brigade.

Staying constantly on guard over her AND my own comrades was a massive issue, severely restricting my freedom of movement: any time I turned my back I had to expect some nonsense going on.

A weight fell off my shoulders when we finally made it back to Vendini, where she had done her crimes, and I managed to hand her over to the spaceport guard station, collecting my pay.
Right after we left from there one of my fellow players mused that maybe she might manage to escape…
I was quite done with having that fugitive around and was quite worried to come home to our freighter, only to find her lounging in the captain’s seat, the others hurrying to fulfil her every wish, so I said:
“She might, but you better don’t help her, or I’m shutting you down.”
We agreed halfway: He would not help her, but if she escaped anyways we would not hunt her again.

I gladly promised that. And I promised myself to focus on middle-aged male fugitives from now on: nobody has heroic daydreams about saving THOSE from the grinding wheels of justice.

Kudos to the GM for walking the tightrope without ever pinning the matter down one way or the other.