SW The Old Republic: Sith Warrior

[Madner Kami]

Ah, this brings back some of the most fond experiences I had with the game. After a while of interaction with all those belligerent and suicidal NPCs, I came to the conclusion, that the only reason the Light Side Warrior is on "The Dark Side" and evil is, because people force their death upon your blade. After a while I worked off the assumption, that my Warrior's emotions of hatred are fueled by one source and one source only: The annoyance my Warrior percieves, because he's forcefully made an accomplice in countless suicides. It became a really satisfying moment, when Jaesa converted to my side because, literally, I was the only decent person around and everyone else was suicidally crazy.

Also, Baras is an idiot and the only reason he has any success at all is, because he somehow has a knack at picking capable underlings. And I never got the fascination with Malavai Quinn. He's literally Paul Bäumer (literally, when it comes to his looks even aka actor Richard Thomas) in the 1979 movie "All Quiet on the Western Front" and boring as fuck.

[Mecha82]

It's funny how in Old Republic most times solution is to kill everyone when in original 2 Fallout games from late 90's you had actual choice when it comes to solving problems and character creation (based on GURPS) in those reflected that. Maybe light side has more options that allow peaceful solution than dark side has but I doubt that.

[hammerofglass]

Bounty hunter gets a lot of situations to end things peacefully and leave enemies alive, confusingly enough for playing a hired killer.

[MightyDavidson]

Bounty hunter gets a lot of situations to end things peacefully and leave enemies alive, confusingly enough for playing a hired killer.

Except he's technically not a hired killer. He can choose to slay all his bounties sure but unless the contract explicitly requires them to die, he'll get paid for bringing them back alive.

[SabreMau]

It became a really satisfying moment, when Jaesa converted to my side because, literally, I was the only decent person around and everyone else was suicidally crazy.

Yeah, I think this might be why Jaesa's my favorite NPC in the game. We got to be Light Side Sithsters together.

[Mecha82]

Bounty hunter gets a lot of situations to end things peacefully and leave enemies alive, confusingly enough for playing a hired killer.

Except he's technically not a hired killer. He can choose to slay all his bounties sure but unless the contract explicitly requires them to die, he'll get paid for bringing them back alive.

Ah yes, Bounty Hunter. One profession in galaxy were you can either kill or not kill target and still get paid for it.

[TrueMetis]

Bounty hunter gets a lot of situations to end things peacefully and leave enemies alive, confusingly enough for playing a hired killer.

Except he's technically not a hired killer. He can choose to slay all his bounties sure but unless the contract explicitly requires them to die, he'll get paid for bringing them back alive.

Yeah, but it's still interesting the it seems like one of the most kill prone ones is the one with typically the greatest choice in leaving people alive. Though arguably in some cases that's not such a great thing for the person you leave alive.

[Karha of Honor]

Bounty hunter gets a lot of situations to end things peacefully and leave enemies alive, confusingly enough for playing a hired killer.

Except he's technically not a hired killer. He can choose to slay all his bounties sure but unless the contract explicitly requires them to die, he'll get paid for bringing them back alive.

Ah yes, Bounty Hunter. One profession in galaxy were you can either kill or not kill target and still get paid for it.

It would not be easier to neutralise the target IRL if the world was as chaotic as the galaxy.

[CmdrKing]

As I recall his argument was that for anything you'd trust a slave with a droid would do it better and cheaper, and they rebel much less often.

So now I'm thinking about this, since it's kinda an interesting question.
(The presumed actual answer is "slaves are a concept almost everyone GETS, understands is bad, and has a long history in the sort of stories Star Wars draws from", but we're going to talk about the implications of this: why are there still slaves if droids exist)

So the simplest answer would be finding some area where droids cannot in fact replace a sapient being. And within the context of Star Wars this is... rare. Droids are routinely shown to possess extremely sophisticated AI, so while they may be poorly suited to academic roles or the like, well... so are slaves, and for regular thinking-on-your-feet task our modern computers just cannot do droids seem perfectly adept.
Most of the droids we see do seem to have either limited limb articulation OR be highly specialized units with dozens of find-manipulation limbs, so it's possible there's a limited set of manual dexterity tasks that a slave might be somewhat more suited for, but even then the cost-benefit ratio doesn't seem great.
The Star Wars galaxy is pretty big with vastly disparate development levels from planet to planet, so I guess on paper a world far enough out on the rim might have a severe enough lack of advanced repair facilities suitable for specialized droids that restricting use of droids in favor of slaves might have merit? But I'm reaching here.

Honestly the only time we see a slave in Star Wars where "just use a droid" doesn't seem like a simpler solution is Twi'lek dancing girls. So, sex slaves and similar. While the old EU DID have human replica-type droids who were confirmed as "fully functional" (Guri from Shadows of the Empire), they were also depicted as sufficiently costly and rare as to approach uniqueness, so... well, that's one thing.

But that's also obviously not the only use of slaves in Star Wars. I mean, Shmi Skywalker could have been used in that role at some point I suppose but she uh... seemed PRETTY confident about that whole "there was no father" bit, and obviously the fact that her son was also declared a slave puts a damper on that being the only routine use of slaves in the Galaxy.

Honestly looking at her case, and the way Watto talks about her and Anakin, my theory is this: most slaves in Star Wars are simply legacy slaves. At some point when hyperspace travel was more dangerous, droids were rarer, harder to repair, and less sophisticated, and more of the Galaxy was freshly-colonized wilderness, use of slaves made sense (in as much as it possibly can). However, because the children of slaves are also slaves, there were always more slaves. The Republic never fully cracked down on the practice (as happened in Earth history), and without outside pressure forcing the issue, slave owners had no impetus to simply give up large portions of their assets.

In other words, a droid would be safer and more efficient, but you'd be giving up a huge amount of wealth to free a slave, and if you owned a slave to start with you aren't the sort of person who's going to do that. So slaves are essentially a symbol of wealth and status and a hard asset to sell if things come to that.

So yeah, based on in-universe evidence, people basically keep slaves because without anyone forcing them to stop, they're not going to eat the economic loss. Or are a nasty enough customer that a sexual object they can kill on a whim appeals to them.

[Madner Kami]

So the simplest answer would be finding some area where droids cannot in fact replace a sapient being. And within the context of Star Wars this is... rare. Droids are routinely shown to possess extremely sophisticated AI, so while they may be poorly suited to academic roles or the like, well... so are slaves, [...]

History disagrees with you. For example Romans and Chinese regularly used highly educated slaves as teachers and beaurocrats. Also, treating slaves badly is something that isn't necessarily a common practice. The Romans for instance finally learned that treating slaves badly is a recipe for disaster, if slave-labour is a wide-spread thing in your realm and it only took three Servile Wars for that particular lesson. Following that "little" kerfluffle, the Roman Republic introduced laws that set rather tight limits on how you had to treat your slaves, rules that were common practise in the various persian predecessor and successor states already and those rules were nice enough that slave revolts just did not happen anymore in the roman state until the end of Byzantium in 1453 and, argueably, being a slave in the successor-state of the Ottoman Empire, wasn't the worst thing that could happen to you either by a long shot, given that the Ottoman's made extensive use of "kuls" in their beaurocratic systems, just like the Byzantines and various arab empires before them.