Droid crafting rules questions

Rules & Game Mechanics
#1

Hi everyone,

I play a Twi’lek Technician and I was looking at the droid crafting rules.

Say I succeed but roll poorly on the mechanics check to craft the chassis for and only get one single success, no advantages, triumphs or anything else. Could the chassis be scrapped and would it be possible re-use (most) of the parts? Or would that not work?

In the next step, while programming the droid. Would it be possible to start over and re-program it if my roll isn’t any good, like a single success? Or is the droids personality set when I’ve rolled my computers check?

I (or my character) has a specific “vision” for what the droid should be which require at least a few advantages (or a triumph) both when building the chassis and when programming it.

I have no problem getting some negative stuff as well, I’d love for the droid to get some unintended negative personality quirk or mechanical issue with the chassis, that would just add character to the droid. However I do feel that my character would start over if she didn’t get at least a few positive effects as well.

#2

You’d need equipment, talents, or Advantage to recover the cost.

Yes. Just takes more time.

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#3

Yes, but it doesn’t mean you can’t reprogram the droid and effectively kill that personality. Droids routinely go through memory wipes and factory resets in the extended universe because of the individuality, quirks, and personalities that begin to form.

If you’re running Force and Destiny, be sure to raise the moral conflict :smiling_imp:

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#4

I have a related question: Has anyone experimented with custom Templates or Programming Directives? Or multiple Directives? I’ve tried to Analyze why some Directives are Average/Hard/Daunting and it doesn’t quite make sense. Combat directive is 3 1-rank Skills, 1 Talent at Average, but Translation is Hard with 2 Talents. So adding a talent increases difficulty? but Healing Directive is Daunting and has less skills than Navigation and equal Talents?! So what skill/talent mix is Avg vs Hard??
And Elimination Directive is +1 difficulty from Healing but 3 rank 4 skills (12 upgrades) and 3 rank 2 and a rank 3 talent and rank 2! What if you want a custom profile with less?

Does anyone have a formula/scale for a Directive of a generic mix of skills/talents?

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Custom droid crafting Directives
#5

Note that due to the nature of the dice system, you will never get both net Advantage and Threat on the same roll, since they cancel one another out. So either a positive quirk, or a negative one. Unless there is a Despair that the GM spends that way.

I am contemplating a house-rule that a droid that has not been wiped/reset for time acquires quirks. Haven’t decided how we decide if pos/neg, other than taking notes how it is treated.

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#6

Actually, the talent Creative Design allows you to, when crafting, spend X Advantage, and the GM spends X Threat.
But yeah, other than that just Despair.

Yes, I’ve messed with custom Templates and Programming Directives. I haven’t made many, but I made “Thievery Directives” which are Hard difficulty and give the droid Skulduggery 2, Stealth 1, and Convincing Demeanor 1.

I don’t have any sort of formulae or scales for measuring them, I just build them to roughly equal existing patterns and balances and then assign the difficulty and time I think makes sense. Part of the reason for this is that some skills will be easier to “program” than others based on their nature and the complexity referenced by the skill, which is an abstraction of many different things, not necessarily directly comparable to other skills.
Mechanically, yes. This costs 15 XP, this costs 10, et cetera, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

#7

How long did you make Thievery take? I have same trouble deciding time required.

P.S. Sorry, maybe this should have moved to GM House Rules topic…

#8

No, it’s fine here. :)
Just 1 day. I made it as pretty much just a version of Translation or Repair.
The time increments seem to be thirds, then full days.
So 8, 16, 24 hours, 2, 3, etc. days.

If you want a rule of thumb (not hard and fast), I’d say 8 hours per difficulty. When you get to higher-end Hard or past Hard, then add a number of days to no more than a week.

Best approach, in my opinion, is to find its closest comparison of the existing directives and making it similar to that.

#9

OK, so why does Navigation take 3 days when it appears skill/talent-wise equivalent to Translation or Repair? Proposal: Astrogation is a LOT of data to program in. I’d argue that piloting is more difficult than language translation or repairing a known part, so wonder why Navigation isn’t Daunting, but maybe the 3 days is a trade-off instead of making it a more difficult task.

Now this makes me wonder, given that I’ve seen comments about out-of-date astrogation charts making that task more difficult—do droids programmed with Astrogation need periodic updates? Per this archived FFG thread, you can make astrogation charts a resource, or steal them from an astromech, so I’d think so.

#10

Yeah, it’s basically that Astrogation and Piloting (Space) are more complex.
And yes, the three days is a way of showing that added complexity without it necessarily being more difficult, which is why I didn’t give any hard and fast “rules” of difficulty=time.

I’d just handwave Astrogation charts or say that they update automatically whenever the droid/navicomputer connects to the network, but if you want to make it more complicated/demanding, yeah, requiring periodic updates makes sense. I’d handle it narratively though.

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#11

I don’t know how people rule the 2 or 3 day tasks, but they clearly require uninterrupted time. Is that working hours or clock hours? Can the mechanic take naps during those hours or does it get extended +50% because they must sleep 8hrs a day?

#12

No, it’s not uninterrupted. You just need to spend some time here, some time there, and total up to meet the full number.

#13

We’ve ruled that you need to spend the hours, and it’s not uninterrupted. So if we have nothing else going on I generally have my character work on crafting projects 10 hours a day. Not only is it easy to calculate (“We have 5 days downtime = 50 hours of work”), our group also feel that it makes sense to leave 7 hours for sleeping and 7 hours for other things like eating, relaxing etc.

On rare occations, when a project has been super important for our group, our GM has allowed my character to work more, and put in like 14-18 hours of crafting work in a day. But in the general day-to-day we’ve landed on 10.

I actually don’t know why they put “3 days (72 hours)” for our group it was just confusing at first. It would’ve been better just to put the number of hours needed.

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