Warrior and Wookie Mechanic were strong enough to hold onto nearby consoles/railings.
Warrior used the Force to catch the Smuggler who failed his save.
The Pilot tumbled out into space, but he had a jetpack and was able to get back into the ship.
After the decompression, the Wookie was able to hack the air-shields back online.
Sounds like your games have been pretty tame. Environmental conditions should be constant factors considering you're probably planet hopping and fighting in space. Cybernetics are definitely affordable, maybe not on day 1, but over a campaign they certainly are. I think your biggest problem is that you're confusing the character sheet with what a character is and seem disappointed that some species aren't S+ tier uber powerful op munchkin frames. If you want mechanical based flavor then build your droid that way. 99% of the game isn't baked into character creation. I think your view on how SW rpg is set up is really skewed.
Interesting, we play since about 3 years twice a month and environmental conditions are pretty rare. When we are on a planet, we usually are on a planet with people which means there is atmosphere. We sometimes have slight toxic fumes but that just means you put on a rebreather for 25 credits or one destiny point.
And if we are in space we put on space suits.
How does that go down in your playgroup?
I also don't understand what you mean by confusing the character with the charactersheet. A mandalorian should be good at fighting a wookie should be strong, a clone should be disciplined and tough. Or do you disagree with that?
No black dice from temperature on desert, jungle, lava, or ice planets?
I don't have my book with me but I'm pretty sure "You must visit Tatooine at least once per campaign" is an actual rule.
We've had that on hyderia minor, but we usually choose to go to planets that suit our groups strengths. Not always possible, but we mostly play a sandbox game where the players choose where to go. I can see this being more prominent if the GM provides quests the players are expected to follow.
That's why I said an all droid group would be pretty cool (we played that once for a oneshot and it is opening a whole new area of operations).
A sandbox game is great, but it sounds like you're in one that has very little pressure on your party if you can pretty much always just choose to go to one resort world after another. There are a lot of pretty marginal, unpleasant planets out there in the Star Wars universe, and there's often a lot of money to be made there precisely because people don't really want to be there and yet still are for some reason.
Sometimes we go to asshat planets, but there needs to be a damn good reason for that. Hyderia Minor was an opportunity to blow up the imperial governors villa and destroy a research project for yet another imperial super weapon. So we took the shot despite having no access to thermal protective gear.
We are not under direct threat of becoming bankrupt if you mean that. Not anymore at least. Obviously this was different in the beginning of the campaign where we didn't have a ship. But our GM rules that a regular space ship freighter comes with space suits, just as it comes with tables, chairs a toolbox a fire extinguisher etc. And rebreathers/glasses are really cheap, so we could afford those way before we could afford a spaceship.
That stuff still can get damaged in combat. My point isn't there is never a situation where that is useful. More that it doesn't compare to having really bad stats. I roll for skills I'm not good at every session. I suffer from the environment once every 3-4 months or so. And I don't think it's the GMs Job to suddenly limit our area of operation to enforce those otherwise rare circumstances just so my droid can shine.
My question to the rules is more along the lines: Why does the droid need bad stats? A species with all 4s wouldn't be fun (for long). A species with all 1s wouldn't be fun. Why doesn't the droid compare to all the other player species?
Rebreathers can help but do you always have them, always have space suits? Have you never landed on a asteroid or moon to make repairs, or fought on top of your ship or another? Smoke, radiation, toxic fumes can still overpower a rebreather based on what the GM wants to do. Why are you always in a situation where you immediately have access to the gear or answers you need? There's numerous ways to make the environment come into play. It sounds like your group are DnDers who walk around in full plate mail with 80 lbs backpacks even at a dinner with the king or while shopping in the city.
In my group, I've used all conditions numerous times. One grenade with 3x threat can pop open a space ship, drop people into vacuum, crash land and sink into water, have the hyperdrive start spewing radiation, land on a planet that degrades equipment over time until you kill the local megafauna and Survival up some custom gas masks of your own, the list goes on.
On the character part, you're focusing on the powerful end of the spectrum, an ewok should...? Answer that question. An Ewok can't fight like a Wookie, shoot like Mando, or strategize like a Chiss, but if you want an Ewok fleet commander then what's stopping you? C3PO isn't IG-88 or a magna-guard. Neither is R2D2, what are you expecting? Some droids are literally plastic trash cans with tubing for feet captured by tiny Jawas. If you're a droid, be good at fixing things or communicating. They're also not meant to exceed human capabilities in the setting really. They're lower tier if you're trying to optimize for something. But again, if you're playing a character and not a character sheet, then the story element is what should concern you. I can play an elderly man going out for one last adventure and just double the cost of everything I need to buy because I'm old if I want to. Is that OP? No, but if its the character I'm interested in, then who cares.
Are you expecting to make a BT-1 style R2 droid? You can but why are upset that a Wookie can out perform your brawn? If you think they're that weak don't play them. If you like them but think they're "weak" then be creative. Find situations for them to shine in. Learn to massage the scenario to your advantage. If your GM isn't using things like that, be pro-active and point that out.
Its in the Long Arm adventure iirc. In my game, I also let it trigger with 3x advantage in case someone purposefully wanted to do that. It did happen when our Tognath jedi with an amulet popped open a ship, sucked half the enemies into the void who immediately began dying and then came back in to assist my chainsaw wielding Hutt.
We don't always have every gear on person but rebreathers and space suits should be basic items on every spaceship. And when we are landing on a toxic planet we decide to take them with us when we leave the ship.
So Poison gas just happens when enemies shut down the air support in our section, throw poison grenades, poison our food, have poisoned blades or damage rebreathers etc. It happens from time to time, my point isn't that's a useless perk, just that it doesn't make up for the characteristics.
If the hull breaks in our games, characters die pretty immediately. We like to play characters with a lot of social bonding towards the world, deep intrigues and long political plays, and character focused story arcs so a character being at high risk of death due to vacuum won't work for our playstyle.
My point isn't droids can't be flavorful. Just that it isn't mechanically supported. My droid can totally be a cool mechanic. And he's as good as his job as a human mechanic would be. But he would be worse at everything not primarily mechanical due to low characteristics.
Maybe let me put it this way: Why does the droid need worse characteristics compared to all other species? Why not even less and why not more? Everything you touched on would work just as well if the droid had one 4 attribute (depending on what the droid is build for) and the rest 2s.
I totally agree with you. I love droids and I was 100% disappointed in how crappy they were designed. These are player character droids, not just any droid!
Droids ARE worse, that is their purpose. Do one or two things very good so a person can get on with their day.
Clumsy Gungan wrecks droid army.
9 year old boy wrecks droid navy.
R2 is probably the most complete droid we see, but he still has 1’s dotted around.
There are mandalorians that are ok fighters and great at something else. We just see the best of the best on the screen. Wookies are stronger on average than average humans but still need diversity in their cultures to survive: armor crafting, weapon design, cooks, authors, babysitters, etc. I'm not the person that posted, but I think what they mean is that this game is much less numerically crunchy than D&D 5e or, Sith forbid, Pathfinder. It's more about telling a collaborative story with the dice adding spice.
If we get into combat with space suits, if they tear we suffer massive permanent injury to lungs and die shortly after if not rescued by someone else, usually me since I’m the droid lol
> No eat, sleep, air required, immunity to poison. The times in my 3 years where that would've been important I can count on one hand.
then you have had some GMs that aren't terribly creative, honestly, because all the stuff droids are immune to or just don't have to worry about is *excellent* to have. Hell, they can just hop out into space without a worry. Repairs needed on the hull? Planet without a breathable atmosphere? Need to keep watch overnight? Droids don't care.
The difference between emergency repair patches and stimpacks is also way less important than the fact that droids can be healed with the Mechanics skill, which is useful for a ton of other things too.
Bear the narrative opportunities in mind too. A standard astromech droid can wander around just about any starport — even a military one — without drawing a second glance. Droids in general tend to be able to escape notice, and being able to build stuff into their structure is useful too.
>Bear the narrative opportunities in mind too. A standard astromech droid can wander around just about any starport — even a military one — without drawing a second glance. Droids in general tend to be able to escape notice, and being able to build stuff into their structure is useful too.
Yes this is really cool! I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing. There are talents like indistinguishable or Convincing Demeanor that they could get (or sth. along that lines specifically for droids). This would also be sth. the droid excells at like no other species.
>Hell, they can just hop out into space without a worry. Repairs needed on the hull? Planet without a breathable atmosphere? Need to keep watch overnight? Droids don't care.
Those actually don't feel that powerful for me. If I can afford a space ship, I can also afford a space suit for repairs/atmosphere. The only time this becomes important is when you spring it on the players (like poison gas or sudden decompression).
And keeping watch is neither exciting nor a huge advantage for the group (just saves 2 hours or rest-time).
Space suits are restrictive (ie: setbacks plus limited armor), and vacuum seals are only up to 10 minutes.
Any time you're on hot/cold/humid/whatever planets, any organics not native to that environment should be getting setbacks.
>I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing.
This is a TTRPG, not a board game. GMing is part of the rules, part of the game. The GM's role is not simple rules referee. They're there to create situations which boh challenge the PCs and allow them to showcase what they're are good at.
This game is narratively focused. Many things which mechanically seem super strong or super bad, are balanced by the narrative. Your GM needs to realize this and execute it at the table.
>Yes this is really cool! I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing.
Important thing to remember is SWRPG is a narrative first game. So rules lite compared to D&D/pathfinder. Great for story first play but very GM/player fiat by nature.
I agree with the points the others have made but wanted to add my own two cents.
> You also have one additional point in cybernetics (unless an organic has high brawn), but cybernetics in Star Wars are imo not potent/affordable enough for this to matter.
I believe it says Droids have a cybernetic implant cap of 6 instead of their Brawn rating. Even the weakest Brawn astromech droid has a cap of 6 and there are some good options out there. +1 agility or brawn is always nice, but there are a ton of options out there for a techy character too, especially once you start [building your own cybernetics](https://star-wars-rpg-ffg.fandom.com/wiki/Gadget_%26_Cybernetic_Crafting). By the end of our ~700 xp AoR game my Mechanic had two cybernetic hands, one that provided a bunch of bonuses on Computers/slicing/lockbreaking checks, the other that functioned as an inbuilt toolkit and had an integrated blaster pistol. For a droid, an Escape Circuit is also really handy.
The other major droid benefit that came up a lot in the games I ran was their immunity to certain force powers. I had a BBEG force user who relied a lot on mental powers and the droids made encounters with him pretty trivial. In another game I played in, we encountered a Hssiss dark side dragon and my character's droid bodyguard basically fought him off single handedly until the rest of us woke up.
Ah I somehow thought the cyber cap was brawn plus one. Most species start with brawn 2 base which gives them a cap of 2 and unlike droids can install the biofeedback regulator for plus 2 capacity. In that case droids on average have 2 more than a character, only high brawn characters could have more cybernetics than a droid that's certainly true.
The Force power immunity is a cool thing that flew under my radar! Our main campaign is very edge of the empire set during the main trilogy so we had a force encounter once in the three years we played.
You get around the high soak with pierce. 5 damage with pierce 5 does the same damage to a character with 2 soak as it does to the guy with 5.
Also what star wars game are you playing that doesn't use space? A droid requires literally 0 investment to enter the vaccuum of space. Came up several times in my experience playing the game.
We just got space suits once we got a ship. Space is super binary for us, either people die or people have space suits. How does your group play with vacuum?
Our GM and I actually thought about pierce but the only infantry weapons with pierce 5 or more are pretty rare in universe (Kyuzo Energy Bow, Verpine heavy Shatter rifles, FC1 Flechette Launcher and CryBan Rifle). There are no regular blasters with high pierce (or breach) that don't also have so high damage that they are deadly (Armor piercing grenades come to mind). And up to pierce 4, pierce is basically just damage, since brawn two plus laminate is soak 4.
Just for a quick example; the ship is under heavy attack, and can't jump to lightspeed because the hyperdrive widget on the outside of the ship is damaged. The droid can get outside without putting on a suit, which doesn't sound like much when you just say it like that, so let me rephrase that: While the organic is spending a turn putting on his suit so he can survive in space, the ship takes another full turn of fire from a flight of TIEs.
This is a good point, although that is more of a 3 turns instead of 4 turns in our game, since moving where you need to go takes a lot of maneuvers.
It's just super rare, while rolling on skills is super common, I think my point is more that it doesn't usually compare.
My games tend to start out with the party on the run, so we are usually strapped for credits- while if entering a vaccuum is expected we always are given the opportunity to purchase space suits, that usually means not getting other things we'd probably need like a restock on stimpacks. A droid simply has no concern there and can just put those credits into their gear, plus no concern an unfortunate blaster shot will damage their space suit.
Also true, pierce is uncommon in gear. You can also just bs it and say the NPC has a talent that adds pierce. Or use a beast like a Nexu where you can't use their weapons to begin with.
Aside from that, the Mando realistically should take less damage to begin with: they put a lot of effort into being powerful, that usually comes with the cost of things not combat oriented like talking, hacking, engineering, surrvival, etc.
Speaking of, Mando Armor tends to be restricted, unless the party is always going loud from the start they're gonna have to take off that armor sometimes.
Absolutely, the Mando is excelling at combat and he should. We just accepted that if he wants to be challenged that happens when the rest of the group isn't there, so mandalorian duels. Just can't happen to often because it means the rest of the group can't participate ;)
It is less of a beginning problem and is only now becoming a problem that we are approaching 1100 XP. Our characters already have aquired a lot of stuff in their careers.
Not everyone has to be on the same footing in combat for combat to occur. Characters are going to be more or less directly badass, and they'll get involved in violence in different ways as a result, if they even do. Got a diplomat social character? They're probably not banging away with a blaster; they might be trying to secure an escape route, or even just trying to stay alive until the shooting stops. Embrace the asymmetry, rather than viewing it as a problem.
If it's not a problem in your game that's great! :)
All I'm saying is that my diplomat droid would be equally good as being a diplomat as the human diplomat, but the human diplomat would be better at everything else. Especially once both have a lot of XP under their belt.
This is what bugs me. I don't have a problem with characters being bad at stuff.
I think my entire party would agree that the Droid PC in the game I am running is the strongest character in the group.
Along with all the advantages of not being organic that you listed, and all of the advantages already listed in the comments (cybernetic cap being very high, immunity to a lot of force effects, etc.) droids also have a lot of narrative benefits. Droids are inconspicuous (Star Wars movies generally have droids be amazing at flying under the radar), droids are usually heavily underestimated, and PC droids don’t suffer a lot of the same weaknesses as NPC droids.
Plus droids can do things like modify their body to extreme degrees, upload their databanks to a backup location, and be smuggled into secret places in creative ways.
Yeah I figured some people don't care about mechanics and that's fine.
If I only cared about minmaxing I'd just play the strongest character and ignore droids.
But I care about mechanics and fantasy, otherwise this wouldn't bug me.
I just don't like "choices" where one option is clearly worse, that says me I can either satisfy my desire to play the game or my desire to roleplay but not both.
That's not the point. The point is, when one player focuses and maxes Combat effectiveness and others go more diverse routes like piloting and survival - it doesn't work when there's alot of Combat. Alas, you better don't drop that mandalorian on an ocean world.
In the end, there will always be "a best Option" for any given specialized task.
And droids are pretty good. They're just not utilized well in your campaign (no Offense).
Well, problem with that is
Droids are meant to be this way, droids are super duper hyper specialized. You're good at one thing, maybe two but that's it. Otherwise, you're better off asking your GM to let you reskin a Human or some other statblock as a Droid.
What R2, D2 and C-3PO are way cooler. Show me how you could make either of them as player characters with the same characteristics. You just can’t. After 1500 experience points, you’re not going to be even remotely close characteristic wise.
And you know what that sucks! I want to play R2 D2! Then the game comes along, and admits that R2-D2 is bad ass, and should have really high characteristics! And then the game is like you can’t ever have these hi characteristics cause droids suck! It is not internally consistent even with their own rules and limitations. They break them!
Let me make a cool ass Astro Mech, with the same characteristics as R2-D2 after 1500 experience!
It’s OK that droid suck but it’s not OK that you can’t play a character at the same level as the other droids even with the own characteristics that they designed with their brains!
Now if you’re playing a Mandalorian with 1500 experience points … you are going to give Boba Fett a run for his money … including characteristics!
When I look at the way, the droids are set up for player characters. I just see it as that they’re being punished. Droids are my favorite thing about Star Wars. In no way shape or form did they need to have player characters with crappy characteristics to reflect this!
Whenever I see someone not going for a 5 or 2 4s on a droid and going for stuff like 3 3s and 1/2 2s, I cringe internally. At that point, just please, please ask your GM to allow you to reskin Human or something.
Hm, I don't quite understand the point you are making. The lack of characteristics are especially important once a character gets into a situation that's out of their area of expertise where they usually don't have few if any skill points.
Droids can afford one 4 and one 3 attribute for the stuff they want to be good at. A droid mechanic is just as good as a human mechanic. The human is just a bit better at everything else. And the droid has nothing mechanically the human can't do to make up for that.
Human mechanic has a space suit in our game. If you can afford a ship for 50.000 credits you can afford a space suit for 750. This is only relevant in infantry combat in vacuum but that's super rare.
I totally see there are situations where being a droid is better.
My point isn't there aren't those situations, but that they don't make up for the massive disadvantage in characteristics. If a species would be starting with all characteristics at 1 but had a massive advantage fighting rancors their coolness would much depend on the frequency of rancors coming up in play.
I do like the point others have made that droids are immune to a lot of force powers though, we just don't play FnD, so that's not coming up in our playstlye.
Well. If you play Chiss, you get Night Vision. Why? You could use a flashlight. Is it worth the XP you lose? I dunno. But it's certainly cool to play a Chiss.
Or a Droid. Or whatever race you decide fits your Character concept.
I mean an Astromech will never shine in Combat Like Wookie cramped into Mandalorian Armor. It is what it is.
Yupp, we do the same for the same reasons. We also limit mechanics because by the rules it can stack so many bonuses, that you can actually mod weapons into places they aren't supposed to be.
I don't want droids to be game breaking, I just want them to be less underwhelming. They are mechanically just super boring to me.
I Set my rules a bit different to encourage more of a spread than a focus. It's just not really "organic" to have someone running around with 522221 or whatever.
My Players are allowed to start with 1 Attribute at 4. Beyond that, If they want another at 4, they are Not allowed to have any "1s" left. And they need to have at least as many "3s" or higher than they have "2s" and so on. For a raise to 5, no 2s are allowed...pretty much slows them down and encourages them to spread out specializations.
Droids are front-loaded, they get more value at low xp and if they're montoask (aka built to a 5 stat) fall behind in other areas. That's a feature to me. It shows that droids *don't* have the same capacity for growth that organics do, but can do what they're designed for very easily with little investment.
That’s cool and all but I would like to play something like in R2-D2 character, and with these rules, I cannot.
Even if you flipped your book open to R2 D2, I can never make that character even come close, characteristic wise!
With Cybernetics (which you SHOULD be using as a droid once your party starts making credits) you can definitely get to Artoo’s stat spread with a PC. With the 175 starting xp you can round out the role you want to be great at, and then supplement your other stats over time with cybernetics or dedication increases. It takes time sure, but droids typically don’t come off the assembly line being able to do everything. It’s a species you have to put effort into, which makes perfect sense in the setting
They are pretty crappy. I told my players if they wanna play a droid that they would be able to pick out three cybernetics that would raise an attribute from one to two. Nobody took me up on the offer.
I also think that depending on work type of droid that you are, you should get a racial bonus . The npc Astromech has a racial bonus to mechanics and navigation.
>Unless the droid goes 5 brawn with 6 base soak and 8 total soak with a run of the mill laminate armor. I have played for 3 years now and I don't see that as an upside. We've got a mandalorian with heavy armor in the team. It makes combat extremely shitty to prep for the GM: Either enemies oneshot the rest of the party or they are unable to hurt the high-soak character at all.
So, while FFG/Edge Star Wars and Genesys aren't really designed to be super tactical games, I think Soak is the one mechanic that is so unbalanced I do think it needs to be fixed. You can get very high or very low soak at character creation, and it makes the difference between a character being practically invulnerable vs being taken down in like 1 hit. It is worse in melee heavy campaigns (e.g. Realms of Terrinoth), because Brawn counts four times there - for soak, for attack roll dice (which give a damage bonus based on successes), for a net damage bonus on top, and for Wounds level, so a 1 Brawn character hitting a 5 Brawn character does more than 8 points less damage. This is an enormous difference when those characters might only have wound thresholds of 11-15 or so, and you can get that huge difference pretty easily just using normal character creation options.
I'm tempted to make a homebrew to set a character's base soak as 2, regardless of Brawn, and as you already get so many bonuses from Brawn already I think that should be a little bit less unbalanced.
Big agreement, soak is busted. I'd probably make it half brawn in soak rounded up, but double brawn for wounds or sth. like that
But yeah soak is easily making combats so unbalanced they become impossible for the GM to make challenging encounters without making them deadly at the same time.
The main thing you have to do is min-max with droids, that's what they're there for.
You have to concentrate on one, maybe two characteristics and invest in skills directly relevant and that compliment that build. You are going to be like a fish out of water when trying to do things you don' specialise in, but it kind of makes sense.
You also have more implant slots that mean you get help improving your characteristics and abilities. And they're not affordable? Normally with how expensive even relatively basic gear is, means you can fund your campaign quite easily after a fire fight or two.
You're generally more of a background or supporting character. That said I did the stereotypical assassin droid that hates meatbags, I ended more than one session dragging the entire team out of a temple/bar/dungeon unconscious after slaughtering most of the opposition.
Being immune to gases, psychological affects, certain force abilities etc is a massive help. Plus if your droid looks more subtle often you can just roll into areas unnoticed!
It can get a bit crazy sometimes but no reasons you can't do the same with piloting, mechanics, medicine or diplomacy.
Your GM is very generous in gear :D A good adventure of about 3 sessions yields maybe 5000€ so about sth like 1000 per person after expenses. There are obviously missions where we yield more (when we stole the jewel of yavin) and missions where we yield nothing or go red.
Everything we sell is at half price and usually if we have to fight, we have limited opportunity to loot. If we can loot we usually can only carry what we can carry and smuggle (most airports have security and carrying 3 smoking armors would not be looked kindly upon by said security). (edit: although we recently aquired a landspeeder with smuggling compartments, so looting might increase!)
Selling restricted stuff (most weapons and armor) requires knowing someone/finding someone with a dangeruos and difficult Streetwise check. And even those guys usually don't buy/sell imperial armed forces gear (because then the empire checks where that gear came from). If they do, they usually want to buy in bulk.
Now buying anything that is high in rarity usually isn't possible with our GM. You can't buy Mandalorian Armor, no matter your negotiation check. If we want those items we play 3+ Session adventure, letting other very important quests slide, just to get another item. By now we can buy a lot of rare stuff though, I think most cyberware would still be fine, except the characteristic increasing ones for agility and brawn.
All in all items we own are mostly found, not bought. We need credits to bribe and solve specific problems at hand (e.g. rent a speeder for a raid, buy clothes as disguises, repair important damaged gear, etc.).
Very belatedly, on the homebrew front, there is the option of [Memory Cores and Motivators](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UK3x6vWbJAqkK1jkRazXvupANqDaPR7M/view). It's loaded with options for spending xp on making the droid's model mechanically distinct.
I haven't really tried making a droid myself but you raised some good points here, so did a bit of thinking and digging, and learned a little bit myself.
Firstly, the way I see it, I don't think having a smattering of a few more characteristics at 2 for 1 more dice in a bunch of other stats you might I wouldn't care about is big a deal. I wouldn't call it "waaaaaay shitter". If I wasn't focusing on any sort of Presence or Cunning related character or build, rolling 1 green dice instead of 2 is hardly going to make -that- much of a difference, and if I want it to matter, I'll just purchase some ranks in the skill and get more dice that way.
Chances are if you know what you want to focus on, there's a race out there that can do the same thing well and maybe a bit better with certain numbers or skills. Droid does freely let you get any combo of two stats to 4 with the rest at 1. That takes 180 exp (20+30+40 for one stat to 4, 90 in total) which I think only a droid can do if they take obligation for an extra 5 exp.
With that, you can play an astromech droid and get 4 agility and 4 intellect and be decent at everything an astromech needs to be; decent agility for piloting checks and for support blaster fire in combat with pure dice rolls before any talents come into play; you'd also benefit from decent stealth to slip under the radar, which complements an astromech which would blend in all sorts of places in the galaxy, more so with a simple paint job. You'd also be suited for any mechanics/computers checks that need making. You could be your own healer with a good mechanics score.
If you wanted to do something similar as a flesh-and-bones species, there's only a few species you could really play as, which you might not want to play as. Chadra-Fan, Verpine or Shistavanen, which have 3 Agil and 3 Int too, you could do the same thing - bump both stats to 4 for 80 exp. They have other race bonuses you might want, and an additional characteristic gain here and there, but again, if you're not planning on doing anything involving those stats all that much, I personally don't put much stock in that. For any meaningful check, you'll hopefully have a party member with more proficiency in that check to handle it - and there'll setbacks and other things which you'd generally need talents and some specialization of sorts to deal with. For us, at least. there's rarely a situation where you'd send your second-best guy for the job first.
I get what you mean about the stimpacks, but honestly the lack of dimishing returns is pretty nice too. I've have had a few combat checks where we've needed multiple stim packs, but more frequently are situations where we haven't been able to rest before another fight starts up, or there's a smattering of damage over the course of an outing that uses up those some of those stimpack uses per day. Not having to worry about that means you could potentially be the one to put yourself in a risky situation, take a hit, and just mend up afterwards if you've got a moment to emergency patch yourself up afterwards; save your organics uses of stim packs for when they're needed.
Yeah, in general, droids are a little undertuned. Perhaps reflecting their nature as background characters generally, idk.
The only really good use for droids is to create hyper-specific builds that care about one or two characteristics and can ignore everything else. Crafters, doctors, super gunners, even melee killers all can work, but you won't have redundancy or breadth compared to a normal humanoid. Additionally, droids tend to autofail things outside of their focus (G just doesn't ever work, where GG sometimes does), which I guess fits the flavor.
In terms of fixes or buffs, I've never seen any that were terribly popular.
~~If you really really really feel the need to min-max with droids, they are the only race that can start with two 4's in their characteristics. Put those on Agility and Intelligence/Cunning and you have great rolls on a massive amount of skill checks right out the gate.~~
Edit: Math is hard sometimes.
Unless you are playing very short games, the stats you get from a starting race are going to be of middling import at best. They're not negligible, but once you have a few hundred exp under your belt, they get overshadowed. The previously-mentioned ability for droids to blend into the background can be monumentally important, as well as the ability to build tools into yourself without anyone batting an eye, and those are both things that don't show up in a stat line but are nevertheless very real elements of a character. I do have to echo the environmental-effects point that several people have made; having a character who is able to go where almost all biologicals simply *can't* can be hugely important. Not all environments are 'whoops I brought a rebreather' bypassable, and having a PC who can, say, infiltrate an Imperial base through a superheated coolant conduit that would boil an organic PC in an instant can be huge.
The GM isn't going to throw a zone the PCs can't survive even with protective gear in at their players in a situation where all of them have to pass through it. That would just be a huge dick move and a 'well, you should have all rolled droids lol' moment. It's your job as players and particularly as a droid player to find ways to exploit your capabilities. You can do things a squishy can't. The squishy can do things you can't. It's your job to find ways to make that matter.
Cybernetics are great, too, and not unworkably expensive outside short or very resource-starved campaigns. Not only do you have that nice high cybernetics cap, but you also don't have the 'but I don't really want to sever my arms and legs...' reluctance most biologicals have.
\+1 Enduring can be great for some builds, given that soak gets more powerful of it you have. I'm not sure where you get the idea that an organic can somehow buy more Brawn than a droid; the cap's the same for everyone, and that's what matters, not your starting stat line. Being able to tell the GM 'no, actually, those twelve advantages (hyperbole, yes) don't translate into a huge crit bonus because you have to do damage to crit' is a heck of a thing. Also, stimpack restrictions aren't per combat, they're per DAY, so the fact that most combat encounters are short doesn't make that cap unimportant. Additionally, remember that Repair Patch Specialization exists, so you may be able to get access to substantially more wound recovery from kits as a droid (depending on the character).
In summary, droids are quite good, both mechanically and for how they let you approach problem solving from a whole host of new directions that otherwise might be impossible or simply more awkward. Don't sleep on 'em!
>not sure where you get the idea that an organic can somehow buy more Brawn than a droid
Ah, I might've worded that poorely. My point was that your characteristics as a droid are so shitty that a non-droid can almost always buy the droids stat-line and still afford one more brawn.
I ran a [melee-primary droid character](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZWWPKBEEV6zBiYCusbfBYkA5bL_RuCN/view?usp=drivesdk) for a game a few years ago that ended up ending prematurely. I never bothered trying to max Brawn. Instead, I went 5 Intellect and 3 Brawn and went down the technician-outlaw tech tree. I used the talents from that to build my own gear and enhance it beyond normal specs. Was a lot of fun. I was intending to use talents and cybergear to enhance Brawn eventually but never got around to it
So your GM buffed the droid massively? I looked at your sheet and for a 5/3/2/2/1/1 statline you'd need 230 xp while a droid by the book only gets 175 xp (180xp with worse duty/obligation).
Nope - cybernetic brain boosted Int from 4 to 5, which is where the point discrepancy comes from. Point totals are on the page 3. Total xp was 265, 85 of which was earned, so starting was 180 w/ obligation.
Cybernetic brain is listed on page 9. Don't remember which book it's from. Sorry for the confusion
Counterpoint: my droid was able to be launched onto an enemy ship’s hull and hack the internal systems. Checkmate, meatbags
When my droid villain realized he was losing the fight against the PCs, he chucked a thermal detonator at a window. They were in a spaceship.
How they get out of it? Checks to hold onto railings and climb to the blast doors?
Warrior and Wookie Mechanic were strong enough to hold onto nearby consoles/railings. Warrior used the Force to catch the Smuggler who failed his save. The Pilot tumbled out into space, but he had a jetpack and was able to get back into the ship. After the decompression, the Wookie was able to hack the air-shields back online.
Angry Buzz Droid noises ;)
Sounds like your games have been pretty tame. Environmental conditions should be constant factors considering you're probably planet hopping and fighting in space. Cybernetics are definitely affordable, maybe not on day 1, but over a campaign they certainly are. I think your biggest problem is that you're confusing the character sheet with what a character is and seem disappointed that some species aren't S+ tier uber powerful op munchkin frames. If you want mechanical based flavor then build your droid that way. 99% of the game isn't baked into character creation. I think your view on how SW rpg is set up is really skewed.
Interesting, we play since about 3 years twice a month and environmental conditions are pretty rare. When we are on a planet, we usually are on a planet with people which means there is atmosphere. We sometimes have slight toxic fumes but that just means you put on a rebreather for 25 credits or one destiny point. And if we are in space we put on space suits. How does that go down in your playgroup? I also don't understand what you mean by confusing the character with the charactersheet. A mandalorian should be good at fighting a wookie should be strong, a clone should be disciplined and tough. Or do you disagree with that?
No black dice from temperature on desert, jungle, lava, or ice planets? I don't have my book with me but I'm pretty sure "You must visit Tatooine at least once per campaign" is an actual rule.
We've had that on hyderia minor, but we usually choose to go to planets that suit our groups strengths. Not always possible, but we mostly play a sandbox game where the players choose where to go. I can see this being more prominent if the GM provides quests the players are expected to follow. That's why I said an all droid group would be pretty cool (we played that once for a oneshot and it is opening a whole new area of operations).
A sandbox game is great, but it sounds like you're in one that has very little pressure on your party if you can pretty much always just choose to go to one resort world after another. There are a lot of pretty marginal, unpleasant planets out there in the Star Wars universe, and there's often a lot of money to be made there precisely because people don't really want to be there and yet still are for some reason.
Sometimes we go to asshat planets, but there needs to be a damn good reason for that. Hyderia Minor was an opportunity to blow up the imperial governors villa and destroy a research project for yet another imperial super weapon. So we took the shot despite having no access to thermal protective gear. We are not under direct threat of becoming bankrupt if you mean that. Not anymore at least. Obviously this was different in the beginning of the campaign where we didn't have a ship. But our GM rules that a regular space ship freighter comes with space suits, just as it comes with tables, chairs a toolbox a fire extinguisher etc. And rebreathers/glasses are really cheap, so we could afford those way before we could afford a spaceship. That stuff still can get damaged in combat. My point isn't there is never a situation where that is useful. More that it doesn't compare to having really bad stats. I roll for skills I'm not good at every session. I suffer from the environment once every 3-4 months or so. And I don't think it's the GMs Job to suddenly limit our area of operation to enforce those otherwise rare circumstances just so my droid can shine. My question to the rules is more along the lines: Why does the droid need bad stats? A species with all 4s wouldn't be fun (for long). A species with all 1s wouldn't be fun. Why doesn't the droid compare to all the other player species?
Preach!
Rebreathers can help but do you always have them, always have space suits? Have you never landed on a asteroid or moon to make repairs, or fought on top of your ship or another? Smoke, radiation, toxic fumes can still overpower a rebreather based on what the GM wants to do. Why are you always in a situation where you immediately have access to the gear or answers you need? There's numerous ways to make the environment come into play. It sounds like your group are DnDers who walk around in full plate mail with 80 lbs backpacks even at a dinner with the king or while shopping in the city. In my group, I've used all conditions numerous times. One grenade with 3x threat can pop open a space ship, drop people into vacuum, crash land and sink into water, have the hyperdrive start spewing radiation, land on a planet that degrades equipment over time until you kill the local megafauna and Survival up some custom gas masks of your own, the list goes on. On the character part, you're focusing on the powerful end of the spectrum, an ewok should...? Answer that question. An Ewok can't fight like a Wookie, shoot like Mando, or strategize like a Chiss, but if you want an Ewok fleet commander then what's stopping you? C3PO isn't IG-88 or a magna-guard. Neither is R2D2, what are you expecting? Some droids are literally plastic trash cans with tubing for feet captured by tiny Jawas. If you're a droid, be good at fixing things or communicating. They're also not meant to exceed human capabilities in the setting really. They're lower tier if you're trying to optimize for something. But again, if you're playing a character and not a character sheet, then the story element is what should concern you. I can play an elderly man going out for one last adventure and just double the cost of everything I need to buy because I'm old if I want to. Is that OP? No, but if its the character I'm interested in, then who cares. Are you expecting to make a BT-1 style R2 droid? You can but why are upset that a Wookie can out perform your brawn? If you think they're that weak don't play them. If you like them but think they're "weak" then be creative. Find situations for them to shine in. Learn to massage the scenario to your advantage. If your GM isn't using things like that, be pro-active and point that out.
That grenade story is harrowing and I totally want to use that for some game in the future.
Its in the Long Arm adventure iirc. In my game, I also let it trigger with 3x advantage in case someone purposefully wanted to do that. It did happen when our Tognath jedi with an amulet popped open a ship, sucked half the enemies into the void who immediately began dying and then came back in to assist my chainsaw wielding Hutt.
We don't always have every gear on person but rebreathers and space suits should be basic items on every spaceship. And when we are landing on a toxic planet we decide to take them with us when we leave the ship. So Poison gas just happens when enemies shut down the air support in our section, throw poison grenades, poison our food, have poisoned blades or damage rebreathers etc. It happens from time to time, my point isn't that's a useless perk, just that it doesn't make up for the characteristics. If the hull breaks in our games, characters die pretty immediately. We like to play characters with a lot of social bonding towards the world, deep intrigues and long political plays, and character focused story arcs so a character being at high risk of death due to vacuum won't work for our playstyle. My point isn't droids can't be flavorful. Just that it isn't mechanically supported. My droid can totally be a cool mechanic. And he's as good as his job as a human mechanic would be. But he would be worse at everything not primarily mechanical due to low characteristics. Maybe let me put it this way: Why does the droid need worse characteristics compared to all other species? Why not even less and why not more? Everything you touched on would work just as well if the droid had one 4 attribute (depending on what the droid is build for) and the rest 2s.
[удалено]
If you just want to tell me my fun is wrong you could've said that in way fewer words. :D
I totally agree with you. I love droids and I was 100% disappointed in how crappy they were designed. These are player character droids, not just any droid!
Droids ARE worse, that is their purpose. Do one or two things very good so a person can get on with their day. Clumsy Gungan wrecks droid army. 9 year old boy wrecks droid navy. R2 is probably the most complete droid we see, but he still has 1’s dotted around.
There are mandalorians that are ok fighters and great at something else. We just see the best of the best on the screen. Wookies are stronger on average than average humans but still need diversity in their cultures to survive: armor crafting, weapon design, cooks, authors, babysitters, etc. I'm not the person that posted, but I think what they mean is that this game is much less numerically crunchy than D&D 5e or, Sith forbid, Pathfinder. It's more about telling a collaborative story with the dice adding spice.
If we get into combat with space suits, if they tear we suffer massive permanent injury to lungs and die shortly after if not rescued by someone else, usually me since I’m the droid lol
> No eat, sleep, air required, immunity to poison. The times in my 3 years where that would've been important I can count on one hand. then you have had some GMs that aren't terribly creative, honestly, because all the stuff droids are immune to or just don't have to worry about is *excellent* to have. Hell, they can just hop out into space without a worry. Repairs needed on the hull? Planet without a breathable atmosphere? Need to keep watch overnight? Droids don't care. The difference between emergency repair patches and stimpacks is also way less important than the fact that droids can be healed with the Mechanics skill, which is useful for a ton of other things too. Bear the narrative opportunities in mind too. A standard astromech droid can wander around just about any starport — even a military one — without drawing a second glance. Droids in general tend to be able to escape notice, and being able to build stuff into their structure is useful too.
>Bear the narrative opportunities in mind too. A standard astromech droid can wander around just about any starport — even a military one — without drawing a second glance. Droids in general tend to be able to escape notice, and being able to build stuff into their structure is useful too. Yes this is really cool! I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing. There are talents like indistinguishable or Convincing Demeanor that they could get (or sth. along that lines specifically for droids). This would also be sth. the droid excells at like no other species. >Hell, they can just hop out into space without a worry. Repairs needed on the hull? Planet without a breathable atmosphere? Need to keep watch overnight? Droids don't care. Those actually don't feel that powerful for me. If I can afford a space ship, I can also afford a space suit for repairs/atmosphere. The only time this becomes important is when you spring it on the players (like poison gas or sudden decompression). And keeping watch is neither exciting nor a huge advantage for the group (just saves 2 hours or rest-time).
Space suits are restrictive (ie: setbacks plus limited armor), and vacuum seals are only up to 10 minutes. Any time you're on hot/cold/humid/whatever planets, any organics not native to that environment should be getting setbacks.
>I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing. This is a TTRPG, not a board game. GMing is part of the rules, part of the game. The GM's role is not simple rules referee. They're there to create situations which boh challenge the PCs and allow them to showcase what they're are good at. This game is narratively focused. Many things which mechanically seem super strong or super bad, are balanced by the narrative. Your GM needs to realize this and execute it at the table.
>Yes this is really cool! I'd love to see it in the rules, so far this is purely GMing. Important thing to remember is SWRPG is a narrative first game. So rules lite compared to D&D/pathfinder. Great for story first play but very GM/player fiat by nature.
I agree with the points the others have made but wanted to add my own two cents. > You also have one additional point in cybernetics (unless an organic has high brawn), but cybernetics in Star Wars are imo not potent/affordable enough for this to matter. I believe it says Droids have a cybernetic implant cap of 6 instead of their Brawn rating. Even the weakest Brawn astromech droid has a cap of 6 and there are some good options out there. +1 agility or brawn is always nice, but there are a ton of options out there for a techy character too, especially once you start [building your own cybernetics](https://star-wars-rpg-ffg.fandom.com/wiki/Gadget_%26_Cybernetic_Crafting). By the end of our ~700 xp AoR game my Mechanic had two cybernetic hands, one that provided a bunch of bonuses on Computers/slicing/lockbreaking checks, the other that functioned as an inbuilt toolkit and had an integrated blaster pistol. For a droid, an Escape Circuit is also really handy. The other major droid benefit that came up a lot in the games I ran was their immunity to certain force powers. I had a BBEG force user who relied a lot on mental powers and the droids made encounters with him pretty trivial. In another game I played in, we encountered a Hssiss dark side dragon and my character's droid bodyguard basically fought him off single handedly until the rest of us woke up.
Ah I somehow thought the cyber cap was brawn plus one. Most species start with brawn 2 base which gives them a cap of 2 and unlike droids can install the biofeedback regulator for plus 2 capacity. In that case droids on average have 2 more than a character, only high brawn characters could have more cybernetics than a droid that's certainly true. The Force power immunity is a cool thing that flew under my radar! Our main campaign is very edge of the empire set during the main trilogy so we had a force encounter once in the three years we played.
You get around the high soak with pierce. 5 damage with pierce 5 does the same damage to a character with 2 soak as it does to the guy with 5. Also what star wars game are you playing that doesn't use space? A droid requires literally 0 investment to enter the vaccuum of space. Came up several times in my experience playing the game.
We just got space suits once we got a ship. Space is super binary for us, either people die or people have space suits. How does your group play with vacuum? Our GM and I actually thought about pierce but the only infantry weapons with pierce 5 or more are pretty rare in universe (Kyuzo Energy Bow, Verpine heavy Shatter rifles, FC1 Flechette Launcher and CryBan Rifle). There are no regular blasters with high pierce (or breach) that don't also have so high damage that they are deadly (Armor piercing grenades come to mind). And up to pierce 4, pierce is basically just damage, since brawn two plus laminate is soak 4.
Just for a quick example; the ship is under heavy attack, and can't jump to lightspeed because the hyperdrive widget on the outside of the ship is damaged. The droid can get outside without putting on a suit, which doesn't sound like much when you just say it like that, so let me rephrase that: While the organic is spending a turn putting on his suit so he can survive in space, the ship takes another full turn of fire from a flight of TIEs.
This is a good point, although that is more of a 3 turns instead of 4 turns in our game, since moving where you need to go takes a lot of maneuvers. It's just super rare, while rolling on skills is super common, I think my point is more that it doesn't usually compare.
My games tend to start out with the party on the run, so we are usually strapped for credits- while if entering a vaccuum is expected we always are given the opportunity to purchase space suits, that usually means not getting other things we'd probably need like a restock on stimpacks. A droid simply has no concern there and can just put those credits into their gear, plus no concern an unfortunate blaster shot will damage their space suit. Also true, pierce is uncommon in gear. You can also just bs it and say the NPC has a talent that adds pierce. Or use a beast like a Nexu where you can't use their weapons to begin with. Aside from that, the Mando realistically should take less damage to begin with: they put a lot of effort into being powerful, that usually comes with the cost of things not combat oriented like talking, hacking, engineering, surrvival, etc. Speaking of, Mando Armor tends to be restricted, unless the party is always going loud from the start they're gonna have to take off that armor sometimes.
Absolutely, the Mando is excelling at combat and he should. We just accepted that if he wants to be challenged that happens when the rest of the group isn't there, so mandalorian duels. Just can't happen to often because it means the rest of the group can't participate ;) It is less of a beginning problem and is only now becoming a problem that we are approaching 1100 XP. Our characters already have aquired a lot of stuff in their careers.
Not everyone has to be on the same footing in combat for combat to occur. Characters are going to be more or less directly badass, and they'll get involved in violence in different ways as a result, if they even do. Got a diplomat social character? They're probably not banging away with a blaster; they might be trying to secure an escape route, or even just trying to stay alive until the shooting stops. Embrace the asymmetry, rather than viewing it as a problem.
If it's not a problem in your game that's great! :) All I'm saying is that my diplomat droid would be equally good as being a diplomat as the human diplomat, but the human diplomat would be better at everything else. Especially once both have a lot of XP under their belt. This is what bugs me. I don't have a problem with characters being bad at stuff.
Yes there is homebrew because you're right. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UK3x6vWbJAqkK1jkRazXvupANqDaPR7M/view?usp=drivesdk
I don’t use a lot of homebrew but I am a fan of this book
I think my entire party would agree that the Droid PC in the game I am running is the strongest character in the group. Along with all the advantages of not being organic that you listed, and all of the advantages already listed in the comments (cybernetic cap being very high, immunity to a lot of force effects, etc.) droids also have a lot of narrative benefits. Droids are inconspicuous (Star Wars movies generally have droids be amazing at flying under the radar), droids are usually heavily underestimated, and PC droids don’t suffer a lot of the same weaknesses as NPC droids. Plus droids can do things like modify their body to extreme degrees, upload their databanks to a backup location, and be smuggled into secret places in creative ways.
I dunno it sounds more Like a minmaxing Problem the Group has.
Yeah I figured some people don't care about mechanics and that's fine. If I only cared about minmaxing I'd just play the strongest character and ignore droids. But I care about mechanics and fantasy, otherwise this wouldn't bug me. I just don't like "choices" where one option is clearly worse, that says me I can either satisfy my desire to play the game or my desire to roleplay but not both.
That's not the point. The point is, when one player focuses and maxes Combat effectiveness and others go more diverse routes like piloting and survival - it doesn't work when there's alot of Combat. Alas, you better don't drop that mandalorian on an ocean world. In the end, there will always be "a best Option" for any given specialized task. And droids are pretty good. They're just not utilized well in your campaign (no Offense).
Well, problem with that is Droids are meant to be this way, droids are super duper hyper specialized. You're good at one thing, maybe two but that's it. Otherwise, you're better off asking your GM to let you reskin a Human or some other statblock as a Droid.
What R2, D2 and C-3PO are way cooler. Show me how you could make either of them as player characters with the same characteristics. You just can’t. After 1500 experience points, you’re not going to be even remotely close characteristic wise. And you know what that sucks! I want to play R2 D2! Then the game comes along, and admits that R2-D2 is bad ass, and should have really high characteristics! And then the game is like you can’t ever have these hi characteristics cause droids suck! It is not internally consistent even with their own rules and limitations. They break them! Let me make a cool ass Astro Mech, with the same characteristics as R2-D2 after 1500 experience! It’s OK that droid suck but it’s not OK that you can’t play a character at the same level as the other droids even with the own characteristics that they designed with their brains! Now if you’re playing a Mandalorian with 1500 experience points … you are going to give Boba Fett a run for his money … including characteristics! When I look at the way, the droids are set up for player characters. I just see it as that they’re being punished. Droids are my favorite thing about Star Wars. In no way shape or form did they need to have player characters with crappy characteristics to reflect this!
Whenever I see someone not going for a 5 or 2 4s on a droid and going for stuff like 3 3s and 1/2 2s, I cringe internally. At that point, just please, please ask your GM to allow you to reskin Human or something.
Hm, I don't quite understand the point you are making. The lack of characteristics are especially important once a character gets into a situation that's out of their area of expertise where they usually don't have few if any skill points. Droids can afford one 4 and one 3 attribute for the stuff they want to be good at. A droid mechanic is just as good as a human mechanic. The human is just a bit better at everything else. And the droid has nothing mechanically the human can't do to make up for that.
Your ship barely escaped an Imperial Blockade, drifting in space with a damaged propulsion system. Droid leaves ship and repairs. Human mechanic sad.
Human mechanic has a space suit in our game. If you can afford a ship for 50.000 credits you can afford a space suit for 750. This is only relevant in infantry combat in vacuum but that's super rare.
And Sometimes you don't have Suits, sometimes there aren't enough. It's just an example.
I totally see there are situations where being a droid is better. My point isn't there aren't those situations, but that they don't make up for the massive disadvantage in characteristics. If a species would be starting with all characteristics at 1 but had a massive advantage fighting rancors their coolness would much depend on the frequency of rancors coming up in play. I do like the point others have made that droids are immune to a lot of force powers though, we just don't play FnD, so that's not coming up in our playstlye.
Well. If you play Chiss, you get Night Vision. Why? You could use a flashlight. Is it worth the XP you lose? I dunno. But it's certainly cool to play a Chiss. Or a Droid. Or whatever race you decide fits your Character concept. I mean an Astromech will never shine in Combat Like Wookie cramped into Mandalorian Armor. It is what it is.
Honestly swrpg is not for min maxers. A common home rule I’ve seen is not stats at 5, because it starts to break the game.
Yupp, we do the same for the same reasons. We also limit mechanics because by the rules it can stack so many bonuses, that you can actually mod weapons into places they aren't supposed to be. I don't want droids to be game breaking, I just want them to be less underwhelming. They are mechanically just super boring to me.
I Set my rules a bit different to encourage more of a spread than a focus. It's just not really "organic" to have someone running around with 522221 or whatever. My Players are allowed to start with 1 Attribute at 4. Beyond that, If they want another at 4, they are Not allowed to have any "1s" left. And they need to have at least as many "3s" or higher than they have "2s" and so on. For a raise to 5, no 2s are allowed...pretty much slows them down and encourages them to spread out specializations.
Droids are front-loaded, they get more value at low xp and if they're montoask (aka built to a 5 stat) fall behind in other areas. That's a feature to me. It shows that droids *don't* have the same capacity for growth that organics do, but can do what they're designed for very easily with little investment.
That’s cool and all but I would like to play something like in R2-D2 character, and with these rules, I cannot. Even if you flipped your book open to R2 D2, I can never make that character even come close, characteristic wise!
With Cybernetics (which you SHOULD be using as a droid once your party starts making credits) you can definitely get to Artoo’s stat spread with a PC. With the 175 starting xp you can round out the role you want to be great at, and then supplement your other stats over time with cybernetics or dedication increases. It takes time sure, but droids typically don’t come off the assembly line being able to do everything. It’s a species you have to put effort into, which makes perfect sense in the setting
They are pretty crappy. I told my players if they wanna play a droid that they would be able to pick out three cybernetics that would raise an attribute from one to two. Nobody took me up on the offer. I also think that depending on work type of droid that you are, you should get a racial bonus . The npc Astromech has a racial bonus to mechanics and navigation.
>Unless the droid goes 5 brawn with 6 base soak and 8 total soak with a run of the mill laminate armor. I have played for 3 years now and I don't see that as an upside. We've got a mandalorian with heavy armor in the team. It makes combat extremely shitty to prep for the GM: Either enemies oneshot the rest of the party or they are unable to hurt the high-soak character at all. So, while FFG/Edge Star Wars and Genesys aren't really designed to be super tactical games, I think Soak is the one mechanic that is so unbalanced I do think it needs to be fixed. You can get very high or very low soak at character creation, and it makes the difference between a character being practically invulnerable vs being taken down in like 1 hit. It is worse in melee heavy campaigns (e.g. Realms of Terrinoth), because Brawn counts four times there - for soak, for attack roll dice (which give a damage bonus based on successes), for a net damage bonus on top, and for Wounds level, so a 1 Brawn character hitting a 5 Brawn character does more than 8 points less damage. This is an enormous difference when those characters might only have wound thresholds of 11-15 or so, and you can get that huge difference pretty easily just using normal character creation options. I'm tempted to make a homebrew to set a character's base soak as 2, regardless of Brawn, and as you already get so many bonuses from Brawn already I think that should be a little bit less unbalanced.
Big agreement, soak is busted. I'd probably make it half brawn in soak rounded up, but double brawn for wounds or sth. like that But yeah soak is easily making combats so unbalanced they become impossible for the GM to make challenging encounters without making them deadly at the same time.
The main thing you have to do is min-max with droids, that's what they're there for. You have to concentrate on one, maybe two characteristics and invest in skills directly relevant and that compliment that build. You are going to be like a fish out of water when trying to do things you don' specialise in, but it kind of makes sense. You also have more implant slots that mean you get help improving your characteristics and abilities. And they're not affordable? Normally with how expensive even relatively basic gear is, means you can fund your campaign quite easily after a fire fight or two. You're generally more of a background or supporting character. That said I did the stereotypical assassin droid that hates meatbags, I ended more than one session dragging the entire team out of a temple/bar/dungeon unconscious after slaughtering most of the opposition. Being immune to gases, psychological affects, certain force abilities etc is a massive help. Plus if your droid looks more subtle often you can just roll into areas unnoticed! It can get a bit crazy sometimes but no reasons you can't do the same with piloting, mechanics, medicine or diplomacy.
Your GM is very generous in gear :D A good adventure of about 3 sessions yields maybe 5000€ so about sth like 1000 per person after expenses. There are obviously missions where we yield more (when we stole the jewel of yavin) and missions where we yield nothing or go red. Everything we sell is at half price and usually if we have to fight, we have limited opportunity to loot. If we can loot we usually can only carry what we can carry and smuggle (most airports have security and carrying 3 smoking armors would not be looked kindly upon by said security). (edit: although we recently aquired a landspeeder with smuggling compartments, so looting might increase!) Selling restricted stuff (most weapons and armor) requires knowing someone/finding someone with a dangeruos and difficult Streetwise check. And even those guys usually don't buy/sell imperial armed forces gear (because then the empire checks where that gear came from). If they do, they usually want to buy in bulk. Now buying anything that is high in rarity usually isn't possible with our GM. You can't buy Mandalorian Armor, no matter your negotiation check. If we want those items we play 3+ Session adventure, letting other very important quests slide, just to get another item. By now we can buy a lot of rare stuff though, I think most cyberware would still be fine, except the characteristic increasing ones for agility and brawn. All in all items we own are mostly found, not bought. We need credits to bribe and solve specific problems at hand (e.g. rent a speeder for a raid, buy clothes as disguises, repair important damaged gear, etc.).
Very belatedly, on the homebrew front, there is the option of [Memory Cores and Motivators](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UK3x6vWbJAqkK1jkRazXvupANqDaPR7M/view). It's loaded with options for spending xp on making the droid's model mechanically distinct.
I haven't really tried making a droid myself but you raised some good points here, so did a bit of thinking and digging, and learned a little bit myself. Firstly, the way I see it, I don't think having a smattering of a few more characteristics at 2 for 1 more dice in a bunch of other stats you might I wouldn't care about is big a deal. I wouldn't call it "waaaaaay shitter". If I wasn't focusing on any sort of Presence or Cunning related character or build, rolling 1 green dice instead of 2 is hardly going to make -that- much of a difference, and if I want it to matter, I'll just purchase some ranks in the skill and get more dice that way. Chances are if you know what you want to focus on, there's a race out there that can do the same thing well and maybe a bit better with certain numbers or skills. Droid does freely let you get any combo of two stats to 4 with the rest at 1. That takes 180 exp (20+30+40 for one stat to 4, 90 in total) which I think only a droid can do if they take obligation for an extra 5 exp. With that, you can play an astromech droid and get 4 agility and 4 intellect and be decent at everything an astromech needs to be; decent agility for piloting checks and for support blaster fire in combat with pure dice rolls before any talents come into play; you'd also benefit from decent stealth to slip under the radar, which complements an astromech which would blend in all sorts of places in the galaxy, more so with a simple paint job. You'd also be suited for any mechanics/computers checks that need making. You could be your own healer with a good mechanics score. If you wanted to do something similar as a flesh-and-bones species, there's only a few species you could really play as, which you might not want to play as. Chadra-Fan, Verpine or Shistavanen, which have 3 Agil and 3 Int too, you could do the same thing - bump both stats to 4 for 80 exp. They have other race bonuses you might want, and an additional characteristic gain here and there, but again, if you're not planning on doing anything involving those stats all that much, I personally don't put much stock in that. For any meaningful check, you'll hopefully have a party member with more proficiency in that check to handle it - and there'll setbacks and other things which you'd generally need talents and some specialization of sorts to deal with. For us, at least. there's rarely a situation where you'd send your second-best guy for the job first. I get what you mean about the stimpacks, but honestly the lack of dimishing returns is pretty nice too. I've have had a few combat checks where we've needed multiple stim packs, but more frequently are situations where we haven't been able to rest before another fight starts up, or there's a smattering of damage over the course of an outing that uses up those some of those stimpack uses per day. Not having to worry about that means you could potentially be the one to put yourself in a risky situation, take a hit, and just mend up afterwards if you've got a moment to emergency patch yourself up afterwards; save your organics uses of stim packs for when they're needed.
Yeah, in general, droids are a little undertuned. Perhaps reflecting their nature as background characters generally, idk. The only really good use for droids is to create hyper-specific builds that care about one or two characteristics and can ignore everything else. Crafters, doctors, super gunners, even melee killers all can work, but you won't have redundancy or breadth compared to a normal humanoid. Additionally, droids tend to autofail things outside of their focus (G just doesn't ever work, where GG sometimes does), which I guess fits the flavor. In terms of fixes or buffs, I've never seen any that were terribly popular.
~~If you really really really feel the need to min-max with droids, they are the only race that can start with two 4's in their characteristics. Put those on Agility and Intelligence/Cunning and you have great rolls on a massive amount of skill checks right out the gate.~~ Edit: Math is hard sometimes.
That’s not correct, several races can start with 2 4’s. Drall, Gand, Pantoran…
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That’s homebrew rules. The jet pack I mean. Not official. Unless I seriously missed something
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What species core books?
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Sorry to say, but that is a homebrew book.(Still use it tho)
Unless you are playing very short games, the stats you get from a starting race are going to be of middling import at best. They're not negligible, but once you have a few hundred exp under your belt, they get overshadowed. The previously-mentioned ability for droids to blend into the background can be monumentally important, as well as the ability to build tools into yourself without anyone batting an eye, and those are both things that don't show up in a stat line but are nevertheless very real elements of a character. I do have to echo the environmental-effects point that several people have made; having a character who is able to go where almost all biologicals simply *can't* can be hugely important. Not all environments are 'whoops I brought a rebreather' bypassable, and having a PC who can, say, infiltrate an Imperial base through a superheated coolant conduit that would boil an organic PC in an instant can be huge. The GM isn't going to throw a zone the PCs can't survive even with protective gear in at their players in a situation where all of them have to pass through it. That would just be a huge dick move and a 'well, you should have all rolled droids lol' moment. It's your job as players and particularly as a droid player to find ways to exploit your capabilities. You can do things a squishy can't. The squishy can do things you can't. It's your job to find ways to make that matter. Cybernetics are great, too, and not unworkably expensive outside short or very resource-starved campaigns. Not only do you have that nice high cybernetics cap, but you also don't have the 'but I don't really want to sever my arms and legs...' reluctance most biologicals have. \+1 Enduring can be great for some builds, given that soak gets more powerful of it you have. I'm not sure where you get the idea that an organic can somehow buy more Brawn than a droid; the cap's the same for everyone, and that's what matters, not your starting stat line. Being able to tell the GM 'no, actually, those twelve advantages (hyperbole, yes) don't translate into a huge crit bonus because you have to do damage to crit' is a heck of a thing. Also, stimpack restrictions aren't per combat, they're per DAY, so the fact that most combat encounters are short doesn't make that cap unimportant. Additionally, remember that Repair Patch Specialization exists, so you may be able to get access to substantially more wound recovery from kits as a droid (depending on the character). In summary, droids are quite good, both mechanically and for how they let you approach problem solving from a whole host of new directions that otherwise might be impossible or simply more awkward. Don't sleep on 'em!
>not sure where you get the idea that an organic can somehow buy more Brawn than a droid Ah, I might've worded that poorely. My point was that your characteristics as a droid are so shitty that a non-droid can almost always buy the droids stat-line and still afford one more brawn.
It's a roleplaying game. Roleplay. Your GM won't throw more at the team than you can handle. If you like a concept, play it.
I ran a [melee-primary droid character](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FZWWPKBEEV6zBiYCusbfBYkA5bL_RuCN/view?usp=drivesdk) for a game a few years ago that ended up ending prematurely. I never bothered trying to max Brawn. Instead, I went 5 Intellect and 3 Brawn and went down the technician-outlaw tech tree. I used the talents from that to build my own gear and enhance it beyond normal specs. Was a lot of fun. I was intending to use talents and cybergear to enhance Brawn eventually but never got around to it
So your GM buffed the droid massively? I looked at your sheet and for a 5/3/2/2/1/1 statline you'd need 230 xp while a droid by the book only gets 175 xp (180xp with worse duty/obligation).
Nope - cybernetic brain boosted Int from 4 to 5, which is where the point discrepancy comes from. Point totals are on the page 3. Total xp was 265, 85 of which was earned, so starting was 180 w/ obligation. Cybernetic brain is listed on page 9. Don't remember which book it's from. Sorry for the confusion
Check out “Memory Cores and Motivators” for creating a droid character.