Anyone know what these are? Or have house rules?

Outlaw Tech and the Inventor talent could use some clarification...

Is rarity a good proxy for difficulty? What's a guide on component cost? How long does it take to make an item?

If it's covered in the book, apologies. Couldn't for the life of me find it, only repairing/modding.

I suspect (read Hope) we will get Crafting rules in the Mechanics Supplement book.

For now, I usually just make it up as I go. PC's need to gather the required parts, and then make some appropriate rolls to build the thing. The Inventor Talent interacts with it, but the crafting can be done without the Talent.

So, for example, building a Droid would require buying or otherwise obtaining droid parts (probably cheaper than buying a complete droid), and then make a Mechanics Check to build the body, and a Computer Check to program it. Then it works like one of the droids from the book. I'll allow some tinkering with the characteristics and skills, up or down a point here and there.

There's no official rules as of yet, and the designers have admitted that several things in the book were written with future products in mind.

Grimmshade's probably on the right track, as it will likely be the Technician (EotE) or Engineer (AoR) that we get to see actual crafting rules. Until then, you're on your own, although if you have the Force Unleashed Campaign Guide, you can probably kitbash something use the item creation rules in that book as a guideline.

I had thought some on the idea of some house rules, but didn't have anyone overly interested in the Technician so I shelved the idea. It would have been done in a flow chart type fashion similar to a talent tree, with each step calling for different inputs like a skill roll, xp, money, resources, etc. The overall difficulty would be set on a scale with examples and I would have named the levels something like Evolutionary, Revolutionary, and Eureka, and made up some examples of each level. The Difficulty level would have set the time frames for each step.

There was some good discussion about this in on the GM board recently that I found really useful:
http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/106431-outlaw-techs-mad-science-and-building-stuff/?view=findpost&p=1087277

One thing that was brought up is that it's important to not undervalue/obviate talents like Contraption.

Thanks guys. Kinda what I was hoping wasn't the case... If not some official rules, was hoping to see some fun/reasonable houserules.

@Shadeleader- This is really applicable and possibly what I was looking for :-)

@Contraption/Utility belt/etc..- Yeah, a really valid point. As it is, it seems like inventor is a bit undervalued and obviated though...

Why put inventor/Outlaw Tech in the book if there's no system for it? Like... There are talents and a specialization tree for modifying rolls that don't exist in the RAW. Grr.

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My thoughts: Base difficulty= rarity... "Extended" test? Cost to be associated with "time to craft", rolled similar to repairing.

So additional successes reduce both cost and time. Advantages boost the next roll. Essentially, an extremely extended repair; repairing from nothing if you will Advantages from the roll on completion carry over and are treated the same as repair advantage.

On the surface, your net income from crafting higher tech would be higher in fringe worlds... but... Your cost for components goes up as well. Your marginal revenue increases, yes, but so do your marginal costs. It's possible to create items cheaper than market, or likely quite a bit more expensive(in the case of high rarity items, due to the high difficulty).

An odd side effect is the great margin to be had making black market(outlaw? ) items. Due to the black market price modifiers, if you're selling them. It opens up a lot of opportunity for GM mischief, for the greedy.

Edit: the formatting got borked, javascript disabled.

I dunno that I'd have Rarity influence the base difficulty as some times are quite rare but fairly simple, while some items are quite complex but have a lot Rarity rating simply because the item is so common. I think the lightsaber is one of the few instances where it's both a complex item to build and has a high Rarity value.

I'm thinking set the base difficulty at Hard, but takes a number of days to build equal to the item's Rarity (in this case, the Rarity reflects the not only build time but also tracking down & getting all the necessary parts). Each day the PC wants to shave off that time adds a Setback die to the roll.

LibrarianNPC's chart could be used as a reference point for how much the PC has to spend and the effects of how frugal/cheap/thrifty they want to be, though I'd instead treat it as follows:

25% of the item's cost = the parts you've gotten were either really cheap or were salvaged, upgrade the difficulty once.

50% of the item's cost = you've got the necessary parts, but there's still a lot of assembly required, so add Setback die.

75% of the item's cost = you've got the parts and some extra guides/tools to help assemble it, so add a Boost die.

90% of the items' cost = most of the work's been done for you, so upgrade your check once.

As for Advantage, I'd say every two Advantage rolled allows the builder to improve a trait of the weapon once, either adding +1 to damage, reducing the Crit Rating by 1 (minimum of 1), reducing the encumbrance value, adding an additional Hard Point, or adding one rank to an existing weapon quality or a single rank of new weapon quality with GM's approval. Every two Threat however does the opposite and worsens a weapon's trait of the GM's choice, and can even remove a weapon quality (a kit-bashed vibro-ax could lose the Sunder quality). A Triumph can be spent to add a boost die to all checks using that item to reflect how well it was made, while a Despair on a successful check instead imposes a setback die to all checks made to reflect the shoddy quality of the item. Despair on a failed check means the entire thing is reduced to scrap and the PC has to start from scratch.

Mind you, all of that is off the top of my head, and could probably use some refinement, but it's not a horrible starting point.

Trying to satisfy the 4 drink rule. E.g. keep it simple enough to understand on 4 drinks. Either explaining or hearing :-P my experiences with item creation in other systems(See also: Deadlands) are that if it's either too bloated, or too vague, it can be awkward for the GM/player.

Rarity was one way of doing that, since it's a proxy for "availability". Simpler or more complicated items were going to get boost/setback dice. Although... I can see destiny points being thrown into the equation.

For items that are high complexity for the rarity, you make up for that with the availability of "premade" parts and components. "The hypnogogic actuator is blown! Luckily these are common and we don't have to build it from scratch... that'd be **** near impossible". For items of low complexity but high rarity... some parts might have to be fabricated/rigged.

You're right though, it might be better to roll that into a negotiation/scrounge roll; I might be trying to throw too much into a simple mechanics/inventor roll.

Other idea(This is my spin on your/LibrarianNPCs posts):

1) Negotiation/Streetwise/Scrounge for parts(Cost)

2) Account for ready-made or player-fabbed components(Skew subsequent roll based on Rarity/cost.. if you want to scrounge or buy more, now's the time)

3) "Repair" via mechanics; there already exists an advantage/threat system for mechanics, let's make use of it. <-- I'm really attached to modeling the creation itself like a mechanics repair... since I already have a table for it that's been balanced to the system in the RAW ;-) This is the part where "inventor" kicks in.

Permanent modifications are something to be leery of, in my head, short of triumphs . The dice system has lots of ridiculous rolls sometimes, making the effect persistent could be dangerous. Over time you're stacking persistent effects from good rolls...