I was thinking about the slicers that you can hire in the Jewel of Yavin adventure. Maybe create some NPCs of different cost that provide different levels of skill to do the mechanics check for your party if they don't have a good enough/reliable mechanic in the party already. That way the additional cost is covered/negotiable and the pcs are given a choice on the likelihood of the outcome. This would handle the non-guaranteed nature of the modding process that seems to be my biggest beef with the guaranteed nature of pre-modded attachments.

IIRC, Streetwise is actually supposed to be this kind of an all-encompassing one-roll-does-it-all sort of skill.

So it seems to me that your first instinct is most likely correct, with regards to an alternative way to get the desired outcome without actually rolling the Mechanic skill. Someone rolling the Mechanic skill would be included as part of the Streetwise roll.

Please forgive me. I don’t remember where the heck I was going with my previous response on this thread.

No worries! There are many, many ways to resolve game issues and IMO it usually depends on the situation at hand. Best to make whatever decision is the most fun for you and your players.

Hello,

(I know this topic is old but I wanted to add my thoughts on the subject as I found this when searching for info on how to work mods)

Ever since I have been looking at Edge books I had been wondering how to get all the mods listed for an attachment actually on one to use.

For instance any time I'm picking out a blaster pistol for a character I always think how neat it would be if I had a Blaster Actuating Module (BAM) with all the mods instead of just the base ones. It would add 3 damage and 2 pierce to a pistol. Sweet. But reading (and re-reading...) the rules for adding mods to attachments made it sound outlandishly hard to get all the mods on an attachment.

When I got the Special Modification book with the Modder talent tree I was sure there'd be a skill (or two?) that would make modding attachments easier. (I mean it's right there in the name...) But alas, no. Gearhead removes a black setback die but does nothing for reducing purples. If I'm in my shop at my workbench with good lighting, and all my tools and plenty of time there isn't any black setback die to remove (is there?) so that does me no good. Plus, Mechanic talent tree already has Gearhead and is accessible lower in the tree. And halving the cost of mods from 100 credits to 50 credits is fine, but not really a consideration. At character creation 100 credits is a lot, but later in the game it's insignificant.

So my first thought was I should be able to pay an NPC or find on the black market a BAM that is already fully modded and ready for me to install for an appropriate increase in cost. Unlike some posting in this thread I was thinking that the cost would be fairly significant. Something like 1500-2500 credits for a BAM that in standard form costs 500 credits. My thoughts went that each extra mod (4) cost 250-500 credits each, so 50%-100% of original cost. That formula could then be applied roughly to any attachment my character might want without having to go into a lot of figuring each time. I figured I'd have this all laid out and present it to whatever GM I happened to be playing with and see what they thought. I figured by making the cost fairly significant I had a better chance of getting them to "house rule" it.

If I had to do it on my own, I'd buy a case of say 20 BAMs and sit down and start "working" on them by rolling dice over and over and keeping track on paper what happened to each of the 20. Seems like a redundantly ridiculous way of spending my gaming time. (but hey, if you've done it, no offense intended!) If I got lucky enough to get one fully modded that one would go on my main weapon. Now I've got 19 variously modded BAMs to sell either to other players or through gameplay to various NPC's ... wanna buy some BAM's? (said like the deathstick guy)

But if I'm just playing a bounty hunter or smuggler or whatever that has no interest in doing mechanical things.... I'd like to just spend my load of credits and get exactly what I want. So I thought... why couldn't there be an NPC who did all that to cases of BAMs or whatever else I wanted to buy and he's got them from +2 damage all they way up to fully modded with a corresponding increase in price for each extra mod?

You can do a streetwise check or whatever else you or your GM wanted to throw in to locate the NPC. TBH once I found a guy or someone in my group did, we'd probably always go back to the same guy to get mods for our gear. (I guess unless it was clear on the other side of the galaxy and we weren't going there any time soon)

For me this doesn't take anything away from a Mechanic or a Modder who wants to do it all themselves. They save all those credits AND have the "cool" factor of having done all their own work.

It already sounds like the consensus (from 4 years ago) is that it's ok to buy attachments that already have extra or even all of the mods available installed. This is just my fleshed out version of how and why and at what cost it could be done that I already had rolling around in my mind. I came here to see what had been posted about the topic before I ever tried to present it to a GM in case there was something I had overlooked, or if it was some kind of taboo.