Hey guys, I am playing an astromech in a basically ground based AoR game, and I am curious as to what your thoughts are on a lower-level droid like an astromech having Duty. It is hard for me to see. What makes sense to me is Obligation - Duty OR Relationship to Owner or another droid.

What are your thoughts on this, or examples of how this does or does not make sense?

In part, it depends on if your emancipated. Even still, your droid could have a segment they feel it's their duty to accomplish. For many droids, that would be Support. Your there to make sure the organics can do their jobs for the rebellion. For an astromech in particular, however, you may feel that your duty is Space Superiority ("It's my job to make sure we survive when we're in space.) or even intelligence ("It's my job to slice into computer systems and find out about the Imperials") You could even take Internal Security. ("The rebellion command asked me to make sure our ship/base/team is secure and on our side.")

The end point being that you doing your work makes the Rebellion trust your team more, even if they don't necessary credit it to you.

If it's a player character, why wouldn't they have Duty? Duty is mostly about what your personal drives are to help the Rebellion, and in what ways your character is compelled to go above and beyond the call of duty to help.

I can think of at least one lowly astromech who went above and beyond to help the Rebellion...

Also, it depends just how you want to play your character. Having an Obligation or a Duty just says "I want a lot of my gameplay to be about ______".

If you want to play a droid who's on the run from a former owner, or who keeps having their adventures complicated by the need to carry out duties for their current owner, that would make total sense as Obligation.

But if you want your droid character to be motivated to help the Rebellion, then one of the Duty options would be more appropriate. As an astromech, something to do with space might be appropriate, or something technological.

You could also consult with the rest of your party to see if anyone else has any good hooks that you can piggy-back on. It's great when multiple PCs are connected in some way (like C3P0 and R2D2, or the droids being bought by Luke, or Chewie and Han, etc)

Yea, I will most likely attach myself (R2-D3m) and be owned by another PC droid (a HK type of droid Hired Gun/Heavy). He takes the damage and I fix him up. Although I am not decided yet.

Part of the issue I am having with Obligation vs Duty for my astromech comes from how I see Obligation and Duty working on a character like this. I guess, for me, Obligation feels like its drive comes from external sources, like a command and ownership would be to a droid, and Duty is more of and internal desire and motivation to accomplish things. Now, I am not saying the an astromech could not evolve that way, but I kinda see my astromech sorta like R2-D2 in the way he did things, doing what he was told and obstinately getting things done. He did not seem to have any other overarching goals beyond his servitude and loyalty to his masters, which, to me more points to Obligation vice Duty. Does that make any sense? Plus I do not see him gaining military rank etc as sentient organic would. Sure the gain access to resources part makes sense, but the rest does not seem to fit.

Here is the personality part of my character's a description below. Only really pay attention to the Dutiful Personality part. The other 2 I thought you may find interesting.

Dutiful Personality

He has always felt a sense of duty to his owners even if others may subjectively see them as “good” or “evil”, which, as a lower level droid, is not a “thing”. He exists to serve and is most happy when he is serving in the best capacity he knows how. In the last few decades he has gained a rather stubborn streak and tends to always try to return to his “legal” master until an official transfer of ownership is made.

Cranky when Bored

“M” becoming bored can be a bad thing for those around him, since he tends to fiddle with (or break things on ‘accident’ or being passive-aggressive perhaps?). If there is nothing to fiddle with then he will start to ram things (or people) or knock things over to show that he is not properly entertained or utilized. He also really does not like it when people break things on purpose just so he has something to tinker with to keep him busy. He finds this rather patronizing. =)

D3m Model Mobility Quirk

As a droid of the D3m line he also was of the initial batch of droids which has a seemingly unfixable quirk of sometimes listing to one side or the other and/or running into things randomly as if his sensors did not notice them. Many patches and updates have been issues as well as hardware fixes, but nothing seems to be able to reliably correct this issue for him. When this does happen “M” will squawk angrily and then you may find him resting on his charging station crankily burble-squawking away while engaged in a diagnostic routine (or plotting what to break next??).

I'd disagree about R2D2, I think R2 was very internally-motivated. He was a weird, quirky droid who'd gone for decades without a personality wipe so he'd developed his own very real personality and motivations.

He was absolutely determined to get that message to Obi-Wan Kenobi, no matter what danger or hardship it took. Now we can argue about whether it's "programming" or "motivation", but you can argue the same kinds of free will questions about human beings. The only relevant thing is how YOU want to play it.

I see Obligation being an external thing--Han Solo the character doesn't want to spend his life running away from Jabba the Hutt, and his Obligation actually prevents Han from being able to do some of the things he internally wants to do. He'd like to stay and help the Rebellion, but they run into bounty hunters on Ord Mantell which complicate the issue.

R2D2, I see him as being internally motivated to help the Rebellion and make the galaxy a better place. He can be snarky about it but he's got a strong drive and helping the Rebels is what he WANTS to do.

Now whether your R2 unit is going to get ranks in the Rebellion military is kind of a separate thing. You could consider it a sort of "honorary" rank, like when Luke tells the technicians he wants to keep flying with R2 because they've been through a lot together. R2 gains a respected place in the Rebellion even though they might not have a literal "rank" for him.

Interesting take! Thanks for sharing.

You make a good case, I think. =)

I will give Duty a try.

The Support Duty seems to fit this theme perfectly!

Why not? Remember -- droids who haven't had memory wipes tend to pick up personality traits or "strange bugs"...can easily be pointed out that SW droids grow their own AI. Why wouldn't having duty make any sense? R2 didn't seem to have duty but you could easily see that he had his own personal duty to the heroes...especially Luke. Helping him all the time and aiding them in times of battle. C3P0 too...cowardly as it was he still tries to help when he could. It was against his programming to impersonate a deity but he did anyway to protect the heroes from death.

Yeah, an Astromech (or any other type of droid really) can have a Duty to the Alliance.

Just from the corebook, you've got Support (keeping the team's gear in prime operating condition), Sabotage (causing havoc on Imperial mainframes and communications), Intelligence (slicing those mainframes for all sorts of juicy info), and Counter-Intelligence (keeping the team safe from Imperial spies and similar intel-gathering efforts) that would work for an astromech. You could probably even spin Space Superiority as the astromech doing its part to ensure that the pilot of the starfighter it's plugged is able to do his job of blowing up enemy fighters, though that does kind of roll back around into Support.

As for ranks, the section in the GM chapter about Contribution Ranks does note that the PCs don't have to be given high ranks to match with the party obtaining higher and higher Contribution Ranks. Chewbacca didn't technically have a rank yet he was just as much a part of the Heroes of Yavin as the main three, and Luke pretty much gave up his Commander's rank (and leadership of Rogue/Red Squadron) by RotJ.