I have always reasoned that PC droids are those few droids that have developed or bypassed their initial programming to start to alter their core programming that came in "factory settings". If they are wiped not all of who they are will be gone. They may lose details of things but skills and motivations and all that stuff would be still intact in their core programming. A vigilance check ( I think that is the skill that would apply, I dont have the book here) may be used to decide how much detail they would lose but I would not wipe a player characters xp to zero. If your going to do that then you might as well kill the character.

Or you can easily say a character has a back up memory and if you dont know about it as it is unusual feature, then you wouldn't think to look for it or wipe it.

Well in true what is a Droid but a smart toaster.

I have always been against Droids as PCs.

I have been against droids as PCs ever since my first WEG campaign. Just starting out, I was not weary of the PC droid staples, but as a word of caution to newer Star Wars GMs:

1. If you let a PC play a droid, there will come a time where they will inevitably want to fit a turbolaser into their eye socket because ... because. The whole point of playing a droid to a PC is the art of camouflage, looking harmless while being deadly in some form or function. Resist this in all forms.

2. If you let a PC play a droid, there will be zero PC players who actually treat him like a droid with the singular exception of wanting the droid to take 'watch' on the rare times they are sleeping somewhere that is not their ship. Nobody will not listen to the droid, tell it to shut up, or horror of horrors, simply turn it off. If you want your PCs treating droids as droids, make sure they are their property and not a fellow PC.

3. If you let a PC play a droid, can you imagine the arguments if you think it's mode of transportation would prevent it from merely following the crew? R2-D2 was stopped by a 5" hurdle in Empire and couldn't follow Luke into his confrontation, it's not like he couldn't open every door in the place if he wanted to. Then you start arguing over giving your R2 player flight capabilities cuz they want to argue that the prequel version is standard. Etc.

C3PO clearly has an emotional attachment to R2 in the original movies, despite their bickering.

So much of what someone is, is their memories... every time a droid is "wiped", all that is gone.

If your referring to the Organa wipe, that has been quite a while before Episode IV. And, he isn't attached to the Skywalkers anymore.

I have always wondered... what was Bail's reasoning of, right then and there, deciding that one droid should have its memory wiped but not the other? Was there a canon reason for that?

In other words, don't ever let someone play the self-aware, thinking, feeling being that gets treated like property, or your players might not be able to look another player in the face and treat them like a slave?

Edit - sorry that came out kinda harsh... the way that "good" characters in Star Wars casually treat intelligent (and by evidence feeling) entities as appliances and slaves drives me nuts.

With respect, I’ve played a droid in a game. While there may be certain tendencies amongst certain types of players, not everyone is that type of player.

In my case, I did my best to really ham it up, and played my droid like a cross between Kryten (from Red Dwarf) and C3-P0, and he mostly got treated like you would expect from a droid.

Need someone who can space an entire squad of unarmed stormtroopers, because you have captured them but you don’t have any way to hold them prisoner? No problem, just have the droid do it.

Players are facing a somewhat younger Boba Fett, and they don’t know how to draw him out? Well, just volunteer the droid to attract his attention and annoy him enough to become target practice, so that another PC can slip past and shoot Boba’s gun out of his hand.

Droid gets blown up by a Thermal Detonator that one of the other PCs tossed and suffers more than his entire Wound Threshold in a single blast? That’s what happens when you accidentally get caught in the blast zone — but no problem, a little mechanics roll from one of the other players and he’ll be right as rain.

You wonder why LE-R0Y-G-B1V started to develop some serious droid psychosis issues?

Wanna take any guesses as to how LE-0N-4RD is likely to wind up?

EDIT: Don’t get me wrong, it is good to warn people about these issues. But just because there is a risk here, doesn’t necessarily guarantee that what you’re warning about will actually happen.

This is a totally valid warning, and should not be ignored. But then, it also shouldn’t be given more weight than it deserves.

I would simply advise a GM, especially a new one, not to allow droid PCs. Just my advice though.

I think that combat droids should be avoided for new GM, or for min maxers players, but a protocol droid or an astromech droid could be a reasonable character for a player.