It’s like the ADM-20 “Quail” pretending to be a B-52 bomber.

Take a look at the small thing under the big thing in this picture:

So, yeah — it’s a one-time use thing, although you might be able to recover it and re-attach it, and find a way to refuel or recharge it, so that you can use it again.

It’s bigger than a cruise missile, but smaller than most fighter aircraft of the time. And it’s got all the electronics hardware necessary to be able to pretend to be a much larger ship.

Modder reminds me of Shien Expert in a lot of ways. It's very clearly half Outlaw Tech-esque and half Rigger, with the two halves of the tree mostly independent of one another, especially in the early game. I'm loath to say that I don't like the tree, because I think the concept is sound, but I wish it were more cohesive?

I think everything else in the book is great, though.

I'm personally quite surprised at the obvious gap right in the middle of the ranged weapon crafting rules. The 'Heavy Energy Rifle' template has the stat-line of a heavy rifle, but has Gunnery as a skill and seems to take the place of an actual heavy weapon template. I'm looking at a weapon crafting ruleset that is unable to duplicate a repeating blaster, barring enough luck on advantages and triumphs that you accidentally make one with the weight of a rifle. Also, the melee weapon crating templates conspicuously lack anything that doesn't scale with Brawn, which is a bit odd (albeit less glaring).

GMs can, of course, fix these oversights, but the ruleset exists to make fewer house rules necessary in the first place.

Can someone please post the sidebars of improvements/customisation's you can make to the templates. I would like to compare them to KtPs to see whether or not I should get Special Modifications.

Crafting rules are the same, but the options for weapons are pretty different than armor crafting.

Basically, if there is a special characteristic that a weapon can have (e.g. Disorient, Burn, Knockdown, etc.), then you can add it to a crafted weapon with the right amount of Advantage. There's also an option to add a hard point. I'm away from book, so I'm going off of memory and can't remember if there's an option to straight up add to the damage rating or reduce the crit cost, but there probably is.

Personally, I'm more excited by the gadget crafting rules for my Technician, as you can really make some compact tools by spending Advantage, and can even potentially build hidden weapons into tools if that's your thing.

You can add to damage once for ranged and twice for melee weapons.

Like Kaigne I don't have the book so I don't recall if you can add a hard point or if you can only add the hardpoint+attachment (2 triumph). Nothing saying you can't remove the attachment after your done which is nice but still up to the gm as always for final say.

I agree completely with Kaigen about the gadget list. Having a tool bench in the shop that gives an auto hit + auto advantage would definately put a twinkle in my eye. Also whipping up a tool kit that was only weighed 1 or 2 instead of 4 or 5 is definatly on my to do list if the gm ok's the use of the crafting rules for our game.

Got my book open and double-checked, there is a damage adding option, as well as a crit reduction option, and a hard point option in addition to the hard point+free attachment option for 2 triumphs.

I kept coming back to the droid crafting rules and looking for fun stuff to do with them. Right now I'm thinking about building a bodyguard droid on the labor chassis for my astromech technician. A Droid Tech with Deft Maker could cobble together something like that for 1750 credits and a few days of downtime. I've been going back and forth on whether a minion group can provide "skilled assistance" and whether doing surgical procedures with a swarm of monotask nursebot remotes is cheesy or awesome.

I'm personally quite surprised at the obvious gap right in the middle of the ranged weapon crafting rules. The 'Heavy Energy Rifle' template has the stat-line of a heavy rifle, but has Gunnery as a skill and seems to take the place of an actual heavy weapon template. I'm looking at a weapon crafting ruleset that is unable to duplicate a repeating blaster, barring enough luck on advantages and triumphs that you accidentally make one with the weight of a rifle. Also, the melee weapon crating templates conspicuously lack anything that doesn't scale with Brawn, which is a bit odd (albeit less glaring).

GMs can, of course, fix these oversights, but the ruleset exists to make fewer house rules necessary in the first place.

Can someone please post the sidebars of improvements/customisation's you can make to the templates. I would like to compare them to KtPs to see whether or not I should get Special Modifications.

One of my players is super excited about an implanted tool kit that is also an arc welder. Handy for fixing stuff and wrecking faces!

Got my book open and double-checked, there is a damage adding option, as well as a crit reduction option, and a hard point option in addition to the hard point+free attachment option for 2 triumphs.

I kept coming back to the droid crafting rules and looking for fun stuff to do with them. Right now I'm thinking about building a bodyguard droid on the labor chassis for my astromech technician. A Droid Tech with Deft Maker could cobble together something like that for 1750 credits and a few days of downtime. I've been going back and forth on whether a minion group can provide "skilled assistance" and whether doing surgical procedures with a swarm of monotask nursebot remotes is cheesy or awesome.

Considering the Improved Speak Binary Talent, I think its intended and awesome.

I agree. I was underwhelmed with the Modder's talent tree in comparison to the Rigger's. I understand the need to diversify the talents to more than vehicles, but...

To me, it seemed a real stretch to have originally included Rigger and the Beast Rider in the Ace book (other than the need to have the same number of specializations per career).

Rigger should have been here and/or in the Engineer's book. Ace Rigger???! Reallly?

And Beast Rider seemed much better suited to the Explorer book where some Outer Rim character made due with whatever ride he/she could find or afford. Kind of a poor man's Driver Specialization.

Modder was the spec I was looking forward to the most. It's not bad, but the Signature Vehicle side is sorta lacking.

I don't have all the vehicle attachments memorized, but I'm not sure 2 Hard Points is likely to equal everything that Rigger can add to their vehicle:

+2 Handling

+1 to all Limited Ammo

+1 Armor

+1 Hull Trauma

+2 System Strain

+1 Massive

Finally got my copy and started digging into the book. I have to admit, I'm not that enthused with any of the specs. They seem very narrow. It's almost enough to make me not want to charge any XP for diving into another tree. I'd probably only require a couple of 4th rank talents on a previous tree before they dive into the next one.

However, I really like the special rules, especially the various workshops...very timely for my campaign, as the players have now accumulated quite a bit of equipment in varying stages of disrepair, and a workshop is going to come in handy.

I think the tricky bit about the Cyber Tech and Droid Tech trees is that they are narrowly focused on something with broad applicability. So Cyber Tech is heavily focused on help you build more and better cybernetics into yourself...which can do a lot of different things depending on what you make. A Droid Tech can have a droid assistant for every situation that they can order around with bonuses from the Speak Binary talents. They both make you really really good at using a specific Swiss army knife.

I was also a bit underwhelmed by the book... it just didn't really go as deep as I was hoping.

I get the impression that the intention of the book was more focused on presenting interesting add-on specializations, as opposed to full fledged Career Specializations. Having said that, there's lots of good juicy bits, and I'll tell you one thing... my Ace: Rigger/(Scoundrel) Pilot is going to be picking up Modder ASAP...

On 3/31/2016 at 1:27 PM, 2P51 said:

I think most folks agree, as do I, the 'ditch setback' Talents are not all that exciting, and it gets to the point where you have to include a ton for the sake of PCs not feeling like they wasted xp on them.

So, I'm starting to work down the Ace: Rigger tree on top of all my Engineer trees - by the time I get done, I'll probably have 5 Black-Be-Gone talents. For fun, we figured that she would have to be trying to fix a landspeeder while it was racing along, have no tools, hanging upside down, be on fire - and having people shooting at her before we started seeing blacks in the roll.

Awesome.