Me and a friend noticed that there is an aspect missing from the crafting rules that appears in the pre-printed items. This may be by design as it turned out to break the crafting system but I was curious on your guys's thoughts.

The only way to get negative qualities to a weapon is to get no advantage at all. The result of this is a standard template with only negative qualities. This make total sense to me if you are in a situation that what you craft is what you get but in a day to day game there is no reason to keep hold of that item. Just do your best to re-sell it and get back what money you can.

Pre-printed items however frequently use downsides to off set bonuses. Yeah that giant beet'n stick is a monster but you need a heafty brawn to use it properly. Yeah, that rifle tosses down 11 damage before mods but it may blow up at any moment. So that got me wondering if anyone had considered a trading system. You successfully complete your item but can add threat to gain an equal amount of advantage. Or to have threat and advantage not cancel each other out, roll 2 threat and 2 advantage and you and gm both get to spend points. Or perhaps that is what you could use those wasted extra hits for. Each hit lets you buy one advantage and one threat. Something along those lines.

Good point. I would be open to negotiate with the player who was crafting the item to give them some advantage or a Triumph at the cost of threat and despair. If a player was 1 advantage away from a quality they really wanted. Sure! I'll toss in some extra advantage, but I'm going to apply this 2-threat disadvantage to your item.

Alternatively, before the PC rolls, you can allow them to gain 1 or more boost die to the roll in exchange for 2 threat per boost that the GM will spend on disadvantageous item quality. Maybe upgrades for despair in the same way?

i guess theres always the possibility of rolling triumph + threat or advantage + despair, sounds like interesting houserules though

Seems reasonable to me. Other games have allowed for built in flaws to offset various boosts. You could consider the "flaw' of the heavy blasters to potentially run out of ammo, and have to be reloaded as the very kind of thing you are talking about.

So yeah, some significant detriment to the item, if something bad is rolled, makes sense to me.

I was under the assumption that threat and advantage don't actually cancel themselves out when crafting. The book says "First, crafters can use advantage and triumph results to make improvements to the item. Then, the GM can spend threat and despair to add flaws." This leads me to believe that the original intention is that they don't cancel, because if they did then the GM wouldn't have any to spend on flaws. So you can have those awesome improvements that also come with the flaws.

With the way the dice work, you can have Threat with Triumph, Advantage with Despair, Advantage with Triumph and Despair, or Threat with Triumph and Despair. In those cases, positive results are always resolved first, so that's why it says it the way it does.

When it comes to OP's question, I would just work those details into a template.

And this is why we always upgrade craft checks guys. Particularly the easy ones.

So last night I tried out a variation of this where, when my PCs were crafting a droid companion, I allowed them to elect NOT to have Advantage and Threat cancel one another out.

The Mechanics roll was YYYYB versus PPPPP, with a net 2 success, 4 Threat, and 5 Advantage.

The 20 minutes of my players and me debating about how much Threat they were willing to give me, and how much Advantage they really wanted, and what the result would look like was so much frikkin' fun. Now my PCs have a military grade assassin droid, with 5 Brawn, who has three Setback dice added to any check made without ranks in the associated skill. (They did the same Adv/Thr trading on their roll to program it, so it's got an extra rank of Piloting (Space) but is "Enthusiastic" and I get to play it for them as an ADHD "oorah" jarhead.)

TL;DR: On crafting rolls only, you should let your players elect to have some of their Advantage and Threat NOT cancel out. More dice + more results = more fun.

When a PC was crafting a droid, I offered a bonus in exchange for giving it an unspecified personality flaw.

So now we have an unappreciated bodyguard droid secretly obsessed by its unaware meatbag mistress.

Crafting is most certainly a place where I'd allow Threat and Advantage NOT to cancel each other out. It feels very in keeping with the genre to me - you made something really cool and useful, but it has a few drawbacks and quirky flaws.

My group runs it as a negotiation. If the player wants something that the GM considers really cheesy, then the GM could trade their threat to cancel out advantages. Conversely, if the GM declares an intent to spend threat to put something really nasty on their crafted item, the player can choose to spend advantages to prevent it. This allows for a flexibility in crafting, where players can choose to produce middle-of-the-road items very reliably, but can also make very potent items with some niche flaws.

i believe the special mod podcast stated that according to raw they do cancel each other out in crafting, but he also stated that is a fun idea and itd be up to the gm and players

I like the idea of going for a trade system. That way, especially for items that can break the game, or when dealing with master craftsmen, it can be a bit more grounded. Especially if the craftsman in question want to sell their goods.

that being said though according to raw triumph and despairs never cancel each other out anyways apart from success/failure count which is an avenue a gm could set perm difficulties anyways this would just increase his.. choices