You might want to have your droid character roll difficult (or progressively more difficult) Discipline rolls to see if they can resist the influence of the droid leader's arguments. Might even make them take a black die if the leader is using his leadership skills to rant over the intercom/speakers.

Good luck!

I will definetily add those Discipline checks 😈

Has anyone ideas on how to increase the difficulty of the combat encounter with the droids?
The group for my upcoming Oneshot might be relatively combat heavy.

I thought about buffing EV and FX a bit but improving for example EV's Ranged Heavy feels weird.

The best thing would probably be to add some new droids, some kind of heavy duty droids specialized for ore-smelting equipped with a Repulsor-Rifle like Equipment to handle the ingots etc.?

3 hours ago, Fl1nt said:

The best thing would probably be to add some new droids, some kind of heavy duty droids specialized for ore-smelting equipped with a Repulsor-Rifle like Equipment to handle the ingots etc.?

When I run this I am going to have a D8 smelter droid on site ( https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/8D-series_smelter_droid ). According to the fluff, these guys can pick stuff out of molten metal and such, so they probably have a pretty high soak valute. I haven't seen any stats for 8Ds yet, but I plan to make him very hard to shoot down (soak 10 and a few nifty qualities, or whatever, but low combat abilities), and have him stalk around and grab PCs, trying to drag them off to the nearest furnace.

You could also add a dozen more battle droids to the dungeoun if you want to... they're already established in the scenario.

1 minute ago, angelman2 said:

When I run this I am going to have a D8 smelter droid on site ( https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/8D-series_smelter_droid ). According to the flutt, these guys can pick stuff out of molten metal and such, so they probably have a pretty high soak valute. I haven't seen any stats for 8Ds yet, but I plan to make him very hard to shoot down (soak 10 and a few nifty qualities, or whatever, but high combat abilities), and have him stalk around and grab PCs, trying to drag them off to the nearest furnace.

You could also add a dozen more battle droids to the dungeoun if you want to... they're already established in the scenario.

I really like this Idea 😎

Yeah, and I can't type. I went back and edited some mistakes in my previous post 😛

What's more, in my campaign this D8 droid was the very first "villain" my players encountered. It was during a short test-game a long time ago when the heroes visited a Mining Guild asteroid base (i.e. dungeon) where the staff had gone missing. The found the place devoid of people and very clean, like not so much as a bolt or food wrapper laying about... and then they discovered a message recorded by one of the last staffers, a terrified fellow who claimed that a "demon" stalked the halls of the asteroid mine. There were no power at the base, 'cause all of it was directed to the smelter works at the deepest levels. The players descended to this hellscape and found a near invincible D8 shuffling around searching for things to smelt. They couldn't kill it, but found a way to distract the very faulty droid enough to remove a panel in the back and switch him off. Oh, and someone had even written "demon" on the droid's forehead in their own blood (presumably while he was putting them in the smelt). The PCs ended up stealing the droid from the mine, hoping to fix him (which they can't as he's too broken and repairing him would cost much more than buying a new one), so they sold him to a rogue mining equipment wholesaler for a pretty penny.

...and of course, the wholesaler sold "Demon" to the mining consortium who built the Debts to Pay mine (I can't recall their name).

This quick little intro scenario I wrote for my players made quite an impression on them, and they've been talking about it and "Demon" ever since. It offered some great roleplaying opportunities and presented the players with a problem that they couldn't just shoot their way out of. It will be very cool and satisfying to now pit my players against "Demon" yet again 🙂

So, I'm gearing up to run a modified version of this scenario and overall I think it is quite decent. I will remove the friendly Admin. Droid as the real function it plays in the story is to remove mystery.

Moreover, for anyone planning to run Debts to Pay , I would advice to pay extra attention to the chef droid at the beginning. A potential weakness of this scenario is the PCs possibly suspecting the droids too early, and the chef droid is there realy to lull the players into a false sense of security when it comes to the droids in the mine. This droid introduces the idea that the droid staff are innocent and possibly oblivious to what is going on, so make sure to play up this character cleverly. He sets the stage for how the PCs will regard the droids of the mine. You can play him for laughs, but do try to get the players to fall in love for the hard-working, weird little fellow.

The R2 unit could then further reniforce this idea if you play him as very panicky and quick to appologize.

It EV-8D3 knows about the PCs coming, he could fake concern by letting the PCs find him with his head in his hands, mimicking human emotion.

Lastly, if the PCs are suspicious, you could try throw them off the scent by having EV-8D3 "admitting" to not understanding entirelly what's going on, fearing that the "pirates" might have some sort of droid-controlling technology in their possession. EV-8D3 might even "admit" to periods of lost time, from which he recovered with blood on his hands, or whatever. "Forgive us, for we know not what we do!"

Good luck!

I added another team of 4 battle droids... I chucked out the Gamma Guards and just had them make a Perception check to notice something out of place. Set it in Tatooine, changed it to Jabba due to a player Obligation as a Hutt slave and actually had 5-8 years left of viability in the mines in case they get sent back by Jabba.

... and the troupe never really got suspicious, maybe as I tried to run it like the scene in ALIENS when they reach the colony.

anyhows, the gauntlet was eventually thrown down at the mine entrance when the troupe started asking too many questions. They made a running, tactical retreat to the changing room and set up and waited... and waited (you hear the droids communicating behind the doors) and waited... and waited....... and waited. One team of B1s was sent in as fodder while EV, the doc droid and the green R2 unit escaped with 3 surviving B1s in the cargo ship... now they have PTSD every time they see a green astromech R2 unit 😄