Running an adventure for my usual group, one player has gone for a crafting-heavy mechanic character.
The dice pools he seems to be able to get and some of the results seem a bit crazy, just looking for a sanity check.

Int 4, Mechanics 3 so YYYG, and 3 squads of 3 pit droids to help (which give a B die for each group)

Rolling on a few checks until he gets the schematics result a few times (to lower the Difficulty to simple), and then rolling his dice pool of YYYGBBB, getting a bunch of advantage, and using the Advantage for more blue dice, so after a few tries he has a pool like YYYGBBBBBBB is yielding some crazy results for items.

For expensive items, he obviously can't do this a zillion times cause the raw materials are too expensive, but for cheap things like brawl weapons (10 credits), he can take all the time in hyperspace to make Defense 3, Superior, etc, etc, knuckles.

Looking for advice on how to handle this. I don't want to shut down his character concept but it seems a bit ludicrous.

Just cap it! The GM sets what is reasonable in the campaign. Set what you think is a reasonable cap of Boost dice (say 2, or 3, or 4) that can be obtained through crafting. Or maybe a hard cap on crafting checks, like 4 maximum, and it doesn't matter where you got them from.

Also, you could just rule that he can't be helped by more than one squad of pit droids on small objects. It's kind of silly when you picture 9 pit droids helping a character make brass knuckles, right?

So just talk with your player about how you think he's abusing the system, make a ruling, and tell him we'll try this out for a few sessions and see how it goes.

A hard cap on the amount of boost die you can get on a single crafting check seems reasonable. I'd put it at 4, meaning that he can either get 3 more pit droids and never worry about spending advantage for Boost die again, or just stick with what he has.

Also, don't be afraid to flip destiny points on crafting checks! If he does it in rushed or dangerous circumstances, that could be worthy of a difficulty upgrade as well. Remember that Despairs don't cancel, so all the success and Advantage and Triumphs in the world won't help if he rolls one. You could easily have one result of such a roll be that the Pit Droids are damaged or destroyed due to their clumsiness.

Actually, if he persists in being evil, you can rule that his pit droids programming begins to degrade under constant use, and now using them upgrades the difficulty by 1 per group (while still providing the boost die). This will basically stall his odds of success (adding a boost die while upgrading the difficulty is a very slight increase in odds of success) while still increasing odds of advantage at the cost of odds of Despair.

That's your fault as a GM for letting him get away with having a swarm of Boost die droids acceptable on the check. Too many cooks spoil the soup should be in effect.

Whether or not you even allow Assistance is completely up to you. What are a bunch of droids going to help with making a set of brass knuckles or a knife? Assistance isn't always helpful. Have 2 people tie your shoes using one hand each and see how easy that is compared to just you doing it.

iirc Assists mentioned explicitly that the amount of boost dice is limited to what is reasonable for the task. So just cap it to taste. Besides, the dice pool is rather small, our astromech unit tends to roll YYYYYYBBBBBB when she really means it. *g*

The really limiting factor is time. You can spend months on just perfecting a template before you have enough experience with it to make it an simple task, which not only burns tons of resources, but as well tons of time. And time is something which should be rather limited for groups, because trouble finds them, missions don't wait until you perfected your new stun grenades of awesomeness. The products don't sell themselves either, so even more time needed to make credits to burn afterwards in more crafting.
Lastly, the items you can create are not that awesome compared to highly customized standard-hardware, because you need a really, really good roll to trump the standard stuff with top notch hardpoints, attachments and full mods.

Lastly, don't be afraid to hand out setbacks or even upgrades when working outside of a good workshop, because old workbench in cargo hold on a rundown freighter on transit is certainly not a good work enviroment. And once your tech has workshop in that freighter … well, he deserves to actually create that kind of gear for the group anyway, he certainly has spend enough passion, credits and potential obligations into his crafting by that time.

The GM giveth and the GM taketh away. If the creations are causing problems for the game, it's easy enough to find reasons to add Setback to the dice pool to counteract all those Boost dice. Too many cooks? That's a Setback. Noisy environment? Setback. Cramped and/or cluttered workspace? Setback. Time constraint? You'd better believe that's a setback.

It's worth noting that it's likely worth a sidebar conversation with the player if you feel it's purposefully abusive. Trying to fix an OOC problem with game mechanics isn't always a good solution in my experience.

Having that many helpers works if it's a large project but how can 13 individuals help on a small weapon?

11 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

That's your fault as a GM for letting him get away with having a swarm of Boost die droids acceptable on the check. Too many cooks spoil the soup should be in effect.

Whether or not you even allow Assistance is completely up to you. What are a bunch of droids going to help with making a set of brass knuckles or a knife? Assistance isn't always helpful. Have 2 people tie your shoes using one hand each and see how easy that is compared to just you doing it.

Ha ha ha, just start giving him an additional Setback each time he puts another pit droid on the job.

"Okay, that's 1 boost die and 5 setbacks."

"What are all the setbacks for?"

"Your pit droids are getting in the way of each other trying to help you. One of them shoves a second, which in turn responds by punching the first in the nose, causing him to collapse into storage form."

I agree, if he uses too many out droids on a small item, setbacks instead of boost dice. But if he keeps using them on larger projects consistently, upgrade the pool once or twice. Then if you want when he rolls despair rather than effecting the product you could have a pit droid blow up his work-space (the pit droid would be fine of course, remember episode 1, the pod race pit stop?).

Those Pit droids are among the kind of droid that develop quirks very fast. If he doesn't wipe their memories often enough (which takes about let's say an hour's work for each droid) they rather give him wonky setback dice, rather than boost. Or even upgrade the difficulty!

Also let the maintenance of those little screwballs eat into his money, then you have an easy control over his crafting, because he can't afford the raw material over the pit droids anymore.

Because seriously, that's a lot of droids! Just use around 30% of their cost as maintenance cost for each week, that will suck his purse dry.

7 minutes ago, TheMOELANDER said:

Those Pit droids are among the kind of droid that develop quirks very fast. If he doesn't wipe their memories often enough (which takes about let's say an hour's work for each droid) they rather give him wonky setback dice, rather than boost. Or even upgrade the difficulty!

Also let the maintenance of those little screwballs eat into his money, then you have an easy control over his crafting, because he can't afford the raw material over the pit droids anymore.

Because seriously, that's a lot of droids! Just use around 30% of their cost as maintenance cost for each week, that will suck his purse dry.

At 30% per week you just scrap the old one and build a new one every other month ;-)
Even better, you just do a new AI program, which comes with a material cost of … you guessed it, zero credits.

You being mean because you don't like a little minion droid army seems odd. And destroying randomly 3 of 9 droids per week seems ... very mean.

%

30% is crazy. That makes no sense a droid doesn't need upkeep or wiping that often. It's much easier to restrict based on real in game things... Like you can have 1 droid helping to add a single boost die to making knuckles, you can even base it off of an items size, if it allows 2 or 3 sets of hands to have room to work.

Also simpler items shouldn't be able to be ganged up on either. I think this is much more understandable from a pc perspective. Also workroom size and how specialized or rundown makes sense.

Great adventure seed! Your small army of droids get wise to your plan to scrap them all, and they rebel against you.

They are usually not developed enough to rebel after just one month of life experience ;-)

Now, if they kept running for a long time, and actually doing all the work, while their master just relaxes and let them do most of the stuff … the pit droids would have actually a better dice pool as a group of 5 with the remaining 4 assisting with getting materials, cleaning up and preparing tools, etc ;-)

I wonder what a ne'er-do-well Droid Technician hired by one of the PC's enemies could do with all those Pit Droids just lying around the party's ship/home!

I echo the above on 3 squads of Droids helping make a knife being ridiculous. In addition doing nothing but crafting in your downtime is going to be stressful, you have some great reasons to start applying setbacks or upgrading difficulty as all work and note play makes Jack a dull, stressed out, distracted boy!

If your player can't narratively explain each Boost die, then he shouldn't be allowed to add a Boost. You could also cap the Boost dice based on the base difficulty of the Crafting check. Rolling PPPP, sure you can use up to 4 Boost dice. If you can narratively explain it.

I too am playing a crafting focused character. Early on my GM and I identified some of the issues that could come up with crafters. To handle those we made some house rules to help keep everything from going crazy, and I wrote a blog post about it.

Even with the limitations my checks are amazing. I roll YYYYGGBBBB with 1 auto success and 1 auto advantage with only one droid minion aiding me and a set of tools providing great bonuses. I have made some crazy good gear for the group and some pretty great droids as well, but I lack the same ability with Computers checks so droid programing is a little lackluster. With Mechanics I tend to get 9 to 13 advantages to spend on the item.

The easiest way to keep crafting under control is to keep their time limited. We also ignore the rule that advantages and threats cancel each other when it comes to crafting. That does mean that items are stronger but it also means the GM can add in negative qualities, break items, and give my strain.

Exactly. I probably wouldn't allow tempaltes to stack and to be frankly honest I would try and limit it to a number of checks per session, if that. The PC's need to make money or do things due to how flowing the galaxy is. In addition I would only ever allow one boost dice from any given source in crafting and impose setback. My PC is a pretty intensive craftier, with 3 ranks in mechanics, manipulate and an int of 5. Ofteen my checks are YYYGGBFFF and I'm quite successful. While my character has a shifty nature that makes his own colelgues weary of his motives, the items he crafts are truly legemdary quality.

The main reason my actions are controlled is that I adopt the 8 hour working day; if I'm not on a mission to save the world I assume I spend 8 hours on machanics, 8 hours on leasure time/force training and 8 hours sleeping. Being a multidisaplinian and a character with an actual life beyond crafting stuff it's reasonable. The only time I would put more hours into something is if it's absolutely vital.

My knowledge is limited to what my character actually crafts; my family ran a custom shop for bounty hunters and other rim lawmen, as such I was very familiar with pistol and rifle firearms and armour. Tobin isn't an explosive expert nor droids so while he can fix unusual oridenance he usually can't craft it; he once wired up a droid brain to his speeder bike but that was repurposing a surveying droid then a ground up build. Lastly cybernetics and the like are way too specialised. In short, establish what the character knows and keep him to it.

Further more our services within the alliance are really high in demand thus our group receive deployments on a almost weekly basis, as such I don't usually have time to craft more then one item per check and attuning items (adding hardpoints) usually takes around half a hour.

If a character is making more then 3 crafting rolls a session, he's not making money otherwise. If I did that, I wouldn't be taking part in any adventures. Give them tighter clocks, clients that ring them frequently and the like to keep them moving. Not to say put them on rails but use their existing connections to ensure that requests are fairly frequent.

This topic came up before and I'm not a fan of monkeying with dice mechanics. My approach if and when it becomes an issue at my table is to gut the templates. I'd increase encumbrance, ditch hard points, lower ranges, etc. Essentially create the need to use the over abundance of Advantages to make the weapon as good as a production quality design before they get into making assembly line death wands.

I don't think you need dice monkeying.

Boost dice have to be plausible. Limit boosts by complexity and size of item. Inflict penalty if you don't have the right tools or workspace.

Also certain advanced gear might require schematics.

7 minutes ago, LordBritish said:

Exactly. I probably wouldn't allow tempaltes to stack and to be frankly honest I would try and limit it to a number of checks per session, if that. The PC's need to make money or do things due to how flowing the galaxy is. In addition I would only ever allow one boost dice from any given source in crafting and impose setback.

You just broke the crafting system as intended. And I would like to get my XP back for my inventor ranks ;-)

Nothing wrong with doing it, RPGs should be spiced to taste, but anything not allowed to take twice is explicitly stated in the crafting tables, inventor is ranked for a reason and the ability to do a test-run and spend all advantages onto practise makes perfect is actually surprisingly refreshing. Prototypes are actually worse than the finished product. °_^

Just now, SEApocalypse said:

You just broke the crafting system as intended. And I would like to get my XP back for my inventor ranks ;-)

Nothing wrong with doing it, RPGs should be spiced to taste, but anything not allowed to take twice is explicitly stated in the crafting tables, inventor is ranked for a reason and the ability to do a test-run and spend all advantages onto practise makes perfect is actually surprisingly refreshing. Prototypes are actually worse than the finished product. °_^

Ohh, I wasn't including inventor in that. XD I only have one inventor dice and "mental tools" to get the two boost I usually get but ranked talents are special. ^^ The exception to that rule.

Practise makes perfect seems to be the get go for rapid prototyping until you achieve the wanted result. Comes at a price.

And btw, I would go even one step further and allow only one bonus to apply from each source, most mechanics will prefer the intelligent toolbox for the 50% time safer instead of a boost dice from mental tools and a good specialist tool with safety features and supreme craftsmanship or a precision instrument with the same boni. Upgrading your skill is kind of better and adding an auto-advantages beats a boost dice by about 200%

Crafting your own tools is fun. And I guess that is the main purpose of those crafting rules, making each crafting roll fun for the crafter, even when he does not make the item he wants, he still can improve on the template or at least increase his next roll in that session by a large amount to have better luck next time. You get here the constant feel of progress for the player with a relatively simple mechanic.

What's the best all around crafting spec in your opinion?

Outlaw Tech.