3 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Outlaw Tech.

Outlaw tech is good, really good, but intuitive improvements blows anything else out of the water imho. Potential for 2 extra hardpoints onto anything you craft or even just repair is pretty, pretty hardcore. Scientist would be my 3rd pick. Best combine them all

Intuitive Improvements is awesome, but it requires an Artisan, and Force (Jedi) careers are forbidden in many games.

Pretty much all gear in this game is broken if you let people just infinitely accumulate more of it and use the best of the best for every single item. Allow people to have one signature item and then go nuts destroying everything else they own. It may seem cruel, but it actually makes for a much more fun game in the long run if you're always hungry.

2 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Pretty much all gear in this game is broken if you let people just infinitely accumulate more of it and use the best of the best for every single item. Allow people to have one signature item and then go nuts destroying everything else they own. It may seem cruel, but it actually makes for a much more fun game in the long run if you're always hungry.

It makes especially for great murder hobos, because they are always starving. It is a arbitrary narrative too. Lastly it goes against the very idea of a crafter class which is all about having the right outstanding tools and investing hundreds of xp into it, xp which could have allowed to ignore most hits anyway for a small fee in strain or increase their states in the same way with the force instead of cybernetics, etc

There is a certain balance in the broken. And it is actually a little bit annoying when people call gear broken, just because it comes with a little more damage or a little more extras. The system is meant to be without levels, but not without progression and even when you hand out 1,000 xp and 300,000 credits to each player, the game stays still rather good and challenging, except when you keep the challenges the same for those 10 times less experienced characters.

I'm not saying you should render a crafter useless by never allowing them to own anything, that's why I specifically said signature items should be a thing.

The issue also isn't that you can't design a challenging adventure for a party of really high end characters, the issue is that you can't give any satisfying rewards to them anymore. It becomes a "What do you give someone who already has everything?" situation every single time. The game is simply more fun if there are items you don't have yet.

8 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

I'm not saying you should render a crafter useless by never allowing them to own anything, that's why I specifically said signature items should be a thing.

The issue also isn't that you can't design a challenging adventure for a party of really high end characters, the issue is that you can't give any satisfying rewards to them anymore. It becomes a "What do you give someone who already has everything?" situation every single time. The game is simply more fun if there are items you don't have yet.

Loot as motivation instead of means to empower characters to follow their motivations. Interesting concept. Anyway spaceships are super expensive and fragile, while the alliance, the local colony or your obligations always can eat p your resources like candy, there is no real need to keep the gear in check. Especially not when you can burn literally millions on homesteads, workshops and ships.

It is not like Ackbar run out of stuff to do when he got his Home One. quite the opposite actually.

10 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

I'm not saying you should render a crafter useless by never allowing them to own anything, that's why I specifically said signature items should be a thing.

The issue also isn't that you can't design a challenging adventure for a party of really high end characters, the issue is that you can't give any satisfying rewards to them anymore. It becomes a "What do you give someone who already has everything?" situation every single time. The game is simply more fun if there are items you don't have yet.

One of my players in my current campaign often talks about his other campaign he is in. They have quintillions of credits and control hundreds of planets. There is never 'too much' when it comes to what the PCs want.

I find that players, especially when they are playing really high end characters, often have the most fun if you've taken their gear away and they can get excited about taking someone's blaster rifle again for once. There is simply an element of stagnation in everyone running around in 4 soak cortosis power armor wielding custom weapons that annihilate any enemy and having an entire army of custom built droids to roll any skill they don't have themselves.

One of my players in my current campaign often talks about his other campaign he is in. They have quintillions of credits and control hundreds of planets. There is never 'too much' when it comes to what the PCs want.

If your campaign is about managing a star empire that's cool, but some people would call that sort of thing "Spreadsheet wars" around here. The thing is, when you're literally controlling the fate of entire planets it becomes increasingly hard to believe that your characters go out to do their own fighting, so it becomes a lot less relevant whether they can theoretically afford a starship's worth of implants and gear.

1 minute ago, Magnus Arcanus said:

One of my players in my current campaign often talks about his other campaign he is in. They have quintillions of credits and control hundreds of planets. There is never 'too much' when it comes to what the PCs want.

The other extreme to extreme low life play. I don't get warm with either of those extremes, but there are certainly players who enjoy those tables.

On 2/1/2017 at 7:51 PM, SkyHaussmann said:

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.

Its been already said, but it is totally reasonable to limit the droid assistance to just 1 blue die. Even a large workshop will get crowed with pit droids tripping over each other. And seriously aren't those things just walking comic relief? I mean what did they do in the movies that was actually anything other than wrecking the equipment they were supposed to be maintaining?

Another consideration is time. You need to enforce the time requirement to craft items. Don't allow the PC in question to just make successive crafting rolls in one session, especially if they try to use the Practice Makes Perfect option to just stack silly amounts of blue dice to their next skill check. Also consider the workshop the PC is using. If it is just the small machine shop on a YT-1300, you can't do much with that; certainly worth a couple of set back until the PC in question spends some money and time upgrading it.

Final point is to simply ask the player "What is it you want here?" Ultimately it is frustrating you that a player appears to be trying to break the system and thus possibly forcing you to have to reign the abuse in. So instead of you spending time trying to run the game and plan adventures you have having to combat munchkinism. That is not fair to anyone at the table, including the GM.

Personally I'd restrict two things.

One is the stacking on Practice makes Perfect, which is just crazy (though partially because of the lack of precision of 'session' - I do my crafting during hyperspace, which with a class 2 hyperdrive can mean we blip through days of crafting in minutes of a game session, though probably many crafting sessions).

Second is just applying the rules themselves. Only one character can provide unskilled assistance, so only one bonus dice for it.

I found the crafting rules are a lot cleaner with capping boost dice equal to the number of ability+prof dice in the pool. So if your crafter has 7 int then he can roll 7 boost.

Also pay careful attention to time. While some crafting checks might only take an hour others can take a long time.

9 hours ago, Darzil said:

Second is just applying the rules themselves. Only one character can provide unskilled assistance, so only one bonus dice for it.

The rules don't actually put a hard limit on Unskilled Assistance. It's Skilled Assistance that is limited to two characters (one for the characteristic rating, and one for the skill rank).

The rules do allow for the GM to easily impose reasonable limits on how many people can lend assistance. Like when folding a towel: two people can do it neatly and quickly, but a third would just get in the way. Likewise, a small group of pitdroids could help with a small project: one to hold a light, one to be the go-fer, and one to be on standby for an emergency. Any more would just be in the way, as they all tried to obey the order to "help" their master

But yeah, there's no hard limits in the rules. It's a very situational thing.

Correct, it isn't a hard limit, (pg 26 Edge of Empire Core) : "Generally only one character can provide assistance at a time. However, the GM may decide that certain situations accommodate more people."

So the limit is one, but a GM may decide to increase that situationally.

So the status quo is one bonus, but the GM can increase it. This is a different situation at many tables to the status quo is unlimited, but the GM can limit it.

Wait until those pit droids all start demanding pay... XD

Once the players realized the hours taken to craft are labor hours not just hours in a day they realized how long crafting takes.

Someone suggested not cancelling the threats and advantages, that has helped a lot. I've also made sure the templates are more of a reward item, so they really treasure them.

5 hours ago, LordBritish said:

Wait until those pit droids all start demanding pay... XD

Actually our R-X unit will start to write complains to alliance command that I got promoted to Lieutenant, while my gunner and co-pilot (her) did still not get any rank at all.
She was all cranky afterwards when installing new attachments to the ship, while we talked to alliance high command and got our promotions. Priceless session

Off topic...

I know what you did, Sky Haussmann.

(Big fan of Alastair Reynolds)

As a guy who likes to dump advantage to get more boosts on the attempt, I think you're player is abusing the system by having 3 crews of pit Droids each working on it. When the item is so small as to be held in one hand (a brawl weapon, knife or pistol) I wouldn't let him get assistance from any pit Droid (the just get in the way/keep him from holding the item to work on it), for a rifle sword, I'd let them have 1 crew of pit Droid helping them, for a Droid or suit of armor i'd let them have 2 crews. For a pod racer i'd let them have 3 crews. If they got "the right tools for the job" i'd let them get one extra boost die but that's it for the base number of boost dice provided from assistance/gear (of course the inventor talent could allow additional boat dice).

But with regards to the underlying question of reinvesting boost dice, I have no problems with that. Actually I have one solvable problem... if he's taking away a lot of game time rolling dice then THAT'S what I consider the problem, not the stuff he manages to craft.

To solve that problem, I wrote a Matlab program to do craftin rolls for me, actually it will roll until it succeeds with one of the specified combinations of triumph and advantage, and it does that 100 times to generate a percentile table that tells me things like how many attempts were made, how many bog standard items were created, and the specific combination of triumphs and advantage. Then I roll a percentile against the custom generated table. I also use the table to see how many attempts would typically be needed to decide if i'll let them attempt it at all. This is just a time saver, and it addresses the only fundamental probably I have with the crafting system.

I'd say 1 set of pi