Good morning Folks,

So I am in the early stages of planning out a character for an upcoming blended knight level campaign (all 3 systems). My plan is to play a Verpine scientist who was doing deep space research when an accident occurred and he lost most of his clutchmates?, hivemates?, whatever. In the equivalent of Star Wars Cast Away, he went a little crazy and crafted droid versions of his lost crewmates. After several years he was eventually rescued and of course he's brought his small army of droids with him.

Mechanically, he is likely going to start as a Scientist or Analyst and go into Droid Tech to get cheaper droid crafting, eye for detail and lots of speaks binary. I've got the mechanics pretty hammered out at this point and I am looking to start with a crafting check of YYYGGGBBB plus 1 adv from gadget and one from EfD (assuming enough success). Computer crafting checks should be similar, give or take.

So with that in mind, I'm looking for ideas for my droid army. Here are a few of my early ideas:

Scientist Droids - half a dozen monotasker with translation directives. With that crafting pool I should be able to have each with 3 Int (modular hardware+superior hardware) and 3-4 knowledge skills. Since they will be minions, I'd give them varied knowledges so that there was 2-3 redundancy of any single one. With Speaks Binary (x3) and Improved SB, that gives them YYYBBB if they do knowledge checks on their own or allow me YYYGGGB if they assist.

Combat Droid - For combat and given the unaggressive nature of Verpine, I was thinking of repurposed emergency response droids. So a fireman droid (w/ Cryoban Projector) and Law Enforcement Droid (with some sort of stun rifle). I hadn't thought out exactly what chassis or programming to use. I like the idea of using Elimination Directives (hopefully with a slightly modified skill set) since that upgrades them to Nemesis regardless of the chassis. I will be working with suggested starter Knight level credits however so my chassis options are limited.

Mechanic and Medical Droid - Obviously the first thing that needs making is a mechanic's assistant. Likely just a monotasker with repair directives. Also, a medical droid would be good.

So here are the things I need help with:

• Given my credit restrictions and crafting pool, am I going with the right chassis options?

• Did I miss any droid builds that are useful? What are your favorite crafted droid combos?

• How does NPC droid destruction work? If they exceed their WT are they perma destroyed or does that only happen after they exceed it x2? Monotasker chassis have craft WT after all.

• Ideas for fun and quirky personalities are welcome. They are supposed to be modeled after real people.

• Ideas to optimize/maximize droid use. Are there good ways to take advantage of all that Speaks Binary or Imp. SB that I'm not thinking of?

• Thematically, how should I flavor the various members of my army? In my head they are fairly small (I should have the adv to reduce their size) but 10 droids moving around is still quite the group. Obviously I don't adventure will them all at once, but even 3-4 seems a bit impractical. The droid tech in the crafting section picture has one that is nice and small but the rules don't really go into detail on how small Sil 0 can be. Thoughts? I was kinda thinking to have them Bug themed and to have some sort of carrier bug that housed and transported some of them (hidden storage talent).

Anyway, I'd love to hear from other Droid Techs about what they've done with there characters, problems they encountered and what worked well. Thanks in advance.

<Side Note> I understand the character is very crafting focused. Normally I'm not so fond of building hyper-focused characters but I figured I could get aways with it because he is a near 100% support character. I also plan on having his ethics prevent him from abusing the crafting system to make 15 dmg Autofire pistols for the other players. What I'm trying to say is that yes, he is highly optimized and yes, I am aware of how that can negatively impact a game. I hope that doesn't negatively impact anyones desire to give advice or assistance.

Well my character isn't a droid tech per se, but he loves his little droid companion fiercely.

The droid is Aye. It's spherical cam droid originally a weather cam. He kept the chassis and basic personality and augmented its intelligence and skills by talking a hunter droid, which is basically a robotic dog and using its brain and spare parts.

Droid is always commenting on cloud formations and giving us weather forcasts, it's also a little loopy and tends to follow scent trails.

19 minutes ago, TheShard said:

Well my character isn't a droid tech per se, but he loves his little droid companion fiercely.

The droid is Aye. It's spherical cam droid originally a weather cam. He kept the chassis and basic personality and augmented its intelligence and skills by talking a hunter droid, which is basically a robotic dog and using its brain and spare parts.

Droid is always commenting on cloud formations and giving us weather forcasts, it's also a little loopy and tends to follow scent trails.

Did you "craft" the chassis with a roll or did you just roll to program and later add cybernetics? What are your thoughts about Flying droids? Obviously Star Wars has probes and remotes that wiz around. Do you think they intended that sort of thing to just be flavor you added to any given droid or do you think that it should cost advantage during crafting, or perhaps that it should be it's own chassis type?

So it was a mechanics check to insert the brain.

I do think flying and hovering should be advantages, or listed equipment for droids.

I bought the Hunter droid.

I also bought the cam droid.

I've played a few sessions with a Droid Tech. The GM allowed me to define silhouette 0 as including "rat-sized," so I made a monotask chassis droid who rode around on my shoulder and helped me with Imp. SB.

The handy thing about Speaks Binary is that it can conceivably apply to any check you ask the droid to do, even if they aren't built for it. I took the step of installing Gank Comm Implants in all of my droids and having one implanted in my Tech so I could quietly communicate with my droids at range, and at one point I used that to tell the medical droid we had left back on the ship to start it up and fly it over to us. Its piloting check was abysmal, but with extra boosts added on, it did serviceably well.

Speaking of the medical droid, building droids specialized in skills that no one in the party is interested in developing. With some judicious advantage spending on the Computers check when programming, you can pump up various directives to have an additional rank of certain talents, allowing you to make a medical droid who is very good at helping the party with long-term recovery between adventures, or a co-pilot droid who can reliably handle Astrogation while also assisting your main pilot (or flying the ship itself if you don't have a pilot). Your mechanical assistant might have the vehicle repair talents you can't be bothered to take in order to keep the group's ship in good condition, etc.

Don't forget that your droids all get their own carrying capacity. Having your droid assistants carry extra tools and equipment around for you can be handy if your character likes being prepared for any situation (and crafting tools to put on your droids is a great excuse to fish for the double triumphs for tools that upgrade your checks).

I ended up starting with only a couple of droids as opposed to a gaggle of assistants, though, despite having Knight-level credits, as I also wanted to devote some resources towards my own equipment (even with the discount talent, Specialist Chassis aren't cheap). The Customizable Armor template from Keeping the Peace is a good way to inexpensively get armor with enough Hard Points to install Integrated Slicer Gear which, aside from helping you make unobtrusive slicing attempts during encounters, can be modded to grant the Technical Aptitude talent, which will bring down your programming time. If one of the other players hadn't decided to build a combat droid as his PC, I might have made a bodyguard droid using a crafted weapon with Disorient and/or Ensnare to provide support without overshadowing the other PCs.