Or at least, a similar droid? After rereading the excellent Anakin & Obi-Wan Marvel comic, I was reminded that holographic lightsaber training droids similar to PROXY from The Force Unleashed are actually canon. In the next game I run, the players will be visiting a Jedi Temple. I'd like to throw in a Holographic Training Droid for fun, and would like to ser how you guys would stat one out.

My party is currently at roughly 300 XP, and I'm thinking of having this droid just be Rival-level. I'm hoping the party doesn't destroy it, and instead uses it as a training resource, so I'd rather not make it too powerful as an ally for them.

PROXY himself? Hmm, I'd do it one of two ways:

Build him on a TON of XP and give him every Lightsaber Form tree at full. You could give him a Force Rating and Force powers, with the handwave that he has micro tractor beam emitters to replicate Move, enhanced servos and repulsorlift assist for Enhance, and so on.

If you want to limit him, take away the Force powers, and state that he can only use one Lightsaber form tree at a time when he's in a proper holographic disguise. He can only use Soresu as Obi-Wan, for instance. Have it be a maneuver to change holograms.

For a more generic droid, I'd just give them one full Lightsaber tree, and maybe some choice supporting talents from other trees. Perhaps a simple module can be replaced to change which tree they have, thus which lightsaber form they're programmed with.

PROXY

Bounty Hunter - Martial Artist with the Shii-Cho Knight spec. Sure he can't use the Force Talents since he's a droid but he'll be an excellent melee combatant with a Lightsaber.

Here's my rough build of the training droid in question:

Holographic Jedi Training Droid

Brawn: 2 Agility: 2 Intellect: 2 Cunning: 2 Willpower: 2 Presence: 2

Wound Threshold: 14 Strain Threshold: 12 Soak: 4

Skills: Lightsaber 3, Melee 2, Brawl 1, Athletics 2, Cool 1, Perception 1

Talents: Parry 3, Toughened 1, Resist Disarm, Jump Up, Street Smarts, Nobody's Fool, Makashi Technique, Soresu Technique, Ataru Technique Shien Technique, Niman Technique

Equipment: Training Lightsaber, Droid Armor Plating (Soak+2), Holographic Disguise Matrix (Containing the images of six Jedi; Kit Fisto, Dooku, Depa Billaba, Qui-Gon Jinn, Plo Koon, and Cin Drallig)

I built it as a basic Droid with 10 extra starting XP (185 starting) and 300 XP after character creation.

Starting Career: Warrior, with 1 rank in Brawl, Melee, Athletics, Cool, and Perception

Starting Specialization: Shii-Cho Knight, with 1 rank in Melee, Athletics, and Lightsaber

120 starting XP into getting each stat to 2 (For the purpose of being able to use all lightsaber forms equally well), 30 starting XP to get Makashi Duelist, 25 XP to get Lightsaber up to rank 3, and the last 10 starting XP to get 2 ranks of Parry (1 from Makashi, one from Shii-Cho)

5 XP to get Resist Disarm, 10 XP to get Makashi Technique, 40 XP to get Soresu Defender, 5 XP to get one rank of Toughened, 5 XP to get the third rank of Parry, 10 XP to get Soresu Technique, 50 XP to get Ataru Striker, 5 XP to get Jump Up, 10 XP to get Ataru Technique, 60 XP to get Shien Expert, 5 XP to get Street Smarts, 10 XP to get Shien Technique, 70 XP to get Niman Disciple, 5 XP to get Nobody's Fool, and the last 10 XP to get Niman Technique.

Admittedly, this makes a very sub-optimal droid, as I could build a far, far better combat droid with 185 starting XP and 300 XP on top of that. But the goal here wasn't to build the best combat droid. Rather, I needed a droid that could train my party members in all of the possible forms of lightsaber combat (as a narrative way of explaining why the characters gain new lightsaber forms). With that in mind, I did not want this droid to be too powerful, as it's entirely possible the players would try to use this droid as backup in live combat from time to time. Not to mention one of my players is playing a droid who has taken a page out of Mr. Bones' book (From the Aftermath book series and Poe Dameron comics), and is able to move his memory banks from one droid body to another. I'd rather the new party droid be worse than his current body instead of a straight upgrade in case he ever decides to take over the new droid.

As this build currently stands, the droid can at least demonstrate each lightsaber form with passable skill (YYG), and is enough to provide a decent training partner for my players without it posing much of a threat in a real battle.

Couldn't you also toss Cortosis on it to simulate the fact that Starkiller didn't kill it even after chest shotting it with his light saber?

48 minutes ago, ASCI Blue said:

Couldn't you also toss Cortosis on it to simulate the fact that Starkiller didn't kill it even after chest shotting it with his light saber?

That's a pretty valid point. I'll probably toss that on there as well.

Starkiller's lightsaber skill is GGY at best. It takes him 3 chops to take out a generic stormtrooper. His reflect is nothing to write home about either, and at the start of the game cant even throw lightning until the second mission.

Starkiller is a D&D player making a Force and Destiny Knight level character- no social skills, all awesome force magic.

35 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Starkiller's lightsaber skill is GGY at best. It takes him 3 chops to take out a generic stormtrooper. His reflect is nothing to write home about either, and at the start of the game cant even throw lightning until the second mission.

Starkiller is a D&D player making a Force and Destiny Knight level character- no social skills, all awesome force magic.

I'd say Starkiller's lightsaber skill would be better than GGY. The 3 chops to take out a generic Stormtrooper is purely for the sake of gameplay. If you beat every generic enemy in a video game with one chop, it would make such a hack-n-slash video game pretty boring. I look at his performance against other Force sensitives to judge his level of skill. I'd say Starkiller is at least YYYYG, if not better. Keep in mind, Starkiller went toe-to-toe with a lightsaber against Rahm Kota, a Jedi Master, Kazdan Paratus, also a Jedi Master, Shaak Ti, a Jedi Council member known for her skill with a lightsaber, and Darth Vader. If a generic, straight-out-of-the-book Inquisitor can have YYYYG as its lightsaber skill, there's no reason Starkiller shouldn't. If I were to make Starkiller for my campaign, I'd just build him as an Inquisitor. I'd probably go 4/3/3/3/5/2, with Parry 4, Reflect 4, Lightsaber Mastery (Willpower), Move, and Unleash. Hmm... Now that I think about it, throwing Starkiller at my players might actually be kind of fun... Thoughts for later.

That said, Proxy's lightsaber skill is definitely fairly low. Starkiller repeatedly defeats him with relative ease, until Proxy goes into Darth Maul mode. Hence why my holographic Jedi training droid only has YYG as its lightsaber skill.

Kota was a Warleader, though, not a lightsaber focused carear. All the others were after several missions, easilly explained by handing out gobs of XP per level.

1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:

Kota was a Warleader, though, not a lightsaber focused carear. All the others were after several missions, easilly explained by handing out gobs of XP per level.

So are you saying that Starkiller's starting lightsaber skill in the game would be YGG, and by the end it's grown? Because your first statement didn't imply that, since you said "at best". Gobs of XP or not, taking Starkiller at the end of the game, his best, his lightsaber skill should definitely be better than that of a generic Inquisitor. Since generic Inquisitors can easily be made with YYYYG as their lightsaber stat, there's absolutely no reason Starkiller's lightsaber stat should be lower than that.

Making endgame starkiller (even as a comparison for PROXY) without an eye for how he levels through the game is ripe for overstatting.

At the START of the game, he's a FR3 darksider with a well leveled Move tree, able to throw sillouette 2 tie panels at people reliably, and pathetic saber skill. I've built him as a knight level character, which is where the GGY comes from. (human racial lightsaber skill, not a class skill)

The famous endgame star destroyer trick needs FR4, a destiny point, a maxxed move tree, and only average luck. (5 pips on 4 dice) Meanwhile he's also filling out the Unleash tree. That's some experience, but not so much that you couldnt run it as a campaign.

38 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Making endgame starkiller (even as a comparison for PROXY) without an eye for how he levels through the game is ripe for overstatting.

At the START of the game, he's a FR3 darksider with a well leveled Move tree, able to throw sillouette 2 tie panels at people reliably, and pathetic saber skill. I've built him as a knight level character, which is where the GGY comes from. (human racial lightsaber skill, not a class skill)

The famous endgame star destroyer trick needs FR4, a destiny point, a maxxed move tree, and only average luck. (5 pips on 4 dice) Meanwhile he's also filling out the Unleash tree. That's some experience, but not so much that you couldnt run it as a campaign.

I think the big difference here is that you're thinking of building Starkiller as a PC, while I'm thinking of Starkiller as an adversary. As an adversary, there's no way I would ever build Starkiller as anything less than an Inquisitor-level foe. As a PC however, I think you're pretty much spot-on with simply starting him as a Dark Side knight level character.

Edit: I'd also make the argument for starting PC Starkiller to also have at least some investment into Enhance, for the sake of the Force jumps that are entirely necessary to complete the game.

11 hours ago, Underachiever599 said:

Edit: I'd also make the argument for starting PC Starkiller to also have at least some investment into Enhance, for the sake of the Force jumps that are entirely necessary to complete the game.

The air dash? I felt they were so anemic that they could be demonstrated by applying his FR3 to his athletics checks, with the base enhance power but no force leap powers.

11 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

The air dash? I felt they were so anemic that they could be demonstrated by applying his FR3 to his athletics checks, with the base enhance power but no force leap powers.

The air dash, and simply the distance of his jumps. He's leaping several body lengths, far more than an ordinary human is capable of with a good jump. Definitely at least the first two Enhance upgrades for Leap that lets him jump a short distance vertical and horizontal, but probably not the ones that increase the range of the leap.

Different system, even in KOTOR a level 20, max str or finessed, max agi PC couldn't take out most mooks in one shot or one round for that matter.

1 hour ago, ASCI Blue said:

Different system, even in KOTOR a level 20, max str or finessed, max agi PC couldn't take out most mooks in one shot or one round for that matter.

And in the FFG RPG system, if you hit a vanilla Stormtrooper just once with a lightsaber, it's a guaranteed kill. So even giving Starkiller a low Lightsaber skill wouldn't make Stormtroopers require more hits to be defeated, just cause you to miss more often.

Didn't Nexus of Power have the temple guardians statted out? You could use those as a basis and ramp them up a bit?

I mean, if you are worried about them using the Training droid in a combat setting, you could tell them that his programming is hard coded to only fight in certain circumstances, such as in a dedicated training room or only with dedicated training weapons. Can't bring him along as back up, as he'll refuse to fight in a situation he wasn't coded to fight in. In that case, you can make him as powerful as you want, as it will only ever matter in a specific training situation, and not just wander around cutting everyone up for you. If the players are particularly crafty, they could try to lure the BBEG into the training room and sick PROXY on them, but in that case, have the droid not fight unless their opponent has clearly and openly agreed to training.

Any training droid or hologram at a Jedi temple is unlikely to be programmed to ambush or fight anyone that hasn't agreed to the training before hand, or else there would be a diplomatic incident any time a non-Jedi dignitary visited the temple and was swiftly assaulted or killed by the droid.

For the droid itself, I'd probably stay away from hard numbers, and just have it adapt its power levels based on who it's fighting, so that it is always useful as a training droid. It's power level remains challenging, but not static. A training droid isn't terribly useful for training if you can beat it instantly, nor if it instantly defeats you. To train you it would need to continually challenge you, or need to be replaced as soon as you became more skilled than it. The nice thing with a droid vs an organic trainer, is it could actually restrict itself to a power level that is challenging to you far more easily than an organic could. It can section off more advanced skills so they don't accidentally use them while trying to teach you the basics. An organic could try to take it easy on you, but they still have all their training to fall back on as a reflex.

Other's have had good suggestions for mimicking the droid having force powers, to better train you to deal with force users attacking you, like tractor beams instead of using Force Move, but I'd leave that as the narrative description of their use of the power, and still use the same mechanical effects of the move power, without trying to figure out how to do the same thing with a tractor beam. And even a lightsaber that only has one of the stun crystals in it, can still be a pretty devastating weapon. Strain is less damaging long term than wounds, but in a fight, it is just as dangerous.

I used a PROXY like holodroid as an reapearing advasary in my campaing.

While he got a set pair of attributs (all 3s in the first match later on up to 4s and 5s as he "upgraded" to match the power level of the PCs [6 not reached yet]) setting Soak to +3 with Cortosis

WT and ST according to number of players and minion droids ect (just what you feel best with for your group)

he got a variables set of Skills and Talents always depending on the "battle simulation program he was running"

e.g. High athletics and technics for engaging multiple target when "beeing" Darth Maul than swithing to a more passiv style for young Obi-wan or a very agressiv style for a expirenced Marek Gallen.

Most "jedi-like" techniques can be done by declaring special droidenchancements. Since he can't be force sensitive, using saber-force-talents needed a "special rule" he was allowed to roll 2-4 FR Dice (depending on the power level) but was always only allowed to use Darkside pipes and he would have to spend 2 additional Strain for this talent.

To use "Move" he had two inbuilt strong antigrav projectors in his arms. Allowing him to attack with ranged(light) at engaged or short range with a base Damage of 5-10 (again powerlevel) and the oppurtunity to shove the enemy by one rangeband away for 2 advantages or/ and knock him down for 2 advantages.

Enhance jump is just used as the Kyzo Jump.

Funny things you and the players can use for thriumph and despair:

SCs double Triumph (or NPCs Double despair): destroy the A.S.P.R. (adaptive skill programming routine) the PROXY-unit loses all his programmed "Forcy" Skills and talents, all he is left with is his attribute, a lightsaber he really shouldn't use now and an athletics skill of 2 as well as the Talents "Bye-Bye" Flip a Destinypoint as an OOTI to selfdestruc, the damage dealt to all characters within SHORT range is based on the remaining WT+5 (this should be used if your players a over abusing looters that want to have the extrem special lightsaber that seems to be able to change forms, colors and attributes... also use it when Proxy should go down just to get shure).

And the talent "Roger-Roger-Time to Go" flip a destiny point and make a hard athletics check if sucessfull the droid can escape due to an very lucky circumstance while everybody knows that he is still "alive".

On 4.10.2017 at 10:01 PM, Underachiever599 said:

I'd say Starkiller's lightsaber skill would be better than GGY. The 3 chops to take out a generic Stormtrooper is purely for the sake of gameplay. If you beat every generic enemy in a video game with one chop, it would make such a hack-n-slash video game pretty boring.

Look at Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, worked for them
Besides, most Jedi Masters have less skill with a lightsaber than Padawan Ahsoka
(including half of the council ones)