My player wants to take a scout droid and an anti vehicle mine and turn the droid into a suicide bomber what do I do??????

52 minutes ago, Matt Skywalker said:

My player wants to take a scout droid and an anti vehicle mine and turn the droid into a suicide bomber what do I do??????

Let them, but add caveats

Suicide bombers have collateral damage, make sure that the collateral damage means they earn conflict

2 hours ago, Matt Skywalker said:

My player wants to take a scout droid and an anti vehicle mine and turn the droid into a suicide bomber what do I do??????

There are rules for playing a dark-sider in the core book.

Any other way to make it not worth it. I mean, sorry but not all are FaD

1 hour ago, Matt Skywalker said:

Any other way to make it not worth it. I mean, sorry but not all are FaD

most governments, especially totalitarian dictatorships tend to not look kindly on acts of terrorism. I would expect the response would be quick and brutal.

Add to this the newfound "reputation" they may get on the street. Fixers and contacts may no longer deal with them due to "the heat", or they may out right sell the characters out.

1 hour ago, Matt Skywalker said:

Any other way to make it not worth it. I mean, sorry but not all are FaD

I can't tell from the OP the exact source of your objection, so the first thing to ask is are you as the GM okay with this kind of murder-hobo gaming? For example, I'm not into murder-hobo games...I don't mind the occasional digression, but for the most part I expect, and try to foster, "heroism". So if you don't want that kind of thing in your game, just discuss it with the group. If they still go ahead, then you should feel free to go scorched earth on them. Any affected parties will send their best to hunt down the perps, and by "affected parties" I mean anyone from governments, to crime lords who take offence at someone else causing mayhem on their streets, to families of the victims who pool their resources to get justice. You can still leverage Obligation and Duty in ways that penalize the PCs severely. And frankly a move like that would bring all the Force users to the dark side immediately in my game...there would be no "10 points for murder, oh, look, you're still above 70 so you're still a paragon". That would be total BS.

On the other hand, maybe you're okay with it in the game, but want the world to "react" appropriately. In that case, all of the above is still applicable (especially the actions of aggrieved NPCs, which might take a few sessions to resolve), but you might go a little lighter on the Morality/Duty/Obligation.

Or maybe there's another reason you don't want them to be able to do it?

Apart from the very good comments above, I have a few questions you can ask yourself. Is the droid motivated to become a suicide bomber or are the PCs just assuming it's fine with ending its existence? It probably has good recording equipment, right? How much evidence of the PCs planning an act of terrorism do you suppose it has in its memory banks? Does it know where the nearest police station is? Are your PCs in deep trouble now? You betcha...

[Oh, everyone say hi to the lovely NSA people who got all sorts of red flags on this topic.]

Depends precisely what the target is, is my initial response.

Is it being turned into a bomb to gain access to a imperial building? Is it intended to disrupt an AT-ST or some other hard target remotely? Or is it being used on a civilian population to sow terror and fear among collateral damage? The intent means everything when it comes to things like this, though I wouldn't usually allow a mine of all things to be turned into a bomb without some requiring of it's basic functions first as they usually have an function that can only be triggered by a circumstance. e.g. being stepped on. Being a vehicular mine it is a direct shaped charge that is intended to go one way, thus it isn't as effective as, say, a thermal detonator.

If it is the former two ideas then there should be no problem. It is being used to gain access or do harm to the imperial engine. If anything it might be more considerate then the traditional application of a mine as it is being directed against which could detonate 20 years down the line; just as previously specified intent is everything when it comes to actions like this. What is their target.

The latter? Then the rebel alliance would have serious problems with this team. If this team isn't part of the alliance then they might wish to shut down this team regardless, as they do see themselves as the legitmate govenment and would do anything to disassociate themselves with radical extremists. If they are part of the alliance the same might happen, they might get disowned, the rest of the rebel cell might be given a covert order to quietly dispose of that part of the party in any manner they might see fit. It depends really; if the operation had a tactical benefit to the ongoing of the war that can't be accomplished any other way, then they might be fine with the destruction of planet sized battle stations. If it is unwarranted force however with no consideration toward the people they should be liberating? Well, a written warning of "knock it off or we will make sure you end up like Saw" should be more then adquite. If they don't get the hint and the party doesn't at least attempt to rein the collateral in then the alliance would likely have them quietly disposed of. The entire unit. So needless to say someone better start taking responsibility quickly.

One member of the party ended up having to leave because he stole a Bothian crystal that contained the data of all their operatives and, in order to give the party more time to be done with it, my PC decided to chuck that PC under a bus by informing on the secert service and now the latter has Bothian's labelling him as the first traitor of the new republic. Highly unfortunate, but he was leaving anyway (he specified that intention to leave to get out of the war before hand) and quite frankly after holding onto it for two weeks in character; it was much too late to return it by the time the party were made aware of precisely what he had stolen. It meant that in order to get him out of here, my PC spent a good amount of time to smuggle him to safety to give him a head start on the competition, in the hope of one day cracking this crystal open and passing the data onto the secret alliance service so that they can finally start controlling the actions of the one faction that could have strong ties with the empire.

I might also specify that in future when making requests like this that you write more then a sentence when asking a question. Because we are having to infer a lot from a single question; quite frankly I find that a bit disrespectful.

Oh and hi NSA!

Need way more info because this is the kind of thing a bunch of extremists like the Rebel alliance would do. Sabotaging speeder bikes for example happened in the Rebels series and this wasn't just one or two, this was a bunch. What is the target of this bomb? Isn't a scout droid pretty low on the food chain as far as abilities and sentience? What's the difference between using a scout droid vs driving a speeder bike into the same location?

On 12.11.2017 at 8:27 PM, EliasWindrider said:

Suicide bombers have collateral damage, make sure that the collateral damage means they earn conflict

Its a sentient droid. You earn conflict for abusing the poor thing already.

I'd go with LordBritish's answer on this one: intent and context matters; there's a huge difference between PCs doing this as a spur-of-the-moment thing for laughs and doing it as part of a carefully planned operation by a rebel cell to eliminate a legitimate military target. It's also only likely to work once if you pull it off - after that, and assuming that the investigation doesn't manage to find anyone responsible, measures will still be put in place to prevent a repeat.

9 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Its a sentient droid. You earn conflict for abusing the poor thing already.

Hmmm, I thought the force had no opinion on abusing Droid unless you were using negative emotions to fuel force powers to abuse it, but that's a the mental state of the Droid killer transgression not it's wrong to kill droids.

First of all, it's 'not going to be worth it' from an economic perspective. I can't think of any situation in which the delivery method would justify the expense of the droid. Now, on the other hand, if the player wanted to put a thermal detonator inside a generic remote (400 credits, and the thing can fly and fit through small spaces, and will generally be overlooked, except in secure areas) that would be a different can of beans.

I agree that what they intend to do with it matters immensely. As has been said, blowing up objects is very different from murdering civilians.

To ethically use such a thing, in my opinion, all of these criteria must be met.

1) There must be no known civilians within the danger zone of the blast, and measures must be taken to find out if there are any civilians in the area.

2) The droid used must not be sapient, either because it is too new to have developed a personality, has been recently memory wiped by someone other than the party, or lacks suffient AI to develop it.

3) The end goal for which this is being used must be a moral one. (i.e. robbing an imperial pay station for credits to enrich yourself probably doesn't count, even if it does hurt a tyrannical government.)

Now, based on my knowledge of Star Wars, all droids have self-preservation programming that would prevent them from carrying out a self-destructive order. Most droids also have programming that prevents the harming of sapient life. In order to create a 'suicide bomber bot' you would have to override this programming which would be at minimum a hard computers check and a couple hours of work.

This trick will only work once or twice before everyone in that sector knows to look for it. Such an act would be all over the holonet.

Edit: I wouln't allow a force user to do this or even to watch someone else in the party do this without gaining conflict, even if the three criteria I mentioned were met. Be careful it's not too much in the latter case, as it tends to not be fun for other players when the Paladin Jedi dictates what the rest of the group can and can't do.

The self preservation thing is a good point. Cad Bane during an episode of Clone Wars installed an explosive then if memory serves wiped the droid's memory or at the least lied about what was installed.

As for value proposition, that is also a good point. If this is some rando pittly thing being blowed up. If however it's an Imp shipyard or some kind of vehicle or munitions factory then it's VERY worthwhile.