So the droid brains can be built with any skill and can have a few mods/attachments to upgrade that skill. I had a player that poured everything into ship work and general mechanics and first thing he did was start building things. I just had a few questions.

Should I allow him to install droid brains onto each weapon on the ship? They are zero hard points. If each weapon has it's own droid brain, it's essentially an assisted check anytime some one fires the weapon right? So they follow normal rules for assisted checks. Highest characteristic plus highest skill rank. If player using the weapon has zero ranks in gunnery, it's just a blue die.

From a roleplay side, has any one had players use droid brains? The description says that they develop little personality quirks. What have y'all done in the past that has been fun?

Ok, the way I take this now (after a few threads here) is this:

Skilled Assistance is usable in narrative time, not structured time.

This means that the brains can during combat or other pressured situation only offer unskilled assistance (extra blue die) or use the skill themselves (2-4 green die). Autopilot can probably make Co-Piloting checks if there is no other Co-Pilot, which could be very useful still.

During narrative time, with plenty of time to operate, they can offer skilled assistance (so character's stat and 2-4 skill). I guess this is would be most common with Astrogation and Piloting.

This works for me, as if skilled assistance worked during structured time then for less than 10k credits you are effectively giving characters 4 skill with no xp spent, which would be out of balance with the rest of things you can buy. They are still very good though.

For how many they can use, it's up to the GM. One per system wouldn't seem that out of whack.

Per the rules ship droid brain attachments can only be bought, not crafted, but a GM could add a droid brain rival schematic to enable crafted ones. In that case I would not allow them to be later modded to improve them, the crafting of the droid programming taking the place of that.

10 hours ago, Darzil said:

Skilled Assistance is usable in narrative time, not structured time.

Do you mind either citing one of the books or quoting the respective dev's ruling;

as far as I can see there's no "instead" in:

"During combat or structured encounters, when initiative and the order in which people act is more important, assistance can be accomplished by performing the assist maneuver. The assist maneuver allows an ally to benefit from assistance provided by an engaged ally on his next skill check. Assistance only lasts until the assisted character's next activation."

Away from book, but what the assist maneuver does is documented in the combat section, and adds a single Boost die (some races get to add two).

As I say, this is my interpretation, based on the rules, and there is some debate. I suspect maybe even disagreement among developers, due to the wording of the droid brains.

Therefore GM call. The call of this GM is that for 8-9k and two mechanics rolls, being able to buy 4 skill in Piloting, Gunnery or Astrogation for 0 xp is unbalanced when compared with anything else you can buy. However, it's still very good even if used as posted above (Extra unmanned gun, 4 skill in Astrogation when not under pressure (and Pilot freed from having to make Astrogation roll under pressure), ~75% chance of reducing Red to Purple via Co-Pilot manouver).

You could use a Droidbrain for every weapon (per RAW) BUT this should be overloading the actual targeting computer on most ships (best way to restrict it before abuse!)

The player can Choose if the Gunner Brain will a) take controll over one cannon or b) assist an actuall gunner.

in case of a) the brain gets his action immediatly after the pilot and can attack with an attribute of 0 and a skill of 2-4 (depending on your modding)

in case of b) the brain will assist the actual gunner ether with its skill level (if higher than the gunners) or a boost (if lower as the gunners) therefore it is not allowed to take an action on its own.

Assistance is NOT limited to narrative time!!!

Only you must have good reason for an assisted check in structured time!
while Battle assistance is covered by the Assistance maneuver (giving a Boost to an engaged ally) or the Boost for advantage, there may come some actions that will need the assistance rules, like:

while 2 PC are fending of the enemy, 2 other PCs are tring to break open a path through a pile of rocks - they will do a skilled or unskilled assistance athletics check on the turn of the slower charcter.
(as Gm you should define that thos two character have two take initative spots one after the other)

The Droid Gunnerbrain is special since it is one of the very few situations where you are able to get a skilled assitance on a Combatcheck (Gunnery)

the weakness of the Gunnerybrain is that it can be sliced! or crippled by a critical wound, deactivated by ion-cannons.

especialy the slicing can be mean: targeting allies instead, or upgrading/ settbacking the combat checks can become quite nefarious.

But as @Darzil mentioned, it can become abusive when you allow more than one or two Gunner brains in the Ship at once to have extra gunners (there fore restiriced it to only 1 or two ^^)

BTW the Pilotbrain will of course allow the pilot to gain the benefit of the assitance in combat, it won't work any less efficent only because a TIE shoots at you.

It would be absolutly absurd to write down the brains with the choice of beeing used as own unit or a assitaning unit, if the only option you can use the assitance would be a situation where you are not allowed to use assistance ( as the Gunner-Brain would only be needed in a structured time encounter [once you want to fire you have to roll initative])

Not interested in starting afresh an old discussion, may I refer to this .

Yeah, I don't understand the reason of the old discussion (I have to take a look and see the arguments in favor).

Per p26 on EotE the section Assistance and Timing states that during combat or structured encounter, assisting can be accomplished by performing an assistance maneuver. No skilled assistance check.

Also, see the co-Pilot maneuver as an additional example.

As a GM I allow Droid Brains and they are super useful, without using the assistance check. Astrogation and Pilot are quite useful.

EDIT: I have to take a look and see the arguments in favor

The official ruling is that you can only have one attachment of a particular type on a starship, i.e. you can only install 1 gunnery Droid brain per ship, I admit that it doesn't make narrative sense but that was Sam Stewart's response when I specifically asked about installing multiple Droid brains on a ship

On 12.11.2017 at 7:54 PM, thecowley said:

So the droid brains can be built with any skill and can have a few mods/attachments to upgrade that skill. I had a player that poured everything into ship work and general mechanics and first thing he did was start building things. I just had a few questions.

Should I allow him to install droid brains onto each weapon on the ship? They are zero hard points. If each weapon has it's own droid brain, it's essentially an assisted check anytime some one fires the weapon right? So they follow normal rules for assisted checks. Highest characteristic plus highest skill rank. If player using the weapon has zero ranks in gunnery, it's just a blue die.

From a roleplay side, has any one had players use droid brains? The description says that they develop little personality quirks. What have y'all done in the past that has been fun?

Droid brains are attachments with zero hardpoint costs. No matter the hard point requirements, outside of weapons, you are only allowed to install an attachment once. Just as you can not stack two armor attachment onto each other, you are not allowed to install two gunner brains.

Now you can install a gunner, astrogation, piloting brain … and have them sabotage each other from time to time. The fluff text describes how some of the droid brains don't get along with each other ... on top are the gunner ones a little trigger happy. ;-)

If you want the general assistance on gunnery checks, maybe just use targetting array, but if you need just more crew, build full scale droids to man the guns. We have for example 5 minion repair droids to assist on ship repairs and 5 assassin droids in the same low quality chassis which hide among the mechanics and do operate ships turrets usually. No need for attachments in that case. And a mono-task chassis is like 200 credits a pop.

Furthermore, as mentioned skilled assistance works not in combat. I don't like it, I am coming from a system which had powerful assist options, so it made me not only sad, but we actually played it wrong at first and had the high agility pilot usually going it back to back with our high skilled sharpshooter upgrade each others rolls. It was super-cool, but it is "against" the rules. And at least the droid brain attachments would not be written has they are if they would work with skilled assistance in combat, because they are to strong and to cheap for that.

My objection to this would be the possible end result. If you think it will be something that is going to be a pain for you and makes it seem lame, then you can simply put a bunch of malfunctions and poor interface grafts in place to keep it from being very effective, and tell the player this ahead of time. But in the interest of making the player happy (and allowing them to play to their concept if they are a mechanic type) you could simply allow it and then adjust for challenge. If you know the ship has droid brains on the weapons and is going to get a serious bonus to every shot then it changes what a challenging encounter looks like for the PCs. This is why I generally don't like a lot of power/gear treadmill stuff as it ends up being a zero-sum game with all the mundane equipment becoming trash.

Oh that heavy blaster pistol is so 400 xp ago. lol

2 hours ago, Archlyte said:

My objection to this would be the possible end result. If you think it will be something that is going to be a pain for you and makes it seem lame, then you can simply put a bunch of malfunctions and poor interface grafts in place to keep it from being very effective, and tell the player this ahead of time. But in the interest of making the player happy (and allowing them to play to their concept if they are a mechanic type) you could simply allow it and then adjust for challenge. If you know the ship has droid brains on the weapons and is going to get a serious bonus to every shot then it changes what a challenging encounter looks like for the PCs. This is why I generally don't like a lot of power/gear treadmill stuff as it ends up being a zero-sum game with all the mundane equipment becoming trash.

Oh that heavy blaster pistol is so 400 xp ago. lol

That could be achieved with allowing him to build actual droids with skills, actions and maneuvers instead of a vehicle extension. No issues with the rules either that way.

On ‎11‎/‎17‎/‎2017 at 11:58 AM, SEApocalypse said:

That could be achieved with allowing him to build actual droids with skills, actions and maneuvers instead of a vehicle extension. No issues with the rules either that way.

Yeah I think that's a better idea. I think it would be good to have his little crew of droids too.