So you know where it says if you fail to mod something, and roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless?

Well my gm interprets this very clear passage as if you roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless, regardless of success failure.

I find these kind of house-rules very annoying, especially because he doesn't acknowledge that it is a house-rule, and I can't really challenge him on it without being an *******.

Long story short I need a one time low to no xp cost way to avoid at least one despair on lightsaber crystal modding roll on an illum crystal. Any ideas?

36 minutes ago, Sir Reginold said:

So you know where it says if you fail to mod something, and roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless?

Well my gm interprets this very clear passage as if you roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless, regardless of success failure.

I find these kind of house-rules very annoying, especially because he doesn't acknowledge that it is a house-rule, and I can't really challenge him on it without being an *******.

Long story short I need a one time low to no xp cost way to avoid at least one despair on lightsaber crystal modding roll on an illum crystal. Any ideas?

Have him re-read the rule again. The rule says,

Quote

If he succeeds, he successfully installs the mod on his gear, and the item benefits from the bonus provided by the mod. If he fails, however, the mod is not installed and he may not attempt to install that mod again. If he failed and his check generated at least one Despair, the attachment is also rendered useless by his tinkering.

So simply rolling a Despair won’t destroy an attachment. What will do so is rolling a Despair on a failed modification check.

I know he's wrong, it doesn't matter, I need a work around.

25 minutes ago, Sir Reginold said:

I know he's wrong, it doesn't matter, I need a work around.

There isn’t one. Push comes to shove, tell him flat out he’s wrong, shove the book in his face and read him the rule right from the book.

A couple things:

First, are you modding the crystal, or are you adding the crystal to a saber? Because there's no roll for the latter, it just works. So that's the best way to avoid despairs

Also, you're correctly stated the text clearly says you have to fail with despair for the attachment to blow up. So above posters are correct, if you can convince him to follow the text, that's great too.

Assuming you do actually want to mod the crystal, like add Vicious, or decrease the critical rating or some such then a roll does apply. However, unless the GM is spending destiny against you, it shouldn't be possible to despair. There's no despairs on purple dice. The roll starts as a Hard (three purple) Mechanics check. However, I suspect you're modifying your own saber, so the difficulty is 2p less (page 196 FaD core book). In addition, you can add force dice to kyber mod rolls (also p196) and Ilum crystals are kyber (p 197).

So you should be looking at a Mechanics check + your force dice vs 1p. Unless your GM is popping destiny on you, that should be cake. Of course, if you're adding a ton of mods, each one increases the difficulty. But it's crucial to note increase difficulty is NOT the same as upgrading the difficulty. Increase adds purples. It doesn't make purples into reds - that's "upgrading the difficulty".

If he is using destiny against you (which is a bit of a jerk move unless he's given you backup crystal options), then there's no avoiding despair entirely, though there are a couple of character options that might do something. They're probably not low to no xp cost unless you happen to be a mechanically inclined character:

• Option 1 should be the Natural Tinkerer talent (Sentinel's Artisan has it midway down the tree) - Once per session, reroll a Mechanics check.
• The force power Manipulate's ultimate upgrade lets you spend two pips for a triumph on Mechanics checks. Technically triumphs don't cancel despairs, but since we're already outside the plain text, you may be able to appeal to a sense of reasonableness.
• Master Artisan's in a bunch of technical trees, but that adds greens to you, and probably doesn't help here - with one caveat. Technically, the 'my own saber' rule can reduce the difficulty to Simple (0 purple), even though Master Artisan is limited to a minimum of 1p. Taken together, if you're adding just one mod, the end result would be rolling against 0p0r. So even if the GM flipped destiny on you, there's an argument to be made you should be rolling against 1p (which can't despair) instead of 1r.
• On the "maybe he'll let triumphs cancel" front, Gambler's Second Chances ability lets you reroll some dice (positive only, so you can't reroll the despair, but you can reroll any yellows you might have to try to triumph)
• An amusing one might be Valuable Facts from Diplomat's Analyst, it's only 15 points into the tree (not counting the cost to buy into the tree in the first place). Even better if one of your party members is a Diplomat, because auto-triumph to any skill you choose once per encounter is a pretty solid buff power for a non-combatant.

There isn't really a way for me to do that diplomatically enough, but I'll think about whether or not it is important enough to me.

Ah ninja'd a bit by Sarg01, that tidbit about decreasing the difficulty is something we didn't know. We always thought the only advantage a jedi got was his force rating for modding crystals. I built my current lightsaber with a personal inlay, so that reduces it further by 1, I'll be able to do 6 risk free. As far as I'm aware if you increase difficulty past 5 you upgrade instead, I always thought that was a rule. Maybe I was wrong?

48 minutes ago, Sir Reginold said:

Ah ninja'd a bit by Sarg01, that tidbit about decreasing the difficulty is something we didn't know. We always thought the only advantage a jedi got was his force rating for modding crystals. I built my current lightsaber with a personal inlay, so that reduces it further by 1, I'll be able to do 6 risk free. As far as I'm aware if you increase difficulty past 5 you upgrade instead, I always thought that was a rule. Maybe I was wrong?

You’re talking about “Impossible checks” on page 27. However that rule does not say that the roll gets upgraded. What it does say is that the GM May allow a player to attempt such a task by spending a Destiny Point and them roll a Formidable check, but only at “critical moments in the story arc, or truly life and death situations.” Not only that but the player gets no other benefit from spending toe Destiny Point and may not spend any additional Destiny Points on the roll either.

Some have a house rule that you upgrade past five difficulty when modding. It is a (reasonable) house rule. (Though it’d work very badly with the ship rules where some things have 10’s of mods.)

3 hours ago, Darzil said:

Some have a house rule that you upgrade past five difficulty when modding. It is a (reasonable) house rule. (Though it’d work very badly with the ship rules where some things have 10’s of mods.)

If ship things have tens of mods, and you aren't in general allowed to make impossible rolls, how is it supposed to work?

If the GM is being that obtuse, then there's no real argument.

Unhelpful anecdote: My group rarely mods their equipment, and we still have lots of fun.

Playing Devil's advocate here, I can kind of see where the GM in this case is coming from. It gets quite easy to abuse the crafting system if you've got a good mechanic and plenty of time and money. When I was playing my Outlaw Tech/Gadgeteer I had Intellect 5, Mechanics 5, several ranks of Inventor and some custom tools, and my teammates had me spending most of my downtime building weapons just as practice. The idea was to keep making things, and making the rolls, with the intention of getting double Triumphs so I could take the Schematic result and reduce the difficulty of making such weapons in the future. Pretty soon I was rolling YYYYY and three or four Boost dice against no negative dice at all when making blaster pistols and rifles.

7 hours ago, Sir Reginold said:

If ship things have tens of mods, and you aren't in general allowed to make impossible rolls, how is it supposed to work?

Well, you are allowed to make Impossible rolls, they just require spending a Destiny Point to do so, and should only be done at dramatically appropriate moments. As for ships having tens of mods, That's where talents, such as the ones @Dafydd mentioned come into play which can reduce the difficulty.

I went over the shipwright stuff when Fully Operational came out and haven't really looked at it since, but I vaguely recall you build the ship in pieces (Hull, Engines, etc) and then assemble the pieces. IIRC, the rules didn't really have more pieces as the ships got bigger, they just had higher costs and labor requirements. That would suggest there's no one "lets stick 10 mods here" check.

12 hours ago, sarg01 said:

I went over the shipwright stuff when Fully Operational came out and haven't really looked at it since, but I vaguely recall you build the ship in pieces (Hull, Engines, etc) and then assemble the pieces. IIRC, the rules didn't really have more pieces as the ships got bigger, they just had higher costs and labor requirements. That would suggest there's no one "lets stick 10 mods here" check.

I believe there's one ship module with 28 possible mods.

22 hours ago, Dafydd said:

Playing Devil's advocate here, I can kind of see where the GM in this case is coming from. It gets quite easy to abuse the crafting system if you've got a good mechanic and plenty of time and money. When I was playing my Outlaw Tech/Gadgeteer I had Intellect 5, Mechanics 5, several ranks of Inventor and some custom tools, and my teammates had me spending most of my downtime building weapons just as practice. The idea was to keep making things, and making the rolls, with the intention of getting double Triumphs so I could take the Schematic result and reduce the difficulty of making such weapons in the future. Pretty soon I was rolling YYYYY and three or four Boost dice against no negative dice at all when making blaster pistols and rifles.

That's pretty fair, the crafting system is pretty broken, but the mod system is a bit different. Also I don't think the schematic option takes double triumphs, also you can only ever take it once per type. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

19 minutes ago, Sir Reginold said:

That's pretty fair, the crafting system is pretty broken, but the mod system is a bit different. Also I don't think the schematic option takes double triumphs, also you can only ever take it once per type. Perhaps I'm mistaken.

As I recall, you can only take the Schematic result once per crafting roll. I don't think it says you can only take it once per template, but I don't have my books to hand at the moment so I stand ready to be corrected.

House Rules and rules-contrary rulings hopefully have a rationale behind them. Does your GM think you are already pushing the power limit for his/her game?

That having been said, I think this instance of a crystal is a bit different to me than adding hyperblasnator to your DLT-20. A crystal in a lightsaber is not some little manufactured component in my opinion, to me it deserves better story treatment. A modification to that crystal is something that should be somehow alchemical in nature (thus the chance for failure) rather than soldering new transistors into a comlink, but also it should have some larger significance other than Joey Jedi wants to hammer a few nails into the end of his glow bat.

As a GM I have noticed that I will usually look on such a thing more favorably if the player can convince me of the cool factor of such a modding. If the GM doesn't like the idea of letting you spend Destiny Points, perhaps you can strike some other sort of Mephistopheles' Bargain with the GM to allow this to go off without the chance for irrevocable failure. More time, a quest to find the master or ancient droid who could do the mod without chance of catastrophe, etc. It may cost you in some ways but the end result being that you don't destroy the ingredients.

Systems exist to serve people, not the other way around.

8 minutes ago, Archlyte said:

House Rules and rules-contrary rulings hopefully have a rationale behind them. Does your GM think you are already pushing the power limit for his/her game?

That having been said, I think this instance of a crystal is a bit different to me than adding hyperblasnator to your DLT-20. A crystal in a lightsaber is not some little manufactured component in my opinion, to me it deserves better story treatment. A modification to that crystal is something that should be somehow alchemical in nature (thus the chance for failure) rather than soldering new transistors into a comlink, but also it should have some larger significance other than Joey Jedi wants to hammer a few nails into the end of his glow bat.

As a GM I have noticed that I will usually look on such a thing more favorably if the player can convince me of the cool factor of such a modding. If the GM doesn't like the idea of letting you spend Destiny Points, perhaps you can strike some other sort of Mephistopheles' Bargain with the GM to allow this to go off without the chance for irrevocable failure. More time, a quest to find the master or ancient droid who could do the mod without chance of catastrophe, etc. It may cost you in some ways but the end result being that you don't destroy the ingredients.

Systems exist to serve people, not the other way around.

I'm really not pushing the power limit of the game. His GMPC is the most combat oriented character, and more powerful than mine in combat, I focus more on social and force powers, and spy stuff. Also we have gone far higher in power before.

Also it doesn't particularly matter anymore now that I know about the rule that you reduce the difficulty by 2 for modding attachments on a lightsaber. Combining that with personalized inlay I'll be able to do 6/7 mods without risk, and I just won't do the 7th, I can live with one +1 less than optimal.

On 2/20/2019 at 1:11 PM, Sir Reginold said:

I'm really not pushing the power limit of the game. His GMPC is the most combat oriented character, and more powerful than mine in combat, I focus more on social and force powers, and spy stuff. Also we have gone far higher in power before.

Also it doesn't particularly matter anymore now that I know about the rule that you reduce the difficulty by 2 for modding attachments on a lightsaber. Combining that with personalized inlay I'll be able to do 6/7 mods without risk, and I just won't do the 7th, I can live with one +1 less than optimal.

Also look at padawan survivor in "dawn of rebellion" the improved secrets of the jedi talent plus 5 ranks of lore (and your own being 2 easier and maybe a force dice rule it was a long time since I looked at this), let me get a fully modded dragite crystal at 1 purple difficulty (the last check might have been 2 purple, I forget it was a long time ago).

On 2/18/2019 at 6:52 PM, Sir Reginold said:

So you know where it says if you fail to mod something, and roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless?

Well my gm interprets this very clear passage as if you roll a despair the attachment is rendered useless, regardless of success failure.

I find these kind of house-rules very annoying, especially because he doesn't acknowledge that it is a house-rule, and I can't really challenge him on it without being an *******.

Long story short I need a one time low to no xp cost way to avoid at least one despair on lightsaber crystal modding roll on an illum crystal. Any ideas?

Kind of crazy huh? Imagine moding an illum crystal and your on your 6 or 7th mod and you roll a despare and you shatter the crystal. I'm sure though if you have a good GM he will work it out to where you just loose the mod but every GM is different. Sorry to hear you have a GM thats a little rule strict like that expecially on that.