So I have a player that is looking to pick up droid tech to build himself an army of droids. He pointed out that deft maker only reduces the amount of materials you need to buy. My Problem, with this is he has expressed an interest in taking this so he just has to pay the half cost, and then set up a droid conveyer belt to basically have the minion group make it for him at that cost. From my point of view deft maker should be only applied if he makes the check to build and spend the time up on the project. I don’t care if he uses the minions to help so long as he’s working. With the way the book is written it’s a little muddy. Can someone clarify?

Also if it does I’m concidering being the one who decides what the advantage are spent on because it’s the droids making it not him. And since he isn’t watching it and it’s gonna be pit droids working, so up yours game mechanics, I thought that would be a reasonable trade off.

21 hours ago, Aries50 said:

With the way the book is written it’s a little muddy. Can someone clarify?

That's not mud... it's poo. The crafting rules, whether for droids or otherwise (but especially for starships) are utter garbage.

So the thing with the construction rules is that they are not intended for mass production of goods, but instead one-off items that are individually made. So at the point that it's the droid minion group doing the building and not the PC, then the construction rules don't apply, especially if they're doing it assembly line style where each droid that rolls off is pretty much identical to the ones that came before and will come after.

That said, I don't think Deft Maker works the way your player thinks it does. The base cost of each item built remains the same, so all that Deft Maker does is reduce the base cost on an individual basis.

So if building a droid would normally cost 1000 credits worth of materials, then Deft Maker drops it to 500 credits, but only if the PC is directly involved in building the droid. Unless the minion group also has Deft Maker, then the materials cost goes right back up to 1000 as the PC is no longer personally involved in the build process. And if the minion group has Deft Maker, then the materials cost is 500 credits. And as the talent says that multiple ranks of Deft Maker don't provide any further cost reductions (on top of similar talents from multiple characters not stacking their effects), then even if the PC and the minion group were involved in the droid construction, the materials cost wouldn't drop below 500 credits.

Fun!:

23 hours ago, Aries50 said:

he has expressed an interest in taking this so he just has to pay the half cost, and then set up a droid conveyer belt to basically have the minion group make it

Fun?:

Seriously though, if he wants a Droid Army, play a Separatist campaign starting at Heroic Level. That way he can just skip the middleman and get his droid Army and a mission to execute with it.

If you're not building a campaign around doing this sort of thing, it doesn't matter if he can get everything at half cost, he will never have the time and resources to actually do it.

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Also if it does I’m concidering being the one who decides what the advantage are spent on because it’s the droids making it not him. And since he isn’t watching it and it’s gonna be pit droids working, so up yours game mechanics, I thought that would be a reasonable trade off.

I'd have to track it down, but I believe in cases like this the book says you don't roll and to assume the contracted party succeeds with a single success.

Droids making Droids?! How perverse!

19 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

If you're not building a campaign around doing this sort of thing, it doesn't matter if he can get everything at half cost, he will never have the time and resources to actually do it.

Key point. Unless you are running a completely open game, the question "so, what do you guys wanna do?" should never come up. The PCs should have options, but they should be focussed on the problem at hand or problems related to the campaign.

If the player wants some kind of tangible benefit for his talent purchase, and you don't want to micro-manage the credits, you could offer something like the homestead rules from Far Horizons. A basic homestead means incidental costs for the party (food, clothing, reasonable fuel and repair costs, and maybe blaster charges) are covered. The rest is still going to be eaten up by production costs, security, management, etc.

Well you could allow it and then have original Droids roll a mechanics check to begin the production (without the player knowing of course). Then you can use Threats and Despairs that you roll to insert your own Order 66 command to have the droid army turn on him at the most (in)opportune moment.

On 6/24/2019 at 4:53 PM, Aries50 said:

So I have a player that is looking to pick up droid tech to build himself an army of droids. He pointed out that deft maker only reduces the amount of materials you need to buy.

I have a player like this, he'd love nothing more than to tell the story of how he rose from a lowly knight to taking over a country, all by micromanaging his finances, clever spending on manors and keeps, hiring underlings who he uses to conquer the neighbouring barons, counts, and dukes, until all submit and call him king. Basically, his dream is to play Civilization in RPG form.

Yeah, right. Super boring for everyone else. I f the player wants to get into that kind of thing and somehow hijacks the campaign, you can bring to bear all the Real World considerations that might also apply. For example: the local economy might not have the supply of materials he needs, and importing jacks up the cost again; the locals might not want a factory where he wants it; the authorities might wonder why he's not selling all those droids and why he's importing so many blasters; the competition might wonder how he's doing things so cheaply and try to steal the tech...there are endless reasonable ways to dissuade him from pursuing it if things get out of hand.

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

Key point. Unless you are running a completely open game, the question "so, what do you guys wanna do?" should never come up. The PCs should have options, but they should be focussed on the problem at hand or problems related to the campaign.

If the player wants some kind of tangible benefit for his talent purchase, and you don't want to micro-manage the credits, you could offer something like the homestead rules from Far Horizons. A basic homestead means incidental costs for the party (food, clothing, reasonable fuel and repair costs, and maybe blaster charges) are covered. The rest is still going to be eaten up by production costs, security, management, etc.

The business rules might work a smidge better, as the business could be a droid factory. That would cover the intent 100%, though I suspect getting the licenses to produce combat droids would require the upgrade (and some ADVENTURE!)

23 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

So the thing with the construction rules is that they are not intended for mass production of goods, but instead one-off items that are individually made. So at the point that it's the droid minion group doing the building and not the PC, then the construction rules don't apply, especially if they're doing it assembly line style where each droid that rolls off is pretty much identical to the ones that came before and will come after.

On the other hand, I would let the player do this. Set up the self replicating droids, turn the conveyor belt on, walk away for X Weeks while they go out on missions. When they come back with $ in their eyes, they find an army of droids that have cast off the shackles of their master and have "expanded" beyond their original mandate.

Good job breaking it hero. You just invented Skynet.

59 minutes ago, Desslok said:

On the other hand, I would let the player do this. Set up the self replicating droids, turn the conveyor belt on, walk away for X Weeks while they go out on missions. When they come back with $ in their eyes, they find an army of droids that have cast off the shackles of their master and have "expanded" beyond their original mandate.

Good job breaking it hero. You just invented Skynet.

That's outside the general scope of the construction rules, and that last bit is essentially screwing over the player largely for the sake of screwing over the player, which is rarely (if ever) a good idea, baring the goal of wanting to get rid of a problem player, but that itself can lead to issues as you've set a precedent to the other players that you may well be willing to do the same to them (take an in-character objective and then maliciously twist it to knife them in the back), and that itself isn't conducive to a long-term happy gaming group.

Or a plot point to see if they can reset their programming without destroying them and save their investment.

I think the homesteading rules work best here and I would have the player make mechanics/computer checks to ensure things are in production.

Accidents will happen to those droids I'm sure. You could have fun giving them weird personality quirks.

On 6/25/2019 at 1:03 PM, HappyDaze said:

That's not mud... it's poo. The crafting rules, whether for droids or otherwise (but especially for starships) are utter garbage.

The starship crafting rules have some really gems of ideas but like so many ships that were rushed into production, they have serious issues. Shortly after fully operational dropped I started working on the minimum neccessary departure from RAW starship crafting to reproduce 95% of ships with a 95% quality match. Here's the current draft