Droids are fixed with Mechanics rather than Medicine. Medicine has Surgeon to improve how many Wounds are regained, but there doesn't appear to a direct parallel for Mechanics aside from Solid Repairs which by RAW is limited to fixing vehicles. Would it be reasonable for Solid Repairs to fix additional Wounds on Droid characters in the same way as Surgeon is used for biological characters?
Can Solid Repairs be used to fix Droids?
I would probably say yes, but maybe not categorically. Hear me out:
First of all, like you said, RAW states that Solid Repairs only applies to vehicles and starships. Fair enough. However, if your group includes a PC droid you could always allow it to apply to droids as well. In all honesty, if one of my players was a droid and another was a Mechanic with the Solid Repair talent I would probably allow it if he asked.
But the thing that occurred to me was that FFG might very well include a Surgeon-like talent for droid "first aid" in future supplements. Just like Explorers will get three new specializations in Into the Unknown, Technicians might get some more when their supplement comes out. Now, I know I'm slightly OCD about this sort of thing, but I hate making house rules that later turn out to contradict official rules. So unless this is urgent, you may want to hold off allowing it until we know more - EotE is a fairly young system, after all.
Per RAW, it wouldn't, since Solid Repairs cites vehicles and starships as the only viable recipients of the talent's benefit.
That being said, I don't see it as a game-breaking house rule to include droids as being a viable recipient of the extra damage repaired. However, do bear in mind that unlike Medicine checks to help an ally recover Wounds, there really isn't a restriction on when you can make Mechanics checks to repair a droid, so it's quite possible that a Droid PC being attended to by the party mechanic (who has a rank or two of Solid Repairs) will be back on their feet that much faster, as there's no "once per encounter" restriction that the meatbag PCs have to worry about.
Per RAW, it wouldn't, since Solid Repairs cites vehicles and starships as the only viable recipients of the talent's benefit.
That being said, I don't see it as a game-breaking house rule to include droids as being a viable recipient of the extra damage repaired. However, do bear in mind that unlike Medicine checks to help an ally recover Wounds, there really isn't a restriction on when you can make Mechanics checks to repair a droid, so it's quite possible that a Droid PC being attended to by the party mechanic (who has a rank or two of Solid Repairs) will be back on their feet that much faster, as there's no "once per encounter" restriction that the meatbag PCs have to worry about.
I would say no based on what Donovan mentioned. It seems like there is no restrictions on droid repairing like medicine.
I would love to see a Fantastic Technology supplement, in the vein of Into the Unknown but but for Technicians, with a big focus on equipment, weapon/armor, mods of all kinds, droids, etc. Specializations could include Droid mechanic, Starship engineer, data analyst, or the like. Just more variety of career skills options and talents to improve/construct other types of tech, like droids.
Maybe if I say all that in the mirror three times on Halloween Fantasy Flight will publish it.
Donovan, that is a very interesting point. I play a droid character, hoping to be the party tank, but was disappointed in the methods available to droids to heal. The oil bath, while healing wounds quicker, doesn't address critical injuries, which makes taking care of those exceedingly difficult. My dm rules that each critical injury can only be attempted to be healed once per a week, where I think the raw here is pg. 219 "A character may also attempt to help someone recover from a Critical Injury by making a Medicine check... ... A character may attempt one Medicine check per week per Critical Injury." Character here, imo, refers to the healer, not the person with the critical injury, hence if your first healer fails, you should be able to seek a second opinion if you will, but I'm not sure who is right here. We resolved this by simply houseruling oil baths to act identically to bacta tanks. In addition, medpacs generating a free stimpack each encounter seems like a really strong advantage, so I asked if my toolkit could generate an emergency repair patch each encounter, and he allowed that.
Your suggestion that Droids don't have the 1/encounter limitation seems to get around alot of my issues with Droid healing difficulty. Does this also apply to Critical Injuries in your opinion? Also, could you cite a page number for why you feel the game works this way? I'm not saying your wrong, just in my reading of the book, all I've come up with is pg. 220 "Droids cannot benefit from medical care. However, they do receive the same benefits from Mechanics checks based on the same guidelines and difficulty ratings as their Medicine-based equivalents. All of the guidelines and rules governing Medicine checks also govern Mechanics checks to heal droids , with the exception that a droid using Mechanics to heal himself only increases the difficulty by one, rather than two." (bolded emphasis mine). This to me seems to support Droids being limited to 1/encounter healing. Let me know your thoughts, I hope it works the way you think, I just want more proof to show my dm. Cheers.
IMHO, yes there is no logical reason to restrict repairing droids at all. I mean if my computers hard drive and GPU goes out I don't wait a week between replacing each part. I just put the time in to do all the repairs.
As a GM each check would take a significant amount of time depending on the injury. Maybe, 1-2 hours per check. This limits the repairs able to be done depending on time limits of the adventure, plus costs could be involved. I.e. it would take 6 hours to repair that critical injury or 1 hour and 5,000 credits to replace the part.
Just some thoughts.
I actually came to the same conclusion as Donovan and archon007. I'm not sure if I'd call this a house rule or an inference based on RAW, but here's how I'd pitch it to your GM:
Since droid "healing" falls under the Mechanics skill, rather than Medicine, that puts them in the same category as damaged vehicles and broken gear. When repairing vehicles and gear, a mechanic can make as many repair attempts as she wants, provided she has the time, tools, and parts to do so. That leads me to believe the same is true for droids. As long as your mechanic has the time and resources to patch you up, I don't see why she couldn't. Maybe it requires a toolkit, 100-2000 credits worth of spare parts, and 30 minutes to 4 hours of her time. As long as those requirements are met, I don't see why a droid would be subject to the 7-day cool down the way an organic would.
Repairing ships and droids was a regular down-time activity in the films. It would just seem odd that your droid might have his head and limbs blown off by storm troopers and the group's mechanic could only make one attempt per week to reassemble him.
My only thought is that there may be a future talent that deals with this very thing.
Hey Doc, love your talent trees, but could you fix the spelling in Street Smarts? You have Knoeledge (Underworld). i didn;t see a PM option.
Hey Doc, love your talent trees, but could you fix the spelling in Street Smarts? You have Knoeledge (Underworld). i didn;t see a PM option.
You have to click on their name then select message. I messaged him for you, us. Good catch.
Edited by archon007Hey Doc, love your talent trees, but could you fix the spelling in Street Smarts? You have Knoeledge (Underworld). i didn;t see a PM option.
Got the message. Thanks for the catch.