Hi, one of my players is a non-combat droid, who recently developed a restrainingoboltophobia. Is there a way of making a droid resistant to that device? Wookipedia tells that Whistler and another droid were able to do that, but have you encountered anything like that in other edition books?

What would be estimated cost?

Increasing the Discipline skill gives some ability to overcome the restraining bolt. Beyond that, the Bad Motivator talent can be used to cause a restraining bolt to spontaneously fail.

Also the FFG staff has suggested in one of the interviews on the Order 66 Podcast that gamer character-droids in contrary to the npc droids always should have a (daunting discipline check) chance to neglect the effect of a restraining bolt. Edit: This actually is a rule of the game (SW EotE core pg 178).

Else I would suggest that anyone else but the gamer-droid could be able to deactivate or even destroy the restraining-bolt on the hard- and/or software-level - if necessary with a more challenging skilltest. Since standard restraining-bolts produced by 'the billions by companies' seem to be very common and cheap, though, it should not be to much of an burden. Exceptions would non-standard restraining bolts. (paragraph edited)

Lacking the deeper knowledge of the game: how does a droid evolbe a phobia, and in addition to that a phobia against this one specific item which would be considered the typical standard threat for droids?

Best wishes!

Mad

My advice to such a player is wear a really obvious one, that doesn't work.

After all there is no point on putting a restraining bolt on droid which already clearly has one.

Great suggestions, thanks!

The -player - developed the phobia

The player developed a phobia of restraining bolts?

Or the player developed the fact that his character has such a phobia?

If there was a device that could be applied to me that restrained me from doing anything I wanted, I would be paranoid of it also. What a minute, I think my wife fits that criteria*. I should start calling her my Restraining Bolt?

*There is 0 chance she will visit this forum so I can safely say such things.

Hmm, might be on to something there Sturn... *looks over shoulder quickly* Must type fast while our evil overlords are not watching!

My group ran into a similar issue as this before. Ran the droid revolution adventure supplied with the GM screen (totally worth it BTW, the Screen not the adventure). Ton of droids being controlled via restraining bolts. My players eventually started doing called shots on the restraining bolts which went hilariously bad. They did capture a few droids and wanted to remove the original restraining bolts and place new ones on them and we wondered if it was as simple as just slapping it on or not.

I didn`t see any time reference for it but I did some digging and apparently restraining bolts are hard wired into the droid's motivators. That means that you have to have full access to the droid and be able to operate on them. I ruled that as long as the droid was concious and not fully restrained they could not install a restraining bolt. Even then it would take several minutes and a successful mechanics check. This seemed to sort it out. I could never remember an instance in movies or books I read where someone just bypassed droids by slapping a restraining bolt on them as they ran past. Maybe if i was feeling really generous I`d let the mechanic spot an old restraining bolt spot that still has the connections just not the external gear. Make him spend a triumph to notice it.

So if you`re player in becoming parinoid just tell him not to get captured or KO'd and it won't happen. Also, tell him to be nice to the other players before they decided that it's time to control their uppity droid. >

If there was a device that could be applied to me that restrained me from doing anything I wanted, I would be paranoid of it also. What a minute, I think my wife fits that criteria*. I should start calling her my Restraining Bolt?

*There is 0 chance she will visit this forum so I can safely say such things.

No one mentioned the Emperor's wife. They were all too afraid.

"Palpatine! You get back here right now and clean the senate!"

"Do you have any idea what replacing the Death Star will cost?!? Or what it will do to our budget!"

"I don't care! What the heck do a bunch of teenagers and an Aluminum Falcon have to do with blowing all that cash!?!"

"Palpatine!"

re: applying and removing restraining bolts. A jawa took a few seconds to spot-weld a bolt onto R2 in epp IV, and only a short time later Luke used something like a screw-driver to lever it off in only slightly longer time. So I would say that they can be applied and removed pretty quickly, but maybe the placement of them needs to be fairly precise. Kinda like using restraints on meat-bags.

Yep, you don't need to open the droid to get it into the circuitry. More like putting something over the heart of a person to zap the heart. It probably has some kind of microcircuitry that pushes through the body of the droid once it is attached to allow it to mess with the droids motivator circuitry so that a user can remotely disable the droid or make it do something else, like come out of hiding.

re: applying and removing restraining bolts. A jawa took a few seconds to spot-weld a bolt onto R2 in epp IV, and only a short time later Luke used something like a screw-driver to lever it off in only slightly longer time. So I would say that they can be applied and removed pretty quickly, but maybe the placement of them needs to be fairly precise. Kinda like using restraints on meat-bags.

So in any case the character has to be KO'd or atleast unable to resist and the restraining bolt would have to have someone with mechanical inclinations to install it. Taking it off would be significantly easier. Probably wouldn`t even be a check to remove it. I`d still say it takes 1-3 rounds (minutes) to install. Reduced for additional successes of course. Who knows, maybe the Jawa had a good day and rolled a triumph finding the previous spot someone had already placed a restraining bolt on R2-D2.