I had a party run through Long Arm of the Hutt and my Technician would like to assemble the droid parts found in the cargo hold of the Krayt Fang to make an astromech droid. I know the text says that the characters shouldn't have the resources to do this, but my player is insistent.

For now I'm allowing him a hard mechanics check every 3 hours representing 3 hours of dedicated work to make or hinder progress on the droid. How many hours of successful laboring should it take to put together an astromech droid? Or should I put different rules into place? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

If the source material says it shouldn't happen, I would have made it a formidable mechanics check. And I would say for time needed to assemble a complete droid from strewn about, random, mismatched parts would have to be anywhere in the vicinity of at least 24 hours

I know the text says that the characters shouldn't have the resources to do this, but my player is insistent.

Without the resources I'd say he needs to flip one if not two Destiny Points to have enough parts, then serparately throw something like a Daunting/Formidable/Impossible (I forget the order) Mechanics check at him.

Also just because a player wants something doesn't make it your job to give it to him at the drop of a hat. Maybe the next session you run has an astromech around someplace if the group happens to come across it. Or he spends a few sessions collecting parts from other places before he has enough to homebrew his droid. Maybe he can buy one and modify it to his liking.

You're talking about a droid capable of calculating hyperspace routes. You can't slap together some rusty durasteel and a fried motherboard, throw some paint on it, and call it R3-D3. You have to provide a universe where there are limits. Otherwise your players are doing the impossible on a regular basis and it will get stale.

I took this a different route and let them put the old R5 together - Mathus is an expert droid mechanic after all, right?

Turns out the droid has a long history, doesn't like the meatbags that it works for, and now that it has a gun, maybe it'll collect on their bounties?

"Yes, but..." is a more powerful GM tool than "No." Your story trumps anything written, and I can assure you, even my devious astromech NPC has not caused much of a stir with the ongoing story, it's only been a boon.

There's a big difference between "repair a previously-functional droid that is blown to bits" and "build a whole new droid from spare parts, including its sentient processing core ." The latter, I would say is flat-out impossible, the players simply don't have the industrial support let alone the sophisticated engineering know-how to build a real astromech droid brain from scratch. Even if they could I think it would take months. That's why that technology is proprietary and expensive, and why there is a solid market in astromechs from major droid industries. I think the former is very doable, if difficult - we see 3PO being reassembled by Chewbacca and also by Anakin, that's mainly what I'm thinking of.

According to the adventure, if the PC passes a mechanics check they are able to discern that the droid parts in the cargo hold can be assembled into an astromech droid though it would be a long arduous process. It goes on to say that the expertise and equipment are not available to the PCs at the moment, but could be a future project.

This seems to end a little vaguely with: could be a future project, but offers no insight into what expertise and equipment would be needed. As GM I'd rather tell my player yes than no. Who wouldn't want to test their mechanics mettle in the given situation? Why mention it in the story at all if you're not going to allow it do be done? However, I also don't want my party to have an army of droids at their disposal. So, given all of the feedback (thanks to all that replied by the way) I will be allowing the "repair" not, "construction of" the astromech droid. I will be upgrading the difficulty of the checks and increasing the number of hours to complete said droid, unless a set of schematics shows up on the market somewhere. Maybe someone will want to trade for some of these Wookiee pelts

At the suggestion of themensch I will certainly be using the little droid as a plot hook!

I would say they need to seek out someone who is in the astromech industry. A current or former engineer or technician who has firsthand experience of industrial droid production. Might need a more comprehensive, precise workshop than can be carried on a freighter or even a typical capital ship.

Like themensch, I'm more of a "yes, but. . ." type of GM. My players have recently asked about how to take care of things like scrounging (our Techie is a Jawa with two ranks of Utinni! already), repairing "destroyed" things (i.e. scavenging a battlefield), or building objects from parts.

In response, this is my approach:

Step 1: "Gathering materials"

Rules-wise, this like buying the object in question: find it's rarity and roll the related skill to get it. My thoughts were Perception for finding it or parts in a junkpile, Negotiation to buy individual parts, Underworld to get more "restricted" materials, Mechanics for taking some scrap and making due with it, etc.

Note that I'm not going to let the party walk away with a 5k droid for no cost without some effort here. I set the difficulties of the above based on what they are trying to pay; the less they want to pay, the harder the rolls. I normally add setbacks for general difficulty to find the items in the area (like a working droid brain in a scrapyard) or if they are trying to pay less than retail, and upgrade the difficulty if the item in question is Restricted or if they are trying to cut the costs in half or less.

Essentially, if they are paying "full price" for an item (but don't want to make it clear that they are getting said item, like a Disruptor Rifle), they just roll as though they were buying it and pay an amount equal to the item in question. If they wanted to scrounge up the parts and only pay half, there's a die upgrade waiting for them.

If the item is already mostly done, like a droid they scavenged (as in your example), I apply a discount to the cost to denote that they are only buying parts. In your case, I'd make them pay about 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of an astromech to buy the missing parts.

Step 2: Building.
If the party is trying to engineer something from scrap (i.e. paying little), or they bought all the parts and want to build it, I just use the rules for repairing weapons that we see on page 159. I set the difficulty at Major (3 dice) when building from the ground up, and Moderate (2 dice) when there's something to work with already. Any previous upgrades get factored in.

Time is really just a matter of what the object is. Smaller things, like blasters, take anywhere from an hour to an afternoon. Droids can take a day to a week. Vehicles can take days (for smaller things, like speeder bikes) to about a month (for a major speeder; longer for something huge). Ships can take as little as a week (the shell is there, you just need to install the parts) to years (if you are literally putting together scrap to make a spaceworthy hull).

I'll openly say I put this idea together while watching an episode of Firefly. "Ariel," to be exact and if anyone is familiar with it. For those who don't know, the crew is trying to break into a hospital, but they need an ambulance airspeeder to appear legitimate. They find the hull, engines, and the rest of the equipment in a scrapyard, repair it and get it working in a day or two. Granted, they didn't keep it longer than the job, but as Firefly is such a great inspiration for Edge of the Empire, I thought it was worth emulating.

Rules-wise, this like buying the object in question: find it's rarity and roll the related skill to get it. My thoughts were Perception for finding it or parts in a junkpile, Negotiation to buy individual parts, Underworld to get more "restricted" materials, Mechanics for taking some scrap and making due with it, etc.

Brilliant idea, I'm stealing it!

Personally I'd make it a Complex check.

• Decide on how long something like this would take and how much it would cost. Lets say with concentrated work and no interuptions it could take 10 days and cost 15000 cr. If it is done as an after-school project I would bump it to 10 weeks..
• Then break that down into so many skill checks. But there has to be a downside too. So you must successfully complete 10 Mechanics checks before 4 failures. If you hit the failures before the successes then you materials and costs are lost and must start again.
• Each check is made after the alotted time and costs 1/10 of the total cost.
• Success means you move on. A Triumph means your costs or time may be reduced to zero.
• Failure means you lose the time, but not the costs. Despair means you lose the costs and time.
• If you make 10 successful checks before 3 failures, you complete the project.

Complex checks aren't in the game but would be easy enough to inplement.

Personally I'd make it a Complex check.

• Decide on how long something like this would take and how much it would cost. Lets say with concentrated work and no interuptions it could take 10 days and cost 15000 cr. If it is done as an after-school project I would bump it to 10 weeks..
• Then break that down into so many skill checks. But there has to be a downside too. So you must successfully complete 10 Mechanics checks before 4 failures. If you hit the failures before the successes then you materials and costs are lost and must start again.
• Each check is made after the alotted time and costs 1/10 of the total cost.
• Success means you move on. A Triumph means your costs or time may be reduced to zero.
• Failure means you lose the time, but not the costs. Despair means you lose the costs and time.
• If you make 10 successful checks before 3 failures, you complete the project.

Complex checks aren't in the game but would be easy enough to inplement.

My only concern here is the number crunch. It's pretty much a rehash of what we've seen in the d20 edition, and a lot of players will then decide that it's better and easier to get new gear by crafting it in hyperspace than it is to buy it. My experience has taught me that even the best of players will get dragged into this arms race because they must in order to keep up with the rest of the group.

This also becomes a big time sink at the table as everyone is going back and forth regarding who is building what, doing the calculations regarding the amount of progress, how many credits have been sunk into it, and how long they want to slow down their trip in order to have a mess of Thermal Detonators inside of an Astromech droid. . .

Anyway, the system as it stands is already more narrative than crunch. Adding complex rules takes away from narrative and promotes crunch and excessive and unneeded math. Just my two cents.

Personally I'd make it a Complex check.

• Decide on how long something like this would take and how much it would cost. Lets say with concentrated work and no interuptions it could take 10 days and cost 15000 cr. If it is done as an after-school project I would bump it to 10 weeks..
• Then break that down into so many skill checks. But there has to be a downside too. So you must successfully complete 10 Mechanics checks before 4 failures. If you hit the failures before the successes then you materials and costs are lost and must start again.
• Each check is made after the alotted time and costs 1/10 of the total cost.
• Success means you move on. A Triumph means your costs or time may be reduced to zero.
• Failure means you lose the time, but not the costs. Despair means you lose the costs and time.
• If you make 10 successful checks before 3 failures, you complete the project.

Complex checks aren't in the game but would be easy enough to inplement.

I signed up to play Star Wars, not Crafting Simulation ABY

I'm all for making it a single one&done check. Set the difficulty and cost to something appropriate, roll it, and move on. If you think it should be more complex, then make the complexity more than rolling dice. They need to go on some adventure to get this particular part or something. I'm thinking like the bit from KOTOR and SWTOR where you have to gather all the pieces to assemble HK. Take what could be a tedious crafting session and turn it into an adventure spanning across the galaxy. Hell, maybe you run it as optional side missions in your main campaign. If the group took the time to save the prisoners, maybe they also find "Part 1 of 12" in the Astromech Assembly Quest that spans over a few dozen sessions and has some wicked climax as the droid comes to life as a badass Nemesis on the ship. Suddenly their safe haven is set ablaze as the droid produces a flame projector from who knows where (you sure didn't install one) and starts blasting everything in sight.

That'd be awesome.

Then in subduing him, you bust up his weaponry and the mechanic has to install some new (non-combat) software and strip out all the big weapons. The group ends up with an NPC droid who can fire a pistol. Nothing major, but a cool story with a nice little bonus payoff.

Personally I'd make it a Complex check.

• Decide on how long something like this would take and how much it would cost. Lets say with concentrated work and no interuptions it could take 10 days and cost 15000 cr. If it is done as an after-school project I would bump it to 10 weeks..
• Then break that down into so many skill checks. But there has to be a downside too. So you must successfully complete 10 Mechanics checks before 4 failures. If you hit the failures before the successes then you materials and costs are lost and must start again.
• Each check is made after the alotted time and costs 1/10 of the total cost.
• Success means you move on. A Triumph means your costs or time may be reduced to zero.
• Failure means you lose the time, but not the costs. Despair means you lose the costs and time.
• If you make 10 successful checks before 3 failures, you complete the project.

Complex checks aren't in the game but would be easy enough to inplement.

I signed up to play Star Wars, not Crafting Simulation ABY

I'm all for making it a single one&done check. Set the difficulty and cost to something appropriate, roll it, and move on. If you think it should be more complex, then make the complexity more than rolling dice. They need to go on some adventure to get this particular part or something. I'm thinking like the bit from KOTOR and SWTOR where you have to gather all the pieces to assemble HK. Take what could be a tedious crafting session and turn it into an adventure spanning across the galaxy. Hell, maybe you run it as optional side missions in your main campaign. If the group took the time to save the prisoners, maybe they also find "Part 1 of 12" in the Astromech Assembly Quest that spans over a few dozen sessions and has some wicked climax as the droid comes to life as a badass Nemesis on the ship. Suddenly their safe haven is set ablaze as the droid produces a flame projector from who knows where (you sure didn't install one) and starts blasting everything in sight.

That'd be awesome.

Then in subduing him, you bust up his weaponry and the mechanic has to install some new (non-combat) software and strip out all the big weapons. The group ends up with an NPC droid who can fire a pistol. Nothing major, but a cool story with a nice little bonus payoff.

This is pretty much how I was planning on handling crafting lightsabers and/or other exotic weapons and armor for my party. Considering, of five players, three have claimed they are Force Sensitive, one is not, and the last is on the fence (my wife, whom I dragged into the Star Wars fandom kicking and screaming until she realized who Mara Jade was and that she could play a Jawa in the games), I KNOW a lightsaber is going to come up eventually, and not all of the parts are easy to find.

The same is true for certain types of droids; making the group go through all the work for the parts only to destroy a "last-in-existence" part due to a single bad roll out of twenty of them is just bad form in my opinion.

Besides, the one-time roll is REALLY good when someone wants to MacGuyver a weapon out of whatever is in the shed with them. . .

I would decide narratively how long you want it take and how difficult you want it to be to reconstruct the droid. If it is I possible, don't bother with dice rolls etc, just tell the players that they work at it for a while and then realize it is pointless.

If it is certain that they will be able to do it, again don't bother rolling, just tell them how long it takes and how much they spend on parts.

If it is uncertain but possible, then have them roll. The difficulty of the roll and the degree of success can determine how long it takes and how good a job they do.

I would only allow the players to assemble the basic droid for free from the parts available. If they want additional capabilities, weapons, accessories, etc, I would require that they purchase at least some extra components.

Our recovered astromech droid in parts has been under construction for the last three game sessions (we do 8-10hr sessions). With the expectation in another one or two, the little guy ("Red" as we've already started calling him) will be up and running around. We've been having our mechanic roll out a single difficult mechanics check each session. Success was, well, success, while each failure or threat cost us time/money in parts (100c and 20c respectivly, IIRC). At the end we'll have a basic droid, which is really all we're looking for, who will become another background NPC for our crew (we already have three others).

In terms of game mechanics, it's not actualy worth much to us (we have a very big party with all particulars covered) so he's little more than a blue 'assist' die running around.

Our mechanic rebuilt our Slicer droid in 2 days. I didn't even bother having him role... What am I gonna say to the other player... "Sorry, you need a character that wasn't all blowed up."

It was our Pit Droid Thief that did this. The green bugs were picking on his metal, an he figured he was in mortal danger. So he backed up his personality, took a grenade and dived into Besh 34 (an escape pod) and blew up.

I was just laughing so hard that he'd even do it. (Air lock, vacuum pump, living things die.)

One of his disguises is an Astromech Droid which he rides around in. He kinda reaches out and plugs into stuff to Slice, but otherwise, it's like a little car. If he gets into a fight he gives himself away.

If it suits your story, allow it. Beware abuse... "Like I got a free droid, and now I'm gonna make more." Also remember that droids are expensive, and you are giving the players a considerable amount of unearned money.

Also remember that there may be a reason the droid was disassembled in the first place. It could be a crazy killer... "You shall burn forever in the pit of doom!" "Ahem... Sorry. I meant ask if you'd like salt with that."

Yeah I think that was the right call for a PC droid. Or just have downtime between sessions that might represent a couple weeks of low level activity or whatever while you get repaired.

Let me pose another question since this seems to be a suitable thread for it: I'm channeling SWTOR and was wondering if there is any place in EotE for reverse engineering technology to build a set of schematics to sell. There are so many narrative uses for something like this. I could probably write a whole campaign based on stealing or gathering technology from somewhere and selling it to the highest bidder, or bringing technology to a lower tech world. So I guess my questions are, what kind of things could be reverse engineered? What talents or checks would you use to make schematics from a piece of equipment? How long should it take?

Let me pose another question since this seems to be a suitable thread for it: I'm channeling SWTOR and was wondering if there is any place in EotE for reverse engineering technology to build a set of schematics to sell. There are so many narrative uses for something like this. I could probably write a whole campaign based on stealing or gathering technology from somewhere and selling it to the highest bidder, or bringing technology to a lower tech world. So I guess my questions are, what kind of things could be reverse engineered? What talents or checks would you use to make schematics from a piece of equipment? How long should it take?

Knowledge Education, Mechanics, and Computers sound like good skills to start with depending on the technology in question. How long should it take? Well that too depends on the tech. If I was going for some sense of realism, for reverse engineering an advanced prototype hyperdrive? I say 3 months with advantages used to reduce the amount of time. If I didn't care about being realistic, then maybe a few weeks down to a few days.

For me, i take it similar to finding the Chassis of a car, and a bunch of parts around. Obviously a quick inventory will find there is no engine, numerous other parts are broken cobbled togehter, or not even the right one, it needs new tires, and the upholstery is trashed.

For the droid some key parts are missing, a processing core, bad motivator, the power cell is bad, and you have some parts from Power droid you have no clue on how to use. Not to mention the oute rcasing looks like it was pulled out of a trash compactor.

Good luck!

The text in the module makes in pretty clear that all the parts are there, "... a skilled mechanic could construct an operational astromech unit from the available parts,... the time, expertise, and equipment are not readily available." Time refers to the fact that Teemo's goons are breathing down your neck, expertise because you're starting level adventurers (unless of course you have guy whose background is a droid mechanic, GM fiat gogo), and equipment probably refers to the fact that assembling and booting up a droid will take specialized diagnostic gear and other tools that are droid specific.

My Outlaw Tech in my game simply repurposed the hand scanner found in the engine room, and jury rigged (not the talent) the datapad to form the tools during the hyperspace jump from Ryloth to Geonosis. He failed his first Mechanics test to build the little guy but netted 4 Advantage so i ruled he simply got all the parts lined up and put in order for his next attempt. After he succeeds he'll have to make a hard computers check to boot up the little guy and away we go.