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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Dean wrote:Not a single thing he said was correct but if any actual person got confused about any part of the rules feel free to ask.
I've been poring over the Saga edition core book to do a full review on it in the style of my old D20modern "no, all these classes are crap" review back in the day.

The book is motherfucking bat shit. Some of the stuff I've seen, is just WOW bad, and I'm only half way through. But running through the "storm troopers will kill you without Evasion" claim in detail basically just required reading the storm trooper section and the CL rules (and WOW are the CL rules bad/incomplete/bad again) as I had already run through the Combat section, and BOY is that section bad.

Now you can go and say "It's all lies and inaccuracies! Trust me!" but that's just basic math based on the rules as written they are sometimes, and indeed FREQUENTLY written in bad, vague or contradictory ways, but that IS how they are written. And I'd lay a bet that basically everything you think I am wrong on are basically just bits you house rule or fill with mind caulk to try and have make any fucking sense (which the rules frequently do not).
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Post by MGuy »

Ido have a question. I ran Star Wars Saga back when it first came out and I wasn't very impressed so I have refused to run it since. I'm not exactly enthused with the implication that the only way to run it in an enjoyable way is to splurge on a bunch of the books and having to learn to optimize 'the right way' in order to have any fun with it. That seems like a lot of investment just to make the game functional at all. So the question is, does the game function decently with only moderate optimization? Could I run the game off of 3 or four books (thinking core rule book, starships, villains and clone wars)?
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Post by Concise Locket »

MGuy wrote:So the question is, does the game function decently with only moderate optimization? Could I run the game off of 3 or four books (thinking core rule book, starships, villains and clone wars)?
No, not really. I found the sourcebooks only amplified the core book's issues.
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Post by Korwin »

MGuy wrote:Ido have a question. I ran Star Wars Saga back when it first came out and I wasn't very impressed so I have refused to run it since. I'm not exactly enthused with the implication that the only way to run it in an enjoyable way is to splurge on a bunch of the books and having to learn to optimize 'the right way' in order to have any fun with it. That seems like a lot of investment just to make the game functional at all. So the question is, does the game function decently with only moderate optimization? Could I run the game off of 3 or four books (thinking core rule book, starships, villains and clone wars)?
Maybe?
Not shure what you did not like with the the core book, so no glue if it would be better with more books.

Starship of the Galaxy only helps you, if you wanted more Options for starship combat and/or more vehicles.
Scums and Villainy if you want Equipment modification in an Fantasy scifi.
Not shure why clone wars is on your list. You want to Play in that specific time Frame?

There was also an Droid book, but I think that one was bad?
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Post by Dean »

MGuy wrote:Ido have a question. I ran Star Wars Saga back when it first came out and I wasn't very impressed so I have refused to run it since. I'm not exactly enthused with the implication that the only way to run it in an enjoyable way is to splurge on a bunch of the books and having to learn to optimize 'the right way' in order to have any fun with it. That seems like a lot of investment just to make the game functional at all. So the question is, does the game function decently with only moderate optimization? Could I run the game off of 3 or four books (thinking core rule book, starships, villains and clone wars)?
4 is the minimum amount of books the system would need to start to feel fun which would be Core, Scum and Villainy, KOTOR, and Threats of the Galaxy which is Saga's Monster Manual. That would let you play the game at about 80% of maximum entertainment value. If your players really wanted to have deep rules for spaceships then Starships would be a good addition to that list. It's relevant to mention that in the modern day every Saga rulebook can be downloaded online for free in about 20 minutes. It wasn't a hugely successful system and it's 7 years old. I don't even know where you would buy these books if you wanted to.

Your question about optimization levels is harder to answer. First learning to optimize the "right way" for the system isn't a Saga specific thing. Any system requires learning it's specific methods of optimization. If you want to play at a high power level you have to learn what's powerful in that given system and each system will have unique answers as to what's good and what's terrible.

To answer your question I think things would still be fun given "moderate" optimization but I don't really know what that means. Nothing I ever built in Saga was the Wish and the Word. They were just powerful characters built to the rules then modified as I found answers to various "broken" things in the rules like CTK'ing or mass AOE attacks. I don't consider myself an optimization genius so I think any reasonably intelligent person could make characters in Saga that could eventually perform at the Starfighter/Tank/Rancor level that makes you feel like a real badass and is a lot of fun.
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Post by MGuy »

@Korwin: The core just wasn't interesting. I can't really remember the specifics because it was a long time ago I even tried to run it and I have not looked at it since. I just remember it being boring, the options just were not interesting.

@Dean: Moderate optimization would be not having to dumpster dive through a bunch of books in order to make a character that can even function (which is why I asked if I could get by with fewer books). Your speech about the game makes it seem like the only way to get a decent experience out of it was to have a bunch of books and go with one of the few builds you've listed (Not counting 'be a jedi').
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Post by Dean »

Basically you're asking if Saga is a game you can play Core only and have a good time and the answer to that is no. It's functional but boring and the entertaining bits come from sourcebooks so if you don't want to use sourcebooks you'll have a less good time relative to how many less sourcebooks you use which is why my original claim is
I wrote:If you start up a Saga game with every rulebook allowed and nothing banned you will absolutely have a great time.
I'm saying it's a great time with lots of sourcebooks and a bad time without them. You're asking how many sourcebooks would equal a decent experience and that's probably a season-to-taste scenario. The game is really cool with lots of sourcebooks, really lame with no sourcebooks. If you want to pick a spot in the middle and play there I don't see why you couldn't if that's what makes you happy. Both of the games I played had 1 player who was operating only at a mild level of optimization and they were still having fun but that doesn't really say anything about the rules other than that they don't make you actively angry to use like 4E or Call of Cthulhu.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Concise Locket wrote:No, not really. I found the sourcebooks only amplified the core book's issues.
Pretty typical for a d20modern successor. Or indeed RPG games in general.

Having a look at Starships Of The Galaxy right now to check out Dean's claims about it...

...and it is terrible. It does NOT rewrite the base flawed starship rules. It does not correct some of the most glaring bugs in those rules or clarify some of the glaring "WTF?" miswordings or contradictions in those base rules.

It does go over the base talents of the game, mostly to stamp a bunch with "NOT IN STARSHIP COMBAT" thus creating a greater split between minigame dominance/uselessness when it SHOULD have been doing the opposite.

It adds in some more starship specific talents... which are largely the same incremental sometimes outright non-funtional due to bad wording shit as in core.

It takes time to give 8 new Talents (as terrible as the old ones) to the Ace Pilot prestige class in particular. Which is hilarious because the Ace Pilot prestige class is, mostly, so bad that you make better pilots out of most Jedi, and also hilarious because that class already has 10 useless talents of it's own and a legacy talent tree to spend its five talents ever on.

The book adds "Starship Maneuvres" that work like the crappy tacked on per encounter system of Force Powers. And as such pretty much definitively suck, and more so thanks to being starship specific, thus causing more minigame break downs as you blow the same resources (your Feats) on choosing which part of the game you should sit on your hands for.

Only Pilots and Gunners get to do Maneuvers, and indeed actual actions other than bullshit aid anothers and "lets just ignore the shitty condition track rules ok?". And basically close enough to everything this book adds is for pilots and gunners only. All the other (terrible) roles introduced in the core, like the laughable "Commander" role, (my favorite as he is the ONLY MAN on his starship permitted to provide tech support to others in the form of an aid another on Computer Use) get crap all or just short of crap all.

This books message for you if you are not a Pilot? Just be a fucking Pilot already and that's literally as there is totally a section titled "But I'm Not A Pilot!" that instead of covering your cool new options as a "not a pilot" just tells you "aw, go on just be a fucking pilot, it's easy trust me, and you don't need to invest anything in it" (just after a chapter or more of material dedicated to investing character resources into pilot/gunner only maneuvers).

The base starship rules have two (broken) scales which resulted in twice the rules wording fuck ups if not more when they wrote the base actions you can take in starship combat. Those rules include the "mixed" scale of "character scale" but basically defined the switch between the scales so poorly and incompletely that they never bothered to even include "you can have separate battle maps on separate scales running simultaneously". Which they sorta needed. That finally gets mentioned in Starships of the galaxy and is basically the one step forward in the book.

The base starship rules have serious issues dealing with character level and appropriate challenge levels for encounters using the games incredibly broken CL guidelines and whatever you pull from your ass. Because even if the game flat out tells you to play an XWing pilot from level one, X-Wings are +9 CL templates for NPCs and the game has NO COMMENT to make on what impact that +9CL should have on a PC, much less on mixed encounters with mixed PCs not all of whom will be in X-Wings. The Starships Of The Galaxy book seems to notice there MIGHT be an issue, but only acknowledges it or discusses it in the context of EVERYONE being in X-Wings and fighting only other vehicles that are also lower level than X-Wings. Then it does something randomly stupid to the CL math that makes just sort of no sense.

This doesn't solve the issue that a level 1 X-Wing Pilot is maybe 9 levels better than his OWN party in mixed encounters. The game still has a major issue where the elephant in the room it ignores is that it only even really begins to work under it's own non-functional terms IF everyone is in vehicles or everyone is not at all times.

This doesn't solve the thing where the base game flat out tells you that a standard party of 4 characters on foot should face 1 Star Destroyer in personal combat as a standard "challenging but fair" encounter at a mere 7th Level (or less!) before anyone even qualifies for prestige classes.

The core rules also have issues with how players are supposed to even afford basic space transports let alone all these ships. These rules take the time out of their day to tell the GM to just give the players ships anyway. But adds in such gems as "Your NPCs should loan them to the PCs then take them away if the PCs don't suck your dick enough" and "Stealing ships is doable, I guess, only it's really really hard and everyone will hunt you and punitive stuff might happen!"

And then the basic borked underlying starship rules remain. Momentum is just short of non-existant, there is no real limit to stopping, turning or moving slowly, ramming rules are insane, the "run in a starship" action is spectacularly poorly written. The Max Velocity rule and Full Stop exist in a quantum state of borkness. The Increase Speed action is written without reference to scale and lets you risk damaging your ship for EITHER a few extra meters of move OR a few extra "hundreds if not thousands of kilometers" of move depending on largely uncontrollable context. The Max Velocity movement cap for character scale movement of fast vehicles is given in km/h instead of squares per round so you have to do conversion maths whenever you use it.

I haven't even bothered looking at the starship customization rules yet, they look like fairly standard points based customization crap. That on it's own tends to break, but in the hands of the d20modern guys, they will have some spectacular failures... but it doesn't matter, the base system remains shot so it doesn't matter what the fuck starships you build they have insane rules for how to fly them or when they are or are not even part of a fight.

If someone sits down with Starships of the Galaxy and comes away thinking that problems with Starships in the core are solved instead of just added to... they are incapable of the most basic analysis of RPG rules.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Fri Sep 26, 2014 3:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by deathdealingjawa »

I think this ties pretty close to the Immortal Everyman Droid build Dean described earlier.
When my group played SAGA, it seemed that droids were the best "race" to be since they could mod themselves, convert cash to stats (buy a better droid, switch out hard drives, brainchips, or the equivalent of a droids soul.), and could change their feats and talents if they got bored or needed a specific set of abilities for up coming challenge.

From a optimization perspective is the only reason to play a organic, the Force?

Dean: Any chance we will get to see the "The punch Droid" and "melee wookies" actually written up?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

deathdealingjawa wrote:When my group played SAGA, it seemed that droids were the best "race" to be since they could mod themselves, convert cash to stats (buy a better droid, switch out hard drives, brainchips, or the equivalent of a droids soul.), and could change their feats and talents if they got bored or needed a specific set of abilities for up coming challenge.
Nope. Very wrong.

Droids cannot use the force. They cannot be Jedi. That alone is a big "worst race" moment.

But, it gets significantly worse.

They are a null constitution race, because hey, that stupid ass rule for constructs? Lets keep that in the "reformed" saga edition. Do you get extra HP? No. Just no cons bonus and nothing to make up for it.

Also you don't get natural healing, you get repair healing, which requires skill rolls in order to succeed. It's still out of combat though, so it's pretty much all draw back.

Custom Droids get to pick between 5 "races" or "degrees" They have some very shitty attribute modifications that are frequently net negative and often badly distributed. But you don't care because ONLY ONE of the five degrees IS ALLOWED TO ATTACK ORGANICS. Every other droid has to "creatively interpret" situations in order to be allowed to do that.

And that one which is alloed to attack organics is net negative stat mods for a mere +2 Dex, and both the -2 negative stat mods are on mental stats, so you aren't swapping bodies to get away from that.

Not that you are swapping bodies ANYWAY because every time you do that you not only lose a mandatory level but you also suffer a very large risk of suffering permanent Intelligence damage.

Now you COULD instead build an off the rack brand name droid instead of a custom droid, and stupidly at level one that can give you MORE CASH WORTH OF CUSTOMIZATION OPTIONS FOR YOUR DROID THAN THE CUSTOM OPTION! But, you probably don't because doing that means you put NPC levels at the front of your character which simultaneously puts you levels ahead of your party members but ALSO means your first levels are massively inferior NPC levels ans you are crippled on Skills, Starting Feats, and you don't get the giant first level heroic HP boost. So you are a custom droid.

You cannot at creation afford any upgrade worth your time of day and all the drawbacks of being a droid. But you CAN install new upgrades into your existing body (but not swap bodies because that's a minefield) later. The core options are incredibly crappy but what it breaks down to is...

Jet Packs : You can build in hovering flight movement. I'm bogged down not wanting to continue in the equipment chapter of the core right now so I don't know if a certain iconic shitty star wars jet pack that only seems to fly side ways into sarlaccs is an option for other characters, but I'm assuming there are more ways of being able to fly in a star wars universe than crippling your species choice with droid.

Lots Of Arms : You can get hilarious numbers of arms in the hundreds if you like. Cheap too. There is nothing productive to do with them. But I'm assuming playing a 3PO droid with 60 arms is just hilarious. Useless but hilarious.

In Built Shields : By the time you can afford the best droid shield your medium droid can use it works out to be basically 30 temporary HP. More if you were fighting opponents with significantly sub par damage output per hit.

Remote Control Brains : Changing bodies is bad, but getting a new brain installed isn't too costly and while you are not allowed to have the remote control brain stuff at level 1 you are allowed to get it later. The problem is if you use remote control you 1) Take a dex penalty and 2) Are a shitty sub par droid character. So you can survive the occasional death of a remote drone... (at significant cost) and no one really cares because you COULD have just been a better character like a proper organic soldier or jedi and NOT DIED, and while you were not dying you were also doing significantly more effective things.

Giant And Tiny Droids : Seems sensible right? You should be able to use upgrades and maybe remote control to be a micro droid or a giant walking tank droid or something right? Well, probably not you specifically aren't allowed to start out as anything other than medium or small sized droids and the way the text words it is that basically all other droid sizes are automatically GM characters only in an open ended sort of way. So good luck with that argument.

After all that the only other thing droids have going for them is reprogramming. You are allowed to reprogram skills, Talents, and Feats you can NOT reprogram your actual class selections (so for instance, premade droids who want to be brand name iconic 3PO or R2 units will NEVER lose their gimp NPC levels). A retrain option is nice, retraining in 30 minutes is sorta nice. But in the end you are again, still a droid, and really there aren't so many options out there that you actually give a crap about switching around like that. If you suddenly need someone who is up on some bullshit non-skill like Knowledge(Bureaucracy) (and yes that very same joke skill lifted almost entirely from Paranoia IS a thing in Saga edition) you don't reprogram a PC to do it. You buy a droid NPC to do it. It's practically encouraged, Protocol Droids are a thing and cost only 3000 credits. Same goes for Astromech and Medical Droids to cover other bullshit skills you don't want to waste a PC on.


So no. Being a droid sucks, and I invite you to read the actual chapter on droid characters in the actual core rule book if you don't believe me because it is insanity warping bullshit written by an idiot.
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Post by Dean »

deathdealingjawa wrote:Dean: Any chance we will get to see the "The punch Droid" and "melee wookies" actually written up?
Totally, I just forgot I hadn't done them what with PL shitting in the thread over and over again. I'll fully stat out the Punch droid next post. They are the build with the highest damage in the whole system. A Punch Droid is a lot like a D&D ubercharger. It stacks several multiplicative effects onto unarmed attacks until it's hits deal enough damage to explode an AT-ST with each punch.

Since it's a Labor Droid it is able to start with Str 24 by the Labor Droid rules from Scavengers Guide. Then it takes the Labor Droid talent "Heavy Duty Actuators" which doubles strength bonuses to damage. Then it takes a soldier trait that does the same thing then a bunch of feats that do the same thing. So it ends up being able to rock-em-sock you every round for something like 1d6+(7x2x2x2x2) damage every round. Note that Saga does NOT use D&D's rule that 2X2=3, so those doubles really do double and it's punch ends up being something like 1d6+100 damage. It's very ubercharger plus everything the Immortal everyman droid does on top. I'll post up a legit build later.

Also to quickly cover some PL bullshit. Natural healing heals you your level in hp every 24 hours with a full nights rest. Droid repair heals you your level in hp every hour you make a DC 20 mechanics check and droids are naturally amazing at mechanics. It's many times better and faster than natural healing. Also....actually fuck it. I think everyone is with the program here that he's actively threadshitting and constantly wrong.
Last edited by Dean on Sun Oct 26, 2014 8:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dean »

Ok lets look at the Punch droid. I'll build him as a 4th level character and we'll talk about his build up to level 8, which is the likely range which you would ever play a campaign in.

Punch Droid, 4th level Soldier
Str 26
Dex 14
Con -
Int 4
Wis 8
Cha 4

Ref: 21
Fort: 24
Will: 13
HP: 45

Level 1: Talent: Heavy Duty Actuators, Feat: Martial Arts I
Level 2: Feat: Slammer
Level 3: Talent: Hammerblow
Level 4: Feat: Echani Martial Arts

Attack: Falcon Punch +19 (1d6+67)
At level 4 you only have one special trick but it's a doozy. Point Buy gets you an 18 in Strength and being a Labor droid brings that to a 22, saying you're made by "Barrowan Arms" brings that up to 23 for no reason and your 4th level ability increase brings that to a 24. Finally wearing a Correlian Powersuit or any other kind of powered armor for another +2 to Strength bringing you to 26.

By 4th level your punch is ridiculous. Heavy Duty Actuators lets you double your strength bonus to damage, Slammer does the same thing, and Echani Martial arts does the same thing. Hammer Blow actually doubles your Strength bonus to ATTACK which means this character won't miss on anything but 1's for the whole campaign and when he hits he will deal 1d6+3+64(8x2x2x2) damage. In a system where missile launchers deal 21 damage on average this character's punch will certainly be the heaviest hit the team has and will be the go-to for Vehicles and boss monsters. Still, the Punch Droid isn't limited to punching and is a perfectly effective character at using ranged weapons, more effective than normal even because the Punch Droid should look like Goro, keeping two limbs unarmed for punching and then some other limbs devoted to holding weapons larger than human characters would be able to comfortably wield.

The next 4 levels of the Punch Droid's life become more open. It is possible to make your punch even better and it was a common sight on Saga boards to see someone who thought they were at the height of CharOp posting a build that could get their unarmed attacks up to 6d12 damage at base (or whatever) but that's fuckin stupid. There are very few problems a 150 damage punch will solve that a 75 damage punch wouldn't, and a 150 damage punch takes about 5 times the resources sunk into it that the 75 damage punch did. So stop at the cheap awesome punch and diversify. The next 4 levels should put you on whatever other paths other than punching you want to add into your character. The punching will always be there and it will naturally keep getting better but figure out what else you want to add.

One option would be to get Cleave, Great Cleave, and Telescopic limbs, letting you punch murder everything within ten feet of you every round. Being able to hit whole squads as a walking high-damage burst effect is nice. If you're really devoted to melee you can also look at the talents Counterpunch, Retaliation Jab, and Defensive Jab. They let you respond to anyone attacking you in melee with a responsive punch, and make anyone who misses you in melee take your Str in damage automatically. I think over investing in melee is probably a waste but if your heart wants what it wants go ahead.

You could also focus on Heavy Weapon use. A Droid's Goro build lets him be a much better ranged combatant than most organics. Taking Heavy Weapon proficiencies and the Dual Wielding feat can let you dual wield Large sized missile launchers. Building this character a lot like the Iron Man character above ends up in a less versatile but higher damaging version of the same concept.

You could also focus on defense. You can install a shield generator and a specialized subprocessor for pretty cheap. If you then take the feat Droid Shield Mastery or the talent Power Supply you can regenerate your shields as a swift action every round. Effectively giving you DR 15 for a small investment of your resources.

Once your Punch droid is in the 8+ level range he's out of what I've ever played. I imagine you would jump into the Elite Trooper Prestige class or the Martial Arts prestige class as those are considered to be strong. It doesn't really matter because by that level you will be insanely wealthy and wealth affects power for Droids in a much more direct way than levels do. I would care a lot less about what talent you took at 11th level than I would about how you've built your custom armor, weaponry, stealth loadouts, holosuits, droidified equipment and so on.

So that's him: Punch-Droid. The last thing I'll say about him is not to forget that he's a Droid. Meaning the the Immortal Everyman droid and he can have a lot of overlap, considering the Immortal Everyman could just decide that he wanted to punch some people today and change every feat and talent he ever took to match.
Last edited by Dean on Mon Oct 27, 2014 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Dean wrote:By 4th level your punch is ridiculous. Heavy Duty Actuators lets you double your strength bonus to damage, Slammer does the same thing, and Echani Martial arts does the same thing. Hammer Blow actually doubles your Strength bonus to ATTACK which means this character won't miss on anything but 1's for the whole campaign and when he hits he will deal 1d6+3+64(8x2x2x2) damage.
Does SAGA explicitly not stack multipliers the d20 way? In other words, is that not 8*(2+1+1)=32 damage?
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Post by Dean »

Omegonthesane wrote:Does SAGA explicitly not stack multipliers the d20 way? In other words, is that not 8*(2+1+1)=32 damage?
Yeah they use normal math. I think it's gonna be a bitch for me to source that being 7 years past system death and after gleemaxes forum wipes, so it may take a bit before I can reference that properly but that was definitely the case. They never reference the D&D special doubling rules and it was answered many times by the designers that traditional 2X2= 4 doubling is used in Saga. The only things I can find right now is lots of forum entries with people referencing it being cleared up elsewhere so for now you'll just have to take my word.

But yeah, if you can find a few doubling effects in Saga you really can get a number to TEXA$!
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Dean wrote:So that's him: Punch-Droid.
I'll note that in order to get the Custom Droid +4 str from the core book (instead of the "can't believe it's not custom droid +2 str from the droid book) you take some stat penalties, and while probably included in your profile you very nicely neglected to mention you pay two whopping great -4 attribute penalties for that +4, for a net -4 to your starting attributes. Because hey, you don't need to actually tell people how sucky the basic profile is while spruking it as a totally playable character.

And interestingly you choose to cop it in the chin and end up with Int 4. Which is interesting because that means you have 1 trained skill. Probably one trained skill EVER. In a system where even Initiative is a skill. That you should really fucking train, what with the skill system numbers being basically broken.

But, you for whatever reason, I think mostly to pretend that the whole "you must roll for healing" thing is no big deal, that "droids are naturally good at mechanics" so I'm assuming you put that skill into Mechanics. What with the whole "droids are natural good at it" thing being, as far as I can tell, basically bullshit, and what with it being the only full "no untrained use" skill in the system. Which you then get to, at level 4 have a net -1 to attempts to repair yourself with, even after training in it. On a DC 20 roll. That you cannot succeed on.

So you either take a friend with you and beg them to waste a skill slot on Mechanics just to repair you (assuming everyone isn't exploiting second wind in largely unintended ways to make natural healing partially redundant) or you NEVER HEAL DAMAGE even if you blow your only skill training slot on trying to remedy that. And since you have no cons bonus you also have a lot less HP to start with...

Then I will note you have written a character centered solely around dealing physical damage to whom the following text applies...
actual rules text wrote:Behavioral Inhibitors : Droids [except 4th Degree Droids] cannot intentionally harm a sentient living being or knowingly allow a sentient living being to be harmed. Furthermore, all droids must follow orders given to them by their rightful owners, as long as those orders don't require the droid to ham a sentient living being. Droids with heuristic processors can sometimes violate these restrictions by creatively interpreting their behavioral inhibitions.
Which in gaming den language translates to "this character's player must suck the GMs cock before asking permission to actually attack enemies".

So. A character who can never heal themselves without another character's intervention. With no skills or abilities at all other than a boring dumb melee attack for direct damage that he has to tell a pretty story and beg the GM for permission to use every time he wants to make it. Normally the gaming den does NOT call that a useful playable build.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Mon Oct 27, 2014 12:22 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Wulfbanes »

1) Or you don't take the extra +2 Strength which matters very little at that point and avoid those penalties.

2) Or you take 1 level in Independent Droid and get completely around that limitation of not hurting people by taking it. A prestige class you can get at level 4 or something.

3) Or you buy a DUM-series Pit Droid to repair you, which conveniently folds up to smaller than a backpack in size. Don't forget to reprogram it to have the feat that allows you to make repairs in 10 minutes instead of an hour.

I'm actually quite enjoying this analysis, Dean. Cheers.
Last edited by Wulfbanes on Mon Oct 27, 2014 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TheFlatline »

PhoneLobster wrote: Then I will note you have written a character centered solely around dealing physical damage to whom the following text applies...
actual rules text wrote:Behavioral Inhibitors : Droids [except 4th Degree Droids] cannot intentionally harm a sentient living being or knowingly allow a sentient living being to be harmed. Furthermore, all droids must follow orders given to them by their rightful owners, as long as those orders don't require the droid to ham a sentient living being. Droids with heuristic processors can sometimes violate these restrictions by creatively interpreting their behavioral inhibitions.
So why didn't R2 help prevent Luke from blowing up the death star and inflicting tens of thousands of casualties? I guess you can argue that every R2 unit is programmed to be a 4th degree war/security droid, but that seems kind of hardcore. And goes against the idea of having combat droids be a separate class.

Also, it means that translator units like C-3PO on the bridge of a warship would be voicing objections to launching any kind of hostile military aggression that would result in casualties.

Loader droids would refuse to load ordinance into fighters. Repair droids could feasibly refuse to do repairs on warships, knowing that they could and would eventually facilitate the loss of a sentient life.

Actually this kind of droid revolt sounds awesome in a Paranoia kind of way.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

TheFlatline wrote:So why didn't ...
House rules, apparently.
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Post by virgil »

PhoneLobster wrote:Then I will note you have written a character centered solely around dealing physical damage to whom the following text applies...
actual rules text wrote:Behavioral Inhibitors : Droids [except 4th Degree Droids] cannot intentionally harm a sentient living being or knowingly allow a sentient living being to be harmed. Furthermore, all droids must follow orders given to them by their rightful owners, as long as those orders don't require the droid to ham a sentient living being. Droids with heuristic processors can sometimes violate these restrictions by creatively interpreting their behavioral inhibitions.
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Post by TiaC »

In a similar vein from the same comic:
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Post by Dean »

The trick is to remember that everything that Phonelobster says is intentionally dishonest. His statements are:

*Droids can't harm sentient creatures
*Droid healing is worse than human healing, and this guy would never be able to heal
*I built this at a low level to disguise weaknesses like not having enough skills

The section PL quoted is talking about general droid rules. Player Character droids are exceptional droids which all come with Heuristic Processors, so an honest debater would have moved on to the rules for Heuristic processors which say
actual rules text wrote:A noncombat droid with a hueristic processor can attack and even harm sentient living beings
This is literally the opposite of Mother May I. All the agency is on the player side. It specifically says that as long as the droid can excuse the action to himself he can do it. There are no other checks or balances, the player is the sole arbiter. The droid section tells you what is the norm for droids, which is useful, and then tells you that you can do whatever you want. It's the equivalent of a Height and Weight table that tells you what normal human measurements are but expressly allows you to be 7 feet tall if you decide to. The droids rules are providing you perfectly valuable information about the game world and then expressly informing you that as a player character you are able to do what you'd like with only yourself to answer to. So PL's is, as usual, lying intentionally.

PL's second line is also bullshit. The Punch Droid, or any droid, could spend 1250 credits (which is nothing, you start with like 1900) and get a repair-bot with a +9 to Mechanics at level 1. In the 8 hours an organic has to sleep to heal the droid would heal about 4 times it's level in HP. 4 times more than an organic would heal in a full 24 hours. Droids can also spend 100 bucks on an Oil Bath which heals them 1/4th their max hp in 30 minutes. By level 1 the Punch Droid outpaces organic healing by many multiples and it will outpace it faster with each level.

Finally lets have some fun talking about the third line because it lets us talk about rules I wanted to get to anyway. I built the Punch Droid at level 4 to show the build can come online incredibly quickly (remember too that PL complained my builds took 20 levels to work, despite me never making a 20 level build). A 10th level version of a Punching Droid concept would be far from skill or option starved, and serves as another good example of why Droids are better than you in Saga. Lets talk about how you would build this Droid going into a 10th level game and why Droid reprogramming is the best thing ever.

I've already talked about how Droids can change every feat and talent they've ever taken, allowing a high level Droid to be any character he feels like given a few hours notice but Droids are also the only ones that can do Polymorph style stat mixing bullshit. A tenth level droid can find another droid, memory wipe them, and then implant themselves in that droids body. They retain their own mental stats but gain new Str and Dex scores. If that sounds like a good idea it is. It has three requirements:

*Making a high use computer check: Being a droid means Use Computer checks are your bitch
*Make a DC 15 Int check: A well built 10th level droid will pass this 82% of the time, losing it also means someone just has to wipe and reboot you with the proper gear.
*You lose one class level: This one can't be avoided but, as I've said, levels don't mean nearly as much as build to a droid. You'll lose a talent and a few hp and you'll gain whatever robo body you wanted. In this case the robo body you want is one that's strong as fuck.

So a 10th level version of a punch droid would just be built as the supergenius immortal droid from before in a body that was also capable of punching through tanks. The feat and talent requirements for being a Punch Droid are so light it's the sort of thing you could even leave in as a staple while you reprogrammed the other dozen talents and feats you had to play with. In a low level game a Punch Droid can fill the Barbarian role perfectly and murder anything it looks at, in a high level game a Punch Droid can fill every role perfectly and also punch AT-AT's to death in Real Steel style robo-boxing.
Last edited by Dean on Tue Oct 28, 2014 1:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Dean wrote:The trick is to remember that everything that Phonelobster says is an intentional lie. His statements are:
You should stop projecting and subsitute your own name into that sentence. I specifically included the line you quoted and my claim re-droids harming sentient creatures is specifically NOT that they cannot do it but that they have to suck the GMs cock first. I don't give a shit how you (frankly clearly dishonestly) interpret the vague bullshit text about heuristic processors. The important aspect is simply that some interpretation is required, you have to tell SOME sort of story to SOMEONE every fucking time you want to make an attack on an enemy. Some GMs don't need much cock sucking, some GMs will need a lot, and indeed as you suggest even some GMs will be satisfied as long as you think you sucked their cock as best you could, hell some GMs will need cock sucking just once and then will let you attack forever. But the rule telling you to suck the GMs cock is fucking there and you keep trying to pretend it is not the giant fuck you that it is to any character saddled with that burden.

Droids (other than battle droids) have a vague and bullshit hurdle of variable and immeasurable nature before they are allowed to punch actual enemies. Non-droids do not, though they almost do, mostly for Jedi who get marginally screwed over with a slightly softer version of that hurdle with the utter debacle that is the game's laughably written dark side mechanics.
PL's second line is also bullshit. The Punch Droid, or any droid, could spend 1250 credits (which is nothing, you start with like 1900) and get a repair-bot
So you just depend on another character and other external resources with actual costs in order to heal at all. That is a real and significant cost and draw back.

Also YOU said droids are somehow naturally good at mechanics and therefore droid healing, and hey your first example droid cannot do that himself. That's important both to demonstrate the flaws of droids and the flat out dishonesty of your prior claims re droids.
A 10th level version of a Punching Droid concept would be far from skill or option starved,
Your -3 int modifier punch droid is getting skills from where? Really? New trained skills in Saga are significantly expensive. It's multiple int boosts, feat costs or GTFO.

And then you just completely misrepresent the actual rules and application of the droid mind swapping/restoring rules entirely. I'm going to just take a leaf out of your tired and repeated methodology and just point out you are flat out wrong and lying about how that works without presenting the actual evidence (since you never do so why should I continue to bother?).

But I WILL encourage people, again, to go read the actual rules. It's batshit, it's bad, it pretty quickly demonstrates that Dean is basically wrong about everything.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Tue Oct 28, 2014 2:10 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Dean »

PhoneLobster wrote:You should stop projecting and subsitute your own name into that sentence. I specifically included the line you quoted
Where?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Dean wrote:
PhoneLobster wrote:You should stop projecting and subsitute your own name into that sentence. I specifically included the line you quoted
Where?
Whoops, I thought it was the line about droids with heuristic processors that ends in "can violate these restrictions" which would make sense to bring up out of context since we have the context already, but that's basically the same line and I included it, so whatever... only...

The notable difference is that YOUR line is actually an incomplete sentence rather than the end of an entire section of rules text.

The REST of YOUR dishonestly incomplete rules text reads...
A noncombat droid with a hueristic processor can attack and even harm sentient beings ... ... as long as it believes that...
WHOOPS I truncated it again! Just like YOU dishonestly truncated it! Should I make people go look it up for the full text?

Nah I'll be honest and put the rest up (unlike you)...
... that doing so will ultimately save more sentient beings from harm.
Which is nice and all but it is all actually just an example of "creative interpretation" (ie GM cock sucking) of behavioral inhibition limitations which people would know if you had included the fucking FRONT of that sentence, which reads "For example, ..." or indeed the front of that paragraph which sets up what it is an example of. All of which is just flat out literally an example of applying the actual rule text I already quoted. And flat out an example of sucking a GM's cock exactly as I have outlined and you have misrepresented.

But hey CLEARLY you are more honestly representing the rules text here. Posting truncated middles of sentences from middles of paragraphs out of context in a way that completely changes their meaning.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Tue Oct 28, 2014 2:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

PhoneLobster wrote:
PL's second line is also bullshit. The Punch Droid, or any droid, could spend 1250 credits (which is nothing, you start with like 1900) and get a repair-bot
So you just depend on another character and other external resources with actual costs in order to heal at all. That is a real and significant cost and draw back.
That logic can be applied to EVERY build that uses equipment at some point, and this isn't even something esoteric.
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