Shard

[Raven Redstar]

I have a player who's interested in playing a force sensitive shard character. However, I'm not exactly sure how to go about helping him create it. He essentially wants to be a Jedi "tinkerer", however the rest of my group are all playing organic characters, and the stats presented in the Aliens.pdf are well, a good starting point, however I foresee the problem of him having a ton more attribute dice for his mental attributes than his organic party members. And even if a droid body is bought with not so great physical attributes. Anyway, any suggestions? He's going to be taking up a protocol droid, but I was actually thinking of giving him whatever cash a starting character would get, and then letting him spend it on his "body".

Thoughts?

-Thanks as always

[Lostboy]

If your worried that you player is going to have mental stats to high you could always limit his or her attribute points. But don't forget it still costs attribute dice to buy force powers at character creation.

[Rerun941]

Definitely an interesting idea for a character. To provide some balance, simply require the PC to purchase his droid's DEX and STR attributes with his beginning attribute dice?
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[Ankhanu]

An Iron Knight eh? Yeah, ya gotta be careful with the stats. I'll take a look at the entry a little later on and weigh in.
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[garhkal]

I have always wondered,. do shards in droids get effected by having the droids memory wiped? Ion cannons??
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[wolfe]

The most inportant question hasn't been asked yet.

What is that players playing style?

If that person is a 'power gamer" then there would be no way in hades I would let them be a shard jedi anything, especially a "tinkerer".

A shard can be bad enough as is with a power gamer, add force abilities and you have a complete nightmare in the making.

[Raven Redstar]

To my knowledge the player isn't a power gamer, however this is the first character I've ever run with him. Also, we're having to tweak history a little bit, since they technically haven't been discovered by the republic for at least 2700+ years, however, since matters on whether or not they want to be revealed to the republic may take some debate amongst themselves, which for them can take a long time... say, 2700+ years, lol. However, one shard volunteered to go with the Jedi master who stumbled across the shard to find out more about the universe as a whole, and whether or not the shard wish to have any vested interest in such things. He happened to be force sensitive. I'm going to have the player buy the droid chassis itself with his starting credits, and I'm going to allow him to purchase attribute dice, at the appropriate multipliers for the degree of droid I think. Which should make it rather expensive to get any more than 1D for one of the two attributes. Also, he's going to have to buy force dice, and because I'm thinking about making him rather naive when it comes to the galaxy and most technology, he's not going to be able to attempt any skill that he's not trained in, since he hasn't be an individual from the collective of his home world for very long. Which should hopefully make things somewhat interesting. At least for a while, in addition, I've granted some of the students extra dice for their force attributes, which I won't be granting this character, since he hasn't been training in the force for nearly as long as the others. He most likely will only have 1D in each of the 3. Which, starts him out a little behind, but hopefully he should be able to "catch up" somewhat over the course of the adventure. My player tends to take on the role of whatever the party doesn't, which usually tends to be an engineer of some sort, so, while people are stacking in to their combat skills, he tends to stack toward repair, and with a 5D or 6D starting technical, it may get quite expensive very quickly. The other thing is, if the character seems to be getting out of hand, I can always knock him off fairly easily, seeing how his droid body will likely only have a Strength of 2D max, some crazy guy with a gun will likely be able to wax the guy if need be. Or cleverly placed explosives. I'm not too terribly worried.

[wolfe]

Waay back in the old republic eh..

History is easy, a misjumped ship can easily be used to explain "finding" Orax at that time period.
A Jedi on board could find a "disturbance" with that "rock" and take it with him only to discover later on after getting back to civilized space it was a sapient being.

Sounds like the only thing you'd have to really worry about is the tinkering the player would be doing, like upping folks weapon damage, modding the ship and all that.

Droids stats shouldn't be getting too high at that time period to worry about really.

[cheshire]

Can you post his proposed stats?

The way that I'm seeing this is that the physical attributes should be purchased from the original 18D dice pool, leaving only 2D in both STR and DEX. (Not a good idea with a Jedi.) Also, take a look at Cynabar's Fantastic Technology: Droids (this book would be a MUST for your campaign). Upping the droid's stats is not easy or cheap. If he gets damaged, I REALLY hope that there is someone else that can help fix him, because if the droid body is damaged, and no one else in the party can stabilize things, he'll be as good as a brain in a jar.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Rerun941]

I re-read the shard description and it said something interesting about a Shard's senses.

Their electromagnetic sense is the ONLY sense they have. (This particular Shard having Force Powers might be a bit unique in that regard, if he has the Shift Sense power.) So unless the droids eyes and ears are specifically wired to translate to the shard, he'll still be effectively deaf and blind.

From a GM's perspective, I'd rule that the droid would have to be specially made for the shard. The shard can't simply be moved from droid body to droid body without extensive (and expensive!) modification of the host droid.
_________________
Han - "How're we doin'?"
Luke - "Same as always."
Han - "That bad, huh?"

[jmanski]

I agree, the droid body needs to be custom made for that individual.

Very intersting character concept.
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[Raven Redstar]

[Akari]

Isn't he worried about darkside points? As I understand it, every part of technology that is part of your body increases the drift to the dark side. A Jedi master would likely forsee this and forgo instructing him in force usage. I would agree on force sensitivity, but definately not Jedi training. Masters have ben expelled for lesser offenses.

Also a lot of places do not allow droids, so he would have to stay outside, which may frustrate the player. That, and ion weapons suddenly became an enormous threat... Don't go alone on Tatooine!

We have had a shard in the party before and the way we did it, was that the robot body provided 1d of strength, dex and mechanical, the rest had to be bought with character points, but that character wasn't force sensitive.
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[Xynar]

But the droid is just a vehicle for the shard. I would let characters buy and modify their vehicles. But the shard cannot perform any "touch" related Force Powers and has one hell of a relationship penalty.
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[Esoomian]

I'd consider the droid a vehicle for the shard so it wouldn't have to accrue extra darkside points but the passenger damage table might be appropriate and with the shard's 1D to resist damage that could really hurt.
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