Based on my analysis of the Craft rules, they seem to exist to support two
basic game design goals:
1) It is easier to buy things than make them
2) It is possible to make things you can't buy
They are NOT designed to allow the creation of starships or war galleys from
scratch but rather to simply give PCs an 'escape hatch' when the equipment
they need to acquire is unavailable through any other means.
While the simple system used for Craft is workable with respect to these two
simple goals, it does not cover the broader range of design & construction
tasks which are so common in technology-based games like SW. To some this
will seem a great gap in the rules, to me it is more of an inconvenience.
When I first read through the SW rules about Droids I was constantly looking
for the table of costs for droid chassies, manipulator arms, locomotion
devices, and optional equipment. By the time I got to the end of the
section and found only the optional equipment list, I was more than a bit
disappointed. So I got to thinking about why there isn't a 'construction
list' and I realized that in SW, droids are just like any other NPC or
monster in D&D, and thus are the DM's to create rather than the player's to
build. Any construction rules would have likely suffered from the same
shortcomings of the old Skills & Powers rules of 2e, and making it almost
impossible to maintain game balance.
In the end I decided that in the SW universe, nobody builds hugely complex
devices like droids, pod racers, starships, or vehicles from scratch - these
are the exclusive domain of the GM (and his big NPC corporations). Even in
Episode I it was clear to me that Anakin had built his pod racer and droid
out of spare and salvaged parts rather than from scratch, and that is where
I think Craft rules for SW could be improved somewhat - adding rules for
salvaged parts that have a bonus 'build point' value assigned to them. A
droid might cost 3,500 cr new, meaning 35,000 build points, but if you could
salvage the translator unit intact from a scrapped droid (a task that might
take a few hours or days), it might be worth 5,000 or more build points
towards the completion of a protocol droid.
I guess what I would like to see is a set of rules that allow the Repair
skill to be integrated with Craft skills to allow for salvaged equipment to
be used in the creation of new devices. This would greatly shorten the time
it takes to build a complex device, bringing it back into the realm of
possibility for an enterprising character. Maybe I'll make that my next d20
project...
-Brad
