Hey gang, I'm BRAND NEW to starfinder, coming off Pathfinder. One of the players in the game I'm running is rolling a mechanic, and is adamant on having a small fleet of drones.
If he's willing to role play building all the drones, and buying/scavenging parts I don't see a real problem with it. I told him they won't have AI with any sort of sophistication, and will not have any of the class features associated with drones.
What I was planning to do was using stat blocks of pathfinder familiars for these lesser drones, and basing their CR on how much his character is willing to spend building them. I would also implement a limit on how many he can control based on either his Engineering or Computers stats.
Think this sounds fair? Any other ideas on how I should play this? Any recommendations on how much they should cost?
They wouldn't be free, he's going to have to pay for the parts and spend time building them.
I haven't thought of it as an extra attack, so thanks for pointing that out. I'd probably have them share the main drone's initiative and attack roll, so mechanically he's just spending cash to buff his main drone's attack.
He's super into having a fleet of drones and if he wants to work for them I see no reason why not.
I think the cost should be somewhat equal to what the other players are paying for both weapons, armor, and personal upgrades at the given level. If the mechanic has a fleet of drones that should be pretty much their whole schtick. The mechanic itself pretty much useless in combat without the drones and needs to hide back behind cover and control his fleet. Number of drones he can build could be limited to his INT modifier too? And you'd have to do a lot of in game balancing. Feel out if he's doing way more/less in combat than the other PCs.
This kind of sounds like a fun mechanic Archetype...if Archetypes still worked that way.
Nice of you to do this much extra thought for the player!
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I'd be careful about the other players at your table too. I know I would get frustrated in that situation: we all take turns with our single characters, and then spend 10 minutes waiting for Drone guy to plan out his army. Even if they share attack roll he/she still will probably want to move them around.
Other thing from a mechanical point of view. Drone Mechanic is specifically balanced around basically being as good as another character full attacking. I.e. The attack bonus of mechanic and drone will be around -4 compared to another combat-oriented character. If the drone gets more effective, now the Drone Mechanic is the best combatant in the group.
Again, depends on your group dynamics but that can get frustrating for the others.
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I'm with Peat, characters with lots of minions can be fun draining for the rest of the group. Particularly if he gets into the mentality of just burning drones to do what other people have focused their character to do. Sure the operative is stealthier but why not just risk the cheap replaceable drone or such.
If you really wanted to do so, here is my suggestion. Pick a single type of drone that he uses, I'd suggest hoover drone. Then let him divide his levels up between as many as he wants each level. He could have one good one and some auxiliary ones or a fleet of minor drones. He still only gets one AI, it's just networked between the lot of them. So only one of them gets the standard action each round, or the extra actions he can provide with master control. I also think it would be reasonable to remove at least one mod from the base drone, to even it out a bit more. Hand wave the domes moving and keeping up most of the time but any time there's a high stress situation enforce this action limit. So no searching a building in seconds just because he has that many drones, the AI is too fragile to handle that much input and action at once.
My suggestion of using the hover drone is because it's tiny, you'll have to worry way less about keeping up with them, providing a giant truck for them and the party to move in instead of a car, they don't take up half the map, and reasons like this. The action economy in SF is very carefully balanced, I'd be generally careful about upsetting it if you don't need to.
There's a spydrone in the Equipment for 4,550 credits. It's a 1st level drone that can't attack and that has to be actively controlled by you or by a computer. So if he wants an extra drone, they're 4,550. That can always be reduced by scavenging parts.
If he doesn't want to have to control them individually, they'll have to act as a swarm. A computer can definitely get that done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
Haha yes this is great
Yeah, it sounds like what I might end up doing is making a homebrew 'drone swarm' mod and I'll keep the cost of the new drones more or less equal to what other characters would spend to buy better equipment.
I'm thinking the swarm of micro-drones is the way to go. Make it all flavor, but otherwise a standard drone. One thing to keep in mind, if you go with swarm-style attacks (auto-damage and distraction), you need to reduce the drone-swarm damage to compensate.
I think how many he can control at once will be an issue, especially to keep game balance. The class feature drone gets 1 action on it's own and can get given more actions by the Mechanic. Probably get a good idea to keep that game mechanic in place but give additional drones 0 actions unless they get them from the Mechanic. That limits the Horde to 2 standards, a move and a swift. Of course, I'm sure money and time can make some of those actions, like reloading, a freebie (i.e. the drone's simple brain can reload the weapon with direction from the Mechanic.)
I'm not seeing much issue with keeping the base cost of the drones lower. In the end, if the Mechanic has 3 drones, he's presumably buying 3-4 weapons of suitable tier, plus his own armor and upgrades. He will fall behind unless you are dropping a lot of gear that's Lvl to Lvl+2 as loot.
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Could I build 3 different types but only play with one at a time i.e. change the type as needed
RAW you can only rebuild when you level, but it wouldn't unbalance the game extremely or anything, would just allow the party to min/max for certain scenarios. If you let all your players swap out things after a long rest that they could normally only do upon leveling up it would seem fair to me.