D&D: The Clone Wars (Part 9)

After a while, making Jedi and Clone Troopers gets a little boring.  Occasionally, I feel as if I need to create something a bit different.  C-3PO and R2-D2 seemed like good choices for characters as they appear in quite a lot of Clone Wars episodes and they are iconic.  Unfortunately, making a protocol droid and an astromech droid using a ruleset that focuses on combat seemed difficult.

C-3PO was surprisingly simple once a friend helped me realize that he is simply the laziest of lazy warlords.  R2-D2 was tough, on the other hand.  Everybody had their own idea how he would be.  Some people thought he was a thief or rogue.  A wizard.  A bard.  Honestly, he is something of a generalist insomuch that he has a gadget for everything, so it was difficult finding something that captured him well.

I wanted to capture a few things with R2-D2.  He is something of a jack-of-all-trades in the Star Wars universe, although he's best known for cracking locks.  Most of his abilities are a result of some gadget or another hidden inside his casing.  From memory, I could think of a buzz saw, an electric zapper, a welding torch, and his booster jets.  So, whatever I chose would have to somehow capture as large a cross-section of those abilities as possible.

The Star Wars character who knows *everything*.

R2-D2, the jack-of-all-trades.

I had originally conceived of making him a Pixie to capture the booster jets, but I did not feel comfortable torquing the Pixie.  Besides, R2-D2 normally only uses his booster jets for brief periods and only rarely.  So, an encounter power would be reasonable enough.  I came across a rather peculiar racial power for Goblins that fit the bill: Leg Up lets a Goblin character adjacent to another creature jump his speed horizontally or 10 feet vertically.  This seemed a perfect match for R2-D2's booster jets.

Thief and wizard were high on my list of classes to use.  However, neither of them quite fit R2-D2 how I thought he should be.  When I started flipping through different classes, I found the Sorcerer to have an array of powers that might fit.  Furthermore, the Storm Sorcerer had a flight ability (on natural 20 attack roll) that also looked good.  So, from that, the Goblin Storm Sorcerer named R2-D2 was born.

I will honestly say that even after I had settled on a Goblin Storm Sorcerer, I still had what was potentially the most difficult challenge yet remaining: an iconic quote.  I spent at least twenty to thirty minutes scouring different websites, trying to find out how his bleeps and bloops are best written.  Unfortunately, I did not find anything that was particularly impressive.  Thus, I stuck with the relatively uninteresting <beep> <beep>. Perhaps I'll touch it up in the future.

People who have read my C-3PO post should already know why it is that R2-D2 is a vampire.  I wanted droids to be modeled after undead.  Radiant damage is ion blast and necrotic damage is more like radioactive damage.  Thus, the natural resistances and vulnerabilities of vampires worked very well.

At some point, I will likely try an alternative R2-D2 build, perhaps using a Pixie with a more wizardly class.  But, for now, R2-D2 is now available to join the rest of the Clone Wars team.