Bringing Out the Big Guns in Starfinder

Friday, June 16, 2017

As a science fantasy game, Starfinder has a wide range of high-tech weapons. Cryo guns, plasma weapons, lasers, full automatic projectile weapons, grenades, and many more categories of high-tech weapons cram the equipment chapter, ready for players to select what they need to stay alive in the adventures to come. But as soon as you mention that lasers are an option, and that Starfinder is supposed to maintain fair backward compatibility with the monsters of Pathfinder, players wonder how a goblin is supposed to be any kind of threat to PCs armed with advanced ranged weaponry. After all, realistically, a laser has to do more damage than a short sword, right.

Well, in a word, no.

Where realism impinges on making a fun and robust game, we're more than happy to deviate from realism—but in this case, it's not really necessary. Modern real-world laser pointers are lasers, for example, and do no damage to speak of when fired at your hand. And while it may seem unrealistic for laser pistols and plasma rifles to do low enough damage that you can be shot 4 or 5 times before you're in serious risk of death, that logic also applies to archaic weapons. It's not hard to make a 1st-level barbarian in Pathfinder who can easily survive four blows from a short sword and still be conscious. Certainly most people would agree that "realistically," being stabbed four times with 18 inches of sharpened steel isn't going to leave anyone in the condition where they can just walk away.

So, since we know lasers (and, by extension, most other energy weapons) can exist at a level where they do little to no damage, we can go ahead and make low-powered versions appropriate for the threats and foes low-level characters are most likely to encounter, letting your character start the game with that laser pistol they've been coveting.

But of course it wouldn't be any fun to restrict characters to such low-powered options forever.

Starfinder assumes there is almost always a better version of any weapon you can imagine—the trick is convincing people to sell it to you (and having the credits to afford it). In many cases the most advanced of these weapons don't make sense for rank-and-file troops. After all, why would an army buy a single avalanche-class zero rifle, when it can buy forty hailstorm-class zero rifles for the same amount of money? Sure, the avalanche-class does three times as much damage. But if you have an army to equip, it's better to have forty guns doing 2d8 damage than one gun doing 7d8 damage.

Of course there are exceptions to that thinking, including elite forces, commandos, assassins, snipers... and player characters.

As characters advance, they'll have the money, and connections, to buy more and more powerful versions of their early weapons. To keep this process simple, every piece of equipment in the game has an item level. That level has no effect on who can use the equipment—if a 2nd-level soldier gets hold of an 18th-level banshee sonic rifle, there's no reason he can't use it to full effect—just as a 2nd-level fighter could use a +5 flaming keen vicious bastard sword in Pathfinder. But by giving every piece of equipment an item level, we can tie numerous rules—including hardness, Hit Points, save DCs, and item creation rules, to name just a few—to a single mechanic. Item level is also a useful baseline to help determine what gear a character has the licenses, connections, and trust to buy. While circumstances and GM fiat can make any adjustment desired, in general a player character in a major settlement is free to buy any gear with an item level up to his character level +2. This gives characters freedom to decide if they are going to focus on just a few pieces of key gear, or do their best to have a variety of slightly less-effective options available, without a GM having to spend a lot of time checking tables and making availability rolls.

In general, there's no need to upgrade your weaponry at every level (though you certainly could if that was exciting for you), but over the course of a character's career they are likely to buy better, more dangerous, more powerful versions of their weaponry. The azimuth laser pistol is 1st level, and does 1d4 damage with an 80 ft. range increment and the ability to set things on fire with critical hits. The next lowest level laser pistol presented in the Core Rulebook is the corona model at 6th level, which does 2d4 damage. Of course, a player might run into a number of other weapon options along the way, ranging from the static arc pistol at 2nd level to the thunderstrike sonic pistol at 4th level or the frostbite-class zero pistol at 5th level.

Of course, for this system to work, feats and class features can't be tied to a specific model or level of a specific weapon. Instead, everything is geared to work with all the weapons for a specific proficiency, or all the weapons of the same category. Weapon Focus, for example, can be applied to all small arms, or all longarms, and so on. The soldier's gear boosts tend to work with categories of weapons, such as laser accuracy applying to all lasers, or plasma immolation working with all plasma weapons.

And that's not even talking about magic weapons! The Starfinder Core Rulebook has several pages of weapon fusions, which are special magic abilities that can be added to a weapon to gain a bonus in specific circumstances, or grant new combat options. For example, the anchoring fusion allows a weapon to immobilize a foe on a critical hit, while the holy fusion allows a weapon to bypass DR/good and ignore all energy resistance of evil dragons, evil outsiders, and evil undead. Fusion can also be placed in fusion seals, special weapon augmentations that can be moved from weapon to weapon if you decide to change your primary attack preference.

Nor does all of a character's increase in damage come from buying bigger guns and more powerful melee weapons. At 3rd level, every character class grants specialization with all the standard weapons the class gives proficiency with. This allows the character to add their level to damage dealt (or to add half their level in the case of small arms or operative melee weapons, the latter of which have the special property that anyone can use their Dexterity rather than Strength to determine their attack bonus). And of course class features, feats, and spells can grant further bonuses, depending on the choices a player makes while building their character.

All of this is tied to our rebalancing of combat math to make the game faster and simpler, while keeping weapon choice important and keeping the importance of treasure acquisition as a feature of the game. It also gives us flexibility when working in the weapon creation design space. The various weapon categories mean that characters with no access to magic abilities can still pick up weapons that do various forms of energy damage; create cones, lines, or explosions; or even stagger, blind, stun, or ignite foes. A soldier might decide their primary fighting style is to use a big two-handed melee weapon, but still carry a few grenades and a flamethrower for situations where they need to affect multiple targets in an area, or just deal a different damage type. It also removes the need to constantly chase pure accuracy bonuses, since doing more damage in a round is no longer dependent on having a 3rd or 4th (or 6th!) attack in a full attack action reliably connect with foes.

Most of the math and design work behind how Starfinder's weapons, attacks, feats, and more isn't particularly obvious to a typical player—quite intentionally—but we've put a lot of time into creating options that work well together, and making sure equipment and weapons generally come into play right at the point when it's appropriate for characters to access them. Hopefully this will allow players to focus less on finding some theoretical perfect combination of game elements for effectiveness, and more on interplanetary adventure!

Owen KC Stephens
Developer