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Has the designer spoken his mind on the issue on some blog or here in the forums?

Seems like an interesting issue to see what the Starfinder Development team thought and if the prices are some sort of misjudgement that is going to change in the next errata or something that was well thought.

An 8th level spell gem does 9d6 damage for 1400.

An 8th level grenade does 4d6 damage for 2560.

Load it into a spell throwing weapon and its vastly more damage to credit ratio.

Yeah but you can throw 2 to 4 depending on your class and level each round.

Amounting to 8 to 16d6 of total damage.

Example:

Bob is behind a 3 foot wall and is exchanging shots with Alice who is 20 feet away.

1 Round : Both shoot each other.
2 Round Alice shoots Bob. Then Bob shoots back. Falls prone as a swift action and hides as a move action.
3 Round Bob plays first and Dick his partner who is invisible casts haste one him. Then Bob stands as a move, shoots as a standard, prone as a swift and hides with the extra move.

Give me the modifiers for this, maybe a better example would help.

Probably much less than you'd think, thanks to advanced in technomagic. ;)

That said, I'd be inclined to say that Absalom Station gets most of its food from off-station. It probably *could* produce enough food, via technomagical industry, but its normally not worth it compared with other uses for its space and energy.

According to the Absalom Station chapter in Dead Suns, the station has near infinite amounts of energy. Given than I 'd say everything that can be grown in hydroponics is grown in Absalom.

That includes most vegetables and some fruits.

That is without the slightest amount of magic.

The issue of space [as in cubic whateverons] may arise though.

I would beg for an answer from the designer regarding turrets.

I'd advise to look into German 20s and 30s and not 40s and 50s since the pecualiarities of the Cold War created a rather strange mix there. After the first world war you may notice the civil war like tension that follows almost all national defeats all over history and over the world.

Its like when something goes wrong in your life. You may attribute everything as personal failure or put the blame entirely on someone else.
The hardest part is to walk the thin line between those two extremes.

Autofire Specialist:

Spend a single charge/round for each target when using a weapon as automatic.

or

You now dont need to spend the whole magazine when using an automatic, you still spend 2 rounds per target as normal.

At Gunpoint :

When within the first increment of a weapon you can spend a full round action to ready an action against a single target with no concealment or cover.

If the target triggers yours ready action you gain +2 bonus to hit.

It really is more about if people advise for Mystics and Technomancers to get Longarms, why not to go all the way down this path.

So spending some time in this forum lately a trend is obvious.

Mystics and Technomancers have a lot to gain from Sniper Rifles and Long Arms.

This makes me wonder why not take it to the next level and use Heavy Weapons.

I understand that Longarms or Sniper rifles are just a feat away from them but in the long run [Say level 5] the average character has gained 3 or 4 if human feats.

So why should I or should not invest in heavy weapons as a mystic or a technomancer?

More mid tier monsters and aliens. Most the book is playable races or high tier aliens in my opinion.

+1000

CR 2-3-4

After all these are close to the levels we gonna see the most [imho].

These 3 CRs in numbers can provide challenge for 1 to 10!

I also need creatures like the Akashas, the Rivener and the Electrovites.

With some background but nothing more than smart beasts.

Some official conversions on the most demanding to convert monsters like
incorporeals or the outsiders would be nice too!

Both would be in a world of suprises.

I suppose an intergalactic war would emerge soon.

The SF world with its quite powerful casters not being really a match for Psychers and the Imperium with its numbers and far far better organization would clash with no end. As one would learn from the other the Imperium would win since the SF world wont be able to outmatch the numbers.

EDIT:
OR... maybe Sf Androids and friends league would win in the end!

The above two posts tackle the game from a class perspective. At the moment I m trying to resolve the dexterity-uber stat and then balance class.

I feel that applying the above will lead to an increased importance of Charisma but wont make dexterity of equal importance to say strength.

The more I think about it the more I am certain that the problem is far more convoluted. It is a about the hit chance and the AC. Both Strength and Dexterity would be balanced in a far better way if they did not provide the hit chance. If dexterity was a tad less important for AC, then we would be able to have a system of 6 more or less equal stats.

At that point I would implement @Kodaku's idea and be done with it.

Oh yes, Dex is VERY overloaded right now. It controls

>EAC
>KAC
>Ranged Attacks
>Init

And that's not even counting skills.

+ Saves

I don't disagree that Dex is on the high end and Charisma is on the low end, but classes are designed from the ground up around gaining resolve from their primary stat. If you change that design choice to help charisma then I'm concerned that you risk throwing out the baby with the bath water.

As an example, soldiers are expected to get hurt - it's pretty much in their job description. Because of that they have good access to resolve (in the form of a high str/dex) so they can reliably recover stamina with short rests. Perhaps because soldiers are expected to use their resolve on regaining stamina, there are relatively few Resolve spenders available for them and they come online relatively late - around level 7-9.

Technomancers get high amounts of Resolve but are less likely to spend them on stamina since they have a lot of resolve spenders available in the magic hack options. These Resolve spenders start showing up as early as level 5.

If we implement your houserule then the soldier and the technomancer can expect to lose roughly 50%* of the resolve they're gaining today. Envoys and Mystics would lose roughly 20%*. I suspect the reality would be that Mystics would get pressed into tank duty because they'd have much more resolve available to heal themselves back up that the soldier has.

As it stands right now it's broadly agreed on that Solarians have a small resolve shortfall compared to other classes. If we implement this houserule then the quality of life is slightly worse for Envoys Mystics and Solarians (1/4 level baseline means they take a net hit to their Resolve pool) and significantly worse for Mechanics, Operatives, Soldiers and Technomancers. In effect, I think we would be creating more problems than we are solving. :-/

** spoiler omitted **...

Hey nice constructive criticism there!

Still I see we can scavenge something out of it.

I ll check the math later but at the moment 1/3 would be nice.

I see your point with the mystic but I dont like the idea of prearranged roles. Maybe mystics will tank more. No problem there. Actual they got this imba 1st level spell that reflects all damage back to the attacker so I can see something nice brewing up here.

Glass beads of several colors to differentiate the ammo.

Helps a lot and provides literal color to the game!

I should note that classes that rely on Strength and Dexterity or Intelligence are already priveleged by many small bonuses already.

High Int provides skills
Strength is melee hit/damage and some ranged damage and bulk and capacity for heavy weapons.
Dexterity ...is a thread on its own.

So all these classes relying on those attributes as main are not balanced already.

Its why Solarian, a wonderful class, has a hard time, solarians need many different stats to survive.

So a soldier earns +4 initiative and AC from his good stat[Dex18], in addition to skills bonus, to hit chance, reflext saves etc that the Wisdom stat provides more or less to the mystic in a semi-equivalent manner.

My last thought on the issue is this:

Since Wisdom and Charisma are less useful except for certain characters you can try to implement an interesting houserule.

Make Resolve = Charisma + Wisdom +1.

+1 quarter level.

This will discard the problem of getting back into the fight twice and maybe have a stabilize left too that occurs up to level 4 to 6 [depending on the ability modifier] and the classes that suffer the most use little resolve.

The reason for this is that the writters completely botched the "science" part of science fantasy by establishing many facts about the way the universe works and then completely ignoring anything they built whenever it's convenient for them.

For example, here are some facts established in the Starfinder universe :

-a large spectrum of AI exists, from Weak to Strong AI and even True AI (ie they have a soul).

-robots exists.

-the level of technology availible in Starfinder is vastly superior to ours.

Considering this, here are some interesting facts about robotic in general :

-the "reflexes" of a machine are more or less the speed of electricity, as it's used to carry the signals that allow it to "think". Its computing power makes processing a situation so close to instantaneous that we can ignore that part.

-markmanship is pure mathematics. If you can account for every factor and process them (which a machine can) there is literally no possibility of failing a shot.

Now, let's take a look at a typical situation in the Starfinder universe. Your party of adventurers are infiltrating an ennemy facility when they take a wrong turn and come face to face with a security drone programmed to kill on sight !

How the fight goes down following Starfinder established in-universe logic : The brain of your character try to make the association between the picture of an armed drone his eyes are sending, the knowledge he has about what an armed drone is, and what he should do now. This takes approximately 0,25 seconds. In that lapse of time, the drone drew his gun, fired a single bullet in the head of each one of your characters and wrote a complete report of the incident to its hierarchy. You're all dead. Roll a new character.

I 'm actually really sympathetic towards your view. Then again some considerations are to be taken into account.

I would handwave the above post that bothers with the algorithm crunching since this is already established to be easy since we got slave droids that are as intelligence as humans on mass production.

However the issues on engineering that arise are not to be handwaved.

Although I enjoy AHAVs from Alien Archive very much I got a stronge distaste for the common robots.

If I was restarting my campaign I would rule more AHAV like robots and 0 androids an other so far and wide intelligent beings.

This way we can have our fun without supra intelligent robots.

What I would do is decide that the study in Robotics was not in equal measure to AI so we ended up with really useful but no so smart robots.

Maybe this can stand as a solution in the narrative. Still its a hack.

Any idea if the weapons generated are balanced at all?

Any chance to raise the curtain of the way they are generated?

Azih wrote:

I don't see why we can't have a starship with even a few hundred million people on it.

I still don't see why there's any particular need to do that. It's not a question of possibility: this is a setting with a sacred site of Sarenrae inside the sun, of course it's possible.

It's just that because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should. The analogy to national or civilizational capitals is false; that's not what Absalom is. It's not the Tokyo of the setting. It is the Babylon 5 of the setting and already ten times that scale. So why would it need to be larger yet? Just feels like a solution in search of a problem. Narratively speaking, any centre of population with more than a million people is surely large enough to tell most stories involving a "city."

Dont be so harsh. Some of us think that anything other than NY,London,Paris or Hong Kong is just not big enough to portrait cultural pluralism right!

Can someone please give some examples of how one can benefit from having a datajack?

JetSetRadio wrote:

Azih wrote:

But I would say that a great city that is the center of the galaxy's culture should be bigger than a Earth city that fills the same role for something as small as a planet's continent or country.

I go back to Tokyo. Absalom Station *should* be bigger than Tokyo at the very least.

You keep saying Tokyo but Tokyo and it is too big to be a space station. Think about how many 36 million actually is. It's a lot. I think New York City which 8.5 Million would be better for a station.

How do you figure “too big to be a space station”? Absalom Station is absolutely tiny compared to stations or even ships in many other sci-fi settings.

How about Hong Kong. Really small, still houses 8 million people!

However, I feel the urge to stress once more that Absalon Station should be considered in VOLUME not area.

In a city most building are a few meters high. Even places like Hong Kong have average building height of 100 meters/yards top.

Absalom can house whatever people need in all his height.

Castrovel: Still covered by lush jungles that even an advanced civilization has difficulty penetrating.

So is Brazil!

If we make a Brazil World that seems really close to Castrovel's description we will end up with Density X Land Area
(148.94 million sq km) (57.506 million sq mi) for a terrestrial earth like planet like Castrovel.
My calculator results in 3.626.689.000.

Thats 3.5 Billions. Nothing to be shy about.

Also notice that the map provided describes a world with less than 70% Sea.

Verces: Usable land area is limited by the planet being tidally locked.

Verces is also a Terrestrial x1 Planet. Given that the whole strip is a stretched sprawl we can use the Northeast Megalopolis of US as an example.

Population (2010) 52,332,123
• Density 931.3/sq mi (359.6/km2)

The equatorial of an earth like planet is 40.000km. For simplicity sake I m gonna use this number to adjudicate the terminator length in Verces.
I m gonna reason that the Urban strip is rather thin, same as the Megalopolis in US, 150km.

Ends up in 40.000x150x359.6
x0.3(Percentage of Land - again map provides a map with 0% visible sea) =~ 630 Millions.

That is an extremely thin width. In the book the strip seems to be a good part of the planet and no seas so the numbers could go up 10-30 times or more.

Akiton: Limited by desertification as a "dying" planet.

Now Akiton seems hard to understand!

@Juniperkitsu

I love how you tackle the issue of scope. However the game already dictates that remote systems are controlled by a computer.

Therefore a gap of knowledge exist in how exactly an observer or Patrol Robot works.

The way I read it in the Archive the two samples above seem to be quite autonomous. But details on how their owners communicate them their wishes is left a bit vague.

The question of middle-man-ing the communication could come up even when meddling with normal people. I can "hack" the security guard at my local mall if manage to communicate with him ["Bob we need you down at the lobby" or whatever]. I think this is something @metaphysician notes at his second paragraph.

@Zombie Lord, Parliamagne

I like that and seems familiar, I think. So a credstick is just there to hold a hash?

Questions:
A) Does it has some sort of intergrated circuit that can denominate lesser amounts of this hash by it self [thus creating a new hash] or
B) Should it first connect to a network and by having this hash you can input how much credits to spend

examples:

A)Iomedea wants to buy a hot-dog from a kiosk down in Botscraps. He is giving her credstick the guy at the kiosk connects it with his credstick and Iomedea types the amount to be paid.

B)Iomedea provides the credstick and the guy at the kiosk has a device pretty much like a real life POS terminal

Further questions for A case:
How does one know how much money a credstick has without contacting the bank ?

Going even further:

A) I m looking for some cool examples for things one could do with the computers skill and the relative DC [please try keep it low like DC 40 tops]

B) Description of a scene with all the relative details that someone hacks something going round by round

C) DC for root access is 33+4xTier [so a comm unit that has a 0 tier computer needs 33, I m imagining people contacting hackers in craiglist to jailbrake their iphone here and may I add rather good ones with at least +13 to even try and without provoking the lockout mechanism if you fail by 5 a +27!!!] what is the narrative and the world building consequences of this ?

Awesome feedback you all!

Its awesome but the loot generator tends to provide more credits or UPB than gear for my taste even when configured to "More ..."

So, I went a little crazy with the launch of Starfinder. Excited at being on the ground floor of a new setting, and wanting to keep track of references for later addition to my campaign setting stuff in Realm Works, I have gone through every published Starfinder product (Core Rulebook, First Contact, Alien Archive, both AP issues, and every released Starfinder Society scenario) and extracted snippets of information.

The Google spreadsheet linked here contains lists of every named NPC, organization, location, starship, race (with source of racial traits, if any), and creature graft, plus a couple of other tidbits.

The spreadsheet is extremely "spoilery" because it includes info on characters and places players will encounter in every published adventure or scenario available.

GM Info & Lists for Starfinder

My goal is to keep this updated as new products come out. I'd love to get this transferred over to the Starfinder Wiki, but those writeups take more time than a simple line item on a spreadsheet and I have a lot of things going on that limit my time. I can't even promise that I'll be able to keep up with product schedules forever, but I'll do my best.

Enjoy!

OMG you are heaven sent!

So last night we had our very first actual session with my group. Yay!
What suprised me the most was my total lack of understanding for the role of the Computers skill in the premise of the game.

A load of questions came around the table.

Can I hack the Observer or Patrol robot ? - I ruled that given the said robots are not drone but preprogrammed unless you bash their skull and plug-in such thing is impossible.

Then I wondered how this robots takes commands from its superiors ?
A communications system can be hacked but then a DC 21 [15+ 1.5x4CR] computers check way to easy.

Should I create a template of a computer with security levels, fake shells, firewalls etc?

Should I make it an opposed check and add the computers skill level of the drone ?

Apart from that further issues came up when the Technomancer tried to check if the credstick given to them for payment had a transmitter so they can track them down.

Is that a computers or a physical science test given that initially he had to check for frequency broadcasting.

Can he do that with his datajack or proper computer with some sort of starfindersque wifi analyzer MK2?

Can you hack a credstick or if not why? [Given a regular credstick can be loaded and unloaded(?)

Most of those questions are part of the world building but I would love some input on the above and some discussion on the issue in general.

Single Frag Grenade cost relative to WBL seems to be random.

Frag level | Damage | Percent of WBL
1 | 1d6 | 3.5%
4 | 2d6 | 11.6%
8 | 4d6 | 7.75%
10 | 6d6 | 8.7%
14 | 10d6 | 5.6%
16 | 12d6 | 5.95%
18 | 16d6 | 5.7%
20 | 20d6 | 5.7%

Do you really want to spend roughly 5% (3-11%) of your WBL for a level appropriate single AoE damage shot? Even as loot, consumables are supposed to count towards your WBL, so they're not even worth it as found gear unless your GM ignores WBL.

Hell, you're better off wasting an entire ultra capacity battery on full auto than using a grenade.

I would love to see the same data side by side with the spell equivalent cost!

Great thread and effort to get these numbers.

I m also trying to tackle the bp to cr issue myself and I m glad people offer ideas on the subject. Early on most people would handwaving the whole thing as a non-issue.

Thing is the list gnoam provides is hard for me to digest when I think of the world.

I feel like 7.750cr for a tier 2 ship is too little so as to keep world consistency in spell prices and npc work prices [even a group of low level npcs can afford a destroyer! ].

Teleporting somewhere takes 90k cr [round trip for the caster plus resolve points cost]. It is instant and has 0 random encounters.

Still a tier 2 shuttle can afford a Level 5 drift engine and make the trip, not once but hundred of times. Able to carry more people than teleport and approach areas teleport cant.

I 'm not really sure I got any real objections but I m sceptic at the moment.

I disagree with the posts that this shouldnt apply to androids. Androids are by definition a construct and a humanoid. A construct is, in fact an item. Additionally, I think that the fact that androids have an armor upgrade slot indicate that as a construct, their hide/body is on some level treated like a suit of light armor with an AC bonus of +0 and one upgrade slot. If you increase the HP of the 'armor' it should act as ablative HP that would have to be repaired/replaced later. Armor is given HP of x+3/level and the tensile reinforcement treats the armor as if it were 5 levels higher. The 'item level' of the android is immaterial, the +3 HP per level would apply to the 'five levels higher.' It may seem like a bit of an exploit, but I would think the android gets bonus HP of 15 (maybe 5 if you rule that their 'armor' doesnt qualify as a sturdy item and gets +1 HP/level instead of 3).

I would then rule that these HP act as temporary and once used, the upgrade must be reapplied. If the # of credits is a concern, charge an installation fee and make the cost more in line with a level 1 augmentation.

A for creativity!

I really like this response.

Maybe following the book :

"Any other piece of equipment has a number of Hit Points equal
to 5 + its item level"

So 6 HP as temporary is pennies and the cost of the item is a burden early.
When u get more levels 6 HP is just flowering.

A system where your damage capability increased per YOUR level instead of the weapons could have partially solved this.

Imagine you lvl, feat etc determined the damage of your pistol and not the lvl of the actual pistol. Imagine then that you still bought a pistols but these had different properties such as plasma, Fire, line arc etc etc. That way you could buy different guns for the properties (of course some properties would result in slightly less/more damage) but essentially the damage of guns are the same.

The general idea is that you should be able to carry the same semi-auto throughout all your carrier and become more deadly with it as you lvl. You shouldn't need to buy a new version because your damage capability is dependent on YOUR lvl.

This system would result in cheaper weapons since YOUR lvl dictates the damage not the weapons itself, no reason for expensice weapons, they won't matter if your lvl 1. For instance imagine a simple gun in the hands of a lvl 20 soldier compared to lvl 10 Soldier with the exakt same simply gun. The lvl 20 Soldier would be VASTLY more dangerous than the lvl 10 soldier. Because weapon damage scaled with character lvl, Thats the system I would love to see.

Hope I make some sense.

Actually the game is almost made that way.

If you take good look you can see through the numerous options that there are weapon archtypes.

Laser pistol, Semi-auto, Plasma-pistol etc.

So its there. Just use the price of the lowest level entry.

It becomes far more difficult with armor though.

What if Resolve was Charisma based for all characters?

So I was watching this video( https://youtu.be/YPAjuYHlVIs ) in youtube and got me thinking how does each of the races really sounds ?

So maybe some of you thought about this already and dismissed it as silly but I need some input on that.

Do you think its possible to combine those two effects ?

It does create some powerful narrative. No really.

Just in case anyone cares getting everything you can fit in a fighter will get you a tier 13 ship.

That is if you add Drift engine lvl 5 and maximize Armor and Countermeasures to the point it does not make any sense, add security stuff for the computer [An Mk8 that is], etc etc.

A Tier 12 Fighter which is just the best stuff is a scary little devil but
50 HP and a TL of 27 is not something I would get my hopes up against a tier 4 Destroyer!

The answer is creating an equivalency will ruin game balance and ruin the in game economics.

From a realistic perspective, star ships would be incredibly valuable compared to individual personal gear. But if this is allowed then you'll have players selling bits of space ships to have the best personal gear in the galaxy. And since in Starfinder a majority of offensive power comes directly from weapons, and defensive power comes from armor this is a bad idea.

I dare to think a new way of tackling this issue. Instead of gifting a ship to my 1st level characters I ... will not do so. I ''ll have them long it and want it and pay it with what ever credits they manage to gather.

Therefore, I need to put BPs into credits.

I would go with the basic 1 BP = 4000 gold/credits from Pathfinder (maybe round it up to 5000 credits so it's easier to calculate).

This would put a T1 ship at 275k credits (T10 = 1,35 Mio credits) - I think this is a reasonable price for a ship/mobile armed player base. ;)

I 'm really torned now. 275K seems little money for a t1 ship. 55 BP for 275 is like 5k per BP.

On the other hand the Lane_S approach of 100k per BP seems too pricey as well.

Then again for 5k per BP a party (#4) of 20 level adventurers would hardly be able to own a tier 20 ship. So maybe it's not as little as it seems in the first place.

Did I miss some guideline in the book concerning the ship tiers for party level ?

Ok so can we quantify some approximation or at least indulge ourselves in a discussion about ships vs tiaras and how all this sums into credits?

Do you mean to say that the question is without any merit in a way?

So here are some hard data coming from the book.

a) A Tiara can teleport someone (and their friends) anywhere in the Galaxy for 800k. For 400k you can get the same deal daily but only for the system you are already in.

b) The cost of a 6th level spell that requires resolve is about 45k

All that in a split second. No random encounters or time to travel that is based on die rolls.

Taking into account all the other notes about costs rising in the second case when the designated location is dangerous and that maybe the actual cost rises up to 90k or more because the Technomancer might consider his own teleportation back as part of the deal...

What is a good exchange rate cr to bp ?

Are there factors I missed that should be valued in ?

Is shipbulding a bull or a bear market according to the setting ? :P