| Torbyne |
I expect Power Armor to be a thing that can be enchanted to a player's tastes at a minimum, i would put decent odds to the core book allowing both technological and magical augmentation of arms and armor as well. actual piece meal building of equipment based off some kind of point buy or tech level seem unlikely though.
I hope for but dont recall seeing anything about vehicle scale combat in the interviews so far. worst case scenario, we might be able to use rules for the smallest scale ships (star fighters?) and employ them as rough stat blocks for large scale mechs. i dont expect to see much in the way of customizing ships and vehicles in the core book however much i would drool over a system like that.
You never know though, traveller was able to put together a basic vehicle and ship customization option in their core book and greatly expand on it in future supplements, Starfinder might be able to pull off the same.
| Jamie Charlan |
Although I'd note that manipulators likely take system slots; while legs may be part of any land movement system, you can change your heading with a stubby weapon "arm" (with some thrusters for an extra kick in emergencies) just as well as some complex legpiece.
Chances are, for things to work out well, for any given hardpoint or system slot we'd have several options:
- If all that mass and processing is used on a fixed weapon mount, that's probably weapons +1 size over the craft maximum. Main weapons on fighters or really nasty capital mounts meant to deal with planetoids or whatever; but you gotta point the hull in the general direction to get a shot.
- You could instead have a gimbal mount for equal sized weapons. They get a nice arc like "Forward", "Left", "Right", "Rear". Probably the standard.
A full turret is likely for weapons one size smaller; can switch by one arc clockwise or counterclockwise every turn, while one more size down gets you full 360 firing point defenses OR a manipulator arm with more limited traverse but that can swap handheld weapons or offer more utility.
In that way, a starfighter or mech - or models like those in Einhander or those silly grappler ships - would be a matter of how you build and equip your vehicle, as well as the scale....
So all we'd be missing are combining or at least docking/control-transfer rules and you can make the "one giant gun" destroyer, the transforming carrier that came with it, and live out your dreams of Battle-7 or whatnot.
Speaking of, where do you think the scale will/should be starting? Is the basic size scale of pathfinder kept and expanded, or is there a separate ship track (with fighters being "tiny ship-scale" thus "huge personal-scale" for example)? Are we looking at "Colossal (ship)" or "Colossal IV" or even "City-Mech G"?
| OmnionMagnari |
My dream is to be able to either have a iron man like class that gets a power armor suit with customization points ala the aegis from DSP, or for it to be its own thing, with money being the primary limiter for how badass it can get. Start with a base suit, put lasers in the hands, flame throwers in the wrists, a jet pack, retractable arm blades, retractable spikes, missiles somewhere (maybe like in the shoulders the little mini ones)
| Jamie Charlan |
you do NOT want money to be the primary limiter. that never ends well.
in a lean campaign you're screwed, and if you're given free access to the downtime system you instead literally get to just spend money to further class abilities on top of the usual loadout.
That's "prepared full caster" levels of will-do-anything" here.
Well that or it'll run right into that other thread regarding planet-busting. But I'd be okay with that part, so long as it's the kind of thing that requires epic levels to do from personal scale gear.