The aim of this thread is to be a destination for Starfinders looking for inspiration on creating custom equipment. Please give suggestions for what you would like to see, as well as feedback and balancing advice on current suggestions. I am always open to corrections and constructive criticism :) I will be starting off with a focus on weapons, but throw out any and all ideas!
The ideas dump will be updated here: Janco's Custom Armory
As a bit of an introduction, I think some others have shared the same sentiment that I would love to see more ways to give weapons more "personality" and variation. While I fully appreciate the difficulty of doing this in a tabletop setting, I think there are some ways in which we can mix it up a little, at least until more options are released (and maybe even give some ideas to the Paizo team).
Essentially, the ability to give a weapon more personality comes down to the resolution at which variables can be mix and matched. I don't get super excited about the fusions, and feel their value could be better distributed. The way I see it, in order to remain balanced within an item level, we have the flexibility to increase/reduce stats (Weapon type, Damage, Damage type, Range, Capacity, Usage, Bulk) and add/remove features (Critical, Special properties, Fusions).
Here I should note that there are some great random generation tools already created over at sfrpgtools, which you should check out if you haven't already. It is awesome at mixing all the variables and outputting some cool gear. I also love the make and model naming schema.
Adjusting stats gives some finer variation for balancing, but I feel creating some unique special properties and applying them more liberally in different combinations is the key to giving something character.
All that said, the idea is that the page linked above will be a running database of sorts for the community to come up with inspiration for your home game gear.
I'll start off with some of my ideas here, ripe for balancing discussions. Alongside the suggestions, I also use a couple of homebrew weapon mechanics that add a little more flavour. Please give ideas on how to better improve these.
The first is Hit type. In order to circumvent the Pass/Fail system in combat a little, I've played with the idea of a breakdown of "Glancing Hit", "Hit" and "Direct Hit". A Glancing Hit occurs if you roll lower than the target AC by 5. A Direct Hit occurs if you roll 5 higher than the target AC. This allows us to add certain weapon effects that only happen on a GH/H/DH in addition to the current Critical Hit, and I don't think puts too much extra load on a GM.
The second is Qualities. Weapon qualities are almost like grafts that you can apply to a base/existing weapon that modify the stats. These are a flat change to the stats and the only indication would be in the name. For example, you may have an "Accurate" Flame Pistol which has a base range of 30 instead of 20. I haven't fully fleshed these out yet but let me know what you think and how these might scale.
Have a read of the current list, and post your own!
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I like a whole lot of these ideas! The qualities mechanic seems really interesting, like a non-magical version of weapon fusions, except they're built in from the start. I would think that each quality would cause a given weapon to cost a certain percent more, with a sliding scale based on how good the increase would be. This post is gonna be split up by my ideas on each quality you've presented.
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So, going off the ones you have in the chart, Accurate could, say, increase the weapon's range increment by 10 feet. On a weapon whose base range increment is 100 feet, this would cost about 5% more. However, on a weapon whose base range increment is 20 feet, this would cost about 75% more.
My reasoning behind those percents is that increasing the range of a 100ft range weapon by 10% is going to be somewhat nice, but won't be that important most of the time, so it would have its cost boosted by less than 10%. However, a weapon where it's increasing the range by 50% at a range where it's absolutely going to matter, would logically have the cost boost be more than 50%.
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I feel that Expanded and Conserving are pretty much the exact same end result (more usage before needing to reload/recharge), but done in different ways, which I feel is redundant and could easily break stuff if they could both be applied (but I'll get to multi-quality in a moment). I think the best way to do those ideas would be to drop Conserving, and have it be a single property that effectively increases the capacity by 10%.
For example, a weapon with a capacity of 40 would have its capacity increase by 4 when made expansive. An weapon with fewer than ten uses would not be a valid target (probably, I'll get to that in a moment). By which I mean, if you have a weapon with 80 capacity, but the usage is 10, it only has eight uses so it couldn't be made expansive.
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Powerful is interesting, because the effective average damage increase from Xd4 to Xd6, and from Xd10 to Xd12 is the same. Therefore, I think it would be a 20% price increase for every die of damage it deals. So a weapon that does 3d6 damage that was made as a Powerful weapon would cost 60% more.
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Lightweight... I think it would probably be, say, for every 10% or fraction thereof you reduce the Bulk, it costs 10% more. So a weapon with 6 bulk would cost 20% more to make at 5 bulk, as it is effectively 17.7777...% lighter.
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So that's my initial thoughts on qualities. I'll look over everything else soon, but I didn't really want to write eight pages of ideas and feedback off the bat. :P