Alangriffith's page

You forget its just not the white nissan reference, its also the license plate (transponder). And why would the wanted information just go to Absolom and not to all Pact Worlds? Sure, different worlds might be more or less zealous about how to follow up, but its pretty easy to share a general wanted list between the worlds and whenever a matching transponder is picked up a alarm goes off.

Also, its not only the craft itself, but also the owner and the pilots. There will be records about that and probably also scans of whoever checked that ship in and out a hangar.

I'm amazed nobody else brought this up, but it's *written in the scenario* that they have false identity codes (altered to disguise the fact the ships are AWOL - so they have *already been* reported and hacked their way round it). So basically they have a fake/stolen licence plate which is police/military. Do Castrovel flight control have the Computers skill to identify those codes as false? Would they believe random adventurers (PCs) over supposedly official database records? Have they been bribed/threatened to look the other way?

Also the rest of the thread has all this talk of a suicide attack or rigging the fighters to explode, but its totally unnecessary to sacrifice the fighters if they escape the combat (or win, which is what the pilots intend). For example:
1) They could land at the official spaceport if their fake codes hold up (and claim the PCs fired first/resisted arrest).
2) They could have a drift-capable mothership in orbit that's too big to enter atmosphere, or doesn't have fake codes and needs to stay out of ground control sensor range (a GM wanting to expand the encounter could even have the fighters intended to lose and flee, drawing the PC ship in pursuit up into range of the mothership).
3) They they could just fly 'below radar' (or through the storm cover) and land at some secret ground base (which really just needs to be a clearing in the jungle, since Castrovel has those big patches of dangerous wilderness nature reserve that don't seem to be patrolled). Again, the GM could expand the secret ground base into its own encounter if the PC ship pursues (perhaps drawing inspiration from drug cartel jungle airstrips in the real world, or doing a more scifi underground secret base).

RoughGalaxy wrote:

My group trudged through the 3rd book of Dead suns and decided the best idea, once they had the intel, was to report it to the space police (the stewards) and let them do their jobs in dealing with the cult.

Your group should've rolled "heroes" to fit in the AP theme. Someone who delegates their troubles away is definitely a bad match.

I recommend watching Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy for inspiration.

In Star Wars the space police are the enemy (The Empire - Han Solo references smuggling past Imperial ships, they aren't just the military but also the police)

In Guardians of the Galaxy they literally call the space police (Novacorp) as well as Bluffing another faction (Ravagers) to deal with the world ending threat.

*That's* what I want to see in AP, or at least AP which have a galactic threat. Have calling in help be part of the plot. Have all those Steward/Starfinder Society/Hellknight ships turn up and fight the corpse/cult/dominion/azlanti fleet, while the PCs in their small ship have to fly through the space battle as cover to try and board the enemy flagship (Guardians of the Galaxy), or attack it through a vulnerable point only a small ship can reach (Star Wars), or land on the planet to do the plot thing there (Star Wars again, also Serenity - in their setting the space police are also the enemy).

Then you can use the cool ship pictures taking up the main book (and at least a couple of stats, if only as description of what firepower they are throwing at each other), and have an epic battle as backdrop, but most importantly it feels like a real living setting, rather than one where the Stewards have battleships and an ultranought but you never see them *do* anything (except that one steward ship the evil cult somehow stole, so it could actually have its stats be used in Dead Suns).

Answering the OP question - my experience of Starfinder? Pretty great, but I made my own adventure without any APs*, and deliberately set it in a backwater bit of nearspace where the Stewards have no authority (as not Pact worlds), the other big powers and groups have no interest, and the local law have hardly any ships (none of them larger than a destroyer), and rely mostly on bounty hunters.

So my PCs actually are the best people to deal with threats, can fight off law enforcement if they want to go criminal (and be targetted by false charges and corrupt bounty hunters if they go hero), and when I do finally have a larger power turn up it will be a 'brown trousers' moment for the PCs, not just 'about time we saw them' or 'them again... oh wait this time they're bothering to get involved'.

I also made sure none of the PCs can be members of the big groups themselves, so if they do find a threat to the wider galaxy it's harder to immediately get support/resources as they aren't trusted (the Starfinder Society have their own fleet and are building an ultranought according to SFS scenarios.... explorers are building an ultranought! Yet none of that shows up to help Society members in good standing when they find a doomsday weapon in Dead Suns)

(*I did buy a couple of SFS scenarios, loot them for ideas/creatures and repurpose them to relate to my plot and not involve the Starfinder Society)

So I was just mucking around with orbital weapons (not really used them) and I think you could devestate a planet with them if this is per the rules.

1) Put an orbital weapon on the weapon mount say a super orbital particle canon.
2) Upgrade it to array (2 weapon mounts).
3) Park ship at long range (100,000 miles) so the planet is in your forward arc.
3) Shoot EVERY target on that side of the planet (every city, every town, every gas station on rural route 9) at -4 penalty.

You'll be doing (2d10 x 10) x 10 to every inanimate structure in a circle nearly a mile across. That's 20 - 200 damage to every person in the area and 200 - 2000 to buildings, cars, roads, infrastructure. Then 10 minutes later you do it again and again and again as the planet slowly rotates.

Am I missing something or would this actually work?

You are missing that Array and its rules apply in Starship Combat, and bombarding a planet isn't Starship Combat. The description for the Orbital weapon property has a paragraph starting "During Starship combat" and then starts a new paragraph to talk about firing at a large stationary target (also, the word 'stationary' here invalidates your statement of "do it again... as the planet slowly rotates", the target won't be stationary if the planet is rotating, so your orbit must be geo-stationery for the target to be stationary - then the planet doesn't rotate relative to you).

So its pretty clear to me that putting Array on your orbital weapon just means that it can fire at every starship target during Starship Combat (with the -4 on top of its normal penalties for targeting certain sizes of ship), but still only fires once at one target in bombardment mode, which is out of Starship Combat.

I appreciate that you could argue a paragraph break isn't enough to make this distinction, and nothing specifically states orbital weapons cannot be used to bombard during Starship Combat. However it's pretty clear they don't work together because they throw up unanswerable questions the minute you try. These force your GM to houserule answers, at which point you are in the territory you are trying to deny BigNorsewolf, of the GM making decisions outside of RAW.

Short version of these rules issues:

You don't have a 'forward arc' for array to work except in Starship Combat, as it is defined by hexes, not angles or real distances. Your bombardment range is in miles, not hexes (and time is in minutes, not rounds). Also, the bombardment rule doesn't mention any attack roll (you just damage an area), but array only lets you fire at every target with a penalty on attack rolls (no ACs/TLs are given for ground targets either).

Also, these orbital weapons have a specific range (and for missile versions, speed) listed in their statblock. IF the array Starship Combat rules apply, shouldn't all the starship combat rules apply, including the range listed? Which would limit your bombardment range to a max of 100 hexes (maybe these represent 10000 miles?) at an additional hit penalty beyond 20 hexes - now you're definitely in range of any defensive starship orbiting, and so close to the planet that only a small section of it fits in your forward arc.

Long version examples of some of these rules issues:

Your ship is parked 100,000 miles away - how far away is that in hexes? SOM page 51 gives some hex to miles conversions, but they are on 3 different scales, while ranges and speed remain unchanged. Put you on the medium/standard one, and a hex is 10 miles, so you are 10,000 hexes away (impractical on any map, but lets say your GM allows it anyway as a thought exercise). But your sensor range is a maximum of 150 hexes (long-range 20, Dejet-infusion adds 50%, x5 for active scan) so how can you even detect the planet, yet alone what you need to target? Still at least it puts the whole planet in your forward arc. If you move in within sensor range on any scale but the biggest (for multiship fleet battles, which you aren't doing), you are now so close to a big planet that your forward arc covers only a tiny slice of the surface, and your array fire is only bombarding a small area.

Lets ignore distance for a moment and consider time - your orbital weapons fires every ten minutes, but starship combat works in rounds, There is specifically no conversion given of rounds to time, and a lot of debate as to how long rounds are. So how long does any defence fleet have to respond between shots? How many times can they fire back (if they are even in range and can detect you, see above)?

Speed of responding ships (or you repositioning to target a different part/side of the planet) are even worse, as they involve both time (undefined rounds/minutes) and distance (3 possible different conversions of speed to miles depending on scale) at the same time.

And then there's the actual weapon, of course. Beam weapons may be okay, but are you telling me an orbital nuclear silo doesn't have to reroll TL every turn as it moves its speed? Starship Combat rules clearly state that for missiles, just like they state how Array works. All or nothing by RAW, right?
Nuclear silo has a listed speed for starship combat of 5 hexes per turn, so even at fleet range (100 miles per hex) it travels your 100,000 mile range in 20,000 turns (we don't know what this is in time, but certainly its slower than the response craft with speed higher than 5 rushing towards you - if you drift out does the missile lose guidance?) and has to make 20,000 rolls against TL - and what even is TL for this stationary target? And can it be shot down by point defence weapons on ships (CRB rules on point defence say you can only shoot down weapons targeting yourself, BUT SOM page 88 describes the Idaran Keris being famous for shooting down projectiles aimed at other ships it is escorting).

It's definitely everyone I've seen so far is reading it as letting you draw a weapon as you move, which is something operatives couldn't do before. So its a definite change from trick attack being a full round action that just happened to have a move baked into it to that movement being a move action to move your speed. What that changes besides letting operatives draw on the move....

I always assumed you could draw a weapon as part of trick attack, as trick attack said 'you can move up to your speed', and draw a weapon says 'combine drawing or sheathing...with moving up to your speed'. Is it the 'as a single move action' wording on the end that was the issue? (because that's still there in the errata'd wording)

Was there a FAQ or ruling that banned drawing as part of trick attack (maybe an SFS thing)? Or was it just a consensus that it was "something operatives couldn't do before"? It certainly does seem to be the consensus from other posters on this thread, I just don't get why (or why its a big deal, for that matter - the operative in my game has all weapons concealed so can't draw as a swift anyway, and I'd assume more combat groups would have weapons drawn most of the time).

Will make puppy dog eyes for FAQ clicks?

I've never done this before, could you explain it? There's a FAQ button on every post, should I click it on your original post? My post? All the posts in the thread?

I'm having trouble seeing this as a rules change. The text is identical except for trick attack being listed as an example of a non-move action that lets you move (which it already was before, as described under trick attack) so what has actually changed?

Was there some FAQ/argument previously that trick attack didn't count as 'move your speed' despite saying the words 'move up to your speed' in its description?

Neither the text you quoted nor the two page references within it list tumble as a movement mode or an example. The actual description of Tumbling under Acrobatics says tumble is a move action and you move at half speed, not that it is part of movement nor even that you can switch between normal movement and tumbling mid action (as you can in D&D 3.5 and I assume Pathfinder 1, which I've hardly played but I'm told shared 95% of its rules with D&D 3.5).

Considering Starfinder already removed the free 5 foot step, restricting movement further by making tumble an either/or with 'move your speed' fits with that theme (I'm not sure I agree with that theme, but that's a different topic, although....

I'm still not sure why the initial design decision was made to have trick attack be 'a full round action that gives you a move' in the first place, and not just a swift action affecting your next attack same round - which would be standard action. You could then combine trick attack with a move action as you saw fit without all this weirdness. Yes then you could guarded step and tumble, but is that really a gamebreaker? You can trick attack at range anyway, you no longer need to be in a flanking melee position to do it when not hidden... where's the harm?)

I've been skimming through the new CRB revision. There are quite a few changes that are entirely new to this printing that hadn't previously been covered in FAQ/Errata. As far as I can tell, all the errata from the FAQ page made it in to the new revision.

Just skimming through the equipment section, I've seen:

A bunch of basic melee weapons picked up the thrown property

Some weapons picked up the analog property that were missing it before

Grenades got massive price reductions (some up to 60% off) and the stagger inflicted by cryo grenades was clarified to be 1 round

Explode weapons can now only critically hit one creature within their explosion.

Injection property has been expanded to allow other types of poisons, not just injury poisons.

Armor temperature protections have been changed from protect only from temps between -20 and 140F, rather than the previous wording that protected against all temps.

A bunch of armor descriptions now use the term "energy field" instead of "force field".

The Venom spur was given a description that makes it a basic melee weapon, rather than the weird undefined state it had before.

Clarifications on which magic items are worn and which are not have been added, which helps work out if you've hit your 2 magic items limit. They also removed restrictions of wearing two of the same "slot", so you can have both of your magic items be hats if you'd like.

Ring of Whispers got a range on its sense through (hearing).

Medicinals and poisons both got a lot cheaper. Some item levels changed for poisons too.

For those of us who like physical books and don't have experience with other Paizo stuff like Pathfinder (i.e. Me), is there precedent for a printed version 2 to follow a pdf alteration?

I'd greatly prefer a physical book to having to use pdf only or cross reference physical book with uber-errata all the time. My preference is certainly enough for me to pay for a new CRB. Don't know about anyone else.

Telok wrote:

Let me see if I have this right. The party decides to go squadron. Lets say they're level 7 and 5 pcs, 4 want to do the individual little ships and the last pc will run the hq.

They look up on the table how many points each individual combat ship gets for 4 level 7s. Each pc builds their own fighter with those points.

Then to build the hq ship they get 180/4=45 points. Heavy freighter costs 40/10=4 points, same with the hangers. Then you buy thrusters, sensors, pcu, drift drive, etc., using the remaining 37 points. So 4 for thrusters, 8 for drift, 1 for terrible sensors, and because we're up to 180 power we need a 20 build point pcu. 37-33=4 points left over for anything else.

That sound about right?

Except that you cannot do that. You cannot use a Heavy Freighter as an HQ option. It can't support the hanger or shuttle bays.

CRB pg 299 wrote:

A hangar bay can be installed only in a Gargantuan or larger starship...

CRB pg 299 wrote:

A shuttle bay can be installed only in a Huge or larger...

So the minimum frame you can acquire is a BULK FREIGHTER.Which means the earliest you can acquire an HQ is 4th level as I already stated.

The solution to that problem is launch tubes, from the Pact Worlds book page 153. "Designed to fit on Medium and large vessels", they allow the launch and retrieval of tiny ships (we're all in fighters anyway, right?).

They are 5BP and 2 expansion bays each, for one fighter, but you don't actually need one for every PC ship. As long as your fighters are drift-capable, you only need to have one or two docked at a time, with the other PCs staying in their fighters while one or two on the HQ ship use the tech lab etc. Even if the GM rules that you can't sleep in your fighter as it has no crew quarters, you can do a 3 or 4 shift rotation to sleep in shifts during downtime, which also means someone is out there on fighter perimeter at all times for when space encounters show up.

So then we decide to exclude the whole fact that our HQ ship can't be "Stolen" or "Destroyed". So until you get more BP at higher levels you have to choose to I add some security to help defend my ship from being stolen while in the battle or even when we are docked.

When docked, leaving someone to guard the ship is also an option. Either PCs (half of my party never want to do much shopping/investigation, and happily stay with the ship while in dock) or NPCs (since apparently the HQ ship has/needs NPC crew? My Starship Operations manual doesn't arrive until next week, I'm just going by what you've said in the thread.)

As for vulnerability in battle, it could be left behind in the drift if the fighters are all drift capable, as Garretmander suggests (this is also very Xwing, which is what I think of when we're talking about PCs in individual fighters. Start in your HQ, then jump to your target, do a raid/recon then return to base).
Another option is leaving the HQ ship a good distance behind in realspace (or driftspace when you're all travelling through drift), with the fighters ahead to look for trouble or attack the target. (sensors and weapon ranges aren't particularly long in hexes, especially compared to fighter speeds). If the enemy only detect incoming fighters on the sensors, why would they assume an HQ ship even exists behind if the fighters could have drift engines? Even if they do, they have to get past your fighter screen which gives you good shots on them as they have disadvantageous facings etc.)

Some GMs/APs may dictate you have to come out of drift right at the combat zone and can't plot a course to come in early, but even then you have some options as you can use the rules for flying within the same system in realspace (planet to planet, or planet to moon).

Another option is to have your HQ ship not have drift engines, and instead effectively act as a fixed base while the drift-capable fighters go out on mission (the Babylon 5 game - a GM could even use the HQ ship stats to represent the PCs squadron's 'docking bay' area, and have it be part of a large space station or mothership for campaign purposes - the bit you spent HQ BPs on is your personal docking space, tech lab etc. and the rest is campaign setting you're not authorised to use without paying credits, rolling social skills etc.)

The 'base' still HQ ship also works well with the the cloaking device from the Nearspace book, which is otherwise useless as you break cloak if you move or fight. An HQ ship launching fighters before combat begins isn't fighting in my book, and even if your GM rules otherwise, the cloak still lets the HQ ship launch fighters out of combat and use the cloak to be safe when left behind for the fighters to go on missions.

So, maths. At a sensible minimum, for an HQ ship with launch tubes, you can have:

Explorer frame (12BP), one set of set of launch tubes (5 BP), M4 thrusters (2BP), cut-rate sensors (1BP), pulse gray as minimum powercore for a ship that size (10BP). So we're down to 30BP minimum, or 36 if you add a drift engine (you're already forced to have a powercore that can handle the PCU minimum for drift.)

This version of course has no weapons, armour, countermeasures or shields (The CRB page 302 says "almost every ship has simple navigational shielding", so you don't need to worry about dying from space dust), and relies on its PC fighters to protect it. But it is something to upgrade from, with 2 free expansion bays (and upgrading to a transport for a 5th bay isn't too expensive either). Don't know how the maths for HQ ships works exactly as I don't have SOM yet, but hope this lower minimum at least reduces the minimum tier problem a tad.

Arguments could be made to go even lower than 30BP, but the above definitely works without needing a friendly GM.

(If you do have a friendly GM.... I'd argue that you don't need thrusters at all for a 'space station' type ship but the rules imply you must pick them. I'd also argue that you don't need sensors at all if you don't move and have a fighter with sensors outside most of the time, and the rules do list sensors as optional.
Then there's the grey area of whether the launch tube wording "Designed to fit on Medium and large vessels" actually bans them from being on small vessels or is just flavour text - if you can put them on small vessels then shuttles with their 3 expansion bays are only 6BP, and can fit a smaller cheaper powercore too. Come to mention it, powercores also have the wording they are "designed for" the sizes on the table - can they not be modified to fit a cheaper smaller powercore on a larger frame? Isn't that what mechanics, ysoki and space goblins are for? Your mileage/GM may vary)

I was wondering are there any rules for space hazards in one of the books?

The new Starship Operations Manual has some. There is currently a sample scenario from it on the forums (A Singular Notion) which contains a space hazard called Time Eaters.

Link:

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6shbe?STARFINDER-ENCOUNTER-A-SINGU LAR-NOTION#discuss

For example I know one AP has a unique ship capable of travelling into a star but I can't find rules for how class a normal commercial ship can approach them before radiation/heat overwhelm its defenses or the gravity well of a black hole captures it?

There aren't really any exact distances or speeds in the game at all (ship speeds are in hexes of unspecified distance, space travel within a system or via drift is all XD6 days not any real distance or speed given), so there definitely won't be any in the books. I don't know whether Starship Operations Manual lists any normal space hazards like 'near a sun', or just whacky sci-fi ones like the time eaters.

This is the sort of stuff the GM makes up or is only relevant for a specific scenario, and then not in real units (e.g. "the event horizon of the black hold is 20 hexes away, if the Devourer cult ship can drag the hostage ship there with their Gravity Gun tractor beam then the hostage ship is pulled to its doom").

But yes. A lot of people have the same problem. I've often said that the gunners have the impact, the pilots have all the agency, and everyone else is just rolling the same skillcheck to aid the gunner. Many of the reviews I've seen to starfnder cite the same problem.

I've had a 5th level captain tell me "I make the diplomacy check on a 1, I'm aiding our gunner hit with the biggest gun and getting coffee... later..."

I have a few solutions I've worked up for this problem with my group of 4, but it won't help the OP as it would make things taken even longer with a large group.

Briefly, to avoid derailing too much, it involves more smaller ships on both sides. The PC ship can have launch tubes (pact worlds book) and 1 or 2 fighters, meaning that in space combat you launch fighters and suddenly you have 2-3 PC pilots with agency. This also leaves the main ship undermanned so the PC crew there have more variety as they need to switch crew roles more often in response to damage, enemies coming into range of certain guns etc. rather than having a dedicated PC for each station all the time.
Minor crew actions become much more important (for fighters and the undermanned main ship) so PCs are making multiple rolls per turn as they roll for minor actions as well as their main roll.

Giving the enemy multiple weaker ships instead of one strong ship gives more choices to the PC ship crew as well (science officer has 3 ships to scan, captain has 3 ships to taunt, gunner has multiple targets to choose from) so it's no longer "my one taunt per combat is used up so I just buff gunner every turn" or "the one ship is scanned so I'll give up on the sensor station now". Especially if you make the enemy ships non-identical, so one might be a glass cannon with long-range weapons, one a short-range assault ship, one tough but undergunned etc. This makes scanning the ships and adjusting strategy on the fly much more important than if they were multiple identical fighters. It's a bit more GM work, but if the GM is into space combat they are probably building custom ship designs for fun/practice anyway, and once you get a few loadouts written down for your main antagonist group you can reuse them (which also makes it feel like a unified military/corporation/pirate fleet).

Multiple weaker ships on both sides also make space combats progress faster, as it is easier for one fighter or ship on each side to be taken out, at which point the losers may rescue/retreat, or if they fight on then their firepower is reduced so the battle ends quicker. Considering how rare and feeble criticals are in space combat, you rarely significantly reduce enemy firepower when fighting a single ship until it hits 0hp and ends combat entirely.

The main rules issue with my method above is that the PC ship budget rules assume a single PC ship - you can buy launch tubes with BP but not fighters.
Rather than splitting the BP budget, I get round this in my current game by telling them they need to steal fighters (not in space combat, but from bases as a heist) and then if they lose a fighter or want a better one they have to do another theft. This works quite well with the Operative being a ysoki ace pilot, and the general firefly/scoundrel theme of my game, but wouldn't work for others.

So much for briefly.... well I hope it may help people on the thread drawn by the title, even though it won't really help the OP (with 6-8 PCs and a GM already taking too long to make choices for a single ship)

I mean, this ability technically allows you to pop an analog padlock with no circuitry from 20 feet away.

That blows my verisimilitude out of the water. Hacking a network through a wall shouldn't be a problem.

Never heard of a sonic screwdriver?

Didn't volume 2 of Against the Aeon Throne establish that species detecting biometrics exist? I seem to recall the doors there could tell if you were Azlanti (or maybe just any human) and required hacking/bypass if you weren't, regardless of any disguise.

Only Reptoids/Grays and others with a magical polymorph effect should be dodging serious technical security looking to find species hiding themselves as others.

The reptoid in alien archive has a change shape ability which says it can 'assume the appearance' of another creature, 'gains a +10 racial bonus to disguise checks' and 'otherwise functions as disguise self' (disguise self being an illusion not a polymorph, though it does say in disguise self description it 'counts as altering your form', whatever that means). Alien Archive doesn't label Change Shape with a type (Ex, Su or Sp).

So if we're saying biohacker auto-bypasses disguises by reporting the humanoid as a reptoid, reptoids should be bypassed, right?

Alternatively, if we're opposing disguise with the biohacker science check, that still gets a nat 20 so would bypass most reptoids (CR1 reptoid has disguise 25 with the bonus if taking 10 or rolling average, level 1 biohacker with at least +1 int modifier modifier and a rank in relevant sciences has 25 with his automatic nat 20 from the custom lab scan. I assume reptoid master scales similarly with the appropriate level biohacker to its CR, but there's a lot more maths I can't be bothered to do to confirm that).

The Gray in alien archive doesn't have any disguise skill listed, nor any disguise abilities or spell-like abilities that would cause a disguise.

So if we're bringing adventure paths into it, has the Threefold Conspiracy been run by anyone for a party including a biohacker?

Would any of the mysteries be ruined by a biohacker PC auto-bypassing reptoid disguises by identifying them as reptoids? Are there disguised grays, and if so does it explain how they are disguised? Would biohacker bypass them as well or is specified as shapeshifting? Is there any clarification that shapeshifting even changes DNA?

These are somewhat genuine questions in that I do genuinely want to know the answers, but I do obviously have the agenda that I don't believe custom lab should bypass disguises, so some of the questions are phrased to show how I feel that happening is ridiculous or ruins the whole shapeshifting schtick of reptoids (and apparently grays, even though the only book I have with them in doesn;pt have any disguise pwoers for them).

People keep bringing up 20 credit disguise kits but you also have to have the skill, and/or use a spell for a +10, or a 500 credit holoskin. Meanwhile the custom lab costs 1 chemalyser or medkit (to replace - first one is free), and counts as BOTH those items in addition to providing this scan, so its effectively 0 credit value to bypass somewhere between 20 and 500.