Calgon-3's page

Starfinder has rules for moving in zero-g as well as a condition (Off-Kilter) for being disoriented in zero-g

"Off-Kilter You are disoriented and floating in zero gravity. You can’t take move actions to move your speed, crawl, or take a guarded step. You are flat-footed and take a –2 penalty to attack rolls.

You must use a method of propulsion to right yourself or grab a stabilizing object such as a wall or ladder (usually as a move action) in order to end this condition. See Zero Gravity on page 402 for more information."

So the kineticist idea should work. The big question would be at what speed would releasing air from the cylinder be at, because you are going to keep moving in that direction until you hit something, take another action to change your direction. I think it would depend on how much air pressure a kineticist can put into the cylinder. My guess is low pressure would be 5' per round, normal pressure 30' per pound, and high pressure 60' per round to keep in the in-game balance range. theoretically, if the air pressure was high enough it could be MUCH
faster.

Starfinder isn't exactly hard sci-fi but it does acknowledge a self-awareness of science in the setting, it just doesn't need to be 100% accurate, and bending, breaking, or outright throwing out the laws of physics is fine in places, at least that's my view on how science fits in Starfinder.

Ay, but

IMO it's really more limited by the amount of air you can create in a round, which is "negligible or light bulk" How much is that? Well "light bulk" so less than about 5 pounds. You can create less than about 5 pounds (mass) of air in a round. This ability isn't designed to make mass quantities of air or exert high pressures.

Elemental Blast is what you need to do that, and it does produce enough force to do real damage, which means it's more than enough for propulsion.

on a station, even sewage is a resource.

The cost of shipping materials is still kind of high compared to shipping them on Earth, isn't it? Which would mean that Absalom and other space stations would have to pay more for the materials they're made out of than Earth cities do.

Which you could model as a game dynamic that there's a steady market on all non-planetary stations for basic materials, including dirt and air. Also a decent price to be fetched for anything on station when you're, for example remodeling.

And a black market in stolen basic materials.

So about 7000 UPB's per pound then? A human could easily carry several hundred thousand of them.

Ancestry in Starfinder can take on whole other dimensions that what was present in Pathfinder. After all, PF takes place in a setting that has magic and some technology. SF takes place in a setting that in addition has wildly advanced technology, so mixes of ancestries that didn't exist in PF can exist in SF because SF has genetic engineers. And the genetic engineers have been at it for how long? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Maybe some humans tried to improve their offspring by engineering in Android characteristics. Maybe an elvish grandfather fell in love with a Ysoki. I think the only thing limiting what can be possible is player imagination and what the GM is willing to allow combined so it doesn't break game balance.

Which goes back to something that's been suggested: maybe what's really needed is an economy of ancestry traits/advantages/disadvantages so you can't craft an ancestry that's better at too many things. Each advantage is balanced by something you're not as good at as a typical character.

Maybe each ancestral trait should have a number of positive and negative value adders and every ancestry that's playable has to be built so it adds up to the same number.

Ah, I have Isaac Asimov's story Segregationist in one of my collections. The theme was humans and robots asking the surgeon for features of the other group, as if each species envied the best features of the other. The surgeon complained that humans should be entirely organic and robots should be entirely mechanical. The surprise at the end was the surgeon sterilizing their metal hands by direct heat. Without that sentence I would have assumed that the segregationist opinion belonged to an old-fashioned human surgeon; instead, the opinion was from a robot, making its impact more startling.

It fits how Robots are programmed to think in Asimov's universe. A robot surgeon could consider a human to be harmed by the inclusion of a mechanical part, and a robot to be harmed by a fleshy part that didn't have the innate sturdiness of robotic construction, and even uncertainty about whether either will be harmed is going to stop them. They have to take the path that they consider to have the least risk of harm. Moreover it blurs the most important line in their ethos, that between humans (who are to be proteced and served) and robots (who are to protect and serve). It raises the possibility of creating a thing that they wouldn't know how to interact with. Difficult problem for a robot trying to navigate the Laws.

Of course Starfinder Robots are not like that. They can harm you.

Or maybe they hardly have any size at all. The important thing about them is they're the essential piece of technology and they could be a standard unit of nanites that are actually incredibly small, but they can latch on to and organize whatever bulk matter is available to make things out of.

Yeah. I think my overall take is that in terms of people per unit volume, it's low compared to many real-life cities. Which is fine. Maybe it was planned for up to 50 million, but never reached that. Or used to have that before something happened.

I think they're programmable matter so they're whatever shape their owner wants thm to be. Their only relevant charactertics are their mass and volume. Most efficiently stored as something stackable, or maybe moldable to whatever shape you want like putty.

An interesting thing I was thinking about is all human population on Earth has to live between -1408 feet (elevation of the Dead Sea) and a little over 16000 feet (La Riconada Peru). Living at lower pressure would stretch human biology. Lower equivalent elevation (higher pressure) seems to be an option. If the station had artificial gravity equal to Earth's, that would mean there wouldn't be any open-air environments where humans could live that were 5 miles high. But they could be 2.5 miles from a center. But also I would think that the amount of artificial gravity in different parts of the station would be set to the preferences of many different kinds of people, largely non-human, and the air would be segmented to mimic multiple different planetary atmospheres so people from there could be comfortable.

epicmusic42 wrote:

So Absalom Station is supposed to be 5 miles in diameter and house 2 million people? Is this a typo or something cause that's physically impossible. Mechanically medium creatures seem to be a 5'by5'by5' cube, so without squeezing the majority of Absalom Station's citizens take up said space.

Now going back to the 5 mile diameter; Absalom Station is supposed to be a dome. This means that the volume of Absalom Station, i.e. total space within it, is equal to half the volume of of of a sphere of equal diameter. Therefore, the volume of Absalom Station is equal (4*pi*2.5^3)/6, or 32.725 miles cubed. Now since there are 5280 feet in a mile, multiplying the cubic miles by 5280 will give us the cubic feet of 172,788.

Returning to my previous point about the space most citizens take up without squeezing; this is 172,788 ft^3 that can be divided amongst the citizens and visitors of Absalom. So, since the most citizens are medium, we can simply divide the cubic feet by 5 to determine the MAXIMUM number of medium creatures that can be in Absalom Station: 34,557.

This is assuming that there's next to nothing except people in Absalom Station. At most this could also include walkways to account for the part where this number has people onto of people. However there would always be someone next to someone else, privacy wouldn't actually exist, etc.

So will this be corrected at any point? Cause the inaccurate world building is really kinda irritating. I'll even make it easy for y'all! 2 million people in the station? So that's 2 million 5'by5'by5' cubes to make math simple. multiple by 5 for cubic feet, that's 10 million cubic feet. Then you divide by 5280 for the cubic miles, 1893.9;round down to 1893. That's the MINIMUM possible volume. Now multiple by 6 and divide by 4*pi for the radius cubed, 903.8; round down to 903. The cubic root of 903 is 9.66 so the diameter of Absalom Station had to be at least 20 miles for it to CONTAIN 2 million medium creatures.

Let's add

...

right as far as it goes, I think? It comes to about 4.8 million cubic feet per person, which is equivalent to a sphere 209 feet in diameter. But of course it wouldn't be laid out that way. The point is, it's quite spacious, with some areas in which there might not normaly be anybody at all.

The comparison to Manhattan above is interesting but misleading. Manhattan is 13 miles long and 2.3 miles wide. We're talking about a roughly spherical station though, that could be as tall as it is wide. Manhattan's maximum height (tallest building) is only a third of a mile tall. Absalom sould be roughly twice as wide, 40% as long, and 15 times as tall as Manhattan.

Possibly one explanation for the low density of Absalom is it could contain large farms, facsimiles of planetary environments and massive industrial infrastructure.

In Pact Worlds terms it has outsize cultural relevance compared to its size and population.

In 40 years of people trying to make an enterprise bridge crew spaceship game, no ones managed to do it apparently.

Just ditch the paradigm and give everyone their own ships.

Might be fine for you, but that's not a game I would want to play.

Instead of rules at this point, it might be good to talk about what types of ship battle scenarios we want to see in SF2e.

1: Obestical to you're destination: Disable and run, or use chase rules.
2: Dog fight: Fight to the end.
3: Pirate attack or other encounter with boarding
4: Running a naval blockade.
5: Obstical to goal, fight long enough to complete a goal.

I support this. The rules should be designed around what makes for fun scenarios to play out. I'll add to your list.

6: Board and seize control of an enemy ship.
7: Divert enemy ships from an ally.
8: Any of the above with hazards to navigation (asteroids, planets, buildings in a city!)
9: Track enemy vessel, maintaining stealth, to discover their stronghold.
10: Enemy realizes they're losing and surrenders. NOW WHAT?

That last should be normal. Most combats don't end in total destruction for one side or the other. Opponents who are losing, unless they're fanatically committed, should attempt to withdraw and if they can't, to surrender. Rule systems need to be designed so that's a playable scenario.

Yeah they're definitely hewing closer to the PF2E Android. But what would the glitching condition mean for an Android? It seems like too severe a handicap to put on Androids given how they've already toned down most of the advantages that Androids have.

or put spells in the upgrade slots of your armor?

Why can't spells be transmitted over computer networks?

Why can't spells be transmitted as modulation on specially designed laser pistol (i.e. a spellgun)?

Spell chips could be single use items encoded to fire a spell once, like a scroll, then loaded into magazines that you shoot with your spellgun. Changing spells is just a matter of loading different spell chips into the magazine.

Can spells be mass produced, or do technical spell items need to be crafted one by one by technomancers?

Historically, rockets antedate firearms, so I see no problem with just straight up having rockets in a scenario where it's established there are firearms at any level of development. If there's firearms, somebody can figure out how to make rockets, including incendiaries, rockets that explode, or rockets that just carry things.

HolyFlamingo!'s idea of integrated magic, firearms, and simple mechanical tech is intriguing.

I don't really understand from your explanation what your situation is. Are you taking over a world and trying to maintain its flavor?
Running an adventure within an established world?
Running an adventure with SF characters in a particular PF2 world?

There are all kinds of reasons why things that could exist wouldn't be in a scenario. They haven't been invented, or they are banned, or the gods just aren't having it because of reasons regular characters aren't party to and can do nothing about.

I think Edicts and Anathemas are culture, but there's room as well for Insticts that are the same for everyone with a particular ancestry because they're wired into the character's biology (or construction and design for Constructs).

Instincts would function the same as Edicts and Anathemas but would be strictly bound to ancestry because they come from what you are not how you were raised. For example a character with a predatory ancestry couldn't choose to not feel a powerful urge to chase fleeing enemies, and a character with diabolic ancestry couldn't choose to not want to manipulate and deceive.

Personal preference that would be a bad idea to actually apply to a game meant for lots of people:

I'd personally be happy to see poison and disease dropped from the system entirely, as things better suited to classic fantasy than to a game where androids, semi-undead, and swarm-offshoots are all core. Sure, the medbay episode is a Star Trek classic, but there's usually going to be someone in the party that makes it a head-scratcher. If it's going to be weird and immersion-breaking anyway, better to just not have it come up.

But, that's solidly in the category of "things Paizo knows better than to agree with".

For me the idea that poisons and diseases equally threaten all species, even species that evolved on different planets breaks my suspension of disbelief in a really hard way. My dog, who is more related to me than any alien from another world could ever be, can be poisoned by chocolate, grapes, or onions, but can otherwise eat most of the same things I can. IMO food, poison, and disease should be specific to AT MOST an ecospheric origin.

Does that break the game? Well kinda. It means poisons and diseases maybe shouldn't be part of the game at all. And what is super advanced tech for anyway if it can't let you shrug off most diseases and poisons with stuff that's in a standard med kit?

Androids are Constructed but are as much living as machine. The rules specify them as needing to eat and sleep and having biological components. They're described as constructed (mostly) of nanites, so it can be inferred that these nanites are a kind of synthetic life born of biotechnology (and technomancy?) as much as or more than computer technology. Unlike SRO's that are constructed wholly or mostly of metal, glass, silicon, advanced AI software, and UPB's I suppose.

that's referring to the SF1E description though. They have been re-described, more vaguely, in PF2E rules, and have lost some things. For example in PF2E they need to breathe but in SF1E they don't.

Of official new rules support, sure. Of the game as a whole? SF1E only ends when you want it to.

There's so much stuff on Starfinder Infinite to explore, and no reason that is going to stop.

Yes, and the fact will be for some time that SF2 won't be a complete system. That is likely to prevent play groups from switching to the new system. Why play SF2 if SF1 is complete? Maybe they'll have some kind of hybrid with new and old stuff mixed together haphazardly.

Either way people tend to stop playing when the system stops publishing, so its likely the end of the starfinder games since you need people to play with. I think i've played ONE PFS1 game since it went kaput. The problems I have with pf2 are bones deep in the system so I don't see starfinder changing that.

As somebody who started playing AD&D, it didn't seem that way to me. The rules were stable for a long time with barely any new books but adventures kept churning out for years and years. AD&D 2nd Edition was kind of a flop. There's always that risk when introducing a new version of a game. Sometimes the players just like the old game better.

Paizo's got to be planning for that. How do they get players interested enough to reinvest in a new set of rules?

I don't feel like combat system inherently unsupports that, unless you mean there being heavy mechanics for surrendering or just more options for capturing enemies?

Its more of adventure design thing of whether all enemies fight to death in morale

Starfinder game mechanics definitely do fail to support that. If you don't want to kill opponents, you have to use nonlethal weapons because if the last hit is with a lethal weapon or a spell that does lethal damage, they just die when they reach zero hit points. (Unlike PC's.) This was an intentional choice but I don't know the reasons behind it.

Nonlethal weapons are more expensive and generally less effective but you can add nonlethal fusions to any normally lethal weapon, so that helps. But there are few spells that can do nonlethal damage. They could make it not so. Spells could do nonlethal or lethal damage at the caster's discretion. (PLEASE DO THIS!)

But the main issue is more scenario and adventure design. GM's need to make not killing everybody an option, e.g. by having enemies try to retreat or surrender once they're obviously losing. And adventure designers need to take it into account that the characters might not be, despite Chaotic Good alignment or whatever, a pack of psychotic killers.

Agree with Karmangator here. Starfinder should not be Pathfinder. It differs in technology, engineering, vehicles that fly and go really fast on the ground, interstellar and interplanetary travel, and alien races are core scenario features and they need to be addressed by core game features.

The basic skills it's built around should not be the same as something that's set in the non-tech or low-tech (e.g. steampunk) milieus.

Characters are going to have to interact with computers and high tech/magitech items and vehicles that need pilots ALL THE TIME.

So they should keep the Engineering, Computers, and Piloting skills, and they should be class skills for classes that are expected to regularly use them, esp. those that specialize in them, like Mechanics.

Calgon-3 wrote:

That still wraps me back to the basic question. Do you want the game to be all about the cool tech or do you want what characters can do to be mostly about the character's amazing skills?

Can a 12th level gunfighter, or whatever you want to call them, wreak havoc with a basic pistol, or do they need a 10th to 14th level weapon to even be in the fight? And how do you balance that against the 10th level Witchwarper that doesn't need any equipment all besides some decent armor to wreak havoc?

I want stuff to be mostly up to the character's skills, at least as far as your main thing goes. Playing with ABP for years has convinced me that it is just plain better than runes or built-in math enhancers.

Gear is fine as far as enabling some mechanics is concerned - consumables, jetpacks, vision devices,... etc. - and to enhance your gameplay with cool abilities you can use occasionally use. But tying basic usability of your character to paying vast quantities of money has always been a terrible idea. It causes so many completely avoidable problems and for what?

Same here, and that goes for armor too. Look at how the prices, EAC's and KAC's of armor scale with level. Your ability to avoid getting hit every round by anybody that wants to hit you depends primarily on the equipment and very little on skill. (Taking character level as a proxy for skill.)

I didn't mention any negatives about having four hands. But maybe there should be. Buying gloves is twice as expensive.

I think the basic restriction is you can only do 3 actions per turn, and you can only do one thing with your hands at a time (aside from holding things or locomotion). So the 4-hand character already has the basic advantage of HOLDING FOUR THINGS AT ONCE or HOLDING TWO TWO-HAND HOLD THINGS AT ONCE and those are huge advantages.

Allow players to fully realize those.

Reloading is a two-hand action that requires your full attention. It's not something you do while aiming or shooting with your other hands because you don't have the attention to spare, aside a Feat.

The other thing it should do is allow you a situational bonus on some actions that two-handed people have trouble with if you involve 3 or more hands. Climbing would be one of those. Or juggling.

But there's another whole natural side to having four hands that would realistically happen. Four handed characters might also suffer a penalty on some complicated actions when they only use two hands because that's not the way they're used to doing it.

I'd say my biggest wish for SF2 is that the combat system and the scenario designs should support combats commonly ending in surrender, capture of enemies, or retreat instead of only ever fight to the death.

I haven't played ship combat under Starfinder Enhanced rules yet and I'm waiting to see how that turns out.

My observations on SF1 starship battle rules is battles can be excessively long, and usually result in the enemy ship exploding, which is uninteresting. I want them to commonly end in surrender, or boarding actions. I want to get to those points in some reasonable number of terms. Not so few that the ship battle is uninteresting though.

It should *matter* how your starship is designed and equipped. If it doesn't what's the point of even having ships? IOW it would be easy to go too far in the direction of it's all about crew members doing dramatic things and employing tactics that rely on having good skill checks.

The stated intention from Paizo is to keep as much of the vibe and thematic/story elements of Apostae intact as possible and replace the drow with another ancestry via a retcon.

The simplest replacement is just make them corrupted Elves. Nobody owns "elves".

That still wraps me back to the basic question. Do you want the game to be all about the cool tech or do you want what characters can do to be mostly about the character's amazing skills?

Can a 12th level gunfighter, or whatever you want to call them, wreak havoc with a basic pistol, or do they need a 10th to 14th level weapon to even be in the fight? And how do you balance that against the 10th level Witchwarper that doesn't need any equipment all besides some decent armor to wreak havoc?

I was actually more worried about these knock-on effects than I was for Pathfinder, especially since my Dawn of Flame PC IS a drow...

Drow might be property of Wizards of the Coast but there were always Dökkálfar. And other kinds of malign faerie folk to base a race on.

Rather than a disaster, this is an opportunity for a creative writer. Dark faerie folk descended in part from malign faerie folk and elves of Golarion and maybe other dark fey from the First World.

How can a spell card set ever be complete? And why would you need a full deck?

Players and GMs want card sets that reflect their character's spell set, which is always much more limited. A utility that allows you to tell it what spells a character has and download sheets of cards you can print and is what I'd want.

What if instead of applying the (possibly) necessary increase to the chasis directly, it was applied through gear selection?

If that could be done, making a number of the defensive options equipment based would then the increase interoperability of Pf2 And Sf2 classes.
So something along the lines of Tech armor coming with HP add-ons based on your hit dice, giving a weighted bonus to lower hit die in order to give them the defense they might need for ranged combat, or possibly have some bonuses added to armor types that grant extra defenses against ranged attacks.
There's options in the future to make equipment matter more, and it makes more sense IMO according to the fiction.

I personally don't care about interoperability of PF2 and SF2 classes. The whole goal, IMO, is to make the game designer's job easier, but I don't care about that either.

I care about is each game, on its own, fun to play and to a lesser extent about system consistency where analagous scenarios work the same way. (e.g. shooting somebody with an arrow or hitting them with a club works the same way and has the same chance of causing them harm). If PF2 classes work in SF2, OK. If they break something that otherwise is fun in SF2, then that class just shouldn't exist in the scenario.

That said, I'm on board with all armor having damage reduction as well as AC increase, and characters having little if any hit point progression. Paizo wants it consistent for the sake of consistency and that's that.

Split level parties are a challenge for GM's and suck the fun out of the game for the lower level players.

There's no fix for it short of making level less important in the game.

I hope there is a reason for melee in Starfidner 2E...

There will be. Lots of them:

I don't see why the rules should envisage such absurd scenarios.

Ships vs. person-scale or regular vehicle scale is for dramatic effect, not combat rules. A hostile ship flies overhead. That's your cue to take cover. It fires at you but misses, and there's a large crater where your smoking body would have been. Also your cue to take cover. Or get in your own ship and go to battle because it's flown by you and is going to take a turn or three to come around and have another run at you.

Ships weapons are made to penetrate heavier armor than medium size characters can wear, even powered. Their interplanetary drives can roast a small building in seconds at short range.

You do not fight them. You fly them or you hide from them. Those are your choices.

That's my opinion, anyway.

No reason the same spells have to exist in Starfinder. Post Gap, the Universe has Changed.

Sounds like a pipe dream. The new combat system's different, and people aren't going to have Stamina Points, most likely because that breaks the whole PF2 compatibility thing. The weapons are going to have to be rethought with the new combat system in mind.

Another requirement that might be to gain a ranged AOO or reaction a sniper has to be hidden, getting a bonus to attacks.

STRONGLY disagree. If you stand out in the open when you know a sniper is there, or you can't take cover, you're vulnerable. Knowing the sniper's presence allows you to be cautious, but if you don't know what direction they are in, you can't take cover effectively. Once you know their position, you can, but if you choose not to, you're just an idiot that is going to get shot.

Pronate11 wrote:

I feel like it should be called something other than AOO (or reactive strike as it will be called in the remaster) for readability reasons and so it can get its own identity. A ranged AOO would not only be very different from a normal AOO, but would also be broken, as things like moving and making a ranged attack would provoke, making it less of a control tool and more of a DPS, as unless you have a melee character that wants to step 5 ft at a time to the sniper, you will be shot. Limiting what triggers it would tone it down, and actually discourage you from doing what does still trigger it.

Good point about the 5' move to avoid the AOO that would actually make it much easier for a sniper to hit someone. So maybe call it a ranged Aoo that would have different triggers and was to avoid it. Because snipers use scopes, the area affected could be limited to a cone facing one direction, that could be set up using an action to cover an area, with aranged AOO active.

I think sniping should take more than one action per round. The first action is to designate a target or target area. The second action is taking a sniper shot. That leaves one action that can't be a sniper shot (but it could be shot under standard rules).

The thing that makes you more vulnerable to a sniper shot is appearing, especially stopping in a place without cover in their target area. I'd say instead of extended range, the sniper who has lined up their sniper weapon on your area gets to ignore three range increments when taking their shot. If you're moving slowly (10 or less), it's two. If they are moving normal speed (up to 30), it's one. Otherwise range is as normal.

That would begin to model the difficulty of shooting at moving targets, which isn't well modeled in either Starfinder or Pathfinder. There should definitely be some kind of penalty for ranged attacks vs. moving targets, across the board, with all but area weapons and area spells.

It's completely obvious that you can hold four things at the same time that each take one hand. Since that's not an action, it's allowed. They should also explicitly state that you can take four-handed actions. For example use all four hands to carry a bulky object, or use all four hands to climb, giving you an advantage on climb checks when you do it, and climb things like walls and ladders while holding on to things with a pair of hands.

We don't have any four handed animals in our world to point at to say what is or isn't possible/reasonable. We have lots of examples of animals that use two, four, six, eight, or 30 legs for locomotion. The locomotion thing is built in to a subsystem of their nervous system, so it can happen without conscious attention. Use of hand for other things requires attention. That's part of why I say four-arm characters ought to be able to use all their limbs for climbing, but it also applies to crawling or swimming.

Logically, four-arm characters could also take actions with a pair of hands while crawling and at least carry a pistol in each hand while crawling. Don't try that at home! Which is a big advantage when that could include taking cover from ranged attacks and firing from behind low cover.

But if you give four-handed characters too many ways they can use four hands to advantage, you might as well delete all the two handed races because nobody will play them.

So, I believe wizards still exist in SF canonically. I believe it was the GM guide portion of the CRB, I forget the name of the book, had stuff about bringing pathfinder classes, and races, in. There is no reason some supplemental material down the line can't have a Starfinder exclusive school/thesis for wizards to make them fit into Starfinder. I think technowizard is fine and cool. I do however disagree with poster about making technomancer a wizard subclass. It should be a bespoke class. I personally associate it the most with SF, but I do have a bias

I have always interpreted in SF! that the Technomancer is what Wizards evolved into as technology advanced. In the pre-modern tech world, they were the smart guys that applied their intelligence at the intersection of magic and technology. We just see them as non-technical because we live in an era with far advanced technology compared to ancient or medieval or renaissance times, or even the first half of the last century. It's a natural assumption that in a world where magic exists, such people would explore how to use magic in new ways that take advantage of new science and technology. Thus the Technomancer.

They're the Wizard of the Future(TM), but perhaps in SF2 some of the other magic traditions have died out or mutated in interesting ways due to the prevalence of technology. Just as in SF1 the Operative replaces Rogues not because there stopped being people doing rogueish things but because they had to interact with technology, and it changed what they could do.

The other spell-using paths should also be evolved by the prevalence of technology. If you didn't adapt, your tradition became irrelevant and won't really be a thing in Starfinder; even if the class is technically playable it could still be a sucks to be you career choice and thus deemphasized in Starfinder.

Gunslinger? Good fit to modern weapons. Fighter or Swashbucker? Not a great career choice if people are shooting at you all the time from outside your reach.

Some thought should go into how the other Pathfinder classes should be adapted and renamed to be viable in a tech heavy universe. Maybe in some cases they just wouldn't, so they won't be represented in the core rulebook and be discouraged for players and GM's because they're not very viable options.

I don't think you can climb and use weapons at the same time is implied. It says "Performing actions with multiple pairs of arms concurrently
is a challenge and can’t be done without intensive training."

Climbing a ladder, using a wand, or performing combat maneuvers with your hands are all "performing actions" with your hands. You need to take the switch hands action if they're not in your active hands. They call out weapons I think only because that's where players are most likely to use them in ways that make these characters overpowered.

I think ultimately that last sentence will be reworded to "You can only perform actions with your active hands."

Definitely want to see that playtested to ensure it doesn't just result in one or more characters just getting squished every time before it appears in an adventure MY character is in.

How well do you expect medium-scale characters, even with armor, to stand up to weapons designed to attack ships?

That violates the established idea of what AOO's are about. It seems like the wrong mechanic.

Moties - all kinds including Masters, Engineers, Soldiers, Mediators, and Doctors.

I don't see any reason that should be a class feature. It should be basic to the combat system. If you think cover should be more effective, the obvious fix is just make it more effective vs everything that's trying to hit you along a line of sight.

I don't like the idea of AOO's for that. Cover is the exception, not the rule, and you shouldn't need another rule to cover a deficiency in the basic rule. Just fix the basic rule so it gives the amount of effect for cover that you want.

IMO this can largely be fixed by GM'ing appropriately. I think cover should be completely flexible from +1AC for barely any cover to +8AC or so for most of your body is behind hard cover.

If it were my game system to design, shields would be carried cover and work the same way as other cover.

We're talking about characters walking around in essentially mini-tanks. There has to be a set of rules for it or you have to just exclude it from the scenarios.

But players won't like being not allowed to do something that's integral to many scifi books, shows, and movies. IMO it's gotta be covered and it's gotta be allowed to work and appropriately scaled so you can mixes of powered-armor clad and other characters.

If you get to giant size mechs, those are vehicles, not armor, and there needs to be a workable vehicle combat system.

Effectively, I think powered armor should be a Construct that you wear, with its own set of hit points and that can be independently attacked. And when your powered armor is disabled (or killed) you are either going to have to get out of it or haul it around by main force.

There are spells and weapons (maybe there need to be more) that specifically target tech items. Discharge, for example.

I do think powered armor should use batteries, or have built in batteries you need to manage as part of your charge budget.

I'm not a fan of the assumption that tanking needs to be a thing that somebody needs to be specialized in. It should be a tactic, not a class, and available to any character that can deal out a load of damage or make it so you're effectively the only character open to attack.

Should a Soldier be able to lay down a withering field of fire (assuming the right weapons) so the enemy has little choice but to try and take them out because they're causing too much damage to ignore? ABSOLUTELY.

Should a Solarian be able (assuming the right weapons and attack bonuses) that is devastating the other side, or interfering with their attacks to such a degree that enemies don't have a thought to spare about shooting at the Mystic? ABSOLUTELY.

Should a Technomancer be able to blast the areas where the enemies are with spells to a degree that makes them the obvious target to attack? ABSOLUTELY.

Should a Mechanic who's operating a drone swarm be interfering with so many enemies or making so many attacks that they draw all the attention away from the Soldier, Solarian, Mystic, and Technomancer because they simply have to deal with that threat first? ABSOLUTELY.

Or a caster that specializes in Abjuration should be a viable class option. Your job is to protect the other party members with area shielding spells, soft cover spells, etc.