Dracomicron's page

Yeah, it's actually more confusing to me that if you're Combat SRO you can mount a simple two handed weapon. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because it doesn't really explain how the SRO would use it. Like SROs don't have to be humanoid shaped, but they often have humanoid appendages, at least for game mechanics purposes. Robot companions that have weapon mounts require one mount for one hand, and two mounts for two handed weapons.

It isn't any more complicated than having an integrated weapon in your armor, or a drone's Integrated Weapon Mount.

I see the Combatant clause to indicate that a warmachine SRO is dedicating more space to its weapon mount...basically it gets two Integrated Weapon Mount slots (following with the drone analogy) instead of one, allowing it to have a 2-handed weapon installed.

It is not well written, but my take is also that the 1 handed martial weapon is for the freebe. It doesn't really make sense for the mount size to restrict it by proficiency category like that.

This also keeps it reasonably consistent with the drone's integrated weapon mount customization (1 mount for any 1 handed, 2 mounts for any 2 handed).

Corpsefolk have a feat where they just become Large at 5th level. That can be... a pretty significant change for a Small or Tiny ancestry.

I read through Corpsefolk and it didn't seem like there was a specific set of creature types that could become corpsefolk. Like, could an Asrazoan be Corpsefolk? A Leshy? A Novian (Dead Suns indeed)?

Assassin's Garrote! With ghost operative, alter ego and a pistol or two you can be agent 47 from hitman.

I was looking at that and fantasizing about a Close Quarters or Armor Storm soldier strangling a whole group of enemies.

Outside of an infiltration-based campaign, the feat tax for Nanocyte Dedication is rough, especially for an archetype that is mathematically underwhelming. It...just doesn't add anything to your build except let you do the "suit up" animation from Marvel movies.

TheTownsend wrote:

I was just looking through Archives of Nethys and realized they cut the Multidiciplinary Mechanic feat from the playtest! No wonder they edited the reference to it out of that "Something Old" article shortly after dropping it. It's a real shame, that was something I was excited about for the class, it just needed to make sure the benefits for the different options were even. I wanted to use mines made of zombie meat!

I hope if they add a book with more features for classes they add that back and um 'flesh' it out. I liked the idea from the playtest but it really needed more other features that played into it.

This was my thought. While I lamented its exclusion from the final product, I must admit that it did not DO much of interest. If it was cut because it's going to become a feat chain in a future product, then it's an acceptable edit.

I'm more annoyed that High Tech Medic was nerfed in some baffling ways (Healbot was not THAT unbalanced that it needed to go) and not buffed in the way that would make it truly worthwhile (sub Int for Wis on Medicine, or, better yet, sub Crafting for Medicine on Treat Wounds and Battle Medicine, because healing is an engineering problem in SF).

Didn't SFS1e have scenarios with the Vehicle tag that folks could bring their vehicles to? Seems like a reasonable compromise.

I have a goblin taxi driver who is getting Crash Afficionado whether vehicles are legal or not, but it would be nice if he could buy a taxi to hurtle through Absolom Station in.

Through spending ACP on boons:

...

The PF2e legacy core ancestries (before Galtic Ancestries came out). Now I think you can use the boon to get the PF2e heartages.

Been low-key looking at the elf ancestry that gives a multiclass dedication for a SFS character. That is pretty slick!

The Junkomancer archetype in Tech Core says to "add one common junk spell of any rank you can cast to your spell list". Now, does this mean to add the spell to your tradition (one of arcane/divine/primal/occult), or to your spell database/repertoire? If it's the former, why is it restricted to those who can cast arcane or occult spells?

I don't have Tech Core yet, but what you described sounds like you're pretty clearly adding it to your repertoire. Most effects that add specific spells don't care what the tradition the spell is in. For example, Shadow Mystic is Divine tradition, but it adds Invisibility as a connection spell... a spell not found on the Divine list.

It would be a pretty bad archetype if it gave you the ability to choose junk spells but didn't even give you one with the feat itself.

Primary Target doesn't use extra ammo; it's a side effect of the Area Fire or Automatic Fire, the latter of which is already accounting for the number of targets. It doesn't make sense for you to fire two rockets, but only one explodes.

That said, it's been confirmed that Primary Target is considered a discrete attack for the purposes of Kill Steal, so I would say Boost only affects the Primary Target attack if you make one. If you don't make a Primary Target attack, the boost would affect the area damage, I think. It seems like a trade-off: either you hit one guy super hard, or you forego that hit to do more damage to the most enemies.

Yeah, SROs feel really good. They're a little like awakened animal, in that you get to choose a size separate from your heritage, but also that size determines whether you get a Strength or Dex boost (Small gets Dex, Large gets Str, Medium gets to pick). Some feat highlights: Hoverbot (grants your land speed the hover trait, and you can Overload Thrusters once per hour to fly for a little bit, which also costs you the hover while it's on cooldown), Off-Road Transport (okay it's just a difficult terrain ignoring ability, but "earth, plants, stone, and trash" is a very broad terrain list), Electromagnetic Manipulation (use magnets to grab metal stuff within 30 feet, and you can also free-hand Disarm at range with it. Upgrades to 60ft for combatants and workers), and Reinforced Chassis (grants pseudo object hardness, like monster constructs get).

They also get a few options that interact with the glitching condition - increasing it or decreasing it on other objects/creatures, inflicting it as a follow-up to a successful Strike, and a big dang AOE capstone feat that forces every tech thing in the area that's not an ally (or their gear) to save or become glitching. I don't know how good those'll feel, as glitching is a pretty underwhelming condition a lot of the time, but it's a thematically appropriate niche!

Kind of a shame that this book also doesn't have any Standardised feats. I figure it's a casualty of the various publishing pipelines, but also those are a nice bit of game design and I want them in all the Starfinder books! They save so much page space for more cool things!

Thanks for the info!

Love that we now get to pick Large for SROs. 1e capped out at Medium.

I feel like glitching is actually really strong if you lean into it. It can really mess up robots or make a BBEG's main weapon not crit as reliably. It's also sorta hard to get rid of.

The other day I Combat Hacked the boss of a Society adventure and ended up causing a miss when it would have been a big hit.

My 1e SRO, Dragonbot, was obsessed with proving his superiority over both robots and dragons, and making other robots glitch sounds right up his alley.

Definitely agree on the standardized ancestry feats.

Dracomicron wrote:

moosher12 wrote:

think of the old sepia snake sigil spell *from Pathfinder 1E.

Twitches and collapses into dust.

https://youtu.be/ZxEY6pBBsKQ?is=f-eeBvFe5IrzZfh9

If you're feeling old, RIP.

If you're pointing out the spell is even older, yeah, I'm aware, but I'm trying to keep commentary within the realm of systems that Paizo properties touch on.

Positively ancient.

And no, I get it. I was just feeling my grognard taking over and had to take a moment. I read Sepia Snake Sigil when the original Unearthed Arcana came out in the 80s.

Did remind me of my favorite Penny Arcade bit about Warhammer Online ripping off World of Warcraft.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/i-hope-you-like-text

Anyway, I don't have Tech Core yet so I'm just browsing the thread picking up crumbs. Looking forward to re-making my old SRO in 2E.

think of the old sepia snake sigil spell *from Pathfinder 1E.

Twitches and collapses into dust.

https://youtu.be/ZxEY6pBBsKQ?is=f-eeBvFe5IrzZfh9

I was sorta hoping that High-Tech Medic would allow Int-to-Medicine, but sadly no mention.

Oh yeah, making the spotlight buff/debuffs simpler and scaling is a great start.

I still want the class to either commit to being a caster or a martial, though. This sorta half-and-half approach dilutes the class in ways that don't seem to add a lot of value. I don't play PF2, so I don't know how the classes there work with being hybrid, so I'm prepared to be convinced.

If the focus spells are "free" based on combat circumstances, then that could work. Like if you're attacked while off-guard a hardlight anvil falls on your attacker as a free action focus spell. Then your focus point regenerates based on some other circumstance (being knocked prone by an opponent?).

I'm glad we're getting more development on the hardlight features, but I think we can go even further. The SF1 Nanocyte was a fantastic class and there was almost no significant problem with them being able to pull gear out of their back pocket (after the errata that they stopped having to eat the party's treasure). Give luminaries a repertoire of specific item props they can make in hardlight, including weapons and 5' x 5' terrain items (crates, ladders, stairs, etc).

Anyway, good start, and good on Paizo for listening to the playtesters.

Mechanic was my second-favorite class after Soldier, and my most amusing character, Dragonbot, was a SRO Bombard Soldier/Experimental Armor Mechanic, so I will certainly be looking at Mechanic (and perhaps the archetype) to see if there is some way to recreate him.

The playtest mechanic seems a little heavy on mines as the ideal play style. They're basically renewable fireball generators. I'll be interested to see how all that shakes out. I currently have a Society corpsefolk drone mechanic with the necrotech feat, and I hope the magi/bio/necrotech options get fleshed out.

Technomancer I have no major interest in, though I'll definitely read it over in case something inspires me. Witchwarper never did anything for me, but I recently made a very cool Gap-Influenced nuar detective, so ya never know.

In 1e I had a fun formian nanocyte, and this is another I'm interested in recreating. Her nanite swarm was a horde of ants, which made some amusing body horror as she used it for medical procedures ("the stream of ants crawls into your wound; you begin to feel better, honest").

I've wanted a low-tech AP in Starfinder since early SFS1 when the Society encountered a bunch of Pathfinder-style civilizations on the Salvation's End asteroid. I played a dwarf operative from one of the vaults and had a lot of fun with her as she encountered new concepts.

Until Thurston Hillman murdered her in the Perplexity, at least.

One of my formative literary experiences was A Wizard In Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff where an astronaut lands on a superstitious, primitive world and he develops a reputation as a magic user using only his technical affinity. It would be really neat to have an adventure or AP where players could pull off something similar.

I haven't played PF2, and I was pretty reluctant to get into SFS2, but my desire to continue playing with the great players, GMs, and Venture staff built over multiple decades afrer the SFS1 sunsetting was strong enough to get me over that hump. In playing the new edition, I can see the gap (heh) where some niches haven't been filled by SF22 options yet.

For example, in SFS1 my 701 character, Zoggy Grav, was an Armor Storm vesk soldier who could best be described as a walking meteor impact (his bull rushing targets included asteroids, mechs, and a proto-god), and his unarmed damage was competitive with high-end weapons. You could just build a soldier to be an unarmed beast.

SF2 soldiers currently cannot really have a viable unarmed build that utilizes their primary AoE class feature, so it is difficult to re-create the same sort of feeling of being an armored juggernaut of destruction, just ripping things apart with gauntleted hands (Zoggy's kids are still pretty cool, though).

I have managed some fun unarmed builds with Striker operatives (including a very bitey goblin and a contemplative whose mind blasts are -technically- unarmed), but the operative kit is a lot different than a SF1 soldier, so here I am wondering what I could do using Fighter, Barbarian, or Monk classes (or archetypes!) in SFS2.

OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 wrote:

Shortest blog I’ve ever seen. Then again, I’ve never seen less movement/conversation/feedback in Playtest threads for any class ever.

And what’s even stranger is that the class seems *almost* universally appreciated.

I think most appreciate it flavor-wise. Mechanics or power-wise not so much.

Even after reading the playtest thoroughly and playing at a table with a Luminary, I'm not sure what, if anything, the Luminary actually does that wouldn't be outshone by an In the Spotlight envoy or Rhythm mystic.

Disclaimer: I haven't had the opportunity to playtest Luminary, but I have studied the class and read a lot of feedback.

The fact that all of the roles are always available seems to me to be a recipe for analysis paralysis, and on a class that can basically interrupt any action to move the spotlight around, this can disrupt the flow of the game as players dither, or even argue, over what role to give any particular combatant, or who to spotlight at all.

My suggestions are twofold:

1. Make moving the spotlight either a 1 action or a reaction move. Make it a real choice that only happens on your turn or once between turns. Reduce the paralysis and main character syndrome.

2. Scrap the "all the roles possible all of the time" thing. Make them ALL feats. Each feat has a benefitial effect for an ally or a negative effect for an enemy that modifies the Spotlight's base effect (which, incidentally, should do *something,* like a base +1 or -1 to attack or damage).

Like, Comedy could give a +1 Reflex to an ally or -1 Reflex to an enemy. But you can only use Comedy if you have the feat for it. This reduces analysis paralysis and lets you focus on builds and team synergy (if your caster buddy uses a lot of Will save spells, you'll want to use the Will modifier feats).

Each platform gets a base feat for free, and higher level feats could let you select multiple lower-level role feats. Even higher level feats modify the spotlight or let you activate more than one role at a time, so like Horror/Romance (True Blood) or Comedy/Action (Jackie Chan flicks). The bonuses are additive so the spotlight action/reaction actually has an impact. The type of bonus/penalty could also be adjusted; if the luminary is dumping multiple feats into the spotlight action, it should feel as strong as an Envoy's directive without being redundant.

I do NOT think the Luminary's schtick should be focus spells... or even any spells at all. I agree with the posts saying that the hardlight stuff should be considerably buffed to be more than window dressing in exchange. It wasn't a problem in 1e when you had Nanocytes pulling 40' ladders out of their pants, and it will not be a problem now if the hardlight items actually have mass and in-game uses.

Hulking Corpsefolk jumps you straight to large size.

No consideration if the original was medium, small, tiny before. Or already large.

I have a skittermander corpsefolk that I intend to take that feat with. I consider it hilarious.

Playtested at level 3 last night with an Envoy in the party. Was outperformed in all aspects by the Envoy: combat, buffing and healing.

Maybe this should be a caster class? This would separate it a bit from the Envoy.

It technically is a caster class, with the focus spells. Just not a very good one.

But I take your meaning. There is room for a full Charisma caster right now, as Witchwarper is Int/Cha and defaults to Int as a an archetype.

I think, in the end, role selection and Spotlight need to be the same action, because as it stands the paperwork is going to get out of hand.

The table's patience for a Luminary's main character syndrome will probably wane the third time they interject themselves into another player's turn, with requisite anaysis paralysis on the correct role to assign or spotlight to move, and to whom.

Moving the spotlight out of turn should probably be a reaction, for that matter.

My SFS1 stellifera didn't even use the water golem; she rode in a pet carrier on a her mechanic hover drone.

Dracomicron wrote:

Okay, my question is, why would the Sports Luminary's hardlight weapons be comsidered improvised for the Luminary? Like, if I am a Brutaris player with a ball or a professional wrestler with a steel chair, wouldn't you know how to use your hardlight creations optimally?

I'm not saying that they should rival a solarian's stellar weapon or anything, but having them at least be competent with their creations... it would at least make for some more interesting situations where you can't bring traditional weapons into a club (like that bit in Incident at Absolom Station).

I'd say that they would be improvised for anyone other than the luminary, and the damage scales to d6 at level 3 and 2d6 at level 6 or so.

The other types could have similar scaling benefits. The hardlight just seems so half-baked right now.

I think the buff to hardlight props is supposed to be a minor little thing. Kind of like a sorcerer’s blood magic, it’s not supposed to have major impact on the game I feel.

I get that, but... why not? The overall impact of this class is currently very underwhelming; if the impact of this class is mostly limited to minor single-target buffs and debuffs, why not have another class mechanic that actually scales?

I can make an Envoy that does pretty much everything better than a Luminary, and I'm pretty sure that is not intended.

Okay, my question is, why would the Sports Luminary's hardlight weapons be comsidered improvised for the Luminary? Like, if I am a Brutaris player with a ball or a professional wrestler with a steel chair, wouldn't you know how to use your hardlight creations optimally?

I'm not saying that they should rival a solarian's stellar weapon or anything, but having them at least be competent with their creations... it would at least make for some more interesting situations where you can't bring traditional weapons into a club (like that bit in Incident at Absolom Station).

I'd say that they would be improvised for anyone other than the luminary, and the damage scales to d6 at level 3 and 2d6 at level 6 or so.

The other types could have similar scaling benefits. The hardlight just seems so half-baked right now.

Okay, thanks for clarifying.

The Swallow Whole and Engulf creature abilities also give the grabbed condition, so I wouldn't interpret grabbed doing anything different than those abilities here.

Okay, but does that mean that victims of either ability can or can't be targeted from outside? What does "off-guard" even mean in that context?

I've started a Yeulentu Colony solarian in Society play, and I decided to take Gooey Engulf, mostly because it sounds so very gross. It has been fun to be a sticky, mossy giant turtle, but some things about it are not clear.

The rules are very similar to Swallow Whole but not quite.

You can Stride and move through spaces of any creatures in your path. Any creature your size or smaller whose space you move through can attempt a Reflex save against your Athletics DC to avoid being engulfed. A creature unable to act automatically critically fails this save. If a creature succeeds at its save, it can choose to either be pushed aside or pushed in front of you at the end of your movement. You can only attempt to Gooey Engulf the same creature once per turn. You can contain as many creatures as can fit in your space.

A creature that fails its save is pulled into your body. It is grabbed and slowed 1, and it must hold its breath or start suffocating. The creature takes 1d6 acid damage at the end of each of its turns while engulfed (this damage can be improved by hardlight handwraps as though it were an unarmed attack). An engulfed creature can get free by Escaping against your Athletics DC. An engulfed creature can attack you but only with an unarmed attack or weapons of light Bulk or less. You're off-guard against these attacks. If you take piercing or slashing damage equaling or exceeding one fourth of your remaining Hit Points from a single attack or spell, the engulfed creature cuts itself free. A creature that gets free by either method can immediately breathe and exits your space. If you fall asleep, are knocked unconscious, or die, all creatures you've engulfed are automatically released.

When a unit is pulled into my character's body, is it fully in there, like Swallowed Whole (sort of implies by the suffocation), or does the "Grabbed" imply that it's just sort of sticking out of me and can be attacked by my allies (and can attack other people within the constraints of Grabbed) The bombard soldier wondered if he could exclude me from his Area Fire if the enemy was literally inside my space.

Either way, this is a very strong 1st level effect that makes the character into a horror movie monster.

I've started an Yeulentu Colony solarian in Society play, and I decided to take Gooey Engulf, mostly because it sounds so very gross. It has been fun to be a sticky, mossy giant turtle, but some things about it are not clear.

The rules are very similar to Swallow Whole but not quite.

You can Stride and move through spaces of any creatures in your path. Any creature your size or smaller whose space you move through can attempt a Reflex save against your Athletics DC to avoid being engulfed. A creature unable to act automatically critically fails this save. If a creature succeeds at its save, it can choose to either be pushed aside or pushed in front of you at the end of your movement. You can only attempt to Gooey Engulf the same creature once per turn. You can contain as many creatures as can fit in your space.

A creature that fails its save is pulled into your body. It is grabbed and slowed 1, and it must hold its breath or start suffocating. The creature takes 1d6 acid damage at the end of each of its turns while engulfed (this damage can be improved by hardlight handwraps as though it were an unarmed attack). An engulfed creature can get free by Escaping against your Athletics DC. An engulfed creature can attack you but only with an unarmed attack or weapons of light Bulk or less. You're off-guard against these attacks. If you take piercing or slashing damage equaling or exceeding one fourth of your remaining Hit Points from a single attack or spell, the engulfed creature cuts itself free. A creature that gets free by either method can immediately breathe and exits your space. If you fall asleep, are knocked unconscious, or die, all creatures you've engulfed are automatically released.

When a unit is pulled into my character's body, is it fully in there, like Swallowed Whole (sort of implies by the suffocation), or does the "Grabbed" imply that it's just sort of sticking out of me and can be attacked by my allies (and can attack other people within the constraints of Grabbed)? The bombard soldier wondered if he could exclude me from his Area Fire if the enemy was literally inside my space.

Either way, this is a very strong 1st level effect that makes the character into a horror movie monster.

Regardless, I'd also want to see moar things like the Fringe Science stuff from Threefold Conspiracy in the game.

That one enclave of human women who were all perfect clones of each other, etc. There's a lot of space in Starfnder to do and elaborate on things like that.

Joro is nonbinary!

Paizo is still a business, and if you value the option enough to buy the book, then it's a good business move.

If you don't value the option enough to buy the book, there are still plenty of things for you to play.

I'm hoping so, so desperatly that we get power armor rules in Tech Core.

I do kinda hope that there isn't as much dissonance between mechs and power armor. In 1e the difference between a huge mech and a huge power armor is that the guy in the power armor is pretty much toast if they get into a fight...even though they are both giant robo suits and the same size, one is a moderate upgrade for a single character and the other is a party-wide resource with planet-cracking weapons.

I also have a Legacy Admittence boon goblin.

You can still get the Venom Spur, just think of it as an upgrade. As for not being able to switch to a new SF2e heritage, I'd role-play it as being an older generation goblin. "Goblin kids these days have it so easy. When I was your age, I had to bite things with my own teeth."

The nice thing about using your own teeth is that you don't have to worry about giving your food persistent poison damage while you are eating. I hear that can lead to some severe heartburn.

Well, some of the new Goblin feats would probably mitigate the heartburn, so...yeah.

Honestly I am just excited to pick up Crash Conoseur at 5th level. Going to crash my taxi into so many things.

I think it's interesting trying to think of scifi archetypes that are common in media, but there aren't space for yet. Off the top of my head-

•Shapeshifting and Physical Transformation

•Nonmagical Intellectual Doctor/Scientist

•Portals and Wormholes

•llusionist with Special Effects, Holograms, etc

I expect that Mechanics will fill the role on nonmagical science heroes, but it would be really interesting to have an experimental physicist-type that creates various nonmagical localized effects like elemental damage, wormholes, or status effects.

I loved 1e Biohacker, if you could get that sort of vibe from the physical sciences, it would be neat.

I do wonder if Vanguard will come back as an archetype, like Nanocyte will. It was such a great, flavorful class, but it was honestly just a tank retread of Solarian.

On the Terraformer idea and sort of borrowing from Evolutionist, it might be interesting to have a class that draws power from the biome they're in, like instant adaptation and resistance to damage based on where they are (resist cold at the polar caps, able to do void damage while in space, with feats and specializations focusing on specific actions. Not quite evolutionist, not quite kineticist, but somewhere in the middle.

Basically the ultimate galactic explorers.

Huh, so I recently made it to Interstellar Species. I honestly never would have expected Evolutionist to be the augmented cyborg class by the name. I expected evolutionist to be more of a shifter than a cyborg with a science fantasy approach to augmentation. So I suppose the answer to most cyborg archetype requests would be the Evolutionist class or archetype. Though all honesty, I could see evolutionist going the way of the nanocyte and becoming either an archetype, or a range of archetypes for each implant type (Magitech, Cybernetics, Necrografts, and Biotech)

Not really related, guess that makes both Evolutionist and Vanguard for classes with misleading names. Like Vanguard, if Evolutionist comes back, I hope it gets a more evocative name.

Evolutionist was a class I was very excited for, that playtested very poorly for me, and ended up not being materially improved for me in the release version, unfortunately.

I thought that it should be built around an evolved "battle form," perhaps like the shifter but actually more like the customized apocalyptic forms of demons from Demon: The Fallen.

If Evolutionist comes back, it needs a long, hard look at its themes and ideas about power costs, because everything the 1e class did was handled better by the vanguard, solarian, AND nanocyte, without the drawbacks for not managing your mutation points or whatever they were called.

Your ancestry feat can be retrained with the usual 7 days of downtime. You can't normally change your heritage unless you have 12 or less xp, (where you can freely rebuild)

It's really the heritage that is bugging me (goblin is now 4th level), because the Pathfinder heritage I chose (Razortooth) gave a weaker bonus than an easily purchased Starfinder augment (Venom Spur).

I could not wait to make a goblin taxi driver for Thurston's table at SkalCon last year, so I bought the Legacy Admittence boon for them. Now that Starfinder 2e rules are out for legacy races, will we be able to respec our legacy ancestry characters with the new (and frankly more setting appropriate) options?

I wouldn't even need a full respec, just heritage and ancestry feats.

I would agree the Stridermanders are just a teaser for the real entertaining part of the scenario.

The descriptions of all the ways the skittermanders "helped" had us rolling.

Che Guevara could not have done better.

My question about Rip, Tear is why it doesn't apply to the claw version of the narural weapons feat. Doesn't it make the jaw attack strictly the better choice?

This is an interesting feat with some situational utility, but I feel like it is missing the key problem with mechanic medics: when you're investing heavily into Int and Dex to make your main abilities and combat work, you probably don't have a lot of room left over to invest in Wisdom.

This is a problem because 1e Starfinder had Medicine as an Int ability, but the Pathfinder 2 paradigm of wanting Clerics to be good nonmagical healers as well now infests SF2.

I think this would be easily fixed by giving the level 1 feat High Tech Medic the ability to use Intelligence for Medicine. This would let mechanics (especially multidisciplinary biotech mechanics) actually be good doctors while keeping Medicine as a Wisdom skill for Mystics.

It also gives a sort of Biohacker feel as Biohackers could basically choose if their main ability score for any science-based check was Int or Wis.

Anyway, that's my two cents after making my first Mechanic using the playtest rules.

Striker Operative needs to give a skill other than Athletics. It's not technically broken as written, but it feels broken in spirit.

Operative is the DEX class. Striker is limited to agile/finesse melee weapons (all agile weapons are finesse anyways) and unarmed attacks. You can't start with a +4 in STR, only a +3. And investing in both STR and DEX is really bad for skill proficiencies because there's only one STR skill, etc. And, if all it did was give you trained in a skill you're not going to invest heavily in, it'd be fine.

But Operative also gets 4 free skill feats as they level... for the skill from their specialization, and only that skill. They do not, however, get free skill increases for it, so you need to spend some of your normal skill increases to unlock better skill feats. Honestly? This ability really feels like it was supposed to be skill increases instead of skill feats, because there's a lot of abilities like that in PF2 for classes. Inventor, Swashbuckler, Thaumaturge... And honestly, that would solve the problem here! Free advancement in Athletics would make you good at that even without going heavy on strength.

Honestly, the forced investing into specific skills is kind of bad anyways - did you know there's only 4 skill feats for Computers at all without raising it to Expert? Acrobatics only has 3 (though in party, because for some reason Steady Balance is listing under Athletics, at least on Nethys). So does Stealth. And especially for Stealth sure, you probably focus on it, but still.

So, as I see it... Specialized Skill Set seems like it's supposed to read skill increases and not skill feats. But failing that, Striker either needs the Ruffian treatment (can take STR as KAS) or a different skill (Intimidation, maybe?) Edit: Ahaha. The playtest let them take STR as their KAS even! But honestly... why does Operative's melee subclass push you towards STR instead of DEX?

Definitely agree. I have two striker operatives, and neither of them invested heavily into Strength because Intelligence is a better fit for being useful as rogue skill monkey substitutes (now in 2e that Operative doesn't have an Edge).

I like the idea of getting automatic skill increases instead of skill feats.

I suppose I should formally request PF2 classes and class archetypes. Want to make a mystic/rogue at some point, and would love to eventually make a vesk monk.

I was wondering about that, too. An easy fix would be to make Area Fire a trained-only activity; for a performance weapon, you'd need the listed level to properly do it at all.

Dracomicron wrote:

Squark wrote:

Dracomicron wrote:

Planning some truly gnarly undead SFS characters since this book just showed up on Character Options.

The Adventure is there, and if you own that, you've been good to go for about a month. To reiterate: This new Player's Guide has not yet been sanctioned. We do not know if the added backgrounds and Stitch Flesh will be SFS legal, and it is not 100% certain the character options reprinted in this document will be available if you do not own the adventure.

The book was an instant order for me. I've been waiting for playable corpsefolk since 2017.

It's in my cart, just waiting for the gold program to start, lol. I didn't realize this until PF2E, but I am apparently a sucker for undead PC options.

Also, on the subject of corpsefolk, I'm thinking of giving them a custom feat that lets them get into the Zombie archetype as an ancestry feat, perhaps around levels 5 or 9. It just feels too appropriate.

Oh that Zombie archetype is, uh, tasty. Hadn't seen it before. Thanks for mentioning it!

I'm patiently awaiting access to PF2 class and archetype boons so I can remake one of my SF1 characters, a shadow mystic/operative knife fighter... since the operative archetype doesn't really give the same stuff operative levels used to give, a rogue archetype would probably be the best fit now.

I'm content to wait on the idea though.

Dracomicron wrote:

Planning some truly gnarly undead SFS characters since this book just showed up on Character Options.

The Adventure is there, and if you own that, you've been good to go for about a month. To reiterate: This new Player's Guide has not yet been sanctioned. We do not know if the added backgrounds and Stitch Flesh will be SFS legal, and it is not 100% certain the character options reprinted in this document will be available if you do not own the adventure.

The book was an instant order for me. I've been waiting for playable corpsefolk since 2017.

Planning some truly gnarly undead SFS characters since this book just showed up on Character Options.

Most systems prevent this issue by making bags of holding explode if put inside a different extradimensional space.

I would imagine that, in Starfinder, safety protocols would prevent such an action as damaging to the planar fabric.

Just going from rules discussion online.

Boost applies to the "next attack," and Primary Target describes itself as an attack before the area fire.

I think I may have misinterpreted a little because if you choose not to Primary Target the Boost wouldn't activate until the Area Fire.