Dope! Very excited to see where this (presumably spellcaster?) sits in relation to the other classes.
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Also is that a tarot card on golden chain? I think it's an ancient bantrid hibernation tower: However, less than 5 years ago, previously unnoticed machinery under Hibb’s surface began to stir. All across the moon, apertures opened in the ground, from which rose tall towers with spiraling ramps. Heretofore unknown creatures emerged from these towers, their small visual sensors adjusting to the light of the distant sun. The members of this sentient species, who call themselves bantrids, had slumbered in stasis for eons before their ancient computers woke them. Because of the Gap and faulty data-storage drives, however, the bantrids had no knowledge of the solar system’s current political climate and no recollection of why their people entered stasis in the first place. Some believe they were hiding from an imminent threat or natural disaster, while others posit that bantrids were the first sentient species in the system and that they put themselves to sleep to wait for others to interact with. The pendant is probably some sort of emblem of office or something. Also, I'd be willing to bet that the mysterious reason for the bantrid's hibernation is gonna be evident pretty soon!
I agree with all of Garretmander's points, and would like to add that, since tracking weapons roll against TL instead of AC, there will be some enemies that are easier to hit with tracking weapons than direct-fire weapons. Point weapons, while okay-ish at warding away missiles, are generally mediocre offensively, so those are BP taken away from improved shields or armor or deadlier weapons. I think that the greatest value is damage per BP or PCU value. For example, compare the trusty coilgun (4d4, range 20, 6 BP, 10 PCU) to the underrated light torpedo launcher (2d8, range 20, speed 16, 4 BP, 5 PCU). For nearly the same damage and almost the same effective range (assuming you want to hit the target in the same round you fire), you save a third on BP and half on PCU! Note that, unlike most tracking weapons, the light torpedo launcher doesn't have the limited fire property, so you can just keep shootin'. I agree with Garretmander in that you should probably not select a tracking weapon as your one big gun, but they certainly have value as secondary weapons to protect your vulnerable arcs.
Anyone else checking this page every day to see if they've updated the cover art? As far as I know, the only bit of non-placeholder art we've gotten for this AP is this fantastic logo, and I am craving some more.
Planning to resurrect/retool an old character from a dead campaign, a dwarven technomancer with an affinity for melee combat. He's likely have the tinkerer theme, as his day job is rebuilding and refurbishing "gently used goods" at his cousin's junkyard with a long-term goal of opening up a family franchise. Alright! Meet Thuldas Crawdun, junior associate at Crawdun Scrap and Salvage. Thuldas Crawdun: Race: Dwarf (pulling heavily from the alternate racial features in COM)
Class: Technomancer (favoring spells with "junk" in the name) Theme: Roboticist Feat: Shield Proficiency Born aboard the first great star citadel Heorrhad, Thuldas grew up in a dwarven society starting to hit its stride post-Gap. His mother, Thuldwin, is a battlemage with over 100 years of active duty aboard the Heorrhad, a seasoned veteran who has defended the Pact Worlds against both the Veskarium and the Swarm. His father, Beowdas, is a second-generation junk dealer who has successfully franchised the family business aboard his scraphauler Deck 17, a welcome visitor among the remote mining stations of the Diaspora. Thuldas draws strongly on both family traditions, forging his mother's arcane talents into tools for refurbishing and repurposing junked starships, scrapped mining tools, and antiquated computers. For the past few years he's been working under his cousin Ferindas (another successful franchisee of the family business) at Crawdun Scrap and Salvage, a compact junkyard comprised of several contiguous landing bays in Absalom's Gateway district. Thuldas is lanky for a dwarf (nearly 5 feet tall!) with a ready smile and a film of grease and rust seemingly ground into his skin. His hands are rarely empty; he's always picking up bits and bobs around the scrapyard that catch his eye. He's also taken to carrying around the blast cover off an old reactor porthole after an incident with a not-quite-inert fuel cell that cost him a few teeth (which have since been replaced with palladium analogues). At 50 years old, Thuldas is barely an adult, but he dreams of one day operating his own scraphauler, servicing communities and colonies throughout Near Space and the Vast. For now, though, he's content to work in a junior role, learning from both the complex technical challenges of the scrapyard and the cultural melting pot of Absalom Station.
I like the way you narratively frame this, but it still stretches credulity from a numbers standpoint. I totally agree that you can't sit at warp 8 all the time, but what about an extra 30 seconds? I think most mechs can fully recharge their shields in that time in combat.
Why does shield regeneration behave so differently in and out of combat? At the start of its turn, a mech regains a number of Shield Points equal to its tier, though its total can’t exceed the mech’s maximum Shield Points. Shield Points regenerate out of combat automatically at a rate of 2 per hour. A tier 1 mech regenerates 10 SP/min during combat, which is 300 times faster that out of combat. A tier 20 mech without enhanced shields can fully recharge its shields three times every minute during combat but takes nearly a day to do so out of combat. I can't find a justification for this in the text.
Alright, how will YOU be putting mechs through their paces? Personally, I'll be dropping my PCs onto Daimalko in a few tier 15-ish mechs and counting how many kaiju they can take out before being mushed into a paste.
Players aren't generally interested in rules that give them less agency. I've only given the rules a quick once-over, but it looks like action economy is set up in a way that four PCs piloting four mechs get roughly the same number of non-trivial actions as four PCs piloting a single mech. In the (hypothetical) situation where a number of smaller mechs combine to form one mega-mech, the available actions of each mech are pooled and any player can select any action from the pool as their turn. The difference would (hypothetically) be that the crunchy bits, like Shield Points and weapon damage, would be calculated using the tier of the mega-mech. (I.e., no one gets stuck playing left leg guy)
I know that everyone is hyped over their July shipments, but I'm just sitting here waiting to get Devastation Ark in my grubby little hands.
Likewise. I recall that game fondly, though Google Wave has not stood the test of time. Oof, that's a name I have not heard in a very long time.
Dotting for strong interest. Planning to resurrect/retool an old character from a dead campaign, a dwarven technomancer with an affinity for melee combat. He's likely have the tinkerer theme, as his day job is rebuilding and refurbishing "gently used goods" at his cousin's junkyard with a long-term goal of opening up a family franchise.
Submission:
Name: Doctor Lillithbryne "Lilly" Flint-bridge (she/her); she avoids giving her first name whenever possible
Gender/Race/Class: Female halfling envoy w/ expertise in Medicine, likely taking a dip in biohacker in the near future Theme: Battle medic General Backstory: Born in the Drift to a family of long-haul freighters and traders, little Lilly set foot on a dozen worlds under a dozen stars before she even learned to walk. Ever curious (and burdened with sticky fingers), she frequently found herself in hot water with the locals, which taught her the value of charm, wit, and bold-faced lies. Frustrated with the limited opportunities available to the sixth child of a cargo freighter family, Lilly decided she would attend medical school. When her lack of academic credentials became an issue, she "acquired" the appropriate paperwork, and in short order the ambitious halfling was attending lectures at an esteemed Castrovelian university. By-in-large, Lilly succeeded in the challenging academic environment, but after four years of intensive study she grew impatient, and she signed up to take her final exams two years ahead of schedule. Faced with this impossible task, she took the only option she felt she had, concocting an elaborate scheme to obtain the test answers and cheat her way out. Unfortunately, her ruse was discovered and the intrepid halfling was summarily expelled. Undaunted by this setback, "Doc Flint" grabbed her meager belongings and took to the Vast, where doctors are in short supply and people don't question credentials. Slowly building a reputation as a medic-for-hire with various mercenary groups, Doc Flint is finally heading back to the Pact Worlds in the hopes of securing more lucrative work. Reason for boarding the Chimera: Veteran Personality: Headstrong, intelligent, and insatiably curious, Doc Flint is accustomed to getting what she wants by shear force of will and getting out before things turn sour. She can be charming and polite, but struggles getting close to people, often viewing relationships as transactional. Flaw(s): Doc Flint has issues with authority (other than her own) and a natural resistance to conventional wisdom, medical or otherwise. She also has a dangerous habit of delving into dangerous situations without a plan or a way out, relying on halfling luck and her own wits to escape unharmed. Quirk(s): Doc Flint tends to rely on her force of personality when her medical talents fail, attempting to convince her patients that their injuries aren't as bad as they appear to be. This has had, surprisingly, some success. She also has a tendency to overdress for the occasion and employ a (fake) high-class accent, implying that she is the very expensive kind of doctor. If the situation ever becomes especially dire, her adversaries may be surprised to learn that this medical professional carries a dangerous vial hidden in a concealed compartment within her cybernetic arm. I almost feel bad adding yet another submission to a crowded field of quality submissions, but darn it all to heck, I really want to play this one. I was pretty tempted to cave in and offer to GM another table, but I promised myself to keep enough bandwidth open to run a table of Devastation Ark in August, so no new GM responsibilities for now.
Submission: Name: Doctor Lillithbryne "Lilly" Flint-bridge (she/her); she avoids giving her first name whenever possible
Gender/Race/Class: Female halfling envoy w/ expertise in Medicine, likely taking a dip in biohacker in the near future Theme: Battle medic General Backstory: Born in the Drift to a family of long-haul freighters and traders, little Lilly set foot on a dozen worlds under a dozen stars before she even learned to walk. Ever curious (and burdened with sticky fingers), she frequently found herself in hot water with the locals, which taught her the value of charm, wit, and bold-faced lies. Frustrated with the limited opportunities available to the sixth child of a cargo freighter family, Lilly decided she would attend medical school. When her lack of academic credentials became an issue, she "acquired" the appropriate paperwork, and in short order the ambitious halfling was attending lectures at an esteemed Castrovelian university. By-in-large, Lilly succeeded in the challenging academic environment, but after four years of intensive study she grew impatient, and she signed up to take her final exams two years ahead of schedule. Faced with this impossible task, she took the only option she felt she had, concocting an elaborate scheme to obtain the test answers and cheat her way out. Unfortunately, her ruse was discovered and the intrepid halfling was summarily expelled. Undaunted by this setback, "Doc Flint" grabbed her meager belongings and took to the Vast, where doctors are in short supply and people don't question credentials. Slowly building a reputation as a medic-for-hire with various mercenary groups, Doc Flint is finally heading back to the Pact Worlds in the hopes of securing more lucrative work. Reason for boarding the Chimera: Veteran Personality: Headstrong, intelligent, and insatiably curious, Doc Flint is accustomed to getting what she wants by shear force of will and getting out before things turn sour. She can be charming and polite, but struggles getting close to people, often viewing relationships as transactional. Flaw(s): Doc Flint has issues with authority (other than her own) and a natural resistance to conventional wisdom, medical or otherwise. She also has a dangerous habit of delving into dangerous situations without a plan or a way out, relying on halfling luck and her own wits to escape unharmed. Quirk(s): Doc Flint tends to rely on her force of personality when her medical talents fail, attempting to convince her patients that their injuries aren't as bad as they appear to be. This has, surprisingly, some success. She also has a tendency to overdress for the occasion and employ a (fake) high-class accent, implying that she is the very expensive kind of doctor. If the situation ever becomes especially dire, her adversaries may be surprised to learn that this medical professional carries a caustic punchgun hidden in a concealed compartment within her cybernetic arm.
Dotting with significant interest! I've been watching and waiting for this specific AP to appear on the forums. I'll put together a submission in the next couple days - something akin to the medical doctor role in classic pulp mystery repackaged as a halfling envoy (perhaps with a dip in biohacker down the line).
Raising this old thread from the dead just to mention that the guide has just been updated to include all published content through the Character Operations Manual, which contains tons of envoy-related goodies.
It looks like the party is going to be 4 characters, Jimbles. Well, that makes picking a starship frame a bit easier. If we have an envoy, a mechanic, a solarian, and a soldier, who's gonna be the pilot?
How many do we have in our party? Does anyone have any expansion bays they would like to use during downtime? I'll throw a concept together, but I might wait until we know more about the party's strengths and weaknesses before drafting up a stat block.
I haven't cooked up an alias yet, but I've got a build for a vesk solarian with solar armor and a shotgun that I'm interested in playing. I don't think that'll overlap too much with a space pirate soldier! I've certainly got some back-up builds if we end up with too many martials, though. Personally, I'm a bit of a fan of starship combat. It certainly can go long at lower levels, but the few higher-level encounters I've seen seem to be less dice-dependent, as AC/TL doesn't really track with level. I'm certainly willing to take on a greater share of ship design and put together a starship combat aid to help speed things up, if that would make it easier on the group. Why have we received an invitation? Personally, I like the idea of being part of a tried'n'true professional adventuring crew, so I like the idea of being celebrities (if someone in the group is flashy enough to be a focal point for that), or accepting the trip as payment for a big job.
I can understand the sentiment of not wanting to derail the playtest of a fairly unique class concept by including some potentially economy-breaking features ("OMG, biohacker totally breaks the economy" would suck the air right out of a bunch of other interesting conversations we're having right now). Looks like this idea is shelved (but not forgotten) for the moment.
We are absolutely looking at starship roles for all these classes. And we are aware we likely don't have them all covered well enough yet. What we really want is feedback from people who have run these characters through both normal and starship combat, with other characters, and their experiences, so we can fine tune where to go with these. I'm in the process of running #1-25 as a PbP with six 4th level playtest characters (two of each class), and while the scenario doesn't have the starship tag (and the players weren't told to accommodate starship roles into their characters), it does have a few skill challenges based on starship crew roles; a few thoughts: Starfinder lends itself to a lot of Dex/Int builds, which is great, but outside of that there are many interesting and fun characters that are gonna straight up struggle because they aren't naturally tuned for starship combat, and the playtest classes are really shining a spotlight on the issue. Yes, any character can be adjusted to fit into a role, by either sacrificing theme or a feat slot as well as 1 skill rank / level (hurts some more than others), but that doesn't really fit the intuitive style of character building that Starfinder seems to be trying so hard to promote, and as Hmm mentioned earlier in the thread, it's best practice to prepare for two starship roles, especially if you're at a Society table.
I think it's still house-rule territory, as I searched the old threads where this question came up and couldn't find a dev response. It doesn't seem like the most ambitious house-rule in the world, but I'm not a game designer - I could be missing some game-breaking interaction.
Serums are injectable (I think), but the Core Rulebook isn't very forthright in this area - you need to check the section on ammunition, of all places: While most combatants rely on darts to deliver toxins to enemies, particularly desperate or overworked field medics sometimes employ darts to conveniently deliver antitoxins, healing serums, and other beneficial drugs across a crowded battlefield. The playtest also explicitly says that you can shoot serums out of an injection weapon:
Still, I would like to get some errata that explicitly states that serums can go into injection weapons. Spell amps are a bit more thorny - despite all the flavor text suggesting that they're injectable, there's no mention of loading one into an injection weapon.
I'm really digging the concept of the Biohacker, but I had a few queries... You must hit an unwilling creature with a melee attack to inject them with an injection, and an injection counts as a consumable basic melee weapon for this purpose. Question: If I make a melee attack to inject with an injection and miss, is the injection expended? If it's not expended, is the type determined (i.e., if I attempt another melee attack to inject the target on my next turn, can I still decide what type the injection is as part of that standard action)? An injection can also be loaded into a weapon with the injection weapon special property as a move action, and you can deliver the injection with a normal attack with that weapon. Question: How does this interact with the conserving fusion (Armory pg. 62), which causes your weapon to not consume ammunition that misses that target? Is just the dart conserved, or the dart and the injection? Question: This one isn't directly based on the Biohacker's class abilities, but is sure to come up eventually. What freely available equipment can be loaded into a weapon with the injection property? Poisons, drugs, and medicinals are explicitly called out in the CRB, but what about serums? The flavor text for darts (the ammunition) suggests yes, but the description of serums indicates that you can only imbibe them orally. And what about spell amps? Their descriptive text outlines them as delivered by injection, but no injection weapons or ammunition reference them.
Hello! I am Jimbles! I also included a bit about class abilities and such that modified Medicine checks, but I'll need to redo all of that when the Biohacker is published.
It's been a year since I put this out there, but I've expanded the feat tree to include all the Starfinder material published in 2018: (updated) The link at the top of the thread leads to a core-only feat tree, for you core-only fans out there.
Interesting! I'll need to take a look at this.
Boy, I haven't updated this thread in a while! To answer a few questions... There are a number of different bits of equipment in the various SF society modules that are unique and could be added. Nice work though. I have thus far refrained from adding equipment from Society Scenarios, because (1) I don't subscribe to that product line and (2) most players don't have access to those sources either. I'm not saying I wouldn't add them in the future, but the SFS equipment is certainly the most labor intensive per item of any source type. Just wondering how hard would it be to have a page that worked like a shop where you put your CL/APL in and your total credits and shows you what you could afford based on being at a normal level, +1 level, and +2 level? You can more or less do this by yourself using filters! (For those not super-experienced with spreadsheets, navigate to your favorite tab and tap on the funnel-looking icon next to the print icon at the top left and select "create new temporary filter view". now there's a little filter icon on each column you can use to only show items less than a particular item level, within a certain budget, or a gazillion other things. Oh, and while I'm here...
Since my last update in this thread, I've added the items from Armory, Alien Archive 2, and all the AP books through the first installment of Signal of Screams. That's a lot of stuff, and now it's all in one place! Major thanks to the very rad Tezlok, who volunteered to assist with data entry and typed out at least half of Armory.
I'm also using v2.5.3 on Chrome. I don't use all the Paizo Campaign tools, but I noticed that campaign auto-arrange, highlight new posts, and auto-select alias tools aren't working.
Ooh, finally! You're a good person, Captain. Consider this my dot - I have a couple character concepts I've been toying with for this campaign - I'll pick one and get more details up tomorrow.
Replacement sixth player, reporting in! Thanks for asking me to the table, GM. Player Alias: Jimbles the Mediocre
(I've never played with a pre-gen before, but I think I've done this correctly. Vchk hasn't yet reached 2nd level.) It looks like we've got the envoy, mystic, and mechanic taken, with an interest in a second mechanic. I'm gonna go ahead and claim Nako, the soldier. That opens up all the roles for the rest to double up. I should have my alias up and dotted in shortly.
Can confirm that both the alias selector and the header-hider are functional on Chrome. Thanks, mah dude.
Huh, cool. Will this be part of one of the subscriptions, or a standalone product?
I think that intentionally blurring the line between what is monstrous and what is playable is a key design aspect in the worldbuilding of Starfinder, so we're unlikely to see any sort of split in Archive materials. I also don't think we'll see a split between the PC/NPC rules in future rulebooks, because that leads to some issues for the person physically organizing the book's layout - where do you put the art or the lore text? It'll end up with readers flipping back and forth so they can read both entries. For those of you saying that a list of separated PC stats would be useful for players to browse, don't forget that Alien Archive delineates playable races in the very useful table of contents.
650 new weapons?!? By my count (and I am keeping count), that's almost twice as many weapons as CRB, AA, PW, and DS put together. So. Pumped.
As for juicy tidbits, what do you want to know (that isn't too spoilery of course). In Dead Suns, there's a point in the adventure around the beginning of book 4 where the PCs leap into the Vast to save the universe and may not return to civilization until they've achieved their goal, thus precluding selling or buying new equipment and relying on crafting and loot for levels 7 - 13. Does Against the Aeon Throne have a similar situation? I would image that, at some point, the PCs are sneaking around the titular empire and just droppin' into the nearest space-mart could be problematic.
I would love to get a chance to play Skittershot! Throw me in that lottery.
I will be running a table of SFS 1-07: The Solar Sortie. I'm looking for a few more players and everything works out I would be looking to start the game Thursday. Ooh, signing up for this one. I've got a concept for a dataphile that I've been itchin' to build.
This seems ridiculous, so am I missing something? Nope! Starfinder does not use size modifiers for combat maneuvers (or armor class, or skill checks, or many other things). It does seem a bit strange if you're coming from a Pathfinder background, but it's just one of the many rules changes between systems.
Is there any way thay boneblades could be listed as weapon as well? There are no details in their section for things like damage. There are several augments, magical items, and other equipment that deal damage without belonging to the 'weapon' category. I'm a bit hesitant to start cross-pollinating the lists, however, because I'm concerned it could get easily confusing. It would be frustrating for an unfamiliar player to find a "weapon" they like in my list only to not be able to find the details in the source material because they're looking in the wrong section. Not to say that I won't look at it eventually, but for now I'm gonna try to keep it simple. Either way, I need to look at more metrics for organizing technological and magical items first.
So the spell schools have taken a bit of a backseat in Starfinder - as far as I know, at least, there are no abilities or equipment that have a school-dependent effect; that is a mechanic saved for the spell descriptors instead (fire, mind-affecting, etc.). Ergo, any quibbling about which school a particular spell falls into is a completely pedantic and unnecessary argument. Having said that, however, I just need to ask - why in the world is fabricate scrap (Pact Worlds pg. 205) a universal spell? Up until now, there were just two spells in the universal school - wish and miracle, both of which are accessed through capstone class abilities. Fabricate scrap is a charming little spell, but why oh why does it enjoy such august company? And why does it have a note to "see text"? What about the text of the spell explains its selected school? If an FAQ for Pact Worlds gets put together, this question is certainly dead last in priority, but I would still love to see an answer.
Bleed damage continues until a character makes a successful Medicine check or regains hit points by any method. Barring those two interventions, bleed damage doesn't have a duration and continues indefinitely.
Pact Worlds is out, folks! I have dutifully added the sweet, sweet new Pact Worlds gear to everyone's favorite equipment spreadsheet. The new gear includes:
I haven't really looked at the PW stat blocks, but the stat blocks in Alien Archive and Dead Suns are more traditional - offensive action under offense, etc. Take from that what you will.
Yes, you can target two different creatures with the two attacks of a full attack action.
Reloading a spell chip is, as far as I can tell, identical to crafting a new spell gem. With that in mind, I would say that (1) you cannot reload a spell chip with a spell you do not know, and (2) it would cost 90% of 110% (for expediency's sake, I would just call it 100%) of the price of the individual spells, not the entire original chip price.
Say you have an NPC with a +3 dex mod and wearing armor with a max dex bonus of +6. The armor's max dex bonus is reduced to +4, but the dex bonus is only +3, so no effect. Now, say you have an NPC with a +3 dex mod and wearing armor with a max dex bonus of only +3. The armor's max dex bonus is reduced to +1, so it would be prudent to apply a -2 penalty to both KAC and EAC (the absolute AC may not be tied to dexterity, but other conditions that penalize dex also penalize AC accordingly). That being said, I personally wouldn't run my game that way. I don't have armor dex bonuses at the ready at the table; instead I would automatically apply a -2 AC penalty to any NPC with the encumbered condition for expediency's sake.
An SRO created on Akiton would speak both Akitonian and Common in addition to any bonus languages, as per the rules. If I were the GM, an SRO that was created by a person or community with a strong racial heritage would get that racial language as well, but that's just my opinion.
Luckily, there's a standardized rule: A character begins play speaking and reading Common, her racial tongue (if any), and the language of her home planet (if any). An SRO constructed on Aballon, for example, would only speak Common (unless a language is explicitly mentioned somewhere, I would assume it does not exist, so there's no Aballonian or SRO-ian tongues).
Pazio has a general forum for PbP and other online campaigns: paizo.com/community/forums/campaigns It's not restricted to Starfinder games (or even Paizo-published games), but there's plenty of Starfinder comin' through the pipe.
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