Kevin Boyer 646's page

While my group is waiting between book 3 and book 4 of Dead Suns, I was planning on doing a little homebrew adventure where they encounter a distressed passenger cruise ship. Unfortunately, the ship I built with the rules as written was just absurd. Huge ship, barely over a dozen passengers. I envisioned about fifty to sixty passengers, twenty ship crew, and a dozen steward staff.

To get this result, I made some homebrew expansion bay rules. I essentially assumed the bays listed in the book (except for the hangar bay and shuttle bay) are medium sized bays and only fit medium sized ships. I made it so larger ships had larger expansion bays.

In our Starfinder game last night, we were running the second module of the Dead Suns series (I am GM), and we came upon an issue with one of the monsters - the first Ksarik that is chasing the party

The party did enough damage to drop the Ksarik to 0 hit points and knock it to dying, but the creature still had all three of its resolve points left. That meant that I understood that it was dying, but not yet dead. Unfortunately, at the start of its turn, its fast healing brought it back up to 2 hp and it was no longer dying. In theory, I could have ruled that this combo effectively makes it impossible to kill the ksarik by hit point damage unless you can somehow do damage on its turn in between the fast healing and the end-of-turn dying resolution stage. I ruled that the party could kill the thing by hacking it to pieces and burning it, which ended the encounter, but the party and I weren't really happy with the rules confusion.

When we looked closer at the resolve point rules, apparently I was supposed to rule that resolve points work differently for monsters. Apparently a monster that goes to 0 is dead, even if it has resolve points.

This is where I reached a 'point of frustration' as I like to call it.

As a GM, I like a character feature (such as resolve points) to work the same way for PC's, NPC's, and monsters. If you call them resolve points, have them work the same way for everyone. I'm fine with the way the number of points being determined differently for monsters vs PC's (a good example is mythic power points in Pathfinder), but please, please, don't make me have to remember how the same damn points work differently for different creatures!

In the future, could you just call the monster resolve points something different rather than calling them resolve and - OH, FOOLED YOU, THEY DON'T WORK THE SAME WAY AS PC RESOLVE! I understand you want a similar game mechanic for the monsters, but this whole 'they're the same but not the same' gives me a GM headache