Because you rolled a natural 20, so even in a hopeless situation there's a small chance to succeed.
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Do you get retroactive trained skills if you up your INT in the Playtest?I bet you should but I can't find it in RAW. Ditto with getting a bonus language when your Int hits 14. Bonus language text seems to specify 1st level, while the trained skills text doesn't.
That would work if it wasn't for the fact that jump jets are not just a nonstandard form of movement, they also require activation via a move action. You can activate jump jets as part of a move action in order to fly during your movement. Trick Attack requires a full action. As a full action, you can move up to your speed. Whether or not you moved, you can then make an attack with a melee weapon with the operative special property or with any small arm. And a full action cannot be used RAW in conjunction with a move action. They're a seperate type of action altogether. If you take a full action, you can’t take your usual standard, move, and swift actions. While I personally would allow my players to use jump jets as part of a Trick Attack at the table, I really don't think it's RAW.
This isn't Pathfinder. Most of the skills that care about armor check penalty - acrobatics, athletics, stealth - are also used as part of a move action. The daredevil operative's whole shtick depends upon those skills. I'm not sure I follow. Not all Acrobatics checks are move actions, and move actions are not components of full actions. The movement and skill check are part of the full action, not a move action (which is necessary for activating the jump jets). The rules are similar enough to Pathfinder for this reasoning regarding action economy to still be true.
A low obstacle is a wall half your height, so I suppose being prone means that you are in total cover (since as you say the enemy has, logically speaking, no line of sight on you). This could result in a cheesy tactic though as you can rise from prone (move) -> shoot (standard) -> drop to prone (swift) in a single round. Then again, you pay for that tactic in sacrificing movement, not being able to full attack and being more vulnerable to melee attacks should the enemy reach you. You can liken this to someone hiding behind a wall and quickly popping out to take a quick shot. This could of course be countered by the enemy simply readying an action. I'd have to say you're right that prone behind low obstacle is total cover, if anything based on common sense. I don't see why a person crouched behind a barrier that covers their entire being would only get a +4 AC (plus the prone bonuses).
Nat 20 in ship combat is only just another way to dish out critical damage to systems, in addition to CT. If an attack is a nat 20 and the following damage results in the total reaching ship's CT, then two critical damages are rolled to random systems. Since the effects of a nat 20 are specifically called out in the Ship Combat section, without reference these effects being in addition to double damage, I think we have to conclude that this omission means double damage does not apply.
I'd say your suspicion is correct. Trick Attack is a full action that allows for an attack preceded by optional movement up to your speed, not an actual move action. A GM may allow it, of course, but by RAW it's a no.
Does an armor's environmental protections work during extreme heat/cold temperatures? The armor rules seem to imply yes at first:
But is followed by:
And in the case of (for example) extreme cold temperature:
Does this mean even with environmental protection we still take 1d6 lethal cold damage per minute in temperatures below –20° F? My gut feeling is no because that would mean that even with sci-fi armor, first level characters couldn't survive more than a few minutes on Antarctica. They would be even worse off on a cold day on Mars. Still, I'd like to know what others think of this.
I've personally gone the opposite here and ruled that Androids can be both healed and mended. But by RAW it seems your interpretation rings truer. I'd say RAI is probably no mending but healing works as normal for simplicity's sake.
I thought the same thing. I saw Flashlight. It has a capacity of 10. You can buy it for 1 credit. Recharging is half the capacity, so it takes 5 credits to charge a 1 credit flashlight. Odd indeed. As per p.234 recharging is half the price of the battery. Since a flashlight comes with a 10 capacity battery, which is not listed in the price listings for batteries, we don't actually know by RAW how much charging a flashlight battery costs. Personally I'd either go for half the cost of a 20 charge battery (so 15 credits) or just simply free (like armor's environmental protection), because it's just a flashlight. For this reason I think it's odd that p.218 points the reader to Table 7–9: Ammunition for battery prices, when so many technological items use batteries that don't fit those capacity categories (there's no price details for 5, 10 or 12 charge batteries).
What makes a big difference to me between Starfinder's Personal Upgrades and Pathfinders magic belts and headbands is that the latter could be things you bumped into while adventuring and had at least some amount of decision-making to them. Stat-boosting items maybe aren't exciting to veteran players, but for those who wanted they introduced some flavor ("This is the belt I took from Reginald the Ruthless") and induced choices, like which party member best needs what belt, and if a Belt of Strength +2 should be replaced by the newly found Belt of Dexterity +4. In contrast, Starfinder's Personal Upgrades are very clinical - there's no concrete fluff as to what they are other than that they could be various things, and they're not lootable items - and they don't involve much decision-making, cause they're not competing for slots. I agree that makes them feel very mandatory. There's no reason not to get them other than lacking the credits (you could say it's a bit of a credit tax). We'll see how it works out. No doubt it's more streamlined and probably better for 3.PF veterans who know what they want out of a build. So my summary would be: SF Upgrades are better (more practical) for the way system veterans play and build their characters, but they involve less decision-making. The RP value is about the same, but it's more on the GM/Player in SF to make them feel like more than just a stat boost.
There is only one weapon with more than 100 capacity. I'd prefer to say it can slot 2 clips, but a DM could say it has 1 clip and an internal battery. Yeah, that makes the most sense to me as well.
The point I was trying to make is that if passive sensors have that much shorter range than active sensors (and weapons for that matter), and if passive mode for sensors determines what can be seen on the battlefield, then it seems one ends up very restricted in what can be targeted. For example, I lay out a hex grid battle field for ship combat. My players have medium range sensors (10 hex increments) with an assumed 'passive' range of 20 hexes (twice the range category). Does this mean the players can't see anything beyond that? How then can they target stuff up to 50 hexes away with active sensors?
In the equipment section there's various mentions of what Capacity means in terms for weapons, armor upgrades and other equipment. These all mention that capacity measures the largest-capacity battery that item can hold. (Implying that you can slot lower-capacity batteries if you want?) So a Jetpack, a Red Star Plasma Rifle and a Gravity Well Hammer all use the same 40 charge batteries to power them, which you then get to recharge at recharging stations when empty. So far so good. However, the Blue Star Plasma Caster has 200 charges listed, while batteries only come in the 20, 40, 80 and 100 varieties. How would you fully reload such a weapon? Maybe it comes with a special battery, but what would be the cost of recharging that? Or maybe you can simply slot two 100 charge batteries in there. But then we have a further problem with technological items like flashlights, signal jammers and detonators, that all use non-standard battery sizes. How do you calculate the cost of recharging those? Secondly, there are mentions throughout the book, especially in spells where batteries come up, of "power cells". But I can't actually find any description of what these are. The wording seems to precise in differentiating the two for "power cell" to simply be a synonym for "battery", yet this seems to be the case? Thirdly, what kind of action would it be to swap the battery in a jetpack? A reload (move) action, or a standard action? Finally, and this is a bit of a different topic, but in the Starship section there's mention of Sensors having a "passive" mode of 2x the sensor's range. What does this passive mode do? As I first read it, it sounds like it's how far the ship can "see" on the grid, but that seems strange cause weapons have much longer range in terms of increments (longest "passive" sensor range is 2 x 20 = 40 hexes, but for short range weapons, that is only 8 range increments as opposed to their max capacity of 10). It also seems implied that the science officer actions, which have a range of 5 increments, are already aware of the targets they scan. Am I simply misunderstanding what "twice the sensors' range category" means, and that passive mode reaches twice as far as active mode, but is less discerning? (i.e. cannot scan things, just "detect")
I really think the Stay the Course action is there as an option allowing you to pilot the ship with a move action and do something else as a standard (cast a spell etc.). I've personally never allowed my players to do more than one sailing action per turn in combat. Then again, that's a judgement call cause I can't find anything conclusive in RAW.
So the final battle is drawing closer and I'm looking over the encounter involving Omara Culverin. I notice in the tactics description that "Once foes are within range, she makes full attacks with her
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