The Cyber Mage's page

My group was in a similar position, so I "motivated" them to act quickly. They had made friends with "Jubby" the boss of the Level 21 gang and had a secondary meeting with him. When they arrived, they found the place on fire and Jubby missing, reports being he had been dragged off by the Kings. That spurred them into action and they stormed the place.

I would clarify that to mean for class abilities. Your caster level can still be your level.

In general, I like them, though personally I would make all of them use every ability slot for consistency, but that is just my personal preference. Also a note on soldier that about how to treat class level for the fighting style would be good.

Feel free to add my technomancer to your list (just a blurb of credit please ;)

Mystic Archetype:
Your mystic level is 3/4 your level in the class this archetype is associated

2nd: Choose a connection. Select 2 0th level spells known. You can cast those at will. You also learn the 1st level connection spell. You can cast 1st level spells once per day per 3 levels (minimum 1). Wisdom is the key attribute for these spells.

4th: Gain the first level Connection power for your chosen connection.

6th: Learn a second first level spell from the mystic list. You also learn the second level connection spell from your Connection. You can cast it once per day per 5 levels.

9th: Gain the 3rd level connection power of your chosen connection.

12th: Learn an additional 2nd level spell from the mystic spell list. Learn the 3rd level spell connection you can cast third level spells once per day once per 8 levels.

18th: Gain wither the 6th or 9th level connection power

---
Technomancer Archetype:
Your technomancer level is 3/4 your level in the class this archetype is associated

2nd Level: Gain Technomantic Dabbler as a bonus feat, even if you don't meet the prereqs.

4th Level: Gain a 2nd level magic hack

6th level: Learn an additional first level spell with technomantic dabbler. learn a single second level spell. You can cast it once per day per 5 levels.

9th Level: Gain a magic hack of 5th level or lower

12th level: Learn an additional 1st and 2nd level spell. Learn a 3rd level spell you can cast third level spells once per day once per 8 levels.

18th level: Gain an 8th level magic hack.

Added some comments to your Multiclass post.

I would like to see an archetype created for each class to act as another version of multi-classing. Basically giving you a taste of a second class to go with your main.

Example Technomancer Archetype:

2nd Level: Gain Technomantic Dabbler as a bonus feat, even if you don't meet the prereqs.

4th Level: Gain a 2nd level magic hack

6th level: Learn an additional first level spell with technomantic dabbler. learn a single second level spell. You can cast it once per day per 5 levels.

9th Level: Gain a magic hack of 5th level or lower

12th level: Learn an additional 1st and 2nd level spell. Learn a 3rd level spell you can cast third level spells once per day once per 8 levels.

18th level: Gain an 8th level magic hack.

If you had the Wisdom you could also use it with Connection Inkling it seems, which is a lot simpler than a 1 level dip.

The prices seem weirdly inconsistent overall.

Using level 1 kinetic ranged weapons:

Tactical Semi-Auto Pistol is the most expensive at 260

The Reaction Cannon is 250

The Hunting Rifle is 240.

What?

No, don't. What you have is great. The only upgrade I'd consider would be allowing a maximum of 1 heavy weapon per non-turret arc, to match capital ships with capital weapons - don't let a Tiny ship have a linked direct fire heavy weapon, for that way lies madness, and larger ships suddenly become useless.

That's basically what I was planning. The upgrade would grant a single weapon non-turret weapon to be upgraded to heavy. But like I said, I want to do some testing with what I have before I get to that. Need to build some test ships at different levels.

Here are some of the system upgrades I am looking at adding to the fighters. I haven't figured out a BP cost for these, but they are currently limited to 1 per ship (and in this case are themed to match my players specifically).

Advanced Comm Suite (Squadron Commander only)
You may perform the Encourage action as a minor action if you did not perform any other captain actions once per turn, however the bonus is halved.

Autothrusters
When neither you or your AI fulfill the pilot role, you may still use your AI’s pilot skill for initiative checks. Additionally you may perform the fly or maneuver action as a minor action, but treat your maneuverability as 1 category worse and your speed as two less.

Deep Scan Subroutine
You may perform the Scan action once per enemy ship as a minor action with a -2 penalty. You and your AI gain a +1 bonus to Gunnery checks during any turn you used a scan action.

Linked Targeting Assist System
When you perform a snapshot or fire at will action, reduce those penalties by 1.

Remote Repair Drones
You may perform the Hold it together or Patch actions on ships within short range of you.

Targeting Relay
When you use the Target System and Lock On actions, you may take a -2 penalty to your check to allow all ships in your squadron to benefit as if they had taken the action themselves

I noticed that too. My party hit level 2 before they got their loaner ship in the adventure path (which had a coil gun on a turret). I upgraded the ship, and threw a second coil gun on the turret and linked them. That 8d4 business was terrible for the enemy.

Oh man, yeah I imagine it would be. I mean that was a pretty one-sided fight to begin with.

This is actually defined under computers. A ship of Tier X comes with a computer of Tier X/2, and a computer with a control module (which is what you're implying) has relevant skill bonuses 2.5*Tier of computer, meaning the math would work out to skill bonus 1.25*X, where X is the Tier of the ship.

I had actually forgotten about that rule existing (though it doesn't seem to work with starships as RAW). Interestingly it actually comes pretty close to my own calculations (mine being just slightly ahead on skills) That said the control modules are absolutely terrible at attacking it seems. (Also in this case the AI is based on the pilot level and not the tier which is good since fighters are going to be several tiers behind the players. In this case the AI's are effectively NPCs in the second crew slot that just happen to be computers.

This is particularly interesting, because the ship rules we have aren't designed to work with radios - e.g. they don't cover having one ship's science officer scan an enemy ship, then report the results to the rest of the fleet. I think it would be particularly interesting to sit down and work out which actions can be made to work across squadrons and fleets.

That's part of the advanced shenanigans I'm working on. Basically a set of system upgrades that allow sharing certain crew actions, or making them more feasible in a single pilot scenario.

Here's an example:
Remote Repair Drones
You may perform the Hold it together or Patch actions on ships within short range of you.

Right now Tiny and Small ships are essentially worthless precisely because they can't mount heavy weapons, so this is potentially interesting, particularly because you forced them to put the weapon in a non-turret arc (which I approve of; it matches how capital ships carry capital weapons). I'm interested in how that works out for you.

It's definitely going to be interesting. The real question will be if it completely invalidates the swifter fighters and interceptors. I'm also looking at an advanced upgrade that will later improve the base frame's abilities to handle heavier weapons but I want to test how these go first.

So I'll be kicking of a military themed campaign soon and I'm really looking to have the players be fighter pilots instead of a shared ship.

With that in mind I have some home rules I'm looking at implementing to try and make it work.

First off to address build points to spend, I'm using the section in the CRB to give each player a single ship of a specific tier. Player tiers are calculated per this formula APL - (Number of PCs - 1). For values less than one, the progression goes 1, ½, ⅓, ¼. This results in more BP spent than a single ship, but a lot of that is on redundant pieces so that's probably fine.

Second since action economy is the real killer for single man ships, each of their ships has a single generic AI that can fill the pilot, gunner, science, or engineering role as needed. This gives them two actions per round and the possibility of performing a minor action (likely usually snapshot). The AI has a flat skill bonus progression in all piloting, computers, and engineering of roughly equal to a player with it as a class skill, full ranks, and a starting ability score of a 10, but increasing it at each level based increase.

One player will be deemed the squadron commander and can perform captain actions for other player within the squadron (but not to boost the AIs).

That is the core of the system that I will be testing prior to the campaign. I'll report on my findings as testing commences.

I also have some advanced options unique to my campaign. I'll share those once I have sanitized them and solidified them.

I also created two custom frames that break some of the rules. Meet the Bomber and the Gunship. Each are tiny ships with the ability to mount a single heavy weapon (of the appropriate type), though at the cost of having no ability to gain additional weapons in their front arc.

Gunship
Size Tiny
Maneuverability average (+0 Piloting, turn 2)
HP 35 (Increment 5); DT —; CT 7
Mounts forward arc (heavy [direct fire only, no additional weapon mounts allowed]), turret (light)
Expansion Bays —
Minimum Crew 1; Maximum Crew 2
Cost 10

Bomber
Size Tiny
Maneuverability good (+1 Piloting, turn 1)
HP 30 (Increment 5); DT —; CT 6
Mounts forward arc (heavy [tracking weapon only, no additional weapon mounts allowed])), rear arc (light)
Expansion Bays —
Minimum Crew 1; Maximum Crew 2
Cost 8

Valeros would likely be a Blitz soldier.

Seelah: female human priest Soldier (Arcane Assailant) with Mystic connections feat

The Starfinder Pawns are pretty great and affordable is you can get away with cardboard standees instead of minis. Otherwise you're goona have trouble finding accurate representations of most things until the minis from that kickstarter ship.

If you want actual minis here are some suggestions though:

*Reaper's Chronoscpes line has a decent variety of some common scifi tropes that could be handy for player characters

*If you need groups of similar minis to match humanoid enemies, Mantic's Deadzone and Warpath minis match the aesthetic and are reasonably priced for minis. Usually $20ish for units of 10. The enforcer pathfinders might work well for the human gang members early on and plague victims might work for the undead later on

*For non-humanoid beasties, it might be best to look for a fantasy equivalent. Reaper would again be my go to here. The Akatas are pretty close to blink dogs for example.

Space ships depends on how fancy you want to get. You can find bulk cheapo plastic spaceships on Amazon that could easily work.

Also after checking a few different levels, it is fairly reasonable (WBL wise) to have 4 identical small arms 2 levels below yours while still maintaining at level light armor. And in a "real game play" sense, fighting against humanoid opponents will likely make it trivially easy to get a matched set of decent guns. My party sold off nearly a dozen Azimuth laser pistols during the first part of Dead Suns for example.

Sure the cost looks nuts if you are using all 4 weapons as top of the line. Instead, (assuming each attack has to be made with a different weapon, which the wording doesn't clearly state) 2 decent pistols, and keep two level 1s around for the to hit bonus

You can already see some of this in the Mechanic class, where they have to pay for their own weapon(s) as well as their drone's (and Hover drones pay an exorbitant up-charge!).

This isn't true though. Errata has already said drones always use weapons that are designed for small/medium creatures.

While I like your two Lightning feats, the updated multi-weapon option is crazy. Allowing a 4 armed race to full attack with pistols at no penalty is nuts.

Something I would like to see would be
"Double Shot"
Prereq: Weapon Specialization
When peerforming a standard action attack while wielding two or more small arms or operative weapons you may treat your specialization bonus as equal to your level instead of half level.

Endbringer Devil - Too Cool, will play a heavy role in my rebirth of Cheliax homebrew adventure

Aeon Guard - Faceless empires are always nice to have.

Barachius Angel - Tech angels are pretty cool.

Assembly Ooze - useful, but terrifying

Dragonkin - I like me some playable dragons. Can't wait to see the skyfire legion archetype

Anhamut Inevitable - Nanite guardians of the drift. Nifty.

Nuar - a cool take on a minotaur analog

The Swarm - gotta have the zerg... er vord... er space bugs

Grays - good creepy mysterious enemy. can't wait to see an AP focused on them

Skittermanders - cute and fluffy!

I will have to look at stealing the plot of this adventure path and scaling it up for this fall. A mini-campaign against the Azlanti Star Empire would fit into my campaign well by that point.

I've considered putting together some charts for adjusting CR on the fly. Seems like this would be a good place to potentially test it as a theory

I actually like the concept of a 3 part adventure path. Maybe not always, but I could see value in having a variety of 3 part paths at various starting levels so you can chain them together as appropriate for your group.

*irk* It'd take a hell of a lot more than "paint doped with uranium" to raise the ambient radiation level to "Low". Maybe if that uranium were recently used inside a nuclear reactor, sure. But uranium by itself is *not that radioactive*.

Also, radiation does *not* ignore Stamina. Nothing in the current rules ignore Stamina.

Technically the Healer Mystic's Lifelink ability ignores stamina, but I think that is about it.

One of my PCs is a Vesk ex-athlete, whose ( unnamed, we suck at names ) sport was basically "Rugby, with no cards and a ball that can explode". It is also canon in my world that Eox is the center of the reality TV industry in the Pact Worlds, this certainly includes some sport/competition based shows.

How about Blastball. Simple, evocative, accurate.

We haven't talked about Eoxian sports yet, but we have made Eoxian Screech Metal a music genre. It is made entirely by various sounds of screeching metal. It's not very popular off-world.

I feel like "XCrawl - Extreme Dungeon Crawling" has a spot as a sport in Starfinder. Especially since the setting has a history of traditional dungeon crawling that has surely been romanticized.

Makes me think of the board game Battlestations. They had boarding missiles.

The gang boss in the cantina and her Vesk bodyguard got one shot off each before being taken out. Was disappointed when the frag grenade I threw with the Vesk (his listed strategy) did 1 whopping point to a party that has both stamina and hit points to burn through, rather than only hit points for the monsters.

That's okay. The Vesk fumbled the roll in my game (pretty much the only way to miss) and the drifting ended up dropping the grenade on him and his boss...

Soldier is definitely the better way to go for melee oriented. Interestingly, Spellthrower seems to work with melee weapons (that actually surprised me), so you can do the same thing with a level 2 melee weapon. With either the Merc or Scholar theme you could do: 16 STR, 14 Dex, 13 Int OR 18 STR, 12 DEX, 13 INT OR 16 STR, 12 Dex, 12 CON, 13 INT and be pretty well off.

As a note, I don't think Nuar are legal in SFS play without a race boon allowing them.

Another option would be to let them salvage it, but talk to the players out of game about it so they only ever take one out at a time (likely they can't effectively crew two ships anyway). Let them keep it and upgrade it to match their tier. It would still take time and maybe charge them a chunk of money they can't afford, but with the option to do a job for the mechanics repairing it to cover the cost. Then let them have 2 ships, outfitted for different types of missions, and choose which they take.

Two primary options: Soldier with Engineering skill (It's class at least) or Exo-cortex engineer.

Soldier options: Start with an okay int (13 would be my recommendation). Then pick you specialization. Arcane assailant lets you self enchant your weapon for some special abilities as "Inventions". Alternatively you could go Bombard for a more goblinish approach, but it lets you make a free grenade every time you rest, and later on powers up your heavy weapons.

Barricade is a pretty nifty engineering feat for level 1. At 5 you can pick up "Technomagical Dabbler" if you have 15 int (hence the recommendation of 13 Int) which gets you access to a few low level spells for minor effects.

Gear wise, start with a Tactical Acid Dart Rifle for your main weapon. As soon as you get a spare 360 credits you can get the spellthrower fusion which will let you use your gun to cast Spell Gems, giving you access to a huge variety of one-shot special effects.

Exo-cortex mechanic is much more straight forwardly an engineer, but with some soldier-lite abilities (including better Profs and a built in targeting matrix to help make up the BAB).

Are these calculations taking into account rounds lost for reloading? The Shirren sniper rifles in particular have ridiculously low ammo counts which will slow down rate of fire over the course of an encounter.

Oh hey, this thread is alive again. Mechfinder is finished, just needing testing and some filling out with pre-built mech profiles and stuff.

In other news, I'm working on the VOIDWITCH, a debuff-focused class that gathers power by manifesting 'motes' (minor debuff effects) and consumes all manifested motes to unleash a powerful final attack. It is more powerful the more motes it consumes in doing so. Watch out for a voidwitch filling the battlefield with these 'harmless' fragments of oblivion. :P

Philosophically, voidwitches are fundamentally opposed to solarians. While solarians believe in a cyclical cosmos, voidwitches draw their power from the dread inevitability of heat death. It'll be a long, long time before we see which school of thought is right, but in the meantime voidwitches make solarians deeply uncomfortable, often on a spiritual level.

Voidwitches are not always evil, despite their nihilistic power source. Some seek the powers of the void simply for their own gain, while others aim to do as much good as they can before the universe draws to a close.

That's a really cool concept for a class and meshes well with what the existing fluff. Also the class sounds really cool mechanically.

I've been working on boosting the power armor. Mostly this involves adding later "Marks" of existing power armor to provide a progression where one can use the same basic chassis, but with better base-line stats, but also adding a few new ones in as well. I'm also adding a new theme and archetype to go along with it. Here is the archetype if anyone is interested.

One thing I didn't see mentioned:

If you have cover relative to an enemy, it can’t make an attack of opportunity against you.

I wanna be the Ysoki that spits plasma grenades.

FiddlersGreen wrote:

I want to be the Ysoki that spits a serum out of his mouth and pours it down his ally's throat. XD

Why not both?

William Pall wrote:

Alright, I'm not sure if this will help anyone, but I'll throw in my two cents for how I'm going to attempt to approach this chronology of events. Once I get a chance to run Starfinder, it will be in this order:

Dead Suns Act 1
The Commencement
Into the Unknown
Yesteryears Truth
Dead Suns Act 2
Fugitive on the Red Planet
Dead Suns Act 3
Claim to Salvation

Granted since I've only just skimmed, it may change, but it seemed like others were asking for others thoughts.

How would you handle XP with that setup? It seems from my admittedly uneducated perspective that your party will end up quite overlevelled by the time you’re in the middle of the AP.

Biggest problem with this is Acts 2 and 3 take place back to back without leaving the drift rock in normal structure. Consider moving both Fugitive and Claim to after Dead Suns concludes.

So in my game, the players ended up making friends with Jabaxa, but were reluctant to storm into the Fusion Queen itself. While they were following up a secondary lead into some more info about the Hardscrabbles, the Downside Kings raided the Level 21s and took Jabaxa prisoner. That got my players ready to storm the club.

Suppose I'm from a primitive world and I interplanetary teleport my way somewhere advanced. What's the exchange rate of gold to credits? My initial intuition is that it'd be 1 gold for 10 credits, but is there any better information to go with?

I did some math across each level comparing WBL guidelines to come up with my calculations. Across all 20 levels it averages out to about 2 credits per gold. Alternatively, you could look at a single level snapshot of when this occurs and come up with the exchange rate for that level. This even could make sense if the character only ditches some now and saves the rest for later as exchange rates can fluctuate.

Full spreadsheet here: Google Sheets

Haladir wrote:

I would imagine that Abadarcorp makes a tidy profit on its starship insurance business...

Yeah, probably. It's a bit difficult to prove a claim exists in the Vast reaches of the Drift. OTOH, it's impossible to collect premiums from customers that have exploded. ;)

That's what relatives are for...

One thing I was questioning when I was reading the archtype stuff the other night is do you only lose the various things on a level where the archtype gives you something or do you lose things like mechanic tricks even on levels where the archtype does not give you something special?

You only lose features for levels where the Archetype is replacing.

The dev team has acknowledged the issue and is looking into correcting it:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uizv?Space-combat-skill-DC-progression-issue#1 5

LeeSw wrote:

I also doubt any real play testing was done.

Add betier weapon and computer to a ship it becomes much harder to fly.

Yeah, this is blatantly wrong.

Playtesting was definitely done.
There are a bunch of guys on these boards who had NDAs because they were playtesting. Plus whoever else they tapped on the shoulder who aren't involved in these boards.

This seems to have popped up a few times in the threads here.

Having said that, I can't understand why the DC s scale like that. I suspect more time playing the game will probably show why.

The Starfinder team has acknowledged it is an issue and will be addressed.

Source: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uizv?Space-combat-skill-DC-progression-issue#1 5

I haven't looked too closely at the math for this, however, keep in mind that the expectation is the PCs are going to be fighting lower level ship opponents.

It is a problem. It'll get addressed.

Excellent to hear!

A key ability score of 14 should net you a minimum of 3 (1 minimum +2 key ability modifier) while a 16 gets you 4 at 1st level. Level advancement does not get you any more resolve until 4th level (5 resolve w/ 16 key ability score), then 5th level comes along and bumps the key ability score to an 18 (total of 6 resolve w/ key ability score 18) and again at 6th you gain another resolve point (3 from half-level +4 from key ability score for a total of 7 RP).

There is a good chance you are putting your personal upgrade into your key stat as well at around level 3 so that's another bonus resolve.

Ran some baseline numbers:

Baseline assumes the attribute starts at 10, increased every level (as it is at least a tertiary attribute), and is a class skill.

Focused is assuming a 16 starting in the relevant attribute, is increased every time, putting your strongest personal mod in it, skill is class and picking up skill focus (or possibly a class bonus) for the skill by level 5 but otherwise unassisted (IE no computers).

Most characters are probably going to be somewhere between the two.
Computers can help bridge some of the gaps, but are limited in how many nodes you have... and the higher bonuses cap out at 2 nodes for some reason.

Easy checks are DC 10 + Tier x 2. Medium checks are DC 15 + Tier x 2. Hard checks are DC 10 + Tier 3 2

At level 20 DC 50, 55, or 70 vs +27 baseline, +34 focused

At level 15 DC 40, 45, or 55 vs +22 baseline, +29 focused

At level 10 DC 30, 35, or 40 vs +16 baseline, +22 focused

At level 5 DC 20, 25, or 25 vs +9 baseline, +16 focused

At level 1 DC 12, 17, or 13 vs +4 baseline, +7 focused

For a Baseline you go from needing 8+ to being impossible without computer assistance for an EASY task. Focused goes from needing 5+ to 16+.

So maybe we aren't expected to always have a top tier ship. How far do we need to lag behind to maintain roughly the same chance of success?

Scale towards baseline:
Level 1 tier 1: baseline succeeds on an 8+, focused on 5+
Level 5 tier 3 or 4: baseline succeeds on a 7+ or a 9+, focused on 1+ or 2+
Level 10 tier 7: baseline succeeds on a 8+, focused on a 2+
Level 15 tier 10: baseline succeeds on a 8+, focused on a 1+
Level 20 tier 12 or 13: baseline succeeds on a 7+ or a 9+, focused on 1+ or 2+

Scale towards focused:
Level 1 tier 1: baseline succeeds on an 8+, focused on 5+
Level 5 tier 5: baseline succeeds on an 11+, focused on 4+
Level 10 tier 8: baseline succeeds on a 10+, focused on a 4+
Level 15 tier 12: baseline succeeds on a 12+, focused on a 5+
Level 20 tier 14: baseline succeeds on an 11+, focused on +4

Based on this analysis, it seems it would be most optimal to keep you ship tier at around 70-75% of your APL. Alternatively for a house rule, change the scaling to be 1.5 x tier for easy and medium checks, and 2 x tier for the hard checks.

I'm actually as fan of Barricade and might take it if I end up with a very ranged focus character. The main benefits to the feat are:

1) Move action, not a full round or more.
2) Can be done nearly anywhere that is not completely barren. Most rooms have furniture or crates and such.
3) +4 to AC with no penalties beyond you can't move out of cover.

Also being in cover stops Attacks of Opportunity now!

Well using the sandbox exploration rules in Pathfinder you have a 50% chance to encounter a hazard or monster per day of overland travel. Makes the drift seem pretty safe to me.

I kinda wonder if the new Archetypes are meant to fill the role that prestige classes previously did. The Starfinder Forerunner certainly seems that way.

Going on the AI thread.

51) The ship is actually a fully sentient AI, has a soul, and is thus illegal to own or sell. The ship happens to choose to work with the party as part of a symbiotic relationship because while it is sentient, it can't really operate itself.

I don't have the book, but I'm going to guess that is not the intention. I suspect the note that it is a poison effect is for applying bonuses to the save (Dwarves?) or immunity (Skeletons?).

Honestly if my players want to chase down a dragon with their ship, I'll likely take a few minutes to stat the dragon up as s ship and go from there.

I dunno, this one came across as a little to jargon heavy for my taste. It starts with a whole bunch of names and phrases that are essentially meaningless to me without some larger context.

I haven't been reading much of the blogs, so I don't know how things will be, but based on my PF experiences, I plan to make the following changes:

If feat trees exist, I'll be removing those by having any feat in a tree be automatically gained as you go up levels. I hate feat trees. PCs will get a lot more feats as a result.

If the Big 6 are going to be required, I'll be removing that and using an automatic power increase to compensate. I want magic items, cybernetics, whatever to be something special for the PC, not a mandatory power increase to keep up with the CR, nor a requirement for a build.

If spells automatically increase in power as they level, I'll be removing that and require the actual higher level spell slot to be used to gain the increased power.

If those don't exist in Starfinder, then all the better. For everything else, I'll be waiting for my copy to arrive.

Feat trees still exist but have been said to be much shorter. Most feats only have stat and BAB requirements, and maybe a single prereq feat.

I suspect the Big 6 are completely gone. We already have confirmation that weapons and armor no longer have numeric bonuses (only "cool" effects) and you get far more attribute increases over the course of your career. They have announced that you can purchase up to 3 different attribute enhancing upgrade with money (+2, +4, +6 each to a different stat), but they don't compete for "slots" with other items.

As for spells, that I can't tell you.