johnlocke90's page

Mechs vs other mechs is fine. Its mechs vs soldiers or mechs vs the environment where things get weird. Low level mechs attack with 5 ton swords that can't break through concrete and do slightly more damage than equivalent soldiers. While also being almost as fragile as said soldiers.

Seeing how ineffective their sword is, its reasonable for players to ask "what happens if I step on the enemies?" to which the answer is "you aren't allowed to do that because it breaks the game design".

johnlocke90 wrote:

I am convinced whoever wrote the experimental vehicle section either doesn't care about or just hates vehicles. Its an awful alternative class feature. You can do most of it with a modest credit investment.

The only thing you actually get is the ability to miniaturize a vehicle, compare that to getting a full drone that you could ride into combat and fight alongside you.

You get a half cost vehicle with an extra upgrade slot that can be modified every level and replaced for free every time it's wrecked. It's amazing.

The drone can't provide total cover (full cover after level 7) and hardness/HP to protect your entire party or ram people for more damage than the best weapons. A level 1 vehicle doing a ram action averages 20 points of damage dealt (Reflex DC 10 negates), takes an average of 5, but also has Hardness 5, so often won't take any at all.

You are right. I underestimated the power of ram actions. I was thinking of it as a vehicle, where it is pretty mediocre.

As a battering ram or mobile source of cover its pretty good.

I am convinced whoever wrote the experimental vehicle section either doesn't care about or just hates vehicles. Its an awful alternative class feature. You can do most of it with a modest credit investment.

The only thing you actually get is the ability to miniaturize a vehicle, compare that to getting a full drone that you could ride into combat and fight alongside you.

johnlocke90 wrote:

This is more what I was getting to.

Setting aside fall damage, its completely reasonable for a person in a 60 foot tall mech to look at the 3 foot tall enemy punching his feet and say "I step on the guy".

But if you go anywhere near that either the guy is likely to die or you are getting an absurd outcome.

And the reason dragons, many of which are bigger than mechs, haven't been able to do the same thing to the humans with class levels for 50 years is...?

This had always been a system about heroes: larger than life fantasy figures who do absurd things like punch out a dragon, wrestle a demon, or behead a vampire lord with a sharpened spoon. And yes, dismantle a mech while they are "merely" in power armor. Having a mech helps but it doesn't matter if the pilot inside is outclassed.

Actually, dragons can do this. They have a crush attack that significantly outdamages the environmental rules. Its just not as noticeable because their size gets reflected in their level. You don't get colossal dragons until the Great Wyrm at CR22. Even the "Huge" adult dragon is CR 14. They don't have this disconnect because their other weapons also do massive amounts of damage.

The difference with mechs that they can be colossal at low levels, so they get this huge dissonance between what their weapons do and what environmental rules or basic physics say they can do.

Who knew that all a colossal monster had to do to kill players wasn't to roll an attack for their bite, tailswipe, or claws, but to just sit on the party.

It's almost as if that was never the idea behind the falling object rules to begin with.

Colossal enemies are over 64 feet tall. If you saw a rat nipping at your feet, would you try to step on it or punch it? Which do you think would be more effective?

Thats the situation most colossal monsters find themselves in.

johnlocke90 wrote:

Leon Aquilla wrote:

johnlocke90 wrote:

So interesting thing to note, low and mid level mechs can do more damage just falling on their opponents. A colossal object falling on you does 10d6 damage, reflex save for half. Do it from 30 feet and with a decent acrobatics check the mech only takes 1d6 damage itself.

At low levels, a mech can reasonably one a shot another mech doing this.

Mechs aren't objects for the purposes of that rule any more than a dragon is.

It literally says on page 112 of Tech Revolution in big, capital letters: "Mechs aren't objects"

No, what it says is "mechs do not count as objects for spells and abilities that affect objects.". Environmental damage rule are neither spells nor abilities.

How else would you determine the damage from a 200 ton mech falling on a person?

Via the Chunky Salsa Rule.

This is more what I was getting to.

Setting aside fall damage, its completely reasonable for a person in a 60 foot tall mech to look at the 3 foot tall enemy punching his feet and say "I step on the guy".

But if you go anywhere near that either the guy is likely to die or you are getting an absurd outcome.

The fact that a 200 ton mech hits for around 2d6+5 damage early on is pretty broken in itself. 10d6 aoe damage is much more representative of what a mech would actually do.

The item isn't just for mobility impairments though. In fact, the article only mentions mobility impairments to say the GM should consider giving a disabled PC a free hoverchair. Otherwise, there is nothing in the article suggesting this is intended for disabled people and the article repeatedly suggests otherwise by listing benefits that everyone could enjoy(avoiding slippery terrain, skimming water and flight).

As for full land speed, that seems pretty straightforward. Your full land speed is your land speed without anything impeding you. If its a broken leg, a spell or armor slowing you down, then thats not your full land speed.

With that interpretation, you could also ignore armor speed penalties. Encumbrance penalties too if we are handwaving stuff the character carries on them.

That actually is an interesting point. A cripple would have a low landspeed and the object is explicit that it uses your land speed. Its not useful for people who have mobility issues as written.

The Athletic and Elite chair also have a number of abilities that would be useful for everyone at relatively cheap costs, like hovering over water and flying, so this is likely to come up even with healthy parties. People are going to try to fit multiple guys on one chair to fly somewhere.

But doesn't this make it unbalanced?

I have no issue with the hurled object dealing Medium damage equal to the tier, my issue is the unbalance of a smaller Mech doing more damage with an object. Huge Mech Throws a Halfling, deals Medium damage, Gargantuan Mech doeals Low damage with an equal Halfling.

The assumption is that there will be appropriate objects nearby for you to throw. Your DM is not carefully cataloguing all the throwable objects lying around and their locations. you will say "I pick up a boulder and throw it" and it will happen to be an appropriate sized boulder.

Throwing objects sucks for damage anyway compared to using a weapon, so this is unlikely to come up much.

johnlocke90 wrote:

So interesting thing to note, low and mid level mechs can do more damage just falling on their opponents. A colossal object falling on you does 10d6 damage, reflex save for half. Do it from 30 feet and with a decent acrobatics check the mech only takes 1d6 damage itself.

At low levels, a mech can reasonably one a shot another mech doing this.

Mechs aren't objects for the purposes of that rule any more than a dragon is.

It literally says on page 112 of Tech Revolution in big, capital letters: "Mechs aren't objects"

No, what it says is "mechs do not count as objects for spells and abilities that affect objects.". Environmental damage rule are neither spells nor abilities.

How else would you determine the damage from a 200 ton mech falling on a person?

Its just a balance question. The team wants colossal mechs doing the same damage as huge ones. Same reason colossal swords do the same damage as huge ones.

Now why they don't want colossal mechs throwing motorcycles, I am not sure on. I guess they didn't think it was cinematic enough.

Thats just the beginning. Consider that a colossal mech can fly or teleport up 30 feet, then fall and do 10d6 AOE damage in a 30 foot square, while taking 1d6 damage itself. You can build this at the low tiers and one shot low level groups.

The reality is that they are trying to make combat encounters that includes everything from 20 pound humanoids to 200 thousand pound mechs. The math on anything size based is going to get weird.

So interesting thing to note, low and mid level mechs can do more damage just falling on their opponents. A colossal object falling on you does 10d6 damage, reflex save for half. Do it from 30 feet and with a decent acrobatics check the mech only takes 1d6 damage itself.

At low levels, a mech can reasonably one a shot another mech doing this.

Shields that have fast-heal equal to their tier + being able to draw on their power core for 1d8 to 4d8 depending on tier seems like it might explain why they don't have too much HP.

I did overlook the high level of shield regen, which at least makes it tougher mechanically. Replenish action actually makes them fairly resilient, although its limited by the issue that SP pools tend to be too small to take advantage of it. The T6 striker with 15 SP is going to be overheal quite often.

Just seems odd thematically. Rather than being big brutes who trade blows and take a lot of punishment, mechs seem better suited to kiting or hit and run maneuvers with their high speeds and strong regen.

BigNorseWolf wrote:

The durability of humanoid beings in roll 20 has never made sense. Just don't think about it too much.

Makes more sense than the durability of inanimate objects. ;) At least heroes and villains having high HP can represent their capability and importance within the story. Walls having ridiculously absurdly high HP mostly serves to prevent decades old dungeon-bypass strategies that probably should have been perfectly allowable back in 1980.

Wall HP is not too bad actually. A 6 inch wooden wall has 60 HP and 5 hardness, which a low level adventure can break through within a minute or two. Thats reasonable.

What is odd is that a Tier 6 mech has lower hardness than a wooden wall and only slightly more HP.

Just looking at the listed examples in Tech Revolution and the health pools on gargantuan mechs are lower than a lot of PCs. For example, the Aeon Striker, Tier 6, has 66 hitpoints, 15 shield points and 3 hardness. Meanwhile, a level 6 soldier is going to have 100ish HP+stamina. It seems to get worse at higher tiers too.

It just seems bizarre that a 50ish ton mech can take less damage than the 200 pound pilot inside it.

Dracomicron wrote:

Brother Willi wrote:

Flanking is different than aiding another. It's about positioning, not about using an action to aid an attack.

You want to add 2 to your friend's melee attack in Starfinder? Because flanking is how you add 2 to a friend's melee attack in Starfinder.

Bonus stacking isn't nearly what it was in older d20 editions.

I follow what you're saying. Here's where I am coming from: Flanking's been part of the d20 rule set since it was invented with D&D 3.0. Aid Another has been part of the same rule set up until Starfinder.

I'm willing to agree that there's a design reason why aiding another using a melee weapon isn't a part of the Starfinder game. That design reason isn't spelled out. I don't see a clear reason why Harrying Fire exists, but a melee equivalent doesn't.

Saying "Flanking is meant to replace aid another" doesn't make sense from a historical perspective, because both have existed along side each other until Starfinder. Saying "Starfinder got rid of melee aid another because it redid the math so that flanking subsumed the aid another action" makes sense, but I don't see a clear design reason for it. Put another way: Can you point me to something that says "we rolled flanking and melee aid another into just flanking?"

Well they redid the math to making hitting enemies much easier, which makes aid other/harrying fire both pointless actions.

I would say they left in Harrying Fire because it sounded cool and kept it weak enough that nobody will actually use it.

I was able to copy them and paste them into Paint, where I could print them.

I did have to click closer to the center of the page though. Clicking the edge would just get the border.

I would allow it. Nothing in the rules stops the ship AI from taking actions.

It only matters for fights happening on your ship, and a minor home field advantage feels appropriate. If anything, this will get used against PCs more than for them.

Hylax is fairly close to an alien bug diety.

More likely, the list of deities is incomplete and details on them are fairly limited because the team wanted to focus on the scifi elements.
The information we got feels like a brief overview for people who didn't play Pathfinder. If someone wants to know more, they can always look there.

As for love, Cayden Cailean had the subdomain in Pathfinder. No reason to think he doesn't still have it in Starfinder. He just hasn't come up yet.

Xenocrat wrote:

Beyond the "it can't be found" handwavium, it might also be prohibitively expensive in ships lost to attack a planetoid with shielded and dug in capital weapons systems installed. The cost of leaving the Free Captains alone is higher insurance costs (they don't kill people who surrender and they honor their bargains) and higher costs on ship armament (probably a good idea anyway). The cost of destroying Broken Rock might be a double handful of battleships and cruisers with all hands even if none of the actual pirate ships in the vicinity fight.

In the Magefire Assault Absalom Station's defenses were enough to trash a sneak attack from what was probably then the strongest planetary fleet in the Pact Worlds' system. If Broken Rock's are even 5-10% as strong, the value of a similar attack is doubtful.

How would pirates with no industrial backing have a station armed so much as tu survive a attack by military vessels?

It has a few capital ship weapons and thats it. Do you know what else has capital ship weapons? Capital ships which navys and a few paramilitary groups have by the dozen.

There is no way Broken Rock could stand up to a single task force. And sending one is not too much of an effort either as it is still inside the Pact System.

All it takes to make weapons is enough UBPs and a guy who knows how to craft them.

Making the capital weapons is actually fairly easy.

johnlocke90 wrote:

Well due to Drift Technology, timelines would actually shrink.

It took months to cross the Atlantic, but you can get anywhere in the solar system within a few hours.

Isn't in system travel 1d6 days?

You are right, although if you have a higher Drift rating it could shrink to 5-29 hours.

Regardless, its much faster than 1700s or 1800s travel across the Atlantic.

I expect security would be easy to get past. They are only there to stop you from killing yourself.

I would not make survival checkbased. Instead, I would require the PCs to research the thing and figure out a spell or technology that could get them through alive.

RJGrady wrote:

So on Earth, Caribbean piracy went on for 150 years, and during a time period where the imperial powers were actively consolidating their territories.

Mapping a projected lifetime or viability to a concept in a post-FTL sci-fi setting based on that concept's history in the real world is tricky. This is mostly because, in the words of a great man:

D. Adams wrote:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Even without the recourse of escaping out into the infinite blackness of the Vast, the sheer scale of the local solar system does very strange things with timelines.

Well due to Drift Technology, timelines would actually shrink.

It took months to cross the Atlantic, but you can get anywhere in the solar system within a few hours.

Telok wrote:

What I'm wondering is what ships the pirates can even find to attack.

This can all be gotten around with corrupt and incompetent law enforcement, but then law abiding and...

Or you can't really drift within a system. The beacon is at absolom station you have to blip in there and then head over.

The core rules say you can drift within system. In fact, its recommended to do so.

RJGrady wrote:

Well, I guess I should know better than to sit in the home team bleachers and criticize. So anyway, thanks for the discussion, I feel like I have a very thorough answer at this point. I feel pretty secure in my understanding of the situation at this point.

You were asking "does Starfinder have this feature". Simple answer, no, it does not.

Should it have this feature? Maybe.

Pathfinder 1 had the Big Six effect where most characters were picking up the same mandatory magic items, because the stats of most monsters were based on the assumption that you had the bonuses those items gave. Starfinder is much the same bit mostly focused on armor and weapons. Also, you can't really upgrade Starfinder armor and weapons, you continually have to buy new ones.

In Pathfinder 1 a lot of people disliked this situation. One solution they came up with was Automatic Bonus Progression - you remove the irritating bonus stat items from your system, and instead people just get that bonus as an effect of being sufficiently high level. Flavorwise, it's a shift from "you're a powerful because you have powerful gear" to "you're powerful because you're high level". It's a bit like this d20 modern defense stat, but applied to more kinds of stats. (Also, D&D 3.5 also had this defense stat as an optional rule.)

Pathfinder 2 consolidated a lot of the character progression into the character (skills, AC, saves, to-hit all go up based on your level). You do collect some bonuses from items, but that's a smaller contribution. A PF2 character who has to break out of prison and steals the noob armor of the nearest guard is a lot better off than if you tried to pull that stunt in PF1 or Starfinder.

Putting in a sort of automatic bonus progression into Starfinder wouldn't be impossible, but it would be rather hard, because you drastically change how much wealth characters would be using. So you have to take a long hard look at how much loot encounters give out and so forth.

Really, its just armor thats in a weird spot. Weapon specialization ensures that low level weapons are fine later on. They aren't as good, but a level 15 character will have zero issue killing CR4 monsters with a knife.

So all you really need to do is give automatic armor progression in return for 25% of player wealth.

Enemies almost never have stamina, so I doubt they thought about it.

Especially not the type of enemy who you could kill with just channeling.

johnlocke90 wrote:

With drift drives, there really isn't a reason to have your pirate base in a populated system.

Since drift travel pops in at absolom station, if you're drift traveling in you're putting your ship in range of their cannons, and if your ship got caught raiding last week they're probably going to use them.

So you have to stay using local travel, you can drift out, but then coming back becomes problematic. MUCH better to stay using local traffic.

Is there a hard rule you can't drift into other parts of Golarian's solar system?

You should be able to do it as long as there are other drift beacons, which pirates could set up.

FormerFiend wrote:

Need them to be made playable.

Can you truly make the ultimate source for truth and goodness playable? Really? That's like making Mister Rogers President, it would be great but probably not going to happen.

I want to believe that when we finally meet the Flumphs at the end of a long AP, they'll say thank you for dealing with the small stuff while they took out the guy trying to unmake the universe.

Also, WOTC owns them, so good luck with that.

johnlocke90 wrote:

Dracomicron wrote:

It does have the consequence that you can make robots and undead shaken with a Demoralize... which... you know that's fine by me. They're already immune to a ton of stuff.

You can even demoralize a mindless ooze. Then follow up with a bluff or disguise to trick-attacking it.

Starfinder is much more restrictive on immunities.

Only if the ooze can sense you in a meaningful way. If it doesn't have sight or hearing, I would expect that it would be hard to demoralize it. The one stipulation that Demoralize has is that it's Sense-Dependent.

True for the demoralize. You can still bluff em for trick attack though.

I have been reading the Pact Worlds book and it came to attention that the Free Captains have their headquarters based in the Pact Worlds system which is home to various factions that would like to see them dead. Their headquarters know as the Broken Rock is a 450-mile-wide asteroid (similar to Ceres) so it's not exactly hard to notice. The only explanation as to why this asteroid has not been atomized is:

To keep law-enforcement organizations such
as the Hellknights and the Stewards off these ne’er-do-wells’
backs, only Free Captains and those they vouch for know the
exact location of Broken Rock. In the event of an attack, an
array of automated capital laser weapons known collectively
as the Broadsides defends the asteroid.

Pact Worlds pg 82

You would think factions like AbadarCorp, Stewards, Hellknights, Knights of Golorion, and the various militaries of the Pact Worlds would have the resources to track down this one base that has been used for centuries.

Because Paizo thought it would be cool to have pirates in the home system.

With drift drives, there really isn't a reason to have your pirate base in a populated system.

If nobody wears armor or goes armed near cities, its because nothing dangerous happens near cities or the local law enforcement is so effective and omnipresent that non-cops don’t need to protect themselves in any way. So there’s no more ‘bad parts of town.’ Drow and all the inhabitants of Eox are now nice people that greet you with a smile and definitely not an underhanded plot. Prices on armor and guns plummet since so few people need to buy them.

That doesn't follow. In dangerous real world cities, people don't walk around in body armor carrying assault rifles. Cities like Tijuana or Caracas tend to have fairly strict(if poorly enforced) weapons laws, in fact. At most, regular people wear street clothes and carry a concealed pistol.

Unless you invest whole hog in armor , NPCs have enough hit to hit you every time anyway and you rely on miss chance and damage reduction for mitigation.

So picking a few random CR 5 monsters, theBarathu has +12 to hit. The medium elemental is +15 and the Ikeshti Rivener is +11. Someone with level 4 Defrex Hide, Basic and +4 dex is at 19 armor. Meaning they reduce enemy damage by about 10-25% just from their armor on a regular attack. On a full attack, they are reducing damage by 30-45%.

So for an equivalent CR monster, they certainly aren't hitting you every time.

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Ixal wrote:

And that is the problem. Why would people, civilians who can't even fight and don't expect that they have to, wear armor all the time? Armor which not only costs a fortune but is also restrictive (maximum Dex and speed penalty).

...why do you think they're wearing armor all the time? There are other kinds of clothing in the game

Of the 24 player characters in my campaign not one uses heavy armor or power armor.

A couple have tried it, but when spaceport authorities prevented them from getting off the ship with it on, or when wearing it and venturing into a settlement and then being hassled by local law enforcement, the decided it was better to get light armor and be less obvious about their intentions.

Nobody wears heavy armor / power armor just for S's & G's. You mean business, not necessarily the good kind.

At least that's how it works at my table.

I think you demonstrated the issue. If you enforce realism, hardly anyone wears heavy armor. The game balance assumes that they are both freely available and if you deviate from that, heavy armor builds suck.

I would guess your players also favor dex based builds, because when heavy armor isn't feasible then dexterity because even stronger, which also means ranged weapons are stronger and melee builds are weaker.

The game has built in assumptions in how its balanced and things start to break when you violate those assumptions.

The game relies on you wearing armor because its the only way to significantly scale your AC.

If you wanted to go unarmored, you would need to homebrew a feat or class feature that gave you something like +1 KAC/EAC every level.

Imo what a starship book needs is not (only) new ships, but more rules for starships to make them more interesting.

- Expanded rules on more combatants, both multiple enemies and having several PC ships, up to 1 ship per PC

- More components, both combat components that allow you to use special action, preferable ones that need to be staffed and activated by PCs with a roll so they don't always roll the same check in every round, and non-combat components for sandbox games

- Variant rules for non autoleveling starships where PCs actually have to invest money into them so they have to decide if they want to improve their equipment or starship

- Optional rules for dealing with PCs/vehicles firing at starships and vice versa and orbital bombardment instead of insisting that it is impossible for no reason.

Expanded rules for ship combat is risky.

The problem is that most people don't do much of it, so the rules need to be easy to learn and remember. It sucks having to figure out how to do something because we haven't had ship combat in 3 sessions.

Huskworld actually has one.

They are shaped like giant bugs, complete with blood vessels and internal organs.

I'll address everything going by RAW, since it's slightly entertaining.

Garretmander wrote:

I'd assume rolling profession to earn a living is like working gig jobs, or getting a low paying job working behind a register, that sort of thing. There's probably a different pay scale for 8-5 office jobs, or say construction work.

Earn a Living

You can use Profession to earn money. A single check generally represents a week of work, and you earn a number of credits equal to double your Profession skill check result.

Increasing your CR and, by consequence, your Master and Good skill bonuses, would represent getting a better job or getting paid better in your regular job.

It sounds bad, but NPCs tend to have a free ranged and /or melee weapon with an item level that matches their CR and that isn't cheap. There are some upsides!

David knott 242 wrote:

Things are cheaper if you have a long term lease on an apartment and cook your groceries at home.

I couldn’t find rules for buying a house or renting it, other than the hotel prices. Still on lodging, a suite with one bed would cost at least 37,5 credits a month, if "you book in advance and pay for them in 30-day blocks", instead of the regular 150 credits if you pay up every night. Maybe a couple can share a bed and split the bill - that'd be only 18,75 credits a month, what a steal!

But on cooking by yourself, no such luck.

Crafting Equipment and Magic Items
“A player character can create all the items presented in this chapter as long as he has the skills, materials, tools, and time needed to construct it. He must have a number of ranks in the appropriate skill equal to the item level of the item to be created.”
“For any food or drink, the appropriate skill is Life Science.”
“To create an item, you must have UPBs with a total value equal to the price of the item to be created.”

And since 1 UPB = 1 credit, cooking your own food costs the...

Keep in mind, if a DM was running a campaigned centered around people doing 9-5 jobs every day, he wouldn't just have the players roll profession checks over and over. He would have them run encounters where they get an education, interview for a job, deal with projects and employees. Then reward them credits based on their performance.

For an NPC, his job isn't just something he does on the side with casual profession checks. It *is* his adventure, so he is going to get more money as a result.

So is that a problem with the system or that AP? I haven't looked into that AP so i can't tell you if it was done well or badly.

I think its a mix. Paizo modules in general assume that your PCs take a very Diablo style dungeon crawl approach regardless of setting. Even in the middle of a city, the module won't consider "what if the PCs call the police?" or "how does the local government react?". Its just assumed that you will head into the building of baddies and kill them with minimal consequences.

Now to be fair to the AP modules, the system spends a lot more time on combat than it does on non-combat encounters. Its fair to assume every party can fight their way through an encounter, but stealth or diplomacy might be impossible.

It does have the consequence that you can make robots and undead shaken with a Demoralize... which... you know that's fine by me. They're already immune to a ton of stuff.

You can even demoralize a mindless ooze. Then follow up with a bluff or disguise to trick-attacking it.

Starfinder is much more restrictive on immunities.

So, the question that I wonder is:

Does the concept of one or multiple evil dragon corporations allow for a plucky setting?

Sure, its a challenge for the PC to deal with like any other.

But they don't necessarily have to be evil. In fact, an ultra-rich neutral dragon corp would probably have an easier time. We already have AbadarCorp led by an actual god.

Minimum crew though... Yes it lets PCs use bigger ships, and even operate them, or a single PC being able to fly a larger ship in an emergency, but that sounds like something better handled by narrative than by mechanics. Otherwise the PCs will likely figure out how many penalties they can get away with and just get a bigger ship.

Bigger ships are worse than smaller ships generally, so that would be a bad strategy.

Its not true that the APs all take place far from civilization. Attack of the Swarm has an entire book in a capital world. Signals of Screams and Deadsuns do too.

I do agree though that nuclear weapons were a mistake. Its easier to handwaive plasma torpedos or laser guns, but nukes are something we all have specific expectations about. And I do wish we had a better idea how much money different people have.

David knott 242 wrote:

What sort of inheritance taxes do the Pact Worlds have?

The difference between members of long-lived races and members of short-lived races is that members of short-lived races have to pay that tax more often.

Otherwise, any differences should cancel out. For example, longer lived races would compensate for their experience preventing mistakes from inexperience by being less flexible in their ability to innovate.

it's a lot more than that. Say you get 10 generations of human to 1 dragon

The dragon doesn't go to college 10 times, spend 180 years in school, spend 10 times as much on diapers and babyfood raising generations of kids, doesn't spend 10 times as much when they stop working for 20 years to retire etc. Those all add up, and over 1,000 years they add up a LOT.

Also, a lot of those generations will have multiple kids. By the 10th generation someone could easily have thousands of kids diluting the money.

a couple of things:

a) The Gap pretty much can be assumed to have wiped out bank accounts, ownership, titles, etc. It was an economic jubilee - all debts forgiven. Since that was what, 200 years back (I think 30-50 would have been more than enough, but Paizo loves them a long time line) there's just been no time for the dragons and deathlords and mega-comuters to have accumulated all the money

b) There were two massive wars - the long war against the Veskarium and the shorter, more devastating war against the Swarm, which probably not only wiped out a lot of capital, but probably required the raising of massive taxes to finance them

c) It's SPAAAAAACE ADVENTURE!!!

Actually Deadsuns starts 318 years after the Gap started, but people still had wealth from before then(although I am sure it causes some issues). The wars would probably be the biggest drain for Pact Planets at least.

Master Han Del of the Web wrote:

I'm, personally, a socialist. So the base Pact Worlds setting being what amounts to a capitalist free-for-all definitely comes up often for the group I GM. With the increased scale of the setting, we only really see the problems inherent in an uncontrolled economy ramp up. Wealth hoarding by nigh-immortal beings is definitely a problem but corporations and wealthy families have already been doing it for centuries.

Starfinder is hardly a "capitalist free-for-all".

The economy in SF is completely made up to support a dungeon crawling type itemization and has no basis in reality.

It is funny how from a player perspective, Starfinder is simultaneously an-cap and has a rigidly controlled market. You can buy nuclear weapons for your ship with little trouble, but nobody will sell you guns 3 levels higher.

I'm, personally, a socialist. So the base Pact Worlds setting being what amounts to a capitalist free-for-all definitely comes up often for the group I GM. With the increased scale of the setting, we only really see the problems inherent in an uncontrolled economy ramp up. Wealth hoarding by nigh-immortal beings is definitely a problem but corporations and wealthy families have already been doing it for centuries.

Actually its pretty rare for a company or wealthy family to horde wealth for centuries. Look at the worlds largest companies. I don't see any that break the 200 year mark. Majority aren't even at 100 years. And most wealthy famlies don't last more than 2 generations.

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/6800

Starfinder is unique in that you actually could have an extremely competent CEO who leads a company for centuries.

For example, the top names in society could have been the same for your grandparents, parents and you. They wouldn't necessarily even be bad people. If your company was run by a kind, intelligent dragon, nobody would particularly want to get him outted 300 years into his tenure.