With vehicles becoming a more integral part of the game, what are we to do with spaceships (and creatures) that are above Colossal in size?
Both the Millennium Falcon and a Star Destroyer are bigger than Colossal, but one is clearly magnitudes larger than the other.
Do we need an extension of the size categories? Or something else?
I'd like to see something different. For one, if they expanded size categories upwards they'd either make more colossal+ monsters or those size categories would go under utilized.
Maybe have ships to have their own size categories.
Given the attack/AC modifiers from size, it would be useful for ships to operate on a different scale, with a quick rule for converting into 'personal' scale. Such as if a person is shot at with a turbolaser.
-20 to hit, x10 damage or something?
I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
Maybe, but spaceship weapons should probably kill most adventurers in a single hit, even at higher levels using advanced gear to defend themselves. Personal laser shields just don't produce enough energy to defend from an actual star ships laser guns.
Maybe, but spaceship weapons should probably kill most adventurers in a single hit, even at higher levels using advanced gear to defend themselves. Personal laser shields just don't produce enough energy to defend from an actual star ships laser guns.I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
Why not? Aren't there characters powerful enough to kill demigods in Pathfinder? Why wouldn't they include characters powerful enough to handle a spaceship? Maybe a powerful technomancer or the bearer of an artifact/technological device. Just because it's a space ship it doesn't mean it needs to be stronger than a level 20 character.
Maybe, but spaceship weapons should probably kill most adventurers in a single hit, even at higher levels using advanced gear to defend themselves. Personal laser shields just don't produce enough energy to defend from an actual star ships laser guns.I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
Starships should kill high levels in one shot? Okay why? High level characters can survive a breath weapon from an ancient red dragon that instantaneously melts a 50+ ft. radius of stone into lava, survive if an object regardless of size category and height falls on them, and even against high tech weapons regardless of size category (like colossal laser and plasma cannons). There's no reason to have a total paradigm shift with high level characters durability because big metal vehicles are in the picture.
Now I'm speaking for Pathfinder, not Starfinder. If that's how they want things in Starfinder then that's cool, too.
There is a chart from old 3.5E which assigns ranges of height & weight, space, and reach, with modifiers for size, grappling (CMB/CMD), and hiding (stealth).
The Fine and Colossal numbers are left open-minded and the weight ranges are a little fudged, but you can work out the numeric progression to find the lower and upper limits of the extreme categories, as well as determine the multipliers used to advance the chart up or down. The Medium category is if course the baseline.
There's three approaches to implementing ship rules which seem reasonable:
1. define them as special creatures with the construct type using those rules
2. define them as another kind of vehicle similar to existing PF vehicle rules (which include things like airships and mechanical dragons)
3. define ships as its own kind of add-on system
Paizo seems to favor option 3 but I could see any of these being used.
Why not? Aren't there characters powerful enough to kill demigods in Pathfinder? Why wouldn't they include characters powerful enough to handle a spaceship? Maybe a powerful technomancer or the bearer of an artifact/technological device. Just because it's a space ship it doesn't mean it needs to be stronger than a level 20 character.Maybe, but spaceship weapons should probably kill most adventurers in a single hit, even at higher levels using advanced gear to defend themselves. Personal laser shields just don't produce enough energy to defend from an actual star ships laser guns.I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
Demi-gods and starships just aren't of the same sort of thing. Apples to oranges.
I feel like you shouldn't be comparing what can and can't be done in Pathfinder to what can and can't be done in Starfinder.
I'm personally hoping they do away with a lot baggage that existed from 3.5 that carried over into Pathfinder. The "invulnerability" of high level characters in one of those things.
Starships should kill high levels in one shot? Okay why? High level characters can survive a breath weapon from an ancient red dragon that instantaneously melts a 50+ ft. radius of stone into lava, survive if an object regardless of size category and height falls on them, and even against high tech weapons regardless of size category (like colossal laser and plasma cannons). There's no reason to have a total paradigm shift with high level characters durability because big metal vehicles are in the picture.
Now I'm speaking for Pathfinder, not Starfinder. If that's how they want things in Starfinder then that's cool, too.
Again, I don't think Pathfinder should be the supply the power basis for Starfinder. I'm hoping the strike a new balance on well... balance.
Demigods are supernatural beings and aren't required to follow the same rules that ordinary (if powerful) mortals are bound by. They're not exactly the best example to use for opponents of starships. We'd be better off talking about starship power and how they can handle themselves against enormous but conventional organism such as space amoebas, uber-kaiju, dire dinosaurs, Awakened sequoia trees, xenomorphs, and clonal entities like Pando.
Is a human of appropriate scale to fight a tank?
Is a tank of appropriate scale to fight a ship?
In Rasputin Must Die characters fought animate tanks and were supposed to bring them down. They were only of huge size, IIRC.
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Yeah, humans fight tanks all the time. Heck I could do it, with enough explosives.
Yes, it's not very realistic, I know.
Our Fighter proved to us that she's a real human tank by surviving a tank running over her.
Our Wizard proved to us that he is as squishy as he seemed to be.
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Yes, when you are playing Fantasy games or Science Fiction a certain lack of realism is not only expected but desired. And it was REALLY cool to see our Fighter tanking a tank (even if I ended having to dimension door her out of there to avoid having her crushed).
Why not? Aren't there characters powerful enough to kill demigods in Pathfinder? Why wouldn't they include characters powerful enough to handle a spaceship? Maybe a powerful technomancer or the bearer of an artifact/technological device. Just because it's a space ship it doesn't mean it needs to be stronger than a level 20 character.Demi-gods and starships just aren't of the same sort of thing. Apples to oranges.
I feel like you shouldn't be comparing what can and can't be done in Pathfinder to what can and can't be done in Starfinder.
I'm personally hoping they do away with a lot baggage that existed from 3.5 that carried over into Pathfinder. The "invulnerability" of high level characters in one of those things.
If there's a system we should have in mind while guessing about Starfinder's "can and can't"s, I suppose Pathfinder is the better one, at least between it and "hopes". I know there have been some confirmed changes to the rules already, but I'm pretty sure that Starfinder has always been announced as:
"Take your favorite fantasy RPG to the stars! Set thousands of years in Pathfinder's future, Starfinder is a stand-alone roleplaying game evolved from the Pathfinder rules and designed to bring you a whole new universe of science fantasy adventures. (...)"
So we should always take Pathfinder into consideration...
Demigods are supernatural beings and aren't required to follow the same rules that ordinary (if powerful) mortals are bound by. They're not exactly the best example to use for opponents of starships. We'd be better off talking about starship power and how they can handle themselves against enormous but conventional organism such as space amoebas, uber-kaiju, dire dinosaurs, Awakened sequoia trees, xenomorphs, and clonal entities like Pando.
Sorry, but I think you made a mistake.
Just as our friend Sauce987654321 said, what I was saying is that PCs are able to fight the likes of Mogaru and even demigods. You should known that Mogaru can blast a 1,200-foot-long beam, and even a spaceship would probably be threatened by it.
But also remember that PCs have starships and those ships scale with the APL. to keep having the ship being meaningful it also needs to pick up new abilities and get stronger as the party levels. To keep the ship side from becoming an automatic win button there need to be enemy ships at those levels that can threaten the PC ship, thus we must have ships strong enough to outclass high level PCs or those PCs will just do without ships.
Indeed! But I'm pretty sure that space combat, space travels, and many other utilities - such as accommodation and status - are also good reasons to have a spaceship. I'mp hoping to see really big spaceships, and maybe those are the ones that you are talking about, the high level spaceships. ;)
I'm pretty much excited about the spaceships. I'm very anxious to see if they are getting stat blocks just as monsters and NPCs. You known, I really want to grab my "Spaceships Codex"... Lots of assumptions I did here, I know! XD
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An actual size-category to actual-size table is one of the things we lost when we moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder, but I've always used:
• Fine = .5 x .5
• Diminutive = 1 x 1
• Tiny = 2.5 x 2.5
• Small = 3.75 x 3.75
• Medium = 5 x 5
• Large = 10 x 10
• Huge = 15 x 15
• Gargantuan = 20 x 20
• Colossal = 30 x 30
It's all centered around the scale of a Medium PC at 5 x 5
There are several new Pathfinder sub-systems that suggest that "next" scale up could be 50 x 50 - kingdom and city building rules use a 50 x 50 lot, and the mass combat rules that go with kingdoms and cities uses standard nomenclature (Small, Medium, Large, etc.) to describe armies. The mass combat system is abstract, but if you wanted to place it on some kind of a tactical map, why not use those same 50 x 50 lots as in city building. You'd get something like this:
• Fine Army = 5 x 5 (which is perfect, because a single creature is considered a "fine army")
• Diminutive Army = 10 x 10
• Tiny Army = 25 x 25
• Small Arm = 37.5 x 37.5
• Medium Army = 50 x 50
• Large Army = 100 x 100
• Huge Army = 150 x 150
• Gargantuan Army = 200 x 200
• Colossal Army = 300 x 300
Shifting to Starfinder - where we might end up wanting mass combat rules and city/base/country building rules at some point - why not use that same scale for starships and other vehicles? A motorcycle would be a Fine Vehicle, a car a Diminutive Vehicle, a big truck or a personal spacecraft might be Tiny or Small, a transport ship might be Medium or Large, and the big passenger liners or battleships might be Huge, Gargantuan or even Colossal.
Over all, the simple x10 for the next scale has a certain intuitiveness to it.
(For myself, I also added a Titanic size category at 50 x 50 for creatures and 500 x 500 for buildings, vehicles and armies, just because I like the parallel of starting with .5, centering on 5, and maxing at 50. But that's just me.)
An actual size-category to actual-size table is one of the things we lost when we moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder, but I've always used:
• Fine = .5 x .5
• Diminutive = 1 x 1
• Tiny = 2.5 x 2.5
• Small = 3.75 x 3.75
• Medium = 5 x 5
• Large = 10 x 10
• Huge = 15 x 15
• Gargantuan = 20 x 20
• Colossal = 30 x 30It's all centered around the scale of a Medium PC at 5 x 5
There are several new Pathfinder sub-systems that suggest that "next" scale up could be 50 x 50 - kingdom and city building rules use a 50 x 50 lot, and the mass combat rules that go with kingdoms and cities uses standard nomenclature (Small, Medium, Large, etc.) to describe armies. The mass combat system is abstract, but if you wanted to place it on some kind of a tactical map, why not use those same 50 x 50 lots as in city building. You'd get something like this:
• Fine Army = 5 x 5 (which is perfect, because a single creature is considered a "fine army")
• Diminutive Army = 10 x 10
• Tiny Army = 25 x 25
• Small Arm = 37.5 x 37.5
• Medium Army = 50 x 50
• Large Army = 100 x 100
• Huge Army = 150 x 150
• Gargantuan Army = 200 x 200
• Colossal Army = 300 x 300Shifting to Starfinder - where we might end up wanting mass combat rules and city/base/country building rules at some point - why not use that same scale for starships and other vehicles? A motorcycle would be a Fine Vehicle, a car a Diminutive Vehicle, a big truck or a personal spacecraft might be Tiny or Small, a transport ship might be Medium or Large, and the big passenger liners or battleships might be Huge, Gargantuan or even Colossal.
Over all, the simple x10 for the next scale has a certain intuitiveness to it.
(For myself, I also added a Titanic size category at 50 x 50 for creatures and 500 x 500 for buildings, vehicles and armies, just because I like the parallel of starting with .5, centeringon 5, and maxing at 50. But that's just me.)
Sounds much like my suggestion in which a fine ship could carry 1 medium creature and doubling each size category to 2 at diminutive, 4 at tiny, 8 at small, 16 at medium, 32 at large, 64 at huge, 128 at gargantuan, and 256+ at colossal. However, your proposition doesn't take into account that ships use a hexagonal base rather than square.
Well, having seen a playtest demo of the space combat combat rules I don't think that's an option. The players ship only had 85 hit points. This tells me that ships and characters are two different rulesets.
You know what, I think you could. Now it didn't give actual size info, but each ship had an armor class and hit points. I'm guessing if it's not outright stated you can fight a ship without a ship of your own it wouldn't be hard to rule it yourself. Though, from what I'm seeing it wouldn't be smart. I'd guess that the demo ship was roughly level 7, with 25 points of shielding on each face, 85 hit points in the hull, an armor class of 21, and high explosive missiles that do 4d8 each. Not something I'd take on.
Maybe, but spaceship weapons should probably kill most adventurers in a single hit, even at higher levels using advanced gear to defend themselves. Personal laser shields just don't produce enough energy to defend from an actual star ships laser guns.I mean I mentioned in the other thread that there are monsters that are hundreds of feet tall/long while the millennium falcon is only 114 ft. long.
Also, there's no reason to add in random modifiers if a starships weapons attack people. Their weapons are already going to have a higher base damage due to their size category. You don't have to have starships do thousands of damage in single attacks to convey that they are powerful.
Starships should kill high levels in one shot? Okay why? High level characters can survive a breath weapon from an ancient red dragon that instantaneously melts a 50+ ft. radius of stone into lava, survive if an object regardless of size category and height falls on them, and even against high tech weapons regardless of size category (like colossal laser and plasma cannons). There's no reason to have a total paradigm shift with high level characters durability because big metal vehicles are in the picture.
Now I'm speaking for Pathfinder, not Starfinder. If that's how they want things in Starfinder then that's cool, too.
That is hit points, but what about absolute size as far as regarding your chances to hit or miss with range? Lets take a real world example, lets suppose you are standing out in a parking lot with a baseball bat in your hands, and there is a car, can you do damage to that car with that baseball bat, or does the baseball bat just bounce off harmlessly because you are a person and the car is a vehicle? If you have two different combat scaled can a spacecraft just ignore someone shooting at it with a laser rifle?
I'm hoping it works like Alternity. In Alternity, A human with a baseball bat (Ordinary Firepower) can damage a car (Good Toughness), but it's going to take a while, or require some really well placed hits. Even then, most of the damage will be cosmetic. Actually "destroying" a car with a bat would take so long it's not even worth trying. Trying to destroy a Tank or Spaceship (Amazing Toughness) with a bat is futile.
If a laser pistol can damage a Starship, why invent a Laser Cannon? Why not just mount 50 laser pistols in a turret and call it a day.
Here is my proposed scale that covers the sane ground as both:
Fine 0.5' x 0.5'
Diminutive 1' x 1'
Tiny 2.5' x 2.5'
Small 3.75' x 3.75'
Medium 5' x 5'
Large 10' x 10'
Huge 15' x 15'
Gargantuan 20' x 20'
Colossal 30' x 30'
Enormous 50' x 50'
Gigantic 100' x 100'
Titanic 150' x 150'
Humongous 200' x 200'
Tremendous 300' x 300'
Honestly, this kind of chart makes me glad there are no more sizes past colossal. Spaces like that make it very difficult to make encounters with those size categories, and I'm not sure what they exactly add to the game. If it were meant for giant starships, then something like 300 x 300 is too much for a mat and too little for something like a capital ship for an unscaled battle mat. 30 x 30 isn't the limit for colossal, anyway, and many colossal creatures are described as something much bigger than their square space would suggest. Plus, having it that way makes it much easier to use them.
I'm also not a fan of the naming. None of them sound any bigger than colossal, so even that makes it a little confusing.
I just think things like space combat between ships of all sizes should be rescaled, sort of like mass combat. I think that makes it easier than unnecessarily creating more categories and forcing them on a grid meant for creatures of typically smaller sizes. You can have both creatures and ships on the mat, but I think ships should be resized. Kind of like how weapons have size categories, as no one thinks a medium sized dagger is the size of a person, if you get what mean.
I mentioned this a few times, but there are monsters the size of ships. A CR 13 Cetus is supposedly around 1,200' long. What's to say that a giant templated Purple Worm (colossal size) isn't as big as the moon worm that the Millennium Falcon landed inside of, or like one of the giant sand worms you would see in Dune?
A stray idea mentioned in another thread could be relevant here.
Space combat involves very large spaces and very high speeds. While an individual combatant occupies a significant portion of its square, a spaceship of any size would fill only a microscopic portion of a hex that it is in, given that each hex is likely to be thousands of miles across. No ship of less than planetary size would occupy more than one hex.
That means that we don't need a lot of detail on spaceship sizes -- fast and maneuverable fighter types and lumbering capital ships are probably plenty.
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Space wizard vs space ship. Game balance, schmame balance.
{. . .}
I just think we need one consistent scale to prevent confusion. What are the chances of a planetoid sized starship of hitting a medium-sized creature on the surface of a planet count the size categories on my scale between them. There are 14 size categories, let me extend the Size modifier chart:Slight +64
Minute +32
Miniscule +16
Fine +8
Diminutive +4
Tiny +2
Small +1
Medium +0
{. . .}Seems a planetoid sized ship would be totally incapable of hitting a medium-sized moving target with a fixed non-turreted weapon, unless the weapons has a rather large area of effect!
Well, that would explain why you can't escape from mosquitoes . . . .
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At GAMA the man running our demo said "One point of starship weapons damage = 100 points of personal damage (unless they changed since I turned in the manuscript)".
So basically 10 points of damage would equal 1,000, then? If Starfinder is supposed to be some lower powered game compared to Pathfinder, then that's cool.
However, if high level Starfinder characters are supposed to be on the same high powered scale of Pathfinder characters, then I'm not really liking this decision. In the same game where high level characters have proven to have insane durability against even the most powerful attacks can just get effortlessly owned by any starship. I don't know, I guess many people still just don't get it, whether they were a developer for Pathfinder or not. Many people I guess just don't realize that a high level character's toughness was a feature of the game, not a flaw.
*high level character survives a mountain falling on him*
*high level character survives against a Colossal sized Gravity Cannon's blast*
*high level character survives against Godzilla's (Mogaru) atomic breath*
*high level character gets one shotted by the Millennium Falcon's turret blaster*
That's some solid consistency right there, huh?
Didn't the developers say that Golarion has vanished during the time of Starfinder? I know exactly why! Because Golarion was totally vaporized by the presence of the awesomely exaggerated power of a starship! They also said that the deities won't say what happened to Golarion, but that's because the gods are too fearful of high tech metal flying vehicles! It all makes sense now!
Bare in mind that I'm only saying this if Starfinder is intended to be a high powered game like Pathfinder. If it is, this is a silly rules decision that I have very limited to no respect for.
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I can find fantasy stories where powerful heroes fight and defeat dragons or other epic monsters and survive ridiculous amounts of punishment. This somewhat justifies fantasy characters getting really high hit point totals; the fictional sources support those capabilities.
So now you can present the examples of people fighting spaceships to justify why that should be possible.
I don't know if this is supposed to be a counter argument, and I apologize if it isn't, but this is a very weak one. With in 2 seconds I thought of Asuras Wrath where there are beings far more powerful than starships. Even in this very thread someone posted a link where Starkiller takes down a Star Destroyer by himself, but I'm sure someone would say he's "super-duper-epic-beyond CR 30" nonsense. Like I said, some people just don't get it.