I think there just aren't enough power armor types at the moment to make a character who specializes in using it. Once that's taken care of, it will probably be a more popular option.
The core book is full of ideas that just need more pages to develop fully. Power Armor is definitely one of them.
I'm really excited for the long term potential of Starfinder.
A good armour choice for people who want to switch hit.
Requires only a small str investment and can replace further points being put into it. A guard soldier can also get into it with no str requirement at all for your halfling in something closer to a mech for him.
A Battle Harness is pretty useful from 5th level (the earliest a solarian or soldier can gain proficiency) to about 8th level. By 10th level, the affordable heavy armor choices provide significantly more protection and the character can have at least 18 Str, anyway (14 Str at 1st, increases at 5th and 10th).
Sadly, IMO, the extremely limited duration of the other power armors in the Core Rulebook make them much less useful outside of "defend the PCs' ship" situations or a planned assault on a single location. They are also useful for a much smaller level range; for instance, a 13th level character in a Flight Frame is outclassed in just about everything (except having reach) by a 13th level character in Exident Skyfire Armor with a forcepack.
The upgrades you can get on power armor seems like it would make it worth it. Once we get some more armor types anyways.
I think we just need to see power armor fleshed out. It seems like the battle harness line would be a good combo of enhanced armor with good endurance 1 charge per hour is a very usable power drain easy enough to swap in a new battery during rests.
Some of the power armor like the jarlslayer seems designed for short sharp incursions. Times when you are planning on assaulting a fixed position or building and you are planning in on going in very very loud in a sharp probably short incursion.
But they currently are so spread out level wise probably not to worth it to dedicate a character to focus on it at this point. Still the soldier option that gets the free proficiency in it also gets a lot of boosts using heavy armor so still a worthwhile option. Then if you come across some nice power armor at the levels you can find them its worth using.
I'd like to see PA fleshed out before answering that, because it feels like we have one suit of power armor, and a few mini-mechs. And all feel disappointing. Then again, I've recently been playing Savage Rifts, so that's probably colored my views on PA.
|
Bumping to increase discussion. Note that a backup generator (in any of the power armour, pilot's light armour, or Android pilot's body) charges batteries significantly faster than the Battle Harness uses them.
Unfortunately that's the only case it's true for. The others need 10 backup generators to even keep up with them. To use anything but the battle harness you need a vehicle to carry it, and hope your team can manage for the three plus rounds it takes you to stop the vehicle, get to your suit, and then get into the suit and join the fight. In nitch games where you don't have to worry about less than two hours of operating time they could be handy. But for now I agree that we really only have one suit, and you'll eventually level out of being ably to really use it. If you could wear heavy armor then it would be nice, and personally I'm looking forward to using some once it's a real option, but for now it's not really there. It's all just possibilities and theories.
Losing a charge per minute for anything but the most basic power armor makes them really situational, in addition to needing feats to use. One of the biggest benefits is for a character with low strength, since it replaces your strength, but you need a minimum strength to have the power armor feat, so it kinda works against itself.
It's the power thing that is most limiting though. 100 minutes of active time is enough for some situations with the highest battery, but a day of adventuring requires a lot of batteries and recharging all of them is going to be either costly or time-consuming. Taking enough batteries for multiple days of adventuring is cost-prohibitive, and if you run out of batteries, your armor is basically stuck. OK for sorties, bad for exploration.
Instead of carrying a boatload of batteries, you could also transport the power armor with you in an unpowered state, which seems significantly more feasible. You just need a Mk2 Null-space chamber (level 9 item). That lets you store the armor and recall it as a full action. Then you need to put it on as another full action. Power armor is not generally worth losing 2 full actions at the start of combat as compared to heavy armor.
So overall power armor doesn't have enough options to scale with level, and has serious logistical issues to using it. I could see bringing it as a backup option for when you know you're going into a fight, but the feat, cost, and stat investment is prohibitive.
For now, Power Armor just seems like something you bring out when you need to repel a boarding party. Until it gets more fleshed out, I see a lot of homebrew happening.
Fleshing out the boarding party rules would be a great way to make power armor feel more relevant.
The two concepts seem perfect for one another:
- Rules for penetrating hulls using your big robot frame
- Deploying titan shields to move up corridors under heavy fire, Reinhardt style
- Jumping into your loader to tangle with a huge space alien that's aboard like in Aliens
- Using the frame to claw your way up an elevator shaft that's been disabled by the enemy
- A big mecha-style duel on a causeway to hold off the enemy power armour while the party fights their way towards a vault.
They don't all have to revolve around 'hero centerpieces' that only one person will enjoy: but they can present methods of solving situations outside of the regular combat/skillcheck/social trio, particularly if you provide multiple tasks to be achieved.
It also provides a mechanism for making athletics or similar checks a bit more 'grand', allowing for classes like soldiers to feel less left behind in the out-of-combat skills department after the first few levels.
I'd still like to see more suits at more levels as people have already requested, but opening up avenues for gameplay from a shipboard, structural or large-scale-architectural perspective is what I think would really sell people on the idea of integrating power armor in their session-to-session consciousness.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When I think of power armour I think this is what I want:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqLc9pj1k0&t=186
Cyclones for Robotech/Macross
I was curious how bad the power armor costs would be, so I crunched some numbers. Let's start with something like the Jarlslayer. We'll assume the PC uses the armor for 8 hours a day, so she burns (8*60) 480 charges, or just under 5 ultra-capacity batteries per day. Let's add 20 charges to the consumption, since she'd probably want to swap batteries before they're fully drained - swapping when there's 4 minutes of juice left in each battery means she'll never run out midcombat. Recharging her batteries at a public charging point would cost (223*6) 1115 credits a day, and take 54 minutes. Alternatively she could charge it at a larger starship (GMs perview) but in that case a full recharge will take eight hours.
Spending ~1100 a day on batteries isn't the worst penalty in the world when you consider that a 15th level PC will have roughly 500 000 credits worth of wealth. For reference, the cost of a 14th level Frag Grenade can run the armor for 16 days. If a GM is willing to let the PC recharge his batteries whenever he's back on his starship (Starfinder Society lets you recharge batteries between sessions for free, which sets a decent precedent), the battery cost is reduced significantly - just carry extra batteries so you can go a few days between top-ups.
The math will look worse for the Flight Frame and the Spider Harness since those both become available at ~level 10. The Flight Frame has the same energy cost as the Jarlslayer, (1115 a day) but an 11th level PC will only have 100 000 credits.
The Spider Suit is weirdly more expensive to run than the other two since it uses smaller batteries, and near as I can tell you can't use bigger batteries than what the armor is rated for*. It runs through 12 high-capacity batteries even if you drain them down to the core, costing 1980 credits a day. I could be (and hope) I'm wrong about this, because the Spider suit already seems like a terrible deal compared to the flight suit.
A suit of powered armor’s battery capacity indicates the number of charges its battery holds. This battery can be recharged as normal using a generator or a recharging station (see page 234), or it can be replaced with a new battery (see Table 7–9: Ammunition). You can put a battery with a smaller charge capacity into powered armor, but you can’t recharge one to hold more than its maximum number of charges.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So I read this thread a while ago and wanted to come back to it once I'd had more time to poke around at the rules.
Powered armor seems to have a lot of advantages with one major drawback: Power. Power is the root of all the problems people are experiencing. Too hard to just be in it all the time, so it's tough to even take it with you.
One of the advantages that hasn't really been talked much about may end up being the one that helps solve (at least partially) the power problem.
According to the entry for powered armor:
The cockpit of powered armor is too small to fit a person wearing heavy armor. If you’re wearing light armor while in powered armor, you gain the higher of the EAC bonuses and the higher of the KAC bonuses between the two suits of armor, and you take the worse maximum Dexterity bonus and armor check penalty.
None of the rules I'm seeing seem to indicate that the light armor's upgrades cease to function when you wear powered armor over it. To me, this seems like an oft overlooked feature of powered armor. You can stack upgrades like nobody's business.
But I want to focus on one upgrade in particular, which has come up in this thread: The Backup Generator.
It's listed in the description of the generator that each generator can only be attached to one item. It does NOT say that each item can only have one generator attached to it, meaning you could theoretically connect one battery to a bunch of generators to charge it more quickly. It's at the very least not explicitly forbidden in that entry.
So how many of these do you need to power your armor? The Battle Harness seems to be very easy to run indefinitely with a single backup generator. The Flight Suit could be charged using the multigenerator technique if you equipped a light armor with six upgrade slots, and put generators in all 10 slots available to you.
The others are short at least 2 slots.
So maybe not super useful. You can be always charging in the light armor, but you still charge too slow for continuous use of the Jarlslayer or Spider Harness. But thus far, no cheese alarms are going off for me.
However, I do have one interesting observation regarding the mechanic class's drone meld capability, and I should warn you that the following section contains some moderate cheese warnings:
Drone Meld
As a full action while in contact with your drone, you can reconfigure it into a mechanical drone suit (or a backpack-like apparatus, for the Tiny hover drone) that you can wear. While in this form, the drone can’t take any actions or use any of its abilities, but you gain either the drone’s flight system mods if you have a hover drone, reactive camouflage (and an invisibility field if your drone has it) if you have a stealth drone, or reductive plating if you have a combat drone.
Now some of the Drone's Mods grant it Armor Upgrade Slots. The Mod might be considered an ability (as mods "grant your drone additional abilities"), but (cue the cheese alarm) the armor slots are technically equipment that you have installed in something you are wearing. So while it is not explicitly stated that you can benefit from the drone's Armor Upgrades, there is a slightly cheesy argument to be made for being able to access the armor upgrades.
On to the next part of the equation: Can you wear the drone into the cockpit of your powered armor?
It's worth noting that the drone doesn't technically count as either light or heavy armor. It's a special case that doesn't change what you're wearing (this one I think is just correct RAW not a lot of space to debate it), so it seems to me like you could wear it in the cockpit if you had light armor on. Therefore, in theory, power any armor on the list indefinitely using the following setup:
1.) Light armor with six slots, each equipped with a backup generator.
2.) Drone with four armor upgrades each equipped with a backup generator, worn by the mechanic.
3.) Powered Armor - all available upgrades can go to real, useful options, preferably things you can only use in powered armor or bread and butter type upgrades.
And then as the mechanic you also get some cool tricks like your energy shield that can augment your ability to survive in the suit.
Anyway, this whole theory relies on the following somewhat dubious ideas:
That Armor Upgrades equipped by the drone do not count as abilities but rather as equipment and therefore can be used by the person wearing the drone
VS.
That the mod that gives the drone the armor upgrade is an ability that becomes inactive when the drone is worn, blocking your ability to access the armor upgrades. (In this case you couldn't pull this crap with the Jarlslayer or Spider Harness - even the Flight Suit would cost all your available upgrade slots to pull it off)
and
You can hook up more than one generator to a single item.
VS.
Connections between generators are always 1:1, each item can connect to only one generator and each generator only to one item. (In this case you would need to charge ten batteries at once at a rate of 1 charge / 10 minutes instead of one battery at a rate of 1 charge / min, and the trick doesn't work very well).
I guess it is also assuming that you can plug up an item (like a battery) which is currently in use, in the way you would a cell phone, rather than that you have to eject the battery first.
I'm curious as to what folks think about this clear and blatant shenanigan.
On the one hand, I LIKE it as a solution to the power problem. Which is a problem. I shouldn't have to invest so much in a skill if I never get to use it because my armor is not able to travel with me.
On the other there are other solutions that are easier to justify in the rules system: Nobody seems to be saying you can't ride your motorcycle with your power armor on (Though if a player told me they wanted to ride their junk cycle in a flight frame I would laugh them out of the room), and you could carry your armor in a sufficiently large null space chamber. So I can see a scenario where someone just transports the armor using one of those methods, but (using the trick above) loads up both the drone and the light armor and the heavy armor with a force field each, so that the player can benefit from their own mechanic shield in addition to three high quality force shields, a titan shield and all manner of damage reduction and energy resistance. Not to mention the boundless number of purple aeon stones you can have wizzing around your head. In the end something feels slightly broken. But, then, you can already do almost all of that to a lesser degree just by wearing light armor inside of powered armor. And also there's a trade off - if you use the armor like that, it's not going to last. You'd be a monster tank for a little while, but you'd have to deal with all the inconveniences of swapping batteries and transporting it, getting in and out when a fight starts, etc.
as a random.
I do somewhat wish that you didn't need heavy armour proficiency for the power suit.
I want my ExoSquad style stuff.Also I feel like learning to use a power suit would not be the same as learning to move heavy armour. Just do to the mechanics of power suits.
but as evidenced by how i said power suit and not powered armour, I guess in my head I have those separated out.
I think if they made it so that you didn't need the extra layer of needing to know how to use heavy armor, then learning how to use power armor would just be too easy.
I'm personally not a fan of the power usage of powered armor in my games.
As written they're functionally useless in all but the best "preptime" situations with the exception of the battle harness. So I'll be using that as the base foundation to build upon rather than the other suits.
For the record I gotta say I vastly prefer the "battle harness" power armor design to the other three. Jarlslayer, Spider Harness and especially Flight Frame feel more like piloted vehicles than armor.
Don't worry. In a Q&A, it's been said that they will try to work in actual mecha suits.
For the record I gotta say I vastly prefer the "battle harness" power armor design to the other three. Jarlslayer, Spider Harness and especially Flight Frame feel more like piloted vehicles than armor.
and terrible ones at that given you can do everuthing they do in a vehicle for way less power.
My interpretation is that the powered arm braces would allow you to carry and wield, say, a sword despite being in what is basically a giant spiderbot. And then the "attach to the wearer's arms" basically is flavor text for "You can use the weapons as proficiently as if you were wielding them while naked."
I agree with Shinigami, I read that mostly as reassurance that "Yes, you can still wield your plasma doshko while you're a spider tank".
For the record I gotta say I vastly prefer the "battle harness" power armor design to the other three. Jarlslayer, Spider Harness and especially Flight Frame feel more like piloted vehicles than armor.and terrible ones at that given you can do everuthing they do in a vehicle for way less power.
Can you?
One of the significant "missing" rules sections is that no flying vehicle lists a maneuverability. I frankly have absolutely no idea how to legally fly a vehicle, without fundamentally violating the flying rules. It's even harder than correctly riding a flying mount, which is also rife with missing rules.
But I also agree that power armor and vehicles diverge in bizarrely fundamental ways - a vehicle can seemingly run all day on infinite fuel, and is armored entirely in paper, while power armor runs out of charge in minutes, and is made out of standard issue armor material, i.e. the good stuff. All this while both appear to be trying to solve what amounts to the same problem of artificial mobility.
Can you?One of the significant "missing" rules sections is that no flying vehicle lists a maneuverability. I frankly have absolutely no idea how to legally fly a vehicle, without fundamentally violating the flying rules. It's even harder than correctly riding a flying mount, which is also rife with missing rules.
If no other rules or errata was coming I'd probably just assign them a maneuverability. Grounded and water vehicles too. Which is very likely happen in the future anyway by the sounds of it.
A fun note is that the flight frame is as big as a tiny starship.
In nearly every game I've seen that has power armor, it's main purpose is in a "shock-and-awe" type attack. Put it on right before combat, then go in hard and heavy, blast everything to bits, then get out.
Added to the fact that you can wear most light armor while in power armor anyway, you could have a character that goes most of the time in that light armor, then hops in the power armor when they know they're going to be fighting.
Which games?
Which games?
Deadlands: Hell on Earth sticks out the most. But looking through my RPG collection... Iron Kingdoms with the Man-o-War armor. I'm pretty sure RIFTS has some power armor like that, but then that has a bunch of crazy stuff.
Aside from Warhammer 40K, that's all the ones I have with power armor, and all of them with the exception of some of RIFT's power armor, has a pretty hefty drain.
I just realized I think I've been thinking about Powered Armor all wrong - I assumed that there were two types of powered armor in Starfinder:
1. The "heavier" heavy armor that wraps around your limbs. It gives you strong armor protection and enhances your strength, but ultimately it's still your arms and legs doing all the work. Fallout 1's T51B, WH40k's Astartes armor, the Crysis armor, Overwatch's Reinhardt's armor etc would fall under this category. I used to think Battle Harness was this.
2. The "mech" powered armor that's more akin to a vehicle than a suit of armor. You don't really walk around wearing them, instead you pilot them with an interface from a cockpit. Rather than simply enhancing the user's strength, you're using the mech's limbs and mechanical strength to interact with the world around you. WH40k's Dreadnoughts, D.Va's mech, Starcraft's SCV etc would fall under this category, as would all the other powered armors in Starfinder.
I've been a little frustrated since I've been trying to build a character around the type 1 armors, and felt like the battle harness was my only option. All the other armors were too big and unwieldy. But then I realized that type 1 armor doesn't actually exist in Starfinder at the moment. The closest we can get is the heavy armor Aegis Series and Vesk Monolith, both mention using power-assisted joints to keep the armor maneuverable. All the powered armors, including the battle harness, seem to fall under type 2 - ie "mechs". You're not using your own limbs to attack, you're directing the suit's limbs to do it for you.
Making that shift in how I think also resolves a lot of unanswered questions I had about PA, like how unarmed strikes work.
Honestly, I kinda picture the Battle Harness as being along the lines of the suits in Edge of Tomorrow... so in a way kinda a mid-point between 1 and 2. It doesn't really make sense for the Harness to be a full mech suit given it's only size Medium, but it still has that basic idea of "you" are attacking only in the loosest definition of the word. And then of course as you get bigger it gets full Gundam, with likely table (or even Character) variance on what the cockpit's like.
Personally I don't think Power Armor should not go beyond Large size. Mainly because beyond that point you're not wearing it but piloting it.
My vision of it comes from things like Iron Man, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, various cyberpunk books featuring it, Battletech, and 40k (space marines and terminators, not Dreadnaughts). Things like Eclipse Phase and d20 future.
I'm preparing a write up for those who want to homebrew that kind fo flavor. I've got an armor storm 3 in my group and he's a new player. Soooo kind of don't want him to feel like hot garbage looking at his choice of suit.
I suspect that there will eventually be support for Iron Man-style powered armor, that is closer to heavy armor in functionality but has some PA features. For everything else, its better to think of it as mecha: used in contexts where vehicles would be relevant, not as an infantry tool.
The 8th level mechanic's Drone Meld trick says hello!
As a full action while in contact with your drone, you can reconfigure it into a mechanical drone suit (or a backpack-like apparatus, for the Tiny hover drone) that you can wear. While in this form, the drone can’t take any actions or use any of its abilities, but you gain either the drone’s flight system mods if you have a hover drone, reactive camouflage (and an invisibility field if your drone has it) if you have a stealth drone, or reductive plating if you have a combat drone. You can end the meld and return the drone to its normal form as a full action. Though it normally acts on your turn just after you, the drone can take no actions on that turn other than transforming back.
Sounds a lot like what some of you are asking for.
Which games?
Fallout 4 immediately springs to mind.
I suspect that there will eventually be support for Iron Man-style powered armor, that is closer to heavy armor in functionality but has some PA features. For everything else, its better to think of it as mecha: used in contexts where vehicles would be relevant, not as an infantry tool.The 8th level mechanic's Drone Meld trick says hello!
As a full action while in contact with your drone, you can reconfigure it into a mechanical drone suit (or a backpack-like apparatus, for the Tiny hover drone) that you can wear. While in this form, the drone can’t take any actions or use any of its abilities, but you gain either the drone’s flight system mods if you have a hover drone, reactive camouflage (and an invisibility field if your drone has it) if you have a stealth drone, or reductive plating if you have a combat drone. You can end the meld and return the drone to its normal form as a full action. Though it normally acts on your turn just after you, the drone can take no actions on that turn other than transforming back.Sounds a lot like what some of you are asking for.
Drone Meld would be a whole lot better fit for the Iron Man idea if it wasn't so limited. Unfortunately it... really is too limited to really fit the idea.
Which games?Fallout 4 immediately springs to mind.
Yeah, when I think Power Armor I always go to Fallout series first and foremost.
The interesting thing about power armor though is, despite usually requiring their own micro-fusion pack (which generates 60,000 watts of energy) there were variants that had been modified to require no energy source at all. Specifically a T-45 power armor variant used by the NCR which no longer provided the side benefits of power armor which were the enhanced strength and less reduced agility one would expect for the main benefit of being in thick plated metal armor.
