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I really hate the build point system presented in the CRB. I like player agency. I do not want space ships that magically improve when you level. Even if you explain it away as the players receiving build points as rewards, it still removes player choice. It also breaks immersion, and just plain doesn't make sense. I want a system where it is up to the players to decide how much they invest in to their spaceship(s). So I decided I want to be able to assign credit costs to BP.
I ran across this thread discussing worth of a bp. Porridge gave a nice breakdown of cost for wealth by level. So I thought I would run with those numbers. Then I gave it a little more thought and realized the way he presented them doesn't work the way I want it to.
Setting the price of a starship to the wealth gained by an encounter with the starship times 10 does seem like a great starting point. This way the PCs can sell a captured starship for the amount of credits they should gain for said starship encounter (going with the normal sell for 1/10th cost). Perfect. Build point costs, however, cannot be set to starship price divided by build points. Build points are used to upgrade starships, so their price needs to be set to the difference in cost between tiers of starship. So running with this math: a tier 1 starship costs 4,600c and has 55 bp. A tier 2 starship costs 7,750c with 75bp. So that means the 20bp to upgrade from tier 1 to 2 must cost 3,150c. So upgrades to a tier 1 ship cost 157.5 credits per build point.
Ok, so this sounds good. I started to write out the math and this is where things get really wonky. The wealth progression in starfinder is not at all linear. It goes up in leaps at different levels. This means that the cost per build point fluctuates considerably per level. I guess I'm OK with this. It just means that certain tiers of ship must have cheaper parts available for them for whatever reasons. It makes more economic sense than there is no bp to cred conversion.
Entries written as follows: tier #- purchase price in credits. Base build points for a ship of that tier. Credit cost per build point to upgrade. Here's how the math turns out:
tier 1/4- 1,100c. 25bp. 80c/bp
tier 1/3- 1,500c. 30bp. 80c/bp
tier 1/2- 2,300c. 40bp. 153.33c/bp
tier 1- 4,600c. 55bp. 157.5c/bp
tier 2- 7,750c. 75bp. 163c/bp
tier 3- 11,000c. 95bp. 150c/bp
tier 4- 14,000c. 115bp. 850c/bp
tier 5- 31,000c. 135bp. 400c/bp
tier 6- 39,000c. 155bp. 280c/bp
tier 7- 46,000c. 180bp. 320c/bp
tier 8- 54,000c. 205bp. 1,840c/bp
tier 9- 100,000c. 230bp. 1,175c/bp
tier 10- 147,000c. 270bp. 2,575c/bp
tier 11- 250,000c. 310bp. 2,250c/bp
tier 12- 340,000c. 350bp. 3,200c/bp
tier 13- 500,000c. 400bp. 5,400c/bp
tier 14- 770,000c. 450bp. 7,200c/bp
tier 15- 1,130,000c. 500bp. 6,500c/bp
tier 16- 1,780,000c. 600bp. 8,200c/bp
tier 17- 2,600,000c. 700bp. 14,500c/bp
tier 18- 4,050,000c. 800bp. 14,500c/bp
tier 19- 5,550,000c. 900bp. 15,000c/bp
tier 20- 7,820,000c. 1,000bp. Maxed
So for example: you decide to purchase a tier 3 starship. You pay 11,000 credits and that gives you 95 build points to make your ship. If you want more than those 95bp you can buy them at 150 credits each, up until your ship reaches 115bp. Now it is a tier 4 ship and you have to spend 850 credits per bp to upgrade further. Once you reach 135bp, then your ship is now tier 5 and the upgrade price drops to 400 c/bp.
If you decide to sell a custom ship, I would give the price based off what tier it is in. So if your ship has 294bp it would be tier 10, with a sale value of 14,700 credits. But if you wanted to be generous, you could do the math to figure out the exact cost.
There are no rules for tier 21 or higher starships in the crb, so I think it's fine to say that 1,000bp is the maximum you can put on a starship; we don't need prices for anything beyond that.
I'm putting this out there in the hopes that other people look and think of things that I missed and how to make it function better. Obviously, you would need to increase the credits the players receive so they can afford their ship. Using these numbers and only credits, the ship would need to receive approx two and a half shares to maintain the appropriate level as the pcs.
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a little more math: if wealth per encounter gives the proper amount of money for 4 players, but the starship needs the same amount of money as 2.5 players, then I need to give out enough for 6.5 players.
lets call the wealth per encounter from the crb a
the new wealth per encounter we need will call b
so I need a/4 = b/6.5
6.5a/4=b
so 1.625a=b
So that means I need to increase the amount of credits given per encounter by 1.625 times.
Yeah, when I was working through the numbers in the post you referred to, it occurred to me that the "upgrading" BP cost (the cost per BP to upgrade to the next tier) wouldn't line up with the "construction" BP costs I was providing (the cost per BP to construct a ship of a given tier).
I was thinking of taking this difference into account by requiring ship upgrades to the next tier to first pay to upgrade their current BP to the next tier (paying the difference in construction BP costs) plus the full construction BP cost of the extra BP being added. But that's admittedly a kind of awkward way to go about it. Bundling all of those costs into the price of the new BPs, as you've done, is simpler and more elegant.
Nice!
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The more I see people that want to convert BP to Credits the more I think it's a bad idea.
Reading through the starfinder forums, there are many others like me who want to allow starships to be purchasable by credits. That is why I started this thread in "homebrew," to discuss how best to implement that. If you don't want this, then you have no need for these house rules and can run as written. If you want to discuss the merits of changing the starship purchase rules, feel free to do so, but please do not tell us that we are wrong to want to play differently than you.
The reason I feel BP and Credits economies should be separate is that ships are incredibly expensive
I think pretty much everyone would agree that *if* ships are incredibly expensive, it's hard to introduce a credit/BP conversion that preserves game balance. But the kind of WBL-based ship valuation gnoams is employing ditches this assumption. On this approach, ships aren't incredibly expensive; on the contrary, low-tier ships are pretty cheap.
Now, as was noted in the other thread, this might not jibe with the picture of ship costs some are used to, on which ships are incredibly expensive. But since the core rules leave credit/BP questions open, there doesn't seem to be anything about the Starfinder setting that demands starships be incredibly expensive. (And there certainly isn't anything in the rules that requires that they be incredibly expensive in one's home settings.)
A scaled method like your has serious flaws as well. Please explain how a heavy laser on a tier 1 ship costs so much less than adding a light laser to a tier 10 ship.
There's a little bit of dressing story one needs to tell here to make sense of varying BP costs. But it seems there are plenty of stories one could offer here to make in-game sense of this.
For example, a higher tier ship is generally better in lots of ways than a lower tier ship. And this can make integrating a heavy laser into a higher tier ship might be more expensive in lots of ways: they need to be made tougher than their low-tier equivalents (to live up to the ship's higher HP and AC), they need to be integrated into more complicated arrays of weapons which makes them exponentially more expensive, they need more expensive circuitry to integrate with the much higher power supplies higher tier ships tend to carry, they need more sophisticated (and expensive) software and firmware to integrate with the more sophisticated and complicated AIs running higher tier ships, and so on.
There's a bit of handwaving here, to be sure. But no more than the game employs to (say) explain why different level PCs can buy different levels of gear.
Using Credits for ship upgrades also has a huge potential to disrupt play balance. The temptation to siphon off credits from the ship for better personal gear is high. Using your scaled method I would be tempted to upgrade my ship to APL+2 early on then focus on personal gear for several levels. Are you prepared to deal with encounter design where the party personal gear or ship are significantly above or below APL? Will it be fun for the players?
Two quick points about this concern.
First, I think if you look at the numbers more carefully, you'll find that this isn't as much of a problem as one might think. For example, a APL+2 level ship will generally be far above what a party of 4 can afford, even if they devote their entire WBL to ship-buying. (E.g., a tier 3 ship costs 11,000 credits, and a party of four starts with 4,000 credits combined. And this general fact holds for higher tiers as well.)
Second, I certainly agree that if players are generally only given credit resources, it could be a little tricky to ensure balance with respect to ship and gear expenditures (though not impossible by any means). But one might want a system that allows ship-to-credit and credit-to-ship conversions even if you allocate credit and ship resources to players separately. And in this case, then I think the problem you're worried about won't arise.
For if you look at the credit costs of ships on this approach, you’ll find that:
(1) These prices allow players to sell ships they capture without wrecking their WBL (since the values are equal to the amount you’d expected an encounter of that CR to get the players).
(2) These prices aren’t so high that players will be constantly tempted to sell off their ship for gear, since the amount you can get for selling your ship is between 1/5-1/2 of the WBL of *one* player -- a relatively paltry sum for a party of 4.
(3) These prices are high enough so that players won’t be able to simply skimp on equipment to buy a better ship, since the cost of a ship of tier X is 2-5 times the total WBL of a character of level X, and the cost of a ship of tier X+1 is generally beyond the resources of party.
So while I certainly understand the source of your concerns, I think that you’ll find that they’re not as nearly as pressing as they might first seem, once you take a closer look at the numbers.
Great thread and effort to get these numbers.
I m also trying to tackle the bp to cr issue myself and I m glad people offer ideas on the subject. Early on most people would handwaving the whole thing as a non-issue.
Thing is the list gnoam provides is hard for me to digest when I think of the world.
I feel like 7.750cr for a tier 2 ship is too little so as to keep world consistency in spell prices and npc work prices [even a group of low level npcs can afford a destroyer! ].
Teleporting somewhere takes 90k cr [round trip for the caster plus resolve points cost]. It is instant and has 0 random encounters.
Still a tier 2 shuttle can afford a Level 5 drift engine and make the trip, not once but hundred of times. Able to carry more people than teleport and approach areas teleport cant.
I 'm not really sure I got any real objections but I m sceptic at the moment.
dot
I have not yet, but I intend to dig out my old Star Frontiers sourcebooks - if I recall, they spent a fair bit of time on the fact that ships are really really expensive, going so far as to devote a good chunk of a chapter of loans and finance.
I think that ships can go ahead and BE really really expensive, if there are other limiting factors on acquiring gear - some RP reason you cannot buy well above your tier. Want to sell that ship you captured for 13 million credits at level 2? Great! You're still not buying yellow star plasma swords for the whole crew...
Anyway, I am just at the beginning of thinking this through, so I'll be keeping an eye on all of there sorts of threads.
I used to play Traveller, where there was a system for calculating starship value but where starships themselves were hugely expensive. Too expensive really, for what they did. A ship for player-characters would typically cost at least 20,000,000 cr, and a character would be lucky to have 100,000 cr at character generation.
They got around this by:
A. Having financing for merchant ships
B. Allowing you to operate a scout ship that doesn't actually belong to you.
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Building off your information I created for my group an excel sheet.
The sheet is quite simple
you put in your APL and number of players
then the total amount of exp the group should have ( a group of level 1 1300xp)
then there are two columns the CR of the encounter and a homebrew thing which is skill checks for furthering the story (not skill checks for someone trying to get a free drink and such).
Once all that is put in it will return with the divided exp for the group and with your, BP breaks down how much BP the ship has gained up to the point it levels up but not to exceed the level of the group.
Feel free to try it out the link below and let me know if you see any errors.
In Star Wars, starships aren't that expensive, the Millennium Falcon for instance costs as much as a new car. Luke sold his land speeder to pay for passage to Alderan and commented that he could almost buy his own ship for that amount of money. I almost wonder why people would even bother to have a land speeder if they could take their starship anywhere they wanted to go. That is also why I designed a Scout/Courier without an air/raft. As you can see, the hangar for it became a tech workshop. I didn't see the use for getting separated from one's starship while traveling in an air/raft. Why not just take the scout/courier anywhere you want to go?
Stop and think about this...
Yes, the cost of the trip is about the same as the cost to buy the ship but not the cost to maintain the ship. If you trip and the ship were about 2m credits but the upkeep of the ship is 250k per week which does not include travel expenses such as travel vouchers and clearance etc.
For your math to make sense, you must be assuming a party size. I didn't reverse engineer your numbers, but it's worth noting that party size scaling is a fundamental disconnect between credits and build points - larger parties have more credits than smaller parties, but all parties have the same BP pool, regardless of size. At either extreme, a 1-person party and a 12-person party are issued identical ship budgets. You can't perform a conversion between BP and credits without addressing this.
The OP's point is fine and reasonable, though I'm not overly concerned with BP vs. Credits, and am fine with gaining more BP with leveling of characters in order to upgrade ships without needing to come up with millions of credits (or whatever the actual BP to credit conversion rate actually is).
I published a Starships, Stations and Salvage Guide for Starfinder as 3PP, written by Edward Moyer, but illustrated and published by me. We do have rules for salvage and earning credits for doing such, but I didn't include any direct BP to credit conversion system. As I didn't want to be the 3PP that made that choice - it wasn't necessary to accomplish what I needed.
Keep trying to figure it though, as it's a worthwhile goal, just that I won't be worried to much whether you find a solution or not.
I'd keep the money and just buy a ticket in a space yacht.
I did some looking into this as well recently due to my players asking about how much a ship would cost and how they can get one.
The best way I can think of is allowing them to purchase a ship with credits, which means they either have to stay at the starting point for a bit to raise the funds or get a loan to purchase one.
Now here is where my math comes in. An unskilled worker earns 1 credit per hour on high end (Core page 235). So with this in mind lets say he works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks he would actually earn 2080 credits before expenses.
Now for basic living expenses he would need food, water, and place to sleep at night. So with that in mind I did a little looking and I found poor food to cost 1 credit per meal (Core page 233). So figuring it would cost about 21 credits a week for food (3 meals a day x 7 days a week). Or 84 credits per month or 1092 credits per year.
Now as for lodging (Core page 235) it cost 1 credit per night to sleep in a pod so for 7 nights it would cost 7 credits, 28 credits per month, or 364 credits per year.
Now remember these are rough estimates. So if you work everything out you would make 2080 credits per year - 1092 credits for food - 364 credits for lodging. That would leave you about 624 credits available to you a year as a unskilled worker to spend as you wish or 12 credits a week.
Now most adventurers do better and we all know that but the unskilled worker would have to spend almost 7.5 years to afford a tier one ship using the table if he didn't spend any of the free credits available to him so he could purchase his ship.
With all of the above calculated and reading the thread I have agreed that we need an easier way to convert BP into Credits. So how about what I propose below?
Tier Build Points Credits BP/Credit
0.25 25 625 25
0.33 30 990 33
0.5 40 2000 50
1 55 5500 100
2 75 15000 200
3 95 28500 300
4 115 46000 400
5 135 67500 500
6 155 93000 600
7 180 126000 700
8 205 164000 800
9 230 207000 900
10 270 270000 1000
11 310 341000 1100
12 350 420000 1200
13 400 520000 1300
14 450 630000 1400
15 500 750000 1500
16 600 960000 1600
17 700 1190000 1700
18 800 1440000 1800
19 900 1710000 1900
20 1000 2000000 2000
This makes the lower tiers a bit more expensive and the higher tiers a bit easier to get but it makes it easy to calculate.
What you do is take the build points x 100 x tier = cost of ship in credits.
Now if you look at cost of equipment, weapons, and armor they don't use BP just credits so that is all arbitrary based of if you think it is worth the price or not. If you don't agree with price try to barter the price down or just pass on it. Some you may find well worth the price so in that case barter or buy it is up to you.
In the end it is up to you as a GM to decide how you want to use the system all the players care about is that you are consistent with your decisions.
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I did some looking into this as well recently due to my players asking about how much a ship would cost and how they can get one.
The best way I can think of is allowing them to purchase a ship with credits, which means they either have to stay at the starting point for a bit to raise the funds or get a loan to purchase one.
I wonder how much did the rebellion charge Luke for the use of those X-wings...
Page 293
While it’s possible to run a Starfinder game that doesn’t
involve starships at all, the Starfinder RPG assumes that PCs
have access to a starship. Whether it was built from scrap,
received from a generous benefactor, or purchased with an
exorbitant loan, the PCs’ starship serves as a mobile base of
operations, a means of reaching distant stars, and a defense
against hostile alien vessels.
Page 305
As the PCs go on adventures and gain experience, they need
an increasingly powerful starship to face tougher challenges.
When the characters’ Average Party Level increases, so does
the tier of their starship [...]This could represent salvage gathered during their exploits,
an arrangement with a spacedock, or called-in favors from a
wealthy patron. Some GMs might require PCs to visit a safe,
inhabited world before they can spend these Build Points, but
this shouldn’t be allowed to impact the campaign too much.
Just let them have a friggin' ship.