Starship skill modifiers

[ashuramarsh]

I was curious about the starship piloting mods listed. Without any information on the crew involved, the bonus for piloting is much higher, such as a Tier 16 ship having a pilot of 16 ranks, but the bonus is like +28. I know the rules on p326, but this seems far more than most PCs will see. How is my question? abstracting is fine to a degree I guess but it creates imbalances.

[Kudaku]

Hm... +28 sounds high, but let's see how a PC would stack up?

Tier 16, so we'll assume level 16 characters. That means 16 ranks in piloting, +3 bonus for being trained, Piloting: +19.

16 dex baseline, +4 from levels (+2 on 5, +1 on 10 and 15), +6 dex augment, 26 dex total for a +8 modifier. That puts us at Piloting: +27.

+3 from Skill Focus. . Note that this could be quite a bit higher if the pilot was a Star Shaman Mystic or an operative since they get better Insight bonuses, but let's keep this class agnostic. Piloting: +30.

He's piloting an Explorer (good maneuverability, +1 on piloting checks) with M10 Thrusters (Movement 10, Piloting+0) and a Mk 7 Duonode (+7 on two checks/turn, let's use one on Piloting). That leaves us at Piloting: +38.

That's pretty encouraging, he'd comfortably beat the +28 pilot with average rolls. If you want to go higher there are a number of ways to increase the modifier further: Ace Pilot theme, Operative/Mystic pilot, captain's Encourage/Demand, weaker thrusters for a maneuvering bonus etc. :)

[ashuramarsh]

Yeah that oen I could understand, by the same token there is another ship, one of the undead ones I think of T14 but has +32.

But the ships were the large ones, average maneuver and they are described as basic computers.

However, yeah but that is a lot of assumptions that a player must have this, this, this and this to be equal to that, to what amount as a standard encounter, not a specialized encounter.

When looking at it like this, seems the developers wanted railroad players into having to do it this way or simply get your ass kicked by a standard. If you don't min/max your just a loser.

[Kudaku]

I wouldn't call what I suggested above min/max, it's basically a level 16 character who uses ranged weapons (thus the high dex baseline), picked Skill Focus: Piloting, and put 1 rank/level in piloting. Everything else comes from the ship. If I really wanted to min/max it I'd have a pilot modifier in the mid 50s, no doubt others will be able to push it much higher. There's not really much need for that though, it would be massive overkill.

The main thing is that rolling Piloting Checks is part of what makes Starship combat exciting, and it's not game-ending if the PCs fail one every once in a while. The starship statblock numbers are designed to challenge competent PCs, since autosucceeding gets boring after a while. Though of course, if you want to play a more relaxed campaign and/or don't want to unduly press your PCs you can always use lower tier ships for combat. :)

[Billiard]

I think in a space based game that requiring one player in a group to have expertise in piloting, which happens to overlap greatly with other useful dex based skills and benefits, is not too unreasonable. I have an operative pilot and I love the fact that I routinely beat the NPC pilots on rolls and thus get to drive our movement and strategy. This is a pretty important part of the game to me. For others, probably not so much - but they can focus on other areas as they wish.