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So, in almost every scifi story or movie, characters tend to hang on to their starting gear and just get better with it, rather than constantly replacing their weapons and armor with more expensive and extravagant versions like in Starfinder or an MMO. I was contemplating how to emulate this in Starfinder. Looking at the equipment tables, there is clearly a lot of fudging going on and no actual concrete mathematical formulas behind the scaling, but it's close enough I think it can be emulated.
Tiers
The best way to handle this seems to be to take a "tier" approach like 4E or to a lesser extent 5E D&D. Since I'll be referring to this with both weapons and armor, I might as well lay it out here. It will result in scaling a little faster at the front end (low level) and a little slower at the back end (high level)... But I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, considering how pathetic and disappointing the low level equipment is, and how ridiculously the equipment scaling goes off the rails at high levels as published.
- Tier 1: Character levels 1-3
- Tier 2: Character levels 4-6
- Tier 3: Character levels 7-9
- Tier 4: Character levels 10-12
- Tier 5: Character levels 13-14
- Tier 6: Character levels 15-16
- Tier 7: Character levels 17-18
- Tier 8: Character levels 19-20
Weapons
The bulk of the work here would be establishing a table of "base" weapons without MMO level requirements - a full panel of melee weapons, pistols, rifles, etc. You would then just get better with them over time. The primary things that higher tier weapons seem to usually get are better damage (with inconsistent damage scaling) and sometimes but not always better range (which I'm just going to extend to all weapons for consistency). Some critical effects are static and always useful, while some have scaling damage dice which would just scale the same as the base weapon damage.
- Tier 1: Base weapon damage [W], base range
- Tier 2: 2[W] damage, range +5 ft (thrown) / +10 ft (mid-range weapons) / +15 ft (long-range weapons)
- Tier 3: 3[W] damage, range +5/+10/+15 ft
- Tier 4: 4[W] damage, range +10/+20/+30 ft
- Tier 5: 5[W] damage, range +10/+20/+30 ft
- Tier 6: 6[W] damage, range +15/+30/+45 ft
- Tier 7: 7[W] damage, range +15/+30/+45 ft
- Tier 8: 8[W] damage, range +20/+40/+60 ft
Solarians would probably need an additional [W] boost as a class feature at levels 8, 12, 16 and 20.
Armor
Armor would still work with the tier system, but would need to be tweaked because AC scales mostly with level. So, some features go up with tier, whereas the armor's AC would just add (your level minus 1) to the base KAC and EAC of the armor. Heavy armor would get additional bonuses with some tiers to keep up with the published armor table. As with weapons, the bulk of work would be establishing a base list of armor without associated levels.
- Tier 1: Base leveling AC, base Max Dex, base upgrade slots
- Tier 2: Heavy Armor +1 AC, base Max Dex, upgrade slots +1
- Tier 3: Heavy Armor +2 AC, Max Dex +1, upgrade slots +2
- Tier 4: Heavy Armor +3 AC, Max Dex +1, upgrade slots +3
- Tier 5: Heavy Armor +3 AC, Max Dex +2, upgrade slots +3
- Tier 6: Heavy Armor +4 AC, Max Dex +2, upgrade slots +4
- Tier 7: Heavy Armor +4 AC, Max Dex +3, upgrade slots +4
- Tier 8: Heavy Armor +5 AC, Max Dex +3, upgrade slots +5
Upgrades
Your ability to use weapon and armor upgrades would be limited by your character level, rather than by "item level" which would no longer exist.
Wealth by Level
This would need to be completely rethought, since the vast majority of monetary expenditure in base Starfinder is constantly replacing your weapons and armor, which you are always basically buying for full price every time because selling old equipment yields almost nothing and you can't lower the price by crafting it yourself. This is why a 20th level character is expected to have received a total of 11,412,000 credits over the course of their career. This is... a ridiculous amount of money. Without the MMO gear grind, it can be brought down to somewhat more respectable levels.
Thoughts? Does this seem like a good starting point to launch off from?
Very similar concept to the automatic bonus progression that’s in Pathfinder Unchained.
Their solution was dropping wealth by level in half
If you want to remove equipment grind, as an overall suggestion this is a pretty good idea. However, the exact numbers probably need to be tweaked.
The issue with linearizing the damage (i.e. growing faster earlier and slower later) is the Alien Archive and published adventures assume a certain amount of damage. Unless you plan on modifying most monster hit points for every encounter to compensate, early on you'll ending encounters quicker than expected while later you'll be taking longer as the monsters have proportionally more hitpoints than your weapons are dealing.
Lets take the humble rifle and its progression in the Longarms projectile category as it exists in the core rule book vs your suggestion:
Level 1 vs tier 1: 1d8, 90 foot range, 6 rounds vs 1d8, 90 foot
Level 7 vs tier 3: 2d8, 100 foot range, 8 rounds vs 3d8, 105 foot
Level 10 vs tier 4: 3d8, 90 foot range, 12 rounds vs 4d8, 120 foot
Level 14 vs tier 5: 6d8. 100 foot range, 18 rounds vs 5d8, 120 foot
Level 17 vs tier 7: 9d8, 100 foot range, 18 rounds vs 7d8, 135 foot
Level 20 vs tier 8: 12d8, 100 foot range, 24 rounds vs 8d8, 150 foot
At 4th level, you're rolling twice as many dice as the game expects, while at 20, you're rolling only two thirds of the dice the game expects. You would probably want to reduce monster hit points by 25% or so at level 20 to compensate, although that starts to make the two enemies worth CR+2 a bit more complicated.
To me the scaling looks more like:
Levels 1-6: 1[W]
Levels 7-9: 2[W]
Levels 10-11: 3[W]
Levels 12: 4[W]
Level 13: 5[W]
Level 14: 6[W]
Level 15: 7[W]
Level 16: 8[W]
Level 17: 9[W]
Level 18: 10[W]
Level 19: 11[W]
Level 20: 12[W]
This is actually quite similar to the base Solarian damage increases on the Solarian weapon, although because they start with only a 1d6, Solarian crystals are then used to bump it up by 1d4 to 6d6 as well. (Reaching a combined 18d6, not 14d6 at level 20). It also matches reaction cannon damage if you use a d10. Other weapon progressions are a bit farther off (say the advanced melee uncategorized Doshkos), in the worst case off by 2 dice at level 19.
Raising damage at low levels was intentional, since I am finding the players are having trouble keeping up with enemies which really shouldn't be that hard according to their CRs. At high levels... it might require more thought.
Part of the problem is that the weapons don't scale evenly. It actually doesn't really go up to 12[W] like you thought except for just a few weapons, because they do stuff like changing the dice around and don't play by the same rules for each weapon class. For example:
- With the longarm laser rifles, level 1 is 1d8, level 9 is 3d6 (basically 2[W] since it switched from d8 to d6), level 17 is 8d6 (basically 6[W]), and level 20 is 11d6 (basically 8[W]).
- With the heavy laser weapons, level 1 is 1d10, level 9 is 3d8 (2.5[W]), level 17 is 7d8 (5.5[W]), level 20 is 9d8 (7[W]).
- Uncategorized doshkos scale faster for some reason. Level 1 is 1d12, level 7 is 2d12 (2[W]), level 11 is 4d12 (4[W]), level 19 is 13d12 (13[W]!).
- And yet flame doshkos are 1d8 at level 2, 2d8 at level 8 (2[W]), 5d8 at level 13 (5[W]), and 10d8 at level 19 (10[W]).
- Cryo pistols are awful. They are only 1d6 at level 5, 4d6 at level 15 (only 4[W]), and an insanely bad 6d6 at level 19 (only 6[W]!).
(Man, why did they design the game this way? This is so jacked. XD)
So, it actually does look like the majority of the weapons sit somewhere within plus or minus 1-2 [W] of 8[W] by level 19-20. However, if we assume the people designing the monsters thought the people designing the weapons would be targeting higher - especially apparent at the level 5-9 range and level 18-20 range - then we could rework the tiers to line up more with the "mean" of the tables.
- Tier 1: Lvl 1-3
- Tier 2: Lvl 4-6
- Tier 3: Lvl 7-9
- Tier 4: Lvl 10-11
- Tier 5: Lvl 12-13
- Tier 6: Lvl 14-15
- Tier 7: Lvl 16-17
- Tier 8: Lvl 18
- Tier 9: Lvl 19
- Tier 10: Lvl 20
Ugh, again... why did they design it this way. XD
Uncategorized doshkos are also unwieldy. If they didn't improve their damage more than their counterparts, there would be less and less reason to ever even consider them. As things are, they end with a 27.5 damage lead over a curve blade, but give up the substantially greater damage potential of a full attack for it.
The rest of your observations appear valid.
I'd be quite interested in seeing a system that divorces progression from equipment like this - or at the very least makes it into an understandable system with less eyeballing of things. I can't give much more input than that at the moment, but I might later if I have time for some number crunching to consider how this could play out and what ripples it might make.
Part of the problem is that the weapons don't scale evenly. It actually doesn't really go up to 12[W] like you thought except for just a few weapons, because they do stuff like changing the dice around and don't play by the same rules for each weapon class. For example:
Thats a good point. If you plot out the damage progression between physical and energy damage types, you'll see the physical damage is on a much faster exponential than the energy damage types. You'll actually need different damage progressions for different weapon types if you want to match current performance.
The basic physical guns (Reaction cannon, rifles) scale as I posted earlier. Given they are the most "fundamental" gun types, I figured it was the simplest case. For some reason, targeting EAC at low levels is valued less than targeting EAC at high levels and thus the damage is reduced to compensate. Its also a fairly significant damage difference.
Consider that the Azimuth Laser Rifle does as much damage as the Hunting rifle (1d8), while the Zenith Laser Rifle does 11d6 (38.5 avg) and the Paragon Seeker Rifle does 12d8 (54). That goes from the same damage to 40% more.
Perhaps they're trying to account for the flat +1 damage per level everyone gets after 3rd level. Thats more valuable on an energy weapon than a physical weapon. At level 20 that makes the damage 58.5 vs 74, which is closer to 20% different.
If we assume we have a 50% chance to hit normally, and targeting EAC makes it 60% and multiply that damage we get:
0.5*74 = 37
0.6*58.5 = 35.1
which is only about 5% off.
I'll also note you're spending more credits on the laser rifle at lower levels (425/250), roughly 70% more. Expected damage output is 20% more on the laser rifle because of the chance to hit. So perhaps that extra cost is considered to balance out that extra 1st level effectiveness. By the time you're at level 20 the cost differences are only about 10-15%, in favor of the physical weapons which are dealing about 5% more damage. So perhaps every 5% more damage is worth about 10-15% more in cost when at the same tier?
In any case you're going to need different weapon tiers for energy versus physical to take into account the average +2 to hit, combined with the extra 1 point of damage per level everyone gets after 3rd level. Alternatively, remove the +1 to damage per level completely, make energy weapons use d6 (long) or d10 (heavy) while physical uses d8 (long) or d12 (heavy). Then try to match current weapons + level in damage. Extra abilities then subtract a few dice to try and match up. Specialization feats now let you do this higher tier damage instead of being stuck at tier 1, rather than adding a flat damage bonus.
Balancing unwieldy weapons is intrinsically difficult, because of the variance in how many attacks characters can get. Many weapons, cryo included, seem to have an implicit assumption that their critical is so good their damage has to be nerfed, although it seems unclear why (remember, higher item level makes save DCs harder). It's definitely the case that better crits "cost" you in terms of item level, damage output, and credits.
NPC health has its own bizarre scaling - for example, why is a CR 2 Combatant 25 HP, not 30? It'll be very tough coming up with any formulae for learning how to deal more damage with weapons that won't modify NPC stats, because NPC stats don't seemingly follow any sane formula. PC stats, on the other hand, are relatively sane: hp+sp for a monoclassed creature is r+c_h*l+c_s*l+c*l, where r is the race constant, c_h is the class constant for health, c_s is the class constant for stamina, and c is the creature's constitution, which is a funky function of level, due to the somewhat arbitrary item levels of personal upgrades. For example, here's racial 4 hp, starting Con 16, every advancement applies to Con, and Con gets second priority for personal upgrades, which occur when item level = character level:
21, 38, 55, 72, 94, 112, 137, 156, 175, 194, 213, 232, 251, 284, 319, 340, 361, 382, 403, 424
Here it is again, with NPC Combatant Health listed right below it:
21, 38, 55, 72, 94, 112, 137, 156, 175, 194, 213, 232, 251, 284, 319, 340, 361, 382, 403, 424
20, 25, 40, 50, 70, 90, 105, 125, 145, 165, 180, 200, 225, 250, 275, 300, 340, 375, 415, 465