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In playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I occasionally encountered gaps in the rules regarding non-humanoid characters. The Pathfinder Core Rulebook, including the newer Player Core, has only humanoid ancestries, so the rules were written for humanoids. It assumes that characters eat every day, sleep every day, manipulate objects with two hands, walk on two feet, breathe air, hold their breath in water, etc.
For example, during the playtest of the Summoner class, I created a summoner with a beast eidolon in the shape of a goat, Cirieo Thessadin, Summoner. What can the goat Fluffy do with its abilities? Can it climb? A Goat animal companion, published years later in Highhelm has Climb 15 feet. But that is a Climb Speed. Without a Climb Speed, the Climb action requires two free hands. Goats lack hands. On the other hand, maybe Fluffy has hands, because I am merely roleplaying that the beast eidolon is a goat, and officially the rules say nothing about whether a beast eidolon has hands or functional substitutes for hands or nothing.
The party in that game later gained a new player character who was a leshy. Do leshies bleed? They have no blood. Well, they have no immunity to bleeding, so by PF2 rules they do bleed. We decided that they bleed sap.
I wrote of this issue before in Starfinder 2e classes and Pathfinder 2e classes? comment #36, where I have some other examples.
Ordinarily, I could simply make table rulings to fit each non-humanoid character into humanoid-based rules, but in December we started playing Starfinder. My players love the weird aliens. They are playing an alate formian, an entu colony, a kiirinta, a stellifera, a strix, a vlaka, and a witchwyrd. The strix, vlaka, and witchwyerd are humanoid if we ignore the wings on the strix and the extra arms on the witchwyrd. The entu colony keeps to a humanoid shape by flowing inside humanoid space armor, and the stellifera mimics a humanoid form with its hydrobody. But the formian and the kiirinta are more insectoid than humanoid. I would prefer that these species fit the rules smoothly rather than awkwardly, and not always by pretending to be humanoid as the entu colony and the stellifera do.
My players have envisioned NPCs as non-humaniods, too. In Skitter Crash the PCs needed to find an osharu research station after they crashed on Varkulon 4. I said, "You see some boot prints." But the module described the osharu as "Several years ago, a cadre of sluglike osharu (Starfinder Alien Archive 2 92) scientists discovered this anomaly and established a research base on Varkulon 4 to study the Drift cyclones, as they named the storms," and I had used that same "sluglike" adjective in my description. The players pointed out that sluglike people would not have feet and would not leave boot prints. So I corrected myself, "You see the gastropod trail marks of an osharu."
Skitter Crash had a head picture of osharu scientist Ponatia as its only illustration of an osharu, but after that session I went to Archives of Nethys's entry Osharu to find a picture for other osharu. I saw that osharu walked on two legs, just like humans. So I asked my wife: did she prefer osharu as gastropods or should I revert to the official two-legged version? She preferred gastropods, writing, "I like thinking of them as gastropods, imagining how such a being would evolve and how they would cope with the technological advances needed to be spacefaring." I made tokens for other osharu by modifying a line drawing of a sea slug. My players declared the cartoon drawing to be cute.
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On Tuesday, January 23, I asked my seven players what they thought about the humanoid assumption. Two liked giving other shapes equal consideration, two said that they could work with assuming humanoid and making exceptions, two did not understand what I was asking about, and one was annoyed when I said that Starfinder 2nd Edition would probably remove some 1st-level abilities and gradually introduce those abilities back with ancestry feats. That player in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign had played a strix who could fly since 1st level, and she greatly dislikes that PF2 nerfed low-level strix flight.
So only 3 out of 8 (37.5%), counting myself among us, care about this issue. It is not worth a major effort.
But I would be happy with a minor effort. We don't need to write fresh rules for each body shape. We need consider only how different shapes interact with gear and actions. Any other aspect of the shape can be flavorful rather than mechanical.
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Starfinder Field Test #3 lists the initial features of an ancestry as Hit Points, Size, Speed, Attribute Boosts, Attribute Flaw, Languages, Traits, and a few special features. It copies the system in the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Player Core.
The PF2 Remastered Player Core also has Gear Statistics in the Equipment chapter starting on page 287. One of those gear statistics in Hands, which lists how many hands it takes to use the item effectively.
What if ancestry entries had a Hands entry to describe what hands the character possessed. Well, since those manipulating appendages might not be hands, I would call the entry Manipulation instead.
What if instead of Speed the ancestry listed Locomotion that mentioned what kind of limbs the ancestry used for movement along with their speed? What if instead of Size the ancestry used Body that gave both size and shape?
The change to ancestries to accommodate non-humanoids would simply be renaming some entries and adding more details.
Vesks would be ordinary, since they are humanoids. Their tail does not matter for manipulation nor locomotion.
BODY
Medium humanoid
MANIPULATION
Two hands
LOCOMOTION
Two legs for Land Speed 20 feet and Leap 10 feat.
Kasathans would follow the same pattern except for their hands.
BODY
Medium humanoid
MANIPULATION
Four hands
LOCOMOTION
Two legs for Land Speed 25 feet
One of my players plays a six-limbed winged fey Kiirinta:
BODY
Small insectoid
MANIPULATION
Two hands on forelimbs
Two gripping midlimbs (can hold but not use items)
LOCOMOTION
Two legs for Land Speed 25 feet and Leap 10 feet
Two wings for Fly Speed 15 feet
Another player plays a winged Formian, The typical formian is not winged.
BODY
Medium insectoid
MANIPULATION
Two hands
LOCOMOTION
Four legs for Land Speed 25 feet and Leap 10 feet
The alternative racial trait that gives wings would become a heritage.
WINGED ALATE heritage
Uncommon, formian
Some formians develop functional wings that are segmented and partly fold into grooves in the carapace between the shoulders when not in use. You gain wings that let you fly through the air in short bursts at Fly Speed 25 feet. If you don't end your movement on solid ground, you fall at the end of your turn.
The stellifera are diminutive aquatic cuttlefish. They mimic humanoid form with a hydrobody, water held in humanoid form telekinetically.
BODY
Diminutive aquatic fish (breathes water)
MANIPULATION
Tentacles that act as one hand
Hydrobody has one hand of telekinetically shaped water
LOCOMOTION
Fins and tail for Swim Speed 25 feet
Hydrobody has fluid flow for Land Speed 25 feet and Leap 5 feet.
HYDROBODY You can telekinetically shape a Small-sized bubble of breathable water around yourself. The bubble can also extend a watery hand for manipulation. The hydrobody repels inhaled poisons. You can maintain the hydrobody underwater or in vaccuum, and while helpless or unconscous. It stores 1 hour of breathable oxygen when cut off from the oxygen in air or water. The hydrobody does not interfere with your Swim Speed.
I moved some abilities of the SF1 hydrobody to ancestry feats.
HUMANOID HYDROBODY ancestry feat 1
Stellifera
With sufficient water, you can expand your hydrobody into a Medium humanoid shape with two arms, two legs (Land Speed 25 and Leap 10), and a head. (Note: SF1 gives the hydrobody a greater Strength modifier than the stellifera's Strength modifier, but PF2 resists changing the Strength modifier except durin a level-up, so we will assume the telekinesis is weaker in SF2.)
DIMINUTIVE DODGING ancestry feat 1
Stellifera
A stellifera inside its hydrobody can be tough to pin down. A creature targeting you in your hydrobody with an attack, spell, or other effect that lacks the mental trait must make a DC 5 flat check. If the check fails, the attack, spell, or effect doesn't affect you. Area effects aren't subject to this flat check. You lose the benefits of Diminutive Dodging while unconscious or helpless.
Before tackling the very difficult entu ancestry, let me give some easier examples.
Gastropod Osharu
BODY
Medium mollusk
MANIPULATION
Two hands
LOCOMOTION
Gastropod for Land Speed 20 feet, Leap 5 feet, and Climb 5 feet
Leaping Frogfolk (different species than Grippli)
BODY
Medium amphipian humanoid (breathes in air and water)
MANIPULTION
Two hands
One gripping tongue, reach 5 feet
LOCOMOTION
Jumping legs for Land Speed 10 feet and Leap 25 feet
I had also been putting a Crawl Speed under Locomotion, but everyone ended up with Crawl Speed 5 feet, so that should be a default.
Now on to the entu colony and the entu symbiont. The symbiont reminds me of Hunter from Hal Clement's novel Needle. And in the forward to its sequel Through the Eye of a Needle Hal Clement said that though he had said, "symbiote" in Needle but biologists had explained that "symbiont" was more correct.
BODY
Tiny ooze
MANIPULATION
None, see heritage
LOCOMOTION
Fluid flow for Land Speed 5 feet, also see heritage
SYMBIONT You can live as a symbiont in the bloodstream of a willing larger host creature. This is often a lifelong partnership. You and your host count as one target and use your host's defenses. The effects on the host, such as damage or healing, are duplicated on you. You can see use your senses and communicate telepathically while inside your host, but you lose your own manipulation and locomotion.
Entering or leaving your host requires one minute of skin contact.
SYMBIOTIC AID Once every ten minutes you can use one of the following abilities while inside your host:
Cellular Restoration [two actions] Restore a number of Hit Points to your host equal to your level.
Improve Condition [two actions] Grant the host an additional save against an ongoing affliction with a +2 circumstance bonus.
Fortify Defenses [reaction] Grant the host a +2 circumstance bonus to Fortitude, Reflex, or Will saves until the end of your next turn.
LIMITED TELEPATHY Entu have limited telepathy with a range of 30 feet.
ANIMAL SYMBIOSIS heritage
Entu, symbiosis
You have a well-trained animal as your favorite host. Choose a creature of Small size or larger with a bloodstream from the animal companion list as your host. You live inside the bloodstream of your host. The partner follows animal companion rules for its features and abilities, but it is not an animal companion nor a minion. You play both the symbiont and host, they have a total of three actions and one reaction on their shared turn, and they share their multiple attack penalties. The animal acts as a trained animal when you are outside of telepathy range.
Strangely, SF1 appears to lack animal companion rules, so SF2 entu with Animal Symbiosis heritage will have to wait until a supplement introduces animal companions. I remember a lot of characters in science fiction novels who had semi-sapient animal companions, such as David Weber's Honor Harrington and her treecat Nimitz. Hosteen Storm and his genetically engineered animal companions in Andre Norton's 1959 novel The Beast Master were probably the inspiration many beast master characters in fantasy.
ARMORED SYMBIOSIS heritage
Entu, symbiosis
Your gear is designed to work with many temporary hosts, such as fellow party members. Your Diminutive armor gains the symbiosis trait that lets it latch onto a willing character's clothing or armor so that you can flow into the character's bloodstream yet still use the integrated features of the armor. You can don and operate symbiosis armor without hands.
COLONY heritage
Entu
You grew into a colony of entu oozes that can function without a host. You are a Small amorphous ooze. You can shape yourself into humanoid form with two hands for manipulation and two legs for Land Speed 25 feet and Leap 10 feet. You require 10 minutes to flow inside a host, and you are Drained 1 until you leave the host.
PARTNER SYMBIOSIS heritage
Rare, entu, symbiosis
You have a lifelong sapient partner. You and your GM work together to create non-player character of Small size or larger with a bloodstream as your host. This partner has the Weak template at 1st level, and remains one level below you at higher levels. You play both the symbiont and host, they have a total of three actions and one reaction on their shared turn, and they share their multiple attack penalties.
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In playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I occasionally encountered gaps in the rules regarding non-humanoid characters. The Pathfinder Core Rulebook, including the newer Player Core, has only humanoid ancestries, so the rules were written for humanoids. It assumes that characters eat every day, sleep every day, manipulate objects with two hands, walk on two feet, breathe air, hold their breath in water, etc.
The party in that game later gained a new player character who was a leshy. Do leshies bleed?
In PF2, I think Bleed is the biggest example of this problem mechanically. Because the rules for bleed damage specify that creatures that don't need blood to live are immune, but nothing ever specifies which creatures don't need blood to live. Also some spells such as Blood Vendetta has a requirement that you can bleed, but again nothing ever specifies if a creature can bleed or not.
So it is definitely something to look at when filling the cantina - what is the basic assumptions shared by every Ancestry entry. And make sure that if an Ancestry has something different, that the differences are defined.
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@ Mathmuse,
I like that some of your examples have different uses for different sets of arms. Another possibility for that is to require more arms per bulk. For example, a skittermander might need to use 4 arms to hold a 2 bulk heavy weapon and all six arms to use a 3 bulk heavy weapon.
Another idea I had was one set of arms would be strong and the other dextrous, I think one of your examples had something like that, but it could be taken faster and have one set using only Str bounces and the other only using Dex bonuses, and you can't mix them for the same task.
The core rule book isn't going to have the more extreme species in it. But a book like Interstellar Species could be a good place to also add variant rules for species dealing with many of the examples you have shown.
I got the need to standardize stat blocks for ancestries and classes. But classes have a bit more flexibility there's a variation of the standard to add the spell per level chart. Then several classes also have the section for I do something different section with its own rules. I wonder if it would help if there was a standard for humanoids and a variation for dealing with more unusual ancestries.
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I like that some of your examples have different uses for different sets of arms. Another possibility for that is to require more arms per bulk. For example, a skittermander might need to use 4 arms to hold a 2 bulk heavy weapon and all six arms to use a 3 bulk heavy weapon.
Another idea I had was one set of arms would be strong and the other dextrous, I think one of your examples had something like that, but it could be taken faster and have one set using only Str bounces and the other only using Dex bonuses, and you can't mix them for the same task.
Some species have different kinds of arms; for example, Trox have, "Vestigial Arms A trox’s four vestigial arms can be used to hold, draw, or put away items of negligible bulk, but not to make attacks, wield weapons, or use items." I figured MANIPULATION should be the place to describe such differences. Note that the Trox's vestigial Arms offers precedent for arms that can hold only limited bulk.
A character with some stronger arms and some more dextrous arms would be hard to describe. Pathfinder 1st Edition allows penalties and bonuses to Strength modifiers and Dexterity modifiers, but Pathfinder 2nd Edition gave a hard pass to such changes and uses conditions instead. PF2 uses Enfeebled condition instead of Strength penalties and Clumsy condition instead of Dexterity penalties, and has nothing that acts like Strength or Dexterity bonuses. I presume Starfinder 2nd Edition will copy that.
I suppose one set of arms could be Clumsy 1 and another set could be Enfeebled 1. Each condition would affect any action that uses those arms.
The core rule book isn't going to have the more extreme species in it. But a book like Interstellar Species could be a good place to also add variant rules for species dealing with many of the examples you have shown.
The playable species in the Starfinder Core Rulebook are androids, humans, kasathans, lashuntas, shirrens, vesk, and ysoki, so it appears that Starfinder started with all humanoids, though the androids and kasathans have some differences. The Starfinder Core Rulebook was published in August 2017 and the second book, Alien Archive, came out two and a half months later in October 2017. Alien Archive included non-humanoid species such as barathu, contemplative, formian, urog, and wrikreechee. It also included the multi-armed humanoid skittermander and witchwyrd. So Starfinder branched out to aliens of other shapes pretty quickly.
The Starfinder 2nd Edition Player Core will probably be 100 pages shorter than the Starfinder Core Rulebook. It would have little room to explain non-humanoid alien features, so it would cover only humanoid ancestries. Thus, it could use the Size and Speed format with no Body Shape, Manipulation, or Locomotion entries. But I would appreciate a paragraph that said, "The ancestries in this chapter are all humanoid. They have one head, two or more arms, and two legs. Their arms have hands for manipulating items and their legs walk to provide a land speed. Humanoids breathe air. They need to drink water and eat food every few days. They sleep during a night's rest to recover from fatigue. Their circulatory systems can bleed. Non-humanoid ancestries in later rulebooks could have different features."
And then the first rulebook with non-humanoid ancestries can use Body, Manipulation, and Locomotion entries.
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I completely agree that there is this fundamental assumption that every player character in 2e is a humanoid that eats, breathes, sleeps, bleeds, and so on, and I'd argue this goes even deeper: not only is this a key design assumption for player characters, it's also held as the standard for player character balance, where any one deviation costs a significant amount of an ancestry's power and complexity budget. This is why Pathfinder 2e has skeletons that can breathe, bleed, and suffer disease and poison, because simply resisting some of those effects is considered hugely powerful, let alone gaining complete immunity to them.
It is this balancing philosophy that is going to make designing certain ancestries in Starfinder very difficult, I suspect, because some ancestries are never going to fully do what some players want from them right out of the box: we already saw how androids need to eat, breathe, and sleep, and can still get poisoned or diseased, because just resisting some of that is strong enough to also warrant a debuff. When we get to the funkier ancestries who have little in common with your typical humanoid, like the stellifera, there are likely going to be some very weird-looking compromises.
With all of this said, though, I feel the current rules can be expanded, rather than rewritten to better accommodate non-humanoids, even if it wouldn't give everyone what they'd want:
In my opinion, not only would these changes future-proof 2e's design to better accommodate Starfinder, they'd also work better with a few niche cases in Pathfinder as well: the anadi ancestry, for instance, have a spider shape they can transform into, and the rules text bends over backwards to explain how this changes their manual dexterity. If the text could simply say something like: "In your spider shape, you have no hands and can't perform manipulate actions other than XYZ", it'd be a lot simpler and probably easier to understand.
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There are a lot of assumptions baked in with Starfinder, and for that matter Pathfinder playable ancestries
1: You are a member of a sentient species with a culture and civilization
2: If you are people have a culture and civilization, they must have some way to build and manipulate and ambulate and perceive the world.
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I think this is a solution to a problem that SF1 had already (mostly) solved. One of the chief ways this is handled in SF1 is a set of default assumptions that are laid out regarding what species can (or can't) be assumed to be able to do. There's this bit, which is printed (in one form or another) in all of the Alien Archives books:
This book continues the Starfinder tradition of presenting players with a multitude of alien species to choose from when creating their characters. See page 158 for a list of the playable species in this book. As always, it’s up to the GM to decide whether to allow player-character versions of these aliens in their game. While there is a preponderance of nonhumanoid aliens with strange morphology, all playable alien races are considered to be able to hold and wield two hands’ worth of weapons and other equipment (unless otherwise noted). Similarly, any playable alien can purchase and use the equipment presented in the various Starfinder books regardless of their specific physiology. A character might have to adjust armor originally created for a different species before they can wear that armor effectively; see page 196 of the Core Rulebook for rules on adjusting armor. At the GM’s discretion, these rules can be used as a baseline for adjusting other types of equipment for similar reasons. The GM can also opt to treat nonhumanoid player races as humanoids for the purposes of spells and other abilities.
(Emphasis mine.)
The default assumption is everyone has 2 hands or hand-analogues, and exceptions to that are laid out in species' stat blocks. It makes it a bit funny to envision things lacking obvious appendages, like bantrids or embri, wielding equipment, but IMO, it's worth it in the name of standardization and having useable characters. Getting down to the level of having rules published for what kinds of locomotion different morphologies have seems a bit too deep in the details pool, especially given things like astrazoans, SROs, mechanics' drones, etc., can all have everything from footed lower appendages to tank treads to wheels, and so on.The default assumption of "has two hands" and "unless otherwise stated, every character can use every item regardless of physiology" has caused some consternation, but in general, has proven to handle most cases - which, for a system as varied and wild as Starfinder, is pretty good. Not perfect, though - and yes, this is one area that could see some improvement.
I'm pretty that there isn't a published default assumption posted about "unless otherwise stated, characters need to sleep" or "exchange gases with their atmosphere" or whatever else, but in general the community has adopted that as a generally agreed-upon convention, as a sort of addendum to "every physiology can use every item." (Every species has some sort of speed entry listed in its write-up, though, so land speed is something that's detailed!) There are exceptions posted, such as species that don't need to breathe or don't need to sleep. It would be nice to have those included in the 'default assumptions,' assuming that those are included in SF2 - maybe somewhere in the creature type rules? Feels like that used to be included in Pathfinder creature types.
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I completely agree that there is this fundamental assumption that every player character in 2e is a humanoid that eats, breathes, sleeps, bleeds, and so on, and I'd argue this goes even deeper: not only is this a key design assumption for player characters, it's also held as the standard for player character balance, where any one deviation costs a significant amount of an ancestry's power and complexity budget. This is why Pathfinder 2e has skeletons that can breathe, bleed, and suffer disease and poison, because simply resisting some of those effects is considered hugely powerful, let alone gaining complete immunity to them.
On the issue of different ancestries having different immunities, I recall the 1941 short story Jay Score by Eric Frank Russell. A spaceship that traveled the solar system gained a new crewman, a big guy named Jay Score. He was new to the job, but smart, tough, and friendly. He liked to spend his spare time in the low-pressure quarters for the Martian crew playing chess with them. This crew was multi-ethnic and multi-species.
Disaster struck when the spaceship traveled a tight orbit around the sun. A meteoroid struck their propulsion system and despite repairs, their new course would pass too close to the sun and turn most of the spaceship into an oven too hot for humans and martians. The crew could protect themselves in a refrigerated section, but someone had to man the controls on the unrefrigerated bridge for a course correction. Jay Score volunteered as the toughest person on the ship.
Afterwards, Jay's friends found him severely injured but not dead. They take him back to Earth, where Jay's father said that he can be repaired as good as new. The twist ending is that Jay was not human. He was the first robot crewman, labeled J20, and his father was his designer rather than his biological parent.
The differences between ancestries can make for good stories. I think that making balance more flexible is worth the effort so that Starfinder can roleplay stories like them.
It is this balancing philosophy that is going to make designing certain ancestries in Starfinder very difficult, I suspect, because some ancestries are never going to fully do what some players want from them right out of the box: we already saw how androids need to eat, breathe, and sleep, and can still get poisoned or diseased, because just resisting some of that is strong enough to also warrant a debuff. When we get to the funkier ancestries who have little in common with your typical humanoid, like the stellifera, there are likely going to be some very weird-looking compromises.
With all of this said, though, I feel the current rules can be expanded, rather than rewritten to better accommodate non-humanoids, even if it wouldn't give everyone what they'd want: ...
I have seen this balance act work in practice in four years of running Pathfinder 2nd Edition. The tight math of PF2 means that a creature of the same level as the party is as powerful as an individual party member, with 95% accuracy. In fact, the creature has better numbers: more hit points, higher AC, and a higher Strike bonus than the average of the party members. The advantage that the party has is their versatility. They have more feats and features and trained skills. They can switch to a fighting style that nullifies their opponent's best attacks. If the enemy is a melee expert, the party keeps their distance and makes ranged attacks. If the enemy is a ranged expert, the party takes cover and sneaks up. If the enemy deals serious damage, then the party heals up.
I don't see a serious imbalance with, "If the enemy bites with venom, then the silicon-based party member immune to organic poisons serves as the protective front line." We simply need to balance the silicon-based species with a few weaknesses of its own, so that its species in not blatantly superior to humans.
For starters, I think we need to collectively accept that the default is for an ancestry to need to eat, breathe, and rest daily, and to be susceptible to bleeding, disease, and poison, along with other assumptions like having a mind and a soul for the purpose of certain effects like resurrection. An ancestry can resist some of these effects as part of their power budget, but will likely never be immune to them in 2e.
I'm not sure we need to specify means of locomotion, as the Sacred Nagaji is proof that you don't need legs to play by 2e's movement rules....
Consider the differences between a default, a standard, and an assumption. A default means that the features hold unless explicitly mentioned as different. I want to set up a system for making changes with minimal effort. A standard means that everything keeps to the standard except for carefully vetted exceptions. I am okay with vetting the changes. An assumption means that no-one thinks about adding a difference.
Teridax presented the Sacred Nagaji heritage for nagaji ancestry as an example.
Sacred Nagaji
You stand out from most nagaji, with the upper body of a beautiful human and the lower body of a green or white snake. Legends claim your ancestors were faithful snakes uplifted by Nalinivati rather than nagaji created by the goddess. Instead of a fangs unarmed attack, you have a tail attack that deals 1d6 bludgeoning damage, is in the brawling weapon group, and has the finesse and unarmed traits. You gain a +2 circumstance bonus on your Fortitude or Reflex DC against attempts to Grapple or Trip you. This bonus also applies to saving throws against effects that would grab you, restrain you, or knock you prone.
Also see the illustration at https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Nagaji02.png.
A sacred nagaji exchanges legs for a snake tail and also loses their fang attack to balance gaining a tail attack. They gain a +2 circumstance bonus against being tripped or grabbed, including by means other than a direct Trip or Grab. That's it.Can a sacred nagaji climb a tree? Can they leap a chasm? Nature says yes. Can they climb with their hands full, since the snake body can warp around a tree better than legs? Nope, Combat Climber still requires one free hand. Can they wear magic boots? Well, we can redesign the boots as one of those rings worn as a decoration on the tail of the illustration. Can that massive tail constrict like a python. Nope, I don't see an ancestry feat that allows that. Can the nagaji stretch to reach ten feet up, which the height of the illustration implies? Nope, not a feature. Can a sacred nagaji in a Starfinder setting use an emergency spacesuit designed for two-legged humans? Yes, because the tail does not matter. The humanoid assumption says that the tail only makes the differences mentioned in the heritage, nothing else no matter how realistic.
If the difference in this case is small, why cannot we summarize it as:
SACRED NAGAJI heritage
Nagaji
You stand out from most nagaji, with the upper body of a beautiful human and the lower body of a green or white snake. Legends claim your ancestors were faithful snakes uplifted by Nalinivati rather than nagaji created by the goddess. Your locomotion becomes, "Serpentine (+2 circumstance bonus against becoming prone or grabbed) for Land Speed 20 feat, Leap 10 feet, and Climb regardless of free hands." Instead of a fangs unarmed attack, you have a tail attack that deals 1d6 bludgeoning damage, is in the brawling weapon group, and has the finesse and unarmed traits.
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There are a lot of assumptions baked in with Starfinder, and for that matter Pathfinder playable ancestries
1: You are a member of a sentient species with a culture and civilization
I am happy with that assumption. A requirement often mentioned in Session Zero before a campaign is that the player character has to want to go adventuring with the party and can work with the party. Lone wolf types who follow the party at a distance to have independent encounter are unworkable. Jerk characters who start intra-party fights are also excluded. Culture and teamwork go hand in hand. Civilization and technology are also linked.
2: If you are people have a culture and civilization, they must have some way to build and manipulate and ambulate and perceive the world.
"Some way to" is quite vague. I want a system that spells out the ways that the character uses.
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I think this is a solution to a problem that SF1 had already (mostly) solved. One of the chief ways this is handled in SF1 is a set of default assumptions that are laid out regarding what species can (or can't) be assumed to be able to do. There's this bit, which is printed (in one form or another) in all of the Alien Archives books:This book continues the Starfinder tradition of presenting players with a multitude of alien species to choose from when creating their characters. See page 158 for a list of the playable species in this book. As always, it’s up to the GM to decide whether to allow player-character versions of these aliens in their game. While there is a preponderance of nonhumanoid aliens with strange morphology, all playable alien races are considered to be able to hold and wield two hands’ worth of weapons and other equipment (unless otherwise noted). Similarly, any playable alien can purchase and use the equipment presented in the various Starfinder books regardless of their specific physiology. A character might have to adjust armor originally created for a different species before they can wear that armor effectively; see page 196 of the Core Rulebook for rules on adjusting armor. At the GM’s discretion, these rules can be used as a baseline for adjusting other types of equipment for similar reasons. The GM can also opt to treat nonhumanoid player races as humanoids for the purposes of spells and other abilities.(Emphasis mine.)
I am glad to see that the Starfinder developers acknowledge the humanoid assumption and for rules on adjusting armor and other gear. I am disappointed that the solution is that the character acts humanoid regardless of its actual shape unless called out as a special feature. Starfinder 2nd Edition can do better.
EDIT: To clarify my last sentence, "Starfinder 2nd Edition can do better," the solution of saying that characters with strange morphology can do humanoid actions is the best workable solution for a game system written for humanoid characters. But if Starfinder 2nd Edition is written with more flexibility in the first place, then playing insectoid characters, serpentine characters, fish characters, and robot characters will be more natural. And by foreseeing the differences, such as fish never drowning and robots never getting poisoned, the developers can still balance the game without trivializing the differences.
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The differences between ancestries can make for good stories. I think that making balance more flexible is worth the effort so that Starfinder can roleplay stories like them.
What you're describing is a matter of resistances, not immunities, and is the kind of story that can already be told with the bonuses androids are given in 2e. I certainly agree that you could establish an even starker contrast between ancestries, but the story you shared isn't really the best example of that. While I also agree that Starfinder could work to make ancestries deviate even farther from the norm, I would also curb my expectations when it comes to getting exceptionally powerful benefits at early levels: you do get to have powerful bonuses from your ancestry, but those are likely to come about at higher levels, so we need to combat the expectation that our ancestry will give us immunity to certain things at level 1.
I don't see a serious imbalance with, "If the enemy bites with venom, then the silicon-based party member immune to organic poisons serves as the protective front line." We simply need to balance the silicon-based species with a few weaknesses of its own, so that its species in not blatantly superior to humans.
I do. If you find yourself in an adventure, or part of an adventure where disease and poison are heavily factored into the balance of many challenges, then your silicon-based party member would trivialize those challenges, much as many early-level challenges in Pathfinder would be trivialized by flight. Breaking an adventure over one's knee due to immunities may have been okay in 1e, but not in 2e, which is why even ancestries who'd normally be immune to certain things express those benefits as resistances or bonuses instead. We could certainly change those assumptions for Starfinder 2e's adventures, and assume that characters can become immune to eating, breathing, sleeping, bleeding, disease, or poison at level 1, but the more assumptions we change, the further we stray from the compatibility with Pathfinder that was promised. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it allows for a proper sci-fi feel, but it is not a small tradeoff.
If the difference in this case is small, why cannot we summarize it as:
Notice how your model does not actually simplify the description at all, and in fact introduces far more ambiguity: what is locomotion here? What is its purpose if you have to explain all of the different movement types anyway? What does serpentine locomotion mean here: is it just the bonus against grabbed or prone, or does it also include the listed speeds?
By contrast, the official description is much simpler: the heritage does what it says, and doesn't do what it doesn't say. Your Sacred Nagaji can move in all the ways a bipedal creature can, and the only difference your tail makes is that you get this bonus against certain conditions, unless something explicitly mentions otherwise. It's not nearly as powerful as what you're expecting it to be in your personal description (Climb Speeds at level 1 are really strong and can't just be slapped onto an already strong heritage), but it does demonstrate that legs or lack thereof aren't really a problem for characters in 2e.
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EDIT: To clarify my last sentence, "Starfinder 2nd Edition can do better," the solution of saying that characters with strange morphology can do humanoid actions is the best workable solution for a game system written for humanoid characters. But if Starfinder 2nd Edition is written with more flexibility in the first place, then playing insectoid characters, serpentine characters, fish characters, and robot characters will be more natural. And by foreseeing the differences, such as fish never drowning and robots never getting poisoned, the developers can still balance the game without trivializing the differences.
Yeah, that is my thought too. It would be nice if the ancestries with non-humanoid features actually had non-humanoid mechanics to go with them. And during the initial game design is the best place to include that. Trying to add it in later is harder.
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I play a Sacred Nagaji in one PF2 game. I RP the character as having stairs as a recurring hated nemesis. But there are no mechanics to back that up. Disguise is also an interesting problem. There should be some penalties for trying to disguise myself as a creature of an ancestry that has legs, but I haven't found anything that says that there is or what that penalty would be. Other than Illusory Disguise saying that it will remove the penalties - whatever they are.
I also find it very frustrating that the tail unarmed attack does not have the grapple trait - so I can't actually grapple anything with it. Even as the Gymnast Swashbuckler that I picked as class.
Also, speaking of tail - the Cobra, which raises its head well off the ground as a means of fighting and intimidation, only brings about 1/3 of its body off the ground. The rest has to stay on the ground for balance. So with a Sacred Nagaji having their head at normal head height for a medium character, then they would have a tail at least twice that height in length. So we are looking at a creature that is at least 15 feet (about 5 meters) long. And 10 feet of that (about 3 meters) is trailing along behind them. But yet they still only take up the standard 5x5 square for a normal medium size creature.
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Interesting discussion. I find that it's a bit tricky to maneuver around this as on the one hand, we absolutely want Starfinder to be full of playable aliens who feel unique to play and not just a "human in an alien mask," but adding in innate traits like being resistant or immune to a type of damage or condition tends to disturb any sense of balance quickly, and completely ignore parts of the game in ways that makes designing challenging and fun encounters in our adventures a bit more difficult.
It's definitely something to ponder for those of us who are staff designing the game, independent publishers considering adding to the content available on infinite, or even GMs homebrewing for their own tables.
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The differences between ancestries can make for good stories. I think that making balance more flexible is worth the effort so that Starfinder can roleplay stories like them.What you're describing is a matter of resistances, not immunities, and is the kind of story that can already be told with the bonuses androids are given in 2e. I certainly agree that you could establish an even starker contrast between ancestries, but the story you shared isn't really the best example of that.
Which stories are the best examples?
While I also agree that Starfinder could work to make ancestries deviate even farther from the norm, I would also curb my expectations when it comes to getting exceptionally powerful benefits at early levels: you do get to have powerful bonuses from your ancestry, but those are likely to come about at higher levels, so we need to combat the expectation that our ancestry will give us immunity to certain things at level 1.
I have been saying immunities due to some legacy immunities in Pathfinder, such as creatures without blood cannot bleed. However, I understand the necessity of toning down or counterbalancing absolute features such as immunities at low levels, because the opponents that the party fights would be quite mundane. Their special feature, such as a negative-1st-level viper's venom or a negative-1st-level giant rat's disease, should matter. That is also why 1st-level adventurers lack armor that snakes and rats cannot bite through.
I don't see a serious imbalance with, "If the enemy bites with venom, then the silicon-based party member immune to organic poisons serves as the protective front line." We simply need to balance the silicon-based species with a few weaknesses of its own, so that its species in not blatantly superior to humans.I do. If you find yourself in an adventure, or part of an adventure where disease and poison are heavily factored into the balance of many challenges, then your silicon-based party member would trivialize those challenges, much as many early-level challenges in Pathfinder would be trivialized by flight.
I played an adventure with disease heavily factored into it: Prisoners of the Blight. The party had to seek answers in a forest infected with Darkblight. Pushing through blighted undergrowth would call for a Fortitude save. The champion in the party had a high Constitution and class-based bonuses against disease, and Darkblight's Fortitude DC was fairly low (DC 15 in the PF1 module, I raised it to DC 25 in my conversion to PF2), so the champion had little chance of catching it and if she did catch it she could fight off the effects soon. She had no fear of the darkblight. Yet the rest of the party had to take precautions. The champion took into account the risk to her teammates. Therefore, Darkblight was still as scary as the writer of the module intended.
If the SF2 party visiting a disease-laden world consisted entirely of silicon-based life forms and mechanical beings all immune to disease, then the players would have a solid reason why their party was selected for the mission. They would want to prove themselves as capable as humans and vesk on this special mission for some fun roleplaying flavor. That would be a different flavor than fear of disease, but it would nevertheless enhance the campaign. And the GM could add sand fleas that are parasites on silicon life and a rust mold that grows on steel in order to restore the disease challenge with two exceptions to their immunity that mission-granting humans had not noticed themselves.
Silicon-based life probably has its own poisons and diseases on its home planet. The rulebook that gives these ancestries could clarify that though they are immune to carbon-based diseases, they are fully affected by silicon-based disease that carbon-based life is immune to. This is not a balancing effect, since silicon-based diseases will be rare in the scenarios. A more appropriate balancing effect would be the difficulty of finding silicon-based food. The carbon party members could be sick and the silicon party members could be starving. Though, the developers of the silicon-based Urog gave them a consume-almost-any-object ability to avoid starvation.
If the difference in this case is small, why cannot we summarize it as:Notice how your model does not actually simplify the description at all, and in fact introduces far more ambiguity: what is locomotion here? What is its purpose if you have to explain all of the different movement types anyway? What does serpentine locomotion mean here: is it just the bonus against grabbed or prone, or does it also include the listed speeds?
In writing my examples in a discussion thread rather than in a rulebook, I have to be redundant. A rulebook can explain keywords in an introductory paragraph, such as aquatic means breaths water but not air, amphibious means breaths air and water, and lack of an adjective means breaths air. And I had not yet figured out what serpentine locomotion means. Instead, I kept it close to the Sacred Nagaji heritage as written and made my system look uninspired.
The PF2 Remasters Player Core has a paragraph about Speed entries:
Speed
Most characters and monsters have a Speed statistic that indicates how quickly they can move across the ground. This statistic is referred to as land Speed when it’s necessary to differentiate it from special Speeds.When you use the Stride action, you move a number of feet equal to your Speed. Numerous other abilities also allow you to move, from Crawling to Leaping, and most of them are based on your Speed in some way. Whenever a rule mentions your Speed without specifying a type, it’s referring to your land Speed.
Locomotion would have a similar description in SF2.
Locomotion
Characters and creatures have a Locomotion entry that describes the limbs or other features that let them move at more than a Crawl. Some entries describe different limbs that have different movement types. Each limb includes a speed for a movement type, which gives the maximum distance that the creature can cover in one action, such as a Stride or Leap, that uses that limb for that movement type. Further notes might enhance or limit those actions due to a non-conventional locomotion.Whenever a rule mentions your Speed without specifying a type, it’s referring to the speed of your Stride.
I changed my notation a little. Now the Sacred Nagaji would have, "Locomotion Serpentine for Stride 25 feat, Leap 10 feet. You can Climb without free hands. You can Stride or Step while prone and rise from prone while doing it." The +2 circumstance bonus against becoming prone or grabbed is dropped in favor of being able to Stride or Step while prone. I don't see anything about a lower snake body that makes grabbing the Sacred Nagaji more difficult.
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Interesting discussion. I find that it's a bit tricky to maneuver around this as on the one hand, we absolutely want Starfinder to be full of playable aliens who feel unique to play and not just a "human in an alien mask," but adding in innate traits like being resistant or immune to a type of damage or condition tends to disturb any sense of balance quickly, and completely ignore parts of the game in ways that makes designing challenging and fun encounters in our adventures a bit more difficult.
It's definitely something to ponder for those of us who are staff designing the game, independent publishers considering adding to the content available on infinite, or even GMs homebrewing for their own tables.
Immunities and resistances come up in this thread because some species, such as SROs, seem like candidates for inherent immunities. In this thread, I instead wanted to play with weird shapes, a feature less likely to unbalance an encounter.
I cut my teeth on my father's science fiction collection written in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Those old-fashioned stories shaped my notions about adventuring in science fiction settings. For example, E.E. "Doc" Smith wrote the Lensman series from 1948 to 1954. The main character Lensman Kimball Kinnison often teamed up with uncanny alien Lensman: Worsel, a serpentine Velantian; Tregonsee, a matter-sensing four-legged Rigellian; and Nadreck, an ultracold constantly-shifting Palainian. I don't expect SF2 to handle Palainians, but I hope for species like the Velantians and Rigellians. And SF1 had already done a good job in that direction.
One of the benefits of Pathfinder 2nd Edition over Pathfinder 1st Edition is that PF2 has a solid foundation built to support new developments. The foundation for PF1 based closely on Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition was not build for ever-increasing variety. It bent into ambiguity under the new classes and gear added in later PF1 rulebooks. I want the foundation for ancestries in SF2 to colorfully, clearly, and consistently handle weird aliens. The Humanoid Assumption works fairly well, but I want a greater sense of non-human physiology.
And then there is the math <rubs hands gleefully>.
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I have studied the mathematics of PF2 encounter balance. I had to, because I spent 3 years and 10 months adapting the PF1 Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2 rules, and that meant converting and balancing the unique creatures in the adventure path. And I also like studying math for math's sake. PF2 has a strictly defined power level for each character-and-creature level. A 5th-level creature has the same encounter difficulty (within a 15% error) as two 3rd-level creatures or four 1st-level creatures. But power level is not purely about raw power. The non-player creatures have better numbers, such as a higher Strike bonus, than the player characters of the same level. This is because the player characters gain an advantage from versatility and teamwork. I had to analyze how that versatility advantage worked so that I could maintain balance.
Non-humanoid alien shapes, hands, and locomotion fall under versatility much more than under raw power.
I presume that Starfinder developers are still debating ideas about creatures with four or more arms. But what about tentacles or crab claws or paws? Players will want their characters to be able to handle common gear such as a laser pistol, so every intelligent species should have at least one fully functional hand. But maybe their other appendages are less functional than hands, just for variety. Imagine an intelligence crab with one small claw that is a hand and one large claw that is a claw unarmed attack. How would that affect combat if the character's claws could not handle two-handed weapons, but the large claw dealt as much damage as a two-handed weapon? The power difference would be minor, but the different fighting style would make for interesting ancestry feats for each type of claw. Yet though the large claw would not wield weapons and magic items, maybe it should be allowed to Interact to open doors. It could have custom rules for that, or the rules could have already covered that some appendages are hands and others are grippers.
Flying and climbing and high speed can evade some enemies for direct combat advantage, but swimming is mostly about crossing rivers and burrowing will probably be rare. Leaping and Crawling are other movement types that are often trivialized. I figure that all species can Crawl 5 feet, since for game mechanics Crawling is essentially emergency movement. But varying Leaping by species could be fun.
How does this fit the mathematics of victory through versatility? Once in Fort Nunder in Fangs of War the party needed to fetch a key from a hook the end of the corridor. But the hook would release a trap door into a 30-foot-deep pit without the weight of the key. The halfling rogue with Trap Finder rogue feat spotted the trap door. They could have made rolls to disable the trap, but the tailed goblin champion said to not bother. She had Climb 10 feet from her Tree Climber goblin ancestry feat. She climbed the wall around the trap door and fetched the key. The math is that the rogue made a successful perception check that saved the party from the trap. Ordinarily next would come a skill challenge to bypass the trap, but instead the tailed goblin had an ancestry ability that solved the challenge without a skill check. Trap Finder removed the true danger of the trap door, but after the danger the tailed goblin PC got to look awesome through natural abilities rather than one of the two rogues looking awesome through Thievery skill.
I described a good example of versatility and teamwork in combat back in August 2020 with the same party as the previous paragraph but during the earlier module Trail of the Hunted.
Two weeks ago, my party fought a high-level rogue with Twin Feint. They discovered a weakness in the tactic. Our ranger was fighting the enemy rogue with our liberator champion nearby. When the enemy damaged the ranger with the first Strike of Twin Feint, the champion used Liberating Step to give the ranger a Step. The ranger stepped out of range of the second Strike of Twin Feint. The enemy rogue ended up using two actions for what was essentially an ordinary Strike. And he would have had to use his third action to move into range again, so he had no way to make a second Strike that turn. The enemy rogue had to give up on Twin Feint and just make plain Strikes in order to have more than one Strike per turn. The ranger, in contrast, had Twin Takedown with no champion saving the enemy from the second Strike.
Claxon pointed out that the enemy rogue boss should have combined Twin Feint with Reactive Pursuit so that when the ranger stepped away in the middle of the Twin Feint then the boss could stride along with him to finish the Twin Feint. (Actually, that would not have worked, because Step does not trigger reactions and therefore won't trigger Reactive Pursuit, but let's ignore that.) The real reason why the boss lacked a response to the Liberating Step is because opposing NPCs are deliberately short on feat-like abilities. They lack versatility. The boss's best tactic was sneak attack enabled by a flank from a minion, but the rest of the party was keeping the minions away through teamwork. The Twin Feint was his backup tactic to enable sneak attack. An enemy probably has only two good tactics, and then becomes less effective when forced onto a mediocre third tactic. The party selected their tactics to nullify the enemy's tactics.
And they didn't plan this. The party knew how to combine their abilities just from working together so much.
Tactics have countertactics, sometimes many countertactics. The advantage of an enemy who flies is nullified by flying or by ranged attacks. The party can respond to an enemy archer by taking cover and returning ranged attacks, but fast movement or sneaking to close in on the archer are other countertactics. Liberating Step from a champion teammate was an unexpected countertactic to Twin Feint. The mathematics of victory through versatility is graph theory to match up countertactics to tactics. The graph network shows that a well-distributed diverse set of abilities increases the change of one of those abilities serving as an appropriate countertactic.
A party of weird alien characters and a token humanoid ought to have a lot of physical versatility from ancestry. Maybe one PC could fly, one PC could have natural camouflage to sneak, one PC could have uncanny senses, and the humanoid PC could be a generalist so that the team would have a good response to a variety of challenges through ancestry alone.
I like that victory through versatility usually requires teamwork. One party member has a key advantage and to get maximum efficiency out of it, the party has to work together. I had a recent adventure where the entu colony party member with blindsight (emotion) could detect the enemies a room with magical darkness that foiled normal darkvision except at close range. The entu colony would have been hard pressed to fight all the creatures hiding in the darkness herself. Instead, she shot some threats and pointed out others for her teammates. And she was the final authority on declaring the room clear.
Which stories are the best examples?
If we want to go big, classic sci-fi films like Alien and Terminator are all about how the different physiology of alien species or machines changes how they can be approached, but my personal favorite is an Asimov short story called Segregationist, where a surgeon reveals himself to be a robot by placing his hands into an oven to sterilize them. Your xenomorphs have acid blood that can chew its way right down to the hull of a ship, your robots can survive in conditions that would kill organic lifeforms pretty much instantly, that sort of thing. I'm not asking to implement this in Starfinder, by the way, so much as pointing out that a lot of sci-fi paints in even broader lines that SF2e is unlikely to capture due to 2e's generally subtler framework.
I played an adventure with disease heavily factored into it: Prisoners of the Blight. The party had to seek answers in a forest infected with Darkblight. Pushing through blighted undergrowth would call for a Fortitude save. The champion in the party had a high Constitution and class-based bonuses against disease, and Darkblight's Fortitude DC was fairly low (DC 15 in the PF1 module, I raised it to DC 25 in my conversion to PF2), so the champion had little chance of catching it and if she did catch it she could fight off the effects soon. She had no fear of the darkblight. Yet the rest of the party had to take precautions. The champion took into account the risk to her teammates. Therefore, Darkblight was still as scary as the writer of the module intended.
You're using a PF1e adventure that you personally homebrewed to discuss 2e's balance... why? Putting aside the many unknowns tied to adapting this adventure to 2e, why didn't your champion just go seek the answers themselves? What happens when disease or poison are the challenge to solving an environmental puzzle and the champion can just waltz through it without breaking a sweat? Champions in 2e have good Fort saves but nothing approaching immunity, so I'm already doubting this quite severely, but your anecdote also ultimately doesn't address the problem that's been brought up.
If the SF2 party visiting a disease-laden world consisted entirely of silicon-based life forms and mechanical beings all immune to disease, then the players would have a solid reason why their party was selected for the mission. They would want to prove themselves as capable as humans and vesk on this special mission for some fun roleplaying flavor. That would be a different flavor than fear of disease, but it would nevertheless enhance the campaign. And the GM could add sand fleas that are parasites on silicon life and a rust mold that grows on steel in order to restore the disease challenge with two exceptions to their immunity that mission-granting humans had not noticed themselves.
Why is it up to the GM to fix a balance problem brought up by your party composition hard-countering the main challenge of the adventure? This is a 1e mentality that 2e expressly aims to avoid, as expressed by one of Starfinder 2e's co-designers in this very thread.
In writing my examples in a discussion thread rather than in a rulebook, I have to be redundant. A rulebook can explain keywords in an introductory paragraph, such as aquatic means breaths water but not air, amphibious means breaths air and water, and lack of an adjective means breaths air. And I had not yet figured out what serpentine locomotion means. Instead, I kept it close to the Sacred Nagaji heritage as written and made my system look uninspired.
The problem isn't that your system is inefficiently expressed, it's redundant by design. You cannot express locomotion without talking about Speeds, and your description for certain types of locomotion specifically listed different types of Speeds at different amounts. Locomotion is just an unnecessary middle-man here that adds no information that can't already be expressed more simply through existing Speeds and traits.
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As a perma-GM: I *definitely* want to err on the side of making it easier to balance games. One of the whole reasons we finally abandoned PF1 is because I got tired of having to *always* hand-hold my players through every character decision because it could have huge impacts on my workload if they messed something up.
I would rather say "Poison corrodes circuitry", "All adventure-relevant diseases of this age have found a way to harm most ancestries", and "Everything bleeds some kind of liquid, gas, powder, or magic" than have to look over my players' shoulders to make sure they're not hard-countering the adventure I've planned purely by accident.
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I'm sure BNW will very much not like what I am saying, but I'll say it anyway. I remember something about cheek pouches not actually improving action economy and such.
To me, playing an ancestry that is very much not-human doesn't need to add power. The ancestry doesn't need to have immunities, or innate flight, or even darkvision. It just needs something that is very different - both narratively and mechanically - that I can use as a hook to make my character show - not tell - that the character is distinct because of physiology.
It also needs to be narratively consistent. And have mechanics that are also consistent with the narrative.
My Sacred Nagaji character is a great example to use for this. I don't need the character to have poison immunity or something like that. Just having the tail unarmed attack have the grapple trait and have the size and space of the creature be 5 ft x 10 ft (two squares) instead of the normal 5 x 5 (one square) size would probably be enough. That isn't more powerful than any other ancestry. But it is very different. It is something I can bring forward with the character to make it feel like it is not just another humanoid with a cosmetics kit.
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One thing that I notice is... well, I posit to you two kinds of stories that can occur at a table.
In the first, the party hits the boss, and it's incredibly challenging, but they manage to pull out a win anyway. This is awesome. (the version where the boss is a bit *too* challenging at the QM sabotages their strategy halfway through the fight in order to make them not kill the PCs is quite a lot less awesome.)
In the second, the party hits the boss, and it's looking like it's shaping up to be a rough fight... and then someone in the party pulls out their One Weird Trick and it turns out that this otherwise legitimately challenging boss is really weak to it and goes down like a chump. This is *also* awesome.
Now, for the second one, you don't want it to be the same player every time, and it's better if it's a combo move of multiple PCs working together rather than just what one specific character was doing. You also don't want it to be the thing that happens... more than about one time in three, or maybe one time in two. Still, it is awesome, and there's nothing wrong with that.
/************/
So I'm still a fan of the optional rules/sidebar solution to the issue, and it occurs to me that one of the more interesting options to fit into a sidebar like that is that no two characters are allowed to have the *same* ancestry immunities. No more than one that's poison immune, no more than one disease immune, and so forth. That lets you have your immunity counterplay to a degree, but the party as a whole can't just trivialize anything. You might be immune to fire (if you're a little sun-person who was raised inside of a fusion reactor) but your buddies aren't, and if you wind up facing off against a bunch of Flame Wolves, the enemy's going to realize that pretty quickly and focus fire on the others. The immunity is a tool you can use, but the encounter is still a challenge, because if you're still standing at the end of the fight, and your friends are all charred corpses on the ground, that's still a loss.
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If a single immunity makes or breaks the plot, just do what Pathfinder2e did in "The Slithering" and ban all humans.
If you want to run a space adventure that centers on survival on a spaceship losing its life support system just ban any species that can live in space on its own.
I want SF2e to be able to tell lots of types of stories not just stories that fit into Pathfinder, like a story for a party of all Novians.
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Which stories are the best examples?If we want to go big, classic sci-fi films like Alien and Terminator are all about how the different physiology of alien species or machines changes how they can be approached, but my personal favorite is an Asimov short story called Segregationist, where a surgeon reveals himself to be a robot by placing his hands into an oven to sterilize them. Your xenomorphs have acid blood that can chew its way right down to the hull of a ship, your robots can survive in conditions that would kill organic lifeforms pretty much instantly, that sort of thing. I'm not asking to implement this in Starfinder, by the way, so much as pointing out that a lot of sci-fi paints in even broader lines that SF2e is unlikely to capture due to 2e's generally subtler framework.
Ah, I have Isaac Asimov's story Segregationist in one of my collections. The theme was humans and robots asking the surgeon for features of the other group, as if each species envied the best features of the other. The surgeon complained that humans should be entirely organic and robots should be entirely mechanical. The surprise at the end was the surgeon sterilizing their metal hands by direct heat. Without that sentence I would have assumed that the segregationist opinion belonged to an old-fashioned human surgeon; instead, the opinion was from a robot, making its impact more startling.
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I played an adventure with disease heavily factored into it: Prisoners of the Blight. The party had to seek answers in a forest infected with Darkblight. Pushing through blighted undergrowth would call for a Fortitude save. The champion in the party had a high Constitution and class-based bonuses against disease, and Darkblight's Fortitude DC was fairly low (DC 15 in the PF1 module, I raised it to DC 25 in my conversion to PF2), so the champion had little chance of catching it and if she did catch it she could fight off the effects soon. She had no fear of the darkblight. Yet the rest of the party had to take precautions. The champion took into account the risk to her teammates. Therefore, Darkblight was still as scary as the writer of the module intended.You're using a PF1e adventure that you personally homebrewed to discuss 2e's balance... why? Putting aside the many unknowns tied to adapting this adventure to 2e, why didn't your champion just go seek the answers themselves? What happens when disease or poison are the challenge to solving an environmental puzzle and the champion can just waltz through it without breaking a sweat? Champions in 2e have good Fort saves but nothing approaching immunity, so I'm already doubting this quite severely, but your anecdote also ultimately doesn't address the problem that's been brought up.
I use a PF1 adventure path as a PF2 example because most of my experience with PF2 was with that adventure path. I started playing PF2 in October 2019 when Age of Ashes was the only PF2 adventure path published and I wanted a different story more to my players' taste, so I converted.
I did not bring the disease resistance into that game. The PF2 champion choose Divine Health class feat 4, which gives more critical saves against disease. PF1 paladins are more extreme against disease, becaust they all get, "Divine Health (Ex): At 3rd level, a paladin is immune to all diseases, including supernatural and magical diseases, including mummy rot," so converting Prisoners of the Blight to PF2 reduced the champion's defense against disease.
The champion could not just waltz through Prisoners of the Blight alone. She needed the other party members' skills and combat prowess for the other challenges of the blighted forest. The gnome rogue needed to steal, the halfling rogue/sorcerer needed to disguise them with a Veil spell, the monk needed to punch froghemoths, etc.
Why is it up to the GM to fix a balance problem brought up by your party ...
I would be a terrible GM for Pathfinder Society or Starfinder Society, because I honed the wrong skills: improvisation and customization. They are not suitable for running scenarios as written in Society games. In my campaigns I constantly alter, AKA fix, the module to give my players the story that they want to play. I see that as the GM's role.
The sand fleas and the rust mold are a suggestion in case the players wanted to face disease despite choosing species that resisted disease. Or, maybe instead they want to fun of feeling special due to their disease resistance.
When something hits the party and I get to say "Oh, I'm immune to that" it feels really great. Though I recognize it can occasionally mess up a story when the plot needs everyone to be hit with something.
Obligatory Order of the Stick example: Evade!
My players love narrative control of the campaign, so they mess up the story even without disruptive abilities, such as, "No, we are not going to sneak into the robber gang's warehouse. We are going to the town authorities with our evidence and let them handle it." In addition, I ran a few PF1 campaigns in which the PCs could specialize their abilities to more extremes than in PF2 (I don't know how extreme Starfinder gets). Story-breaking powers are more common in PF1.
If the PCs break the story as written, then I piece together a new story out of the setting to continue.
Fortunately, my players avoid disrupting the story just to show off. They change the campaign's story only to make it better.
As a perma-GM: I *definitely* want to err on the side of making it easier to balance games. One of the whole reasons we finally abandoned PF1 is because I got tired of having to *always* hand-hold my players through every character decision because it could have huge impacts on my workload if they messed something up.
I would rather say "Poison corrodes circuitry", "All adventure-relevant diseases of this age have found a way to harm most ancestries", and "Everything bleeds some kind of liquid, gas, powder, or magic" than have to look over my players' shoulders to make sure they're not hard-countering the adventure I've planned purely by accident.
I have had robots bleed sparks. The bleed strike had caused a short circuit.
What is a balance problem? Balance has two aspects. Intra-party balance means that each and every member of the party is pulling their weight in service to the party's goals. If one character is five times as useful as another character, then the party feels out of balance. However, a temporary imbalance is fine. Imagine that the party is in a tomb gathering macguffins that are each behind flames. One party member resists fire enough to reach into the flames to grab the macguffins. At those moments, that party member is especially useful. But when the whole party is necessary to reach the flames, that imbalance is not broken. It merely feels lucky.
Encounter balance means that the GM can judge how difficult an encounter will be in advance. We want challenging combat that makes the PCs strain and we also want to avoid a Total Party Kill by mistake. We GMs can customize the encounter beyond simply summing up CR, since we are familiar with the party. A GM would know that due to the SRO frontline character in the party, a venomous creature won't be as big a threat as against other parties and can add more threats. But this does not necessarily trivialize the venomous creature, since its fang attack still deals piercing damage.
On the other hand, a module writer does not get to see the parties that will play through the module. Thus, a tight system that makes the power of any random character with known level predictable against a creature of known level aids the writers in making consistent adventures. Immunity or strong resistance against all the creature's good attacks would throw off the encounter calculations. And as I explained in comment #18 a creature will have only two or three good attacks. Thus, creature design requires a careful matching game: their attacks need to be foiled by appropriate tactics but not automatically foiled by a common feature of many species.
Some resistances can be treated as a creature design problem rather than solved by a ban on those resistances at low levels. SF2 offers a chance to redesign problematic creatures. Um, which ones are problematic? Do the Alien Archives have creatures that rely mostly on bleed, poison, or disease?
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One option for game design that does allow for more powerful ancestry innate abilities is to have a list of abilities that are available for ancestries to have - and that can be easily compensated for using equipment for ancestries that don't have it.
For example from SF1 - vacuum immunity. Sarcesian can survive in vacuum for up to an hour and are able to move around. And any other ancestry can do the same with pretty much any armor and some low level thrusters.
Perhaps Bleed should be given the same treatment since there are so many ancestries that have non-organic biology. SRO and other constructs, undead, crystalline composition, ...
So an ancestry can have Bleed immunity as an innate feature of their ancestry. Other ancestries can get coagulant equipment as part of their armor perhaps. And the game is rebalanced to not consider Bleed damage to be a significant addition to an attack - it is expected that the player characters will be immune to it.
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Besides using equipment to stop bleed damage, if someone in the party is not immune to bleed damage in a battle where everyone does bleed damage, keep them away from the front line of battle. If everyone in the party is immune to bleed damage why are the opponents not smart enough to use different weapons, or tactics? Are there really any adventures built around the immunity or lack of a single damage type?
Environmental immunities on the other hand I could see having a bigger impact on a game such as surviving in a vacuum, because having environmental immunities or not is something you could build a survival adventure around. This brings up the question is it better to limit all species from having immunities or if is it better to limit some species in some adventures like The Slithering does.
This also applies to should all armor have built-in environmental protection or not. Personally, I think it would be best to have armor options both ways.
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Mostly what I am hoping that the game and game developers avoid is creating a scenario that leads to a meta of "You should play _______ ancestry because they have comparable features of other ancestries and also have Bleed immunity. Bleed damage is fairly common starting at level XX, so being immune to that makes your character more powerful."
I also want to avoid a meta of "Well, playing _______ ancestry comes with the Bleed immunity, but the ancestry is otherwise so nerf'd that unless the campaign features Bleed damage fairly often you are better off picking something else."
Ancestry choice should be meaningful, but not so mechanically impactful that it becomes a limiting factor of the choices available to actually play and have a good time with.
I use a PF1 adventure path as a PF2 example because most of my experience with PF2 was with that adventure path.
Do you not think that basing your entire experience of 2e around a homebrewed port of a 1e adventure is coloring your judgment a little? It's great that you've managed to flex your powers of improvisation, but laying the tracks as the train is running is, once again, very much a 1e mentality and not a 2e one. 2e is designed so that, by default, you don't have to have fabulous improvisational design abilities as a GM to be able to run a game, because the mechanics work as written. If you do want to customize things, that's great and the game even equips you with the tools you'd need to do so coherently, but 2e is not a system that expects you to fix it on the fly. Not implementing broken powers at inappropriate levels is part of why it gets to work so well, as is not requiring GMs to houserule on the spot in ways that can turn out grossly inaccurate.
Case in point: Prisoners of the Blight is a 14th-level adventure, and your established DC of 25 is easier than even a very easy check at that level. It is therefore obvious that a character capable of critically succeeding on every success against disease would find themselves disregarding your challenge entirely, because the challenge you've established is trivial for that level. More generally, any static DC quickly goes from hard to trivial as the party levels up, yet even the strongest performer is going to find themselves not leaving the weakest performer in the dust due to how 2e's tight math puts everyone within a consistent range of success and failure for level-appropriate challenges. Even with a Champion specced against disease, you are never going to run into a situation where they will completely trivialize a level-appropriate challenge against disease, even if they will fare better than most others. This is why official 2e APs can include disease as a major challenge and not get steamrolled by a party of Well-Groomed Catfolk or multiclassed good Champions. Though I do want differentiation in my alien ancestries, I would also like Starfinder 2e to keep that same ethos and not require me to watch out for abusive combos that would trivialize the AP I'd be running.
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Mostly what I am hoping that the game and game developers avoid is creating a scenario that leads to a meta of "You should play _______ ancestry because they have comparable features of other ancestries and also have Bleed immunity. Bleed damage is fairly common starting at level XX, so being immune to that makes your character more powerful."
I also want to avoid a meta of "Well, playing _______ ancestry comes with the Bleed immunity, but the ancestry is otherwise so nerf'd that unless the campaign features Bleed damage fairly often you are better off picking something else."
Ancestry choice should be meaningful, but not so mechanically impactful that it becomes a limiting factor of the choices available to actually play and have a good time with.
I wonder how important the game media is in Starfinder. I don't know of any websites tracking the game media of SF or PF2e. For Star Wars X-wing the media info is updated almost daily. Maybe the developers have that kind of information. I'm curious if the top played species suggest they are popular due to being seen as stronger or just are fun to play for other reasons. I would imagine that FF2e has a tighter meta because there are fewer species.
Part of the problem with the meta data for SF or PF2e species is that likely most that data might come from organized play and in organized play some of the species are not available or have to be paid for with achievement points to play.
I use a PF1 adventure path as a PF2 example because most of my experience with PF2 was with that adventure path.Do you not think that basing your entire experience of 2e around a homebrewed port of a 1e adventure is coloring your judgment a little? It's great that you've managed to flex your powers of improvisation, but laying the tracks as the train is running is, once again, very much a 1e mentality and not a 2e one. 2e is designed so that, by default, you don't have to have fabulous improvisational design abilities as a GM to be able to run a game, because the mechanics work as written. If you do want to customize things, that's great and the game even equips you with the tools you'd need to do so coherently, but 2e is not a system that expects you to fix it on the fly. Not implementing broken powers at inappropriate levels is part of why it gets to work so well, as is not requiring GMs to houserule on the spot in ways that can turn out grossly inaccurate.
Remember that the only true PF2 adventure path available in October 2019 was Age of Ashes. Some Paizo people have acknowledged that that adventure path has too many Severe-Threat challenges, due to inexperience with the new PF2 system.
Though I do want differentiation in my alien ancestries, I would also like Starfinder 2e to keep that same ethos and not require me to watch out for abusive combos that would trivialize the AP I'd be running.
I am curious. How does a Starfinder mentality differ from a PF1e mentality and a PF2e mentality? Which parts of that Starfinder playstyle do people want to retain in Starfinder 2nd Edition?
My own players in my Starfinder mini-campaign want more science fiction in their adventuring. They are happy that they do less killing people and looting bodies; instead, they do more rescuing people and earning rewards.
Case in point: Prisoners of the Blight is a 14th-level adventure, and your established DC of 25 is easier than even a very easy check at that level. It is therefore obvious that a character capable of critically succeeding on every success against disease would find themselves disregarding your challenge entirely, because the challenge you've established is trivial for that level.
Okay, you caught me. I did make the save against Darkblight easy on the party. By -2.
The description of Darkblight in Prisoners of the Blight says,
DARKBLIGHT
At its core, the Darkblight is a supernatural infection infused with the energies of both the First World and Jeharlu. It slowly transforms the land it infests into a planar seep, allowing both fey and demons to cross through into the Material Plane. The taint spreads primarily through plant life, making it as much a place as a disease. The Darkblight can infest creatures as well as plants, though this often requires extended physical or supernatural contact with infected plants. Dryads, with their spiritual connection to specific trees, are especially vulnerable to the Darkblight.Humanoids and fey not bound to a tree are generally at risk of infection with the Darkblight only after prolonged contact with infected plants (24 hours or more) , or when magically occupying the same space as a plant with spells such as transport via plants, tree shape, and tree stride.
Immunity to disease does not render a creature immune to the Darkblight’s effects. Removing the infestation requires successful castings of both remove curse and remove disease, or else a limited wish, miracle, or wish spell.
DARKBLIGHT
Type infestation, special (see above); Save Fortitude DC 15 negates infection, Fortitude DC 21 to avoid effects once infected
Onset 1 day; Frequency 1/day
Effect initial effect 1d4 Charisma damage and nauseated; Cure 3 saves
Special Plant creatures reduced to 0 Charisma by Darkblight immediately gain the fungal creature template and remove all Charisma damage. Fey creatures take 2d4 points of Charisma damage on a failed save, and if reduced to 0 Charisma by the Darkblight, they fall comatose and rise at the next sunset, gaining the blighted fey template and removing all Charisma damage.
My conversion split the disease and the curse into separate parts. A person who caught Darkblight in the blighted forest automatically acquired Arlantia's Blessing, too.
Darkblight Disease, Disease 8
Disease
The Darkblight is a supernatural infection infused with the energies of both the First World and Jeharlu (Cyth-V'Sug's realm). It slowly transforms the land it infests into a planar seep, allowing both fey and demons to cross through into the Material Plane. The Darkblight can infest creatures as well as plants, though this often requires extended physical or supernatural contact with infected plants.
Close contact with Darkblighted creatures and plants (not counting an attack by a blighted creature unless Darkblight exposure is part of its effects) calls for a save against Darkblight infection. A successful save against exposure to Darkblight renders the creature immune to further exposure for 1 hour.
Saving Throw DC 25 Fortitude; Onset 1 day; Stage 1 clumsy 1 and stupefied 1 (1 day); Stage 2 clumsy 1 and stupefied 2 (1 day); Stage 3 clumsy 1 and stupefied 3 (2 day); Stage 4 clumsy 1 and stupefied 4, Plants gain the fungus trait and lose the clumsiness; (2 day); Stage 5 death. Your body grows fungus, which will entirely consume your body in 3 days.
Arlantia’s Blessing, Curse 7 DC 23
Curse, Divine, Transmutation
The fungus of the Darkblight Disease replaces your flesh instead of infecting it.
Saving Throw Fortitude DC 32 Effect If you have the Darkblight Disease, you do not suffer the clumsy and stupified conditions from it. You cannot remove the disease by anything short of a limited wish, miracle, or wish spell while the curse is active, but you can reduce it to stage 1. The duration of the stages of Darkblight increase to 10 days. You cannot go to Stage 5 of Darkblight while on ground consecrated to Cyth-V'Sug. If you reach Stage 5 Darkblight on unconsecrated ground, instead of dying you permanently transform into a fungus creature of a level near yours, such as a Lesser Fungal Shambler, Fungal Shambler, or Blight Spriggan.
For a 14th-level PF1 character the weak Fortitude save bonus is +4+Con. For a 14th-level PF2 character with trained Fortitude save bonus is +16+Con. Thus, for the same odds as the PF1 DC 15 Fortitude save, I would need a PF2 DC 27 Fortitude save. The DC 25 I chose is low by -2. The PF1 strong 14th-level Fortitude save is +9+con, while the PF2 expert 14th-level Fortitude save is +18+Con. At the strong-save level, a PF1 DC 15 save would convert to a PF2 DC 24 save.
The DC in the module was easy because the PCs had to save against Darkblight many times per day. Even if they were careful about not touching the plants, some creatures' unarmed attacks exposed to Darkblight on a hit.
I am arguing because I am a mathematician and my professional pride wants to show that I converted the numbers in good faith. I don't know why Teridax is arguing about my numbers, but Teridax appears to want to invalidate my claim that I have played a module in which disease is a major factor. Really, a better argument is that I have run only a handful of game sessions of Starfinder. What are the poison-themed, disease-themed, or vacuum-themed Starfinder modules?
I did go easy on my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion party in two other ways. First, they began Prisoners of the Blight at 15th level instead of 14th level, because the players kept asking for side quests to free villagers enslaved my the Ironfang Legion (I have a spoiler-laden discussion of their levels at levelling up, comment #5). Second, I gave them forewarning about Darkblight via encountering human villagers infected with Darkblight. No-one in the party could cast Remove Curse. The druid had multiclassed to cleric and could cast up to 3rd-level divine spells, but Remove Curse is 4th level. The forewarning taught them that they had to acquire a Wand of Remove Curse. And curing the villagers was tough, because the low-level villagers had to roll their own Fortitude saves against DC 25 unless the party healer used her new Legendary Medic feat.
Back to the topic of resistances and immunities in interstellar ancestries. Ancestries that can eventually gain full immunities through ancestry feats would probably gain them at 13th level, like with Unbreakable-er Goblin ancestry feat 13. So a 14th-level adventure could have some PCs with a full immunity to its scary theme. Prisoners of the Blight did not depend on the darkblight alone for its threat. It also had fungal monsters, a dragon, blightguard warriors, a bandersnatch, and ancient mysteries to unravel to finish the mission. Really, the module writer Amanda Hamon Kunz put more effort into ensuring that the party would not teleport past dangers than into ensuring exposure to Darkblight.
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I'm curious if the top played species suggest they are popular due to being seen as stronger or just are fun to play for other reasons.
For a single sample, I asked my wife. She said that she chose to play a Kiirinta because she wanted an exotic alien who seemed like a natural pilot. She wanted to play a pilot in our mini-campaign.
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I'm curious if the top played species suggest they are popular due to being seen as stronger or just are fun to play for other reasons.For a single sample, I asked my wife. She said that she chose to play a Kiirinta because she wanted an exotic alien who seemed like a natural pilot. She wanted to play a pilot in our mini-campaign.
Just be careful if she is flying the ship near a flame. It would be cool if a flying creature could use piloting checks to do fancy move actions. Or have ancestry feats to do a barrel roll or other stunt when moving.
I like to play Ysoki because I used to have a pet rat.
I like to play shirren because I think it's funny to play a species obsessed with choices in a game built around making choices.
I like to play space goblins who think they are the best ACE pilots in the galaxy but don't bother taking the ACE pilot theme or even putting points into piloting.
Thinking about this I just realized the only time I ever really look at special abilities and bonuses that aid combat while picking a species is when building a melee character, for everything else I'm just looking for flavor.
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Remember that the only true PF2 adventure path available in October 2019 was Age of Ashes. Some Paizo people have acknowledged that that adventure path has too many Severe-Threat challenges, due to inexperience with the new PF2 system.
Sure, but it's 2024 now, and PF2e has over a dozen adventure paths, most of which have far more forgiving encounters. Are you saying you haven't touched any of those APs and just played one homebrew campaign using 2e in five years?
I am curious. How does a Starfinder mentality differ from a PF1e mentality and a PF2e mentality? Which parts of that Starfinder playstyle do people want to retain in Starfinder 2nd Edition?
My own players in my Starfinder mini-campaign want more science fiction in their adventuring. They are happy that they do less killing people and looting bodies; instead, they do more rescuing people and earning rewards.
Just to list a few specifics off the top of my head that are relevant to this discussion:
This is, by the way, completely tangential to the 1e versus 2e mentality, which is one of mechanical design and which expectations are placed upon the GM to fix what the system breaks. 1e features lots of different mechanics that the GM is expected to deal with on the spot to avoid breaking the adventure, whereas 2e features lots of different mechanics that are expected to work well pretty much regardless of adventure.
I am arguing because I am a mathematician and my professional pride wants to show that I converted the numbers in good faith. I don't know why Teridax is arguing about my numbers, but Teridax appears to want to invalidate my claim that I have played a module in which disease is a major factor.
I'm not sure you quite understand: you didn't make the save easy by -2, you made the save easy by -7. Read the rules once again: a standard 14th-level DC is 32, and a very easy version of that DC would be 27. Your version is even easier than that. It is therefore unsurprising that your homebrewed disease would be trivially easy to resist for a party of that level.
You mention "trained Fortitude", except literally no 2e class at 14th level remains only trained in Fort saves. Your bonus would also still be completely wrong with just a trained bonus, as it fails to account for resilient fundamental runes (which, like all fundamental runes, are essential to 2e's balance), and the Con boosts that are so commonly-picked that they may as well be standard. Even a class as fragile as a Wizard would have at minimum a +22 to their Fort saves at 14th level, giving them a whopping 90% success chance against your DC 25 disease every time they roll. Your Divine Health Champion would have at minimum a +25 to their Fort saves with only a +2 to their Con mod, meaning they would at worst fail, rather than critically fail, and only on a natural 1. Every other time, they'd critically succeed. It is therefore no surprise that your disease was so easy to trivialize, and I'm surprised the rest of the party didn't do this by just stocking up on greater antiplagues.
None of this is to impugn your credentials as a mathematician, please understand. Rather, the fact that the above math is so grievously wrong is relevant to the discussion, because you've insisted that challenges in 2e can be trivialized and things still somehow work out:
I played an adventure with disease heavily factored into it: Prisoners of the Blight. The party had to seek answers in a forest infected with Darkblight. Pushing through blighted undergrowth would call for a Fortitude save. The champion in the party had a high Constitution and class-based bonuses against disease, and Darkblight's Fortitude DC was fairly low (DC 15 in the PF1 module, I raised it to DC 25 in my conversion to PF2), so the champion had little chance of catching it and if she did catch it she could fight off the effects soon. She had no fear of the darkblight. Yet the rest of the party had to take precautions. The champion took into account the risk to her teammates. Therefore, Darkblight was still as scary as the writer of the module intended.
What this discussion has revealed is that despite running a 2e campaign for the past five years or so, you appear to have missed several crucial bits of the system that govern its balance, to such a significant degree that I feel it is tainting your understanding of how the system works and what its design philosophy stands for. I would urge you to go through the ruleset again with a fresh look, and see how the math works out in relation to scaling proficiencies, fundamental runes, common attribute boosts, and so on. I would also urge you to look at some official diseases for 2e: none of them are trivial like your version of Darkblight, and some of them are in fact quite terrifying. Even your Divine Health Champion would find resisting those diseases non-negligible, meaning those are challenges everyone has to face. This I think is key to 2e working as written, and I don't think Starfinder 2e needs to abandon this design philosophy to give us interesting alien ancestries.
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When something hits the party and I get to say "Oh, I'm immune to that" it feels really great. Though I recognize it can occasionally mess up a story when the plot needs everyone to be hit with something.I've found it feels great at first, but over time it gets less and less fun. I'm playing a character who managed to become a dry lich in a 3.5/PF1E game right now, so I've got tons of things that just don't affect me. At first it was fun, but over time it's gotten more and more tedious having to check the effects of everything to see if I happen to be immune to it, and mildly frustrating for both me and the GM when they have to put in lots of extra work to find things that'll hurt my character but not trash the rest of the squishier party. I've partly solved the issue by throwing out lots of spells to defend my friends and share damage with them, but it's still less than optimal where encounter design and tension are concerned.
For the record, even as the guy who's out here openly advocating for ancestral immunities, I agree that we don't want the whole 3.x "immunity to half of everything" situation. That stuff just went way overboard.
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For the record, even as the guy who's out here openly advocating for ancestral immunities, I agree that we don't want the whole 3.x "immunity to half of everything" situation. That stuff just went way overboard.When something hits the party and I get to say "Oh, I'm immune to that" it feels really great. Though I recognize it can occasionally mess up a story when the plot needs everyone to be hit with something.I've found it feels great at first, but over time it gets less and less fun. I'm playing a character who managed to become a dry lich in a 3.5/PF1E game right now, so I've got tons of things that just don't affect me. At first it was fun, but over time it's gotten more and more tedious having to check the effects of everything to see if I happen to be immune to it, and mildly frustrating for both me and the GM when they have to put in lots of extra work to find things that'll hurt my character but not trash the rest of the squishier party. I've partly solved the issue by throwing out lots of spells to defend my friends and share damage with them, but it's still less than optimal where encounter design and tension are concerned.
Also an advocate for ancestral immunities. to balance ancestral immunities what if there were anti immunity spells and ammo? Instead of removing ancestral immunities giving GMs tools to easily and quickly fix encounters that would be rendered useless by an immunity.
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to balance ancestral immunities what if there were anti immunity spells and ammo? Instead of removing ancestral immunities giving GMs tools to easily and quickly fix encounters that would be rendered useless by an immunity.
Possible and has precedent. See Darkvision and Greater Darkvision (or Player Core pg 433) and the Defy the Darkness Dwarf feat (or Player Core pg 44).
It is also a bit limited though. If an AP is written to have standard Darkness, then the Dwarf with Greater Darkvision is going to still be immune to it. I think it can still lead to one of two scenarios.
1) The upgrade to get the improved immunity will be seen as nearly mandatory. Otherwise you technically have the immunity, but it doesn't really do anything in practical gameplay because all of the APs are written with options to use the Greater versions of the damage/condition that the standard immunity doesn't prevent.
2) The upgrade to get the improved immunity will be seen as unnecessary since the campaigns are written with only the standard damage/conditions and having the GM swap in an option to bypass that is considered very adversarial because the GM is deliberately crippling one particular character because of a valid build choice that they made.
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Also an advocate for ancestral immunities. to balance ancestral immunities what if there were anti immunity spells and ammo? Instead of removing ancestral immunities giving GMs tools to easily and quickly fix encounters that would be rendered useless by an immunity.
Well... let's look at what immunities *should* be.
- "I don't need that". This is things like your SRO being immune to vacuum, hunger or thirst. They don't have the biological processes that require things X, Y, or Z, and therefore lacking them just isn't a big deal. Even if Thirst Powers are a thing somehow, the idea of anti-immunity Thirst Powers is kind of screwy. You'd need to be attacking reality on a conceptual level to make that kind of thing fly, and that sounds more like a special power of a single kind of creature that has a lot of rules text already than anything that people would really plan around. Incidentally, this also covers the way a bog-standard human, wearing nothing but archaic gear, is immune to glitching.
- "I was born of this". This is things like Novians being immune to fire damage and similar effects when the home planet of a species is what others would consider inimical. Like, they're tiny living suns. You think a flamethrower is going to kill them? Realistically, though, this would be better represented as a resistance (perhaps a very high resistance) than as a full-on immunity. It makes sense that it's possible to get temperatures so high that it'll do bad things to a microsun. It's just seriously nontrivial.
- "That's not how my system works": This is for when the critter isn't immune to the idea on a conceptual level, it's just that they won't be affected by the kind that affects everyone else. Silicoid and robotic life forms aren't going to be affected by poisons that have been tuned to work on organics, or viruses and bacteria evolved to feed on them. At the same time, metal-eating mites are entirely plausible for this world, it's certainly possible to catch a computer virus, and it's even possible for bad fuel to seriously mess up the functioning of your internal reactor in a way that could shut you down for good if you don't realize and get it fixed soon enough. By contrast,t eh things that have either been evolved or designed to work on you won't work on your bog-standard human buddy with the reenactment fetish, any more than glitching did. So in this case, I guess it's not so much an immunity as a vulnerability profile. "Check out my awesome human immunity to bluetooth DOS attacks!" Immunity piercing doesn't make all that much sense here, but it is possible to have multiple vulnerability profiles being targeted at once. It just gets kind of repetitive and also strains credibility if you're doing that every time.
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what if there were anti immunity spells and ammo? Instead of removing ancestral immunities giving GMs tools to easily and quickly fix encounters that would be rendered useless by an immunity.
I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it gives GMs more options - and, indeed, I have advocated for this in other threads. If you for whatever reason need poison to affect the SRO in your party, sure, say it's techno-magical poison that melts circuits as easily as flesh. Hell, there's even existing options for poisons and diseases for that already, like instant virus or circuit melter. Heck, the biohacker class's entire biohack class feature specifically says, from the get-go, that biohacks affect constructs, undead, and other non-living things because you're not just mixing in bioreactive crap, but also chemical compounds, nanites, and whatever else that affects non-organic physiology just as easily. There is room for this in the existing design space.
But, on the other hand, it feels really bad, as a player, when you think you've prepared for something (by being the right ancestry to have, or you bought gear that grants, or cast the spell or whatever else to get resistances / immunities) and then the GM says "aha, but, this isn't just Fire Damage, this is Double-Plus Limit Break Fire Damage, that bypasses resistances!" This is an actual example, by the way.*
If we start having different 'levels' of adverse conditions, it starts to feel very gamified. Like, for example, if you can get Resist X 1 from your ancestry, which lets you ignore Level 1 X. But, aha, the bad guys have figured out how to do Level 2 X, and you're still affected! So then you take the feat or buy the gear or whatever to get Resist X 2. And then oh noes the baddies now have upgraded to Level 3 X and you're still affected..! It turns into this weird arms-race treadmill that just...doesn't sound fun.
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I'm honestly starting to think that people worried about ancestries with immunities are just doing so much pearl-clutching about maybe one or two ancestries (SROs and Living Holograms, mainly) who have a broad array of sweeping immunities. I'm pretty sure Thurston has specifically said that he knows SROs (and, by extension, holograms, since they have the same Robotic species ability, word for word) are too OP and that they'll be toned down in 2e (although I hope they still have some strengths against those effects; but maybe something more in line with a +2 vs bleed, poison, etc., that plant-like or undead-like or other X-like species have, rather than just blanket immunity.) So that case, we can safely assume, is dealt with.
Beyond the broad suite of immunities SROs have - what else is there? I think most other species with immunities are, comparatively, few and far between, and where they exist, are niche. Like sure Elves are immune to magical sleep, but how often does that come up. Androids (and many others) are immune to inhaled stuff/vacuums, which does come up all the time, but any adventurer can buy that for cheap. Other, more esoteric things (like borai being immune to negative energy damage, or quorlu being immune to flanking) feels okay, in that they're relatively rare species, and those are very niche immunities that aren't going to be game breaking (because of either low occurrence, or low impact, or both.)
Put another way: we know SROs are OP, and that they're being dealt with. But that one "bad apple" isn't enough to throw away the whole bunch, Sapient. Give it one more chance before you give up on ancestral immunities?
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I'm honestly starting to think that people worried about ancestries with immunities are just doing so much pearl-clutching about maybe one or two ancestries (SROs and Living Holograms, mainly) who have a broad array of sweeping immunities. I'm pretty sure Thurston has specifically said that he knows SROs (and, by extension, holograms, since they have the same Robotic species ability, word for word) are too OP and that they'll be toned down in 2e (although I hope they still have some strengths against those effects; but maybe something more in line with a +2 vs bleed, poison, etc., that plant-like or undead-like or other X-like species have, rather than just blanket immunity.) So that case, we can safely assume, is dealt with.
Beyond the broad suite of immunities SROs have - what else is there? I think most other species with immunities are, comparatively, few and far between, and where they exist, are niche. Like sure Elves are immune to magical sleep, but how often does that come up. Androids are immune to vacuum, which does come up all the time, but any adventurer can buy that for cheap. Other, more esoteric things (like borai being immune to negative energy damage, or quorlu being immune to flanking) feels okay, in that they're relatively rare species, and those are very niche immunities that aren't going to be game breaking (because of either low occurrence, or low impact, or both.)
Put another way: we know SROs are OP, and that they're being dealt with. But that one "bad apple" isn't enough to throw away the whole bunch, Sapient. Give it one more chance before you give up on ancestral immunities?
Good points. I think Stellifera are the poster child for how strange things can get while SROs are one of the poster child for needing immunity balance because of being Robotic.
"Robotic
SROs are immune to bleed, disease, death effects, poison, nonlethal damage, and sleep effects unless those effects specify they affect constructs. SROs can be affected by effects or spells that normally target only humanoids, but receive a +4 racial bonus to saving throws against such effects. SROs can eat and drink, though they don’t need to, and they must recharge their internal batteries by entering an off-line mode that is similar to sleep for 8 hours every day. SROs do not breathe or suffer the normal environmental effects of being in a vacuum."
Out of all of that the only parts I'm really attached to are the SROs do not breathe or suffer the normal environmental effects of being in a vacuum. Of the others, some can be explained away like bleed works by cutting hydraulic or oil lines, or in the case of holograms causes a leak in the holographic projector (maybe projectors need some kind of gas to work.) Nonlethal damage could cause a shutdown without killing the SRO. Disease, death effects, and poison could be balanced with technological variants, like EMP attacks, hacking or computer viruses. I'm not worried about android's immunities as much because they are bio-mechanical, that's the price of trying to imitate life too closely.
The other extreme case I think is Trox, but in that case I think it's OP enough that splitting up its abilities over level makes sense.
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I mean, in my case, I've never really been worried about loss of immunities. I've been worried about loss of flavor :'D
Like I was super disappointed as automaton to figure out I can't smuggle myself by putting myself in box into a vault because I need to "air" despite not "breathing" x'D Plus every time I got disease or poison everyone was just kinda baffled at "how"
Like if you play as skeleton, you'd definitely assume you could survive in situation where living person would die, right?
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So I've gotten a bit excited about this whole "vulnerability profile" idea, and I thought I'd spin it out a bit. I'm not asserting that it necessarily is The Way To Go (it's possible that it'll be too clunky to really be worth it) but I think it's interesting.
First of all, I think it's very sci-fi, and does great things for flavor. It lets you do things like having the scavenger-bot who's pursuing the party SRO but largely ignores the organics in the party unless attacked... or the big, meaty predator who is the opposite. If your party is all one type or the other, that encounter just passes you by.
It lets you do interesting things with augmentation. Like, yeah, you can get that shiny new robot arm, and it has some real benefits... but it also means that you add on another vulnerability profile because suddenly you aren't immune to glitches anymore, and that reclamation bot is interested.
It means that the adventures really want to start to play around with optional encounters. You can have threats and hazards that are moderate, difficult, or trivial depending on what the vulnerability profiles in the group are, and you can have different ones. Like, yeah, the ugly broken-down parts of Absalom Station might well have both areas that aren't safe for robotic characters and areas that aren't safe for organics, but they're different areas, and they gate different things. There's obvious benefit to going through the one that's easy for you, but if your'e willing to take on the more challenging option as well there might be real benefits to having done both.
Of course, you're also going to want to have an option for "no, really, there's disease here, and I don't care who you are" and for that one you have... magic. Seriously, if I'm throwing around a Primal spell to inflict disease on someone, then I'm not summoning a specific bacteria to do the job. I'm drawing out the idea of "being diseased" and imposing it on their form, and letting it shape itself to the vessel. Conceptual hell-plagues don't care what you are. Everyone has a soul. It might actually be a kind of self-affirming moment, in the middle of an absolutely miserable experience. "Oh, yeah. You totally have a soul. Otherwise you wouldn't be trying to vomit out your everything right now." "...but I don't even have a digestive tract." "Sucks, doesn't it?"
So yeah. You'd have some threats that wouldn't care about vulnerability profile (because they were Cheating With Magic, or they had a variety of hot-swappable tech options that let them target whoever) and some that would, and while having a non-standard vulnerability profile might be an advantage in general, it wouldn't be an unmitigated one... and at the same time it would feel impactful.
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It lets you do things like having the scavenger-bot who's pursuing the party SRO but largely ignores the organics in the party unless attacked... or the big, meaty predator who is the opposite. If your party is all one type or the other, that encounter just passes you by.
It means that the adventures really want to start to play around with optional encounters. You can have threats and hazards that are moderate, difficult, or trivial depending on what the vulnerability profiles in the group are, and you can have different ones.
For a campaign that was written after the characters were created, that would be really cool.
But good grief I would hate to be the PFS/SFS scenario writer trying to write an adventure like that into a limited number of pages and needing it to be balanced for any random character composition that shows up.
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For a campaign that was written after the characters were created, that would be really cool.
But good grief I would hate to be the PFS/SFS scenario writer trying to write an adventure like that into a limited number of pages and needing it to be balanced for any random character composition that shows up.
So, I can understand why you say that, but if anything I might argue the other way.
Tuning challenges to your PCs too hard can get frustrating for the player, because it winds up making their choices not matter. I was in a campaign once where the DM thought that The Most Awesome Thing was getting into fights where the party was barely able to squeak out a win, and he wanted to do that every single time.
This had two problems. The first problem was that he didn't actually have the skill to do this honestly, and he didn't trust his players, so the way fights really went was that we'd be attacked by monsters who were played incredibly tactically regardless of what kind of monster they were, with favorable DM rulings, right up until one party member ran out of HP and fell over... at which point they would switch to Moron Mode and allow the party to defeat them handily. So there were real issues there with how our tactics in battle functionally didn't matter. "Someone falls over and then you win" was going to be the result every single time regardless.
The second problem was that even if he'd had the level of skill necessary to pull this off consistently without the obvious cheating it would have been frustrating and disappointing as players. Your skill in character design doesn't matter. Your tactical skill doesn't matter. Everything will be arranged perfectly to give you the desired level of success regardless of how well you perform. Your choices don't matter. That's not what a healthy game is supposed to look like.
So now, back to your response... "Balanced" shouldn't be a straightjacket. It's okay to have encounters that are more or less challenging based on character design choices, as long as there's a reasonable level of challenge overall. It's okay to be able to trivialize certain threats as long as it doesn't happen too often and there's still plenty of threat to go around once you're done. Now, you do need to maintain a degree of balance between the players, so if being a robot gives you a spotlight-generating advantage in one place, it should make your life harder somewhere else... but there's some flexibility there.
As a player, having a moment when your ancestry actually matters is cool. (The same goes for all of your other choices, but we're talking about ancestries here.) It shouldn't dominate the narrative, but having it actually matter, and not because your GM specifically put in an encounter so that your ancestry could matter in it? That's cool. It feels good.
...and if you're a designer and the story that you want to tell is all about being organic characters facing off against a threat that's especially effective against organic characters? That's the sort of thing that can fit into the character creation guidance for that AP just fine. That's not going to be the case for most APs, though. Heck - I'd bet that there will be a decent number of APs where this stuff doesn't really show up at all.
Now... is it worth it? I'm not going to boldly assert that it is. I'd argue, though, that it's at least interesting enough to consider.
Like I said, for certain things it could be really cool.
I'm not thinking that it would work for Paizo though. I am envisioning writing a scenario and having it rejected because, "It doesn't work if none (or alternatively, all) of the characters have either the constructed trait in their ancestry or have tech augmentations like prosthetics. This encounter gets bypassed entirely, so that doesn't leave enough combat for the scenario quota. And if only one character has the trait, then the entire enemy party focus fires that one character until it fully dies and then leaves the rest alone."
It could be a cool alternate rule though. Or Infinite.
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There is definitely that trying to equalize gameplay of all ancestries as close as possible to the "what would be dangerous to human" does kinda kill off the diversity in them
I kinda just feel skeptical about notion that there is only one solution to this and any other option is something to be dismissed
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There is definitely that trying to equalize gameplay of all ancestries as close as possible to the "what would be dangerous to human" does kinda kill off the diversity in them
I kinda just feel skeptical about notion that there is only one solution to this and any other option is something to be dismissed
The big issue is organized play because you might not know who is playing what until 5 minutes before the game starts, and you can't just homebrew to fix things in organized play like you can in a home game.
Instead of banning some species from organized play, like SROs are currently, what if some species were listed as not playable unless a scenario says otherwise? This way some scenarios could be written to work with including SROs and be labeled as such. This could be applied separately or in groups for any problematic species.