Notes from the playtest: Guns

[Teridax]

Taking a slight break from writing class feedback after the Solarian, Soldier, and Witchwarper (plus playtest notes for the Barathu ancestry) to discuss one of the core aspects of the Starfinder playtest: the guns. How do they hold up? How did the new traits and mechanics feel to playtest? What state is the game's ranged meta in at the moment? Here are my findings from about a month of playtesting, which I'll split my post into sections, spoiler, and add a TL;DR just so it's all a bit easier to navigate. Some of the recent errata addressed some concerns I had, which I'll note in my feedback, but also raises or highlights other problems, which I'll also note.

Methods:

My playtesting methods were fairly straightforward, as were their limitations:

I initially started by trying to pair as many weapons with as many classes and ancestries as made sense, then experimented a bit with Pathfinder classes, before eventually settling on weapons I felt worked optimally with specific classes. This meant I ended up having far more data on guns like the seeker rifle than others like the streetsweeper.

Because most classes preferred to use guns, and the one melee-focused class in Starfinder used their own weapon, I ended up naturally focusing on guns rather than melee weapons, which is one of the reasons why this thread focuses on guns (that, I think guns are the real meat of Starfinder 2e's combat more than melee weapons).

I initially experimented pairing certain classes with weapons I knew wouldn't suit them (for instance, AoE weapons on the Operative), just to see how they felt and to confirm there weren't any hidden synergies I weren't aware of. As I refined my playtests over time, I ended up settling on more conventional picks.

Because the only class that could make adequate use of advanced weapons was a level 19-20 Operative (with the exception of AoE weapons, which had their own issues), I ended up with only little data around advanced weapons.

Once I ended up playing with different weapons, I eventually settled on the pre-errata seeker rifle as my "default" gun on most martials, not even because the weapon was stronger than alternatives, but because it made fights end faster (and I'll detail my issues with that below). I obviously haven't playtested the post-errata seeker rifle as much.

TL;DR: I started out by varying my weapon usage as much as possible on different classes and ancestries, before eventually settling on a smaller subset of picks. I ended up using the pre-errata seeker rifle and martial guns more than any other type of weapon, because simple weapons were otherwise weaker than martial guns and advanced weapons were mostly inaccessible.

General:

In this section I'll be discussing some of the broader aspects to guns, such as the inclusion of non-physical damage types, ammo, and their progression:

I'm a big fan of including non-physical weapon damage types, as I think this adds more variety to weapons and helped trigger more weaknesses in certain instances. However, this also meant martial characters ended up running up against immunities several times in A Cosmic Birthday, with a few monsters being immune to cold, electricity, or fire, and many creatures and hazards being immune to poison, which limited the appeal of the needler pistol and injection rifle. This to me says that backup weapons are going to be even more of a necessity in Starfinder, as martials will find their weapon getting hard-countered far more often. I don't think needing a backup weapon is a bad thing either, so long as it's made clear from the start that this is an expectation of martial classes in Starfinder in order to function as intended.

Because guns deal less damage than melee weapons and were the centerpiece of combat, it felt like martial damage was weaker overall and slowed down combat, which I'll detail more below. I do think this is more a problem with enemy Hit Points not being tuned around gun damage in Starfinder than a problem with guns, however, and I appreciate that their balance is somewhat close to that of ranged weapons in Pathfinder for compatibility reasons.

A major factor that impacts compatibility, however, is the extra upgrade slot guns get over property runes on archaic weapons. Because each slot means an additional damage upgrade that can be slotted, this creates a power creep problem where starting at level 8, Starfinder weapons get much more of a damage increase than archaic weapons, and end up dealing more damage overall. I would really advise against this extra upgrade slot, and would prefer it if there were alternative ways to customize guns at level 1 that didn't translate to this kind of power creep.

Resistances were a major problem with guns, and often were almost functionally identical to immunities because of their ability to completely negate damage from hits that weren't adding an attribute modifier to their damage rolls. A Corpse Fleet Officer's resistance of 5 to a bunch of different damage types is a big deal at a point where your Strikes are often going to be dealing less than 5 damage on a hit. I'll also raise this issue when discussing the ranged meta below, but I think resistances in Starfinder need to follow a different benchmark from Pathfinder, where the minimum in PF is the medium amount for resistances in SF.

Non-physical damage seems to be costed quite steeply, and these weapons felt weaker overall than their physical counterparts. While I understand the benefit in triggering energy weaknesses, part of the problem was that these weapon also ran equally into resistances and immunities, to the point where the non-physical damage type was much more of a downside than a positive in the case of poison. I feel non-physical damage types ought to be costed neutrally with the exception of strong damage types like force, vitality, void, or spirit, and in the case of poison damage ought to be treated as a downgrade.

Advanced is both a weapon category and a weapons grade, and this ambiguity I think needs to be rectified by renaming the advanced weapons grade to something else (and while we're at it, swap the positions of "paragon" and "ultimate", because ultimate gear is currently not in fact ultimate).

Advanced weapons were almost entirely impossible to playtest properly, because no character could use them adequately outside of a few specific scenarios. Operatives can use advanced guns at the same proficiency rank as martial guns at levels 19-20, plus the Card Slinger at level 15 for what it's worth, and AoE weapons break proficiency entirely (but AoE guns aren't worth using to most characters, which I'll detail further below), but that's it. Ancestry feats that allow the use of a simpler weapon proficiency track for advanced weapons offer no advanced weapons to use for this purpose.

Most of the new weapon groups' critical specialization effects are copies of Pathfinder crit spec effects, and so performed as they should, with one exception: sonic weapons deafen their target on a failed save for an entire minute, whereas every other condition lasts only a round at most (and persistent damage can be removed). This is, for starters, way too strong, but also makes this particular effect one-and-done for encounters, whereas even crit spec effects that deal persistent damage will have you wanting to reapply the effect to the same target.

TL;DR: Non-physical weapons are a great addition to weapons and tactical play but are currently costed too highly in my opinion, and the game doesn't seem to have adjusted its resistances and other NPC stats around the lower damage of guns. Aside from sonic crit specialization being overtuned and the extra upgrade slot on weapons harming compatibility through power creep, the basic 2e framework works well in Starfinder as it does in Pathfinder, though it would've helped to have been able to access advanced weapons more easily for playtesting purposes.

Expend, Magazine, and Reload:

I thought it best to discuss these three aspects of guns in a single section, as I think they all relate to one another and I think form this little island of associated problems at the moment:

In my experience, there were two types of guns: the ones that were likely to require reloading at least once in a fight, and the ones that didn't. The majority of weapons I used fell in the latter category with the exception of particularly drawn-out fights, which to me suggests that some guns are simply not worth the trouble to track how much of their magazine they're expending and when they need to reload.

Because each gun has its own magazine size, expend, and reload value, and this all needs to be used to calculate ammo expenditure with every Strike, tracking gun usage was particularly tedious for NPCs. I think it's okay for a player character to manage their own expenditure, but tracking ammo usage on NPCs both slowed down play quite a bit and often felt completely useless, because they almost always died before needing to reload.

Prior to the latest round of errata, ammo was far too expensive, and even after the errata we got to projectiles, this still remains the case for batteries and petrol tanks. This now creates a weird in-between situation where some weapons seem to have a higher expend just to present some added cost at lower levels, but this is no longer true for projectile weapons, whose ammo is now as cheap as in Pathfinder, so this just makes expend feel all the more finicky and pointless to have around.

Of all the reload 2 weapons in the game, only the reaction breacher and pre-errata magnetar rifle were likely to require reloading during a fight, with the autotarget rifle only running out when making Auto-Fires against multiple targets, and the flamethrower running out only in drawn-out fights. Overall, I felt only the reaction breacher truly warranted its long reload, as the other guns either didn't run out reliably enough for it to trigger in every fight, or have since been errata'd. Now that the seeker rifle is reduced to a magazine of 1, the gun takes an entire round to fire and then reload each time, which is one of the many ways in which I think the gun was overnerfed, even though I haven't yet playtested the errata'd version.

TL;DR: The system of magazine sizes, expends, and reloads bogged down play quite significantly while often having no effect on many guns and NPCs. I feel this is currently one of the major pain points of guns as implemented, as I think these stats make Starfinder's combat much less smooth to run and even more drawn-out than it ought to be. I'd go as far as to suggest removing expend and magazine sizes entirely, making most guns reload 0, and giving a trait to some of the remaining reload guns that let them make 2 or 3 shots before needing to reload, which I think would make for a similar end result while making guns significantly easier to track.

New Traits:

Starfinder adds quite a few new traits to guns, a welcome expansion from Pathfinder's ranged weapons. I'll discuss AoE traits in a separate section, but here are my findings on the rest:

Aeon and caster on the aeon rifle weren't a combo I got to test out much, due to the weapon being advanced, but the traits looked appealing as a means of further customizing weapons and adapting their damage. Worth noting though is that the aeon trait already exists and is used to describe aeon creatures, so that trait might need to be renamed to avoid confusion. It might also be worth moving the spell gem portion of the aeon trait to the caster trait, as a large portion of that trait also relies on having a spell gem slotted.

While I understand the usefulness of the analog trait in blocking out weapon rune usage, the trait added nothing within the context of Starfinder itself and just bloated weapon trait lists. I feel this could've been avoided by just declaring runes to be exclusive to archaic weapons.

Arc did not feature on weapons I used the most frequently, but its extra damage when it triggered felt like a weaker form of splash. I don't think this is a bad thing, as it's nice to have small traits that can be easily added onto weapons, though I also fear that this trait is going to be strictly limited to shock weapons, to the point where it almost feels like a stronger version of this ought to have been implemented as the weapon group's critical specialization effect.

Boost I think could've been a much more fun trait to make use of if martial classes in Starfinder didn't have Strike boost actions already: the Envoy wants to use Get'Em if they want to Strike, the Operative wants to Aim if they want to Strike, and neither the Solarian nor the Soldier really want to use boost weapons, whereas casters wouldn't want to spend two actions boosting then Striking. I think the problem here has more to do with the Envoy and Operative having such rote actions taking up their turns than the boost trait itself, and in a different environment it'd likely feel much more useful. It'd also be interesting to see boost actually add traits rather than damage, but I can understand the current implementation being more conservative.

Breakdown was essentially a non-trait, as assembling the weapon when its light Bulk would prevent you from becoming encumbered would encumber you then and there. It also made no difference on the card slinger, as the weapon already has light Bulk.

Alternative critical effects are one of those interesting ideas that I think need more associated mechanics to showcase: currently, there seems to be little reason to not just put those weapons into the critical trait's weapon group, though this would change if certain options specifically relied on a weapon belonging to a certain group.

My experience with the professional trait is limited to its pre-errata version, though in both cases the trait creates this awkward little proficiency gap specifically with the Operative at levels 13 and 14, where their weapon proficiency outstrips their proficiency in any skill (also, the trait is misspelled on the hammer). Beyond this, this trait looks like an interesting way to incentivize specializing in a certain skill, so I'll be keen to see more weapons with this trait to see how it impacts build choices.

The unwieldy trait felt almost entirely redundant in the vast majority of cases, as the weapons that used it either had the area trait, which meant they could only fire once per round anyway, or had a magazine size of 1, so most classes wouldn't shoot it more than once per round. This was exacerbated by the feats and class features that instructed me to ignore the unwieldy trait when it did apply, which made me feel like this new trait was mostly just a big waste of space that only occasionally barred the use of a reaction. I'd be happy to see this trait removed entirely, as I don't think it has a place in 2e.

TL;DR: Starfinder introduces some interesting traits, particularly the aeon, boost, caster, and professional traits, though my ability to properly test out these traits was limited due to the inaccessibility of advanced weapons and busy action economies of the classes that might want to boost their weapon. Aeon as a trait needs renaming to avoid clashing with aeon creatures, and unwieldy I think needs to be nixed entirely due to being almost entirely redundant.

AoE Weapons:

Since the design of area and automatic weapons was revealed in Field Test #1, I was skeptical of their implementation, and had my concerns regarding how they'd shake out in practice. Playtesting has only worsened my impression of these weapons. I've detailed my lengthy criticisms of AoE guns in multiple other threads, but will list them again here:

Because weapon proficiency doesn't matter on AoE weapons (their saving throws use your class DC), I had total freedom of choice over which ones to pick, on any class. This is not a good thing in my opinion, and is one of the interactions that AoE weapons break.

Unfortunately, for some strange reasons the majority of advanced AoE weapons felt worse than their martial counterparts: The pre-errata magnetar rifle could only target up to three opponents with an Auto-Fire, and even post-errata makes crap Strikes at advanced weapon proficiency, the plasma cannon has worse stats than the stellar cannon in nearly every respect save for its damage die, and the screamer is way too short-ranged for a weapon that can only fire within its first range increment. Even with a full range of options, I ended up going for the stellar cannon and the machine gun on my Soldier, which I felt performed the best overall. If an actually strong advanced AoE weapon were to ever be released, however, it would easily run the risk of invalidating every other AoE weapon due to this, and causing problems if it were strong on any one class irrespective of proficiency.

When I gave one of these weapons to a Pathfinder Commander, they ended up using these weapons better than anyone else besides the Soldier alongside single-action tactics like Reload!, gaining access to more AoE than they could otherwise access despite being a class whose damage is entirely single-target: if AoE weapons didn't have so many problems, I'd consider this a genuine compatibility risk, and the fact that a class with a legendary class DC wasn't enough to redeem AoE weapons is, in my opinion, a damning indictment of those weapons in their current state.

On any other class but the Soldier, AoE weapons did not perform well in my opinion. Even when just a trained DC would've been enough, casters couldn't afford to take two actions to make an attack instead of casting a spell, and martial classes using these weapons dropped significantly in damage output overall, and felt about as rigid as a caster due to needing to spend two actions to do their main thing of attacking, while often operating from only a limited range. Starfinder martials actually did worse overall than Pathfinder martials, surprisingly, because SF2e's martial classes often have to spend at least one action doing their class's thing before taking the rest of their turn, and a three-action rotation was just too inflexible even for a Guns Blazing Envoy.

I significantly disliked the non-interaction between AoE attacks and the bonuses and penalties that normally benefit Strikes, like off-guard or heroism. This came up a few times in my playtests, and made those guns feel shallower overall, while not feeling like real weapons. This also made them subtly even weaker than regular guns than would seem on paper, because they were less likely to increase in accuracy through tactical play.

I ran into a lot of enemies with high Reflex saves, and while I think that makes sense for Starfinder (SF enemies I think ought to have better Ref saves and worse Fort saves than in Pathfinder overall), this made AoE weapons less accurate overall.

Worth noting that even on the Soldier, AoE weapons often fell dramatically in effectiveness due to having a hard range limit on their AoE attacks, another interaction with normal weapon stats that these weapons break (in this instance, range increments). Fighting Amnieka in A Cosmic Birthday when the creature was flying high above ground meant my automatic weapon-wielding Soldier could only make regular Strikes at a steep accuracy penalty, and my area weapon-wielding Soldier couldn't attack with their cannon at all. A similar problem occurred when I made the flying repair drones fly a bit higher than prescribed in the scenario.

To top it all off, one of the consistent issues I ran into with AoE weapons was that in Starfinder's combats, enemies often were spaced too far apart for the AoE bit to kick in. In the Fire Team Fiasco encounter from Field Test #5, for instance, every enemy starts 20 feet away from the next, and the distance only increases as combat plays out. In the instances where I did catch multiple enemies at a time, usually 2 and often with the help of a graviton Solarian, it still didn't feel like this amazing burst of damage for the actions I was spending, even if it was satisfying catching more than one enemy in my AoE.

On a more minor note, I found it tiresome for the Soldier's entries in particular to keep repeating "Area Fire or Auto-Fire". I find it strange that these two extremely similar types of weapons that basically do the same thing (range and expend aside, Auto-Fire is functionally just a cone Area Fire) required different rules, which added a lot of text to the Soldier's entry especially.

While it didn't come up often, the interaction between Disarm and AoE attacks is ambiguous, as they don't make attack rolls. I ruled in favor of Disarm applying the penalty to the DC, but can't confirm whether this is RAW for sure.

Towards the latter portions of my playtests, I experimented with homebrew and house rules to see what impact they'd have over regular gameplay. One such instance was implementing AoE weapons as regular guns with various traits that let them deal splash damage on their Strikes, and the result was a significant improvement to their gameplay, especially to the Soldier after adjusting the class around this. This also to me suggests that AoE weapons would be much more usable if they had the flexibility of regular weapons and just had the interactions of regular weapons overall.

TL;DR: AoE weapons in my experienced performed so poorly that I don't believe they are fit for purpose as written. They are clunky, altogether weak, and don't actually feel like real weapons so much as a different mechanic altogether shoehorned into a few guns, breaking several basic interactions along the way that risk causing even bigger problems further down the line (if an actually strong advanced AoE gun gets added, for instance, literally anyone could take it). Because the Soldier is made to use these weapons, these are a major contributing factor to the problems I experienced with the class in playtesting. As loath as some people would be to see this, I very much recommend Paizo try implementing these weapons as regular guns that deal splash damage in bursts, cones, and lines alongside their Strike damage, perhaps even also add the agile trait to automatic guns, as trying out versions of these guns significantly improved the gameplay of AoE weapons in my experience.

Ranged Meta:

In this section I'll go over the ranged meta overall, as right now I think there's some room for improvement:

For starters, I can confirm that the ranged meta was a thing in my games. Characters defaulted to guns because their mechanics often worked better with those and they started a distance away from their opponents, and in some encounters it was literally impossible to fight in melee. This part of the ranged meta I think is a success.

The ranged meta, however, is incredibly slow. Enemies seem to use the same Hit Point and resistance benchmarks as for Pathfinder despite gun damage being much lower than melee damage overall, and for this reason combat ended up being much more drawn-out than in Pathfinder. I think NPCs need to operate on a lower benchmark of HP in Starfinder than in Pathfinder.

For a similar reason, my party didn't generally feel really threatened in ranged combat, because most classes seemed to have really over-padded defenses, especially the casters. It was easier for the enemy to focus the casters than in Pathfinder combat, but this I think was due to the Solarian and Soldier failing to draw adequate attention to themselves and thus "wasting" their own defenses. If those classes could tank like their Pathfinder counterparts, the Mystic and Witchwarper wouldn't need their current inflated defenses, and cloth casters from Pathfinder would be able to thrive better too.

The ranged meta also felt really repetitive in my experience. It's very easy for characters to entrench themselves in cover and just not leave, and because often ended up shooting then taking cover from the same position, combat generally felt really static, fairly shallow, and much less dynamic than melee combat in Pathfinder. The additional AC everyone was getting dragged out combat for even longer, as nearly everyone missed more often. I can understand Pathfinder not really needing to flesh out its ranged-versus-ranged combat, but Starfinder I think needs to add mechanics around ranged combat that encourage more dynamic positioning and punish staying behind the same piece of cover for too long.

As mentioned with AoE weapons, enemies rarely end up getting close to each other, unless they're melee or some specific mechanic incentivizes them to do so. This obviously didn't favor AoE weapons, but also meant AoE spells were trickier to pull off than in Pathfinder, though I did get to facilitate this a bit more with a graviton Solarian. There's perhaps room to incentivize people to group together more in general.

Later in my playtests, I experimented with a few extra general extra rules of play: one was to make enemies Taking Cover off-guard to attacks from angles where they didn't benefit from cover, and this made positioning much more interesting by encouraging characters to move to a position where they could literally catch an opponent off-guard. RAW, moving to negate someone's cover also negates your own cover, so you're generally giving up an advantage similar to the one you're hoping to gain, whereas this tipped the scale in favor of the aggressor, while still leaving situations where taking cover was the right thing to do for just one round.

Another couple of extra mechanics I experimented with was one universal action that let you help an adjacent ally Take Cover, and another universal action that let you give an adjacent ally a circumstance bonus to their next attack's damage roll and let it partially ignore cover. These actions encouraged everyone to group up more, at the very least into pairs, and the damage action sped up combat a fair bit too.

TL;DR: The ranged meta exists in Starfinder in that guns were the default weapon to use, but I don't think is entirely successful as implemented right now. Ranged fights are slow and repetitive due to the lower damage of guns and the overuse of cover, which to me suggests 2e needs to add more meat to the bones of its ranged-versus-ranged combat, obviously not a focus for Pathfinder but definitely one for Starfinder. Defenses need to be deflated in SF, and I think there needs to be additional mechanics added to encourage grouping up and reward good positioning, while punishing long-term entrenchment behind the same piece of cover.

The big TL;DR to all this is that I think Starfinder's gun-based combat has some solid elements owing to its 2e framework, but also quite a few shaky bits that will need refining. Some new mechanics added to Starfinder's weapons I think need reworks or outright removal, as they didn't pan out well in practice, and above all I think the game really needs to speed up its combat beyond its current pace, mainly by deflating enemy defensive stats and discouraging excessive entrenchment in cover. Other players have noted that guns felt weak and need buffing, and while I do think guns could be improved in many ways (chiefly, by streamlining them with the removal of the magazine and expend statistics for the most part, and by making most guns reload 0), the underlying issue I'd say is more that Starfinder needs to harmonize its NPCs with its gun-based gameplay, which I think ought to mean lower HP and resistances overall. I think one of the challenges the current playtest missed was adapting 2e's framework to ranged-centric gameplay: Pathfinder doesn't flesh out ranged combat terribly much, but Starfinder really needs to if it wants to be on the same level of tactical play, in my opinion.

[ElementalofCuteness]

You don't want to balance for the gun-meta, w2hich may or may not exist at this point. If you some how balance for that then you run into the issue of melee being extra spicy and melee is already strong. You don't want to see the secret meta being a monk who moves like 60ft each move section or a similar class who can gap close but do it with a stronger weapon.

However guns having reload is just clunky and wastes turns for no gain. It seems off but not 100% terrible, I just can't put my finger on why it feels weird.

I doubt AoE Weapons will ever be good, they are this weird state of being 1 half weapon, 1 half cantrip for martials which bring up the question. What is 4d10, 50ft Stellar Cannon vs 12d4 , 60ft Needle Dart? Technically they should be stronger then cantrips but in pratice they somehow don't... Perhaps they need more then 4 Weapon Dice for a change.

[Teridax]

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

You don't want to balance for the gun-meta, w2hich may or may not exist at this point. If you some how balance for that then you run into the issue of melee being extra spicy and melee is already strong. You don't want to see the secret meta being a monk who moves like 60ft each move section or a similar class who can gap close but do it with a stronger weapon.

The ranged meta very much does exist, at least in my experience. If you try going for a melee playstyle, you will spend most of your actions moving to your targets when you could have made ranged Strikes instead, exposing yourself the whole way through when you could be behind cover, would be exceptionally MAD, and wouldn't have much synergy with your own abilities as a Starfinder class. Even the Solarian struggled due to their lack of gapclosers, and some fights made it literally impossible to fight in melee due to enemies being able to fly and shoot. Pathfinder classes being able to leverage their mobility and deal high damage after spending so much of their turn moving into range are just as valid as a Solarian doing the same, and melee-focused characters wrecking face in melee does not prevent the fact that melee is something you opt into in Starfinder, not the default. Might as well balance enemies so that they're not bullet sponges.

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

However guns having reload is just clunky and wastes turns for no gain. It seems off but not 100% terrible, I just can't put my finger on why it feels weird.

In my experience, I think part of it came from the feeling that a reload was looming on my character, but often never really materialized, because the fight ended before then. Effectively, I was spending a lot of time tracking ammo expenditure and calculating when one or another gun was going to require reloading, only for that time to often be wasted.

ElementalofCuteness wrote:

I doubt AoE Weapons will ever be good, they are this weird state of being 1 half weapon, 1 half cantrip for martials which bring up the question. What is 4d10, 50ft Stellar Cannon vs 12d4 , 60ft Needle Dart? Technically they should be stronger then cantrips but in pratice they somehow don't... Perhaps they need more then 4 Weapon Dice for a change.

It would be closer to 4d10 + 6 + 4d6 due to weapon specialization/greater weapon specialization (the latter of which the Soldier is currently missing), plus weapon upgrades, so it's 38.5 damage on a hit compared to Needle Darts' 30 damage (and you get half damage on a successful save), so while it's still not great as far as AoE damage goes, and probably still below focus spell damage, it's still above cantrip damage. The issue I think comes precisely from bending these guns out of shape, so I'd say making these work even less like regular weapons is the last thing to do to actually fix these.

[Ascalaphus]

So my first impressions after playing the first "level" of Cosmic Birthday with an envoy;

- Most guns have 5 shots in them, but for some it's obscured by a "capacity 10/spend 2" thing. I understand that later on batteries get bigger so it gets bigger eventually. But do we really need "spend 2"? Couldn't we just start with capacity-5 batteries? Let's get rid of a layer of complexity here.

- 5 shots, together with Get 'Em and having to move from time to time, means you're not going to run out of shots until at least round 3, maybe 4. So for most combats it doesn't matter. By the time we get 10-shot batteries it really won't matter.

- We all hated the idea of buying ammo. The Prismeni feat that lets you use Electric Arc to recharge batteries is extremely popular with our group.

All of this is bringing me to the question: should this degree of fine-grained ammo tracking really be in the game?

What, from a game design perspective, do we gain from ammo tracking?

The main thing that comes to mind for me is the "what if you crashed on a planet far far away and you were running low on ammo, wouldn't that be exciting?" and sure, that's kind of a classic sci-fi trope. But how often does it come up? If this is really a serious fear, aren't players going to do things like stock up on huge amounts of batteries? Then it'll require even more GM railroading to make it happen.

So I'm wondering, aren't we putting a lot of burden on the standard game, for the exceptional situation?

[Teridax]

I agree with the above criticism. While I can understand wanting parity with Pathfinder and enabling ammo tracking for the sake of certain feats, nonmagical ammo tracking there is so trivial that it can be easily handwaved. Reloading is generally not a problem either because outside of a couple of guns with a specific traits, ranged weapons either don't need to reload at all or just need to reload after each shot, making that easy to track as well.

By contrast, Starfinder generates a whole bunch of stats that all lead to the basic result of certain guns not needing to reload over an entire fight. I suspect more GMs might eventually handwave reload requirements and nonmagical ammo expenditure there too, but the danger with Starfinder's weapons is that some weapons are in fact meant to have meaningful reloads, so it wouldn't be a good idea to handwave all of them.

[HolyFlamingo!]

I really like most of the suggestions here, except for decreasing enemy defenses. As a GM of both systems, I don't want my cool aliens to instantly fold against a barbarian. Increasing the damage output for everyone would probably feel a lot cooler.

Like, say we did actually reduce everyone's defenses, right? We'd still have the problem of rolling a 1 on damage, which feels wimpy regardless of how many HP the other guy has. Maybe add dex or half-dex back into damage as a special treat? Or something. Hell, anything to make them competitive with the stone-aged bows and arrows that still feel better to use most of the time, preferably other than a bunch of weird caveats baked into class design.

[Teridax]

The problem with increasing damage is that this creates a whole bunch of knock-on effects: if you're increasing ranged damage in Starfinder but not in Pathfinder, that then raises the problem of melee weapons in Starfinder, which would deal comparatively less damage, and ranged weapons in Pathfinder, which would also deal comparatively far less damage: the last thing 2e needs is for an Operative to show up to Pathfinder games and start outdamaging the melee greatsword Fighter, or any similar problem where melee builds or ranged builds in one edition are invalidated by others.

I also think that ultimately, increasing player damage and decreasing enemy HP are two ways of going about the same thing: if we're buffing everyone's damage, that decreases time-to-kill in the same way as reducing enemy HP; the benefit to reducing enemy HP is that you don't need to upend the system's entire weapon math for this to work. The assumption that Starfinder enemies would fold instantly to Pathfinder enemies I think misses the fact that Starfinder enemies, which are generally ranged, would increase time-to-kill against themselves for Pathfinder classes by simple virtue of requiring those classes to spend actions getting in range first, which as the Solarian demonstrates does not come for free.

With that said, I'd support adding some more mechanics that enable more damage from range: I think one thing that really needs to happen is for there to be some ranged equivalent to flanking, in that characters ought to have an incentive to position themselves relative to one another at range in order to deal more damage and apply certain useful conditions. I also feel there could be a couple more universal actions that ought to encourage people to group up when fighting at range, and one such action I came up with let you give an ally a circumstance bonus to their next shot's damage equal to half your level and have it partially bypass cover. In general, making cover something that's not great to entrench yourself in for the entire encounter would also deflate enemy defenses, and thus speed up combat.

[Ascalaphus]

Hmm, some kind of crossfire mechanic? That makes your life-in-cover harder if enemies are firing at you from different directions? (To be measured as coming in across other sides of your square maybe?)

[HolyFlamingo!]

Replying to Teridax: I absolutely agree on needing baked-in, universal options for breaking people out of cover. Shootouts should not be boring; you need pressure and movement.

I can see your point on enemies having lighter HP totals proportional to how good they are at sniping (and that's a good balance point overall), but the monsters are what I'm here for as a GM, so I'm nervous about making that the primary solution. Like, it's not that creatures are too bulky, it's that all the SF2 weapons are either awkward or wimpy. I don't think there's any harm in tuning them to be a smidge stronger. This way, better tech would feel like an actual improvement, and anachronistic characters could still feel good, as they'd get to use them too.

Your point about not wanting operatives to outperform fighters is noted, as well. I think part of what helps in that regard is that operatives are pretty fail defensively, with worse saving throws, lower health, and fewer options should an enemy get into melee with them. And while it's true that, as you said, getting to them is not free, they'll probably have a really bad time against anything that survives long enough to do it. I also think it's important to note that operatives are only doing damage most of the time, as apart from Hair Trigger (which will likely be nerfed), they lack any lockdown or crowd control potential.

[Teridax]

Re: additional rules and universal actions, here are the ones I used in the later stages of my playtests to compare them to my unmodified gameplay experience:

Cover Exposure:
Taking cover exposes you from angles where you’re not covered. If you’re Taking Cover at the end of your turn, you’re off-guard to attacks against which you don’t benefit from cover until the start of your next turn.

Provide Cover (One-Action):
You pull a willing adjacent ally into cover, or help them retreat further into cover. The ally Takes Cover.

Spot (One-Action):
You help a willing adjacent ally’s shot find its mark against a designated target you’re observing. Choose how you help your ally, which gives Spot a corresponding trait: you can help your ally with advice, adding the auditory trait, by pointing to the target, adding the visual trait, or by using an appendage to guide their attack, adding the manipulate trait. The GM might allow other ways to help your ally.

Until the start of your next turn, the ally’s next ranged attack against the target gains a circumstance bonus to damage equal to half your level (minimum 1). A target benefiting from greater cover against the attack has the benefits of standard cover against it instead, and a target benefiting from standard cover has the benefits of lesser cover instead.

Cover Exposure provided the "ranged flanking" I was looking for by encouraging characters to try to move behind enemy lines or at other angles that would expose enemies for a significant relative bonus to their attack roll. In the case of the Operative, I found it synergized so well with their speed that I felt it provided much more interesting gameplay than Aim, which I consider a boring damage steroid. The Spot action I found encouraged both allies and enemies to at the very least pair up, which benefited the Soldier especially, and the circumstance bonus to damage made ranged shots feel somewhat more reliable, while adding damage overall.

HolyFlamingo! wrote:

I can see your point on enemies having lighter HP totals proportional to how good they are at sniping (and that's a good balance point overall), but the monsters are what I'm here for as a GM, so I'm nervous about making that the primary solution. Like, it's not that creatures are too bulky, it's that all the SF2 weapons are either awkward or wimpy. I don't think there's any harm in tuning them to be a smidge stronger. This way, better tech would feel like an actual improvement, and anachronistic characters could still feel good, as they'd get to use them too.

I can definitely empathize with not wanting monsters to die too quickly, though so far I've dealt with the opposite problem where fights often dragged on for far longer than encounters in Pathfinder. This didn't change when employing Pathfinder classes either; what they had in melee damage they generally lacked in mobility, to the point where I generally had much more success opting into less damaging ranged builds. Even the Monk and Swashbuckler with their mobility still relied on ranged attacks when dealing with flying enemies, so the sliding scale between damage and target access is preserved there in spite of severe imbalances one way or another among Starfinder classes.

As for guns, I agree they could do with some improvements, but part of the issue is that they're already stronger than archaic weapons by dint of having an upgrade slot at level 1, and I personally don't actually consider that a good thing. There's this general assumption that high-tech weaponry absolutely must outperform archaic weaponry, but I don't think that works very well in a game system that aims for compatibility between the two. Rather, I think the important part is that those types of weapons ought to feel different, and the system of grades and upgrades instead of runes could help with that. I also feel pure damage is not necessarily the best way to improve guns: rather, I'd prefer to remove the stuff currently holding them back unnecessarily (namely expend and reloads on many guns), while maximizing their uniqueness over archaic ranged weapons, such as by making automatic guns agile, implementing more splash traits, and just going further with some of the new traits SF introduces.

[Ascalaphus]

A game mechanic that made a deep impression on me was the way the Shadowrun computer games handled ammo.

Guns had a capacity and expend, and you needed to reload them from time to time. However, you did NOT track ammo in your inventory. Ammo was limitless. So it was only tracking the time until you had to spend actions reloading.

I rather enjoyed that; before you go through an ominous door, you spend some time going through your team making sure all the guns are fully loaded. It creates a nice feeling of "getting ready", without getting into the weeds of tracking all that ammo.

All of that just to show: tracking ammo as inventory is a game design choice, not a law of nature that must be followed.

And that's also why I like your proposal to only track shots for the guns with few shots until reload. It really isn't necessary for the game to be completely symmetric and count every gun's ammo. That's far too bean counter for a game we play for fun.

[moosher12]

Frankly, while I understand the idea of simplifying the system by making bullets free. It's a system that neither myself nor my players enjoy. As they enjoy a light bit of simulation.

A lot of my and my player's draw to the 2E system, is after all, because it simulates things that D&D does not bother to, and that it enables us to quantify character concepts that D&D could not.

Granted, I don't think tables should not do this. Far from it. If anything, I'd like to see it listed as an optional rule in the GM Core to ignore buying ammo. As I think it would be common enough it should have a segment.

But I'd rather the rules for maintaining weapon ammunition be there, but be ignorable, than them not be there, and have to tack on ammo maintenance, as frankly, most optional rules lack the perceived polish that main content has, because it's optional content, there is less pressure to make it feel as good as it can feel.

[exequiel759]

I would love for them to remove reloading (with the exception of weapons balanced around reloading) because I also felt that while playing it really didn't matter? The only one in the group which was constantly reloading was me and only because I had Hair Trigger (so I was making like 3 attacks per round in a sense) but I feel Paizo probably wont remove it because reloading makes sense from a "realism" perspective.

Before somene mentions it, I hate talking about realism in TTRPGs because I feel most of the people that use the "realism" card don't understand that even in the low levels characters can do stuff thats beyond superhuman, but in this case I mean realism in how something works in real word. For example, a greatsword IRL is a heavy weapon that cuts down foes, so mechanically its two-handed weapon that deals a d12 slashing damage. A big part of gun "iconography" is reloading, so I wouldn't be surprised that, if Paizo went in the direction to remove reloading, to replace it with something else.

If I had to choose a replacement, I think a mechanic similar to firearm's misfire could be appropiate. Like, weapons don't need to be reloaded because its assumed you take proper care of them, though some effects could cause a "misfire". However, this would only work for energy weapons and not projectile weapons, though in that case I guess they could just make the magazines bigger to the point of it not mattering in 99% of situations.

[moosher12]

Usually some folks like me don't mean realism as in you can't be heroic. We more mean realism as we do enjoy a degree of immersive equipment management.

I've had one player say it irks them that there is no rough estimate to what fuel costs, because they want to manage that sort of thing.

I've had another player that was annoyed that pouches were removed from Pathfinder 2E. because he likes to outfit his character with individual accessories where every item has a place.

Though now that I think about it. I think we are using the wrong terminology. I think some players are asking less for realism and more for immersion and verisimilitude. Stuff like looking forward to going to town to do daily tasks like shopping for ammunition, keeping your car fueled. Visiting a gas station, buying gas, and walking out with a Big Gulp and an Akiton Bar before driving off with your party.

You can't become buddies with your local ammunition dealer if you never have to refill your ammo, after all. You won't think to visit a gas station and impulse buy some snacks for the party if your car doesn't need fuel.

These small, menial things, needing to eat, needing to keep your weapons and vehicles fed, it gives opportunities to live in the world, have light, personal interactions that are beyond the plot, the places where the story and characters can really develop depth.

[OrochiFuror]

If you only needed a small handful of batteries, and say you pull a used one out and put it into a charger so when you need it again it's full. Then once in a while have some downtime and fix up or replace your charger and/or batteries at a gun store. Best of both worlds as the latter part can be scaled up or down in importance for the group.