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After looking over A Cosmic Birthday it's obvious a big part of the playtest is hazards. Many of the hazards can be disabled with skills, crafting being the most common with computers, and thievery being the next common, especially in hazards dealing with technology. Other skills may apply depending on the hazard. Many of the hazards can be disabled through damage but have hardness you have to get through. Dealing with hardness came up in anotehr thread and got me thinking. In the class description there is a section saying "During combat... you" "During social encounters... you"
So my question is During hazard encounters...
what might each class do?
What skills might that class have that would be useful?
What weapons a class has access to might be useful?
Does a class have any special abilities that would be useful?
Useful could be spotting a hazard, figuring out how it works, or disabling it.
Another question is what equipment that any class can use that might be useful for dealing with hazards?
The answer is always the same: try to improvise something relevant while the two people who have the right skills slowly make one check per round each. Class features generally don't interact with hazards, so listing it out class-by-class doesn't really do much.
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The answer is always the same: try to improvise something relevant while the two people who have the right skills slowly make one check per round each. Class features generally don't interact with hazards, so listing it out class-by-class doesn't really do much.
Class plays into this because some classes have more skills, and some skills are more commonly taken by some classes. Also some classes start as expert in perception which is needed to spot some hazards. For hazards with high hardness, some classes are more likely to deal higher damage. There isn't one right answer to this but there are trends.
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A Cosmic Birthday has 20 Hazards, I counted ways to interact with all the hazards and compared them to the 1st-level pre-gen characters. I looked at perception to detect the hazards, skills to disable them, and max damage to be able to beat the hardness of some hazards.
Proficiency level needed to detect hazard
Untrained: 1
Trained: 17
Trained or detect magic: 1
Expert: 2
Zemir Witchwarper: Trained +3
Dea Solarian: Expert +5
Obozaya Soldier: Trained +3
Navasi Envoy: Trained +4
Iseph Operative: Expert +7
Chk Chk Mystic: Trained +7
So class matters when spotting hazards with an expert-level stealth DC. Solarian and Operative both start as expert in perception. Mystics have an advantage from high wisdom but lack expert in perception to find the harder hazards. Note: Out of the 22 simple hazards in the GM core 8 require an Expert to detect.
The most common skills used to disable hazards, followed by the number of PCs with that skill.
Computers: 9 / 2
Crafting: 9 / 1
Thievery: 8 / 2
Arcana: 4 / 1
Occultism: 3 / 1
Religion: 2 / 1
Acrobatics: 2 / 4
Athletics: 2 / 4
Diplomacy: 1 / 3
The number of skills able to disable a hazard from A Cosmic Birthday by character.
Zemir Witchwarper: 7
Dea Solarian: 6
Obozaya Soldier: 2
Navasi Envoy: 18
Iseph Operative: 17
Chk Chk Mystic: 10
Some skills cover a MUCH larger number of hazards than others. The number of pre-gens with each skill is fairly even disturbed, but the number of hazards each character can deal with varies greatly.
Out of 20 hazards, 13 can be disabled with direct damage, of which 11 have a hardness ranging from 2 to 12. One hazard can only be hit by indirect attacks and has a hardness of 10
The number of hazards that can be hit by max non-crit damage from a weapon from the pre-gen character sheets to get through hardness.
Zemir Witchwarper: 8
Dea Solarian: 11
Obozaya Soldier: 13
Navasi Envoy: 8
Iseph Operative: 8
Chk Chk Mystic: 11
This makes up for Obozaya lacking the needed skills. The average hardness is 6, but for the highest hardnesses Obozaya would need to roll an 11 or higher on a d12 with +2 damage.
I got more ideas on this but out of time for now...
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Ugh. I am getting the old you can't find traps unless you're a rogue vibes.
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Ugh. I am getting the old you can't find traps unless you're a rogue vibes.
Looking into this I got that vibe at first, thinking only 1 or 2 classes would be good at finding hazards, but then I looked at PF2e classes and there is a lot of them that start as experts in perception.
Barbarian, Bard, Fighter, Gunslinger, Investigator, Ranger, Rogue, Swashbuckler, Thaumaturge.
I'm hoping mechanics get experts in perception too, because mechanical hazards are likely to be very common in futuristic settings, also you can't fix a starship if you can't find the problems with it.
I'd like to see some hazards list skills that could be used in addition to perception, like using engineering when looking for mechanical hazards, arcana when looking for magical hazards, or warfare lore for looking for mines. That would give more classes ways to help find hazards specific to their skills.
Another option would be for tech items that could help to scan for hazards too.
Also, not all hazards have to be hidden, it's not hard to notice a reactor core alarm going off when it's overheating, but using the hazards rules could be a way to make fixing it more interesting than just a simple skill check.
In theory, I think hazards chould be more common in Starinfder, a starship or space station is basically a large mechanical hazard with living spaces in it, surrounded by the hazardous environment of space.
On disabling hazards, I'm getting the feeling that Thievery as a skill to disable hazards is mostly used for PF2e compatibility, every hazard in A Cosmic Birthday that used Thievery had either computer or crafting as one of the skill options. That's a good sign that disabling hazards is not just for Rogues.
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I don't like the hard coded you have to be an expert/master/ to do a thing. It means if you don't have thievery maxed out you may as well not have it. Being a master at something should come with some kind of mechanical advantages, if +2 isn't enough to be good at that making the "bonus" just basic functionality just feels like a cop out.
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I think it's less about the +2 and more about if someone has the level of training to disarm the trap. Out of the 20 Cosmic Birthday hazards, only 2 required an expert. All the simple hazard examples in the GM core that have experts in them are 5th level or higher, even the 19th level hazard only has expert. I think it's because everyone is trained in perception, using experts is a way to show training is required.
I'm still wrapping my head around it, all of these play out slightly differently, for who or when a check is made.
Stealth +5 (expert)
Stealth +5 (trained)
Stealth +5 (trained) or detect magic
Stealth +5 (untrained)
Stealth DC 5
Stealth DC 5 (trained)
Stealth DC 5 (expert)
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If I'm reading the rules right it goes something like this
No minimum proficiency rank.
Automatically receive a check to detect hazards
roll a secret Perception check against the hazard’s Stealth DC
Stealth DC 5 anyone
Stealth DC 7 (trained) anyone trained
Stealth DC 6 (expert) anyone expert
Stealth DC 12 (expert) anyone expert
With a minimum proficiency rank.
Roll only if someone is actively searching,
(using the search activity while exploring or the Seak action in an encounter)
and only if they have the listed proficiency rank or higher.
Stealth +5 (untrained) anyone with + 5 or higher Perception
Stealth +7 (trained) anyone trained with + 7 or higher Perception
Stealth +6 (expert) anyone expert with + 6 or higher Perception
Stealth +12 (expert) anyone expert with + 12 or higher Perception
Here are a few examples that show how strange things can get.
Stealth DC 30 (or 0 if the trap door is disabled or broken) or detect magic
Stealth +16 (expert) to detect magical sensor; noticing the wheel has a DC 0
Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (master) to notice the control panel
Stealth +12 (trained) (or -10 and no minimum proficiency if the surface is disturbed)
With that kind of flexibility looks like they should be able to make variations that allow checks for different skills that might help some classes out once in a while for certain types of hazards.