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Because we're kind of late to the party the surveys are down, so this is pretty much the only place left to post my thoughts on the playtest that we just ended tonight.
Playtest party was 1 Human Soldier, 1 Human Operative, 1 Barathu Solarian and 1 Pahtra Mystic.
General things:
- Strength is overly weak in this edition due to increased engagement range and improved ranged weapons if the weapons are indicative of the final weapon selection that will be available. My recommendation is to limit augmentations to Strength + Constitution, rather than Constitution + 1, as a lot of augmentations are in the realm of mobility, which is traditionally the domain of Strength.
- As all items need to be wielded to be used, at present using multiple arms for consumables is actually worse than using only two arms since Switch Active Hands is two actions back and forth, while using Swap empties your hand after using a consumable, and is generally equal to using two arms for everything else - except you drop more items if downed, which feels like a straight downgrade. Suggest allowing multi-arm characters to pick up a number of items equal to one per pair of arms, and explicitly using the word 'wield' only for weapons and armour.
- Auto-fire is asymmetric as it has the Attack trait, but doesn't actually involve making an Attack roll (such that Strike-Autofire is strictly better than Autofire-Strike). It should either take an untyped penalty to Reflex DC of a magnitude equal to half the multiattack penalty rounded down, or have the Attack trait removed entirely.
- Zero gravity flight has an identity crisis where it can't decide whether it is dependent on an atmosphere or on a gravity source, because atmospheric zero G environments exist (like grav chambers) and non-atmospheric gravity environments exist (like the external surface of a large space station, or even in a zero G environment under the influence of spells like Personal Gravity). Wings and the like should be dependent on the existence of an atmosphere, not the existence of gravity.
- Glitching is heavily underpowered, affecting the value of spells, feats and the like which inflict it. The DC should be raised to 12 plus the Glitching value to be in line with Clumsy or Enfeebled 1 - and even so it would still be harder to use due to working only on tech creatures and objects. Since 'Stunned 1 for the round' is referenced, this also leads to the age-old unresolved controversy of what happens when a character is Stunned on its own turn, where some GMs rule that the only action lost at the start of the next turn (with one variant where reactions and free actions are blocked until then and one which doesn't affect them), and some rule that the round ends outright leading to a total effective loss of 4 actions, leading to unnecessary GM variance. We use the interpretation of reaction and free action blocks with the only action loss being at the start of the next round at our table.
Race specific (actually playtested):
Barathu:
- Adaptable limbs is an ancestry feat tax; 5 speed is too slow for use with Stride otherwise and a number of features and spells work only with Stride, not Fly. Plus, 15 speed for one feat is ridiculously high. The base land speed should be raised to at least 15 feet, and the feat can then raise it to the full 20 feet.
- Fluid anatomy's cooldown is too long and should be reduced to 10 minutes.
Pahtra:
- Krreyvash: The only level 1 biotech augmentation is the gill sheath, so it might as well be called the catfish; at the same time, it does not restrict replacing this with a non-biotech augmentation later on with its current wording. Would recommend altering wording to specifically limit it to biotech augmentations, and to make sure there's other relevant choices in the final release.
- It is trivial to not be able to pick any level 9 ancestry feat at level 9, so more options need to be added.
Race specific (based on reading which resulted in options not being picked by any player):
Android
- Networked Androids should explicitly be able to Hack with no hand requirement, at present you still need to hold a device in hand while using shortwave, which doesn't make much sense since said device is the one doing the hacking rather than you.
Shirren
- Communalism's range is too short and should be increased to at least 15 feet, preferably 30.
Vesk
- Opening Roar is not an action, which means a PC with it can both use it *and* another free action triggering on initiative; e.g. PCs with Battle Cry can Battle Cry on top of it to Demoralize a total of 3 creatures, which seems unintended. This should be properly rewritten as a Free Action that triggers on Initiative, so that the limit of one Reaction/Free Action per trigger applies to prevent this kind of thing.
Ysoki
- Cheek Pouches are currently useless as they do not alter hand economy, bulk limits or even make the items in them easier to hide. They should give a +4 circumstance bonus to DCs for others to Seek or Steal items in them as long as the Ysoki does not talk and/or allow for ingested consumables to be consumed directly from the pouch without requiring it to be moved to the hand first.
- Overcrowd is asymmetric; it should also allow for a Small ally to move into the space of an Ysoki with it.
Borai
- Etheric is wrongly written; Void Healing does not allow creatures with it to be 'healed by void damage', but to be 'healed by void effects that heal undead'. At present it can be misinterpreted to allow any void damage effect to heal its user using the Specific Rule clause.
- Metabolize Soul scales extremely badly, and should be changed to 1d8 plus twice your level.
Prismeni
- Drift-Touched gets worse at 13th level as the Prismeni is unable to ignore the standard cover granted by it as currently written; it should either give the player the choice to use standard cover or concealment and/or explicitly allow the Prismeni to ignore it.
Class specific (actually playtested):
Mystic
- Vitality Network regeneration being based on skill proficiency (which can be non-Wis skills) but spellcasting being based on Wisdom across the board, plus the strange case of Expert proficiency doing nothing for network regeneration, encourages players to not actually place any ability scores in the skill used for the Connection but raise it anyway, which is thematically jarring. In addition, while 4 points per round is incredibly high at level 1, 8 points per round is incredibly irrelevant at level 20. Would recommend altering network regeneration to a half player level rounded down with a minimum of 1 per round instead, and altering the Mystic casting ability score to be the ability score of the skill used by the Connection - i.e., a Rhythm mystic will be a Charisma caster.
- Group Chat is vague as to what 'communicate telepathically' means; it's not clear if it also allows for Telepathic Bond-like functions or if it only allows its explicitly declared functions, especially when the idea of 'Chat' involves more than simply status-checking. Should either be renamed to something along the lines of 'Mystic Empathy' if it is meant to be only used for its whitelisted functions, or explicitly specify what 'communication' is meant if it is meant to be used for Telepathic Bond-like communication as well.
- Spot Healing's cost is too high when the healing occurs after the damage. It should either be reduced to exactly the same cost as the Transfer Vitality action, or provide temporary hit points immediately before damage is taken instead at the price of a higher Transfer cost.
- Network Shield's cost is too low; for a main healer, not going down due to damage is valuable enough that this feat is worth taking even if the Transfer Cost is exactly equal to the damage prevented, making this a feat tax at present.
- As Convert Illumination does not counteract the darkness, this can be abused to provide unlimited Hit Points with a single spell limited only by reactions; would recommend it counteracting magical darkness from other sources and automatically ending any magical darkness caused by the mystic. This is especially exploitable in combination with a Solarian with Graviton Corona.
- Network Attunement does nothing as written unless there is another Mystic in the party, it needs to explicitly allow allies to use *the Mystic's* Transfer Reactions.
Operative
- Combining a Ranger-like Aim system with Fighter-tier precision with action compressors with Rogue-like skill feats loads this class with way too many benefits, especially later on when multiple attack penalties can be suppressed, and in combination with Hair Trigger, which is effectively a ranged Reactive Strike. The Operative should have Ranger-tier accuracy at base, not Fighter-tier accuracy.
- Strikers cannot benefit from Aim if making unarmed strikes, which makes their proficiency in them questionably irrelevant, and currently all Agile weapons have 1d4 dice. Would recommend allowing Finesse weapons to also be used by Strikers, and Aim to also benefit unarmed strikes for Strikers.
Solarian
- Given the weapon damage is limited to 1d8, the increased engagement range in Starfinder and the significantly improved ranged weapon options for non-Solarians, Solarians should have Fighter-tier accuracy at base, not Ranger-tier accuracy. To rebalance it, the Binaric Assault Revelation should then impose -1 to hit on both the Solar Flare and Solar Shot.
- Supernova causing friendly fire and Black Hole not causing friendly fire are not currently balanced considering their effects. To account for the friendly fire, Supernova should affect creatures in an emanation of any radius of the player's choice up to a maximum of 30 feet, where any radius beyond 15 feet deals d6, and any radius within 15 feet deals d8.
- Graviton Nimbus Surge is generally worse than useless given the Solarian *wants* enemies to be in melee range, and should be either inverted to pull the triggering creature *closer*, or give the player character a choice.
- Stellar Rush is too restrictive and is unusable in aerial, aquatic and zero-G combat, which makes it extremely situational in a Starfinder context. It should instead allow any two Move actions to be used, not necessarily Stride.
- Shattering Impact's effects are too weak to justify the effective three action cost; the weapon shattering should only occur on a hit and it should add an additional weapon die rather than merely upgrading the die.
Soldier
- Targets which critically fail their save against an Autofire action should also be suppressed, not just targets which fail.
- Overwhelming Assault should impose -6 with the second attack on an Agile weapon, not -7.
Class specific (based on reading which resulted in options not being picked by any player):
Witchwarper
- When sustaining the Quantum Field either directly or through an Anchoring action, the Witchwarper should be given the option to reposition it to some extent, even if not necessarily anywhere within 100 feet. The class is currently highly problematic because in any combat with moving engagements it is necessary for the Witchwarper to explicitly recast the Quantum Field as a full action, which is a cripplingly high action cost for a full caster (although tolerable for a martial class), and makes Zone feats extremely unwieldy to use unless taken with Quantum Aura or Quantum Transposition. Testing is required to know how much movement is a good idea, but I would posit 10 feet to be a good number to test with.
- Warp Wounds can be triggered by non-Attack effects, but oddly only gives Resistance for Attacks, and should be reworded to just give Resistance against its trigger. This is also one of the only effects capable of dealing unconditional damage even to unwilling enemies with no counterplay, which is overly strong; I would recommend altering it to only deal half of the prevented damage against enemies, but full damage to willing allies.
- Quantum Aura should be a 10 foot emanation from you rather than one 'targeting' you as the latter language implies flat checks are required if the Witchwarper is Blinded, Concealed, Dazzled or Invisible.
Equipment:
- Weapon Upgrades should advance together with the Tracking value of the Weapon, not the number of damage dice. Armor Upgrades should advance together with the AC bonus of the armor, not the Resilient value. At present, weapon and armor effectiveness has uneven jumps, which is especially bad for Weapons as damage dice advance twice at the same time with damage-based Upgrades.
- The effect of Glitching on Tech armor is unclear. It is unknown if it is intended to result in Glitching being placed on its wearer, on Glitching being triggered only if Comms Units or similar items are used, or on Glitching being triggered every time the armor is 'used' by being targeted by an Attack of some sort. We used the second interpretation, but this will lead to very wide table variance.
- It is not clear if Spellshape actions can be used with Spell Ampoules, as they must be used directly before 'casting a spell', but Spell Ampoules Cast a Spell through a Manipulate action instead of the Cast a Spell action, and this should be disambiguated in the Spell Ampoule section itself.
- It is not clear what the hand economy is if activating a Spell Chip from an integrated Comms Unit in Tech armor. It could potentially be a free hand requirement, a requirement to Interact with the Comms unit before using the Spell Chip, or no hand requirement at all.
- Force Fields are terrible between the combination of their armor upgrade slot requirement, Action activation requirement, prohibitively high costs, and nature of shutting off once it reaches zero Hit Points. As they are strictly inferior to using False Vitality spell gems as needed, which will mean they end up only being used by characters planning to stack both of them or characters with no access to Trick Magic Item or Spellcasting. They should have one of: a boost to their HP with the regeneration removed, a reduction to the temp HP and increased regeneration with no shutoff at zero HP, or activation as a reaction instead of an action.
- Dermal plating is overpowered relative to other options like Cairn Form and any other competitor for the Augmentation slot as it applies to multiple types, and should provide 1/2/3/4/5/6 resistance instead of the current 2/3/5/6/8/9 at the same cost.
Spells:
- A lot of spell summary descriptors do not match the spells' full text and require a QA pass.
- All spells that target objects with the Tech trait have questionable and wildly GM dependent interactions with Hazards with the Tech trait, as those are technically unattended objects.
- Mind Skewer refers to 'Hits' and 'Critical Hits' although it targets Will and does not possess the Attack trait.
- Stumble does not increase the distance fallen for swimming or floating targets at higher levels.
- Uncanny Eruption has no Sustain limit and can be sustained up to 4 times in the same round.
- Telekinetic Tantrum: Stunned 1 on a hit and no incapacitation is strangely overpowered even if the Psychokinetic Slam can only be used once every 2 rounds. Recommend altering it to only doing Stunned 1 on a crit.
Modules:
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Ysoki
- Cheek Pouches are currently useless as they do not alter hand economy, bulk limits or even make the items in them easier to hide.Squeekpreach it! Make cheekpouches usefull again
When playing a Ysoki get a number of free rerolls = equal to the number of d20s the player can fit in their cheeks and still be able to talk. Call it the putting your merch where your mouth is reroll
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Great feedback Koganei! Its a shame the surveys are all wrapped up. I noticed some of the same while reading but didn't end up getting a chance to playtest with my group. Hopefully other folks who did get to the surveys highlighted some of these points.
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My hope in pointing these out here (especially the wording based ones rather than the balance based ones) is that they either help to get Day Zero errata or maybe spark some internal discussion.
It's a lot less effort to type than the time we took to playtest the thing, and I think there's a better chance of this being seen here by actual staff than in some other social media channel.
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As a big Barathu fan I completely disagree that they need increased land speed; With Merfolk there's precedent for 5 foot land speed ancestries with worse primary movement speed types than flight, with the introduction of the Traversal trait as detailed in the wrap-up blog post relying on exclusively flight will be more viable, and in general I would argue having to deal with the weaknesses of flight (no step, action tax when hovering, etc.) is a fair tradeoff for its strengths (and can be circumvented with Adaptable Limbs anyways). I don't want the strength of Barathu's flight to be diluted by making their ground speed stronger.
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As a big Barathu fan I completely disagree that they need increased land speed; With Merfolk there's precedent for 5 foot land speed ancestries with worse primary movement speed types than flight, with the introduction of the Traversal trait as detailed in the wrap-up blog post relying on exclusively flight will be more viable, and in general I would argue having to deal with the weaknesses of flight (no step, action tax when hovering, etc.) is a fair tradeoff for its strengths (and can be circumvented with Adaptable Limbs anyways). I don't want the strength of Barathu's flight to be diluted by making their ground speed stronger.I feel the same way about quite a few pieces of feedback here- "you've correctly identified a problem, but I either don't understand your proposed solution or think it doesn't address the bigger issue".
traversal trait. This new trait mostly applies to player-facing rules that reference Stride. When it applies, traversal allows the use of alternative movement types (burrow, fly, and swim) to be used in place of land Speed, akin to how Sneak works. Expect to see this greatly impact some abilities used by the envoy and solarian (to name a few).
Disembarking the Starfinder Second Edition Playtest .
We don't have the final text for the traversal trait, but it does look like it solves a lot of issues. What do you consider the "bigger issue?"
