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This allows different GMs to come up with different ways to handle it.
What do you mean allows? Having some idea what Paizo's thoughts or suggestions are regarding the game they designed doesn't stop me from doing anything, it just gives me some sort of working frame of reference for what the developers think is normal.
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... As an aside. I think part of the trouble with this specific example is as much a balance issue as a conversion issue.
Flight is less valued in SF, but it's still a strong ability and Dragonkin have flight and darkvision and limited telepathy with a party member and 10 hp. That's pretty overloaded for a base ancestry.
Vesk are also Starfinder and also 10 hp/20 feet but only have low-light vision. So worse eyesight and no flight and no telepathy.
Like there's been talk about SF2 ancestries having a larger power level and more wild abilities but in reality that's only a couple of them. Most of them are fairly unremarkable and I'm sort of struggling to understand what Paizo's vision there was because the balance seems really haphazard.
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I'm sort of struggling to understand what Paizo's vision there was because the balance seems really haphazard.
I think the designers did a superb job on Starfinder 2e in general but they do have a smaller, less experienced team and, more importantly, we're talking a brand new game vs one that has had several years to fix balance points and improve.
There are some rough edges but so far I've seen nothing that is particularly egregious. Every class and ancestry is playable and none dominate the game.
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Why should that be the conversion default?
I understand that as a PF2E GM and player, this is your primary concern. But but why should Paizo as a company privilege PF2E-primary campaigns over SF2E-primary campaigns?
This is the problem; any 'conversion' document must take one specific perspective on how the two systems are put together, which is not necessarily the perspective of many games.
The advice for converting fly Speeds exists because flight at level 1 is fine in Starfinder, but not in Pathfinder. There doesn't need to be a two-way conversion for this particular fact, because your sprite in Starfinder will need no changes to do just fine.
I also think that the claim here is generally off-base: there are in fact elements of Pathfinder that need adjusting to fit well in Starfinder in my opinion, chiefly damage reduction mechanics of any kind, and that is something Starfinder's GM Core doesn't really cover, so it should exist somewhere else. You are correct that a conversion guide should be two-way, and that is something a conversion guide can achieve just fine. However, that does not mean every mechanic needs two-way conversion advice, because some mechanics are only problematic in one game and not the other. Flight, for instance, is one of those mechanics where the conversion would be one-way, because the problems only arise when characters can fly too well and too early in one of the two games. I don't think this is really something to complain about, either, because it means less to worry about when porting a sprite to Starfinder.
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The problem I see is that people are trying to force all races to be equal. All races are not equal. That is why you have the uncommon and rare traits. Make Flyers uncommon or Rare and let flyers fly.
Give dragonborn glide at 1st level and flight at 5th level simple fix. Give them the feats from the 3rd party author that used to work for pPazio.He knows game balance.
I ported a flying race from another game they get 40' gly at first level
they are small and have a penalty to strength and hate melees they hate bright lights and have a penatly to their fort save from flash or orther light effects.Dont't try to shoehorn all races into one cataory PFS while fun is far to restrictive and should not be used as a normal set for all races.
Rarity traits are not a power creep excuse system. It's thematic related to scenario or adventure (like this ancestry is uncommon or rare in Inner Sea but it's common in Tian Xia or in another plane. Or this teleport spell is uncommon because it can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge).
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The problem I see is that people are trying to force all races to be equal. All races are not equal. That is why you have the uncommon and rare traits. Make Flyers uncommon or Rare and let flyers fly.
Give dragonborn glide at 1st level and flight at 5th level simple fix. Give them the feats from the 3rd party author that used to work for pPazio.He knows game balance.
I ported a flying race from another game they get 40' gly at first level
they are small and have a penalty to strength and hate melees they hate bright lights and have a penatly to their fort save from flash or orther light effects.Dont't try to shoehorn all races into one cataory PFS while fun is far to restrictive and should not be used as a normal set for all races.
Note also that PF2 has Ancestries, rather than Races.
Rarity traits are not a power creep excuse system. It's thematic related to scenario or adventure (like this ancestry is uncommon or rare in Inner Sea but it's common in Tian Xia or in another plane. Or this teleport spell is uncommon because it can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge).The problem I see is that people are trying to force all races to be equal. All races are not equal. That is why you have the uncommon and rare traits. Make Flyers uncommon or Rare and let flyers fly.
Give dragonborn glide at 1st level and flight at 5th level simple fix. Give them the feats from the 3rd party author that used to work for pPazio.He knows game balance.
I ported a flying race from another game they get 40' gly at first level
they are small and have a penalty to strength and hate melees they hate bright lights and have a penatly to their fort save from flash or orther light effects.Dont't try to shoehorn all races into one cataory PFS while fun is far to restrictive and should not be used as a normal set for all races.
Ancestries with flight (and other movement) speeds are a little tricky because they half fit in the "teleport trivializes certain kinds of adventures" category, but with fast speeds, it can definitely overstep into combat balance as well. That is partly why it feels like such a flimsy balance dial.
It is starting to sound like the SF Dragonkin ancestry is just a slightly overpowered ancestry as a whole for either system, and it is interesting that Society choose to allow it. I guess we will see with the Draconic Codex how much of those balance issues spill over into Pathfinder.
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It's probably worth considering that early on in PF2 they were much more conservative about the power budget for ancestries than they became later. Compare, for example, the ancestries in the Mwangi Expanse book to the ancestries in the Tian Xia book.
It might be a project worth considering to just juice some of the premaster ancestries so they're not vastly inferior to ancestries from the same game.
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I have to partially disagree, as because Starfinder does not have jump flight as a stopgap, Pathfinder flying ancestries should be entitled to, depending on the ancestries methods of flight, either a level 1 fly speed, or a fly speed available with a greatly reduced heritage or feat cost. (A strix could fly right away, a tengu could fly with the proper heritage, and the dragonblood and nephilim can fly as soon as they get their first feats).
This I think is where multiple options would likely be a good idea, as I think there can be different takes on this particular aspect of ancestries: in my opinion, letting those ancestries fly at level 1 in Starfinder instead of relying on feats isn't strictly necessary, as those ancestries I'd say are balanced relative to others in Starfinder even without flight, including flying ancestries like the barathu or contemplative. The dragonkin in this respect I think is the exception rather than the rule, as they are straight-up better than other ancestries like the vesk.
On the flipside, Starfinder is the perfect reason to let ancestries that clearly should fly from early on do exactly that, as I think is especially the case with the strix. It'd certainly be nice to have advice on giving that to certain Pathfinder ancestries with special Speeds in a Starfinder game, and that would likely not require much text or effort to do either. In all cases, GMs would have both the tools to run balanced cross-play games at their table and the freedom to choose how they want to run things.
Rarity traits are not a power creep excuse system. It's thematic related to scenario or adventure (like this ancestry is uncommon or rare in Inner Sea but it's common in Tian Xia or in another plane. Or this teleport spell is uncommon because it can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge).
While i agree Rarity shouldn't be a power balancer, isn't teleport in the exact same category as 1st level flight from ancestry, as both "can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge"? The only difference i can see is the scale of travel that can be avoided, so if rarity on teleport is fine, then so to should it be fine for starfinder ancestries with 1st level flight.
While i agree Rarity shouldn't be a power balancer, isn't teleport in the exact same category as 1st level flight from ancestry, as both "can trivialize adventures where the travel is the challenge"? The only difference i can see is the scale of travel that can be avoided, so if rarity on teleport is fine, then so to should it be fine for starfinder ancestries with 1st level flight.
This is a valid point, and I think is particularly relevant to crossover play given that cross-planetary travel is commonplace in Starfinder, while being much rarer in Pathfinder, at least in Golarion.
I'd say that the key difference within Pathfinder is that making the adventure about traveling from one place to another tends to be a much more central element to the campaign than at which point to include flight: this is something a developer could do well to explain from their own perspective, but the impression I get is that flight is a tool that's considered okay for navigating higher-level obstacles and fighting higher-level enemies, but isn't meant to be available at a time when simple things like walls, gaps in the ground, and hungry wolves are meant to be meaningful impediments to the party's progress. By contrast, teleport can set the entire tone of an adventure: its absence means a campaign can have the higher-level party go on an odyssey from one place to another, which carries its own flavor, whereas its inclusion lets a campaign send the party on a best-of tour of Golarion or another planet where they never linger in the same place for too long.
I'd say even in Starfinder it's probably justified to still make it uncommon, though: at higher ranks, teleport would sideline travel by starship, which can be an important part of certain adventures, so I'd understand a GM wanting to keep it inaccessible to a party. Beyond just conversion guides, it'd be nice to have more developer insights on why certain options are made uncommon or rare.
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Ancestry balance is certainly more complicated than just raw numbers for statistics like HP and movement speeds/types.
For example, the elf in Pathfinder looks pretty weak numerically (terrible HP with a penalty to CON) as an ancestry, but it has some of the best ancestry feats in the game, so people continue to choose to make elven characters despite the set backs.
When I look at the Vesk and the Dragonkin for Starfinder, it seems like Vesk feats are equally some of the best in the game, while the Dragonkin feats are pretty run of the mill and in SF2 it seems like being large is a much bigger detriment than it is in PF2: Reach is less important and in environments like spaceships, you could be stuck squeezing a lot. If players can get darkvision and flying with equipment at low levels, those aren't really the same kind of boosts that they are in PF2 as a whole.
All of this is to say that I don't see anyway that allowing ancestries across games is going to be anything but a case by case basis for the GM in deciding if it is good for their game. A guide really would have to go ancestry by ancestry in each direction for conversion to relieve a GM from needing to familiarize themselves with both systems and what what the expectations are for those systems, as well as understand what kind of adventure they are trying to run. Which I still see as being a much better community guide than an official Paizo one, since the community will keep it up to date and have pretty much as good a grasp of each game's expectations as any one Paizo developer.
Elves have amazing movement speed, though, and dragonkin have excellent feats, including using your bonded partner to gain standard cover, being able to fly vertically at no penalty, and essentially a better Cantrip Expansion as a 1st-level ancestry feat. Vesk, meanwhile, do have some fun feats to play with, but I wouldn’t call them the best in the game by any stretch. I’m not generally a big subscriber to the notion that ancestries have their base abilities balanced by their feats, but even if I were, I don’t think there’s much of a case for it here.
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The "some ancestries are made amazing by their feats" angle often doesn't take into account how some ancestries are going to appear in one book with some feats and go years (or possibly forever) without getting a new feat. So while "Elves have a weak chassis but great feats" might be a good reason to play an Elf, there might never be a corresponding argument to play a Shisk.
Feats are also complicated by versatile heritages with their own feat packages.
Like the hypothetical scenario of an ancestry being overpowered but having really bad feats just completely fails when you take a versatile heritage that also has good feats.
There's also adopted, which admittedly costs you a general feat but also gives you access to most of another ancestry's options... heck Dragonkin even have an ancestry feat for that.
... Also Unicore's premise is just not correct either. Elves trade 2 hp for +5 movement speed. That's a totally reasonable trade on its own, and one that gets better the higher your level because ancestry HP never scales. Mechanically focused players might play an elf because of their chassis, not despite it.
Not to mention that the penalty to Con barely matters when you can literally ignore it and take human boosts instead. Ancestry feats are probably the most weirdly designed feats in the system IMO, because some are arguably stronger than some class feats and others are weaker than skill feats.