Starfinder General /sfg/

A small one and its complement... That shit makes for some adventure there

Doesn't really matter much either way as long as the characters have the agency to leave/move about as they need.

Space station - adventure comes to you, and you have personal ships to go elsewhere

Space cruiser - goes and seeks out adventure, and you have shuttles to go elsewhere

I remember the games better than the movie.

I've always wanted to have an android society in sci-fi where the androids are "born" into debt to their parents and have to work to pay the debt off.

Like a cross between Vulcans and Ferengi.

>I never played Pathfinder
Get the hell out of here while you still can, you lucky bastard!
(no really. run.)

Well, much or most of it is a big improvement over Pathfinder, but pathfinder and really the entire d20 system's core (we're talking all the way back to D&D 3rd edition here; much of the fucking problems and errors were copypasted directly after all) are pretty shaky ground in the best of circumstances so "better than that" is no real badge of honor.

It seems like it could be fun enough, but, I think you might do better with Mongoose Traveller 2.

The games were fucking good. Very fucking good.

How about an old junk carrier left over from the war prior to the prior war?

So any good resources to find groups? I decided to look for a group that'd meet after work but "Starfinder Redmond" just returned links to Paizo's corporate office. Gamer Connect seems to have a grand total of six starfinder entries, all on the east coast.

A carrier. Some of us have uniform fetishes that also appeal to most players.

Just don't go all BSG, but such surplus is exactly the kind of thing that ends up in the hands of mercenary groups or simply put on second-line duty in the middle of a hell-zone after "updating" it with modern auxiliary craft.

>The EW snub-fighter hits almost as hard as one of our point-defense turrets and has four times the sensor resolution, so we have it patrol pretty much all the fucking time

>The nuke launchers on that bomber use exactly the same warheads as our old MIRV complement, so we can just restock like six bombers with one anti-ship missile.

That would give weight to the typical "things revolve around the PCs", since their own crafts are quite literally what the commander uses to compensate for all the obsolete crap he's stuck with.

It's literally just pathfinder, but set in ultra-high fantasy/sci-fi SPACE. Really the only thing you need to know is that Space-ships are an integral part of the core game rules, but space combat is absolutely shit unless you run a lot of houserules.

Also the generic base setting is hilariously bad. This game really needs a competent DM with a good custom setting, and a strong grasp over a lot of common space opera/western tropes. So here's a couple things:
> Grab a bunch of 3rd party supplements and .pdfs off of the thread/OP, you're going to need them. The game is pretty bad on it's own without them.
> The party starts with a ship, automatically. It levels with the party, and is a core part of the setting.
> You need to houserule a lot of things, because the game has hilariously bad scaling.
> Like seriously, the piloting DC to do a barrel-roll in a level 20 fighter craft is FUCKING 100. A level 20 character would literally need to roll in the ballpark of 60~ on a d20 to get that.
> Weapon damage scales MUCH faster than player health.

In my own setting, there's a bunch of different visually distinct 'subtypes' of Androids that are made by different corporations. Which range from everything from Sex-bots and common workers, to razor-edge combat models. Like take for example, a Yunhwa Precision Model-2, or a "Doll".

They're 6 - 7 feet tall humanoids, always female, and with a thin plastic 'skin' that's made to look like porcelain. The "Dolls" are often nearly featureless, with no actual genetalia(even their "breasts" have no nipples), aside from their faces. Many of them also sport antlers made from carbon fiber, which is supposed to be a mimickry of their CEO(who is an actual dragon, in her human form).

Their "security" variants include built in cloaking systems that feed off bioelectricity. The party encountered a kill-team made of these androids, with the callsign of "Snow Dragons".

Fuck yeah.

Starship DCs cap at 70, user, and the barrel roll is only 50. It's still not viable for basically any PC because of how the rules are written, but it's not 100.

Outside of starships, skill DC scaling is actually manageable at lower levels, but the multiplicative scaling basically punishes you for trying to do something your class isn't the best at once you get to higher levels.

I can't speak for fun, though, because I haven't had an opportunity to actually play it yet.

Could somebody explain WHY there is DC scaling at all? Shouldn't things become easier as you become more skilled? And the difficulty based off an opponents skill if necessary?

>Could somebody explain WHY
paizo fucked up, they admitted it. it will be changed eventually. just homebrew it to fix it for now

Starship combat is PAINFULLY slow too. My game had a very simple early encounter, where the party had just robbed a bank of several hard drives. They got onto their ship, and took off as a corporate kill-team was inserting in. But on their way out, they got strafed by two corporate fighters in low orbit.

> Simple combat, a single tier-1 Small Freighter, versus 2 Tier 1/4 fighters.
> It then lasted the next 4 hours.

Here's a few problems that need fixing.
> Starship combat scales with your SKILL RANKS, not actual skill. Therefore the operator pilot is as good at flying as the fucking mechanic.
> Starship shooting similarly scales poorly, so the party-face Envoy was as good at shooting as the actual ace-pilot who built his entire character for ship combat.

Basically you need to change it so that your party actually benefits from their skill modifiers, and available class bonuses. The player who literally built his entire Ace-Pilot Operator to be the goddamn red baron, needs to actually benefit from having a piloting bonus of +12 at level 1.

The gunnery needs to scale with your FULL shooting modifiers, or your Piloting Skill(but only if you're the pilot). The way I run it is that the pilot can fire his forward guns-only using his full piloting skill. Everyone else uses their BAB+Dexterity+Weapon Specialization. Make it pretty much exactly the same with every other role.

That way your party members actually feel like they benefit from building their characters to be good at ship combat.

Because paizo refuses to do math, and barred the mechanics from their entire playtest from the looks of it.

some goddamn moron put that in, no one was ever allowed to take even ten seconds to crunch the numbers (which is why everyone figured it out as soon as leakanon started putting up the pictures but not even once before) and the result was that even in the shit you're best at, by endgame you've got a lower chance of succeeding than you did at level 1, though if it's what your class and feats most specialize you in you can still succeed at it - if not reliably any longer.

Now add in that for ships, class abilities and equipment DO NOT apply to spaceship actions, and you're left with DC 70 checks and an envoy with no bonus to his roll.

Scaling may not be the best way to describe it, but basically, if you're using a skill, you'll need to beat either 15+1.5*CR or item level if it's just a DC, or 1.5*CR, usually +4 or +9 if it's an opposed check. For any given object, that value won't change - a level 1 lock will only ever be a level 1 lock, whether you're level 1 or you're coming back at level 15. But that level 15 lock is likely going to be harder for the level 15 character than the level 1 was for a level 1 character.

The 1.5* thing is actually pretty manageable if you're a Mechanic trying to do the things a Mechanic does, because you get a bonus from being a Mechanic to Engineering and Computers. But if your class doesn't give you that bonus to the skill you're trying to use, you can fuck right off at higher levels.

Starship DCs are fucked because they use even higher multipliers - 2 or even 3 - based primarily on the tier of your own ship. Which is the equivalent of the ship's level. So your ship gets better, but gets harder to do anything with, and it's getting harder faster than you're getting better.

They were pressed for time and were completely rushing to get the book out on an early release schedule. That would be my best guess at least. Which would explain why they were completely unable to proofread the basic shit.

Which leaves me with the question of if they were pressed for time so much, why did they spend a completely inordinate amount of time shoveling SJW bullshit into their books?..

They explicitly prevented things like fighters and shuttles from having weapons capable of threatening things at higher levels... problem is that doesn't mean "dreadnoughts" it means "other fighters and shuttles but ten levels from now"

Even the tier and upgrading, if you were hoping to just NOT spend your points so it doesn't get tougher, are actually linked to APL, leading to one of the first anons bringing this up on here a couple of weeks ago saying something along the lines of "Kirk and Spock have some encounters on the planet and level up, so now Scotty can never stop a warp-core breach again and Sulu forgot how to fly backwards"

It really doesn't explain how a year of playtesting never so much as noticed multipliers on DCs. They never, ever tested the numbers there.

Well, I don't know. Did the people writing the mechanics also write the fluff you're complaining about, or was that handled by someone else who was being paid specifically to write the fluff you're complaining about?

Semi-serious question. A lot of the math is pretty bad, yeah, but I really don't know how well you could connect that to any of the fluff existing.

>It really doesn't explain how a year of playtesting never so much as noticed multipliers on DCs.
Maybe their playtesting focused exclusively on ERP?

What's the best role for a halfling to fill in Starfinder?

cock sleave if its an incase halfing

>Weapon damage scales MUCH faster than player health.
I'm glad to hear that that actually. Should help control irrational murderhoboing

Honestly that's just poor design. They really should have left that kind of problem up to the DM, who should be making a dreadnought basically unkillable on it's own.
> Party ignores the questline to obtain the manufacturer's specs for the evil corporation's Dreadnought, so they don't know about it's critical weakness.
> They also don't have the backup of the entire rebel faction, with a small-fleet of capital ships meant to hold it's attention while they and a small group of crack fighter pilots engage the dreadnought's critical weakness.
> Party goes to solo-engage a Dreadnought with their tiny ass Explorer. Because murder-hobos
> Dreadnought has literally thousands of HP, and is fully equipped with weapons that can slag capital ships.
> Party's Explorer proceeds to fly around the dreadnought, plinking away at it's literal thousands of HP, until one of the dreadnought gunners rolls a 20 and instantly slags the party ship.

It would be like if Luke Skywalker took his X-wing to go fight the deathstar, but without the plans that show the exhaust port weakness. So he just flies around shooting down tie fighters until one of the Turbolaser turrets gets a lucky hit on him. Do you even Space Opera?

innocent bystander

Actually that sounds like it wouldn't help most murderhobos either don't think about the possible consequences of their actions or are abusing exploits in the game to fuck the setting anyway.

It would help slow down the weapons upgrade treadmill as well.

Actually, that's how it's done in Traveler. A fighter can get into dogfighting range (although 0g so it's more like psychotic pvp-championship circlestrafing acrobatics) with a larger vessel, which can end up with something like a -8 to hit it (on 2d6 trying to get 8+ so you better have some beam laser turrets and a good gunner) at point-blank range, with the fighter's guns (more like its one gun) always pointed right into the thing's parts.

Problem is you'll need like fifty turns without ever getting hit once, and when you're 10,000km away those turrets can track you with great ease, but hey if there's 4-5 of you and you DO manage to get that close, the capship's completely fucked like in freespace.

> Weapon damage scales MUCH faster than player health.

...does it really? I guess that at or near 20 it might, but the squishiest character you can even build without actively and pointlessly tanking your con is still getting an effective 9 HP per level. Most characters are going to get 12 or 13, and dedicated combatants will get 14 before con.

Exactly this. Ideally the DM should have the combat setup in such a way that taking on capital-ships should be a long affair, and in a decisively storylined way. You need a hefty mixture of fighter-craft, bombers, and other capitals to take on really large ships.

> Yes you can evasion-tank the Dreadnought's lasers, but that's just fucking bait for one of those gunners to roll a lucky 20.
> Why do that when you can get friendly Frigates/Corvettes/Destroyers to take hits for you?

Let the wolfpack of Destroyers hold down the dreadnought's attention, while your fighters take on the enemy fighter craft. Because it's a dreadnought, and it would be stupid not to have it's own personal compliment of fighters, and your bombers go for critical functions like Engines, Reactors, and Shield Generators.

It really aught to be a complicated, hectic fight. And absolutely near the end of a campaign.

Having played only 5E, what the everloving shit is this scaling?

What are some key parts of old Golarion lore should I try to look into to try and fill out the cultural parts of Absalom Station? So far, reading the the CRB there is the Golden League which seems to be based off of Tian Xia what other countries would make for interesting ethnic gangs?

nobody runs this game so what does it matter

Another part is that those giant spinal weapons are not so good against small things. It's not too bad shifting a 30 ton fighter about so its centerline particle-beam punches a very small hole in a destroyer, but trying to do the same with a 300 kiloton monstrosity that has to dim for a minute before firing? Not quite as simple.

And ton for ton, chances are good that destroyer is packing a bit more in its front arc than the planet-buster is in its lower-back belly. But it would help if someone could keep the frigates off its back...

>would make for interesting ethnic gangs?
evil white men?

No, now go back to sucking BBC like a good little cuck.

Brace yourself: You only don't understand because you can't yet believe we were talking about something THAT stupid...

First: Tier = APL. Any PC ship's tier, unless talking about a very temporary hijack or the like, is equal to the party's average level. If you're all level 15, the ship is tier 15. This is whether or not you've spent the points the tier gives you. Full stop.

You can double a starship's shield regen rate for 1 minute (they regen per minute so for one tick) by succeeding at a DC 15+(2xShip Tier) check. So, Tier 1 = DC 17 engineering check. Level 10 = Tier 10 = DC 35 engineering check. Doesn't matter if it's the same exact shield generator you've had all along. Only your level matters. Level 20 = DC 55.

A Captain can spend a resolve point and his action to do a check at DC 10 + 3xTier (DC 13 at level 1, DC 70 at level 20. Class abilities cannot apply to this, remember). Success gives the captain's action to one other player depending on the check you made (engineering to give it to the engineer, computers to give it to the science officer, and so on).

A Tier 1 Carrier can fly backwards this turn by using a DC 12 check (10 + 2x tier). An interceptor owned by a level 12 pilot can only succeed if it passes a DC 34 check.

Pressing the 'balance shields' button for the science officer to autodistribute shield energy into all four quadrants is a DC 17 check at level 1, and a DC 55 at level 20.

and so on...

What the actual fuck?

this sounds like Korean MMORPG logic

I know at least 1 game where it took you longer to heal the higher level you were because you healed on a per-point basis, rather than a % basis

The same goes for the majority of skills over in the skills chapter, except they're not x2 or x3 most of the time.

You want to be sorta decent at stealth but not the true "completely sneaky" guy, just, enough to not cause him shit when you need to stick behind a crate as he sneaks by? Well fuck you. Because skills are against the HIGHER of either an entity's own skill bonus (so, say, perception) OR 15+1.5x the encounter CR. The bonus is generally 15+1.5x the encounter CR + 4 if they're bad at it or +9 if they're good at it. Whoops.

And it's not just stealth. Any skill except for a few very specific exceptions like I think acrobatics, is like this. So any skill you do not heavily specialize in with your class abilities? Forget it. By level 10-12 your chances of success are crap, and by level 16+ anything you're not a top-expert in just can't succeed at all, because you can't roll a 23 or 24 with just a d20.

Anybody know what this is from? I love ultraviolent animes

And because you're probably wondering?
No, the only bonuses available other than "your stat + your basic skill bonus (ranks, +3 if class skill) + skill focus feat (except from the mechanic's exocortex since that's a class ability giving it) are the ship's computer, which can if very very very expensive give up to ... +10 to two actions on the ship per turn, tops.

There is no other equipment to give you bonuses if you thought "oh but obviously you'll just buy better engineering controls with a few points"... no. There are none, the basic normal actions just get tougher and tougher and tougher as you level until most can't do the toughest ones at all.

Are you trying to inject cuteness in your games sfg?

What kind of images do you use for kasatha, shirren and vesk?

It's a Tomino classic: Ideon.

The one upside is that the design lead himself has explicitly stated the starship DCs are a problem and will be examined!

This won't do anything to fix normal skills, though, so that's still terrible at higher levels.

This shit does't make sense, I'm pretty sure tie fighters werent assigned to individual pilots and they all had to shuffle per mission. Why does that one have kill markers?

Why the fuck would things EVER get harder as you're more used to them?

>What kind of images do you use for kasatha, shirren and vesk?
Pics of roaches, lizards, and coneheads.

That's true for the lower rungs of pilots in TIE/LNs, but there's actually a lot of elite squadrons out there. Anyone able to survive a couple of missions in a TIE is worth a promotion.

Customization may be frowned upon in the Empire's fighters, but if you're one of the five TIE Interceptors on that star destroyer, at the very least the seat's angle stays just the way you like it every time.

So I see that weapons have different tiers and what not but what's the best way to handle special weapons?

Basically, there are a number of weapons from different games I want to re-create in system. pic related definitely of a devotee of Asmodeus to smite cultist of Rovagug.

Paizo: 1.5 years of playtesting gender pronouns, 0.0 years of checking if the math even works out at its most basic level of usage

The good news is Paizo's diverse hiring practices have resulted in some great ideas for character models

>Its not enough that its a fat fuck, it actually has to be a fat fuck with tumblr hair coloring

Thanks

You have to admit it really looks like a player though. It even covers both genders

Is that Vladimir Harkonnen after he was infected or poisoned but before he completely turned into the floating pussy pig?

You know, I could ignore that thing when it was just in the book, because sometimes things go wrong and you have to run with it anyway. But I don't know how they could think it's a good idea to put that on a cover. That, of all the designs they already have.

Technically in the book he could still walk, the suspensor rig just helped him to carry his bulk. That said, the dude is the fucking iconic for Arcane Assailant and is a member of the Hellknights

yeah, but in a rather... slaaneshi way.

Maybe Beast Rabban.

Remember when we used to complain about how dumb valeros looked?

I kind of miss those days...

I identify with him - he is dark, edgey, and has a positive body image like me. He is my new spirit-kin.

>He

ok /sfg/
stat them

no

Do it yourself faggot.

+2 dex +2 con +2 cha
-2 int -2 wis

I recycled my Starfinder Pawns of him

So what part of the system do you like the most, /sfg/, and why is it garbage? Personally, I like building starships. It's actually the part of the mechanics I find most interesting right now. Unfortunately, starship combat is the most broken part of the game right now, and the actual numbers for ship scale and the like aren't really any better.

is this porn?

Yes.

thats a hard one.
they are hot but have super weak self control.

+2 Con/Cha -2 Wis with a severe penalty to will Saves in certain conditions

Incase makes amazing porn but its a shame that he rarely does second chapters.

They don't have weak self control, it's just human pheromones are a narcotic and aphrodisiac to them.

...sauce?

Don't answer that, I'm just retarded since I was distracted by the art

The artist is Incase.

I love how the pol-tards can't go five seconds without frothing at the mouth about anything they see as SJW. Not even discussions on mechanics and numbers are immune, since the little shits will just keep inserting their bitching everywhere.

>Rule mechanics and fluff must be written by the exact same person

You're the type of person who gets angry at the cashier for why the price of their burger has gone up, aren't you?

I only do that when they don't change their signage to reflect the new price. Ambush pricing is illegal, at least in this country.

Heroin addicts. Author even admitted it.

wow

So obviously those DCs should only have increased when the skill of the opposition increases, like your level 20 rogue needs their +23 Stealth skill mod because they're up against a higher Perception skill. That's obvious, and they were stupid to present their rules in that way because everyone is going to look at that and say "those rules for spaceships don't make sense".

But ignoring that, why does DC increase by 2 each level when skill modifier only increases by 1 each level?

Add to that your ability mod increasing by +1 every 8 levels (assuming you're bumping that 18 up) with a +1 for the occasional ability boost gear (no idea how often you get those) and a +1 from your class for every three levels or so (e.g. the operative's insight bonus). Are all those miscellaneous bonuses supposed to let you keep pace and get you the other +1 per level you need to keep up?

I'm going through the maths and attempting a quick n dirty conversion from PF/3e scaling to 5e Bounded Accuracy just to see if that works. Trying to get my head around the logic for this scaling. It ALMOST looks like, on average, PCs do in fact get a +2 every level and the rest is 4e-tier crappy mechanics contextualising.

You know, I always thought that PF team was just downright inept when it came to math. But this shit right here? This thing has outright malicious intent written all over it. In big bold letters.

A lot of it is because they're still thinking in PF terms. A DC 55 is fucking easy to reach at 20th level in PF.

I don't think it's malicious, but I do think it's unnecessarily conservative. They're jumping through hoops to try to keep DCs and bonuses at about the same level through an adventuring career, similarly to Pathfinder. The problem is that they've contextualised their mechanics poorly and they haven't fixed the issue of the enormous gulf between low and high level characters.

This is why I'm working on this homebrew that uses 5e maths instead of 3e maths to power Pathfinder.

So, continuing that, if you were playing Starfinder with more 5e based skill progression and less terrible terrible DC scaling, would you still expect to see a character like the Envoy be proficient in 8 different skills?

5e has about the same number of proficiencies, and each character has between 2 and 4 from their class, with two more from their background. (And a few more if you count tool proficiencies as skills, which they sort of are. Disguise is a tool in 5e, as is their equivalent of Engineering.)

So it might work, but it feels a bit off to have a character just get 8 skills from their first level. Would you always pick Envoy as your first class if that meant effectively getting 8 skill ranks for your entire career? Envoy1/Soldier19?