/sfg/ - Starfinder General

Starfinder General: I made a race edition

What is your character build? What is its DPR?

/pfg/ unified link repository (trove contains all current leaked PDFs in Starfinder folder): pastebin.com/fr9piFCi

/sfg/ unified link repository: pastebin.com/BBVzM7tm
Cheatsheet: paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5lk2n?Starfinder-Cheat-Sheet
FAQ: paizo.com/starfinder/faq

Things to do:
Run games
Raid the other Science fiction/ fantasy games and steal their map assets
Make a Plant race (drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uga6da_8HoNjZvWmVvTWRvSlk/view?usp=sharing)
Make a Fish race (drive.google.com/open?id=0BxorJiX7ellIWDlTOEtibVZuRUE)
Make a turtle race (1d4chan.org/wiki/Arocku)
Make a Veeky Forums adventure path
Graph class builds and DPRs

Old Thread: Race: Oozemorph (Working Title)

Ability Adjustments: +2 Str, +2 Con, and either -2 Dex or -2 Wis
HP: 4

Size and Type: oozemorphs are medium oozes with the humanoid subtype

Limited Blindsight: oozemorphs can switch betweeen their normal vision and their blindsight as an action, and remain with that sense until changing it back as an action. When using blindsight, they have blindsight out to 30 feet but are otherwise unable to see at all past that range. When an oozemorph is using its normal vision it must have some form of eye molded into its shape.

Formless: an oozemorph has the compression universal creature rule, and can squeeze through any opening a liquid could with enough time and effort. An oozemorph’s equipment cannot typically change size with them, and an oozemorph can don any or all equipment in a single 5-foot square as a full action.

>What is your character build? What is its DPR?
Fucked it up, that’s what I get for using my phone.

...

Has anyone tried updating their favorite Pathfinder AP to see if, say, Carrion Crown in space? I guess it probably wouldn't, but there's a shitload of opportunity for Lovecraft type stuff. I dunno, maybe Gothic horror just relies too much on relatively primitive technologies.

I think it would take something close to a full rewrite. Maybe the prison is a remote space station full of marooned ones and nihili? Blew the airlock instead of triggering a crude deadfall? TotB would be a little weird, and vampires and werewolves don't exactly have the same punch.

Gothic horror has always gone well with space, even as action horror which is what those are.

A lot of them could be a framework for SF APs, but the differences in settings might demand a huge rewrite for most of them.

Though when I think about it, a Kingmaker inspired colony game sounds fun. Lots of ways to go too, could be marooned on a planet with a few nanofabricators to start getting buildings up, claiming turf on a rare, habitable world, mining asteroids, establishing a space station, etc.

Not going to lie, I'd be down with that.

Given the way gear scales in SF I'd be tempted to run something like pic related as the setting. Your village gets safe access to water as soon as you clear out the threshers.

if you guys want to make an AP ill help you. we can setup a 1d4chan page and work on it together. it could be alot of fun.

I've been debating trying to do this as well, but like what some others said it looks like you'd have to almost re-write the whole thing
plus some skills have been rolled together and such so you'd have to pile that on to your conversions as well

My schedule's too full to add even a fraction of building an AP, but I have a couple of hours to spitball ideas today if people want.

Go ahead!

ive been thinking about making an AP for a while. my idea is that it is based on the movie wingcommander. the party is part of the crew of a carrier that is patrolling in a remote part space. while there they discover some kind of powerful ruins or something and they have to race against enemy forces to follow clues to find it. the party does exploring on the ground and in space while the carrier evades and does large scale battles. enemy forces could be swarm or vesk or anything else. is that worth expanding? does it sound fun?

So, building cities and even a nation on a nasty, brutal deathworld. Is this going to be for colonists and PCs expect resistance from other factions trying to claim it? That would be the closest option to Kingmaker. Or maybe it's a crashed colony ship, the planet is undesirable so PCs start with less equipment/support but don't need to worry about other spacefaring factions arriving from the start, becomes more of a survival deal, perhaps some time pressure as cryopods are slowly but steadily failing so they need to build enough to support people before each section dies off.

In either case you've got a ship to use as a base, either out of fuel but intact or with a lot of damage and lost systems, but maybe you can power them back up after repairs, at least to buy time.

Deadly wildlife and precursor civilizations are a given. Also fixing how the building economy of Kingmaker worked.

that seems similar to an idea i had for "scramble for africa" in space. multiple nations create colonies on a planet. inspired by civ beyond earth, avatar, interstellar, alpha centauri etc.

Sort of how KM works too, since that's the inspiring AP for this. So, we need factions. Could use the ones from SF, adapted if needed, or come up with a few new ones.

One needs to be whatever entity the party is working for, from a megacorp looking to control mineral rights and biotech discoveries on a new world, to an overpopulated nation trying to move some people elsewhere. This faction likely abandons the party or gets cut off later on, granting the group more independence in their rule.

Ancient civilization might be extinct, but various super-tech ruins can still be found, full of security measures, automated weapons platforms and magitech robo-soldiers.

Several competing factions could include leww scrupulous versions of the PCs own backers, space hippies out to prevent the exploitation of virgin worlds, an earlier expedition turned raiders, surviving aliens turned with more primitive technology but still dangerous, and even some sort of star monsters occasionally descending on the world.

I was planning on running a hex crawl where the players repaired three heavily damage space stations as their hub for exploration. Only one is functional at the beginning of the adventure, and the players are tasked with exploring the area for goods and making their own maps and delving ruins for ruins from The Gap period.

I’m making drift travel impossible in the hexes by saying the area is on the edges of the Vast and Triune’s dominion is incredibly weak there meaning the drift is one-way to the stations let alone getting back (only half-true, the corporation running the show can travel the drift to the station there and back).

I’m looking at Stars Without Number for ideas on how to run the sandbox, and I’m going super light with the “kingdom” construction using One Quiet Year as the way it gets built up and to encourage what benefits a quest has.

I’ll let you know how it goes, but we are finishing up our 5e campaign still so I think the game won’t start until January.

i have some written i think lemme look it up...
looks like it was lost/deleted but the idea was that different nations on earth find the first habitable exoplanet within reach and compete to colonize it. of course the planet already has several primitive native races with advanced biology. the major theme is the conlfict of earth nation vs earth nation and earth nation vs natives. some natives fight others ally. its like a space version of the colonization of north america, different indians factions and different european factions all fighting each other. IDK if starfinder players want to have earth nations as their thing but thats what my original idea was.

we can change it to be SF or not up to you guys

Could work, for the moment the ideas are all very general and this thread is fairly slow, but any sort of details to help with the setting are good.

What is the settlement was treated like a starship and given a set number of build points per tier, and it grows along side the characters in a contrived but functional way?

Just through the easily gamed economic system of build points from Kingmaker out the window.

Sounds workable at least. Say they can even exceed their allotted city points, but doing so starts to incur penalties of some sort as it gets bigger than they can manage.

It’s certainly less paperwork and less easy to break than Kingdom building

Update for the no one interested

impossible to balance and i dont know why you even want them. not inspiring at all.

I mean, what’s posted is balanced - they have extra costs in repairs and don’t have to spend in armor, just be upgrades. Their armor will be a little low to average their whole career, and everything else is in line with the math of the game.

As for not wanting robots, there was a lot of people demanding robots from before, and I want robot NPCs which still is hard to do with Alien Archive’s rules. So I made a thing based on droids from one of the Star Wars games. Really I made this for my use as GM.

I've been wanting robots for a good while now.

Really, as long as robots are available, the only thing I'm missing is an evolution-based enemy eater, like the zerg, or tyranids, or whatever. It's a pretty common Sci fi trope, and I'd love to see something of the sort be playable in a tabletop game.

Looking for some advice

Just picked up the Core Rulebook and the Alien Archive. I'm going to be GMing a game with 3-4 players starting after Thanksgiving to give everyone time to check out the rules and make characters. I've got a lot of experience playing 3.5, 4e, and 5e, but I've never actually played Pathfinder itself and all of my players are either new to tabletop or only have played 5e. Is there any advice you could give for getting people into the system? Also do you guys include the legacy races for playable characters? I was planning on limiting them to the main playable races to start at least to get a handle on things. If nothing else I don't even want to get into them using the Alien Archive races

Well check out my pdf, and look how easy it would be to make a PC as NPC consistently. I think I hit all the major robot tropes.

Honestly, in my experience Pathfinder is at its best the wielder and more snowflake-y the players get so I would allow the crazy races, especially when people can’t optimize well. My only advice is the same as for 5e, start at level 3.

>Start at level 3
Why? such an odd number

level 3 is a good place to start because
>PCs have a level of competency over 'just off the boat' schmucks while still being low grade. You actually only get weapon specialization at 3+, making it a good jumping point since Weapon Spec is actually really important for damage output
>Avoids early game hell, as many builds require a level or two dip in given classes to be effective. the classic "solarion dips into Blitz soldier" thing is particularly noteworthy
>Allows people enough money to customize their gear without being hard pressed for bsic necessities
>Avoids Rusty Dagger Shanktown, though that's less of a thing in Starfinder in general

>Rusty Dagger Shanktown
Forgive me, I'm new, what're you talking about?

It's a serious problem at low levels that a lucky damage roll can outright murder a player character.

Say you've got a soldier. He has 7 HP, 4 from race, and 7 stamina from class levels, assuming he has nothing in constitution. Total of 18.

Someone closes to melee, hits him with a 1d10 damage weapon and a +3 strength modifier, right? if he rolls high, that'll destroy over half the soldier's effective HP in one go. If it's a critical, he's been dropped to negatives in a single strike. it gets better when you realize that someone making a full attack can strike twice.

Pathfinder has lower HP values due to not having stamina, which is why the phrase got coined there, but it still applies to Starfinder. The trick, of course, is that damage values don't scale as quickly in the early levels as HP does, so one or two extra levels provides a considerable buffer versus sudden and unfun death.

Basically just low level players fucking around

Did you purposefully list your references in increasing order of quality?

Does anybody know what monsters from pathfinder would make good underlings or soldiers for a arch devil? The alien archive itself doesn't have many underling-type enemies aside from goblins and a few others so I'm resorting to using pathfinder monsters.

Pretty much any devil ranked below an arch devil, I should think.

Well I use 3rd level in 5e (and he modules also basically tell you to) because you have established your classes flavor, and are capable enough to survive danger with good tactics and will likely not be completely overwhelmed. The reason levels 1->3 in 5e are done the way they are (you basicallly level once each session) is because it’s not very fun and never was despite needing 5000XP to get there in 3.pf games.

Starfinder seems to have randomly copied the level 3 magic number by giving every class weapon specialization at level 3. So you have a bit of a build and you have a few class abilities and a bit of HP/SP to work with. Your characters just feel more like an adventurer and a lot less like he got some sort of sickness for the first few sessions.

The atmosphere of the first game would be perfect. The second was too campy, and TPS never happened, just like how Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened.

To camp for the starfinder game, or to camp in general?
Because I loved the camp in the second.
Agree on TPS.

Too campy for a Starfinder game, I think. I get that a typical campaign has a single villain and they show up every so often to do nasty junk, but Jack just wouldn't translate, I don't think.

Fair.
Having a Jack Villian could work in a game, but as an overarching bbeg it wouldn't work outside the set up of the videogame.

What sci-fi classes are missing from the game? I feel like there are some gaps still, though I’m not 100% on what trope-y things would need a brand new class.

What sci-fi archetypes are there that can be made into a class?

Well there are space primatives, or lucky scoundrels. Lots of variations on super scientist to the point that alchemist is basically a 1 to 1 conversion. Shapeshifters

The existing classes (other than solarian) are vague and open ended by design. It'd be difficult to find a character that couldn't be worked in there, somehow.

That being said, there's not really a dedicated scientist/alchemist class. There's a scientist theme, and the mechanic and technomancer, but they're both a little more specialised in machinery and magic. You could go with envoy, I guess.
I'd like to see sort of a technologically enhanced alchemist, with dart guns and stuff.

There's also barbarian and ranger, who both don't really work very well in the starfinder universe. It would help to have them exist for primitive aliens, though. I remember seeing a monk conversion called "adept" that looked quite cool. Envoy takes up the role of bard and you could theoretically fluff them to have a musical instrument while they do so.

>lucky scoundrels
I think operative/envoy has that covered

There’s literally no mechanics playing with luck at all.

Actually, monk is probably the closest to what a “space primitive” is like in shows - follow the old ways, meditate abandon channel some inner power, etc. not a lot of barbarian types.

Most of the envoy improvisations can be fluffed as being very lucky.
Unless you're talking, like, dice mechanics. Like -actual- luck.

Dice mechanics are normally how lucky characters are handled, and it gives something mechanically distinct from the existing ones. On top of that, they're fun which is why you never see them in 3.pf inspired games.

We're most definitely missing a biological thing that evolves through gaining levels and growing new and unique adaptations. It's a pretty common sci fi trope, so I expect it to be filled eventually, but at the moment we've got nothing.

I could see it being an interesting archetype, at the very least. The real trick is writing the gear in such a way that it works, since the evolutions would need to effectively replace gear loadouts for the character.

I bet it could be done basically translating an Eidolon over. The tricky part is how race would interact with it.

If we're carrying things over from pathfinder, we have two basis to work off of - the Eidolon, and the Aberrant Aegis.

I think one easy way to bypass the need for armor would just be to have the character grow a biological suit of armor that levels up with them; a scaling armor bonus to both KAC and EAC that goes up with level, and make it so that it takes up your actual armor slot.

If we handle it mechanicals just as sort of an evolving suit of living armor that grows out of the person, it handily deals with the race question as well. We actually know that, in-universe, mutagenic abilities developed out of a given person have been around for literally centuries - look no further than the Alchemist class to see it - so that gives us thematic justification.

The armor is easy IMO, because armor scales really fucking easily (it's basically just a tiny bit over 10+character level). People will REEEE about scaling armor that takes up a slot, though (despite it being both obvious an elegant as a class feature).

The trick is to make it worth it. I imagine we need to have it be somewhere in between light and heavy armor for defensive value, so that it's not an instant-buy for basically every class that can afford the archetype.

After that, we can have it modified through an already existing subsystem - the armor mods system. The biological armor can't be modified by the technological components in the CRB, but it'd be easy to roll with specific "evolution" slots that you get more of as you go up in level. Certain evolutions may require more slots than others, and be comparatively strong.

The question is whether we should includes designated weapon slots for growing biological weapons, ala Tyranids or Zerg.

What if they “ate” technology and incorporated it into their being? Like you upgrade and armor by buying a new one, absorbing it, and molting leaving a creepy ass shell behind? Then at least the shell is something that could be resold or something, I think there’s even an armor material like that in Alien Archive.

Yeah, I was thinking more of the first game, and really just the wasteland world setting. Plenty of bandit and corporate factions, threat of dangerous alien artifacts and a villain that pulls strings without even making an appearance. Of course for a ttrpg you'll want a final showdown eventually, in this case maybe some raider lord from a previous colony got their hands on the macguffin and goes full "a god am I"

So... you want to play a builder?
Either /qst/ here or /builders/ on the other chin

>/d/ material on Veeky Forums
Ain't even mad

Well more than just building, the Kingmaker AP has you carve a nation out of the wilderness between two warring factions, find out the land is owned by an ancient fey queen with a massive grudge, oh and a famous warlord seems to have been resurrected with his sights set on your young kingdom. A ruling council of adventurers, what could go wrong?

... that still is a builder in the sanse of old Veeky Forums builder games, you know.
And I mean this as a praise.

Fair point. I think some of the appeal in making it an AP is that it ends up more widely available than just when someone on /qst/ or a build board is running for everyone on at a particular hour, becoming a thing done by YOUR group, when you can all get together.

Builders are only fun with 8 people and above.
My own group is 5 players strong.
Go figure.

The Kyokor plate armor? Maybe, but with the way I've described it to this point the armor doesn't really require any money to maintain, which means selling it is just purely making cash through class features.

just like old times, eh?

I mean she's melting and is a babe.
What a humble /d/eviant can ask for more than this?

I had a concept for a sort of take on the ravenous swarm angle called the "Phaccine". Inspired by the Apparoids from Starfox assult they were of nanotech based origins, imagine for a moment a carnifex reconstructed by the people making metal gear ray, small mechanized zerglings with energy wings. shit like that. They'd can assimilate others into their swarm, often merging pilot to vehicle and growing that into a new organism.

Say they manage to infect a tank crew of 3, first they are bound to the tank and continue controlling it under the hive's thrall, then after the fight they refine the merging, until the tank is now something resembling a metal ultralisk with guns, with the minds of the crew now merged into a single cunning shock trooper.

the key difference between them and nids and zerg. is that they still know how to pick their fights, often dropping onto planets written off by the greater interstellar community. Or even planets openly disliked, say a world is dealing with skynet, its quarantined and the population written off, the Phaccine ask for jurisdiction and pretty much fix it up, nobody cares how, they just care that skynet is gone.

>the key difference between them and nids and zerg. is that they still know how to pick their fights
I'm pretty sure they know how to do that already, to be honest. Whenever the Zerg were under the command of a unifying intellect (Kerrigan, the Overmind) they never actually went to a planet they could't take - it's just that they fought and killed for the stretch of land they were looking for. As for 'nids, they're actually in much the same situation, with many of the hive fleets just tossing more and more armies onto a given planet until the defenders are overwhelmed.

But the idea of a superspecies accepting shitty planets because it keeps them out of conflict with other races does make sense, if they're particularly intelligent. They can survive in places others can't, so why don't they? And suddenly they're able to work alongside those other species rather than being at constant war with them. It's an interesting difference.

exactly the idea, think tenuous cold war climate, people scared of them but also too scared of conflict to act on it, so they keep pointing them places and letting them, set up the occasional embassy/chapel where they encourage people to voluntarily join

>Lots of variations on super scientist to the point that alchemist is basically a 1 to 1 conversion

You can replicate Gordon Freeman with the Soldier though.

how'd you do it, user?

Just make a character with the background of a scientist in game, take Soldier levels 1-20

>Encourage people to voluntarily join
That's got to be a tough sell.

Leave everything behind because you don't have much? Earn a sense of belonging as part of a greater whole?

It'd be a tough sell to someone rich, but to the dregs of society, the option to be part of something, and the promise of a new life are seriously powerful. As I recall, it's how America got its initial settler population.

Well, I think there's a bit of a difference between "travel to a new land in search of opportunity" and "surrender yourself to be mutated into a nightmarish entity by an alien race".

Warhammer 40k covers this a lot. Just look at Chaos Space Marines and Daemons. All it takes is a sufficiently shitty situation and a sufficiently tempting offer to make mere cosmetics not seem to matter.

And frankly, that's a really, really good reason to fight that shit at every turn.

Only way to fight that is through civil projects and enhancing quality of life for the general populace. But there will ALWAYS be officials that screw over the little guy, and those would be the sort of people that this assimilation appeals to.

think of it as like a mix of The Khala and a more honest version of unitology

you still have your mind usually, still exist as some manner of individual, can even disagree, but there is always the unity of thew whole to lean back on, always the ability to stop and just let yourself be in tune with everyone else.

naturally not everyone is into that, hell the swarm has probably ejected those who disliked being connected plenty of times

Which alien is the most fuckable?

thats not even a question

Lashunta, followed by Androids.

Andoids don't count as aliens.

Okay, fine. Lashunta. In many ways, they're custom-built to get fucked by Humans.

I can't tell if your just presenting a view or actually beleve it

What if the class starts as a symbiote suit, so the armor is literally the mutagenic part of your class? So at 1st level you are just a guy in a Guyver, but you get more horrifying as time goes on as you and the suit become one *thing*.

And then you treat it like an armor you can self enchant like some classes in Pathfinder, but you are leveling the suit for a set cost and electing to give it set stuff like armor enhancements.

As far as weapons go, I’m not sure a good way to make it part of them except the absorbing thing. I just don’t know. I really like this idea though.

No feedback on an ooze race?

It's a very neat idea. If iI had more time, I'd probably homebrew it up myself.

I can do it, but I will need some help making sure the math is right.

Well, if you get around to doing it, I'll be sure to give you feedback. for now, though, I need to get some sleep.

How would an all-liquid planet work?

Same way gas giants would, I imagine. Liquid lower levels with a relatively solid core, with the atmosphere being layered.

several gas giants actually have layered liquid cores.
The issue you might have is what caused the liquid to condense and hold together as a planet without a solid core.

Gas giants without solid cores are formed by gas collecting to the point that gravity and pressure forms the liquid center.

So in normal physics and all liquid planet would have a massive thick gas layer on top of it.

But this is Starfinder, so magic magic magic.

so in term so 'self enchanting', that's pretty similar to how armor upgrades work in this setting.

The only issue you might run into, if you play with super RAW types, is that the armor and upgrades don't take money, so the class will have extra wealth to spend on other things.
This is only an issue if the player insists on having the same wealth per level of stuff, ignoring that they've got free wealth as a feature.

this is why the "vow of poverty" got all messed up if you played without good role players (it wasn't that great with it either, but it could work).

It worked fine in the one game I played with, as the player was very big on roleplaying someone who give everything to the poor, and getting stuff to give to the poor. Even then the GM put in a lot of work making sure loot was still balanced with and among the party.

the swarm as in "The Swarm" from the Starfinder setting?
Because no, they don't.

Though the Shirren and the god they have are a cool example of collectivism combined with individuality.

Another cool example of this, kinda, is the Parshendi from the Stormlight archives, well before their gods return.
They can all attune to various rhythm that go across the entire race, but have individual minds.

No this was just a take the user had come up with

Cores would generally be liquid, it's a ball of churning molten ore unless your planet is a dead husk with no notable gravity or magnetic field like the Moon.

Depends on the makeup of the gas giant.
Don't remember which is which, but iirc some of the ones in our solar system go 'gas, liquid, rock, molten rock', while others are just "gas, liquid" with no solid layer.

All of the ice and gas giants in our solar system have a rocky core of some sort, but whether or not the rock is liquid isn't necessarily known. The pressures involved are high enough that there's probably some exotic states of matter, aside from all the metallic hydrogen.