Hacking Starfinder

It's not quite as good as the original, Alternity.

But there are tons of options for good space opera play, man.

d20 being swingy and meh isn't new, of course.

It won't be long until a ton of space opera material for Genesys has been "de-Star Warsed" for your consumption.

If you're looking to hack a D20 game to replace Pathfinder may I suggest Stars Without Number?

>I like Starfinder's ruleset

There's no account for taste.

If you need some d20 sci-fi system because you're either too stupid or lazy to attempt learning any other system, check out Stars Without Number. It's what the assclowns behind Starfinder WISHED they could have done.

So Spelljammer?

Dude like half of starfinder's math is broken. Pcs actually get WORSE at piloting ships as they level

Pathfinder 2.0 is just a theory at this point, the Pathfinder fans threw a massive fit on the Paizo forums when they announced that they're looking into doing Pathfinder 2.0 which they totally deserved, they built their own toxic community on the forums themselves

If you're dead set on a d20 based game, you also should just check out 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Ignore your elitist friends who tell you that D&D 5e is the worst and 3.PF is the only good edition, 5e fixed a ton of the major problems that 3.5e had and that Pathfinder never fixed because 'muh sacred cows'.

5e threw the baby out with the bathwater, making everything boring, and still isn't actually balanced. There are still spells that solve any problem out of combat, spells that are win buttons in combat, and the proficiency system is so awful that there's even more reason to be a spellcaster so you don't have to interact with it. And without Tome of Battle/Path of War there aren't cool things for martials to do, just mash two bags of hit points together until one of them runs out.

>recomming GURPS to someone who doesn't do a 360º and walk away from paizo cucktry
user... He already has D&D brain rot, he is beyond salvation

i don't know if that's the kind of broken that actually matters in any significant way.

>proficiency system is so awfu
how so?

>representation
NOPE

Wait, what?
Explain, I'm curious as to how the hell a situation like that even comes about.

GURPS is generic. What the fuck are you on about, "proper sci-fi"?

I'm not RECOMMENDING it, since I didn't like it at all personally, but it's NOT a "proper sci-fi" game.

>If you're dead set on a d20 based game, you also should just check out 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

The weird thing about 5e is that it has very obvious crippling flaws, but it ends up being fun every time I run it

There are rolls with DC = 15+APL*3

So at level 1, with a level 1 ship, you've got a DC 16, but if you're a pilot, assume you've got a 16 in the relevant stat; you've got a +4 and succeed on 12+.

But at level 20, that's a DC 75. If you're focused, you've got +34 on a Piloting check, but you succeed on a fucking 41+. On a d20.

You need to catch up on the FAQ/errata, they fixed the DCs months ago.

>they announced that they're looking into doing Pathfinder 2.

Where/when was this?

>triggered by words

The Proficiency system makes passing skill DCs an unreliable game, and it progresses in numerically small, staggered bumps; when the absolute hardest you can invest in a skill is "I get a reroll with it", the mechanical separation between invested and not invested feels very small. The incredibly staggered progression of Proficiency also leads to very odd bumps in competency.

>unironically defending paizo
lol ok

>"I like speaking Spanish, and I want to pick up a second-language. I've heard French is similar to Spanish, so I thought I'd give that a go, since it's near to something I'm already familiar with. What do you guys thing?"
>"Why don't you just learn Aramaic?"
The 'logic' of GURPS-posters.

More like "Why don't you just learn Esperanto?"

Like. Don't, because there's no point, but it's quite generic.

I think the proficiency system (applying the same bonus over multiple types of rolls) is actually great, your complaint is more with bounded accuracy (having small numeric bonuses which scale very slow).

At least by my definition.

Bounded accuracy doesn't work with absurd 3.PF DCs though. Bounded accuracy essentially means that a 35 isn't "practically" impossible, it may well be mathematically impossible. You could legitimately say "sure roll but the DC is 40" and the player just gets a sad look and puts his dice away.

I understand Bounded Accuracy and think that conceptually it's a good idea, but think that DnD 5E integrated it poorly; I also wish Advantage worked more like Shadow of the Demon Lords system.

If you haven't read SoTDL, the way their Advantage/Disadvantage works is that every Adv you have is 1d6 you get to roll; but you only take the highest and add it to your roll. Disad cancels Adv out on a 1:1 basis, and lots of class features either passively add Adv to actions, add them based on circumstance, or let you willingly take Disad dice in exchange for a more powerful effect. Rolling 4d6 take the highest to add to your roll doesn't sound as great as a full reroll, but when it does lots of stuff to help you even out the probability of your average roll, and interacts in interesting ways with the Critical Hit system. Which is, again for those who haven't read SoTDL, you get a Critical hit if your total result is 20 or higher, period, which is harder to get than it sounds due to how heavily SoTDL limits your gain of flat modifiers.

I agree, I don't think bounded accuracy, at least in its current form in 5e, is a good fit for the d20 system.

>very obvious crippling flaws
like what?

DCs go up for fancy spaceships faster than PCs get better at piloting. It's not an issue until lategame, though, which I don't think literally anyone has actually played.

I think it's probably like wizards having the potential to break the game in that it doesn't really happen in actual games. It's predominantly a problem noticed by people number crunching and calculating and theory crafting outside of actually playing with other people.

>the mechanical separation between invested and not invested feels very small.
I don't know if that's actually that much of an issue, especially in actual games rather than theorycrafting.

From 1 to 20, a character's total bonus to rolls in whatever he's supposed to be good at will probably go from +5 to +11. A level 20 character doing something he's supposed to be good at will fail against an untrained peasant a significant portion of the time. You're getting the low-level comedy of errors the whole game. Unless of course you play a caster and can just bypass the system entirely.

Does that ever actually become an issue in-game?

Paizo at one point, on their forums, said that they were thinking about looking into Pathfinder 2.0 based on the Starfinder system, I don't have the screenshots, but basically the Paizo forums went apeshit at the mere idea and thus Paizo has never mentioned it again.

They should have fixed it during the beta testing, it took them years to develop Starfinder and the broken garbage they released just shows that Paizo doesn't give a single fuck.

Paizo just seem incompetent.

>I don't know if that's actually that much of an issue, especially in actual games rather than theorycrafting.
It is. If you want to actually feel professional in some skill in 5e you want to have the doubling of proficiency like on bard and a reroll. Only then you can feel like someone who knows what he is doing.

>If you want to actually feel professional in some skill in 5e you want to have the doubling of proficiency like on bard and a reroll. Only then you can feel like someone who knows what he is doing.
How would do you know how I feel?

>They should have fixed it during the beta testing, it took them years to develop Starfinder and the broken garbage they released just shows that Paizo doesn't give a single fuck.
This. I don't think they had beta testing. I don't think they read what they had written, or even thought about it at all before writing it down. The rules were just so amazingly and obviously bad that they can only be the result of a random thought they had while huffing paint. And even if they fixed it later, the damage was done - you only get one chance to make a first impression, and the impression they gave was that they didn't care about the product they were making at all.

What rules are obviously or amazingly bad?

Thermorectal analysis with soldering iron.

This board has serious reading comprehension issues.

Unless you write in this mix of a lawyer's style and ELI5 language with disclaimers, you will be misunderstood. How the fuck do you even go outside and talk with real humans, Veeky Forums?

The OP post quite specifically said "I want Starfinder mechanics and rules but without Starfinder's sci-fi setting. Also I don't want Pathfinder, in the inevitable case you suggest it unless I rule that out here first".

Then we've got people suggesting SWN, GURPS, Genesys etc.
And two sane people, one of whom pitched in with 5e.

Then it all went to roasting Paizo, which is fine.

It creates a disconnect where, often, you will be beaten at the task you're supposed to be skilled at by your teammates, because the roll is a vastly more influential than your actual ability until you're in your mid-teens, levelwise.

A Cleric with High Wisdom will frequently out roll the Ranger at Perception, etc.

This creates a sense that NO ONE is actually good at anything.

I haven't read Starfinder, so I won't be as great a help as others are, but as a simple example, that fuck up with the Piloting skill is disgusting because it's the same problem that made Truenamers famously unplayable in 3.5, the system that Paizo built itself on. They should KNOW that shit doesn't work, because they already watched it fail spectacularly.

You assume Paizo know what they're doing and are actually competent.

>You have a level 1 grenade do 20 times less damage than a level 20 grenade.

That's hilarious. Why would you ever use anything but the highest level grenades?

My character has been a cook for 20 years, even while on his adventures out in the wilderness he has spent his entire life working to become the perfect cook

Bonus = Proficiency (2-6)+stat (capped at 5)
Bonus= 7-11

Average joe that just picked up a pan for the first time in his life

Bonus = stat (-1 to 5, lets say 2 for arguments sake)

DC 5
Chef = 100%
Joe = 90%

DC 10
Chef = 90%-100%
Joe = 60%

DC 15
Chef = 65%-85%
Joe = 35%

DC 20
Chef = 40%-60%
Joe = 10%

I feel like the random dice roll has too much of an impact on the stat that my character is dedicated to. There should be a wider gap between Joe and Chef since Chef has been doing it much longer and should be better at it. This is a problem with d20 systems in general but its an even bigger problem in 5e.

I'd suggest you also check Star Wars Saga Edition and True 20 for additional ideas.

He said he liked 3d6 rolling and autistic character gen while disliking Pathfinder and how fucky Starfinder's gear rules are which is why I threw out GURPS. If that's not his jam that's fine, but based on what I was given it seemed like a reasonable suggestion.

You don't, because item treadmill is the name of the game. Damage is tied almost exclusively to your weapon, the wielder is an aside (unless you're a caster, of course). This has the side effect of making Sunder and Disarm the best way to deal with humanoid enemies at medium-high levels.
Also you're not allowed to buy from stores gear above your level. Just buy mind you, not use. And certain communities have an arbitrary limit to the level of gear you can buy in stores.

>Fantasy Craft

>Also you're not allowed to buy from stores gear above your level. Just buy mind you, not use. And certain communities have an arbitrary limit to the level of gear you can buy in stores.
Does it ever actually say you're not allowed to buy them? All I've seen is that it's a general guideline that things above their level will be too expensive unless you save, and that many shops won't sell expensive stuff on account of not having it in stock.

They're rare and expensive.

>You have a level 1 grenade do 20 times less damage than a level 20 grenade. Even abstracting the whole concept of HP values doesn't help much, because then that huge discrepancy just switches to describing different efficiency.
It's usually fine though, swords for example go from steel longswords to some nanotube ceramic composite to single atom edges to molecular rifts through time and space.

>Damage is tied almost exclusively to your weapon,
I think that only becomes an issue past maybe level 15, which I don't think anyone has ever actually played in real life beyond theorycrafting. Before level 10 a melee fighter is gonna get a large majority of their damage from str and class bonuses.

A level 7 soldier might do 2d8 or 2d6 damage with their weapon (average of 8) and have a damage bonus of like 14 (5 from strength, 2 from gear boost, 7 from weapon focus)

The damage is going to be less-so if you're using a ranged weapon but that should be expected from a gun.

How many times do you actually get into cook-offs with peasants though? Does it become a problem in actual games with actual people?

Your Joe has d20+1, not d20+2 btw.

But, nonetheless.
Replace d20 with 3d6 and you get the following:

DC5
Chef: 100%
Joe: 99%

DC10
Chef: 100%
Joe: 74%

DC15
Chef: 83–99%
Joe: 16%

DC20
Chef: 25–74%
Joe: 0%

How do you like this?

Every merchant in the galaxy can tell what level you are by looking at you and will refuse to sell you items with a higher level than you have. Seriously.

Do you not understand the concept of examples?

I do, it's just that I'm not convinced that the DC disparities between different power levels is really something that would actually become that much of an issue, in real games.

It really seems like more of a simulationist theory-crafting nitpick than something that would actually get in the way of the fun.

d6's are probably more realistic for comparing different DCs and getting multiple results, although d20 DCs are waaaaaayy easier to set, and way more straightforward with the maths. Any change to a d20 DC is just going to be a linear 5% chance, while 3d6 is statistically messy.

Eh, it's a vague outline. I don't think it's a rule that anyone who isn't a super lawyer is going to really care about.

It's an "assumption" made for "typical settlements", and even then it's something that most GMs will probably ignore.

Cook offs maybe not so frequent but other forms of opposing checks or "races" to some goal with NPCs happen often. Sometimes because DM made the challenge here and sometimes because players wanted to do something on their own.

You could of course say "X is bigger than Y therefore the one with X wins". Or handwave it completely. But in this case why the fuck you are using this system at all?

Imagine a shop IRL which sells cellphones. They have new, factory-packed everything. But for some reason, they sell every cellphone generation that existed, but for different prices.

So, you've got the bulky 90's Motorola phones for $10, and then something like Nokia 3310 for $100, then an iPhone (the first ever iPhone) for $1000, and a current Samsung flagship for $10000. Now, they won't sell you anything yet, not even when you have enough money. You have to start at the Motorola brick. Then, as you make calls, a lot of calls, you gain experience with making calls and using your phone. You don't know how they track how experienced you are, but they talk about some 'levels'.
Furthermore, after some time using your Motorola, you suddenly discover that you can't make calls with it. The sound quality gets skittier, messages won't come through. You have to change your cellphone, for a pricier one. That's not an issue, but you'd probably like to get that damn flagship already, you have the money. But they won't let you.

The answer is here:
You aren’t going into just any store. Maybe it’s a Costco equivalent that has an entry fee that sells the reliable weapons. You want something nasty, you talk to my Boy Jimmy, but Johnny Tightlips with him might need something done before he hands over the battery pack.

You’re also falling for the 4e Problem, that you aren’t staying on planet Hoboken. The game expects you to go to weirder, stronger, awesome places. You get more opportunities to loot l/but better gear from more upscale boutiques that don’t just care about selling their guns, but that you look the part doing it. At Level 20, you are a Warlord and should demand only the finest weapon, not going back to Jimmy

see You're kind of taking something very literally when it's very unlikely to actually mean anything.

Additionally bonkers: a grenade that deals 20 times as much damage costs 216,000. The level 1 one costs... 35.

So you could instead hire like 20 people, give them, let's say, 10 grenades each and still have 209,000 left.

>triggered by reality

See The math applies to EVERY proficiency in the game: Perception, History, Stealth, Athletics, EVERYTHING.

And it's MOST notable at the starting levels: a Level 4 character only has a proficiency bonus of +2, so if another character has a relevant stat, or god forbid a BETTER stat (Because, let's not forget, the 5e PHB says the default system is stat rolling, so most DMs will use it. This will lead to things like your Rogue only having 16 Dex, and the Monk or Ranger sitting at 18 or 20.) Then it's quite easy for your character to be outdone at their specialty by the untrained but gifted amateur.

And suddenly those 20 people with 10 grenades say "We want 200,000."

>Please try again.

>so if another character has a relevant stat, or god forbid a BETTER stat
Why is that such a bad thing? Monks and rangers can be sneaky or dexterous.

Are you an idiot? The word representation has other meanings different from your American PC bullshit or w/e.

It's like how $60 of caviar isn't much better value for money than $60 of plain rice, but if you're that rich then you might as well.

Even then, there isn't really anything wrong with an interstellar warlord of unimaginable psychic power owning an inordinately large amount of really cheap grenades.

That's not what the henchman rules say.

>Unskilled labor 4 per day or 1 per hour

Even with the "potential danger" applying a 10X modifier you are only looking at 40/day.

Unless you think you can't hire some gangbangers to throw grenades at people from a hive city slum for a pay that is more than they can make in a year.

>triggered as fuck, begins autistic screeching
paizo fan confirmed

Cool, so you're being disengenuous. That's fine.

I assumed so, since your repetitive questions were clearly baiting, but I didn't want to leave you in ignorance if you were simply uninformed.

Just not convinced that your ranger accidentally sneaking as competently as your rogue is really a problem that's noticeable enough for people to care about.

The guy you are replying to is literally caring about it right now. In this thread.

Or he doesn't count because obviously REAL D&D players don't care?

As a note, by the time a character has 215,000 to spend, a field of 20 unskilled laborers isn't a threat to him.

He can gun them all down in a hail of automatic gunfire, or have spent the 7,500 credits to have DR 5/- on his armor, meaning that each grenade will do a max of 1 damage, so the group will likely kill themselves off long before becoming a threat to the PC.

We can only assume he only hired them to take out something without DR.

Most of these issues that people complain about are purely just theorizing on Veeky Forums. It doesn't matter unless it's in a game.

It's a critical mistake for people to be making to care about things that aren't going to actually happen, but it happens all too much.

>They should have fixed it during the beta testing, it took them years to develop Starfinder and the broken garbage they released just shows that Paizo doesn't give a single fuck.

I know, but I'm just saying people should actually keep up and know that they have been fixed.

What's really hilarious is that 35 credit grenade does a 1d6 of damage. It has a zero percent chance of outright killing anything that doesn't have a CON mod deep in the negatives.

Let me give you a comparative example. From both playing 5e and GURPS.

In a GURPS game I was playing a martial artist/brawler with above average abilities. If I remember right it was around 150 points. In course of adventure I had no trouble being able to guess the chances of success and skew them in my favour. And as a crowning moment character rolled from the ladder without taking any damage and kicked the guy at the base of it in the nuts. The chances of success were around 90 to make it without heavy trauma. Character didn't have a single cinematic advantage or supernatural ability. He was just a guy who like beating people.

In 5e I played a bard/barabrian. Because I was kind of a mentor/advisor figure and didn't actually need that much of DPS - there were other people for it. Instead I tried to get some skills that would compliment what party had - Athletics and Nature I think. During the course of the game I started to constantly use magic and bardic inspiration to supplement the skills. Because raw +12 is nowhere enough to be able to do many things reliably. Considering that most of the time DC jumps from 15 to 20. And on sometimes even 25.

The character in GURPS felt more competent and powerful than the one in 5e.

You could give them higher level grenades (maybe it's even more optimal cost/benefit? Probably not, but I'm too lazy to do the math).

If they die, even better, you don't have to pay them/can get your 'nades back!

Worth noting that you didn't spend all that money. You spent a fraction of the money. Assuming we go with "40 credit a day" as their pay (and that doesn't take into account that the x10 multiplier is for specialists, and only when/if they are in danger, not for unskilled labor who are sitting on their ass until they are needed), and give each guy 2 grenades, If you just absolutely want to wreck a place in a single day, you can have 216,000 / 110, which is almost 2000 dudes with d6 grenades, for the price of a single 20d6 one. Or maybe go less crazy and employ 100 for multiple days. They will sure as hell make back more money than a single grenade would if they ever see action, even as just hirelings.

It's also a critical mistake to dismiss it out of hand because you read it on the internet. It's the same shit with complaining about monk vs druid balance in 3.5; no matter how much you say it doesn't matter in practice, I've met multiple people where similar events soured them on the game.

In a game, if another player has an equal modifier to you, he will tie or beat you 52.5% of the time.
If his modifier is 1 lower, he will tie or beat you 47.5% of the time
if it is 2 lower, 42.75% of the time.
and 3 lower, 38.75% of the time.

This creates a feeling of futility: At 3 lower, from levels 1-4, that means you could be trained in a skill, AND have a higher modifier to the stat, and still roll lower than your teammate more than 1/3 of the time.

Your 20 Charisma trained in Persuasion Bard is going to lose to the 18 Charisma sorcerer a real a palpable amount.

Now watch that happen with every initiative roll, every attack roll, every save, every skill check. The things you trained it will fail you while the lucky idiots succeed, again and again and again.

It creates a feeling of futility. Of uselessness. Why should I do anything except the one thing I am AMAZINGLY better at, if almost half the time, I lose to the guy who rolled better than me at chargen?

And I've watched it play out in the games. I've seen the ranger announce their 18 Perception proudly, and then the druid says "21".

And then you watch BOTH of them fail a DC 15 check, and the Goblin fighter rolls the 18 to beat them.

No one feels like they're good at anything, because statistics means someone else is beating them AT THEIR TRICK close enough to feel like every other time. And you watch the players instinctively react: they try and make new characters to bring to the next adventure, because "This one just doesn't feel like he's adding much," without noticing that half the group is saying the exact same thing: NO ONE feels like they're adding much.

Granted, the group I watched it all happen to had too many players (6-7), which accelerated that sense of uselessness descending, since there were just more rolls happening, but that's the real experience: your character is trained in a thing, you have backstory invested in your ability to do X...and it means nothing.

My point was to counter the guy arguing that the NPCs would turn on you with all the grenades: they COULD, but mathematically, they're absolutely no threat to the PC by the time he's throwing around the money being mentioned: he could gun them down with gear worth 10% of his current wealth.

Eh, they can kill goblins if you're lucky or soften them up otherwise. They work well enough, realism aside.

No, no, and no. You've missed the whole point. Why is there such a big discrepancy between the effectiveness of different versions of the same product? And even more of a discrepancy between prices?

Okay, I'm no military expert, but I can believe in a 20x discrepancy. Maybe the higher-end stuff is newer technology, more expensive, more rare, whatever.
But the prices? Grenades ain't some luxury shit with arbitrary pricing depending only on artifically inflated demand. Are they made of fucking gold?

You can argue whatever you will about a shitton of other factors baked in, including contacts and reputation, but it doesn't excuse the apparent wild discrepancy between the technological levels these products, wildly different functionally, come from.

Anyway, look at how Traveller handles equipment of all sorts. It doesn't break suspension of disbelief. Granted, Traveller never tries to handle a certain design intent of having a (relatively) steep level-based abstract progression, but shouldn't you drop such intents if they actually stand in the way of the supposed main purpose of RPGs?

>It's not an issue until lategame, though, which I don't think literally anyone has actually played.

I started to notice the DCs getting out of hand as soon as level 6 in my short test campaign. Despite having good stats and being put into ship roles that matched them, they were noticeably worse at piloting their level 6 ship compared to their level 3 one despite having access to better computers.

Honestly the ship rules in general are pretty awful. The ship roles are not created equal and lead to certain party members being bored out of their mind, and it's crunch only serves to bog down what should be an exiting sci-fi staple without giving you much fun for the amount of work you sink into it.

Two answers:

1. Armor gets better
It gets Shields and stuff too. You need better guns to fire better bullets

2. Paizo
>Competence

Hey. Still pretty new to Starfinder; only started looking into it in late December. Joined my first game and got the GM to let me play an anthousa solarian.

I'm wanting to focus on a Dex / ranged build, using solar armor. However, my question is: is there any way to use solar armor with heavy armor? Like, is there a feat or something I can take?

I really like the anthousan fluff and basically want to play a dimly lit, bio-organic terminator.

Everyone keeps mentioning SWN. Sell me on it, why is it so loved? Serious user

Again SWN, what is so special? never read it

It's an OSR game that's very generic at its core (making it simple to pick up), but stole the best mechanics from everywhere else for its optional systems (trading, planet/system creation, etc.).

It’s corebook has a free version

You mock Joe, but watch an amateur episode of Chopped or something, some Joes are indeed incredibly gifted

again i see the same problem with most modern/sci-fi games
Armor does not reduce damage, only makes it harder to hit
weapons have no penetration value
thats just not good enough for modern firearms