Can Starfinder get some love?

[LordErebus12]

Long time no see, my friends...

So, can we get a starfinder Prefix from this forum? :P

[Knitifine]

I second this.

[khadgar567]

Thirded and agreed

[Psykenthrope]

Yeah, a Starfinder subforum would be great. Maybe it could be tucked away inside the 3.x forum?

[Morphic tide]

I agree, given that Starfinder has some lovely mechanical features and balance points. It'll probably need a caster nerf/martial buff overhaul within three splats, given Pazio's record, though I blame that on Wizards of the Coasts' example, but it'll still have features worth working with.

[khadgar567]

I agree, given that Starfinder has some lovely mechanical features and balance points. It'll probably need a caster nerf/martial buff overhaul within three splats, given Pazio's record, though I blame that on Wizards of the Coasts' example, but it'll still have features worth working with.

What caster nerfs and martial buffs mate

[Rynjin]

I agree, given that Starfinder has some lovely mechanical features and balance points. It'll probably need a caster nerf/martial buff overhaul within three splats, given Pazio's record, though I blame that on Wizards of the Coasts' example, but it'll still have features worth working with.

Starfinder has a different design and setting team, so it notably lacks Jason Buhlman and James Jacobs' input on anything. That gives me hope that the current team (led by Owen KC Stephens IIRC) can avoid those pitfalls, since they're all pretty swell dudes who have made some pretty cool things (we can forgive Owen for making the Godling[s]).

[Morphic tide]

Starfinder has a different design and setting team, so it notably lacks Jason Buhlman and James Jacobs' input on anything. That gives me hope that the current team (led by Owen KC Stephens IIRC) can avoid those pitfalls, since they're all pretty swell dudes who have made some pretty cool things (we can forgive Owen for making the Godling[s]).

Casters don't have to deal with the bull**** that is the weapon scaling. The level six artillery beam costs over 10 times as much as the level one artillery beam, but deals only one more damage die. And has a Usage twice as high, so it's only improving burst damage. And not by much for how much more it costs. Twice as much to use, over ten times as much to get and you don't get any Crit or Range improvement.

The costs are just utter bollocks. The vast majority of the time, you're better off dumping wealth into filling out cheap item slots and getting lower-level expendable weapons that deal nearly as much damage. Most things scale in price arbitrarily absurdly, with a +4 and +6 personal augmentation having a cost difference of 68,500, while the +2 and +4 only have a difference of 5,100. The difference between DR 6 and DR 7, three levels apart in required level, from Dermal Plating is 378,500, with the ratio of the cost being 3.32. In other words, increasing DR by one point more than triples the cost for going from 6 to 7.

Guess what the level 20 wealth by level is? Three million seven hundred seventy five thousand(3,777,000) So the difference between DR 6 and 7 is over a tenth of the WBL of a max level character. A max level weapon costs over a fifth for marginal improvement over stuff that costs massively less, when you account for paying for more versatile stats. The scaling cost for gear, that thing Martials are typically crippled by reliance on, is so utterly broken that casters casually end up with over a quarter as much disposable wealth, before we get into how they can cut operation costs with magic, like cutting out the need for a recharging station with a 2nd level spell that lets them charge batteries at a high enough rate to be combat viable, let alone the effects when downtime enters the equation.

Basically, gear costs are inflated in a way that utterly destroys any dedicated Martial outside a Solarion who dares to have more than one level-appropriate weapon, who get 12d6 with their class feature weapon at level 20 and can grab most crit effects for minuscule costs. And the cost of the crystals that enhance it goes up by a factor of 7.71 to go from the most expensive 3d6 crystal, which has Severe Wound on crit, to the least expensive 6d6 crystal, which has Knockdown on crit.

The gear cost scaling is so insane that Cyborgs are probably the best archetype simply for being able to pack more low-level augments and improve the low-level augments further. It also has the advantage of not gouging out your character's class features at bundles of levels and thus lets you actually be a member of your class with the class-defining ability list instead of having that list gutted out for a large number of levels.

Really, the first major homebrew project is liable to end up just being fixing mechanical blunders.

[rferries]

Casters don't have to deal with the bull**** that is the weapon scaling. The level six artillery beam costs over 10 times as much as the level one artillery beam, but deals only one more damage die. And has a Usage twice as high, so it's only improving burst damage. And not by much for how much more it costs. Twice as much to use, over ten times as much to get and you don't get any Crit or Range improvement.

The costs are just utter bollocks. The vast majority of the time, you're better off dumping wealth into filling out cheap item slots and getting lower-level expendable weapons that deal nearly as much damage. Most things scale in price arbitrarily absurdly, with a +4 and +6 personal augmentation having a cost difference of 68,500, while the +2 and +4 only have a difference of 5,100. The difference between DR 6 and DR 7, three levels apart in required level, from Dermal Plating is 378,500, with the ratio of the cost being 3.32. In other words, increasing DR by one point more than triples the cost for going from 6 to 7.

Guess what the level 20 wealth by level is? Three million seven hundred seventy five thousand(3,777,000) So the difference between DR 6 and 7 is over a tenth of the WBL of a max level character. A max level weapon costs over a fifth for marginal improvement over stuff that costs massively less, when you account for paying for more versatile stats. The scaling cost for gear, that thing Martials are typically crippled by reliance on, is so utterly broken that casters casually end up with over a quarter as much disposable wealth, before we get into how they can cut operation costs with magic, like cutting out the need for a recharging station with a 2nd level spell that lets them charge batteries at a high enough rate to be combat viable, let alone the effects when downtime enters the equation.

Basically, gear costs are inflated in a way that utterly destroys any dedicated Martial outside a Solarion who dares to have more than one level-appropriate weapon, who get 12d6 with their class feature weapon at level 20 and can grab most crit effects for minuscule costs. And the cost of the crystals that enhance it goes up by a factor of 7.71 to go from the most expensive 3d6 crystal, which has Severe Wound on crit, to the least expensive 6d6 crystal, which has Knockdown on crit.

The gear cost scaling is so insane that Cyborgs are probably the best archetype simply for being able to pack more low-level augments and improve the low-level augments further. It also has the advantage of not gouging out your character's class features at bundles of levels and thus lets you actually be a member of your class with the class-defining ability list instead of having that list gutted out for a large number of levels.

Really, the first major homebrew project is liable to end up just being fixing mechanical blunders.

Damn that's disappointing! I was hoping weapon damage would scale by level rather than by weapon cost.

However, to get back to the main point - any mods going to chime in about making a new tag? Or shall we stick to just the Pathfinder tag?

[Rynjin]

Weapon damage does scale by level for the most part. All characters get the Weapon Specialization Feat in any weapons their class gives proficiency in (adding their level to damage).

Just like PF, most damage comes from static boosts and not dice past a certain point.