Developing to Spec: Part 16b — Vital Choices

This is the second section of Part Sixteen of a series of articles looking at creating a set of Starfinder feats under specific constraints.  You can read along as we convert every feat in the PF core rulebook to Starfinder (and  share my thoughts on that process, as a developer and writer)— or you can just look at the finished feats (as they are written, and I have time over the holidays to update the list) here.

Our alphabetical rundown has brought us to Greater Vital Strike, which obviously has Vital Strike and Improved Vital Strike as prerequisites. So, we need to somehow create a new combat option that’s worth a three-feat investment, that doesn;t break the game’s combat math.

And, to be honest, I’l not 100% sure this succeeds.

The idea is to give an alternative to the Starfinder full attack option. With the base Vital Strike, you end up being able to take a move action, take the same penalty to attacks as with a full attack, and if you hit get increased damage (more than one attack hitting, less than two, which tracks with the average result of a full attack though it’s not perfectly equivalent, and whether it’s better of worse is going to depend on a lot of factors). This is likely fine.

Improved Vital Strike makes you 5% more likely to succeed, and is in keeping with the math from the solarian flashing strikes… but anyone can pick it up and it’s not limited to melee weapons. That might steal too much thunder from the solarian, or it might be fine. Greater Vital Strike works like the solarian and soldier onslaught abilities, but isn’t as good total, and comes into play later, but ALSO is available to anyone.

My best guess is that these are okay, and good for some character builds, but not too good. But I’d certainly want to playtest them before I was sure of that.

(Presented below in the order you can take them, rather than alphabetical order as they would be in a feat list. I went ahead and did all three now, rather than saving one for tomorrow’s post.