Hi everyone, and welcome to the fourth installment of making a critter for Starfinder, and the MONSTER GARAGE! :P
STATTING UP THE CREATURE (part 3)
Continuing on from last time, it’s time to fill in some of the attacks and abilities of our creature. So we now turn to page 129 of the Alien Archive once more, but this time, we start by looking at Table 2: Combatant Array – Attack Statistics.
First, we look at Attack Bonuses. You’ll notice that one of the numbers here is marked as high, and one is low. This is because most creatures have a type of attack that they’re strongest at, either melee or ranged. This goes for practically all systems, though not all of them spell out the distance. So when you’re creating your creature, devote some time to consider their primary attacks. A creature that’s strong and tough would tend to have a high melee value, while one that’s smart, dextrous, or relying on spells would tend to have a high ranged value. That’s not always the case of course, but it works as a rule of thumb. Here we’ll go with our creature being a melee combatant, so with a High value of +22, and a +19 as the low value, we’ll put those in. (Do note that I’m seriously considering not giving this creature a ranged attack, but we’ll leave the stat for now).
Next up comes the damage types, which are here split in Ranged Damage and Melee Damage. These are pretty straight forward. For ranged: If it’s an energy attack, you use that column, and for Melee it depends on the number of attacks you have (though here the damage type is not relevant). For our creature, I’ll fill in the Ranged damage as doing Fire (an energy type) damage, even though I’m thinking of not giving it a ranged attack. It’s something I’ll address before buttoning up the creature. For the melee attacks, I think this creature, with its many legs, should have several attacks, so I’m going to give it the full attack range (i.e. 4 attacks) that each do 1d10+10+Strength. It’s worth noting, as this is something that confused me, to begin with, that this damage ALSO only applies to a single attack – i.e. if you have multiple attacks, you still only deal damage from that column, even if you’re only using one attack. (If the creature only had one attack, it would be 2d10+10+Strength). So here, due to the Strength modifier, we fill in +1d10+18 in both Melee and Multiattack. This being its spider legs, I’m going to call it claws, and have it do slashing damage. While this is mentioned on the Multiattack creature ability, I find that it’s worth noting here, that these attacks are at -6 of the normal attack (i.e. +16 instead of +22), since it’s more than 2 attacks. Normally multiattacking (which only has 2 attacks) would be at -4.
Then we have Creature Type Graft where we determine what kind of creature it is. Now as I’ve mentioned before, I see this creature as a mix of robotic (i.e. construct) and undead. But for the purposes of this one, we’re going to make it a construct with the technological subtype, meaning that it is a form of sentient robot created through technology – again, fitting in with the terror-weapon we’ve envisaged. So we’ll give it that subtype and all of the abilities that come with it (you can see all of those here, for brevity’s sake) – it also has adjustments for saving throws (-2 to all of them) and for attack rolls (+1 to all of them), as well as a BUNCH of immunities.
Next steps would be Subtype and Class grafts if it had either of those that gave special abilities, but I’ve chosen that this creature isn’t specialized enough to need a subtype (for example, an elemental would have a subtype depending on the element it was attached to) nor a class (where a human soldier would have the soldier graft for example). It does have ONE ability from the class grafts though, which is the Resolve Points. Calculating those is a matter of taking your CR and dividing by 5 and adding 3, giving us a total of 5.
So now our creature looks like this:
#NAME# CR 10 Combatant AL Huge construct (technological) Init +X; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision; Perception +19 Aura X (X ft, DC X)
DEFENSE HP 165 RP 5 EAC 23; KAC 25 Fort +10; Ref +10; Will +7 Defensive Abilities construct immunities
OFFENSE Speed X ft. Melee claws +23 (1d10+18 S) Multiattack 4 claws +17 (1d10+18 S) Ranged X +20 (XdX+X #Damagetype) Space X ft.; Reach X ft. (omit if Small or Medium)
Offensive Abilities
STATISTICS Str +8; Dex +5; Con —; Int +1; Wis +3; Cha -3 Skills Athletics +19, Engineering +19, Intimidate +24, Languages Other Abilities
ECOLOGY Environment Organization
SPECIAL ABILITIES (DC 16 – 2 abilities) #Insert Description of Special abilities here, in alphabetical order#
And now that our creature is really beginning to take shape, next time around we’ll finish it up in terms of abilities, and ecology. We’ll address any missing lines that are either not used or which we haven’t filled yet, and we’re going to add a small bit of a blurb-story – fluff if you will – to it. 😊 This was originally posted on d20radio on the 5th of June 2020.
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