Tactical Rules

Combat in Starfinder is cyclical. After initial steps that begin a battle, every character acts in turn through a regular cycle of rounds until the combat ends. Regardless of how it plays out, combat follows this sequence.

This section presents the key terms and calculations needed to adjudicate the most basic elements of combat: attacking and defending. For a full breakdown of all actions characters can take in combat, see Actions in Combat on page 244.

The specific actions you can perform in combat are detailed in this section. For quick reference, specific combat actions are organized by their type in the Actions in Combat sidebar.

Your Hit Points (HP) measure how hard you are to kill. No matter how many Hit Points you lose, you aren’t hindered in any way until your Hit Points drop to 0. In addition, you have Stamina Points (SP) that work like Hit Points but replenish more easily, and you have Resolve Points (RP), which you can use to keep yourself from walking through death’s door. See page 22 for more about Resolve Points.

Several factors can influence combat or grant you modifiers to attack rolls or other statistics.

It’s often very important to know where all the creatures involved in an encounter are, as well as what terrain and other objects are present. The rules for movement and positions work best when keeping track of positions using a battle map and miniatures. A battle map is typically divided into a grid of 1-inch squares, each of which represents a 5-foot-by-5-foot area. Starfinder uses miniatures on the 30 mm scale (meaning a miniature of a 6-foot-tall creature is approximately 30 mm tall), available at paizo.com or your local gaming store.

The rules below cover moving in environments with normal gravity conditions. For more about movement in zero gravity, see page 402.

Just as actions determine what you can do in combat and movement determines how you get there to do it, senses determine what you can perceive and how. Different alien races might have many different senses, but essentially all senses are separated into precise and imprecise senses. A specific creature’s senses are typically further refined into special abilities that more tightly detail how it perceives. These abilities include blindsight, blindsense, sense through, darkvision, and low-light vision, and the description of these abilities is found in Special Abilities beginning on page 262.

The broad definitions of creatures’ types of senses are below, followed by an explanation of how they function.

A number of creatures and characters with a variety of classes gain the use of special abilities. These abilities range from ones that can be activated in a way similar to spells to more static abilities that grant special senses or traits.

Throughout the course of her adventures, a character often comes under the effects of conditions, circumstances, magic, technology, or other factors that provide her with bonuses or penalties to certain game statistics, such as her Armor Class (AC), attack rolls, or saving throws. The situations that can grant bonuses or impose penalties in Starfinder are practically limitless, but bonuses and penalties all function using the rules described in this section.

While it’s always a good idea to keep track of all bonuses and penalties affecting your character at any given time, such tracking is particularly important during combat. After all, that +1 morale bonus to attack rolls from the envoy’s get ’em improvisation might mean the difference between either landing the blow that fells a security robot or allowing it to remain standing (and subsequently take out a wounded ally). GMs should take care to note all bonuses and penalties that are in effect during combat, but ultimately, it’s usually up to the player to track the bonuses and penalties affecting her character at any given time so that she has an accurate handle on how she performs in combat.

The rules that govern bonuses and penalties, as well as the different specific types of bonuses, are described below.

Whether an effect is created by a class feature, spell, or piece of equipment, it usually has factors such as area, duration, and range that are defined using specific game terms, as well as descriptors that indicate its type of power (and that sometimes affect how it works). The following section describes how effects’ areas, descriptors, durations, ranges, and targets work, and it also gives the mechanical definition of line of effect and line of sight—two factors key to determining whether a character can use a spell or piece of equipment effectively.

When you’re in a vehicle fleeing from enemies who are on foot, or you’re on foot yourselves trying to stop a vehicle, movement and combat are represented on a grid, such as a battle map. Different rules apply to chases between vehicles, since they involve much greater distances (see page 282).

Vehicles are objects, so they don’t have actions or reactions of their own—they must be piloted by a character or an AI autopilot (see page 280). However, they might still move when uncontrolled (see page 280). In some cases, a vehicle’s item level affects the DC of the pilot’s or passengers’ skill checks or otherwise factors into how these rules work. See pages 228–229 for the statistics of specific vehicles.