Design Diary: Why Combat Maneuvers in Starfinder are Designed to Be Difficult (Patreon Exclusive) (Patreon)

I mentioned in Monday's post that I'd be happy to go into more detail about why Starfinder has combat maneuvers target the value of foe's KAC +8, which is a known and intentionally difficult number to reach. So, as a Patreon exclusive, here's the short version (and if more people are interested, I can do a longer one):

Combat maneuvers in Pathfinder were proven to be able to shut down a foe as dangerous as your whole party. grapple a spellcaster, and they are then easily killed. Disarm a swordsman and grab his sword, and he stops being a threat.

Now in Pathfinder, there's at least one big drawback -- if you don't burn a feat on a maneuver, you provoke an Attack of Opportunity when you attempt one Since Starfinder was tasked to be simpler than Pathfinder, we limited AoOs to only when you leave a threatened square, make a ranged attack, or cast a spell. So combat maneuver become safer to attempt.

Further, with the decision to have so much damage for characters to be tied to their weapons, things like disarm become a 1-roll way to largely neutralize a huge segment of foes.

So, the idea was to make those combat maneuvers, with no extra resources put into them, neither more effective than less effective than other kinds of attacks at neutralizing a foe. With that decisions, and the KAC serving as the target number base (again, to be simpler than CMD/CMB of Pathfinder), the question was how much harder does it need to be to succeed at a maneuver to ensure that, on average, grappling or disarming someone takes as many attempts to neutralize them as it takes if you just attack them. 

On *average*, a group of 4 PCs trying to disarm a foe will succeed and drop them in about the same number of rounds as if they all just shoot at it. Further, their odds of success are higher if they work together (flanking, envoy boosts, operative trick attacking to make target flat-footed, and so on). Pushing the whole party to coordinate to take down a significant threat means that successful combat maneuvers are likely to involve the whole team, rather than one player shutting down a villain and everyone else feeling unneeded.