Strikes

When building your creature's selection of Strikes, use the following sections to set the Strike's attack bonus and damage. Give the attack all the normal traits if it's a weapon; for unarmed attacks or weapons you invent, give whatever traits you feel are appropriate. Note that these traits might influence the damage you give the Strike. You might want to make sure a creature has an unarmed attack if you think it's likely to get disarmed. Creatures should always have access to a ranged strike; even if most PCs can't fly until they get access to jet packs at 5th level, lower-level PCs might still have access to climb Speeds and limited flight options like jump jets much sooner. Some ancestries give innate flight speed too, so it's possible to have a 1st-level PC flying around the battlefield, which means most creatures do need a ranged option or be in an area where flight mobility is limited. Many parties can also pin down melee-only enemies in a way that makes an encounter trivial if the enemies don't have ranged strikes. Manufactured Weapons As noted in Items, most creatures have less treasure than PCs, so those that rely on manufactured weapons are significantly weaker if you don't adjust the weapons' damage to compensate. The method for determining Strike damage abstracts the sources of damage, so you don't have to worry about adjusting the weapon's damage. If you do decide to calculate the weapon's damage, give your creature weapon specialization or greater weapon specialization much earlier than a PC would get it. You might also need to add sneak attack or similar abilities to make the creature deal more damage. On the flip side, you might want to use a one-off creature as a source of a particularly high-level piece of treasure, such as a higher-grade weapon. In these cases, you might want to make the attack bonus higher for a tactical weapon or the damage higher for an advanced weapon so the PCs feel the weapon's effect before they obtain it. This will make the treasure feel more powerful since they've already been on the receiving end.