BigNorseWolf's page

I need to trim the beard soon. its spring and the critters need the nesting material.

When I was about 8, outside the arcade was a candy store and I got white chocholate once and liked it.

So i've had a white chocholate bunny in my easter basket for around fourish decades since.

EDIT: I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with callouses. CY, David, BNW, and anyone else who works with their hands all day to the point of having significant callouses on your fingers, do you have issues with fingerprint recognition as well?

Possible but hard to tell apart from the general druid aura that will cause electronic malfunctions.

I had a really large fighting stick from the ren fair that I used as a walking stick, 1 inch diameter ~3 inch diameter octagonal

I was coming back from a small hike along the road (so, walk through town to woods, walk through woods, walk home) and there was a squirrel on the side of the road that had been hit by a car. The squirrel doesn't seem in shock enough to go in the shirt, so I start jogging home to get a car and a box.

Cops are not happy seeing the rather large person with a giant stick running through down. I get pulled over. Lean on the stick puffing a bit "Hey whats up?"

"Whats with the stick? You're kinda freaking people out running with the thing. We got two calls

"Oh. There's a squirrel back there that got hit by a car. I was going to go home get a box. One of the cops mention having seen the squirrel.

"Whats the stick for?

"Walking stick. Pole vaulting. Mugger deterrent....

"Well you can't have that if you're going to hit people with it.

"no. deterrent. The idea is i DON"T wind up ... you know what, no time. They seize it. get a receipt. Tell me not to go pick up the squirrel.

Of course, run/walk home, get dad show up in the truck (no sign of the squirrel though)

Walk to the police station a few days later. Guy asks for id. Is shocked when I say I'm 16 and no learners permit (six foot with a full beard). But did you steal a giant oak octagonal walking stick from anyone ELSE this week... Get it back. Start walking home.

Of course get pulled over. Alright enough of this.... " I JUST got this back from the police station. I didn't have time to argue last time but right now I got ALL day..."

I have no idea what he's going to do with them, but he was cacklingly ecstatic to get them.

Did he ever figure out about the tooth fairy?

Pouring a healing potion onto a teammate being a full action has to be my #1 most hated rule...

Well, melissa has a caustoject full of them for a reason. Post erratta you don't even need to roll to hit.

Well THIS is finally a thing. Its amazing if you haven't seen it. The best adult animated musical about hell ever. Its.. oddly uplifting.

The Aesthetics were amazing. First few episodes were amazing, but seemed to slow down for no reason in the middle/end.

I love when the dice are in on the joke....

I took a chomp, a bite,
getting bloody dark out
panic if you're still alive,
six to eight bites to midnight
and now if I swallow there may be no tommorow
but when the buffet's dun
might as well be snacking on the sun.

A partial eclipse must have been more confusing to the ancients than a total one.

"Why's it dark and getting cold? Oh something is blotting out the sun"

"Whys it a little dark and getting cold.... " looks at the sun and sees mo difference "weeeiiirrrd"

Surrounded? You mean a target rich environment. MUAHAHAHAHAH

There's also i survived the 2024 NY earthquake shirt. With a picture of 1/4 pieces of lawn furniture tipped over.

Next up, locusts!

Only got 90% coverage here, it was cool but you absolutely needed the glasses to really see anything. The sun otherwise just looked slightly cloudy. I may have looked for another effect a liiitle too long.

earthquake, check. Locusts check. Eclipse check. Flood.. eh getting there. Tourists cause a state of emergency though...

I'm not that far from nyc so 94%ish percent will have to be good enough. Should probably find the glasses i bought last week...

For my money, the best space combat game is Ad Astra Games' "Attack Vector: Tactical". But it's not for everyone.

mmm chocholate

4.8 earthquake in jersey felt in new york.

Here it's just a little shaking.

If I was going to wish for a projectile of choice for trying to hurry the garbage crew it would be the trash panda...

The 1e envoy definitely has the problem where you benefit so little from charisma that you don't want to max it out and instead concentrate on your hit stat. (Usually dex. Strength based envoys have problems at a lot of levels. The three action economy would probably help that a lot.) Don't get me wrong you need a good charisma for your social skills, but the difference between 1d20+14+1d6+1 and a reroll and a partridge in a pear tree and 1d20+16+1d6+1 and a partridge in a pear tree.

The best weapon for the class is a large unwieldy gun but unlike the operative, they're disincentivized from using a weapon you'd think of an envoy having (like a deringer or a stilletto)

If you SAY something is a charsima based class and don't build it in, then part of the player base subverts the expectation and you have show don't tell. The other half goes with the path laid down and get frustrated when their class isn't working. In PF1 an envoy with a gun bigger than they are isn't a trade off it's an upgrade.

Bring a book.

Usually the cheap travel times are so off your odds are running from gate to gate or sleeping over in the station/terminal. Or missing your buss. Spending 4 hours in a station isn't the best idea but it beats spending 16 hours worrying you'll be stuck there for life.

I ran into in the NYC port authority central that either recognized me from a con or just could tell I was on my way to origins and was giving me a better route...

.... for fertilizer and water extraction and the like.

So about 7000 UPB's per pound then? A human could easily carry several hundred thousand of them.

1 kg (2.2 lbs) rice contains 50,000 grains. I've hauled 50 lb bags around town so say 100,000-200,000 just slung over your shoulder, more if you want to get a backpack or a wheeled luggage something.

you keep going, this is the fun part! wheeeeeeee

Stuffed in the back of a prius

car rocks dangerously to the side

"Oh my god did we hit something?"

"...Nope sorry.. just moving my leg...

In other news, I get to navigate the fun-filled world of overnight school trips. Four of my forensics kiddos qualified for state championships this season.

Everyone try to commit one staged murder and solve the other 3?

We must be using different definitions of battlefield control. Mine is merely a method.

That new fangled treantmonks guide you were pointing out doesn't just tell you to control the battlefield its very explicit about what spells do that and how.

WHAT exactly are you doing to do "battlefield control" ? you're not just declaring to the dm "I will control the battlefield!" you're doing SOMETHING.

The secret tactics fu in Pathfinder 2nd Edition

The technique over controlling who takes the damage is what I'm questioning. The damage will be average (even a bit above on the bellcurve and there's a problem), the damage won't come in crits, and the damage will be evenly spread our are all problematic. The last one in particular because...

I am a storyteller and I tend to let my players' efforts work as intended if they are competently planned

And ideas of competent vary wildly.

What I see a lot of is a defensive line of characters (either pcs or npcs) with characters out front as bait. having the bad guys attack the battle turtle in front is a convention. It's one that previous editions helped to establish and the biggest reason I see it work is people buy into it.

Naratively, you're standing there protecting your allies the bad guys have to get through the slightly injured people to get to the people one hit away from going horizontal. (Bob at 4 hp).

As a tactical game you're doing nothing to show your allegedly superior tactics and battlefield control. There is very little you can do to stop people from walking right past you to kill bob without some really fortuitous terrain. Cover and hidden stop working once the kobold passes the corner. The three action system and few AOOs give people a LOT of freedom to just zip around the battlefield.

On the one hand, its kind of unrealistic how easy it is to get by people- that's enabled by the stop motion nature of the game. One the other hand, someone is just as dangerous at 4 hp as 24 and the kobold knows that, as well as the other rules the world works under. Going around the mostly intact person to Finish someone off is mean.. but the kobolds motivation is to live.

I don't think you can count on one of those considerations being more important than the other assume that one WILL outweigh the other and deride any other results as poor tactics.

My favorite part is that I'm still upgrading the interior -- I'm replacing all the speakers and the stereo, fixing all the loose clips, etc. To replace rear speakers you need to pull out the back seat, so yesterday Impus Minor went out to take it and he asked, "Dad, is this driveable?"

"Yeah, why not?"
"There's no back seat!"
"So don't take more than one passenger!"
"Um, OK."

i don't see how thats not room for more passengers.

So your arguments boil down to "No one wants to be a healer"

"Off healing isn't enough"
"the DM is gonna make it lethal, and doesn't have a choice not to"
"Using stategies and tactics to avoid damage won't work because I've never seen it work."

A system that allows individuals to build THEIR characters and still function is far more enjoyable to me than a system that requires rigid builds and food groups. Starfinder is absurdly good at that and pathfinder2 is really pushing the foodgroup model at low levels. If the envoy doesn't work in a melee party then you need to geek suduko melee around someone wanting to play an envoy or an envoy wanting to play with melee.

Off healing isn't enough at low levels.

What players consider basic strategy: focus fire on the wounded person till they drop the bad guys consider basic strategy too. PF2 lacks components to ameliorate that. In starpath1 I can justify the kobold not rushing past Pike to finish off Bob. In pf2 not taking out bob feels like playing deliberately dumb. It is the DM's choice, but it should feel more natural than metagamey. With Starfinder 2s ranged meta, that is going to kick into overdrive.

When I've never seen it work, there are factors not accounted for in the math that will make it not work, and there's a part that is entirely hand-waived.. Yes. I am going to conclude it won't work. I don't think that the skill ceiling for most RPGs is so high that there's some secret tactics fu that can't be explained. I have never seen anyone appeal to it and then demonstrate it, and I have seen a LOT of people appeal to it in a lot of systems over the years.

I have explained tactics in detail many times in the Pathfinder 2nd Edition forums

The tactics you're describing are the best you can do with a bad situation, but I don't think they rise to a solution. Crit happens, and its guaranteed to happen with enough rolls. You're relying on a solution which I've found to be more of a paradigm than a strategy, and as stated above, that can easily break and is not load bearing.

Control the battlefield is a goal, not a method.

Even assuming that the enemy is relying on ranged attacks for which defensive positioning is useless

In pathfinder/ 3.x , Pike the Pikeman could control the battlefield by threat of AoO's given. You didn't want to pass him. Even if the first penguin got pushed through his reach and found an AOO, combat reflexes leads to the dirty harry speech about how many shots are left in the polearm.

Besides habit, I do not see much allowing that in PF2 at low level. I don't need a ranged weapon to stab Bob while he's hiding in the back. I can walk 50 feet, right past the entire party, and gank Bob with no repercussions, and start flanking with my friends next round. The party needs to fill a corridor to stop that.

I have been playing long enough to see battlefield control as a new concept explained in Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards: Being a God for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition

... That was not a remotely new concept at that point.

I am not unfamiliar with the concept. I am skeptical of its importance when it comes to brass tacks. Those brass tacks are INCREDIBLY system dependent.

The working mechanism for dealing with the roughly 50% fail rate and one-per-hour restriction on 1st-level Treat Wounds is tactics.

Every time I have seen someone suggest the vague handwave of "tactics" they've left if blank. Or said something that won't work. You've done the same thing but moved tactics (that would help some supposing battlefield control) to use battlefield control and then handwaived there will be battlefield control. The bad guys can throw rocks too, and in starfinder the plan is they all have lasers. Even the wolfs have lasers. The wolfs ARE lasers.

They don't HAVE to attack the healthy people in front. They can see bob's in the back holding a kidney and leaking valuable red fluid like a sieve. The lack of AOO means walking past the people you put up front is really easy outside of spaceship corridors.

Even IF you somehow manage to control where every monster is fighting and one of those hits you're averaging is going to be a crit, or a lucky 3 hits, or a higher than average 2 hits, it will drop someone. And then the rest goes like dominoes.

Not sure if flying negates the zero g rules or if i'm now playing asteroids after mashing the forward key....

For those squinting and plotting they are 130 feet out

To date I've been in five different campaigns, each starting at level 1, and medicine's always worked well for us.

I see no mechanism for you getting passed a roughly 50% fail rate.

I mean, that's the point people upthread are making, isn't it? In order to heal you need one skill, Medicine.g.

Yes, people are making that assertion. I feel that assertion is so far removed from reality (fantasy reality?) as to either be Asmodean level rules lawyering or completely disingenuous. As a practical matter, yes you can heal with the medicine skill. No, that is not sufficient healing at low levels. Yes, I can technically dig the foundtion of a house with a spoon. No, not going to happen.

Replying to Big Norse Wolf

So what, a system should never allow you to be hurt because then you require a healer, a role which you cannot imagine anyone enjoying, and you seem to actively encourage people to develop the same attitude.

All of this is wrong. None of it remotely follows from what I said.

Starfinders stamina system allows you to be hurt and come back largely without a healer. Starfinder has a lot of solutions for healing not covered by your coffee break, because that primary mechanism has already done a lot of the heavy lifting. Any backliner with a mystic cure 1 gem can give an emergency levelX 6 ish point heal to the tank. Any mystic can dip healing with an epiphany, and if all else fails Calden Cayden brand six packs can have you feeling better one way or another if you drink enough of them.

I do not think healing needs to be done THIS way is NOT the same as I don't want healing to be a thing.

I know some people like that role, but its not 1/4 of players.

I'm not making converts. Just stating how most people find it.

Do you also object to social encounters because that requires someone to build as a Face?

Social encounters

need an ability to go south anyway in case gamers or the dice find it.
are a minority of encounters (the encounters where you will be hurt? Most of them. Including the social encounters when they go south)
Take up a skill or two at most

The comparison to requiring an entire character dedicated to them is just not genuine.

Well for PF2, you can just be trained in medicine

You don't just need to be trained in medicine at low levels.

1 level 2 trained 2ish wisdom= +5 healing. (the +1 healers kit is a few levels away)

You are about ~50 % likely to fail to heal your comrade for an hour
Within that fail rate you are 20% likely to DAMAGE someone, possibly killing them. so you really can't use that option. Worse if you don't have a 14 wisdom.

The mundane healer needs battle-medicine, a skill boost in medicine (which matters less as you level), and assurance, because the person bleeding out on the ground is the LAST person who can take 1d8 hp of damage at the worst possible time. Thats still going to hard cap you at around 2-3 encounters, and you'll be dragging people home at the end of 3 like its calden caydens bar crawl.

My experience leveling up has been that healing moves from a 2 action job most of the time, to occasionally, to Oh crap it just hit the fan, oh right this person can heal its been so long we forgot about that....
0

Also, maybe it's not the worst idea to talk with everyone while building characters and talk about healing

And get a collective groan. New system new class new way of healing is interesting once. But unless there's more than one it's just "the healer" and its rarely what people will be chomping at the bit to play.

support should be viable enough on its own to justify its existence without being a necessity. Requiring it, even just to slog through the low levels, is a step backwards from starfinder 1.

or someone noticed that the door had recently been fixed by some ... less than code methods from the engineer , thought that meant the lock was an easy target and tried it. (most front doors are made to be easily openable by a determined firedepartment so aren't much of a barrier even when they ARE working properly)

If someone had known you would be gone for an extended period of time they could have made off with a TV at least and not a wham bam grab what you can.

David M Mallon wrote:

Car companies these days can't reliably make functional tire pressure sensors. Why would I trust them to make sensors that are supposed to drive the car?

We bought a 2006 Prius. By 2009 the tire sensors went out. $350 later they were all replaced. By 2012 they went out again. The dealer wanted another $350. I told them where they could stick their tire sensors.

On the little nozzle thing you unscrew?

Indeed, a problem you seem to be a part of yourself, my good wolf! I mean, "the boring job?" For shame!)

Not. Cool

If I WANT to play a support character that's one thing. And I will.. IF i can find a unique gaming mechanism that I enjoy doing it with. In PF1 i had a lot of fun with everything from splitting ridiculous amounts of damage with high con clerics using shield other to a white furred brown furred transmuter turning the party into various monsters complete with a pamphlet entitled "I'm a WHAT?"

But no one should feel they HAVE to. If the game is forcing that on players by practical necessity (and it feels like low level pf2 play does) that's an element of design I do not like, and the solution is not as you've done repeatedly in this thread, to tar everyone that doesn't like it as a dirty selfish munchkin.

I know of exactly -0- people who are interested in riding in, much less owning, a self-driving car. The corner-cutting has, can, and will cost lives.

Amazon has a lot of interest in owning a LOT of them.

those DPR-obsessed hooligans can go blow their own actions while ranged characters (and casters, hopefully!) enjoy an increased variety of bespoke buffs.

If your buff is bespoke then it is incredibly limited in both usability and power.

If your buff is supposed to be bespoke for the situation then you absolutely need more than one, even at first level. Or your functionally don't have your main class feature. A bard might be boring but its at least functional. there are levels where the sf1 envoy isn't.(or well wasn't)

One thing i really like about starfinder 1 is that you can throw any group of mixed nuts on an adventure and they'll be fine. It might be because a lot of my pf2 stuff is low level but I do not see HOW you survive those levels without a healer. Who gets stuck with that boring job has me flash backing from everything to the 80s table top to wow raids.

Similarly Ranged has to stand or fall on its own. If you need a party with everyone taking a role they don't like to make it come together that's not going to fly. Then you're just going to get the four melee monsters.

Are we talking Alien or Starship Troopers?

Whoops missed a turn. carry on.

.or, perhaps, much like Vonnegut, readers or viewers are adding a point that was never intended by the creators, then marveling that no one else sees it...

As often as i use the curtains were (*##$ blue meme, the themes were present enough in the novel that even if, somehow, the movie creators weren't aware of them they would have come through.

Hm. Nah. Get 'Em isn't really "load bearing,"

Not get em. The idea that starfinder is pew pew lasers. In SF1 that lasted until people saw navasi do 2 damage with a pistol while Obo was smashing things for 10 with her doshko.

it's just the directive you get right away for free.

It's not free. You had to become an envoy to get it.

Like all other directives, it should be situational, because a class that does the same sequence of actions every turn is boring. The fact that it doesn't stack with off-guard means that envoys have to pay attention to the field and coordinate with their team.

It also means that for first level, your entire class is irrelevant in combat under the wrong circumstances. Fairly common circumstances at that.

Enhanced did a lot to fix it, but Envoy felt REALLY bad until improved get em kicked in. It wasn't just because you were locked in to the same action routine, it was because you fairly often had no effect on the fight than to just be a worse soldier. If you had to move and attack, no get em. Or no attack and then you have less effect on the combat than a melee soldier with coordinated shot.

If you're worried about the attack routine, you have 3 actions. if one of them is always get em that still leaves 2 other actions to combo with.

For instance, if Punchy and Stabby are going to move in to flank, they won't need the Get 'Em bonus once they're in position, freeing up the envoy to do something else on their next turn.

Like shoot shoot and shoot like a worse soldier/operative? Because if your class consists of one feat and that feat shuts off in a stiff breeze then you don't have a class when initiative starts.

But if Punchy moves before Stabby, she can still benefit from a basically free effective +1 on her turn while setting Stabby up for his +2.

IF the envoy goes before stabby sure. Thats a lot of ifs though, and the more you need to line up probabilities the less they are likely to all come together. You're also taking the envoys baseline performance from All the people on the team attacking to just the one person attacking without flank: a MUCH smaller audience.

I think I have seen ONE envoy go the improved feint route in no small part due to how ubiquitous flat footing your opponents was (mostly from operatives)

I mean, that's why people complain about bards: they're both too good and too repetitive. It doesn't matter if you're doing well if you're bored out of your mind or feel pressured to not deviate...

How are their other actions? Haven't played/seen one except one of my clerics has it as an archetype.

Oh WHOOPS did not see i wasn't up yet.

There are PARTS of starship troopers I like. But its really inconsistent.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE.

Watched The Muppet Christmas Carol followed by A Flight of Dragons with one of the guys who hasn't seen it last night. Next up is Twice Upon A Time and then he will see where me and my brother get our humor from.

The flight of dragons art book is amazing to look at. (The pseudo bestiary was a lot of linear conjecture even for the genre)

The dragon and the George series (where flight of dragons gets most of the plot and characters) are a lot of fun.

The use of Get'em I don't see anyone talking about is for anyone to just yell [/b]"Get'em"[/b] then roll a bluff or intimidate check to try to make the target think everyone is after them, so they flee. This avoids all the bonus stacking issues and encourages teamwork because aid to skill checks can stack.

On a more serious note (although I really would try bluffing Get'em.) With all the talk of bonuses stacking is there a list or database of bonuses listed by or filtered by type?

That's incredibly DM dependent and more system and encounter design. I mean if you're going up against a party of space explorers you don't get into the fight if the thought of them using coordinated fire on you is a problem.

The space between Won't run away without that trick, and will run away with it, doesn't leave a whole lot of room.