Metaphysician's page

I had an arc in my Starfinder game where the players were tracing the Villain Organization of the Game to Triaxus. They ended up fighting some terrorists who were trying to set off a hot war between dragons and not-dragons.

In general? Dragons are people. Very very powerful people, but still people. . . and not as untouchably powerful as they used to be. Sure, a dragon is a big and powerful, but so is a star cruiser, or a tank brigade. Which is why all but the most ancient and epicly-powerful dragons tend to tie themselves into social structures in some way. Unless your CR is significantly north of 20, you either are obeying laws set out by someone else, or setting out laws to be obeyed by others. . . usually that latter one way or another.

I can understand the desire to do things like "lock down time scales to allow for simultaneous onboard actions", but ultimately I'm pretty sure its a case of "You can't have everything you want". Its impossible to lock down time scales without also locking down distance scales, which would mean much more rigorously defining ship combat in a way that would make it either less useful or more a pain to run or both. Being able to define the size of a hex based on the needs of the situation is a positive benefit: it allows you to use the same engine to do open space combat, knife fighting around a mega structure, and everything in between. If you can't scale hex size to circumstances, that means you either need to restrict space combat to one set of assumptions, or you need a whole bunch of added rules to handle things closer in than "open space". Ship combat is *already* a clunky minigame, it doesn't need to be made clunkier.

That said, I do agree, it would be good to silo combat and non-combat ship functionalities. Players shouldn't be encouraged to sacrifice one to gain the other, because the ship *should* serve both functions in a campaign. Relatedly, there should be a list of basic functions, like escape pods, that are *free and default*. Unless there is a good *specific* story reason, players shouldn't have to pay for stuff that is either mandatory for the story to happen, or where the only function it serves is to make the GM's life easier. Escape pods especially fit this: Starfinder is an RPG, not a roguelike or strategy game. A ship functionality that gives the GM more ways to *not* kill the party is a positive good, as the default assumption should be "the GM is not trying to kill the party, because when the party dies the story ends".

Sanityfaerie wrote:

Karmagator wrote:

Sorry, but pretty much anything is a better solution than messing with player level. That isn't a solution, that's creating a problem.

Oh, I'm sure that we could come up with something that's worse.

Admittedly, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything.

3.x-style multiclassing and ancestral hit dice, maybe?

In game microtransactions. To play a 4 armed character, you must pay your GM $5 per session, and Paizo $30 per campaign.

Hasbro: "Write that down!"

Karmagator wrote:

Sorry, but pretty much anything is a better solution than messing with player level. That isn't a solution, that's creating a problem.

Oh, I'm sure that we could come up with something that's worse.

Admittedly, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything.

3.x-style multiclassing and ancestral hit dice, maybe?

Your not thinking hardcore enough:

Race Based Class and Level Restrictions. *eg*

Honestly, my two main thoughts on this discussion:

1. As some people have already touched upon, while blocking and choke points and range control may be the primary defensive strategies in a melee-oriented setting, in Starfinder? The name of the game is 'cover and concealment'. You don't primarily keep your squishies alive by putting a beefy warrior in the way to block approaching hordes of enemies, you keep your squishies alive by getting them behind a wall. Which is to say. . . seriously, people- stop hanging out standing in the open. Unless you have a good reason to be exposed, you should *always* be kneeling behind an obstacle or hugging a wall alcove or otherwise reducing your exposure to enemy fire. Every +2 AC helps, and if some enemies just don't have LOS at all, even better.

2. The entire paradigm of "tanking" from MMOs is really inappropriate in the first place. A "tank" in Starfinder ( or most tabletop RPGs ) is not defined by their ability to mechanically draw aggro and compel enemy decisions. A "tank" is defined by *survivability*, having the armor or HP or whatever that allows them to take hits, and thus take risks. Why is this important? Because this allows a "tank" to engage in risky exposed actions that force the enemy to respond or suffer, as NPC forces *also* have victory conditions and things they are trying to achieve. A Soldier doesn't need some mechanical superpower to force Will saves on enemies, if they instead do things like "I am a heavy melee fighter with high mobility, I can just bum rush the comparatively squishy spellcasting officer leading the enemy force". The enemy NPCs don't focus on Soldier and shoot less at the Operative and Mystic because they failed a Will save; they focus on the Soldier because *he's trying to cut down their leader*.

My own viewpoint: space hexes are *usually* big, but they aren't *always* big. Part of why space hexes don't have defined scale in real world terms is because, depending on the context, they may be bigger or smaller. If your own in the open, far away from any planetary bodies, each hex might well be thousands of kilometers across or more. However, if your in a cinematically-tight asteroid belt, or in orbit around a planet, or right next to a mega structure? You are in a place where mobility, line of sight, and line of fire are all variably obstructed, and this effectively limits the scale of action. . . and thus the size of a "hex".

The only hard limit, by this theory, is that one hex can never be smaller than the largest ship involved in the encounter. I can't see this really coming up, though, unless you are doing a Trench Run style encounter where one especially large ship is the *environment* for a ship battle.

Honestly, this argument is mostly reminding me about how annoyingly hard it is to find stats in Starfinder for "basic members of generic armed forces". Its like no one ever considered the possibility that you might need stats for infantry or ship crew of one of the baseline humanoid races, either as enemies ( because the players decided to tick off someone official ) or as allies ( because they have support from someone official ). Even now, you have to basically hunt and peck from a dozen different sources, and also do the truly bizarre move of taking a bunch of stat blocks under the 'Mercenary' label, and port them *back* into being regular military.

The Gap pretty much *has* to be universe-wide, or else it wouldn't work. The Golarion System is a major region of importance on a planar level, and also once interstellar travel became possible, it should equally be an important region on an interstellar level. If everyone in the solar system forgot 500 years of history, but everyone who had contact with and knowledge of them elsewhere retained it? This would very quickly mean "None of that 500 years would actually be forgotten anymore", not without a direly implausible conspiracy of silence.

That isn't even counting how, if only Golarion got hit with the Gap, it would put them at a crippling disadvantage versus every other society that *hasn't* suffered such a disruptive event. This would require some major juggling to make sure no one would be able or willing to take advantage of such a moment of weakness.

Metaphysician wrote:

Xenocrat wrote:

The field test is never going to get to the vanguard or evolutionist, those won't be in the playtest or SF2 core rulebook. We're getting soldier, operative, envoy, solarion, mystic, and witchwarper, it seems.

Wait, what? No Mechanic? No Technomancer? That feels like it *has* to be a mistake. Are you sure they just haven't itemized all the classes included yet?

My own expectation is that the Mechanic and Technomancer will be released as part of a tech-based Rules book within a year of initial release. So you won't have them instantly, but you should have them pretty early on.

That would be. . . almost incomprehensibly bizarre. Starfinder is a space opera setting, "figurative and literal tech wizard" is one of *the* most defining character archetypes for the milieu. It'd be like doing a medieval fantasy setting, and relegating the Fighter to a secondary supplement.

I am really keeping my fingers crossed that this is a miscommunication, because if not? It *really* doesn't bode well. The kind of design mindset that would lead to "Eh, who needs the Mechanic class?" would be highly likely to lead to all kinds of other really bad design decisions.

The field test is never going to get to the vanguard or evolutionist, those won't be in the playtest or SF2 core rulebook. We're getting soldier, operative, envoy, solarion, mystic, and witchwarper, it seems.

Wait, what? No Mechanic? No Technomancer? That feels like it *has* to be a mistake. Are you sure they just haven't itemized all the classes included yet?

Michael Gentry wrote:

It seems very weird to recalculate the CR of a fight every time a combatant drops. That leads to all sorts of absurd outcomes, of which the Solarian's powers shutting down is not even the dumbest. Furthermore, as BNW pointed out, if you're going to recalculate CR every time an enemy drops, then you also should be recalculating APL every time a PC drops.

As long as the PCs are still rolling dice and spending resources and not taking 10-minute rests, then a CR 5 encounter remains a CR 5 encounter until the last space goblin drops.

I agree. But if you have a GM dead set on reading it another way there's nothing to really lean on that says that they're out right wrong.

There absolutely is something to lean on, its just not in the rules book. Its "Look, GM, you are making an idiotic ruling that is harming the fun of the game. Either stop a moment and reconsider whether this is a good idea, or I am leaving." Because despite pretensions otherwise, the GM is not God. Their authority extends only as far as the players allow it to extend.

As I've said many a time: a rules solution cannot fix a player problem. And the GM is absolutely a fellow player.

If the fight is "no longer significant enough" to count for the Solarian's powers, it should also be no longer significant enough *to keep running*. GMs are *also* not supposed to run fights that aren't meaningful challenges.

Fundamentally, the issue is Starfinder, being a D&D derivative, hinges too heavily on weapons ( and equipment in general ) for character capability for "no gear" adventures to really be viable as a rule. Yes, you *can* do them, but the degree to which lacking proper equipment cripples a character means that they pretty much have to be customized to a specific party of PCs, and even then they might not actually work. Even with the best effort, you'll likely end up reducing the encounter to a mini-game, and that's assuming you don't have one or more PCs who basically ignore the issue. Good luck balancing a no-weapons encounter when the Solarian or Vanguard in the party can effortlessly destroy opponents that would in turn effortless destroy the weaponless other PCs.

There are certainly systems in which "no gear" works fine as a reasonable challenge condition, but that would mostly be games where character capability primarily comes from character abilities.

Huh. I missed the connection between Baba Yaga and Triaxus. Is she the reason why Triaxus has such weird seasons?

Also, not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd suggest adding a mention making explicit that the Hut of Baba Yaga is an artifact, and that its "destruction condition" is "the permanent death of Baba Yaga". AKA, "Hah, good luck". *ahem*

Also also, if I were running this kind of thing I'd have the appearance of the Hut explicitly variable, in the sense that if she wants, it *can* appear as a high tech mechanical walker, or its traditional chicken legged form, or pretty much any other imaginable variation on "building that walks". Which it appears as depends on the whims of Baba Yaga. Sometimes she makes it "blend in" to the surrounding milieu, sometimes she makes it stand out.

Holidays are likely to be significant to either the deity or the church. Abadar probably would celebrate the end of the fiscal year ... or perhaps the day immediately after income tax filing deadlines as a day of rest for himself and his followers. Damoritosh would be all for marching up and down the square for when Vesk Prime first unified, with other worlds celebrating their own days as local festivals. Besmara might just declare that it's a holiday when you make it back to port in one piece, regardless of the day on the calendar, but a specific Free Captain could celebrate the anniversary of getting their first ship or first prize.

Actually, I am now envisioning that *every* Damaritan holiday is traditionally celebrated with a giant military parade. . . no matter how incongruous. Like, they have a Valentine's Day equivalent, a celebration of love and romance. . . and it starts with a parade of tanks and marching troops in the morning. There are various elaborate historical and theological explanations, but it mostly just boils down to that the Vesk really like their parades. Even Damaritosh couldn't actually change it.

An idea someone could run with: the First World *does* connect the Prime Material with another plane. Its just, that connection is very tightly guarded against, because its a very very bad one: the Qlippoth, the realm outside existence from which aberrations and horrors come from. This is partly why the Dark Tapestry exists- the link between the First World, the Qlippoth, and the Prime Material makes the empty material places between stars the easiest place for such beings to incur upon the planes.

Now, actually traversing this route is really hard, since one of the few things all the Eldest agree upon is "No trafficking with anti-existence horrors". However, its still probably the safest and easiest route for a mortal being who wants to reach the Qlippoth, since the alternatives tend to involve things like "Do a deep dive through the entirety of the Maelstrom's chaos" or "Use artifact-level magic to punch a hole in the planar shell, and hope you are gone before someone like Pharasma or Desna shows up".

What would the proper pronouns be for someone that spins to the right vs. the left? or for their polarity of charge?

My snarky answer would be "north and south", but actually, hmm. . .

Random linguistic idea: when using spoken/written languages to refer to species who have 'spin' or 'polarity', the norm is not to use distinct gendered pronouns. Instead, you use the standard neuter pronouns of the language, but with a suffix added that is either a rising or a descending vocalization, representing the two different possible spins or polarities. Say, rising is right-handed spin, descending is left-handed spin.

Examples: A right-spin novian you are talking to right now is "Youa", while the left-spin novian the two of you are talking about is "Ito". A group of novians would just be "Them", unless the group is entirely/mostly one spin, then they would be "Thema" or "Themo".

Neglecting to include spin suffix is a minor faux pas at worst normally, especially in casual or quick talk with strangers or when dealing with people who just don't have or sense polarity. However, *deliberately* using the wrong polarity suffix is a serious insult. Its not directly analogous to gender-based insults and slurs from species with such, but its roughly the same severity; the general meaning is "I wish you didn't exist".

^I would also expect the existence of a subset of food synthesizers that is expensive for high capacity but not for quality, to churn out fast food in places where the management doesn't want to pay fair wages or in dangerous neighborhoods (although in the latter case, considerable expenditure would be needed for security, so that miscreants don't steal or trash the food synthesizer). A subset of such dangerous neighborhoods would be prisons (for which the management probably wouldn't want to spend money on real cooks anyway, unless they thought they could get the prisoners themselves to do the work).

For the more ethically-run prisons, kitchen privileges would be one of the carrots, both in terms of cooking and eating at them. Behave yourself, don't start fights, and take your work assignment and rehab sessions seriously? You get access to the block kitchen and can join the dinner cooking rotation, eating tastier food and doing a task that is probably more entertaining than the average prison chore. Use that kitchen access to grab a cooking knife and stab your cellmate? Well, in addition to everything else, enjoy eating synthesized meatloaf for the rest of your sentence.

I feel like the 10% resale value shouldn't really be making you dependant on useful equipment dropping from your foes, you still are meant to be getting your WBL with things you are likely to sell being assumed to be only worth that 10% when gms do their adventure planning. Are gms for some reason ignoring the WBL section and assuming most dropped gear is worth full price towards WBL or 0 if players are unlikely to pick it up to begin with?

From what I've seen it just does what it says in the book. Discourages players from trying to loot everything enemies have, because that's sort of weird in a sci-fi or modern setting.

If your gm is considering gear people aren't going to be using as big parts of their rewards.... then that's them screwing up, not the game.

This. I am fairly certain that most of the problems people have encountered with the "economy" are actually from GMs ( or adventure writers! ) ignoring how WBL and loot assignment is supposed to work. You simply can't treat all loot drops as full value, you *have* to adjust based on your specific group of PCs. If there is no Solarian in the party than any Solarian crystals are only worth 10% value. . . and if the adventure mostly drops Solarian crystals, then the GM needs to make up the difference elsewhere, or change the loot drops.

( Which, btw, is something adventure writers *should* take into account- as a matter of good practice, they *should* include specific points flagged as "Here is where to add optional treasure or pay if the players are lagging behind in loot, here are suggested ways to do it." A writer can't know what the classes and current gear and future desires of your specific party are, but they can recognize that this will be an issue. )

It makes me wonder if culinary synthesizers can handle such a wide array of choices.

That's actually part of how I explain why cooks and restaurants and grocery stores are still a thing: they by and large can't. Food synthesizer are effective, but the food they can generate is limited in variety and complexity. You can live on it, and even be reasonably content on it, but most people when given the choice will want at least some "real" food, at least some of the time. Someone uses it to produce utilitarian meals like lunch meat sandwiches or canned soup, while going to a restaurant to eat food for pleasure. Or they'll use it to generate base ingredients like pasta or ground protein cube, but then cook it up themselves into an actual meal using real vegetables and spices. Etc.

This would probably also be variable as effected by price, natch. A really top quality food synthesizer might produce food indistinguishable from the work of a top chef with authentic ingredients, but it probably costs about as much as hiring a top chef and supplying them with a fully stocked kitchen, too. Conversely, a bargain basement synthesizer might be unable to produce anything but the most basic survival food ( think 'nutrient bars, protein cubes, and gruel' ); great if its a survival situation and the cheap emergency food maker is the key to not starving, not so great if your a slave or serf or whatnot and your overlord is only doing the minimum to keep you from dying today.

Yeah, all else being equal you would expect a larger animal to be louder and lower, but nothing says male dragons have to be bigger. Hell, given that they are usually portrayed as egg-layers who keep and protect nests, I could see good arguments that *female* dragons would be the bigger ones, to better protect the nest and hatchlings. Which, IIRC, has precedent in at least some reptiles and birds.

That aside, I hadn't considered the interaction between breath weapons and vocalizations, and its a *really* cool idea. Literally, in the case of some species like white and silver dragons. *ahem* I could see it going two different ways, possibly at the same time: either a dragon species has vocalizations whose sound is influenced by the structures need to generate the breath weapon ( ex: resonance through a thick sac of compressed gas for a poison breather ); or vocalization that are in part generated *by* the breath weapon structure ( ex: low level combustion generating some of the tones in a fire breather ).

The precise rules for how drift beacons work and how many are needed to what are vague, deliberately so. The correct answer to questions like "How many drift beacons does it take to make a star system Near Space" is "How many do you, as the GM, decide it takes?"

That said, my interpretation is that drift beacons are *beacons*: they provide navigational aid. Which is to say, you don't need to go to or from a beacon, you just need beacons around so you can "see" your destination. Aside from special cases like Absalom Station, when a star system is labeled "Near" or "Vast", its the whole system that is so. You can lock in a course to anywhere in the system ( subject to the navigation checks anyway ). A system being part of 'Near Space' doesn't mean that it has a few beacon-labeled spots where you can head to at Near Space travel times while the rest of the system is Vast.

Oh, and re: space piracy, some things to consider-

1. Even in the present day, in-system ships that lack drift drives are probably going to be a thing. Especially since, for in-system travel, drift drive is only slightly faster than conventional engines ( and when not abstracting for drama and playability, there are probably tons of routes where the drift isn't faster at all ).

2. Space is big. Even with space opera drives, journeys from one part of a solar system to another take days. That makes it highly plausible that assistance to a pirate's latest victim is more than a few minutes away.

3. Pirates like soft targets, and soft targets likely can't afford to spend a minute spinning up their Drift Drive under fire. If the pirate ship gets within engagement range, that is pretty much that, the target can either surrender or get blasted.

4. Piracy doesn't need to be about "fair" fights to defeat and capture prey. Pirates are thieves, and thieves love inside men. Its a lot easier to do piracy if you have stolen itineraries, targets with sabotaged engines, or possibly a guy holding the bridge crew at gunpoint.

In my campaign, the players pretty much could never have enough movement. There was always the desire to move a little farther to get a more favorable position ( better angle on enemy, more cover ), even aside from the full attack thing. I'd say Haste is still plenty useful, it just requires a little more thought than "Cast, attack twice, win everything".

That said, given how many anecdotes I've heard about Starfinder games where the players *don't* use movement and positioning wisely/at all, I'm not shocked that there are reports of Haste doing nothing. If your usual tactic is "stand in place, make full attacks until someone dies", Haste isn't going to help you.

My own take on 'elder thing' cosmology for the Paizoverse. . . basically, not everything from the prior iteration of the universe was destroyed. Some things. . . well, 'survived' is a very strong and deceptive word for what they did, but they persisted. Being unconnected to this current universe and also having survived uncountable amounts of non-time in the non-space that is non-existence, these non-beings are at best alien and usually outright inimical to pretty much everything in the entire Planar Sphere. 'Qlippoth' is the term used to refer both the 'region' outside the Planar Sphere that is the home of these beings, and also to the beings themselves. This is distinct from the 'Dark Tapestry', which is basically the portion of the Planar Sphere where the barrier separating existence from the Qlippoth is thinnest: the distant darkness between stars, where neither matter nor thought has any presence.

Now, actual Qlippothic beings are extremely rare inside the universe, and with good reason. However, some fragments and pieces of Qlippothic forces 'learned' how to hide inside a shell of Planar Sphere substances, sustaining and shielding themselves. This is where Aberrations come from. An Aberration isn't just some life form with tentacles, its basically a tiny fragment of non-universe inside a meat suit. For added fun, they aren't connected to the River of Souls either, which is part of why most aberrations are so carelessly hostile- unless they are metaphysically expelled from the universe, they just reincarnate eventually.

( For the record, yes, this means a lot of critters that get labeled as 'Aberration' I recategorize. Bantrids and the like are just life forms with different anatomy than humanoids, and so are Magical Animals or Monstrous Humanoids or the like. 'Aberration' is restricted to metaphysically hostile species. Being descended from cephalopods doesn't make you an 'aberration' anymore than being descended from an insect does. )

Oh, and the most powerful Qlippothic entities are in the range of gods, which is where the Mythos deities come from. Also, yes, this does include Desna, because while being Qlippothic does make you incredibly alien, its not actually *impossible* to choose to embrace the new universe. Its just incredibly rare, hence why a big part of Desna's job is "Keep her kin out of the universe, because most of them suck".

I'm not actually familiar with Quorlu off the top of my head, but my inclination is to go weird with exotic undead. A rock creature isn't going to spontaneously develop exposed bones or rotting flesh. Instead, it will have changes appropriate to how its own physiology works:

-Crystals go cloudy, change color, or gain fractures

-Solid mineral portions become brittle or sandy, while flexible portions lock up and go rigid

-Metallic portions undergo destructive allotrope transformation ( ala 'tin pest' ) or alloying ( like how gallium destroys aluminum )

-The creature goes 'cold', losing the heat, electricity, or radiation that they normally emanate from their life processes

All of which might not be recognizable as 'undeath' to the random untrained mammalian observer, but would be just as obviously wrong and unnatural in the 'eyes' of a silicon lifeform as desiccated flesh and the smell of rot would be to us.

Metaphysician wrote:

Eh, in humans the difference in voice register between men and women is a secondary sexual characteristic itself, not an inevitable side effect of physics ( men and women with similar size and mass will still have different vocal ranges ). Even if dragons have no size difference between the sexes, vocal properties could still be a dimorphic characteristic. It doesn't *have* to be, sure, but it requires no special effort to justify. Admittedly, it probably shouldn't coincidentally match human assumptions about voice and sex, either, save for audience convenience.

Don't female dogs have higher-pitched barks than males, given the same size and breed?

I think so, but note that dogs are fellow mammals who also use testosterone and estrogen as their primary sex hormones. How sexual dimorphism works for a closely related species is not how it works for more distantly related species. And while fantasy space genetics means that a mammal is probably a mammal even if it evolved on a completely different planet. . . dragons and dragonkin are potentially various things, but definitely *not* mammals. ;)

When you use the spell to wish for more avatars, be very careful to specify that you mean the word in the sense of "small square images used to represent a person on a forum".

This is a case where you really don't want it to get the wrong definition.

I don't know, I think everyone would appreciate the forum getting a copy of Shelyn's holy text slash coffee table artbook "Avatars of the Universe: A Divine Compendium". :p

Waterhammer wrote:

Prisoner has friend rendezvous with prison ship. Prisoner let’s self out of cell; leaves with friend.

Easiest escape ever.

Other ship blown away by automated defenses and or both ships explode from "accidental drift engine malfunction"

Thank you for volunteering for the position of ___Scapegoat___ at the Humane Prisoncorp Luxury cell facitlities (An Eoxian LLC). But our company is experiencing a recent downsizing due to an unforseeable __act of god__or other liability limiting occurance____ . I will forward your resume to Jailcorp Luxry cell facilities, a new startup launching next week.

Yep. Its not an easy path to rescue because you need to actually get confederates into position to retrieve you from your "suicide attempt". Its a space ship, it can easily be surrounded by nothing but vacuum for hundreds of kilometers around or more, and on an unpredictable route at that. The hard part of the rescue would still be "Actually getting to the prison ship without being spotted and captured/killed", and that wouldn't be much if any easier by the evil airlock of jerkiness.

Impossible? Not in the slightest, you would "just" need to do stuff like "compromise the intended route of the prison ship" and "smuggle certain gear and info to the rescue target" and "arrange some magic or supertech means of avoiding notice". I see this as a plus, because "Not impossible, just complex and risky" is otherwise called "An adventure premise". ;)

Writing off a loss doesn't eliminate a loss, it at best reduces it. Yes, it sucks that shipping costs went up. You know what also sucks? Millions of people dying in a pandemic that also happened to kick the s$*@ out of the global supply chain.

Sure, but if you are using prisoners as labor, you probably aren't storing them on ships. ;)

Beyond just "the setting is huge, any stupid idea is probably going to be done once" combined with "people are terrible"? I'm actually imagining something vaguely similar to the POW camp from the Bujold story "Borders of Infinity"- a prison designed to maliciously comply with the letter of the law, and only just. What the people running the prison *want* to do is to abuse their prisoners and perhaps kill a certain percentage, but they aren't legally allowed to do so. However, they are allowed, required even, to provide "safety equipment", and these prisoner-accessible airlocks meet the letter of the law as safety equipment. It turns the prisoners themselves into instruments of their own torment without technically violating any laws or treaty obligations or such.

I mean, I'm pretty sure people will complain if your prison ship puts one airlock on every cell, too. ;)

I'm glad I'm not the only one who locks onto the word "mega" in "mega dungeon" when thinking sci-fi.

One thing I would note is that science fiction gives a very different scale context for a mega-dungeon. The typical fantasy dungeon is awkward even for just horses, but a sci-fi dungeon? Could entirely be big enough that you need to bring your entire *starship* into it. Even on a smaller scale, a mega-dungeon could have primary transit routes large enough to allow for some nice sci-fi trucks as mobility aid/pack mule. It doesn't have to be all five foot corridors.

I mean. . . mecha are not just an optional rule, but they are a thing that wouldn't even make sense in every campaign in the first place. Why would you expect them to receive heavy support, compared to rules covering stuff that would logically fit into any and every game?

Fundamentally, the issue with using AbadarCorp as antagonists is that Abadar is very specifically *not* the traditional Lawful Stupid version of LN. Most of the reasons why megacorps tend to be evil on a larger scale simply aren't applicable, not because Abadar is good, but because Abadar is intelligent and thinks long term. Thus you don't generally get the usual kind of petty or vindictive greed out of AbadarCorp, since the "Boss" cares about the bottom line two centuries down the road, not just next quarter. Making money today is bad if it means you lose more money in the future, and a bad reputation is a good way to lose that future money.

( Plus, while AbadarCorp the business is a business, Abadar the god is the God of Civilization, not the God of Making Money. Economics and business are very favored tools of his, but ultimately tools towards an end, not the end itself. His end is more like 'Create a web of laws and relationships that engenders order across the universe'. )

This doesn't mean you can't use AbadarCorp as antagonists. Just, it would hinge on either corrupt *portions* of the Corp ( even a god doesn't have perfect internal affairs success ), or else a more nuanced ideological conflict then "Evil corporate exec likes shooting poor people for fun". Like, maybe someone discovers a particularly lush new planet. AbadarCorp wants to colonize it and turn it into a beautiful new civilized world where sentient life can live among and enjoy its beauty and bounty; while the Xenowardens want to maintain it as a nature preserve, so that its rare natural splendor can remain untouched and unharmed for study and for its own worth. Who is right? Well, it mostly depends on which things you decide to value more, rather than which faction happens to be wearing a black hat and twirling a mustache.

I would say, when it comes to loot? Pay more attention to item level then total credit value, because the former is much more important. An excess of credits will mostly just mean the players have more options, and more fun, as long as they still have to follow the level limits on what gear is available. It is extremely hard to break the game while staying within those level limits, whereas its very easy to render the game un-fun if the players don't have adequate equipment.

Related to this: if you provide loot drops in the form of actual gear rather than credits or UPBs? Be very careful to distinguish between gear the players are likely to actually use, versus vendor trash. A 1000 credit gun that nobody in the party wants to use is not actually worth 1000 credits worth of wealth-by-level, its worth the 100 credit resale price.

I lean towards "anything that isn't a Computer can't be hacked unless you have an ability that lets you do so". A drone is not a Computer, so it can't be hacked by default, just like a Robot Guard can't be hacked. Etc.

I *would*, however, allow someone to hack the Computer that is *controlling* an NPC like a drone or robot. . . and note that the Personal Rig *is* a Computer. And in practice, any robotic NPC that isn't an independent AI? Probably should have a Computer controlling it somewhere.

I did read the Pahtran Revolution sub-plot with great interest, though I'm concerned about running it if the developers have any intentions to give it a "canon" solution.

I'd hate to create a carefully brokered agreement where say, the High Despot of Vesk-6 always has to be a Pahtra but Vesk-6 stays in the Veskarium only for a splat to come out next year (Drift Solution? Drift Fixing?) that says "....and then the Council appointed a Skittermander as emperor of the Veskarium and he said that Vesk-6 is unconditionally independent"

How is that different from *any* campaign one runs? When you choose to run a campaign involving large scale events, this intrinsically means you run the risk of diverging from canon, since players are the ones who get to make the most important decisions. This just means that your own personal campaign is just that, personal. Which it always was.

I have yet to see a class ability that grants a new combat maneuver and calls it such. I have seen several that modify the rules for how a combat maneuver may be used. I would be interested to see any class abilities that you, or anyone else, can recall that grant an all new combat maneuver.

Your making the mistake of assuming that because something doesn't exist, that means the rules forbid it from existing. Not everything that isn't explicitly allowed by the rules is banned, quite the contrary.

So, yes, the reason this particular Solarian ability can't benefit from Improved Combat Maneuver is because it doesn't actually say its a combat maneuver. This does *not* mean that there is some unstated, unwritten law that No Class Ability Can Create A Combat Maneuver.

Yes, absolutely. Nothing kills the verisimilitude of a setting more than the sense that it is static and unchanging, and there is no such thing as too much setting lore. Drift Crisis does this even better than the average lore book by making it 100% unambiguous that not everything in it is one singular canon, forcing the GM to actually GM and make choices in how their game will run.

"Dr." Cupi wrote:

thistledown wrote:

Because it allows skipping of content.

Someone sealed themself in a pod with the only controls on the inside? Hack it anyways.

Door that you're supposed to open only after exploring the rest of the ship? No problem.

Walking down a hallway and a computer happens to be on the other side of the wall but in range? Got it.

Baddy has info on a pad / controls to a device that you need to defeat him for / find out about later? Nah, skip the whole thing.

In a home game, all of these are fine, and the GM can just roll with it. But when a scenario has to be run as written, doing things that break the intended narrative causes problems.

That is a curious claim. What problems are caused?

When the narrative breaks, you get table variation as GMs try to get things back on track. And organized play tries to avoid table variation whenever possible.

Then the problem is with the GM, and the insistence that table variation is a bad thing. Its 100% unavoidable and inevitable, and part of the *job* of the GM to make individualized adjudications. If the GM is unable or unwilling to do so, then everyone should just leave the table and go play a video game instead.

Also, players *should* be able to "skip content" via the appropriate usage of their character's abilities. If an adventure breaks because the story can only work if they solve things in one single way? Then the adventure was broken going in. Solving a problem via hacking is just as valid as doing it via combat, or stealth, or social interaction, or magic begoobery.

My own way to justify/handle sonic and cryo weapons: both of them work fine in a vacuum, because neither of them actually rely on ambient atmosphere. Sonic weapons, despite the name, don't "actually" use a beam of sound, but a beam of gravitons that induce vibration in the target. Likewise, cryo weapons don't "actually" spray supercold matter, but emit an entropic field that drains heat from the target via exotic thermodynamic effects.

Basically, I throw technobabble at the problem, and a weapon being subject to realistic physical limits is only a thing when I intend for a weapon to be old/cheap/primitive/etc.

I imagine that eventually our robotic brothers will object to the implicit racism in CAPTCHA systems, even though they can easily pass the test. . .

*ahem*

This is one of the reasons why I tend to think Weapon Specialization should be eliminated as a feat/class ability, with the level-based damage just made a default part of the rules. Everyone always gets to add their level to damage, its just part of having a level. Or half level for certain weapons ( and 1.5x level for others ), but that would still be a property of the specific attack. The idea of adding level to damage would be part of the combat system.

The Ragi wrote:

Or set Starfinder fifty thousand years into the future, so the lore of both games don't connect at all - no continuity to worry about

Having a non smithereened planet there at all that isn't overrun with undead or home of the space runelord empire tells you how some things went.

Its not even just about spoiling canonical endings. If Golarion exists and hasn't been destroyed, then it will inevitably dominate the status quo of the Pact Worlds. Shunting Golarion out of play gives them a lot more freedom to write the setting as something other than "Golarion and its Amazing Planetary Sidekicks".

( Yes, in theory several of the other planets are as old and powerful and important. In practice, that isn't how it would be written. Narrative inertia is a powerful force. )

This sounds cool. Hopefully the "deep dive" is at least as much fluff about culture and history ( and *lists of example names* ), as things like feats and gear.

Hey, someone else likes the "build a single boss opponent as multiple different critters" trick!

I would add that, one other advantage to that trick is that you can effectively build the intended boss *tactics* into the writeup, reducing the in-the-moment burden on yourself. If you want the Big Bad to refrain from using spells until after being bloodied, you don't need to keep track of that judgement call until some ambiguous point, you can just build his "stage one" form without any spells.

BigNorseWolf wrote:

That doesn't apply in a starfinder universe. Somethings price tops out at the number of UPBs it takes to make

That's inaccurate, the prices given for items in the books are stated to be their Typical price, not their fixed price and we have plothooks and sections that mention characters jacking up the prices of their stuff.

In addition we know that buying items of higher level can involve increased prices because of the increased effort that goes into the seller obtaining the item for you.

Also, something to consider is that the UPB is the standard unit of currency. If demand for something buildable by UPBs increases the value, the result isn't that you now need more UPBs arbitrarily, the result is that the value of "One UPB" as a unit of currency changes. If twice as many people want a Gidget that takes 100 UPBs to build, then the value of 100 UPBs goes up double, because you get twice as much bang for your buck. Now, in practice it wouldn't scale that fast ( because there are millions of things people buy that can be built with UPBs, and they won't all have that kind of increased demand simultaneously ), but that is the basic principle.

Oh, and also worth remembering: Starfinder is not an economics simulator, its an adventure game. It never claimed to precisely model the economics of an entire universe. It only models enough of it, and to enough accuracy, to facilitate players playing as adventurer type characters. Thus it simply won't give mechanical representation of factors that aren't directly relevant to adventurers, or that should properly be handled by GM Discretion as part of their designing stories.

Also, yeah, I know Lao Shu Po was already a god long before Starfinder. However, there is a difference between being "a god", and being "one of the twenty most powerful and influential deities that stand out as the major figures of the setting". The latter doesn't *necessarily* require an increase in power ( a lot of deities aren't Big 20 simply because their area of cultural focus is elsewhere or they just don't have many worshippers ), but it certainly is compatible with such. Like if she ganked a rival deity when given the opportunity.

Xenocrat wrote:

Norgorber suffers from having an often mocked name and too much overlap with the cooler and better fit to the setting Lao Shu Po. Better to let him fade away.

My personal headcanon is Lao Shu Po shanked him and stole his divine power.

Likewise, with an added element of "Norgorber had absolutely zero friends, because he's a thoroughly unlikable monster, whereas Grandmother Rat is actually capable of diplomacy". Like, Lao Shu Po is still a terrible person, but she's not the God of Serial Killers, to put it one way. When Golarion vanished ( or had whatever Gap-related disaster happen to it ) and Norgorber's resource base took it in the teeth, Lao Shu Po basically went to war, and took over his domain and empire. She now lives and rules over the Axis undercity, and Norgorber, *if* he's still alive, sits and seethes in what used to be Lao Shu Po's home in Abaddon ( which she "conceded" to him as part of the "armistice"/surrender terms ). But except for the broad official statement that "All the old gods are still around except where specified", I'd totally go with "He is super dead".

The description was ambiguous, but I interpreted that the gates have to be in fixed locations. Yes, yes, relativity of space/time, but basically you couldn't put a Gate on a ship, it had to be on a "stationary" location like a station or planet. At the very least, I'd be inclined to make physically moving an active Gate a fraught and risky affair at least mostly as hard as setting up a Gate in the first place.