Dawn of Legends (A Legacy of Failure) (Inactive)

Game Master JamZilla

There is definitely a combination here that will give the full effect of being put down below constitution. With out it just being death, I think you should really feel it, treat it somewhat like raise dead.

2 negative levels, although I feel 1 a day is quick. (But I suppose we are hero's)
Then at least Exhausted(maybe just sickened) tell a full nights rest, just to hit home you have been through something bad, and won't just walk it off with -2 to everything.

I'm all for people not just being dead, it's a lot of investment and I truly like everyone's character here. It's a shame to lose certain relationships, even though I do think 'death' to be an interesting way to add to role-playing and drama to a game it's unlucky it happened on these crappy guys.

I agree Ebon, there's a big difference between getting killed by Ultron and a lowly mall-cop scoring a lucky x4 crit with a sidearm.

But there should still be some risk.

Are you saying 2 negative levels that return at 1 a day and exhausted until a full day's rest?

Ok so I'm going to go with two negative levels that return at a rate of 1 per day. If that seems either to harsh or two easy we will adjust.

In the meantime, you need to get Trystt back into the land of the living

Haha, Trystt, I meant 'we could all leave if Trystt isn't up to it.' Spore wouldn't leave you behind!

I'm immune to poison, how's that affect the cloud?

It does not affect you in that case. Your sight is still limited however

So is my last post Rd 2 then? My goal was to pop out on their side, then try and leave them back in towards the group.

Im a little confused. Is it possible for you to draw some arrow or something for the route you wanted to take?

I'm going to delay and see what happens with Spore.

I marked up the map with a few arrows. Basically I'm going forward enough to make sure the barricade folks see me, then moving back towards the others, hoping some follow. If Trystt conveys that she and the others intend to go around the building, I could conceivably go back towards the barricade and do more distracting, and/or hide in the cloud until they appear, but that's for another round, I think.

Gotcha. You will have seen the enemies in the cloud then.

There is on droid and two men wearing gas masks, armed with submachine guns.

As a side note; a friend of mine is a subscriber and has received his pdf of the Starfinder Core Rulebook. I had a quick glance at it yesterday when I went to see him and there are quite a few simple I would like to put in place here because I think they fit seamlessly.

There are two types of AC for example - Kinetic AC and Energy AC. They are a much cleaner implementation of what I was attempting with Ballistic AC.

I like the Stamina and Resolve system because I think it helps with the knockout dilemma we had recently (bigger pool of hp, spend points to recover stamina, to auto stabilise etc)

Scaling weapon damage - yes

Better grenade rules - yes

Rules for car chases and piloting

Anyway. We are rapidly closing in on the end of Book 1. So if people are still enjoying and engaged I'll propose some of these changes for when we move on to Book 2.

Interestingly, the protective spells (Shield and Mage Armour don't exist) grant damage reduction to your choice of damage instead of a flat AC bonus.

No worries JZ, those rules tweaks sound appropriate and thematic :)

Interesting. How much Starfinder are we likely to incorporate, enough to justify the PDF?

Honestly Trystt, not a huge amount.

Most of the big changes are in action economy, spells and spellcasting and of course classes and feats - all of which I wouldn't be looking to incorporate.

Scaling weapons would probably only apply to Napalm because he is the only one to use an actual weapon. But they make sense for enemies.

The way I explained it to Ebon is to remember Agent Coulson in Avengers. He is probably level 3ish and when he came up against Loki, if he had used his sidearm the trickster would have laughed it off. But that Destroyer Weapon blasted the god through the wall. So it's a good way of keeping some encounters interesting in future without every grunt having 8 levels in Gunslinger.

I wouldn't expect wholesale changes though, but equally the pdf isn't going to be hugely expensive so may be worth picking up.

Cool, thanks for the feedback. I might pick it up anyway.

Technically, I use a weapon, too... when its absolutely necessary. =P

Yeah but I'm sure as you level up your need to use one would diminish due to access to more spells and hexes. But if I'm wrong, I stand corrected :)

I like the changes, as you said the big stuff is scaling damage and it won't really affect us. Maybe when you have proper time with the book you can go into more detail. It seems I'll have to do some manual stuff no falling back on to hero labs :P

I'm going to get it just because I'm interested in how they took Pathfinder and turned it into Starfinder.

It seems a lot of systems were just cut down to basics and made a lot simpler and I think they wanted to do that with Pathfinder but didn't go to such an extream to keep the 3.5 people who came over happy.

I'm really excited about the changes in Starfinder. I'm hoping they actually solved a lot of the arms race on bonuses while still letting the rest of the system work. Bounded accuracy was a great concept with 5e, but I still want the Pathfinder customization.

I'm curious about those grenade rules. :)

I think the stamina/hit point separation will work very well in this setting. I'm less confident about it working well in a gritty, dark, survival type game.

Headed to GenCon tomorrow. Maybe some spotting posting through the weekend.

Enjoy Lucas!

Attacking the bot. I'm away for the weekend and don't think I can edit the map. Can anyone help me out?

Just getting back from GenCon. I'll try to get a post up tonight.

Picked up the Starfinder PDF and am still looking over it.

So far, I really like its HP, Stamina, Resolve system. In fact, each of the systems that you brought up seems solid. PF can use a little streamlining.

Just letting you know I will be away for a couple of days starting tomorrow evening. Unlikely to post then until Sunday. Thanks!

Apologies for my general slowness. We've just move into a new house (our first home!) and things are a bit crazy.

Hey, congrats! That's awesome!

Awesome news dude! I know you'll be in for a period of not being able to find anything, boxes everywhere and general chaos.

But it's all worth it when you look around and realise it's all yours.

Congratz! It can be very hectic, its so nice to have a place to call your own.

Excellent, congratulations!

Sorry guys, update tomorrow. Minor laptop trouble

It's a move action, Ebon

Thanks Spore, I couldnt find it easily.

Midnight, I think you have 8 more HP from the hex.

Cold resistance 5 and healing back 3 HP this round will put me at 14 hp. Can't take too many more of those though!

Couple questions:
-Does the snowball provoke? Not sure about when he became visible.

-What's the DC for the stagger from the Snowball?

Yes it provokes and the DC is 15

dang, 3 eights?
*Shakes fist at dice*

Did that attack count the flanking, Ebon?

I didn't, I missed that. I will make sure to double check that next time.

Congratulations, everyone may Level Up!

Oh, boy, this is a particularly good one.

Ok, i’ll Sort out my level up later.

I was going to take Ki Metabolism, it’s not the best power but I really like it for RP reasons and just seems really cool. I’m guessing I don’t get my spells back after two hours either :)

Don't forget the weapon and armor attunements from Automatic Bonus Progression. =)

Classes: Magus/Witch

HP: +6

BAB: +1

Stat: +2 Int(Mutant)

Magus Hex: Cackle

Magus Spells: Brand, Burning Hands

Witch Hex: Distraction(Heroes of the High Court)

Witch Spells: Detect Poison, Hold Person, Fog Cloud

Skills: +11 Adventuring(2+Int(5)+Boon(1)+Int bump(3)), +2 Background

This level pretty much makes Napalm's basic build complete.

Classes Alchemist/URogue

HP +6 (5+1(con))

BAB +1

Saves +1 Fort, +1 Reflex

Stat +2 Dex (mutant)

Skill increases Acrobatics, Craft Alchemy, Disable Device, Heal (2 ranks), Knowledge Local, Knowledge Meta, Techcraft, Perception, Stealth, UMD

URogue abilities
Debilitating Injury Target gains debuffs when taking sneak attack damage
Precise Splash Weapons Deal sneak attack damage with splash weapons on first attack of each round
Scout's Charge Charge attacks deal sneak attack damage as if opponents were flat-footed

Alchemist Discovery
Smoke Bombs Bombs can create Fog Cloud effect for 1 round/level

Alchemist formula TBD
Questions on spells though, GM:
Bullet Shield: I assume this would just be +4 deflection to BAC?
Protection from Arrows: Would this work against bullets too? Have we seen magical bullets? A 1 hour/level duration seems awesome

FYI, Napalm can now charge 10 feet and throw a splash weapon (Charging hurler), inflicting sneak attack damage (Scout's Charge) and applying penalties (Debilitating Injury) to his opponent once each round.

That's awesome, Napalm. One more level for me; at 5 is when Spore can really start destroying things (sundering weapons and armor and ignoring harnesses, that is).

Aye, that's cool, Napalm. It's a great feeling when everything comes together and your guy is finally your guy.

Also, GM-JZ, +1 Fame for leveling?

Indeed!

+1 Fame and +4 Resource Points

That should put you on the equivalent of around 3k gold.

Nice, sounds like everyone is getting a decent power boost at level 4. Think I'll need to up the challenge somewhat and increase the variety of enemies!

While we enter that natural cooldown period after a chapter finishes in an Adventure Path, I wanted to sound you out on including some Starfinder rules which I think will streamline some things and actually it is a ruleset quite fitting for what we're doing.

Skills

Starfinder features much more appropriate skills for this kind of game and also a consolidated list.

Only thing is I know it's a pain for people who use Herolab to change these things.

Scaling weapons

I hate the idea that heavy weaponry becomes irrelevant and I don't want to give every mook levels in Gunslinger and Deadly Aim just to keep up. I do, however, love that different classes are proficient with different firearms and basic/advanced melee weapons in SF and get a bonus to damage equal to your character level with longarms and heavy weapons and half your level for small arms.

This, in addition to weapon damage that scales as technology gets more advanced, I think is a really smooth way to keep things challenging as you progress without every enemy character that uses a firearm being built in exactly the same way.

This would also apply to you of course but I think probably only Napalm and Trystt are likely to use weaponry.

The downside is that the ruleset assumes you have stamina in play (which is like a secondary pool of hp) and you only getone attack in Starfinder, there is no iteratives. So having a low level enemy like Kraven the Hunter jump in with a 10d10 gravity well hammer for three attacks could swing things too far the other way! But I think I know how I would keep that under control for both Heroes and Villains.

Armour

The SF system of Kinetic Armour Class (anything physical + bullets) and Energy Armour Class (spells and energy weaponry) is really nice and simplifies what I was trying to do with BAC.

It's very straightforward, my only concern is how spells such as Mage Armour and Shield interact with it as well as a few other AC boosting spells because they don't exist in SF. Just have to think about that.

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I know some of you may not have read through the SF Core Rulebook but I think these are the rules that would fit in quite seamlessly but really want to get your thoughts on them.

Initial thoughts, let me know what y'all think:

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The downside is that the ruleset assumes you have stamina in play (which is like a secondary pool of hp) and you only getone attack in Starfinder, there is no iteratives.

Are we not using the Stamina/Resolve system after all? I'm still in favor of it. I doubt it will be that hard to figure out the numbers for our classes.

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Skills:

I'm on board for consolidating skills. I am a Hero Lab user, and it will be a slight inconvenience, but nothing that can't be handled. I already keep a separate file with bard/sorcerer as a spontaneous casting template.

It looks like Disable Device becomes a sub-skill of Engineering and Mysticism(Spellcraft), depending on the trap. So, would the rogue bonus apply to both? There are a few quirks like that we would need to iron out.

Will we use piloting instead of the driver, sailor, pilot professions?

Will we still use the background skill system? With the consolidation, it probably isn't necessary. At the same time, I'm a skill point junkie, in case that isn't obvious. In Starfinder, I think all classes have 2 extra skill points anyway. Would we just adopt that model?

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Scaling Weapons:

How complicated would it be to do away with iterative attacks? Flurry of Blows becomes better. Napalm, do you start chucking multiple flasks, or do you get to throw and melee? Midnight, do you hit multiple times with your kinetic attack? Could that be alleviated with scaling the damage of those attacks?

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Armor:

Could Mage Armor and similar spells work like this SF spell:

RESISTANT ARMOR, LESSER: Lesser resistant armor grants the target (and its gear) protection from your choice of either kinetic damage or energy damage. If you choose kinetic damage, the target and her gear gain DR 5/— that protects against bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. If you choose energy damage, pick any two of acid, cold, electricity, fire, and sonic damage. The target and her gear gain energy resistance 5 that protects against the chosen types of energy. This damage reduction or energy resistance doesn’t stack with any damage reduction or energy resistance the target already has, and multiple castings of this spell don’t stack.

SF has different levels of this spell which might be necessary with scaling weapons.
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Trystt's thoughts

Awesome, thank you Trystt for giving such a considered response.

1 - Stamina and Resolve.

While I'm not against it per se, I think a second pool of hp is going to be a hugely powerful boon for you guys. Midnight's damage reduction is going to apply in 95% of circumstances and although it's only 5, it's consistent. And Spore's healing ability makes those two amazingly tanky as it is.

Of course I could just up the damage/challenge, but it would definitely need careful management.

Also, a lot of the powers in SF key off resolve and we wouldn't have access to those so it would only really be used for recharging stamina.

2 - Skills

These skills are kind of consolidated so I wouldn't expect to increase the amount of skills any one has at the moment. I don't mind if we keep background skills or not really, they don't play much of a part in this world as is in my opinion so happy to discuss that one.

Rogues (and anyone with trapfinding) would get the bonus to both I guess.

3 - Scaling Weapons

I think the problem is that Midnight and Ebon already have scaling weapons and they also get multiple attacks. Ebon losing flurry and later the ability to do 4 or even 5 attacks is going to be a huge nerf I think.

Similarly Napalm and Spore will also get multiple attacks before long.

4 - Armour

Oh it looks like that spell is a clear replacement for Mage Armour et al so yeah it would probably just replace that.

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Love to hear everyone else's thoughts.