Today's my last day before holiday travel, so my posts may get a bit sporadic for the next week or so, but we'll be back up and rolling in Janurary. I hope you are able to enjoy the holidays with friends and family!
Enjoy the holidays. :)
Yeah, again, have a beautiful time.
I hope you all had some lovely holidays! Welcome back to the Drift Rock - some zombies want to eat your face. Since we're in that awkward period between Christmas and New Year's, I'm going to wait a few days before botting people - if you're still travelling/celebrating, take your time!
Happy New Year y'all! The holidays have been pretty busy and drawn out for me, but I'll be back up and running tonight or tomorrow.
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Hey guys! Looks like everyone is back from the holidays (more or less), so I'd like to chat a bit about my plans for this campaign in 2019 (and beyond)!
Most important thing first, I suppose - my wife and I are expecting a baby! It'll be our first, and we're due in late March. It's gonna be a very exciting yet stressful time, and I will take some time off from GMing for a bit of parental leave (something in the neighborhood of two weeks, perhaps). Hopefully baby Jimbles will wait until the due date, but babies are notorious for following their own schedules, so if I up and vanish one day, that's the likely culprit.
Between now and then, baby willing, I would really love to push through the remainder of the Drift Rock and complete Book 1 of Dead Suns. That should leave you at a good break point and give you some time to level your characters, plan a bit of shopping, and engage in some peer-to-peer RP before we pick back up with Book 2. I don't think we'll have difficulty getting there by then, but I'm gonna be a bit more aggressive with botting people just to ensure we don't slow down too much.
Speaking of botting, I still haven't heard anything from Jehir's player. It's been nearly six weeks at this point, so Jehir will be leaving the group to pursue his own goals at the next sensible story break. Fear not, however! I've already lined up another player whose own Dead Suns group fell apart between Book 1 and 2. We'll still have a full compliment of six.
I haven't mentioned this yet, but I plan to issue Chronicle Sheets to anyone who wants one at the end of Book 1. For those of you who participate in or are interested in joining Organized Play, this is a fun little reward for participating in the Dead Suns Adventure Path.
Congratulations in advance on the coming wee-one! Since it's your first it'll probably be late rather then early, but you never know. Be sure to stock up on sleep before then, because afterwards you'll take it when you can get it.
Sorry to hear that Jehir will be leaving, but glad to see that you've already got a replacement. Who's coming in, if I may ask? If you'd rather not say at this point, no biggie.
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It's me! Greetings, all!
Congrats on the baby, Jimbles! They are a lot of work but super rewarding. I hope you are prepared to stop sleeping for a while. ;)
Looks like you will need a beefy guy/girl/being to replace Jehir. I will probably make a soldier or solarian, or maybe an exocortex mechanic. I will consider my options and make a character soon.
Welcome to the menagerie, Brainiac. :)
Congrats Jimbles!
Glad to have you on board, Brainiac. I read along with a few of your games ;)
Congratulations on the baby. I would make plans expecting to be off for more than 2 weeks, but maybe you'll get lucky and your first won't be a bottomless feeding pit the way mine was.
Jimbles, are the races from AA2 available to choose from for my character?
Jimbles, are the races from AA2 available to choose from for my character?
My original rules for character creation are posted at the top of the Recruitment thread. In addition to what's posted there, you can also use character options from any of the hardcovers and any race (from any Paizo source) that originates from the Pact Worlds. Other races are allowed with GM permission if they've got a decent lore writeup in the source material and you have a pertinent reason for journeying to the Pact Worlds to join the Starfinder Society (like our lovely scyphozoan friend).
Your character will start at 3rd level and you have 4,000 credits to spend at creation.
Working on an orc gladiator soldier.
Congrats. Hope all goes well.
Welcome Brainiac. I was a player in a couple of your online Starfinder games a while back.
Kragga was born and raised in an orc enclave on Apostae. The drow's social engineering programs trained him from an early age to be a loyal servant and a capable scout and explorer. The intensive conditioning bolstered his confidence in his perceptive skills to the point of cockiness, such that he believed that no hidden danger could escape his notice. Unfortunately, this would prove to be his downfall, figuratively and literally.
While exploring the mountains of Apostae, he overlooked a weak section of a rocky escarpment. The resulting landslide left him with two mangled legs. Rather than expend resources to heal the crippled orc, the drow wrote him off as a loss and left him for dead. And that would have been the end of Kragga's story were it nor for an enterprising witchwyrd mystic that came upon the orc as he languished near death.
Seeing a potential for profit, the witchwyrd used his healing powers to mend Kragga's broken bones. In return, he conscripted the orc to serve him as a gladiator. As few in the Pact Worlds had ever seen a true orc up close before, Kragga immediately became an overnight sensation on the entertainment combat circuit. His prodigious strength and fearsome mien struck a chord with audiences, who demanded to see more fighting orcs.
The witchwyrd's stable only had one warrior, but the alien devised an ingenious scheme to make it seem otherwise. In between matches, he would inject Kragga with various serums to alter the orc's appearance and even his sex to make him appear to be a different person. To observers, it seemed an entire orc "clan" would take the field one after the other, when it was really an army of one.
At first, the constant body modifications didn't sit well with Kragga, but as time wore on and the transformations became commonplace, the orc began to enjoy and actually crave the changes that would come after every match. Spending equal time as both a male and a female altered her sense of gender identity to the point that she became completely fluid, associating herself with whichever sex she happened to be at the time.
Eventually, the gladiatorial officials grew suspicious of the witchwyrd's unique stable, and it was only a matter of time before his ruse was discovered. They arrested him and forbid Kragga from ever setting foot in an arena again. After years of fighting being all she knew, Kragga was adrift without a hiearchy to fit into. She drifted through the Pact Worlds for a time before arriving at Absalom Station and learning about the Starfinder Society. Here at last was the social order that she craved--superiors to tell her what to do and a purpose for which to fight. And lucky for her, there were numerous vacancies in the ranks that the First Seeker was desperate to fill.
Now, Kragga serves the Starfinder Society as a soldier. He cares little for the minutiae or reasons behind his assignments, only wishing to put his scouting and fighting skills into action. He uses most of the rewards from missions on various serums to alter his body, having become mildly addicted to the sensation of transformation during his gladiatorial days.
By the way, I'm considering running the Signal of Screams AP if any of you might be interested. It's a horror themed campaign that starts at level 7 and goes to about 13.
*waves hand and jumps up and down*
Or am I in too many of your games already?
By the way, I'm considering running the Signal of Screams AP if any of you might be interested. It's a horror themed campaign that starts at level 7 and goes to about 13.
I haven't seen anyone offer SoS on the PbP forums! I would be very on board for that, if you did decide to run it.
I think I've reached peak PbP, currently. Playing 5, running 2, But thank you.
Or am I in too many of your games already?
No such thing!
I have only seen Starfinder in action up to level 4 so I'm interested in how higher level play works. And the first adventure is really well-written.
Congratulations on the upcoming child, Jimbles!
Greetings Braniac, good to see you again. I would certainly be interested in joining your game (assuming that you decide to run it, of course).
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Alright, I will run the game then! I will get a thread up and post more details in the morning, but in the meantime you can start thinking of 7th level character concepts.
Ooh, I’ve been real interested in playing SOS as well.
You are welcome to join too, of course. :)
The discussion thread for Signal of Screams is up now. You may also dot in at the gameplay thread.
Question:
Can you wake someone using Telepathy?
If you can precisely locate someone (e.g., you can see them), then you could wake them with limited telepathy just as easily as yelling them awake.
Are we playing that personal comm units don't have built in cameras?
Every other game I've been in has treated them (essentially) like smart phones (with all the functions thereof).
Yeah, RAW, they don't. I have no issues if GM Jimbles rules that all comm units have cameras. Diedre paid extra to have a camera in hers just because I felt there was no way she was going to be running around without a way to log video for her viewers. :)
It's been facetiously suggested in a thread dedicated to the subject that the reason they don't have cameras is because Golarions are more advanced socially then we are. :) Cameras cause nothing but trouble. In fact, they may be responsible - indirectly - for the Gap. Someone suggested that the Gap was the result of a spell gone awry - a spell to delete naughty pictures that someone inadvertently spread on the infospheres.
As for comm units, I have (in this game, at least) ruled that they don't have cameras. This is contrary to the general ruling that comm units are basically smartphones, but there's enough camera-related gear across different books that I feel that every character having a video recorder on hand isn't RAI. That's just my opinion, though, and how we've run this game so far. Diedre paid extra for a cheap camera unit at character creation, and we've defined that there's a simple camera in Miraj's detective kit.
Lots of interesting stuff in the gameplay thread! I'll around to that... soonish.
A minor ice storm has knocked out internet service in my county. I'll hopefully get a post up this afternoon, but knowing my ISP, it could be days.
Ouch. I'd be fit for a fancy white coat by then. :)
Luckily, it turned out to be just an hour. I bet someone tripped over a power plug in a server room or something.
Was someone vacuuming?
I don't have all the skill rules copied into my notes, but tumbling is certainly one of those things I always need to come back and check.
Miraj, you're correct in that you succeeded to pass the first square but failed the second. However, that did not end your movement; only failing to tumble through an enemy's space ends your movement. However however, you move at half speed while tumbling, so it's a moot point - you moved 15 ft. either way. Failing to tumble through a threatened square provokes as normal movement, but the robot was obviously out of reactions at that point.
Tumbling, like any other move action that isn't simply moving your speed, cannot be performed as part of a trick attack.
Thank you for the very descriptive post - it makes it much easier on me when there's a rules question.
When we were taking a break around the time we found the corpse of the owner of the starship, I forgot we have to spend a resolve point to reset our SP. I'm only down 1 point (although I don't quite remember when that happened) so I'm not worried, but it looks as if Diedre may have forgotten to spend the resolve point. I hope we might get the option to correct that oversight before we get into the battle.
If that is allowed, Miraj will spend a point and reset the SP total, just in case it makes a difference later.
My work schedule has shifted back to working days. The times I generally will not be able to post are from around 6 AM (American EST) to around 2 PM, Monday through Thursday. I suspect this will be my schedule for at least 4 months.
If that is allowed, Miraj will spend a point and reset the SP total, just in case it makes a difference later.
Whoops, I totally missed this comment when it was first posted. Because of the asynchronous nature of PbP, I'll make it a general rule that you can retcon any mechanical choices up until your first action in the next combat (if I want to change this later, I'll give you a heads up).
Fair's fair, so I feel obligated to point out rules that hurt me as much as I do those that help me. As far as I know, there is no 'holding the charge' in SF for a touch spell like there was in PF/3.5. I've been over the CRB and the SRD's multiple times looking for one, and may have missed it, so if I'm incorrect, feel free to point it out to me, but as far as I know, if I miss the attack on the Jolting Surge, the spell is wasted.
((You are, of course, free to do whatever the heck you want as GM, and if you want me to keep the spell, I'm happy to try the attack again next round.))
So I just looked into this, and here is something:
.
Touch Effects and Holding the Charge
Some effects, most notably spells, have a range of touch (see Range below) and require an action to activate. In most cases, if you don’t discharge a touch effect on the round you create it, you can postpone the discharge of the effect (also known as holding the charge) indefinitely. You can make touch attacks round after round until the effect is discharged. If you make any other attack, activate another ability, or cast a spell during this time, the touch effect dissipates.Some touch spells allow you to touch multiple targets as part of the spell. You can’t hold the charge of such a spell; you must touch all targets of the spell in the same round that you finish casting the spell.
According to this, you should be able to keep the spell.
Dude. Thank you. I literally searched for that in my PDF like 5 times over the last year and could never find it.
I am going to contend that I must have just jumped to a better version of the universe. ((AKA I was wrong.))
It's in the tactical rules of all places, under defining effects. I only know this because my first SF character was a melee techno built around jolting surge and the GM pointed it out to me, so I get a little fwoomp of joy every time I point it out to someone who thinks they just burned a spell slot for nothing.
That probably explains why I didn't see it. I kept checking the magic section (where it was in 3.x/PF) every time it came up. Mea culpa.
Is it too much to ask to get one good attack roll?
Not a good time to have a collective spasm of bad rolls.
Nah, that just means it's Tuesday. *shrug*
Sorry for the erratic posting. I'm looking at T-minus two weeks until paternity leave (give or take), and I'm running around like a headless chicken trying to wrap up a collection of personal and professional projects. I'm still optimistic that we'll finish out Incident at Absalom Station before I disappear, though, so fear not!
Take time to enjoy your world being right-side up for now. It won't stay that way. ;)
Enjoy your last few nights of being able to sleep soundly! Studies have shown that new parents don't return to their normal amounts of sleep for about 6 years after having their first child. So you have that to look forward to. :D