Boedullus's page
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***OODLES OF SPOILERS BELOW FOR WHITE GLOVE AFFAIR***
I do not get it. I think the implementation makes for interesting rolls and strategies, but it seems so... like, not related to any human psychology I know. The book opens: "heist of the century!" As players get excited for some Fireflyesque let's be bad guys action, instead they wind up having to... bid on a ship full of loot? Like it's an episode of Storage Wars for rich people? Except all the rich people are this close to backing down from the whole process? Except then once they do bid successfully then they have to steal it anyway? Except it's not a cool heist but rather a frantic smash and grab? And the ultimate prize is some BP and 6200 credits? (Which at level 9 gets one players an extremely under-leveled item?) WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE
I don't get it. This feels like it would drive players berserk confounding their expectations time and again, dangling nifty stuff in front of them and snatching it away to offer up something else, and when they resign themselves to that, repeat. Plus the whole concept seems so... weird. Like, I've never worked in shipping, but is this how it works? Someone cobbles together a trailer full of gold and auctions it off? Ugh, I'm back in questioning my sanity mode again. Really feel like the wheels are coming off on this one.
Wow. After Fly Free or Die 2 came out guns blazing with that awesome map pack add-on, FFoD 3 not only ditches that but doesn't even show up in My Downloads as downloadable as a single file. And all this after the debacle, which looks to never be getting resolution, in which the Devastation Ark pdfs were over 10x the size of the usual.
I don't know whose job it is over at Paizo to make the pdfs or if they just toss the responsibility to whoever's working on a project, but somebody needs to make a procedure/standards guide for pdf creation and somebody else in quality control needs to make sure it's followed. This is bizarre and disappointing as hell.
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For a while, I've been thinking about unsubscribing from the SF APs and just buying them piecemeal when/if they looked really good, but man. The new map pack set for Fly Free or Die is SO FREAKING GOOD. Man, here's hoping they keep doing those. The resolution, being able to switch the grid off... it's a night and day difference in quality and usability for the virtual tabletop. So. FREAKING. Happy.
I subscribe to the SF APs and keep a copy of each book's PDF on my hard drive. Probably pretty common. They eat up some space, but it's not *so* bad.
Or at least it wasn't until the Devastation Ark series came along, each PDF over 20 times the usual size, a full Gb for the trio. Absolutely nothing different in them in terms of quality; I'm given to understand they just formatted the files differently.
Now we have Fly Free or Die, slashed to a mere 5x the usual size, BUT WITHOUT HIGHLIGHTABLE TEXT. Goodbye copy/pasting, hello tedious recopying manually.
What on earth is going on over at Paizo that something they seemed to have handled so easily is suddenly completely fubar?
I just downloaded my copy of Waking the Worldseed. Very very excited that Paizo has finally created a high level AP. That said, the book, while around the usual length (68 pages), is a whopping 340 Mb. That's larger than the pdf of every book in Dead Suns, Attack of the Swarm and Dawn of Flame COMBINED. While it's not breaking my machine or anything, I don't have the biggest hard drive, so it's not great for me.
Anyone have any insights on why the thing is soooooooooo much bigger than its predecessors?
So at the onset, the PCs are given leave to investigate the front runners for the Directorate. The rules give guidance on treating this as a Diplomacy check to gather information. I'm sort of baffled. In a sci fi universe, and one in which the PCs are wanted criminals, AND one of them is a CLONE of one of the people they're asking about, it seems unthinkable that for basic information, they would ask around instead of exclusively using the infosphere. Like, if I wanted to know more about my Congressional candidate, who in the world would go to the pub and ask people instead of going to google?
It's not a big deal, but it seems really weird that they framed this in such a way, even put in a small rule system for conducting the research. Do not get it, and now I have to rewrite it all so it makes sense. Bleh.

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Anyone else feel like the Biohacker is rather underwhelming? Most of their abilities are so weak I feel like I'd only bother to use them because I could. Remove/add dazzling? +1/-2 to attacks or ACs? Like, it's not nothing, but it feels like you could do an entire adventure path and only actually derive any benefit from these abilities a few times. Even the presentation - you get Minor and Basic Biohacks, but there's no Improved/Greater (etc.). I feel like they hit the nail on the head - the abilities are basic, and minor, and they basically never get upgraded to anything better.
The class isn't god-awful, but I feel like they're not The Best at literally anything. The envoy, for instance, as another class with lackluster raw offense/defense, actually gets some pretty significant combat abilities, with healing, extra actions, debuff removal, etc. This feels like that, only all those capabilities are lesser, with seemingly nothing out of combat to make up for it.
Am I missing something?
Just read through Firestarters, and I gotta say... what? This AP looks SO. BORING. It's just bubble after bubble, half of it with no concept of the real villain, who you don't even get to face in the end. (At least, it sounds like Malikah never actually makes an appearance.)
Exploring the sun is neat, but it hardly merits 6 entire adventures. Probably not 2. The plane of shadow got 1 in Signal of Screams, which seemed about right. But now we're locked in to five more months of finding and thwarting the BBEG's top minion. In sun bubbles, over and over.
Not impressed.
In Escape from the Prison Moon's alien archives, I noticed the radiation drake's atomic bolt dealt 3d10+3 (plus radiation exposure). For a CR 9 creature, I'd have expected a +9 modifier. Is that an error, a deliberate decision...? I even wondered if the damage from the radiation exposure would add up to 9 on a failed save, but medium radiation (DC 17) would be 7 damage, for a total of +10, so that doesn't seem quite it either. Wondering!
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