Captain Hawley Cromwell, "The Mad Barnacle"'s page

Some posters have joked that Paizo should just get rid of martial classes and make them all casters. The way the game is set up in P1, that's probably the only way to do it.

Joked? If you are referring to me, I was quite serious. Imagine the world of pathfinder - it has the usual, real life laws of physics, but also additional physical laws of magic which describe how magic behaves, as well as bridging laws between those two sets. Now you have two kinds of people - one kind(mages) can interract with the latter set, while the other(various mundanes and muggles) can't. How can you expect mages not to dominate the design process here? It'd be like if in real life some people could only move, look and interract with objects in two dimensions, while some others could jump, climb, raise their head to look at things above or below them and otherwise move in three dimensions. Obviously the latter kind would be ridiculously overpowered. They could sneak past people by climbing a tree and moving along the branches, kill people without repercussions by dropping things on them (not like 2-d people would know why a person suddenly died), heal diseases nobody else could heal (how can you heal a sprained ankle if you can't look down to notice your ankle is sprained?), and so on.

IMO if you want players to be in some sense equal, then the least you should do is make it possible for all players to interract with all laws of physics, instead of a ridiculously limited subset. The.Bard mentioned they (and many others) want their fighters to be "like a warrior from the legends, like Beowulf, Heracles or Cu Chulainn (spelling?), not some random historically accurate-ish fighter." Well, Cu Chulainn was a reincarnation of a god. Heracles was a son of a god. Beowulf (unlike the other two) wasn't of literal divine descent, but he did do things like:

• In order to kill a monster at the bottom of a lake, he dives into it. In full plate armor. It takes him a day to sink to the bottom, which does little more that bore him because dude just can hold breath that good. He then kills the monster, and swims out of the lake (still in full plate) while carrying it's head.

• Gets into a week-long swimming contest across the sea. He loses, but only barely, and because he was doing it in full plate armor and had to waste time killing 9 leviathans along the way, while swimming, without rest.

• When asked to get rid of a realy scary giant fella, decides that it would be only fair to not use any weapons, since the giant doesn't use weapons either. He then rips the giant's arm off and wins the fight.

• Gets into a fight with a dragon. Dragon bites him clean through the neck, which lightly inconveniences Beowulf as he proceeds to disembowel the dragon with a dagger. He dies later, but not because of something lame like horrific blood loss, but because of epic-level dragon poison that was on it's fangs.
  

As far as their respective worlds were concerned, those three were the casters of their respective settings. Or at the very least, they had full access to the full set of laws of magic in their respective universes. So IMO, if you want "balanced" parties, give everyone magic. Monks use magic to become tough enough to drop from orbit, fly through the air, and so on, warriors use it to punch out dragons and make their swords cut through light to become invisible or what not, and casters use it to change shape and send fire from the heavens. Nice and balanced, using the same force of magic.

To be honest, if you just want to fix CMD, easiest way to do that would be to ban martials entirely. Makes sense too-in a world where some people are capable of bending the laws of reality, why would you expect someone who swings a stick around and can't bend the laws of physics to keep up? Just because they are the same level, i.e. spent the same amount of time adventuring? It'd be like arguing that if two people with 20 years of job experience were sent to an isolated island to survive, guy who flipped burgers at Mc Donalds can "keep up" with a NASA rocket scientist who hunted bears with a knife for fun and advised Navy Seals on survivalist training, just because they both spent 20 years getting that experience. One guy can just do more stuff, obviously he will be better and more useful.

On the other hand, making casters keep up with casters is the easiest thing in the world. Just make sure each of them has a nieche they can fall into (wizards-versatility, clerics-holy magics, sorcerers-sheer amount of spell slots, druids-various animal summoning and weather control, etc), and you are done. You might end up with casters that stab people with swords (and channel spells through them), because their magic helps them do it better, or because in the scenarios they find themselves in swords would be particularily useful, but those casters won't have trouble keeping up with what the other people in the party do. Because they too have magic. And thus you won't get a situation where one person can easilly do a thing (e.g. summon food and water) that is the entire core concept of another character (e.g. forager type ranger), because everyone has fairly versatile magic to begin with.

Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

IonutRO wrote:

Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

Ikiry0 wrote:

They are, yes but so is 'Attack bonus' and 'Armour Class'. Which is part of the reason why multiclassing soldier is such a boon to the Solarian. Resolve based on a stat that actually helps you.

If you are playing a Solarion Charisma does help you since the Revelations DCs are based off of it.

Most revelations are very situational and hardly worth using, especially the starting 2 zenith powers, so increasing their DCs at early levels doesn't really benefit you much.

If you want to use them it does.

And for "Early Levels" we have Flare, which lets you blind enemies, and Gravity Hold, which lets you yank enemies around, both very useful things available at level 2.

And, even better, Radiation!

Sickened isn't as big a debuff as (say) Blinded. But it lasts for as long as they're near you instead of just 1 round. It affects everyone within 10', instead of just one target. And best of all, you can just kick it in and it stays up; no burning an action every time you want to use it.

Yarr! Not quite, matey! Only adjacent and blocked by any non-archaic armor out there, including 95 credit starter suits, yarr!

I'm down with the new continuity. It's basically just a nice blank slate for GM's to fill in space (hehehe) where they please and how they think the world might have changed from between Pathfinder and The Gap and the results of Starfinder.

** spoiler omitted **

It means previous writers don't have to stress out about what happens in the future, or stuff in the past influencing Starfinder too much, short of a planet wide extinction event, which is something most AP's only hint though don't really deliver on. And that's good enough to me, because that same stress isn't on any GM to have their lore or information match up with stuff in Pathfinder or consider how exactly the starsystem has changed in the spanning time. Again, it's a nice blank slate and one that I think the system needed for it's stories to work alongside Pathfinder's, while maintain some similar content or expanding upon information already present in Pathfinder that wouldn't have been touched on in Pathfinder (like some of the other planets in the Core star system).

I do wish the elves had a bigger presence given that they were the first colonisers of various planets, and would have loved to see what their opinions on galactic expansion would be like. I suppose it's down to what Forlorn are like in the new world.

Also, since there are half-orcs, and definitely goblins, that can only mean that there are orcs as well.

And that means....

SPACE ORCS! YAAAAAAY!

(I hope there are hobgoblins and gnolls as well! space gnolls!)

It's the opposite of a blank slate. Amnesia on that scale would radically change all societies everywhere basically forever. Imagine if tomorrow everyone in the world woke up without any memories of their life up until that point. That's not going to pass over a couple days. A lot of people will die (as doctors don't remember they should help patients, firefighters don't fight fires, mothers forget to feed their babies, and so on), there would be widespread rioting and starvation (since truck drivers won't deliver food items into cities, only supplies there would be from shops and supermarkets, which will run out relatively quickly). Societies will collapse and might have to be redeveloped from scratch as everyone reads about "democracy" and "laws" in books (assuming they don't forget how to read).

That produces very unique effects on a setting. Like, think about this backwards: first you come up with the setting (space, drift, sci-fi with spaceships and magic), then you try to design a backstory for that setting. Now, you want it to be as simple as possible, so that it doesn't require anyone to learn anything. Simple option is to just leave it entirely blank and unexplained. Players will cobble together some ideas for a backstory themselves from various other examples of literature, and GMs can easilly invent their own explanations for things. For most adventures that wouldn't even be necessary, as only current state of the cosmos is actually relevant.

However, that is not what Starfinder does. Instead, they pick this incredibly convoluted amnesia backstory which obviously produces a lot of weird permanent effects. Furthermore, instead of just extending the gap indefinitely into the past (and thus making it just a part of this particular setting), they staple Golarion to the whole thing.

Why. That's the question I want to ask. I get the Drift, even though that is not an original idea. I get the Gap if it is properly expanded upon, as I don't remember any settings with world-wide amnesia as the premise. But why add Golarion? It just makes things worse on all fronts, since now you have to insure some sort of continuity between these two completely different settings -otherwise, why are you even including it? But here Starfinder goes even further, and insures that Golarion itself is nowhere to be found, guaranteeing no continuity. Why? What's the purpose of that? It's like painting the walls of your house white, then black, and then white again. Why did you waste two layers of paint if white was what you wanted all along?

Even the idea that Golarion could exist somewhere results in difficult questions for the setting. Given that Starfinder is apparently on the same material plane as Golarion, do the same physics and metaphysics apply to both? Can you craft magical items that were easilly crafted on Golarion in Starfinder? Can you cast spells from Golarion? Some (really, quite a few) people on Golarion were casters high-level enough to guarantee their immortality and invulnerability to minor threats. Some of those casters would be the traveling type, preferring to spend their time on other planets/planes, insuring they would avoid whatever cataclysm befell Golarion itself. Why don't you see them on Absalom station? A whole lot of money to be made by selling your unique capability to cast Old Magic spells or craft Pre-Gap magic items. Golarion had very particular limitations on what mortals could physically do, as encoded in Pathfinder skill list. Are those limitations the same as those of Starfinder? If it's the same universe, physics should be the same.

Basically, I don't see what existence of Golation brings into the setting.