Count me in as disliking the review restriction. I've written quite a few reviews for adventures I've either run or played, and those reviews have been pretty serious examinations of the material on offer. Of my reviews, probably less than a third are for adventures I bought through the Paizo store. Humble Bundle-sourced pdfs, borrowing adventures from friends, or even being a player in an adventure someone else is running would all be disqualified from posting reviews if this goes through. That means basically far less reviewing from me.
Surely there's a better way to eliminate "troll" reviews than this.
Cool looking character. The gentle giant is a fun and clear character archetype, so it'll be a neat iconic to use in PFS.
Like I see a few people have already highlighted up-thread, I wish there was more to his motivation than "I have an innate call to resolve adventuring challenges". Feels like he has nothing at stake and no clear goal beyond resolving issues caused by the godsrain until he gets to go home. His reason for being an adventurer is "he has to, because magic". Wish there was a bit more so there's more hooks to playing as him.
I'm not a huge fan of either the story nor the design here. The story feels juvenile and edgy in an angsty modern teen kind of way ("the fighting blackens her soul" for example), and simultaneously makes her too much of a special wunderkind (raised by and studied under a master tactician) and completely handwaves her capabilities. In many ways its exactly the kind of backstory my friends and I would have made when we first started playing Pathfinder, so in that sense you could say it's perfect... though I expect a bit more from Paizo.
I'm particularly unsatisfied with the total lack of goals - it even ends with her expecting to meet suicide by combat. She has no particular ambition and no particular enemies (Despite the fact that she's killed so many people. She even admits she could go back to Urgir any time, making even that source of drama tepid). Does she fight for the helpless or does she fight for the money or does she fight just because her only home is on the battlefield? It's vague, non-committal. She just fights and feels vaguely guilty.
It also does nothing to show that she's a good commander! People come to her banner and she "sen(ds) them into combat to their deaths" and yells at them a lot. We never get a scene showing how she outwits her enemy, how her tactics save the day, how being a commander is a cool thing. Presumably she must be good if she's survived and continues to attract people to her, but y'know, please show it to us! It's the entire point of an iconic is to be the representative of that class.
Unfortunately, the visual design also just doesn't look like a cool character I'd want to play as. She looks like a random lieutenant you beat along the way to the boss in an AP.
RE AI: I know people are paranoid now about AI seeping in everywhere as it gets more polished, but I expect Paizo has a high degree of integrity for things like this.
Suryo pinged me for potentially joining as a substitute player, but it looks like Rosc has you covered. Let me know if you need another one in the future, since the game looks like a fun one!
Great analysis. I agree that as written the core features of this subclass don't seem to work together right, especially at the lowest levels (This is generally a problem with technomancer as a whole, but particularly bad here). My own thoughts regarding the subclass largely echo yours, but to reinforce how much of a problem this design is, I've highlighted the biggest pain points.
Fundamental issues as I see them:
- When doing the thing the class seems to want you to (summoning minions), you don't have actions left over to apply most spell shapes or overlock. Sustaining spells or Commanding minions similarly "gums up" your action economy on turns after the one where you've cast a summon, leaving you unable to indulge in all the neat spellshapes available unless you want to miss out on casting a 2-action spell.
- The Overclock Boost does nothing since you don't have access to minions that you would Command rather than Sustain. This is (mostly) a dead feature as written without dips elsewhere. However even with a robot companion, activating Overclock Boost and getting value out of it requires way too much jumping through hoops.
- Neither Incognito Spell nor Signal Relay make much sense as first level features, with the first being too niche while the second isn't practical due to your limited access to tech minions. I also question how relevant casting buffs on minions is over casting them on your martial allies. Only spells that are actually locked as self-targeted seem like good candidates for this focus spell, and even that is probably highly dependent on the specific spell.
Parts I like:
- The higher level subclass focus spells are *absolutely* what I want out of a minion-focused character. Enhancing your minions to make them significantly more effective is enticing.
- Good "tech interaction" spell list. Discharge, speak with computers, control machine and wall of steel are very appropriate and should be useful. The rest of the list largely enables the core concept. Very satisfied with this one.
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As it currently is written, this subclass looks pretty neat at higher levels where you have flexibility to use its powerful high level focus spells. On the other hand the relatively weak jailbreaks, questionably useful Overclock boost, and the difficulty in overclocking with its action economy make it look like you'll waste more time trying to overclock than it'll ever be worth.
Yep, totally works. However, I don't think the benefits of overclock gear are worth spending two actions and a focus point. It's just a very low impact round to do so, granting yourself a minor buff that in some cases only lasts 1 round. I certainly don't think using overclock gear this way "makes the class functional".
At high levels this is a non-issue anyway since you'll have plenty of slotted spells, while at low levels I think the intended design is that you don't always have gear overclocked, or that you jailbreak only rarely.
I like all your suggestions Kishmo. I feel like way too many of the feats here were named without a thought beyond "lol gamer/programmer reference", without any deeper consideration for what those terms mean. Unfortunately, I'm also one of those that just don't enjoy how reference-laden the whole class is. A little cheeky nod to real life is fun, but this is just a barrage.
Great feedback Koganei! Its a shame the surveys are all wrapped up. I noticed some of the same while reading but didn't end up getting a chance to playtest with my group. Hopefully other folks who did get to the surveys highlighted some of these points.
I haven't had a particular issue with Devastation Ark being too easy.
My players are currently in Book 3, and I can say they struggled with a number of combats in the first two books. In book 1 the spiciest were the exsiccate encounter (they didn't have the right ranged weapons to stop their regeneration and they ate a lot of AoOs) and the bryvath encounter (impossible aura + confusion/spectrend were back-breaking). Both of those encounters were close calls for my group. However having played a lot of Starfinder I'm well aware that optimized parties are really really efficient at downing foes and the higher level you get the more that becomes true. You can scale things up for your group - or not - there's nothing inherently bad about them stomping every encounter unless they're getting bored.
I'm surprised about your "not great NPCs" comment as I found them pretty fun when I ran book 1. Lots of variety.
I didn't have them use their howl every action, just because I find that boring... but even then it was a rough battle.
What do you mean? Blazing Howl has a cooldown of 1d4 rounds.
I do suspect that the blazing howl was intended to be 2A (though I checked in Book of the Dead and indeed it's only 1 action, so it's not a AoN slip up). It sounds like the true difficulty of the encounter might be more like severe than moderate thanks to the big up-front aoe dmg. Thanks for the heads up!
Now that sure strike isn't propping up remastered battle oracle, I feel like there's definitely room to make weapon trance feel like a worthwhile action, rather than a very clunky general feat. Personally I would juice weapon trance to compensate as follows:
- Weapon Trance is sustained with any strike, whether or not it is successful.
- Weapon Trance grants a status bonus to damage with melee weapon strikes equal to the number of weapon damage dice.
This is modest enough that I don't think it'll rock any boats, but it does make weapon trance distinctly more appealing for the up close and personal gish.
I don't contest that the version they ended up creating is much easier to balance and requires less overhead in play. But I do think they abandoned the traditional necromancer experience to get there. Obviously a lot of people actively LIKE this more straightforward, necromancy-themed more action RPG inspired version that doesn't have the overhead and considerations inherent to being a traditional necromancer. But there's already multiple classes in this game that involve juggling some resource restriction in combat in order to execute cool spells or things that are effectively spells: focus points, overflow, unstable, etc. While this particular iteration has some unique aspects that will be tactically fun to consider, it's also just very safe territory.
PossibleCabbage mentions taking the Undead Master archetype if you want a permanent undead minion. In my mind, this is such a basic aspect of being a necromancer that it should be, if not a core part of the class, at least an optional feat or chain.
Squiggit wrote:
... How much of the stuff you're describing do you want, OP?
Like skulking around sinisterly in graveyards, having to scrounge for corpses, abilities that only work on creatures that leave behind dead bodies... a lot of that sounds like it would be genuinely really miserable in play.
I agree there could be room for some long term minion support, but that could be as simple as offering up the Undead Master feats in-class without having to archetype.
Probably not all of it in the form I described, due to creating too much friction with playing with your fellow players at the table, but I feel the class should at least made some nods in this direction. I would love to see a necromancer that has some basic benefits with the Create Undead ritual (maybe it's a lot cheaper and easier to cast for them). Or one that gives some reason for you to care about visiting places where there are a lot of dead bodies. Or one where the player gets excited that they beat a particularly powerful enemy because they can upgrade the undead at their disposal in some fashion - even if that upgrade is small or temporary. Or one that allows you to command multiple minions at once, but restricts your options while doing so to not bog down gameplay.
I think a class that captured the classic vibe of necromancy, while still being playable and not disruptive, wasn't impossible.
So I've now read through the whole of the necromancer, and I came out of it feeling... unsatisfied.
On the positive side, it's a very cleanly constructed class with a mechanical gimmick / gameplay style in the Thralls + Grave Spells that I think will give it a unique feel to play. It strikes me in some ways as very similar to the kineticist, where the neat tricks you pick up as class feats end up comprising a large portion of what you do in combat. Plus you have some spell slots to add utility and variety and extra punch when you need it. As an initial playtest it feels VERY solid and VERY functional. I think the design deserves a lot of kudos because Paizo was facing the unenviable challenge of creating a class that provides a "many minions" feel without bogging down gameplay.
However, as a necromancer this class just does not work for me at all. It feels like someone played an action RPG video game (Diablo?) and decided to use that as essentially their only inspiration. It commands "undead" in name and flavor only. It delivers so little of what I imagine when I think of necromancers. It feels like the designer was so focused on delivering smooth functionality in combat, that to avoid bogging down the pace of the game, they essentially made a necromancy-flavored kineticist.
A hollow feeling expression of necromancy When I think of necromancers, I imagine sinister figures stalking graveyards, exhuming the dead and infusing corpses with necromantic energy. I imagine the callous noble waited upon by shambling servants. I imagine killing your foe, only to raise their body and have them shambling clumsily after their friends. I think of cultivating a horde and turning it upon your enemies. OTOH I also think of the necromancer who is only as powerful as his horde, who has to flee upon losing control of it. I think of needing to sneak and skulk because societies shun such evil desecration. I think being a necromancer in fantasy is a lifestyle as much as it is a flavor of magic.
Obviously, some of these vibes are impossible to translate into a tabletop class and have it work. But so much of this class abandons the traditional strengths and limitations of necromancy in favor of making it "play nice". From not maintaining even a single long duration minion, to not needing corpses for your core "dead raising" ability, it feels hollow.
Thralls are creatures in name only They appear from nowhere, at no cost*, have no actions or movement, and vanish upon expiry into the ether. They're like summoning an inanimate object. You don't inherently need dead bodies to create them (though at least there's a neat reaction that lets you do so) and they don't leave anything behind. They have seemingly no negative associations. You can't even have them shamble about and trigger traps for you unless you make a giant one with a level 8 feat. They're so abstracted for the sake of functionality that they don't feel like undead minions at all.
Other than Undead Lore you have no particular advantage dealing with undead you encounter No Command Undead, no Panic the Dead, no means to show other necromancers who's boss other than the stuff available to all occult casters (Bind Undead, etc). You're on the same footing as any other caster. It feels *weird* that you've got nothing unique to do when your level 1 party is attacked by a half dozen skeletons. The only notable advantage is the bump on mental will saves vs. undead, but that's such a minor thing when you consider all the different types of undead out there.
No means to get long lasting undead minions Outside of combat, having undead minions doing your bidding is to me a meaningful part of the necromancer fantasy. This is true even if they're not significant participants in combat. Unfortunately you have no inherent perks associated with the create undead ritual or better use or access to spells and feats that give you longer lasting control.
The class doesn't play nice with summon undead and any actual minion control The necromancer design looks quite action-hungry to me. It really wants to spend its 3 actions each round making thralls and spending thralls. Summon Undead and other minion control needing to be Sustained simply doesn't fit in elegantly with this "build and spend" gameplay loop. The class also just has zero interaction with summon undead in its features or feats, making the message clear that you're not going to be using it.
Limited access to vitality manipulation The occult list is spooky, but it's missing core spells involving manipulating vitality and void energies. Instead you get the whimsical bard music magic and a pile of mental magic. Not having raise dead or massacre feels like a big miss.
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Again, I think the class as a whole is really well constructed and cool, but it feels like a weirdly video-gamey imagining of the necromancer.
Thanks for the insight. So is one of the takeaways here that Starfinder characters are overall stronger than their Pf2e counterparts? Or is it really just outlying options being too good? I haven't been able to pull a group together to test at anything other than 1st level, but these write ups suggest that even a somewhat less optimized group will comfortably be punching well above their weight...
Looking through the things you tested, it also seems like higher level enemies need more flexible tools at their disposal so you don't have quite so many binary encounters. This was a problem in Sf1E as well, as higher level characters had broad spectrum capabilities and defenses (thanks to augmentations and armor upgrades mostly) that tended to outclass the things they were fighting from one angle or another.
Really interesting write up that highlights some feats and options that might be above the intended power curve. Can I ask why you had so many fights with 6+ enemies? I find from both games I run (in PF2E) and prewritten modules that this is exceedingly rare. Usually you get at most a half dozen foes, and most typically it's 1-4.
There's a couple foes right near the beginning of Chapter 2 that suffer from the "not a good target for the Weak adjustment" that several foes have. Their description and capabilities also don't line up very well. As a result I did a small rework for any GMs that may wander over here.
Spoilers for Encounter in D2:
The creature in question has very high hardness for a Level 1 creature, and this doesn't get adjusted by the Weak adjustment. For my group fighting two of these at once would have been needlessly brutal for what should be a low-to-moderate encounter. This edit emphasizes the rusted nature to weaken the hardness and adds some boar/bull flavor.
Replace the Weak Animated Armors with the following:
Rusted Bull Armor - Creature 1
[medium][construct][mindless]
Perception +4; darkvision
Skills Athletics +7
STR +3 DEX -3 CON +4 INT -5 WIS +0 CHA -5
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AC15 (11 when broken); Fort +8, Ref +2, Will +3; construct armor
HP15; Hardness 5; Immunities bleed, death effects, disease, doomed, drained, fatigued, healing, mental, nonlethal attacks, paralyzed, poison, sickened, spirit, unconscious, vitality, void
Construct Armor Like normal objects, the rusted bull armor has Hardness. This Hardness reduces any damage it takes by an amount equal to the Hardness. Once it is reduced to less than half its Hit Points, or immediately upon being damaged by a critical hit, its construct armor breaks, removing the Hardness and reducing its Armor Class to 11.
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Speed 20 ft
Melee [a] horns +8 (forceful, magical), Damage 2d4+2 piercing
Melee [a] gauntlet +7 (agile, free-hand, magical) Damage d6+2 bludgeoning
Reckless Charge [aa] The armor strides twice and then makes a horns strike with a +2 circumstance bonus to its attack roll. It becomes off-guard until its next turn.
On the topic of ammo in SF2E, my experience with SF1E was that almost no one kept track of ammo. It's too much tracking for something that is basically almost never a real restriction, and it looks like we're heading that direction for SF2E as well. I think Paizo should 100% consider a more abstract ammo system as an optional variant rule (if not the main rule) wherein you have infinite ammo for normal attacks, but you use up your whole magazine when you use your gun's special ability - be that area fire, or something else. That way you have a delayed action cost (reloading) when you do your "cool thing" but otherwise you don't have to monitor ammo.
As someone who has played a lot of Lancer over the last year, that system is not particularly simple overall, but it uses abstraction and simplification in several spots to bring in-play complexity and overhead down. No ammo tracking at all there, for example.
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I also thoroughly wish for Paizo to consider how to make the ranged combat baseline more interesting for SF2E. There have been good suggestions above, but I think a simple dichotomy between cover being super strong and there being multiple ways to flush people out of cover would be the first key step. PF2E's standard cover bonuses are pretty good, but it lacks ways to defeat cover in interesting fashion from range (usually done by just having your melee allies rush the enemies in cover). Powerful but delayed aoe attacks would do the trick, but they have to be strong enough that I don't just want to sit there and eat them.
One interesting feature of PF1E for very experienced groups was that the difficulty of a prewritten adventure was dictated in a semi-collaborative fashion. The GM could set the adventure difficulty based on selecting an AP, and then the players could actively select their own combat difficulty based on how hard they optimized their characters. If you wanted to breeze through and you had a GM who was on board, you could optimize to the hilt while the GM ran the adventure "as-written". If you wanted to make it more difficult, you played weaker or more mechanically fragile builds.
Some other systems actively make player buy-in a core means of setting difficulty or raising the stakes. I've toyed around with ways to implement this in PF2e without any good successes yet.
I've found that players are most satisfied with high difficulty when there's clear feedback that the challenge is a result of their own decisions, both in and out of character. They need to be able to draw that line from their own action to their character dying without feeling like some BS was involved.
The GM adjusting difficulty between sessions can also cause some friction, unless its done with explicit player buy-in. Some players are happier to have their characters die if they've explicitly refused the GM's offer of lowering the difficulty of a campaign. It's all quite complicated!
The new floating disk replacement - Carryall - seems neat. Not sure if its been discussed elsewhere. Mechanics are a little different (and demand Sustains from the caster) but it can heighten to carry other people and fly up into the air!
Resilient sphere got a rename, can affect creatures of any size, and can be heightened to increase its Hit Points. Also quite neat.
Force cage has been reworked into Lifewood cage, but uses many of the same rules (including being invisible, which is very funny for a cage made of wood). Invisibility sphere was also renamed, gets a larger aoe, and no longer immediately ends during the first round of combat.
Quite a few other interesting changes, but nothing too dramatic other than live wire based on places I've been listening.
It does seem that the new Explosion of Power feat opens up some very spicy, very risky blasting builds. It's like the old wizard elemental tempest focus spell except it costs no resources and no actions. It certainly blows other damage focused blood magics out of the water. I'm not sure if Paizo intended it to work with anoint ally. If they did, it's both powerful and safe. But even if not, a 12th level hasted elemental sorc can stride into melee, then chain lightning into elemental toss for:
6d8 piercing vs AC
6d6 fire basic Reflex
8d12+6 electric (multiple targets) basic Reflex
6d6 fire basic Reflex
Against on-level foes that's threatening 125 ish average damage against targets with 200-230 HP. Seems like it overshadows most other blasting options.
Undead sorcerers can do something similar with vampiric exsanguination, except they also get temp HP to help against any potential crack back and can unload high damage harms (nova-ing their resources) to get several sequential blood magic triggers.
If you're feeling particularly bold, you can also combine Explosion of Power with the elemental bloodline's vanilla blood magic (thanks to blood sovereignty) and squeeze out another 10% more damage at the cost of 20% or so of your HP.
Really good ideas both of you, thanks! I do think ultimately just the direct OOC buy-in is the best move, with some adjustments to the set up depending on preferences. The exorcism spin sounds really fun.
So far I've read through Chapter 1 and am concerned about a narrative inflexibility built into it as written. The first chapter presents Abstalar's desire to contact Nualia's spirit to forgive her for her misdeeds. This goal is integral to the resolution of the chapter because it's only through being forgiven that Nualia reveals the threat of the Seven Dooms. Also most of the interesting drama in this chapter comes from factions in town that would oppose bringing back Nualia's spirit.
The problem is... what if the players/PCs don't agree with Abstalar? I think it's not out of the question for players/PCs to fall on the other side and say her crimes far outweigh any of the town's cruelties toward her.
As a GM, if the players don't agree with the thrust of the narrative, you can still entice them with gold or the ever useful "well, that's how the AP goes" to get them to go along with it, but I would much more like to transform the adventure to work with their viewpoint instead. However, Chapter 1's "forgiving Nualia" elements feel so load bearing... I'm not sure how best to adjust it, especially the Influence encounter at the end where the players have to personally find ways to forgive her.
Any thoughts on what might be a good way to change this?
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On a related note, I think Burnt Offerings is a tricky way to tie into this AP. This AP assumes a very particular resolution for Nualia at the end of Burnt Offerings, and one that (from my experience running or playing or reading campaign journals) is often not the way the book ends at the table. I've seen several redeemed Nualias, captured Nualias, escaped Nualias that return in Book 2... people LOVE not killing her. And the AP is written such that killing her isn't mandatory.
The entire premise of Chapter 1 of this AP is that Nualia is definitely dead and definitely still full of vengeance. By going Burnt Offerings -> Seven Dooms you either massively reduce the allowable possibility space for the resolution of Burnt Offerings, or you have to totally overhaul this Chapter 1.
I really enjoy looking through the various Paizo APs in the store and checking out what people have to say about each book, in order to work out what to run next. After a few months of not doing so, I wanted to take a look at some of the newer 2E APs and found that lots of reviews appear to be either missing or hidden in some fashion, judging by the addition of empty lines throughout the review tab.
I know Paizo was dealing with an epidemic of serial "1 star" reviewers that don't leave a comment. Did they go through and just wipe out all those reviews?
I like this. Reads very well and very clearly to me at least, and removes the rules hiccup from the normal stunned rules. Having to spend several dedicated actions getting out of stunned reminds me a little of fighting games (and other games) where button mashing after you get stunned breaks you out of it.
I'm not seeing any unintended consequences at first glance, but they could be there.
I've been pretty dissatisfied with Starships in SF1E, but I'm also far from confident that Paizo will execute them well in SF2E. They do know what the issues are, but their track record on "additional" rules systems has not been great based on my own personal experience. Generally they tend to be undertested and therefore end up with some big holes in them. I've been pondering how to overhaul SF1E's starships for years on and off without really reaching a satisfying result, so it seems like a tough nut to crack.
The recent discussion has got me thinking again, so here are some of my own pain points and preferences:
We definitely need lighter weight rules for Starship combat and (especially) construction.
Part of the reason that starship building gets assigned to the one person who cares in SF1E is that the rules are complex and difficult to implement into a viable ship design. There's not just a barrier to entry in understanding how they work, but a barrier in knowing how to make a good ship with them. Worse, they're entirely separate from the normal rules. It's like having to learn a whole additional game. And on top of that, you may use these rules one out of every 10 sessions, so they're never fresh in your mind. While Waterslethe's suggestion to split up that barrier to entry by having each person "build" their own station is good, I think it'd be even better to just simplify things down. Less customization, less math, easier to remember and play.
When I say simplify, I'm thinking:
- Ship frames that give you all the stats you need for the ship (likely scaling with tier), so you don't have to do any math or work out the right balance between investing in one feature over another. Basically, your team chooses if you want to be fast and weak, slow and strong, or how tricksy your ship is.
- The option to slot a few things in and out on each frame, such that building a starship is 5-10 choices that can be discussed at the table rather than between sessions. You'd pick a weapon for each mount, then add several utility "units" or "systems", that would primarily give your ship new things to do in and out of combat, above and beyond the baseline.
- Starship roles that each have a few good qualitatively impactful (and therefore memorable) actions each, with fewer actions that require die rolls to resolve.
Starship Stats should probably be independent of character stats
I hate getting into a starship combat in SF1E when playing a solarion. You just feel like such an obvious second-string contributor. One solution for this is to just make roles that work for all 6 of the attributes. But that just pigeonholes your character into the role that matches their class. A technomancer might want to do magic, but not always be the engineer or science officer. You could also make roles flexible, allowing multiple skills or attributes to work. Ultimately though, I found myself gravitating toward just divesting character stats from starships entirely. It gives people the most flexibility to pick the roles they like to play, and allows them to not need to reference both their character sheet and their starship sheet at the same time.
"Tactical" starship combat is utterly uninteresting against single targets in open space, and that probably won't change if Paizo sticks to compatibility with PF2Es normal combat system
Imagine in PF2E that 50% of combats were a single PC Fighter, specialized as an archer, vs. a single enemy archer in an open field. That's SF1E's starship combat in a nutshell. There's no real decision making. You point your biggest gun at the enemy, aiming at their most damaged quadrant if you won initiative, and fire.
If you want one-on-one dogfights to be fun, the starship combat rules need to have proper dueling mechanics that add some play/counterplay and tension. The current system of firing arcs and flight movement absolutely does not accomplish this. There are TTRPGs that do dueling well, and generally what I've seen is that the keys are: the ability to attack and defend on multiple fronts (HP, morale, or other resources, and the individual status of limbs/systems), the ability to choose variable levels of risk when you take actions, and the existence of actions that counter other actions so you're encouraged to not be predictable or rely too much on any one tactic.
If introducing robust one-on-one combat rules is not reasonable (probably because it tends to be complicated), then the best solution is to have far more complex objectives and arenas. I've been playing Lancer recently, and one of its strongest features is that most encounters have "defeat all foes" as only a secondary or backup objective. This means players are constantly challenged to approach encounters differently, adjusting their loadouts or focusing on different tactics. Leaning into this approach as "default" for starship combat would do a lot to keep it fresh even with a simple ruleset and fairly open hex maps.
Great summary WatersLethe! I might quibble over some of your key takeaways, and my personal "dream" starship combat structure may be a bit different than you've presented, but I think you've hit on a number of really important pain points from SF1E's version of the rules and I like your solutions.
In general I think the whole system deserves a massive simplification vs. the rules we have in SF1 now, but without going all the way to the narrative combat we got in Enhanced. This is especially true in the ship building portion, where so much of it is just a jigsaw puzzle in order to keep up with ever increasing ship statistics. My own previous feeble attempts at homebrewing something have focused on having each custom system giving you a new action or utility in combat, rather than adjusting stats or damage.
Based on my experience with 2E, I very much agree with the big single enemy encounters don't feel all that fun to play….Basically, I feel like the encounter building guidance we have right now leads to fights that are technically "balanced" but are rarely a good time. The more I GM 2E, the more I find myself leaning back on the encounter building principles I learned back in PF1E.
[snipped for clarity] Any chance you could list or comment on those PF1 encounter building principles?
I don't really have a good source to point at (though the GM's Guide to Challenging Encounters from Alexander Augunas is always good reading), or an organized list of everything, but broadly and in no particular order:
- CR is a starting point. After a few encounters you know better how much your PCs can handle, as well as what kinds of encounters are easy and hard for them. If a particular kind of threat is harder for your PCs, then consider it higher CR. The same is true in the inverse (for example, you can throw any number of mundane archers at the PCs if they're always packing wind wall).
- Players are always more stressed about the difficulty than it seems on your side of the table.
- Action economy is king. A foe with fewer actions only wins if it can control the PCs action economy. (Generally less true in 2E, though still valuable to keep an eye on)
- Complicated monsters are best used as bosses, mini-bosses or solo threats. Especially if they have auras, things that trigger very frequently, and action economy advantages. (In PF1E terms, you should sparingly use encounters with things like 4x mummies, or 4x enemy casters with slow or confusion, or 4x high level dragons)
- Simple monsters serve as better minions. Feel free to cut abilities off a monster to make it more minion-like.
- Variety in creatures, objective and terrain is mandatory.
- You can throw any amount of very weak foes into an encounter without adjusting the encounter difficulty. PCs will find a way to AOE them down, bypass them, or ignore them. They'll still provide "texture" and serve as body blockers. You can even treat them as having a damage threshold for KO rather than HP, to reduce bookkeeping.
- Unfair encounters are A-OK and strongly contribute to both narrative and game feel, so long as they are A) telegraphed both ahead of time and within the encounter itself and B) able to be escaped from in a way that is clearly shown.
Based on my experience with 2E, I very much agree with the big single enemy encounters don't feel all that fun to play. Far too often it just feels like rather than these difficult encounters being difficult due to some capability unique to the foe, they're difficult solely because you're being ground down by the implacable weight of the creature's numbers. On the flip side, low level foes are squished again solely through the weight of your better numbers. The consistency in numerical capabilities between creatures and PCs of similar level means that any fight against a single foe feels surprisingly similar - getting pasted by enemy crits while you eke out small advantages (debuffs, buffs, etc) until you can even things out.
Despite how PF2E's encounter building promises balance and easy GMing, there are plenty of traps. Many monsters are just boring when solo. Others are too complicated to be a minion. Others have cool auras that introduce challenges for the players to tackle when a higher level than the party, but which only challenge the GM with relentless busywork and bookkeeping while having minimal impact when used as a minion. Basically, I feel like the encounter building guidance we have right now leads to fights that are technically "balanced" but are rarely a good time. The more I GM 2E, the more I find myself leaning back on the encounter building principles I learned back in PF1E.
Ooh, quite interested in this one, particularly as a P2E adaptation. I've heard the original had some very cool themes and story, but was bogged down with excessively grueling encounters. Seems like what you're planning to do in terms of adapting the AP would be just what it needs.
I've seen only one death as a GM, and that was during a famously unbalanced season 1 scenario. The group was unsuited to fight the creature that served as the boss, leading to an absolutely overlong slugfest that left most of the party on their last legs in HP, sp, and rp. In an act of heroic sacrifice, one party member led the boss back to a trap the group had bypassed earlier, triggering the trap and killing them both.
Awesome! I feel like grenades have always been on the verge of being good as a control and support tool, especially for the grenadier-focused mechanic alternate class feature. Maybe this will push them over the hump.
Requiring an action to "swap arm focus" is probably the single worst part of what has been revealed so far on SF2 for me. It feels deeply unreasonable in my mind to require a full action for a creature that has lived with multiple limbs all it's life to switch from using one limb to another limb. It tears me right out of the illusion that we're trying to model "fantasy reality" in a fair but realistic way. Instead, it's a transparent mechanical ball and chain.
Given the wild variety of species in Starfinder with different physical capabilities, I think the game would be far healthier if it didn't balance its weapon and defense options around the number of hands they take to use.
Packing a punch in spellpower is exactly what I was thinking. It's been a while since I got to play a technomancer and there's been quite the assortment of fun blasty options printed since. On top of some great utility spells.
Sounds good. I'll put a character together over the next few days then. Looks like the party could use either another melee or someone solid at INT skills.
Hi all! Guiness reached out to me about joining in on this game. I'd be happy to jump in and do some more SFS scenarios, especially since it looks like this isn't for credit, so I don't need to have a character in the right bracket.
I *have* however played the Scoured Stars Invasion before (though not any of its followups), so I'll leave it up to you Thom on whether that's a dealbreaker. If not, let me know what rules I need to follow for a character build.
The really wild array of augmentations and armor upgrades would be fun. They occupy a similar place to magic items, but they're far more science-fictiony and have some really awesome effects.
Definitely excited about this one. Love the name. I really hope this is a proper "amalgam" deity, representing the reconciliation of Zon Kuthon and Shelyn and the twisting of both their portfolios into something really weird. Lots of ways you can intersect art/beauty and pain/secrets.
Also, I'd be very happy to see a visual/personality design somewhere in the realm of Testament from Guilty Gear.
I love magic having "in-world" fundamental mechanics, having a sciency feel to it. However, I've felt for a long time that the existing spell schools were poorly defined and really should have been overhauled into a much more robust set of categories based on what spells fundamentally are affecting. These changes instead go the entirely opposite direction to what I'd prefer - quite frustrating! In-world schools that teach buckets of spells just does nothing for me thematically (all wizards I've played in the past were either self-taught or studied under an individual mentor).
I'm particularly concerned that the new schools will significantly limit your "school" slot. Since the school lists can't be easily expanded as future books come out, you can be stuck with unimpressive or disliked options for your school slot. Sorcerer already has this problem with their bloodlines, where bad spells are taking up space in your repertoire. It'd be worse with wizards if your school slot is locked in to accept one of these spells.
Sounds exciting! A clean up of the presentation of the game is definitely a good idea, and there has been a lot of good errata that'll be nice to fold into a complete product.
Looking forward to seeing what other small changes and tweaks make it in.
Agreed. I'm a little disappointed that Thursty seemed to be playing down the similarities between this and Pathfinder Unchained. Makes me think that none of the four classes will get true overhauls, just minor tweaks compatible with their existing mechanics.
Whoa, the witchwarper change is big. Did I understand right that they get twice the spell slots, but their bonus spell slots can be only used on infinite worlds? That frees them up massively.
Sounds like envoys are getting a freed up on action economy somehow so they can spend more actions attacking at low levels.
Starfinder Society GM. 1,135 posts (20,150 including aliases). 43 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 12 Organized Play characters. 31 aliases. 
