Christopher LaHaise's page

Update for Starfinder, yes please! I want to run this for my group, but I don't want to teach yet another system. Ideally SF2e will be as close to PF2e as systemically possible. This is all that has kept me from buying up all the Starfinder books as I have with Pathfinder First and Second editions.

Whereas I'm the opposite. I'm still using PF1, and if SF2 was closer to PF2, I simply wouldn't buy it. I find PF2 far too restrictive for my tastes, and I want that level of flexibility in Starfinder.

Q: "Will this have an effect on Starfinder?"
A: "Not Yet."

I'm not a fan of 'not yet'. I like the Starfinder engine as-is (closer to PF1 than PF2), and I've dumped a small fortune into getting as much Starfinder and 3PP Starfinder material as possible. There's a few specific things in PF2 I would not want to see in Starfinder. Now, if you were simply to tweak Starfinder a bit and integrate stuff like you're planning with PF2, okay, sure, a 'Starfinder Core' would be cool. No complaint there.

One reason I like social-fu is because it allows a player who's not good at this kind of thing to actually be able to play a character who's better at that kind of thing. Much like how someone without much knowledge of the setting can use lore skills.

On top of that however, I believe that other tactics should be just as viable as combat. You run into a pack of goblins - how do you convince them to take your side and work with you? Or to convince a member of the Frost Giants to betray his lord?

How do you convince the King's Court to blackball someone you don't like, so they lose influence? These could all boil down to 'roll diplomacy', but that doesn't really lay out a system for if you're trying to do anything nifty or different - and there's no *Classes* that do this sort of thing - one reason my sister's pissed off with Starfinder. She wanted at least one purely social class - and there aren't any.

One thing I'm hoping we'll see in PF 2.0 are options for characters who don't want to do physical combat. In our group, there's a lot of social activity involved in our encounters, before we even get to the weapons, and it would be great to see character options which step away from physical combat and go more into social conflicts. Whether it's trying to negotiate with a hostile force, convert people to the cause, or cloak and dagger in the king's court, having characters able to do more outside of combat would be a godsend.

Think about it - a cleric who's more oriented towards uplifting spirits and inspiring the faithful than about smiting undead and fighting on the front lines. A magician who's about bewitching and entrancing opponents with words and illusions than fireballs and lightning bolts. A rogue who can talk anyone out of their goods, convince everyone he's on their side, while walking away with their belongings.

I would love to see archetypes and feats that put as much emphasis on social activities as they do on combat activities.

Shooting for the moon, I was thinking about 2e Pathfinder, and something I'd kind of like to see - though in no way would I expect to see it become true.

Release the core rulebook - sure, no problem. Base Classes, Base Races, Base Spells, no problem - I'm fine with this idea.

Expansion Books - because we know sourcebooks would be coming sooner or later - I would love to see act as a 'collection'.

The Book of Classes - takes all the Classes from 1e, tweaks and updates them, and releases all of them in a single book. ALL of them. Take the old Prestige Classes, turn them into Archetypes.

The Book of Magic - an encyclopedia of all spells produced for Pathfinder, plus a few score new spells. Clean them up, touch them up, there we go. Words of Power could be fleshed out in this as well.

(And as an aside - I hope overcasting is going to be a thing in 2e - take a lower level spell, cast it as a more powerful and potent spell at a higher level - 5e got THAT right.)

The Book of Races - all the Races from 1e, plus a bunch of new ones - discussing 'half + X' races, so dwarf / human? Sure. Elf / halfling? Okay. Have it talk about how the different races of dwarf, elf, etc, produce different hybrids. I'd love this. We could see tiefling elves, or genasi dwarves.

Looking at this, and the 'four tiers of success', I was wondering - are there going to be explanations on how some of this might work - especially with Rogue Evasion?

The classic example I see in debate is 'stick a rogue in a 10 x 10 x 10 room, then drop a fireball - how does the rogue take NO damage at all?' It isn't like the rogue 'dodges' the fireball, or 'finds the place of least heat' or something like that.

It would be good to pin down the 'physics' of some of the abilities, so people know how it functions. Is it a magical ability which protects the individual? Natural? Do they 'phase out' or 'slip into the shadows' or something?

Hopefully, 2e will put this kind of discussion to bed.

Reminds me of UO - you start out as a blue player, one of the "good guys". You work up your character by going into dungeons and forests and killing monsters (or animals, as the situation requires it). You fight red players: the bad guys, players who kill other players.

At some point, blues usually give up on good and go evil, joining the reds to kill the usually-weaker blues.

Reds don't need to bother killing monsters, because they've done that before. They're better off going after the more organised, presumably more intelligent armies of good guys, showing off their power and turning them to the dark side.

Having never played UO, I never knew this. Huh, that's actually kind of interesting, and depressing. Thanks for sharing though, appreciated.