CriticalQuit's page

Hello, I was working on calculating out the full underlying stat block for the Oliphant, so that my gaming group could work on upgrading it.

Unfortunately, I found a problem with this: The Oliphant's initial configuration is using 27 more PCU than its reactor generates! On top of this, the reactor listed (Pulse Black), can't actually be installed on ships of the Oliphant's size (Medium) in the first place!

While this should be relatively straightforward to fix by just giving the ship a larger power core to start, I was wondering if there was anything intentional going on with it, or if this is just an oversight. Some of it is that the ship's thrusters aren't listed in its block: By working backward from its speed it can be determined to have M12 thrusters, which are actually consuming a whopping 80 PCU.

Currently running this AP myself. My interpretation is, since this is still a test model, they've got an undersized power core (it's so small it's not even rated for a Medium ship) because they're only really testing the internal systems (namely, the null-space cargo holds). The power core has enough power to cover the thrusters and the shields, which is probably all they really need for a flight test. The players don't actually get into any starship combat until after they level up to 4, and can swap out the power core, so there shouldn't be an issue until then.

Bit of a necro, but the group I'm running's one divine character is an inquisitor of Andoletta, empyreal lord known for her association with shepherds and the guiding of communities. I find it to be a perfect contrast with Hastur, who is a bit of a shepherd himself, but in the exact opposite way.

I think the preponderance of the evidence is a no.

Trick attack repeatedly calls out the target of the trick.

You can trick or startle a foe and then attack when she drops her guard (BNW note singular). As a full action, you can move up to your speed. Whether or not you moved, you can then make an attack with a melee weapon with the operative special property or with any small arm. Just before making your attack, attempt a Bluff, Intimidate, or Stealth check (or a check associated with your specialization; see page 94) with a DC equal to 20 + your target’s CR. If you succeed at the check, you deal 1d4 additional damage and the target (bnw note singular) is flat-footed against your attack. This damage increases to 1d8 at 3rd level, to 3d8 at 5th level, and by an additional 1d8 every 2 levels thereafter. You can’t use this ability with a weapon that has the unwieldy special property or that requires a full action to make a single attack

A swarm is immune to attacks and effects that targets a single creature

A swarm is considered a single creature for the purpose of being targeted by an attack, so a trick attack with a weapon with the explode property (or a blast weapon, if you use a thasteron blunderbuss) would work, since the explosive ammo's fiery quality treats the weapon as having the Explode property when fired at a creature with the swarm subtype, overriding the single-target immunity that would apply with a normal bullet.

Personally, I imagine a Driver Operative would likely be using a vehicle of some sort, likely an enercycle since it's a low level easy to acquire vehicle, but it seems especially valuable if you're playing an adventure where you're going to be in a vehicle regularly.

Personally, I've made the specific interpretation (or perhaps house rule?) that the move action to Drive counts as moving your speed for the purpose of Trick Attack, in order to allow my operative in Fly Free or Die to make trick attacks during the Winterpeak Run sequence. Since drive doesn't require any checks and otherwise functions like normal movement, it makes sense to me to allow it.

The Starfinder Society is paying them for the work they're doing from books 1-3, though once you get to book 4 they aren't really in contact. If they wanna stay freelancers, the SFS does pay for freelance work i think. The only downside is that not being licensed starfinders means that they don't carry the respect the title commands when interacting with NPCs in book 2 and 3, but if your players prefer to see themselves as mercenaries or the like that may not be an issue.

The only thing that matters is your players being willing to pursue the discovery made in the Drift Rock, and to fight the enemies that race them for it. As long as they don't give up on the plot proper, being Starfinders is just setdressing they can skip!

Yeah, Azlanti has their own digital currency presumably backed by the Azlanti Star Empire government. It's roughly one to one on absalom pact credits, i believe because it's also pegged to the UPB. Most Azlanti empire citizens will take trade in UPBs more easily since they're more immediately valuable than absalom credits.

Sounds like the precog is being rolled up into the witchwarper? Seems reasonable, they're pretty similar in concept.

So as we know since the first AP, messages can be sent cross-planet and cross-galaxy by sending communications through the drift (i believe there's been inconsistent statements as to whether said communications take the same number of days, or the number of days but by hours instead; i believe it's by hours since a radio signal can travel faster than a starship). However, one thing I'm uncertain about is: Can messages be sent within and received within the drift, or do they only arrive once you exit the drift? There's a few times in one AP where a message only pops in when you exit the drift, and I'm not sure if that's coincidence or if that's how the message relay system works.

My players came to the conclusion that they needed to purchase these things as a necessity once they began trading for themselves with the Oliphaunt. If it seems like your group is very resistant to the thought of purchasing that stuff with credits it wouldn't be unreasonable to allow them to purchase it with BP using the galactic trade rules from book 1 I think. Your players can quite quickly end up with more BP than they need so coming up with new ways they can use them to improve their business without making them more powerful in combat is a good use for them.

Yeah, that's a good idea. The cargo rig isnt really a combat vehicle, so letting them buy it with BP instead of credits will be a pretty reasonable choice. May or may not do the same with the Cargo Lifter power armor since no one in the party has even Heavy armor proficiency, but that costs a lot less than the 5k rig. And even then, they might prefer to just get the much more affordable hovercarts.

Thanks for the input! I'll stick to the Oliphaunt as-is and see what they do.

First session went great btw!

Hi everyone! I'm gearing up to start this adventure path with a group of friends today after finishing dead suns, and we're all pretty excited about it!

In book 1, the party has the cargo rig and the hover carts which are implied to be standard issue for EJ Corp company transports. However, there's no mention of if such useful items are present on the Oliphaunt, and the Cargo Rig doesnt appear as a normal vehicle on archives of nethys. I'm curious what some other folks decided to do regarding cargo transport? I know the books suggest using a Cargo Lifter power armor for loading and unloading, but transporting cargo from landing zones and buyers/sellers still seems, if not relevant, at least flavorful, and would give opportunities to use vehicle chases and other such encounters during normal hauls.

How did any other GMs handle this and/or what would you guys suggest? Did you tend to hand wave that aspect of trading, did you have the players buy a vehicle from scratch, or did you give them a rig to accompany the Oliphaunt?

I've started up pathfinder 2nd edition with a few groups, with a few fellow 1e veterans and a few newcomers in each, and the difference is immediately noticable and EVERYONE is having a good time! The new system is significantly easier to teach and pick up on, and our one true newcomer to tabletop as a whole has learned the system almost immediately, and everyone's really having a good time trying to figure out their best move on a given turn and put themselves in an optimal situation, since critical hits are on a sliding scale based on how well they can put enemies at a disadvantage. And I'm falling in love with the Golarion setting a lot as i start getting more into the adventure paths, currently running both Rise of the Runelords and Age of Ashes. Really glad to be playing!

Not sure how I feel about focus replacing spell points... how much will this limit the use of staple abilities like bardic performance and channel energy? I'd hate to be stuck in a D&D 5e situation where my bard cant boost more than twice per day.

People still make 3x3 alignment chart memes of goddamn everything. People have always liked the alignment chart and people always will.

Also I remember everyone hated the five point alignment axis from 4e, including myself.

Hello CriticalQuit,

We just began shipping the Alien Archive Box yesterday. Yours can ship anytime in our subscription/pre order shipping window for November. That is between yesterday and November 15.

Thank you!

Hello! Not sure if this is an appropriate question to post on customer service, but is it possible to get an estimate on when the pawn boxes I ordered will ship? The Core Rulebook one is a backorder, but i believe the Alien Archive one was a pre-order, as i purchased it before the official launch.

It's not urgent, but I was hoping to use the pawn boxes and flip-mats for my campaign and we're getting close to being ready to start playing!

Between the loss of iterative attacks, the un-randomization of health values, and the slightly more stable growth of damage ability over time via increasing dice numbers and +level bonuses from specialization, Starfinder definitely seems to be more focused on making combat a little slower and more methodical, and I look forward to it!

Pathfinder's metagame so often revolved around maximizing full attacks, usually at range, to the point where as a GM i had to bend over backwards to create environments where fights would have some element of risk to them! While Starfinder's certainly made ranged attacks more ubiquitous, it's definitely gonna be easier to make combat feel less like a one-shot shootout.

As others have said, the Core Rulebook includes the GameMastering section rather than include it separately! The CRB for pathfinder also includes information about the setting itself, as well as the logistics needed for creating custom starships and running their combat.

The Alien Archive is the game's first Bestiary and also includes rules for creating your own enemies, and the method for doing so is a LOT easier than trying to create stats from scratch like I used to do for pathfinder. Very good to have!

I think that's all you'd absolutely need to get rolling, but Starfinder Pact Worlds is coming in March and it'll apparently have new info about the setting as well as some more items and races, so might be worth grabbing later down the line if you aren't doing an entire homebrew universe.

I pre-ordered mine! Here's hoping it ships soon!

So I know this includes my alien archive pawn box plus I think one of the flip mats, but fingers crossed my backordered stuff makes it in too!

I'm looking to have my PCs start a band!

Yeah, still working on that. Kiiinda went back to the drawing board on details. Originally, I was gonna have the campaign lead up to this music group fighting the Prince in Chains in an attempt to break through to his past self and turn him back into Thron. Kinda got carried away with the epic and am trying to start from scratch with music based adventures.

Perhaps their performance schedule is increasingly hindered by dramatic adventure opportunities?

183. Your eye implants were advertised to include a helpful User Interface to monitor your vital signs and other important things. However, the UI seems to have been designed by the world's most amateur game programmers.

184. With horror, you realize your new fully metallic robotic arm itches.

I'm gonna be GMing a game for a group that was originally gonna be running a pathfinder campaign i made before starfinder dropped and all of us were like "oh man we gotta do this."

Right now my idea has the starship crew starting off as a small team of space contractors helping an AbadarCorp researcher and accdientally intruding on Azlanti Star Empire territory and getting themselves marked, and then slowly doing missions to earn money and obtain allies as they uncover a greater plot by the Empire to make a move on the Pact Worlds.

It's definitely a viable option, letting you upgrade your base attack to be effectively Full BAB and giving you free heavy armor/longarm proficiency. Relying on one good base attack bonus rather than two lower ones is good for those who don't wanna rely as strongly on luck. Plus, being able to get some drone boosts for yourself is nice.

I think it'll still end up being less popular if only because who doesn't want a robot buddy?

I like to imagine the test of the starstone now involves a written test as well as the "practical exam" of security bots, but the info you need to know to pass was lost to the Gap.

Humans definitely disseminated all over the Pact Worlds. They just lost their original planet.

The one place you probably won't find humans is the elven forests on Castrovel, because there's no way native elves will let a human within 10 miles of them.

As far as I can tell, Deadly Aim is better as a way to add a little extra damage onto a single attack rather than something to add onto Every Single Attack Made like the with the old pathfinder calculus.

If you're calculating for making a full attack every round, yeah, it's gonna be less useful, but if you're in a combat where you're able to stand there full attacking every round, it's not a very interesting battle.

I do think that you don't need the data-jack with the exocortex because the exocortex gives you the ability to interface with machines and computers at a distance, functionally the same effect as the datajack.

I like the concept, with Archetypes not being a branch of a specific class but rather something anyone can fill in, but I don't think I'd use any of them myself. Maybe that's just cuz i think the base classes are already really good.

Definitely like how most of the classes have some solid customization options on their own. The ratio of ability options to abilities gained and lack of Extra X feats for those abilities definitely makes it a little easier to distinguish different members of the same class... albeit giving me option paralysis like you couldn't believe because so much of it is so cool........

I don't have much to add to the discussion here, but I love the ongoing commitment by Paizo to keep things LGBT-welcome, as do all my LGBT friends that I play with!

Exploring the universe is an exciting concept! Can't wait to see how these chronologues continue.

Oh, that happened in Wildstar! It was the origin for the Mordesh race.

That said, I'm gonna join the camp who say a medical quarantine would be attended by the Stewards. A blockade seems more like something you'd to erect for an embargo or other form of indirect warfare, but seems to militaristic for a quarantine.

I'm not too upset by the pricing model. The low level weapons are comparable to the stuff we got in pathfinder, sure. But being able to look forward to saving up for a stronger weapon that does different damage types, does more dice worth of damage, has special crit bonuses, that's exciting! Gives us something to look forward to.

It would be nice if there was a cheap but low-range sniper rifle for early use. Maybe with 100 or 150 feet, but a smaller damage die than the tactical shirren-eye?

(They can't be used with trick attacks at level 1 anyway...)

If I had to guess, the phasing out of shields is for similar reasons to two-handed melee weapons no longer getting 1.5x strength to damage, changing the importance of handedness. The fact that armor numbers scale up a lot higher seems to compensate for the inability to use shields to boost your AC.

The energy shields from armor upgrades help, but they're basically just temporary hp.

The nice thing about starfinder is that, due to the way weapons scale their damage up with level, even a seemingly less optimal option like doing a more ranged-focused Solarian still works pretty well.

Starfinder does seem to be designed specifically to discourage pathfinder's long-running trend of accidentally encouraging melee combat builds to be dex-focused, by making the finessable weapons very specifically oriented toward the Operative class. But it makes up for that with way better ranged weapons, i suppose!

My two cents: since androids are manufactured artificially, they're definitely still androids. Having systems that imitate human beings just makes them Blade Runner androids.

I think the distinction of a cyborg is that cyborgs are living things that then have their parts replaced with machinery, ala DC's Cyborg, Robocop, or the mechanical chimeras from Mother 3.

I do wonder what an entity that was once living, but has had every single organic part of their body replaced with machinery, like Clockwerk from the Sly Cooper games. Do they still count as a cyborg or are they just a robot at that point?

The Steal combat maneuver would also work if you want to steal the potion off of their person (if they're not holding it).

It would then be a separate Improvised Weapon Attack to smash it over their head.

In my old game, the party's oracle had readied counterspelling for a particular enemy type in an urgathoa cult. He wanted to counterspell any of their uses of Finger of Death.

Also, I counterspelled his Black Tentacles. get dunked on

When the original rule was written, Ultimate Combat wasn't out yet and firearms didn't exist. Did you expect them to go back and errata literally every single rule to explicitly mention firearms?

If you can't execute someone with a point blank gunshot in a dramatic fashion, what's even the point?

I'd say firearm Coup De Grace works the same way as any other weapon coup de grace. Maybe with a roll to avoid misfire.

I think referring to them as rounds is a misnomer, anyway. During the duration of time stop (right after you cast it as a standard action) you're able to take the equivalent actions of 1d4+1 rounds worth of time. But those rounds themselves are not rounds, because time has stopped (or at least, slowed down to the point where it might as well have stopped). And of course, you can't just save those rounds, because once time stop's effect is up, time is flowing normally again.

Basically, everything that happens during your Time Stop spell happens within the standard action you used to cast it, and as soon as time flows again, the only thing that's actually happened in real time is your standard action. It's still your first turn, and if you have any actions left, you can still take them.

Hopefully 1d4+1 rounds is enough time to find a steamroller to crush your enemy with.

Just put your hand through his shirt and puppet him around. Or wait, is that only with dead people...

Wearing a Hat of Shade despite not needing one could work. Make the excuse that you just don't like the sun in your eyes.

Shouting "WRYYYYYYYY" occasionally might help too.

Well, it's notable that dragons are basically giant lizards in the end. Reptiles tend to be able to go for long periods of time without food, as they spend most of their time dormant. I would imagine if the dragon doesn't have to move much, it won't have to eat as much.

Otherwise, think about the amount of food a lizard would eat and then multiply that by the size of the dragon compared to the lizard.

Or something like that. It's a bit silly to consider seriously.

CriticalQuit wrote:

The Divine Bond works on any weapon, not just your favored weapon!

There are a few archetypes that change out, like Divine Hunter only working on ranged weapons, but standard paladin can use it with any weapon they're wielding.

I think he's playing an archetype which specifically alters divine bond.

The Enlightened Paladin archetype does that, but it also gets monk unarmed strike damage at half paladin level as monk level, which makes unarmed strike worth it...

OP, are you using the Enlightened Paladin archetype, or are you a standard paladin?

If it's a throwable weapon that is a One-Handed melee weapon (like the spear) or a one-handed melee weapon that also has the Throwing magical enhancement (which makes any weapon throwable) you should still gain the benefit of the bonus damage die with the Impact enchantment, which only says "when it strikes, it deals damage as though it was one size category larger."

You can't bull rush with it by throwing it, though. That's melee only.

The Divine Bond works on any weapon, not just your favored weapon!

There are a few archetypes that change out, like Divine Hunter only working on ranged weapons, but standard paladin can use it with any weapon they're wielding.

An individual character can serve different deities in different ways, and the Faiths of Purity/Balance/Corruption books and Inner Sea Gods book actually go into major detail about the worship of each god and what classes they favor (some gods favor non-divine classes, like Shelyn likes bards or Gorum enjoys fighters and barbarians).

A rough summary of my take on the flavor of those classes, based on the way the classes are written flavorwise:

Clerics are devout worshippers who have dedicated their lives to service of their god, specifically as a mouthpiece for the deity. Clerics have a wider range of magic due to their dedication, but lack the martial training of the more warrior-like classes. A cleric would likely profess the wisdom and ideology of their deity within the way they speak, but probably wouldn't turn EVERY conversation into a sermon, just the ones that are important. A well-written cleric keeps the will of their deity in mind with every decision, but still makes their own decisions.

Paladins are devout champions who seek to better the world through virtue and valor, and take on the burden of a strict code of conduct in order to be considered worthy of the considerable power that paladins are granted by their gods. Paladins are given the power needed to take matters into their own hands, so they typically seek wrongs in the world and try to make them right. Paladins may be members of a regular church order or an entire paladin order, or may even have taken the mantle solo. A well-written paladin considers the impact of every action he takes, and feels guilt when his failures lead to a loss for all. The paladin asks not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for he.

Inquisitors are a bit of the darker side of the divinity spectrum, even for the better deities. Devotees who use actions rather than words, Inquisitors are more versatile agents who seek to solve the church's problems through subterfuge and subtlety, rather than open resolutions or direct intervention like the cleric and paladin. Inquisitors are typically more quiet about their faith, especially among enemies, but will invoke their deity's name when the time is right to pass their Judgment. Inquisitors know that their actions are more pragmatic than ideological, but it is for their deities will, and so it must be done.

As for warpriests, they're just clerics who integrate more training in combat into their regular devotion. It's more ubiquitous than the other divine classes.

Of the characters I made that were any good, I had a chaotic evil character who was impulsive and sadistic, but at most a nuisance. She typically played the devil's advocate character, suggesting the cruelest solutions to problems, and often tried to be intimidating even when conflict wasn't necessary. Luckily, she was a a weak as hell witch, so the other characters tended to quite literally hold her back so she wouldn't be a problem. But she was fun and silly and people loved her.

I have a chaotic neutral barbarian now and i really do the chaotic as "free of bounds" proper opposite of lawful. He's a drifter who goes from town to town seeking out fighting pits and street fighting rings to compete in. He's not averse to talking to people or working in a team, but he tends not to stick around and make friends. He has something of a distrust of authority figures due to some bad experiences in the past, but he makes exceptions for those that prove worthy, especially Paladins, whom he believes are trustworthy.

You could also potentially counter an NPC-led scry-and-fry by using magic to protect yourself from scrying. Can't teleport to you if they don't know where you are...

As a GM, this thread made me weep bitter tears.

With multi-weapon fighting and 16 arms, yes this works, with a -6 penalty on all attacks (-4 from firing the double pistol, -2 from dual wielding? maybe -4, i don't know if pistols count as light weapons). But then you have 16 empty pistols.