Dennis Muldoon's page

we'll also be traveling tomorrow (driving down to SoCal with the kiddo), so may not have a chance to post. We'll be down there all week visiting family, so posting will probably be slower in general for us.

Do we know what kind of character will be joining us? If not yet, maybe we should wait on some of this stuff.

Any objection to Kiri taking that wand of vital beacon? They have primal witch dedication, so I think they can cast it, and I think having that on as a daily prep that they can use on themselves or Chim in melee would be a great use of that.

Thanks for running, GM!

I have 2 GM Glyphs, so I can give 2 Hero Points away. I usually give them to the lowest level teammates.

We definitely have enough glyphs at the table for everyone to start with a 2nd hero point.

Dov quickly sends commands to the junkracer's onboard computer to help Zark deftly maneuver and muscle for rank, so that the engine doesn't burn fuel too fast on an empty tank. He wants the engine pumping and thumping in time, so that Zark is first across the finish line.

Welp, now that's in my head.

I'm in; just want to make a few adjustments to Rovuur while I'm still at level 1.

Same. Fine moving on, no objection if someone wants to do more.

Glad to hear things are calmed down for you, and especially that your dad is doing better!

That one is on my list to attend some day; it always looks like fun.

I am back. Sorry for the delay

No worries, hope you had a fun DragonCon!

That cellular stimulant is fun if anyone wants it! I'd say makes more sense for a more martial character, but I don't really know SF well enough yet to determine that!

I don't think cellular stimulant is actually very good as a spell amp. Since it only gives one extra action for that one round, spending an action to use a spell amp of it doesn't do you any good, it just makes you fatigued and uses a hand. A caster spending their third action at long range (120 ft) to boost their martial ally for a round makes sense sometimes. A spell amp, not so much IMO.

To keep the challenge though, let's see if we can post in initiative order...

I'm having trouble understanding how that fits with the new rules. Isn't the whole point of the PF2/SF2 chase system that the party should post in the order that makes sense for the challenge at hand, because the people who aren't suited for it might get bumped to the next challenge?

Not a problem. Your hero point is yours to spend or not as you want.

On another battery note, most energy weapons use two charges per shot. With a spare battery priced at 10cr, that means each shot costs 2cr, 20x as much as a projectile round. They can be recharged, but you have to recharge it 20 times to get the cost per shot down to what it is for projectile weapons, and by that time you very well may have upgraded to a higher-capacity weapon. In addition, 10cr is a lot for a 1st level character trying to buy starting gear--approximately 7% of their starting credits for 5 extra shots.

All of this is to say, batteries are too expensive. My errata suggestion is changing them to ~2cr for a replacement battery.

Starfinder Player Core pg. 432:

Requirements You have a battery with no remaining charges.

This means that you can't recharge a battery that has one charge left, which I don't expect is the intention. This could easily be fixed by changing the requirements entry to something like "You have a battery with fewer than its maximum number of charges."

Failing that, I guess I have to bring the Witchwarper, since it is the last pregen left?

I'm fine switching if you'd be more excited about the soldier. I just picked it for the sake of picking one, and am fine with either.

In my experience, these adventures that come with pregens tend to have built-in story hooks for the pregens, so they are usually better fits than another character would be.

I’m good with any of them, but just for the sake of picking one I’ll grab Wildfire (though happy to switch if someone else has their eye on them). I didn’t try a soldier on the playtest, so I’m interested in learning some of the auto fire nuances.

Excited to play with you all!

Not sure yet if I'm going to play a pregen or make something myself. Is there any player-facing guidance about building characters to hook into the story?

Congrats James! Thanks for all your service to our region!

A little sad to see appendices going away. I find having the stat blocks separated out makes prepping and running easier.

Congrats David and the other 5-glyph heroes! Thanks for all you do to make org play happen!

What an incredible piece of artwork in this post.

:D

You say they aren't hard to disable, but there are only two skill options and one of them takes three successes to disable the thing, and no option to attack it. It's not hard for a character trained in occultism, but its hard-to-impossible for anyone else. The DC may not be high, but I think that's on balance harder to disable than most complex hazards.

I see a lot of discussion of how to handle the phantom here, but that's not what worries me reading this. I'd love to hear how it's gone for people when multiple copies of the hazard are going at once. Aside from the huge range and not-insignificant damage to *all* PCs in 90 feet, all those PCs also have a chance to be blinded (and on a failure no less, not a crit fail). If you have 4 copies of the hazard going at once, that's potentially 4 chances to fail a save and be blinded each round, which seems like it would result in a *lot* of blind PCs. This seems really rough on both players and GMs at first glance, so I'd love to hear how it's gone for folks.

Definitely seems like things are pointing to something being wrong with these Starfinders.

It's a playtest. The PF2 playtest had some really deadly stuff too. Maybe they're intentionally poking at limits?

No, you have that backwards. The choice of animal is flavor; the size is mechanics, which you have to abide by in PFS. You can call yourself a tardigrade, but you have to interact with the world as a tiny creature.

It certainly violates the spirit of cooperative play. If you bypass all the challenges by finding some loophole in the rules, you're going to ruin the fun for the rest of the table.

Reading through the level 5 solarian pregen, I'm seeing a disconnect between the solar weapon rules and the pregen in a few places:

Is the entodemonologist Who doesn't have a name listed? supposed to explicitly namedrop Helsa Embersplitter, or keep it coy?

The explicitly "quoted" examples of his dialogue all make reference to 'her' or 'my lady' but then as the conversatino ends it says: He laughs and adds that Hesla would be displeased with him for oversharing. Notably that sentence is not framed as quoted dialogue from him.

I certainly don't expect it to actually remain any sort of secret that Hesla is up to bad things for longer than Gencon and Season 6's launch - plenty of people assumed as much even from its announcement - but curious exactly how much reveals on the player side were intended to be experienced here.

Since he only says that if they do particularly well in conversation, I would guess that it's an intentional thing, revealing important info to reward effective diplomatic efforts rather than charging straight into battle.

That Zemir art is absolutely incredible!

I hope we have some proficiency scaling changes to go with these more fundamental changes to the class as well.

That said, both the PDF and the module should be recognized as legitimate and I don't think either has to somehow prove it. Both are made by Paizo internal people collaborating with contracted people and then published by Paizo.

I don't think it's a question of legitimacy, but a question of what is the "source of truth". Multiple sources of truth for a single thing is a recipe for exactly the problem Rob describes here.

Has Paizo ever done errata for PFS scenarios, though? Is this new ground we're getting into?

I don't know that they've ever called it errata, but they have updated the PDF with changes (most commonly but not exclusively for specials).

On another note, I got a chance to play #6-99 The End Awakens at KublaCon a few weeks ago, and it was a ton of fun! Joseph and Mike did a delightful job with that one.

(Also, Joseph is absolutely right. You really should go pick up a copy of Mecageddon! What are you waiting for?!)

The Elytrio scenarios remain some of my favorites in SFS. I haven't had a chance to play this one yet, but I can't wait to see what Hilary does with the setting. I know I'll have Jack in mind when I do; he was one of my favorite people to play with, and our community is richer for his memory!

Can't wait for this!

I can't wait to immediately forget everything I read in this very important setting book.

I will agree that using the Cast a Spell activation of an item very clearly says that the item is what is casting the spell, not the character doing the activation

Does it?

Activate Cast a Spell ; Effect You cast daze.

That seems pretty explicit that it’s the person doing the casting to me.

There's not a lot to make the site mobile friendly, I'm afraid. I know in the past I've set some shortcuts on the keyboard on my phone, like tapping 'b' twice -> [b] [/b ]. etc.

Dennis Muldoon wrote:

I will miss the free lore skill that came with school training. More Lore skills at the table is fun. Any chance we could replace training with something like “all PFS characters are automatically trained in PFS lore”? It’s honestly never really made sense to me that you’re average Pathfinder wouldn’t know the basic history of the Society.

HMM wrote:

Can we just add PFS Lore as a bonus lore to all characters?

This actually already exists :D The lore you get from the PFS training replaces the default PFS lore that all Pathfinders get as part of the character creation. If you don't choose a school, you get PFS lore automatically :D

Huh, TIL. Thanks!

I will miss the free lore skill that came with school training. More Lore skills at the table is fun. Any chance we could replace training with something like “all PFS characters are automatically trained in PFS lore”? It’s honestly never really made sense to me that you’re average Pathfinder wouldn’t know the basic history of the Society.

Hooray! I'm glad to see we're following up on that particular thread.

The most off-putting thing for me as a GM that doesn't involve player issues is the sheer volume of material (new classes, new ancestries, new mechanics, new/expanded lore) to try and keep up with. I buy the material but I largely don't even try to read through it all until I encounter a situation (whether as a player or as a GM) where I need to know something about it or a particular thing piques my interest.

I think that's a good approach, TBH; there's no need to preemptively 'keep up' with all of the new options to be able to GM well. Learning it on the fly, together with your table, is fine. Learning from your players and trusting them to help figure out how something is supposed to work is a good thing, IMO. I think a culture of 'the GM has to be the absolute rules authority' is a bad thing, and ultimately harmful to org play.

I appreciate another option for apparel in large sizes, since the switch to Amazon for merch basically shut us out.

Strange that we had enough DMs to fit the entire space in 2019 and now they are all gone. Its doubly weird given that the overall attendance in 2022 was higher than even 2019.

Gee, can't imagine what might have changed between 2019 and now....

I'm sure I'm not the only one that previously did a full slate of GM slots, but now doesn't feel safe attending a massive con with a practically non-existent covid policy, in a state that has demonstrated itself to be pretty bad at public health in recent years, not to mention the risks associated with travel to get there.

Heck yeah! Starfinder's great setting with PF2 action economy? What could be better than that!

Cavernshark mentioned ships, but I'd love to see other vanities back as well. Those were always lots of fun for high level characters in PF1. They don't have to have a mechanical effect to be worth adding, but I would love if they were tied to unlocking new skills for Earn Income. For instance, if my cleric of Cayden Cailean bought the You Own a Bar vanity, then he could use Diplomacy for Earn Income, to represent how full the tip jar is.