Despair's page

Hey, this is neat!

Couple things I noticed:

Merisiel's character sheet still has the old Rogue weapon proficiencies.

Two encounters, 11 and 12, have the same title (though it was like this before as well).

The Xulgath tokens on map 2 have the old art.

The Male Dwarf Fighter pawn is a very smol guy.

You aren't kidding. The Fighter, Dwarf, Male REALLY shrank in the update. Looks comical next to the Fighter, Dwarf, Female.

I had guessed Dexterity because there were a number of other abilities I felt were a bit of a stretch, and it was the one stat not covered by any of the new backgrounds. And multiple had Strength. Also, Dexterity just seemed more of a Thrill Seeker thing than Strength.

"Choose two ability boosts. One must be to Athletics or Constitution, and one is a free ability boost." -- Lost Omens: Firebrands p75

Athletics not being an ability, perhaps it should be Dexterity?

Fixed! 24 hours after reporting, downloads cleanly.

I should have noted in prior post that I had tried clearing browser caches, clicking "Problems downloading this file? Click here." and waiting overnight and trying again before reporting.

https://downloads.paizo.com/3128765/v5748aid7rhwa/v5748a8inisgg/StarfinderS ocietyScenario3-10LiveAdventureExtreme.zip leads to the following page:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
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<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
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<RequestId>3S6QCS5H5XEGCM9P</RequestId>
<HostId>kiphgfEFm/lQgroCFiCGHR+qy9cCgvD6JmoCuJpwFqRHxWK3kIXln0fMCtJw2 qBRobAvGFDlQvI=</HostId>
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I can't even reach trouble downloading the file. It never gets past
Personalizing... Click link again in 60 second

Managed to download #3-01, but #3-02 never finishes personalizing in my Digital Content downloads list. It's now showing as downloaded. Site is fabulating, possibly with blazing trousers.

Well, the shoggoth probably just grows a new mouth whenever it wants fresh teeth. Unless it is addicted to the sensation of brushing its teeth...

A vampire predating the Gap probably has centuries of habit of polishing and protecting fangs, it can't survive without them!

Hygiene Kits all around! Out the airlock for anyone who fails to take AND use them!

Regenerate requires a living target. If the body is on some form of artificial maintenance, presumably nobody, but it might still count as alive. Growing a brain doesn't mean you create contents out of nothing. Plus there's the whole soul issue, which is presumably still in the brain in the cylinder.

Most RPGs count memory as tied to soul in situations like this. Except for bad writers who should stay away from science fiction, who persist in bringing out nonsense (at least for higher earthly life) like genetic memory.

Soul, mind & body distinctions often get a bit weird in RPGs, especially around life restoration.

I'm not sure there's any way to get a functional mind in the regenerated former-brainless body, outside of possession, or maybe using it to raise an alternate you. Which might require transporting that body to that alternate universe, first. Perhaps it is already there, through the portal...

Willowers only get +2 Intelligence.

"These alternate ghorans have the listed ability scores and size,"
Though the pluralization is confusing, another hint is the stat blocks on other races list the new phenotype's stat modifiers completely, not partially requiring adding in something from another phenotype.

Regenerate only affects the part targeted, unless all the parts are in contact, in which case they reassemble themselves and the process is far faster.

Regenerate doesn't just regrow missing limbs, it regrows ruined organs and even missing heads of multiheaded creatures. So it should regrow everything, attached to the brain. Might requiring opening the cylinder during the process of regeneration, once things are far enough along...

1. Raise dead would either need to rapidly be followed with a regenerate spell, or revive them as a brain in a cylinder again. If there are no pieces missing, I'd assume it'd repair the cylinder, since that's part of the body. Just like if the target was an SRO. It's the creature part that matters, not the construct elements. There's some risk the soul might not be willing to be raised, if expecting to come back in the cylinder.

2. Reincarnate mentions the target being a dead creature. Brain in a cylinder is that. It comes back as a whole, randomly determined creature. No effect on existing body, whatever it is currently up to. They even get the choice to keep all their old augments, since it doesn't require the entire body be present.

I don't think I have it wrong. Note the days managing the course, and the use of the word minimum. It may not be intended to work how I'm reading it, but especially if the players don't know the time rolled, there are pessimizations. And then there's the mess of trying to calculate it out day by day, especially with a faster drift drive.

Sanity: Reduce it to one roll for Manage Course on an entire drift travel, success gets you there in 3/4 the time, narrow failure no change, 5 point failure it takes 1.25 times as long, fail by 10 or more for more serious consequences solves the whole thing without it turning into a pilot trap minigame. Minimum time is still the minimum possible to roll. Then apply your Drift drive divider.

Clean, fast, doesn't exchange small benefits for many chances at mishap, and lets you move on to handling the other character's downtime during travel. Or if they aren't, just get on to the action faster. Pilot/astrogator gets to feel more like Han Solo, Daniel Leary, or Val Con yos'Phelium (if their skill and luck supports it).

Also, you could give them an escape. There's some notes about brain cylinders "lucky" enough to be attached to drone bodies breaking free of their restraints, sometimes. If one of them is lucky enough, and manages to steal the others, and figure out a way to escape...

Even escape doesn't necessarily end their troubles.

Hope someone is interested in the knowledge they bring back, because that might be all that funds replacing anything they failed to recover/loot in the escape. Like their bodies. Or maybe they'll just have to get used to "life" as drones/powered armor.

Assuming that they don't just get snapped up and packed off to R&D. BOLO project, students of alien tech, magic, and medical science... there's no shortage of possible parties who might not place their well being over possible gains.

If we can't have flumphs, other cute, cuddly aberrations should be applied ubiquitously.

Except the RAW say it raises the minimum by 1 day per day spent at Manage Course.

RAI just about have to be something else. Because as it's written it just seems to be a trap option.

Unless I'm misreading it. p154 COM: "For example, a trip to the
Vast during which the Pilot spends 3 days successfully managing
the course can’t be reduced below 8 days (5 minimum for the
trip plus 3 days spent managing course). Only one creature can
perform this activity for a given starship each day."

Not when the minimum time to travel goes up with each day spent managing course...

The minimum time being increased by days spent managing course baffles me.

If you roll a 5, and try to manage your course, you ALWAYS increase travel time.

And per-day checks dramatically increase the chances of a bad roll causing a disaster. Overall, it looks like the best option is to travel vanilla, it's faster on average (though not worst case), and less risky.

Is there something I'm missing here? The rules seem like a lot of tedious extra rolls for a statistical net loss.

Do pilots normally know how long the trip is going to take at the start of the trip?

Let's say you are traveling to an unfamiliar system in The Vast with a Drift 1 drive in your ship, and you expect to fail your navigate roll without noticing. So that's 6d6/1 for travel time, probably the best case for travel time reduction with Manage Course downtime activity.

Each successful day Managing Course, you shave 6 hours off your travel time, but raise the minimum travel time by 1 day. If you have a failure, not only have you raised the minimum travel time, but you worsen actual travel time as well.

So the average is 21 days to travel there, minimum 6. Let's spend 8 days Managing Course. You've now raised your minimum to 14 days to get there, in order to shave a maximum of 2 days off your travel time. So now your travel time is 14-34 days instead of 6-36. Of course, if you succeeded at the navigate roll, it'd be 13-28 days, instead of 5-30.

Manage Course worsens your best-case travel time by 24 hours to knock 6 hours off your worst-case. Over the long term, your average travel time goes up.

It gets even worse for shorter trips or with a better drift engine.

This seems like a lot of extra tests, making travel tedious, for something that slows travel more than it helps. Why?

If the Manage Course days could overlap with the minimum travel time, so spending 8 days managing course only adds 3 days to your fastest travel time, and knocks 2 days off the worst. And spending 5 would be free, as long as you don't fail.

Odds of failure are 10 worse than your initial navigate check. So DC35 to Manage Course to The Vast. Er.

A few more thoughts in that vein: Let them get smeared by the defenses (just not in the head...)

And everyone who died (or is that "died"?) also wakes up on the far side of whatever...

Real world, it's difficult for elite soldiers to do endless guard duty. So defenses are probably mostly automated, or staffed by bored grunts. Even expensive, scry-shielded installations are probably cheaper than constant shift changes (and wind up with fewer bored troops that fling themselves through the spaghettifier, just to escape the tedium).

Elite troops are particularly unhappy at long term guard duty. Especially when there's more immediate threats elsewhere.

Traps could probably be researched or social engineered, if they can figure out how to find out who did the installations without triggering alerts (or worse, inadvertently contacting an interested party who demands they succeed for them instead).

Security theater fits as an interpretation of the situation, without contradicting appearances (only their substance), and it gives you easier options for showing them entertaining lies, hideous truths, and ugly deaths. Not necessarily in that order.

I have choice paralysis on characters. Aside from leaning hard towards the non-core races (too many years of playing on the most boring races). After that, there's so many themes, and beyond the classes, build choices within them, and then there's archetypes... And that's without even considering multiclass possibilities.

Operatives can be any sort of spy, master-of-all-trades, dirty fighter, anything with widely varied skills. Could easily argue for Han Solo as an Operative. He's a terrific pilot, engineer (Millenium Falcon has multiple flaky redundancies, it's bizarrely tough for it's size, but flaky because it's tuned past it's limits on everything and only runs because it's crew are as good mechanics as pilots according to some interpretations), gunslinger (especially in the Brian Daley novels), good at almost anything he attempts.

Envoys are anything from Firefly Companions, diplomats, executives, vloggers, spies, to commanding officers. I haven't looked closely enough at them to pick out any less obvious possibilities or subversions.

Usually there are ways to do similar things with multiple classes. Classes don't have to be a stereotype, especially in personality/appearance. A spy who always wears camo is more likely to get noticed than not. I'd lean more towards second skin with environmental-protective (everything but radiation, as that is redundant with armor) reconfigurable clothing over it, so a move action changes the clothing part of your disguise. Formal suit, party clothes, street clothes, uniform, travel clothes. Also worth a look for Magical Girl cosplayers.

Maybe the guards are there for show, because they're really studying what happens. But don't want liability, or to have to round up their own "volunteers."

Perhaps the spaghettification is just what happens when you have to disintegrate someone to transport them, and are a bit less concerned with the aesthetics?

As far as what's on the other side, why not both? They're (not really) sci-fi soldiers in a fantasy world. Because Lovecraftian horrors have put their brains in cylinders and have are testing simulations/illusions to delay the brains from disassociating into uselessness.

Success could be a disaster. Though it might take them a while to figure it out. Maybe have them wind up fighting Mi-Go with brain cylinders in Golarion, and finally starting to understand that something terrible has happened...

Or you could go with Grays. And have them arrive somewhere in the Vast with no idea how they got there or what happened on the way.

The wording on the feat is unclear, but given it affects strength and dexterity skill and ability checks...

They also missed any arm-mounted melee weapons that aren't wielded, claw implants, etc. Badly worded feat, but the intent seems plain that it affect any action with your arms. Definitely could use errata, assuming there isn't any, it is not futureproof.

Dracomicron's argument that Unarmed Strike is a Basic Melee Weapon should quiet any rules lawyer unwilling to follow the spirit of the rules. He's arguably being kind in permitting it not to affect kicks, given the wording doesn't remove the disadvantage for non-arm skill checks. I'd probably go with that one myself, though.

It seems unlikely that Hat of Disguise and Morphic Skin would stack fully. Use the best bonus. Or maybe permit a fraction (Morphic Skin lets you change body dimensions, which makes it harder to pierce an illusion). Hat of Disguise appears faster and doesn't require acquiring a disguise outfit. Hat of Disguise/Disguise Self doesn't say anything about fooling biometric scanners, unlike Morphic Skin. Then there's piercing an illusion only to have them look the same underneath...

There's a point where game rules fail to cover every possibility, and that combination certainly has some things to think about. I can find arguments for both directions, but +20 is a ridiculous amount of bonuses to one skill. I'd probably go with fractional stacking, if at all. Or roll once for disguise self without the skin bonus, and another time for morphic skin without the disguise self bonus. Use latter for biometric, and if the illusion is pierced.

Easy answer is to get the Mi-Go to do it. Disintegrate dust sounds a lot like essential salts needed for a Charles Dexter Ward-style resurrection (haven't dug around to see if that bit of the Mythos in Starfinder... yet).

Of course, your friend probably wind up in a brain cylinder, but with good timing, maybe you'd get all the pieces to do a proper resurrection before the discarded parts are disposed of.

Alternatively, consider installing the brain cylinder in powered armor, or a pet carrier on their drone.

Actually, there are rules for installing guest cabins in expansion bays on p299 of the Starfinder Core Rulebook.

Or as a makeshift you could resort to tents in the cargo bay. assuming especially the mobile hotelier includes a high-tech improvement on today's inflatable mattresses/foam rolls, self-inflating aerogel-filled mattresses or somesuch. If not, foam futons ought to be pretty silly cheap, and there's a lot of room in a cargo bay.

And just space anyone who didn't bother buying hygiene kits when they were told to.

*Ponders a "Pajama" entry for clothing type, with bonus to resist exhaustion from poor sleep conditions.*

HammerJack wrote:

To be fully inside of the drone, you would be want to be a stellifera, and install a pet carrier armor mod on the drone.

...which is sadly not legal in Society play.

It isn't?

I'm still reading up on SFS OP rules, but the Dec 2018 Starfinder Society Additional Resources document I have says about Alien Archive 2 "All equipment in this book with a listed item level and price is legal for play except arquand horns, calecor skull-globes, dreamstuff, mi-go brain cylinders, mi-go brain hollowskin, shantak whistle, shotalashu link cord, shotalashu saddle, and squox pet. [skipping some details about polymorph exceptions] Feat: The Squox Companion feat is not legal for play."

Stellifera does require a boon to unlock, but it does appear Pet Carrier works, at level 1 and 100 credits, for any race small enough to use it [1 Tiny, 2 Diminutive, or 4 Fine creatures at a time]. Note you'd need your diminutive environment suit or gill sheathes to guarantee your stellifera doesn't smother in there, as there isn't enough room for a medium hydrobody, and I'm not sure there's rules for drone environmental systems (an oversight, I'm sure).

One issue is not having line of sight to anything from inside the carrier, so you need a camera mod or some other way to see outside your drone, so can't really do anything until 3rd level in Mechanic.
Last requirement is using Armor Slot as your Basic Mod for your Drone, which you have 1 of at level 1 Mechanic.

Have I missed something?