DrSwordopolis's page

wizard are too weak,noone want to play wizard in my party

I can't blame 'em. I wouldn't mind playing a martial in 2E, but I'd hate to play a caster.

Anyone have a grand solution?

I suspect I'm in the minority, but get rid of +1/level entirely. If everything's supposed to be a coin flip, just own it and turn this into a d2 based system. Otherwise, use fractional BAB and saves and allow for the narrative possibility of a 20th level wizard who isn't also an expert tracker, healer, debater, and lockpick.

1.) "Save or lose" spells are so far and between in PF1E that they are mostly irrelevant.

Possession, Magic Jar, and Plane Shift come to mind, and are certainly go-to spells in the tables I've played at. Adapting those to fit the new "four categories of outcome" system could serve as a method of nerfing the spells a bit without dropping them into the "useless" category, though Paizo's track record thus far doesn't inspire much confidence.

Additionally, the paid DLC is pretty reasonably priced - there may be two or three DLCs for both CK2 and EU4 that may be considered "weaker", but given the amount of hours I've gotten out of both, I'd find it hard to argue I didn't get my money's worth.

There are some examples of DLC being released that should have been in the original game, but Paradox's offerings aren't among them.

When you hit a flat-footed creature, this weapon

deals 1 precision damage. The damage increases to 2 if the
weapon is master quality or to 3 if it’s legendary.

There are two weapons in the playtest that have "backstabber" - the Dogslicer and the Filcher's Fork.

The Dogslicer doesn't even do piercing damage, for Desna's sake.

Presumably the leaf druid's more of a traditional caster druid, probably focusing on crowd control (entangle) and utility. My guess is it's "Leshy Warden, but as a core option".

Should we expect access to the playtest PDFs as they ship, or on August 2nd?

The transformation also attempts to counteract toxins in the food or water.

Is "attempting to counteract toxins" a reference to a defined mechanic, or just filler while you're still working on the mechanics of the spell?

Where are people getting the impression that "Twist the Knife" would be 4d6=2d6 bleed instead of 4d6=2 bleed?

The vague hope that the option might be remotely relevant, rather than utterly worthless. Paizo's history on bleed doesn't lend much hope.

WHAT?! Doing an extra 2d6 per round isn't worth a feat?! I must be misreading your post.

In what universe is an extra seven damage per round relevant at level 7, even assuming the enemy doesn't have a trivial means of eliminating the bleed? It's like thinking the flaming/frost/etc +1 weapon enchantments are better than a static +1. Sure, it's a "cool" ability, but the math doesn't back it up.

Of course, many of the rogue's class feats also increase her fighting potential. One of my favorites is the 6th-level feat Twist the Knife. With this feat, as long as you have just hit a foe and applied your sneak attack damage, you can apply persistent bleed damage equal to half your current sneak attack dice. That's sure going to leave a mark.

Is the math being changed to make bleed attacks do anything? If you're hitting someone for 4d6 twice a round, doing an extra 2d6 each round is nice, I guess, but hardly worth a feat. If bleed stacked with itself and wasn't trivial to fix, then that might be worthwhile.

It's essentially a less versatile version of cacophonous call, which is considered a pretty good bard spell. The extra rider effects are superfluous compared to the nauseated effect.

The fact that it's an evocation/light/dark spell makes it interesting, although less effective if you've invested in spell focus for more common psychic schools, like enchantment.

Oh good. Thanks for the info!

So, is our general consensus "A lot of cool flavor and awesome archetypes but the Shifter class sucks"?

Cool flavor, meh archetypes, and extremely limited versatility for no reason I can discern. Be prepared to see cookie cutter shifter builds based on Shifter's Edge, agile AoMF, and wildshaping into a dire tiger.

It is, however, playable, and certainly not worse than any other tier 4 class.

If you use Weapon Finesse to get dex to attack, but still use strength to damage, you can add 0.5 your level to damage for two attacks with shifter's claws.

It's a crazily OP feat.

I'm rolling with depressed, but pleased that they're trying to address their editorial shortcomings.

Someone do the math and figure out how laughably little power this is and how expensive this makes the average US electric bill in Starfinder credits.

A charge in Starfinder is apparently about 0.27kw/hr, or ~2.46cents, if you're buying power in the Seattle metro area. My car's battery apparently has ~222 charges, and a supercharger recharges at ~300 charges/hour.

A charge is also equivalent to 72 AA batteries.

(All calculations based on a human expending 40kcal per 10 minutes of walking, which equates to one charge. Math may be suspect. The charge system is obviously a game system abstraction and nobody on the design team actually intends for physics to be seriously considered.)

The Operative has 2 different insight bonuses to skills built in (One from the spec, one from the Operative's edge) that are thus non-stacking.

Addressed by Mark, I believe - apparently at 7th Operatives get something that lets them always take 10 on skills they have skill focus in. Don't have the PDF myself, so can't confirm.

It's been pretty apocalyptic around here. There's also a major wildfire going on in BC, which means the air around here is nice and smoke-filled.

Today's been relatively nice, though, and this coming week shouldn't be as bad.

Ick. I've been worried about the Solarian since that first class preview showed off two objectively terrible class features. Maybe they can get salvaged by new talents/feats in further books.

I wonder if anyone's done the math yet to derive distance from Golarion's sun based on the published orbital periods. If not, something to do over the weekend, I guess.

Is ship-to-ground combat mapped out at all? Can you have someone flying around in a fighter providing air support to people on the ground?

Oddly because of the composition of my playtest group, we had three physics PhDs playing it, so I got to take some really nitty gritty physics comments back to the main Star Council like "The solarian's black hole ability should...<insert some sort of catastrophic event> whenever he used it."

Starfinder Physics Unchained: Spring 2019!

Oh. Any powered armor - meaning armor with integrated muscles/weapon loadout/sensors/etc, requiring some sort of limited fuel source?

Thanks again Calth and All-Seeing Orb; you guys/gals make waiting for the PDF much easier.

How detailed is the hacking section? Similar to the Disable Device section in the CRB (a page), or more in-depth?

Are the "big" higher level spells still around? Teleport, plane shift, haste, scrying?

Is there a technological way to plane shift (aside from drift drives, which I gather simply go into the drift and then back to the material plane)?

Are there single-pilot fighter craft in the game?

How big is the ship to ship combat section? 5 pages, 10, 20?

I doubt there's any canon description.

For myself, I'd probably assign different nationalities different salutes based upon their real-world inspiration.
American style (palm down, index and middle finger touching the brim of the hat) salute for Andoran.

British style (palm out, index and middle finger touching the bring of the hat) for Cheliax-sphere countries.

Maybe a "Roman" fist to heart salute for Taldor? I dunno.

Piggybacking onto this - will poison be a workable combat strategy in Starfinder?

In Pathfinder it's almost impossible to make a decent poison build due to the expense and super-low DCs of poisons. Will we see an operative who uses a self-poisoning blade that needs reloads every 10 strikes, or a soldier with a gas grenade attack?

Reliable isn't the same as easy. Magic is dangerous enough in the Hogwarts-verse that it's illegal to use unless you have graduated from magic school with the right qualifications.

Sure, but since nobody fails out of Hogwarts unless they are completely incompetent (squibs), graduation is not exactly a high bar.

There's also the serial killer vigilante archetype, which is pretty good.

Surprised to see David Weber's Honorverse in there, given the sci-fantasy focus, but that just leads me to even more anticipation of reading the naval combat section.

If I cast subjective reality on the sun does that mean it becomes night time, but only for me?

If you're close enough to cast Subjective Reality on the Sun, you have bigger problems than night time.

Both of those revelations seem mechanically terrible. I'm really confused by the choice to show them off.

Yeah, especially after the balanced and interesting powers presented for the Operative, Mechanic, and Soldier.

Concerning, but we don't have the whole picture yet, so I'll remain optimistic. Worst case, they're the new rogues*, and you just avoid playing them if at all possible.

*in an "objectively terrible" sense, not a "stealthy, sneak-attacky" sense.

Wait, Gravity as hard sci fi? *Shudder* No. The Martian was harder sci fi - the big whoopsie there was that Martian atmospheric pressure couldn't generate the winds seen at the beginning of the story.

Gravity was about as hard sci fi as Aliens.

Personally, I'm hoping they hit a sweet spot somewhere between Babylon 5 and Firefly. Loose enough to tell a variety of stories, but sane enough that "wizard did it" isn't the best explanation for everything.

How is that wizard still alive?

My initial though as well. Followed by "... how is the *party* still alive" shortly thereafter.

As other posters have pointed out, your characters have unusually low saves, not high. I'm assuming there's not a whole lot of system mastery going on. Not a bad thing, but you probably don't need to up the challenge any.

Travel yes, but I'm not so sure about comms. Mention was made of using the Drift to launch message packets back and forth in drones or on small carrier vessels, so I don't think interplanetary or interstellar communication is realtime.

In Starfinder? Probably, or at least that's what they've indicated. It does, however, require that Pathfinder's Sending (edit: and Gate, and teleportation circle, and...) get nerfed or retconned.

It probably makes for a better story experience to have expeditions out beyond the range of the Interstellar Communications Network.

I am, however, hoping that the magic is less hand-wavy and a lot of the obvious physics exploits are dealt with in Starfinder. Otherwise we may wind up with Starships powered by decanters of endless water or permanent walls of flame.

FTL comms and travel exist in Pathfinder, so that, at least, shouldn't be an issue.

Flagged to be moved to the PFS forum - the customer serive folks probably can't help you here.

Sometimes tables don't happen; it sucks when it happens, but such is the state of pick-up gaming. It's likely that although you were there before other players, the seven that participated had signed up online before you. I'd reach out to the VC and see about getting priority for the next scenario they run. I'm sure he or she would be happy to accomodate.

Actually, if you can convince (or are) the GM to allow eldritch poisoner to use alchemist discoveries affecting poison, it's a very strong and interesting choice. Reliable poison source that's not overpowered, with the ability to add interesting status riders to the poison.

Otherwise, make sure it's a class with its own source of poison, such as toxicant/poison darter, unless your GM is willing to houserule poison cost wayyyy down. Poison's terribly ineffective/expensive as written.

I AM the GM.

Ask yourself? =)

But seriously, this is a choice you get to make. Personally, I've never made a player appraise anything common - appraise is for rare and interesting occasions, not determining the market value of a dagger.

Edit - In the campaigns I run, I typically set up a Google Doc to track party inventory, leaving an entry at the bottom that says "===move items below here if you want GM to convert them to gold===", it seems to work well.

Not so far as I'm aware, and since Bestiary 1's Celestial, Fiendish, Zombie, and Skeletal templates. (I'm probably missing a few)

I permitted it in my "Evil Kingmaker" game. Considering the magus went full-on lich and the king still has aspirations of vampiredom, it really wasn't too unbalanced to give the fighter the graveknight template.

Even offered some fun roleplay moments as the Graveknight had been vanquished, only to have the vanquishing barbarian lord put the armor on as the rest of the party retreated, giggling.

As with everything else, depends on the group, the GM, and the campaign.

Paizo tends to believe players will use consumable resources, and in many groups that's the case. However, in the games I've played/GMed in, it's usually "sell everything except the wand of CLW, we'll use the other stuff for crafting/purchasing.

In my game the hunter just cast ant haul on her roc and flew to Tamran to handle selling/buying. The slow pace of the AP actually makes crafting much more viable than other APs.

Dimensional Step Up is amazing, although moreso for evil GMs than players. My compliments to whomever thought it up.

KingOfAnything wrote:

Wei Ji the Learner wrote:

When new products are released in the Starfinder Society, they are *already vetted* for Additional Resources.

What do you mean by this?

An Additional Resource document gets published day-of-release? Or all developed content is kept appropriate for organized play?

Either/Or/Both

A way to keep sales 'up' while also ensuring customer satisfaction.

The latter's not really going to work - there are always going to be feats/options/whatever that are evil (antipaladin) or disruptive (leadership), but it should be possible, especially with the slower pace of Starfinder releases, to vet as products hit shelves.

As others have said, pre-vetting of additional resources would be great.

* A more relaxed crafting system. Arbitrary crafting is a terrible idea, but being able to say, upgrade from a Ring of Hacking, Lesser, to a Ring of Hacking, Greater, would be nice. So would the ability to do off-slot item variants at double the price, or combine two items at a cost of 100% of the cheaper item and 150% of the more expensive one.

* A system for crewing a spaceship with your fellow Starfinders. I have no idea how the rules are going to work in Starfinder, but a vanity or entire subsystem based on customizing your personal ship could be really fun and provide a lot of character customization. At the very least, a system of vanities (10 prestige for a basic ship, 5 prestige for a stealth module, 5 prestige for teleporters, etc...) would be great.

* Re-balance the fame/prestige system, or do away with fame altogether. The way it works in PFS at present is for your first couple of levels, you're restricted from getting anything fancy, which for spell casters typically means you're just sitting on your money, maybe buying a pearl of power, until you hit the fame requirement for a +2 headband/+2 belt. After you hit level 4 or so, the fame limitations increase so much faster than your income that they become meaningless almost immediately.

* If there are scroll/potion/wand analogues, allow purchases at variable caster level. Otherwise you end up with shenanigans like buying a riffle scroll of resist energy, communal - not because you want to be able to cast a resist energy silently for all your friends, but because that's the only way to get a caster level 7 resist energy scroll.

* Related to that, get rid of the "purchasable items" on chronicle sheets, unless they're unique.

* If a boon grants +1 on diplomacy checks with the Mi-go tribe of Arsenius VI, ensure that it will be relevant in a future scenario in either the current season or the one following.

* (I know people will disagree, but a personal wish) Get rid of "once used, cross this boon off your chronicle sheet" type boons that grant a minor bonus. Ever finish a role playing game with ten thousand mana/health potions in your backpack at the end that you save "just in case"? Yeah. Look at your chronicle sheets for a character that's reached retirement age and tell me how many one-time-use +1 bonus on saving throws against devils/may add 2 to handle animal checks vs bees type boons you have. Either make them permanent or don't grant them at all.

* Allow GMs to make day job roles, if day jobs are a thing.

* If starting traits are a thing, allow retraining of them

My understanding of illusion spells is that there are NO rules or guidance on how they work or to run them, so when illusions are concerned basically anything the GM is rules and basically can't be wrong since there aren't really rules.

The best part of Ultimate Intrigue (for me) was the detailed rules on how divinations, enchantments, and illusions work. I highly recommend checking it out.

Maybe they rolled knowledge religion for their character?

That was actually the case, but the result was in the 20s - the GM was just running low on sleep. He still managed to run a pretty good session of Cultist's Kiss, and I enjoy sitting at his tables, it was just a funny one-time slip.

A feat, sure. Or something. Or just simply new skill uses. Currently there is nothing allowing you to do such a task. Grapple rules doesn't allow you to hang on to creatures too large and climb/attack, and none of the skills detail anything of the sort either.

Have you tried the vexing dodger rogue?

Would be nice to see another way to do it, I'll grant.

What's great is messing up in front of John Compton. He won't say a word unless it's really bad, but his eyes get REALLY big. ;-)

I'll never forget his expression when a GM misremembered and described Lissala as the Thassilonian goddess of friendship and kindness. =)