Dustin Heaton's page

Why is space-age gun worse than crossbow?

Because balance > all.

It's the same as holding a dagger to someone's throat in Pathfinder. The rules don't really support it, but the best way to handle things is a coup de gras that can be used as a readied action.

In general, when science fiction tries to justify having organic pilots at all, the reason I see is computers are too predictable and are incapable of coming up with creative tactics. That's even stronger in starfinder because once you have an artificial intelligence that is capable of creativity, how do you really distinguish that from an SRO or the entities that became triune?

Personally, I'd say in general for combat rules most differences come down to the system being designed to facilitate ranged combat and make it possible to balance, unlike Pathfinder where it's broken both ways.

I'd like to be able to make a street samurai, but you get pretty close with an exocortex mechanic if you reflavor the source of some of the bonuses.

Roll20 has a grid you can place over a map, tokens, and dice. For playing the game, what more do you want? There are character sheets too, in case you're playing with people you don't trust not to cheat for some reason.

As far as a character builder goes, Lone Wolf is currently being slowed down by a certain misadventure called "trying to keep up with a playtest".

Just give all his friends a NMMNMP (not my monkeys, not my problem) patch and they'll leave him behind the next time they leave a planet.

Some quality of life alchemical items so it doesn't feel like alchemy only exists in the adventurer market

Quality of life items in general, really. You know there's no way someone hasn't created a ladle of prestidigitation in a world where that cantrip exists.

in point of fact (assuming I'm remembering correctly) gods can die, just generally not without GM help. see Aroden for details

to answer the question though, see other responses, most people don't worship a god or empyreal lord because they want their god to be stronger, they worship them because they represent ideals that that person values. AKA, npc's aren't power gamers

And lamashtu killed a god to get his powers and become a full deity. There are also the gods who died during Starfall.

They're more interested in foresight, forgiveness, or peace than history, knowledge, or self-perfection? The empyreal Lords almost if not always have different focuses from the full deities they most closely resemble.

X-wing
Assault gunboat
YT-2000

Unfortunately for me, two of those are fighters and thus difficult to make work well for PCs in the ship combat system that was designed for a group on a single ship.

Paizo may be growing, I don't know one way or the other, but to keep the same pace once they introduced starfinder they would have had to double their staff. Since it's still unknown how well starfinder will take off that would be incredibly irresponsible from a business perspective.

Omnius wrote:

How does Advanced Weapon Training give you dex to damage? Not seeing that option/effect on the list.

At any rate, "Dex is the God stat," is kind of an issue a lot of games have. But... at the same time, it's kind of necessary to deal with the MAD issues of a lot of melee types and give muggles in general a bit of a boost, so I wouldn't say the usefulness of strength is necessarily something that needs to be *fixed*.

*I stand corrected. It is only dex to attack.

You still get to use dex to attack tho. Add agile weapon property and you get to use dex and damage with anything.

Weapon Master's Handbook wrote:

Fighter's Finesse (Ex)

Source Weapon Master's Handbook pg. 18

The fighter gains the benefits of the Weapon Finesse feat with all melee weapons that belong to the associated fighter weapon group (even if they cannot normally be used with Weapon Finesse). The fighter must have the Weapon Finesse feat before choosing this option.

You still have to survive ~ 5 levels with no damage bonus, and unless taking weapon finesse, no attack bonus. And then if you already have weapon finesse, why bother? As a fighter your static damage is going to significantly outscale the few points you get from a larger weapon.

Entirely a GM call. I allow it because the entire point is to trade a feat (or two feats and a precious skill to get a hyper-focused version of crafting for martials) for the ability to go above wealth by level. It makes little sense to me to let the players craft during their time in the adventure but not in the largely limitless time beforehand.

The "you have to own it" restriction appears to only apply to non-core books, of which there is currently only one for Pathfinder and most of it is banned anyway.

It looks like you may actually be talking about the card game (the use of deck instead of book), but Ridiculon's advice applies there as well. They have to be played in order.

There are no stats for Kringle because gods aren't started. Also, they'd have to decide when the Halloween equivalent was for Golarion to know which hat he should be wearing.

Garbage-Tier Waifu wrote:

Also, Endless Ammunition just generates the ammo, but you still need to go through the motions of reloading it, so it isn’t as exploitable as shadowshooting.

"A shadowshooting weapon never needs to be reloaded; after a shot is fired, this smoke immediately coalesces into the ammunition required to fire the weapon again."

"Each time an endless ammunition weapon is nocked, a single non-magical arrow or bolt is spontaneously created by the magic, so the weapon’s wielder never needs to load the weapon with ammunition."

I'm not seeing the difference. The "This ability does not reduce the amount of time required to load or fire the weapon." is irrelevant for this, since you do not need to load ("the weapon’s wielder never needs to load" - you can load it, if you want to use special ammunition, and then it takes the usual time, but you don't need to), and firing the crossbow is just aiming and pulling the trigger as often as BAB allows.

While I'm not against the idea of helping crossbows not suck, I think the idea here would be that the one shooting something physical still has to be pulled back and locked in whatever manner is appropriate, which is what consumes the time. Actually nocking the bolt isn't time-consuming as shown by bows being a free action to reload.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Bloodrager: NO WAY (MAD, and you can't afford to dump Wisdom on this chassis).

This seems doable as well... maybe a Dex-based halfling urban bloodrager.

Str 7 - 2 = 5, Dex 14 + 2 = 16 (all level-up increases here), Con 12, Int 7, Wis 10, Cha 11 + 2 = 13

Take Weapon Finesse and Combat Reflexes, and fight with an agile elven branched spear with the ioun stone for proficiency. Probably destined bloodline with Fate's Favored to shore up your stats, but aberrant and arcane are solid choices as well. Your Will save should be acceptable if you grab a trait for it and get a hedgehog bloodline familiar, and you can always take Iron Will as well if the need arises.

And before you can afford the agile weapon and ioun stone, you're doing what, 1d4-2 with a rapier?

I honestly didn't think people still used random encounters. I haven't experienced it in a game in probably a decade now. It seems very strange to me. Creating balanced encounters is enough work that as a GM I want every encounter to be story driven so that I am not wasting time on scenarios with little narrative impact. As a player they just seem pointless. They don't bring anything to the table.

The last campaign I actually got to play in relied fairly heavily on random encounters as it was exploration-based. The GM also didn't particularly care about the "balanced encounter" part though, which is part of why the campaign died after five or six sessions.

No, the followers that Ragathiel deems worthy of giving the gifts that come from his obedience feat are those who are in a situation like the worldwound. Just like there are followers and even priests of various gods that aren't clerics or paladins, many if not most followers won't follow the specific obediences that grant extra power.

I like a challenge. How about this text from the dismissal description:

"...there is a 20% chance of actually sending the subject to a plane other than its own."

Ooh, the dimension of dreams. Arcanist goes to sleep and hears "hey boss!".

Should we make a list of minimalist houserules to patch the class? I believe that was one person's intention when they asked what minimum changes would make the class palatable. I am loathe to make houserules and homebrews, but when I must I like to make them as simple and brief as possible.

So far, I plan to allow Shifters to wildshape between their selected aspects without consuming wildshape uses.

I'm also considering allowing them to choose to wildshape into any major aspect form at some cost (to keep major aspect selection having some meaning). I don't know what that cost should be yet but a GP reagent or faster wildshape time usage (1 extra hour per hour?) could be appropriate.

Doubling the usage would be good (mostly because I hate the idea of class abilities spending gold and what it does to WBL balancing), but you'd probably want to make it more granular than an hour if you're allowing shifting during a wildshape.

I'm sure it's been said before, but you could change one line and I'd be satisfied with the class. Get rid of x/day wildshaping. I'm fine with the duration, I'd like more forms but can love with it, but the whole "change shape once and you're either stuck there for hours or waste your main ability" is terrible, especially when your other ability is "I have bad grooming standards, fear my 1d4 fingernails". I want to play a freaking animorph, dangit!

Barbarian, even if I haven't gotten to play one as a PC yet.

Inquisitor and wildshaping druid are my favorite classes in the game, so... One of those, depending on how important knowledge skills are.

In addition to the stat generation method, you'd need to specify a level to get anything useful.

Generally, characters with lots of skills (especially knowledge skills) or some kind of shape shifting ability. I might be going to be breaking this pattern if I ever manage to get to play again instead of GMing because I keep going back to a melee kineticist when I'm building characters for fun.

The only other solid rule is no elves. Egotistical jerks, the lot of them.

In addition to realistic combat not being fun for D20 RPGs, Starfinder isn't meant to imitate realistic combat. It's meant to emulate cinematic content. How often do you see a hero in a movie get hit by sniper fire and die vs just getting a flesh wound or disabled arm that's better in a few hours or days? Similarly, how often do you see the hero using a sniper rifle to take out the villain instead of being right in their face with a pistol or submachine gun/assault rifle equivalent?

Dustin Heaton wrote:

You're a bbeg near the end of your life. You use greater mind swap on a young person. Not all spells are meant for players.

I guess that makes sense, but it seems strange to do that rather than other sources of immortality that give you better stats. Lich/Psychic Lich, for starters. Or find a wizard that can cast clone and get him to make you some scrolls. There are a lot of those on the planet, and probably more than arent statted officially that work in the statted libraries and universities around the planet that you could probably pay to help. Especially since there's a large chance unless you're just a simple race like a human or something that you lose some racial abilities with major mind swap.

Because you're a person, not stats on a page, and most people, even evil ones, don't want to experience death and/or undeath.

You're a bbeg near the end of your life. You use greater mind swap on a young person. Not all spells are meant for players.

It's the kind that was the primary form of ranged combat at the same time as the rapier was a common sidearm for nobles. I think it's commonly referred to as rank and file gunnery?

(Non-sarcastically, Pathfinder doesn't concern itself with such things as historical styles, techniques, or consistency of technology.)

Assuming your bow is currently a +1 (adaptive is a special and doesn't figure in) adding shock would make your bow +2 as far as cost goes, so you'd pay the difference between a +1 and a +2. Since E.A. is a +2, adding it to your bow would make it cost the same as a +3 so you'd pay the difference between a +3 and a +1.

Paris Crenshaw wrote:

Lonewolf has already said that a connection will only be needed when making updates to the character. Once you have the character in the app (or whatever) it will stay there. If you lose your connection, your character doesn't go anywhere. You just won't be able to synch updates you make in the app with the version in the cloud.

EDIT: It just occurred to me that there is no reason that HLO can't be used to print out paper character sheets for use at the table. HL Classic can do that, now, and it is the way many people actually use the software. I doubt very seriously that LWD will be removing the ability to print character sheets from within the software.

What is considered an 'update'?

Buffs?

Debuffs?

Damage?

Resource Expenditure?

Miscellaneous conditions?

Right now, it seems very unclear, especially with the good chunk of folks I play with that use electronic devices, as to whether or not that would be allowed to be updated in 'real time' with the current description of services.

And if folks are paying for an *online* version to use on their electronic devices, then it seems counter-intuitive to require them to print out their character to play, then, doesn't it?

This is the biggest question I have that they still haven't answered. If you can't do those offline, then the view-only mode is less useful than a paper character sheet.

As much as I dislike the subscriber and always-online model in principle, I'll probably buy at least the base version for Starfinder when it comes out (whenever that actually is). Whether I do any more than that hinges around how the license->account work. If each license translates to an account where I can have one that gives my players access to everything I've bought, then I'll migrate when that's possible (assuming adjustments and the combat tracker work).

It works for me because my group meets at (most of) our workplace and I use Roll20 for the map, so if the internet's down then the game night can't happen anyway. If any of the local game stores still supported Pathfinder and I was playing there, it wouldn't work as none of them have public wifi.

There's way too much "Soon" and only half-answering questions in the FAQ for me to feel comfortable.

Biggest con of the mind blade is you're a psychic caster, so your concentration checks in melee are tough, even as a magus.

So you want to split "gather information" out of diplomacy and further split it into two skills? Would you also be giving characters bonus skill points to offset this?

If you have all the other skills you need and have a point or two left over, pick a knowledge that's relevant to your campaign and Mac it. Even if someone else has all the knowledge skills. One more piece of information can make all the difference.

Robert Brookes wrote:

JiCi wrote:

Look, I doubt that the Pathfinder Society (yes, that is a real organisation in Golarion) has these special teams tasked to observe the wildlife and/or explore ancient civilizations

That's literally what they do.

Yeah, it's just that that kind of work isn't interesting enough to be a scenario for Society play. At best your Pathfinders may run across some of these specialized field agents during an adventure.

Day 1: Studied nature.
Day 2: Studied nature.
Day 3: Studied nature.
...
Day 57: Something interesting happened.
Day 58: Studied nature.

That kind of thing just doesn't lend itself well to player characters.

At least not during the game. One of my favorite characters had the end goal of establishing a library of monster lore once the that that was the main plot was taken care of.

Yeah, medium is pretty much the only way to do it, just realize that you're going to be at a much lower power level than a major X-Men villain.

Piercing damage is less valuable since Dr/piercing is relatively rare.

My two favorites both relied heavily on GM rulings that followed the rule of cool, but here goes:

1. I'm playing a telekineticist "rogue" in a homebrew campaign where we are very over wealth by level but also unable to buy significant magical artifacts so I've been investing heavily in alchemist fire (the only readily available alchemical weapon). So one night, we're attacked by a custom demon that's largely immune to our weapons, but is also weak to fire. Our sorceress goes down and we're headed for a TPK (balance wasn't this DM's strong suit) when I get the idea of asking what would happen if I used my telekinesis to throw the bag full of alchemist's guess I'd bought earlier at the demon. GM ruled that they would work as normal, just in a big bundle. I actually hit for a change and it turns out 12 vials of alchemist's fire do a good chunk of damage.

The second story is shorter. Different DM and we were taking a break from the campaign I was running to play we be goblins. I was playing the alchemist and got eaten by a giant frog and the GM ruled that all of the vials I was carrying would break and go off, and any fire would ignite the fireworks I was carrying. Once we added everything up, both the alchemist and frog were very dead, despite the frog getting some healing from a few potions.

_Ozy_ wrote:

Why are you in close quarters instead of flying around the battlefield raining down destruction?

As I mention in my little hyperbole example... the vast majority of encounters are usually ones in which the characters are immediately put on their heels. They don't get to determine when a fight happens, and it's usually due to an ambush. So before anything, first round, BAM! You're pinned by a melee attacker. This is easily the case in about 75% of every combat round I play in.

If you're getting ambushed in 75% of your encounters either your GM has it out for you or your characters should really invest more in skills like stealth or perception. My experience is closer to the opposite of that, but my characters tend to specialize in scouting and knowledge.

what PF needs is compound bows.

Maybe in Starfinder. Way too modern for Pathfinder using WW1 weaponry as the basis for "modern".

Bluenose wrote:

Do you know how to reload a matchlock arquebus? It's a complicated process with a lot of steps and getting some of them wrong isn't going to have good results. That's a perfectly good explanation for making it an exotic weapon - shooting is the easy part.

Beyond what the above posts have said, the trouble with this argument is that nonproficiency applies penalties to attack rolls and doesn't have any effect on whether or not you can reload the weapon.

Also revolvers are on that list too and they're certainly not very hard to reload.

The revolver bit is a non-starter. They're advanced firearms, so if you're dealing with them firearms should be martial weapons.

And the penalty to hit is easy to explain too. The entire point of volley fire had to do with the inaccuracy of the early guns in the hands of an average soldier, but specially trained skirmishers would used aimed fire to target high value targets And then by the time cartridge based firearms come around and aimed fire becomes the standard, firearms are martial weapons so the standard soldier is proficient.

Kind of odd that the sling, which took significant training to even be able to fire properly, is a simple weapon and the firearm, which you can learn to use with reasonable proficiency in half an hour, is exotic.

zainale wrote:

how many feats does it take to make a good slinger?

ammo drop and juggle load are your bare minimum, unless you're a halfling. They can just exchange their acrobatics bonus for the same effect.

Based on most people I see when I go to the range, I don't know that I entirely agree with the simplicity assessment. That said, the real reason firearms may be "exotic" is the training in whatever magic trick is used to reload muzzleloaders in 6 seconds.

There are quivers that go other places than your back. I generally envision those for my archer characters. The harder part for me is where they're carrying the strung longbow bow.

I like the interpretation from the Iron Druid Chronicles. Cold iron hurts the fae, but only inhibits druidic magic. Because of that, they can't wear a suit of armor made of iron/steel, but the main character is a skilled sword user, since that isn't enough to block his connection to magic. Things get a little more complicated later when the author decided to limit the "affects magic" bit to meteoric iron, but the idea stands.

Ranged Feint. From Ultimate Intrigue apparently.