Ectar's page

Should this thread be stickied?

The end times are nearly upon us. Praise be to Groetus for bringing the old store's existence to an end.

As per usual, concerns regarding Groteus and the End Times have been greatly exaggerated.

Will the "Paizo.com is down" thing be updated to reflect the less than immediately temporary nature of the website's status?

The real challenge would be to make general applicable actions for each starship role that don't use their entirely own rules, which was one problem of SF1 starship combat.
The only role that "progresses" the fight was gunner, after all, for most fights. The rest more or less only had the task to support their gunner and/or disrupt the enemy's, after all.

Plenty of characters meaningfully contribute to traditional combat scenarios without causing enemy hp to go do down.

Also, the point of "only gunners progressing the fight" is still the case in 3/7 of the CSS examples on the archives. You must defeat an enemy ship to achieve victory, which can only by progressed by gunners.

Scenes where a primary victory condition is not defeat enemy ship(s) are, imo, the ideal usage of the CSS system.
Scenes where destroying one, or especially more than one, enemy ship is required, I think I would prefer something more tactical.

I see it this way:
The devs changed the soldier and operative specifically so they wouldn't be "the fighter in space" and "the rogue in space". All well and good.

However, in games without the Pathfinder classes, such as SFS, you no longer have a fighter or rogue. The soldier kind of covers fighter, but not really. Likewise, either the operative or envoy kind of cover rogue, but not really.

There's just big holes in SF2E's class design space that the devs have plugged with the existing Pathfinder classes, if you're in a game where you're allowed to play them.

And if the systems are meant to be interbalanced, why aren't they allowed in SFS?
Or vice versa?

I dunno. For most things the trappings rarely seem to matter and the underlying mechanics are largely similar.

Would the situation change if instead of Dominate the player had cast Possession and the enemy crit failed the will save?

Personally, I'm of the mind that Controlled would supercede Fleeing in most cases, but open to hearing more thoughts.

The problem is that "Threaten" doesn't mean anything in the context of SF2.

There's probably players who'll read that and think of the common usage of the word "Threaten" and verbally accost their foes to gain flanking with that ability.
The Exploration activity version of Coerce uses that kind of language, even.

Squiggit wrote:

ninjaelk wrote:

All that being said, I also have no idea what is going on with Dance Partner. Do we have any clarification on what "threaten" means in the context of sf2e?

I just checked and you're right, the concept of threat/threatening with a weapon is never defined in SF2 player core.

.. To be honest I'm having trouble finding a definition in PF2 material too.

It's on page 255 of the SF1e Core Rule book. At least that's where it came from in Starfinder.

Reach and Threatened Squares .

It's trivial to find in PF1E material as well. But that's still a failure for the text of Dance Partner.

Jim Butler wrote:

Swiftbrook wrote:

I like the look of the new store. Most of the changes don't affect me and my purchases.

I am disappointed, and frankly don't understand, the lack of a links to the product reviews and forum pages. With the new Paizo system that rewards reviewing products I just don't understand why those reviews would not be linked predominately to a products page. Not having a forum page dedicated to a product linked on the products page (if not included on a products page as it is now) is a giant step backwards. Since I have a general idea what a product is before I go to its product page, I actually look at the comments before I read the product description.

Thanks for listening.

Reviews will be present on each product page, but existing reviews won't be transferred to the new store. We can also add links from each product page to the forums for people to discuss the products, but they won't be embedded on the page like they are today.

-Jim

As someone who values reviews a great deal in terms of what others share and what i share on paizo and elsewhere, this continues to be very annoying. I spent a lot of time on my reviews. Will the reviews just be gone or will they still be accessible somewhere for me to copy and paste?

The lack of a migration for reviews and preorders is shocking and frankly not consumer friendly. i know the whole speech about verified reviews but if i have purchased the product and reviewed it then you should be able to migrate that.

That aside, new site looks pretty neat. And i don't see the foundry changes as a big deal for me since i already canceled my subscriptions long ago (and don't use PDFs when running on foundry all that much). But for others i am excited to hear that a solution might be explored for that eventually.

Related question: will old purchases be verified in the new store, for the purpose of being able to review things?

Here's the problem. I'm fine with using science lore skills, but out of the first 5 scenarios, the word science is only used in the first scenario special and it's only used twice. Each time it's used as an alternative to using Physical Science Lore in place of Nature.

Gosh that's saddening.

Edit: better yet, don't tell me. It can only make me think worse of the game than I'm already starting to.

Ectar wrote:

Squiggit wrote:

I 100% prefer crafting to engineering. Genuinely surprised to see something so trivial being used as evidence of the system being diluted or weakened.

Crafting vs Engineering is a flavor fail, but not a load bearing one.

The removal of Physical Science without an adequate replacement is more symptomatic of SF2E being diluted, imo.

I think this is backwards, tbh. Having "pretty much all the sciences" crammed into one addon skill helped contribute to SF feeling like a weird hack of Pathfinder.

Like... astronomy, geography, geology, meteorology, oceanography, all forms of physics and chemistry, and also a catch all for all forms of potion and medicine crafting mashed together was just kind of a disaster of a skill.

That's honestly fair. It's the same kind of weird regarding Crafting making one equally good at masonry, smithing, leatherworking, and carpentry. Having all of non-life science in a single skill was probably too much. But being merely a Lore skill concerns me that Science as an avenue of Skill expression (largely in the form of Feats)

Also, Medicine was a separate skill

I'm just feeling a de-emphasis of science and engineering in the Science Fantasy game.

Master Han Del of the Web wrote:

People continuing to undervalue Lore categories is even more disheartening.

Especially when a lot of the time, using a lore skill reduces the DC of a skill check.

All that's needed to add more science to the game is for the writers or GM to include more skill checks with Life Science Lore, Physical Science Lore, and or the players using them.

Lore skills don't get nearly the same level of feat support that the other skills do.

I'd also say that if you're looking for extremely specific knowledge of a particular topic, that's what the Lore skill is for in 2e. Pick a Lore subcategory or make one up, and you'll be covered. SF2e's Player Core even explicitly lists Physical Science as a subcategory of Lore you can take.

Ugh, if anything that only further entrenches my feelings. Dropping Physical Science from a primary skill to a lore subcategory is disheartening.

I 100% prefer crafting to engineering. Genuinely surprised to see something so trivial being used as evidence of the system being diluted or weakened.

Crafting vs Engineering is a flavor fail, but not a load bearing one.

The removal of Physical Science without an adequate replacement is more symptomatic of SF2E being diluted, imo.

Just gonna lend voice that I prefer the compatibility as it makes cross-compatibility less of a headache.

Crafting I think is more apt as it's a universal term. You can craft a computer and you can craft a sword, and you can craft a plate of bacon and eggs, and you can craft a fine wooden statue. You cannot engineer a plate of bacon and eggs, or a fine wooden statue, though. So all of a sudden, there are a bunch of items you cannot craft anymore. If your character is a street artist that uses a chainsaw to carve statues of people from logs, is that engineering? If your character is a street artist that paints caricatures, is that an engineering check?

Though at the same time, I think there was room to have a technology skill as an additional recall knowledge skill, and potentially an alternate crafting skill (but I'm also of the school where I think Arcana, Nature, Religion, and Occultism should be usable to Craft magic items of their type, so why not Technology for tech items), but I'd also see Computers as not needing to be extra, and would probably just absorb Computers into such a skill.

Couple of responses:

2. I think you can absolutely engineer food and especially a statue. Architecture, structural engineering, and more care very much about appearances. Engineering is not the antithesis of art; they're often related.

3. Besides, cooking is a lore skill ;)

4. As an engineer, Engineering and Computers are pretty distinct skill sets; I really wouldn't want the game combining them, just like they didn't in 1E.

I guess the thing is that your Starfinder character probably isn't doing graduate research in glaciology on Triaxus, or anything. We're going on space adventures and need to test things relevant to space adventures and those tend not to be very academic. Like it feels bad to have invested greatly into meteorology and just never have the weather come up in the entire adventure because you're spending the whole time indoors on space ships/stations and caves/caverns.

So it just seems like we're unlikely to design a bridge, but might need to MacGyver a new capacitor for the deflector array so crafting does mostly apply to this. If you want to represent "my character knows about oceanography" that seems like what the Lore skill is for (which could stand to have a rebrand honestly) since that's "specialized knowledge that's not guaranteed to come up."

That's the whole point! Oceanography was less than 10% of the topics covered by Physical Science! That skill gave you broad knowledge of the non-living Physical world. But there is no equivalent skill for 2e.

To cover all the grounds of Physical Science in 2E you'd have to take an additional 7+ lore skills.

The use-case of Crafting is more or less fine. It's just the branding, to borrow your terminology, doesn't fit as well as Engineering did.

SF1 read as Science Fantasy.

SF2 reads as Future Fantasy.

I get that it's a symptom of the much-vaunted compatability between the systems, but that homogeneity dilutes Starfinder in a way I don't like.

It's supposedly a science fantasy game, but we have ~2 skills related to science and 4 related to Magic. And "crafting" sounds way worse in this context than its progenitor: "engineering".

Ugh. I really can't get over how much I dislike "crafting" for Starfinder.

Even the Crafting specialties feel distinctly Pathfindery, with Starfinder paint.

I really wish the skills kept more akin to their old name schemes. If necessary, there could've been a blurb in the GM Core about compatability, like "If playing a Starfinder character in a Pathfinder game, consider replacing uses of the Engineering skill with Crafting."

Physical Science is the other skill that feels absent in the Pathfinder suite of skills.
I don't feel like they adequately cover "astronomy, chemistry, climatology, geography, geology, hyperspace, meteorology, oceanography, physics, and other fields of natural science".

I dunno, y'all. It feels like the Science and Engineering are taking a backseat, which I think is a real shame.

Tridus wrote:

Bulk takes the problem of "you have add up a bunch of numbers and the total can get to 3 digits" and replaces it with "you have to add up a bunch of numbers except the decimals don't work like you expect, the numbers are extremely arbitrary and hard to estimate on the fly, and the whole system becomes extremely confusing once large or tiny PCs are involved."

Rhetorical question: How do decimals not "work like you expect"? They round down, just like everything other time you end up with decimals in Pathfinder.

Non-rhetorical question: How does it get confusing with large and tiny creatures? (I have never had any large or tiny PCs in my games).

RAW an item of Light Bulk for a medium creature is considered Negligible Bulk for a large creature.

I don't see most martial characters needing to take a rogue archetype to empower their builds because there are many other ways to put the enemy off-guard.

In terms of be a must-have for “everyone”, exemplar archetype is under a way more dangerous position where you probably have some ikon that improve significantly your martial build and unless you don't have enough feat slots you have no reason to not take it.

This is a wild take, to me. Things can be power crept to the point of obviating previously existing options, but if those new things aren't so busted as to be considered mandatory in every related build, it's not a problem?

Imo this was precisely WotC's perspective going in to the printing of the Modern Horizons sets. Absolutely warped the format.

Whenever I try to build a kineticist, I feel foolish skipping weapon infusikn. Which is a good case for making it a freebie.

It's SO good. Literally the only time I'm using a blast that isn't weapon infused is the free 1A version when channeling element after an overflow and I don't need Thermal Nimbus.

Having a blast with it, just hit level 10 (Though I played 1-8 mixed between a Thaumaturge and playtest Commander)

There are plenty of non-wooden Plant creatures, even in newer books.
The Giant Flytrap and Sargassum Heap chief among them.

But also plenty of Wood Plant creatures such as the Arboreals.

Also non-Plant Wood creatures. Like Jungle Drakes and Forest Trolls. Weird.

As a GM, I'd look at the pictures, if ones exist, and read the description. If it sounds like they're partially composed of Wood, I'd allow it.

For the particular creatures, I'd definitely allow it. They're both clearly made of wood and, notably, were printed before Rage of Elements, which introduced the Wood trait.

Ectar wrote:

I do think OP's story is a good cautionary tale about mixing PF2 and SF2 not being quite as harmonious as top level discussions have indicated.

I have not seen a single compatibility discussion where the flight issue wasn't explicitly mentioned.

Because I am the one that mentions it, if nobody else did!

Absolutely, forum goblins like us are the ones discussing it.

2) There are Pathfinder ancestries that also get flight at level 1. I recognize that the Dragonkin has a longer flight speed, but I still don't think that this is game breaking. What was game breaking in this context was having the PC ferry the other players. There are rules for PCs being mounted by other PCs, and as a GM I would have applied those rules to the challenge.

Carrying someone across a gap sounds far more like using the Bulk of Creatures rule than PCs as mounts rule.

I do think OP's story is a good cautionary tale about mixing PF2 and SF2 not being quite as harmonious as top level discussions have indicated.

I think it would be fun to do a CSS statblock for the Death Star trench run, to show that you can do some of the most iconic space battle scenes with CSS.

Appropriate that you choose a space battle scene where the actual battle happens largely in the background and the victory condition isn't "defeat the opposing ships".

Almost like that's the kind of scene CSS is designed for.

I feel like this exact question has been brought up several times before.
Would be super cool to get dev clarification.

Might run the 2e conversion of this, but I find the mention and talk of Baba Yaga in the PG a spoiler. Can someone explain why it is not?…

It is a bit. It's about a much of a spoiler for the AP as reading the back cover of a novel is. Less even, in retrospect.

And it's really not very spoilery (I re-downloaded it to refresh my memory). It basically boils down to Baba Yaga is somehow involved. It's less obvious than Iron Gods involving machine deities.

This one?

I've missed RD posts.
I feel like they always generate either interesting discussion or heated debate and I'm here for it.

I was thinking there might be overlap between free-hand and concealable, but there really isn't. Just the wrist launcher, which is not great.

moosher12 wrote:

War of Immortals kicked off the Godsrain, and battlecry! kicked off the Hellfire Crisis.

Man they've done a much worse job promoting the hellfire crisis I think this is the first I've heard anyone mention it.

Is that the new war with Cheliax and Andoran?

I'm not super abreast of upcoming APs.
I just know that there's no shot we get to play it out from Cheliax's side.

Xenocrat wrote:

I'm not sure what the sin is here and what kind of people end up in this realm. Tech bros demanding (and providing) 80 hour work weeks for s+#*cos in the delusional pursuit of valuable equity that obviously isn't ever going to happen?

Fast food assistant manager who keeps getting turned over for his general manager franchise ownership application but doesn't quit?

Ununionized game developer who works long hours for subsistence wages for the love of the game?

I guess the special action that activates the mental damage would be something like spending an action doing nothing at all.

Managers who run companies to trap workers with tactics like emotional abuse, unreasonable expectations, false negative references, blacklisting, low wages, holding immigration status hostage, etc. Anywhere people are peeing in bottles because they can't take breaks.

Possibly also people who throw themselves into work in order to avoid their families.

Owners who hire an excessive number of part time employees, because it's cheaper to pay 16 people to work part time than it is to pay 8 people to work full time (since that would require benefits in many states).

Cold call centers.

Ectar wrote:

I was on board right up until "Ksedahl, the demon lord of ceaseless employment." It's about the eye-rolliest epithet I've heard in ages.

The description of the realm was cool.
Oh well.

Hmm. A few alternatives, then.

"Demon lord of overwork" is probably the simplest.
"Of endless hours."
"Of ceaseless toil."

It's certainly a demon lord that's useful to reference. I've got an Eoxian gameshow host who presents risking your life for fame and fortune in a deadly trivia competition as an alternative to the crushing anonymity of working for one of these companies and dying of stress before retirement. Giving him a demonic boogeyman makes that pitch all the more legitimized.

Ceaseless toil gets closer. Imo the name really needs to emphasize the wholly unproductive nature of the demon lord's ministrations.

And if the name isn't strong enough (and I argue it's not) , it just sounds silly, banal, and non-threatening.

I was on board right up until "Ksedahl, the demon lord of ceaseless employment." It's about the eye-rolliest epithet I've heard in ages.

The description of the realm was cool.
Oh well.

Trying to keep this game related...

This is what happens when a government is run by someone with.
+10 deception
+10 intimidation
-10 diplomacy
-10 economic lore
-10 will save vs big building, faltery, money, or women
Has the confused and controlled condition,
and is easily dazzled and fascinated by posted to the infoshpere.

Game related, yes, but far afield of the thread.

I'm somewhat concerned that we just won't get tactical starship combat for maybe a really long time.
If people play the system without it long enough, there's no incentive to remake the system that caused so much derision in the previous edition.

Comparing the PF2e GM Core and SF2e GM Core makes more sense. I've only briefly paged through the GM Core at a game store, and I'm hoping to download it at 12:01 am tonight. But I'm willing to make a wild guess that the 70 missing pages are the Treasure Trove section of the PF2e GM Core, which takes up 108 pages. Starfinder is not a treasure-finding game, but it does have a ton more high-tech equipment that the players can buy, which way SF1e had an entire book of equipment. I suspect the Tech Core will be that + the 2 tech-related classes.

I would love to hear where you suspect the 70 pages were trimmed from when your pdf arrives.

The GM Core says tactical rules will be in the forthcoming Tech Core. Either:

1. There will soon be a quick, perhaps abbreviated and/or poorly run playtest.
2. They lied/changed their mind about the playtest and there won't be one and GM Core is telling the truth.
3. GM Core is mistaken and they decided to yank out a huge chunk of Tech Core pages previously plannged for tactical starships and replace them with something else after GM Core was sent to the printer.

I'm betting on no playtest. Having one always seemed like a bad idea: it's inevitably going to make a lot of people mad at the design they chose and they'll have limited time and flexibility to respond to any feedback, so better just to not scare off the preorders.

Huh. Well ain't that something? I hadn't realized GMC made a promise like that.

Reading through this AP with the desire to run it in the future.

It feels like Hao Jin's memories of Syndara are handled pretty inconsistently?
In chapter 1, the name Syndara means nothing to her in one spot, while being described as a vague collaborator in another.
But in Chapter 3 the block text seems to indicate not only that she remembers him, but also sussed out that he's behind things.

I haven't noticed anything indicating a change in her recollection, except maybe the music? But why would that matter?

So, because I genuinely cannot tell:

Was there something said indicating particular aliens not making the jump to 2E, or was this thread pure speculation?

Oh dear: the mods hid OP, which now makes *me* look like the OP.

Yup. Confused the heck out of me for a minute or so there.

Kinda weird, ngl. Almost rather the whole thread were nuked.

You listed pretty much entirely stuff that we wouldn't know.

Point taken on the list of questions I chose.

But what DO we know?
I never got a playtest adventure so I don't know if there's anything there. The Free RPG day product was pretty scant, but it has a ship with some details to work with.

I'll take any info about any ships in 2E.

I know ship v ship combat isn't released yet, with Cinematic ship combat announced for GM Core and Tactical ship combat as of yet unannounced AFAIK.

But still, what info is out there regarding ships?
How fast are they? How many people can they hold? What are their names? Armaments?

Literally anything and everything about ships in 2E.

Ectar wrote:

Accuracy buff?

Ancestral Memories.

Oooookay. Imperial, not Arcane.

The Sorcerer got massively buffed for blasting: getting a buffed version of Dangerous Sorcery for free in addition to better starting focus spells, including the arcane Sorcerer's accuracy buff, has effectively given the class the tools to blast to maximum effect without needing to pick specific build options to get started.

Accuracy buff?

So to get value out of a summoned creature... you buy two Summon X scrolls when you make a new level? Then you use them in a moderate to severe fight to conserve your resources for the Boss Fight.

They come out of your consumables budget & you only get a few as you want to use them before you/your enemies level up and leave them in the dust.

That's not exactly an insignificant investment.

Soon(TM)

Ah, a fellow enjoyer of Blizzard's old communication style.

Okay.
Fingers crossed the SF2 forum update is independent from the much-hyped wider website overhaul. I feel like that thing has been coming soon:tm: for ages.

There still isn't a Starfinder 2E secon to the forums.
I realized this while trying to find information about the Solarion's Solar Weapon and got almost all first editing stuff.

The Core classes still have their playtest forums up near the top of the page, even though they're released.

It's just kind of a mess to find threads regarding 2E non-playtest material right now.

Back in the day a friend cast fireball at enemies that boarded our ship while at sea....

You can guess what happened to the ship.

The sails and ropes caught fire?

It's not that easy to catch wood on fire with instantaneous heat like a fireball.

OrochiFuror wrote:

All the powerful reality and magic warping spells got turned into rituals, so what does being an arcane spell at its core mean anymore?

Might be wishful thinking but if we get another shot at Secrets of magic, since it can't be remastered and needs to be redone almost entirely, would be nice to get another deluge of spells and hope to balance out the number of uniques a bit. Just to really hone in on the flavors of each tradition.

It sounds like Rival Academies did not scratch that itch? If that’s the case, did that most recent arcane-focused book do anything to address the above concerns? I’ve been debating getting it, but did not want to do so unless it really turned the wizard up to 11.

The most worthwhile thing Wizards got in RA was removed in errata (or was clarified to never have been intended to work as written)

So Battlecry! is out now.
Lightly perusing the Archives, I didn't notice a new reason for the Mobility/Offensive tactic split.

There's a description of each subset contained in the Tactics section, but the distinction feels unnecessary.

In most groups Gather To Me! is more impactful in combat than Reload! or Shields Up!, but whatever. This is just a mild complaint thread now.

Shifter!

alsyr wrote:

I hope so! Guardian and Commander turned out great and Runesmith and Necromancer are both promising, so there is clearly still design space and thematic niches left for them to explore. I personally would love to see a Shifter class as I don’t think we quite have anything that covers that fantasy.

I'm sorry. you need to be more specific.

What doesn't the Wildshape Druid have to cover that fantasy.

The Druid character from the D&D movie seemed to play far closer to a PF1 shifter than any typical D&D or PF2 class.