Greydoch's page

My favorite part about starfinder is how completely modular the classes are. An entire party of players who all chose to play a single class can build each PC entirely differently.
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Did anyone else notice that in the red shift revolution art from the competitors section they have drawn the Worlanisi as being incredibly tall?
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Also corpse fleet ships are canonically usually not airtight.
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Does anyone else remember, in one of the 2021 PaizoCon or GenCon panels, some Paizo Person saying that there was a new "god of awakened AI & sapient star ships that is itself an awakened starship" in Galactic Magic? I swore someone said that, and I remember being really excited about it...except, it's not there :D

I, too, remember something like that being said, and was also excited. I now believe the statement might have been about Accelsys, who's avatar is a spaceship, and the thought about it being about awakened AI and sapient starships was more of my inference as a fan rather than the explicitly stated fact of the situation.

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Asmodeus doesn't have some divine right to be worshipped. It's not weird that a sophisticated, cosmopolitan society like the Pact Worlds doesn't have a critical mass of devil worshippers. In PF1 his status as a core god was contingent and historically new with the ascension of house Thrune establishing a base of operation and positin of superiority in one of the most important nations of the setting that no one else could successfully invade and overthrow during at least the last several decades.

If you need a deity of law in Starfinder, Abadar has you covered. The slavery and tyranny aspects don't fit in the Pact Worlds, you either need to be in control of some territory ala Cheliax/Thrune or competing for individual souls. He's just being outcompeted in the modern era and no significant planetary governments have been successfully held by his worshippers

I mean it is mentioned that a Malebranche (read Minor devil god) rules an entire planet in the book, which is then by default a subject of Asmodeus. And in the back of one of the adventure paths we learn of a "vacation" planet owned and operated by hell. Not making an argument for giving Asmodeus more love in any future books, just adding more info.

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So when scrolling over the art in the new blog about Jessica Catalan joining the
Starfinder Team, the art identifies itself as "Many Souls Android". What do we think that means?

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In the Character Operations Manual we are introduced to the Xenomorphic Android and the ways in which it would change an androids base abilities. With the Starfinder Species Survey, Pathfinder 2E making Planar Scions a versatile ancestry, and the Dawn of Flame using Ifrits of ancestries other than human, I would like to open the discussion of the changes that might be made to Planar Scions abilities when they come from other races.

Ex. Lashunta Ifrit- Both Lashuntas and Efreeti have telepathy in some form, but RAW Ifrits do not. I put forward that Lashunta Ifrits should still have limited Telepathy. Also, Lashuntas naturally have the cantrip Psychokinetic Hand and Ifrits have limited uses of the spell Overheat, these could be replaced with a modified version of Telekinetic Projectile that instead of 1d6 Bludgeoning damage would instead due 1d6 Bludgeoning and Fire. This could be contextualized as losing fine motor control provided by Psychokinetic hand and adding a bit of the natural affinity for fire to a inborn telekinetic ability.
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I think a hanakan would ne the best choice for a velociraptor like race.
- Greystoke

Does anyone know what's coming after "Fly Free or Die"? Usually we would know by now right?

Master Han Del of the Web wrote:

...But I even enjoy armor Solarians so some would say that utterly discredits me.

I for one don't. My first Starfinder character, who I am still playing, is an armor Solarian and he's still one of my favorites! His solar armor looks like angel wings!

My Armor Solarian is a worshiper of Besmara and his armor takes the form of black kraken tentacles that manifest out of his tattoos.

The board games in armory keep being brought up as a ridiculous pricing example, but these games provide a specific and extraordinary effect. Your players want to buy shoots and ladders tell them its a credit and move on but if they want to purchase the uber rare magical version of ultra risk that guarantees to sharpen their mind it might be more expensive and harder to find.
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I'm also now hoping we get a Xenodruid class! :D

Mystic with the xenodruid connection.

I can't get to the website!

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What is the next STarfinder WEdnesday about?
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Most conspiracy theories (lizard overlords, faked moon landing, aliens hidden in area fifty one, etc.) are completely ridiculous. These preposterous theories take away any meaning from the word conspiracy, whose definition is:

a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
"a conspiracy to destroy the government"
synonyms: plot, scheme, stratagem, plan, machination, cabal, intrigue, palace intrigue; More
the action of plotting or conspiring.
"they were cleared of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice"
synonyms: plotting, collusion, intrigue, connivance, machination, collaboration; treason
"he was due to stand trial for conspiracy to murder"

Conspiracies are actual things, such as a conspiracy to commit murder. But tinfoil theorists take power away from what should be considered a serious word and turned it ridiculous.
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Verces has the added benefit of being in a constant light state. With constant night or twilight, heists and intrigue can follow a different time table.
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Really, Starfinder? Belladonna? Does our FTL spaceship's doctor also recommend urethral mercury injections for what ails you?

Or how about a nice laudanum tincture for my dizzy spells?

Or maybe a Magical malady needs a magical cure. Which Belladonna is known for its use in folklore. Besides the fact that a good deal of medicines even in the modern day are derived from plants although after extensive extraction and manipulation. Would you prefer they call the medicine Lycosatril™ for those who won't let lycanthropy get in the way ( Please consult your Doctor to see if Lycosatril™ is right for you)?

BPorter wrote:

3. Poor little Absalom Station only has 980,000 humans. Cuvacara has 3 million humans. Arl has almost 7 million humans. Yet, Absalom Station is portrayed as the center of human society. This only makes sense if Absalom Station is the primary place where humans can significantly wield power.

And dont forget Striving. That Acanite city has 152 million inhabitans, 13% of it human which means just short of 20 million, making it by far the largest human community in the system.

Yet I doubt that the intention was to make Aballon the center of humanity and they just didnt calculate things through.

It really makes me wonder how those places are supposed to look like. Even the Pact World book doesn't really give me any information about the actual day to day life and actual state of development of a planet. Apparently it needs a big adventure to get some information about that.
Castrovel is in a Dead Sun adventure, right? I have to read that when I get the chance. Triaxus hasn't appeared in an AP yet as far as I am aware. I wonder if it will be as rural as the Zo entry makes it look like or if it approaches an European population density (from the high level description it seems to be the most likely to do so from all planets imo) and what that means to the overal population numbers of Ryphorians, Dragonkin and true dragons.

A little real world numbers that help this make more sense, but about thirty three million people claim Irish descent in america. This compares with the 6.7 million people that actually populate Ireland. Does that make America the center of Irish culture?

So a few questions for the play test wrap-up:

1. What was the biggest oversight caught by the play test?

2.What is the change that you are most excited to make?

3. What is something you thought was cool but was found to be cumbersome or unpopular during the Play test?
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Xenocrat wrote:

They aren’t missing, they’re just not important or worshipped in the Pact Worlds in significant numbers.

Source?

In the Pact worlds book there is mention of a moon circling Bretheda called Yashu Indiri, this moon has many shrines to lesser deities including specific mention of Cayden Cailen.

I would also argue that dying and the process of releasing your soul to make way for a new one are inherently different. Starving to death, bleeding out, or succumbing to a disease leaves a body damaged in some way and probably not suitable for a new life to come into it like a purposefully surrendered body would be.
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You asked a Question and got several answers. I understand that it is not what you are hoping for but nobody is agreeing with you. Why do you continue to argue?
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A ranger/explorer of some kind would be nice. A true spell caster too (the tecnhomancer is more of a ranged magus, and relies on weapons, hacks for weapons, and shooting spells from the weapon). A scientist can work too. A psionic class based on telekinesis. An investigator/detective. A savage fighter.

There is literally an explorer specialization for the operative.

I suppose no one will convince the unconvinced about fullcasters but they basically already said, No, it was an intended part of the design to leave them out.

I don't know what you mean by scientist but a lot of classes could have people be scientists.

There is already psionic Archtype (phrenic Adept) and the mystic class is basically able to be flavored as mental powers especially with mystic paths like overlord and mindbreaker.

And again there is LITERALLY a operative specialization called DETECTIVE.

As Far as a savage fighter I assume you mean something like a barbarian, but that would honestly be more like an archetype or in my opinion an even better soldier Fighting style. That being said the Mystic Devastator Path actually makes for a pretty savage character, even including it's own Rage like ability.

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More types of spellcasters is always useful, even with the explicit styles of magic removed. For example, my main Divine caster is built as a technomancer because I couldn't see triune giving their priests a way to summon first world creatures and not robots, and the idea of getting power but still needing your own technological abilities to use it seems very fitting with how Triune's biggest gift to the universe was handled. So I would disagree on the Mystic covering all types.

Right, but you made a character not covered by the mystic class using an existing class, in the technomancer. So the original point being all spellcasters are covered may not have been confirmed but it certainly wasn't refuted.

As a hotel employee, one of the most common questions that I get here at work is, "what kind of mattress is that in the room?" A simple question with a simple answer, sealy black commercial mattress. We are not the highest end hotel nor are we particularly expensive and so our mattresses while not being cheap would not necessarily break the bank, depending of course on the size of your bank. Here is where this story becomes pertinent to the conversation. These mattresses are not available to the public. You cannot buy one. It may be a sealy, a well known brand that people often have in their homes but the line of mattresses that it belongs to is not available to the public. That isn't to say that you could never get your hands on one. Know the right people, pay extra money to have it procured, etc. This is a real life example of an everyday item that has restrictions on whether it can be bought or not.

Now if we extrapolate some of that knowledge that comes from that scenario and use an item that has been talked about earlier in this thread we might start to make sense of this. The humble lock able to keep people out of rooms you don't want them in or to keep items safely in one place or container so as to protect it. There are many locks available on the open market such as bike locks which are cheap and able to be busted by an equally cheap bolt cutter and house door locks ranging in strength from being able to be kicked in by a relatively strong foot to needing much higher amounts of force to make it cave. Even with locks on the open market you can see a dramatic shift in price levels. Then there is going to be locks not on the open market, those that are the domain of retail and businesses on the low end and museums, art galleries and banks on the high end, and the domain of public safety those that are used by law enforcement to hold prisoners and the government to protect state secrets, projects and weapons. Those used in the commercial domain and those used in the governmental domain we would certainly want to keep out of certain hands not even to stop people from using them but to stop people from learning how to get around them.

Items of that caliber would certainly not be readily available to someone without substantial amounts of money and hefty connections. Unless you specifically write this into the back story of your character, most PCs are just random citizens without governmental or banking ties and would have no access to items rated for commercial or governmental use. Thus by gaining levels you gain reputation is certain circles whether legitimate or otherwise, with people willing to sell you certain items. These items would still probably be filled with proprietary technology and/or be exceedingly difficult to procure making the price seem exorbitant for an otherwise mundane item.
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@Tryn: Why does it need to be written in the CRB? It may All be speculation, but an economy is an incredibly complex thing. IT seems that you are expecting an awful lot of people who are essentially only game designers. They are not economists or market specialists. They just want to build a fun game and make things with better abilities harder to get.
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Apologies beforehand for the extremely long post.

It sounds like the basic problem Tryn and a few others have is that the SF (or Pact Worlds) economy is nonlinear, and it's motivations are not explicitly detailed.
This does not preclude a logically maintained system, though I do agree with Vexies that the vehicles sections have more than their fair share of abnormalities and look forward to them being updated in the future.

Now it is always an option for the GM to explain the economy as he sees fit, or even alter it according to his whims or the groups wishes, but this eventually begins to diminish the point of a CRB.
As such, I commiserate with Smite and Vexies over the lack of a granular equipment upgrade system, though the fusion/armor-slot systems seem to be the beginnings of this and indeed provide grounds for much creativity from the GM.

In terms of realism, I would like to qualify my statements with an interesting bit of trivia: The T-Rex is said to have existed closer in time to modern civilization than to the Stegosaurus.
That is, in terms of SF millennia, our modern real-life world would have likely existed much closer to the Fantasy times of PF than to the current ~300AG of SF, so any comparisons to modern analogs should be taken with a grain of salt.

That being said, as Tryn implies, we judge everything based on our current norms so any system should at least try to appeal to those.
In that respect, modern economy and indeed the very physics underlying our universe are definitively Non-Linear. If linear systems were as prevalent as you seem apt to believe, we would have little need for the fields of statistics or economics studies as is.
The very concept you bemoan is due to the phenomenon of "diminishing returns", an underlying component of most aspects of reality. Athletes put in more and more work to see smaller and smaller improvements, programmers scan and trim large amounts of code to eke out marginal benefits, etc.

Really if there is a difference b/w modern economics and those in SF, it would be that standard material/labor costs are much lower, likely in part due to the addition of magic. As such, many low level (<5) items are fairly cheap, but higher level goods spike in price due to a combination of traditionally high R&D recoup costs (try looking into how much exactly any one piece of US military gear costs the government), and bureaucratic impositions (think EPA evolved over millennia, plus licensing/permitting fees for the individual or the equivalent cost to bypass the system through the black market, etc.)

Indeed as Metaphysician points out, the highest level gear may not be produced at all, but is only made to order after a series of vetting processes tied to your adventuring reputation and pocket book.

As for the quintessential question of how (or whether) starships factor into the economy, one must consider that SF society is vastly different than our own. So where now it might be odd to see multitudes walking around with open carry weapons, but "everyone" has a car; in SF the former isn't blinked at while streamlined public transport covers the latter.
Maybe it's easier to keep track of who owns/operates a ship than who has what weapons, so the fees associated with weapons scale faster to limit supply, and ships are believably "cheap". That is, the rules/laws of economics are similar, but the society that influences how those rules play out and act upon different categories of goods/services is fundamentally different from our expected norms.

Do remember that the Aeon Guard Specialist in the Alien Archives, an elite unit of a fearfully powerful modern empire, is only CR7 with appropriate gear. At the end of the day, no matter how the economy is supposed to work internally, adventurers have always been supposed to stand out from every other aspect of society in some way and their interactions with it and its economy to be far different than those of the rest of the world.

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Based on this vehicles and ships have to cost more then 1 Mio credits (because vehicles/ship should be more expensive then normal weapons). So player will NEVER have enough credits to buy a new ship (or so much that they can buy weapons far above their APL).

My Friend made a pretty good argument against this. IN the starfinder universe ships are supposed to be easily accessible. Possibly as accessible as cars or at least RVS. Now while you can find RVS in the multimillion dollar price range you could also find some closer to 30,000 to 40,000 dollars. Then we can look at real world weapon prices, specifically shotguns, a quick search says that one could buy a shotgun from the Bass Pro Shop for as Low as $210.00 and then you can find another one for $4200.00 at the same store, then you can find a beretta shotgun for $25,000.00 and even more exclusive shotguns for several hundred thousand dollars.

Okay seriously, as a person who actually shoots a real gun in real life, you don't actually change your grip when you reload. You let go with one hand, grab easily accessible ammo (probably in a pouch at your hip) and then put it in the weapon. This could easily be put into a single move action. And again to reiterate you do not actually change your hold on the weapon.
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What does everyone think the crew of the "Vox Machina" would look like? Obviously, the two systems used don't match perfectly, but it could be fun to design a starship crew based on the team.

Some of my ideas would be:

Vax'ildan- Operative with ghost specialization and a haste circuit implant and multiple weapon feat not sure how to add the paladin aspect maybe solarian with a darkness mote and the as of yet unseen divine champion archetype.

Vex'ahlia- possibly a drone mechanic with her trusty combat droid trn-kit and definitely the feats to use the bow and arrow. maybe some levels of operative later.

Percival- exo-cortex mechanic who has taken the feats to wield a sniper rifle maybe some later levels of technomancer to replace the hex ability.

Scanlan- Envoy/Mystic not sure which path. would have the profession street musician and be a feychild gnome.

Pike-Priest theme Healer mystic and armor manifestation solarian to have the golden light of saranrae and melee weapons. bleachling gnome.

Keyleth- xenodruid mystic

Grog- maybe soldier(blitz) or solarian(weapon?) he seems to be the hardest for me.