I know it'd be way down the road if it happens at all, but maybe they're saving the self-enhancement stuff for the evolutionist?
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Planning my lunchbreak tomorrow specifically around PDF drop time. The creativity of SF2's class design has really impressed me so far, jank be damned.
Two things I'm hoping for: 1. The mechanic should feel extremely competent in their chosen area of expertise (instead of being constantly one-upped in the skill department by everyone else). 2. The technomancer, by being able to monkey with gameplay assumptions nobody else is allowed to touch, should feel just a little bit like cheating.
Squark, I think you're right to raise an eyebrow at the powercreep here. If I had to guess the logic behind busting it so severely, I'd probably say that the "ranged meta" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. For instance, getting into melee should be both riskier and more difficult in theory (how often will charge and parry actually pop off?), and fleeing is slightly less of an encounter ender when it's easier to pop back into the fight from a distance. The charge and parry also lock you into a two-handed, sword-and-pistol fighting style, which is a bit gimmicky and expensive to maintain. The fact that you can only personally demoralize each enemy once per combat is also a natural limiter on how effective Holo-Roger can be, especially if whatever you just demoralized beats you in initiative. Press Gang the Soul is checked by being tied to both your spellcasting DC and melee attacks, and few classes are good at both. So, there are some natural caps and tradeoffs here. The question is, are they enough? If we were looking at PF2 exclusively, definitely not: this is such a slam dunk for dexy, charismatic martials that it's tough to resist, and it straight-up improves upon a lot of similar standby features (rogues and swashbucklers are screaming). This is powercreep. On an archetype. Before the full game is even out yet. But looking at SF2 alone, or the 2e engine as a whole? Maybe not. It's hard to say without putting it in context with everything else SF2 has to offer. It seems like it'd be great on operatives and envoys, but a tough sell on other classes thanks to how demanding it is on your playstyle. Can enemies cope with it? No idea! The only monsters I really drilled down into were the laser wolves. But if they get similar action compression, then it's fine; the playing field just needs to stay level. As for cross compatibility, yeah, I think some jank was to be expected. Mystics and witchwarpers already powercrept PF2 casters, the operative dethroned several ranged martials, and the prevalence of creatures with both ridiculous mobility and ranged attacks at low levels made it tough for low-level PF2 characters to keep up. Homebrew balance tweaks seemed like an inevitability long before Paizo ever showed off the Space Pirate. I personally don't mind a little extra work as a GM (every other cross-compatible system family I've played up to this point has required some finessing to make everything fit), but not being able to blanket drag and drop could be a significant annoyance for some.
Over on the Starfinder 2e subreddit, Justnobodyfqwl commented on how the newly revealed Space Pirate archetype looks unapologetically powerful and exciting in a way that's a noticeable break from how PF2e often balances its content. And I agree: the archetype rolls a better version of the level 7 Battle Cry skill feat into its dedication at level 2, grants a two-action stride and MAPless double strike at level 4, a combination of Nimble Dodge and Opportune Riposte at level 6, and an auto-heightening innate spell that you can sustain via striking at level 8. Wow!! And it's all done in the spirit of the fantasy with plenty of imagination and silliness on the side. It's delightful, it's fun, and it's STRONG. Too strong, perhaps? I don't know--it's definitely busted for PF2's standards--but balance is relative. It's likely that the melee-oriented feats will be more difficult to take advantage of if most enemies would rather avoid you. However, if everything in SF2 has this kind of oomph? Then I think we're in for a real treat. Doubly so if enemies have the same level of mechanical swagger; I wanna see rockstar features like Broadside Charge and Pirate's Parry all over Alien Core. But if it's just this archetype, or it's just players with these toys, then SF2 could wind up with a very stale, lopsided meta. Regardless, when I showed this archetype to my wife, she immediately started workshopping a character while dropping hints she wanted a pirate-themed campaign in the future. If that's not effective design, then I don't know what is. What are your thoughts, gang?
Universal replayability is a dream come true! Nonetheless, I'm right there with Lavabeing in hoping that each scenario has at least a little room for variation. Stat blocks right in the text instead of way at the back should be nice, but I hope they're formatted nicely and don't spill over onto the next page. The coolest abilties tend to be at the bottom of the block, and if they wind up on a seperate page, I'm way more likely to forget about them.
Because SF2e will share the "alternate ancestry boosts" rule with PF2e, any ancestry and class combo should be at least viable (if a little suboptimal). This means that I could play my favorite ancestry and class at the same time--shatori and vanguard, respectively--without nerfing myself into the ground. I'd love to see both adapted to 2e: shatori have enough interesting lore and mechanics to fill out a feat tree, and the vanguard with its entropy point minigame feels like it would function beautifully within the 3-action system. But that's just my dream character, which doesn't matter to me too much as someone who prefers to GM. So, my biggest hope is for a robust catalog of interesting enemies, especially intelligent humanoids who can fill different combat and narrative roles, such as those found within SF1e's profressional/NPC families and PF2e's NPC Core. Weird alien monsters are cool (and I love how unique they are, compared to how much PF steals from folklore and D&D), but I need to be able to tell my war stories and urban mysteries. And I especially need statblocks across all levels: PF2e has this nasty habit of not printing enough high level material, so all parties get funneled into fighting the same dragons and fiends at high levels unless you're willing to participate in some pretty aggressive homebrew. Basically, interesting player options mean nothing without equally interesting challenges for those players to face, and I honestly don't care that much for pre-written adventures, far preferring to make my own. I will pay all of the money for the Starfriends to inject six billion stat blocks directly into my veins.
SROs, holograms, maybe finally playable anacites... There are plenty of dope synthetics I'd love to see in that book.
Ivis and Katrina's stories were really inspiring. They really show how important it is to accept, support, encourage, and believe in each other.
I read both PF1's Distant Worlds (a delicious buffet of pulpy goodness) and SF1's Pact Worlds (which expanded Golarion's solar system by leaps and bounds while still preserving its history and pulpy soul), so I'm pretty excited to see the canon carried forward one more time. I'm also, like, really eager to compare the six new ancestries to their 1e versions and my PF2 favorites, just to see if I can get a nice taste of how the edition's gonna shape out.
The Black Lives Matter humble bundle in 2020. I'd dabbled a little before that--bought the PF1 beginner box to play with friends around 2014-ish, but didn't quite click with it--but something about 2e made sense to me. Stayed because the game did everything D&D did, but better, ESPECIALLY monster design! PF2 creatures are just so much more interesting from a tactical standpoint, and the encounter balancing tools actually work!
I'm glad to see Paizo continuing to support and uplift Black voices. Also, the Griot anthology looks really cool!
The OG technomancer got some beautiful updates in Starfinder Enhanced. I hope those updates make it into the core class concept for 2e, even though the technomantic talents will definitely need a rework both to fit within 2e's guidelines and divest from OGL spell schools. Being able to (de)buff other people's casting is so cool, and it's a largely open niche. Also, I doubt we'll get either until much later in the edition, but the three alternate subclasses--divine tutor, drone technomancy, and junk technomancy--are so flavorful. Junk technomancy in particular sounds like a nice way to make a funny gish. I have a personal little conspiracy theory that the runesmith and necromancer helped influence and were influenced by whatever the mechanic is turning out to be, as one spawns a mass of minions while the other enhances party gear. I have no idea whether it'll be a blend of these (and other) classes (like the envoy mashes up commander/investigator/bard/rogue), or if it--like soldiers and solarians--will be its own thing entirely.
These are all great changes that should make the game feel a lot smoother and more aggressive, which is awesome. Don't forget to buff the damage output of certain creatures to match the new weapon baselines, too! Anyway, all hail Drip-Chk, our new fashion overlord. The bisexual ombre certainly makes him look less Asmodean.
These contributor spotlights are always a treat. I love supporting indie developers, artists, and authors whenever I can (and God knows mankind cannot live on freelance alone), so it's nice to be able to put a name to each work and follow up with their other projects. Also, glad to see that Sayre has new projects to look forward to, and I hope things get better for his family.
He deleted his twitter and reddit accounts as well, and was not listed as a staff member on the "impossible" playtest. Obviously, it's not our place to snoop--the dude's entitled to his privacy--but whatever happened probably wasn't great.
I hope Sayre's okay. Talent aside, he seemed like a really cool guy.
I wonder if the necromancer will get some cross-tradition spell poaching, a la the psychic and animist?
Okay, so prime takeaway seems to be that enemies aren't keeping up with players in regards to detection and mobility. Also Edna's riding the struggle bus with the solarian, but he's been posting about that elsewhere already. I feel like I might wind up banning unlimited flight/invisibility in my own games, because they seem primed to create a really unhealthy relationship between the players and the GM. Like with any other cheese strat, either the GM puts up with it and watches game balance simply collapse, or counters it and makes all that player investment useless. Might be better to just pretend those options don't exist.
I wanna thank David for sharing the baykok with us. It made for a challenging encounter and lovely evening of spontaneous research afterwards (we just HAD to learn more!). Sometimes I have mixed feelings about turning other people's mythology into guys you can beat up, but other times I'm really touched by the pieces of themselves that each author and artist includes.
Julzakama has a couple appearances, I think: he calls the party to check in on them and give them a new adventure hook once circumstances cause the first to fall through, then shows up at the end for a cute little epilogue. He isn't exactly necessary, but if you cut him you'll have to find some other way to nudge the party into/through the sandbox section.
Is that the final cover? Because if so, the retro-inspired framing is good enough to make me consider going for these instead of a subscription.
Just like player characters, an NPC's cantrip rank is equal to half their level, rounded up.
The Starfinder 2e Galaxy Guide is set to release in May 2025, a few months ahead of the core rulebook.
Ooh! Making a stat block for Jean Jacket has been on my to-do list since I first saw the movie! I like how many different mechanics are cross-referenced in this write-up, as it makes it clear you know the system really well! I'm surprised you didn't do anything with JJ's "final form," though. Would that be better represented by a seperate stat block, or just swapping some abilities?
Teridax, it's likely that the sweeping weapon changes you'd like to see are going to take more time and effort than some mid-playtest errata drops. That said, I agree that I don't like the design approach of kneecapping gear, then creating a class to fix that gear. It narrows build possibilities a little too much, I think. Then again, the two major shooty-shoot classes being weird little offshoots of the historic gunslinger makes some thematic sense to me, so... I get how we got here, I think?
I'm surprised so many people are having trouble with chapter 2's organization. Having everything sorted by location made sense to me, as it's a sandbox where event triggers can happen completely out of order or not at all. Is it because everyone is so used to linear adventures from Paizo? Are people not reading the whole thing before running it?
After thoroughly enjoying some of Thursty's various nasties from Rotgrind, I'm really excited to get absolutely wrecked by whatever lurks in this adventure. Let's rock.
Something about the idea of mythic ancestries makes me feel squicky. It seems... I dunno... bio-essentialist? Eugenicsy? It just... flattens all these diverse cultures down and makes some of them inherently better than others in an even more exaggerated way than is expected for an RPG with mechanically differentiated species options.
On scaling: PC and enemy stats actually scale at about the same rate as each other, so a +1 at level 20 is just as valuable as a +1 at level 2.
One of my friends just starting running a WotR 2e conversion, so this is dropping just in time. I'm excited to see how these surprisingly simple tweaks (outside of the archetypes themselves, which we haven't seen yet) impact overall game feel.
Hold up, Perpdepog, did you say weapon dragons?Behold, the face of the future! Thank you for introducing me to robot dragon build-a-bear. My life is better now that I have this knowledge.
Hold up, Perpdepog, did you say weapon dragons?
There's a lot of discussion about player options for SF2, but not much about toys for GMs. Which is a shame, because a good roster of creatures is essential for any combat-heavy, crunchy RPG! So, tell me about your favorite SF1 monsters and miscreants and what makes them cool! Let's build our own dream version of the first 2e Alien Archive together! For me, I really loved the various humanoid foes in Interstellar Species and Pact Worlds. They covered a lot of campaign roles and level ranges, meaning there was a fantastic selection of options for when you wanted to do something more social and less dungeon-crawly. I also think anacites are adorable, and think 2e presents some unique opportunities to bring forward their various solar-powered and networking abilities.
Monster-on-monster combat is a delight, enough so that I wish more people tried it (Jason Bulmahn's MAUL series--already linked in this thread--is a great example). I'd also suggest familiarizing yourself with skill actions, as those are the things players tend to forget or have the most questions about. Loot, too, takes some getting used to, as there's a lot of it, some of which is required to keep PC stats on track. It's still kind of a tricky spot for me, lol, and I've been running the same homebrew campaign for three years!
Replying to Teridax: I absolutely agree on needing baked-in, universal options for breaking people out of cover. Shootouts should not be boring; you need pressure and movement. I can see your point on enemies having lighter HP totals proportional to how good they are at sniping (and that's a good balance point overall), but the monsters are what I'm here for as a GM, so I'm nervous about making that the primary solution. Like, it's not that creatures are too bulky, it's that all the SF2 weapons are either awkward or wimpy. I don't think there's any harm in tuning them to be a smidge stronger. This way, better tech would feel like an actual improvement, and anachronistic characters could still feel good, as they'd get to use them too. Your point about not wanting operatives to outperform fighters is noted, as well. I think part of what helps in that regard is that operatives are pretty fail defensively, with worse saving throws, lower health, and fewer options should an enemy get into melee with them. And while it's true that, as you said, getting to them is not free, they'll probably have a really bad time against anything that survives long enough to do it. I also think it's important to note that operatives are only doing damage most of the time, as apart from Hair Trigger (which will likely be nerfed), they lack any lockdown or crowd control potential.
This has been a really enjoyable read. I'm glad that part 2 is turning out to be as fun in practice as it is on paper. Filing away your notes on too many enemy immunities for when I finally run this myself.
I mean, you could build a funny melee envoy if you wanted to. Lead from the Front gives you medium armor, so dex is less of a must. Get a fly speed and you can wrassle anything. But yeah, I feel like choice of dex or strength would be much better than locking each martial class into a specific stat. Make a weapon trait that makes you aim with strength instead of dex for the heavies; it's much cleaner than whatever the hell else is going on.
I really like most of the suggestions here, except for decreasing enemy defenses. As a GM of both systems, I don't want my cool aliens to instantly fold against a barbarian. Increasing the damage output for everyone would probably feel a lot cooler. Like, say we did actually reduce everyone's defenses, right? We'd still have the problem of rolling a 1 on damage, which feels wimpy regardless of how many HP the other guy has. Maybe add dex or half-dex back into damage as a special treat? Or something. Hell, anything to make them competitive with the stone-aged bows and arrows that still feel better to use most of the time, preferably other than a bunch of weird caveats baked into class design.
Casters needing dex is nothing new, but I feel like soldiers should at least be able to substitute strength for dex when wielding a two-handed gun or something. Hell, just make strength their key stat and give them intimidating prowess for free; it'd clean up a lot of the class's jank.
Yes girl go orc mode!!
Considering how many melee classes in PF2 have good gap closing options (barbarian, fighter, monk), I'm surprised the solarian doesn't. It's a weird oversight.
I think there's some definite validity to these criticisms. So much of the soldier feels like it's trying to make two jank ideas (area fire and base CON) work that it leaves little in the class budget for cooler stuff.
Since others have already talked about narrative anchoring, I decided to tackle this question by putzing around with the game's math. As The Raven Black said, level is a simplified abstraction of combat prowess. There is a predictable range of numbers that go with each level that tells us how good a given creature is at killing dudes and avoiding death. The abstraction isn't perfect--in published adventures, big picture consistency is often thrown out in the name of nailing the correct situational feel--but thanks to the encounter building guidelines and actual play experience, we can pretty easily extract a "rule" for what level says about overall power. The rule is as follows: something two levels higher than something else is twice as powerful. We can see this reflected in XP values, as every two level jump between creatures results in double the XP, suggesting these creatures are doing twice the work within the same encounter. Put another way, one guy at level 8 can take on two guys at level 6 in a fair fight (and four guys at level 4, and so on). A commoner, the most basic type of guy in the world, is a level -1 creature, which is equal to one minus two. This means that, at level 1, your typical PC--with smart tactics and a bit of luck--could fight two completely average guys at once and win. Her presence on the battlefield is worth twice that of a random, average dude. By level 7, she will be worth 16 average dudes, and over a thousand by level 19. I know it's kind of silly to reduce level down to how many guys you could take in a fight, but that's precisely what it's measuring on the GM side, so why not? It lets you guesstimate the kind of jobs PCs should be doing based on how many normal guys it would take to accomplish the same. So, at level 1, a PC adventurer is twice as efficient at solving your giant rat problem (and half as likely to get killed) as your neighbor Jim would be. Get a group of 4 of them, and they're removing rats with the efficiency of Jim's entire household (including the in-laws).
In Chapter 2, there's no map of1 Little Akiton. Has there ever been one? I'm okay with making one myself (and feel like I have to just so I don't lose track of all the locations/NPCs/hooks), but it'd be nice to have a place to start.
Oop, contemplatives stealth-confirmed! That means of the six ancestries available in the upcoming Galaxy Guide, we know four of them: contemplatives, kalos, dragonkin, and astrozoans. I wonder who the remaining two will be?
Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but wasn't this supposed to come out today? It's listed as "unavailable."
Yeah, I'm pretty sure nobody would complain if wizards got some buffs (and I'm surprised Paizo's been digging their heels in about it for so long). The question is, which buffs? More/better focus spells? More forgiving spell prep? More unique feats? Some kind of extra, passive oomph a la dangerous sorcery? Something's missing from the class, I feel.
Since Paizo is apparently "listening to your feedback on the potential impact of these licenses on community tools and websites," I want to add my voice as another person who would donate my books and move on if it became difficult and/or impossible to openly create community tools or run a podcast/YT channel. Paizo's games are as popular as they are due to their ease of access. That access is possible through the hard work of dedicated fans, not the company itself. Don't do a Games Workshop. |
