Jamie Charlan's page

There's a clause right now in the onslaught sniper that prevents you from ever dealing more damage than a normal blast with its own effect modifiers would, save for the multi-hit onslaught blast bonus.

An onslaught blast can deal no more damage to a single target than normal for a blast of that type from a kineticist of the onslaught sniper’s level (for example, a 7th level onslaught sniper using a simple energy blast cannot deal more than 4d6+½ Con to an individual creature with their onslaught blast, plus whatever effects might alter a kinetic blast’s damage)

What's the intent here? It seems to have been an accepted suggestion, from the comments? Because if it's to make sure nothing ever deals as much as a regular kineticist would have, it worked. The entire archetype falls on its face for damage as soon as Empower Metakinesis comes online, since the archetype does not get abilities that would improve a kinetic blast's damage, just more blasts, and those just hit a damage cap.

Against multiple targets you're better off using regular form infusions to pull it off as well, you were going to pay the burn costs either way, and Twin Metakinesis isn't capped at "but just the first blast gets to do any damage".

I love the style and feel of the onslaught sniper over all, but that limitation just seems to spit on it and makes sure it's a trap. Am I missing something here?

The mechanics should be properly balanced so that we don't even need the big 6 in the first place.

You don't want it to be like those (very badly done) corruption ratings. At its very base, for many people of higher sanity than 'adventurers'* getting a cyberlimb can be the difference between life as a cripple and - depending on the quality/tech-level - being almost normal and fully functional again.

The majority of people should have no difficulty spending the rest of their lives without some inexorable decline into psychosis: *most* people are fairly resilient, at least mentally, and will just maybe get one "your body has changed a little" talk and get on with their lives. Having a problem or a hiccup isn't supposed to make you a chronically sobbing mess or mindless killbot.

People learn to walk again, people learn to use wheelchairs and prosthetics; most people don't collapse into suicidal depression or murderfrenzies at the drop of a hat.

Something like cyberpsychosis shouldn't really be a risk until you're reaching brain-in-jar levels, and might possibly require an additional stress factor such as "the corp that did it has a killswitch" added in.

*AKA those freaks who decide being knee-deep-in-the-dead exploring space stations which had gone full eye-of-terror on the sector is just "I work this tuesday"

Even computer cores in Star Trek (at least as of TNG era an later) use subspace FTL around the core itself and the optical data network because the physical limitations of lightspeed had become a bottleneck.

Each core was bloody massive, too; a Galaxy-Class had 3 for redundancy (not surprising given how much computers blow up from every touch!) and each is fatter and at least as tall as the M/ARA too.

I wonder if the name is short for something else...like V'ger in the original Star Trek movie....

Damned Unimatrix Command Ships..

Let's say you've got one of various... alternative burn types, such as the Gambler's, the Legendary Kineticist's and so on.

Does Balefire Infusion's Burn stack to those, or does it create its own standard-burn stack that would have combined with a regular kineticist's?

*Plasma* ah, image reminds me of how I loathe what pathfinder did in their tech guide.

"Hey, because WBL, feat entry taxes and needing two artifacts just to craft some more batteries isn't enough, let's make your damage not "and" but "half and half", so that someone with resistances or immunities gets ALL of them applied and stacked against your shots!"

Let's *not* do that to plasma this time.

These two ain't from me, just found, but plenty of good stuff:
http://imgur.com/gallery/xiTpT
http://imgur.com/gallery/TehO1

They'd have to scale back the level of caricature the golarion goblins are, though.

It better not be ewok analogues or we're going to have to glass a lot of worlds.

Is this the time I tell him that the game already has a Hunter class?

No this is where we have the low-levels draw straws to find out who'll get to try our newest attempt at replicating that tiny ball mode thing the hunter has.

The last few attempts had rather gross results....

Windows XP, ME, and the abandoned Windows 9.

Could be worse. Could be ME, Vista Home, and 10 Home with nothing opted out.

I want to see elven starships made of trees.

It feels more 'real' a thing if it's not called starwood. Chances are the wood would've been around for centuries or millenia before that particular use was discovered after all.

"Wait, they made the hull with what?"
"Turns out feetbreeze is really well suited to keeping an atmosphere in despite all the temperature changes, or something like that, they said"
"... the stuff we use to keep our soles from smelling rank?"
"who knows what they'll come up with next"

Just to note, on the subject of fighters/automation:
Often part of the cost (not counting the colossal markups caused by those writing up the offers still working for the companies they're contracting) of military vehicles comes precisely from the automation involved. Yes you save space, mass and manpower by having a computer handle it, but you *do* need to stick a better control system than if you can just have someone doing it. This extends from weapons (a guy in the back literally chucking bombs out the side was eventually replaced by mechanical hardpoints, and now electronically controlled internal bays or the automated defenses on large ships which can be set to freely engage at-will in an emergency) to navigation and everything else.

Thing is, you do have to pay for those functions. You CAN have a fighter with hyperdrives, but compared to having a dedicated engineer at his station, it's more expensive on initial purchase, and harder to fix in-flight. There's good, there's bad.

So a gestalt of three systems then.

Keep in mind that the void is a horrible place as much for us planetbound people as it is for our machinery. When something's built to function well for substantial durations in space, its crafters have already attained a level of knowledge and understanding that ensures any failure to function due to environmental factors is a major cockup, and not "well how could they ever have suspected".

First, if ships are capable of two-way atmospheric interface, then something like the plane of air should not be problematic. You've got propulsion capable of getting you off a planet, and weak subjective gravity: aerodynamic drag becomes your only real limitation there.

Water requires sealed hulls or other ways of avoiding infiltration. The greatest danger, pressure, would be a deadly condition to characters as well, but again the plane of water itself has no objective gravity and thus 'weightless', which is why characters only need to worry about water-breathing there and not inifnite crushing. One problem not present in the void would be infiltration, so something like current NASA designs would need drastic changes from the current norms; you can't just expect the medium to provide gaps and insulation for you.

Earth's obviously a mobility issue, but that means travel through it would be a factor of either phasing technologies or simple firepower; if you can disintegrate a path, just glass your way to wherever.

Fire, Positive and Negative are more problematic. Fire means a constant influx of energy that needs to be dealt with by the vessel, and the latter two tend to just permeate across or through things, and require something to block them directly. This is mainly where weapon and shielding technologies come in; 30 fire damage per round every round with no respite is what you need to be able to handle above and beyond your regular dissipation requirements.

Pos/Neg-Dominant planes are of no real risk to the ship itself, but exposure to either will rapidly decimate any crew exposed to the plane's energies.

Here's the thing though:
Every last one of these conditions is something that by pathfinder standards a mid-level adventurer can handle - even mundane martials, not only understands but can handle, whether with magic, supernatural shielding, or even natural (Ex) methods. Every last one of these conditions *HAS* to be something a typical ship can handle to a degree even without major upgrades, otherwise the party will eventually have to leave the thing behind because *they* can just fly through flares and their ship can't.

Gravity means you do need your engines functional, and particularly bad quality engines might be at risk if something happens.

In pretty much any planar condition short of "inside a star" (also deep fire-elemental zones) the ship itself should be able to handle itself just fine, or that means someone's cut some serious corners in the design: That's what you get for buying Flaypple products assembled in Caina by nervestapled halflings who can no longer kill themselves, for coppers on the platinum, and still paying top-latinum for the thing because of the brand name.

Simply put; if ships aren't tougher than their bloody OCCUPANTS, then why do they even exist in the first place? (this is why we'll need them to be capable of improvement so they don't get utterly surpassed in damage by the party bard by level 11 and resilience by a naked wizard with no spells in an AMF by level 12) Good design necessary. Absolutely necessary. Mark that down, devs; it's an easy one to screw right up.

Of course, the real danger would be if you take significant damage. The heat shouldn't be an issue, though you may need to keep an eye when firing in combat, but it's when your shields are down and hull breached that the conditions are suddenly where they should not. Like deck 5. Deck 5 has 40 demons in it now. That's four tens. And that's terrible.

The biggest stacks of skeletons are usually exactly what that organization screams against the loudest.

If everyone else is allowed to eat pixies, you're not special. You're not above all the other pixie eaters... and most importantly you're not above the law. So eating pixies should definitely be illegal. It's sort of a Highlander complex, "there can be only one" and all that.

So for most races, governments and corporate entities, unless they're directly producing a service or product and thus profit on the opposition to something (the average religion vs undead for example), then whatever they're most morally against officially is what they're most likely to be caught doing in an airport bathroom but left unpunished due to being an anointed saint or an elected official.

Also useful for spotting flaws; any loose laws. As history has pretty much consistently shown us with few if ever any exceptions; whatever the sickest, worst abuse the wording of a law could possibly lead to is usually precisely the intended goal to begin with. Loopholes aren't accidental, those caught red-handed simply shrug their shoulders and pretend they didn't know. Somehow ignorance of the law IS an excuse, but only as long as you're in office or wearing a badge and uniform.

Say hypothetically that someone had no damn clue what a chakat was, but couldn't risk clicking on the link because while nice old boring text is perfectly fine, any 'images' showing up would basically get caught on camera and result in job loss.

Hypothetically of course.

If such were the case, what might one soon retroactively never-wanted-to-know about the absolute worst parts of this 'chakat' stuff, that one could be told on here using the worksafe thing that is pure text?

You could say that what's 'reasonable' and 'realistic' should be within the bounds of its own setting and not our lives.

If the world is full of wyverns, sharks that swim through rocks, titanic humanoids that don't collapse under their own weight, and of f***ing deities and dragons, then "normal human" is something that evolved under THOSE laws of physics as they are, not under ours.

Certainly, one half the classes should not be restricted to real-world limitations just because "they're using per-day spell slots" (especially when those haven't run out the way they pretend they do since 3.0), nor should the other half be allowed to stick their **** in the very fabric of reality while pretending they're playing the same game.

The "it's all about as many attacks as possible" also needs to go. Snipers and the like need to be viable; "vital strike" is anything but.

Pointmen in spycraft could be built heavily around that.

That's got nothing to do with leadership and everything to do with decent targeting.

What, did you think you'd *pray* for a "flamestrike" in Starfinder?

As a fun example we have the engineer (and also as a special on one of the gear-set compression phasers) in STO: They have two versions of Orbital Strike as a high level ability. The first is an instantaneous blast that'll cover a wide radius - usually enough damage to wipe out anything short of a boss right then and there which means you eliminate one group of enemies every two minutes... And there's a trait that offers a 'chaser beam' mode that's lower powered but will keep melting down everything (if things under it die it'll move at decent pace towards the next nearest enemies it can fry up) for a good 8-10 seconds; far more total damage though. The damage type depends on your faction!

Either is perfectly usable even deep underground or against enemy aircraft, which is perfectly sensible when you consider these things were already slagging asteroids at range almost 300 years earlier.

Colossal differences in class design quality and narrative power need to be gone and stay gone; if that means complete loss of pathfinder compatibility so be it.

No space kenders.

And let's try not to shoehorn 'lessons' too heavy-handedly with all the races and what not; the only thing "afterschool specials" ever did was ruin our hopes of getting to watch cartoons and force us to choose between the weather channel and the news.

We're still deep in lameness territory when you turn "prepare x spell in x slot" to "spell slots per day" (you know who did spell slots per level per day? FF1 on the NES).

It also, let's be honest, has no sci-fi feel to it. Psionic power points fit that much better, but as do things like Shadowrun's drain mechanics or even just an action-based charging system like the Gambler Kineticist basically does (despite the naming scheme in that archetype it's more of a turbine you spool up than some sort of game of dice - pun intended)

Besides, as we've very painfully experienced for decades now, balancing "but you can do it all day" vs "but you can only do it once per day! well okay five times later on, and also more times thanks to your casting stat, oh and there's items to increase how many are stored too at the same time" has resulted in ... "disparities".

We quite simply need a better, cleaner system that fits something other than Dying Earth thematically.

That seems needlessly anti-grenade. It needed to hit against people in the blast radius, you halve the damage on those hit (and nothing on those missed), and THEN they get to reflex-half the result?

Did anyone even *take* damage from grenades after all that? Seems to me at that point you just pocket the thing and laugh as it goes off...

Or a ship or FTL drive called Glenn.

Definitely not a unit of measurement, though. It doesn't sound right for those.

Don't forget the 'chunky salsa' effect. That one's always fun.

As for grenades, that's not exactly 'randomness' but science. They will usually burst from the ground (larger shells are a different story), so you're doing this to both minimize the exposed cross-section, and to sacrificially have your feet and legs in between shrapnel and your moistest critty bits.

However, surviving and not being horrifyingly debilitated or maimed are.. not exactly the same thing unless the damage system is as abstracted as in here.

Sure, why not. Tenthed.

I'd certainly like for it to stop working in those particular conditions when I put a phaselocking railgun slug through their foreheads, that's for sure.

"lol DC 14 reflex half that can never be raised on weapons you can't even fire once let alone afford till at least level 10 lol" Is rather insulting as well. That kind of thing should never even have to make it to playtesting before getting caught, let alone printed as-is. Someone should've been smacked upside the head and quite clearly was not.

Axis could devise a better system, but Hell is going to be better at selling their system to the mortals.

I dunno, I mean, Axis could just chuck itself straight at the planet to get its point across...

It's in the same vein as the temporary non-phaselockable teleportation that characters with evasion perform when dodging a reflex-half in the middle of an empty room with no exits.

Actually what would help is less binary status effects, and stacking rather than entirely separate ones.

Rather than a spell that paralyzes the target and thus either never works or instantly ends the entire encounter, have it be a progression with slow. Rather than instantly winning low level battles with sleep, have it run through fatigue,etc.

When you're significantly more powerful than the target, or specialize i that effect type, or they're particularly vulnerable, or maybe if you crit, you can go much faster through the stack, but it helps ensure that you don't have the 1/0 problem of "I-Win button vs completely worthless waste of time.
Even resistances/immunities can be tuned much better this way. Take Fatigue>>Exhaustion>>Sleep for example:
Someone immune to fatigue may very well simply be allowed to operate until exhaustion without the penalties.
Someone immune to exhaustion but not fatigue may have a higher 'red zone' where they've been fatigued for a while but keep going with the same penalties until they finally drop.
Resistance could give a buffer by one 'step' or the like in addition-to or instead of better saves.

This also gives a chance to things like poisons, which tend to either be instantaneous death or outright ignored as never having a point by PCs; if you can *stack* poison to shorten the frequency without shortening the total time (in other words it ticks more and more often), kinda like FFXIII did it, it could work well.

Should be more than 4 if you're spending all day training various skills and *not* studying magic for twice the starting age modifiers...

Outside the US, though, it's the exact opposite.
The GM goes "that's ten miles away" and people kinda blank for a second, then try to figure out what that equates to. Can't even really picture a 50ft rope, we just have it marked down because that's the item, and the GM will always tell you either that's enough or you'd need 2 or 3 of them put end to end. You've got reason to believe he'd say that no matter how long they were, but he'll catch on if you buy string.

It's 15.24 meters by the way. They're usually more likely found in 20 meter lengths if sold here.

Grams are nice and precise and really easy to scale up for large batches.

That's how the rest of the world feels about imperial.
"What the hell is that 113? Above boiling??? No wait, USA." And then we have to subtract 32 and divide the result by 1.8. OH. It's 45.

Even the cheap thermometer function on my father's flipphone has decimals, though.

So, I mean, it's not like you aren't able to divide each degree in at least ten with even old crap from radioshack.

And, somehow, you think that temperatures going from 18-35C in summer and -5 to -40 in winter are... somehow *not* showing any nuance or indication of danger in any way?

** spoiler omitted **

To much of the world that's exactly how imperial units read like nowadays.

Yes, I said that already. You can buy the real 25mm battlemats. You can go get one in montreal, but you need to check carefully because there'll be 1" in there just as often mixed in since most of them come from the US (shipping costs after all). Last time I bought one the only visible difference without grabbing a ruler was that one of them said 25mm (1") and the other said 1" (25mm).

But like I said, battlemats keep imperial usable; it's when you're not using a mat that metric becomes that much more valuable.

BTW; 1.5m is more often used as that's 4.92ft, as opposed to 2m (6.56)

The regular 1" battlemat IS effectively a 25mm battlemat. You get a teeny bit of leeway (1mm every 2.5th square/hex) because it's not perfect, but for most purposes since you're counting square/hex spaces rather than true distances it does the job. 'real' ones are also available of course, and honestly you won't be able to tell the difference if playing pathfinder, so it's really a matter of proper measures.

Your minis will fit no problem, which is why we tolerate the american mats up here (pathfinder keeps to "5x = 1 square, so just divide by 5 and count the squares"), but will use proper metric measurements without one like if playing battlefleet gothic or infinity or something.

The conversion is particularly healthy when dealing with travel distances or long firing ranges, as it's always 10, 10, 10

Well firstly, 1" is just a teeny bit above 2.5cm (it's 25.4mm), so for most gaming purposes that need a battlemat you're fine. We use feet when we must since it doesn't matter too much as long as you stick to JUST feet, like on a battlemat playing pathfinder (5 per square, and all measures divisible into 5' squares anyways)

Squares will usually represent 1m (bit over 3.2') when in metric games at the personal scale. Larger tactical scales usually use hexes and will usually have their own value, like, say, 50m (Heavy Gear regular combat scale), or 250m (HG air combat scale) or 500m (space).

The big advantage is that no matter what conversion in metric is always mindlessly simple, even if you're trying to figure things out between two completely different scales. Also great is that something like a 1m-across 'square' makes two guys dagger-fighting a bit less silly in adjacent squares, as well as one's zone of control to prevent people from rushing by you.

Canada mostly just uses imperial because one of our largest trading partners insists on it. It's almost entirely metric, except when your aunt exclaims she lost a whole 40 pounds (as opposed to that time she gained a mere 20kg) or when you get something that's obviously meant for the US market because we all look alike to Chinese manufacturers.

All the official measurements are in metric and have been for some time.

"We don't want to change therefore we're right" is... sad.

You do realize that the majority of the players are used to the imperial system? (Don't call it gibberish, please. It's not that hard for one-dimensional units.

Is the majority of players actually fully just the US? Because most of the people I play with are ... well... not. I think one guy on roll20's American?

Now let me show you some real gibberish!

1 foot is 12 inches. 3 feet is 1 yard. 22 yards is 1 chain. 1 furlong is 10 chains. 1 mile is 8 furlongs or 5280 feet.

1 fathom is 6.08 feet. Too clear? Alright, it's 2.02667 yards. YEAH. 100 of those makes a cable! And 10 cables makes a nautical mile. What? Yes, The normal mile wasn't boaty enough, so it's 6080 feet not 5280. But that's not good enough for the british navy (at least the americans didn't take that one with them): Nay, a fathom has to be 6 feet... despite the rest of those calculations! AWWWIGHT! YEAH! LOGIIIIC!

Mmmmmm... Base-10 measurements...

Those victims of a retro-chronal causation looking for their home like little lost puppies, yes.

It would be a real tearjerker if they weren't dimension-eating planetbusters that assimilate entire ecosystems just from being thought about too close.

Mid-Level. Teleport is a 6th level spell. You can certainly afford a Teleport Without Error scroll or the like at least once per adventure, or at worst at level 11 the appropriate classes can hand-cast the regular 'port themselves. There's also double-planeshifting, once you've got a proper focus to start up. It's slot-heavy, but available from 9th.

You wanna lock down the shenanigans, I don't disagree; but "beam down to the planet" first needs "snap fingers, bit of garnish, done" out of the way before the problem's actually taken care of, especially if it happens to be expensive (WBL was a bigger gatekeeper than caster level often enough for such utilities)

As long as it can be done magically ('compatibility' as a drawback, one might say) then having full-fledged transporter rooms and replicators (same tech after all) is really not an issue, since at least those are already more restricted by "it's on the ship".

As long as someone can just finger themselves and wave a wand, there being a technological version is not much of a problem.

Besides, there's likely to be plenty of dimension anchor systems or terraport interdiction fields or whatever anyways!

Alternatively battlelords versions:
Defense/dodging is a mostly passive penalty to accuracy, but generally won't help all THAT much (still, turning 8 hits into 7 hits might keep you alive rather well with all that armor on).

Your armor will generally-speaking stop all damage from making its way to your own HP, and if heavy enough will also halve the incoming damage (before its own threshold applies) from lower tech weapons (basic lasers and powder weapons with calibers smaller than an HMG) as well.

Armor has Threshold (amount of damage directly prevented), absorption layers, and integrity. The second part are the actual armor plates,etc, while the latter is the framework holding it together. Replacing absorption polymers is cheap and easy, but they're literally HP on that location. Integrity is lost from more damaging attacks depending on the weapon type (plasma and the such are particularly evil there) and if integrity runs out, the armor falls apart at that location no matter how much AP was left after the hit is calculated.

Lasers ignore AP, but deal less damage to begin with and you can buy laser-specific AP layers to fill up some of the location if need be as well instead. Shield generators can help too.

There is of course tons of armor upgrades, all the way up to mechanized battlesuits which the best of are literal walking tanks (and more expensive than a less miniaturized actual tank), though at that point it's a bit closer to an exo-suit than to regular power-armor (which is also available).

Even though you're disposing of it, it's not called waste disposal when that hazardous waste is rammed through enemy ships at relativistic velocities.

"I cast FIST" aside, Constitution was one of the prime stats for Psionicists in 2nd edition; that energy was produced by the body after all, and learning to use it more efficiently still requires having some to start with (you'll just last that much longer with a larger tank). Likewise, having extra physical boxes helps stay alive if you ever go physical with your drain in Shadowrun. Sometimes aiming and putting the magic together is something you learn by rote with enough practice, but in the end you need to be able to handle all that power running rampant through your body if you want to put it to great use.

One aspect that would help socially would be an appearance secondary statistic. Yes, having confidence and whatnot helps, but you're not going to get any words in if people are retching from your very face.

This would allow bonuses for people with better physiques (because it *DOES* help), either making something other than "put everything in CHA, nothing else matters" a good idea for bard types, or at least letting the barbarian's body make up for his tragic inability to perform a tongue-twister when he's surrounded by those noble ladies.

And at the other end of the spectrum, well, you had better be just that good with words if you look like you were beaten with the ugly stick - which makes sense. In fact you can take it a step further into the unrealistic absurdity into hackmaster-style negative appearance scores (0 was already "some folks will attack you on sight while screaming 'monster' and 'it's coming, run'"), where suddenly you start looking more and more attractive to physically-evil inhuman entities. Because at that point, the ... thing... running around with -25 appearance had the exact same effects as nymphs on evil tentacled horrors.

Although you could already replace damn near everything with INT already in pathfinder. We need to see more use from not-int, and especially CON.