Alright, how will YOU be putting mechs through their paces?
Personally, I'll be dropping my PCs onto Daimalko in a few tier 15-ish mechs and counting how many kaiju they can take out before being mushed into a paste.
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Greetings, spacefarers! I’m Jimbles, and I’ll be your GM for this adventure, if you so choose. I'm looking to recruit one or two additional PCs for my table of Dead Suns, which started with six souls but has been reduced to four by the ravages of time. For those of you unfamiliar with Dead Suns, it is the inaugural Adventure Path for Starfinder, and it takes a group of hopeful adventurers on a whirlwind tour of the Pact Worlds and beyond as they battle multiple factions for the fate of the galaxy. It’s a fairly on-the-rails adventure with minimal downtime, although I try to find some moments to explore the characters’ personal stories as they advance from everyday Joes to professional heroes. Player Expectations
Character Expectations
For the maximum amount of fun, I recommend creating a character that is generally a good person, is willing to experience new things, and is unafraid to take risks for the benefit of others. Although I encourage character flaws, I discourage you from building characters with traits that limit interactions with others, whether it be a character that’s uninterested in social interactions or an actual space-racist (please, please do not build a space-racist, space-sexist, or any other space-ist). Current Party Members:
As it stands, the party contains:
Roll Playing:
Please adhere to the following criteria when building your character. They mostly follow the standard character creation rules, but I’ve adding a few restrictions for the sake of story.
The Core races (android, human, kasatha, lashunta, shirren, vesk, ysoki)
Alternate racial features from the Character Operations Manual are allowed.
Role Playing (Minor Campaign Spoilers):
At this point in the campaign, the PCs have journeyed to the city of Qabarat on the planet Castrovel, looking to find information on a mysterious asteroid they encountered full of ancient alien tech. Unbeknownst to them, an unknown enemy has heard of their discovery and already divined its importance. This foe has preemptively kidnapped the party's contact and traveled across the planet, looking to find ancient knowledge within the jungle ruins of a vanished civilization - knowledge that could put countless star systems at risk of total annihilation!
New members of the party may fall into one of the following roles: already a member of the prestigious adventurer's guild, you've been sent by the Lorespire to bolster the party's skill set and manpower. living on the fringes of the wilds, you offer the party guidance as they trek across the untamed jungles of Ukulam in a bid to save their contact and discover their new foe. affiliated with either the university in Qabarat or the research station on the edge of the jungle, you decide that tagging along with the party is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to further your research, the risks be damned. a defender of all the residents of Qabarat, you won't rest until the kidnapped victim is safe and their abductor is brought to justice. you've been tracking a cell of mysterious cultists for some time now, and now by joining forces with the party you might be able to take them down for good.
If you'd like to join this table, go ahead and read through the spoilers above before posting your character. You don’t need to create an alias yet, but please leave a post including your character’s name, a brief description, and a spoiler containing an in-post character statblock. Recruitment will be open through midnight CST on February 7th (two weeks from now). If you have any questions, please let me know!
Discussion thread is up! Discuss as you wish.
A hemispherical room with rows of plush theater seating encircling a central projector, the starscape chamber is often used to share astronomical findings (or watch 4D vids when the rookie Starfinders think the administrators aren't paying attention). At the moment, however, the room sits quietly, gently projecting the constellations of the Pact Worlds against the domed ceiling. With a few minutes yet until their meeting with Venture-Captain Naiaj, six Starfinder Society contractors filter into the space.
The Church of Triune approaches the Starfinder Society with a stunning discovery: a centuries old Society starship has been found in the Drift! The PCs must search the Lorespire Complex for all the information they can on this starship before heading into the Drift and uncovering what befell the lost vessel... Greetings, spacefarers! I’m Jimbles, and I’ll be your GM for this adventure, if you so choose. I'm looking to open up a scenario specifically for those people interested in participating in the Starfinder Character Options Playtest. I've chosen the scenario "The Beacon Code Dilemma" because it's (1) repeatable and (2) doesn't have the starship tag. I'm planning to run it at subtier 3-4 to accommodate playtest characters of 4th level. Characters
Expectations
Other Stuff
I hope to launch the game before the end of the week, so if you're interested, drop a post and get to building that playtest character!
Discussion thread is open for those already in the campaign.
Greetings, spacefarers! I’m Jimbles, and I’ll be your GM for this adventure, if you so choose. I’m looking to open up a PbP Dead Suns campaign that takes full advantage of the new player options in Alien Archive and Pact Worlds. I’m reasonably familiar with PbP (fourth game overall, second as GM), and this will be my second Dead Suns campaign (I’m running another table IRL). For those of you unfamiliar with Dead Suns, it is the inaugural Adventure Path for Starfinder, and it takes a group of hopeful adventurers on a whirlwind tour of the Pact Worlds and beyond as they battle multiple factions for the fate of the galaxy. It’s a fairly on-the-rails adventure with minimal downtime, although I’ll find some moments to explore the characters’ personal stories as they advance from 1st to 13th level. Player Expectations
Character Expectations
For the maximum amount of fun, I recommend creating a character that is generally a good person, is willing to experience new things, and is unafraid to take risks for the benefit of others. Although I encourage character flaws, I discourage you from building characters with traits that limit interactions with others, whether it be a character that’s uninterested in social interactions or an actual space-racist (please, please do not build a space-racist, space-sexist, or any other space-ist). Roll Playing:
Please adhere to the following criteria when building your character. They mostly follow the standard character creation rules, but I’ve adding a few restrictions for the sake of story.
Point Buy
Theme
Race
Class & Archetype
Equipment
Role Playing:
The video starts without preamble, showing a spartan but clean room with a large table and several empty chairs scattered around it. On the far wall is a window overlooking a crowded plaza, full of bustling people and the occasional hover tram gliding through the frame. The perspective of the camera shifts slightly as the speaker picks up some static before a figure walks into the frame from behind the camera’s perspective, sits across the table from the camera, and sets a battered datapad on the table in front of him. “G’day t’ ya. My name is Duravor Kreel.” Duravor is perhaps four and a half feet tall and relatively lanky (for a dwarf, at least). His thinning hair and bristling beard are both iron-gray, and deep-set eyes smile out from under bushy eyebrows. His well-worn and oft-repaired coveralls would imply him to be just a common dock worker, but a badge bearing a stylized compass rose sits brightly on his chest, showing him to be a member of the Starfinder Society. He smiles before continuing. “If you’re receivin’ this missive, then you’re one o’ several prospective applicants to the Starfinder Society. Now, first off, I must apologize - in days past, I would have performed these interviews in person, but recent events have left us short-staffed, an’ I must remain here at Absalom.” The dwarf clears his throat as he looks down at the datapad in front of him, holding it at arm's length to combat his nearsightedness. “Now. I have a few questions here. If you are indeed interested in joinin’ the Society, please send a response to each question ‘without any omissions or falsehoods’.” Duravor reads this last section in an exaggerated tone, rolling his eyes. Muttering something under his breath about “personnel management”, he continues reading monotonically, his pad still at arm's length: “Prospective applicant: please tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What is your family like? How has that impacted your personal growth? “Prospective applicant: what is your educational and occupational history? How would you apply your skills and talents as an agent of the Starfinder Society? “Prospectiv- ah, gods.” Duravor sets the pad down and rubs his eyes. “I can’t handle any more o’ those canned questions. Let’s do the rest o’ this freestyle, eh?” The dwarf’s eyes twinkle as stabs a thick finger towards the camera. “Tell me this. Why do you want t’ join the Society? An’ then tell me this - what was the one thing that almost held ya back?” Looking at his pad again, Duravor sighs. “Alright, one more question for th’ desk jockeys. ‘Are you currently dealing with, or do you have a history of, any legal or extralegal trouble up to and including a violation of Pact Worlds law?’” Waving his hand dismissively, he continues, “that’s not a disqualifyin’ situation, you should know. We got all sorts on th’ payroll, but the bigwigs don’t like surprises. “An’ that’s it! I hope to hear from ya soon.” The video ends with Duravor walking out of frame, picking up the camera, and fumbling with it for several moments before finally ending the recording. If you'd like to join this table, go ahead and read through the spoilers above before posting your character. You don’t need to create an alias yet, but please leave a post including your character’s name, a brief description, and spoilers containing an in-post character statblock and a writing sample. Recruitment will be open through midnight CDT on April 25 (one week from now). If you have any questions, please let me know!
So the spell schools have taken a bit of a backseat in Starfinder - as far as I know, at least, there are no abilities or equipment that have a school-dependent effect; that is a mechanic saved for the spell descriptors instead (fire, mind-affecting, etc.). Ergo, any quibbling about which school a particular spell falls into is a completely pedantic and unnecessary argument. Having said that, however, I just need to ask - why in the world is fabricate scrap (Pact Worlds pg. 205) a universal spell? Up until now, there were just two spells in the universal school - wish and miracle, both of which are accessed through capstone class abilities. Fabricate scrap is a charming little spell, but why oh why does it enjoy such august company? And why does it have a note to "see text"? What about the text of the spell explains its selected school? If an FAQ for Pact Worlds gets put together, this question is certainly dead last in priority, but I would still love to see an answer.
I haven't found anything that states if reduced rounds (surprise round or the staggered condition) are a subtraction of action (that you could then add more actions to) or a hard cap (if you're staggered, you can't take more than a standard action no matter what).
Discussion thread is open. Discuss as you wish!
Gameplay thread is up! Please dot in here.
Just One Run is a homebrewed Starfinder adventure for 4-5 3rd level PCs within the Pact Worlds setting. It’s short and sweet and hopefully a good test run for you (if you’re new to Starfinder, new to PbP, or if you’ve trying out a new character concept) and some good PbP GM experience for me.
No need to create an avatar yet, but if you do, please be consistent as to not confuse me. If you have any questions about your build, this thread is a great place to ask; I love answering questions.
I've been having a lot of fun with Starfinder since it launched, and I think the boards could use a little more of it. I've never run a PbP game before, though, so it may be prudent to get some practice in with a oneshot before I go and launch a whole big campaign. I'm planning on something that would look very similar to this: Story Teaser: Captain Ross is hiring a new crew for her newest freighter, the Inscrutable. She says that she wants a combat-ready crew due to the recent rise in piracy, but is that her only rational for all these guns? Character Creation
Adventure Style
Anyone interested? This could be a good taste test for anyone new to Starfinder or someone trying out an experimental build. If I get some good attention, I'll probably open recruitment next week and launch the adventure in early Janurary. Oh, and I'll finish writing it. That might be important.
Every time I go to pick a feat for a character, I need to slog through a big list of feats where at least half of the options are not useful or not available. In order to speed things up a bit, I made this handy little tree diagram, and I thought some of you might find it helpful.
The categories are loose and somewhat arbitrary, but I think they help to clean things up a bit. If you like this, lemme know what else you think could use the tree diagram treatment.
Since Starfinder came out, the class I've been tinkering with the most is the envoy. I'm not sure why - I suppose that its tendency to accrue a broad library of abilities instead of just improving the same thing over and over is attractive to me. Anyhow, I've been making notes on the class for a while, and figured I just just go ahead, clean it up, and put it out there as a class guide:
Let me know what you think! I would appriciate any (constructive) criticism you've got, as well as any insights to the class I may have missed, or sections I should have included.
As you may or may not be aware, Starfinder has a lot of equipment. I've noticed that the most tedious part of creating or leveling a character is buying gear, simply because you need to wade through tables full of items you either aren't interested in or are unable to purchase. So, because I'm such an exciting and adrenaline-seeking person, I went ahead and tabulated all the equipment in Starfinder in a spreadsheet:
If you're not super familiar with spreadsheet filtering, try this out - navigate to the tab of your favorite kind of equipment and hit the filter icon (right next to the print icon) near the top left of the window. A drop-down icon will appear in each column. Play around with these filters - you can do things like
...and the list of potential lists goes on. I've included all the equipment from all the books I have as of today (October 2017): the Core Rulebook, Alien Archive, and the first two chapters of Dead Suns. I'll do my best to keep this spreadsheet up to date, but no promises. I'm certainly open to suggestions, so if you see an error or would like an additional attribute column to sort by, let me know!
I'm a bit of a visual learner, so when I'm tinkering with character options, I like to sketch out my options. Add in some procrastination this morning, and I ended up diagramming the improvisation tree for envoys. I'm dropping it here in case anyone else finds it useful. I'm, uh, not exactly a graphic designer. It's not terribly pretty, but hopefully it illustrates how the improvisations relate to each other, both as prerequisites (which are fairly simple) and as modifiers (which are slightly less simple). The four colored improvisations improve other improvisations, and the affected improvisations carry color-coded tags. Improvisations with other improvisations as prerequisites always have the same restrictions and modifiers as their prerequisites. I was surprised by the impact of (most of) the modifier improvisations. Expanded Attunement, Long-Range Improvisation, and Clever Improvisations affect most other improvisations. Universal Expression, on the other hand, only impacts Dispiriting Taunt, so only the most Intimidate-based envoy builds should even consider it.
I've really enjoyed reading the play-throughs of other groups, so I thought I might add mine to the mix. I think I bring something different to the table - I'm a greener GM than most on these forums (Pathfinder was my first RPG experience, and that was just two years ago; my only GM experience is a run-through of Jacob's Tower), and I cater more to the play experience than to hard and fast rules. I have four players at my table, three with moderate Pathfinder experience and one with more extensive RPG creds going back to 3.0. As for this thread, I'll try to keep things succinct, focusing on decisions the characters made and their effects on the story. And of course, your questions/comments are welcome. I'm mostly writing this up because I enjoy hearing myself talk (or watching myself type?), but helping others is a fun bonus.
Fisher: male human starfarer mechanic 1:
Fisher speaks common with a strange accent and carries a bag full of starcharts everywhere he goes. He seems strangely intent on the Starfinder Society's records of inhabited planets.
Fred: female damaya lashunta outlaw envoy 1:
"Fred", a native Castrolvellian, is on the run from something she refuses to talk about, although she constantly emphasizes her innocence. Hoping to make some coin and earn a bit of political capital, she's signed up with the Starfinders in order to build a new career.
Splinter-1: male android xenoseeker solarian 1:
Splinter-1 is tremendously nondescript, even for an android. Although he considers himself male, he deliberately keeps his appearance androgynous to further capitalize on his ability for disguise. Hailing from the Diaspora, Splinter-1 is quiet about his motivations for joining the Starfinder Society.
Zenka: Host shirren starfarer mystic 1: Raised in the perpetual sunlight of Verces, Zenka was forever changed when they first saw the stars on their first spaceflight. Now Zenka strives to spend as much time in space as possible, and seeks membership with the Starfinder Society in order to get paid to do so.
So I'm toying around with a character built around high mobility and touch spells - run up, slap 'em with a spell, and run away. So far I've decided on a ysoki themeless technomancer (ysoki for the moxie ability, themeless for Acrobatics as a class skill, and technomancer for a greater selection of offensive touch spells). Here's my build up to 6th level: 1st Level:
2nd Level:
3rd Level:
4th Level:
5th Level:
6th Level:
For gear, I'm looking at a decent pistol, some good light armor, a personal upgrade for Dex, a miniaturized Tier 1 computer, and a handful of situational spell chips. What do you think? Any feats/spells/gear/magic hacks that I should pick up instead? What should I go for at higher levels?
So, the description of the back matter in Temple of the Twelve includes this bit: Details on the destructive Cult of the Devourer, including a new mystic connection and new cult gear, by Owen K.C. Stephens. I'm interested in that new mystic connection - it'll be the first non-equipment customization option presented after the CRB. What do you think it's like? The Devourer is already associated with the Mindbreaker and Star Shaman connections. What abilities do you think the new Cult of the Devourer connection might have? Going by the Cult of the Devourer art and description in the CRB, I thought that perhaps the new connection might revolve around giving allies permanent boosts in exchange for long-term penalties.
Its prerequisite feats, Minor Psychic Power and Psychic Power, both allow you to take the feat more than once, acquiring a different SLA each time; however, Major Psychic Power does not have this callout in the feat text. Is this an error of omission, or is there some balance reason to disallow a character access to both augury and status as SLAs?
All of Starfinder's core classes can be competent combatants, even the spellcasters. As I muck about with character building, I've noticed that it's natural to build a caster around ranged attacks - give a technomancer or a mystic the longarm proficiency feat, invest in Dex and your casting stat, and you're good to go. Just for fun, I'm trying to do something a little different - build a melee focused caster. In order to prevent accidentally building a melee combatant with token spellcasting abilities, my one rule is to keep full spell progression (no dipping into soldier, no matter how attractive it looks). Here's my initial foray: Vorital, human mystic (mindbreaker) 1:
Human mystic (mindbreaker) 1 Priest (Basmara) CN medium humanoid (human) Init. +0; Perception +7
What do you think? Is there a race better suited to melee caster than human? Is mystic or technomancer a better choice? How should I level out this character? I'm particularly stuck on point-buy; I want to maintain a high to-hit and spell DCs, but I don't want to loose too many skill points and I need to find some way to increase my AC.
One of the things that frustrated me as a rookie GM learning Pathfinder was that it was so difficult to find monsters that fit a concept & CR that I was looking for. With the sheer amount of content out there (five bestiaries by the time I started playing), the perfect monster for a particular encounter was probably out there, but I didn't really have a way to comprehensively search for it. Now that we're on the eve of Starfinder, I'm trying to think up some low-effort tools that would be helpful to inexperienced GMs and put them together myself (emphasis on low-effort; I'm no programmer). In that vein, I've thrown together what could become a simple Monster Database in Google Sheets, using the stat blocks from First Contact as an example. When you open the spreadsheet, hit the Filter button near the top left (next to the printer icon) to put your own temporary filter on the database (if you're spreadsheet-literate, skip to the next paragraph). Now you can use the filter icons in each column to weed out monsters you're not interested in, not unlike online shopping. For example, you can use the filters to find all monsters with a CR of 4, low-light vision, and a climb speed, or combatants with a CR between 3 and 7 that speak common, or large-sized creatures that deal ranged damage against KAC and have a bluff modifier of at least +10. If this is a new concept for you, (1) this help page goes into filters in more detail, and (2) welcome to the wonderful and exciting world of spreadsheets! I've included all the info I thought I would need to search by. If this might be useful to you and there's a column you'd like to see included, let me know. I cut out some attributes (like Init. mod) because I couldn't see them being a useful metric and this thing is wide enough as is. I hope to expand and update this sheet as the APs and Alien Archive come out. P.S. - as soon as I get my hands on the CRB, I plan to do something similar for spells and equipment as well.
A few semi-hypothetical questions, based on a character concept one of my players is toying with for our upcoming campaign:
Food for thought.
Every group plays at a different speed. How fast do you think your group will move through Dead Suns? I've never had the opportunity before to play a Pathfinder AP, so I'm quite uncertain as to how quickly my group will play Dead Suns. How fast have you moved through Pathfinder APs in the past? Assuming Dead Suns contains an equivalent amount of content per volume, are you concerned about playing the game faster than it is released? If so, what's your plan? Are you going to schedule fewer sessions? Play something else halftime? Run some Starfinder one-shots, or try to slip additional material into the Dead Suns campaign? |