Jon Yamato 705's page

So lets say the operative fails to trick attack put hits (most common result at my table) that still has a max average damage of 112 points of damage per round.

Wait, what?

It's just the opposite for us. The trick attack is an automatic success. But the operative doesn't have full BAB and misses a lot. How is your operative failing their trick attack roll?

The DC is 20+CR, so for the CR11 baddie would be 31.

By that level, the operative in our test party had 10 ranks in the skill, plus 3 for it being a class skill, 7 points of stat, 4 points (if I recall correctly) of operative bonus, 4 points from a class feature, and 2 points from race (ysoki). +30 to roll a 31.

Even if you dropped the race bonus and lowered the stat bonus to +6, it's still +27 to hit a 31. *Much* better than the operative's chance to hit, in our hands.

Or one could take the NPC operatives in Pact Worlds, specifically the Mercenary Commando (p. 157). A pair of these were an encounter in one of the modules we used for playtest. They have Stealth +25, or +29 when using trick attack, per their description. They succeed automatically against PCs of their level (DC30).

I will look at the numbers in the rest of the post when I have access to my player's character sheets. But this jumped out at me. We've been wondering if we're playing it wrong as the roll appears trivial, but we checked the rules carefully and can't see a mistake. Trick attack was hard at very low levels but had been automatic success for a while by 10th.

We find, for our games, that it really helps if GM and player(s) have a consistent understanding for what things PCs can do safely, what they can do with some risk/effort, and what things are beyond the pale. Otherwise you get unpleasant sessions where the GM is sitting there wondering why the PCs aren't making any progress, while the players are sitting there fretting that the thing they're apparently supposed to do will get them in trouble with the authorities. Or vice versa: the PCs do something and the GM has to say, "Um, guys, that brings down all of Absalom Security on your heads."

I know this isn't an issue for everyone. It is a big issue for us. And yes, I am willing to give a briefing on local law every time the PCs hit a new station or planet: that's part of what makes it feel like a *new* station or planet and not just the same old same old. To use an Earth example, visiting Somalia should feel really different from visiting Singapore. If it doesn't, the different locations are just cheap painted backdrops on "AdventureWorld" which is not what I personally enjoy.

I would like to politely ask that the response to "This doesn't work for me" not be chorus after chorus of "Go play something else, then." If you are going to have a thread on "What is your experience with Starfinder?" it is quite legitimate for people to mention negatives as well as positives. Maybe those who are upset should start a thread "What are your positive experiences with Starfinder"?

We are thinking of doing Threefold Conspiracy but weren't sure about the rules, so we just did a speedy combat-and-skill-checks-only version of Dead Suns 1 and Aeon Throne 1 with various levels of characters.

My player is excited by designing ships, but both of us were displeased by all four of the starship combats: I personally would happily never run another one. The pilot is the only character making any meaningful decisions--the gunner generally just has to roll to hit with the facing weapon. And the decisions the pilot is making are bizarre--they don't feel like starship combat to me so much as some kind of puzzle. If you want to do this well it's a lot of tedious calculation.

This may change at higher levels, I don't know. My player hopes it will. If it doesn't, I'm throwing out starship combat. (All the AP examples so far have been extremely forced, anyway.)

I will also note that the last fight in Aeon 1 would naturally have been an air combat rather than a space combat, but apparently you can't do that. Having some cloud banks, maybe a ground emplacement firing on the ships, some mountains, etc. could jazz things up, and this was a great opportunity missed.

Each of the 2nd Edition APs has had an early encounter which destroyed a lot of parties. I really wonder what is going on with the authors' control of difficulty.

My group bailed on 2nd Edition in large part because the playtest control of difficulty level was so demoralizingly bad. I had thought, though, that with experience with the system this problem would go away.

My spouse says, the system is for high-level play and doesn't actually work well at the low levels. (When we tried a first level Starfinder scenario we had the same feeling. It was too brutally hard to be any fun. We thought that around 3rd or 5th things might improve a lot.) Maybe a practical solution is to start PCs at 3rd, both in Second Edition and in Starfinder. We've been doing that in First Edition for some time and it generally seems okay. The PCs can show a little flair in the early going, rather than having to play super carefully, and this is good for setting up characterization. (If making an in-character but sub-optimal decision will get you killed, you probably won't; then the character never develops much personality.)

Where the NPCs ended up:

Ramona was Head of Security, and her protege was Mayor of the capital town (the government system didn't allow two roles for one person--did I mention we had a whole lot of election intrigue?)

Rayland was head of T's Edge, a covert operative force.

Eliza, amazingly, not only survived but got hold of a enisysian (a little symbiont that lets you break immunities to mind control) and was slowly and steadily working towards becoming an aboleth. We can only hope she'll be a friendly aboleth.... I was really surprised at who the PCs befriended and who they did not.

Koloshkora was Mayor of Mangrove, a city on pilings out in the bay (where the refugee locathahs went).

Thanaldu and its sibling Emmeroo became important recurring NPCs, part of a plotline where the PCs researched how to break aboleth control over their slave races. (I became very fond of Emmeroo, one of my favorite NPCs of the campaign.) There was a lot of angst over whether humans and faceless stalkers can possibly coexist peacefully.

Ochymua lived to fight another day, but is currently somewhere far, far away from these awful PCs!

Perril ended up sharing her body with the disembodied awareness of a monk from Eox (this is what happens if you fool around with the Orrery) and was the Mayor of the deeply technocratic town of Nal-Shakar. (Her people tend to call her the Queen of Nal-Shakar, offending the anti-aristocracy sensibilities of the rest of the island. We did a lot with subculture clash.)

Harcourt was a major public figure in Pearl Bay, the most Luddite of the kingdom's towns, and a major political adversary of the PCs: a lot of their electioneering was dedicated to not letting him get into office.

Eamon was Minister of Religion. Kurvis lost his election for Minister of Trade but was still a major political figure.

Deadtooth the monkey goblin necromancer kept getting caught supporting the other side, and amazingly, got to claim coercion/mind control/mistakes every time! They eventually exiled her....

Wow. Really a fun campaign with a lot of rich stuff going on. Kudos to the inventors of these NPCs: it was great material to work with.

Lessons from this campaign:

(1) The rate of technology development was too high for my personal tastes. I think if we kept playing they'd hit some kind of Singularity in another 5 years or so! I don't know if the best answer would be quarterly rather than monthly kingdom turns, or increasing all the tech development costs, or lengthening the tech trees, but something should have been slowed down. (My player really wanted to have about one kingdom turn per play session, so that was a constraint--it would have been tough to get this with quarterly kingdom turns, and I think impossible with yearly ones.)

(2) As usual, episode 6 was a weak link. The aboleth plans to harass the colony are a bit laughable at this level (a dozen 10th level dominated fighters, really?) and the Compass is confusingly hard to run, unfinished, not internally consistent, and generally unsatisfying. The plot to destroy Absalom is too disjointed from the storyline. (And my player, a Pathfinder Society veteran, would have been tempted to say "Okay, we'll go for that" the same way that players in Second Darkness sometimes ended up helping the drow destroy Kyonin!)

(3) Veiled masters don't fill their campaign role well. They need nondetection *desperately* or by the time they are level-appropriate, none of their illusion and shapeshifting abilities will work. Their spell repertoire is heavily biased towards the annoying Symbol spells (the times I tried to use these, they hurt the aboleth about as much as the PCs....) and their physical capabilities seem pretty irrelevant for a creature that should be shapeshifted into a humanoid all the time. I gave mine nondetection but I ended up wishing I had rewritten them from scratch.

Regular aboleth weren't all that great either. Shouldn't they be immune to mind control?

(4) I asked the player what he wanted to do next and his first comment was "Something less three-dimensional." Underwater combat is a pain! Flying combat is also! We stacked figures on bases to indicate height, or sometimes drew multiple slices through the map, but no matter what we did, it was hard. We had one fight in a 40' wide shaft deep underwater that was just madness to run.

(5) If you run this, be sure everyone agrees exactly what dominate does and how it can be detected. The module authors don't; some of them think that if you don't give orders you can hide the dominate (Episode 1).

(6) I think it's more fun if there are more aboleth and they don't vanish from sight between #3 and #6. We had an aboleth with a living submarine (a fleshwarped whale) that was a recurring threat for a long time.

(7) Ruins of Azlant totally shines as a kingdom-building game. I can't imagine doing it any other way. It hands the PCs two major artifact installations (the Orrery at Nal-Shakar and the Mutation Engine in the Flooded Cathedral) and in a standard campaign these mean nothing. (In ours, the PCs used the Mutation Engine to make two-armed into four-armed sahuagin, as a way of meddling in sahuagin politics; what they did with the Orrery was even more surreal.) It has the PCs explore the island and then nothing much happens with it, whereas we got really familiar with the whole area and fought back and forth over it throughout the campaign.

Overall, a fun campaign. Stressful to run (lots to keep track of, and 14th level with heavy equipment is quite formidable, though still easier than letting it go higher) but quite rewarding. Kingdom-building is good for developing NPCs and long-term plotlines.

I would never assume a campaign would go to 20. Just look at how many reports we have on "how episode #1 went for my group" vs. "how episode #6 went for my group." So, rather than it seeming obviously best to push the high stat, to me it seems obviously best to go for having a useful bonus (and they are pretty much all useful) at a level I *know* I will be playing at.

Game design wise, I am really not a fan of "give up power at level N to get more power at level N+5 or N+10." It puts pressure on the GM to run from N to N+5 or N+10, and in my experience also creates pressure to get to N+ *sooner*, which can damage the campaign.

Certainly if you were building for a one-shot rather than a campaign you would never consider taking that odd stat point.

Luke Styer wrote:

The title is a reference to “The Devil in the White City,” a book that is literally about a serial murderer hotelier who operated in a major city during the World’s Fair, and this guy is introduced as a hotelier during the Golarion equivalent of the World’s Fair.

Sure, but how many players know that going in? I certainly didn't until it got brought up, and I'm interested in serial killers and was already familiar with H.H. Holmes.

My household had read the book, and the title was a clear and annoying spoiler. If we ran this we'd be firmly in "pretend you don't know the whole plotline in advance" territory. Which we can do, certainly, but it's not as much fun for me in particular (my player doesn't care as much).

I read multiple parts of this, and my player did as well; in the end we weren't willing to run it.

We've done "PCs as circus troupe" twice before, so the idea wasn't novel; but it's a good, flavorful idea. However, we felt that the AP sets it up and then mostly abandons it after episode 3. It's hard to avoid this in a 1-20 advancement scenario, but I felt that the AP would run a big risk of the player going "I know I have to deal with the xulgath plot but I don't want to; doing so will force me to abandon the circus plot which I'm more invested in." (Like the problem many people had with Second Darkness: running the inn is more fun than going on with the main plot.)

The quality that a previous poster described as "Are we the baddies?" really bugged both of us. Just at the moment, we are not up for "These folks are irredeemable, never mind what horrors our kind have committed, you shouldn't feel the least bit bad about wiping them out." It left a bad taste in my mouth. This was made worse, I think, by the very strong Aztec flavor of the pyramid in #5. If you want to be saying "These people are much more vile than humans" you probably should not model so closely on real-life humans.

Finally, it had the problem that so far all 2nd Edition material has had for me, which is that I can't form any conception of how skillful/ powerful people in the world are supposed to be. In #2 the PCs go up against a corrupt circus and it's a fight. In #4 they go up against some local yokels who have formed a sort of gang, and ... it's a fight? In #6 the PCs, who are now astoundingly high level, hear that their circus (with acts presumably reflecting that astounding level) wouldn't make the least impression in Absalom and they'd better go elsewhere. I just have no idea what's going on here.

On the positive side, I really liked the first part of #5, before the pyramid, for its vivid visuals and weird situations. I liked the fact that the xulgath army in #4 had stuff going on inside it, factions and plots, and wasn't just a dull monolith. And, while it got a bit strained by #6, I liked having the PCs recruit acts for the circus during their adventures.

It seems to me that if they meant the AP to be an uncomplicated romp against a clearly evil foe, Paizo knows quite well how to write those. Take _Giantslayer_, for example. The giants are shown as motivated by greed, a sense of racial superiority, and bloodthirst. There's no pagecount spent detailing why their grievances might be legitimate. My player group didn't have a problem with Giantslayer. Similarly, in Ruins of Azlant the villains are shown as ruthless slavemasters with zero concern for anyone's interests but their own and an agenda of stamping out free will everywhere. My player group tried to redeem a lot of strange things in that AP, but had no trouble with the overall arc of opposing the slavemasters.

_Extinction Curse_ opens by telling the GM, at least, that the xulgaths are attacking because Aroden did them a tremendous wrong. It's a strange decision if you wanted uncomplicated good-vs-evil. I know that my play group would find that out, and decide that their goal must be to make right what Aroden did wrong. I don't think this would make the AP easy at all to run, and I wouldn't personally try, though some of the suggestions here could work.

I find the suggestion that if you aren't up for morally empty hack-and-slash you shouldn't be playing Pathfinder to be utterly bizarre. This is the company that gave us _Wrath of the Righteous_, where redemption of evil individuals is a major theme throughout. Sure, you can play the games that way, and I have no complaint--do whatever you like with your group, and I'll do what I like with mine. But saying that your preferred style is the only one and anyone who criticizes it ought to leave? That's bizarre, and also super rude. It's rude to Paizo as well as to other posters--I doubt they really appreciate people telling their paying customers to GTFO.

I have to wonder how you get the PCs to go after orb #6, and not the one the druids took. I mean, other than saying "Players, you gotta. You figure out why." It seems as though the druids' argument to you can be summed up as, "A faction we disagreed with took the orb, dooming this area. But you can't have it. So go to the Vaults for the other one, okay?"

This module is really flavorful and was fun to read for me up until the pyramid, but then "we have to make sure you hate the xulgaths so you won't be tempted to pity them" kicked in, and right now...that's not a theme I really wanted to see. Bad timing, I guess.

I've been troubled by the vast injustice of Aroden's actions all through, and if I were to run it I'd have to find the PCs some way to make things right. Maybe #6 plans to do that, but if so, the relentless Aztec-ritual-sacrifice motif in #5 is not going to help.

I think that any time you are tempted to write, as this module does in its intro, "The PCs may want to make things right but they come to realize that--" you are treading on thin ice. You can't actually make PCs, or players, realize things. And an LG human might well feel that Aroden was the god of humankind, he did a terrible thing here and people are still suffering for it, this *has* to be put right if it possibly can. (Turning the AP into a story about failure, if it can't.)

#5 was the first installment that made me actually consider running (part of) this AP, but I'd have to ditch the main plot; the situation is, to me, relentlessly tragic and more or less insoluble, and very jarring paired with the light and fun circus subplot.

I played a rogue in _Council of Thieves_ who pocketed a bit of loot from every single haul: she figured her employment at House Varuna wouldn't last forever and wanted to make sure she didn't end up as a street hooker again.

Towards the end of the game the PCs needs a lot of money in a hurry, and Rose said, "I'll lend it to you" before entirely thinking this through. The party leader, Lily Varuna (by that time the head of House Varuna) smiled at her quizzically, and Rose, with a sinking feeling in her boots, said, "You knew, didn't you?"

"Rose, you should know I read minds by now."

"Oh. Um--no interest on the loan?"

"That will be fine."