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I really appreciate this discussion, and creating a separate space for it was a good idea. It's always good to remember that folks often have dramatically different levels of experience with neurodivergence, and knowledge of neurodivergence, whether or not they are themselves neurodivergent... or know they're neurodivergent. Thank you all for sharing your perspectives. My sincere hope is that anchors remain a core aspect of the class, rather than optional feats. So, it's important to find a way to do that without making people feel like their character has to pick a "neurodivergent option," which is not what we intend. It's too early in the playtest/feedback process to know exactly what we'll do, though. To the degree that the anchors are neurodivergence-coded, it's a bit funny to me that it was, at first, purely unintentional. The spinning Inception top was indeed the first thing that came to mind when the concept of "anchors grounding the witchwarper in reality" first arose. Then, stuff like Roland Deschain's obsession with reaching the Dark Tower, or John Wick's memories of his brief, happy, not-filled-with-assassins time in "the real world." The anchors only really started to feel like they were neurodivergence-coded after the fact. I probably shouldn't have been so surprised that they turned out the way that they did. Anyway, back to dev! Thanks again for the discussion.
The intent with the class’s various neurodivergence-coded aspects isn’t to present neurodivergence as a superpower. That’s a trope that I find problematic as well, and it’s something the team is well aware of. A witchwarper’s powers come from their exposure to a paradox (e.g. “I am from another timeline”), not from the way their brain works. A witchwarper does magic in much the same way a wizard does; by understanding it. But instead of understanding magic formulas, a witchwarper understands the nature of their paradox. An anchor, whatever form it takes, helps ground the witchwarper in reality even as they use their paradox to create reality-altering magic. None of these abilities are intended to be the “result” or “effect” of a character’s neurodivergence. The intent is to invite players to associate their anchors or other abilities with whatever degree of neurodivergence that they wish; but it’s just that, an invitation. Of course, a character of any class can be neurodivergent. The hope is to provide some representation, not to present game mechanics for any particular neurodivergent traits. All that said, intent and impact are different things. “I didn’t mean it that way” isn’t a very good excuse when one causes offense; if the attempt at representation is just too close to being a bad trope, that’s important feedback. We can’t really know if we’re having the intended impact without hearing from people who are playing the game, so we appreciate all the playtest feedback we continue to receive.
By the way, we're talking a bit more about witchwarper (among other things) on Paizo Live at ~4:00 PST today. I suggested we preview two feats... but Dustin convinced me that we should reveal even more than that. See you there! https://www.twitch.tv/officialpaizo
There's a decent rundown of the upcoming playtest products over here: Starfinder Playtest Product Announcements!. The tl;dr is that most of our playtest material releases at or shortly after GenCon this year (2024), and the new edition launches at GenCon next year (2025). You can check out our PaizoCon panels next weekend to learn more, of course!
something im curious about after reading the pdf is what the enemy gun's capacities are, I'm not sure how many shots they should take before reloading for these encounters Thanks for pointing this out. The level of detail and information in our attack entries is an ongoing conversation on the team—we want to strike the right balance between "the right info for the GM" and "this takes up way too much space in NPC entries, leaving less room for stuff like special abilities, tactics, and lore." We'll be paying close attention to the community's feelings, here, but we certainly agree that it's helpful for GMs to know when the baddies need to reload. (... and if the baddies survive enough rounds to empty their mags and reload, the player characters are probably in rough shape!)
If they're anything like Doomsday Dawn, there will be sections purposely meant to stress test some of the baseline assumptions of SF2E. Because the baseline assumptions of Starfinder Second Edition are the same as Pathfinder (at least in terms of the underlying mechanics and math), we have less of a need to "stress test" the system during this playtest. So, our playtest adventures aren't much like Doomsday Dawn in that respect. We will have specific areas where we're looking for feedback, though, and playtest surveys to allow you to provide that feedback. We'll have a lot more to say about those in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for our PaizoCon panels!
I'm surprised that social skills have been largely left out of the Leadership Styles so far. For what it's worth, this is intentional. One reason is that, regardless of leadership style, we want any given envoy to be able to use the three main social skills as needed. The social skills seem like the most "obvious" leadership style options, and we want envoys to have a broader repertoire, rather than a narrow niche (both in terms of skills and round-by-round action flexibility). That said, feedback like this helps us figure out how our ideas are working for the broader community, so it's much appreciated. This is what playtesting is for! We've already made some adjustments to the envoy for the Playtest Rulebook, which you can learn more about it just a few months. :) So, it doesn't quite look the same as the Field Test envoy any more, and it's likely it'll change even further as a result of the playtest. What might change? Can't rightly say. But your comments are definitely the kinds of things that we're thinking about, and we're excited to see the envoy (and all the other classes) in action!
How are you supposed to attack an enemy with a MAP without some sort of AOO?I was about to question the same thing. I'm trying to read again to be sure i'm not missing anything. The phrasing of that Guns Blazing ability is a bit awkward. The phrase "that has a multiple attack penalty" is referring to your ranged Strike, not to the enemy. "Make a ranged Strike that has a multiple attack penalty against an enemy" probably makes more sense! This would allow you to do some cool things, like use "Get in There!" then Strike twice and still grant the Lead by Example benefit.
The fun thing about building the solarian for this playtest was that, yes, it was a melee build, but it was also quite different from another melee solarian build I played in one of our internal playtests. (My first task after joining the Starfinder team was to create a character for that playtest, which was more work than it sounds like, given the status of all our documents at the time!) It was more of a graviton-focused and "tanky" solarian, with less of a focus on moving quickly and dealing damage and more of a focus on repositioning/pinning down enemies (and staying alive). One of the big things I learned from that playtest was that, yes, my solarian felt quite powerful and dangerous once I was able to get into melee combat, but I wanted more options for dealing damage while closing the gap. So we wrote some feats, and soon(ish) you'll get to playtest them! But, no, not soon enough. ;)
Thursty: "So, what's your character's name, Player 1?"
I understand the disappointment and frustration around the Blood Lords sanctioning decision. Speaking for myself, it was not an easy decision to make. Of course I want people to have more sanctioned content for Pathfinder. Of course I trust our community to handle content responsibly. And I wrote Zombie Feast (the first volume of the Blood Lords AP) myself! And it was my first AP volume! Imagine how difficult it was to balance my excitement about my first full adventure path, my responsibilities as the Pathfinder Society developer to provide excellent content for organized play… and the harsh reality that Blood Lords is, ultimately, not suitable for organized play sanctioning. At the end of the day, no matter how responsible you are about how you portray the content in Blood Lords, no matter how much you sanitize the grimmer aspects of the adventures, the Blood Lords AP assumes your characters are abhorrent people, that you work for and support an abhorrent totalitarian government, and that you can and will routinely have opportunities to do abhorrent things, either for self-gain or in the name of Geb. In that way, it is unlike the vast majority of our content. Even when there is uncomfortable content in our other adventures, the assumption is usually that your characters are *not* willing to do abhorrent things. Even if they aren’t exactly heroes, the assumption is that they’re definitely not villains. The exact opposite is true in Blood Lords. Again, speaking personally, it was a difficult decision. That might not make it any easier of a pill to swallow, but I hope you understand that our reasoning is far from “ew, this is kind of gross, we can’t trust our community to portray this well.” I’m not so worried about the content that goes against individual sensibilities—that’s something we absolutely trust our players and GMs to handle well. But the very premise of this adventure path, and the foundational assumptions of who your characters are and how they will behave, go far beyond “sensibility” concerns. Transparently, when we reached our final decision, despite my disappointment that my very own debut adventure path volume would not be sanctioned for my very own organized play program, my primary emotion was relief. I don’t expect this to make anybody feel better about our decision, but I hope it provides some insight into my personal thoughts on the matter.
So, for those of use who like to try and play the season with one character, is it possible to get a feeling on the number of meta-plot scenarios and their levels? We published a blog post laying out all of Year of Shattered Sanctuaries, and I'd love to do the same thing for Year of Boundless Wonder. We're not at the point of being ready to do that yet, though. I can say that the structure of Year of Boundless Wonder is similar to Year of Shattered Sanctuaries in that there are multiple standalone stories which all contribute to a greater whole, rather than a linear progression of scenarios intended to be played in a specific order.
Eando Kline rips off another eversticky note reading "destroy" and slaps it on a crate of cursed potions. "Whew. I think that's the last of them." Zarta peers up from the strange chalice she was examining. "No. There's another room. That way, behind the pile of chests." Eando sighs. "I'm going to need more of these. Got any more 'destroy' stickies?" Zarta tosses him a stack. "Sure. I've only been using the ones that say 'protect' and 'contain.'" She suppresses a wicked grin while Eando storms off into the adjoining chamber, notes in hand, grumbling something about the abundant arrogance of archivists. "Now," she says, picking up the chalice, "whatever shall we do with you?"
I wish the writers would be more engaging in these threads to shed some light on these hiccups. That's understandable, though it isn't the author's job to monitor the forums, and we developers generally prefer that they leave such questions to us. Transparently, I've been quite busy with PaizoCon prep + GenCon scenario development. I'll loop back with more specific, bullet-point responses as soon as I can, but it looks like the issues that have been raised here are typos and other errors. Apologies!
Content Note: This scenario does not include harm to children or child endangerment. The Pathfinder agents (player characters) face danger, but the students of the academy do not. This was an expressly stated requirement in the original outline, and the author did a wonderful job meeting this requirement while creating lots of fun combat, puzzles, and role-playing opportunities. “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” –God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, 1965
By the way, I wanted to give a shout out to this adventure's author, Jacob, who did a stellar job, conducted thorough playtesting, and delivered exactly what was asked for with this adventure. The rebalancing we had to do for the final encounter is entirely on me.
We made a few adjustments the final encounter and we've updated the PDF. Please be sure to re-download the PDF from your downloads page. You may need to click "Problems downloading this file?" to refresh the file. It's still a hard scenario (as intended), but not so "brutally unfair." Enjoy!
I'd love it if this conversation could move elsewhere, as we've gone beyond the concerns of the original post, and we're well outside the "space for grieving" Tonya offered when she kept the thread open. Questions about org play policy, or questions about how to best follow the code of conduct, are certainly reasonable topics for discussion, but please raise them somewhere with a less demoralizing thread title. I am tired of seeing "SHAME ON YOU" at the top of the forum every time somebody posts here. Please let this thread die.
Maybe Christopher had another pronunciation in mind, but in my mind it's "vill-TIE-duss." Whatever you can easily say at the table should be fine. Of course, now I'm smacking my forehead because Viltydus should have they/them pronouns, and there's clearly at least one instance of "his" referring to Viltydus in the text. Many apologies for that. Thanks for the feedback!
I'm excited about the story justification we came up with for skeletons (eventually) becoming an option in Pathfinder Society, and the author of the adventure in question did an excellent job making our idea come to life (pun intended). Wish I could say more, as I'm just as excited as everyone else for Year 4... but I can't!
Yup. And even if you could augment them to hold aspis badges too, you know it would just point to the grand lodge's collection of them.I love the wayfinderfinder. Feel like that needs to actually be a thing :) So what you're saying is that we need to begin developing a wayfinderfinderfinder, just in case. |
