Nerdy Canuck's page

Even considering spell casters in a world of guns, I still don't get it.

Automatic spell failure on getting hit is the thing I think you're missing.

Readied actions to attack upon spellcasting would automatically shut down basically all casters; they can't function if the attack goes off before the spell, because readied actions become an extremely easy near-perfect counter.

If you make a change to this, you need an explicit exemption for spellcasting, or you've completely broken spellcasting.

Wait, does that mean the gods listed in the Connections entries for the Mystic are "more guidelines than actual rules" to quote those pirate movies (I hate having to do this, it's a good quote but Johnny Depp is a Terrible Person(tm), yanno?)? You can pick a connection even if your god of choice isn't on its list?

You do not, as a Mystic, require a god at all, and there are absolutely no rules around gods and Mystics. So, yes, they're really just guidelines.

The closest thing to a rule on this is that deities "rarely" grant connections that don't fit their ethos, but you don't even need to get your connection from a deity in the first place. The book example is that as the god of freedom, Weydan is unlikely to look kindly on Overlords - but there's really no reason for that god to take issue with a Star Shaman.

Wouldn't be a bad place to drop a couple dedicated divine classes, though.

Frankly, I think the Mystic's "divinity-optional" approach is a way better approach for Starfinder's setting.

There are class features that can increase the number of attacks you're able to make.

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

Nothing in the system that makes it that way, far as I can tell.

Skittermanders?

An entire species using weaponized politeness and helpfulness in order to take advantage of an invading force's honour code to prevent true colonization?

Also, have you read about how Skittermander Whelps eat?

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

These weapons would be easy to create

No, no they wouldn't.

Clearly, you have the right to dislike the idea of 4-handed weapons and chances are low anyway for anyone in Paizo to ever read this thread so I don't think it will have any impact.

Still, I really would like to know what you dislike about this idea. To me, you seem to have a bad gut feeling about it.

Either:

(a) These weapons are worthwhile, in which case every extra-arms option has instantly become more powerful from a presently balanced state, or

(b) These weapons are not strong enough to have that impact, in which case they're overall weak enough to be a non-option.

Systems interact with each other; a change in one place ripples out to impact other areas of the game.

It's less of a "bad gut feeling" and more of a "I see where else in the game this would impact".

BigNorseWolf wrote:

By the time you have the cloaking field aren't you taking 10 to stealth things and thus auto succeed on any stealth check to trick attack against cr +7 or lower?

Core Rulebook, p. 133 wrote:

Unless you have an ability that states otherwise, you cannot take 10 during a combat encounter. Also, you can’t take 10 when the GM rules that a situation is too hectic or that you are distracted, and taking 10 is almost never an option for a check that requires some sort of crucial effect as a key part of the adventure’s story.

Operatives have an ability which states otherwise - Specialization Skill Mastery.

Taking 10 in combat, and thus on Trick Attack checks, is 99% of the point of that feature.

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Dracomicron wrote:

None of this actually addresses the legitimate rules questions about the limitations of needing a free hand

for the third time, it's. In the video.

Finally watched it. They were awfully hesitant to say. Used terms like "I think so..." implying that they weren't ready to come down with a solid ruling after reading dozens of pages of arguments on the forums.

Or perhaps not being in a position to make/issue an official determination at the time.

Yeah the thing is, if the whole party is doped on passive perception, they will (speaking in terms of probability) see less than if they're all rolling.

... No, because they're still rolling when they think to. But players don't actually have to ask for the check to be able to notice things. In practice, it works out quite well - you're still rolling any time you're actively looking for something, but you don't get screwed over by not having asked.

On this note, I'd like to point to one of may favourite things DnD 4E did: Passive Perception; it makes sense that a player shouldn't have to ask for a Perception check for their highly perceptive character to notice things.

Starfinder really is easier for people who don't know pathfinder rules isn't it?

Reminds me of when Pathfinder first came on scene, and the group I was playing with at the time kept getting thrown off by the differences versus 3.5...

We are not playing the same game at all.

Then, you do whatever you want with D20 system. Just, in my opinion, there are far better systems to handle cinematic combats. D20 system is based on minis and maps. Getting rid of them is a drastic change to the game.

In my experience, maps and minis aren't at all common.

And they are absolutely not an essential of the D20 system - they're nice to have, sure, but if you don't have the money for them or something that's just fine.

But I am probably playing him, and Starfinder, wrong. :D

As long as you and your group are having fun, you're doing it right - I'm just trying to make a significantly more general point.

Yes, you definitely need to keep rolling, though the conditions do lower the target's AC, and make maintaining a bit easier than initiating.

Which I could see getting real fun for a Vanguard with a Throttle weapon when the Character Operations Manual comes out.

And That is my current problem with the way NPCs are built in Starfinder.

I mean, your problem appears to be that you want it to be a different game.

Like, seriously. I've played games that do what you want - they have extensive rules around legality, but equally importantly, they have extensive rules around how you can circumvent that or avoid detection.

Both sides of that coin are absolutely required - so, with the "anti-supernatural bracelet" that doesn't appear to actually exist anywhere in the text, there'd need to be additional rules around how you get detected as having those abilities, how you avoid detection, how you defeat those inhibitors... It's not a small thing.

"This system doesn't do a thing it was never designed nor intended to do" isn't exactly much of a criticism.

Isn't it ?

They even mention that possibility in their question.

Planar Scion traits takes precendence over whatever base race the character might be. For PCs at least.
Going beyond that is homebrew. Sensible homebrew as long as you don't get crazy with it, but still beyond the actual rules (I'd look at the Borai guidelines to modifiy the scions, in that case) .

The OP wants something along the lines of applying a graft to the Nuar, not replacing the traits of the Nuar. So, yes, what they want is beyond the scope of the rules - hence why I suggested the Homebrew section.

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

Metaphysician wrote:

Its important to remember that, even in the space-born future, Starfinder is still a setting where horrible monstrosities wait around potentially every corner. The definition of "safe place" is very, very limited. Combine that with the numerous species possessing innate powers considerably more threatening than low level weapons? The result is arms control being a thing of only limited usefulness, even where it could theoretically be enforced.

I mean, in a universe where Solarions can just create a weapon out of thin air, Technomancers and Mystics can wreck your day without warning, any sort of arms control would have to be aimed at those individuals as well, which... Well, it suggests a pretty specific kind of society if people are getting controlled like they're weapons.

What would be Government's and Law Enforcement's response?

That entirely depends on the government.

I was trying to avoid saying it, but, there isn't really a policy for that situation that doesn't move towards some pretty terrible authoritarianism, because the only option is to control the person. Any government system with good protections in place for people's rights could not actually do anything about it without somehow suspending those protections.

So for any government that's meant to be Good, or at least Neutral, the answer may legitimately be "nothing".

Perhaps the best assumption here regarding the intent is that making a Stealth check to Hide while in cover breaks observation from any observers who you have cover against.

Moving away from strict text resolution for a second, does that seem like a reasonable read on what the design is?

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Claxon wrote:

I'm not saying you should never try to get people to surrender, but I am saying don't be surprised when it doesn't always work and you eventually get shot.

I see this as a case of working as intended.

It's an iconic thing to do in an adventure and the rules are terrible at modeling it.

You can sneak up behind someone and.. gain no advantage over them.

You can ready to shoot someone, but they ALWAYS shoot before you then. You're not risking getting shot you're guaranteeing it.

You can see it not working in the stewart archetypes demand surrender, an ability to make you better at holding to fire becoming absolutely terribad.

Even if the readied action let you fire before they did, it would still be mostly meaningless, because in general a single shot from a weapon will not kill most enemies, unless they are significantly below your level.

The rules just don't handle the situation well whatsoever, regardless of how the readied action rules work.

I mean, you could go for an Intimidate check with a high circumstance bonus, then if that check fails into a Surprise round with both of them counting as aware (for the action limitations); it covers for the situation where it turns into a fight in a far more reasonable fashion than just turning around for an instant full attack.

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

Let's say you're in a room with multiple exits within range of your move speed, and you want to get out of the room while concealing which exit you've used. The Bluff check allows you to conceal your initial direction of travel, which is not insignificant.

Okay, lets go with that.

Its within range of your move speed, so 30 feet to go through the door and move around the corner far enough that people can't see you.

You're going to make a bluff check, make a stealth check at -20 (-10 for doing the batman thing, -10 for moving quickly) and move 30 feet.

OR

You could scurry to the wrong door far enough to get cover, make one stealth check at -10, and then scoot back the other way to the right door.

Only one check, the check doesn't rely on two different skills with two different attributes, and the penalty is actually doable.

I said they were withing range of your movement from your starting position, not from each other.

@Scottybobotti: I think you and BigNorseWolf are misunderstanding. When you said "multiple attacks" he probably thought you wanted to have your mount move into melee so you'd have a full action left to do a full attack.

That's clearly not possible with the Survival riding rules.

But you meant: spend my move action to give my drone a move, and then we both spend our standard action to make an attack, so that's multiple attacks.

That however should be possible. It's weird that you use Survival for it with a drone, but for now that's how it goes. Maybe SCOM will provide something more mechanically thematic.

Per the Limited AI and Master Control rules, that's not how it would appear to work.

Shouldn't the sudden inclusion of an at (or near) level weapon and armor put the player hilariously over WBL?

Let the player pull his shenanigans, at the end of every session ask the players to do a wealth audit. Players above WBL don't get any more loot or money until they even out.

Shouldn't they be scaling towards the WBL for the next level?

OK. I haven't played at high level characters yet. So I am trying to understand where the problem here is.

Operatives and maybe Envoy dominate in skills. It is actually hard to build an operative that isn't good at practically every skill. Envoy can do well at most things that are important and can get even higher skill roll results than operative in a few select things.

The other classes don't have anything that compares to this very well.

So in order to do skill challenges at high level, the DCs scale at about 1.5 per level (taking Ascalaphus as citing things correctly). This is in order to make sure that the challenges are still challenging to an operative at high level.

But this leaves the other classes in the dust. A soldier or Mystic has no hope of doing skills stuff at high level play.

Is that a good summary and understanding of the problem?

So what we are looking for is a way for any class to pick a skill or three and be capable of succeeding at the high (base + 1.5 x level) DCs of skill challenges at high level, yes?

The DC's in the system assume the presence of an insight bonus which scales with level. Unfortunately, that means that if your concept requires your character to be a specialist in any skill not covered by your scaling bonus (if you even have one), that concept is impossible.

You can't have a Mechanic or Technomancer who is a master pilot, for example, because their scaling bonuses don't allow for it. Classes providing specializations can be good; classes gating specializations is often less so.

This is essentially about providing for characters the game does not currently support.

Default class ability save DC: 10 + Half Class Level + Key Ability Score Mod

See page 58, Core Book.

Just LOL if you don’t have a sniper with Force Soles Mk 2 walking half a mile above the rest of the party at all times, outside the max range of all non-sniper weapons on the ground.

This reminds me of a hilariously useful (and only moderately broken) XCom strategy...

Still, this is the age of the internet, I can't help but think that most people who are really interested in this game eventually make their way to the web site.

That's... Not remotely the case. The readership of a site like this represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall playerbase of any given game. Always.

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

Except that they do, because that person will be unable to afford to keep up on equipment - leading very easily to a serious spiral effect that wrecks the game for them.

OR they could stop wasting their money.

That is one of two possibilities; the other is that they will continue to lean on the only strategy that's really left to them (and perhaps even lean into it harder). When you have two possibilities, one of those two possibilities is catastrophic to player experience, and which possibility happens is driven solely by player behaviour, there is a very serious problem that needs to be dealt with somehow.

I'm sure it was just future proofing.

... No, just no.

Ascalaphus wrote:

Say, observing a target for three rounds where the target is not aware of the sniper, or at least not able to take steps to make it hard for the sniper.

So... bring the assassin class into starfinder?

Personally I think snipers are currently unsupported, but in an okay place mechanically. They need adventure writing to support their use, like vehicles and starships.

On the flipside, the time to prepare does make abilties like Supercharge Weapon more powerful. A level 1 Technomancer can make a level 1 Sniper Rifle suddenly deal 1d8+4d6 damage.

The actual problem Sniper Rifles have is that they don't actually deal more damage than a similar Longarm, and without the action to aim may actually have less range than their closest equivalent - it appears to be a design assumption that the Sniper quality and the Unwieldy category counter-balance each other perfectly, but for the number of weapons a character is likely to have in Starfinder this doesn't necessarily hold.

I'll agree that operative's edge is a bit too fast. Possibly even twice as fast as it needs to be.

If it was halved, but left at it's current rate for specialist skills and initiative, sure. As is, until past level 10, you look to the operative unless there is a charisma envoy for face skills, a wisdom mystic for wisdom skills, and intelligence technomancer for intelligence skills, etc...

Would be good if there were ways to get scaling bonuses outside of your class - maybe if Skill Focus and Skill Synergy had some sort of scaling to them.

I would allow this at my table if it was an on the spot idea and sounded Fun.. however, i agree it shouldn't work.. this thread was not fun to read.

Yeah, it's absolutely harmless to allow it - but it's absolutely not RAW, and pretending that it is opens the door to much, much bigger problems.

I hope this isn't overkill I just wanted to show that it is not munchikenery

Just one problem with that: It is. You're trying to dodge the opportunity cost inherent to limited upgrade slots, and trying to claim that you can do this because you're not explicitly barred from this.

Doesn't pass the smell test.

You could also argue that the light sensitivity isn't only about the eyes themselves, but also about the brain's processing of the information - meaning no prosthetic is going to deal with the problem, really.

More broadly: What OP is trying to argue is the way it works is not only wrong, but it fundamentally break the game. Period.

There is no way to put a high level party on a low level ship and have things work properly. Between tier-based DC scaling and CR based enemy ships, forcing players permanently into a severely under-leveled ship by saying "no, you spent those BP, you don't get them back". DO NOT EVER DO THIS. You will completely break the math of all things starship related and never be able to do a starship encounter properly again.

If you wanted to make this work through some sort of houserule setup, you'd have to rewrite all the starship rules.

A personal comm unit has a planet-wide range, and does not appear to require any network (for example, there are no rules at all for what sort of planets it does or does not work on) - especially given the existence of the System-Wide and Unlimited variants.

Which is to say, as far as the rules go, there would be no rules for what you're asking about because it wouldn't exist in the first place.

So if you want a better relationship with the police you can talk to your dm about how to go about that. But keep in mind the relationship is rarely if ever going to be good enough to solve the problem with calling in the Calvary.

Or, perhaps more to the point, you are the Calvary.

Basically, all these complaints seem to boil down to "Paizo should have made a completely different game from the ground up, than the one they actually wanted to make or had any experience or skill at making".

Or, perhaps, "Starfinder isn't good at being something Starfinder was never designed to be", which... Obviously? Sci-fi systems are just as terrible at doing science fantasy, so...

So.. everyone is handed a tactical nuclear pistol at level 1, or everyone gets a blaster at level 1 and damage is based on your level?

Systems like Shadowrun don't have scaling damage. While some weapons might have slightly higher Damage Values, the weapons you're using at super high "level" (in Shadowrun in particular, there are no levels - you can spend Karma on advancing your skills, stats, and other abilities, and spend money on gear, but there's no distinct levels or classes) will do pretty close to the same damage as the weapons you start out with - and under some circumstances, you'll find yourself using weapons like the ones you started with or even worse quality (because where you can actually smuggle your gear into and such is very important in that game - there is absolutely no assumption, ever, that you can just take weapons and armour anywhere you like; there are rules around legality).

As characters get more advanced, they might become harder to hit, and they might have armour to help protect them better, but literally anyone who decides to pick up literally any functioning gun and take a shot at you might kill you.

Starfinder is very much Science Fantasy - and that doesn't mean "science fiction with some fantasy elements", it's a completely separate and distinct thing. And that's good - games like Shadowrun are awesome, but they have a very different tone and feel and not every game that wants to do futuristic things should be that.

I wouldn't think so. If you don't make an attack roll, then you haven't attacked, so you didn't expend any ammo.

Right?

Which also leads to the question of whether you roll both attacks at once, and how to handle it if you do.

Nevermind

Edit: You don't get it. Not worth my time.

It's not that people don't get it. It's that there are very important reasons why the rules in Starfinder don't work like that, and it is very reckless and possibly game breaking to change these rules without due consideration.

Nerdy Canuck wrote:

Have you considered that the reason people don't understand your position no matter how much you "spell it out" is that there are elements that are fundamentally incompatible with how other people understand the game?

The reason I've mostly checked out of the argument (though I've still been following it) is because I'm absolutely certain you're wrong and equally certain that nothing could convince you of this because we seem to understand the game in fundamentally different ways.

Basically, RPGs are like photons. Most of us understand the game in terms of particles. BNW understands it as a wave (complete with some information paradoxes).

I wonder, would it be like photons in the way that neither the particle nor wave interpretation could be said to be perfectly correct or incorrect?

Not that. But if 5 pages of spelling it out won't do that I don't hold out much hope for 6

Have you considered that the reason people don't understand your position no matter how much you "spell it out" is that there are elements that are fundamentally incompatible with how other people understand the game?

The reason I've mostly checked out of the argument (though I've still been following it) is because I'm absolutely certain you're wrong and equally certain that nothing could convince you of this because we seem to understand the game in fundamentally different ways.

Some equivalent to weapon fusions for armour would be cool.

@Xenocrat

We will have to agree to disagree.

To me every example I provided was an event that triggers an offensive readied action.

This is how it is done and will be done at my table.

If my players cleverly word a trigger event condition I will almost always allow it.

The same also applies to the baddies.

It might trigger an offensive readied action, but that action will happen after the triggering action completes. So, to return to the spell example, the attack would connect after the spell is cast - narratively, they might almost happen simultaneously, but you don't get to use a readied action to prevent them from casting their spell (unless the spell takes longer than their own turn to cast, as with Summon Creature). There are very important reasons it works that way - to the point that changing it without understanding those reasons and making appropriate corrections runs the risk of completely breaking the game the second the players figure out what you're really letting them do.

Some thoughts:

- Vehicle design rules
- Weapon design rules (not actually an unsolvable design problem - just put them a touch behind the power budget for their level, as the cost of being custom-made)
- Something that feels like mechs; power armour is cool, but doesn't fill that space because piloting a mech should be about, well, Piloting
- More support for characters who are invested in crafting, so that crafted items don't always have to be behind the power curve of purchased gear

To provide a reference, take a look at X-Legs - which have the System entry "All Legs and Feet".

Thought: Ghoran Solarian assassin with a solar weapon in the form of a sickle, and a serious hatred for vegans.

That's true wherever the odd point goes, though.

Nah, toss it to Dexterity and the difference is at least useful for hitting prerequisites (and the deficit in total points takes longer to come around), and putting it into Intelligence or Constitution makes it effectively a non-issue.

There's literally zero value in taking specifically a 17.

For cultural reasons, Vlaka born blind or deaf are left blind or deaf, despite easy techno-medical fixes for those conditions.

Of course, in Vlakan society, that might not be perceived as something to "fix". Given that all Vlaka, by the rules, know signed and tactile versions of their language, it's a safe bet that Vlakan society has very much adapted around the range of senses the typical Vlaka has, such that being deaf or blind in their society isn't really a disability to begin with.