Samantha DeWinter's page

In general, tracking weapons are mathematically locked into close combat only. The chances of successfully landing an attack with a tracking weapon drops exponentially with the number of gunnery checks you have to make. For long range combat, use direct fire weapons. The range penalty with only one attack roll is much better than making multiple rolls even if the second and subsequent gunnery checks have lower range penalties.

I've found long-range missiles to only be useful for NPC enemies, with "missile boats" firing large broadsides, to make for interesting encounters.

Ah, the universal fun of "do you always have cover in a 5ft wide hallway?"

Roll 20s thing is that its a box of leggos. It hands users an API script, a bucket of macros, a page and says go forth and build.

I... may need to look at Roll20 at some point. This flexiblity is why i've stubbornly stuck to MapTool over the years. If I need something new, I just write my own macros for it. If Roll20 has that with more stability, that sounds tempting.

How is it with the actual map-creation side of things? The one thing I love about MapTool still (having compared it to FantasyGrounds, which another game is running in) is that it lives up to its name. It's really great for creating *maps*, with drawing tools, image handling, vision blocking and layering.

Probably the same as UPBs, being 1000 credits per bulk unit.

Foundry this, Roll20 that... isn't anyone else running Starfinder games in a cobbled-together macro framework in MapTool?

Well, the players of level 3 heroes still like to feel like badasses, and they're literally the main characters of the story, so... yeah... still would give them a shot at it regardless of level.

That's fair. I'm thinking "PCs now on free ballistic trajectory at the hull of the enemy ship" and their tools for dealing with that will vary by level. Level 3 PCs may come up with something clever, or may now have their goals shifted to "get out of this mess alive" which can also be an interesting session.

I just let my players get their hands on a portable grinder with a relatively early sidequest. Seemed the easiest answer.

I assume you mean Focus Fire, not Focused Damage. Text as written:

Focus Fire (Ex) - 5th Level
When you make a full attack with a ranged weapon, you can make both attacks with a –3 penalty instead of a –4 penalty as long as they both target the same creature. If your first attack kills or knocks out the target, you can instead make the second attack against a different creature at a –4 penalty. Once you have the soldier’s onslaught class feature (see page 112), you can use this ability with it, making three attacks against the same creature at a –5 penalty; if your first or second attack kills or knocks out your target, you can make your remaining attacks against a different creature at a –6 penalty.

As it specifically calls out Soldier's Onslaught and has special limitations for it, I do not believe it would give any bonus to other full-attack types like Quad Attack.

One important note for the DM: don't do that the first time. The bad guy..worse guy? Antagonist? Usually doesn't know about the step up and strike, so they should try to guarded step away from the melee at least once. You don't want to negate a characters investment in the feat line by just having them get the same AOO for walking away that everyone else gets.

Yeah, definitely a good call.

If you are a caster standing next to someone with step up and strike you walk 30 feet away, take the regular aoo, and then blast them.

That sounds like what I was looking for, thank you.

There was a lot of discussion about interrupting spells with readied actions a while back, but I couldn't find anything that addressed this issue...

If a melee character with Step Up and Strike gets into melee range of a caster, that caster is completely neutralized with no further action from the melee character. Are there any options for the caster to actually... do anything, in this situation? Casters already got a hard nerfbat in Starfinder, but this seems a bit much.

(previous not-entirely-applicable discussions:)
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ukyg?Disrupting-spell-casting-questions
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs42ffi?Clarification-on-interrupting-spells-wit h-a

Aside from their names and classes in this book, is there any official information on the ruling twins of the Azlanti Star Empire?
Edit: from any source, not just this adventure path. I couldn't find anything.

David knott 242 wrote:

It looks like the PDF of the Starfinder Core Rulebook has been updated. Have the changes in this PDF already been posted in the FAQ/Errata, or is there some other place we can find a list of the changes from the original version?

Some of the changes are already listed on our FAQ/Errata page; the rest of the changes will be added to that page as soon as we are able. Thanks for your patience!

I'm really wondering what kind of convoluted approval process exists here that "as soon as we are able" is over a month and a half. =/

If you're going round-by-round, yeah, it's not gonna be particularly workable. You'd need a "holdout" situation where you're abstracting the combat.

Seems to me like Zombies *should* be all but harmless if there's only one of them.

If we're talking realism, a steep re-entry like these pods would have to use, on an Earth-similar planetary atmosphere, should be around five minutes in the blackout "hot" zone. Total drop time probably double that. That would put un-shielded fire damage at around 60d6. Plus 20d6 from the sudden stop at the end.

Edit: No more than 12 damage per round though, which makes soaking it with fire resist gear completely possible.

Say you want these on a medium ship. 9 BP to get +3 speed for 5 rounds (at the cost of +3 to piloting DCs) seems pretty worthwhile. But the same thing, costing an extra *80 PCU* when PCU is already the major limiter in many builds, seems prohibitive.

Do booster thruster housing modules provide the power for their contained thrusters, or do you still need the PCUs free to power an entire second set of thrusters for your ship? The flavor text suggests it's entirely self-contained, but "Fuel" is not "PCU", which is left undefined.

Since they "recharge" for 24 hours after use, I'm inclined to assume the RAI here is that the thrusters are self-contained, but I wanted a sanity-check here.

For context:
https://aonsrd.com/Starship_ExpBays.aspx?ItemName=Booster%20Thruster%20Hous ing&Family=None
https://aonsrd.com/Starship_Thrusters.aspx

Insofar as this is a worry, I think the new Design Budget optional rules in the Starship Operations Manual (which impose caps on what percentage of a ship’s BP can be allocated to certain things) will help with this.

I have been able to find *nothing* about the new SOM's content. Where did you hear about the design budget?

I actually made a whole combat around effectively this question. Enemy (with good range and gunnery bonus) firing missile barrages at our heroes in an asteroid field. Basically, the rules were simple:

1. LOS required for initial lock. LOS NOT required for tracking rolls on subsequent turns. However-
2. Missiles travel a straight line from their position towards the target vessel. If there is an asteroid in this direct-line path, the missile hits the asteroid, not the target.

This allowed the players to use asteroids as cover, and made the combat much more tactically interesting, as they dodged around to line up the shots they needed on the enemy.

Yeah but think of the labor that magic must do.. if we are taking into consideration 'magical logic'.. the work of getting a little dodad to tell the trigger 'no' when it doesn't meet the condition (striking a target or otherwise accomplishing the goal aka harrying fire) seems quite trivial compared to teleporting them back into the clip of the gun.

So yeah in my world the hapless gunner would just be aiming, cursing, and continuing to have a red light or something similar flash indicating to anyone familiar with a conserving fusion what is going on.

I love the logical-but-not-game-rules extrapolation of this, that in-world you could take this fusion, wave your gun in the general direction of the enemy, and just pull the trigger as fast as you possibly can, and when one of those reckless shots would potentially hit, the gun actually fires.

(How did we get on Tungsten death rods?)

I asked if players could break balance if given a lot more expansion bays to work with on larger ships. The answer was basically "no", so far. Trying to use Atomic Rockets logic in Magic/High-Sci-Fi doesn't count.

Probably not... unless your players are the type to try to use questionable math and the upb cost of hull repairs to argue for a way to cheaply fill their dozens of 0bp cargo bays with tungsten rods...

- and then realize that basically any tactical use of them gets them branded as terrorists by every government in near space. <.<

Is there any reason that significantly upping the expansion bays for huge and larger ships would break the game balance? Even spamming hangars, I don't see how players could break things, given the limitations on multiple player ships. It's not like they'd have more BP to spend.

From the description, I don't think you'd need to use a move action to simply immobilize the target, as long as your standard is spent on maintaining. The move action is just to move the target around.

Honestly, it seems like a reasonably powerful (if situational) crowd control ability to me. Primarily useful against targets that are stronger in melee than at range, sure, but spending a single party member's actions on nullifying a single enemy target (while the rest can fire away from range) would often be well worth it. Yeah, it can be negated by saves, but so can basically every detrimental effect.

They're a "use them if you loot them" weapon, I guess, since that's effectively 10% cost.

There is no official rule on combining clothing functionality, so by RAW I would say that it isn't legal. Beyond that, cost would be house-rule, but I'd make it custom work and probably add a hefty surcharge.

Awesome! Thanks, Joe!

Some idiot wizard opened simultaneous adjacent portals to the planes of positive and negative energy in an attempt to make a new power source and everything blew up spectacularly.

Another way to increase the difficulty is by having multiple enemy starships. I don't have a good effective encounter level formula though. Three tier 20 starships is going to be a much more difficult battle than a single tier 20 starship (obviously). But three tier 16 starships is probably an easier battle than a single tier 20 starship. Not sure on that though since I haven't analyzed the math or run through multiple encounters with that scenario.

I remember reading a rule of thumb somewhere as "drop a tier, add a ship" for equivalent power. So two tier 20s could be an effective tier 21 encounter?

This has been bothering me for a long time. In the corebook, the mechanic hover drone has only 6 STR (makes sense, it's tiny and light, unlike combat and stealth drone) and, for some weird reason, 8 Wisdom, as opposed to 10 of the other two types. Why? Why does the tiny drone have a worse wisdom than the other two drone types? The strength I understand, but the lower wisdom score is just wierd.

Smaller body, less internal space, less complexity for computation?

I've been trying to put together an expanded list of starship frames to increase potential options for customization. I think I've got a decent start here, but I'd appreciate some input on balance.

Google Doc here

Some notes:

1. The mouseover rule change on the "turret" column header has an outsized importance to balance. It's my answer to the discussion here but should probably be addressed separately from the rest of the frames' stat balance.

2. Not all frames are optimized for combat. The fact that the by-the-numbers "best" starting ship is a Light Freighter, and not the Explorer always bothered me. Thus the expansion bay rules on freighters and dedicated passenger craft.

3. I did not list, or touch on at all, supercolossal ship frames. My outlook is that these are going to be plot devices anyway, not something players are likely to touch.

4. The Tramp Freighter is probably unbalanced. It was a plot ship that I included in the list for my players' reference. Feel free to comment on it anyway though.

Credit where it's due:

1. Below the main table, I have the unmodified stats for RAW frames (in green), followed by a list of homebrew frames (in red) by Alex Olson that I borrowed from shamelessly.

2. All example ship images, along with several custom ship concepts are taken from Endless Sky, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

I love it, and am now retconning a major NPC in my campaign into this class.

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?

In this context, the cloaking field doesn't seem too terribly unbalancing. You can trick attack every round up to CR +7ish, or trick attack every other round in the ungodly unfair situation of your GM putting you up against CR +8 or higher (seriously, when would this happen? Attacking Cthulhu?).

*also, re: the last two posts, yes it's explicitly confirmed that skill mastery can be used to take 10 on trick attack.

Its possible that various forms of this kind of. . . I guess "voluntarily intersex"? . . . status might take over the word 'trans' in this setting or a similar one. After all, the medical technology and magic is such that the real world form of transgender should be readily identifiable and treatable with biological sex transformation indistinguishable from having been born with the "correct" body to match your neurological sex.

At which point. . . well, its also a setting with countless species, who don't only have radically different concepts of gender express and sexual dimorphism, but who quite often don't even have two genders. I kind of have a hard time imagining that "I was born with the wrong body, but it got fixed at age 6" being a thing that would bother anybody in nearly all cases.

And with linguistic differences on top of that, I suspect that you'd have a popularization of neutral pronoun usage as the widespread default with specific forms of address used on request.

True, thinking of it as not a feat and more a class/level feature does ease my brain.

Yeah, it's best in terms of balance-with-other-feats to think of the actual *feat* as a versatility feature, letting you apply weapon specialization (class feature) to more weapons, rather than being the thing that provides the bonus itself.

I'm reminded of early 4E dragonborn that could fly, but only as NPCs. Precluding my dragonborn character from ever having that as an option sure made my character feel far less heroic.

Ran into a very similar issue with Sarcesians, where NPCs can fly twice as fast and stay in the void (CR) times as long as a player. I just homebrewed a custom racial feat, but in the rules, NPCs can just be better than a player ever can be.

I understand that separating the systems makes balancing easier, but that should be things like CR-based statblocks for quick creation, not unique abilities that PCs of the supposedly same race can never get. See how the Drow Magic racial entry works, adding a character build option from a high level NPC class, rather than locking it away - that's closer to what I see as ideal.

If you're piloting a Colossal or Supercolossal ship, I think your strategy generally has to become "pound the enemy into paste with your turrets". You don't dogfight in a Dreadnaught.

It's not about reversing how language works, just about accepting that not every time you see the word observation/observed/observing, they mean the state Observed. There's just a limited number of synonyms for it that don't sound really awkward.

"A creature currently being observed can’t attempt a Stealth check which would result in breaking Observed without first breaking that observation."

In the Observed section: "A creature currently being observed can’t attempt a Stealth check which would result in breaking Observed without first breaking that observation." This sounds circular if you think that the state Observed and "observation" are the same thing. But they're not; Observed is a keyword state, while "observation" is not a keyword but just a synonym for perceiving or witnessing.

That... sure is some linguistic interpretation. "can't attempt a stealth check" is pretty explicit. If A must precede B, you can't have B be the solution to A.

"To break observation, the creature must either

* mask itself from your precise senses (with darkness, fog, invisibility, or the like, but not with effects such as displacement that still leave a clear visual indicator of its location),
* move somewhere it can’t be observed (a place with cover, for example),
* or use Bluff to create a distraction to momentarily break your observation of it."

The examples of things that can mask you from precise senses are all things that can make it impossible to see you. Darkness makes you impossible to see (assuming nobody has Darkvision). 10ft of fog completely blocks vision. Invisibility also blocks vision.

It says you can't be observed in cover, but this rule applies to people who have the Observed state and want to make a check to end it. Clearly Observed and this observation that you're trying to break can't be exactly the same thing.

Or the text is self-contradictory. This isn't a divine text, the game designers can make mistakes. If the text conflicts with itself, the answer really shouldn't be reversing how language works to make it fit.

Different writers on different chapters?

breithauptclan wrote:

I have also noticed what he does to my name when he is quoting things by hand. Mostly I am amused, but if I ever change my avatar picture it isn't going to make sense any more.

Look, i've met 4 people online and 2 in person who asked me if i was the same person as that "big nosed wolf" guy from the forums and I've made it EASY....")

Easy. It's "Puppy".

Claxon wrote:

does everyone agree that being unobserved and having some type of cover/concealment are two separate requirements for stealth?

No actually, it's the main point of contention. According to the easy stealth folks cover or concealment breaks observation enough to try a stealth check.

The problem is, it's stated in multiple places that cover is an example of something that can break observation. It's actually the go-to example almost every time it comes up in the rules. Which means the argument here is really that the game designers badly overlooked the consequences of what they were writing. I come down solidly on the "require some kind of active breaking of observation" for actual playablility reasons, but I think the reason I don't get any pushback on that from players is that they're all so used to Pathfinder working that way that it's never questioned (and I am blessed with a lack of rules lawyers in the group).

Hit that update button, then head home for the weekend!

What inertia? Ships come to a cold stop without a pilot to spend actions; missiles run out of fuel and stop. There's no inertia in "Starfinder space."

;P

I've decided to chalk this up to "emergency brakes" that kick in when ships are unpiloted. If someone wants to get hacky with the ship's systems and figure out how to coast, they're more than welcome to. "Continuing moving" isn't the primary benefit of having a pilot, "not having jack squat for defense" is.

I'm seeing that it could possibly work, but requires very specific ambush setup, plus luck, and the enemy gets at bare minimum a turn or two to run and try to stay ahead of the missiles (so it's not viable for smaller/faster enemies). Add that to the need to keep making TL rolls for every missile, and it gets relegated to "if the players can actually pull this off, they deserve to have it work"

Is there something in the build that makes the comparison shopping besides the average damage of the weapon necessary ?

I think the special version of the Weapon Specialization feat is unique? Or is there some other way to get 2X level added to damage on other weapons

pithica42 wrote:

Do "unarmed attacks" count as weapons?

And see this is the question I don't understand.

If someone told me they weren't, I'd literally just point to the chart in the Core Rulebook that lists them as weapons.

That's like asking, "Do curve blades count as weapons?"

Of course they do.

This is actually a minor point of interpretation I wanted to pull out. If you ignore the fluff sentence, this means that hand and foot attacks can be used in place of bites with nothing changed. - which is how I let my group's soldier run it, with her having long fingertip claws instead of Sharp Pointy Teeth. I do lean towards requiring the feat/ability tax on the build though. With imp. unarmed, raw lethality, and arcane assault, she's by far the heaviest hitter in the group.

... item level of your hands isn't an issue that's come up yet. Permissively, I could just make it character level, but I'll have to think it over.

For those of you who have to keep scanning, how on earth do you and your gm keep accurate track of so many variables without turning starship combat into a slow quagmire?

Running it on a framework that tracks the numbers for me, mostly.