Sputt's page

Milo v3 wrote:

Xenocrat wrote:

I thought the downside to accessing the scaling cantrips was that they're still not good enough to replace a pistol?

That's unfortunate.

Two thoughts about the cantrip option.

1. Unlike on-level pistols, they're free. So if you stick to cantrips, you get a huge chunk of change you can spend on other things.

All in all, it looks like a viable option to me.

Not so sure it is viable for witchwarpers and precogs. With Hazard and Injury Echo being reflex/will save to negate, with enemy save scaling you'll fall more and more behind with no good way to raise the DC.

For mystics and technomancers it looks like a great free alternative to small arms, though.

Using PDFimages (under linux) it has been pretty simple to extract the images from the PDFs. It is just a pain because it does extract the images, but it extracts the craptastic compressed image. This method is good for maps and character images, but with using the modules from Fantasy Grounds, this has been less of an issue for me.

Does it work on HotV#1 interactive maps file, too? Nothing I've found works on that.

After all, starfinder got rid of 'holding the charge' for touch spells

No, they didn't get rid of that.

CRB pg 271.

Touch Effects and Holding the Charge

Some effects, most notably spells, have a range of touch (see Range below) and require an action to activate. In most cases, if you don’t discharge a touch effect on the round you create it, you can postpone the discharge of the effect (also known as holding the charge) indefinitely.

You can make touch attacks round after round until the effect is discharged. If you make any other attack, activate another ability, or cast a spell during this time, the touch effect dissipates.Some touch spells allow you to touch multiple targets as part of the spell. You can’t hold the charge of such a spell; you must touch all targets of the spell in the same round that you finish casting the spell.

if you own the pdfs, cut the maps out with a snipping tool. then use an image enhancer [i use zyro . com] to improve the image quality, and paste that in your VTT.

It would be nice if Paizo recognized the challenges that they are making for DMs, but then again, they sell the complete APs w/ maps through FantasyGrounds and other VTTs, so...

Feel your pain.

Having to get a map with snipping tool is a huge issue on its own. But let's ignore that, since that's what you actually have to do for some maps.

The quality on some maps are ridiculously bad. Junker's Delight has great maps that look good in the PDF, with a unique art style. Grabbing them, however, means they now look like a kid, not particularly skilled, drew them with crayons. And that's after using an image enhancer. At no fault of the artist, Paizo delivers really bad maps for that adventure.

Liberation of Locus-1 has maps that look bad even in the PDF. Once extracted, they're so bad that I don't know I'd run the adventure at all. If I, who would lose an drawing contest against my 5-yo, look at the maps in a pdf and think "wow, even I could do better" - it's really bad.

Back to the snipping tool thing. For Horizon of the Vast 1, that's the only way I've figured out how to get anything from the map PDF. A pdf tokenizer just grabs outlines and black shadows, which I'm guessing means that's how they intended to deliver it? None of the maps (except the hexcrawl). While it's nice of Paizo to supply a pdf with the maps, it would be a whole lot better if it wasn't literally useless for its intended purpose of letting me use the maps when playing.

The lack of a .pdf with the maps on JD was a huge disappointment, after the slight improvement that started with FFoD.

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It's so bizarre they won't even try to sell high-quality maps separately, as its own products. You just can't get them at all.

I guess the strategy is to give us trash quality so we won't pirate them? What is this, the 90s?

It was nice that FFoD had its own file, but that's about where its usefulness ended. The content was pretty much useless for getting the image and setting it up as a VTT map - at least for book 1 and 2. The only reliable way I found was to take screenshots of the PDF and then patch it together. The older APs were much, much better than FFoD for quality ease of use for VTT, even if they had a wonky grid. And that's saying something.

I've been setting up a few Starfinder APs in Foundry VTT, and I'm not sure what to do about the map quality.

I understand that FFoD had issues, with the promise that it would be better after FFoD was done - but it hasn't been made better.

Liberation of Locus-1 has really poor quality for the maps. They're tiny, and honestly just look really bad when extracted from the PDF. The worst of the bunch. After the map has been aligned with the smallest grid possible, the map looks like a cheap proof of concept from an inexperienced artist.

Horizon of the Vast#1 has a separate map file, but I can't get any map except the hexploration map from that. Can get them from the campaign PDF, at a lower quality. Not as bad as LoL1, but still pretty bad. At least they're usable.

Junker's Delight doesn't come with a separate map file, and not all maps can be copied from the PDF. The ones I can extract look strange - some kind of artifacts around the outer edge. The hand-drawn art style that, admittedly, looks pretty good in the PDF itself, looks like a child's crayon drawing once the quality drops from getting it from the PDF.

I have to admit that I'm increasingly disappointed with every single new PDF release.

Is this the new bar for the maps? Is this what can be expected?

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They’re really committed to story, character, the lore of the pact worlds and also to respecting the mechanics of the game. They released every week through the pandemic and have over 130 episodes on their main feed (playing through Against the Aeon Throne, Signal of Screams and then Devastation Ark).

They’re my absolute favourite Starfinder podcast and if you haven’t tried them yet, I’d really recommend you give them a listen!

Truth! Southern Tomfoolery is brilliant. Highly recommended, for sure!

Actually sending a message and sending images is exactly the same. Its just data. Only the volume differs.

And that sending messages intra system works in 1d6-1 hours and breaks the laws of physics is stated in the core book exactly that way (using the drift, so no issue with something blocking the path).
Laser I brought up because its a technology which is already implemented in the real world so no "science fiction handwaving".
And with 200+ years of intra system cooperation why would bandwidth be limited and expensive instead of there being dozens of laser relay satellites from corporations and governments in both the orbits of the individual planets and Lagrange points?
And if you have such sensitive data to be worried about interception then you just teleport the storage device instead of putting it on a ship.

We went from Morse code, to phone calls, to more advanced data transfers over a long time for a reason. A 20-word message of a few handfuls of bytes, or, at a minimum, terabytes of data. I'm not saying images aren't just data. I'm saying that the volume is so different that the solution will be entirely different - so different that it's not even remotely worth comparing. Which is what I meant with my RL example; it's entirely possibly to take 3d MRI scans of your brain, but it's prohibitively impractical due to data volume. And that's just one image. Compare that to two hours of how many images you have per second, where 60 is on the very, very low end.

Setting up relay satellites for intrasystem communications would take a lot. Bandwidth is not unlimited. There's a finite bandwidth available, per physical laws, which is why it would be prohibitively expensive to commercially send a lot of data.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that I don't think it's the cheaper, safer alternative.

You said that it was unbelievable that physical copies of media would be sent. I'm saying that it's quite believable. You can choose to handwave away any physical limitations you want, and that's fine, but if that's your approach then the rest of your post where you complain about the system inconsistencies is just a personal hypocritical rant for the sake of the rant.

Sputt wrote:

There's a new movie out, and it's in a 3d format. You want to transmit it to the next planet over. Distance and transmission speed isn't something you can change without handwavey "space magic!".

You already have space magic as according to the core book messages take 1d6-1 hours intra-system, specifically breaking the laws of physics. So the only question is bandwidth.

And if you do not want to use space magic, there are always technological means to ensure large scale communication between planets like laser communication between relay satellites in orbit of the individual planets.

If you cherry pick the handwavey "space magic!" that fits your point, but choose to ignore what doesn't - then yeah, it's easy to make an argument for absolutely anything and everything in the system.

Sending a message isn't comparable with sending images, especially when we're talking billions of images.

Magical telepathic messages are quite limited in the setting, too. About 10 words per six seconds (or 20, if you include the reply as being made in the same time frame), if you can see the target.

Over large distances there's going to be more issues. Laser communication in space is going to have tons of issues, not least among them piracy and the risk of something just plain blocking. Over long distance the redundancies and security needed would increase transfer time exponentially with distance. Relay satellites could alleviate some of that, but traffic on them would likely be prohibitively expensive for large data transfers (just like buying bandwidth irl is absurdly expensive).

Still looking pretty decent to hire a crew to take a storage device from planet to planet. For low data messages? Nah. For media? Certainly.

Anything short of magically teleporting the storage device from one spot to another, seems unlikely to be as fast as hauling the thing there physically.

media being shipped physically around the pact worlds instead of transmitted with encryption is also rather unbelievable.

That one I completely buy into. There are going to be three important factors; transfer rate, distance, and size.

There's a new movie out, and it's in a 3d format. You want to transmit it to the next planet over. Distance and transmission speed isn't something you can change without handwavey "space magic!".

You can change the rate by increasing bandwidth, but if everyone does that there's going to be an insane amount of interference - meaning you'll have to spend a larger portion of your bandwidth on redundancies to assure quality.

Looking at file size and it's going to get scary large. If you want to keep image and audio quality up, you're not going to want too much compression.

In my day job I've spent quite a bit of time making system integrations for hospital equipment. Currently there's a huge problem with how various scans take a ridiculous amount of space, since they basically need to be kept in a raw format - a few pixels wrong and it could be the difference between an experienced radiologist seeing that dark spot on your MRI and not diagnosing your tumor. Now they're talking about 3D scans. So every single scan that used to be one image, will now be thousands of images. We can take 3D scans already, we just can't realistically store them anywhere. Now imagine how that new 3d movie you want to send in high quality from Castrovel to Absalom, and over its 2h runtime you will, on the low end, have millions of images per second. Some compression will be fine, but I bet it's not enough to make up the increased quality and features.

I'm okay with harddrive storage space having increased a lot in Starfinder since that's easier to develop. Transfer rates, however, have very real limitations. It's already faster (and possibly both cheaper and better for the environment) to send a shipload full of DVDs from the US to Australia than it is to send the same data through the internet (though this particular example falls apart once you compare sending a ship of DVDs with transmitting the same movie once, copying it, sending the copied data).

I fully believe it would be faster to load a single harddrive on a ship with the movie and have Space UPS deliver it, than to transmit it between planets. You can get rid of the limitations with space magic, but if your argument is that it's not reasonable to manually ship media between planets, I think you're more in science fantasy than science fiction.

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End of their Against the Aeon Throne is on my list of best endings, any category of media. But it didn't really end as they kept going into Signal of Screams and keep making great new episodes. I don't really like horror, but their version of SoS is brilliant all the same.

Lots of memorable characters, both from the players and GM.

When I run my own games, I aim for the stars by hoping it's half as good as their game.

Highly recommend you listen. At least listen to a couple of their Fly Free or Die episodes, which is an AP particularly good for listening.