WhiteWeasel's page

Is Starfinder doing okay? Or is it already beginning to plateau, or even die off?

Don't know about anyone else, but I'm personally losing interest and jumping ship from starfinder. It's combination of several factors, but it's mostly a disconnect of what the game offers and disapproval of it's rules. Our group is used to narrative/roleplay first type of games like Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness. One of the reasons our group has put up with starfinder this long is that we have a great GM that chooses logic and roleplay over arbitrary paizo-isms.

I think the real problem this game has is that it feels like a video game. It has a bunch of ideas and conventions that make sense when applied to that space, but here on the table where's there no computer to do all the behind the scenes work, it feels clunky because you gotta flip to three different pages to get all of those little rules cogs to mesh together.

As far as Starfinder goes I still feel the community impressions (and thus your player's impressions) are out of sync with the mechanics. The art and layout all have a sci fi look, but in reality the mechanics and game play are tuned for something like Borderlands and Destiny: shootem up and take their guns. That's a fine idea for a game and even interesting. But I found so many folks were trying to force sci fi on it, and had rightfully expected something like sci-fi, because that's what the game presents as in its visuals.

I blame a lack of good sync between James Sutter, the creative lead, and Owen KC Stevens, the design lead, for at least some of this. During the publicity cycle Sutter was out front and talking Firefly and Shadowrun and even Star Trek as touchstones. Not a word about borderlands or Mad Max style stuff.

I think as time goes on, more and more people likely realize starfinder isn't a real science fiction game, but fantasy with the veneer of sci-fi like warhammer 40K. And that it's not a really roleplaying game, but Borderlands with RPG elements.

Our group wanted a Fallout 2 experience, and we got Fallout 4 instead so to speak because of that aforementioned disconnect between the game's presented aesthetic and mechanics.

I haven't played Starfinder. Getting really interested, though.

1. What do you like about the current edition?

2. What would you change?

3. Is there anything you wouldn't want to change?

1) The Gap. Long story short, up until about 400 years ago, though an unexplained supernatural event, all historical accounts and memories were wiped, "resetting" the galaxy if you will. This is narrative genius for two reasons. The first is that it allows starfinder to ditch any baggage lore-wise from pathfinder (and not spoil any future events). The other is, that it creates a "clean slate" of a galaxy where there are so many unknowns, anything can happen or crop up and more or less seem reasonable. This makes starfinder - dare I say, perfect for homebrew shenanigans and custom settings.

2) The game is too crunchy and constraining with it's rules. Starfinder and by extension pathfinder, feel like a video game where you have to adhere to a rigid set of defined parameters that at times, seem completely arbitrary.

But what really gets me is that because of the very "programmed" nature of the rules, they interact with many other rules at once and and it's very daunting for newer players to try and keep track of making all of those little "pathfinder-ism" cogs to mesh together. There are way too many references to other rules in the book that make players have to flip to one or more other pages to fully understand the nature of an interaction, which is really inconvenient and slows down the game. If not overhauled entirely to minimize inter-dependencies, the rules at least need to be more concise and organized better if they are so important to follow closely.

3) What I wouldn't change is how alignment is handled: That it basically doesn't matter. What makes any argument of morality compelling is the inherently subjective and fuzzy nature of morality. Putting clear labels on morality defeats the point of it. I'm glad it's dead.

@WhiteWeasel

O...k... O_O I stand corrected then, thanks for the info :)

Starfinder has the Sun and its own asteroid belt, the Diaspora.

So, well then, I supposed that the only resource to consider is money, but... a powerful lord wouldn't hav eto worry this much about that either :P

In a society where materials are super abundant, the chief limiting factors for logistics are going to be labor, manpower, transportation, and bureaucracy. Like the other Isaac said above, it would be less about the materials, and more about the actual time and effort to get them.

I haven't seen a machine/artifact that can create items out of thin air either, so unless you overmine a planet or several planets, you will never get a huge armada if you consider resources.

While starfinder doesn't quite go into this level of realism, i'd like to point out that space is far bigger and more vast than credit is given.

To quote Issac Arthur on starlifting:

In the starlifting episode, we saw that a civilization could pull 1000's of earths worth of metal out of their own sun, but even 1/1000 of an earths worth of building material would be enough to build an aircraft carrier mass spaceship 100 trillion times over.

You do not need planet mining to field large fleets by any stretch of the imagination. After all, star ships have a lot of empty space in them compared to how much materials they use. Not to mention, there's little need to planet mine unless you are going for truly colossal mega structures like dyson spheres. Excuse my vernacular, but asteroid mining is 'hella lucrative.

In 1997 it was speculated that a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 1.6 km (1 mi) contains more than US$20 trillion worth of industrial and precious metals. A comparatively small M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of 1 km (0.62 mi) could contain more than two billion metric tons of iron–nickel ore, or two to three times the world production of 2004. The asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to contain 1.7×10^19 kg of nickel–iron, which could supply the world production requirement for several million years. A small portion of the extracted material would also be precious metals.

To give you an idea of the scale here, a Nimiz-class aircraft carrier (one of the largest in the world and would classify as huge starship in starfinder terms) has a mass of a mere ~88,000 metric tones.

When it comes to asteroid mining, not only the raw materials are important, but the fact that unlike planets, they have tiny gravity wells and do not need a lot of work to get access to and process them. This makes obtaining resources in space FAR easier than planets as the ease of building space-based infrastructure goes up dramatically the easier the access to space is. And keep in mind, all of these speculations are being done with real-world technologies and limitations in mind like limited delta V and no access to FTL. In the starfinder setting where for all intents and purposes, starship travel is extremely easy, fast, common, and cheap by real world metrics... let's just say the pactworlds can produce more than enough supplies to fuel all of the infrastructure they will ever need in the near-future and then some.

And to really drive it home, all of this is before factoring fusion power and particle accelerators for transmutation, so if the demand was high enough, materials can be directly synthesized. After all, where do you think those antimatter mega-missiles come from?

Alright, I got a secondary/alternate submission that is a little more understandable. (Maybe too understandable...)

Change-Face.

One might think it's an alternate take on "two-faced". But no, a change face is something far worse than someone with conflicting behaviors or morals. They act like they are your friend. Like they are someone you should care about. But the reality is, they don't give a rat's ass about you. You are little more than pawn, only worth your usefulness to them. They leech off of the goodwill of others, and take the feelings of others and twist it for their own gain. Every problem is your fault, and you need to apologize for your incompetence if you are worth their friendship.

If you ever dare to speak out against their passive-aggressive manipulative behavior, they'll say your overreacting, downplay their actions, say things about you to your friends, and poke and prod at every chink in your self-esteem to get you back in line. And if all else fails, they'll discard you like trash because you are no longer eating their pudding-pop b!!@~*$@.

Despite the wide and varied lineages of the pactworlds, "Change-Face" is near universal in it's understanding. Everyone who carries knives in their backs, emptied their hearts into a trash can, wasted their empathy, had a pretend friend, or danced with a soulless avatar, knows what a change-face is at the fundamental level.

Whether they betrayed a vesk's honor, warped skittemander's will to help into something they never wanted, or spat upon the honesty of an urog, a change-face is a swear that carries an intimate pain to it that is reserved for the vile and the abusive.

To openly call someone a change-face is a supreme insult upon their character, and those who use the term wantonly quickly find themselves carrying the word's weight in blood.

Instead of a problem, it seems the game system simply doesn't fit your expectations.

So much this. After playing a lot of sci-fi games that had starship combat that ranged from using weaponized tractor beams and mining equipment for a starship melee class to watching the enemy ship disable it's own power supply to avoid being cooked to death because I shot off their heat radiators, I kinda toss expectations out the window.

While I admit that there's a lot to be desired for starfinder starship combat, I find the current upgrade system very interesting. Ship hulls behave more like computer cases where they are the pretty much frame for the actual hardware. The only reason to get a bigger frame is to fit more stuff or be compatible with certain modules. Which would make sense in the pactworlds setting given the wide disparity of technological advancement in equipment. This would handily explain hyper optimized PC ships, as they are essentially sleeper builds.

WhiteWeasel, I love this, but you have a higher opinion of us than you should if you think we would be able to use and/or explain this, haha. I am having trouble pronouncing it let alone using it in a sentence.

Thanks for the submission though, and everyone else here!

You quoted the wrong guy, but yeah, I do have a tendency to lean towards complex ideas as I really push the science fiction part of starfinder. (It would be pronounced Pro-Tee-Um-Eyes if you were curious) Plus, I wanted to 1-up disintegration. Getting disintegrated means getting destroyed so thoroughly your body turned to dust, getting protiumized means getting destroyed so thoroughly your body's atoms shatter into hydrogen. Now that's overkill.

Though that said, it would be a rare use case swear, as using it would mean extreme hyperbole, or someone is about to lose a game of chicken to Vegeta or Admiral Holdo.

My problem for rolling is that my friends do it for mostly stat gain because of the higher average. Not to mention, my two GM that roll for stats are kinda white hat about it and are a bit... lenient when it comes to bad rolls. Sure, it resulted in me getting Beep, the incredible hulk of tengu in pathfinder with two 18's and the lowest of 13, buuuuuut it kinda defeats the point IMO.

And my personal problem is what if we do keep where the dice fall, we often get one or two players that are wildy better/worse than the others and the short stick feels left behind, or the the rest are playing catch up.

I improvised a hybrid buy, where each character gets 10 points to distribute, but they get two +2's to a random score determined by a d6, (1 is STR, and 6 is CHA) so my players can still feel powerful, but still be on level playing field with each other.

This thread highlights one of the biggest flaws of otherwise great game. It doesn't feel like a tabletop adventure at times because it's ham stringed by it's over reliance on rules. Basic logic should not break down because someone forgot to specify the parameters or the parameters themselves are too rigid. If paizo really wanted that, Starfinder should have been a video game.

Less of a outright swear, and more of an exclamation. Protiumize. Verb. In the realms of theoretical physics, it is possible for an atom to be decomposed into it's constituent particles should a vastly powerful force be applied, rendering the object into a highly ionized cloud of hydrogen (lone protons, or protium) and neutron radiation. Or in other words, energized so dramatically the object in question undergoes spontaneous nuclear fission.

In scientific communities and highly intelligent races, to Protiumize something is slang often used to describe something destroyed with an excessive, obscene amount of force. This is almost always used in hyperbole, as the given energy magnitudes involved are far beyond any known technology, and to use it literally would imply rather dire circumstances.

Example 1:
"Are you insane?! The Vesk would protiumize us if we tried to play chicken with the Vindicas Tyrant!"

Example 2:
Science Officer: "Sir, you're not going to believe this, but I've just detected a brief energy discharge measuring in at 214 yottawatts from this empty region of space twenty degrees to port, several light years away."

Captain: "What does that mean?"

Science Officer: "Either a wormhole opened up in the wrong place, or we just saw someone get protiumized with wrath on the order of a small star directed at them.

Yeah most definitely, and they would had succeeded, at the cost of a couple of Resolve, but they did the opposite of focusing, they went on grabbing more enemies and that's generally a bad idea in every possible game from tabletop to MMOs, you simply don't start running forward in a dungeon.

You should get your party a copy of XCOM 2. They'll quickly learn to never aggro multiple pods of enemies at once if they want to live. ;)

Unless the party in question is a police state and is homogenized enough as a system of power to enforce it (which the pact worlds is clearly not) gun control would have to be on done on the local level. I.E specific locations and establishments. It would be just like going to the casinos on the strip in New Vegas. Leave your guns at the check in counter (or stuck somewhere unmentionable).

When you take the attack or full attack action with weapons (including a Solarian’s Solar Manifestation, but not Spells or other special abilities of any kind), you can take a –2 penalty to your attack rolls. If you do, those attacks deal additional damage equal to half your base attack bonus (minimum 1).

Since you can give enemies feats as per the AA creation rules, I was wondering how this would be calculated. Because with RAW, giving a CR 6 combatant +8 to to damage for a -2 feels a bit... strong.

I personally would house rule it to their half CR instead to make the feat function on a power level closer to what the players get since their BAB is their close to their level anyways.

Don't megaton measure explosive power, and not weight or mass?

Mega is a standard SI prefix.

exa E 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^18)

peta P 1,000,000,000,000,000 (10^15)
tera T 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12)
giga G 1,000,000,000 (10^9)
mega M 1,000,000 (10^6)
kilo k 1,000 (10^3)
hecto h 100 (10^2)
deca da 10 (10^1)
(none) (none) 1 (10^0)
deci d 0.1 (10^−1)
centi c 0.01 (10^−2)
milli m 0.001 (10^−3)
micro μ 0.000,001 (10^−6)
nano n 0.000,000,001 (10^−9)
pico p 0.000,000,000,001 (10^−12)
femto f 0.000,000,000,000,001 (10^−15)
atto a 0.000,000,000,000,000,001 (10^−18)

One megaton is equivalent to a million tons. Therefore a 1 megaton bomb is equivalent to that mass of TNT in destructive power. Which is about 4,184,000 gigajoules.

Read the full descriptions of feats, they may be better/worse than you think from their summaries.

For me in particular, I wished I figured out sooner you can pair antagonaize with the envoy's not in the face.

As a standard action, you can antagonize a foe that can see and hear you by attempting a Diplomacy or Intimidate check (DC = 10 + your opponent’s total Sense Motive skill bonus, or 15 + 1-1/2 × the opponent’s CR, whichever is higher). If you succeed, the foe is off-target and takes a –2 penalty to all skill checks for 1 round plus 1 additional round for every 5 by which your result exceeds the DC, or until it makes an attack against you, forces you to attempt a saving throw, or damages you (whichever comes first). Once you have attempted to antagonize a foe, that foe is immune to this ability for 24 hours. This is a language-dependent ability.

As a move action, you can choose one enemy within 60 feet. That enemy must succeed at a Will save or take a –4 penalty to all attacks it makes against you until the end of your next turn. At 6th level, you can spend 1 Resolve Point to make the enemy take the penalty with no saving throw allowed.

I find it way too funny that you can smack talk an enemy and then immediately backpedal to give the baddie a -2 to hit everyone else, or a -4 to hit me. It's just like that scene from super android 13 abridged.

Kid Gohan: Hey, why don't you pick on someone your own size!
*Giant hulked-out blue android turns around and growls angerly*
Kid Gohan: Euuhhh, well, clearly not me...

When it comes to traps and starships, I'm disappointed by the lack of hostile life support options, or rather the small amount of races with incompatible habitability needs. It would totally be within this game's humor for a ship to be boarded and it's occupants native to a planet of 5g decide the best way to deal with boarders is to turn off "guest mode" on their gravity generators and watch their intruders do their best yamcha impression.

Seems like starfinder really needs the golden rule of magic for class features.

The first golden rule of "Magic The Gathering" states that whenever a card contradicts the basic rules, the card takes precedence.

All things considered...

{quote=Dougalas Adams]Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

The overwhelming majority of space is a vast swath of nothing. Were it not for game contrivance, pulling matter into the drift would be incredibly rare, and it would be just hot plasma from stars 99.99% of the time. I can see why people in-universe see it as a negligible downside.

To help myself keep track of whose who, and where they are in combat at my table, I have made colorized versions of the official paizo character sheet, along with initiative trackers that you can fold in half and place on top of your GM screen.

Color Coded Character Sheets And Initiative Trackers

Example Image

The character sheets come in 8 colors (Not counting the blue vanilla character sheet and greyscale), making for 10 total colors.

I figured I would post them here if anyone else finds them useful.

That still doesn't explain why the enemies are never attacking anybody but you. Yes, you can threaten them, but if shooting you does nothing, why are they not shooting at your allies instead? Instead of wasting turns futilely pinging off the heavy plate of a great big Vesk warrior, try to flank and threaten the squishies who've apparently decided to forgo actually wearing armor.

That sounds like more like a problem with how the GM runs the encounter. Even simple minded enemies can address basic tactical questions like: Who is my biggest problem? Who is the most vulnerable? Are my current tactics working? etc...

crawling through a vent is *very* loud. He should be spotted immediately.

Be the breeze. Just like thor the god of thunder.

Besides the noise issue, ways to make vents less attractive hiding spots is that air ducts could be inconvenient to use for a multitude of reasons.

-Vents may be made of smooth and difficult to climb materials.
-Vents may have cleaning bots in them that can't be moved around, so they get in the way and can't be moved or broken apart without making a ton of noise.
-Vents themselves are noisy to be in from the rushing air and hampers PC's perception.
-Some vents may be pressurized and adding a blockage on top of that not only would cause detectable pressure loss disturbances, but may blow the player around and slam them into walls if they lose their grip.
-Vent networks are easy to get lost in.
-(My favorite) Essential/important systems might run on a separate ventilation loop entirely, so the player only can bypass a limited amount of the structure, and must expose themselves for a bit trying to find the closed internal loop.

Also, climbing in vents may be viable for civilian or public structures, but any place that's going to be legitimately worried about a break in is going to have countermeasures set up because that's the first thing someone would think of to try and bypass their security.

Eh, the issue with simple asteroid bombardment is, its slow. Sure, its not *that* hard to send an asteroid or ten at a planet, but if the planet sees them coming, they have a lot of time to send their own ships out and either redirect them or blow them up. It only works as part of an existing successful planetary siege. Which is why I imagine people don't spend a ton of time flinging asteroids at each other.

As for setting off a supernova via relativistic planetoids? I'll believe its a major issue when there's any evidence that anyone has that level of tech. Being able to move an asteroid slowly does not mean you can take planet-sized masses and accelerate them to a larger percentage of C.

Isaac Arthur does a great video on planetary assaults invasions.

And I agree with the relativistic planetiods thing, moving an object of that mass to near relativistic speeds with any kind of ease is grossly underestimating the energies involved here. Especially with conventional thrusters.

If we are talking doomsday weapons, I'm surprised we haven't brought up the Nicoll Dyson Beam. Take several large asteroids worth of metals and harvest them to build a cloud of wafer-thin mirrors around the local star in a dyson swarm, and suddenly you can focus the light from those mirrors and you got a literal death-star. Alternatively, you can cover the back of your projectile of choice with solar sails and you got relativistic projectiles for days anyways. Much easier than moving a whole planet. So much easier in fact, it can be done with technology that we pretty much have now. No new physics or technologies like fusion. Our bottleneck is the sheer scope of the project with our current (lack) of space infrastructure. Such a project would be trivial for a setting where we got cities in space, magic, and FTL.

Also, if you want to overlook the fact this would involve a time frame of millions of years, you can use those mirrors to channel a supergiant star's light in one direction, and thanks to newton's third law, your supergiant star will go supernova a few hundred light years in the desired direction.

You can also use a shell of mirrors around a black hole to make a pretty spectacular bomb.

Man, you can kill a lot of people with mirrors...

Multiclassing is a lot of numbers to deal with @-@, but then again, I'm doing it all at once by generating a high-level character. Right now I'm using the Awesomenauts as my inspiration as their zany-saturday morning show style seems right at home with the feel of starfinder.

Going to make my favorite (and main) Raelynn as a soldier 9/operative 7. Note that i'm going to accurate emulation of her abilities/role in her respective game over making the most optimal build.

It is tricky, but as long as you have a schtick, and all aspects of your build support that schtick, then you'll do okay.

-snip-

Basically, look for classes that have overlapping, yet still stacking, abilities, and be prepared to give up the highest level abilities in each class, in order to maximize that one area.

Here is a list of various dips that I've been looking at that I think may be worth the cost for some builds in some games. There are all the usual caveats about skill bonuses not stacking, and worrying about getting Weapon Spec at 3, and effects on caster level and BAB. I think, unfortunately, most of these don't work most of the time because of all that. But I think they can work, especially if you start at higher level where you don't necessarily have to feel the pain, and especially if you take dips that either shore up a class's weakness or compliment their strengths (though, because of insight bonuses not stacking, and so much being tied to class level, this is hard).

-Snip-

Thank you so much for the help. That was the kind of stuff I was hoping to see. While I asked this in a general sense, the specific reason was that I was thinking about doing a one-shot with some pregen characters and was wondering how well the game supports "flavor first" character design so my players can have wacky character concepts to play as instead of soldier mcbadass #14.

So far my experience in this game has been pure monoclassing. How well does multiclassing play out in this game, as I have many questions about it.

1) When multi classing how do you split it? Do you go evenly, or is it more dominant/side class. E.G so-and-so has solarion 5 and picked up soldier 1 for that blitz bonus?

2) Any special notes on class match-ups? E.G like types only, such as combat with combat (Like the soldier solarion above) and support with support (like a technomancer mechanic), or can you mix and match anything?

People actually care about the stat boost? 90% of the time I just picked what went best flavor wise with the character I wanted to make.

At this point if you can't really change up the danger of the encounter, the best you can do is maximize player preparation for it. Telegraphing to the players that these enemies will kill them if they get the chance is very important. That way if the party dies, they at least felt like they had a chance to do something about it and gave it their all.

There's really no sissyfooting around the issue. If you are in an escape pod and someone wants you dead, you're just fish in a barrel. The fact escape pods have no propulsion at all means you are a sitting duck astronomically speaking. And unless starfinder does something to address it, stealth is not really an option in space if you are going for the undetectable kind. (For example, any ship with life support would glow with several hundred watts of thermal radiation) They can't run and they can't hide, they are just totally screwed if they end up in that situation.

The best option is to either not end up in that situation in the first place, or do something that takes away/interferes the enemies reason for going full destruct-o-mode.

The best worst case scenario is for the players to survive is for them to fake out the enemy and jettison the escape pods without entering them, hoping to triune they are dumb/cocky enough to take the bait and leave afterwards. Praying their environmental protections last long enough until rescue.

WhiteWeasel wrote:

thejeff wrote:

Or you just move it because it's magic.

Or just make it colder.

Magic isn't physics. You don't play physics games like changing albedo, you just summon eternal winter.

Thinking about magic in physics terms is a fool's game. Some spells are easy and should use huge amounts of energy, others are much harder, but might require much less. Others of course it doesn't even make sense to talk about "amount of power" in any conventional sense.

Why not? Magic is just bending the laws of universe to your whim. It's not a stretch to think the more dramatic the change in the "law" is, the more powerful the spell needs to be in some metric to achieve the desired effect.

The metaphysics of magic dictate that it becomes more difficult as it helps you overcome powerful foes and obstacles, not in proportion to the energy it would require to accomplish a similar task via mundane means. Duh.

Yeah, totally should have seen it that way, after all; Magic A is magic A. "It's been said that as long as magic causes problems for the main characters, it can be free-form and arbitrary; but once it starts being used to solve the main characters' problems, it needs to be given strict limits."

Or you just move it because it's magic.

Or just make it colder.

Magic isn't physics. You don't play physics games like changing albedo, you just summon eternal winter.

Thinking about magic in physics terms is a fool's game. Some spells are easy and should use huge amounts of energy, others are much harder, but might require much less. Others of course it doesn't even make sense to talk about "amount of power" in any conventional sense.

Why not? Magic is just bending the laws of universe to your whim. It's not a stretch to think the more dramatic the change in the "law" is, the more powerful the spell needs to be in some metric to achieve the desired effect.

Would slowing a planet's orbit actually require more power than locking the planet in eternal winter without changing its orbit? Just magically imposing snow and cold everywhere.

Nooooooooooo.

From what I could look up, the total kinetic energy of the earth for example is 2.69x10^33 joules or 2,690,000,000 yottajoules. Earth's gravitational binding energy (AKA the amount of energy you need to dump into it to shatter it) is 2x10^32 joules or 200,000,000 yottajoules.

Anything that has the power to alter a planet's kinetic energy in a meaningful way would require an amount of power that would be classified as a doomsday weapon in any other context. Being able to enforce an eternal winter via magic should be child's play. Just raise the planet's albedo to make it better at reflecting the energy it gets from the sun and it's temperature should drop.

Great new challenge! As a former Gallente pilot, a pretty good way to bring on the mayhem is variable damage types!

Duality Rifle, Kilojoule (if power needs to be tweaked down or up, rename to hectojoule and megajoule respectively)
While formally known as Hybrid rifles, project duality was the code name for a new type of weapon that combines the properties of projectile and energy weapons, and thus are more known colloquially as duality rifles. These large longarms are sleek in shape with organic curves and iridescent highlights that can come in any color combination imaginable, though white with teal highlights is the most common aesthetic choice.

Hybrid rifles have been recently been unleashed onto the market by a little-known technology manufacturer known as Dwarf Star Industries as a marketable feat of engineering to push the boundaries of weaponry. Hybrid weapons use both batteries and conventional projectiles to create "charged" ammunition that deals superior damage relative to their contemporaries, and can even be "overcharged" for more power. However this does mean the weapon requires two separate sources of ammunition to be loaded to correctly function. Duality rifles can still be used as conventional projectile weapons should their power source be depleted or technologically suppressed, but they will lose their energy damage type, crit effect, and their total damage will be halved. This complex setup requires a large amount of material volume, and thus the weapon is relatively expensive and bulkier than most traditional rifles, though not severe enough to be unwieldly.

These hybrid rifles can be configured to deal thermal (fire) or EM (electricity) damage at time of purchase, or at anytime that weapon could have a fusion installed; with a similar amount of effort. (10 minutes of uninterrupted tinkering).

Additional Flavor text: Recall knowledge DC 20 (engineering) "There have been rumors about Dwarf Star Industries working on a new hybrid model that can change it's energy damage type by loading in specialized ammunition instead of manually re-configuring the weapon, but these sources have remain unverified. and even if they are correct, it may be sometime before the developments go live." If you decide the above idea of damage based on ammo type is not too much of a mechanical nightmare to incorporate, or something to upgrade to as the game progresses, here are the mechanics for it just in case.

Due to their specialized nature, hybrid ammo is fairly expensive and sold in small bundles. V is the damage type the hybrid weapon will gain when loaded with that particular type of ammunition. It costs 50 credits per 10 hybrid rounds, or 20 credits to convert 10 longarm rounds into hybrid rounds.

Exothermic rounds grant the weapon Fire damage
Endothermic rounds grant the weapon Cold damage
Electromagnetic rounds grant the weapon Electrical damage
Hydron rounds grant the weapon Acid damage
Concussion rounds grant the weapon Sonic damage

Item Level 7

Other Mechanical Notes
1) Should a hybrid weapon encounter a target with resistance of some type, divide the damage by half and and apply the appropriate half to the appropriate resistance.
2) Remember that the boost effect only applies to charges expended.

I still find it really weird that I was told not to read the CRB all the way through even though I explicitly told the people in question that I wanted to try out GM'ing. Isn't the game master obligated to know the rules as thoroughly as possible? Sure I'm going to be doing lots of homebrew, but shouldn't I know what the rules are anyways before I decide break them?

Not to mention, if I paid for the materials, I can use them as I please.

Well, the old school gygaxian rule was "Don't read the DMG/MM until you're ready to start GMing." Basically, there's no need and you'll just spoil things for yourself anyway.

Mind you, I never played that way from the start and I haven't met anyone who does in decades.

Gary Gygax may be the grandfather of tabletop games, but honestly, the more I hear about him, the more he kinda sounds like an jerk who started a lot of bad trends in game dessign. Just about anything I hear described as "gygaxian" is practically synonymous with punishing game design.

To contribute something to the main topic, it could possibly be Sturgeon's Law. Seems like tabletop games are more accessible now than ever before and being a "nerd" isn't stigmatized like it was decades ago. So games "back in the day" only attracted the people that were really into it. And now days, you just have nine joe schmoes throwing dice around for every great role player.

Wow. For real?

Yeah, they tell me it's too much information to digest and it's just better to skim it/look up as you need. I'm not too inclined to agree with that.

WhiteWeasel wrote:

Wait, you're supposed to read the rule book cover to cover? Every GM I talked to was like "No don't do that."

Of course not, it would be a threat to their power if players did that and suddenly knew more about that game then they did.

;P

Thing is though they told me that when I asked about being a GM myself.

Wait, you're supposed to read the rule book cover to cover? Every GM I talked to was like "No don't do that."

Wow this really blew up.

So when it comes to weapons with mixed damage types such as an accelerated star knife that does Fire and Piercing, what happens when the weapon hits a target with DR or energy resistance, but not both?

I would argue that true seeing would not work since it is clearly intended to work against supernatural/magical tomfoolery. Whereas the astrazoan's shape changing appears to be biological (therefore mundane) in nature ala parasyte.

Are you just adding the races stat wise, or are you going for playing them in character? If you want to play them in character you are going to run into a lot of problems in the SF setting since the vast majority of 40k races/factions are massively xenophobic and likely will have hostilities if not declare outright war with the other factions.

Not to mention you'd need a pretty good explanation for why the pact words A) Hasn't been wiped out and B) why the pact worlds would put up with shall we say the space marines for example given that their outlook on life would be harsh by Azlanti standards.

At its inception, the Imperium of Man made one of its core objectives the extermination of all alien life forms that posed any threat to humanity. Thus many species suffered extinction at the hands of the newborn Imperium which perpetrated one act of genocide after another. This would also apply to the majority of human civilisations encountered during the course of the Great Crusade like the Interex and Diasporex civilisations, which had founded cultures where alien and human populations had successfully integrated into a single whole. Diplomacy was rarely tried, and was more often offered only to other human civilisations encountered in the course of the Great Crusade. Certain aliens, such as the Eldar, who were more technologically advanced than the Imperium were often simply left alone so long as they did not threaten human interests.

The Imperium of Man's extreme xenophobia and outright call for genocide against all other intelligent species in the galaxy is in some ways justified by the sheer hopeless belligerence of most xenos races encountered since the Great Crusade. Almost all alien races encountered by Mankind since the Emperor first began to push his forces out amongst the stars have been so malevolent or aggressive toward humanity that any form of negotiation or parley often proved impossible. Other instances, such as during the Imperium's first encounter with the human-alien alliance known as the Diasporex, would end in violence because of the inherent distrust the Imperium had for all alien civilisations even if there was common ground that could be found.

This policy of unconditional hatred persists into the modern Imperium more than 10,000 standard years after the Great Crusade ended in the blood and fire of the Horus Heresy. In that time, many more alien civilisations have been discovered and destroyed regardless of threat level, culture, disposition, or technology. These sentiments of xenophobia have been reinforced by the Imperial Creed, which preaches that Mankind has a divinely-inspired manifest destiny to be the sole ruler and inhabitant of the galaxy. Humanity alone, the Imperial Creed teaches, is the sacred form of intelligent life chosen by the God-Emperor to spread out amongst the stars. All other intelligent life is to be reviled as an abomination and an affront to the God-Emperor's plan for Mankind.

Much of the Imperium, led by the religious fervour of the Adeptus Ministorum, believe in the extermination of all aliens, even those that are entirely peaceful species. When the masses are stirred to such fear and fanaticism, they demand destruction over any kind of cooperation or coexistence. This might seem like a harsh measure, but it is an age where ignorance is a virtue and brute force is used to solve a multitude of problems; the dangers of failing to act are too unthinkable to elicit any other response. It has not become this way without reason; most aliens encountered by Mankind are hostile and devious, and some have proven as ruthless and ambitious as humanity itself. To them, there is no room in the galaxy for the Imperium.

My Female human solarion Veronica really like punching things. So her solar weapon is a literal power fist.

Also a bit of a tangent, but I'm just a bit irked when everyone makes comparisons of a solar weapon to a lightsaber. Solar weapons way more like the energy weapons you see in anime like dragonball or a poor man's green lantern with how you are the source of the weapon and how you can define it's shape. Making an instant equation to lightsabers kinda boxes in creative applications IMO.

Bit of a necro, but I'm really thinking about syrinscape. Sadly my iphone 4s can't get the app because it's too old. Does the paid version of syrinscape let you make custom soundboards with files from your computer? That is going to be a big selling point to me since I find the stock sounds to be a bit underwhelming.

I still want a race of giant caterpillar/millipede like aliens so I can show off my superior hugging ability to all the other poorly "armed" races.

Eh, I'm pretty lenient with names. My only concession is that if someone uses a third party name, they might as well go big and play up the part. So I expect a "Brock Samson" to be a operative melee machine. =P

This site seems to be broken less than the old, so i'd say that's an improvement.

Though I wish this forum had a dark mode. It's just too bright.

I wonder if anyone has build the Pact Worlds in Universe Sandbox.

I don't have the new one, but I do have the old one from 2011ish. I could totally do that.

Ok, so... I do understand this is mostly a topic for kicks and giggles, but I think something very important is being forgotten in this discussion. This world is not an analog of the real world. Now you may look at me and say "NO DUH!". Here is my point though, this solar system would be a problem in a Star Trek-like Universe because, while it still does assume FTL travel and alien planets, Pure Sci Fi worlds like Star Trek are supposed to be utterly mundane and anything out of the ordinary is probably made using advanced scientific abilities, whether those means are understood by the protagonists or not.

Starfinder, on the other hand, is a world of wild magic. This would wreak havoc on physics and the viability of planets to support life. To paraphrase how one of my favorite hfy! posts put it, with magic in the universe planets will terraform themselves for free.
-Beta

I'm well aware that starfinder is more science fantasy than science fiction, and doesn't claim to realistic. Though, as an astronomy nerd, I like someone did their homework, or at least tried to not to completely throw the rules out the window. It's so easy these days to write off any inconsistencies with MAGIC!, so seeing someone putting in the work to make sure their stuff holds up to a little bit scrutiny is always a nice treat.

It's would be less about collisions and more about triaxus's gravitational effects disturbing the orbits of other worlds, destabilizing the system. Since it's inclination and exact eccentricity is never specified, it's hard to judge it's effects other than it being an implausible planet.

One might wonder, with all of the inhabited planets in the pactworlds system, one might think it's unrealistic. Short answer: Yes, but not nearly as bad as you might think. So far, I've only done the rudimentary math, namely just figuring out their semi major axis to see where they would be spaced out in the system. All values are assuming the sun is equivalent to the earth's sun, and that the days and years are in reference to earth.

All of my equations were taken from Artifexians worldbuilding videos.
Classical Planetary Systems
Orbits For Earth-like Planets

Sun
Class: G
Mass: 1
Habitable Zone (I): 0.95 AU
Habitable Zone (O): 1.37 AU
Inner limit: 0.01 AU (planets will break apart if any closer)
Outer limit: 40 AU (anything outside this boundry would be considered a trans neptunian object, which are typically asteroids and dwarf planets)
Frost line: 4.85 AU (Distance where volatile compounds such as H20, NH3, CO2, & CH4 become solid ice. Gas giants are typically formed out +1 AU from this line)

I have not calculated them yet, so all of these numbers are assuming 0 eccentricity and inclination. Which isn't that bad since only one or two planets even bother to mention those. And, artificial structures such as Absalom station and the Idari are omitted as well as the diaspora since they are not planets. I've extrapolated their worlds distances from the sun based on their orbital periods.

1.0 = 1 AU

Aballon: 0.044 AU - Outside sun's Roche limit. Good. World is appropriately mercury-like and features artificial habitability or robotic lifeforms. Totally works.
Castrovel: 0.645 AU - Too far inside sun's habitable zone. Oceans would have boiled away and become Venus-like or barren.
Akiton: 1.59 AU - Planet is just outside the HZ, but unlike castrovel, it's not by as much, and we got some room for bullcrapping here. It's dark appearance and lack of oceans gives it a low albedo and industrialization means it could have a fair amount of greenhouse gasses in it's atmosphere, making it a good enough heat absorber to just barely be habitable.
Verces: 2.09 AU - Well outside of the sun's HZ, and too far for conventional tidal locking. One could argue because it's tidally locked, it sun facing side should be heated up enough for habitability, but thanks to the inverse square law, Verces gets only ~23% of the light as earth (Absalom station) does. The backside could be cold enough that gases would freeze out of the atmosphere, and reduce the rest of the planet to a barren ice cube. Best case scenario is that is that convection currents keep the heat distributed just enough for dry ice snow and liquid methane rain like titan. (That kinda sounds like a way cooler planet TBH.)
Eox: 2.96 AU - Cold and (un)dead. Makes sense.
Triaxus: Screw Triaxus. It's eccentricity means it would spend the majority of it's time far outside the HZ. Life not possible, and probably screws over all of the other systems planetary orbits if it's not in resonance. That fact it's orbit is unnaturally slow just throws equations out the window.
Liavara: 5.25 AU - Gas giants outside the frost line. Good job. Have not done the research on moon probability. Only mess up here is that it's not the system's largest gas giant, but that's passable.
Bretheda: 9.7 AU - See above, bar last sentence.
Apostate: 39 AU - Barren, and it's wild inclination is justified since it's a captured dwarf planet.
Aucturn: 63 AU - "Planet" is supernatural in nature. No point in judging anything here.

Over all, the only major conflicts are Castrovel, Verces, and the affront on science; Triaxus. And the planets are far enough apart from another they would be in reasonably stable orbits. Except for Triaxus.

Pact Worlds: 7/10, would swarm again.