Ezren

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Organized Play Member. 39 posts. No reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 1 Organized Play character.


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Here's hoping that there will be a new hardcover printing of this someday.


Hmmm, interesting! Thanks for pointing it out. That description and outfitting sounds almost exactly like what we were facing, albeit with a custom crew.

I think we got hit with a flyby 4-5 times during the battle, and they succeeded every time they tried. Not impossible odds, but definitely on the lucky side. Our Destroyer is (by BP count, anyway) sitting pretty close to the line between tier 10 and 11. Not sure exactly which side of that we are on, but I think it's tier 11.

I contrast, our pilot lost the initiative check against them... Twice, I think? (out of over a dozen rounds)


To be fair, our pilot is an operative with quite high Dex and has taken several abilities and feats that specifically boost their piloting/starship handling abilities. I'm not familiar enough with Starfinder to be able to say for sure if their piloting skill has outpaced the level of our starship, but it is certainly possible. We're doing the "Fly Free or Die" campaign, level 11, not sure how far that is into the story, and just managed to finagle our way into getting enough BP to get a Destroyer by deviating from the storyline.

I don't know for sure about our opponents as I'm not the GM, but I gather from post-game discussion that our enemies are a bunch of assassins who are great at in-person combat, but their pilot is merely "competent" for their level. Our GM thinks their pilot was built around the idea of being a reasonable opponent for a middling average group flying the Oliphaunt or the Rust Bug; not a group with a character that went "I want to be the best pilot in the galaxy!" as a career optimization, flying an actual built-for-speed warship. It may well be that it isn't that they have a bad pilot, just that we have a reliably awesome one.

It is a recurring bit of frustration for our GM that if we can't outfight it, then we're basically guaranteed to be able to outrun it.

In regards to the actual battlespace - we were in an asteroid field that made it so that it was rare that either of us could do perfect circles or 180 loops, or straight lines for more than 6 hexes. Occasionally possible, but rare.


Hmmm, not really. With an adversary that has average manoeuvrability, we were repeatedly in situations where if we'd been able to go first, their only shot at doing a flyby (or even getting within melee range at all) would have been getting the captain's order action or getting all the officer positions spending their action on boosting manoeuvrability &/or speed. And if they'd done that, well, they're not regenerating shields or patching things, and they'd be dead that much faster.

Against an enemy ship with good or better manoeuvrability and high speed, then yes, definitely, a flyby is probably a possibility regardless.


Situation:
- Flying a highly mobile destroyer with our pilot being sufficiently better than the opposing pilot that they won about 95% of the helm phase initiative checks.
- Enemy is a heavy freighter that has a tether turret and a Hacksaw Arm turret with an excellent gunner for each weapon. They had a forward gun, but it was something fairly weak and unimpressive.
- Operating in the upper levels of atmosphere, so limited to 7 move before we incur damage.

During the course of battle the enemy ship (which lost initiative and thus went first almost every single time) routinely used the flyby attack to ensure they got to use their two melee weapons against us. When we got to move, we positioned ourselves as far out of their flightpath as we could get and still bring our forward canon (persistent particle beam) to bear. Usually about 5 hexes away.

----
Rules interpretation as best we can tell:

1. The ship that rolls lower in the opposed pilot roles must go first.
2. A successful fly-by attack allows the designated weapon arc (in this case they chose turret) to fire on us in the gunnery phase as if we were at range 1.

----

Impact:
This seems to guarantee that, so long as a ship can keep to the general vicinity (within regular speed distance) of their target and make the flyby check, optimizing for melee and having the worst possible pilot (that can still make the flyby DC) is actually beneficial.

---
Impressions:

Any time that the ships are positioned such that the enemy ship was likely to pick a flyby attack, we felt like we would have been better off having our pilot abandon the controls and assigning a no-name generic crew member with 0 ranks in pilot to take control (and then use whatever excuse we can to give said generic crew member all the penalties we can muster by interfering with their ability to pilot), since that is the only way to ensure that we go first; and it doesn't take any skill checks to just fly straight forward. And just doing basic forward flight but getting to go first would have been *far* preferable to letting them go first and do a flyby.

In other words, it seems that when a ship has short/melee range weapons and/or otherwise incentive to use flyby attacks, that having a pilot with high ranks and/or good luck is actually a disadvantage, since a high pilot score leads to going second, and less likely to be able to use flyby. (For ships with average or worse maneouverability, or lower speed.) So, less manouverable ships benefit from having worse pilots in this situation.

----

Questions:
A) Is this actually correct?

B) Is flyby a situation where it is better to be sufficiently worse than the enemy pilot in order to go first?

C) Does the pilot who roles best in the initial opposed check *always* forcibly must go second? I know that in most situations going second is definitely the better situation to be in, but it seems weird that being a super-awesome ace pilot would be forced to do so and not given the opportunity to rush ahead and do something first if they so choose. After all, they *won* the opposed pilot check, right?

D) What happens when they do a flyby maneuver, and then we move and end up eleven hexes away, and they hit us with a tether during the gunnery phase? Do we have an eleven-hex long tether between us? Does our movement get retconned to have not left the 1 hex radius of the enemy ship? Do we drag them along with us?

Thanks for any extra info you can provide.


I just leveled up my technomancer and had to quickly pick a few spells, and grabbed haste because, well, it's haste. (This is my first Starfinder character, after a long Pathfinder career).

We get into a sticky situation, and I cast haste, and really looked at the spell description... And yeah, really wishing I'd had the time to read it fully because it's terrible. It's situationally useful for helping pure-melee characters do full attacks and still get some movement, but that extra movement action only applies during that full attack. Otherwise, it's just a +30 bonus to movement (or double, whichever is lower).

Even my DM (who is also new to Starfinder) thought it was surprisingly weak. He's seriously thinking of downgrading it to being a level 2 spell; but honestly, I'm not sure I'd waste a level 2 spell slot on it 90% of the time.

Not sure what what the idea was creating such a weak spell for a level 3, but yeah, I'll be asking my DM if I can swap it out for slow after our session.

Anyway, is it really this bad? Are we missing some crucial detail? The best we can see is that it is situationally moderately useful, but never good, and definitely never a *strong* spell.i

Any chance it has been errata'd or buffed?


I most definitely agree with this. There's a lot of fun teamwork feats that encourage the party to think and work together, try out new tactics, and do more interesting things in battle. But the chances that all or most of the party takes the same feat? Slim to none.

Actually, that being said, out of all the campaigns I've ever been in (or watched over), this current one is the first one where two of my players are actually planning on taking the same teamwork feat. Pack Flanking and Circling Offense are the two they are considering, I believe.

But them aside, very underutilized. Some are very under-powered, too.

Bonded Mind, for instance. For the price of a feat, you can talk to someone else who has this feat with no chance of being overheard. Provided they are within sight of you. Personally, I'd house-rule that to be with anyone else with that feat that either you can see or that is within 100'. That at least makes it a tad more useful.

That being said, I'm tempted to give my players a set of bracelets that grant "Bonded Mind" as a slotless item. They'd love it, and it would be moderately priced chunk of their loot, but it isn't worth taking up an item slot, let alone a feat. And I'd be seriously considering having it spontaneously upgrade at some future point when they're exposed to some wild magic or something to gain the "Exceptional Aide" feat too.


I like the feel of it, and in fact have been working on something along the same lines, although in a different direction: Instead of summoning, I've always enjoyed the thought of geomancers being the ones that build the large area effects. As in the ones that might well reshape the entire battlefield or (at high levels) even entire areas. As such, I'd been poking around with a mechanic for expanding spell effects.

Mine was based on the Arcanist, and used a mix of time and arcane points for expanding spells. My reason for that is that most geomancers I see in books tend to be the massive build up types: They may take a minute to cast the same "shape stone" spell that the wizard flips off in a few seconds, but the geomancer's reshapes half the mountain instead of just a small ledge.

I used a sliding scale for this: Initially, they could just draw on the earth's power and bump the time to cast up from regular action to full round action for the equivalent benefit of a widen spell. At later levels they could increase that to 2 full rounds for 3x the radius, 3 rounds for 4x the radius, etc. I think I capped it at extending it a maximum of 1 round per 2 caster levels.

On the arcane side, using the arcane points as fuel to allow for greater control over the shape of the spell tied nicely with the time=area mechanic to give some fairly impressive battlefield control abilities.

The downside to being so ground focused, however, is that so much stuff in the game can fly, teleport, or otherwise negate stuff on the battlefield itself. Which is why I resisted the urge to limit the above area expanding effects to earth related spells.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this provides you with some additional ideas or not, but I hope it does. Good luck, and keep up the good work. Looks like it should be a fun class.


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That's a good point. I know I've played dedicated crafting builds myself a time or two, and they are fun to play.

On the flip side, as a player I've always enjoyed the fact that pathfinder (and 3.x in general) provides the rules so I don't have to ask the DM how long stuff takes, because I can work it out and then bring it to the DM for approval. So in retrospect I'd like to stay away from the "DM arbitrarily assigns a time frame" method.

For the first situation, it makes me think that crafting feats should be left in the game, but should receive a different benefit. For instance, say, having the feat grants a +5 bonus to the relevant check for crafting the item (goes up to +10 when you have 10 or more ranks in the relevant skill). That would allow specialists more flexibility when crafting to hit higher DCs to accelerate crafting or bypass requirements, etc, while still allowing anyone the option of doing so.

One idea that occurs to me to retain the dependability of the 3.x ruleset while reducing timelines is basing it off the recommended wealth table. Thus regardless of

Find out what percentage of the character's recommended wealth for their level is. Apply that percentage to two months, with a limit that they can't make items worth more than half their recommended wealth.

Which gives times along the following:

50% = 1 month
25% = 2 weeks
12% = 1 week
6% = 3 days
2% = 1 day

This would be the base timeline that assumes 8h a day of dedicated crafting. Crafting checks would be done as normal, with each minor failure increasing the time by 1 day, and successful accelerate crafting reducing it by a day. (or by half a day if it would normally take 1 day).

So items that even their character would consider to be cheap and disposable would be the matter of an afternoon of crafting, while major projects that their character would likely consider to be their greatest creation so far would take up to a month to complete.

Of course, while that looks good in theory, now I need to go check the actual numbers to see how much of an improvement that is over the standard system.


First off, while I appreciate the difficulty in balancing the effects of crafting on planned campaigns and that it can throw off the balance of the wealth per level vs loot received tables.

The Problem (as I see it)
Crafting, as I see it, doesn't work. Characters that take crafting feats are effectively reducing their own power in exchange for half price of certain categories of items, and the freedom to customize them. And on top of that, especially at higher levels, it takes so long to make items that characters have to take months of down time in between encounters to make use of their feat. Seems like a rather unfair way of treating characters that have spent feats to gain the ability to do so.

That being said, I'm not too concerned about how long low level crafting takes. It seems reasonable that low level characters might take days to make something, maybe even a week or two. It seems very unlikely that an epic archmage is going to take several months off to make some item that may be useful. Ideally, I'd like the general "useful item creation" to take 1-7 days regardless of what level the PCs are, with "very powerful items for their level" to take 2-3 weeks to complete, with month+ reserved for things that are pushing the limits of their crafting abilities to the limit and beyond.

My Solution (Part 1, and 2 a, b, and c)
1) Remove the crafting feats. Anything can be crafted by anyone who meets the rest of the requirements (caster level, spells, materials, etc). non-casters that want to make magic items still need to take the master craftsman feat, however.

and one of a, b, or c:
2a) Increase the crafting limit to 2'000 gc per day.

2b) Increase the crafting limit to PC lvl x 500 gc per day.

2c) Remove the cap on value per day entirely.

Caveat:
I fully understand that I will likely have to either decrease the value of the treasure they find, increase the power of their opponents, or otherwise adjust encounters upwards a bit to compensate.

Results:
Hopefully, a bit more interest in crafting amongst my players. Crafting, particularly at the later levels where things get a bit more interesting, will not take ages and ages to finish.

Side-effects:
All classes that receive crafting feats for free will receive a +1 lvl metamagic feat instead (or equivalent)

So, I guess my main question is "Am I missing something? Are there some reason that I am missing as to why a character should have to spend feats to be able to make something? Is allowing characters the option to make their own stuff in reasonable lengths of time going to break the system or something?


Hmmm, thanks for pointing that out. I've come across Hero Lab before, and it looks like an excellent program, and I've tried the demo. I'm kind of hesitant about it, though, due to the fact that it looks like quite an expensive proposition to get access to everything. Our group plays with pretty much the entire Pathfinder ruleset, but our budget doesn't extend to paying an extra $10 per rule book to have access to all the content again. Although from the screen shots and the feel of the demo, I could see it potentially being worth it.

Since you seem to have it, maybe you could clarify something for me. Is the downtime sections available in the core Pathfinder module? Or is it an extra DLC that has to be purchased? Their supplement website doesn't list Ultimate Campaign as a separate module, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

edit: Apparently I didn't look hard enough. Farther down the page lists Ultimate Campaign as another $10 add-on.

I think HeroLab is probably out of our price range for now, but I'll definitely keep it on my wish list for the the future.


For the past year or so in our campaign, I've been using excel spreadsheets to calculate how much capital has been generated, expended, and lost. Given that we're starting to get into the higher levels, it is starting to get kind of complicated.

It strikes me that this is the sort of thing that real-world industry and commerce general have to use, and that there is probably better ways of handling it than simply calculating it all out, and adding a new set of lines to my spreadsheet.

Are there any open source / freeware programs out there that handle this? Or other neat tricks that anyone has figured out for handling it? I rather like the Downtime system as a whole, but the paperwork for it is getting out of hand.


Looks interesting. I like the attention to detail. I haven't actually used it yet, but on a first glance, it looks like the sort of thing that would make for excellent material for low-magic settings where the crafter's skill is a much more significant contribution to a weapon's value than the magic that may or may not be on it.

I suspect it would be too complex / too detailed for settings that have reasonable access to magic crafting, though.


After looking at the numbers some more, I agree that a flat 20% is too high.

Having taken a look at the SBH for some inspiration, I'm currently plotting out the effects of a variable benefit: Stone Shape and Wall of Stone both reduce the cost of constructing a room by x %, where x is the level of the caster. Regardless of volumes, requires one casting of the spell per room, and only benefits rooms that are structurally made of stone. (If it's not primarily made of stone, no effect. Although in that case there's a variety of wood related spells that would have the same effect)

Walls are the iffy part. If using the DT rules, then continue as if they were a room. If using SBH's wall calculations, then it requires a casting of the spell per 5' section.

Does that seem a bit more balanced?


That's a good idea. I'll have to include it when talking with my DM.

Note: I just went over the spell description again, and realized that I'd misinterpreted my fellow PC's statement. When he said his spell could do 7 x 5' squares of stone wall, I was visualizing 7 5x5' squares of solid stone, whereas the spell description specifies 1" thickness per 4 caster levels, so in this case, he can actually create a 2" thick wall that covers 7x5' squares. To make it thicker, one halves the distance. So to get a 3' thick wall, I'd only be getting about a 2' section. Little more than a column.

So that throws all my calculations off by quite a bit. Doesn't change the utility of the spell for internal walls, but makes it substantially less useful for building actual defensive walls. Still valuable, but not nearly as much so.


Here's the situation: the crafter in my party made a magical item that casts Stone Wall and Stone Shape spells once per day each.

The question is, how to integrate that into the Downtime system? The initial use, namely using it to build the stone walls of my stronghold, is fairly straight forward, in this case, it can build 35' worth of the standard "Natural Stone" wall per day. (that's 5' thick, 10' tall)

But what about using it for building rooms? Stone Wall, particularly when used in conjunction with Stone Shape for finer details, should be very effective at building *all* the walls. But how does one determine the costs as a result? There's no real guideline as to how much of the cost of a room is the structural walls, and how much is the stuff inside it.

Consulting with the Stronghold Builder's Handbook doesn't really help much here, either. It lists a series of bonuses, namely reducing the cost of walls per a certain number of castings. But the DT system doesn't calculate wall costs separately, so that's not much of a help.

1) I suspect that the easiest way to do it would probably to simply assign a flat bonus. Something along the lines of "reduces the cost of the room by 25%, and requires 1 casting per room." Doesn't really adjust to appropriateness of the situation, but it is simple and fast. And let's face it, the Downtime system (as opposed to the Stronghold Builder's Handbook) really simplified things a bit in order to speed things up.

2) Alternatively, a better way might be to figure out how much material it produces, then work from there. Taking the volume of stone produced by the spell, and converting that volume into stone blocks (by volume, anyway, enough to make 60' of wall), then I could use my conversions of the SBH to figure out how much capital that is the equivalent of.

(Just FYI, I made a numerical conversion of most of the SBH rooms and walls into the downtime system, which included figuring out costs for each wall type by the 5' section. In this particular case, I had determined that it took 10 goods and 9 labour to build a 5' section of Stone Block wall, whose standard thickness is 3'. I'm using the values for Stone Blocks, as the prices for Natural Stone walls state that they are the cost of shaping a naturally occurring stone formation into a wall, not creating the stone itself)

So, long story short, a stone wall spell that can create a 35' natural stone wall is essentially equivalent to 120 Goods and 108 labour.

Having figured this out, one could work the spell into large construction projects by stating that the spell provides that much Goods and Labour towards the construction, and spend as one sees fit. Given how large those values are, however, this spell would essentially pay for the entire thing, which doesn't make sense.

3) Find a very simple stone room, one that is simple enough that one can assume that the majority of its cost is the structure itself and not the contents. Let's take a basic Cell, that seems pretty close. It costs 5 Goods and 4 Labour, and can range in size from 1 to 9. Let's take 4, as a value in the middle. 4x5' squares, so that makes a 10x10 room, or a perimeter of 40'. Dividing the total cost by the circumference, and we get 0.125 Goods and 0.1 labour per 5' section of wall.

At that point, we could broadly assume that the cost of each room includes 0.125 goods and 0.1 labour per 5' section of wall. So after figuring out the circumference of the room and the cost of that particular wall, one could rule that the Stone Wall spell could cover that portion of the cost.

Which is looking to be an incredibly math intensive method of calculating its impact.

4) As a slight variation on this, one could use this value, then extrapolate it out to the cost of each room, and figure out what the average percentage is, and simply use that value as a flat percentage reduction of cost as per point 1.

--------------------------

So, at the moment, I those are all the options I can see for using this spell. Kind of amusing that the somewhat math involved SBH actually appears to be the simplest and least problematic, despite not fitting terribly well with DT.

For the purposes of integration with the DT system, I think a flat 20% cost reduction for rooms with stone walls is probably the best solution. It is simple, straightforward, and close enough to be acceptable. Of course, with the stipulation that 1 casting can only apply to one room.

So, what do you all think? Does any of this make sense? Or am I missing some fairly obvious solution?


OK. If by "round disadvantageously" you mean round up in all situations, then (for individual rooms, at least) the feat only has an effect when that room costs 10 or more goods. Which means that out of the 93 rooms listed on the d20pfsrd downtime page, only 19 of them will actually change in price. And only two will save 2 or more.

That seems a bit useless, unless one can total the cost of a structure *then* take off the discount. If one can do that, or at least apply the discount to the total amount being built at that time, then it will actually start adding up. And also makes sense, since it does specify the cost of the structure, not the cost of the room.


Along the same lines as this, regarding the benefit of the feat:

Quote:
When you supervise a construction project or do the construction yourself, reduce your raw material costs by 10%. You gain a +2 bonus on Knowledge (engineering) checks. If you have 10 or more ranks in Knowledge (engineering), this bonus increases to +4.

They both make sense, but I was wondering about the "reduce material costs by 10% part. Since I'm working under the Downtime system using capital, does it work better to reduce the amount of goods capital needed by 10%? Or reduce the cost of generating/purchasing goods capital by 10%?

(For the record, I'm producing all the capital I'm using. Takes a bit longer, but makes for better story progression)

edit: Just ran some calculations, and it amounts to the same cost. So the bigger question is "which way is easier to keep track of and deal with? Reducing the amount of goods needed by 10% has a serious risk of resulting in decimal values.

edit2: The second question would be "Does that 10% reduction in raw material cost affect just the "Goods" capital, or would it also include the "Magic" capital? Given that the latter can be used as a substitute for expensive spell components, it could be interpreted as raw material components, just really expensive ones like diamond dust and gold and whatnot.


Lots of very good ideas here. In particular the combo of "everyone gets leadership for free - but you need to *use* it to actually benefit" combined with Kingdom building rules.


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From all these stories, then, I think I've been lucky. The three DMs that I've played with over the years (and continue to play with) all enjoy upper-level play just as much as the lower.

Personally, I find the 9-18 range to be the sweet spot for most campaigns, but we also have a strong tendency to carry over characters, and grow campaigns until we reach a point where we're all satisfied with where our characters are.

Our longest running campaign (in 3.5) reached somewhere over 45th lvl, and actually resulted in all the characters taking up positions in the pantheon of Gods (several replaced deities outright, others, such as mine, became heralds of sorts. That was an awesome campaign that spanned years, both in and out of game, and remained challenging right up to the end. Almost got TPKed a few times, but we managed to pull through. And surprisingly, I think the number of times we had to resurrect a party member could probably be counted on one hand. We did resurrect an entire village that was destroyed as a result of our actions, but our own lives? Stayed alive by our own means, thank you very much.

I've often wished for epic level rules for Pathfinder, as in an honest to goodness Epic Level Handbook. But we'll make do without it.

Anyway, in Pathfinder, our campaigns seem to end somewhere in the 21-25 range. That always seems like a nice place to end. And it gives a chance to put some of those capstone abilities to the test. No point in getting them if one isn't going to do at least a *little* adventuring after that point, hmmmm?

I know in our planning sessions, we almost always pick somewhere in that range for our end goal.


The rules from Ultimate Campaign are actually pretty straight forward, once you actually get a spreadsheet going and build what you want to have.

That being said, one has to be very clear form the beginning: You know those miniscule amounts of gp you can get from using profession? The ones that aren't worth even using for most PCs past, oh, about 8th level? Running a business doesn't make a whole lot more than that. At least, not at first.

Players need to change their mind set: A business isn't about *making* money, it is about *magnifying* money. If you generate capital of any kind (especially magic for the party crafter) you can stretch any gp you get from adventuring far enough to get 4x more than you could if you were buying the stuff from the store. Takes time, though, and you need to have the proper facilities going. If a character was focused on it, the magnifying property could actually break the wealth balance of the game. But it does take a *lot* of work to do that, and generally quite a bit of time, too.

So a better way of thinking about it is that running a business or an organization won't make them rich - but it could let them act (and be equipped) as if they *were* rich.

tip: Once things get going, take 10 for all the rolls. Saves everyone a lot of time.

I heartily second Ravingdork's tip about getting the DM to gloss over random events. Makes things a bit less interesting, but that is a *lot* of rolls. I'd suggest a better system might be to simply roll a d20 for every 30 days of downtime, and whatever it rolls is the number of times the DM should roll to see if there is an event. Cuts down on the dice rolling by a bunch.

More likely, though (and what my DM does) is the DM simply rolls whenever he feels like it. As best I can tell, it works out to about once per week of downtime.

Also, don't deal with construction at the table. RPing events related to it? Sure, great! But RPing day to day management/construction is tedious at the best of times, let alone for all the players that don't have personal connections.


I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got in the organization side of things. The more material to flesh out dealing with all those followers, the better. Likewise, the more ways to involve hiring people and building organizations *without* having to spend the feat, the better.


Ooh, Thanks! That looks great!

You wouldn't happen to have behind-the-scenes notes on how you prepared the encounters, would you?


Just to give a bit more info on the plot arc as it stands so far:

Spoiler:
While we're currently running some homemade stuff running around the island dealing with minor problems (sabotage, kidnapping whole villages, a raider camp) we're going to be culminating with the "Tower of the Last Baron" and it's sequel "Chimera Cove". These are transplanted from the Andoran/Cheliax frontier, and are being framed as the culminating elements of what's going on on the island - Cheliax trying to take it over. The two modules give a lot of flexibility to work with, and, if the PCs take advantage of them, will end up with them controlling a number of large, but slow ships, as well as a smaller and faster one, and a port that is personally friendly to them.

When they return to the capital, arriving about the same time as the army that was off dealing with the renegade Baron, they'll find that a Cheliax force has already stormed the docks and taken a small portion of the lower city, and more ships are arriving. The leadership of the kingdom (who have been giving the PCs orders up to this point) will be sending the PCs with refugees away from the city in hopes of getting them to safety. Safety, in this case, in the form of whatever ships they've secured on the opposite side of the island.

This provides the lead-in for them needing to find somewhere to settle these people and try to build up resources to take back their island. These refugees will be following in much slower ships, probably overloaded. So the PCs have a few weeks, potentially even a month or two before the first refugees arrive.

I'd need to do a bit more research, but both the Andoran/Taldor border and the Taldor/Qadira border seem like they could have similar sorts of political conflict.

I think I'll go with the Taldor/Qadira one. Between the description of the border being rife with ruins and monsters, Taldor being a decaying empire rife with internal conflict, and a history of conflict, Qadira seems like a very reasonable alternate sponsor interested in establishing a city-state or mini kingdom to guard its Northern Frontier.


Then there's also the problem of "Where did they come from, and where will they go?" The prosperous trader nation on an island sounds like a great fit for Absalom.

I think I'll probably use that little island to the NW of Absalom - Escadar. I can dream up political (and crisis) to keep the Absalomians from interfering. If the invaders that are pushing them out are from Cheliax, they could be intent on establishing an outpost to maneuouver around the Andorans.

So our intrepid heroes can flee NW to Almas and be recruited there with the intent on establishing a frontier kingdom in what I'll deem to be untamed and/or dangerous lands between Almas and Cassomir.

On the other hand, I'm tempted to have Eastward be the direction of flight, and have them end up being recruited to civilize the lands between the frontiers of Taldor and Qadira. The description of Qadira explicitly states that there's a lot of ruins and breeding grounds for dangerous monsters in the area. And that doesn't (potentially) require erasing a major city from the map. :)

Sounds like Kingmaker will be all but unrecognizeable by the time I'm done with it.


OK, I've got a party of noble brats who have been cheerfully solving problems for their country for the last few levels. They've caught wind of a variety of "Dark clouds on the horizons" foreshadowing doom and gloom for their island kingdom, but they're still fighting to hold things together. While there is a slight chance that they'll manage to stem the tide (I'll give them the chance, but it'll be hard), the more likely result is that they'll end up in a fighting retreat and end up getting sent ahead as scouts to find someplace for the refugees to set up camp. How well they do with this (along with some choices they make in the sessions between now and then) would determine how much resources they have to start off a new kingdom with.

I'd already more or less planned this much when I got the chance to flip through Kingmaker. I rather like the story arc, and frankly I could use some help on plot and stuff to flesh out setting up a kingdom. Unfortunatly, Kingmaker starts off at 1st. My general thought was to have them arrive in port and get recruited as per the Kingmaker story arc, with the added complication of having two groups to please: The Sword lord patrons on one side that want a stable ally in the region, and the groups of refugees coming in on the other that want to set up shop and work on figuring out how to reclaim their island.

From the swordlords point of view, this brings two additional parties into the already volatile mix, along with an already simmering war.

1) Does anyone have any resources for "boosting" Kingmaker up by a few levels? I realize I could simply jump to part 3, but I'd rather not skip on plot elements in the first two.

2) I'm tempted to run the first two modules on "slow" progression, as there's enough new things with getting a kingdom up and running, that they won't mind slowing down the pace of level ups at all. That way While the first two modules might be leveled up considerably, the 3rd will be only somewhat, and then the remaining ones as printed.

3) Any ideas that come to mind with this interesting conjunctions of plot?


Just a quick question: The title of the book includes (OGL). Is that just to denote that it includes some OGL content from other sources? Or does that signify that it contains new OGL content? If it is the latter, will it get added to the Paizo SRD (or any other OGL content site)?

Mostly interested in the nitty-gritty of the skills and crafting rules.

Thanks.


True, but when I'm surrounded by hostile combatants beating on me with swords, I consider going prone to be an extremely harmful condition....

Hmmmm... On second reading, the text for "Heroic Defiance" stipulates that it can delay the onset of a "harmful condition OR affliction." which would seem to indicate that it could include anything, including dangerously all consuming laugher, that one could be afflicted with.


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The text for Heroic Defiance specifies that it allows you to delay the onset of one harmful condition for one round. Hideous Laughter is unusual in that it has two main effects: 1) It renders the target unable to take any action (but is explicitly NOT helpless), 2) makes them fall prone.

Now, being prone is a condition, so Heroic Defiance should be usable to prevent you from falling prone. But what about the former part? Being unable to take an action (but not stunned, helpless, or anything else like that) means that it isn't actually a condition, so doesn't meet the literal interpretation of the feat.

This question thus has two parts:
1) Could Heroic Defiance prevent the "take no action" part of the spell's effects, since it is essentially a condition but isn't explicitly listed as such?

2) In the case of a spell inflicting multiple effects simultaneously, does a feat such as Heroic Defiance only affect part of the results, or all of them. (for instance, in this case would it prevent the target from falling prone, but doesn't stop the laughter?)

For the record, in our campaign I ruled according to the literal interpretation, and the DM agreed with it: That my PC didn't fall down, but couldn't take any actions due to laughter.

---

3) The last question that this brings to mind on a related note: Hideous Laughter allows a second save the next round. If one failed the first save, and used Heroic Defiance to avoid falling down, does one roll the second save the next round before the prone part actually kicks in? Or does the second save not get rolled until the spell has *fully* taken effect for one round? If one takes the line that Heroic Defiance could, in fact delay the onset of both aspects of the spell at once (perhaps through multiple usages - I'm playing the Unbreakable fighter archetype which gives multiples usages of the feat at high levels), would one be able to make the second save before having suffered any ill-effect? Or would one have to suffer a round of spell effects before making the second save?

Actually, this is more of a general question: When does one make the second save for an effect that has been delayed by Heroic Defiance? On the next round before the effects actually kick in, or on the 3rd round after the effects have actually had a round of effect?


Hmmm, I forgot about the table in the damaging objects section.

Environmental:
So at their standard thicknesses, the two have the same hp, but if both are the same thickness, iron has 4x the hp. (90hp vs 360 hp when both are 10x10' areas at 1' thick.)

Damaging Objects:
If both are at 1' (12") thickness, then stone has 90hp and iron has 360hp. (it is unclear what size a wall this is referring to)

It seems that the numbers in the two sections (Environmental and Damaging Objects) do actually agree, they're just confused a little bit due the variety of terms and criteria they use.

Given that a standard masonry wall does have the same hp as a standard iron wall (just takes up 1/4 the space) I'm still not convinced that being able to cheaply boost the hardness of it up to be on par is particularly balanced. Regardless, though, I don't think it is game-breakingly so.

Thanks for pointing out the damaging objects section and for bouncing numbers!


OK, so I guess there's some confusion here, given that there's several different walls that we could be talking about. For the purposes of this question, I'm assuming that the "Defensive Wall" in the Downtime rules (the double cost stone version) is referring to a masonry wall, since that matches the climb DC, but it doesn't mention anything special about it. For the purposes of initial comparison, I think it is best to use what the environmental rules list as the standard thicknesses. Which means 1' for masonry walls, and 3" for iron walls.

.
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As best I can tell, a stone defensive wall would be thus:
hardness: 8
hp: 90 hp per 5' section (20' tall)
climb dc: 20
break dc: 35

Walls from various sources.

Stone wall (as per Wall of Stone spell.)
hardness: 8
hp: 15 hp/inch for a 5' square (180hp for a 1' thick wall, per 5' section)
break dc: 20 +2/inch (34 for a 1' wall)

Masonry wall (as per Environmental rules)
hardness: 8
hp: 90 hp for a 10'x10' section 1' thick (45 hp for a 5' section 10' tall)
break dc: 35

Iron wall (as per Wall of Iron spell.)
hardness: 10
hp: 30 per inch (360 for a 1' thick wall) per 5' section.
break dc: 25 +2/inch (31 for a 3" wall, 39 for a 12" wall

Iron wall (as per Environmental rules)
hardness: 10
hp: 90 hp for a 10'x10' section 3" thick (360 for a 1' thick wall)
break dc: 30
Note: Environmental rules state that typical thickness is 3"

Given all that, if one is comparing a stone defensive wall with fortification (which is 90hp per 20' tall/5' wide section, hardness 10) it is exactly the same hp for a standard iron wall, 20' tall ( 90 hp, hardness 10)

Interesting. So a fortified defensive wall would be actually *harder* to break than a standard iron wall, would have the same hp, the same hardness, but would be thicker and easier to climb.

So the only real differences from the fortified stone wall to the iron wall is that the iron wall has -5 to its break DC, +5 to its climb DC, and takes up 1/4 the space.

It is unfortunate that the environment page doesn't give construction costs so we could compare those too.


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Can the Fortification augmentation be applied to defensive walls?

Given that Defensive Walls are listed as rooms, and the augmentations can be applied to any room, it would seem to be "yes", strictly speaking.

However, doing so allows one to build a 200' wall 20' tall with the same hardness and hp as a wall of iron (3" thick), for the ridiculously low price of 820gp.

On a related note, can the "Fortification" augmentation be stacked? If one has a forge, for instance, that one really wants to be fireproof, could one fortify it multiple times to give it a fire resistance of 10 or 15?


Well, they actually integrate fairly well. The room list, for instance, merges quite nicely, although there are exceptions.

My merged spreadsheet has where I am at the moment with combining the two.

As far as rooms go, the downtime (DT) rooms are really close to the basic stronghold builder's handbook (SBH) versions in cost, although the descriptions don't exactly match. DT describes basic rooms as simple, decent quality but nothing noteworthy. The SBH versions generally sound like they're low quality and cheapest available stuff sort of thing. Which makes the transition to the "fancy" and "luxury" versions even harsher.

Given that
a) most players and heroes don't really want to live at the bottom end of things, and
b) pathfinder rules take precedence when they actually exist

I took the DT version as the updated form of the basic room, then added in the fancy and luxury versions, and figured out capital costs/benefits along the same lines as the DT version of the room. All in all, this worked quite well.

The only place where I had to create something out of whole cloth was with the libraries / book repositories. SBH has an interesting system of a library room holding X number of book lots. You then buy lots of books to put in them. Different qualities of lots provide different bonuses and take up different numbers of lots. It is a pretty complicated system, just to handle books. Since DT takes priority, I used its "book repositories", which give a flat bonus to one particular subject, and the "Magic repositories" which are magic libraries (same thing, just to Arcana and spellcraft), then added a "Book upgrade" augmentation that increases the size of the bonus. To get the full functionality of the SBH libraries I'll probably also add a "generalist collection" augmentation, that halves the bonus but allows it to be used for *any* knowledge check instead of a single one.

The one other change to rooms is with the super-variable size rooms. Like auditoriums. Which have a size range that essentially lets you double the size (and capacity) of the room without changing the price. I think the SBH version makes a lot more sense. It gives the price for the standard size, and if you want a bigger one, buy multiple. The cost you're saving on the multiple inner walls that aren't there is made up for in the increased cost of the structural supports for the ceiling. (arches and vaults and the like)

Walls:
Honestly, walls are the reason I went back to the SBH from the DT in the first place. Everything else I could have lived with just what is in the DT. But the "defensive wall" that the DT has is, frankly, unsuitable to be a wall for anything other than a mansion or inner-city property. It'll hold off a mob, or a riot, or even opportunistic bandits or raiders. But as soon as you have any kind of siege weaponry (or spellcasting) I think it is safe to say that wall would be breached within the hour, if not within minutes.

To determine the prices in the chart, I took the base price of walls from the SBH at the 1ss size. Which is where 100% of the walls are external walls (and thus built to be defensive structures taking siege weapons). Since 1ss is essentially a 20'x20' square, that means it has 80' of wall, or 16 5' sections. Divide the price for 1ss worth of wall of that material by 16 to get the price for a single 5' section of it. These are the values that I used.

Unfortunately, there's a problem here. You can do the same calculation for any of the sizes in the table, simply adding in the reduction in price based on what percentage of the external wall is of the material you wish to use. When I did this, however, I got an extremely wide range of prices per 5' section. Some were a bit cheaper than the price I worked out from the 1ss size, but most were more expensive. Some are extremely expensive. Currently, I can't think of any reason why building 500' of wall should be more expensive per 5' than building 50' of wall (other than the market dynamics of finding that much material).

Two other things I should note:
1) Construction costs: I determined the Capital costs as such: Take the price for the wall, divide in half, then assign an amount of capital that equals the price in earned cost. Generally speaking, they are almost entirely "Goods" and "Labour", although a few of the odder materials require some "Influence" (bone, glass, and hedge), and the magical ones require "Magic". The Wall of Force option, of course, breaks the trend, as it requires pure magic capital.

2) Currently I only have prices for the structural walls. I haven't done the free standing ones. In interest of simplicity, I am tempted to simply have one price for walls. They have the same characteristics either way, so it seems unnecessarily complex to have two prices simply depending on whether or not they're backing a structure. Wouldn't be too hard to add, though.

3) Inner walls. Given that I switched the pricing for walls over to "price per 5' " instead of basing it on the area of the structure, the formula for pricing internal walls got thrown out the window too. So something needs to be worked out for this.

4) On the walls chart I use decimal values for capital costs. Due to the really low costs for some of these wall types, it was either that or give percentages, and tell people to just calculate the build cost, then have them calculate what percentage of that amount needs to be paid in which kind of capital. Or assign very lopsided capital costs. Like making Dirt walls cost purely labour capital. Which come to think of it, wouldn't actually be unreasonable.

To-do list:
1) Add the most recent rooms that just got added to the OGL (from Heroes of the Wild)

2) Figure out some way to calculate inner wall cost.

3)Convert the list of additions that one can add to the walls and/or structure. Most of these are magical, though, so should be fairly straight forward: Minor changes where rules have changed, tweaking the cost, and assigning a capital cost. Which is probably going to be almost exclusively Magic capital.

3) Decision: Does the Fortification augmentation (+2 hardness, ER 5 vs fire, doors improve to being "Strong wooden doors") apply purely to rooms, or can it be applied to walls? The DT lists "defensive walls" as being a room, so strictly speaking it does apply. That being said, it fails what I'd term to be a sanity check: A basic stone defensive wall with the fortification augmentation (purely using the DT rules here) would cost 820gp, and give you a 200' wall 20' tall that is just as hard and tough as an iron wall (hardness 10, hp 90 per 5' section). Whereas actually building it out of iron would cost 15200gp using my SBH based calculations.

4) Decision: How much technical accuracy is important to have in doing material cost calculations? For instance, the cost of building an iron wall seems extremely low: doing some rough calculations, a 200' wall 20' tall, 3" thick (standard thickness of an iron wall) would use 491558 lb of iron. Which, if bought individually as trade goods (cost 1 sp per lb) would total 49155.8 gp. Even if you halve that to 24577.9 gp to account for the fact that it is being handled in-house instead of purchased ready to go, that's still a fairly huge discrepancy). Although I suppose one could simply hand-wave it away with the justification that in building a wall, one isn't using pure iron, but rather an alloy of some kind. Likewise, in such a bulk project, one would be using lower grade iron, not purified trade bars.

5) Figure out what is OGL and can be posted freely, and what is not. On the DT side, I'm using paizo's online content and the d20pfsrd for convenience, and if I recall correctly, all of that is OGL. On the SBH side, however, I don't think any of it is explicitly OGL, other than the physical statistics for various materials, which are found in quite a few OGL sources. Given that I'm not reposting descriptions, images, or anything that can only be found in the SBH, I don't think there's any concern there. The closest I come is the wall numbers and while those are *derived* from SBH numbers, they aren't the same ones. And I think derivations are generally permissible. That being said, I don't want to step on anyone's toes.


As far as the rules go, they're kind of scarce as to what sort of income a mine would generate, from what I can see, there's sort of three main rules for it:

1) The Stronghold Builder's Handbook specifies that if your stronghold has a single income source, you get 1% of the total value of the stronhold as income per year. So with a 120k stronghold, you get 1.2k gp per year as income. Or 100gp/month.

2) The Kingdom building rules specify that a mine boosts your local economy by +1, and provides you with 1 BP per kingdom turn. Given that a kingdom turn is a month, and 1 BP is roughly equivalent to 4k gp, so you get 4k gp/month.

3) The Downtime rules are full of stuff for profiting from your castle and structure... but they don't explicitly mention mining, forestry, or any other kind of primary-resource gathering operations. The closest it comes is in the "Teams" section, where you can hire a team of Craftspeople, which is a team of 3 people trained in a particular craft or profession, typically level 4 experts. Such a team has an earnings value of +4 (gp, Goods, or labour). Which translates to earning 40gp/month, or 36 capital (either goods or labour). Keeping in mind that you have to pay the costs of that capital (360gp, in this case). Which sounds like a loss, until you realize that you can use that capital to accomplish 720gp worth of crafting or construction. (or other things) And of course, multiply as needed to get the size of your operation.

So the first one scales depending on the size of your operations, but leaves all the details of how exactly you're making money up to the RP factor, but nails down the amount.

The second assumes that it is a mine of national significance, and thus rather large (aka since it can't share a hex with much else, it likely a reasonably large scale mine, and has dozens, if not hundreds of miners. So it probably represents the upper end of what your mine *could* become, but probably isn't yet.) Also a fixed amount that doesn't dwell on the details of exactly how many people are involved, or anything.

And the third one ignores what kind of mine it is, and simply tells you how productive a team of level 4 experts in mining would make/produce in the given time period. This one more or less ignores the structure, but emphasises the body count. Note: If you care to convert your structure into the downtime rules - or at least, the rooms in it - there's probably a fair number that will stack with your miners to produce quite a bit more.

((I wouldn't recommend converting fortifications over, though. While the DT system is remarkably detailed and usefl for the rooms and internals of a structure, it is abysmal at dealing with the fortifications and walls. What it has in the way of defensive stuff is most suited to mansions and inner-city stuff))


This would definitely be nice; add a bit of diversity to the ranks of iconics.


Hmmm... I hadn't thought of using fortification as a stackable upgrade.

According to the downtime system, a 100-200' stretch of stone wall costs 420gp. (that's 20' tall, climb DC 20, and includes a basic gate with a simple lock) It doesn't actually give a hardness, hp, or break DC, but assuming that it is masonry (which matches what you mentioned) it would be hardness 8, 90 hp per 5' section, and break DC 35. Which actually lines up with the "Superior Masonry" from the SBH.

(the only difference between masonry and superior masonry being the extra 5 on the climb DC, representing close fitting bricks and smoothed surfaces. Which would be what a noble would want on their mansion. Which fits, since the general feel of the Downtime system seems geared more towards building in-city properties of all kinds.)

Anyway, as per the Downtime rules, a Defensive Wall is a room that one can simply upgrade with the Fortification augmentation, which costs 300, and adds +2 to the hardness.

Which would effectively give us an iron wall as you said, at the cost of 720 gp per 100-200' stretch. It would even have the same hp as the iron wall. (albeit spread out over 1' thick wall instead of 3"). The only benefit that actually building in iron would be a) less space used, and b)Iron has a higher climb DC.

Thanks for pointing that out. That is by the rules, but I think it fails the sanity check, in multiples ways. :/ I think I'm going to have to look at that some more. 720gp seems far too cheap to get a wall 100' wide and 20' tall that is as hard as iron. Much less a 200' wall 20' high.

I won't even go into boosting it up for Adamantine until I get a grip on the iron equivalence. I think one might simply have to say that the Fortification augmentation can't be applied to stronghold walls, only to actual *rooms.* But I'll go dig around it a bit first.

((As far as that goes, that's one of my few problems with the Downtime system - the excessive variation in sizes. Seems rather odd that you can build anywhere from 100' of wall to 200' of wall for the same cost. There's a few of the larger rooms that suffer the same problem, too. I like SBH's method a lot more - Here's the basic size, if you want bigger, build multiple and describe it as all one room))


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(This is mainly a conversion, but does contain a bit of suggestions/houserules)

I've got a character in our current campaign who is becoming increasingly construction focused.

Initially, it was simply upgrading an estate and expanding it to include an orphanage and school, along with some secret labs for the party alchemist. All this got me into the downtime construction ruleset, which worked really well for that sort of thing.

But now the party's gone up four or five levels, and both our wealth and ambitions have too. Now our builder is thinking more about building a mighty fortress a couple days journey outside of town, and the alchemist is looking to build a full university. Not the little university outlined in the examples section of the downtime guide which would handle, tops, about 50 students. Maybe 100 if you really cram them in or assume they only spend a few hours a day there and you can get multiple batches in per day. No, he wants a big university that can handle about five hundred full time students, along with a permanent research staff. And fortified to boot. Our lead engineer decided to combine the two into a fairly massive fortress-university.

Unfortunately, at this point the downtime rules kind of start faltering a bit. The university side still holds up fairly well - between the rooms list and the teams, it can handle scaling up to a full university fairly nicely, actually. The problem is on the defensive side.

The Downtime rule set only has options for two kinds of walls - wood and stone. In both cases, the description makes them both sound more like the sort of thin palisades you'd find around a mansion in town. More than enough to hold off a riot, or even a small horde of soldiers, so long as they don't have anything in the way of siege weaponry (or equivalent spells).

So the question is - what resources are there (player-wise) for building a real stronghold? Something that one could realistically use to build something that could hold off a fairly large, well equipped army with siege weaponry for months or even years?

Given the lack of any alternatives that I could see, I've been working on converting the Stronghold Builder's Handbook into the downtime system. My primary focus is on the rooms and the walls, as that is the meat of the issue. Of particular interest was bringing in all the options for wall materials. The "Extras" are also interesting, but given that they are all magical stuff, I figure that one can simply halve the price and have them cost an appropriate amount of magical capital. Fairly simple and straight forward.

The link to my spreadsheet of room and wall conversions can be found here I'd rather like to get some feedback on this to see if it is reasonable.

Also, if anyone else has any material for using the SBH in pathfinder, particularly for including it into the downtime system, I'd like to know about it.


This sounds like a situation where you need to have a conversation with your DM. Either they have a preconceived notion of what they want you to do in order to get that item, or they don't want you to have it, and are using the in-game mechanics to do it. Either way, I suggest talking to them sometime outside of the game about it, that way you can either get a hint about how to get it, or find out that you might as well stop worrying because it isn't available.

It is always possible that the DM doesn't want you to buy it because he knows that one of the next big baddies you'll be up against has one...

All that aside, Sigil would be a great place to look. Very high potential for your PC to get squashed like a bug, given the nature of the place.

The City of Brass with the efreet is probably also a very good possibility. It isn't as uber connected as Sigil, but it is probably a bit safer, all in all. It does have a very strong industry, both magic and mundane, so it'd be reasonable to find what you're looking for there.


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My character has developed a real interest in building magnificent structures, and thus the story feat "Monument Builder" (rules here) has attracted my attention. While the majority of the feat makes sense, the benefit he receives after completing the goal seems kind of ambiguous. The part about speeding up construction makes sense, but the other, not so much.

To be specific, part of the benefit is that "all the character's structures increase in value by 10%."

As best I can tell, this doesn't have any actual gameplay effect, although it does open up the possibility of combining the "discount" from construction with the increased value to give a particularly energetic builder the chance to turn construction into a business. Potentially a rather lucrative one, if the builder can find customers with that deep a pocket, anyway.

Is this the point of the benefit? Or does it have some other gameplay impact that I'm missing?

Thanks!