Zitchas's page

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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?

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.

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.

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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, 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?

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.

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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?

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?

(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.

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!