stephan10's page

Congratulations everyone!

I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, long-term I believe it's the best move, both for Paizo as well as for the majority of the players. I would imagine it simplifies things a lot in-house if you only have one core system. As a GM I also appreciate not having to worry about rule differences between systems, e.g. whether flanking bonus is in addition to flat-footed. I also like PF2's three-action economy system and the streamlined traits. And to be honest, some parts of SF seem a bit rushed and benefit from being updated (notably starship combat). It also makes "crossing-over" easier, giving players more options. At least in SFS it also seems like it has been getting harder getting games to fire for around 1 1/2 years.

On the other hand, it at the very least puts the next two years in a weird place. While it already has been a bit difficult getting SF games to fire, I wouldn't assume the announcement leads to a surge of popularity for SF1. And if I assume the majority of games will switch over to SF2, it makes buying SF1 books and materials a bit of a harder sell, especially as it means SF1's life cycle has been shorter than PF1's. Relatedly, it makes it harder to get motivated to invest time in learning new parts of the system. E.g. I've been thinking of finally running The Devastation Arc AP - but if that's the only adventure I run at that level in this system it makes it more difficult to find the motivation for the effort. I also find it difficult keeping the different rulesets apart, so with the Starfinder playtest (and Starfinder Enhanced) coming up I feel like I can comfortably only focus on one or the other. There's also the issue of baseline expectation management (including technology). Some people will expect all options being available while others were already up in arms (mostly torches and pitchforks) because of Guns & Gears. From a technical perspective it's difficult to tell how the different VTTs and tools will be able to handle the cross-compatibility, as it's usually more complicated than you would first expect. There is also the risk of all of the ancestries (and classes) being more of the same. SF has benefited from its cantina feel of a wide menagerie of species being available - which is difficult to achieve while having sufficient differentiation for the various species while at the same time making sure every species is a roughly equal choice.

My goodness, you kept detailed records! Now... How did you ever track these statistics?

I hope that you get to play a bit more now. It's nice to mix things up a little. I like playing about 1 in 4 times, just so that I can keep track of my characters and have a chance to be silly!

Congratulations again on your magnificent acheivement!

Hmm

Thanks!

It does help to have VTT statistics and a simple parser, otherwise you'll likely never finish counting these rolls.

Thankfully, I do get to play a bit too, though rarely SF itself.

Also congratulations to Jason Thuel of course!

Some statistics from the way to 5th Nova:

Total d20s rolled: 32510

Average roll: 10,474213

Total Natural 1s: 1638
Total Natural 20s: 1577

Combat:

Natural 1s in combat: 495
Natural 20s in combat: 529

Initiative rolls: 2288

Ranged attacks and melee attacks are closer than expected (5129 vs 5222) [no information on spells as they have too much variability].

1617 Reflex saves, 756 Fortitude saves, 696 Will saves

Skills:

Acrobatics: 567; Athletics: 725; Bluff: 343; Computers: 1059; Culture: 951; Diplomacy: 782; Disguise: 35; Engineering: 1588; Intimidation: 229; Life Science: 498; Medicine: 431; Mysticism: 617, Perception: 2714; Physical Science: 266; Piloting: 894; Professions: 463; Sense Motive: 564; Sleight of Hand: 65; Stealth: 461; Survival: 573

Other:

Games played as a player at 1st level or with pregens: A few. Games played at 2nd level or higher with characters that were not pregens: Zero.

Manually generated chronicles: Around 768. Chronicles made with RPG Chronicles: Around 54. Joy about not having to fill out new chronicles manually: 100 %.

Some notes:

Almost every scenario from the four seasons should be included at least once, some several times. This includes the Skitter one-shots and One-Shot #1. Not included are the newly released 4-09 and 4-10, as well as Starfinder: The Starfinder Four VS. The Hardlight Harlequin and One-Shot #2 for obvious reasons. Due to AP credits, the total amount of games is probably a bit under 150 games.

The vast majority of the rolls should be rolls from the PCs, though NPC rolls will also be included (no way to really filter the rolls without specifying each and every PC name). This should mostly affect attack rolls and saves, NPC skill checks do not come up very often. NPC initiatives are usually handled automatically and will therefore not affect the amount of initiative rolls too much.

Note that this will not be 100 % correct, so treat it with some caution. Some rolls are from test games, there are also test rolls made by players, random rolls, rerolls, … A few rolls have been lost due to crashes or parsing errors. It’s also entirely possible I accidently attributed some rolls incorrectly, I just quickly adapted some older code. Trick attack rolls can skew certain skills. In some cases, players manually rolled d20s, making them not feasible to categorize.

Also bear in mind that for the rarer checks there is a self-fulfilling cycle: Players are less likely to take them, which also causes them to be rolled less. E.g. if a check allows Disguise or Computers, the Disguise check is unlikely to actually be rolled, even if it actually would be a RAW option.