Fardragon wrote: Maybe spells have simply been consolidated across fewer levels, so level 8 and 9 Pathfinder spells are level 6 Starfinder spells.
Without vancian casting there is no need to have quite so many different spells available.
Doesn't work. There are enough good spell vs bad spell issues already. Squishing 3 more levels down into the mix just makes the spell system worse (and leaves martials out in the cold even more).
The point of 6 spell level classes is to allow for spellcasters with more involved class abilities. And, I suspect, to jettison some of the game breaking spells at higher levels
How would you consider a game to be broken? You know the bad guys get those spells too! You know in standard science fiction, the GM gets all the super science while the players just muddle through.
If you fix spell scaling, so you don't need higher level spells that are simply more powerful versions of lower level spells, it becomes quite easy to squish 9 levels into 6, especially if you ditch broken spells.
Some of it was fun! Generally it was agreed upon that if your character reached a high level, it was time to retire him or her and role up new characters, in some versions of D&D for instance, there was even rules for "Divine Ascension". If you characters reach high enough levels and could acquire worshippers, they could become gods! Gods were not so high and mighty back then, if your characters were of high enough level, there were combat statistics for various gods in the Deities and Demigods book, you could use them as monsters to challenge your high level characters. Nothing wrong with that. In later additions, those stats were only for the god's Avatars, if you killed a God's Avatar, he couldn't manifest for a number of years, and then he'd get revenge on the person who slayed his avatar when he came back, and then it became unfashionable even to publish combat statistics for Avatars, deities only got a paragraph description in a world book, and that was only of concern to clerics of that specific deity. Without clerics, you might as well not have gods at all.
Tom Kalbfus wrote: .... Without clerics, you might as well not have gods at all. Says you. I, and many others, happen to disagree.
Back on topic.
I am interested to see explored the psychological impact of the Gap on people who lived through it.
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graywulfe wrote: Tom Kalbfus wrote: .... Without clerics, you might as well not have gods at all. Says you. I, and many others, happen to disagree.
Back on topic.
I am interested to see explored the psychological impact of the Gap on people who lived through it. Living through the forgotten time is not a problem because those people did not forget anything.
The psychological impact of the Gap depends on how much time passes between the forgotten time and the actual forgetting. If people woke up one day with no memory of anything before the present, then they would be extremely disoriented. But if they still have several years of memories between the end of the Gap and the present, then most people will only gradually realize that some memories have been wiped.
that would be pretty selective, what ever did that would have to sift through everyone's mind and find the memories so they can delete them, not only that but every scrap of paper, even ones that have been lost, every computer record. What could be so thorough? if all evidence has been deleted, then how could anyone ever find any clues to what happened?
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I am sure that we are dealing with power at a divine level.
But even the power of a deity cannot completely overcome human ingenuity. It is virtually impossible to prevent people from inferring information from the sizes and locations of the data erasures -- but that is not a problem as long as they make whatever key data needs to be kept away from mortal minds remains inaccessible.
But I guess we will find out the known characteristics of the Gap in August.
There is also more than one deity, while one deity might be able to erase information from most minds, perhaps they can't do that to other deities. Maybe another deity might be helpful in recovering that information, perhaps by pointing the characters in the right direction.
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Or multiple deities were working together -- or something more powerful than a deity. Who knows?
David knott 242 wrote: Or multiple deities were working together -- or something more powerful than a deity. Who knows?
I'm doubtful that pathfinder has an overdeity like those found in some other fantasy worlds. My personal thoughts are that, whether they're mortals or gods, people tend to talk. We have gods of knowledge and gods of chaos, for whom nothing would keep them from getting the secret out. I am doubtful that gods were exempt from the gap to begin with. If they were exempt than that would imply other outsiders might also be exempt if it was only on the material plane, making finding information about the gap as easy as punching one out of a wizard's imp familiar.
Or, if you are ever fortunate enough or skilled enough to learn the truth of the Gap, some outsiders show up out of nowhere and take you away to someplace pleasant and beyond all contact with the mortal realm.
And we will never know the answer.
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For my own canon I'm interpreting the Gap as a section of history were there are no records of the events that happened during that time. The people who lived during what we call the Gap lived their lives normally but now, x amount of time later, we now how no recollection of what happened. It's as though the events of that era were erased and even the gods don't know what happened.
Picture if you will there not being any recorded history of what happened in the 14th and 15th century. We know that those centuries happened but we have no idea what happened in them and we have no idea when the data was lost. History gets fuzzy at the beginning of the 1300's before blacking out through the next +/-200 years. Towards the end of the 1400's history starts getting fuzzy again and then leaps back into focus in time for the Renaissance. We have ruins and other physical artifacts from those centuries but nothing to put them into context. Furthermore, the precise start and end of the missing years varies for each culture that was present during those centuries.
The scariest part is that not even the gods know what happened and why. They bluff about it to cover up their own confusion and terror but the harsh truth is that something far more powerful than even them altered history AND reality without them even noticing. Even one as mighty as Asmodeus would soil himself with that realization.
SM
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Tom Kalbfus wrote: Oh well! If its the same setting, there needs to be an in setting explanation in order for it to be the same setting. I don't know why you need to get rid of 7+ spells, its assumed that such high level spellcasters are rare anyway, so if rarely encountered, why are they such a problem in a science fiction setting and not in a fantasy setting? Most people in the setting don't use magic at all! They ride on horses, use swords, fire bows and arrows and most are farmers. A wizard needs to be level ~13 before he accesses the 7th level spells. Maybe the reason why we don't see more 9th level casters is simply because no one bothers to dedicate that much time to spellcasting, with technology easily available to most folks. All of the potential wizard apprentices get siphoned off to Technomancer school or whatever.
I mean there is no shortage of jobs and skill sets that ready access to information and technology have rendered either obsolete or unappealing.
For all we know their are some curmudgeonly liches out complaining about "BACK IN MY DAY, WE ONLY KNEW 1 FIRST LEVEL SPELL AT FIRST LEVEL, AND WE LIKED IT" to every technomancer that walks by their porch.
Umbral Reaver wrote: And we will never know the answer. Not much of a mystery if we never know the answer. Perhaps there is an overdeity but he is not the subject of worship, does not answer prayers. The overdeity is a computer, the gods people worship are a part of that program so they are clueless as to what happened.
Quote: A matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure proposed by Robert Bradbury, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. Quote: Possible uses
Some possible uses of such an immense computational resource have been proposed. One idea suggested by Charles Stross, in his novel Accelerando, would be to use it to run perfect simulations or uploads of human minds into virtual reality spaces supported by the Matrioshka brain. Stross even went so far as to suggest that a sufficiently powerful species utilizing enough raw processing power could launch attacks upon, and manipulate, the structure of the universe itself.[8] In Godplayers (2005), Damien Broderick surmises that a matrioshka brain would allow simulating entire alternate universes.[9] The futurist and transhumanist author Anders Sandberg wrote an essay speculating on implications of computing on the massive scale of machines such as the matrioshka brain, published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.[10] Matrioshka brains and other megastructures are a common theme in the Orion's Arm universe where they are used by superintelligences as processing nodes connected via artificial wormholes.
matrioshka brain
Tom Kalbfus wrote: Umbral Reaver wrote: And we will never know the answer. Not much of a mystery if we never know the answer. The Gap is Starfinder's analogue to the mystery of Aroden's death. It will never be explained.
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Maybe there is no Gap, because Starfinder is a projected future for Pathfinder. Most science fiction stories set in the future have a gap. 2001 A Space Odyssey had a gap between 1968 and 1997 When Hal was first brought online. The Gap serves the function of keeping the story relevant for the duration of the gap. When you project a future you have to assume a number of things will happen between the time you projected the future and the time of the projection, to allow some wiggle room and uncertainty of the immediate future and the more distant future that you are projecting.
A Matrishka brain is big enough to simulate a whole galaxy of worlds, it can simulate an entire cosmology with gods, outer, inner, and transitive planes if you like, it can also simulate magic, it can be the ultimate computer game. If such a big computer can simulate billions of worlds, it can also simulate one more along a parallel reality track, that would be Golarion. The Gap exists because the events that supposedly were erased haven't actually happened yet. The Matrishka Brain ran one simulation and then split it in two creating a whole future galaxy but without Golarion, and then it continues to run the Golarion simulation. A technomancer can hack the Matrishka brain to transfer him from Starfinder to Golarion, and he will appear to have travelled back in time, but since there is a gap, there is nothing he can do to change history, because he doesn't know how history went, there is no causual connection in actuality between Golarion and Starfinder, that is just a projected illusion. People have records and memories of what went on before the gap, and as time passes in Golarion, those memories are being added to in Starfinder, and the gap closes at a rate of 1 second per second. Some members of long lived races can exist in both these places, an elf for example could have a younger self in Golarion and his older self in Starfinder, and everything the younger elf experiences is added to the older elf's recollections. records appear in computers and in books as things happen concurrently in Gorlarion.
But there is a Gap, and it isn't because everything is secretly preposterous supercomputers.
The devs have been really clear that something happened, and it affected everyone. Whether this is absurd or worth dealing with will hit individual tastes, but it is a setting element. One that will remain mysterious- 'big reveals' of setting-wide mysteries tend to go badly among fan communities.
If its never revealed, then it doesn't matter what the answer is, each GM can then have his own answer to that mystery, mine makes logical sense, even if it isn't the correct one. If you have a computer that can simulate everything, part of that everything it is simulating is people's memories of what occurred in the gap. Imagine if I creates a world in the 23rd century, it exists in the future, but we don't know what happened between now and then, there are spaceships and warp drive, but we don't know how we got to that point, it is all kind of fuzzy. We have a history, but the first 50 years of it between now and that posited future is missing, one solution is that 23rd century isn't actually in the 23rd century but exists now in a parallel universe made to resemble what we thing the 23rd century may someday look like. It is supposed to exist in out own future, but since we don't know how that future is to turn out, and we don't want to constrain our freedom to act in the present day, we have this zone of uncertainly called the gap. Since we don't know what occurs next in the next 50 years, we don't know what we have to do to alter that future.
One reason the Gap may exist would be to facilitate time travel between Pathfinder and Starfinder. People can theoretically travel back and forth between those two points in time. Starfinder people can go back into the past to Golarion right before the gap without knowledge of what happens next, and Golarion people can travel to the future in Starfinder without finding knowledge of their fates, that way both settings maintain their free will of action, there is no fate or destiny because of that Gap. Effectively they may exist at the same time, or it may be that the Gap is real, and time travel is limited to he point in time just before the gap and the point in time at present day Starfinder, both time windows move forward in time at 1 second per second.
I doubt the writers have a "correct" answer that they know themselves.
Kind of like "Lost".
I think the Gap solves a problem though, they want to continue to run Pathfinder and write novels about that setting while they run Starfinder which is supposed to being its future, normally when your in the future of something, you can find out about the past, the gap prevents them from doing that and thus prevents them from revealing stuff about the Pathfinder setting, that they don't want to be held to as they write new Pathfinder products. So with Golarion gone, there is no one to go digging around there to find out what happened.
Think of them as two parallel realities, while one is technically in the future of the other, the Gap renders that point moot.
Fardragon wrote: I doubt the writers have a "correct" answer that they know themselves.
Kind of like "Lost".
It has been stated by the Starfinder development team that they do know the answer.
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Of course, since only Golarion is missing, folks writing Pathfinder adventures still have to tread lightly about running adventures on other planets.
David knott 242 wrote: Of course, since only Golarion is missing, folks writing Pathfinder adventures still have to tread lightly about running adventures on other planets.
The Galaxy is open to all. With a 100 thousand million stars in ours alone.
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I said Pathfinder adventures -- not Starfinder adventures. Of course the entire galaxy (and perhaps beyond) is open to Starfinder.
graywulfe wrote: Fardragon wrote: I doubt the writers have a "correct" answer that they know themselves.
Kind of like "Lost".
It has been stated by the Starfinder development team that they do know the answer. Yeah. The "Lost" writers made that claim too...
David knott 242 wrote: Of course, since only Golarion is missing, folks writing Pathfinder adventures still have to tread lightly about running adventures on other planets.
Not really. The Gap sees to that. Say in a Pathfinder story Eox is destroyed. Oh look, in Starfinder it is back. However did that happen? No one knows, because the Gap.
Pretty easy not to write a story that destroys Eox.
Voss wrote: But there is a Gap, and it isn't because everything is secretly preposterous supercomputers.
The devs have been really clear that something happened, and it affected everyone. Whether this is absurd or worth dealing with will hit individual tastes, but it is a setting element. One that will remain mysterious- 'big reveals' of setting-wide mysteries tend to go badly among fan communities.
And honestly, it's probably better that way. Star Wars Episodes 1 to 3 were so hyped up for the sixteen years that passed after Return of the Jedi that the films would have had to be three Godfather-quality epics in a row to have a chance to avoid disappointing the hardcore fans--and there would still be folks that would never be pleased. When someone is driven by their childhood memories their expectations are impossible to beat. Same for the diehard fans of The Hobbit & TLOTR, Duke Nukem Forever, etc.
In the mystery of Aroden's Death and the Gap, the hype that has built up in the imaginations of fans couldn't ever be beat by whatever Paizo did decide to release as the canonical answers to those mysteries.
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The more I read about the Gap, the more I recommend "The Big O" anime, as an example of what life would be like after one.
What happened during the Gap isn't a mystery. It's a secret.
David knott 242 wrote: Of course, since only Golarion is missing, folks writing Pathfinder adventures still have to tread lightly about running adventures on other planets.
It is in a separate Universe from Starfinder, the Universe split, in one Universe is Golarion in the other is Starfinder, that is what I would guess.
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