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As the title says. Go, go, go!
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What upcoming Switch game are you looking forward to the most?
I haven't played a legacy game before, and I'd like to play one with a group of varying board game–experience levels. What would you recommend?
Do you have any sick candy cane–farming strats in Pocket Camp?
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What upcoming Switch game are you looking forward to the most?
If Animal Crossing is coming to switch, then that wins by a mile, saltlick! In the meantime, The Sexy Brutale and Nine Parchments look interesting. And I still have DOOM to finish and L.A. Noire to start.
I haven't played a legacy game before, and I'd like to play one with a group of varying board game–experience levels. What would you recommend?
I’ve thus far played only Rob Daviau legacy games; of those, I’d recommend Pandemic Legacy (Season 1) for a group with a range of experience. Pandemic is a good gateway game anyway, and its cooperative nature means folks can pitch in as they’re willing/able.
(Sweet en dash, by the way!)Do you have any sick candy cane–farming strats in Pocket Camp?
Just one: save your daily free visit to Shovelstrike Quarry for when the reward is candy canes... If you’re trying to craft all the event items, you might start with the ones with corresponding event challenges (in Timed Goals) that reward candy canes. But it’s going to be a grind either way.
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Joe, what's your favorite thing you've developed so far?
Antihero’s Handbook! (With Amanda Hamon Kunz!)
As this was the first thing I worked on as a developer, I’d say I was thrown in the deep end—except I had you and Amanda as my water wings! I got to develop both Adrian and Lacy’s first articles for Paizo, which has a neat symmetry to it. Also, it had art from my first art order! (Yoon origin story ftw.)
What is the best video game of all time?
... and why is it Final Fantasy Tactics?
(Also acceptable: Chrono Trigger, FF6, various 'Zeldas, or mmmmaaaayyyybe something like Illusion of Gaia or Secret of either Evermore or Mana, or maybe Vagrant Story.)
:D
Related, but different question: what is your favorite game, and why?
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What'd ya know, Joe!
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What is the best video game of all time?
As Polygon recently told us, it’s Tetris (which sure is a weird way to spell Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild).
... and why is it Final Fantasy Tactics?
Because it’s one of the few contexts in which JP is valuable...
Related, but different question: what is your favorite game, and why?
I appreciate this distinction!
The Witness: a Myst-like puzzle game that is a glorious intersection of art, logic, philosophy, and game design that rewards thought and attention. I won’t go into specifics because the game is best enjoyed with zero information going in...but maybe I should start a thread for fellow islanders...
What's your favorite Appalachian Trail memory?
If you could edit something from Adrian Ng, what would it be?
If you could manage the development of of something by Adam Daigle, what would it be?
If you could contribute something to Andrew Mullen, what would it be?
If you could hide something in that one guy's closet, what would it be?
If you could question that other guy, what would it be?
If you could use tactics or a lion on that one guy, what tactic would it be?
Do you like Polygon's Unraveled (with Brian David Gilbert) show? Do you have a favorite? And if so, which?
What's the name of the bird on your head in your twitter picture?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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If you could edit something from Adrian Ng, what would it be?
If he ever writes a Starfinder module, I'd love to edit it.
If you could manage the development of of something by Adam Daigle, what would it be?
His rad idea for an RPG that uses [redacted].
If you could contribute something to Andrew Mullen, what would it be?
Continued confidence in his abilities as a writer.
If you could hide something in that one guy's closet, what would it be?
A life-size cardboard cutout of Joe Pesci.
If you could question that other guy, what would it be?
How did they gain the rank of Captain?
If you could use tactics or a lion on that one guy, what tactic would it be?
A lion.
Do you like Polygon's Unraveled (with Brian David Gilbert) show? Do you have a favorite? And if so, which?
I didn't know I did, but it looks right up my alley! Ask me again in a few weeks.
What's the name of the bird on your head in your twitter picture?
Button
Those are a fantastic series of answers (thank you), and that is an absolutely adorable bird name!
I'll try to remember to ask you about Unraveled later!
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What would be the aspects of both Pathfinder and Starfinder lore that you'd say you're most knowledgeable about, for the purposes of asking questions in this thread?
Like I know if I want to ask questions about elves or demons, I go to James Jacobs' thread, while if I wanna know more about the rivethun or skittermanders, I'd see if Crystal Frasier is around. What parts of the settings are YOUR wheelhouse?
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Can you answer this question in Interpretive Dance?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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What would be the aspects of both Pathfinder and Starfinder lore that you'd say you're most knowledgeable about, for the purposes of asking questions in this thread?
I'm way into the Drift! Its locations, quirks, and outsiders—especially the spectra.
I also now know a fair amount about Liavara (after preparing for yesterday's Starfinder Wednesday stream). Otherwise, though, I'm a setting butterfly, fluttering around all the interesting and colorful pieces!
What is the best in life?
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Can you answer this question in Interpretive Dance?...
-- o -- \ o / -- o
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That was Awesome! :D
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What is the best in life?To crush your enmity—see it driven before you—and to hear the affirmation of your wisdom.
This. This is gold. Thank you.
(And here I thought you couldn’t top the dancing one.)| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
(And here I thought you couldn’t top the dancing one.)
How is the cost & level armor calculated?
i.e., for home brewing new armors, how does the KAC, EAC, Movement Penalty, Skill Check, Bulk, Slots and category (Light/Heavy) impact the cost of the armor and the assessed level of the armor?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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(And here I thought you couldn’t top the dancing one.)How is the cost & level armor calculated?
i.e., for home brewing new armors, how does the KAC, EAC, Movement Penalty, Skill Check, Bulk, Slots and category (Light/Heavy) impact the cost of the armor and the assessed level of the armor?
Appropriate that you are asking this question, as the answer is a bit of an interpretive dance! Like most design, it's a mix of science and art.
For the science: Cost, level, and AC are the most tightly tied together; I'd look at existing armor and use those as a baseline.
The art: Consider how impactful/restrictive/easy-to-get-around various penalties and bonuses might be to characters of different classes and builds—here's where you also make sure that the armor isn't strictly better or worse than existing armor.
Good luck!
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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[I'm answering this again, because I can.]
What upcoming Switch game are you looking forward to the most?
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening! I played the Game Boy version as a kid and loved it (was my first Zelda game), and the reskin looks so beautiful.
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How do I deal with the growing sense of FOMO I've been getting when I find out the updates to the canon that come from SFS play in later published stuff or updates to the Starfinder Wiki, and the increasing resentment that builds because I don't have time for Organized Play?
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How do I deal with the growing sense of FOMO I've been getting when I find out the updates to the canon that come from SFS play in later published stuff or updates to the Starfinder Wiki, and the increasing resentment that builds because I don't have time for Organized Play?
I nearly did a spit take reading this, because I feel this so hard.
If it helps at all, I've found luck playing online, in small chunks, breaking up scenarios over multiple sessions. I've got a small-but-stable group of players that I GM for, who play for 2ish hrs a week. It means that we need two to three sessions = two to three weeks to get through a single scenario, but it means that I am at least not getting behind on what's happening in the Society. The Org Play rules do state that you can't play another adventure with a character while it's still "playing through" a scenario broken into multiple sessions, but otherwise it's totally compatible with the greater Org Play world.
(If you're free 8pm to 10-ish pm EST on Tuesdays, and can join a Discord/roll20 game, we've got room in the group! If the internet bit causes hesitation, don't worry - it's pretty straight forwards once you've done it a couple times. We're about to start season 2 stuff, with Pact World Warriors, and I intend to run Four for the First after that. PM me if interested :D)
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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How do I deal with the growing sense of FOMO I've been getting when I find out the updates to the canon that come from SFS play in later published stuff or updates to the Starfinder Wiki, and the increasing resentment that builds because I don't have time for Organized Play?
Handling FOMO is something I know very little about. If you figure it out, let me know!
So: space dryads when? XD
(Also: is there any particular design considerations or ideas when generating Starfinder fey, compared to other monsters?)
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(And here I thought you couldn’t top the dancing one.)How is the cost & level armor calculated?
i.e., for home brewing new armors, how does the KAC, EAC, Movement Penalty, Skill Check, Bulk, Slots and category (Light/Heavy) impact the cost of the armor and the assessed level of the armor?
Appropriate that you are asking this question, as the answer is a bit of an interpretive dance! Like most design, it's a mix of science and art.
For the science: Cost, level, and AC are the most tightly tied together; I'd look at existing armor and use those as a baseline.
The art: Consider how impactful/restrictive/easy-to-get-around various penalties and bonuses might be to characters of different classes and builds—here's where you also make sure that the armor isn't strictly better or worse than existing armor.
Good luck!
Building on this question, how portable to you see the Starfinder ruleset is from the Starfinder default setting?
The way equipment was set up and named is a small obstacle here.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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So: space dryads when? XD
(Also: is there any particular design considerations or ideas when generating Starfinder fey, compared to other monsters?)
Space dryads now! But not in any print products I know about. ;)
Starfinder fey haven't necessarily kept all of the design signposts that they had in Pathfinder, but they still have a creature type graft (Alien Archive 133) to keep in mind, and of course a strong First World connection (and all that that implies).
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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how portable to you see the Starfinder ruleset is from the Starfinder default setting?
The way equipment was set up and named is a small obstacle here.
I see it as eminently portable (no bias here =p)!
For me, it's just a matter of renaming a few setting-specific things (like doshkos and the Drift), and taking or leaving certain rules elements, buffet-style, to turn the system in a certain direction (excising magic and hybrid items for a less fantasy sci fi, for instance).
Are there other elements that make that more difficult in your view?
how portable to you see the Starfinder ruleset is from the Starfinder default setting?
The way equipment was set up and named is a small obstacle here.
I see it as eminently portable (no bias here =p)!
For me, it's just a matter of renaming a few setting-specific things (like doshkos and the Drift), and taking or leaving certain rules elements, buffet-style, to turn the system in a certain direction (excising magic and hybrid items for a less fantasy sci fi, for instance).
Are there other elements that make that more difficult in your view?
Not really. It is just the equipment names/descriptions.
Once the drift is replaced by a different FTL system, the Starstone no longer matters.
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how portable to you see the Starfinder ruleset is from the Starfinder default setting?
The way equipment was set up and named is a small obstacle here.
I see it as eminently portable (no bias here =p)!
For me, it's just a matter of renaming a few setting-specific things (like doshkos and the Drift), and taking or leaving certain rules elements, buffet-style, to turn the system in a certain direction (excising magic and hybrid items for a less fantasy sci fi, for instance).
Are there other elements that make that more difficult in your view?
Not really. It is just the equipment names/descriptions.
Once the drift is replaced by a different FTL system, the Starstone no longer matters.
One other game system that blends very well with Starfinder is Stars Without Number. It's got a lot of good bits to it that are quite system-neutral but that can easily be dropped into Starfinder. It has a different take on FTL that puts more topology into the galaxy, and it's got a big toolbox for running sandbox settings and adventures. That then goes quite well with stuff like UBP crafting and all the stuff we can put in spaceships that doesn't strictly have a role in starship combat. So it augments the off-rails aspects of Starfinder very well.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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One other game system that blends very well with Starfinder is Stars Without Number. It's got a lot of good bits to it that are quite system-neutral but that can easily be dropped into Starfinder. It has a different take on FTL that puts more topology into the galaxy, and it's got a big toolbox for running sandbox settings and adventures.
Yes! I love its planet-generation stuff in particular; I drew inspiration from it (and from a few dozen other things) for the Deck of Many Worlds, which should definitely help folks have more sandbox-style adventuring/storytelling in Starfinder (and other games).
Genuinely curious: Why? And what would you change?
The way equipment (especially armor) is carefully stat-ed out for each level results in an equipment list that is needlessly long and essentially redundant.
I would have the armor and weapon tiers go up less frequently.
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Genuinely curious: Why? And what would you change?
I'm not entirely fond of it myself, although I've come around to it a bit. I have a couple of gripes:
* Having to constantly buy better stuff and selling back your old stuff for only 10% is unpleasant. I realize that it has an advantage in WBL handling, because any windfall or setback doesn't have too strong a persistent effect, but still, it's not pleasant to feel like you're throwing away money.
From a certain angle, just about any item you buy is a consumable; an armor that only stays effective in a certain level range is basically a consumable. However, buying ostensibly permanent items with no plan to keep them kinda grates against years of "spend your money wisely" conditioning everyone gets growing up.
* You have to somehow know when you should be upgrading gear. This is not skill that you just automatically get. This is a bit easier with armor, it seems that you do alright if you pick a particular flavor of armor (say, lashunta tempweave) and keep upgrading to the next mark when it becomes affordable and available (level). This tends to keep pace nicely with rising Dex and max Dex on armor.
* Weapons are more problematic; if you see yourself as for example a starknife thrower, there's a jump from level 1 to 8. Thanks to weapon specialization and ability upgrades your damage doesn't fall behind too terribly, but you can't put a lot of fusions on a level 1 item. Also save DCs against crit effects depend on item level. So item levels are important but badly distributed.
* Fusion costs are wonky. It's often cheaper to buy a low-level staging weapon, put fusions first on that, and then more them to your higher level main weapon at the reduced cost. Fusion costs go up very steeply so you can't really leave that money on the table, but it feels like an exploit.
* Fusion seals don't do what they promise, because they need a 24h warmup time.
* Armory had several armor upgrades that do something 1/day, and then also block that armor upgrade slot from doing anything else. This is immersion-breaking, technology doesn't work that way. Fine if the upgrade only works once per day, but why does it block the slot if you can just remove the upgrade with a few minutes' work? I realize designers sometimes want to make stuff limited use and don't want people circumventing that by buying multiples, but this is not an elegant way of implementing such a restriction. Investing things a la PF2 is more elegant, because it's based on a special resource you have as a person. But that only makes sense for magical things, technology is by its nature impersonal.
* As a presentational note, equipment is generally sorted in the book by how it works (magic, tech, hybrid), not by what it's for. But whether something is magical or not doesn't matter a whole lot, so most of the time this just makes it harder to find items while shopping.
* Levels of computers cost money but don't appear to do anything.
* On a more setting-based note, we don't have a great holistic picture of what Starfinder technology is capable of. It seems like AI and uiquitous surveillance and data mining tech is inferior to real life. You don't seem to have a lot of devices with the level of power and versatility of a modern smartphone. Meanwhile energy weapons and space travel is superior. So it's rather hard to say "you can assume these things are generally present in a high tech environment". That cramps the style of classes like the mechanic and technomancer who are supposed to gain some of their narrative power from working with the environment. But with how vague technology is, that environment is a bit of a blank room.
EDIT: whoa, that seems pretty negative when you put it altogether. Please read it with as context that I do rather enjoy the game. It's just not perfect (yet).
* You have to somehow know when you should be upgrading gear. This is not skill that you just automatically get. This is a bit easier with armor, it seems that you do alright if you pick a particular flavor of armor (say, lashunta tempweave) and keep upgrading to the next mark when it becomes affordable and available (level). This tends to keep pace nicely with rising Dex and max Dex on armor.Genuinely curious: Why? And what would you change?
This is much closer to what I would have wanted!
Also, characters from visual media (especially comics or television series - not wanting to waste budget on costuming) tend to have an iconic look. Even in written works, the author doesn't want to waste word count with frequent changes to the character's appearance.
With the way weapons and armor change so quickly, that element gets lost.
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In other news ...
Would Starfinder benefit from a Game Mastery Guide?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Are the Swarm inspired by starship troopers bugs (Insectiod alien race) and starcraft zerg (evolving organic technology race with hive mind)?
Heck yeah! Both of those appear on the Inspirational Media page in the Core Rulebook, and around the office, we sometimes lovingly refer to the Attack of the Swarm! Adventure Path as "the Starship Troopers AP."
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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The way equipment (especially armor) is carefully stat-ed out for each level results in an equipment list that is needlessly long and essentially redundant.
I would have the armor and weapon tiers go up less frequently.
Genuinely curious: Why? And what would you change?I'm not entirely fond of it myself, although I've come around to it a bit. I have a couple of gripes:
Thank you both for your feedback! I'd love to take some time and discuss your points further; hopefully things'll calm down enough here in a month or two that I'll be able to do that.