Starfinder Lead Designer
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In other news ...
Would Starfinder benefit from a Game Mastery Guide?
Absolutely—in fact, I think it benefits from any solid guide for game masters.
The Pathfinder First Edition Game Mastery Guide was the first Paizo product I ever picked up (for a game I was running in a different system), and I'm really liking what I'm seeing go into the Second Edition book.
(Watch Leo and Logan talk about it here!)
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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.
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.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:
Actually, Ascalaphus proposed a good approach that would avoid rebuilding the game.
* 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.
Developing gear as chains that kind of guide a player when to upgrade would be a good way forward.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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What's one science fiction/science fantasy sub-genre or trope you think "Boy, I wish Starfinder could handle this better than it does right now"?
Open-ended, planet-of-the-week, scrappy-starship-crew-takes-on-the-galaxy adventures!
(Which is a big part of why I created the Deck of Many Worlds. ...And I've now made this seem like a planted question. Oh well!)| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
What's one science fiction/science fantasy sub-genre or trope you think "Boy, I wish Starfinder could handle this better than it does right now"?Open-ended, planet-of-the-week, scrappy-starship-crew-takes-on-the-galaxy adventures!
(Which is a big part of why I created the Deck of Many Worlds. ...And I've now made this seem like a planted question. Oh well!)
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What's one science fiction/science fantasy sub-genre or trope you think "Boy, I wish Starfinder could handle this better than it does right now"?Open-ended, planet-of-the-week, scrappy-starship-crew-takes-on-the-galaxy adventures!
(Which is a big part of why I created the Deck of Many Worlds. ...And I've now made this seem like a planted question. Oh well!)
On that note, I think it would be exciting to see APs play up the freedom and field-adaptability that UPB crafting and your own ship design can give you.
When I first laid hands on Starfinder and discovered how much easier crafting was compared to Pathfinder, I assumed that a typical mission might be like "so, we landed on this planet, and it seems the local fauna is immune to X and vulnerable to Y, so before we go into the main area, let's fab some appropriate weapons".
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)
Handling FOMO is something I know very little about. If you figure it out, let me know!(This is a SciShow Psych video, for the record.)
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Question for you, Joe!
If my Starfinder players ever encounter Zo!, should I attempt my best Tim Curry impersonation, or my greatest Vincent Price impression when portraying him? Both actors seem to have the right blend of flamboyance, menace, sleaze and impressive mustaches...it's so hard to choose!
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Question for you, Joe!
If my Starfinder players ever encounter Zo!, should I attempt my best Tim Curry impersonation, or my greatest Vincent Price impression when portraying him? Both actors seem to have the right blend of flamboyance, menace, sleaze and impressive mustaches...it's so hard to choose!
Jason Keeley does an excellent Zo!—I'd follow his lead (you can listen here). An Rocky Horror–level Tim Curry is definitely an excellent choice too!
What is one thing you've wanted to put into SF, but haven't been able to (or haven't been willing to), yet? Why (if you can comment on it)?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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What is one thing you've wanted to put into SF, but haven't been able to (or haven't been willing to), yet? Why (if you can comment on it)?
Well, there's [redacted] and [redacted], but most of all, I want to see [redacted]! Hopefully one day...
Oh, and reasonable prices for medicinals. (But watch the skies; we have a plan...)
Otherwise, I've been lucky to work with folks that come up with fun and interesting ideas and find a way to make them happen. The only real limitations have been our team size and the inexorable march of time—it takes a surprising number of person-hours to make these things happen!
I am surprised at the number of person-hours it takes to make these things happen!
Also, [redacted] and [redacted], sound amazing, but I totally agree that [redacted] is top tier!
And huzzah for medicinal pricing!
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How do you like equipping humanoid NPC that are less then CR1? The information on Alien Archives pp 137-141 is not clear.
Do you treat the NPC as CR1, or do you have some different formula?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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How do you like equipping humanoid NPC that are less then CR1? The information on Alien Archives pp 137-141 is not clear.
Do you treat the NPC as CR1, or do you have some different formula?
I just follow the guideline in the Gear section on page 137:
Gear has a minimum level of 1 and a maximum level of 20. For example, if a creature’s CR is 1/2 or if the creature’s CR is 1 and the graft suggests an item of “CR – 1,” you would give it level 1 gear."
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How do you like equipping humanoid NPC that are less then CR1? The information on Alien Archives pp 137-141 is not clear.
Do you treat the NPC as CR1, or do you have some different formula?
I just follow the guideline in the Gear section on page 137:
Gear has a minimum level of 1 and a maximum level of 20. For example, if a creature’s CR is 1/2 or if the creature’s CR is 1 and the graft suggests an item of “CR – 1,” you would give it level 1 gear."
You know, it helps if I actually read the rules from time to time. :(
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I like that “brass” is a color scheme. :D
Makes me happy.
Contributor
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I've polled the team, and it sounds like brass and red are the go-to color scheme!Does the Skyfire Legion have any official color scheme for their uniforms/banners/insignias?
Thanks in advance!
Awesome! Thank you! I'm going to be painting at least one mini for a Skyfire Centurion character, and I wanted to see about finding the right colors! Thank you tons!
Also - not a question, but I wanted to thank you for devising the Deck of Many Worlds. The idea behind that is amazing, and seeing the preview images catapulted it to the top of my wishlist!
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Also - not a question, but I wanted to thank you for devising the Deck of Many Worlds. The idea behind that is amazing, and seeing the preview images catapulted it to the top of my wishlist!
Say, thanks—I hope you get your wish and share some of the worlds you create with me!
Relatedly, Jason Keeley and I had a blast on the Twitch stream last week making a few worlds (with chat voting on which cards we used)—YouTube video just went up.
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Contributor
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Also - not a question, but I wanted to thank you for devising the Deck of Many Worlds. The idea behind that is amazing, and seeing the preview images catapulted it to the top of my wishlist!Say, thanks—I hope you get your wish and share some of the worlds you create with me!
Relatedly, Jason Keeley and I had a blast on the Twitch stream last week making a few worlds (with chat voting on which cards we used)—YouTube video just went up.
I am only 13 minutes into the video (water world + intergalactic race) and I can already see how you can get billions of combinations. The attribute bar, alone, that you and Jason pulled already gave me at least 3 different ideas on how to write a story for a high-tech, high-religion, low-accord world!
Yep, I now officially love this twice as much as I did before (which was already a lot)! Bravo!
...Now I need to devise a way to convince Thurston to let GMs use this in SFS somehow, too!
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SFS already has one repeatable scenario (1-12, Ashes of Discovery) that lets us create a world and a culture for our players. I could see us developing another repeatable based on that idea. I think it might work best if we could do one that uses both sides of a large flip mat, and allows GMs to pick and drop the monsters like the PF1 scenarios Tome of Righteous Repose and Beyond the Halflight Path did.
Being able to be unpredictable about monster placement is part of what makes a scenario really repeatable, but it would be cool to have an element that could use some of the ideas from the Deck of Many Worlds.
BTW, happy holidays to you and the rest of the team, Joe!
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The more I have looked at other systems, the more I am liking ... Starfinder.
Have you had a similar experience?
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Do you have any backwards bat shit crazy town you have to visit family in during the holidays.
We live in the Midwest, so it's a given for us.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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The more I have looked at other systems, the more I am liking ... Starfinder.
Have you had a similar experience?
I find that my appreciation for Starfinder grows in proportion to my appreciation for other games =)
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Do you have any backwards bat s@%+ crazy town you have to visit family in during the holidays.
We live in the Midwest, so it's a given for us.
Nope—no required visits for me! Funnily, (part of) my hometown was just featured on Atlas Obscura.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Am I helping?
Someone, somewhere, sometime—and that's all anyone can do!
Ooooooooooooooh!
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I like the ruling (even as I fear it), and thus am required by law to wonder: would it be possible to share any of your thought process on making it?
(I like the idea of a combat maneuver specialist or a tk-specialist force-moving foes past allies to provoke.)
EDIT: for clarification and because I'm a rube sometimes.
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I like the ruling (even as I fear it), and thus am required by law to wonder: would it be possible to share any of your thought process on making it?
(I like the idea of a combat maneuver specialist or a tk-specialist force-moving foes past allies to provoke.)
EDIT: for clarification and because I'm a rube sometimes.
Yeah I'm also curious about the background, because I totally expected it to go the other way.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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This one was pretty straightforward for me, both from previous conversations with our former design lead Owen K.C. Stephens and the book as written (where we explicitly state exceptions to the less-than-clearly stated rule). However, we did discuss this as a team—and reservations were definitely shared! I'll be keeping an eye on and ear out for any developments.
Thanks! I'm hype for it, myself, but I was just curious what the idea was! Thank you!
Here's a question:
If you, Joe Pasini, suddenly appeared in a StarFinder AP (and you got stats and whatnot to work with it), which AP would you want to "live through" and why?
And what race (human is a good pick, but not strictly necessary!) and class would you choose?
(Acknowledging, of course, that this is a purly mental exercise, and caveats about loved ones notwithstanding.)
Basically, The Game Come to Life trope! Like Jumanji or Tron! But with an SF AP!
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This one was pretty straightforward for me, both from previous conversations with our former design lead Owen K.C. Stephens and the book as written (where we explicitly state exceptions to the less-than-clearly stated rule). However, we did discuss this as a team—and reservations were definitely shared! I'll be keeping an eye on and ear out for any developments.
I think one of the more remarkable things that this ruling lets you do, is bull rush someone, then take an AoO because they're moving out of one of your threatened squares.
PF1 didn't allow AoOs on movement forced by bull rush unless you had Greater Bull Rush, and even then it only allowed AoOs by your allies, not you.
So is it okay to Stellar Rush into someone (dealing some fire damage) and then take an AoO if you manage to push them?
(That sounds so flippin’ coool!)
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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If you, Joe Pasini, suddenly appeared in a StarFinder AP (and you got stats and whatnot to work with it), which AP would you want to "live through" and why?
And what race (human is a good pick, but not strictly necessary!) and class would you choose?
Oh, so scary! Definitely not Signal of Screams. >_>
I want to say I'd hide in the casino in volume three of Dawn of Flame, but I'm not sure I'm too keen on being inside the sun either.
I think I'll go with: a shirren mechanic (with a hover drone) in Attack of the Swarm!
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If you, Joe Pasini, suddenly appeared in a StarFinder AP (and you got stats and whatnot to work with it), which AP would you want to "live through" and why?
And what race (human is a good pick, but not strictly necessary!) and class would you choose?
Oh, so scary! Definitely not Signal of Screams. >_>
I want to say I'd hide in the casino in volume three of Dawn of Flame, but I'm not sure I'm too keen on being inside the sun either.
I think I'll go with: a shirren mechanic (with a hover drone) in Attack of the Swarm!
Related question: Are you in a Starfinder Adventure Path volume?
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Related question: Are you in a Starfinder Adventure Path volume?
Not that I know of! Unless that sneaky Jason Keeley got up to no good...
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Not that I know of! Unless that sneaky Jason Keeley got up to no good...
Related question: Are you in a Starfinder Adventure Path volume?
Does Jason Keeley read this thread?
Okay, Pasini. Here's the deal: I need a new car*!
So, because of that, you've gotta give me one!
Specifically, one of these beauties!
You decide the BP, but keep in mind, I got two kids and school traffic lines I gotta wait in, so it's gotta allow for a nice stereo or decent wifi!
*
(This is, of course, a lark. Please feel free to instead design your own personal vehicle that you'd like for you. Or just shake your head and move along. :D)
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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Okay, Pasini. Here's the deal: I need a new car*!
*Slaps roof of book* This bad boy can fit 40+ new starships—including a tier 4 one I wrote that should work great for picking up the kids.
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How common is knowledge about the existence of the Grays in the Pact Worlds? Like, would a hypothetical PC Gray be greeted with a question like "What are you? I've never seen a species like you before," or "Holy crap, you're one of them Grays! Done any creepy experiments lately?! Can you tell us what your people are REALLY doing?!"
Okay, Pasini. Here's the deal: I need a new car*!*Slaps roof of book* This bad boy can fit 40+ new starships—including a tier 4 one I wrote that should work great for picking up the kids.
We-heh-heh-ll played, sir! Well. Played.
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Starfinder Lead Designer
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How common is knowledge about the existence of the Grays in the Pact Worlds? Like, would a hypothetical PC Gray be greeted with a question like "What are you? I've never seen a species like you before," or "Holy crap, you're one of them Grays! Done any creepy experiments lately?! Can you tell us what your people are REALLY doing?!"
It's my expectation that in Starfinder, "what are you?" is a rather gauche question—(which admittedly wouldn't stop species from asking it!)
I think there have got to be plenty of places still where the only people who know about grays are fringe conspiracy theorists, so only those folks'd be particularly taken aback at a party of PCs that included one.
In places where grays are better known, a PC gray that's wandering about in the open would probably be assumed to be less sinister by the mere fact that they're not trying to hide (or abduct everyone in sight), and probably outside the gray "inner circle".
Speaking of conspiracies, I can't wait to see what people think of The Threefold Conspiracy...