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It seems a little odd that the doc is growing whats essentially opium and doesn't know it. A possible technobable explanation is that the left handed version of the molecule the plant produces is a bad tasting alkaloid that discourages insects while the right handed version is the analgesic.
She's aware they had an anomalous batch a while ago, but obviously ordered production on that cultivar halted. She has the memmo and everything. Reports from her technicans show that concentrations of the right handed version of the molecule is under 1 percent, you'd need to eat a bathtub of salad to feel anything.
Do the testing myself? I have a PHD...
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"I check the computer for a fake shell" Has become the new "I perceive the door"
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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It seems a little odd that the doc is growing whats essentially opium and doesn't know it. A possible technobable explanation is that the left handed version of the molecule the plant produces is a bad tasting alkaloid that discourages insects while the right handed version is the analgesic.
She's aware they had an anomalous batch a while ago, but obviously ordered production on that cultivar halted. She has the memmo and everything. Reports from her technicans show that concentrations of the right handed version of the molecule is under 1 percent, you'd need to eat a bathtub of salad to feel anything.
Do the testing myself? I have a PHD...
I love this, and am absolutely stealing it when I run this adventure.
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While PCs are in the drift the science officer is asked to roll checks to see if the unknown ship is detected.
Whenever I need to ask for such a roll I try to obfuscate it for something benign and flavorful to not tip my hand that there's something there they didn't find if they fail.
In this case, I described having to make a course correction to avoid a drift storm - and ask the science officer to scan the unusual phenomenon for study. Regardless to the outcome of these rolls I give some meaningless detail about it being caused by clouds of different planar essences colliding and that it was good they avoided it.
If they succeed, I give them a photo handout showing the distorted silhouette of the ship against the storm - a creepy visual forshadowing for the ship that'll almost certainly cripple them once they leave the drift.
Anyway, here's my prep files including this extra handout in case others find this useful. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o_2YEdyLIX6IrM3uLrUEpBfPGvna18-n?us p=sharing
Also, did anyone else nearly have a TPK on their hands from the final combat? I was running high tier.
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Except it totally is.
Normally, you can concentrate even in a distracting situation, but if you’re casting a spell and you take damage from either a successful attack that targeted your AC or from an effect that you failed a saving throw against, the spell fails.
You are most at risk of taking damage while casting when a spell’s casting time is 1 round or longer, you have provoked an attack of opportunity, or a foe readied an action to attack you when you began to cast. However, if you are taking ongoing damage (such as if you are bleeding or on fire), your spells are not disrupted in this way.
Bolded for emphasis.
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Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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I'm well aware of that passage. Back around the time the core rulebook was first getting into most people's hands, there was a whole debate in a couple of threads about whether that passage meant that you could ready to interrupt spellcasters, because of page 249 of the core rulebook stating that:
You can prepare to take an action when a certain trigger occurs by using a standard action. Decide on a standard, move, or swift action and a trigger. You can take the action you chose when the trigger happens. This changes your initiative count to the current initiative count for the remainder of the combat. If you used a reaction on your previous turn and then chose to ready an action, you still regain your reaction at the beginning of your original turn, not when you take your readied action.If your readied action is purely defensive, such as choosing the total defense action if a foe you are facing shoots at you, it occurs just before the event that triggered it. If the readied action is not a purely defensive action, such as shooting a foe if he shoots at you, it takes place immediately after the triggering event. If you come to your next turn and have not yet performed your readied action, you don’t get to take the readied action (though you can ready the same action again).
Some examples of these threads are:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2um5y?Casting-spells-in-combat
http://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5ljv8?Five-Differences-Between-Star finder-Rules-and#29
The developer clarification in that second thread made it pretty clear that a readied attack will not work to interrupt a standard action spell, which is most of them.
So, while you could ready an action to interrupt a full round cast, it's not a really isable tactic unless you have spellcasters around that try to summon monsters instead of casting a standard action spell when they see a guy holding his fire for the crucial moment.
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Ran this yesterday as a last-minute substitute GM, so I only had time for a quick read-through beforehand. First thing to note is that this scenario can go really long. The starship combat is actually very challenging and even my experienced players were spending a lot of time coming up with the best tactics. (Having said that, kudos for specifying enemy tactics that keep things shorter.) The research station tour is very open-ended and can have a lot of role-playing. So can the izalguun, and the conclusion can take a while as well.
Two complaints:
1. Neither of the encounters have “PCs begin here” locations.
2. Spinjack has an exocortex and his tactics call for using “target lock” (which I assume is exocortex Combat Tracking) against a target. The problem is that NPC stat blocks in Starfinder specify neither BAB or class levels. So there is no immediate way to know how much that should add to his attack rolls. When an NPC has this ability the bonuses need to be in the stat block. Such as:
Offensive Abilities combat tracking (1 target, +2), . . .
(I extrapolated that low tier Spinjack is Mechanic 5 and high tier is Mechanic 7 from the abilities and also from the amount of HP provided by the energy shield. But I should not have needed to do so; it should have been in the stat block.)
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Regional Venture-Coordinator, Central Europe
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How to use the exocortex for a NPC is explained in the alien archive:
For a mechanic creature with an exocortex, add target tracking at CR 1 (see below), wireless hack at CR 5, twin tracking at CR 10, multitasking at CR 15, and quad tracking at CR 20.
Target Tracking (Ex): As a move action, this NPC can designate and track a single foe, gaining a +2 bonus to attack rolls against that target. Use this same bonus for twin tracking and quad tracking.
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OK. Now that I know that I know which book to look in I see it. But I stand by my statement. It needs to be in the stat block. It is 14 characters extra (counting the parentheses). Starfinder is an overall easier system than Pathfinder, but the stat blocks are much harder on a GM. I’ll reserve the rest of my rant for a more appropriate thread.
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RPG Superstar 2015 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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I'm well aware of that passage. Back around the time the core rulebook was first getting into most people's hands, there was a whole debate in a couple of threads about whether that passage meant that you could ready to interrupt spellcasters, because of page 249 of the core rulebook stating that:
You can prepare to take an action when a certain trigger occurs by using a standard action. Decide on a standard, move, or swift action and a trigger. You can take the action you chose when the trigger happens. This changes your initiative count to the current initiative count for the remainder of the combat. If you used a reaction on your previous turn and then chose to ready an action, you still regain your reaction at the beginning of your original turn, not when you take your readied action.If your readied action is purely defensive, such as choosing the total defense action if a foe you are facing shoots at you, it occurs just before the event that triggered it. If the readied action is not a purely defensive action, such as shooting a foe if he shoots at you, it takes place immediately after the triggering event. If you come to your next turn and have not yet performed your readied action, you don’t get to take the readied action (though you can ready the same action again).
Some examples of these threads are:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2um5y?Casting-spells-in-combathttp://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5ljv8?Five-Differences-Between-Star finder-Rules-and#29
The developer clarification in that second thread made it pretty clear that a readied attack will not work to interrupt a standard action spell, which is most of them.
So, while you could ready an action to interrupt a full round cast, it's not a really isable tactic unless you have spellcasters around that try to summon monsters instead of casting a standard action spell when they see a guy holding his fire for the crucial moment.
Thanks for the feedback! Chalk this up to first-time Starfinder author growing pains; I didn’t follow the blog commentary religiously as it came out, so I missed Owen’s clarification and based the guards’ sample tactics on what I understood the core rules to mean, including the passage Misroi mentioned and my previous Pathfinder experience. Fortunately the guards’ tactics are flexible, so GMs should just use a different tactic based on what the guards know and what the PCs do.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Ohio—Dayton
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Ran this yesterday as a last-minute substitute GM, so I only had time for a quick read-through beforehand. First thing to note is that this scenario can go really long. The starship combat is actually very challenging and even my experienced players were spending a lot of time coming up with the best tactics. (Having said that, kudos for specifying enemy tactics that keep things shorter.)
Thanks for posting your ship sheets to PFS Prep. It looks like there are a couple errors though.
For the Vandal Rockets you have speed 10, when it says they are treated like HE Missile Launchers which have speed 12.On the Tier 6 ship you have Piloting +2, when it's listed as +1 in scenario.
Totally stealing them for when I run this.
Starfinder Society Developer
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OK. Now that I know that I know which book to look in I see it. But I stand by my statement. It needs to be in the stat block. It is 14 characters extra (counting the parentheses). Starfinder is an overall easier system than Pathfinder, but the stat blocks are much harder on a GM. I’ll reserve the rest of my rant for a more appropriate thread.
This is fair. I'll do my best to catch these types of slips in the future.
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Thanks for posting your ship sheets to PFS Prep. It looks like there are a couple errors though.
For the Vandal Rockets you have speed 10, when it says they are treated like HE Missile Launchers which have speed 12.On the Tier 6 ship you have Piloting +2, when it's listed as +1 in scenario.
Noted for correction when I have access to a full computer.
Totally stealing them for when I run this.
Sadly, you wannabe rogue you, I must inform you that it’s not stealing when someone posts them publicly in the hope that you will use them.
Share and Enjoy!
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OK. Now that I know that I know which book to look in I see it. But I stand by my statement. It needs to be in the stat block. It is 14 characters extra (counting the parentheses). Starfinder is an overall easier system than Pathfinder, but the stat blocks are much harder on a GM. I’ll reserve the rest of my rant for a more appropriate thread.This is fair. I'll do my best to catch these types of slips in the future.
Thanks, Thursty.
I wouldn’t really call it a slip, but there are quite a few little things that add up to a decently large burden on GMs. Anything the OP team (and Paizo in general) can do to reduce the amount of prep time is greatly appreciated.
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Best Starship combat in Starfinder so far. The look on players faces when the first shot from from the enemy did 47 points of damage was a classic(I rolled high). I still can't stop laughing at the reaction. Things got serious for the players. They were so used to easy starship combats that They took them all for cakewalks. They really worked together on strategy and pulled together and won but not before burning the boon that lets your starship recover 30 hit points when it reaches 0.
I played this one also and the winning ship only had 10 hull points left.
My only problem with the scenario is length. It needed to be shortened.
I couldn't finish it in the 4 hour hard stop. I had to hand wave the final section after the final battle. We were literally being pushed out the door at time even though we needed maybe 15 minutes more to finish.
When I played it the GM gloseed over the entire meeting with the scientist with no option for the tour and sent us right out into the wilderness to save time.
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In the Megzoloth encounter, the CRs don't match the number of creatures. The low tier is listed as a CR 6 encounter when it should be a CR 8, and the high tier is listed as a CR 8 when it should be a CR 9. If each encounter instead had one fewer enemy, the CRs would be correct. Which of these sets of numbers is accurate?
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Starfinder Society Developer
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In the Megzoloth encounter, the CRs don't match the number of creatures. The low tier is listed as a CR 6 encounter when it should be a CR 8, and the high tier is listed as a CR 8 when it should be a CR 9. If each encounter instead had one fewer enemy, the CRs would be correct. Which of these sets of numbers is accurate?
The CR of the encounter is intentionally lowered by the presence of the izalguun hunters who are (ostensibly) on the PCs side and make the overall difficulty of the encounter easier. That being said, unless you're playing this in a home campaign, the CR of the encounter rarely has a major effect in Organized Play tables.
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Likely GM fiat - I gave the PCs the info that there was a self destruct mechanism, but they had to roll high enough on their scans to get that. I think that ended up being Tier 4 or 5 info, which most people don't bother to get. (Not that it mattered. A crit with the unidentified ship's main weapon means this fight wasn't going to go well for the party, paired with their inability to roll over a 5 to hit anything and failing literally every Piloting roll.)
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Thanks for posting your ship sheets to PFS Prep. It looks like there are a couple errors though.
For the Vandal Rockets you have speed 10, when it says they are treated like HE Missile Launchers which have speed 12.On the Tier 6 ship you have Piloting +2, when it's listed as +1 in scenario.
Totally stealing them for when I run this.
Updates posted to pfsprep.com
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Regional Venture-Coordinator, Central Europe
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In the opening of the scenario, the players are told, "On that note, you might want to make sure you have some means of communicating with a new species. By this point in your careers, I assume you’re capable of that."
However, none of us knew how to do that. The only thing anyone could think of were spells (Share Language, Comprehend Language, etc), but there were no spell-casters in my group. There is no way to UMD spell gems, and spell ampoules cannot be made with divination spells. After digging for a technological item, I went ahead and told them that this was taking too long and we have a space combat to get to (I'll need to come back to that later), so I'm just going to let you know that it's not going to matter - there will not be a language barrier issue.
A player who has gone through the CRB more thoroughly than I have yet said he's never seen a universal translator. After the game, I found one item way beyond their level (mindlink circlet mk 3, lv 14) that could do it.Where is the universal translator?
Simple answer: there is no perfect universal translator.
There are some things that can help you:Mobile Translator (tier 1 wayfinder boon) which acts as a very rough translator.
Quick Pidgin - lvl 6 xenoseeker theme ability
Spell Gem of Share Language that can be used by non-spellcasters with the help of a Spellthrower weapon fusion.
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Starfinder’s lack of a generic “potion” creation mechanic has thrown up some surprising consequences. While a dilettante adventurer in the Pathfinder setting can carry potions to temporarily overcome barriers (both physical and cultural), the non-casting Starfinder may simply have to make do with less effective tools.
I suspect this will ease as more material is added to the campaign.
Contributor
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OK. Now that I know that I know which book to look in I see it. But I stand by my statement. It needs to be in the stat block. It is 14 characters extra (counting the parentheses). Starfinder is an overall easier system than Pathfinder, but the stat blocks are much harder on a GM. I’ll reserve the rest of my rant for a more appropriate thread.This is fair. I'll do my best to catch these types of slips in the future.Thanks, Thursty.
I wouldn’t really call it a slip, but there are quite a few little things that add up to a decently large burden on GMs. Anything the OP team (and Paizo in general) can do to reduce the amount of prep time is greatly appreciated.
As I'm prepping this to run myself, now, this thread has been incredibly helpful - thank you to all involved.
I second Kevin's statement - this isn't a "slip" by any stretch of the imagination - Starfinder is still very new and we're all learning as we go here.
Thursty, just in case an update to this scenario is in the offing, could maybe also request that BAB values for NPCs/enemies (...and iconics as long as it's late/early and I'm being ambitious?) be added to stat blocks? That way, if something in the future is ever missing when it goes to print (as it were), class levels can be extrapolated.
This scenario looks really amazing, and I'm excited to see what my locals think of it in a few days!
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Starfinder Society Developer
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Thursty, just in case an update to this scenario is in the offing, could maybe also request that BAB values for NPCs/enemies (...and iconics as long as it's late/early and I'm being ambitious?) be added to stat blocks? That way, if something in the future is ever missing when it goes to print (as it were), class levels can be extrapolated.
I can pretty much say that this isn't going to happen in Starfinder. The entire system is crafted so that NPCs specifically don't have BABs associated with them. Instead, everything is created using the rules in Alien Archive, for ease of creation. This means that a creature generally has a value close to the values presented for its CR. Some authors/me while developing may adjust these values to make it fit better for the creature.
Just one of those new design philosophies people need to get used to. I know, from behind the GM screen, I've REALLY enjoyed the freedom it provides me when it comes to designing cool stuff.
Coming up on this adventure, and with the earlier advice about NPC stat blocks in mind: Spinjack has the Deadly Aim feat in both tiers. Looking for some advice on either 1) What damage bonus this should provide or 2) What feats folks recommend as a good replacement.
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While it doesn't exactly answer this question the Alien Archive says:
If you want the NPC’s attack to be especially deadly, you can use the damage entry from the row for the NPC’s CR + 1. If you do, it’s usually best to lower its attack bonus or AC a bit or give it some other shortcoming.
Looking at the rows in the expert array, I'd just step up the damage die when using Deadly Aim (1d6 becomes 1d8, 2d6 becomes 2d8) and add 1 to the damage.
To be honest I probably wouldn't use Deadly Aim at all. Spinjack already does more damage than the array says he "should" and even with a -2 he's still going to hit PCs most of the time. And you definitely shouldn't switch out and give him another ability.
(I'm running a home game rather than a SFS table, to be clear.)
Ran the starship combat last night. My PCs' player-created starship (with all that entails) vs. the baddies. Glass cannon vs. glass cannon! My guys generally blow through starship combat without dinging their hull; this one they survived with their shields shot to ribbons in every arc, their hull integrity down to about 50%, glitching weapons, and malfunctioning engines.
My players are going to freak out when an armada of these bad boys come pouring out of the Drift a couple of levels from now!