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That makes absolutely no sense. At all. There is no discernible play difference between a DM baby poppping into existance at 2 with a capstone because their player capstoned and then dm'd vs one that cannot because they dm'd and then capstoned.
Now, if you apply the capstone and THEN start giving them GM credit, I don't see anything wrong with that.
I'm presuming that the devs are concerned with temporal causality. You can't go back in time and help to start the career of someone who is, at least in-universe, already an established adventurer with numerous chronicles under their belt at the time your main reaches Tier 4.
I'm not discounting what GMs do (I myself GM), but GMs already get a ton of benefits. They get to pick and choose what they want off of chronicle sheets, and their characters can't die from adventures their players GM.
The intent of the capstones, as far as I can tell, is to incentivize playing a brand new, 1st level character when your older character nears the end of their career. If there was no incentive to play a 1st level character, GMs might well skip the low levels entirely, which might seem a bit ivory tower-ish to newer players.
I'd be fine if it were different. I'm just saying that I think I understand the intent.
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I don’t know if this is helpful, but I have (personal use) PDFs that have all the Starship Roles - updated to the correct DCa and with the higher level actions added. I also have PDFs of all the Society starships transferred to Starship sheets and with weapon ranges included.
They aren’t quite at Paizo standards - wrong fonts - but if it helps I can send them to you and they can be passed on to the layout department to be brought up to snuff. (Realizing that layout is likely the bottleneck anyway.)
Venture-Agent, Netherlands
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Something I'd like clarification on as well, and I don't know if it's in the handbook as I couldn't find it...but maybe I'm blind.
If you champion Faction A.
You play enough scenarios to get 5 passive rep in Faction B.
Do you then have to spend 2 fame to champion Faction B to use the benefits?
Or
Can you start using Faction B's benefits already without spending any fame?
Main thing for this example is for the future regarding stuff like Jadnura faction boon for replays but was curious nonetheless.
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The intent of the capstones, as far as I can tell, is to incentivize playing a brand new, 1st level character when your older character nears the end of their career. If there was no incentive to play a 1st level character, GMs might well skip the low levels entirely, which might seem a bit ivory tower-ish to newer players.
I'm not sure that's it or that it makes sense. With the exception of the starship capstone, several of them would make sense to apply to the character that earned them: you can't suddenly become a ghibrani or gain any benefit from giving yourself a boon you already have. Sure, anyone could benefit from more fame, but at that level it would be a rather hum-drum boon.
But even in those cases, why could you only be able to recruit level 1 Ghibrani, why does only a level 1 being have access to a new ship, why does a level 7+ only shepherd a level 1 being and not a 2 or 3 or 4 into the society? Can no one exist with experience or skills before becoming a Starfinder?
No, trying to create some sort of setting realism can't be the reason,
The reason has to be to prevent some sort of game abuse that, I certainly cannot see. That's what's confusing us: what is the purpose of this rule, because the stated purpose given in the original thread about it (applying a capstone to a level 1 and moving it to a new level 1 before reaching level 2) doesn't have anything to do with GM credit.
..,something that's been brought up before by multiple other people in the original thread.
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Something I'd like clarification on as well, and I don't know if it's in the handbook as I couldn't find it...but maybe I'm blind.
If you champion Faction A.
You play enough scenarios to get 5 passive rep in Faction B.
Do you then have to spend 2 fame to champion Faction B to use the benefits?
Or
Can you start using Faction B's benefits already without spending any fame?
Main thing for this example is for the future regarding stuff like Jadnura faction boon for replays but was curious nonetheless.
All a Champion boon let's you do is accrue reputation. Ther's no requirement to have a Champion boon to purchase other boons written anywhere. One you have the requisite Tier, you meet the prerequisite to purchase boons.
As a PC earns Reputation associated with a faction, she unlocks additional benefits and access to more boons. A PC’s overall standing is represented by her Reputation Tier. These tiers are numbered 0 through 4, with a Reputation Tier of 0 representing no advancement within a faction, while a Reputation Tier of 4 is the height of prestige within a faction. A Reputation Tier of 0 is not a valid Reputation Tier to collect the rewards from boons based on Reputation Tier. To advance in Reputation Tiers, a character must collect the requisite amount of Reputation as detailed on Table 2–1.
No qualification on how you earned that reputation.
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I've stated this a number of times, but since it was mentioned earlier, I would like to toss my hat in, yet again, for including Ranges in all ranged attack types for all stat-blocks (ships and NPCs). Having to manually look these up or hope my memory is correct every single time I set up a table is a giant waste of time in the aggregate. I know this is a 'Quality of Life' type deal, and is bigger than just an SFS guide. But if I could go back in time and force the developers to make one change to the game, this would be it.
Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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I've stated this a number of times, but since it was mentioned earlier, I would like to toss my hat in, yet again, for including Ranges in all ranged attack types for all stat-blocks (ships and NPCs). Having to manually look these up or hope my memory is correct every single time I set up a table is a giant waste of time in the aggregate. I know this is a 'Quality of Life' type deal, and is bigger than just an SFS guide. But if I could go back in time and force the developers to make one change to the game, this would be it.
I was going to make a bigger post about this but I absolutely agree, I spend to much time looking up weapon statblocks and adding the information to sceanrios or APs.
this really is not like PFS where you likely just have to remember bow and crossbow range, there are plenty of weapons, and quite often weapon range also increases with item level.
Of course, it's not just weapon range, but also magazine size (which is quite relevant for automatic weapons), it would be a huge quality of life improvement for me.
Oh, and if you the scenarios gives swoop hammers or another reach weapons to security robots, just please just add that reach as well. I am somewhat experienced when it comes to SFS, but since I don't regularly use some weapons I usually have to check.
When it comes to some weapons, names are somewhat similar so I usually end up looking up weapon abilities.
If at all possible just list the weapon abilities in the stat blocks, or if that is too cumbersome, just add a list of all the weapons used to the appendix.
This really would be a giant quality of life improvement and would make it easier for new GMs to run SFS.
Venture-Captain, Minnesota
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I've stated this a number of times, but since it was mentioned earlier, I would like to toss my hat in, yet again, for including Ranges in all ranged attack types for all stat-blocks (ships and NPCs). Having to manually look these up or hope my memory is correct every single time I set up a table is a giant waste of time in the aggregate. I know this is a 'Quality of Life' type deal, and is bigger than just an SFS guide. But if I could go back in time and force the developers to make one change to the game, this would be it.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
I have most of the ship weapons memorized now -- but my players don't, and most of my other GMs don't. Please make it easier for new GMs to do ship combat!
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Yeah, I manually add ranges to all weapons when prepping stat blocks for my games.
(Side note: I also shift the Languages line up to the first block of stats and include Sense Motive after Perception on the Senses line, making that block the all-around "at first glance" section.)
Contributor
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This is something that hasn't come up too often, but just enough that I wanted to mention it in case it's worthy of consideration. I've now seen a few (2 that I can recall as a GM and now 1 as a player) where a party of 5 players whose APL puts them barely into the higher subtier have suffered significantly.
All SFS scenarios have a balanced 4-player adjustment system, but parties of 5 are sometimes at a severe disadvantage (namely in scenarios where PCs get a certain number of "actions" during a gala, investigation, party, sleuthing, etc.). I know that the smaller tier-ranges in SFS help prevent the old PFS problem of GMs having to look up whether a party not clearly "high" or "low" might be playing up with the 4-player-adjustment vs. down with no adjustment...but I wanted to bring it up just in case anyone else felt it would be worth looking at.
As always, thank you Thurston and OP team, for all that you do to make our games fun and accessible!
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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This is something that hasn't come up too often, but just enough that I wanted to mention it in case it's worthy of consideration. I've now seen a few (2 that I can recall as a GM and now 1 as a player) where a party of 5 players whose APL puts them barely into the higher subtier have suffered significantly.
All SFS scenarios have a balanced 4-player adjustment system, but parties of 5 are sometimes at a severe disadvantage (namely in scenarios where PCs get a certain number of "actions" during a gala, investigation, party, sleuthing, etc.). I know that the smaller tier-ranges in SFS help prevent the old PFS problem of GMs having to look up whether a party not clearly "high" or "low" might be playing up with the 4-player-adjustment vs. down with no adjustment...but I wanted to bring it up just in case anyone else felt it would be worth looking at.
As always, thank you Thurston and OP team, for all that you do to make our games fun and accessible!
This may be more something for scenario writing guidelines than for the Guide, but I do agree that it can be an issue.
Situations such as "you have 4 round to all 6 of you talk to someone" (24 checks) while the 4P adjustment is "you get 6 rounds for all 4 of you" (24 checks) mean that a 5P party is making only 20 checks.
In such situations, also introducing 5P scaling for that scene seems appropriate.
A special but frequent case is Starship Combat. Since each player can fulfill only one role at a time, small parties have a very different experience. Often the 4P adjustment is unsatisfactory, and 5P parties are screwed in comparison to 6P parties regardless. On the other hand, some crew roles get used rather little because of this drive to focus people where they're most obviously needed. Which can cause trouble for writers if they want an element of a set piece fight to depend on there being a captain or science officer. Finally, the skill sets of pilot/gunner, engineer/science officer and captain/anything tend to overlap. Which leads me to an idea for a fix:
For parties of less than 6 players, a character may act in two roles, provided no other character acts in the second role.
For example: a 4P crew has the engineer also function as science officer (a lot of characters pick up computers and engineering together), and the pilot is also the captain (he's one of those operatives that's got most skills so he can support anyone).
Starfinder Society Developer
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I can see the concerns about the scaling for these, and it might just make more sense to include the number of checks based on the party number rather than even include a "scaling the encounter" sidebar. It's something I'll keep in mind for future scenarios where this happens.
As for the "scenario writing guidelines" that's something I'm working on internally. The problem, is that between development, guide, convention season crunch, sanctioning, additional resources, and all the other stuff that comes up as part of the job, it's tough to find the time to sit down and actually update the freelancer-facing documentation. It's a high mark on my priority list, as I've certainly learned _A LOT_ since I've taken on the reins of developing Starfinder Society. Really, I'm still learning things every time I work on a new scenario!
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I loved the 1-31 practice of having variable DCs based on the size and level of the party, as well as building scaling success into the checks.
Having a check that succeeds on an "Average" success (which could be DC anywhere from 19 to 22 based on the party's specifics, but have a superior effect if they hit the "Hard" number (from 24 to 27).
That. Do more of that.
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Starfinder Society Developer
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I loved the 1-31 practice of having variable DCs based on the size and level of the party, as well as building scaling success into the checks.
Having a check that succeeds on an "Average" success (which could be DC anywhere from 19 to 22 based on the party's specifics, but have a superior effect if they hit the "Hard" number (from 24 to 27).
That. Do more of that.
Do people agree with this sentinment? I've had a lot of feedback in PMs/messages/conventions that points me to believe that GMs prefer all their DCs listed inline in a scenario.
So, I'm curious as to what the prevailing majority would like to see... ok, maybe not here. Might be a good opportunity for another thread if someone cares to create it!
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Do people agree with this sentinment?
I like this style a lot. It cleans the text up significantly, makes it very easy to run checks, and lets the GM focus more on the game. It would also make it a lot easier for 5 (and 7!) player adjustments - especially in cases where it really matters like the party trying to accumulate a certain number of successes.
I'd really like to see the party size adjustment sidebars go away completely.
Even when they're on the same page as the event or encounter they apply to (and they often are not, sometimes even 2-3 pages away with a full-page map in-between) GMs have a tendency to miss them. Being out of continuity with the rest of the encounter stats makes them something the GM has to explicitly remember to look for every event or encounter, even when we do remember to look for them its extra GM work that slows down the game. In the worst cases, a VC/RVC needs to get involved to retcon a PC death (or even TPK) because the GM didn't make the adjustments.
I've seen and really like the style whereas the adjustments are inline; eg instead of "Space Goblins (6)" with a separate sidebar, it could be "Space Goblins (1 per PC)", "Space Goblin Bully (1 for 4-5 PCs, 2 for 6-7 PCs)", or "Space Goblin Witch (1 for 6+ PCs only)".
When enemies have a condition or have lower HP to accommodate smaller groups that could also be in-line in the stat blocks.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Some way of retraining besides the mnemonic enhancer (which only lets you go back one level)
Yeah, very much this. You can't change choices like soldier style after a couple of levels, when you find out the choice you made really isn't doing what you thought it would or if something cooler comes out in a new book. You also can't get rid of a dip level that you regret. Or if you're an operative and took a skill focus that's mostly redundant because your Edge is bigger now, you can't get it back either.
My preference: retraining mostly like in PFS, but a bit stricter on prerequisites. In PFS, you can retrain a feat you took at level 1 into one that you only recently (say at BAB+11) qualify for. There are some shenanigans you can do that basically end up with you having a lot more high-powered feats/talents than you're supposed to.
So what I'd want is (and this would take some effort to phrase in a fool-proof way): you can retrain, but the result afterwards is a build that you could have also reached organically without retraining, by just taking things as you leveled up.
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(and this would take some effort to phrase in a fool-proof way): you can retrain, but the result afterwards is a build that you could have also reached organically without retraining, by just taking things as you leveled up.
I think a "statement of intent" at the end of any section describing the mechanics of retraining would go a long way in this regard.
Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Bellevue
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Had a very productive meeting last night and a few things are on the docket:
-We're going to look at moving the ships into their own Community Use Document
....
As always, I'm here and listening! :)
-Thursty
Great idea, I'll make a couple of suggestions:
- We know what the Pegasus and Drake look like, but there's one new ship we NEED an illustration of .. the Gorgon. As a GM I think starship combat works so much better when people can visualize their ship. And we should be seeing more of these ships enter service as players level up.- While I'm at it, some PCs have done the adventure path and have alternative ships available. Please consider putting the Sunrise Maiden in there too. The Society has a few of those floating around.
- Third recommendation, The society has a few rare starships from charity boons floating around. A picture of the Manticore (and stats) for the Manticore would be cool. I understand if that's a tough call.
- Final recommendation, The Master of Stars. PCs aren't likely to need these, but it'd be cool to see the Society flagship - illustration and stats.
I guess, what this all summarizes to, is can we get this great idea updated to a "Starships of the Society" supplement?
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands
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- Third recommendation, The society has a few rare starships from charity boons floating around. A picture of the Manticore (and stats) for the Manticore would be cool. I understand if that's a tough call.
I like the idea of a picture as someone lucky enough to get the Manticore but I think the stats ruins the point as they are rare for a reason right?
A picture would be epic though, I second that recommendation!
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Starfinder Society Developer
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Pictures are something I always fight for, but they tend to eat into our budget. Generally, we don't have art budget set aside for things like Guide Updates or anything boon-related, so it's a bit tough.
That being said, I'm interested in getting some images of these out there! It just might take a bit of time.
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Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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I loved the 1-31 practice of having variable DCs based on the size and level of the party, as well as building scaling success into the checks.
Having a check that succeeds on an "Average" success (which could be DC anywhere from 19 to 22 based on the party's specifics, but have a superior effect if they hit the "Hard" number (from 24 to 27).
That. Do more of that.
Do people agree with this sentinment? I've had a lot of feedback in PMs/messages/conventions that points me to believe that GMs prefer all their DCs listed inline in a scenario.
So, I'm curious as to what the prevailing majority would like to see... ok, maybe not here. Might be a good opportunity for another thread if someone cares to create it!
I very much agree with Dracomicron, the way it was presented in 1-31 is my prefered option thus far - but I am used to running interactive and they tend to use that format as well.
The way I deal with scenarios is usually to colour code and mark all the various DCs, the approach used in 1-31 saves me quite a lot of work.
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The way I deal with scenarios is usually to colour code and mark all the various DCs, the approach used in 1-31 saves me quite a lot of work.
If you're using a physical copy that makes sense. As someone that runs off of my brand new they finally made them sized for my fingers tablet it takes almost a minute to scroll back through the scenario for that chart.
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Venture-Captain, Minnesota
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I underline all the skill check DCs in Good Reader -- I have yet to GM from a physical copy outside Free RPG day scenarios -- and I write down the Easy, Medium, Hard DCs on a card that I keep in front of me. Another good place to do it is on the initiative tracker.
Hmm
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Probably something to pass along to the art department but...
Top down images of the starships. The 3/4 views look really cool, but making either a physical or on line token out of them leads to a lot of "which end is the front and which end is the back..." of that thing. Even with color coded hexes.
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The rules and restrictions on what you can't and can't play presented in a way that is pretty convoluted and I can't understand why.
Race: When you start you can only play the races listed in chapter 3 or 13 of the core rulebook. (This may change as you get "boons" from playing in the future)
Theme: You may play any published theme except psychic investigator (or whatever the one you can't play is)
etc.
The guide definitely needs to be more new person friendly. see if this helps
But the guide comes out once a year. What would happen if between now and next year they published another theme that wouldn't work in organized play? It would be legal and they'd have to publish a new guide every time something came out.
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Are you volunteering your web services?
Because Paizo has 99 employees, each with a workload they can barely manage now, and like only one of them is web guru (when they're not moderating the forums).
BNW's guide is the sort of player-support supplement that Paizo doesn't have the person hours to create.
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This is the opposite of what I'm talking about. Someone who reads this, misses the caveats 2 or 3 pages after this and runs off to create a character will not be happy when they come back with a skittermander they can't play.
I don't think it's possible to write anything near a page where someone can't take a sentence out of context and misinterpret it.
but I do think this is something that is worth highlighting.
ahhhh no. I hate bright yellow.
I don't think the standard of writing you're looking for is possible.
If you write something that says "all themes are legal except paranormal investigator" you have to go and update it every time a new illegal theme comes out. Something already exists for that, it's the additional resources document. Sometimes it's easier to write that as inclusive and sometimes it's easier to write it as exclusive.
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Starfinder Society Developer
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Hey folks, just popping in again.
As you've all discussed, I completely recognize that the current iteration of the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide is somewhat bloated, based on its roots from the Pathfinder Society Guide that it was based on. Note, the original Starfinder guide was based on Pathfinder because of time constraints as we launched our first season. I'm well aware that the guide could probably do with a more thorough re-work in order to make it more accessible to new players.
That being said, it's not happening in this update. This update is going to be a bit more housekeeping and general updates, with some quality of life improvements. I'm hoping once some of the PF2 fervor passes, we can perhaps look at getting a more substantive update, especially if it can build off any major changes to the new Pathfinder guide!
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Hey folks, just popping in again.
As you've all discussed, I completely recognize that the current iteration of the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide is somewhat bloated, based on its roots from the Pathfinder Society Guide that it was based on. Note, the original Starfinder guide was based on Pathfinder because of time constraints as we launched our first season. I'm well aware that the guide could probably do with a more thorough re-work in order to make it more accessible to new players.
That being said, it's not happening in this update. This update is going to be a bit more housekeeping and general updates, with some quality of life improvements. I'm hoping once some of the PF2 fervor passes, we can perhaps look at getting a more substantive update, especially if it can build off any major changes to the new Pathfinder guide!
That sounds like a safer policy, with a major rework there's always the risk of some paragraph getting shuffled around to different chapters so many times that it falls through the cracks, and we as readers are left scratching our heads over "did they quietly repeal that rule?"
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I suspect we'll do a "major overhaul" at some point, but it won't be something that's worked on in the middle of Convention Season™
:)
*quietly slinks back to developing*
Something I've wondered for a while.
Realistically, how long is Convention Season™?
It seems like it runs from February (ramp-up/prep) through the actual big cons (May thru August) and into Octoberish (post-con/decompress).
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Starfinder Society Developer
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Realistically, how long is Convention Season™?
Starfinder is a bit different for convention season than Pathfinder.
Basically, we need to get our May scenarios done 2 weeks prior to PaizoCon (for GMs to review). We also need to get our June scenarios done 2 weeks before Origins (which is located mid-month so they're due almost a full month earlier). This compresses our schedule down, meaning that we have to get everything done in the March/April/Early May time period.
Oh, also there's a guide update in there. Luckily, we learned from last year and aren't also releasing our August Starfinder releases early at Gen Con this year (oh boy, was THAT fun)
So it's a hectic three months (more like two months of actual development work from my side) in which we need to get 8 scenarios and an interactive special done. I say two months, because these need to be done early enough to go through edit/layout, so while I'm working on these scenarios, I'm also spending time answering editorial questions that come up, copyfitting questions, back/forth with freelancers working on these projects, reviewing final drafts, making art orders, and any other random things that come up with scenarios.
Then, once that's all done, convention season starts and I tend to lose about 3 weeks of productive work time, because I'm off attending at least three different conventions. Which, funnily enough, equates to about all the time we'd "save" by front-loading so much content.
As for the obvious question of "Well, why send you to conventions then?"
For myself, I know there's a noticeable upswing of productivity when I go to a convention and interact with fans and see people actively playing our products. So going to conventions is actually really important to keep myself jazzed to go through the whole process again for the next year! :D
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I loved the 1-31 practice of having variable DCs based on the size and level of the party, as well as building scaling success into the checks.
Having a check that succeeds on an "Average" success (which could be DC anywhere from 19 to 22 based on the party's specifics, but have a superior effect if they hit the "Hard" number (from 24 to 27).
That. Do more of that.
Do people agree with this sentinment? I've had a lot of feedback in PMs/messages/conventions that points me to believe that GMs prefer all their DCs listed inline in a scenario.
So, I'm curious as to what the prevailing majority would like to see... ok, maybe not here. Might be a good opportunity for another thread if someone cares to create it!
I have gotten used to the charts that came in with the specials. I find them easy to use, since worst case I can just print out the chart.
However, I do think that they have the risk that standardized DCs will allow players to meta game their rolls a little.
I also like the scaling, it was helpful in this scenario. Plus, I always like make a DC of x for a certain level of success, make x+5 (or whatever) for better success.
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Another request for the possible starship compendium is the PCU value of the ship weapons for the sake of responding to scans. It's not horrible, but the current ship stat blocks have the weapons as 1-liners anyway.
It's almost certainly outside the scope of this update, but personally I think the better fix for this is to have the scan results show the highest damage weapon rather than PCU. I have a feeling that's the shorthand that ends up happening at most tables, anyway. I'm a prepper GM, with macros that show scan results for me, and I still often end up in that exact scenario anyway, and usually just default to 'highest damage' when I can't figure it out from my notes. I'm 100% against anything that forces me to crack open a book during play. I'm 10,000,000,000,000% behind the idea of including ranges on the stat-blocks.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Changing the scan result would be a CRB update. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done in the guide. I’m just pointing out that including the the stat block avoids going against or creating errata for the CRB.
Well, yeah. But they seem to want statblocks to be the same across SFS and APs, so now it's two teams who have to get on the same page, and maybe also the people who write example starships for hardcovers like Pact Worlds, ...
That said, I very very much want ranges and easier scanning would be sweet too.