The broken or damaged hyperdrive, or warp coils, or whatever Lost in Space specific trope you want. It's a die-hard "technology-can't-save-you" trope of science fiction and science fantasy. But for some reason designers thought having an ancestry that innately eliminates this trope (i.e. scenario possibilities) would be good game design? I'd love to hear an explanation.
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Because it is one trope of many and not every party will have a prismeri in it. Different parties inherently negate different tropes. Also the capacity to negate trouble with drift engines is a fairly niche ability that only comes up in a specific context.
Honestly the same criticism could be leverage against just about every specialization in the game. Part of a GM's job is tailoring the adventure to meet the wants of the players while still executing on their planned vision and if a prismeri inherently removes a big aspect of their planned campaign then they can ask their players not to use the ancestry. This is no different than asking players not to take Create Water and Goodberry in a campaign where wilderness survival in adverse conditions is a key aspect.
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You're assuming the Drift always works; there's an entire book, Drift Crisis, two APs, Drift Crashers, and Drift Hackers, an Adventure, and several scenarios that show that is not always the case.
That the Drift can crash, or is otherwise not always reliable, is one of the greatest GM tools of all time to explain or make almost anything happen.
Also, the prismeri's ability says "Once within the Drift, the starship travels via conventional thrusters, as normal." Since you have to travel in the Drift with conventional thrusters to get to the point, you need to be at to jump to your destination in the material plane, if the ship's conventional thrusters are also out, the best Drift travel will do is allow you to ping-pong back and forth to the drift and back, likely returning to a random location each time, since you can't travle in the Drift to the drift beacon you needed. You would be completely Lost in Space.
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The broken or damaged hyperdrive, or warp coils, or whatever Lost in Space specific trope you want. It's a die-hard "technology-can't-save-you" trope of science fiction and science fantasy. But for some reason designers thought having an ancestry that innately eliminates this trope (i.e. scenario possibilities) would be good game design? I'd love to hear an explanation.
I don't think you're correct in your assumption. Prismeni don't innately eliminate the trope or scenario possibility, they just change the exact conditions. Prismeni can turn a working conventional drive into a working drift engine. If the drive itself is what's broken, then everything can proceed similarly. It's just a lower standard of repair, and the Prismeni gets to feel like an important part of the equation (functioning as the drift component that would be much harder to cobble together).
If you want a true "you're trapped here forever with no hope of leaving ever" situation, then Prismeni shouldn't be allowed... along with planar transport spells, and the various ancestries that can get those.
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The broken or damaged hyperdrive, or warp coils, or whatever Lost in Space specific trope you want. It's a die-hard "technology-can't-save-you" trope of science fiction and science fantasy. But for some reason designers thought having an ancestry that innately eliminates this trope (i.e. scenario possibilities) would be good game design? I'd love to hear an explanation.I don't think you're correct in your assumption. Prismeni don't innately eliminate the trope or scenario possibility, they just change the exact conditions. Prismeni can turn a working conventional drive into a working drift engine. If the drive itself is what's broken, then everything can proceed similarly. It's just a lower standard of repair, and the Prismeni gets to feel like an important part of the equation (functioning as the drift component that would be much harder to cobble together).
If you want a true "you're trapped here forever with no hope of leaving ever" situation, then Prismeni shouldn't be allowed... along with planar transport spells, and the various ancestries that can get those.
Other options could be:
There's a space storm that blocking access to the Drift.Some kind of Drift dwelling creature has been spotted in the area, making Drift travel dangerous.
The enemy cast a spell on your ship that locks it out of the Drift, even with a Prismeni or functioning Drift Drive.
Maybe Triune is having an off day, so she's temporarily shut down the Drift?
Or the DM could just have it be that the Prismeni don't have that ability unless the ship's drive is specially designed to allow a Prismeni to do so.
Spells cannot prevent or enable drift travel. Interplanetary Teleport won’t send you there or send you out, and a dimensional lock doesn’t stop a drive from functioning.
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You're assuming the Drift always works; there's an entire book, Drift Crisis, two APs, Drift Crashers, and Drift Hackers, an Adventure, and several scenarios that show that is not always the case.
That the Drift can crash, or is otherwise not always reliable, is one of the greatest GM tools of all time to explain or make almost anything happen.
Also, the prismeri's ability says "Once within the Drift, the starship travels via conventional thrusters, as normal." Since you have to travel in the Drift with conventional thrusters to get to the point, you need to be at to jump to your destination in the material plane, if the ship's conventional thrusters are also out, the best Drift travel will do is allow you to ping-pong back and forth to the drift and back, likely returning to a random location each time, since you can't travle in the Drift to the drift beacon you needed. You would be completely Lost in Space.
One use I have seen in a party was when they were on an enemy ship escaping into a life pod while the ship was in the drift. They were able to pop the life pod out of the drift but then they wound up having to land the life pod on an unexplored alien world until they could fashion a transmitter to call for help/ a pickup.
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Sometimes, cool things are a little more work for the GM, or not for every game. That's okay.
Prismeni is fun because you can turn turn any space-worthy ship with weeks of life support drift-capable. Taking that fun away for the one percent of games that want to strand players somewhere- the half-percent that want to strand them somewhere without actually wrecking their ship- is just not a great tradeoff.
Now, in PF2, this sort of thing would be handled by Prismeni being uncommon. SF2 doesn't seem interested in putting rarity on any ancestries or heritages so far- if Astrazoan is common, I'm not expecting much at all to be non-common. If something is specifically a bad fit for what the GM has planned, then it'll need to be addressed. GMs can still ban common things or adjust rarities.
Finally... If a player is picking Prismeni, it might be worth finding out if they actually want to play out a Lost in Space trope.
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Because it is one trope of many and not every party will have a prismeri in it. Different parties inherently negate different tropes. Also the capacity to negate trouble with drift engines is a fairly niche ability that only comes up in a specific context.And when it does, it will invalidate the entire adventure/scenario hook. That is just dumb. For no good reason. And is trivially fixed (see below).
Then refer to the other half of my response which you cut off. If a malfunctioning Drift engine is important to whatever scenario you are running, ask the players not to take Prismeri. Again, this is no different from disallowing a caster from taking Create Water and Goodberry in a wilderness survival focused adventure. If you cannot have an adult conversation with your players then that is on you. Personally, I never encountered this trope in my entire career playing SF1e from release to today. It is not as pervasive or important as you seem to think.
It is not 'dumb'. It is not present for 'no good reason'. It is a niche but flavorful ability that follows in the footsteps of the other planar-touched ancestries that make traveling to their planet easier, such as Fetchling.
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There's this saying... I'm pretty sure it involves mountains or maybe it was molehills, not sure. It might have been relevant here and explained why you're getting so much 'pushback'.
It's a niche ability so it gets to be more potent than normal within its niche. That's how these things are balanced. Compared to, say, darkvision or flight I frankly find it too niche to be a primary driving factor for building a character around.
Anyway, I'm done here, you're clearly not interested in the opposing side and I'm not interested in giving you ground.
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As someone that is interested in playing, it is quite disheartening that you are so opposed to even the simplest fixes to the most blatant problems.
Dude what? You don't like an ability, other people don't share your concerns. That's not an attack.
This feels like such an over the top reaction to a minor disagreement over an extremely niche heritage option.
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You're assuming the Drift always works; there's an entire book, Drift Crisis, two APs, Drift Crashers, and Drift Hackers, an Adventure, and several scenarios that show that is not always the case.
That the Drift can crash, or is otherwise not always reliable, is one of the greatest GM tools of all time to explain or make almost anything happen.
Inventing reasons why it doesn't work, is a huge extra headache.
PF2 made Talking Corpse, every Ritual and most of the AP content Uncommon. Pharasma can reject any resurrection attempt, just like the target can.Specifically to avoid forcing unecessary headaches on the average GM.
I think you are overthinking what a drift crash has to be. Out of all the APs, adventures, and scenarios that took place during or around the Drift Crisis, only in Drift Hackers are the PC able to fix it. So you play any of the other adventures knowing the PCs can't fix it and most likely have know idea what's going on.
If having a Prismeri in the party ruins a planed adventure, and a GM wants to use a Drift crash to prevent the Prismeri's ability, if the cause is in the drift, and the drift being down prevents the PCs from getting to the Drift then, there is no way the PCs can be the ones to fix the problem, and could also block them from even know why it's down.
If you don't want to leave the PCs with an unsolvable mystery, just have their com units beeb, and send them a text message saying
"The Drift is down for scheduled maintenance, sorry for the inconvenience, we are working to restore service ASAP"
I see lots of work around suggestions that a GM can use within a game. I feel like I'm only hearing from forever GMs though. How bad must it feel to have a character to play that has a certain ability, only for the GM to be like -- "Know that cool thing you can do, well, you can't cause reasons."
That's a design flaw. And my original question was, why would game designers consider it good game design to have a core class that eliminates a common trope of the genre.
I'd argue that it was NOT good game design. Because to run a common trope, you have to take away something from the player agency that they get at 1st Level character creation.
IMHO, GOOD game design would place this ability as higher mid-range ancestry feat or (if left at a base ancestry ability) to place it on an ancestry with the uncommon tag.
I was simply trying to understand why the design decision to NOT go that route was taken.
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I mean just hard disagree. It's a highly flavorful yet generally not mechanically super powerful (in terms of game numbers) ability because of how specific it is. When it comes into play, it feels very cool, yet because of the nature of how it works, it's not a high powered option that's going to disrupt combat or social encounters dramatically. It's an opportunity to leverage the cool themes of a specific heritage in specific circumstances. This is awesome. We need more stuff like that.
The fact that in some very niche circumstance it can prove disruptive to a story is very much why fixing it should be a table discussion first, rather than a game design issue because the reason it's causing problems is because of the very unique circumstances of the game being described.
It's similar to how spells or abilities that provide easy access to food or certain types of items can trivialize high stakes survival scenarios with scarce resources. The problem is the specific intersection of table goals and mechanics, so a systemic change doesn't make sense.
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In Starfinder, playable species play a bigger part in the game than in PF2e. You will often hear people talking about the cantina feel in Starfinder. To have a cantina feeling, you need more access to more ancestries, especially at the start of the edition, where we only have 19 playable ancestries compared to SF1e's 140. Also, Organized play plays a bigger role in Starfinder, so more ancestries need to be accessible by default.
Not a forever GM by a long shot. In SF1e, I've never been on a PC controled Starship without a drift engine, and I've never been on a ship that lost its drift engine. Any game involving a Lost in Space survival trope involves being crash-landed on a planet. In every Starfinder game where we had a starship, there was nothing stopping us from jumping into the drift and going someplace the GM was not expecting. Just like in every PF2e game, where the players have feet and simply didn't choose to walk in another direction, what kept the game on track was a plot or mission, not giving ancestries with feet the uncommon trait.
Drift travel is the most common method of space travel in Starfinder; anything disrupting, preventing, or replacing that would need the GM to come up with an explanation in a homebrew game, in published adventures and books, we have the Drift Crisis.
I do see a problem with the Prismeri drift ability in the Playtest book, it doesn't have a drift engine rating, so we have no idea how fast a ship drift traveling by a Prismeri would arrive at its destination. Maybe it's fixed in the Player Core, maybe the rules changed in SF2e, and don't use drift engine ratings anymore. Too soon to tell.
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I think that the answer to your question is that not everyone considers this bad game design. It's a cool ability, it's almost never disruptive, and it has plenty of ways to still deal with it in the tenth-of-a-percent of cases where the GM is running Lost in Space with a player picking Prismeni.
If I had a Prismeni character and my GM were running a stranded story, I'd expect them to swap "drift failure" for "engine failure" and to pretend that my character is saving months of repairs (or even making it possible) by shortcutting the hardest part of the repairs. If I weren't playing a Prismeni, repairs would still take however long the GM wanted.
Paizo is making some changes to bring some more common tropes back, like poison gas not just being invalidated by level 1 armor, so it's something they're conscious of.
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I see lots of work around suggestions that a GM can use within a game. I feel like I'm only hearing from forever GMs though. How bad must it feel to have a character to play that has a certain ability, only for the GM to be like -- "Know that cool thing you can do, well, you can't cause reasons."
That's a design flaw. And my original question was, why would game designers consider it good game design to have a core class that eliminates a common trope of the genre.
I'd argue that it was NOT good game design. Because to run a common trope, you have to take away something from the player agency that they get at 1st Level character creation.
IMHO, GOOD game design would place this ability as higher mid-range ancestry feat or (if left at a base ancestry ability) to place it on an ancestry with the uncommon tag.
I was simply trying to understand why the design decision to NOT go that route was taken.
I'm with QuidEst on this one. The simplest fix is to replace "drift drive not working" with "engine not working".
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I fear the forever GMs are the ones most opposed to common sense fixes and PF2 design in general. Because if we don't put asteroids in the Starpath of new GMs, that means you don't need their experience to be a good GM.
Seriously? You have an entire thread of people giving you common sense fixes for a rules-as-written issue, and you're accusing them of gatekeeping because they didn't like your specific homebrew?
Like, I was in agreement that adventure-negating abilities like create water and talking corpse are bad design--specifically because banning or writing around those options is unneccesary extra work--but you're such an unpleasant person that I feel dirty giving you an inch.
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I think new GM isn't going to have this problem. Why? Because I think a new GM crashed the ship, or shot it down, or had a catastrophic engine failure, or marooned the PCs. I don't think a new GM is saying, "Your ship is capable of space flight, but unable to enter the drift" and then getting hit with the "gotcha" of being able to upgrade space flight to FTL.
I think what will actually happen is that players will be playing Prismeni so that the party can operate out of a glorified space-worthy pizza delivery van given FTL capabilities as a fun bit. It's a fun bit, and I'm glad it's available from level one at minimal cost, because it's most fun when the party is broke.
I'm of the opinion that the fun stuff Prismeni's current form enables is more important than the risk of incompatibilty with one very specific version of one plot. If Prismeni could make a magical FTL bubble for the party at level 1 that replaced a ship entirely, then I would be agreeing with the premise of the thread! But I think that the difference between "engine upgrade" and "magic FTL bubble" is what solves the potential problem in advance.
And hey; I could be wrong. I don't think I am, obviously, but people generally don't. If the Starfinder team does hear a lot of stories about Prismeni ruining Lost in Space plots, or new GMs feeling like its ability is too much of a "gotcha", I do expect that they'll look into what can be done. But I think that preemptively quashing a cool and unique heritage's signature ability because it might cause those problems isn't a good idea. At the very least, there are a decent number of people here who think it's less of a roadblock than the original poster does.
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1. "Let themoddersGMs fix it." is not a common sense fix. It is the Bethesda/WotC motto.
Too late! Book's published. Getting your hands dirty is the only available solution (unless you wanna just sit around and beg Paizo for errata, but like, what are you gonna do in the meantime?).
2. I literally have no homebrew in this this thread. So I have no idea what the last sentence even means?
You literally posted a proposed fix about the prismeni ability not affecting fuel stores or broken components. What is that if not homebrew?
Like, it's okay to be mad about a broken feature making it all the way to publication. I agree that the heritage perk is problematic. But it's hypocritical to bash other people for trying to help you fix it while proposing a fix yourself. Unless the only way you'd actually be satisfied is if Paizo canonized your homebrew, in which case... come on, dude. No company is going to just yoink stuff off the forums and publish it. Ethically and legally, that's a nightmare.
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"Let themoddersGMs fix it." is not a common sense fix.
"Change something cool and unintrusive because it requires a workaround for this one person doing one extremely specific thing" is not common sense either though.
It's not that unreasonable to expect that if I want to run some very specific and slightly offbeat scenario as a GM that I might have to make some adjustments to do so.
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I see lots of work around suggestions that a GM can use within a game. I feel like I'm only hearing from forever GMs though. How bad must it feel to have a character to play that has a certain ability, only for the GM to be like -- "Know that cool thing you can do, well, you can't cause reasons."I fear the forever GMs are the ones most opposed to common sense fixes and PF2 design in general. Because if we don't put asteroids in the Starpath of new GMs, that means you don't need their experience to be a good GM.
I've finished GMing 1 scenario. My second scenario is still running and is about halfway through. I'm planning on GMing my 3rd scenario in September.
So I don't feel I'm gate-keeping, or that anything I say is too difficult for a new GM to figure out, since I'm a new GM. I also play PF2e, so I'm not opposed PF2 design in general, but I feel "some" PF2e players who haven't taken the time to learn more about SF1e lore are missing out on why there isn't a problem in the first place, because the Drift fixes everything, it's kind of like the myst in Ravonloft but even more flexable as a tool for the GM.
The Drift even fixes real-life GM issues. If a player misses a game session and returns the next week, you can use the Drift to explain that.
If this isn't about homebrew game solutions for making a Lost in Space campaign, because somehow Prismeni ruin that. Then I also don't see the issue because the best example of a lost in space adventure in SF1e was the Drift Crashers AP, Spoiler, the Drift Crash caused it.
SF2e is compatible with PF2e, but it's not the same as PF2e In Starfinder, we have the Drift, the Gap, and the Cantina. Those 3 things have a big impact on what is common or not between SF2e and PF2e.
