Pathfinder Second Edition

I was initially a bit disappointed to hear of the second edition. But after some though I realized that Pathfinder 1 has some issues and maybe a new version could fix them up. After all In some ways Starfinder has made improvements over Pathfinder so it would just be a matter of finding the sweat spot between the two.

If you had asked me a  month ago what I didn't like about Pathfinder my list would look something like this:

1. Christmas Tree Effect: Most classes need magic items to be effective. This is especially notable in that usually these items are usually the same for everybody. Cloak of resistance, Belt of physical stats, Headband of mental stats, ring of protection, amulet of natural armor and apparently a 6th item I'm forgetting.

2. After level 10 you are pretty much guaranteed success or failure. Pathfinder rewards specialization so you are either so good at a task you don't fail or the DC is so high you'd never bother to attempt it.

There are a few more but these are the big ones.

Starfinder does a pretty good job tackling my first issue. Stat booster items are rare and strictly limited. Most magic or tech items give you an ability you didn't have before and might let you do something cool like fly temporarily, or get a breath weapon. Power level of these items seems appropriate. Stat items are not needed because of the healthy increases every 5 levels.

Pathfinder 2E takes this limiting to a whole new level by introducing resonance. Each magical item usage costs resonance points on a per use or daily basis. I'm not really sure what problem this is trying to solve. CLW wands allow parties without a healer to function in 1E. Starfinder takes care of this issue with the Stamina/Rest system. 2E just nerfs healing altogether. Unless you have a cleric that wants to only use healing spells get used to having a short adventuring day.  It seems like really poor game design to me and huge step backwards from everything they've done before. Not everyone should need a healbot in their party. It sucks when that healbot is you.

After seeing 2E's solution to point 2, I'm not so sure if it's a problem worth solving. In 2E optimizing really doesn't seem possible with the Beta rules. Your rates of success are always relatively fixed. There's really no sense of progression. You hit 50% of the time at level 1 and 50% of the time at level 20. The flip side of this is that even things you've never invested in at all you still have a 30% success rate.

For me part of the fun of 1E was coming up with a character concept and then digging through the myriad of splat books trying to find the right combination of options and bonuses to make it work. In 2E you can't do this. The classes are all very rigid and any sort of bonus is very rare and often limited to obscure situations.

A lot of the class options seem to fall into this area. You get a +1 bonus when performing this rarely used skill on the third full moon of the year.I think over all the power level of 2E is much lower than 1E. Most class options felt under powered, rarely useful, or just bland and boring.

And why is everything a Feat?

Goblins as a player race? Really? Goblins, that eat dogs and children. Goblins that think written words are evil. How do they get a +2 to charisma? They are stupid little anarchist devils.

It's not all bad. I like the new action system. Bards, rogues and fighters all seem pretty good. The cleric seems like the strongest overall (probably to entice people to actually want to play a healer). The ranger options and weak and limited. Why anyone would play one is beyond me. So far they are this edition's Rogue. Paladin is pretty bad too. Alchemist is unplayable until they fix resonance. I haven't really looked at the druid. Barbarian seems ok but many of its options fall into the useless/corner case/boring categories. And Superstition, wtf were they thinking there? Being unable to use magic in exchange for a tiny bonus? The same applied in 1E but only when raging and the bonuses were good enough to make it worth the risk. This is just a terrible waste of page space.

Sadly that's what a lot of the options seem to be to me. A waste of page space. I seriously wonder if you took a level 10 character with no class feats (/ugh, shiver) and compared them to level 10 character with class feats and see the difference in performance. I think it would be very small.

Starfinder has straightjacket classes as well but at least the options are varied, useful and interesting. When you look at all of the available options and don't like any of them, the game has a serious problem.

For Paizo's sake I hope they turn things around. They've done good things in the past so I have some faith that they'll turn things around. But from looking at the the design choices so far it looks like they are trying to build a game I have no interest in playing. Which isn't so bad. I still have lots of unused character ideas for 1E and as more things get added to Starfinder hopefully I'll find that system as enjoyable as some people in my gaming group already do.

Starfinder: Creature Creation

For the last couple of days, I have been playing around with the creature creation rules in the appendices of the Alien Archive book. I decided to have a go at recreating a babau demon for Starfinder. The first step is to select an array. You may choose a combatant, expert or spellcaster array. Since the babau is described as an assassin demon, I chose the expert array since it would require a fair number of skills. The babau is a CR 6 monster in Pathfinder, so that is what I used to acquire EAC, KAC, HP, save modifiers, skill modifiers, ability modifiers and number of special abilities from the array. This results in somewhat lower ability modifiers than the Pathfinder babau and an oddly high Will save, but otherwise reasonable results. We have the option to switch save modifiers to better match the creature concept, so I switch Fort and Will.

Next steps are creature type and subtype grafts, in this case, outsider and demon. The former provides darkvision and some save and attack bonuses, while the latter provides certain immunities, energy resistances and the ability to summon allies. Skipping over class and template grafts, we get to the assignment of special abilities and promptly crash into a brick wall. The Pathfinder babau has a number of abilities not covered under its grafts, including spell resistance, damage reduction, spell-like abilities, natural weapons, multiattack, feats and its unique protective slime ability. However, a CR 6 monster only gets two special abilities according to the array. I believe there is some sort of error here, since there are plenty of monsters in the Alien Archive with far more special abilities than are indicated in the arrays. So, I decide to drop the multiattack, since the babau prefers to use melee weapons anyway. I also drop the feats and spell-like abilities (except summon which is granted by the demon graft). I keep the SR, DR and protective slime ability from the Pathfinder stat block.

Demon, Babau  CR 6
XP 2,400
CE Medium outsider (demon)
Init +1; Senses darkvision 60ft.; Perception +13

Defense  HP 80
EAC 18; KAC 19
Fort +11, Ref +5, Will +5
DR 10/cold iron or good; Immunities electricity, poison;
Resistances fire 10, cold 10, acid 10; SR 17

Offense
Speed 30 ft.
Melee spear +15 (1d6+11 P) or claw +15 (1d4+11 S)
Spell-Like Abilities [CL 6th]
1/day - summon allies (1 babau 35%)

Statistics
Str +5; Dex +1; Con +3; Int +0; Wis +0; Cha +2
Skills Stealth +18, Acrobatics +18, Athletics +18,
Sense Motive +13
Languages Abyssal, Celestial, Draconic, telepathy (100 ft.)
Gear cold iron tactical spear with durable fusion

Ecology
Environment any
Organization solitary, pair or gang (3-6)

Special Abilities
Protective Slime (Su) A layer of protective slime protects a babau's skin. Any creature that strikes a babau with a natural attack or unarmed strike takes 1d8 points of acid damage from this slime if it fails a DC 18 Reflex save.

Overall, it seems to be a reasonable build. The protective slime ability loses some of its effectiveness because the hardness of advanced materials used in Starfinder is too high to be damaged by the acid. Also, the loss of many of the spell-like abilities did nerf the creature a bit. I might be inclined to give some of those back. One weird observation I did make, the choice of how to assign the ability modifiers seems to have very little effect. The save and skill modifiers are set independent of the ability modifiers that apply to them. Only the damage bonus to melee attacks and initiative modifier change depending on ability modifier assignment. It certainly speeds things up, but is somewhat counterintuitive and makes the assignment of ability scores rather pointless.

-Rognar-

Starfinder: Earth and the Cthulhu Mythos

As we prepare to start our first Starfinder campaign in a few weeks, I have been thinking more about the Starfinder setting. There are a lot of pretty cool things in there and I will talk about a few of my favourites in later posts. Right now though, I am going to discuss the planet Earth and its place in the Starfinder universe. We know that Earth exists in the Pathfinder universe. There are at least two APs I am aware of in which characters either travel to Earth directly or encounter evidence that ties to Earth. The version of Earth described in these examples is not necessarily our own, but it is certainly a reasonable facsimile with historical figures, places and events in common with our world.

This relationship becomes more interesting when you consider that the Cthulhu Mythos is very real thing in the Pathfinder/Starfinder universe. This implies that the authors of the Mythos; H.P. Lovecraft mainly, but also August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsay Campbell and others, exist in the universe and that, rather than being fiction writers, they are actually seers and oracles. Their writings are not merely pulp stories, but are, in actuality, prophecies. So consider for a moment, the number of Great Old Ones who slumber in the dark recesses of our world. Cthulhu sleeps in the city of R’lyeh, somewhere in the depths of the South Pacific. Tsathoggua languishes deep under the American plains in the lightless cavern of N’kai. Ithaqua stalks the Arctic wastes and Gla’aki watches from a murky lake in the Severn valley of Gloucestershire. Still others, Atlach-Nacha, Zoth-Ommog, Y’golonac, Einhort, Cthylla and Ghatanothoa may be found hidden away in forgotten tombs underground or deep below the waves. Most of the Great Old Ones on Earth came from elsewhere and many are imprisoned by the Elder Gods, awaiting a time when “the stars are right” to escape their incarceration.


Now, consider that the period of “present-day” Golarion corresponds to the time when WWI is being fought on Pathfinder Earth. I won’t spoil where this information comes from, but suffice to say, a little research into Pathfinder APs will reveal it easily enough. This would also be the time that Lovecraft began his writing career. At this point, we come to “the Gap”, the millennia-long period of lost memory that even the gods won’t discuss. All we know is that some time during that period, Golarion disappeared, to be replaced by Absalom station. We do not know when this period began in the time reckoning of old Golarion, but it is intriguing to consider that a connection between the Gap and some cataclysmic event leading to the escape of so many Great Old Ones, as foreseen by the great oracle of Providence. It should be noted that Nyarlathotep is now a core deity in the Starfinder universe. What role did the Crawling Chaos play in the events obscured by the Gap to earn such a prominent place in the new order?

-Rognar-

BLS in Calgary

Last Saturday night was a big night for metal in Calgary, with Sabaton returning to The Palace and Black Label Society playing at the University of Calgary. I already had a ticket for BLS before I was aware Sabaton would be in town, but I saw Joakim and the boys from Falun last year, so I was happy with my choice. BLS had Eyehategod and freakin' Corrosion of Conformity opening for them. I would've paid to see CoC as a headliner. Sadly, I missed pretty much all of Eyehategod's set waiting in line to get through security. That's what you have to put up with when you take in a show at the U. Nonetheless, the rest of the show was amazing.

Fronted by the immortal Pepper Keenan, CoC played a solid set that leaned heavily on their classic albums from the 90s. I especially enjoyed Vote with a Bullet, Albatross and Who's Got the Fire. Now I'm really hoping for that on-again, off-again Down reunion.

Then it was time for Black Label Society, with frontman and guitar god, Zakk Wylde.

Zakk Wylde is an absolute madman, pounding his chest and his guitar in equal measure. BLS played for over two hours with many songs bleeding into one another such that at times you weren't sure what they were playing. The set combined songs from their new album Grimmest Hits with an excellent selection of older stuff, especially from the albums 1919 Eternal, The Blessed Hellride and Mafia. It was at times poignant, such as the performance of In this River in tribute to the late Dimebag Darrell. Other times, it was sheer madness, especially when Zakk went on a ten minute guitar solo playing Fire It Up while walking through the crowd with a train of roadies following behind him carrying his audio cable aloft. The virtuosity of this man cannot be overstated. He is arguably the greatest heavy metal guitarist in the world today. Great show and one more thing off my bucket list!

-Rognar-