Shop For All Roll For Combat Products at Battlezoo.com!

Dead Suns 058: O Co-Captain! My Co-Captain!

With the secret cultist base fully explored and no leads it’s time to go back to Absalom Station and regroup. Of course, things don’t go quite as planned and drama ensues – who will Captain the Sunrise Maiden?

Also for this week’s GM/PC Tip, Stephen explores how to handle drinking and gaming!

And don’t forget to become a supporter of the podcast our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/rollforcombat where you can help us while unlocking fun exclusive rewards for yourself!

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would also love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes!

Talking Combat 057: Same Ship, Different Day

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 057: Better Homes and Starships.

There’s really not much more to say about the cultist base. I suppose the one remaining thing is personal – as long as the skill checks to repair gear are makeable, Tuttle will come out of this with a weapon AND armor upgrade, which is pretty nice. On one hand, it’s only going from a +5/+6 to a +7/+7, but I do get back the second upgrade slot that I lost when switching to the D-suit. Also, at least in headcanon, I can tell myself that since it’s ysoki technology, it fits better, so Tuttle will now be humming ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” whenever he enters rooms from now on.

Overall I don’t mind the occasional low-combat clue hunt. While the combat engine is the driving force, it’s actually nice to step away from that once in a while. Having said that, when you do that, it’s probably a good idea for the GM to drop a few hints that that’s the nature of this particular section of the story, so the PCs don’t spend hours searching for the secret door to the mythical “rest of the adventure” that’s not there. As a player, it can be pretty difficult to leave the mindset of the “big fight at the end” behind, so sometimes it’s hard to accept that there’s no fight and there’s a tendency to think you missed something.

I suppose the real question is: what do you do in one of these low-combat clue hunts if the players aren’t finding the clues? Then you find yourself in a situation where you’re not fighting anything, you’re not gaining information… you really are just spinning your wheels. I suppose that’s where maybe the GM has to step in and deus ex machina it a little bit and have the players stumble upon a datapad or something that either gives them the information or points them back to the place they overlooked.

At any rate, on to the meat of the episode: Adventures In Shipbuilding.

As Steve points out right at the end, this was actually the product of two different game sessions. There was a really rough first pass which went roughly up to the point where Chris, John and I had three different numbers in our builder app, and that’s actually where we stopped for the night. Then we kind of cleaned up that first session offline and did the rest (including weapons, which we didn’t even touch in the first session) in the second session.

I found that at a high level, the best way to do this process is to build the ship you want, see how badly you overspent, and then try to dial things back to get the ship you can afford. In doing so, it feels like the shields or the computer tend to be the places that offer the most wiggle room because there are a lot of options that offer a wide spread of build point and power usage choices. With other systems, the choices tended to be more narrow.

Some general rules of thumb:

  • When it comes to thrusters, you pretty much want to be as fast as possible. The cost difference isn’t that much, and the combat benefits are vital. If you’re not moving 10 or 12 spaces, you might as well be wearing the interstellar equivalent of a KICK ME sign on your hull.
  • When it comes to Drift engine, yes you want to have one, but the use case for the higher levels is marginal – you get where you’re going faster, which might lead to less “wandering monster” encounters in the Drift. I suppose it depends a little on your campaign style – if you’re playing more of an open-ended “explore the galaxy” game, it might be worth investing in. For adventure paths, which mostly tend to hop around the Pact Worlds, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of upside.
  • Also worth mentioning that the power logic on Drift engines is inverted – it doesn’t cost power against your power budget, but you have to have a minimum power core for the drift engine you select. (I assume that implies that all the “combat” systems are turned off when you’re in Drift travel or something.)
  • Armor is a mixed bag. It doesn’t cost anything in terms of power, but its build cost is accelerated by the plus and the frame of the ship, so it can get expensive (in terms of build points) fast. Also, once you get above +5, it starts messing with your target lock – i.e. less maneuverable, easier for missiles to hit.
  • Expansion bays, crew quarters, etc. are mostly throwaway costs. With a few exceptions (the Hangar Bay being the biggest), they don’t draw a lot of power or take a lot of build points. Leave enough resources to have… something… but don’t sweat it.

Lastly, I should mention I made a mistake on weapons, which we might want to correct next time we’re in spacedock. I mistakenly shot down John’s idea of the 8d4 railgun because I got tripped up on my terminology. A Heavy weapon CAN still be mounted on a Medium frame (which is what the Sunrise Maiden is). It’s Capital Weapons that require a Huge (or larger) frame. Though there would also be a cost to upgrade the weapon MOUNT from light to heavy as well. So… yeah, we could’ve upgraded our weapons more than we did, and my misreading of the rules is primarily to blame.

On the other hand, Tuttle got his science lab, so there’s that! Though I thought it was kind of funny that I was the one arguing against it – +1 bonus on science checks vs. the ability to craft stuff? – while Mo and Hirogi were arguing in favor.

There are three other observations I had about shipbuilding, though neither directly impacts this campaign.

First, I echo Steve’s sentiment that it’s initially counter-intuitive that none of this costs money, that the ship is almost just another member of the party. I can sort of understand why – it would be another potential cash sink in a game that already has a fair number of them; furthermore, you’d be spending a large chunk of party loot on something that doesn’t even get used every adventure. But it’s still sometimes a little odd that your ship just levels up along with you and you can get new gear for free.

Second, it seems like the jump between big (NPC) ships and player ships is almost two different games, and I wonder if that’s going to create issues at the higher levels, and/or in homebrew campaigns. Basically, the short answer is Capital weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than light and heavy weapons, but can only be placed on Huge ships, which have crew complements starting at 20 and going into the hundreds.

My most immediate concern is that I worry that player ships might be badly outgunned at high levels. Right now, a ship with a Capital weapon could literally one-shot the Sunrise Maiden – tear through shields and hit points with one dice roll. And OK, Han Solo shouldn’t be trading shots with an Imperial Star Destroyer either, but I worry you could reach a point in the story where you just don’t have the firepower to get past the obstacle in your way.

Of lesser concern, but still worth noting, is the fact that a party of players can’t man a big ship by themselves. Which, as mentioned, locks groups out of the heaviest weapons, but also messes with the potential of open-ended Star Trek style campaigns where the ship is the home base and fighting other big ships is a more commonplace happening. Now, I realize if a gaming group really wants that sort of game, it can be solved with GM prerogative – you can either hand-wave some AI that reduces the crew complement or “United Federation of Planets” it and assume there’s an NPC crew that’s willing to work for free, because paying 14-16 NPCs would bankrupt most groups. But it’s a limitation worth keeping an eye on.

In saying all of this, I recognize Starfinder isn’t Star Wars: X-Wing. Ship combat is ultimately an add-on, not the core mechanic of the game. But it is true that some people, particularly on the homebrew side, are going to want to make it a more front-and-center piece of their campaign, and some accommodations are going to have to be made.

The third of my observations is that I hope expansions lean further into the more exotic aspects of sci-fi at some point. Right now, other than a few weapon effects, ship combat is pretty conventional; it feels like those old Avalon Hill wargames. And that’s not a bad thing… I played some of those and really liked them as a kid. But if you’ve got this sci-tech/magic hybrid sandbox to play with… bring some of that into the ships. Maybe you can have Mirror Image for your ship, where it creates multiple sensor ghosts. Maybe you can have a starship equivalent of Blink, where you can do a short range teleport once or twice per combat. Nanobots that heal hull damage to the ship? Where’s the Omega-13 device from Galaxy Quest that rewinds time? At some point, I’d like to see my sci-fi ships incorporate some crazy sci-fi shit and not just trade cannon shots like they were ships of the line at Trafalgar.

But those are concerns for other days and other campaigns. Today, we’ve got a slightly more powerful Sunrise Maiden 2.0 (or should it be 6.0 since it “leveled” up with us?) and we’ll resume our hunt for…. Cultists? The Corpse Fleet? I guess we’ll figure that out next week. See you then!

Dead Suns 057: Better Homes and Starships

With the cultist base empty, the RFC crew decide it’s time to move on… and do some shopping! After months of adventuring it’s finally time to upgrade the Sunrise Maiden. Of course, the gang has different ideas as to what should be upgraded. Hirogi and Mo want railguns and missile launchers, Tuttle has his eyes on a new science bay, while Rusty just wants/needs luxurious crew quarters. Decisions, decisions!

Also for this week’s GM/PC Tip, Stephen explores how to run a dungeon which has already been looted before the PCs arrive.

And don’t forget to become a supporter of the podcast our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/rollforcombat where you can help us while unlocking fun exclusive rewards for yourself!

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would also love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes!

Talking Combat 056: Movin’ Right Along

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 056: Rage Against The Machine.

This is one of those weeks where I thought the big-picture discussions on the side were far more interesting than what was going on in the game.

That’s not to say nothing happened. Certainly, Rusty getting his face blown off by a laser was amusing. Though I’m forced to ask who puts that much firepower on their sock drawer? I also wasn’t faking genuine remorse at hitting and critting CHDRR, even though I was under the effects of a confusion spell. We also had another incident of Hirogi bleeding encounters, though it turned out that was Steve adding a little extra oomph to what would have otherwise been a kind of boring fight.

It’s funny Steve mentions that because although the editing of the episode doesn’t linger on it, I’m fairly sure we went into the room with the second veolisk in the early stages of exploring the compound. Granted, we didn’t stay very long and we didn’t search, but I really thought we had passed through that room before. So now that Steve says he added the second veolisk to make it a little more of a workout… that would certainly explain it.

I suppose one might ask if it’s the GM’s place to do that. The short answer is absolutely yes – first and foremost, the GM serves the story and the mutual fun of the people playing. And you can’t have it both ways: we’ve talked before about giving the GM the latitude to make an encounter easier to avoid a likely TPK; if you’re going to accept that, I think you have to be equally accepting if a GM feels like an encounter would be too easy and decides to spice it up a bit.

(Obviously none of the above applies to Society play. In Society play, things are very regimented, and part of the experience is that everyone who played a certain adventure played the same adventure. If the GM starts winging it there, it undermines the experience.)

I do think Steve was right to make this fight tougher. Take out the veolisk and those two sentry robots would’ve been almost a foregone conclusion. But more than the challenge, it felt like the right call story-wise. At the risk of a mild spoiler, we’re about to leave and we KNOW (based on the symmetrical architecture of the base) there’s basically no rooms left to explore. Given that we’d been wandering for almost an hour since the last major story point, two robots would’ve been an almost anti-climactic finish. The goofy, chaotic fight we ended up getting served as a nice way to wrap things up and end on a high note. “Serve the story.”

And that’s another question Steve briefly touched on. When should a GM hand-wave actions that clearly aren’t going to move the story? When should he or she say “you aren’t going to get anything else from this, time to move on”? As Steve mentioned, everything after hacking the main computer was… “filler” isn’t quite fair, but it certainly didn’t add any major developments to the main plot. (Yay, we learned how to chant “Nyara knows”!) So when does a GM pull the plug on something like that and steer things (subtly or overtly) to something more productive? You particularly see this a lot when it comes to roleplaying and interacting with NPCs – some people just want an almost MMO-like transaction where they get the quest from the quest-giver and move on; other people really want to drill in and talk to these NPCs and get their whole life story, even after they’ve got the three pieces of information they actually need.

I think the right answer is to read the table and the players and see how they’re responding, and in particular, to make sure the players are equally invested or equally ready to move on. I think where things get problematic is where one person is either dominating the action or (on the opposite end) feeling like they’re being railroaded. If the party as a whole wants to dig in and search every room because they want to feel like they earned every scrap of treasure they find… OK, that’s the game you deliver to them as the GM. If everyone is cool with “we Greyhawk the room”, then THAT’s the game you deliver. But if most of your players are checking their phones while one guy pokes every floor tile with a 10-foot pole, that’s the scenario where you’ve got a problem.

I do think session boundaries present an opportunity for the GM to steer without steering. You don’t have to come right out and say “this isn’t going to get you anything, move it along”; a little reminder that “oh hey, we have about 40 minutes left” can get the players to clarify their priorities – if they still want to open every jar in the pantry, you’ve at least left them a hint that they’re sailing into the waters of diminishing returns.

The one place one would have to be careful with all of this is the danger of leaving the players under-geared for future encounters. Much as we’d like the story and the grand adventure to be center stage, the dirty little secret is that gear matters – some of this stuff is balanced with the assumption that the party will have certain levels of firepower. If they miss one magic item or a few credits… eh, whatever. If they walk away from an entire wing of a dungeon – especially if they walked away because the GM convinced them to do so – I think you have to throw in a way to make that up, loot-wise. Maybe have their benefactor give them an extra reward. Maybe throw in a side quest before the next major development in the main story, so they can make up some of the difference.

(Holy crap, I just gave a GM tip. WORLDS COLLIDE!)

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the idea of not using skills in a campaign.

First, I’m glad Steve called out the fact that Tuttle would be pretty useless in a zero-skill game… saves me most of the trouble of doing so. And I’m not lobbying for some zero-combat game where our characters strive to bake perfect soufflés and become experts at… pottery or something. I know at its Gygaxian roots, this all started as a wargame, and at the end of the day, combat is still the engine that drives the action.

But once again, I come back to the theme of storytelling. This game evolved beyond its grognard roots, and the reason it did so is that people wanted to use the platform to tell interactive stories rather than just beat the crap out of each other. Sitting around coming up with Tolkien Fight Club scenarios (“Dude… Aragorn, Legolas, and Galadriel… against Smaug”) is superficially interesting; the story of destroying the One Ring is a book parents still read to their kids decades after it was written.

Now, “we beat up the other guy” is a good story, and the details can sometimes be compelling. Skywalker v. Vader. Deckard v. Batty. McClane v. Gruber. And yes, it’s easier to model those sorts of things with game mechanics. But “we beat up the other guy” is certainly not the only story out there, and not always the most interesting. To keep it in sci-fi terms, not all Star Trek episodes were resolved by combat – sometimes an impassioned Picard soliloquy or inverted chronaton particles accomplished what a photon torpedo couldn’t. For an even better example, look at Doctor Who: those stories are pretty much NEVER resolved by fighting. It was always The Doctor talking his way out of trouble (social challenges) or coming up with some technological solution (skill challenges). (Don’t come at me with “Gallifreyan jiu-jitsu” – people did a lot of drugs in the Baker years.)

So I think when you take skills out of a campaign, you’re not just making characters less interesting, you’re making the stories you can tell less interesting. I still love cracking orc skulls as much as the next guy, and Ezrik (my mindless thug of a warpriest; the one with the chainsaw) was one of my favorite characters ever. But I think leaving room for other playstyles is a big part of what makes this shared hobby of ours more than just a pen-and-paper version of Mortal Kombat.

I think the one small exception is introducing new players to the game. I think when you’re running new players through their first couple sessions, I think combat is a more accessible entry point than a bunch of skills challenges. Let ‘em whup a little kobold ass so they can see the possibilities, THEN ease them into skills once they’ve got the bloodlust going.

So I recognize I barely mentioned the actual game action this week, but I thought Steve raised some really interesting issues, and like he himself said, we exhausted the story relevance of the cultist hideout once we found the main computer. Next week we should get off this godforsaken rock and figure out what to do next, so hopefully you’ll be back next week to join us for that. In the meantime, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and join the conversation going on over there.

Starfinder Alien Archive 2 Review – Scions, Tigers, and Bears – Oh My!

If you enjoyed this review make sure to check out our weekly actual play podcast where Jason and the team are playing the Starfinder Dead Sun’s adventure path as well as the occasional Starfinder Society adventure as well.

Normally when someone says “more of the same”, it comes across as a bit of a pejorative. “More of the same” sounds like “boring” or “uninventive”.

But what if the “same” was already really good? What if the “same” was the Alien Archive, which delivered a nice batch of monsters for GMs to play around with, but also sprinkled in playable races for your players, new tech and magic items to stock your treasure hoards, and general world-building lore? Why would you reinvent the wheel if you got it right the first time?

That’s where I feel like we are with Starfinder’s Alien Archive 2. I thought Paizo came up with a really good formula for the first book because I thought they made a nice reference book that gave GMs everything they needed to run their campaigns AND threw in some content for the players too. So they’ve basically done the same thing this time: the “mix” is a little different because there’s maybe a little less world-building to do and slightly fewer playable races (only 16 this time as opposed to 20-some last time), but overall they stuck with what worked.

In terms of nuts and bolts, the table of contents lists 65 entries, though sometimes an entry is a single creature; other times, an entry might be multiple examples of the type, or a more general category of creature (“herd animals”, to pick an example). For those of you who are compulsive re-rollers, 16 of those are identified as playable races. Slightly fewer than last time, but still a healthy chunk of new choices.  In terms of sourcing, most of the material is original, but there are some Pathfinder holdovers that have been converted to the new system, and they also imported a few creatures from adventure paths or Society games (I noticed the akatas and garaggakal from Dead Suns, off the top of my head).

This time, whether it was intentional or not, the book feels like it has a few broad “themes”.

The first theme is animals. There are several “beasts of the forest” type critters, category entries for things like “predators” and “herd animals”, and several of the playables are animal humanoids. The Pahtra and Vlaka have you covered on cat and dog/wolf humanoids, respectively, but the one our Discord channel was raving about (and rightfully so!) was the Uplifted Bear. I mean, you get to be a bear with humanoid intelligence who can wear armor and wield weapons (though, damn right, you also have claws that serve as natural weapons). The supporting text for the Uplifted Bear also gives us this gem:

Uplifted bears are sometimes rumored to have violent temperaments, but their personalities are as varied as those of any sapient species. Some uplifted bears take great pleasure in playing to this stereotype when they meet other people, drawing out the biased assumptions of the ill-informed, and then mocking them.

I’m sorry, but if you can’t muster a smile at the idea of a sentient bear that threatens to eat people before giving them a wink and a big hug, I don’t know what to say to you.

I would also observe that the “Uplifted” concept feels like it could be applied to pretty much any animal. So… (taps microphone for benefit of Paizo people who might be reading) two words for Alien Archive 3: “Science Otters”. The judges would also accept a team of Uplifted red panda commandos.

The other broad theme of Alien Archive 2 is a deeper dive into the world of the undead. It feels like Starfinder wiped the chalkboard clean as far as what we know about the world of the undead, and Alien Archive 2 starts to drill into that a bit more. So you have some classics like the Ghost and the Ghoul, but you also have newcomers like Corpsefolk (think of them as worker-class undead in Eoxian society – not quite zombies, but “real” undead look down on them), Bone Troopers (Corpse Fleet soldiers: they look like the aliens from Mars Attacks after a few months of Crossfit), and the Emotivores (undead that died under circumstances of strong emotion, so they have psychic abilities tied to emotion). For those of us who found the initial treatment of undead in Starfinder to be a bit of a blank slate, it’s nice to see them… (wait for it)… put some flesh on those bones.

A few other random highlights that leap to mind: Lovecraft fans will cheer the arrival of the Colour Out Of Space – a malevolent cloud of shifting color that will do all sorts of bad things to you. It makes an appearance in a Pathfinder adventure path but gets brought into the future here. The velstrac are an extraplanar race who think religious enlightenment can be achieved by inflicting pain on themselves AND others, so they’re a weird combination of brutal and masochistic. And then there’s the CR20 Living Apocalypse. It’s a cloud of evil radioactive energy that’s the byproduct of large-scale destructive forces (power reactor meltdowns, firing of doomsday-level weapons), and it pretty much just destroys everything living in its path. And when it can’t find anything to destroy, it can search for wireless communications to find new targets. Or… send out fake distress signals.

Turning our attention to playables, obviously the uplifted bear is the talk of the town, but there are several interesting choices. People feeling nostalgic for Pathfinder get orcs, hobgoblins, aasimars and tieflings (the latter two listed under the more generic “Planar Scion”). As I mentioned, the Pahtra and Vlaka have dog and cat lovers covered. My two personal favorites are the Ghoran and the Osharu.

The Osharu – they’re slug people. Right down to the ability to secrete slime to create difficult terrain. That’s self-explanatory: who wouldn’t love that? With the Ghorans, I’m drawn to the lore – they’re plant people that started out as Pre-Gap creations of a druid, and they looked more like Swamp Thing. The druid designed them to be “perfect” but that included TASTING perfect, so humans hunted them almost to extinction to eat them. “NATURE’S PERFECT SNACK”, quite literally. The surviving Ghorans went into hiding, survived, and eventually evolved into a more conventional humanoid form with two subraces. They also founded their own planet where they went full Genesis Device (minus the explodey part) and converted a barren rock to a floral paradise. Now THAT’S a backstory.

As with Alien Archive 1, the Alien Archive 2 has a sprinkling of creature-themed “extras” scattered throughout its pages. Weapons and armor, technological devices, ships, feats, etc. About half the creatures come with some form of add-on content – sometimes it’s a tool or weapon used by the creature, sometimes it’s something that can be made from the remains, other times it’s just “scientists tried to figure out how the ability works and came up with this gadget that does a similar thing”. The one thing I appreciated is that AA2 puts these into an index in the back – something AA1 did not do – so you can look up the page an item is on with minimal fuss.

Speaking of “the stuff in the back”, whereas Alien Archive 1 felt like vital reading because it explained the system for creating creatures and gave rules for how to do it, Alien Archive 2 is more standard “back of the book” stuff that mostly just expands that system to account for this new content – as such, it’s probably only essential for the homebrew GM. There is a useful appendix that gives detailed rules for polymorph – in addition to formalizing polymorph as a spell (self or mass) and feat, it answers the questions of “how much of the polymorphed character is still you, how much is the critter you’re turning into” through the mechanism of “forms” – the GM and player work to create a “form” for the combined character. The rest of the appendices are mostly just lists and indexes: creatures by CR, creatures by terrain/environment, index of where the “extras” are, index of the playable races, etc. Not new content, but does make it a LOT easier to navigate the book. In comparison, AA1 only had a single table for creatures by CR.

All in all, I’d consider Alien Archive 2 to be a successful addition to the Starfinder line. If my praise seems a little more subdued, it’s probably just because it’s the first follow-up book – Alien Archive, Pact Worlds, and Armory were the first books of their kind, and Alien Archive 2 is just going back to the buffet for another plate. But if you feel like the Alien Archive model represents a winning formula – and I do – then it’s just a question of how big an appetite for new monsters you have. To that, I say “keep ‘em coming!”

Dead Suns 056: Rage Against The Machine

Confusion abounds this week where the PCs attack their allies as often as the bad guys. Plus, more face melting traps! But the end is in sight as the PCs have run out of cultist base to explore… and yet still no leads.

Also for this week’s GM/PC Tip, Stephen explores the concept of rolling for all skill checks vs. “just giving it to the PCs”.

And don’t forget to become a supporter of the podcast our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/rollforcombat where you can help us while unlocking fun exclusive rewards for yourself!

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would also love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes!

Talking Combat 055: Summer Camp for Sociopaths

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 055: Stop Hitting Yourself.

I CAN’T DRIVE… (episode) FIFTY-FIVE!!!!

Sorry, just wanted to get that out of my system. Do I have to mail a four-cent royalty check to Sammy Hagar now?

So it appears the “Whomping On Cultists” portion of our program has been postponed. It appears that there are no cultists to whomp on.

The big story reveal of the episode was that Tahomen’s last transmission included orders to his cultist playmates to pack up their gear and head for the next location. Unless there’s still a rear guard yet to be met, nobody’s home. We also got a bit of a lore dump, but most of that felt like flavor rather than specific clues as to what to do next. Torture, evil ceremonies, ancient elvish priestess… summer camp for sociopaths!

We also found out there may be a third party with undead connections – the Corpse Fleet badge we found amidst the viscera, the broken necrograft, etc. – but we don’t know their role yet. Are they trying to stop the cultists? Are they trying to steal the ultimate weapon for themselves? An alliance between the two? (Well, you usually don’t chop your allies to bits with a laser grid, so… unlikely.) Is it just a coincidence and the Corpse Fleet stopped by selling the Eoxian equivalent of Girl Scout cookies? (Also unlikely, and not just because the undead don’t really eat cookies.) All TBD, but the plot has certainly thickened.

OK, JUST thought about it… I’m really hoping the juxtaposition of undead + cultists doesn’t mean they’re going to find a way to resurrect Nyara. Psychotic undead elf priestess holding thousands of years of pent-up anger as a Big Bad? In the words of Sam Beckett at the end of every Quantum Leap, “oh boy”.

But… but… Paizo would never… do something that…

(curls in the fetal position and begins weeping)

Sorry, where was I?

In the midst of all of that: critter fight! Specifically, a veolisk, the spacefaring cousin of the basilisk. I’m on record that I’ve been excited to see more exotic space critters and less humanoids, so this was fun. And OK, maybe it’s because Tuttle is a wuss who can’t punch himself very hard and CHDRR is immune, but as status effects go, I really don’t mind confusion that much. 50/50 you just waste the turn, which is no worse than missing with an attack; 25% you take some minor damage, and 25% you get to do what you want anyway. That’s really not that bad as status effects go. Frankly, the akatas on the Drift Rock were worse.

As far as the mistake Steve made interpreting the gaze attack: I’m sure part of my ability to be magnanimous is that the mistake broke in our favor, but I really wasn’t too worried about it. I agree with his general vibe that gaze attacks are usually explicit attacks, not aura/passive effects, so I don’t fault him for missing it. I’m wondering if maybe since the attack was reduced from petrification (for a basilisk) to confusion, they made it a little easier to use. Either way, a timely crit made it a fairly short fight, and we’re back to exploring the compound.

For the record, I was only half-kidding about keeping this place as a hideout/base of operations. It might be kind of useful to have a place to hole up if there’s ever a reason we can’t return to civilized worlds. You know… when Hirogi does something that finally gets a bounty placed on all of us. We’d have to do some renovations though: Tuttle would NOT be a big fan of the lack of privacy involved with interconnected rooms. Or the spartan bathrooms. He’s a space-rat who’s fond of creature comforts.

We’d definitely keep the death lasers, though. I could even see Tuttle working on ways to make them more lethal.

The last major development is kind of a selfish one. We found an armory with some possible weapon upgrades! Hooray! Tuttle has literally been using the same azimuth laser pistol since fairly early in Level 1*, and there’s been a few fights where I literally could not overcome damage resistance without overcharging my weapon. Yes, there’s an engineering roll to fix them, but as long as it’s anything reasonable, Tuttle should be fine.

To be fair, I’ve at least considered a weapon upgrade every time we’ve gone shopping, but the price-to-benefit was always pretty limited. It always seemed like it was “pay half your money, to jump up from a d4 to a d6”. Kind of hard to justify when there were more interesting things to buy, and I suppose I’ve been hoping a weapon upgrade mixed in with the loot would be quicker in coming. And now it finally has. Better late than never, I guess.

(*=Technically Tuttle had a semi-auto pistol for the first session, but he attached that to CHDRR after the opening fight at the spaceport and took a laser pistol for himself. So, basically since Day One.)

That’s it for this week. What does next week look like? Well we’re still not quite done exploring the complex, but if you assume what looks like a symmetrical floor plan (and/or no additional floors), there’s probably not a lot of real estate left to cover. I’m not sure if there’s still more clues to be found or if the computer was the big find and we have to cobble something together from what we have on hand – maybe we can descramble the garbled destination if we go back to Absalom, maybe we look into the undead connection or something (contact Gevalarsk Nor and see if they’re missing any Corpse Fleet dudes?). I guess we’ll find out next week. See you then!

SP06: Interview with Paizo Developer Eleanor Ferron

If you enjoyed this interview make sure to check out our weekly actual play podcast where we’re playing through the Starfinder Dead Sun’s Adventure Path as well as the occasional Starfinder Society adventure!

Welcome to another special edition of the Roll For Combat Podcast where we sit down and talk with Paizo Developer Eleanor Ferron.

We discuss Eleanor’s many influential contributions to the Starfinder universe and her first Adventure Path! We discuss perhaps the most-played Starfinder adventure to date, Starfinder Society Scenario #1-01: The Commencement, and some of the secrets behind writing that scenario and designing the faction leaders. Of course we perhaps her most famous creation to date – Strawberry Machine Cake! Learn how SMC started out as a fun little side-note and then grew into a full-fledged Starfinder phenomenon. Finally, we discuss Eleanor’s latest adventure, the second book in the Against The Aeon Throne Adventure Path, Escape from the Prison Moon. We also discuss cuttlefish… that’s right, cuttlefish. Check it out!

And don’t forget to become a supporter of the podcast our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/rollforcombat where you can help us while unlocking fun exclusive rewards for yourself!

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would also love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes!

Dead Suns 055: Stop Hitting Yourself

If you can’t find any cultists to beat on, hit yourself instead! At least, that’s what happens when you throw mind-controlling dog-lizards into the mix. Plus, treasure! Well, broken treasure… but treasure!

Also for this week’s GM/PC Tip, Stephen is a bit under the weather so just does a quick tip on how to prep your monsters before a gaming session.

And don’t forget to become a supporter of the podcast our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/rollforcombat where you can help us while unlocking fun exclusive rewards for yourself!

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We would also love it if you would leave us a review on iTunes!

Talking Combat 054: It Slices, It Dices, It Makes Julienne PCs!

Jason recaps the events from Roll For Combat, Episode 054: Let’s Dance.

I wanted to start this week’s episode by clarifying something I thought might have been a little confusing – the technical difficulties. Basically, my D20Pro client was applying an invisible -3 to all my saving throws – instead of +6/+8/+2, it was giving me +3/+5/-1, even though it was correct on the actual game server. Now, it’s not that hard to work around – you can either manually adjust your saves (though the GM has to approve changes to your character sheet) or you can just roll raw d20s with the dice roller – but it was a little shocking at first. My roll sucked anyway – crap plus three is still crap – but you want to get these things right.

Also, credit due to D20Pro’s support – they identified and fixed the issue within 24 or 48 hours of us pointing it out to them. I feel like I should be fair – if I’m going to point out a mistake the tool made, I should give them credit for fixing it as well.

So back to game action – we finally found the Batcave! It dawns on me after the fact that we probably should’ve been a bit more methodical in our search from the get-go – in fact, I think the alcove that hid the hatch was like the second or third location we visited, so we actually could’ve ducked a few fights. On the other hand, who am I kidding? We’re completionists by nature AND as a tactical concern, we generally don’t like leaving enemies wandering around in our rear. So in reality, we probably would’ve swept and cleared the map even if we’d found the hatch earlier.

Once we get into the compound, our first challenge is the Moron Gas trap! I don’t know if it was general impatience – it took us 2 or 3 game sessions to actually find that hatch, so I just wanted to find some cultists to beat on – or that I always get excited about skills challenges, but I really need to remember to look for traps more than I do, going all the way back to poor Mo getting blasted by the improvised goblin cannon on the Arceon. This time, at least there’s no damage: I’m just a little stupider than usual for a while.

After getting past the first airlock, we’re confronted with the real meat of the episode: The Trap That Wasn’t. Taking off my Player Hat and putting on my General Fan Of The Story Hat, I had a bit of a guilty feeling, like maybe Steve let us off easy on that in two respects. First, there was dropping the hint about countermeasures so that we would wait out the Moron Gas: seems like he gave Tuttle a bit of a freebie we didn’t deserve. Second: Bob did say he was going to explore the room but then changed his mind.

On the other hand, one can make counter-arguments on both fronts. On the computer front, one could argue that there are visual indicators of intrusion detection that even a stupid person could recognize. I mean, we all know what the login screen for Windows looks like, so what’s the Pact Worlds version of Windows? As far as Bob exploring the room, Steve’s rule has traditionally been things start happening when you move your character, and Bob never actually started moving in the tool. So right or wrong, that was at least consistent with Steve’s policies on non-combat exploration.

I have to admit that when Steve described the trap: yeah, I would’ve liked to see that in action. Not on me, of course. But on somebody. I’m kinda hoping it does the Wile E. Coyote thing where the laser beams chop you into cubes and the cubes are still sentient for a half-second before plopping to the floor.

And as far as Steve’s threat to redeploy the trap at some later date: UM… YOU DO REALIZE YOUR BLOG-WRITER LISTENS TO THE SHOW, RIGHT?

As far as the GM tip this week, I thought about being offended that Steve was infringing on the players’ turf a little with a player tip, but whatever. I sometimes talk about my (far more limited) GMing experiences, so he can talk player stuff every once in a while.

Micro and macro motivations are not anything I ever articulated quite that way, but it’s a decent way to look at it, I suppose. I think the general idea is that you need to develop a general framework for how your character would react to certain situations, and then the general framework informs how you would respond to specific situations that arise during the adventure. Personally, I use people as the building blocks when creating characters – sometimes real people I know, sometimes fictional characters I want to emulate, sometimes more of a general archetype… often a combination of the three – and tweak until I find something that both feels original, and still represents something I’d actually want to play.

Tuttle was a co-worker I used to work with, melded with sort of a generic archetype of an academic always chasing his next research grant. Maybe a little bit of Brent Spiner’s character from Independence Day as well (the part about finding lethal technology cool instead of frightening). As I said in her intro, Nala from the Society game was the lead character in Baby Driver, but with more of an optimistic upbeat personality like Jubilee from the X-Men, and in certain “how would a teenage girl react?” situations, I also borrow from my own daughter when she was that age.

So okay, I make comparisons to other people the focus, but we arrive at a similar place. But let’s look at Tuttle through the lens of Steve’s micro and macro motivations.

Tuttle’s macro motivation is that his career is stalled because he’s the low rat in the pecking order at his job, so he doesn’t get enough grant money to pursue his projects. Maybe there’s also a little ego at work, feeling like he does better work than some of his colleagues but doesn’t get recognized for it. So he decided that moonlighting with the Starfinder Society might be a way to come across some new technology in the wild and fund his research. He’s not really about saving the universe and doing good, except insofar as the universe has to continue to exist so that people will eventually recognize his greatness, bad guys don’t respect patent rights, and he doesn’t want to do anything too disreputable that would get him a stink-eye in the academic community. He’ll do good up to a point, but he’s not a “do-gooder” per se. His idea of “doing good” is more “playing by the rules”. (As reflected in his Lawful Neutral alignment.)

Micro motivations? When it comes time to go shopping or to divvy up magic items, he’s far more fascinated with gadgets than buying the next biggest gun. He gets kind of offended and chippy when other party members try to infringe on “his” territory by doing computer/engineering/science skill checks. Conversely, he hangs at the back of combat because it’s not his thing – beyond his stats being weak, there’s a level to which he sees the rest of the group as his hired muscle; they just aren’t aware of the fact. He was offended at Hirogi offing the sniper not so much because he valued the sniper’s life, but because a) the sniper might have had useful information, and b) he wouldn’t want “accessory to cold-blooded murder” to come out during a grant approval down the road.

In terms of interpersonal relationships, he tends to be frustrated by Hirogi’s impulsive behavior, since he’s a big fan of computing the variables before acting. Unexpectedly, he actually came around to liking Mo, but in the way one might like a favored pet – he’s loyal and reliable, and does what he’s told. In short, Mo’s house-broken. Rusty is a bit of a conundrum. On one hand, Tuttle is happy to let Rusty handle all the “talking to people” duties because he finds small talk annoying; he’ll happily let someone else take that off his plate. On the other hand, he also sees Rusty as a bit of a stuffed shirt: the fact that Rusty runs around acting like he’s in charge makes Tuttle associate him with certain high-and-mighty colleagues at his old job who got better funding despite having worse ideas.

The one place I have to admit I’ve been roleplaying this badly has been with regards to Rusty’s transformation. I, the player, am weirded out by it because I’m so used to seeing undead as evil from Pathfinder, and I’ve been letting that creep into Tuttle’s reactions. But Tuttle should be fascinated by this and should be pestering Rusty to take skin samples and asking invasive questions about bodily functions on an hourly basis. FOR SCIENCE!

That’s about it for this week. So we managed to knock on the door and let ourselves in without getting killed – next week we should be able to start exploring the cultist lair and find some skulls to crack. Maybe we’ll even find a way to go back and set off that trap… right? I guess you’ll have to wait until next week to find out, but in meantime, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and enjoy the ongoing merriment.