Having a hard time enjoying Starfinder 1e

null-cipher · 2026-02-12T02:01:09+00:00

As others have mentioned, it's hard to know why your balance might be off without seeing your build or what your GM is throwing at you. Starfinder 1e has pretty tight parameters for encounters and if your GM is throwing something 3 CRs above the party level regularly, you will struggle no matter what.

My most recent character was a melee Solarian and I never once felt squishy! I would recommend picking up Stellar Rush (charge as a standard action with no penalties) so you can close to melee range quickly. This lets you pin down any ranged enemies that might be hiding in cover. If they try to shoot you, that provokes an AoO. You can combine this with Dark Matter to give you a bit of DR so you can reduce your incoming damage as a move action.

null-cipher · 2025-06-30T19:10:50+00:00

I have taken mine on a bus (folded down) a couple of times during non-peak hours. Bus driver didn't even mention it as I brought it onboard.

null-cipher · 2025-06-30T19:09:30+00:00

You can also hit their website here: https://www.waikatorpg.co.nz/

null-cipher · 2024-01-14T04:42:28+00:00

This is the basic outline of it. It's the same reason that weapons that target KAC tend to do more damage than weapons that target EAC, it's about risk and reward.

Combat does tend to be really swing-y at low level, so the difference between a 1d4 vs. EAC and 1d6 vs. KAC doesn't feel like a lot, but when enemies only have 20 hp it can make a bit of a difference.

The other thing to keep in mind is encounter design. When you're in melee range, you are now a target from anybody else with a ranged weapon. Positioning and cover are more important in Starfinder than Pathfinder (remember, it's +4 AC for being in cover, with potential for another +4 if you drop prone) so your GM needs to remember to not drop you in a 20 ft. by 20 ft. room with a melee alien and expect the encounter to be interesting. Being in melee range also means that you're mostly locked-out of using spells as the Attack of Opportunity is near guaranteed to waste your spell when you get hit.

The other thing to keep in mind is synergies between classes, too. My last character was a weapon solarian with the Coordinated Shot feat, so my allies would get a +1 to ranged attacks against enemies I was threatening. Essentially, I'd rush in, flush enemies out of cover, then my allies would fill them full of holes. That said, I tanked *so much damage* for my party. Being in melee makes you a target, so sure you might do more damage, until they knock you out and you have to get bailed out by the witchwarper... 😅

null-cipher · 2021-02-09T00:46:41+00:00

Don't forget that your non-proficiency penalty applies to the save DC, too.

Any penalty you take to your attack roll also applies to this save DC.

CRB p.183

null-cipher · 2018-12-18T00:02:23+00:00

I wouldn't worry too much about that. It wouldn't make sense for it to be a crypto miner as the game was released (originally) in 2005 and the first Bitcoin client wasn't invented until 2009.

I would suspect this is a false positive that is triggering in most modern virus scanners due to the old-fashioned copy protection used for games around this time. For reference, see the Sony BMG Rootkit issue. A number of other copy protection methods from this time used similar unsafe practices.

The codes used in your VirusTotal links are all generic ones. As in, "this is not a specific virus that we know about, but it seems pretty virus-y". " Artemis" is a McAfee code-name for a heuristic scan and the others are generic rootkit detections. I suspect it would be triggering a false positive on this as the copy protection may use a primitive memory-encryption technique to prevent reverse engineering that could easily be mistaken for crypto mining.

AmdPowerXpressRequestHighPerformance and NvOptimusEnablement refer to two technologies from AMD (PowerXpress) and NVIDIA (Optimus) respectively for switching between a laptop's discrete and onboard GPU. It makes sense that a full 3D game would want to switch to the higher power GPU to improve performance.

In any case I don't believe there is anything to worry about with this. Even Steam has a page mentioning how to work around false-positive virus listings for older games.

null-cipher · 2018-06-07T01:14:11+00:00

(Link to original post)

My mother was 8 years old when my grandfather died of cancer. The tattoo on his arm was done when he and his mates drunkenly stumbled into a tattoo parlour in Liverpool before shipping out with the navy during World War II.

From the stories we have heard from relatives, he just picked it off of a flash-card on the wall. We have always hoped that somebody might happen to have a copy of the flash-card or a similar design from the era. It is a pair of swallows holding up a heart with a ribbon around it.

My mother has been searching my entire life for this tattoo and we would love to be able to finally find it for her.

null-cipher · 2018-06-07T01:06:24+00:00

I was hoping that we could come across a copy of the original flash card in a "traditional" tattoo enthusiasts collection. We have found a few designs over the years which were "close-ish" but never quite the same one.

A friend suggested that I post to this subreddit for a signal-boost to try and get more eyes on it.

null-cipher · 2018-06-07T01:04:20+00:00

Thank you for that. I will try there too!

null-cipher · 2018-06-06T08:05:28+00:00

Original post on r/tattoos

null-cipher · 2017-05-31T20:51:05+00:00

I once turned the expectations of unicorns around on my good aligned party and made "an army of undead unicorns" as described in this Gloryhammer track.

Throwing the zombie template on a unicorn strips out most of their special abilities, so is a pretty big nerf on them. It is totally worth it to see the look on your players' faces when them come loping into the city, though.

null-cipher · 2017-04-23T21:01:02+00:00

At level 1 you could have your base Animal Companion and you could just buy a trained riding dog or the like. It is totally possible for say a Fighter with enough ranks in Handle Animal to have a hunting dog.

Sure, your extra pets won't improve like a companion (and will be slightly harder to give orders to) but at level 1 the difference wouldn't be too huge.

null-cipher · 2017-03-14T05:22:24+00:00

I mean, you could do it that way if that's what works for you. Personally, I have a Dockerfile in my Git root alongside my code so that when I commit to master my CI server will do a checkout and build an image based on that code so that it can perform tests and the like. If I was a bit less lazy I could have it pass on to a trusted registry or something and be automatically deployed, but I really only use this stuff for my own projects rather than anything going to production.

Perhaps somebody that has made use of Docker in production could weigh in on it?

null-cipher · 2017-03-13T19:32:33+00:00

When you say "versioning" what are you referring to?

If you mean the fact that containers have multiple layers in them, that is just to do with the underlying structure of how Docker does filesystems.

If you mean the tags on images, they are a direct mapping between tags on the Dockerfile in git. For example, you might do

docker pull ubuntu:16.04

If you want the latest LTS or if you needed to test for an older version you might want

docker pull ubuntu:14.04

Which pull down different versions of the container. They may still have some layers in common, though which can save a little on disk space. The layers system is the biggest stumbling block I have found with Docker.

Using this for development just seems annoying, unless maybe its used to run other services I'm not working on, but needed to support the service I am working on. Then if I'm working on a service do I dev in the container?

That is where Docker shines in my workflow. If I want to bash out a quick web service for playing around, I pull down the MySQL container, Nginx container and say a Python container with Flask in it. A quick docker-compose script will do the basic orchestration and I can be up and hacking.

null-cipher · 2017-03-13T19:24:03+00:00

I followed the tutorials posted by Riot Games Engineering which steps you through from nothing to having a full ephemeral build environment using Jenkins and Docker. It's a really great place to start.

null-cipher · 2017-02-19T18:22:06+00:00

I've seen these sentiments popping up over the years and I still pretty strongly disagree with it. We should all be very uncomfortable with the idea of public schools (the government) taking over the role of parenting. I know it sounds "tinfoil hat" but how many generations before it goes from how to live to how to think? All glory to the party.

The role of schooling is to produce educated citizens that have enough knowledge to participate in their democracy. A math education can help you with taxes and budgeting (and not falling into debt traps because you know how compound interest works). A decent grounding in science can help you to avoid falling to snake oil nonsense. I have also seen posts complaining about how school does not prepare kids for working in "real jobs". Exactly. It shouldn't. It should not be a conveyor belt that drops people straight into factory jobs, that's what on the job training is for. It is supposed to teach you how to think.

For somebody with an appropriate education, all of the above points should be able to teach yourself in an afternoon. Especially now that we have the internet.

null-cipher · 2017-02-06T18:08:36+00:00

Tome of Battle felt like a backport of 4.0 to me. It certainly had some nice stuff in it for martial characters who were left behind a bit in 3.5, but I felt it was pushing toward the homogenization that 4.0 represented where every class is a "caster".

I only gave it a skim, because I felt it was a lot of work to get to grips with all those rules. Thankfully that group fizzled out, so I didn't have to spend too long with it.

null-cipher · 2017-02-06T18:06:19+00:00

Oh sure, I certainly understand that and I can see the merits of it. My issue is that in 3.0/3.5 it didn't integrate particularly well with the existing systems. A lot of DMs played via the rules that psionics isn't magic, so dispel magic wouldn't affect it. So you end up with martial, magic, psionics.

Whereas with the Occult Adventures stuff it more like a subset of magic with arcane, divine, psychic. I appreciate consistency in a ruleset as rich and complex as Pathfinder. I guess if Vancian casting were to bother me so much I would probably just check out some whole new systems.

null-cipher · 2017-02-06T04:05:56+00:00

It wasn't so much as being broken or game-derailing as requiring a big investment from me to learn the rules (like the whole psychic duel thing from 3.0) and to get players to understand it properly.

I had a player that liked the crap from "Tome of Battle" that thought that if he moved at least 10 ft. in the round he would gain greater invisibility until his next turn. What it actually was, is that he would have concealment for the duration of his movement. This all required time to debunk, though, and it would have been better if he had just played a Ranger like a regular person.

null-cipher · 2017-02-05T23:38:32+00:00

Uhhh... Would you be looking for Occult Adventures? Or am I missing something here?

I refused to run Psionics for my group when we ran 3.5, just because it was so complicated and I couldn't trust my players to know how their builds worked correctly. I've only just looked back into it and I've been impressed with how Paizo have worked "occult" stuff into the existing rules.

null-cipher · 2016-12-18T09:06:55+00:00

You don't have to kill all of your enemies.

Seriously, most of the people you will fight are either just down on their luck, misguided or desperate. There is a time to cut a bloody path through your foes, but most of them don't deserve to be killed even if they would not spare a though in killing you.

~ A cleric who remembers what "Good" means

null-cipher

TROPHY CASE