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11:19, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Starfinder, ahoy!

Posted by Carakav
Carakav
member, 608 posts
Sure-footed paragon
of forthright dude.
Fri 18 Aug 2017
at 02:43
  • msg #1

Starfinder, ahoy!

So I picked up the Starfinder core rulebook... it's interesting stuff! Obviously going to take some getting used to, and I'm not entirely sure how much of the base setting that I find interesting, beyond the stuff that deals directly with Golarion and its legacy. I think I've read articles and the book about the various new core races several times, and aside from "Andriods" and "Humans" I still can't recall any of their names.

There's the four-arm people. The bugs. Lizard people. Ratfolk. The people that are two races in one... I think that's it? Oh, and the antennae people.

A few thoughts on my first skim-through:

- Cool art, bro!
- Okay, mostly still Pathfinder so far...
- Four-arm people seem fun. Big stompy lizards too. Rats have cheek pouches as a racial feature XD
- I like the idea of themes, but I wish they were fleshed-out more. Really bare-bones. Should have been more like sorcerer bloodlines.
- Classes, okay. All bases covered. What on earth is a 'solarian'?
- Laser pistols start at 1d4 damage. What a joke. At level 20 people are dealing 11d6. Section on power armor only has a handfull of entries. Ugh.
- Item crafting is bare-bones.
- There's a gender-changing elixir! And it's cheap! Make sure to read the fine print before imbibing (condoms are your friend, people).
- Vehicles! Yay!
- Combat is mostly the same. No differentiated 5' step... though you can still 5' step as a regular move action.
- Starship combat = yikes! I'll save this for later.
- Spells are spells. Most are lifted straight out of Pathfinder and re-flavored.
- Setting has some cool ideas, but it's also not well fleshed-out in the core book. I really only care about Golarion, which is apparently a big secret in this setting, because lazy writers couldn't be bothered with playing-out the planets history in such a way that they might back themselves into a story-canon corner that might make releasing new random Pathfinder adventure paths somewhat complicated.
- Section on Pathfinder conversion will get a lot of use, especially when it comes to monsters. Aside from a level 20 goblin, there are no new critters listed in the book. Pathfinder is the only source, at the moment.

So basically, this will all consume a serious amount of my brain power over the next week or two. I'll need to absorb it, and maybe play it a few times, before I could really give it a proper review.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:05, Fri 18 Aug 2017.
kbdevil1a
member, 61 posts
Fri 18 Aug 2017
at 03:29
  • msg #2

Starfinder, ahoy!

I'm downloading it now (though that's proving more difficult than anticipated), and I can't wait to play it tbh. I love sci-fi rpgs, and I'm hopeful. I plan on RTJing for every Starfinder game I see on here.
swordchucks
member, 1423 posts
Fri 18 Aug 2017
at 13:23
  • msg #3

Re: Starfinder, ahoy!

I'm already running one game of Starfinder (apologizes to those that didn't get in - I really did get a lot more interest than I can support), so I'm all-in with it.  I like what I've seen, though there are big chunks of the book I haven't looked at yet.



Carakav:
- I like the idea of themes, but I wish they were fleshed-out more. Really bare-bones. Should have been more like sorcerer bloodlines.

They're meant to replace Pathfinder's traits and take some cues from 5e's backgrounds.  Thus, they are thin, but that's mostly on purpose.  They certainly have more meat than the 5e version and they have a bigger impact than the PF traits, so I don't know that they need a lot more.

They mostly serve as a layer of flavor for a character and a chance to get a class skill you might not normally have access to with some other bonuses thrown in along the way at higher levels.

Carakav:
- Classes, okay. All bases covered. What on earth is a 'solarian'?

Solarians are meant to be completely different.  They're based on one of the extra-solar race's traditions that they brought with them (the four armed guys, I think).  They don't have a direct Pathfinder analogue.  They're also kind of hard to wrap your head around (and I haven't quite figured out how they work).

Carakav:
- Lazer pistols start at 1d4 damage. What a joke. At level 20 people are dealing 11d6. Section on power armor only has a handfull of entries. Ugh.

There were space limitations, so there are lots of areas that'll get expanded in future books (this is Paizo, after all).  I'd love to see more gear, personally, but I suspect people will be clamoring for more on starships first.

Laser pistols are in the small arms category which pretty much every class gets, and they're kind of crappy.  On the plus side, they do fire damage, which is pretty good.  In the same category, you also have projectile pistols that do 1d6, which is slightly better but requires bullets.  If you want to do decent damage, you need to get longarms or better (and there are lots of ways to do that, though feats are the most universal).

Carakav:
- Item crafting is bare-bones.

That was an intentional change.  Crafting uses skills you're already going to want, so the cost of being good at crafting is low.  There are small bonuses to the quality of the gear, but the biggest thing that you get out of it is availability.  If you find you really need a flamethrower, being able to craft one at cost on-site is a heck of a lot better than the week or two of travel time it might take you to get one from off world.

Carakav:
- Starship combat = yikes! I'll save this for later.

You and me both!  They say it's meant to be fairly simple and should engage the whole party.  I haven't read the rules in depth on that yet, though.  I do know that they've release the first SFS set of quests and that includes a pretty in-depth set of handouts for space combat.  That might be a good place to start?

Carakav:
- Spells are spells. Most are lifted straight out of Pathfinder and re-flavored.

There's also a good bit of rebalance in it, too.  One of the biggest changes is that they're taking a concept the used in Occult Adventures and kind of synthesizing it with a 5e concept to give you spells that you can cast at a variety of levels.  For instance, if you know Flight, you can cast it as a first level spell for one effect or a sixth level spell for a different effect.  It's a lot cleaner than the Occult Adventures version (since all the spells are grouped together in one spell) and a lot more robust than the 5e version (which usually just changed one variable of the spell when you changed the level you cast it at).  I haven't figured out quite how yet, but there are apparently ways to rarely cast spells that used to be 9th level spells in Pathfinder.

quote:
- Section on Pathfinder conversion will get a lot of use, especially when it comes to monsters. Aside from a level 20 goblin, there are no new critters listed in the book. Pathfinder is the only source, at the moment.

Alien Archive will have extensive rules for making monsters, which are apparently much more in line with the ones from Unchained than the ones from Pathfinder core.  The goal is to have monsters be more consistent and easier to use than Pathfinder default.
 If you need monsters right now there are a few statblocks in the two free products they've put out (though First Contact may have some inconsistency with current rules).
Isida KepTukari
member, 164 posts
Elegant! Arrogant! Smart!
Sat 19 Aug 2017
at 11:07
  • msg #4

Starfinder, ahoy!

I'm still working my way through the book, but I found a lot of things so far to grab my attention.  I found some interesting things in character creation - point buy is rather different, and stat advancement every five levels going to four different stats every time, the bonus being added being bigger or smaller depending on if the score were initially high or low.

I'm liking the new races; they cover a lot of ground, theme-wise, for everyone.  The classes are even more modular than Pathfinders, which will at least make it much easier to add things to classes in further supplements.  I like the Stamina/Hit Point combo too - it gives you two levels of danger in a fight.  Either being knocked out, or the vital seriousness of an actual wound.

Swordchucks - Thanks for pointing out the trait/background analogue to themes.  I was comparing them to the Cypher system's descriptors, though the themes gets their bonuses spread out, rather than up-front.

quote:
There's also a good bit of rebalance in it, too.  One of the biggest changes is that they're taking a concept the used in Occult Adventures and kind of synthesizing it with a 5e concept to give you spells that you can cast at a variety of levels.  For instance, if you know Flight, you can cast it as a first level spell for one effect or a sixth level spell for a different effect.  It's a lot cleaner than the Occult Adventures version (since all the spells are grouped together in one spell) and a lot more robust than the 5e version (which usually just changed one variable of the spell when you changed the level you cast it at).  I haven't figured out quite how yet, but there are apparently ways to rarely cast spells that used to be 9th level spells in Pathfinder.


That's interesting!  There's something similar that precedes this: Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved.  Spells were much more flexible.  You could take, for example, a first-level spell that made rocks fall from the sky, and cast it normally in a first-level slot.  Or as a diminished version in a 0th level slot that did less damage in a smaller area.  Or as a heightened version in a 2nd level slot that did more damage, etc.  That helped a lot when you might be out of one spell slot but in need of some version of that spell.  I look forward to getting into that!

Re: Ship Combat - I really hope this is as easy as they say.  I haven't worked much with large vehicle sub-systems in any gaming system, so we'll see how easy they are to understand to a (relative) newbie in that area!
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