I’m going to take a different tack with this blog for a bit.
I play role-playing games – as in, tabletop, dice rolling, role-playing games – and in my hobby I’d done a few reviews for a couple of RPG forums, enough to where a few game publishers actually forwarded me free material to review. Ironically, I got turned off to those sites because of the non-gaming, political discussions, after one of those forums got taken over by the kind of SJWs who think anybody to the right of Che Guevara is a Nazi, and the other site went in the opposite direction, being so disgusted with “social justice” movements that they think Donald Trump is a hero. And much of the reason I got into those political discussions is that the gaming discussions bored me. I already knew what I liked, and the commentary seemed to be mostly fixed opinions on various games, which became too predictable to be worthwhile. I still did reviews, but I noticed that not too many people read them, and in the case of one of those sites, not too many people were even contributing reviews anymore. It was a point of diminishing returns.
Which didn’t stop me from actually playing games with my friends. I have two separate groups playing on two different nights. One of them frequently runs Pathfinder, a Dungeons & Dragons offshoot that became popular after the owners of the actual D&D brand temporarily decided to turn their product into the gaming version of New Coke. Recently, the host of our game wanted to try being Game Master of the new spinoff game, Starfinder, which is Pathfinder in space. Sorta.
In light of both our game experience and my study of the core rulebook, I wanted to do a review of Starfinder, because it actually differs in some respects from the original Pathfinder, and in light of the recent news that after almost 10 years of Paizo Publishing making the Pathfinder RPG, they’ve decided to playtest a second edition of the rules – for which Starfinder helped serve as a model.
Starfinder, like Pathfinder, is set in its own fictional universe, like the D&D settings of Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms. In this case, Pathfinder is set on the Earth-like world of Golarion, which is established to be in a solar system with other planets, most of which have their own humanoid races, akin to early 20th Century science fiction. The premise of Starfinder is that it occurs some point in the far future in the Pathfinder universe, but for some reason, Golarion no longer exists. Or is in another dimension. Or something. No one knows why. In fact, whatever it is that removed planet Golarion also removed everyone’s memory of exactly what happened, an event now known to the interplanetary civilization as “the Gap.” (Supposedly this was done to prevent Pathfinder players from changing the established history of the setting, though given the severe difference in tech levels, no Pathfinder player characters should have lived long enough to see the Gap.)
Likewise, the Starfinder setting still technically has the Tolkien-like races such as Elves and Halflings, but stats for them are in the back of the book. The core rules focus on Humans and the inhabitants of those other worlds in the solar system, such as Androids, the four-armed Kasathas and the telepathic Lashuntas. It also features the Vesk, a warlike reptilian race who tried to conquer the solar system before both sides had to ally against a greater threat. Most of these races (including Androids but not Vesk) had game stats in Pathfinder material that was previously published for sci-fi crossover scenarios. What’s different, and where you have the first change from the prior Pathfinder game, is that each race (including Humans) has their own stat for Hit Points. Hit Points of course are the D&D stat that determines how much damage a character takes before getting taken out. Traditionally, though, players rolled their hit points on “Hit Dice” randomly depending on their character class, with warrior classes getting more hit points (rolled on a 10-sided die, or d10) and scholarly wizards getting less (rolling a d6 or even a d4). In Starfinder, Hit Points are a set number coming from both a character’s class and race, the two values being added together at 1st level and every new experience level. Starfinder also gives characters the “Stamina Points” stat, which is related but not quite the same thing, and the Resolve Points stat, which is pretty important in play (see below).
Character classes are different from the set given in Pathfinder and most D&D games. Pathfinder is infamous for taking the base assumptions of D&D classes – the “martial” fighters and rogues, with clerics and wizards – and exploding them with various options in new sourcebooks such that there are now at least twenty. Starfinder, at least in its corebook, only has seven classes. Some cases are obvious analogs to D&D/Pathfinder style classes. The Soldier, for instance, is the equivalent of the Fighter, only a good deal more versatile. In this regard, there’s another clear difference between Starfinder and the edition of D&D that Pathfinder was based on: Soldiers get twice the skill points of D&D/PF Fighters. (Spellcasters also got screwed on skill points in Pathfinder, whereas in this game most people are assumed to be technically skilled, so each class gets at least 4 skill points per level.) You also have the Envoy, who uses Charisma to outmaneuver enemies and help friends (basically a Bard, or what some games would call a Noble), the Operative (read: a Rogue, or Thief), the Mystic (Cleric) and Technomancer (Wizard or Sorcerer). However there is also a Mechanic class that deals specifically with the technical issues that you would get in a space science fiction game, with options like cyberware and drones. There’s also the Solarian, a melee warrior class which for reasons unexplained is able to “manipulate the forces of the stars themselves.” This gives access to some pretty cool comic-book type powers, but most of them require the solarian to already be in combat over a period of rounds in order to be “attuned” to stellar energy.
Furthermore, there’s a step in character creation that’s actually introduced before the rules for races and classes. It’s called the theme. There are actually more character themes (ten) than there are classes, ranging from Ace Pilot to Themeless (as in, if you don’t want to pick one of the other themes). Each adds +1 to a favored attribute, creates a “theme knowledge” (reducing the difficulty number of checks to recall a favored subject, and adds to a favored skill, like Piloting for the Ace Pilot theme), and adds three other abilities at 6th, 12th and 18th levels. The themes usually link up to a certain class – for instance, the Priest theme adds +1 to Wisdom and aligns perfectly with the Mystic class – but the thing is that each theme could combine with any class. So if you combined Mystic with the Mercenary theme, you could define your character as a military chaplain.
Again, while skills work much as they do in other D&D/D20 System games, the Starfinder skill list includes the things that would be necessary in this setting, namely Computers, Engineering and Piloting, which don’t have analogs in fantasy games. All three of these skills are needed for different crew positions in starship combat, which is another common element in this game that doesn’t exist in Pathfinder. This also means that some skill functions got absorbed into other skills. Survival is still a skill, for instance, but most people use vehicles, so Riding isn’t its own skill in Starfinder. Instead, one uses Survival skill to ride a creature.
In practice the main difference between Starfinder and Pathfinder is the array of equipment available through technology, although most of it will not be available to 1st-level characters due to sheer cost. One feature of this game is that equipment items (including armor and weapons but also computers) have a level, like spells or characters. This is on a scale where a survival knife does 1 to 4 hit points damage, costs 95 credits and is level 1. By contrast, an elite gyrojet rifle does 6 to 72 (6 12-sided dice) in damage, is level 17 and costs 242,500 credits. The range of non-magical weapons available due to technology is greatly increased, including lasers, cryo (cold) weapons and electric stunners, among others, although again the damage at low levels isn’t much. You can also mix magic and technology, which in this setting frequently involves “weapon fusions”, commercially available, advanced enchantments that can be applied to an existing weapon or can, with difficulty, be transferred from one weapon to another. (So if you wanted a Holy or Dragon Bane Shotgun, this is your game.) Also, similar to cyberpunk games, cybernetics and bio-systems can be installed in a character’s body, although this is also expensive in relation to the item level. (A standard datajack that can be attached to one’s skull for computer interface is 625 credits. One with bonuses to the Computer roll is up to 8525 credits.)
While the equipment list is necessarily expanded for a science fiction game, the magic spells list (for what is still a fantasy game) is actually compressed. This might be because the technology that is available to everybody (with enough credits) makes magic less unique. For instance, a medical lab can install an item called a regeneration table, which uses nanites to effectively duplicate any heal spell up to Raise Dead, although the need to attune to a given creature’s biology means it can only be used once. In any case, both Mystics and Technomancers only get 6 levels of spells as opposed to D&D’s traditional 9. Various spells with similar but progressive effects are grouped into one spell with various levels, thus the Cure Wounds spells become one “Mystic Cure” spell at levels 1 to 6, and the 1st level “Feather Fall” in D&D simply becomes the 1st level spell version of Flight. The book says that spellcasters don’t care too much about the distinction between “arcane” vs. “divine” magic, but in practice, mystics seem to focus on psychic and healing powers, while technomancers “hack” physical processes. Notably, while Wish (or Miracle) is still on the spell list, it isn’t given a spell level, rather a spellcaster needs to be 20th level to cast it (once a week for a mystic to use Miracle, whereas a technomancer needs to spend 2 Resolve Points and ‘fuse’ two 6th level spells to use Wish).
In Play
The Starfinder game my Gamemaster is running has gotten our characters up to 3rd level after about 5 or so adventures. We have a Technomancer (me), a Mechanic, a Mystic, an Operative, a Soldier and an Envoy. I believe the GM is using a published series of adventures (what the company calls an ‘adventure path’) and it does a fairly good job of introducing the players to successive elements of the game setting. For example, when our team was hired to explore a certain asteroid, we had to use a rented shuttle, which for reasons still unknown got attacked by a fighter craft, thus leading to low-level starship combat. The corebook’s section on Starships explains that various crew positions each require certain skills, which in turn make certain classes better suited to certain bridge stations. For instance while the Envoy is not great in direct combat, most of the actions assigned to the captain in starship combat are best performed by the Envoy or other high-Charisma character (this game seems to go with the Captain Kirk concept of ship command). Attacks are based on the gunner’s base attack bonus, which means that the gunnery role always goes to the soldier (or solarian). Otherwise I have noticed that most classes are flexible in regard to holding ship positions. The Technomancer, for instance, is likewise not good in direct combat and doesn’t have all the engineering tricks of the Mechanic, but has several of the Mechanic’s core skills (including Engineering and Piloting) and thus while best suited to be science officer can serve well as a pilot or engineer. By contrast the Mystic class doesn’t have either of those skills, and while it does have several Charisma skills the character would only be a good captain if it were built around such skills. In practice the mystic is very much a “healbot” in the D&D mode, and as it turns out, healing is at least as important in this game as it is in Pathfinder.
In regular (non-starship) combat, characters not only use Hit Points but the aforementioned Stamina Points, which are similar to concepts from some other d20 games (like Wizards of the Coast’s licensed Star Wars game). The difference is that while Hit Points only recover with Cure spells or an 8-hour period of rest, Stamina Points can be recovered with a 10 minute rest, but that requires the expenditure of a Resolve Point. In character creation, each race gets its own base hit points (from 2 to 6) at first level, plus a similar number of hit points at 1st level and every level thereafter due to character class. Each class provides a certain number of stamina points (plus a Constitution modifier) per level. Resolve Points are “an intrinsic reservoir of grit and luck tied to your talents and often enchanced by your class.” Each character has a number of Resolve Points equal to half character level (round down, minimum 1) plus the character’s key ability score modifier (e.g. Wisdom for Mystic). Stamina Points and Resolve Points normally refresh entirely after 8 hours of uninterrupted rest. Without magic, hit points only recover at the rate of 1 per character level each 8 hours, or twice that with 24 hours of complete bed rest. The kicker is that while stamina points give each character an extra layer of durability compared to D&D characters, once they’re burned off, you take damage to hit points. Once hit points are gone, you don’t go into negative hit points. Rather, each round you lose 1 Resolve Point until your character is medically stabilized. If that doesn’t happen and you would be brought below 0 Resolve Points, you die. So this is the Resolve Point economy in combat: You can use Resolve Points to stretch your character’s stamina points (with a 10-minute rest), but you don’t want to use them all, because if you should go down to hit points (which is likely if grevious damage causes the character to lose both stamina and hit points in the same battle) and are in danger of going to 0 HP, your remaining Resolve Points are the only thing standing between your character and death. This is complicated still further because Resolve Points are the “hero point” mechanic of the game. At mid to higher levels, certain class features either require spending a Resolve Point or require the character to have at least 1 Resolve Point still unspent. So while the Starfinder character is twice as tough as the D&D/PF character on paper, in practice you have to budget the use of Resolve Points very carefully in order for that critical situation to not sneak up on you.
In Conclusion
There were some things about the Starfinder game I didn’t like, such as being rather vague in how certain abilities translate from SF to Pathfinder and vice versa. For instance, Small characters in Pathfinder (like Gnomes and Halflings) are treated as having a slower movement rate than Humans, but this isn’t mentioned here, even though it is mentioned that Starfinder Dwarves have a movement rate of 20 feet that is not affected by encumbrance (just as in Pathfinder). The layout and font resembles a tech manual (whereas the Pathfinder Core Rulebook has pages resembling yellowing parchment), but unfortunately it also reads like a tech manual, and not only does the smaller font make the work physically harder to read, the layout also makes it harder to get information on healing lost damage points, how solarian class powers work, and other non-trivial bits.
Nevertheless, the game at least provides the sort of skills and equipment that would be necessary to run a science fiction (or even contemporary) setting using D20 rules. (It’s certainly better for that than D20 Modern.) And as I mentioned, it might give us a peek at the Paizo Publishing design philosophy as they playtest Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Like, if the Pathfinder Fighter more resembled the Starfighter Soldier, it would probably work better. From what I’ve seen from Paizo’s site, the Pathfinder notes seem to be fairly similar to my experience with Starfinder: A lot of good ideas that aren’t clearly expressed. I like Starfinder from what I’ve played so far, but your mileage may vary.
And on that note…
HAPPY EASTER!