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  Welcome to Starfinder! Do you find yourself disappointed by the lack of laser guns and starships in regular D&D? Do you enjoy Shadowrun, but wish you could play it in space? Are you tired of humanoid characters getting all the glory and want to try playing a sentient floating jellyfish or giant silicon cockroach instead? This is the system for you! Starfinder takes place an undefined number of years into Pathfinder’s future—undefined because several millennia are missing from the memories and recorded histories of species across the galaxy. Spaceflight and interplanetary travel are commonplace, aided by faster-than-light travel through a hyperspace dimension called the Drift. With the galaxy smaller than ever, the time is right for any bored or enterprising lifeform to grab a pistol and call themselves an adventurer—just try not to die before you even get off-planet. WHAT’S DIFFERENT? Starfinder is more than just a reskin of Pathfinder. Races, classes, and core mechanics have all been changed, though they should still be fairly accessible to anyone coming in from 3.5, Pathfinder, or 5E. Below is a list of the most important mechanical changes. Spellcasting – The traditional nine-level spell system has been replaced with a six-level equivalent. All casters now work the way “spontaneous” casters do in other editions, where you know a set number of spells and can cast them a given number of times per day. Some of the highest-level magic (e.g. Wish, Miracle) is now harder to get ahold of. Hit Point and Stamina Points – Starfinder divides your health into two categories, Hit Points and Stamina Points. Stamina points sit on top of hit points and always take damage first; in order to damage a creature’s hit points, you have to drop their stamina points to zero first. Stamina points are much easier to recover than hit points and are more akin to the nonlethal damage of previous editions. Also, there are no more negative hit points—when you drop to zero, you begin to use up resolve points instead (see below). Resolve Points – Similar to the Hero Points or Inspiration of other editions, Resolve Points are an additional resource that can be spent to accomplish difficult tasks. You spend resolve points to recover stamina or stabilize while dying, as well as activating certain class features. Revised Combat Mechanics –
CORE RACES ANDROIDS – “Living constructs” with both mechanical and biological parts, androids were originally created by humans as a servitor race, but have since liberated themselves and formed their own society. HUMANS – The mainstays of any fantasy game, humans trace their lineage to the lost planet of Golarion, but their adaptability and passion for exploration mean they can now be found in any corner of the galaxy. KASATHAS – A four-armed warrior race from a distant world orbiting a dying star. They migrated to the Pact Worlds on their worldship Idari, but refuse to leave the culture of their own planet behind. LASHUNTAS – Divided into two subraces, Lashunta can be either master combatants or gifted scholars. Both have psychic abilities and natural magnetism that make them born leaders. SHIRRENS – Helpful psychic locusts who broke away from a galaxy-devouring swarm and evolved their own individuality. They’ve tied the process of decision-making into their own pleasure centers and are now literally addicted to choice. VESK – A warlike reptilian race that until recently was at war with the rest of the Pact Worlds species. Their sense of honor and imposing build make them natural mercenaries and soldiers. YSOKI – These furry, ingratiating, technology-loving rodents are definitely not ripoffs of Rocket Raccoon. Why would you even think that? CORE CLASSES ENVOY – Space bard. This class is focused on diplomacy and aiding your teammates in battle. Yell loud enough and you can bring someone back from the brink of death! MECHANIC – All-purpose hacker and engineer. You have either a neural processor that gives you extra tricks in battle, or a drone that acts as your partner. MYSTIC – Space cleric. Your connection to a particular deity or ideal grants you thematic magical powers. OPERATIVE – Space rogue. You breeze past pretty much any skill check that gets thrown at you, and make up for a lack of combat aptitude with this system’s version of sneak attacks. SOLARION – Jedi! Or space paladin, if you squint. You have either armor or a weapon shaped from stellar essence, and use the delicate balance of the cosmos to pull off spectacular feats. SOLDIER – Space fighter. This class lets you specialize in one of several fighting styles that let you make the most of Starfinder’s ridiculous lists of weapons and armor. TECHNOMANCER – Space wizard. Utilizing arcane forces and powerful technology, you hack the universe itself to make it better serve you. BOOKS The core books currently available for Starfinder are the Core Rulebook and Alien Archive. If you buy a physical copy of the Core Rulebook, beware; many of the early printings have weak bindings that break with the slightest bit of use. Paizo is supposedly working on fixing this. Pact Worlds is due out in March, and it will cover the planets (and planet-like space stations and ships) in Starfinder's primary star systems. The only adventure path so far is Dead Suns, with four books out of six currently released. It's received mixed reviews, but can be tailored to most groups with a bit of elbow grease.  As with any system, Starfinder has an extensive list of pros and cons. Please try to be polite while discussing the parts that you hate.
Cygna fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Feb 28, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 02:10
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Reserved for a lore post that may or may not ever get written.
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Feb 28, 2018 02:11
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I'm just going to post the FATAL & Friends review. It has a lot of good points on why this system is not that good. But I'm here to talk about the Starfinder "Masterclass" miniatures being designed by Ninja Division, a company known for not producing their content on time. And guess what? They're running behind on these miniatures; their last update on Kickstarter informed backers that they're still designing the sculpts. Someone in the comments noted that their figures seem to be off-scale as well.
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Feb 28, 2018 02:18
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Isn’t it the Core Rulebook not the Player’s Handbook? This ain’t your grandpappy’s D&D
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Feb 28, 2018 02:24
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Arivia posted:Isn’t it the Core Rulebook not the Player’s Handbook? This ain’t your grandpappy’s D&D  I have my Core Rulebook PDF titled "Player's Handbook" because my brain still thinks it's playing 3.5. My mistake!Hitlers Gay Secret posted:I'm just going to post the FATAL & Friends review. It has a lot of good points on why this system is not that good. I've never ordered from Ninja Division before, but I did see a lot of discussion around their Starfinder Kickstarter about how their minis tend to be low-quality and generally unimpressive. I ended up backing them anyway, but I'm not expecting great things. I hope the starships at least turn out all right.
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Feb 28, 2018 02:37
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Hi! On review of what I wrote below, I think I loving hate this game. It's Basically What It Says: Finder but with Star Instead of Path At this point I would like Paizo to make their own game or something, instead of whatever the hell happened here, where we got something that is more complicated in many ways than even 3E, less fulfilling, and brings to the table absolutely nothing you'd reasonably expect out of a space opera system--even the derivative stuff. That's a shame, because at this point it's a much more fertile genre than Sociopath Shitfarmers Meet in a Bar and Fight Kobolds. If they had gone whole hog and directly stolen from the genre on the cover of the book, the game would be a hell of a lot more interesting than it is. Instead, Space Fireball, Space Charm Person, Space Goblins, Space Dragons (dragons with an arm cannon!), and such are the rule. You can play an appropriately weird race in Starfinder, but you have to fight through the countless variations of lizardmen, four-armed creatures whose third and fourth arms are vestigial until they take feats, and plucky cute-but-nasty races. As far as the basic expected genre tropes, there's almost nothing. It's Actually Less Fun than the Badly Aging System It's Based On You might have thought 3.0 was a little dense in 2000, with a lot of hidden rules designed to reward system mastery at the expense of your friends' fun--but Starfinder, despite PF being forever marketed as 3.75, is actually more irritating than that in a lot of ways. - Rules that should be up-front and clear but are hidden deep within stacks of text are common. The Operative has secret skill points; everyone gets a damage bonus tied to level at level 3, but skip ahead 100 pages to see what it is. - They somehow managed to make hit points difficult to understand. - There's sixteen times as many weapons as there needs to be, because they inelegantly just made tiered versions of every weapon to keep you on a completely disinteresting item treadmill. - There's plenty of ways to roll characters who just don't function in the game's meta, even if you try to do everything it says you can do on the tin (and sometimes especially when you try that). And after all that and more, the end result is very boring. Get ready for a lot of turns where the totality of your turn is rolling to see if you do literally anything, and then rolling damage if you do. Not a strong offering in this day and age, to say the least. As you would expect from 3E, tactical movement is almost nil and the drama comes from seeing who fails a saving throw that takes them out of the fight first. The Ship Thing Is Not as Cool as Your PF Friends Say It Is The ship system is... Well, it's the most innovative thing going on and probably the weakest on balance and fun. It works on a role system, so you have a pilot, captain, engineer, science officer, and gunner. In practice, the pilot is controlling all of the action and the other characters are doing things that the pilot player could probably also do if you just told him to. But if you had four or five PCs piloting different ships, the system is so kludgy that it would slow to a crawl, since for example you're rolling initiative alone every round and then going in opposite order. There's very little tactical element for those other people aboard the pilot's ship; in large part you either roll well or you don't. There's not really a system for differentiating your tactics in there--you have the correct skill bonus for your position and can do anything, or you don't and you can't. The system math here is also highly suspect even by 3E standards; this entire subsystem became disinteresting to the point of meaninglessness as soon as we got a nuke launcher at level 5. An extra nuke for your nuke launcher just happens every ten minutes, in a game where you will spend multiple levels trying to get to 1d8 Space Damage on your character. The game just seems to assume that you won't take advantage of the fact that you have an interstellar ship with nukes, and that instead you'll keep the crawl experience and the ship battle experience mentally partitioned. And to be honest the crawl experience is so completely bog standard 3E that this is true. Strafing the Space Kobold den or firing a tactical warhead down their cave is not really broached as a topic. Please Kill Me My group has been working through the published adventure, but took a break to play other things while waiting for the next bit. The adventure is mostly crap and again takes absolutely no genre cues from any of the things you wanted to play instead of D&D--it's almost pigheaded in how boring it is. I loathe the thought of going back to this game and probably won't. Name Change fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Feb 28, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 04:09
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The core rulebook is terribly organized, I'll give you that, especially if you're coming from an older system. My Pathfinder veteran friend and I went back and forth helplessly on whether the lack of falling damage rules under Acrobatics meant that there was no falling damage in this system, or whether you just couldn't reduce it with Acrobatics, or whether they expected you to use the old Pathfinder tables, until I finally found the blurb we needed under the game mastering section, of all places. Between the organization, the typos, and the poor physical construction, the core book was clearly a rush job, which was disappointing given all the lead-up. I haven't been disappointed by the setting so far--I love it to pieces, if you couldn't tell--but then, despite it being billed as a space opera, I went in expecting more Shadowrun than Star Wars. And that's really what it is: d20 with a cyberpunk flavor. You can argue that they should have been more innovative with the mechanics, and that its adherence to traditional D&D trappings is uncreative, but the system was designed to be D&D in space. If they'd changed absolutely everything, it wouldn't be a recognizable brand. Not sure why you're so down on having partitioned roles on a starship. It's a genre standard, which is something you're clearly into. The engineer and science officer could use a little more excitement in their phases, but they can always grab a gunnery slot and start shooting if they feel unfulfilled. I've gone though a few starship combats now and each time it felt like a pretty cohesive experience, with everyone supporting each other's actions. It does break versimilitude that starship wealth and equipment are so clearly divided from character wealth and equipment, but it seems like a necessary evil for pre-written campaigns that assume the PCs have a functioning and properly leveled ship to get from place to place. If you run your own homebrew sandbox, then you can cut that part out and let the party do whatever they want with their transport/flying artillery.
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Feb 28, 2018 17:58
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Ratspeaker posted:Not sure why you're so down on having partitioned roles on a starship. It's a genre standard, which is something you're clearly into. The engineer and science officer could use a little more excitement in their phases, but they can always grab a gunnery slot and start shooting if they feel unfulfilled. I've gone though a few starship combats now and each time it felt like a pretty cohesive experience, with everyone supporting each other's actions. It does break versimilitude that starship wealth and equipment are so clearly divided from character wealth and equipment, but it seems like a necessary evil for pre-written campaigns that assume the PCs have a functioning and properly leveled ship to get from place to place. If you run your own homebrew sandbox, then you can cut that part out and let the party do whatever they want with their transport/flying artillery. It's the eternal problem with doing starship combat in RPGs. Everyone wants to be Scotty, but no one wants their only useful actions in a starship fight to be "roll Engineering to determine how many squares the pilot can move this turn" and "roll to repair 3d6 points of hull damage". Most scifi games with ship-to-ship combat fall into that to some extent, and it always ends up being vaguely disappointing. Add Starfinder's weird starship DC scaling on top and you end up with characters doing the single thing they're any good at each turn and it's just not what you were hoping for.
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Feb 28, 2018 18:42
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Ratspeaker posted:The core rulebook is terribly organized, I'll give you that, especially if you're coming from an older system. My Pathfinder veteran friend and I went back and forth helplessly on whether the lack of falling damage rules under Acrobatics meant that there was no falling damage in this system, or whether you just couldn't reduce it with Acrobatics, or whether they expected you to use the old Pathfinder tables, until I finally found the blurb we needed under the game mastering section, of all places. Between the organization, the typos, and the poor physical construction, the core book was clearly a rush job, which was disappointing given all the lead-up. It's not the worst-organized book I've ever seen but it's not great either. quote:I haven't been disappointed by the setting so far--I love it to pieces, if you couldn't tell--but then, despite it being billed as a space opera, I went in expecting more Shadowrun than Star Wars. And that's really what it is: d20 with a cyberpunk flavor. You can argue that they should have been more innovative with the mechanics, and that its adherence to traditional D&D trappings is uncreative, but the system was designed to be D&D in space. If they'd changed absolutely everything, it wouldn't be a recognizable brand. I don't know where this line of reasoning gets trotted out from but I hear it a lot from my table and online. Apparently Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Eberron, to name just three settings that got away from template D&D, never happened and are now unrealistic expectations. quote:Not sure why you're so down on having partitioned roles on a starship. It's a genre standard, which is something you're clearly into. The engineer and science officer could use a little more excitement in their phases, but they can always grab a gunnery slot and start shooting if they feel unfulfilled. I've gone though a few starship combats now and each time it felt like a pretty cohesive experience, with everyone supporting each other's actions. It does break versimilitude that starship wealth and equipment are so clearly divided from character wealth and equipment, but it seems like a necessary evil for pre-written campaigns that assume the PCs have a functioning and properly leveled ship to get from place to place. If you run your own homebrew sandbox, then you can cut that part out and let the party do whatever they want with their transport/flying artillery. It's not the role system itself, it's that the roles suck and like almost everything else are predicated on "roll target number or go gently caress yourself." They missed a really obvious opportunity to make it about starfighter + fleet combat. Instead the game is designed for 1-on-1 starfighter dogfights where four players are just performing dull as dishwater tasks.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:05
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I will do some class reviews based on what I've played and rolled for new people coming in: ENVOY – Bad in a very 3.0 way, where you need to pay taxes in the form of otherwise dead ability choices to have your abilities affect everything. Your actual abilities, at least early on, are extremely underwhelming. Like Mike Mearls, the Paizo designers don't seem to take the non-magical "leader" role seriously--everything feels limited in terms of effectiveness and versatility, while casters as always get by without anyone questioning their narrative control. MECHANIC/MYSTIC/SOLARION – Can't really comment on specifics, having not built one. OPERATIVE – Played Operative. To level 5-6 has consistently felt like by far the strongest class in the game in terms of versatility and consistently high damage. If anything, has too many skills. Their sneak attack mechanic (roll once to see if you hit and once to see if you do more than 1d4 damage) is really dumb, but if you know what you are doing during creation, you will never fail the sneak attack check. SOLDIER – Lots of OK-to-good options with little overhead necessary on tracking them. Feels like a more modern design than most of what I've read. TECHNOMANCER – If you want to deal damage as this class you should just be taking their options to whip up large guns out of thin air before buffing the attacks, nothing else is really necessary; but in consequence it feels like a weird flavor of soldier. The actual spells are not that exciting by comparison.
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Feb 28, 2018 22:31
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Ratspeaker posted:Not sure why you're so down on having partitioned roles on a starship. It's a genre standard, which is something you're clearly into. The engineer and science officer could use a little more excitement in their phases, but they can always grab a gunnery slot and start shooting if they feel unfulfilled. I've gone though a few starship combats now and each time it felt like a pretty cohesive experience, with everyone supporting each other's actions. Problem is having partitioned roles can work but you need things to be dynamic and fluid and give you lots of things to respond to who aren't the specialised pilot. As a very basic example, if attacks against ships always caused secondary effects such as blowing coolant pipes in your ship that would give people penalties, you could give the engineer or even a character without a specialised space ship skill the option and motivation to go and seal that coolant pipe to remove the penalty from the other members of the group OR go and repair the ship to get some health back. Just real basic stuff that a more dynamic system would encourage that should be cooked into your raw attack mechanics. I'll ask the question since I genuinely don't know. What is the published adventure trying to get you to do if its not a Space Opera? kingcom fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 02:30
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kingcom posted:Problem is having partitioned roles can work but you need things to be dynamic and fluid and give you lots of things to respond to who aren't the specialised pilot. As a very basic example, if attacks against ships always caused secondary effects such as blowing coolant pipes in your ship that would give people penalties, you could give the engineer or even a character without a specialised space ship skill the option and motivation to go and seal that coolant pipe to remove the penalty from the other members of the group OR go and repair the ship to get some health back. Just real basic stuff that a more dynamic system would encourage that should be cooked into your raw attack mechanics. Work for the local adventuring society, the Starfinders, who exist because there needs to be an adventuring society. Visit a pre-industrial elf kingdom ruin. Stop apocalypse cultists from activating an ancient elf superweapon. There's some forays into learning about liberal undead (do business with the mortals!) vs. conservative undead (kill the mortals!) and convincing a disembodied brain that genocide isn't the most efficient solution for political problems. But it feels lightweight. Aside from being punctuated by the ship battles, there's nothing going on that feels any different from your average D&D adventure. It's Shadowrun maybe in the sense that it has similar art assets. But Shadowrun is also largely a game about executing carefully-planned and very dangerous heists in a cyberpunk dystopia. Players are rewarded for thinking it through. The politics are fairly complicated and difficult to separate from your character. Giving a lizard a lasergun isn't cyberpunk. The android race is so utterly unexplored as a concept that it's criminal. Going from room to room to kill the evil space dogs over and over again is brainless. It's a fair question to ask what would a better game would look like. I would have liked to see a lot more stuff that I didn't immediately recognize from literally any bog-standard D&D campaign. I've played my fair share of toothless Wednesday D&D games and other stuff where there's nothing to engage with except your character build. I'm really over it.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:33
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Also, the ship combat is way too geared for the PC's; the GM has to do every ship role themselves.
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Mar 1, 2018 03:52
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Also, the ship combat is way too geared for the PC's; the GM has to do every ship role themselves. Wait the ship combat is identical for NPCs? Like its not just a move and attack roll? Theres no 1-man fighter squad style mechanic to just have a bunch of enemies? dont even fink about it posted:Work for the local adventuring society, the Starfinders, who exist because there needs to be an adventuring society. Visit a pre-industrial elf kingdom ruin. Stop apocalypse cultists from activating an ancient elf superweapon. Yeah that sounds like just a regular d&d plot and if this wasn't the starfinger thread it would be indistinguishable, Paizo's strong suit is normally their adventure paths but none of that seems like it has anything to do with a sci-fi setting or a cyberpunk tone if thats the approach. I mean the first pathfinder adventure path, Rise of the Runelords was a pretty dull by the numbers adventure for the most part so maybe thats the case here? One of the distinctive cyberpunk elements that I think of with Shadowrun is your SIN, the id that basically defines who you are and reinforces the whole 'you are being watched and the man knows what you are doing all the time' dystopian hell future. I'm not sure if I've seen anything like that so far in the setting material? People are cool with satan worshipping drow I guess? kingcom fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 04:13
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kingcom posted:Wait the ship combat is identical for NPCs? Like its not just a move and attack roll? Theres no 1-man fighter squad style mechanic to just have a bunch of enemies? No, it's not actually dystopian. There's no "damned if you do/don't" thing going on, hacking is a check to pick a lock, and as in D&D there's no exploration of the implications of anything. If you need an ability score booster, you can specify that it's a genetically-engineered symbiote organism or nanotech-based, for example, but there's no consequence to your choice.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:49
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Has anyone homebrewed yet a DC scaling system that isn't broken? I'd do it myself but 
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Mar 1, 2018 10:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:Has anyone homebrewed yet a DC scaling system that isn't broken? I'd do it myself but In general, or for ships?
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Mar 1, 2018 11:06
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dont even fink about it posted:In general, or for ships? for ships, I guess? Or are there non-ship-related DCs that are also borked?
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Mar 1, 2018 11:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:for ships, I guess? Or are there non-ship-related DCs that are also borked? There’s a ship DC FAQ. Or there was before the site redesign.
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Mar 1, 2018 14:03
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You can still access that stuff if you have the url on hand, everyone is still figuring out the new layout over there though so some things may be borked. In any case, how bad are the DCs as you level?
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Mar 1, 2018 16:24
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Alien Rope Burn talked about it in their write-up I posted. Along with a chart to for reference.quote:However, there's one major issue with all of this, it's that the DCs for making many of the required rolls for starship positions are badly broken. Many have rolls with DCs of 10-20 + (2 x tier) or 10 + (3 x tier). As such, they ramp up faster than PC skills can keep up. At a certain point, piloting, commanding, engineering, etc., becomes improbable or impossible for high-tier ships. By levels 11-16, certain actions will become near-impossible or outright impossible for PCs to make, depending on how much they've invested in their ship's computer and their own maximization. See, one of the key points is that these skill rolls also ignore any class bonuses, so even an Operator or Envoy's skill boosts are no good in this situation. While you can use Skill Focus, it's a stopgap measure.
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Mar 1, 2018 17:24
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Alien Rope Burn talked about it in their write-up I posted. Along with a chart to for reference. Oof, I didn't realize you lost a lot of class bonuses. That's horrible.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:16
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The good news is that they've errata'd the DCs. The bad news is that the DC still increases slightly faster than skills do by themselves and I don't know if the other skill bonuses you get are enough to compensate. (Also it's a blatantly bad design choice and it's still really weird that the original DCs made it to print.)
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Mar 1, 2018 22:28
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I played one of the Starfinder Society sessions at FLGS. I brought a Kasatha Soldier because I saw the Fusillade feat and thought that might be a cool concept. A four-armed merc that fires four identical pistols and gets cool AOE bonuses, etc. Well, I ended up feeling useless because every other level 1 character was better optimized and was dealing out 10-20 dmg per round vs my 1d8 (because I could only afford a rifle and hammer instead of four pistols). Granted, I've been away from Pathfinder and 3.5 for a while now, but I'm finding that all the criticisms of this system are 100% legit. I'd rather play Star Wars (or Genesys lol). I do like the setting, though. The setting reminds me of some of the good parts of Synnibar and Phase World. I love these cosmic fantasy settings, but so far, I think this is yet another case of the mechanics being bad. I might try one more Society session if it's tagged with spaceship combat because I want to at least try it out, as my search continues for a good battle system for starships.
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Mar 2, 2018 20:42
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Finster Dexter posted:I played one of the Starfinder Society sessions at FLGS. I brought a Kasatha Soldier because I saw the Fusillade feat and thought that might be a cool concept. A four-armed merc that fires four identical pistols and gets cool AOE bonuses, etc. Well, I ended up feeling useless because every other level 1 character was better optimized and was dealing out 10-20 dmg per round vs my 1d8 (because I could only afford a rifle and hammer instead of four pistols). Do you remember their builds? Doing 10-20 at leek one is impressive. Where they melee soldiers?
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Mar 2, 2018 23:06
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dont even fink about it posted:Oof, I didn't realize you lost a lot of class bonuses. That's horrible. To follow up on this, the errata mentions this: quote:Under "Actions" on page 322 it is stated "Class features and items affect crew actions only if specifically noted in the class feature or action." Does this mean I can't benefit from the skill bonus of operative's edge, or an envoy's skill expertise? Instead of letting ships exist in a world that was half-divorced from dungeon crawl play, they probably should have fully divorced it and taken skills out of the equation. The sliding DC thing is not doing much for the overall experience except adding another thing to have to look up or memorize.
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Mar 2, 2018 23:39
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dont even fink about it posted:another thing to have to look up or memorize. Isn't that the point of Pathfinder/Starfinder?
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Mar 3, 2018 00:56
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Axiem posted:Isn't that the point of Pathfinder/Starfinder? I did make the mistake of giving Starfinder a chance and expecting a lot.
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Mar 3, 2018 01:04
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Note that weapons are not all created equal; unless you are an Operator, you should be not be using pistols, and nobody should be using snipers or operator melee weapons. Yes, that means many classes will probably have to burn a feat to get access to Real Weapons.
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Mar 3, 2018 01:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:Note that weapons are not all created equal; unless you are an Operator, you should be not be using pistols, and nobody should be using snipers or operator melee weapons. Yes, that means many classes will probably have to burn a feat to get access to Real Weapons. One of the "funny" things about operatives is that they get a bunch of sniper options. Because they can't get a sneak attack with snipers, this is a complete waste of time. And the only way a melee operative would be viable is if they went Str instead of Dex, which breaks other parts of their kit, including their resolve points. As a ysoki operative I was pretty much the only person in the game with mobility in combat; they can move as part of their sneak attack, and ysokis use Acrobatics very, very well. Everything else was 3E football linemen where no one moves until the other person falls over.
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Mar 3, 2018 03:08
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I genuinely believe the team they put on this doesn't know how to play Pathfinder or D&D or anything and are just going off vague second-hand stories. So many elements just literally don't work. Not even poorly designed but, yea, the weapons thing, it just doesn't loving work for some classes, you literally HAVE to pay a feat to get weapons that put you on scale with literally anyone else and this is a combat focused game! This isn't a story game where it's like 'oh well ok my gun kinda sucks but that's fine I'm the face/sneakyboi I'm kinda gonna be doing that while you guys are slaughtering people hopefully. Sneakface is gonna have to be there with you killing space Orcs and his weapons are objectively gimped for no reason other than a feat tax!
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Mar 3, 2018 05:44
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That stuff sounds completely asinine. What would be the point of all these options if most of them don't even function. It's not like you can even realistically convert anything from Pathfinder into Starfinder, right? And my phone auto corrects to Starfinger.
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Mar 3, 2018 06:32
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sexpig by night posted:I genuinely believe the team they put on this doesn't know how to play Pathfinder or D&D or anything and are just going off vague second-hand stories. So many elements just literally don't work. Not even poorly designed but, yea, the weapons thing, it just doesn't loving work for some classes, you literally HAVE to pay a feat to get weapons that put you on scale with literally anyone else and this is a combat focused game! This isn't a story game where it's like 'oh well ok my gun kinda sucks but that's fine I'm the face/sneakyboi I'm kinda gonna be doing that while you guys are slaughtering people hopefully. Sneakface is gonna have to be there with you killing space Orcs and his weapons are objectively gimped for no reason other than a feat tax! Sneakyboi's damage is fine (even best in game most of the time) as long as you game the skill he has to roll every time he attacks with a pistol. The skill check is I believe 20 + monster's CR (making it a mystery number in every fight that the GM has to tell you). So you are rolling to hit twice forever. If you miss the skill check, you do 5% of your normal damage. It's extremely inane.
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Mar 3, 2018 07:41
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Nomadic Scholar posted:That stuff sounds completely asinine. What would be the point of all these options if most of them don't even function. It's not like you can even realistically convert anything from Pathfinder into Starfinder, right? And my phone auto corrects to Starfinger. because having options is good. Look how many options there are. Look how many statted things there are. This is a very rich and deep game, because look how many.
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Mar 3, 2018 21:23
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ProfessorCirno posted:Note that weapons are not all created equal; unless you are an Operator, you should be not be using pistols, and nobody should be using snipers or operator melee weapons. Yes, that means many classes will probably have to burn a feat to get access to Real Weapons. Why are the snipers bad? I'm going to be playing this game soon and while I'm not rolling a sniper one of my friends might be, so I'd like to caution them if they're really that bad.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:08
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Epi Lepi posted:Why are the snipers bad? I'm going to be playing this game soon and while I'm not rolling a sniper one of my friends might be, so I'd like to caution them if they're really that bad. Sniper rifles lose the ability to make full attacks and a reasonable clip size in exchange for the ability to fire from a range that would be unreasonable to model on a battle map if you spend a move action before attacking. Given HP totals and the way range increments work, this mostly just means you can take out a third of one person's health before they close the distance and just fire on you normally and all you've done is annoy the GM by making them keep track of distances during all that. (Also they have way fewer upgrades than regular long-arms, but that loops back into the ways Starfinder's equipment treadmill is bad.)
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Mar 4, 2018 00:48
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Sniping: There is at least one sniping encounter in the adventure. Our group and DM mutually agreed to just ignore the guy and skip it because the entire experience was annoying for all involved. Keep in mind the rest of my group is much more pro-Starfinder than I am.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:53
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Epi Lepi posted:Why are the snipers bad? I'm going to be playing this game soon and while I'm not rolling a sniper one of my friends might be, so I'd like to caution them if they're really that bad. Less damage then long arms and unwieldy to no real benefit. If you spend your entire round making one shot, you get very high range...and that's it, that's all snipers do for you, at the cost of less damage and no multiattacks ever. The high range is likewise probably never going to actually come into play because it's frankly absurdedly TOO long - the chances of you being in a fight where your enemies are several hundred feet away is not exactly a common one, and longarm range is good enough to cover just about every situation. It also suffers the same problem stealth does in tabletop games - for a sniper to be useful, everyone else either has to also have a sniper rifle, or be utterly useless in the situation. Pistols incidentally are also terrible. Not only do they have low base damage and low non-laser range, they only add half your level to damage from specialization unlike all the other weapons. Operators use pistols. Solarions use lightsabers. Soldiers can instead go for melee or heavy weapons. Otherwise, everyone uses longarms. Yes, it costs a feat, because, hilariously enough, only the soldier starts with actual weapon proficiencies; nobody else does. The game isn't exactly filled with awesome feats to begin with, though, so who cares.
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Mar 4, 2018 00:53
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ProfessorCirno posted:Less damage then long arms and unwieldy to no real benefit. If you spend your entire round making one shot, you get very high range...and that's it, that's all snipers do for you, at the cost of less damage and no multiattacks ever. The high range is likewise probably never going to actually come into play because it's frankly absurdedly TOO long - the chances of you being in a fight where your enemies are several hundred feet away is not exactly a common one, and longarm range is good enough to cover just about every situation. It also suffers the same problem stealth does in tabletop games - for a sniper to be useful, everyone else either has to also have a sniper rifle, or be utterly useless in the situation. Yeah do not sweat feats, most are extremely boring or edge case at best. You should focus on feats that you will be constantly seeing benefit from, rather than situational things or things that diversify your abilities (generally always the rule in D&D but especially true here). Spending a feat to get weapon or armor proficiency is not a "wasted" feat, given the selection and the need.
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Mar 4, 2018 01:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:Less damage then long arms and unwieldy to no real benefit. If you spend your entire round making one shot, you get very high range...and that's it, that's all snipers do for you, at the cost of less damage and no multiattacks ever. The high range is likewise probably never going to actually come into play because it's frankly absurdedly TOO long - the chances of you being in a fight where your enemies are several hundred feet away is not exactly a common one, and longarm range is good enough to cover just about every situation. It also suffers the same problem stealth does in tabletop games - for a sniper to be useful, everyone else either has to also have a sniper rifle, or be utterly useless in the situation. I definitely noticed this when my girlfriend and I were building characters for our upcoming game. She took feats so that her Envoy could wield one of those lizard people axe things and it didn't really feel like she was wasting the feats, even beyond our usual not giving a poo poo about optimized builds.
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Mar 4, 2018 04:02
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