Starfinder RPG, First Thoughts

Unlike many of my tribe, I am NOT attending GenCon 50. I have attended in the past, but I am not a fan of huge conventions these days.

However, I did pre-order Paizo’s new RPG, Starfinder, based on my experience at PaizoCon earlier this year. Thanks to said pre-order, I have a copy of the RPG in hand.

Starfinder is, in my opinion, not Spelljammer for Pathfinder. It is not D&D in space, but rather space opera with magic. Closer, thematically, to say Star Wars or perhaps Shadowrun in a space setting. As such, this is pretty much right in my wheelhouse.

While I have not yet read the book cover to cover (I’m not THAT fast of a reader), I’ve managed a decent scan through what’s needed for character creation so far.

As I understand it, and if someone in the know wants to comment in more details please feel free, two of the major design goals were to:

• Make the game more accessible for less experiences gamers, and
• Ensure that they did not obsolete previously published materials, most specifically, the Bestiaries.

My personal opinion, is that in many ways it is essentially a Pathfinder 2.0 fork. Not wanting to repeat the mistake of how D&D 4th was handled, they did this with a new game and setting, rather than just declaring a new edition and waiting for the edition wars to die down.

At this point, the core mechanics behind Pathfinder are 17 years old, and it is a crunchy game that encourages system mastery, and there is a lot of published material for it.

That’s all well and good if you’ve been gaming as long as I have been, but I would never call Pathfinder ‘friendly’ when it comes to new gamers.

So, coming back to the first point, character generation does appear to be less complicated than Pathfinder, and one of the more common min-max exploits has been removed.

Effectively, to create a character you select a race (human, android, etc.) , a theme (Ace Pilot, Outlaw, etc.), and then your class (soldier, technomancer, etc.). Once all of this is complete, you may spend 10 points (1 to 1) to raise your stats. You  are allowed to lower stats as well, but you do not get points for this. No stat can be higher than 18 at start, and in general, you may only have one stat as low as an 8 due to racial stat modifications.

I’m still looking through skills and feats, so I will be posting again. I also hope to be posting a sample character, but Paizo has not yet updated their Community Use document. I assume that should happen shortly.