Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derren" data-source="post: 7868021" data-attributes="member: 2518">Starfinder might be a little too much fantasy. It does very little with the Sci-Fi part of its setting.In the D&D 3.5 era there was also a short lived Dragonstar setting from FFG.Edit: To clarify what I mean, Starfinder does not have a lot of connection to the Pact Worlds. Each planet receives a small writeup and thats it. And as basically everything remotely humanoid is playable you do not need to have a connection to them at all. So basically what you want.The trouble starts with playing SF as Sci-Fi because the system makes very little use of science fiction concepts and instead follows the usual fantasy/D&D concepts of four guys crawling through a dungeon far away from civilization, only visiting it to unload million credits worth of loot to spend it all un the next tier of weapons with nonsensical prices which are also locked behind a level requirement based on their adventure usefulness. So even healing or cure disease potions or board games that give a bonus to a skill roll when you played them require a minimum competency in monster slaying (I am not making this up. The board game is a level 6 item)The system offers no support for science fiction or even modern concepts like surveillance technology, modern or futuristic laws and how to bypass them (In SF its normal to walk around a city in heavy armor armed with rocket launchers based on some published adventures). Computers more resemble things from the 80s. Self contained boxes which control 1 or 2 functions. There is no support for large networks or even matrix style systems and the skill system quickly reaches its limit when you try to implement it as every computer must be of the same level as the PCs computer skill as otherwise its either trivial or impossible to hack them.That extends to the setting itself. Nearly all of the Pact World planets are less developed than modern day earth and mainly consist out of wilderness. The most SciFi you can get are floating cities like on Star Wars Bespin on a minor planet. The major planets look more like Tatooine or Kashyyyk, depending on the climate there.Starships are the worst. They just exist, but are disconnected from everything else. Neither do you need to spend ressources on them, they just get better as you level up and the GM is supposed to invent a reason for why. There is no interaction between them and the rest of the setting. The only thing they can do is to serve as an explanation how you got from A to B, have space fights with a very limited set of constrains (one PC ship vs. 1 or 2 equally leveled enemy ships) which are very unbalanced (turret weapons and powerful shields beat everything else easily) or to install crafting stations for your PCs to use. Every interaction between starships and the rest of the game is actively discouraged. Shooting the large, lone monster on a barren asteroid in the middle of nowhere with no one else around with your starship weapons (actual scenario from one adventure)? Nope, not in Starfinder. Go down and fight it mano a mano.Even in the lore starships are problematic as for example installing self replinishing nuclear weapons is a low level option and no one has a problem with it.Sure, you can try to houserule all those issues and make SF SciFi compatible, but you have to fight the system tooth and nail to do it as it is simply not designed for it. Gun restrictions in civilian areas? Now you hosed the soldier while making the already powerful operative a god. More sensible item prices? Now you broke the reward loop and potentially made spells much stronger than normal attacks (or the other way around). Create better computer and hacking rules? The limited and level based skill system makes that very hard. Its not unsolveable, but the question is if it is worth it, especially when you have other settings to choose from.So if having fantasy fights with technobabble weapons like plasma scythes are enough for you then you can take SF and throw out the few mentions of the Pact World. But if you want adventures which deviates from that and add more Cyberpunk/Shadowrun, Transhumanism or just more SciFi feeling you are better off with something else.</blockquote>

Verification