Starfinder Roleplaying Game

[rjshae]

Okay, I recently found out about Starfinder Roleplaying Game, the sci-fi version of the Pathfinder RPG, and it has me interested. It reminds me of the old Star Frontiers game, which I had an opportunity to try back in the day. Apparently now Pazo is converting it to compatibility with 2nd edition Pathfinder rules so you can swap between the two. Currently they have published playtest versions of the rules, which sounds like a novel approach. They are planning to release the 2nd edition version of Starfinder early this year (2025), so I'm planning to pick up a copy for evaluation.

Has anybody played Starfinder PnP? I'm curious to know your experiences. My sci-fi RPG PnP experiences are with Star Frontiers, GURPS, and HERO. For sci-fi, I've enjoyed the Fallout/Wasteland/SW:TOR/Rogue Trader video games. Some day I'd like to enjoy a sci-fi  tactical RPG video game akin to Star Frontiers, and Starfinder sounds promising for that purpose.

[Elerond]

I have played Starfinder 2nd edition beta, like Pathfinder 2nd edition it works well in campaigns that are lots of tactical battles as in those system works best. 

Most of the character sheet abilities, spells etc. are meant for battles. Also  splitting game in three modes, encounter, exploration and downtime. Most of the game time goes is spent in encounter mode, then exploration and time spent in downtime mode is usually quite little.

Most of the encounters are combat encounter, although rules give rules for social encounters, but they aren't as well defined as rules for combat encounters. Combat encounter system uses Paizo's three action system, which means that each character gets three actions for their turn which they can use to do what they want. Things like moving, attack, hiding etc. are just actions character can choose to do or they can use actions given their feats, items, etc.. Some things like many of the spells use two or more actions to do. To avoid that people just attack three times each turn, character gets minus to their next attack action and even more minus to their third and so on attack actions. In my opinion this gives players reason to look some other options that they could do their turn. There is also quite good math behind the minuses and bonuses that characters can get from conditions and items, etc. that in difficult encounter it is usually mandatory to use buffs and debuffs.

Exploration is more flexible mode that changes to moving around in dungeon, space ship, etc. to traveling between planets. Usually in this mode game master may give some skill challenges in form of random hazards or finding glues etc, Game master should also use how players behave in this mode to determine how well they are prepared to next combat or social encounter.

Downtime mode is meant to just forward time in game world and give player ability buy new equipment, find information about their next mission/s. So bit like breather between more action heavy segments in story.

Starfinder has quite interesting lore and as Paizo also supports bringing stuff from Pathfinder it gives big variety of options to pick in terms of character races, occupations, classes etc.