Nerd Pride Radio

Three of my sons and I played a good 8+ hours of Starfinder this weekend, getting through the first third of Book 1 of the Dead Suns adventure path.

Friggin amazing! Seriously. Sooooo good!

I had heard from a couple places that this adventure path was only mediocre. Those reports were gravely in error. I'm wondering if those people were referring to "Into the Unknown" which was a free PDF containing a five-part mini starter adventure. Because we played halfway through that one a couple months ago, and it was a bust. We had fun--a lot of fun--but mostly because of the cool setting and cool characters. The adventure was poorly written, and worse than that... uninspired and uninspiring.

Dead Suns 1: Incident at Absalom Station is really good. A big chunk of the book is dedicated just to fleshing out Absalom Station itself. Plus, I just got the Alien Archive, so I had the ability to people the station with an amazing variety of new races. And it just came alive in our hands. I started them in a small dwarven mining colony, panicked that they're losing their ship forever (they will) and eventually get them on a shuttle back to Absalom to find work. And it felt real. I can't stress that enough. It felt real and alive the way Pathfinder feels to me. The way Shadowrun always did. The way Star Frontiers NEVER did.

Minor spoilers are coming for this adventure path, so read at your own risk...


It felt so good. (End spoilers, by the way).

We haven't experienced starship combat yet, but that will be the very next segment. We haven't played with any magic, because no one on the team is a spellcaster, and neither were any of the NPCs in this first segment. We have an Envoy, two flavors of Soldier, and a Mechanic. I let the boys choose whatever they wanted and then introduced an NPC Envoy to round out the team.

Storytime: The envoy is a bookish coward. He's sweet and lovable, but takes no initiative without someone else suggesting stuff to him. As a metatool, I found him really handy when there was some interplayer disagreement, and I though Noah was getting needlessly dismissed. Noah says, "They know we're here, so I open the door and toss in a grenade and then shut it again." His brothers, for whatever reason, thought this would be foolish and they shouted him down. Personally, I thought it was at least as good as any other plan on the table, so after some heated discussion, I just had the Envoy sheepishly interject: "I kinda liked the grenade idea." So they did it. It worked well. Noah got to shine for a little bit. Super cool.

This first segment was very Shadowrun, and in a very good way. They got to play as a tactical covert team, and it was a new experience for them. It went well. Plus, as a group, we've settled into a very comfortable combination of roleplaying and dice-rolling to handle a huge array of non-combat stuff. Between Diplomacy, Culture, Computers, and Intimidation, they managed to help me build the scenes that would get them to the dice rolls. Sometimes they'd roleplay the whole thing, or if it required a level of smoothness or expertise that the character had but not the player, then they'd fake it and describe the gist. Then the rolls decide where we go from there. I know, I know... I just described 80% of RPGs, but it really came out well here. It didn't feel artificial.

And I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Combat is deadly, y'all! Seriously deadly. It doesn't go so far as to make it real-life deadly where any bullet could be the one that ends you. With your HP and Stamina, you can be pretty confident of being able to take two or three hits from these pansy-ass 1st level weapons. But it racks up quick. Armor Class is really low compared to Pathfinder, so the hits come often on both sides. Getting cover should be everyone's first priority. We'll see how well this levels, but it made for very dramatic scenes.

I can't believe I have to wait two more months for the next sourcebook.

There were some very poorly considered design decisions made on the final series of encounters in the book that turned a lot of folks off. It was exasperated by inflexible (and outright shitty) GMs not knowing how to handle the problems of that encounter design. That's where a lot of the negative blowback came from. Ironically, it's very similar to the blowback the first book of Runelords got eons ago, for similar poor design decisions on one of the later encounters.

I've heard better reviews on book 2 (which is already out...as is book 3, not sure about your two month timeframe there).

Also, the one thing about Into the Unknown that we kept was Julzakama, the Vesk pawnshop owner.

The team wanted to sell off some gear. I was just going to handwave it and give them the cash, but someone said, "Hey! Let's take it to that guy we met last time. We can get information there too."

So we started a new scene and immediately... "That's not his accent!" Aw crap. What did he sound like last time? Apparently he sounded like some sort of Eastern European gangster from a bad movie. I personally think I came off more as stereotypical Dracula/Transylvanian. But they were happy.

I suspect that Julzakama is going to become their Huggy Bear.

Definitely make sure to look carefully at the last few encounters when you go to do your planning for Book 1. Without any major spoilers, an enemy is sprung on players with a protective ability that can easily turn into a nightmare to handle at the existing level of the PCs (and for the gear received).

One piece of advice for starship combat: Keep crews lower on enemy ships. The more crew a ship has, the more checks they can make. And making checks is EVERYTHING in starship combat. That's why fighters and interceptors can be scary. They don't spend points on Drift engines and the necessary power for those engines, but on the flip side, they are balanced by the fact that they can make only one or two checks per turn. If you load up ships with max crews (6 for most ships you'll see for a while), you easily end up with two gunnery and two engineering checks, plus the rest of the crew. That can make enemy ships tough.

Also, I'd highly suggest to always give enough NPCs as part of the crew to allow the PC's ship to have the max crew number.

Minor spoilers on the Dead Suns adventure path:

They've played a little Shadowrun style covert ops. They've had a small sampling of starship combat. After last night, they have a taste for some Alien-style space horror. Theyre still in the middle of that, but they're loving it.

I will say you really do need a team of four or five to make this work with minimal adjustments (which is as-advertised, so no surprise there). A healer is nice but so far not an absolute requirement.

Jeff's right about fully crewing your ship. The extra rolls make a difference. We have two NPCs now on the team--one an envoy who provides a small team bonus and is mostly ineffectual in combat. The other they just picked up. A mystic doctor with some healing magic. This one will stay on the ship almost all the time--acting as crew and healer but not participating in the "away team missions".

There's couple issues with Dead Suns book 1. The enemy Jeff references COULD be an issue and I'm glad I'm aware of it, but i think it'll go over fine. Second though, they have a choice to explore two different areas. Their instruction say to do X first and then Y. And it seems the logical choice. But there's nothing stopping them from going the other way, and my team almost did. If that had happened, they would have been in a lot of trouble. Y is geared as a higher challenge than X, and I had no easy way to fix things if they hadn't changed their minds at the last minute. Should have prepped something.

Tangential, but I figured I would share:

I developed this house rule for my own games, but feel free to use. If you hate tracking ammo and usage as much as I do,
that is. .

And yeah, healers do not factor in anywhere near as much as PF. Stamina Points (and the various tech items that work with the medicine skill) change SO MUCH in Starfinder.

Another good one (that I found on Reddit) that I believe I'm going to add is changing how ability score upgrades are handled. Rather than raising four attributes every fifth level, I think I'm going to space it out to make a more natural growth progression. So every level from 2nd to 17th, you can increase one ability score. You cannot raise an ability score more than once every five levels. This leaves it with the exact same number of upgrades (and the same rules), but it leaves you feeling like you are making progress more frequently.

Also, another one stolen from Reddit: Simple change to make missiles and torpedoes act like actual missile and torpedoes in spaceship combat. Just give all tracking weapons the Broad Arc property.

Fuck. Sorry for crapping in this thread. I had two tabs open, and meant to put those posts in one of the older Starfinder threads.

If you don't check the FAQs on the Paizo site that often, you might want to look over , Mike. A slew of updates dropped last week, and there are updated DCs for almost every single starship combat task. The old DCs (in the corebook) aren't a huge problem at lower levels, but getting past about level 7 or so, they can become problematic.