[Starfinder] First game... after-action report

[Mike]

We played our first session of Starfinder over the weekend. I am running them through Into the Unknown while we wait for the first adventure path to arrive. (Anyone who is interested can download First Contact and Into the Unknown for free from Paizo. They were published as previews before the Core Rulebook was finalized, so they aren't quite perfect).

The team: Aidan's a Vesk soldier (sharpshooter) Field Agent. Eli went Lashunta soldier (hit-and-run) Ace Pilot. Noah's an Android Mechanic Xenofinder. Their captain is a Ysoki Envoy Scholar who mostly stays on the ship and has taken only defensive abilities and feats. So, the team has no magic out of the gate, and they are effectively operating with 3 1/2 characters. The mission was written for 5-6 players, and the note for "How to scale for only four players" was at the very end and I didn't see it until the game was done. So I didn't scale this down at all, and they had a rough time (but survived and succeeded... YAY!)

First impressions: Combat is deadly, y'all. Holy crap. At least at 1st level it is. Our huge, tough Vesk soldier with all the stamina and HP was the first one the bad guys went after, and first hit out of the gate was a crit with a power hammer. It took all his stamina and over half his HP in one shot. It would have taken any of the other characters to a Dying condition, so they were lucky it was the Vesk. This was all scary as crap, but bear in mind that it wouldn't have been a death sentence. Had any of them gone to zero, they each have 4 or 5 Resolve points (hero points basically) that they could have used to stabilize and ward off death and maybe even get back 1 hp to stay in the fight if it was desperate.

There's no confirming crits. Every 20 is a crit. Crit effects are spelled out for each weapon. Usually it's just straight double damage, but sometimes there are other crit effects as well. If you have 8 people in a fight (+1 drone), expect two or three crits in a short (5 round?) combat. Logically, I am not at all fond of not confirming crits. To me that's way counter-intuitive. So if a space goblin is fighting a dude in heavy power armor, the goblin only hits on a 20, but then EVERY hit is a crit? Makes no sense. But I think if I can let that go, it will actually play out pretty well, because...

Target numbers are SOOOOOO low! Stats are capped at 18 at 1st level, and it's a low point-buy that encourages most characters to have a 16 and a 14 as their top two stats... or 16/16 if you work it right. So your attack bonus at 1st level is going to range from +3ish (for non fighters) to +5 or 6 for soldiers. Starting ACs are all 11 to 15, maybe, so both the good guys and the bad guys were all hitting 60-75% of the time. So deadly. I'm telling you, Armor classes and save DC's (the action target numbers) for all sides were very often just 12 or 13. Not tough to hit. Be ready for this. As a GM, the low target numbers in combat really threw me. I'm so used to Pathfinder and HP being the be-all-end-all for damage that the constant successes (especially from bad guys) took some getting used to. It means that tactical combat will become more important. The guys made almost no use of terrain and cover, and it would have really helped them. Plus, they DO have those resolve points to pull them out of a bad situation maybe once or twice.

I do like that bad guys don't have so much rigmarole around them. They have bonuses listed, they have relevant target numbers, they have HP. No worrying about bad guy stamina or resolve or anything else. You get the numbers you need to roll their dice and nothing more. If they get to zero HP, they're out. Done. I think this will be a lot easier to use than what I'm used to once I have more practice at it. It already feels nice.

Non-combat skills felt very much like Pathfinder. Culture (mostly a knowledge type skill), Diplomacy, Intimidation, Stealth, Perception, Sense Motive all played out in familiar ways. The boys were very comfortable here and had a great time roleplaying through the investigative sections. I've been listening to the Cosmic Crit podcast, and the GM there is really good at setting a scene and evoking the sci-fi flavor of the world, so I've been stealing copiously from his style, and it's paying off.

Again, I can't speak to magic at all, and ship combat will be next week.

To sum up, all I got this week are combat and skills. Skills are easy and natural. Combat was really rough and is going to require some adjustments from me, but it felt super-dramatic, and the players were really on the edge of their seats and very proud of themselves when they finally triumphed. Very cool.

Side note on the game setting: The attitudes and actions of characters in the base Starfinder setting are very much like those in Pathfinder. I'm going to have to adjust some preconceptions I have. For example, the adventure as written assumes that characters will loot the bodies of people they kill/defeat, even in the middle of Absalom Station. There was no due process, no coming down to the precinct to talk to the authorities about the three people you just killed... just grab their gear and... apparently someone will take care of those bodies. It just felt like someone should be investigating and asking questions. I may have to institute some of that. (Although since this was published before the rules were finished, some of these assumptions may just be poor writing... or it might be the lawless, libertarian nature of Absalom Station. I don't know).

[Eliahad]

And my book will get here on Saturday.

Thanks, Mike.

[Mike]

Yeah, the SRD is available, BUT... apparently the Themes are not open content. Clever move. So you can't even complete a character from the SRD unless you have a good grasp of what themes are. The book encourages you to create your own (and we did, by modeling theirs), but they didn't really give any guidelines for how to make them yet.