At UK Games Expo (UKGE) a couple of weekends ago my friends and I were able to play some preview encounters of Starfinder, the upcoming Sci-Fantasy RPG from Paizo Publishing.
I’ve been looking forward to running a science-fantasy game since before Starfinder was announced when I got excited reading an io9 article about the Aethera campaign setting for Pathfinder and backed that on Kickstarter.
We first played a simple combat encounter with some of the iconic Starfinder PC’s. The more streamlined mechanics (at least when compared to Pathfinder) have often been hinted at but these weren’t readily apparent in our brief combat encounter. It’s not clear to me how much of that was the GM getting mixed up with Pathfinder terms (they mentioned flat-footed AC more than once despite that not being explicitly listed on any of the character sheets and the article on Paizo’s blog saying that there’s no flat footed AC).
The different classes that were available on the day (Envoy, Soldier, Operative and Technomancer) each had interesting mechanics to use in combat and hinted at some of the differences when compared to classic fantasy games like D&D and Pathfinder.
One obvious difference is that Starfinder has two AC types for different attacks, Kinetic and Energy, which make a lot of sense for the setting and aren’t any more complex than Pathfinder’s AC/Touch AC.
We also learned a bit about how damage is initially taken from a stamina (I think) pool before being deducted from the character’s hit points. Stamina is more easily replenished than HP and sounds like a tool to remedy the 15-minute adventuring day, much in the same vein as short rests and spending HD in D&D 5e.
All in all though, the combat felt like a fairly standard d20 encounter.
The real difference was in the starship combat. In Starfinder each party has a starship which is customised by the players (pick chassis, add-ons, etc) and “level’s up” alongside the party without consuming any character resources (i.e. money/credits).
Starship combat initially appeared daunting, the “character sheets” have lots of numbers such as different shield values for the shield’s four arcs (fore/aft and port/starboard). However, these values all made a lot of sense in play with minimal explanation from the person running the encounter.
The real wow moment of the starship combat was how the different phases of a round (engineering, movement, shooting) are structured and how the starship encounter system allows each member of the party to fill the role of a crew member and have very real effects on the outcome of the encounter, so long as the dice are on their side.
The preview had:
- a pilot trying to win initiative to move after the enemy (so as to better react to their movement) who could make various movement options to improve our defences, positioning etc.
- an engineer who was able to restore some HP to the shields, charge the weapon systems and other tasks.
- the gunner who could chose whether to attack once without penalty or twice with reductions to each roll, which weapons on which facing to use and who/what to target.
As I understand it the full game has additional roles (captain and science officer) to further increase the range of actions players can take to affect starship combat.
Our starship combat encounter really was a huge amount of fun. The Paizo team seem to have come up with a great little mini game that has everyone involved and working together.
My fellow GM left our play-test of the starship combat ruminating on how to develop a similar set of mechanics for naval ship-to-ship combat in his 5e fantasy campaign. Very good stuff!
After our two preview encounters at UKGE I’m even more excited for Starfinder than I was before. This game looks to have some solid mechanics to really help cement the science-fantasy setting. I’m really looking forward to running this game.