Flack Jack's page

Hello Paizo Customer Service,

Would you please cancel my Starfinder Society Subscription. Thank you!

Greetings fellow starfinders,

I was wondering if any of you may have pondered the differences that treasure provides in this science fantasy game compared to it's predecessor, and how you have dealt with those differences. I will start by stating my thoughts on the what the differences are, and then follow up with my proposed solution to what I perceive to be difficulties.

As it says in the game mastering section of the core rulebook, assume your players keep any gear that is better than there own, and assume that the sell or discard anything worse than, or on par with their current gear. (Not verbatim)

This presents a problem for theory of mind. Anyone that is used to making treasure troves in pathfinder knows that their players don't always like what you think they are going to like. With the new economy that means they sell it for 10% whereas before they were selling it for 50%. The GM can always try to fix it next session, but the laps he/she must do to catch up have gotten a little longer as a result.

There are multiple possible solutions to this problem. The best, but most time consuming would be paying close attention to your players, and making sure that vesk soldier eventually finds that plasma dashko they've always wanted. However, space is a big place, and the players are going to need to loot a lot of it. So with time constraints being what they are the best solution I can think of is to calculate an average.

For me that has meant finding the mean between selling all and keeping all. So 10,000 credits of gear off the shelf at your local Abadar-Mart being sold back for 1,000 means estimating 5,500 in loot. Credits and trade goods adjust this simple calculation, of course. This will still require the GM to play catch up with their players and what they decide to keep, but it should hopefully be less burdensome in the long run.

I am no mathematician by any stretch, so my concept may be good, but my numbers may poorly crunched.

My questions to readers would be, does this sound like a reasonable method of treasure calculation? Am I making a problem where there is none? Otherwise, what method would you use to estimate treasure alongside level advancement?