Kreistor's page

Thank you all for the responses. I have my answers.

To address some of the insults:

I don't follow the "news" every day. I did at the beginning, but then the sheer weight of the delay to releasee caused me to just set the whole thing aside until there was an actual chance the "news" was relevant. I have no interest in reading massive amounts of tiny announcements that become irrelevant regularly because of arbitrary changes: coming in at release to find out what the product contains is the life of most people. You can let news on some product become your life cause... but I have games to run and no time for that.

I am not an utterly dedicated "Paizo can do no wrong" GM. Don't expect people to be. Most people are not.

I was not asking for everything in the first release. I wanted SOMETHING relevant in the initial release. There is NOTHING relevant in the first release. I listed all those questions because I needed to show how little new Paizo produced.

I don't need "settings": all of my comments are about missing rules. I want a RULES wrapper for my own settings. RULES require balance and testing, and one GM cannot reasonably do that. You should all have seen the grotesque failures that are home-grown classes that you can't let at your table. Those are easy... writing an entire system for interstellar combat is a whole world of difficulty worse. I've done it before.. I prefer not to because these take a team and group feedback.

All science fiction has an element of fantasy in it. Our real world physics currently strongly suggests that interstellar travel by awake humans is impossible because it has to be so slow (due to impacts along the way... interstellar space isn't a true void) that it would take 50 generations to get to the star that will approach to 1 LY in a million years or so. We suspend our disbelief to allow for pseudoscience to provide answers to question science cannot provide. Some fantasy is inherent in the beast of sci fi. But sci fi still has its foundation in science, with fantasy added where science fails. No science was added to Pathfinder with this release. It is just fantasy again.

But when we talk about STARfinder, it must be distinctly different or the STAR is just a grift to get you to buy something that otherwise you wouldn't bother with. And that is what this devolved to. The real work needed to be done on what I described above: something that makes common Sci Fi tropes available without massive GM effort to invent rules. Otherwise, this would just be a different way to portal between dimensions (or prime material planes) like the 1989 setting for a competing product. If there was an included method to get from one place to another... which it doesn't include.

That did not happen. At all. There is literally NOTHING in this book that justifies the STAR. Zero Sci Fi tropes have become available that weren't already available.

The entire Starfinder team should be embarrassed at this utter failure. I am sure most of you will buy it. They probably will not lose money. But the non-dedicated fans that are just looking for a useful product will not find it, and if they do buy it and find out how utterly useless it is... they won't continue with the system. The first product needs to represent what you will do with the system. All this represents is... that Paizo can't do a sci fi system at all because they have no clue what that is.

This will drive away the average GM. It shouldn't have been printed. It can do more harm than good to future releases.

I am extremely concerned about the Starfinder 2E Player Core. I just watched an early access review and... I am stunningly disappointed in what was not reviewed. I am praying that what I did not find in it was just the reviewer skipping past what he thought was not important.

1) Where are the starfighter rules?
I was planning to run a Battlestar Gallactica style campaign... but the review had no sign of any starfighter combat nor any available starships. I didn't even notice a single car or aircraft rule. What about Firefly? Star Wars? This is STAR related... where are the STARS?

2) Where are the computer hacking rules?
We are 40 years beyond the 3D hacking of the cyberpunk genre. Has computer hacking been minimized to a single die roll, and if I want something more complicated I have to write the rules myself?

3) Where are the 0-G combat rules? This very much looks like 1G earth worlds only. No spacesuits for asteroid hopping. No mining gear for asteroid mining.

4) Where is the SCIENTIST class?
Or are we supposed to continue to use the medieval style inventor and alchemist? I see mystics and spell lists and magic items... but nothing even remotely scientific. Why do I need more mysticism? I could already create Luke with regular Pathfinder.

Please help me understand how this is NOT the Pathfinder 2E ruleset reprinted with different races and classes and art that have vague sci fi tones, but are really just more fantasy.

Because right now, I see zero reason to buy this book. It adds nothing that I need to run an interstellar campaign. I don't need new classes and races. I need a futuristic galaxy to play in. FUTURISTIC, not more medieval. The review strongly suggests that this is just a mostly transparent skin on fantasy Pathfinder 2E.