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My group has been playing Pathfinder for several years now and we would be very interested in beta testing Starfinder.

Is there any route to doing this?

Is there even going to be any sort of beta?

What are the qualifications for doing something like a tabletop game beta test?

What is the time investment for testing and providing feedback and the like?

I have so many questions?


Rerednaw wrote:

It would help us better tailor advice if we had more information.

Nature of campaign? A published module, Adventure Path, or home brew?
Character creation standards?
Class/builds/level/wealth of party?
Item creation/Leadership feat?

The action economy issue and encounters per day have already been dealt with, so that is good general advice. Other than that I would suggest using waves and red herrings.

Smart bosses will throw minions or doubles at the party...when the party is weakened, then the boss will strike.

I'm running a home brew campaign I built from the ground up. That probably makes it a little harder to give sound advice and it's my first time doing so, so lessons are being learned every session.

Nevertheless, here is my party makeup:
Character creation was standard form and I allowed any stat at or below 10 to be rerolled.
Characters are all level 5 and composed of a Half-Elf Rogue, a Human Cleric of Norgorber, a Half-Elf Warmage (3.5 converted), a Half-Orc Barbarian, a Human Ranger, and a Human Magus.
The average wealth of my players right now is in the neighborhood of 50,000gp.
The Cleric has scribe scroll and no one has leadership since no one is a high enough level.

I previously thought the Warmage was a Magus as well, but I forgot that he converted the class from 3.5

I've had two sessions since I created this thread and the advice so far has already helped balanced things out a bit more.


Wow thanks for the advice everyone.
I've definitely caught on to the single big enemy issue already.


I'm DM in a game running roughly 6 people, and two of which just entered in as magus. My other four regulars consist of a rogue, a barbarian, a wizard, and a ranger. Bear in mind that this is my first campaign dealing with magus so I'm still getting acclimated to the class.

Before the maguses entered the mix I was able to run scenarios with single large targets and it proved a decent challenge for my players, but in the last couple of encounters I've run the magus players were able to make short work of the large target enemies doing what seems like a disproportionate amount of damage relative to the rest of the party.

So disproportionate that it's becoming quite clear that my other players aren't enjoying themselves as much because they're being blatantly outclassed in combat. It also doesn't help that one of the magus characters found boots of speed in a random loot drop.

How do I handle this?

From what I can tell, magus is just a powerful class, but I don't necessarily know if I want to arbitrarily give my other players good items and buffs to bring them up to snuff.

I've also realized that magus is most effective against one body as opposed to multiple enemies, but I am definitely the type of DM who prefers one or two large enemies at the end of a dungeon as opposed to hordes of goblins pestering you throughout.

Any advice would be helpful, because at this rate my BBEG is going to have to have like 2000hp for him to be any amount challenging to the maguses, but then he just becomes an annoying grind for my other players.


BretI wrote:
Expect very spiky damage output. Sometimes the Magus will completely destroy an opponent in one round (spell strike with a critical can cause a LOT of damage), while if they get unlucky the damage will drop to almost insignificant (failing concentration checks and no crits) so be ready for it as a GM. Don't think "that was way too easy" when they get lucky.

Thanks. That guide answered a lot of questions I had especially about Spell Combat and Spellstrike used in sync.

And yea, spiky damage indeed...


ryric wrote:
Unless there is a magus archetype involved that changes this, all maguses get detect magic in their spell books. The player simply needs to change their prepared spells and they are good to go.

I'll point this out to them, but both of them showed me their spell books and they didn't have the spell. To their credit it looked like their spell list was generated off of some program so perhaps the program missed it. This is also my first game with Magus players so I'm still trying to get to know the class.

Thanks for the input everyone!


I did some brief research but none of what I found here explicitly answered the question I had about the abilities listed in the title.

I got in a rather long debate with a couple of my magus players when they tried to identify a magical aura cast upon a village making use of Knowledge (Arcana) without first utilizing Detect Magic in order to confirm the presence of a magical aura.

Since the villagers were acting strange my players contended that a Knowledge (Arcana) check would suffice for identifying the aura in place and I rebutted that they could only ever suspect there was a aura in place and would never actually know until Detect Magic was performed.
It boiled down to minutia in the definition of "Identify" meaning you needed to know it was there in order to identify it.

Since I had more or less made it obvious by contending the point so fervently that there was indeed a magical aura in effect I let it slide, but made it be known that from there on I would want Detect Magic cast to be able to identify an aura.

You might ask yourself, "why would they put up such a fuss to cast a cantrip?" Well, my genius magus players neglected to take Detect Magic as one of their cantrips...

Anyway, I guess at the end of the day all I want to know is if I am just in requiring Detect Magic in similar scenarios in the future.