Our little gaming group here in the desert of eastern New Mexico started playing Pathfinder APs regularly since February of 2016, though many of us are older gamers that have played RPGs since the early 80s. We have yet to finish an Adventure Path, but we're trying hard! Our very first foray into Pathfinder was a homebrew campaign that went Mythic and then completed around February of 2017.
After doing half of Hell's Rebels (a player retired) and half of Hell's Vengeance (the GM retired) and the first book and a half of Kingmaker (same retired GM from Kingmaker) we have reached book 5 of ongoing Curse of the Crimson Throne, book 2 of ongoing Strange Aeons and this last weekend we started...
Dead Suns!
Apparently I feel that I need to GM at least three times a week to really be fulfilled. So far, so good!
Since Starfinder is so new, I thought someone might enjoy seeing our progress and experience. I also find that journaling sessions helps me to remember important details, etc, down the road - so I'm killing multiple birds here. Die birds, die!
We had our Session 0 about a week ago. We discussed how the rulesets and character creation were different and then rolled up characters mostly together. One of the players was out sick, and a couple of our Pathfinder players expressed zero interest in the setting so our Session 0 had three present players and myself as GM.
Player 1 - let's call him Space Lancelot, or Lance for short, is our tactical genius. He's always playing the mechanics game during combats and really loves to work the system. He often offers advice to the other players at the table, but is pretty good about not trying to run their character for them or be too bossy.
Lance is currently interested in playing every 'type' of different character, regardless of tactical strength (he realized toward the end of our Mythic campaign that challenge is more fun than power for him) so he chose...
A Lashunta (Damaya) Technomancer Spacefarer.
If you're impression of Lance is that he's a bit of a power gamer and a bit of a rules lawyer, you are not wrong. He does a good job of avoiding the negative aspects of those labels most of the time, though, and as a GM I really really appreciate his contribution to the group. Often that contribution is keeping the player characters from getting their asses ripped out by the bad guys. In the case of our first Starfinder session, I was very pleasantly surprised at some of his choices.
Lance was a little annoyed that his 12 Charisma wasn't going to help him as a Technomancer much, and asked if he could use the Quick Pick attributes to skate around that. We took a vote anonymously and it was decided we would stick with standard options for now.
Space Gawain is our youngest player, having just entered High School. He and his mother comprise half of our Curse of the Crimson Throne group on Saturdays. Gawain is an interesting young man. He often enjoys just being an audience member along for the ride and does engage that often in the game portion of the game, but every now and then, after the party may have been wracking their brains or pounding their heads against the wall - or maybe just completely at random he will say something like:
"Wouldn't it be funny of actually the Plague Doctors were a cult of undead worshippers working for the Queen that we just met and actually she's the bad guy?"
Gawain loves SciFi and has been looking forward to Starfinder very much (he has been working on his own setting for a while now.) He decided to make a Ysoki Mechanic Outlaw with a hover drone.
Space Kaye just likes playing is probably the most well-rounded of the players in terms of which activities excite him. He's a big Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars fan. He rolled a Vesk Soldier Mercenary, though he was torn between that and the Solarian. I think I may have talked him out of the Solarian by telling him that they were a bit underpowered in the early levels according to semi-popular wisdom.
And last we have the player I will call Space Tristan. Tristan is my daughter. Her usual characters are slightly off center. She enjoys dwarven barbarians, witches, tieflings and long walks on an eldritch beach under the pale eye of whatever moon can bear to stand the site of mortality and madness. In Starfinder she decided to play a Shirren Mystic Xenoseeker with a connection to Hylax (though it was close between Hylax and other dieties, once she chose the Forever Queen she got really involved with it.)
I rolled up an Android Solarian to play alongside them in case we were short a person, but our Vesk Soldier made his way along eventually and we had a full four for the first session.
