Palidian wrote:
Hello hello all!
When Starfinder came out, my friends group was rather excited to play. Most of us prefer fantasy, but we enjoy some good Sci-Fi and a space-themed Pathfinder game seemed like the perfect route to go! We asked the resident Sci-Fi fan to GM, and he took to it with relish. He put 10+ hours of work into each session, and the characters were fun and had good chemistry. However, as of yesterday we stopped playing and are planning the switch back over to a Pathfinder AP. I thought I would share some of the reasons we stopped, as almost all of them are actual issues we had with the game, for anyone who's interested.
1.) Customization
This is the big one, and by far the most jarring difference between Pathfinder and Starfinder. In PF, there are a staggering number of options that help players tailor their character and gameplay to exactly what they have in mind. I realize that PF has been out much longer and has tons of material added later, however we found that it seemed like even the PF core rulebook just had more stuff in it. Starting off in vanilla PF, there are 11 classes to choose from, each with its own unique abilities. In SF, there are 7 classes. This trend continued throughout SF, with a shorter spell list, a replacement of archetypes with "themes" that offer little in the way of actual use and are more or less simple flavor. My group grew frustrated with the simple lack of choices to pick from.
2.) Mechanics
In SF, my group found that mechanics seemed to often fall into one of two categories: confusing or arbitrary. Many rules were written in strange ways that required several minutes of cross-referencing to figure out; for example, reading that grenades are thrown weapons, but they do not have the "thrown" special property, meaning that the section on "thrown weapons" does not apply to them but the section on "thrown ranged attacks" does. We got confused and cross-eyed many times trying to figure out simple things, and we are all experienced in PF, so we're no strangers to...
I noticed quite a few things wrong with this, like you saying that there's no archetypes... There are still archetypes... though not really lacklustre they're still there, and Themes replace traits not archetypes.
You're complaining about customisation? True it has less customisation than Pathfinder but Pathfinder has been out for at least a decade and has hundreds of books while Starfinder has been out for 6 months and has 2 books so of course Pathfinder has more customisation. Though the classes in Starfinder has much more customisation than classes in Pathfinder.
I've notcied alot of your complaints is that you dislike the fact that Starfinder is not Pathfinder in space and you lack the ability to grasp that they're two different games not the same game. An example is the thrown weapon complaint, of course it's not going to be the same as in Pathfinder as it is two seperate games, sure the two games share alot of similarities but they're still separate games.
My last rebutal is about resource tracking, in all honesty I've done more resource tracking in Pathfinder than Starfinder because in Pathfinder you're going to have a few wands, if you're a Ranger you're going to have at least a couple different types of arrows, if you're a Gunslinger you'll have many different types of bullets and then you have black powder and alchemical cartridges and that's just to name a couple of builds. In Starfinder there isn't that much resource tracking because of rechargeable batteries which makes resource tracking a whole lot easier.
I respect that you may not like Starfinder and prefer Pathfinder, but I had to point many flaws in your arguments. Make it easier on yourself and before complaining understand your complaints to be able to correctly defend your postition.
Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 11 posts (14 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 36 Organized Play characters. 1 alias. 