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The current offerings have some balance issues that need to be fixed in future scenarios.One thing that needs future attention is the AP lengths. Currently they are many pages short of Pathfinder APs.
I imagine it's because SF is breaking ground, and only two core books are out. But I'm hoping that as splatbooks come out (like Pact Worlds in March) with more options that future APs lengthen into full pages.
To gain traction and to keep the draw of Starfinder, SF products will need to meet the PF AP standard, I think. I've really enjoyed SF so far, and hope for its success.
I’m going to have to disagree with you. If you take a PF AP and crop it down to only the Society sanctioned content, then they are comparable. I like that I get to play 100% of the books, completely sanctioned, without caveat. I hope they don’t change it and add all this new content that isn’t Society legal. I say keep the APs at 3 4-hour completely Society legal tables. They got this one right.
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I love both the Pathfinder line of products and the society specific material, but I do not want the standard line to limit itself to support only PFS specific material. That the APs are more encompassing is a reason why they are so successful. I think Starfinder AP could be the same, but not if they throttle the product to force it to work 100% within the limitations of SFS. If we have to have compatibility documents, so be it. I would rather the AP be completely free to explore anything and everything in the universe even if said material is not appropriate for SFS. One of the reasons I (and many people) play APs is to distance myself from the limitations of organize play.
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It's certainly a challenging balance to achieve.
On end of the spectrum, you have players who are limited to one weekly session of SF, Society or not. Those players, by virtue of how most play at venues is done, are limited to Society content. Being one of those players, it sucks when you get to live out a cool story like a book, but then get told sorry, we're only going to do the odd numbered chapters of the book. That's enough for you to get the gist.
As a 40hr/week employee who travels for work, a 12 semester hour college student and a "soccer dad" running his daughters to cheer, gymnastics, piano and 7 different therapists every week, I fit this category. I make 4 weekly games and 1 monthly game each month (which I mostly GM prep for) in the St. Louis stores. I fit into this category.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have some gamers with no significant other, no children and few extra-curricular activities who are able to play a home game and society game every week.
Most people are probably somewhere in-between. While I have no delusions that as a player limited to Society only play (also by virtue of the fact that there are few coworkers that I could even dare bring up my gaming hobby too while maintain some semblance of promotability) that I will get to experience every shred of SF content, I am grateful that it is far from Pathfinder's established norm of publishing content that will probably never see PFS (i.e. Strange Aeons) in any significant quantity.
I am grateful that I have the option of spending money supporting a system that supports content that all of it's players can enjoy, without dividing the player base into those who can and those who can't. So thank you , Paizo for providing me the opportunity to experience the Dead Suns AP without having to eliminate half or even a quarter of your content, just to be afforded the option to play it.
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Also I wanted to play the Adventure Path outside the context of Society Play. But with the current demand versus supply, people are consuming it as part of their Society Play.
^ this. 100 times, this. I was originally hoping to play in this AP with friends separately from society...but with somewhere between 18-24 local players interested in Starfinder (and us only being able run ~4 public tables a month given local FLGS scheduling at the moment), we may have to run the AP, which means I'll be spoiling it for myself when I start prepping to GM.
What we've done (Talen and I on Fantasy Grounds) is run SFS games and then run the AP with a different set of characters so people can just do as they please with their SFS character while waiting on their AP character to finish off the three sessions.
Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
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Also I wanted to play the Adventure Path outside the context of Society Play. But with the current demand versus supply, people are consuming it as part of their Society Play.^ this. 100 times, this. I was originally hoping to play in this AP with friends separately from society...but with somewhere between 18-24 local players interested in Starfinder (and us only being able run ~4 public tables a month given local FLGS scheduling at the moment), we may have to run the AP, which means I'll be spoiling it for myself when I start prepping to GM.
I play and run a fair bit of PFS and SFS public and private games, and I am currently playing and GMing the AP in campaign mode.
To be honest... I can't really suggest running the AP in SFS mode. If you play with a level 1 group, encounters towards the end can TPK them (not even mentioning the final encounter) and while a level 2 group might have decent chance (and even then I would suggest 5 players) the early part might be a bit boring for them.
Individual system mastery might have a part to play here.. but I would not feel forced to use the AP for SFS play.
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Please No. 2 SFS plus 2-3PFS a month is too much to keep up with.Honestly the exact opposite of this for me. I am really enjoying SFS, but have mostly stopped playing/running PFS. I just get no enjoyment from it anymore.
This is how I feel, I don't think the release of SFS should be throttled by the rate of PFS releases, because people who want to play both find it hard to keep up with.
I still play PFS, it's fine, but I'm far more interested in SFS and have never really kept up with every PFS scenario that comes out anyways. With the exception of seeker content, I haven't played PFS games in 4-5 months, just run them at my gamedays. But I am really loving SF and would not complain to have a couple of those games to sit down at a month around GMing.