[Starfinder] Teaching the Game. What are the “best practices”?


Advice

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My playing group is made up of veteran Pathfinder Players, but we want to get into Starfinder. (I’ll be the GM.)
This is the same group from this thread, and we are finally getting around to playing.

What have people found to be the best methods to introduce new players to the Starfinder game?

For example:

  • Does making them go through character creation help understand the game? Or would giving them a “pregenerated character” be a better approach? Are the Paizo pre-gens worth using?
  • Should I make “equipment” kits for each character class and make those available to the PCs?
  • Is Into The Unknown a good introduction? I hear it has a rather nasty creature in part 4. (The ship the PCs are given in Part 5 seems a little difficult to fly) Is there a better choice?
Note: Since we would not be playing this for "credit", I can make changes to whatever scenario I would use.


You know your prayers better than anyone dispensing advice, so take it all with a grain of salt.

Character Generation is always a fun exercise, and helps prayers get engaged in both the background and rules - so yes to that.

Likewise, letting them sort out their own equipment can be a good exploration - so no there.

How deep do you want to drive on your first game? Pick an adventure of appropriate length whose theme you feel would resonate with your players.


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Takeaways from my own experience and discussions on these and other forums:

0 - Have a Session Zero and make it clear what kind of Space Adventure everybody wants, using reference to popular media everyone is familiar with if possible. Actual-play podcasts can be a useful reference, too.
(My group identified Cowboy Bebop and Firefly as thematic touchstones. A group I'm a PC in uses "in the style of the Glass Cannon Podcast" as a guide.) Also make it clear what you want from the table as a GM: do expect everyone to take their tactical and teamwork responsibilities seriously? Is roleplay Job One? Is the tone of your game comical and zany, or cosmic horror or both? Etc.

0.1 - If some specific part of your group is expecting Pathfinder-in-space, make sure they clearly understand the differences between the rulesets and get them familiar with the tactical-rule-changes cheat sheet early. Also make sure they understand there are genre differences between the two systems; Starfinder characters come equipped for scenarios not native to the PF dungeon crawl and the game economy is not set up for looting enemy corpses and reselling their stuff back in town for half its value. These differences are because it's a science fantasy game and PF has basic assumptions that aren't on-brand for that.

0.1.1 - If someone at your table wants to play a Jedi, make sure they understand that Solarians are not Jedi. (Either that or consider adopting one of the homebrews that reskins Solarians to be more like Jedi.) If they're going to be pining to play a "full caster" who never has to use a gun, make sure they understand that this is not how casters in SF are presently set up.

1 - Whatever scenario you decide to run, try to customize it as much as possible to your Session Zero and to the characters people come up with. Starfinder has fewer classes but, arguably, a wider palette of character concepts than Pathfinder; and Themes and Professions will have different impacts on different players, with some people really wanting to lean into them for roleplay purposes and feeling frustrated if they're given nothing to do. So for example, if running "Into the Unknown," make sure you work in some opportunities for your group's Icon to do their thing.

1.1 - Personally I think letting the characters earn and customise their own ship is part of the fun, and I wouldn't use one of the Starfinder Society generics, but that's me.

2 - Don't be afraid to lean into mechanics like the Vehicle Chase rules and use them to build scenes you wouldn't encounter in a Pathfinder AP.

2.1 - Take your time and make sure everyone fully understands what's going on during your first use of Starship Combat. The ruleset is elegant but counter-intuitive for a lot of people. It's probably a good idea to make sure you're doing Starship Combat someplace that has an interesting setup -- a ship's graveyard, an asteroid field, dodging around a space station, hunting through a nebula -- so that it's not just two ships slugging it out in open space.

3 - Like Schoon says, take all the above with a grain of salt. Ultimately everything should flow from what you know about your players.

Have fun!


The Paizo pregens are great. They're probably better than most player's first character they would make. In my limited experience, first-time players often forget about the starship combat when making a character, and find out that they are not very useful. The solarian and mystic pre-gens are not very useful in starship combat.

For starship combat, the following are the skills you need ranked in order of importance:
Piloting, BAB/Dex combo (for gunners), Engineering, Computers (Science Officer), Diplomacy (captain), Intimidate(captain).

So make sure to educate the players that this is an important subsystem. Starship combat is much tougher than tactical combat, and you are much more likely to "die" this way because the resolve system makes players a bit tougher.

Into the Unknown is not as easy of a series of quests as its Pathfinder counterparts (typically can laugh your way to success in those). I recommend having the skreebara flee after a certain amount of HP rather than a fight to the death if you aren't giving credit.

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CeeJay wrote:
0.1 - If some specific part of your group is expecting Pathfinder-in-space, make sure they clearly understand the differences between the rulesets and get them familiar with the tactical-rule-changes cheat sheet early. Also make sure they understand there are genre differences between the two systems; Starfinder characters come equipped for scenarios not native to the PF dungeon crawl and the game economy is not set up for looting enemy corpses and reselling their stuff back in town for half its value. These differences are because it's a science fantasy game and PF has basic assumptions that aren't on-brand for that.

This is actually my biggest single concern with my group.

Joshua James Jordan wrote:
I recommend having the skreebara flee after a certain amount of HP rather than a fight to the death if you aren't giving credit.

Actually, this is also a more accurate model of animal behavior. I would still give credit in this scenario, as the PCs still defeated the creature.


Lord Fyre wrote:
This is actually my biggest single concern with my group.

I can totally see why. And I don't have a lot of direct-experience advice to offer about this; I'm running on virtual table top with players I auditioned and who were pre-filtered by a concept document, so it's a lot easier for me to nip this in the bud.

But I do know me some old-school D&D 3.5 nerds and I have some thoughts about how I'd get them in a Starfinder mindset.

I think what I'd probably do, before even getting to Session Zero, is just have an old-school viewing party. The kind where you get a bunch of friends together, have some beers and nachos and just watch some sci-fi s@*!. Maybe play some of whatever flavour of space opera you're into, be it Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, Farscape, Blake's Seven, Dark Matter, whatever.

Let them soak it up and get in the conceptual headspace. I feel like once you've done that, and gotten everybody into the groove of the kind of adventures you want to see at the table, a lot of the Pathfinder-veteran munchkin-isms and obsessive "what's my character's DPR relative to a Soldier" stuff will sort itself out.

(This is easier yet if you run an RP-heavy campaign where you can lay down as law that A Consistent Roleplaying Character Concept Comes First. But of course that imposes a lot of work on the GM: you have to be comfortable improvising characters and scenarios. Still, even if you're not that kind of GM, which is totally fine, I think you'll find it helps to filter out some of the more obvious stuff.)

Of course no strategy will filter all of the b%!@+~@+ out. Even in my situation, I still had a munchkin show up at my table who had mainlined online discussion threads about how Solarians were walking corpses if they didn't dip a level in Blitz soldier and you should probably get the GM to homebrew rules where you can switch between Armor and Weapon solarian at will or use them both at once. A lot easier to kick those people in my situation; if it's someone you've been gaming with for 25 years it would be way harder. In that case I guess you'd have to go a bit hard-sell, but for all but the most rigid and obsessive power-gamerss it should still be doable.

Hope that's of some help.


CeeJay wrote:
But I do know me some old-school D&D 3.5 nerds and I have some thoughts about how I'd get them in a Starfinder mindset.

3.5 is "old-school" now? Damn I feel old. I mean, I didn't start until well into 2nd ed, but I have friends my age that played original D&D and Advanced.


My first game was Ye Olde Basic Red Book. :) It's all relative.

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