So many DC's... Help a 5e convert

[CDBAILEY]

So having never played Pathfinder and being strictly a 5e guy (boo! Hiss!) I'm a little perplexed about the skill DC's presented in Starfinder.

As a GM am I really expected to remember what the DC is for a character who's attempting an acrobatics check to balance on a 6 inch beam whilst in windy conditions? Am I meant to commit to memory what the formula for working out the DC for a PC to use an acrobatics check to bypass taking an attack of opportunity on a threatened square is?

Coming from 5e I'm beginning to feel like they'll never be a time where I don't have the rulebook open, marked with sticky tabs on dozens of pages. Is this normal?

5e leaves much of these DC's to the DM to decide, whereas Starfinder has hard coded rules and maths for everything. Surely I'm okay to just streamline much of this procedure by determining DC's using my own initiative, right?

[SirShua]

Yep, all the rules can be tweaked as you see fit. You don't have to memorize the dc modifiers, and if you think there should be one, adding +2 or +4 to the dc works.

[Joe Jungers]

Honestly, for most of the situations where a PC is attempting a task, my presumption is that the player will have the formula/data needed to do their task. That being said, there are time where I'll need that info for the opposition, so I usually look up the info during my session prep in those cases.

For those niche situations (like the one you described above), that's when I turn to the charts - so that I don't have to have that factoid memorized.

As to needing to 'know all the formulas', that's something that comes with time & system experience.

[CDBAILEY]

I figured as much with the flexibility, I'm just prepping our first proper session (we played Into the Unknown as a taster) and suddenly felt very overwhelmed! I just know some systems have very rigid maths so I didn't want to start messing with things that were going to be hugely detrimental later on.

[LankyOgre]

One benefit is to remember is that by having them all in the book, players and GM's can talk about them. I 5e it's not entirely unlikely that the GM will just pull the DC out of a hat and the same action may be a DC 15 one session and then a DC 12 or 17 the next. This makes it very difficult for the players to make logical choices about their actions. Being given a lot of DC's helps clarify expectations. You as the GM are still allowed to add or subtract a bit from the DC, but now you don't have to remember, "did I say DC 12 last time? Or was it 16?"

[pithica42]

What LankyOgre said.

My experience with systems that leave things like this "up to the DM" has always been that everything is completely inconsistent. This is true whether you're playing with multiple DM's or a single one. That lack of consistency can lead to a sense that the game sometimes feels unfair, especially with inexperienced DMs or DMs with agendas (like the ones that want their story to work exactly as planned and will fudge the numbers whenever needed to make it work).

Getting familiar with an SRD helps, a lot, since they're searchable, and generally arranged in a self-referential manner. Some people find DM screens helpful (they often have charts of the most common DC's). There's also some pretty straightforward guidelines on how difficult things should be for a given task in a fair contest (assume moderately difficult tasks for an average ability character should be about 50/50, easy tasks (or more skilled characters) less difficult, hard more). Eventually though, you'll remember the ones that come up most often.

[Metaphysician]

Also, this is one of the things the DM Screen is for: charts of common skill uses and their DCs.

[The Ragi]

These will probably help you:

Starfinder GM Screen

Starfinder Condition Cards

And you can usually look these details ahead of time, unless you have some crazy creative players. In this case, they should look such details ahead of time, help out a little as well.