Bounty Hunter Campaign

[EltonJ]

I've been running a bounty hunter campaign. Basically the group is traveling all over the Bahamut sector looking for bounties. The Bahamut Sector is a homebrewed campaign so far.

Anyhow, the group is level three, and in our last scene, the engineer managed to hack the environmental controls of a bunker on top of a glacier. He made it so that it would be too hot and oxygen reduced. The people of Stampede surrendered without a shot fired. Should I award full xp to the group for such inventiveness?

[Hmm]

Absolutely.

Anytime they come up with a clever solution like that, you should absolutely reward it. It makes the group feel like they accomplished something, and it allows them to explore different kinds of stories with you!

Hmm

[Ascalaphus]

The general rule for XP is that you earn XP for overcoming the problem (trap, monster in your way, BBEG princess holding dragon hostage). So yeah, they overcame several encounters in one fell swoop.

What your players are doing is demonstrating a different approach to adventuring than the orthodox 3.x paradigm. They're less interesting in headbutting their way through every encounter, and more focused on the main goal of the adventure. I point out 3.x because this was also a thing in 1st/2nd edition D&D games, where healing capability was considerably lower and it made sense to avoid some fights to focus on the main prize.

Starfinder lends itself well to a style of adventuring you can call [i]heists[i]: analyze what the goal of the adventure is, figure out how it's defended, and how to get at it and get away again. Avoiding some or all of the fights is generally desirable.

Starfinder lends itself well to it because you have some things at easy disposal that you don't have so much in Pathfinder:

* Long range communication, enabling the party to split up and keep working together, consult allies, negotiate with enemies, try to trick people into betraying secrets (phishing for the bunker password) etc.

* Starships, allowing fast flight away after a mission.

* Starship weaponry aimed at the ground. The CRB says you're not supposed to do that, but that should be taken with a grain of salt. Players can absolutely try it (there's no physical reason not to); but it can make a challenging fight very easy. So if you want there to be challenging fights, you need as a GM to make sure not every problem is suitable to solve with orbital bombardment. This can be done in many ways: air traffic control won't let the PC's ship get close or will respond harshly if they fire weapons at targets on an inhabited planet; the PCs don't know beforehand where the enemies are; the players don't know there are enemies to begin with; bombardment would cause collateral damage; the target is in a deep bunker; bombardment would ruin a stealthy approach. All that said, sometimes a bombardment can be the perfect distraction for someone to sneak out of a place.

* Hacking.

* Divination and mind control spells.

----

Designing for a heist style campaign is a bit different from classic dungeoncrawling. Because the party doesn't intend to face encounters unless they have to (fights are noisy and dangerous), you can and should actually put more enemies in, that aren't all intended to be fought. Design a standard guard patrol and deploy a dozen patrol units. It's up to the PCs to figure out how to slip past them (gap in rotation, illusion, stealth, tranquilizer dart before they raise the alarm) because there are too many to fight all of them.

There's a good article about how to GM heist style adventures in Ultimate Intrigue. I strongly recommend it.

[Metaphysician]

I generally favor giving full rewards for any solution that is done via peaceful ( or "peaceful" ) means. One shouldn't discourage solving problems via means other than violence.

The only exception is if the "solution" they followed is clearly and obviously far easier than the combat encounter would have been. If the enemy forces are CR 10, while hacking their computer is only a CR 5 challenge and fully defeats them? Probably should not give the full CR 10 awards. Of course, if I'm doing my job correctly, I should have designed the adventure around that CR 5 option ( and perhaps others ), with the CR 10 fight being something the PCs are *not* supposed to attempt.

["Dr." Cupi]

I agree with all of the above. As a player, one of the most frustrating things a GM can do is shut me down for getting creative. Getting creative is one of the reasons I play tabletops instead of video games. Plus, with how modular Starfinder is, what is the harm in them getting xp at any point? You can always just bring encounters to their level fairly easily.

If you want to 'tunnel' them, you might look into raising the CR of other options. That way, if they choose another 'simpler' option, they will at least have to work harder in some way. Also, if your group begins relying too heavily on computer hacking, you can just give the main computer an air gap security (meaning, it can't be accessed except physically). A good example is in SFS scenario 1-06.