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By that, I mean outside of reprinting "pocket editions" or something, there will be no new main books for first edition?
Generally happy for the community with it being rather happy with the eventual jump to 2nd Edition, but for me, that is of no interest at the current time. Just wondering if I need to keep an eye open for another book or if I call the game "finished" at this point (will still be playing).
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There's no more rule books, Starfinder Enhanced was the last.
Mechageddon! AP and SFS modules are still forthcoming on the adventure side for SF1.
I think we're down to the aps and the comics as the source of official rules at this point.
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I posit that a better way to look at it is not "at its end", but rather "complete". Like the version of SF1 that contains All The Things is pretty much by nature the best version of SF1, right?
If you're excited by the possibilities of SF2, then that's great, but if you like SF1 and don't want to switch, there's absolutely nothing saying that you have to... especially if, say, you want to play a mech campaign.
It's going to be a while before SF2 gets built out to anything like the level that SF1 is currently.
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Player base is likely to shrink (a lot), which will be the main issue going forward with the system.
Player base is likely to shrink (a lot), which will be the main issue going forward with the system.
That's going to depend a fair bit.
- If your primary source of fellow players is your personal group of friends or your local gaming subculture? Whether there is shrinkage or not is going to depend on you all specifically.
- If your primary exposure is the local organized play group? Well, you're likely to see some shrinkage, yes, but not immediately, and it'll probably hang on for a while yet.
- If your primary exposure is via online play, there's going to be enough of a persistent community to keep you all going for a good while. All you have to do is find each other.
Just for a bit of potentially useful perspective... the PF1 boards on this site still have a fair amount of chatter on them, and the Online Campaigns Recruitment board looks like it's got a healthy contingent of PF1 as well.
So... will it mean that the SF1 community shrinks a bit as people shift over to SF2? Yes. It does. That doesn't have to mean that any given person or group of people needs to make the switch if they don't want to, though
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Either way people tend to stop playing when the system stops publishing, so its likely the end of the starfinder games since you need people to play with. I think i've played ONE PFS1 game since it went kaput. The problems I have with pf2 are bones deep in the system so I don't see starfinder changing that.
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Another reason why SF1e might hang on longer too, is there were lots of new players that got into the game after the OLG mess, many are from 5e that may have chosen Starfinder over Pathfinder2e. There's a good chance many of them are not going to want to switch systems again anytime soon, and being new to Starfinder there are years worth of content available to them now. Also, DnD players tend to homebrew more, and use more 3rd party content, which could help keep SF1e going for years.
One problem I see is that a lot of people play Starfinder through organized play. That gets hard over time if their no new scenarios coming out.
One way around that is if the player base made its own standards for unofficial organized play that allowed GM to homebrew scenarios. One idea for this is that each GM would be responsible for making up their own organization that would give out missions, and that missions can't mess with the bigger setting. If you want to blow up a planet in a scenario then the GM would have to make up a new planet and not use a published one. That way GMs would be free to make their own scenarios without messing up each other's people's scenarios.
In Magic the Gathering some players made up the commander format and that ended up being the most played format. So anything is possible, and with Starfinder Infinite we already have a platform to make something like this happen.
Though Paizo will stop publishing new material for Starfinder (1st Edition) when Starfinder 2nd Edition comes out in 2025, the current Starfinder will remain more popular for a few years. Because that is what happened with Pathfinder.
Roll20 used to release statistics on how many games of each type were played on it. The most recent report I can find is The Orr Report Q3 2021, covering exactly two years after Pathfinder 2nd Edition was released in August 2010. It states that Pathfinder 1st Edition was 3.2% of its games with character sheets, Pathfinder 2nd Edition was 1.4% of its games with character sheets, and Starfinder was 0.6% of its games with character sheets. That might have a residual effect to it, because I still store my old Roll20 campaigns on their server with no indication that they are inactive.
For anecdotal evidence, I currently run a Starfinder mini-campaign using the Skitter Shot line of Free RPG Day Starfinder modules and a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign using Battlezoo's Jewel of the Indigo Isles adventure path. Two of the players in my Starfinder game, my wife and our younger daughter, are also playing a PF1 Tyrant's Grasp campaign. Another player in my Starfinder game is running a PF2 Outlaws of Alkenstar campaign. That represents 4 systems--D&D 5E, PF1, PF2, and Starfinder--all actively played among my friends and family.
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I'm trying to not weigh in on SF2 discussion because, well, I want to be generally positive, but I'll say this. As someone who just isn't interested in the PF2/SF2 ruleset but is interested in the SF setting, I plan to keep up with the game line once it transitions.
The twofold truth of the matter is that SF's creature and encounter design is streamlined enough that converting SF2 adventures to SF1 will likely be relatively painless (I say this as someone who converted all of Legacy of Fire from 3.5 to PF1 to run it.), and it's going to take SF2 a good long while to branch off in directions that SF1 hasn't covered. So my hope is to keep on trucking in the 2E era, converting adventures. Heck, I'd even ponder putting adventure conversion guides on Infinite, but I think I'd slam into a hard OGL/ORC wall there.
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As somebody who started playing AD&D, it didn't seem that way to me. The rules were stable for a long time with barely any new books but adventures kept churning out for years and years. AD&D 2nd Edition was kind of a flop. There's always that risk when introducing a new version of a game. Sometimes the players just like the old game better.Paizo's got to be planning for that. How do they get players interested enough to reinvest in a new set of rules?
AD&D2 was deliberately designed to be mostly compatible with AD&D1: Creating a new edition was somewhat controversial at the time, and I believe TSR only did it after Gary Gygax was pushed out and could no longer stop it, so they decided to stress compatibility over actually fixing the counterintuitive 'lower numbers are better' game mechanics they had inherited from the earliest incarnations of the game.
You could probably argue that AD&D2 was more of a 'half edition' as it is feels much closer to 'D&D3.0 to D&D3.5' level of change than 'AD&D2 to D&D3' or 'D&D3.5 to D&D4' levels of change.
As for Paizo's plan, their hand is basically being forced by the recent 'I am altering the licensing agreement: Pray I do not alter it any further...' rumblings from WotC that, while at least temporarily retracted, put Paizo in a position where they have to either revamp their games to such a degree that any lawsuit from Hasbro/WotC would be laughed out of court really quickly or run the risk of a protracted lawsuit bankrupting them before a favorable decision could be reached.
Don't get me wrong: A new edition of Starfinder was probably going to come anyway, but recent events have probably pushed it up a year or two.
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Heck. From what I can recall, the author's foreword on 2nd edition straight-up said "We made this thing by going around to cons and finding all of the house rules in 1st edition that people were already using, and then incorporating them together in a coherent whole."
Also... I'm not sure I believe the spiel that 2nd edition was a flop. From what I saw, it sold a whole mess of books. The Complete X for just about every X you could think of, and the various setting books and... it sold a lot of books.
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Nearly 20 books and over 50 adventures (plus years of Organized Play) feels like a really, really good run for SF1.
My home group plans to jump on the SF2 playtest bandwagon to try out the new rules, but I will also be running the recently released Scoured Stars Adventure Path for them as well. (A couple of them have played most of the original adventures, but not in any kind of sensible order.) And I'll be playing and running SFS 1E scenarios at cons for at least a couple more years. And debuting at least one more new 1E SFS character, because I had an idea for someone to make use of the new SFS GM boon.