Hi there. Starting an SF2e run through Abomination Vaults and planning to start in July with about one session per month. Unfortunately that probably means our first session will be before the release of the the Player Core. Curious how extensive the updates will be to the level 1 experience (since we'll only have one session before the Player Core comes out). Is it reasonable to assume that most of the basic mechanics for first level were pretty solid at the time of the playtest, or will there be so many changes that it just makes more sense to wait until August to start playing to avoid confusion at the table? Curious to hear what people think
I'd avoid having to remake your characters, personally - just wait until Core is out!
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Waiting is certainly the safer thing to do. However, if you are really excited about getting to start playing, you can simply plan to have a time when there will be a wash of temporal trans-dimensional power come from the Guantlight and have it be an opportunity for all the characters to rebuild themselves. You can then flavor it as a campaign level WitchWarper-like effect that affects the whole party. (and even potentially some of the NPCs)
If the players know that it is going to happen, they don't have to worry about it, and might even feel encouraged enough to lean into it and try out things they might not have tried, knowing they can in-story change if they decide to. I'd not limit them to making changes if the class changes in such a manner they can argue it is broken for them. Simply make it a free opportunity for the universe to change, and their characters to change in it.
I actually did the mystical sudden-refresh and advancement of level at this point in the Abomination Vaults we have been running. It didn't have a magic-rebuild option though as we didn't need it.
If you have a store around you running FreeRPGDay, the pregens for the Starfinder 2 adventure may provide some hints as to how much things will change (I say may because there's always the chance they're printed before all changes were finalized).
Waiting is certainly the safer thing to do. However, if you are really excited about getting to start playing, you can simply plan to have a time when there will be a wash of temporal trans-dimensional power come from the Guantlight and have it be an opportunity for all the characters to rebuild themselves. You can then flavor it as a campaign level WitchWarper-like effect that affects the whole party. (and even potentially some of the NPCs)
If the players know that it is going to happen, they don't have to worry about it, and might even feel encouraged enough to lean into it and try out things they might not have tried, knowing they can in-story change if they decide to. I'd not limit them to making changes if the class changes in such a manner they can argue it is broken for them. Simply make it a free opportunity for the universe to change, and their characters to change in it.
** spoiler omitted **
Well the way I'm planning to run it is allowing for rebuilds/regrouping between floors anyway. I'm not sure that all the players will be present for all of the sessions and I want to give everyone a chance to try out a lot of the options as we're running this as an introduction to Starfinder for our gaming community.
The ground floor is taking place on the swamp moon of Dagobahn't, and then when they find "stairs" these are actually computer banks with the coordinates of asteroids that have been launched at Absolom Station that need to be disabled ... each asteroid contains a floor of the dungeon. They'll travel between the asteroids on the Starship Otari, and a different "away team" can be present for each asteroid.
I think starting now is perfectly fine. I've been playing using the playtest rules on and off for months now! Even when playtest errata completely changed how class options worked, it wasn't really a problem.
I don't think the core mechanics of anything are going to change much, at least according to the blog post they made about playtest feedback. It seems like they're mostly going to just buff the weaker stuff.
As long as your players know "this is a playtest and the final release might change some stuff, so you might have to tweak your character exactly once in a couple of months", it'll be fine.
I would second this. The core game play rules are PF2e so are basically stable or with minor alterations that should not cause too many problems.
For some of the SF2e classes there may be some changes but I don't think it would require massive reworks of characters but maybe just let people have some downtime to do retraining if needed. As long as everybody is cool with that I don't see much reason waiting.