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Regardless of the hysterical nature of the Thread title, having a pretty solid critique of the PFS/dragonkin ancestry inclusion is the perfect way to help Paizo understand possible errors or problems.
I don’t think using words like scolded or chastised are merited every time a forum poster decides there is a problem mechanic.
If the devs are reading the forums, and this thread in particular, they’ll now know that there is a subset of folks, however small, that think the “Dragonkin Affair”is problematic for PF2R, and that it should be looked at carefully moving forward; and that it might not be a bad idea to expand on the “advice” given for “compatibility” in a useful “conversion” document, either as a PDF or some other form. Not bad ideas, and seemingly an attempt to forestall, or futureproof the game/s we love.
Also, there is definitely a group, however small, that are*done* with encumbrance, bulk, weight etc, and if a new edition occurs (*shock* *horror*) then some of these functions, mostly removed from….ahem…some other, newer, flashier kids on the block, might be viewed as not only vestigial, but anathematic to cinematic, narrative storytelling.
I get the concern, it would be bad if PF2 started printing ancestries with flight at level 1, but the fear being generated in this thread is about way more than that.
It seems like some of the fear is that society folks made a mistake and didn't realize that letting such ancestries count for the special boon broke with SF guidance. It was a curated list. I think they knew what they were doing. They are trying to generate hype for Starfinder. Having some special ancestries that will get other society players asking questions the rare time they see one was probably a goal. It is very likely this conversation generates attention for Starfinder.
I think there is a lot of interest from players for breaking the expectations of play by mashing up PF2 and SF2. Allowing SF2 content in a PF2 game from the beginning feels like the GM is choosing to go with that. Starfinder is a Sci-fantasy game. If those are not elements you want in your game, why would you allow it? If you do want those elements, it is probably a good idea to at least read the GM advice on AoN first. If you do, you will be prepared to decide what to allow and how it will affect your game.
I think the secondary fear here is that society has basically made this call for itself in a way that some players didn't want, but it is very limited in scope, hence why the fact that it is a one time deal (for now) is relevant to the overall conversation. Conversations about whether they should do special events with SF2 boons in the future feel much more like a society question that a PF2 question.
Lastly some people seem to feel like the existence of SF2 somehow forces all of this on PF2 and that is just not true. I imagine we will be getting a follow up AP to Iron Gods in the next few years, James Jacobs has been hinting at wanting to do that for a very long time. That AP will very likely include content that throws a ton of Sci-Fantasy into PF2 but it will all be rarity locked, probably rare and possibly even unique. The game was designed from the beginning to allow this kind of modularity without disrupting core game play.
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Part of what makes me think this is a society issue is that it's trivially easy to keep people from bringing flying ancestries from SF2 into PF2 games- as a GM you say "no." It's easy to keep options from one system out of the other system, whether it's for flavor, or balance, or whatever.
But as Unicore points out this is a limited problem since they probably won't let you do this again, or at least shouldn't. What I'm concerned about is the problems from "bringing a flying ancestry from Starfinder to Pathfinder" are going to make people less likely to cross-pollinate with the fun stuff that works well.
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I get the concern, it would be bad if PF2 started printing ancestries with flight at level 1, but the fear being generated in this thread is about way more than that.
It seems like some of the fear is that society folks made a mistake and didn't realize that letting such ancestries count for the special boon broke with SF guidance. It was a curated list. I think they knew what they were doing. They are trying to generate hype for Starfinder. Having some special ancestries that will get other society players asking questions the rare time they see one was probably a goal. It is very likely this conversation generates attention for Starfinder.
I think there is a lot of interest from players for breaking the expectations of play by mashing up PF2 and SF2. Allowing SF2 content in a PF2 game from the beginning feels like the GM is choosing to go with that. Starfinder is a Sci-fantasy game. If those are not elements you want in your game, why would you allow it? If you do want those elements, it is probably a good idea to at least read the GM advice on AoN first. If you do, you will be prepared to decide what to allow and how it will affect your game.
I think the secondary fear here is that society has basically made this call for itself in a way that some players didn't want, but it is very limited in scope, hence why the fact that it is a one time deal (for now) is relevant to the overall conversation. Conversations about whether they should do special events with SF2 boons in the future feel much more like a society question that a PF2 question.
Lastly some people seem to feel like the existence of SF2 somehow forces all of this on PF2 and that is just not true. I imagine we will be getting a follow up AP to Iron Gods in the next few years, James Jacobs has been hinting at wanting to do that for a very long time. That AP will very likely include content that throws a ton of Sci-Fantasy into PF2 but it will all be rarity locked, probably rare and possibly even unique. The game was designed from the...
This is a complete mischaracterization of the actual concerns that have been raised in this thread. For my part, my "fear" is that Paizo has not done enough to establish what differences in balance and design exist between Pathfinder and Starfinder, such that tables choosing to port content from one system to the other are likely to end up with significant and unwanted disruptions to their gameplay, especially if they follow the example set by PFS. Judging by this thread's page alone, I don't appear to be the only one to have this sentiment. I believe Paizo could do with a more specific list of things to watch out for with more specific instructions for how to adjust for one system or the other, which a conversion guide would address neatly without requiring a great deal of work.
Really, I'm not understanding this obsession with Society or this insinuation that anyone is claiming people are being forced to port content across systems: the problem in my opinion specifically stems from when people want to port content but are unaware of the pitfalls or how to fix them. We've talked about flight at level 1, but as mentioned before, porting the Nephilim ancestry to Starfinder is similarly dangerous because the Nephilim Resistance feat can let you take zero damage from a great deal many ranged weapons, and this same problem applies to many other kinds of energy resistance effects that are balanced around the higher damage of melee attacks in Pathfinder. This is not mentioned at all in Starfinder's GM Core, much less in any Pathfinder rulebook. I can understand not caring about a conversion guide or not particularly agreeing with criticisms of the systems' compatibility, but I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would devote this much time and effort to try to invalidate the constructive feedback of other people and vilify them for it.
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Bulk specifically exists to simplify exactly that compared to the terrible old days of lbs, and I use it at my table. Notably, the way it's calculated, you only need about 20 things for it to matter on characters for which it'll matter (the smallest bulk is 1/10 and most people will have things with real bulk). The thing that comes up most often are low Str people (usually casters) wearing medium armour and trying to have a pile of consumables in easy reach. Trying to find the line for those guys is not easy without bulk!
For certain definitions of "simplify". You get smaller numbers but you also get a ton of edge cases, confusion with size differences, and bizarre outcomes.
With weight, we never had problems like "10 shortswords are 1 bulk, until you put them on the Centaur player, and now they're negligible bulk and thus the system just stops counting them." At that point the GM has to impose an arbitrary limit anyway because the bulk rules just shrug and go "I dunno".
Bulk takes the problem of "you have add up a bunch of numbers and the total can get to 3 digits" and replaces it with "you have to add up a bunch of numbers except the decimals don't work like you expect, the numbers are extremely arbitrary and hard to estimate on the fly, and the whole system becomes extremely confusing once large or tiny PCs are involved."
Once you're outside of the absolute most common scenario, this is not simpler at all.
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Really, I'm not understanding this obsession with Society
That's because Society is the only place where a GM can be forced to have to deal with it. PFS GMs don't get to say "no" the way everyone else does.
Which is generally the best fix for this. The systems are mechanically compatible, but the baseline assumptions of how things work aren't the same and that means bringing anything over without checking it carefully first is a dangerous idea. And that's where I agree with you: the guidance for doing that is lacking.
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That's because Society is the only place where a GM can be forced to have to deal with it. PFS GMs don't get to say "no" the way everyone else does.
Which is generally the best fix for this. The systems are mechanically compatible, but the baseline assumptions of how things work aren't the same and that means bringing anything over without checking it carefully first is a dangerous idea. And that's where I agree with you: the guidance for doing that is lacking.
While I agree that GMs are obligated to accept player character choices in Society, I still don't think this paints the complete picture, because behind this is the assumption that it's always the player requesting some broken option to a wary GM. It can and often very well will be the GM themselves who will want to port not only character options, but also monsters and other elements from one system to the other, and because they both use 2e and 2e generally assures us that everything will work right out the box, they might not think to adjust across systems, particularly as I think some of the incompatibilities are so subtle that not even Paizo caught them immediately.
For example, in one of the Starfinder playtest adventures we received, encounters were chock-full of constructs and machines with Pathfinder-grade resistances (the adventure in fact featured many monsters lifted directly from Pathfinder): these resistances were so high relative to the party's much lesser gun damage that it was almost impossible to damage them, which massively drove up the difficulty of those encounters. To my knowledge, this isn't really acknowledged anywhere in any official rulebook, which means that if a GM were to throw in, say, an animated armor into a Starfinder game, that armor would be difficult way beyond its indicated level, and so in a way the GM wouldn't necessarily be able to anticipate unless they had a profound understanding of both systems and the awareness to catch this kind of issue. It's therefore not just an issue with player options trivializing challenges, though that is certainly a problem as demonstrated by OP's example; it's also a problem of GMs porting content across systems, running that content RAW by all other measures, and ending up creating dramatically imbalanced challenges as a result. In all cases, I do think this all points to the same thing that we agree upon: we could do with fuller guidance on porting content across systems, and both ways too, and some kind of conversion guide would really help with that.
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This is a complete mischaracterization of the actual concerns that have been raised in this thread. For my part, my "fear" is that Paizo has not done enough to establish what differences in balance and design exist between Pathfinder and Starfinder, such that tables choosing to port content from one system to the other are likely to end up with significant and unwanted disruptions to their gameplay, especially if they follow the example set by PFS. Judging by this thread's page alone, I don't appear to be the only one to have this sentiment. I believe Paizo could do with a more specific list of things to watch out for with more specific instructions for how to adjust for one system or the other, which a conversion guide would address neatly without requiring a great deal of work.
Really, I'm not understanding this obsession with Society or this insinuation that anyone is claiming people are being forced to port content across systems: the problem in my opinion specifically stems from when people want to port content but are unaware of the pitfalls or how to fix them. We've talked about flight at level 1, but as mentioned before, porting the Nephilim ancestry to Starfinder is similarly dangerous because the Nephilim Resistance feat can let you take zero damage from a great deal many ranged weapons, and this same problem applies to many other kinds of energy resistance effects that are balanced around the higher damage of melee attacks in Pathfinder. This is not mentioned at all in Starfinder's GM Core, much less in any Pathfinder rulebook. I can understand not caring about a conversion guide or not particularly agreeing with criticisms of the systems' compatibility, but I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would devote this much time and effort to try to invalidate the constructive feedback of other people and vilify them for it.
Yeah, I think it's very fair to say that it shouldn't be on every GM to anticipate why SF content might not work in PF beyond personal aesthetic preferences, and Paizo ought to provide guidelines to help GM's understand the mechanical implications specifically so it is easier for them to combine the content.
That early comment claiming that Dragonkin in Pathfinder are fine because Pathfinder already has ancestries with flight at level 1 I think is probably the best argument for why that material is needed. If a regular contributor did not intuitively understand how those major mechanical differences in how flight works or why they're important, it's not really fair to expect your run of the mill GM to catch that either, it will obviously fly over a lot of people's heads (lol). It doesn't really have much to do with OP's title for the thread, but I really appreciate when stuff like this is explicitly spelled out in a place where I can easily find it (ie, not through word of mouth in a forum) so when a player asks me to allow something it only takes me a little bit of searching to see "oh, Paizo says I should change dragonkin's flight to match the progression of sprites if I wish to include it" because my first instinct prior to this thread would have just been to automatically say "no" and then my player would have been unnecessarily disappointed.
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Playtest adventures tend to stress test specific mechanics or questions developers have. On page 250 of the SF2 GM core, there is explicit advice about looking at your party’s damage types and thinking through whether specific creatures you want to use will provide extra challenge to your party. There really are multiple pages of thoughtful advice dedicated to making material from one game useable with the other.
I have yet to see any concern brought up in this thread that isn’t at least pointed out in the GM core. The advice might not be as explicit as some players want it to be, but I think that kind of detail is going to be much better coming from the community sharing play experience and collected in Guides like happens with class guides, because so much of it is going to be subjective to what GMs and players are trying to do. But all the big picture concerns are at least brought up in the guide.
As already pointed out when someone else referenced these exact same rules on this thread, and made the effort to actually quote them that time, the guidelines for archaic adventures are vague and incomplete, as they only vaguely point to Pathfinder flying ancestry feats, which no longer follow a standard progression, don't cover what to look out for when taking Pathfinder content in to Starfinder. You'll notice that I keep mentioning a conversion guide: I hope you understand that a concise reference sheet listing exact mechanics to watch out for with a concrete list of adjustments is meaningfully different from asking someone to refer to page #246 of a large rulebook in order to be told to essentially just figure it out.
I kind of think what you're asking for needs to be a community creation.
Paizo has not done a lot of stand-alone conversion guides. There's the remaster conversion guide (to accommodate the abrupt shift caused by the OGL mess), and there was the PF1 to SF1 monster conversion guide (which did not address subtleties like energy resistances). I might be missing some, but those are the only ones I know of.
Paizo has conversion advice in the relevant book, because... well, publishing books is the major way they deliver rules? It includes notes to watch out for unusual senses and early flight on ancestries, to be careful of converting monsters that resist the party's major damage types, and other things like the differences in the environments commonly encountered. It doesn't have a list of specific adjustments to make, because that is both too much of an ongoing project, and something that the appropriate answer to will vary from table to table.
This feels much more like the space that gets occupied by something like the Elephant in the Room feat reworks in PF1- somebody puts together a concrete list of what they personally think the best adjustments are, and if enough of the community likes it, it becomes a common shortcut for GMs.
But Paizo isn't going to put out something that says, for example, "Flight:
Pathfinder to Starfinder:
- Give ancestries who can eventually obtain a permanent fly speed a heritage granting that fly speed
Starfinder to Pathfinder:
- Replace first level flight with the following feats (...)
- For ancestries with a land or hover speed below 20ft, adjust it up to 20ft."
I think that's just way too rigid and prescriptive for Paizo to publish themselves, locking them into a specific balance relation between the two systems early on.
Playtest adventures tend to stress test specific mechanics or questions developers have. On page 250 of the SF2 GM core, there is explicit advice about looking at your party’s damage types and thinking through whether specific creatures you want to use will provide extra challenge to your party. There really are multiple pages of thoughtful advice dedicated to making material from one game useable with the other.
Remind me which damage types Hardness goes up against, specifically?
I have yet to see any concern brought up in this thread that isn’t at least pointed out in the GM core.
But it’s not being pointed out, is the problem; at best the notion of damage types and resistances is only vaguely alluded to. This to me reads a lot like the kind of people who point to millennia-old texts to try to claim that modern technology like planes or the internet were actually invented in ancient times: if you look hard enough, squint, and maybe use your imagination a little, you can easily find that anything will say whatever you want it to say.
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I think that a lot of people haven’t read the the SF2 GM core and heard PFS let in flying ancestries and just kind of extrapolated and panicked. It will pass as folks get familiar with the system.
Personally, I am not likely to let much SF2 content into the campaign I am actively running, which will take us years to finish. It’s a PF1 converted AP nowhere near techy stuff. After that, I’d probably talk to my players in picking “what’s next?” And if “PF/SF hybrid” is what players want, it’d be very easy to do that with a homebrew campaign or if just one player wants one techy option I could look that over and decide on a case by case basis.
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I think a lot of the concerns here are somewhat overblown.
The next campaign I run is possibly going to be Starfinder. My cunning plan is to tell my players "starfinder material is encouraged. Pathfinder material may or may not be allowed and may or may not be altered. If you want to use anything ask me".
Then I'll look at specific requests and decide then what to allow and change. After having played an entire 4 playtest adventures and maybe 10 SFS level 1-2 adventures I feel fairly confident that I'll make reasonable decisions. Given that they'll be made in the context of specific characters and a specific campaign I think it highly likely that my decisions will be better than those that would be found in a 100 page conversion guide issued by Paizo which will be primarily aimed at inexperienced GMs.
If somebody said they wanted to bring Starfinder material into a Pathfinder campaign my reaction would be "likely not but ask. Maybe"
The key here is "specific character and campaign". A flying archer is going to be a much greater issue than a flying 2 handed weapon melee fighter. A flying character is going to be a much greater issue in a wilderness campaign than in a dungeon crawl.
Would a conversion guide be nice? Sure. Is it even remotely necessary? Not at all. Is it a good use of Paizo resources?. Not my decision to make but I'd guess not.
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I think that a lot of people haven’t read the the SF2 GM core and heard PFS let in flying ancestries and just kind of extrapolated and panicked. It will pass as folks get familiar with the system.
That’s interesting, because several people in this thread have pointed to Starfinder’s GM Core and its section on archaic adventures as evidence that the guidance is lacking, as well as argued off of playtesting experience. I for one have done both, and had to specifically cite the bits of the rulebook you’re referring to because for all the implicit self-attributions of game knowledge and claims of the facts being on one’s side, your arguments appear to be quite short on specifics.
Just so that we’re all on literally the same page, here is a link to the guidelines for anachronistic adventures, and here is a link to the guidelines for anachronistic creatures. You’ll notice that these guidelines don’t refer to problematic mechanics like Hardness or player-sided resistances from character options, and what mechanics are referred to are generally given only vague suggestions at best. For player flight, for instance, the suggestion is to “adjust by instead using the progression of movement speed-related ancestry feats presented to other ancestries in Pathfinder:” what does this even mean? Does this mean getting a fly Speed at level 5 just like how the vanara can get a climb Speed, or does it mean you get to fly at level 9 like a tengu? Is this progression automatic or are you meant to create ancestry feats just for this purpose?
This is what I mean when I say Paizo could do more here. As it stands, the guidelines could do with significantly clearer wording and a more comprehensive list of adjustments, which would benefit any GM trying to port content from one system to the other. It can perhaps feel personally satisfying to claim that everything is already in the rules and that everyone else should just get gud, but I don’t think that kind of argument really helps anyone or contributes positively to discussion, nor does it stem from any solid basis here.
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I think the reason for Paizo to avoid releasing a "conversion guide" is this might create a "well, Paizo says I can do this" problem. It genuinely seems like the community is better doing this on their own.
Like Shirren are mostly fine if you wanted to play one in Pathfinder. You would probably want to change the flying heritage, but other stuff feels fine. Except during Pathfinder times the Shirren didn't even exist yet, they were still part of the Swarm and a GM is justified in saying "I don't think you should play that in Pathfinder." Even things like a Vesk fell through a portal so now despite being from a different galaxy you get to play one should the sort of thing that happens rarely.
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Bulk takes the problem of "you have add up a bunch of numbers and the total can get to 3 digits" and replaces it with "you have to add up a bunch of numbers except the decimals don't work like you expect, the numbers are extremely arbitrary and hard to estimate on the fly, and the whole system becomes extremely confusing once large or tiny PCs are involved."Rhetorical question: How do decimals not "work like you expect"? They round down, just like everything other time you end up with decimals in Pathfinder.
Non-rhetorical question: How does it get confusing with large and tiny creatures? (I have never had any large or tiny PCs in my games).
RAW an item of Light Bulk for a medium creature is considered Negligible Bulk for a large creature.
So, by extention, a centaur, a large creature, can carry an infinite number of medium shortswords.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
That's because Society is the only place where a GM can be forced to have to deal with it. PFS GMs don't get to say "no" the way everyone else does.
This really understates the burden put on GMs when you have to scrutinize individual options to determine which are problematic, which might be problematic even if they appear mundane, and which might actually not be problematic despite superficially looking absurd.
That's a lot of extra examination work to put on a GM when the default assumption should be more that the system just works on its own.
In some ways the society GM has the better experience here. The dragonkin might easily overcome some skill challenge, but since you don't get to say no and you aren't making fundamental on the fly balance decisions you just shrug and move to the next encounter.
But Paizo isn't going to put out something that says, for example
Why do we take for granted that Paizo shouldn't?
Cross compatibility was literally an advertised feature. A big selling point was that these were the same underlying system, even closer than PF1 and SF1. People have bought Starfinder or Pathfinder content based on that pitch.
This backpedaling to "Oh well it's not really compatible and you should do a ton of work on your own figuring it out" is extremely lame.
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I know things that I've flagged for conversion are of course, speeds in general. Fly speeds are the biggest factor, but there is also the matter of Climb Speeds being much higher in Starfinder than Pathfinder grants. Then there is the Ysoki's ability to have a 3rd arm for a tail, which raises the question of whether that feat should be reduced to work like a tiefling's tail in a Pathfinder game, and whether a tiefling's tail should function as a 3rd arm in a Pathfinder game, as well as for other dexterous-tailed ancestries.
It seems like it would be a really strange case to bring a SF2 Ysoki into PF2 when it is an ancestry that already exists in PF2. I think that highlights why my default for players asking “can I bring X ancestry into PF2?” Is “sell me on why this is necessary for your character concept in a way that fits with the campaign narrative expectations, and isn’t an attempt to just exploit mechanical differences between the systems?”
I think players will make the kinds of guides that are being asked for here faster than Paizo would be able to and keep them more up to date.
Bulk is one of those rules that I always felt pointless. I don't recall a single table I was in that used bulk rules, but GMs still asked players to not carry around 1000 things in their backpack because it didn't make sense. The few times I remember bulk being discussed it was usually for players searching ways to mostly ignore it, which usually isn't particularly difficulty (bags of holding being the easiest and most accesible option). Thats why I kinda ask myself if there's a ton of tables that don't use them (or don't use them RAW at least) and those who use them search for ways on how to ignore it, why don't make it a "a GM determines if you are overencumbered or not" rule and call it a day? It would also save a ton of page space if you removed the bulk of every single item.
I think bulk rules work okay but generally not something to pay a ton of attention to unless players are just being actively murder hobo loot mongers. Generally everybody has plenty of bulk to hold their expected gear and a reasonable amount of loot unless their str is intentionally gimped or they have been cursed in some way that drastically lowers it.
It seems to mostly come into call when players are trying something weird/edge case/stupid.
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Please do not force SF 2e and PF 2e to have the exact same balance points. This just leads to nobody winning and a needless edition war to happen for 0 reason.
I think the things for which a conversion guide will be useful, moreso than ancestries, is classes. A GM can make a quick call based on any ancestry on nothing more than "this isn't really a story featuring people from other planets." But people are going to want to play something like a Mystic in a Pathfinder game and there's no reason this shouldn't work, so some guidance a la "recharge weapon is nonfunctional in Pathfinder so replace the cantrip granted by the Elemental Connection with something else, and you might want to alter Data Bond so you don't give access to Summon Robot in a pathfinder game" would genuinely help people.
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... In a way it's kind of almost a funny failsafe that bulk rules tend to fail the most when a player tries to do something stupid. It's like a crumple zone on a car.
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Compatible, not necessarily balanced the same. Something they covered a lot.
I guess I don't really see it as worthwhile for Paizo to go through and spell out how to handle every potential issue. What they have with "Hey, flight is strong at low levels in PF2", "Keep an eye on party damage types when pulling creatures over", etc. is fine by me. When the advice doesn't do the job, it's okay to have one fight that's a slog where the GM learns that high-hardness constructs are rough for ranged parties.
They're still two different systems.
Anyway, that feels like a rehash, so I'll stop talking in circles with that.
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They're still two different systems.
They're literally not. Like actually and completely the exact same system.
I think the things for which a conversion guide will be useful, moreso than ancestries, is classes. A GM can make a quick call based on any ancestry on nothing more than "this isn't really a story featuring people from other planets." But people are going to want to play something like a Mystic in a Pathfinder game and there's no reason this shouldn't work, so some guidance a la "recharge weapon is nonfunctional in Pathfinder so replace the cantrip granted by the Elemental Connection with something else, and you might want to alter Data Bond so you don't give access to Summon Robot in a pathfinder game" would genuinely help people.
Im surprised such a guide is not in the GM Core. Might be a cool book idea to explore in the future. A big old crossover AP with its own player guide and rules on how to convert content for either game.
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They're literally not. Like actually and completely the exact same system.
They're still two different systems.
Whoops, distracted typo talking about system compatibility.
They are two different games. Mea culpa.
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They're literally not. Like actually and completely the exact same system.
They're still two different systems.
They're foundationally the same but their balance points are intentionally different, as well as sporting a ton of mechanics unique to each other.
The developers have explicitly laid this out, ironically when they were talking about how much more accessible fly was for characters in Starfinder vs Pathfinder and that this is an intentional choice.
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I think the things for which a conversion guide will be useful, moreso than ancestries, is classes. A GM can make a quick call based on any ancestry on nothing more than "this isn't really a story featuring people from other planets." But people are going to want to play something like a Mystic in a Pathfinder game and there's no reason this shouldn't work, so some guidance a la "recharge weapon is nonfunctional in Pathfinder so replace the cantrip granted by the Elemental Connection with something else, and you might want to alter Data Bond so you don't give access to Summon Robot in a pathfinder game" would genuinely help people.Im surprised such a guide is not in the GM Core. Might be a cool book idea to explore in the future. A big old crossover AP with its own player guide and rules on how to convert content for either game.
Edit: The one trick is that, for like the Mystic, some of the information would be in different sections, like the spells and feats sections...but the class guide tells you that.
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Different solar system, not galaxy. Vesk are from the same galaxy as golarion, so can come to Golarion via a rank 10 teleport. (On this note, every ancestry in Starfinder, except for ancestries that do not exist yet, like the Shirren (They'd need time travel, plus this), could theoretically access Golarion via a rank 10 casting of Teleport.)
I mean, as a GM hearing about this character my first response is "tell me more why someone used a 10th level spell on a 1st level nobody?" I'm not saying there can't be a good answer to that, but I hope the answer is more interesting than "this is what I need in order to justify playing this character."
Different solar system, not galaxy. Vesk are from the same galaxy as golarion, so can come to Golarion via a rank 10 teleport. (On this note, every ancestry in Starfinder, except for ancestries that do not exist yet, like the Shirren (They'd need time travel, plus this), could theoretically access Golarion via a rank 10 casting of Teleport.)I mean, as a GM hearing about this character my first response is "tell me more why someone used a 10th level spell on a 1st level nobody?" I'm not saying there can't be a good answer to that, but I hope the answer is more interesting than "this is what I need in order to justify playing this character."
Yeah, as a GM, I want my players choosing ancestries and backgrounds that will help their characters fit into the campaign world and have local connections that we can build up together over the course of a campaign. I especially don’t want players making choices that so completely overshadow the starting campaign scenario that it makes the adventures of the campaign feel underwhelming and meaningless. “I am the only one like me you will ever encounter can get very “protagonist energy” very quickly.
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What I don't get is why some people are still desperately insisting that we shouldn't have a conversion guide, when there is clearly demand for it in this very thread alone. Like, if Paizo does actually go and release one, how does this hurt you? The people loudly professing that it's not needed can just pretend it doesn't exist, while the rest of us who want to actually try porting over content from one game to the other without breaking our campaign in half can do so with the proper tools.
In the same vein, I fail to see what a lot of the argumentation here aims to achieve: we can claim all we want that Paizo did warn us that the compatibility didn't include balance (in a select few posts deep inside social media conversations), that technically we're already being told to adjust our content (in extremely vague terms on page two-hundred-and-whatever of a rulebook that covers only a fraction of the content to watch out for), or that Paizo isn't contractually obligated to tell us how to balance for cross-play (in a game system where balance and consistency are key selling points), but at the end of the day, to whose benefit is any of this? Ultimately, these arguments are vacuous, and seem to be made for the express purpose of coming across as morally or intellectually superior to anyone who dared to post critical feedback on this thread. Arguing this way isn't going to help a GM balance a feat like Nephilim Resistance for Starfinder, nor even alert them to the underlying risk of leaving such a game element untouched, nor is it going to convince people who have experienced actual instances of cross-game incompatibility in spite of what little existing guidance exists. Rather than make false accusations of ignorance or expect prospective GMs to psychically divine the mental gymnastics one has developed to excuse away the gap between both games (or is it the Gap?), it would likely be more helpful for us all as a community to at least try to see what can be identified as something to watch out for, or at the very least stop talking down to people who have valid reasons to ask for more clarity.
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“I am the only one like me you will ever encounter can get very “protagonist energy” very quickly.
I mean, the game kind of does this already with Rare classes and ancestries. You can make a Kashrishi Reflection Exemplar with the Chosen One background gives off more “protagonist energy” than a Kasatha Mystic for example. Not everyone wants to start off with local connections or to be a cookie cutter fit in a campaign and they don't need Starfinder to get there. Heck, you could have a [human, android, ysoki, ect] Knight of Golarion or a Golarion Survivor Human anything might fit in better than some PF2 characters.