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Starfinder Core Rulebook - Game Review


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Starfinder is something of a sequel to Paizo's popular Pathfinder fantasty/adventure game. This one takes place in outer space, and has a deep, rich history tied to Pathfinder's Golarion setting. The game has a very unique history that includes some interesting concepts, such as 'The Gap', a period of time lost to history, a mechanical holy trinity that created 'the drift'--a dimension through which ships can travel at tremendous speed, but at the cost of a piece of space from the traveler's home dimension, and other cool concepts--like Eox, a planet full of undead and reality TV. Perhaps the best part of the game is the mechanics that give amazingly wide options for character creation. In addition to a class, each player picks a theme--which adds flavor on top of the class options. With 7 classes, 10 themes, and 7 playable races, there are 490 player options out of this core rule book! That doesn't even include the 6 bonus races in the Pathfinder conversion guide at the end of the book. There are also some mechanics that depart nicely from Pathfinder. Skills are paired down and simplified. Health is broken out into hit and stamina points. Equipment is given levels to help GMs keep their games balanced. Where Pathfinder has a plethora of spells from levels 0-9, Starfinder trimmed down the list by condensing some spells and tops out at level 6, making magic much simpler. Combat is limited to fewer attack actions per character to speed things up. One of the best features of Starfinder is cool new set of mechanics for starships and starship combat. All players in a party get a chance to particpate as pilots, science officers, engineers, etc. in ship-to-ship combat, which takes place on a hex board. Some find the system tedious given that it has less action than typical combat. It adds an interesting mechanic, but it's not meant to be used in every session. When running starship battles think Star Trek, not Star Wars. It seems that the designers wanted the sort of all-hands-on-deck fights against one other large ship that you see in Star Trek--not the dog fights that you see in the Star Wars films. Keep that in mind when running a game to make it interesting.There are solid rules for building starships based on an abstract resource called 'build points'. It seems that in an effort to balance player wealth, there are no monetary values assigned to starships in terms of 'credits', the currency that all other items are purchaged with in this game. This is a bit of an awkward point conceptualy, since players will want to know how much their starship is worth--but it makes the game more playable. However, Starfinder's few problems are a minor hindrance. Overall it's a great game that does a great job of blending fantasy and sci-fi. The game is off to an amazing start and it is poised to be one of the best RPGs for years to come.

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