Starfinder

 Well, I splurged and bought myself the Starfinder Core Rulebook and the Alien Archive. I'm reading through the Rulebook, which is arranged similarly to the Player's Handbook for D&D. As someone who has played 5E but not Pathfinder, the latter of which is what Starfinder is based on, I'm definitely having to put pins in many rules concepts that I have yet to totally understand.

The game does share DNA, thankfully. Ability scores and their modifiers work pretty much identically, though Starfinder seems to push player characters into boosting a wider array of abilities than D&D's focus on just getting your most important ones maxed out.

A couple concepts leap out at me as different. First off, you have both Hit Points and Stamina Points. The latter is a reserve of what I like to think of as "walk it off" points. Damage reduces Stamina points before you start losing HP, and this is treated as the kind of minor damage you take that wouldn't be a permanent injury. I believe (if I understand correctly) that you'll actually wind up with a little more SP than HP, and that you can recover SP more easily.

I haven't gotten deep into equipment and the like, but it also appears that characters have two separate armor classes - one for kinetic attacks (bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing) and the other for energy attacks (acid, cold, fire, etc.) Some armor will give a better bonus to one or the other.

While the foregrounded playable races have a classically sci-fi bent to them, there are also statistics for playing dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, half-orcs, and half-elves in the Core Rulebook. The game is science-fantasy, and along with the existence of magic there are other fantasy tropes that you can include.

5th Edition simplifies a lot of things from earlier editions, like having a single proficiency bonus that applies in myriad ways. Starfinder is a bit different in that you have several skills that you can invest points in differently - so your Sense Motives (kind of Insight) skill might have a different bonus than your Perception skill even if you have both of them, despite both being Wisdom based. (Assuming I understand correctly.)

The array of available weapons is huge compared to that in D&D, but I believe this also covers advanced things that might be thought of as magic weapons in D&D. Armor also has slots for upgrades like jet packs - though I should stress I haven't actually read this yet.

There's a whole section in the book for Starships and starship combat, which seems very exciting, though of course it also means learning some additional rules. I definitely think that when I run my first adventure/mini-campaign of this I'll start things off on foot and then have the players get a ship once we've gotten used to the other rule elements.

After six years, D&D 5th Edition stuff has become second nature to me, so it is a little intimidating to dive into a different rules system, even if that system is fairly similar. Still, I'm excited to read more, and I figure that once I get comfortable enough with Starfinder I can start doing a bit of blending to suit my own purposes.