In Praise of D&D's Redundancies

 In the Player's Handbook, every class that has the spellcasting feature (and also Pact Magic, which is technically a different one) has a lengthy explanation for how you calculate the saving throw DC of your spells. It's a lot of repeated words, always following the same formula: you take 8, add your proficiency bonus, and then add your spellcasting ability, which of course is different for different classes.

This fairly substantial block of text takes up a good half a page or maybe a little more in each of the class descriptions - and it's really almost all of them because even the Rogue and Fighter have subclasses with the Spellcasting feature. Likewise, Monks get a similar explanation for their Ki saving throws. So Barbarians are the only ones without this description, meaning there's about five and a half pages dedicated to repeating this.

And I think that's a great thing.

See, I was doing some character building for Starfinder - just to help me wrap my head around it in case I ever need to help others do so. I was building a Soldier, and took the Bombard fighting style (fighting style in Starfinder is the name for Soldier subclasses) that, at least at first, focuses on grenades. The cheapest grenades - a reasonable thing to stock up on at low levels - deal 1d6 piercing damage in a 15-ft radius, and thanks to the fact that my Soldier has an 18 Strength and is a Bombarder, I can throw them an additional 20 feet, for a total of 40 feet away.

But I had to search through the Core Rulebook to find any explanation of what the saving throw DC was for those grenades. This is true for a lot of abilities - class abilities will refer to abilities forcing a saving throw, but there's no explanation there, or even in the general class description.

When I was first looking at the rulebook when I bought it initially, I actually made a cheat sheet for each class because I didn't want to have to flip back and forth through the book before I'd memorized them.

Now, part of this is certainly due to the fact that I have seven years of experience with 5E D&D and have never actually run or played Starfinder. I'm sure this would become second nature over time. Starfinder also has variable DCs in some cases. For example, the Operative (rogue equivalent) has one DC that foes must meet to succeed on saving throws against your abilities (which is 10 plus half your Operative level rounded down, plus your Dexterity modifier) but a different DC for features that have enemies make a skill check against you (10 plus one and a half times your Operative level, plus your Dexterity modifier).

Indeed, there's really no place in the Soldier class description that makes any mention of how to calculate a saving throw, despite their capstone feature, Kill Shot, requiring one. So, one needs to look to the "Key Ability Scores" section on page 58 to find that, ok, it's 10 + half your soldier level + your Strength or Dexterity modifier (whichever is higher - like Fighters, Soldiers can focus on Strength or Dexterity).

D&D, given that it separates out the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, has a bit more room, but I really think that the format here, where the book frequently reminds you how to calculate these things, is a lot more user-friendly.