So, I have not yet run a single game of Starfinder. But two days ago I ordered two supplementary books beyond the Core Rulebook and the first Alien Archive.
I have never played Pathfinder, largely because the genre in which it exists seems to be handled sufficiently by D&D 5th Edition. Pathfinder was, of course, released something as a response to 4th Edition and an attempt to build a kind of new edition that was more of a continuation of 3.5th Edition.
The point is, Pathfinder was built, pretty explicitly, to just be something you could play D&D-like games in.
Now, the nitty-gritty of it is something that players might have strong opinions about - Pathfinder's relative open customization versus 5E's more streamlined and narrow approach to character builds (not to say that complex multiclass builds don't exist in 5E). But the point is that just about any story you could play through and most character concepts you could come up with in 5E would have some analogue in Pathfinder, and vice versa.
I think the reason I've become so interested in Starfinder is its farther lean into true Science Fiction tropes. Spelljammer in D&D makes no attempt to change game systems - indeed, it does even less than what I think we expected it to do, which was to create ship-to-ship combat systems (there are such systems in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but I haven't heard a lot of people using them).
This got me thinking, though, about the utility of new game systems.
In the midst of the OGL controversy, a number of companies announced plans to build their own new RPG systems. I believe Kobold Press, Paizo, and MCDM (and likely others) have all been talking about doing that.
On one hand, I think that a more diverse marketplace would be great for the TTRPG world - competition can drive innovation. But it's also true that these games tend to be difficult to learn - there are tons of nuances and tricks to them that can be daunting for a new player.
Those same nuances and tricks are, of course, also part of the appeal. It's exactly these sorts of things that allow clever players to come up with clever builds and strategies, and which get online communities playing around optimization or even just building ridiculous concepts that focus on narrow strengths (I played a one-shot with a Fighter who had specialized into grappling, and literally held an archdevil underwater while we pummeled it to death).
The point is, purely from a player perspective, if there's a system that does what I need it to do, I'm probably going to be very hesitant to try out systems that do the same thing. Starfinder looks like it can scratch an itch that D&D doesn't quite reach (though it comes close).
There are, of course, simpler RPG systems. I briefly played a bit of Kids on Bikes, and while I think that's almost absurdly easier to pick up, it's a system that is sort of there to be unobtrusive and avoid getting in the way of the improvised storytelling. I don't think there's such a thing as a really effective "build" in Kids on Bikes. And that's fine given that its focus is more about telling a story than being about overcoming challenges (the story might be one of people overcoming challenges, of course).
One thing I do wonder about is whether Starfinder could be used to tell more Star Trek-like stories - the ones that are less about the big phaser fights and starship battles, but are more conceptually complex. I think D&D and Starfinder kind of default to just making a bunch of ability checks or skill checks to resolve things like that, though on the other hand, it seems that most systems do that anyway.
I don't know if I have a huge point here, other than that I really hope I can run (and maybe, maybe, play in) some Starfinder one of these days.
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