Jumping around in the book a bit, I've been approaching Starfinder very much from my perspective as a veteran of 5th Edition. This is not a tutorial in the system, but is more a journal of my sussing out how the game works.
There is a whole lot here that is familiar, but there are tweaks and differences that do play a noticeable role.
Looking at combat, things work in a fairly similar way. You still roll initiative, with a bonus based on your Dexterity. And each turn is broken up into three main things on your turn and one reaction at any time.
Standard actions are what you'd expect, likely to be spent attacking or casting a spell or doing your significant "thing" for the turn. Swift actions are similar to bonus actions - you won't always have something to do with it. Notably, changing grip on a weapon is considered one of these, so for example if you have a weapon that could be wielded with either one or two hands, you'll use your swift action to do so. You also have a Move action, which obviously can be used for movement, but a number of other class features and such can use it as well - you might forgo moving on your turn in order to do something like manipulating an object.
Notably, as well, a few familiar rules work a bit differently. For instance, opportunity attacks can occur any time you try to move from a space that is threatened by a foe - meaning that if you try to position with an ally to flank them (which is a core, rather than optional rule here) while already in melee range, the creature can thwack you even if you stay within that range.
As far as I can tell, there's no penalty for making ranged attacks while in melee. One of the Soldier fighting styles seems built around using ranged weapons in melee, which is pretty badass.
Overall, though, I think D&D veterans shouldn't have that much trouble with the system. There are a lot of conditions to learn, but I don't think that it's going to be all that difficult getting the general flow of it figured out.
One thing I am noticing is how 5th Edition's introduction of both the Proficiency Bonus and the concept of Advantage and Disadvantage, the latter being a replacement for varying bonuses and penalties, really simplifies a lot of these systems. For example, Androids have a -2 penalty to Sense Motive checks (and others have a -2 penalty to sense theirs). I think if you were to do this in 5th Edition, you'd just say they have disadvantage on Insight checks. Granted, -2 is a more granular penalty (I believe that on a d20 disadvantage on average comes to about a -3.5 penalty).
One thing that's a bit surprising is that I don't believe that any classes get a second attack per turn. That said, with the Weapon Specializaiton feat, you can do pretty serious damage with a weapon. You pick one of the weapon types (such as longarms, advanced melee weapons, etc, each of which represent a class of about a dozen or so different weapons) and you get to add your character level to the damage you deal with that kind of weapon. Notably, ranged weapons don't get a bonus to damage based on your Dexterity (melee and thrown weapons still get a bonus from Strength) so the total balance of it all is a little complex.
Weapon damage also has a much wider range - the low-level things you can buy with your starting money will do like 1d8 and the like, but by the time you're high level with a lot of credits, you can get something like an Elite Autobeam Rifle that does 12d4 fire damage. A lot of weapons also have a special effect on a critical hit - laser rifles like the aforementioned will typically cause the target to burn for additional damage on subsequent turns until they're extinguished.
This, I'll actually say, kind of solves an issue that D&D has - at a certain point, D&D characters don't really have a use for gold. Once you get your heavy armor wearers in plate, you're really looking out more for magic items than anything you could just buy for gold. In Starfinder, there are magic items as well as "fusions" and "upgrades" that you can get for your gear, along with just more powerful gear that is prohibitively expensive at lower levels.
Another wrinkle with combat is that there's a special Maneuver AC you have in addition to your Kinetic Armor Class and Energy Armor Class (usually the former is higher than the latter, so it's a bit easier to hit things with lasers and other elemental weapons). Maneuver AC is 8 higher than your KAC, and when someone tries to do something like shove you, grapple you, etc., they need to hit that AC instead.
Generally speaking, I think DCs and ACs go a lot higher in Starfinder than they do in D&D. With the most expensive heavy armor, you could get a KAC of 32 without any other enhancements (you'd also need +4 to Dexterity.) But also, by level 20, your base attack bonus (which is sort of your Proficiency Bonus but only for attack rolls) is +20, and that's before you even add your Strength or Dexterity and whatever other bonus you might get. A Ksarik, which is a large plant-beast, is only CR 4 but has a +12 to its attacks (though I haven't figured out if CR scales quite as it does in D&D.)
The game's Monster Manual equivalent, the Alien Archive, is a much thinner volume, and so I suspect that if/when I run a longer campaign I'll need to either do some homebrewing or buy more books. But I think I should probably have enough to work with for now. I've gotten very comfortable homebrewing monsters in D&D, so I could try my hand with Starfinder once I'm more comfortable with the system.
The fact that the Core Rulebook is a sort of combination of the PHB and DMG does make sorting between what is crucial versus what is somewhat supplementary a little tricky. For instance, there's a section within the equipment chapter on computers, with rules for hacking and such, that seems likely to come into play only if the GM wants it to.
Anyway, things are starting to make sense a bit more. I don't think I'm quite at the point where I could run a game yet, but once I get through the rest of the classes and maybe re-read the section on skills I'll be in a better place to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment