Starfinder 2e is Apparently Fully Compatible with Pathfinder 2e

 I still haven't had a chance to run a game of Starfinder - as I've written about a lot on this blog, most of my players are pretty familiar with D&D 5E, and generally are more interested in trying out simpler RPGs rather than crunchier ones - Starfinder, I'd argue, is probably a little crunchier but not to an absurd degree, but I understand the friction.

I've never actually played Pathfinder - back before 5E came out, some friends had been talking about potentially getting a Pathfinder game together (warning us that D&D wasn't so good anymore - I think in the last decade 4E has gained some love, but it was pretty widely decried back in the day) - but this game never game about.

Starfinder came out in 2017, three years after 5E had seen D&D return to prominence as the big fantasy RPG. Starfinder was built on the bones of Pathfinder, which itself was built on the bones of 3rd Edition using the OGL.

Still, structurally, it was pretty different, as far as I can tell - Starfinder, for example, has a two-tiered health system.  You have Stamina Points, which are relatively easy to get back, and are depleted first, and then Hit Points, which take a lot longer to recover. Losing the former is the kind of ding or graze that your character can laugh off, while losing hit points is when you start sustaining real injuries.

What's curious about the second edition is that the intent is now to allow Starfinder and Pathfinder to be fully compatible with one another - meaning that you should be able to take classes, ancestries, and monsters from one game and use them in the other.

I'm really curious to see how this works, even if I don't know that I'll have the mental bandwidth to really get invested enough to understand how it all works. But it does look like pretty much everything from the Starfinder core rulebook will be there - I believe every race (probably called ancestries now) and class will return (along with the Witchwarper class, which showed up in later supplements).

To me, as someone far more familiar with 5E, I was really hoping for a harder commitment to science-fantasy with the Spelljammer setting. Starfinder hits that balance quite well, but it's just an unfamiliar rules system.

I think Paizo is probably making a really good decision in allowing "cross-play" between the systems, though I also wonder how Pathfinder itself is doing in this era where so many other fantasy RPGs are cropping up.