Starfinder: Finally Finished Reading It

 

Written in 2017, I picked it up in '18. It has indeed taken me this long to read the whole book. Now I haven't read it religiously, but I have been picking it up about once a week and reading three to five pages. The information is dense and meant for the truly committed D&D 3.65 player getting into science fiction  with its own nuts and bolts. Of course it has like thirty authors and twenty-five supporting people listed on the side scroll of credits, so one might expect that from a book that is 19,000 to 1.6 million pages long depending on the day of the week that one is reading it.

At least some people are playing it. At GenCon, I've seen about a dozen up to twenty plus events for it every year since its release. They might've even moved on to second edition. I attribute this to supply-based RPG "designer" Industrial Complex producing mega-widgets that need to sell only 30% of the stock to make some money, but there are ppl sitting down to play the game. Unlike a lot of new SF RPG works on the bookshelves these days, which garner hundreds of true fans online for maybe six months of online play by some people, including disinterested wouldbe actors, on YouTube. Meanwhile the older SF RPG books have dozens of fans that suck on nostalgia juice and confuse the product with Starfleet Battles or Traveller alternately.

The rules are some very solid and detailed SF stuff. Even when a thousand ppl playing one hundred Starfinder campaigns a year, only a quarter of the provided rules would come out in play. When I started reading the starship section, I was glad to see that the authors were trying to turn vessels into Characters and encounters. I was also wondering how they saw my private notes, but hey I only really got serious about space ships in my own work like five years ago-- still some three years before I waded into this book's section for them. The Character species are things like sexy robots with facial hair if needed; humans; giant lizard people to be used as Tanks; antennae-having psychics, space chipmunks; hidden-faced four-armed things; and interesting, for once, bugs. Dwarves and whatnot from Pathfinder and/or D&D are welcome. The setting is a solar system (and a bit more) striving to be a blank slate for the author-GM. So blank it has only 300 years of history. I like the world listing format, it covers the basics in good sci-fi terms designed for actual play at the table (mostly time and gravity), which I find a very helpful take for my own stuff.

Would I play it? I haven't finished running my first D&D-based combat in thirty plus years over six sessions of play for my TOG OSR fantasy setting yet, so, no. Still the rules here are thought out and helpful to any S-F GM that is only looking for tips. The true Path-finding GM, I am sure can make it work. Overall a Loch Ness Monster game system on the scale of Smurf to Godzilla.