Tabletop RPGs in 2023

Yeah, I’ve seen that mentioned before - its the first Free League kickstarter in a long time that I have no interest in.
Both because of the setting, and because of recent delays in all things kickstarter.

I know some people are fans of Starfinder, so here’s this:

That’s pretty harsh, bro. ;)

I mean certainly there are those who willingly elect to play Starfinder, much as there are dudes who are genuinely into cock and ball torture. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

I thought it was interesting to read as a preview of the kinds of changes they might make to Pathfinder 2E before that came out, but I came out of the experience with no desire to play it. Just blech overall.

The only thing I thought was clever was the ABC character creation process, and Paizo did end up using that in 2E.

I didn’t hate running a starfinder game. The system definitely needs to be enhanced though.

Whats wrong with Starfinder? I can tell it seems hip to against it here, but it, and Pathfinder are very succesfull, so they must be doing something right?

I was actually kinda interested in this new edition of Starfinder, as I like sci-fi adventure as a game, and I find Traveller to very, very terse, sparse, and slightly boring.

For my part, I just got incredibly burnt out on mechanically complex, tactically involved d20-style gaming after many long years of running a heavily homebrewed PF1E campaign for a group of shameless munchkin min-maxers. Don’t get me wrong, we had plenty of fun along the way, but the part of my brain that can derive joy from tinkering with stats, carefully balancing encounters, charting out massive dungeons and battlemaps, etc., has just been burnt out utterly from those experiences. Starfinder has a different crunch-organization than PF1E (and PF2E is again different), but the overall feel of those particular numbers in those particular ways with that particular level of complexity is anathema to me these days.

Which sucks, since I am in year 3 of a D&D 5E campaign and am helping run a different multi-GM 5E campaign. . .

But hey, I go where friends are, at the end of the day, and try to keep my complaints away from them, thus, you must all hear my whinging :)

Starfinder is very rules-mechanics heavy in terms of combat. It has to be, because you are doing mostly ranged laser pew-pew combat. So cover mechanics/sight lines are important. I didn’t find it too onerous, but it certainly could be a bit more elegant. They took some of the best stuff in Starfinder and put it in PF2. Also, the ship combat rules were completely and utterly broken. My groups min-max freak found out that if you spent all of your ship loadout currency on the best shields, you were impervious. They then also bought the biggest gun available, and then ship battles just became long slogs of slowing wearing down eachother’s shields. Them taking shield damage, recovering 90% of it, and then using their one big gun once a turn. I thought of a home-brew fix as making kinetic weapons bypass shields, forcing ships to balance/shield hull importance, but that would have required a complete re-write of all of the pre-built NPC ships. So, we just scrapped space combat.

My group isn’t as jazzed about sci fi as I am, so I went back to PF2 for my newest home-brew campaign.

Amusingly people also generally feel like the "space"ship rules introduced in 5E’s Spelljammer products last year – to the extent that they exist at all – are also badly broken.

Having tried for five years straight to build a satisfying, balanced, interesting, and not-convoluted Star Trek-y starship system for my own RPG, I can appreciate it’s difficult, at the very least.

I think Modiphius did a great job of translating the “action bridge crew” feel of Star Trek in their spaceship operations/combat rules. Way less stress on ship-to-ship crunch and more about officer players doing stuff on the bridge and yelling commands to team members. Of course, that’s a bummer for folks that wanted a rehash of something like the old Starfleet Battles, but I felt they shouldn’t have expected that from Modiphius or really any modern RPG writer.

For me, Starfinder just felt very Pathfinder-in-space and despite all the ways it differed, the lore and basic systems just came off like a generic reskin. It didn’t help that the lore was very tropey as well, with the undead planet and zombie ships, hell/demonic race and ships, the praying mantis race, rat dudes, energy swords, etc. A lot of it just had my eyes rolling, which probably isn’t fair, but that’s how I felt.

In fairness core PF lore is also basically just, let’s take all the fantasy tropes possible and toss em into a fantasy world shaped blender, then parcel out the resulting gonzo slurry over the course of 9000 splatbooks…

Well, yeah. Hahahaha

It’s so hard to balance the plot armor that saves your party from a TPK every time they get in a scrap with the tissue paper that satisfyingly explodes on everyone else’s ships. Plus the unobtainium drives that make staggering distances less boring but hopefully never break, the MST3K life support systems for eating, breathing, and maybe artificial gravity that hopefully never break, the dumbed down control systems for the average party member with 12 INT but formal education that stopped with shoeing horses that hopefully never break…

Yeah. The longterm goal was always to let individual crew members feel like they were doing cool, evocative dramatic things onboard the vessel (classic shit like science officers scanning for weaknesses or calculating FTL jumps, comms officers holding terse negotiations and subtly getting vital information out to specific targets, captains giving high level tactical orders and rousing speeches, engineers patching up systems damage and boosting engines, etc., as well as less-ship-oriented-but-still-vital stuff like repelling boarders, doing physical repairs, etc.) in a way that both acknowledged the vast benefits that having a Better Ship should give while also allowing for Incredible Character Skill to let them do extraordinary things with mediocre equipment, all while enemy craft’s turns/actions moved swiftly enough to not bog things down while they still felt threatening without being OP. . . it was a lot, hah.

A big one was that last concern. Players definitely always dug doing cool stuff on-ship, but when that meant that PC-controlled ships got a minimum of 5-6 actions/turn, it was either give enemy ships their own officers doing unique actions (UGH so much work as GM and also very slow) or give them huge numerical bonuses to counteract the action economy imbalance or make every fight against a ton of weaker enemy craft even when that wasn’t narratively appropriate. . .

. . . long story short, I think we wanted too many non-compatible things, and while our players had a lot of fun over the five seasons, it never quite worked the way I always wanted it to.

Since Starfinder explicitly does a lot of the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph’s giant parenthetical, I try to be understanding about how unwieldy and unbalanced it wound up being, heh.

Thought this was an interesting sounding role playing game, though Quinn is really good at making just about everything he plays sound interesting. I guess the downside is that the game is only that interesting once, creating a singular experience that’s almost impossible to repeat.

Oh, I loved the idea of the undead planet and zombie ships. Kind of neat that they are not “evil” and part of the pact worlds alliance. But also, they have a very large contingent of the population, including part of the military and the rumored “corpse fleet” who are very much not in line with being peaceful.

But yes, it was all very much Pathfinder but in space.

Its pretty cool! Played it online during the covid lockdown. Definitely worth picking up.

Wow that’s Life is Strange the board game! Same vibe, very slightly changed narrative and setting. It even has very similar setting, NPCs and relationships. Kind of merging the Chloe/Rachael characters into the missing person, including the denouement and search, the indie soundtrack vibe, the texting thing, ect.

Colville has talked about working on the Star Trek RPG (Decipher’s version) and how ship combat in it originally was a lame version of Star Fleet Battles and how he binned that idea and went for the bridge crew angle.

A lot of it was the fantasy of playing the TNG bridge crew and quite a bit was also that it wasn’t fun and didn’t work well shifting to a whole new game where most of the players probably didn’t have anything to do.