Yeah, the Pathfinder Remaster has more or less been just a Find-and-Replace experience, from what I’ve seen, but I gotta say, some of those terms are deep in there.

My Starfinder thoughts started out as something, but then grew pretty unmanageable here. I’m sorry. Wall of text incoming. tl;dr: Starfinder 1e is pretty cool, though flawed (especially with regard to starship combat), and I’m looking forward very much to SF2e.

Starfinder is pretty cool, but especially after Pathfinder 2e dropped, it ended up kind of feeling like Pathfinder 1.5 in space (if Pathfinder Unchained was 1.25). A lot of good stuff there, some really great crunch in places, but some of the mechanics that would get fleshed out more fully in Pathfinder 2 are still in a very early stage in Starfinder 1, and some of the stuff that Starfinder inherited from Pathfinder 1 shows its age, I think.

Starship combat in particular came off feeling a bit half-baked, which is a bummer since that was one of my main draws for the system. Unless you do some pretty extensive houseruling, starship combat is really polarized: either it’s over in two turns, or it’s a long, boring slog. I believe, with no real proof, that the starship combat is really just a cleaned-up and slimmed-down spacey version of the much-maligned naval combat subsystem from Skull & Shackles, with a few things for other PCs to do tossed in; to wit, the only people really doing anything of consequence during a starship encounter are the pilot and the gunner. Everyone else offers a slight bonus to combat at best, but generally the other members of the party end up just doing the same thing for a dozen turns while the pilot makes all the decisions and the gunner rolls all the dice. It just doesn’t seem like it was really very extensively iterated on, and as a result it feels like an afterthought.

Now, more classical combat (that is, a party, with their own weapons, acting individually in initiative, not as a ship) was definitely not an afterthought. They implemented an interesting system of separating the AC into two different ACs: EAC (Energy AC) and KAC (Kinetic AC). A laser gun, then, attacks EAC, while a projectile weapon or avalanche attacks KAC. That gives a lot of flavor to combatants with disparities between the two: you might have a big, beefy, non-technological monster on a jungle planet with an absolutely massive KAC but an almost nonexistent EAC, or alternatively a member of a very advanced society that hasn’t used bullets for millennia who wears a shield that protects them from energy blasts but is taken completely by surprise when somebody swings a crowbar at their head. It definitely supports a Dune-style story in that regard.

They also separated out HP into Stamina and Health; you go through your stamina first, and then eat into your health, but you can recover Stamina between battles almost automatically, while HP is harder to restore. You can also use Stamina (and the metacurrency of “Resolve Points”) to activate abilities, work technology, etc. but at the risk of having lower health if a battle breaks out.

The classes are really good, too. In fact, that may well be where they spent the most time fine-tuning and iterating. They ride a very fine line between being familiar without feeling like “oh, this is just the Space Wizard.” The Envoy is kind of like a cross between a Bard and a Social Rogue; the Mechanic is kind of like a Tinkerer archetype, though their relationship with their drone or exocortex feels like a Ranger with their animal companion; the Mystic is a Druid/Psychic; the Operator is a thief Rogue with Dex Fighter elements; the Solarian is basically a Jedi; the Soldier is the closest to just being “a fighter but in space,” but they’ve refocused it to be much better at ranged combat; the Technomancer is an Alchemist/Wizard/Thaumaturge. And the non-CRB classes are much the same, with a lot of great flavor and interesting sci-fi tropes turned on their heads.

So, all of this to say, Starfinder would run a really good Dune-like or even Star Wars-like space fantasy game, or an incredible Shadowrun/Blade Runner-style cyberpunk game set on a planet of neon and rainstorms, but it is emphatically not tuned toward a Star Trek-style team science/starship combat game, or an Alien/Event Horizon-style space horror game. At least not without some rework.

Speaking of which, the default setting is really interesting. The Pact Worlds are explicitly set in the future of the same cosmos where Pathfinder takes place, but in order to keep the Pathfinder continuity from feeling irrelevant (since Starfinder obviously exists), they took away Golarion entirely (saying that it’s safe but nobody knows where it is, potentially including the gods) and created a timespan of indefinite length called The Gap, wherein people and records just kind of…forget more or less everything but the vibes. It’s a really useful story element that kind of gives them license to do whatever they want, and they also treat it like the Death of Aroden in Pathfinder continuity: it’s the inciting incident for a lot of stuff that follows, and sort of forms a dividing line between the old world and the new.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Starfinder 2e, which is currently in production and which I will be playtesting at Gen Con this fall. The game is going to be 100% compatible with Pathfinder 2e, which almost makes it feel more like an expansion than a game in its own right, but also means that you don’t have to relearn a whole new set of rules. If they can shore up the problems in starship combat and implement some of the flavorful mechanics from SF1e into the 2e ruleset, I think it’ll be the space fantasy game to beat.

Which I guess it already is, given the flop of Starjammer.