Starfinder Versimilitude questions for Starfinder (HP and Skills)

[Derren]

I am currently in a mood for a fantasy/sci-fi mix (space opera) but there are not that many settings for this that I know of. Starfinder would be one option, but I always have some concerns when it comes to modern or scifi settings and a D&D inspired D20 setting. Mostly because of the high HP characters tend to have. I can rationalize a mighty warrior charging through a hail of arrows to engage an enemy in melee, but have a hard time accepting someone running through machine gun fire or generally the idea that in a modern or future scenario there are still people fighting with melee weapons.

How is Starfinder in this regard? From the previews it looks like melee combat is still a important part of the setting. Is it at least presented well enough to be believable or is it a "Don't think about it" thing? And are Starfinder characters as durable as D&D characters are and thus able to close into melee range no matter what weapon the enemy uses as they can always shrug off several hits or is the combat so deadly that charging an enemy over an open field results in you going down before you reach them?

Another question is about skills. Same story as above, I can accept that skills are pretty basic for medieveal fantasy worlds, but in modern/scifi scenarios I rather have skills which take a significant investment to be good at instead of a character who is good at nearly everything because he plays the rogue or whatever the skill class is and has more skillpoints than he knows what to do with them.

 

[Celebrim]

You really have to decide whether you are wanting a game of hard sci-fi or whether you are going more for science fantasy (star wars, star trek, fifth element, etc.) or a more space opera feel.

Realistically speaking, you can only have fantasy heroes in an age where defensive technology vastly exceeds offensive technology. That's why two of the great ages of fantasy are the Early Bronze, where we get narratives like the Illiad, and the Medieval. It's only when expensive armor allows a single full-time skilled warrior to take on a dozen or two dozen unarmored foes that you can tell a realistic narrative about a single hero against 'overwhelming odds' and not instead have to tell a war story about sudden and meaningless deaths. If you are doing hard science-fiction, sure, probably heroes get gunned down by machine guns just the same as everyone else, to say nothing of getting blown to bits by 155mm shells. That's why fantasy is typically resistant of allowing firearms into the setting.

But, if you are going the space opera route, you can either ignore that problem and do the sort of romantic thing that we in America did with old West gunfights, where we turn them into something fair where mean of heroic skill can face off against great odds and somehow not end up riddled with bullets, or else you can create a conceit of personal defensive technology that recreates an age of fantasy heroes as long as you don't look that close at the physics. Maybe your heroes are all in mechs, or powered body armor, or all have personal force shields that let them shrug off hits from weapons.

Or you can go all the way to science fantasy and throw realism out the window at all and have weapons that obey the dictates of plot alone and even introduce magic into the setting under the guise of some other more scientific sounding thing like 'psionics', as for example in 'Star Wars', 'Firefly', 'Mass Effect' or much of 'Star Trek'. That sort of stuff is really popular - much more popular than hard sci-fi - and I reckon that Starfinder would run science fantasy perfectly well. Even relatively hard science fiction like Babylon-5 and The Expanse has science fantasy elements, so its possible to have much of your setting be hard science fiction but appeal to 'sufficiently advanced technology' whenever you want to add some magic to the setting.

As for the skills/hit point dichotomies, you can handle that with NPC classes that are highly are entirely non-combatant. No one says that something like a Laborer class needs to have a BAB progression at all, or more than 1d2 hit points per HD/level. Most of the time, that's just demographics anyway, and it rarely comes up in play. But even in my D&D, I tend have the world heavily populated with commoners and experts with 8 CON or less, who even if they are 9th level don't have significant hit points. And has for the breadth of learning, remember that you are doing genera emulation, not realism. What skills do Spock and Captain Kirk have? Pretty much all of them. But if you want starting characters to be less than heroic to start, then by all means bump the DC of everything by 5.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I haven't actually cracked my copy of Starfinder yet, but one of the things I've heard is that it goes the D&D 4E/5E route of re-defining HP to definitely not correspond to serious injury at all, by letting you recover HP for free over a short rest.

I'm not sure whether that helps or hurts the case for the game.

 

[Celebrim]

I guess I should add to this that no edition of D&D has ever claimed that hit points represents the ability to just shrug off hits. There is a false dichotomy that frequently comes up in this discussion that amounts to 'meat/no meat', and Gygax explicitly rejected that interpretation.

If your are playing D&D, and a couple of arrows hit you doing say 13 damage, we know absolutely nothing about how wounded you are until we see your hit points remaining. D&D operates under 'fortune in the middle', where we say what we intend to do, we roll dice to determine the success, and then we interpret the success or failure based on the circumstances. If a character in D&D is struck by three arrows for 13 damage, and they have only 5 hit points, that character has been solidly struck in several locations in the body, causing shock and severe bleeding and will likely die shortly without assistance. But if a character in D&D is struck by three arrows for 13 damage, and they have 50 hit points, then those arrows didn't solidly connect with the character at all. Instead, the arrows glanced off them, didn't fully penetrate the armor, or were nearly dodged leaving the character with only a few nicks and scratches. The same damage resulted in a very different narrative result.

D&D operates under the idea that for a hero, there starting hit points at 1st level represents basically their 'meat' and the additional hit points that they earn at higher levels represents their skill, luck, divine protection, and magical forces that collectively protect them. When a PC is wounded, most of the damage that they take is absorbed metaphysically by spending their luck and energy to evade the attack, resulting in relatively trivial wounds. Only when the PC begins to run out of hit points entirely do they begin to sustain serious wounds.

There was some controversy in 4e (and to a lesser extent 5e) concerning whether hit points can be redefined to mean not 'some meat' but 'no meat at all', and you can but only by doing a even more arm waving to distract you from the problems with that interpretation than is usual for traditional hit points. For example, one aspect of the 'some meat' interpretation is that when you are 'hit' you are actually literally 'hit', and if you aren't actually literally hit then it becomes really weird explaining 'on hit' effects like poison or energy drain or paralyzation that a great many D&D monsters do. I'd avoid that interpretation as entirely unnecessary, and go there only if you really want to.

If you are worried about how a hero survives running through a hail of laser fire, the answer is mostly the same as how a hero survives running through a hail of arrows - those lasers are largely evaded. He might be burned by near misses, grazed by hits that leave scorches on clothing, or have hits largely mitigated by his armor, but until the hero runs out of hit points those lasers are never solidly connecting with him. The hero comes out scratched up, burned, and the worse for wear, but does not sustain any really serious wound. Only as the hero's hit points start to run out, do the hits become increasingly serious until the hit that reduces the hero below zero hit points, which is narrated as a more solid and potentially lethal hit.

Basically, I don't think you should worry about lasers and machine guns being inherently more lethal. It's not like in D&D a PC is actually taking solid blows from battle axes and still going anyway. At no point in the games history has it ever endorsed that way of narrating the game. Now maybe an elephant's hit points are all meat and no skill and luck, and that's a perfectly fine narration for an elephant, but that's a different matter.

 

[Derren]

The definition of HP doesn't really change anything for me in this regard.
A modern or scifi character who regularily runs through heavy suppression fire unharmed (because a mechanical hit is not a real hit) to hit the enemy with archaic melee weapons (no matter how much technobabble is attached to them) is for me not more believeable than someone who gets hit several times while doing so.
It is even ok if a character is able to do this because of equipment like having a very advanced power armor, but when everyone is able to do that because if nebulous concepts like HP and level it gets strange for me.

As for Kirk or Spock having all skills, I disagree. None of them could perform engineering miracles like Scotty or had medical knowledge like McCoy.
Considering how advanced knowledge already is and will only get more advanced in a svifi setting it simply does not feel believable to me that someone ends up being an expert mechanic, hacker, medic and diplomat just because he choose to play the rogue or equivalent.

Anyway, I was specifically asking how durable characters in Starfinder are and also how skills are handled, specifically how easy or hard it is to specialize in several of them and how many there are as this are the main things for me which negatively affect my immersion in modern or scifi settings when they are too "gameist"

Edit: Am I reading the SRD right and the Operative can out of the box keep nearly half the existing skills maxed?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Starfinder has basically all of the stuff that you don't want.

You might try something like GURPS: Transhuman Space or D6 Space (it has been a while since I played D6 Starwars, from which D6 Space derived, but IIRC, peeling out the jedi makes gunfights highly deadly).

 

[Celebrim]

Well, I agree Starfinder is not what you want, since Starfinder is probably closer to Warhammer 40k in theme and assumptions.

I do think you should limit your desire for realism some what. When you say things like "A modern or scifi character who regularily runs through heavy suppression fire unharmed..." it suggests to me that you are asking for realism without having ever actually played with realism and understanding the consequences of that.

If you want realism, you either don't want combat (and especially battlefield combat featuring things like suppressive fire) or you should expect multiple characters to die every time combat does occur. Realism in a modern battlefield session means that over the course of a short campaign with say a half-dozen major combats, each player will go through about 10 player characters, because realistically speaking a battle rifle is very accurate, and if it strikes you at the very least you are going to be maimed for weeks if not for life. And if you are further going into 'future' settings where you have weapons that have presumably obsoleted modern firearms, well they are going to be more lethal yet. Games that attempt to simulate realistic combat using modern weapons are invariably hyper lethal and characters will die regularly owing to bad luck and in situations that the player will have no control over.

I could direct you to GURPS. I've played GURPS. I'm telling you now you probably do not want to play GURPS.

So what exactly are you looking for when you say you want 'versimlitude'? What sort of science fiction game do you want to run?

As for Kirk or Spock having all skills, I disagree. None of them could perform engineering miracles like Scotty or had medical knowledge like McCoy.

While I might accept an argument that Spock was not a good of Doctor as Bones or as good an engineer as Scotty, I encourage you to rewatch the series if you think this. There are plenty of occasions where Kirk and Spock demonstrate that they are good at everything when they are separated from the rest of the party. I honestly can't think of anything Spock cannot do given the time, and Kirk shows extensive knowledge of pretty much everything at one point or the other in the series. For example, Spock constructs a Tricorder using parts available in the 1930's to a homeless man, surely an 'engineering miracle' that meets or surpasses anything Scotty is capable of. In general, the entire Star Trek bridge crew in all versions of the series can and will demonstrate knowledge of every subject and skill when separated and on their own. Sisco or Picard are likewise universally capable, as is even someone like Diana Troy. The bridge crew of Star Trek absolutely do have hit points or similar plot protection abilities, as witnessed by their survival rate relative to 'red shirts'.

 

[Celebrim]

Starwars, from which D6 Space derived, but IIRC, peeling out the jedi makes gunfights highly deadly).

Well, it depends on what skills and weapons you give to the bad guys. But straight out of the box, Chewbacca can certainly run through a blaze of stormtrooper fire, dodge or shrug off the blasts,and maul the armored foes with his bare hands, much less some sort of melee weapon.

This goes back to what I'm trying and failing to communicate, that how deadly you want a system to be depends entirely on encounter design. If you run D&D using 1st level characters, but give the foes they face modern weaponry that has been realistically modelled, they will certainly not be able to run through a hail of bullets. In fact, probably no one is ever going to reach high level because the game will be so lethal that PC's will die long before they get enough hit points to realistically having a chance of surviving a fire fight. So in this since D&D absolutely models what the OP says bothers him, but is also and at the same time probably not the system he wants.

You could do something similar with Starfinder. If you run Starfinder where level 6 weaponry is as cheap as level 1 weaponry (or nearly so), fights will be short, sharp and deadly. No one would dare run through a kill zone. Starfinder is very much trying to be D&D in space though, complete with magic items and wizards, so like Mass Effect (which does similar D&D in space stuff) it has tiers of equipment that effectively act like magic items.

 

[Derren]

Well, I agree Starfinder is not what you want, since Starfinder is probably closer to Warhammer 40k in theme and assumptions.

I do think you should limit your desire for realism some what. When you say things like "A modern or scifi character who regularily runs through heavy suppression fire unharmed..." it suggests to me that you are asking for realism without having ever actually played with realism and understanding the consequences of that.

If you want realism, you either don't want combat (and especially battlefield combat featuring things like suppressive fire) or you should expect multiple characters to die every time combat does occur. Realism in a modern battlefield session means that over the course of a short campaign with say a half-dozen major combats, each player will go through about 10 player characters, because realistically speaking a battle rifle is very accurate, and if it strikes you at the very least you are going to be maimed for weeks if not for life. And if you are further going into 'future' settings where you have weapons that have presumably obsoleted modern firearms, well they are going to be more lethal yet. Games that attempt to simulate realistic combat using modern weapons are invariably hyper lethal and characters will die regularly owing to bad luck and in situations that the player will have no control over.

I could direct you to GURPS. I've played GURPS. I'm telling you now you probably do not want to play GURPS.

So what exactly are you looking for when you say you want 'versimlitude'? What sort of science fiction game do you want to run?



While I might accept an argument that Spock was not a good of Doctor as Bones or as good an engineer as Scotty, I encourage you to rewatch the series if you think this. There are plenty of occasions where Kirk and Spock demonstrate that they are good at everything when they are separated from the rest of the party. I honestly can't think of anything Spock cannot do given the time, and Kirk shows extensive knowledge of pretty much everything at one point or the other in the series. For example, Spock constructs a Tricorder using parts available in the 1930's to a homeless man, surely an 'engineering miracle' that meets or surpasses anything Scotty is capable of. In general, the entire Star Trek bridge crew in all versions of the series can and will demonstrate knowledge of every subject and skill when separated and on their own. Sisco or Picard are likewise universally capable, as is even someone like Diana Troy. The bridge crew of Star Trek absolutely do have hit points or similar plot protection abilities, as witnessed by their survival rate relative to 'red shirts'.

Yes, I want "realism", at least as much that as that I can accept that it is the modern day or future with all its advances instead of Conan with technobabble. And that includes that bringing a knife to a gunfight generally being a very bad idea.
Also, more deadly combat has the advantage that people look to other things to solve their problem instead of defaulting to combat like it usually happens in D&D. Just see Shadowrun or Traveller. Although I require it not to be that deadly, its still D20 after all.

Too bad that Starfinder seems to keep all the D20 trappings of Pathfinder or D&D, but not really surprising.

 

[Celebrim]

Also, more deadly combat has the advantage that people look to other things to solve their problem instead of defaulting to combat like it usually happens in D&D.

Ok, that's good to hear, because you really can't run a science fiction game with a lot of combat if you want your combat to be realistic.

If you are familiar with Traveller, why don't you just use Traveller?

Personally, I'd probably run D20 Modern/Future and homebrew what I needed, or use N.E.W./O.L.D. but I'm not sure that either would meet your criteria for enforcing sufficient bullet fear on the players.

D20 systems typically have this thing where they have casual realism up until about 5th level, and then 5th-10th is more action hero, and beyond 10th increasingly powerful superheroes. GMs that want to keep it gritty often limit things to the first 5 levels. But how D20 plays depends a lot on encounter design. If you consistently run 1st level PC's against CR 5 foes, it will play not that different than 'Call of Cthulhu' and PC's will have to avoid combat to stay alive.

Likewise, it's really not that hard even in D&D to make bringing a knife to a gun fight usually a bad idea just by introducing guns with sufficiently high technology. It's just that D&D normally, if it models firearms at all, models 13th and 14th century weapons which in real life existed at a time where one could reasonably bring a 'knife' to a gun fight and it was not only not bad idea - it was probably a good idea. Even from a realistic standpoint, melee weapons weren't obsoleted by firearms until the late 18th century, and the bayonet charge while overused by poor commanders has had a small place on the battlefield even after it was largely futile.