SFS Quests - Into the Unkown: Starfinder Society Game 8/22

[Talen]

This session has been reported I emailed your chronicle - if you didn't receive it, please email me....Im not certain I had everyone's address correct. Also , if you discover any errors, let me know and I will correct. We didn't discuss days jobs, but if you were going to spend your downtime and have the skill, let me know and we can update.

[Talen]

Gunbunny, I didnt have your email so your chronicle is attached here.

[Talen]

Gagsmith, I didnt have your email so your chronicle is attached here.

[corwynn]

I emailed you a profession roll for my day job.

Thanks a lot to everyone for the fun. I think it went very smoothly considering none of us have a lot of experience with the game yet! Looking forward to the next chance to let my inner Zoom out...

[gagsmith]

Agree with corwynn, very fun session. Looking forward to more!

[Curaidh]

Talen, a quick question if I may:
1. How did you handle the encounter between the Loreseeker and the Endless Threnody as well as the encounter with the Lawblight?
Did you create them as creatures and made the combat tracker somehow work? Did you handle it completely manually? How much time did it take to handle those encounters with FG at the current stage using "modified" PF?

I'm working on converting S01-00 to S01-03 into FG since I have a long vacation upcoming and plan to DM as much SFS games as I can during that time, however I'm not entirely sure how to best handle the "vehicle sections" in the Scenarios, be they ground based or starships. (My Experience DMing with FG is still fairly limited tbh)

[corwynn]

So, what he did was use the hex maps (lining hexes up is painful, so you're forewarned) and turn facing on. All movement was done as the rules dictate. The enemy ships were placed in the combat tracker, but there is a bit of record-keeping that has to be done however the GM sees fit. You can have the HP of an enemy in the tracker, but you will end up needing to manually adjust the numbers because of the shields. (You can, before shots are fired, adjust the tmp of the enemy to reflect the shields in the relevant facing.)

Because people are switching stations and such, the whole thing is a little fiddly and hectic in FG. There's no really great automation there. You can absolutely build in checks and effects, but that relies more on people using what is pre-populated than they sometimes will during a real session.

The first fight took us over an hour. The second less than half that.

If nothing else FG speeds up skill checks over pen-and-paper, so you're probably better off running using FG than trying to do the fights the "old fashioned" way.

Best advice I can offer: just go ahead and take it slow. Let people do their thing, even if it means they jump in a little late. "Oh yeah, I just remembered, I wanted to do X in the engineering phase!" The rules for vehicles are enough different from what people coming from Pathfinder are used to dealing with that there's no sense in rushing forward. If you're running a game, you will probably find that the more "normal" activities (investigating, character-character scale fighting) will go fairly smoothly, as while they have changed a bit from PF/3.5, they bear enough resemblance to them to progress quickly enough. That should leave you a bit of time to slow the pace a bit during the most unfamiliar sections of these games...

Best of luck!

[Talen]

I agree with everything Corwynn said. I'd note a few other things:

1. Keeping the ship roles straight can be done in the party sheet with the Order tab and scratching out the name of each role as a header (Captain, Pilot, etc). Going forward I plan to use an image of a ship's bridge and label each of the chairs.
2. I created a table for the Critical Damage chart to roll which worked well. Going forward I will also create an effect to drag and drop for glitching, malfunctioning and wrecked.
3. Lining up the hex grids was not fun, but I made that harder than it needed to be - I just needed a map from space - any gridless google image would have worked rather than importing the map from the Quest Scenario. Other than the asteroids, there was no meaningful terrain and you can create asteroid tokens to add after the fact.
4. I tried to create ships as both creatures and vehicles and landed on using creatures since you could preload the skill check bonuses for your npc ship crew.
5. The ship role handouts from the Quest scenario were very useful and I will likely import them into every scenario I have ship combat.
6. Copy the entire ship description onto the other tab on the creature entry -it was a useful reference.

The screenshot below is how Im thinking I might run the combat - Im just not sure if it will be too cluttered and cumbersome.

[Curaidh]

Thanks a lot for the answers. Definitely a big help to get some input on the matter.

I think I'll wrap up "The Commencement" first since it does not feature actual ship combat and except for one of the missions can be considered quite "classical". It also has the added bonus of being the first evergreen.

[JackalAion]

I wish I had a monitor that big X.X