There's a ton of other issues though:
Weapon (and armor) scaling. It goes purely by price, and more money outright equals more power. A starter laser pistol costs 350 credits and does 1D4 damage, the most expensive laser pistol does 8D4 damage and costs 245,200 credits.
Not only is this just plain weird, it also heavily discourages any character who wants to have multiple weapons. Say you want power armor with an in-built flamer, wield a plasma rifle, and want a nice melee weapon and pistol as backup? Have fun gimping the damage of all of those.
I can see why they did that, they tried to pull back from having massive bonuses to hit/damage and now weapons just get better. It's a new design paradigm, and they're trying to make it work. Because HP scales, you have to have weapons that scale to a lot of damage. Unlike games like the Star Wars Fantasy Flight RPG, where you can have a bajillion weapons because damage doesn't change as you get stronger, damage has to scale higher in Starfinder.
Starship DC scaling.
Your starship has a tier equal to your character level (or rather the groups average). Almost all skill checks related to starships scale with (something + Tier x2), except for those which scale with (Tier x3). You'll be playing catchup at best, and at high levels you'll be lucky to make normal-difficulty checks if you aren't an Envoy or Operative.
That's interesting. Hadn't looked at that. I've never been a fan of starship combat, in any system. Even in Star Trek/Star Wars games, I'd prefer to do away missions or ground stuff rather than fly a ship around.
Archetypes, the Phrenic Adept especially, and especially for Envoys and Solarians.
They cost you class features at 2nd, 4th, 6th, 9th, 12th and 18th level, with some archetypes not replacing all of those.
For Envoys, Mechanics, Operatives and Solarians that replaces their equivalent of talents, which they gain every two levels. You'll be stuck with maybe a first-level choice (depending on class), but nothing else, until 8th level - then only get your next one at 14th level (since the 9th-level often is just "gain a feature at 10th-level instead of 9th, in place of the 10th-level talent).
And for Envoys and Solarians, you basically define your character with those talents. At least a mechanic still has a drone to customize, and an Operative gets some other nice things, the Soldier only loses bonus feats and gets all the class-unique things, and the spellcastres only lose spells known - but for the Envoy and Solarian, you're basically a class with barely any class features if you take an archetype.
This isn't as much a flaw as the other things, I would say, mainly because it's a 100% new design paradigm that I can't say I've ever seen in a level based system before. They're trying new design paradigms out, not all can be hits.
I do agree the archetype sucks, though.
Envoys have way too many talents (Envoy Improvisations) that you're expected to take twice. Want "Get 'Em" to aid your groups attack, and want it to scale to +2? You need to take it a second time. Want to taunt the enemy as a move-action instead of a standard-action? Take the talent twice. Same for Inspiring Boost and for Hurry.
This really really limits player choice. The list of talents also stops at 8th level, and while some auto-improve at 12th level, it's basically the same problem the Fighter had with bonus feats - having multiple 6th-level options just doesn't make a 12th-level character if you have no 12th-level options, much less having three of those at 18th-level.
Yeah, saw that. I'll wait to criticize it before I see how our group looks at upper level play/
Solarians have a ton of problems too. Their list of talents does get new options until 16 level, so that's good.
But the class simultaneously really wants you to be a melee combatant with high strength (there's no good finesse-option other than just wielding basic melee weapons), have high charisma, and wear light armor. It's MAD, in a bad way.
Charisma does nothing for melee. It influences the saving throw DCs of your revelations, and the amount of Resolve-points you get. A melee-focussed Solarian will be stuck with really low Resolve, which is quite bad.
At the same time, you really can't build a Charisma-heavy Solarian either, because there just aren't any good staple revelations you can rely on in combat - well, you could maybe try and disable enemies, but it'll be unreliable.
And ranged combat won't work due to a lack of proficiencies.
And while you don't have the same extreme lack of talents of the Envoy because you don't have to keep upgrading the same thing, you still have a relative lack of them with just getting one every two levels, given that they're your central class feature. There's even empty levels at 5th and 15th level, FFS.
Solarians were a mistake, I think the internet has agreed on that. They're solidly meh. That is a problem that
should have been fixed, if they'd actually done open Beta testing. But they had an echo chamber. Now that it's out, classes going forward (and new class options) should be better balanced.
By the way, there is no "Extra Talent" feat that could fix some of the above issues, and while easy to homebrew, why the heck isn't it in the game?
Speaking of feats, some are just weirdly bad.
Minor Psychic Power, Psychic Power, and Major Psychic Power, for example. The first is a feat to be able to cast one 0th-level spell, from a limited list, three times per day. The second gives you one 1st-level spell (either Comprehend Languages, Detect Thoughts, or Mind Link), useable once per day. The last is either Augury or Status (2nd-level spells), also once per day.
Meanwhile, Connection Inkling and Technomantic Dabble each give you two 0th-level spells that are at-will and one 1st-level spell that you can use several times per day. That's more than three times the impact for the same cost.
Yeah, I already designed to homebrew the extra class feature into games I run. Don't know why it's not there.
Those feats are mirrors of Pathfinder feats, I believe, so I think that's a copy/paste issue they should have checked before deciding it was ever good enough in Pathfinder to bring over.
Personal Fixes I'd apply to Starfinder:
- Equipment just scales with the character level, and screw wealth-to-power. Mostly, it'll still give you fancy power armor, augmentations or magic items where the price tag seems justified
- some fix to the Starship scaling issue. Ideally something on the size, and how many weapon mounts you've added to the chassis (because those either require more crew or make the thing more cramped), not just tier.
- a feat that allows you to buy back some or all of the talents lost to archetypes
- Envoy Improvisations now auto-upgrade, and from 14th-level onward you can spend an Improvisation on reducing the resolve-cost of once Improvisation by 1 (to a minimum of 0).
- Solarians get extra revelations at 5th and 15th level, and possibly also at 9th level.
- the Psychic Power feat line now gives all the spells, and makes them at-will. Because none of those spells are broken if you can spam them (Augury costs Resolve). Alternatively, if that's too powerful, give extra options for every 3 character levels (for 0th-level), at 8th and 12th level (for 1st-level) and at 14th-level (for 2nd-level), somewhat reducing the intial power.
All of those would just eliminate most of the anti-fun I've found in Starfinder so far.
I'll check with my group, I like those ideas a lot.
In case it seems like I'm really disappointed about Starfinder - yes, I am. There's just too many bad and possibly broken design choices, and often just too many things that prohibit creating a fun and varied character.
An Envoy with five or six difference choices on how to boost allies in combat? Fun! Having two or three such choices for most of your career? Much less so.
Empty levels on the Solarian? Who thought that was fun? MAD? Also not fun!
Paying way too much for a cool archetpye? Why?
Not being able to have an arsenal of weapons without a huge loss of power? Anti-fun!
And so on and so forth.
So I'm really disappointed, and I really rather anticipated this game.
Other than the Envoy thing and the archetype thing, I haven't been that upset about the system. But I can see how some may be upset.
I will say, though, one more time, that there isn't a good way for them to do the weapon thing. They could have it scale by class, but at that point it adds a lot more complicated stuff to multi-classing. Or if it simply scales by level, that seems really arbitrary, IMO, and it's not something I want. I see it scaling by weapon price as a subtle distinction, since paying more for a weapon makes sense to me for it to be better.
