Recently I convinced my starfinder group to indulge me and try out playing Scum and Villainy (the sci-fi hack of Blades in the Dark). I had recently been thinking that while I enjoy playing starfinder I often find the combat can drag, with each round taking a significant length of time and each player only getting to take 3 actions.

It has always been true that in games I've run (and played) the most fun is had in exploration mode where the players and the GM have freedom to essentially just mess around. Recently I had the opportunity to introduce some new players to starfinder which resulted in a lot of fun setting up the stakes but it seemed to drag once initiative rolled.

To a not insignificant degree this can be attributed to the players not being that familiar with the game. In fact this also goes for my main group to some extent as due to the style of play and my use of milestone levelling the number of combats per level has been very low. Combine that with being very tolerant of absences and it means that a player may not have time to learn their new combat abilities. Furthermore, my group started playing starfinder 2e at level 4 after switching from starfinder 1e when the playtest first began.

By trying scum and villainy I had hoped to allow the fun setup part of the game to become the entire game. However what we found during our playtest was that it didn't really click.

Initial Impressions

I found constantly having to come up with consequences for partial failures pretty difficult (I suspect that I would get better at this over time). I think the biggest issue though was with the system of position and effect. Choosing position and effect often felt arbitrary, and at least from where I was sitting it felt like the players had the ability to really stretch plausibility in the narrative when stating actions. This is likely inexperience preventing me from being able to state position and effect effectively.

One of my players when I asked for opinions after the session said it felt like there weren't any stakes to what was happening. Like it was just a sequence of unrelated events happening after each other. I think that this is largely due to our unfamiliarity with the system constantly getting in the way of our ability to lean into it.

DCs and Degrees of Success

When playing starfinder I find it very natural to set DCs in response to player actions and lean into player role play choices. If a player ever wants to do something implausible, I don't have to say that will have limited (or perhaps even no) effect - I can use the tools at my disposal to just set a very high DC.

Scum and Villainy suffers from an issue which other games like Call of Cthulhu suffer from: where the GM doesn't have control of setting how difficult an action is. In the case of scum and villainy only how effective it is and how severe the consequences of failure are (through position). I think I prefer systems where there is a DC to beat which the GM can set arbitrarily high if they'd like to, without directly negating the player's ability to take the action if it is "impossible" or "very unlikely to work" - as is probably more common. In the rules for Scum and Villainy there is an example of an action with "no effect" where a player tries to shoot a fleeing starship with their pistol ¹. In this example the GM basically has to shut down this option because otherwise any roll higher than a 4 on a d6 would cause this starship to be stopped by a single character shooting it with a pistol. The rules encourage everyone to understand why there is a no effect ruling here and come up with new actions to get around it (like getting a bigger gun). But if there is time pressure that makes that not work in the fiction then the answer is essentially "no".

Conversely in a game like starfinder if a player wants to do something that's very unlikely to work I can still let them. I can still have their character do what the player wants them to do. I can let them know that this is very unlikely to work and set the DC very high. Then on the off chance they roll high enough they can still succeed. In pathfinder/starfinder 2e especially I can set the DC so high that even on a 20 they only succeed because on a nat 20 you go up a degree of success, and give them the standard effect instead of an extra critical effect.

Planning

One of the core features of forged in the dark games is the fact that the players skip the planning and use flashbacks to retroactively come up with a plan.

In part I think this was part of what was disorienting for my players in our play test session: the pre-given scenario puts them in a situation the players did not prepare for and so they have less concept of what is going on.

More fundamentally though I think this is a problem simply because a lot of where my table gets the fun from is from coming up with a truly ludicrous quarter baked plan, and then watching it go wrong. You lose some of the fun of that when the plan isn't yours. This issue may in part be remedied by not using a starting scenario from the book and instead starting in a more player led way.

Combat Crunch

Being able to resolve "combat" in scum and villainy so quickly was legitimately very cool. But I do wonder if me giving the players too much ability to affect the narrative by not limiting effect more caused some of the loss of stakes. In general I allowed them to incapacitate those in their way in 1 or 2 checks (mainly because the players chose the action and that's what they asked to do). However, I think the game would really suffer if I introduced some kind of pseudo-hit point system by forcing players to take multiple rounds to down an enemy (I guess I'm describing setting up a clock).

I have in the past gone out of my way to remove some of the mechanical crunch from starfinder. When presented with second edition and reading the GM Core section on subsystem I decided to come up with my own narrative form of starship combat which is not in small part inspired by the mechanics of forged in the dark systems. You can read about it in Starfinder 2e - Star Ship Encounter Sub-system. I created this both due to the lack of starship combat in starfinder 2e at the time and explicitly in response to issues we had previously found with starfinder 1e's starship combat system.

Conclusion

I'm glad I took the time to play scum and villainy. However I don't think it was the solution I was looking for. I also admit that a lot of my criticisms of this game come from me running it badly due to a lack of familiarity. But I guess in some sense that was the point. Every time I have changed system (5e -> starfinder 1e -> starfinder 2e) I have always done a test session first. The similarity of these systems to each other allowed that to work relatively smoothly (it is worth noting that prior to playing 5e I played a lot of BG3).

I think that if I decided to spend the time becoming familiar with this system it might turn out to work well for my group. But on the other hand: I think that we're comfortable in starfinder 2e, and I think that the pathfinder/starfinder 2e system better supports me with the tools I want to tweak the game with sub-systems that will work with my group.

As we go forward I will likely spend some time streamlining starfinder combat. I have plenty of ideas. Like running more combats with fewer high level monsters instead of many low level monsters (less time on the GMs turn), pre-preparing finite state machines for enemy behaviour so that monster moves are more mechanical.

I hope that as my main group continues our new campaign (now reset back to level 1) and we get the opportunity to learn how our characters work, that combat will become less of a slog and more of a tight tactical game. The kind of thing I really enjoy in Baldur's Gate 3 (which has the significant advantage of using a computer to resolve all game actions very quickly) and board games like Undaunted Normandy.