Starship Frustration

[Topdecker]

This rule set is pretty much dead to me until the core is feature complete.

It has been, what, heading towards 16 months now since release? It has gone from having a time frame to having no time frame. Anyone remember the hype about this being a premium ruleset? Paid for Manning, got Manziel.

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[Octavious]

This rule set is pretty much dead to me until the core is feature complete.

It has been, what, heading towards 16 months now since release? It has gone from having a time frame to having no time frame. Anyone remember the hype about this being a premium ruleset? Paid for Manning, got Manziel.

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Yeah I remember all the hype.. we sure didn't get what we were promised and paid for .. now it seems we never will. I stopped GM that game and buying anything at all months ago ,, I saw the writing on the wall so to speak.. and I think lots of ppl did . One thing for sure.. I wont be buying any more FG rulesets or anything else with the promise of it being completed in the near future.. fool me once... Ill stick with D&D

[goodmanje]

Yea, but D&D sucks...

If the game has been a financial disappointment I can understand SW not jumping through their butts to speed a lot of time on it. I thought their would be a lot more interest in the game from players. It’s fantastic!
Very unfortunate.... but I’m going to keep playing it.

[esmdev]

I had a similar feeling some time ago with the Traveller ruleset related to starships.

Some time ago, however, I stepped back to assess my general Traveller games and found that I don't generally use battle maps and tactical combat for starships anyway, so I figured that can wait. Most games I run revolve around the PCs and their interactions with the world more than ships which are primarily about getting from place to place.

So the way I see it, so long as I can run adventures with PCs ships can be theater of the minded.

Because my gaming group of 30 years has spread across the planet, FG/Discord is really the only way we can game anymore. So a functional Traveller ruleset that lets players be players is all we really need.

So my question is, how much do you expect to use the starship rules of Starfinder vs. the amount of time players will be out in the world doing things away from ships and vehicles? My assessment for most Traveller games came out to less than 5% for actual ship to ship anything (that does not count things taking place on the ship which can be handled with a simple battlemap made from deckplans.).

Edited to fix really crazy spell check replacements

[Davido1000]

Its more the fact people paid for a product that is unfinished when people who pay the same price for say 5e get a finished one and now its been confirmed its not a high priority which makes me very disappointed.

[Topdecker]

I think that the lack of prioritization for Starfinder is going to have more to do with FGU releasing than anything else. Smite really won't be able to focus on anything when that process begins and I don't see them releasing FGU in any months other than March through August. They have to get the upgrade in place and stable before the Christmas sale season. Anyhow, if we've just entered one of those time frames and if this is the window, no individual product will get much focus for a good 4 to 8 months.

Anyhow, you can't fault them for being honest. Hopefully they'll give it some attention when they can.

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[ddavison]

While I can understand some disappointment in not having a starship sub-system built into the ruleset, I wanted to address a few things.

1. Starfinder is as complete as 5E or any other system we support. It features all the same functionality for building characters (which are more involved than 5E) and running adventures.
2. Automation is comparable
3. Data and content support is comparable
4. Starfinder starship combat is a new and complex new sub-system that represents only a part of the game. It's very similar to ship based adventure paths in Pathfinder or 5E. Those are still capable of being run despite not having an automated sub-system to run ship-to-ship combat or mass battles.
5. We include all the rules for Starship combat from the book. You just have to run it manually like you would if you didn't have a VTT. You still get access to the content in an easier to use format
6. No VTT (that I'm aware of) automates starship combat or even provides nearly the level of automation that we provide in SFRPG

A Little History and Current Status
We did actually commission and pay a large sum of money (way more than we have made on Starfinder sales) to create a ruleset and part of that was for Starship combat. We saw work-in-progress of a pretty functional prototype for ship building and tracking. None of the actual code was actually shared with us during development and all of that work was lost to us.

We have started working with several other community dev volunteers who wanted to take a stab at it but so far none of them have provided any sort of prototype for us to review. We recently moved the SFRPG ruleset into the core product so that more potential people could look at how the ruleset is built and work on building out an additional combat tracker. I know there are a few devs working on this. If any of these show promise then we will work with them to get it integrated and the devs compensated.

Additonal updates to SFRPG are not a top priority for our internal team, so we have to rely upon community devs & contractors for any additional work at this time -- or wait until our internal team are through the top priorities.

[esmdev]

Its more the fact people paid for a product that is unfinished when people who pay the same price for say 5e get a finished one and now its been confirmed its not a high priority which makes me very disappointed.

I totally feel you. There are a whole lot of rulesets that I wish were as automated and complete as 5E. In truth, there are a lot of things about 5E that I wish would be better and more automated. Still, other than the starship automation, seems to be a fairly playable ruleset by all accounts.

[UltimateGM]

I can see Dougs point. From a business owner and a realist why would you spend money to develop something again? From a business perspective though I would also have the person who was working on the starship functionality either give the code that he already has up or return the cash that was paid to him or her. If neither one of those things happened then I would file a lawsuit. The biggest problem with a lawsuit is that you may end up paying tons more money in the long run then the cash that was given as payment and if that was the case then you would be better off just paying someone again.

[Trenloe]

From a business perspective though I would also have the person who was working on the starship functionality either give the code that he already has up or return the cash that was paid to him or her. If neither one of those things happened then I would file a lawsuit.

Easier said than done, as FG developers are all over the world.

It's hard to just turn up at their house and threaten to criticise their curtains! ;-)