Variant Rules

If you're not sure about a variant rule, take a chance! Make sure everyone in your group understands that this is a trial run and that you might need to adjust or remove the variant rules later on if they're causing unexpected side effects or not working as you intended. When you're playing with variant rules, be sure to let any new players who join the group know about the variant rules your group has chosen. This helps them set their expectations, which is important for making sure there's a feeling of fairness among your players.

If your group is playing a game with themes that call for it, you might wind up combining multiple variant rules together, possibly applying several options at the same time. For instance, in a gritty, hard science fiction or survival-horror game, you might start the PCs as 0-level characters and alter the proficiency bonus progression to remove level at the same time. In general, the variant options in this chapter are sufficiently self-contained, with explanations of how they change the game, that you should be able to combine them without trouble. When you design your own variant rules, be on the lookout for places where new rules might have unexpected overlapping effects on each other and the game.

This variant removes the item bonus to rolls and DCs usually provided by magic and higher-grade tech items (with the exception of armor's item bonus) and replaces it with a new kind of bonus—potency—to reflect a character's innate ability. In this variant, magic items, if they exist at all, can provide unique special abilities rather than numerical increases.

Sometimes the story of your game calls for a group where everyone is a space pirate or an apprentice at a cosmonastery. The free archetype variant introduces a shared aspect to every character without taking away any of that character's existing choices.

Before they were heroes, every PC came from somewhere, whether they poured coffee in a dusty, sun-scoured village like Chk Chk or performed in a busy spaceport like Dae. Sometimes, it can be a lot of fun to play a prequel game set years before the PCs' first adventure as heroes, or you might have an idea for a low-powered adventure. The rules below provide ways to build and use level 0 PCs.

This variant removes a character's level from their proficiency bonus, scaling it differently for a style of game that's outside the norm. This is a significant change to the system. The proficiency rank progression in Player Core is designed for science-fantasy games where heroes rise from humble origins to legendary strength. For some games, this narrative arc doesn't fit. Such games are about hedging bets in an uncertain and gritty world, in which even the world's best soldier can't guarantee a win against a large group of moderately skilled mercenaries.

The initial implementation is fairly straightforward: the proficiency bonus just becomes +2 for trained, +4 for expert, +6 for master, and +8 for legendary. It's best to give an untrained character a –2 proficiency modifier instead of a +0 proficiency bonus.

Additionally, for creatures, hazards, magic items, and so on, reduce each statistic that would include a proficiency bonus by the level of the creature or other rules element. These statistics are typically modifiers and DCs for attacks, ACs, saving throws, Perception, skills, and spells.

Finally, decrease the skill DCs of most tasks. You can just subtract the level from the DC tables, or you can reference the Simple Skill DCs (No Level) table for a set of DCs that's easier to remember. The new DCs make it a little harder for high-level characters to succeed than it would be when using the default numbers, in keeping with the theme mentioned earlier. Combat outcomes will tend to flatten out, with critical successes and critical failures being less likely across the game. This is particularly notable in spells, where you're less likely to see the extreme effects of critical failures on saves.

• Ancestry Paragon provides more ancestry feats to help further differentiate characters using Starfinder's diverse array of species.
• Expanded Space Rules gives guidelines for adding additional rules when playing in zero gravity and a vacuum.
• Galactic Hero Points provides a simple adjustment to make Hero Points more heroic.
• Skill Paragon provides additional skill feats for a specific skill to help highlight the themes of the character and campaign.

Many characters have some elements that connect them to their ancestry but identify more strongly with their class or unique personality. Sometimes, though, a character is the embodiment of their ancestry to the point that it's of equal importance to their class. For a game where an ancestral background is a major theme and such characters are the norm, your group might consider using the ancestry paragon variant.

This set of variant rules provides a more realistic approximation of some of the stranger phenomena concerning zero gravity and vacuum environments. They're meant to supplement the existing rules, not replace them. You can apply any or all of them to your campaign, as each adds additional challenges and opportunities for memorable moments in space!

These rules add additional complications to an already logistically complex environment. Therefore, you should only use these variant rules if you plan on having multiple encounters in space. Make sure the first couple of encounters in zero gravity are simple in execution and trivial in difficulty so players can get used to the additional rules and understand them before you add additional complexities like creatures who use special abilities to exploit the environment.

Hero Points are a powerful resource that can change the course of a scene via a key reroll. However, sometimes the use of Hero Points can become underwhelming when the reroll result is worse than the initial result—it might even feel worse if the reroll result is the same result as the original roll! This simple variant rule is intended to make Hero Points more of a heroic resource in your campaign, allowing you to reroll low results into something better. Using this rule will increase the overall power of Hero Points and, like some other variant rules, is something you'll want to heavily consider the ramifications of before including in your game.

Skill feats allow characters to gain thematic feats that can help them in exploration, downtime, and social interactions. But given the high stakes of encounter mode, many players feel pressured to select skill feats that improve their efficacy in combat at the expense of selecting feats that better represent their character's abilities. This can be especially frustrating if a character wants to specialize in a skill like Diplomacy or Piloting that includes skill feats that might only see use in one or two sessions.