Some RPGs are suited to telling a tight story, and some work best in a sandbox where players can explore and adventure as they please. The Elite: Dangerous RPG definitely falls into the latter category.
That makes sense, though, as the original Elite is arguably the granddaddy of open-world videogames. Despite coming on cassette tape and taking up considerably less memory than this web page, it allowed players to explore an entire galaxy of starbases, pirate bases and asteroid fields, and the tabletop version from Spidermind sets out to emulate the same feel of freedom and exploration.
Unlike its digital ancestors, however, the Elite: Dangerous RPG isn't designed around a lone-wolf star pilot but rather a whole party of them. Or possibly the term is 'squadron', as every player is expected to have their own ship, whether it's a single-seat fighter or a cruiser teeming with laser cannons.
It still sets out with the aim that any character can achieve any role they want though, and as such there's nothing even slightly resembling classes or even archetypes in the rulebook. Instead, you build your character by picking a number of background options that can determine everything from your childhood to your career. For example, if you decide that your character used to be an engineer they get extra points in their repair skill, while a brief foray into politics boosts their social skills.
The sheer range of options is staggering - apparently cheerleading at high school is worth +20 points in athletics - and set the scene for Elite as a whole. The entire game seems based around giving you choices to upgrade and tweak your character, their gear and their ship. Sometimes this could mean investing in a fresh rack of missiles, while others could involve dying your skin an attractive shade of blue for a bonus to social encounters.
In terms of crunch, therefore, the game is incredibly broad but not particularly deep. Everything from charming a contact to firing a chaingun is settled with the same core mechanic of trying to hit a target number by rolling a d10 with a skill bonus on top. Every ten points you have in a skill you gets you a +1, with early-game characters maxing out at around a +4 and only the greatest of pilots ever reaching the heights of a perfect +10.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, and for a game that looks so intimidating at first glance Elite: Dangerous is surprisingly quick to pick up, with the only truly complicated part of the rules being those for space combat. Even then, most players should be fairly comfortable with their options once they get a couple of encounters under their belt.
It's the kind of system that rewards players who like to tinker with their character and enjoy looking over weapon tables and lists of cybernetic enhancements, imagining how they'll use them in the next encounter. At the same time, it doesn't need them to spend hours on a single turn as they activate buffs and roll on endless tables.
The biggest flaw, perhaps, is in the universe itself. Elite has always been about the tales players made up for themselves rather than those presented in the fiction, and as sci-fi settings go the one presented in the Elite: Dangerous RPG is incredibly generic. Between the corporate-run Federation, feudalistic Empire and democratic but anarchic Alliance all the tropes you'd expect are well-represented, and at times it feels as though the game is calling out for some unique twist that shakes things up a little.
Appropriately enough then, it's up to the players to write the stories that make their galaxy come alive, and the Elite: Dangerous RPG certainly provides the tools for them to do that.
contributed by Richard Jansen-Parkes
That makes sense, though, as the original Elite is arguably the granddaddy of open-world videogames. Despite coming on cassette tape and taking up considerably less memory than this web page, it allowed players to explore an entire galaxy of starbases, pirate bases and asteroid fields, and the tabletop version from Spidermind sets out to emulate the same feel of freedom and exploration.
Unlike its digital ancestors, however, the Elite: Dangerous RPG isn't designed around a lone-wolf star pilot but rather a whole party of them. Or possibly the term is 'squadron', as every player is expected to have their own ship, whether it's a single-seat fighter or a cruiser teeming with laser cannons.
It still sets out with the aim that any character can achieve any role they want though, and as such there's nothing even slightly resembling classes or even archetypes in the rulebook. Instead, you build your character by picking a number of background options that can determine everything from your childhood to your career. For example, if you decide that your character used to be an engineer they get extra points in their repair skill, while a brief foray into politics boosts their social skills.
The sheer range of options is staggering - apparently cheerleading at high school is worth +20 points in athletics - and set the scene for Elite as a whole. The entire game seems based around giving you choices to upgrade and tweak your character, their gear and their ship. Sometimes this could mean investing in a fresh rack of missiles, while others could involve dying your skin an attractive shade of blue for a bonus to social encounters.
In terms of crunch, therefore, the game is incredibly broad but not particularly deep. Everything from charming a contact to firing a chaingun is settled with the same core mechanic of trying to hit a target number by rolling a d10 with a skill bonus on top. Every ten points you have in a skill you gets you a +1, with early-game characters maxing out at around a +4 and only the greatest of pilots ever reaching the heights of a perfect +10.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, and for a game that looks so intimidating at first glance Elite: Dangerous is surprisingly quick to pick up, with the only truly complicated part of the rules being those for space combat. Even then, most players should be fairly comfortable with their options once they get a couple of encounters under their belt.
It's the kind of system that rewards players who like to tinker with their character and enjoy looking over weapon tables and lists of cybernetic enhancements, imagining how they'll use them in the next encounter. At the same time, it doesn't need them to spend hours on a single turn as they activate buffs and roll on endless tables.
The biggest flaw, perhaps, is in the universe itself. Elite has always been about the tales players made up for themselves rather than those presented in the fiction, and as sci-fi settings go the one presented in the Elite: Dangerous RPG is incredibly generic. Between the corporate-run Federation, feudalistic Empire and democratic but anarchic Alliance all the tropes you'd expect are well-represented, and at times it feels as though the game is calling out for some unique twist that shakes things up a little.
Appropriately enough then, it's up to the players to write the stories that make their galaxy come alive, and the Elite: Dangerous RPG certainly provides the tools for them to do that.
contributed by Richard Jansen-Parkes
