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No, they aren't - at least, not any moreso than D&D's mechanics. You handle beating somebody with a sword differently than affecting them with a spell, both of those are different from injuring them in some trap, and all three are different from debating them at court. Different situations...

As JimAde says, the polar area that has no sun for a period of the winter and extended daylight for a period of the summer will be much larger. With enough of a tilt, you can have a large area that's basically a land of eternal night, good place to store all those unsightly undead.

My experience is pretty much the opposite - the scenario you describe seems to be far more common in rules-heavy games, because it comes up every time you move outside situations covered explicitly in the rules. Rules-light games, with unified resolution mechanics, are much more likely to give a...

Sounds like it could be HeroQuest, which is a narrative system in which your motivation for performing an action can be as great a contributor to success as your skill at that action. Or possibly The Riddle of Steel, in which spiritual attributes give you an (often decisive) edge in situations...

Just one MegaTraveller book isn't much use, there were three in the box set way back when. But anything you can't find in hardcopy will be available fairly cheaply on drivethrurpg. I personally use the classic Traveller rules for ships (Book 2, not Book 5 - I like my ships small), and...

If your goal is to replace psionics, you might want to take a look at The Psychic's Handbook from Green Ronin. It seems to be based on the SWd20 Force powers system, but is built for D&D, so Steve Kenson has already done the conversion for you.

Since the rulebook there have been five print products and 19 ebooks, plus T20 lite and 11 other free downloads, from a quick perusal of their website. Seems a respectable enough catalogue to me, YMMV.

You can't really discuss military issues without discussing the economy that pays for it, and D&D doesn't do economy very well - the basic assumptions of magic item availability and character wealth by level require that there be millions upon millions of gold pieces worth of stuff produced just...

Given the timeline, I'd say it's about 90% likely that it's the OGL parts of Blue Rose - all the mechanics, none of the fluff, with magic, fantasy equipment, etc. Not just a bit, a lot like M&M in combat resolution and such. Character generation and advancement is different, and the magic...

From his FAQ: http://www.wilwheaton.net/faq.php#trek I think "throw it away" is a bit of mischaracterization, but then again I've only read one side of the story.

I've looked at the Menace Manual, it didn't seem particularly useful; guess it depends on the sort of campaign you run. As earlier mentioned, d20 Future is in the SRD now, for that matter I believe a good chunk of the Menace Manual is, too. So unless you're really a fan of owning the books, you...

It is d20, but based on Spycraft rather than d20 Modern. AEG lost the license a few months ago, I believe the current theory is that Eden will pick it up and use their Unisystem ruleset, but I don't know if that's been confirmed or is still in the internet rumour stage.

I think Universe's starmap went out to 40 or 50 light years, much like 2300 AD's; I found the latter one easier to use, but I think they were based on pretty much the same data. Which of course is wildly out of date nowadays, there's a variety of websites with more up to date data. My favourite...

That's not science, that's technobabble (or Treknobabble for the specific setting that does it a lot). It's the same as in a fantasy setting where a story is finished by pulling some kind of magic out of nowhere in the last five minutes, in either case it's just weak storytelling, not a problem...

Firefly is so close to a standard Traveller game that a fair number of people on rpg.net and COTI (kind of the Traveller equivalent of the ENBoards) wonder whether Joss Whedon played the game. They're mechanically decent, but IMHO very overpriced. Buffy and Angel are pretty straightforward...

If I had to pick a line, I'd draw it somewhere around 1600 for Europe. My basic way of approaching the problem is asking "When did the sort of training-from-childhood to produce an elite warrior become cost ineffective?" That to me marks the transition of the fighter from D&D class to d20M...

No, but I would say that the EU is often ignored by Lucas, and that seems to be the case here. That of course is secondary to the point of stormtrooper competence, which as I noted is generally pretty decent when they're not interacting with the heroes. That makes them pretty much the same as...

Various Lucas quotes I've seen tend to make me believe the Stormtroopers are still clones, though possibly from a different base DNA pattern. Leaving aside the Ewok fight (which was silly, but would've been a lot cooler if they'd gone with Wookies as initially planned), Stormtroopers generally...

Eh, I dunno. On the minis side, it justifies the "anybody can fight anybody" situation, which leads to a nice range of games and styles. In a roleplaying context, it'd mean that none of the governments (and equivalents) are good guys, but particular individuals - such as a group of PCs -...

I played in a campaign once where some of the gods of the Forgotten Realms were trying to manipulate Cthulhu into destroying their rivals - the setup was that the big C was far more powerful than any individual god, with an utterly alien mindset but he could possibly be manipulated via some of...