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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jedavis" data-source="post: 5445919" data-attributes="member: 35933">Of Traveller d20, True20, and Mongoose Traveller, my group has so far enjoyed Mongoose the most.  Traveller d20 was problematic because in d20, levels are everything, so characters who get lucky during character creation completely outclass unlucky characters by dint of having more levels (especially with military careers, where they can earn thousands of extra XP by winning battle honors).  The de-implementation of dead levels was rather clunky and easily disrupted by multiclassing, and the starship and vehicle design rules were also painful (Wait, I need to allocate extra reactor space for headlights?  Back to square 1...).  Finally, their armor as pseudo-DR rules, while interesting from a mathematical standpoint, slowed down combat significantly.  True20 was pretty good, but the characters got to the point where only optimized spellcasters could threaten them, and I couldn't justify the existence of a sufficient number of such spellcasters within the game world to reliably produce credible threats (never mind the build time on said casters for me).  MongTrav so far seems a solid system.  Much lighter rules-wise than either True20 or Trav20, core mechanic is 2d6+mods vs DC 8, and only need the one core book to play or run the game.  Characters are reasonably competent, but still within the bounds of human believability even at high numbers of terms (I think we have one character who did 7 terms of prior history).  Current party makeup is an ex-marine, a doctor who dabbles in engineering, a psion, and a hacker / assassin (ex-corporate intel).As far as GMing goes, I've been running sessions mostly by the seat of my pants... NPC stat blocks are so stripped down compared to d20 that very little mechanical prep is needed, leaving me free to think of interesting things to have happen.  Similarly, combat is pretty fast, but not terribly lethal; generally people go unconscious without dying, and to guarantee death you have to take an extra turn of shooting after that.  Even the non-combat characters (the doctor and the psion) are useful in combat (whereas in Trav20, many of the noncombat classes got 1/4 BaB, making them useless when the shooting started); the doctor is a decent shot, and even though the psion isn't trained in Gun Combat, he's got an upgrade to his weapon that lets him add his Psi bonus (though he's still more effective at killing people with his brain than with bullets).As for your thematic requirements:So far, the game I've run has consisted almost entirely of exploring Ancient ruins in a setting where the only aliens known to exist have been extinct since before humanity achieved interstellar flight.  You could drop FTL pretty easily, though it would take a little design work to hack the pre-built ships in the book; you'd need a lot more reactor fuel, but no jump drive.  It might also affect some of the core assumptions of the trade rules, but if you're looking to explore rather than trade, probably not a problem.  The psionics so far are pretty reasonable; our psion is a teleportation specialist with Teleport 4 (skill ranks: 0 is trained, 1 is competent, every point after that is about 4 years of experience with that skill.  So 4 is mastery, more or less), and it's still expensive and dangerous to use.Conclusion: unless you're really set on d20, I recommend Mongoose Traveller.  It's a pretty good system, and doesn't require much modification for what you want to use it for.</blockquote>

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