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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badwe" data-source="post: 4646075" data-attributes="member: 61762">If you take the exact numbers from D&D and strip away the flavor, only to put on a new coat of paint, you'll find most of the system still works.  The main point of difference is that D&D doesn't have nearly as much emphasis on ranged combat as one would expect in a sci-fi setting.  If you can locate the books, I highly recommend finding the core of Alternity, as this was meant to be a generic sci-fi setting, and is considered by some a prelude to third edition in terms of mechanics.  Most importantly they have some sci-fi races such as T'sa (reptillian), or Fraal (Roswell style aliens) that you might be able to graft over races such as Dragonborn, Tieflings, or Dwarves.  Elves in space has never been particularly bothersome to me, not sure why.As for space combat, that's a pretty big hole to go down.  The way I see it, you have two immediate choices: a SECOND reskin of the combat/class system, or a skill challenge:*Second Reskin: just as easily as you can call a Fighter a Street Samurai or a cleric a MedTech, you can call a Fighter or Wizard a Fighter or Wizard class warship, with the Warlord-class ship being a command and communication center.  Interestingly this almost makes healing surges MORE intuitive ("Attention crew of the Tordek, your ship has sustained damage, dispatch repair crews immediately" "Unfortunately sir, all of our repair crews are dead or otherwise engaged.").*Skill Challenge: In many ways, a skill challenge is meant to replace combat anyway, and you can be as broad or specific as you like.  If the party is all crew to a single ship, they may be required to inspire the NPCs (Diplomacy), predict the enemy's movement (Insight/Perception), Hack into/Jam the enemy's communicatoin (<s>Thievery/Arcana</s> Infiltration/Technology), so on and so forth. Of course, you can do something as simple as Failures = damage sustained on the player's ship and Success = damage to opponents ships or distance gained (If evading a larger force), or do something more complex.  As long as it's built on top of the skill challenge system, you'll know approximately how much XP to give out.  Also like skill challenges, failure should not necessarily lead to immediate annihilation, but more likely a sub-adventure like being board, tractor beamed into an enemy dreadnaught (read: dungeon), or having faulty navigation equipment from the damage lead to a crash landing on an alien planet.A while ago I had actually thought a good deal about this myself, and I seem to remember a fair number of hiccups can crop up where the analogy stops working and requires too much work/rebalancing to succeed, but I hope you don't run into that problem! Make sure to post back how it works out.</blockquote>

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