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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 1533833" data-attributes="member: 172">Paranoia - An (allegedly) humorous madcap dystopian sci-fi game with a high body count. You are in an arcology of sorts run by a computer. Mutants and secret societies are outlawed. Oh, and all the pcs are mutants and members of a secret societies.Traveller - possibly the most long enduring SF setting/RPG. It's mostly built around 60s-80s sci-fi tropes, like Niven, Piper, Aasimov, Clarke, and others. The Imperium is a human dominated empire, but is largely feudal in flavor, with independant worlds having a lot of variety. Players are often interstellar travellers of one sort or another, often being starship crew on a tramp trader or scout of some sort, but occassionaly travel in other capacities.Key features of the setting other than the empire is that there is no subspace radio or anything like it; messages were carried by couriers from system to system. Humans as a race were seeded across space, along with other species native to terra, including an uplifted race of wolves as a PC race.The system has seen many iterations and liscences. The original is usually referred to as "Classic Traveller", and didn't even have a setting until after several books had already been published; this is a nostalgic favorite of many and had some great adventures. The Classic books are being reprinted and you can usually find them. MegaTraveller is my favorite version because it more cleanly codifies many aspects of the classic system. Metaplot wise, it introduces a civil war that some were not fond of (but you could just use the system as is in the classic setting.) Unfortunately, out of print and hard to find.Traveller the New era changes the setting drastically by reducing the emprie to ruins at the hands of a bizarre computer virus that somehow spreads by radio waves. It is widely rued by those who found the "virus" subplot or the scope of the changes unpalatable (me included.) Also a step down system wise, IMO.Traveller 4 or Marc Miller's traveller was an attempted ressurection of pre-TNE traveller, but is widely regarded as a failure in that vein. It had cleaned up chargen and some wonderful Chris Foss art, but OTOH had a bizarre dice pool system and skill system was clunky, and supplements broke from canon in major ways.Both GURPS and d20 have versions.GURPS version assumes the rebellion never happened. If you like GURPS, there is no reason you shouldn't like GT, but as a classic traveller fan, I don't think the chargen feels right. (A longtime staple of traveller is you randomly generated your character's career. In the earliest versions, your character could even die in chargen; this was gone as of MT and all later varaints.)Traveller d20, or T20, has been published by QuickLink. It is made to use classic or megatraveller stats for ships and planets. It's really a nice iteration, and combat (like most traveller variants) is much more deadly than D&D.Spycraft - I like it, wish I had more chances to play it. A nice variant of d20, definitely a bit in the heroic vein. May need toned down if you are looking for something a bit gritty, but I really like the action dice mechanic (better than d20 modern's action points) and the chase rules are nice -- so nice, other d20 publishers are grabbing them for their own projects!d20 Modern - A nice flexible system with some interesting third party support; I am using it right now in conjunction with D&D for my crossworlds RPG using the Second World Sourcebook. The only thing I would change is the nonlethal damage and automatic weapons rules (a lot of d20 modern players feel that way.)</blockquote>

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