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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GuardianLurker" data-source="post: 9244793" data-attributes="member: 786">I really only have one candidate for WORST rpg (sorta). That's d20 future. Given it's stated design goal of being a toolkit to support any style/genre of science fiction/fantasy, I was a little suspicious as that's a VERY tall order. It failed in ALL of its attempts at its stated design goals. It is not fit for use.Given its stated goals, I'd give it a limited pass if it could replicate any one of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the near-future sci-fi (like "Green Mars", or Total Recall). NOPE. It comes closest to the near-future sci-fi, but fails even there. It's biggest failure is lack of understanding of the scales involved - even at the interplanetary level, much less interstellar. Example: It's FASTEST listed ship drive is achieves 25x the speed of light. (In ST:TOS terms that's Warp 3.) For interplanetary travel, that's very speedy - Terra to Pluto is then somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes away. That same drive takes ~2 months (4/25 years) to travel to our nearest neighboring star. Doable - roughly equivalent to a modern day sea voyage across the Atlantic. But our next nearest neighbor is 3x that distance. Again, doable - roughly equivalent to cross-Atlantic voyages in the 1500's. But if you want galaxy-spanning (or at least fully interstellar) adventures, you need more than that. There's a reason Warp 4 is considered slow in Star Trek.Conversely, even the slowest spaceship make space combat meaningless. Because space combat happens at fighter-jet speeds. Which means space combat only happens when 1) BOTH sides want it to happen, and 2) elimination of the combatting forces is the ENTIRETY of the goal. If the space combat is only incidental/an obstacle to the goal, one force just refuses engagement, and there's nothing to prevent that.The ship-building system is barely functional, and frankly is so divorced from the rest of the system, that you'd probably be better off importing a ship-building subsystem from some other RPG.One of the other goals is that d20 Future was also supposed to be interoperable with 3.x. It is, technically, but the power-scale is so much in 3.x's favor that it isn't practically. And it doesn't help that even if you just stay in the d20 Modern/Future system, the d20 Prestige Classes are unerwhelming/underpowered. Nor, frankly varied enough.Some of these problems could have been fixed with an increase in page count. But more of them are just basic failures. Frankly, DragonSpace (a 3rd party supplement), despite it being a purely Fantasy-In-Space setting, does a better job for the 3.x era d20.Space Hero, Spacemaster, Traveller (all versions), Fading Suns, Ashen Stars,.... are all better science fiction RPGs. And Space Hero is probably closer to actually being a multi-genre science-fiction RPG.</blockquote>

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