what's a good sci-fi rpg product and why?

[jollyninja]

lately i find myself itching to blast robots with a laser pistol or wrist mounted rocket launchers or some such thing from the back of a jetbike. the problem is i don't want to play rifts and it's the only sci-fi game i am really familiar with. so i guess some sci-fi games and where they excell and where they fall flat would be great. ie rifts, interesting background concept but making every single living foe from scratch and 9000 sourcebooks can be a pain for dm's without alot of time and money, ie me.

what i'm looking for is basically a good combat system and skill system with a reasonable (read laser pulse to the head will kill you) chance of death. i'll probably homebrew the setting, all i want is mechanics.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Check out Traveller T20. It uses a different combat system that will indeed result in character death from shots to the head. A character has two stats instead of Hit Points, Lifeblood & Stamina. Every shot that hits automatically does the damage dealt to Stamina and has the potential to do the same to Lifeblood. Armor reduces damage dealt one dice per point up to the last dice and then point for point from the last dice. Critical hits don't figure in armor and the damage goes directly to Lifeblood. Your Lifeblood is equal to your CON. Since the head isn't normally armored obviously head shots go directly to Lifeblood Critical Hit or not.

Example 1:
PC: Shoots NPC in the chest with a pistol that does 3d8 damage and rolls a 7, 5, 4. The NPC is wearing armor that grants AC 4. The lowest two dice are discarded for Lifeblood damage and the remaining two points of armor reduce the 7 to a 5. The NPC took 5 Lifeblood and 16 Stamina damage.

Example 2:
PC: Shoots the NPC in the head (or any other unarmored location) or scores a critical hit and rolls the same damage dice. He does 16 Lifeblood and 16 Stamina damage. Unless his CON is 17 or higher the NPC is now down for the count and dying.

Traveller T20 is really more of a generic Hard Sci-Fi game than a setting. There is campaign setting material in there but the majority of the book seems focused on allowing the GM to create whatever Sci-Fi game he/she wants. There are rules for ship construction, planet design, creature design, and star system design. Since it is d20 you can use materials from other d20 games. One friend ran a Traveller T20 game where a Sci-Fi race of Mind Flayers was beginning to make an invasion of known space. Very cool stuff. It is the PERFECT game to run a campaign set in the Firefly TV Show universe. The only non Hard Sci-Fi thing in the book is that they include their own rules for Psionics though obviously you could use any other d20 source instead if you wanted Psionics to be more powerful.

You MUST have a d20 core book with the main rules... Traveller includes Rules Changes but they don't reprint everything from the PHB or Star Wars d20. I'd suggest using Star Wars d20 as your core rulebook though... you can add any of the Star Wars alien races to the Traveller game and with a little work you can also adapt the ships. Character classes would swap well too with a little work. If you want Jedi in a Traveller setting you can do it. Just swap Wound Points for Lifeblood and Vitality Points for Stamina. You would have to work up a mustering chart for each Star Wars class but that wouldn't be that difficult... just use the most similar class from Traveller.

 

[johnsemlak]

FOr those not familiar with Traveller, what is the technology in T20 like? Can it be used to play in settings similar to Star Wars, Star Trek, or that of the old Star Frontiers game? Does it have the cliche sci-fi weapons?; how does space travel work?; etc?

 

[Calico_Jack73]

By the book it is fairly low tech as far as personal combat energy weapons go. Bullets still make holes in people just as well if not better than lasers. However, there is Battle Dress (power armor), hovercraft, flying belts and other staples of Sci-Fi. If you want a Blaster just make up the stats yourself or use the ones from Star Wars.

Space travel is a little like Battletech. Each ship has a Jump value and can jump that many Parsecs between refuelings. Some ships carry extra fuel so they can make back to back jumps. The fuel is hydrogen which is the most common element in the universe so refuling usually involves flying into the upper atmosphere of a Gas Giant for the budget Traveller. You can also buy it. Jump time is the same no matter the distance... two weeks. If you have a jump-3 ship you jump 3 parsecs in the same time it would take a jump-1 ship to go 1 parsec. YES... I know a parsec is NOT a measure of distance.
Starship combat can be however you want it. If the party has one big ship then they all can fill crew positions on that one ship and do different things during combat. If they each have their own small fighter that works too. I played in a game that recreated Wing Commander and it was pretty awesome.

Edit: One thing that I like is that there is NO subspace FTL communications. Communication is the speed of the fastest ship. If you want to get a message somewhere you hire a ship to carry it for you. It can make for all sorts of cool adventures. Players can be the Sci-Fi equivalent of the Pony Express. Watch the Firefly DVD set if you get a chance and you'll get an idea of what the classic Traveller game is like (except Traveller has Aliens, Firefly does not).

 

[Calico_Jack73]

FOr those not familiar with Traveller, what is the technology in T20 like? Can it be used to play in settings similar to Star Wars, Star Trek, or that of the old Star Frontiers game? Does it have the cliche sci-fi weapons?; how does space travel work?; etc?

Traveller probably could recreate those settings (I'm not that familiar with Star Frontiers) but as for Star Wars there is already a great d20 game out for it. Star Trek has so much source material I'd suggest going with an honest to god Star Trek game instead of adapting another game to it. It isn't to say that you couldn't do it just that you'd have some serious adapting to do.

I highly reccomend Star Wars d20 as the Core Rulebook to use for Traveller.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

If you are interested, there is a free Traveller T20-Lite available for download. Just follow this link below to it. It only contains one character class and some of the rules changes but it is enough to get started.

Traveller T20-Lite download page

 

[Ron]

Traveller is a great game and it is available in several systems. The original system was developed in three different editions: Traveller (aka, Classic Traveller), MegaTraveller, and Marc Miller's Traveller. All of them skill based (no classes) and with the original Life Path character generation system. The third edition of the game, Traveller: The New Era has a different system, adapted from Twilight 2000. Besides T20 (which uses d20), there is also a GURPS version of the game (GURPS Traveller).

I suggest you to go to the publisher site, where there is plenty of information about T20 and other versions of Traveller. If you register, you can even read an article about adapting Traveller d20 to other settings.

 

[jasper]

Yes go with traveller t20. Except for treks subspace communicators and warp drive you could do a knock off of enterprise especially the early seasons. I just finished my time in the chair and working on my next go round. I download the starmaps from the traveller site. It does help to plan on time. For example the travellers recently made contact with a minor race (in star trek read alien race of the week). To help the aliens join the imperium they delievered a message to nearest star base. Now for the message to get back to star fleet hq it going to take 39 jumps which is least 39 weeks. The answer will arrive back to local star base in 18 + weeks due to the HQ using a faster ship. So the players may know more not before Sept 5 of the next year. Currently it is May 27th.
Even the bar room brawl could turn deadly. Ex read my story hour. Squish roll a nat 20 so all the damage went to lifeblood. Just say Squish is not on a prison planet due the ref being nice.
You could do star wars with some reworking on the psi rules. I forbade lightsabers right off the bat because I know there would be arguements on what can and can't do. Read anything lucas wants to do in this scene.
Also Hunter was nice.
I order the ref screen a little over a month ago. Well the order was fumbled. When I called him, he return the phone call in 4 hours and let me choose which free product I wanted to make up for it. Also the site is good for ideas and help. And the edition wars are very mild. Generally like 1st ed is better but take the 1sted chapter on rogues drop the pick pockets ability and give them this. Or the ship you downloaded is for gurps increase the cost by a factor of .5 and it should be near your rule base.
But the traffic is sparse compared to here so you sometimes will have to wait a day or while for the gurus to surf in.

 

[Thanee]

Star Wars D20 looks pretty good, too, and is not hard to learn, if you know D&D3E already.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Psion]

We used Traveller (in this case I mean Classic and Mega Traveller) for some space-operish campaigns, though the combat has a bit of a gritty edge to it. It worked out anyways.

Weapons tend to be a bit more realistic than in most space opera. No technobabble weapons like "phasers" or "blasters", and it is assumed that energy weapons, while they begin to be available fairly early, need some pretty big power supplies. That said, some of them do some pretty hideous damage at higher tech levels.

I rather like T20. The class arrangement is a lot more sensible than most hacks I have seen at them in d20 SF games. However, the chargen takes some getting used to. Here's a tip if you buy it and have trouble with it: class determines what profession you can enter, not vice versa. Think of class as the skills you list on your resume, and profession as the job you are trying to get.

I am considering tinkering together a master-of-orion game using t20 rules, or a similar setting with lots of alien diplomacy and warfare.

Space travel: I am a rabid traveller fan, but there is one thing that was always a conceptual hurdle for me: 2d spacemaps. I mean they worked great for player autonomity, allowing players to decide where they go next. But conceptually, it just doesn't work for me.

FTL travel is cool. There is no "subspace radio", which means that courier ships must carry interstellar messages, and there are a lot of surprises in space combat.

Jumps always take one week, regardless of distance. This is good to give the players some down time/training time/healing time, and is also great to isolate the crew of a ship for a horror or mystery scenario.

If you want to go the non-d20 route, fortunately you can still get classic Traveller reprints. MegaTraveller I feel was a better, more brushed up version of classic, but it is long out of print, but no reprints, so you'll have to get it used if at all. Avoid TNE and T4 like the plague. If you go with the reprints, at least try to scrape up a MT player's manual or referee manual so you can at least have the nicely codified task system (vice the rather ad hoc one that existed in CT.)

If you like GURPS, GURPS Traveller is currently supported. Personally, though, I dislike GURPS and think that it does not capture the feel of Traveller nearly as well as d20 does.

One nice thing about T20: World and ship statistics are printed in the same format as CT/MT, so if you get the reprint or old products, you can plug them in to T20; the only thing you will have to convert is characters and creatures.