Your Favorite non-GDW Scifi RPG, Part 2

[Blue Ghost]

Personally I liked "Champions" because it had scifi elements in it, although it wasn't "space oriented" unless your villain was from another planet or something. Did some Bab-5 D20, but didn't like it much primarily because of the Bab-5 property.

Star Wars D6 was a lot of fun. FASA's Trek RPG was a bit cumbersome with all the skills in the book laid out on every character sheet. It just made for ... bookish gameplay; i.e. "Hang on while I check to see if I have that skill" kind of thing. It also lacked support, which was kind of the criticism that some of us had with MT, however more forwardly put MT was than CT. For the record MT had a lot of background material support, but our group was waiting for the MT version of the Adventures and Short Adventures.

I tried to get a GURPS game going several times. It was always my feeling that GURPS, because of the huge library of supplements, could lend itself to taking conventional CT era characters, and really challenging them into environments where to quote the producers of the first Heavy Metal film "situations in which they shouldn't belong..." Maybe someday.

Blue Planet is well researched, but also lacks support. I had high hopes for T20, and am sorry that Hunter has passed on for a variety of reasons. He really put his heart and soul into that and this website, or so I am of the opinion.

GAMMA World had some of the same issues with FASA's Star Trek game. Bought Star Frontiers, but never played it.

 

[Enoki]

Still a little surprised none of these were mentioned. A sci-fi wargaming went in the 70's these rules weren't bad at all

http://spacesquadrons2998.blogspot.com/2013/02/starwar-2250.html

(Site listed just for reference purposes)

The rules had their issues, but at least they worked and were playable.

 

[Barsanuphius]

Trek sorta....

Prime Directive...Starfleet Universe by Task Force Games/Armadillo Design Bureau.

 

[Timerover51]

What? No Metamorphosis Alpha?

While Gamma World 1st Edition was interesting, I really like Metaphosis Alpha, 1st Edition. I still have my original hard copy, plus bought the PDF files for it. I have this dream of having a group of Travellers come across the Starship Warden and figure out how to get inside. Then the fun begins.

 

[ManOfGrey]

Star Frontiers taught me physics.

A friend of mine turned me on to Star Frontiers. At the time, I 'kinda considered it "Traveller light." However, they had a very interesting concept regarding space travel. Ships did not have artificial gravity, but could accelerate at 1G as they traveled away from a planet. When they accelerated to 1/10^th the speed of light, "a cosmic phenomenon became apparent" that allowed a ship to transition to speeds faster-than-light.

So, first of all, all the ships in the game were laid out like the Broadsword or Azanti High Lightning, with decks facing so that "up" was towards the front of the ship. As the ship constantly accelerated at 1G during its travel, the people inside were pushed against the deck at 1G. Once the ship reached its destination, it turned around and decelerated at 1G, which also "pushed," (actually pulled,) people into the deck the same way. Thus...artificial "gravity." (Viola'!)

But, I wondered, how long would it take to accelerate to 1/10^th the speed of light at 1G, and how far would you travel? I was taking college physics at the time, and sat down one evening to figure it out.

Turns out it takes about a week, and you get from the orbit of Earth, to about the orbit of Jupiter.

Then...much to my surprise(!)...that very question was asked on my college physics test a couple of weeks later!

 

[Winged Cat]

Play a game, get college credit? Seems legit.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Hey, that also solves a problem I hadn't gotten around to working out:

Ship misjumps, has only enough fuel left to run the power plant at Pn-1 for a week, not enough for a Jump. How fast can it get itself up to if they're not worried about slowing down at the destination? (That is, they assume that if they can get somewhere to be rescued, the people there will be able to match vectors to rescue them).

Basically, at 0.1c it's 326 years per parsec. With 2 weeks fuel, that's only 163 years per parsec; one could assume that low berths have radioisotope generator backups that might last that long.

 

[aramis]

Hey, that also solves a problem I hadn't gotten around to working out:

Ship misjumps, has only enough fuel left to run the power plant at Pn-1 for a week, not enough for a Jump. How fast can it get itself up to if they're not worried about slowing down at the destination? (That is, they assume that if they can get somewhere to be rescued, the people there will be able to match vectors to rescue them).

Basically, at 0.1c it's 326 years per parsec. With 2 weeks fuel, that's only 163 years per parsec; one could assume that low berths have radioisotope generator backups that might last that long.

In Traveller's Digest, in the Medical Articles, there are 3 kinds of Low Berth passage...
One of which is cryo - once the ship is out of fuel, the cryo needs no maintenance energy after a week or two...
The others need steady supplies.

 

[aramis]

FASA's Trek RPG was a bit cumbersome with all the skills in the book laid out on every character sheet. It just made for ... bookish gameplay; i.e. "Hang on while I check to see if I have that skill" kind of thing. It also lacked support, which was kind of the criticism that some of us had with MT, however more forwardly put MT was than CT.

20+ adventures, 4 sourcebook/CGen expansions (Romulans, Klingons, Merchants, and Fed Intelligence), 3 ship sourcebooks (Fed, Klingon, Romulan— each with a revised version for 2E), and the Tricorder set, plus monthly columns in FASA's house rag counts as "lack of support"???

Only D&D and Palladium did more back in the day.
I think it may be that you didn't know where to get it, but the support was there.

 

[Ulsyus]

I was able to walk people through CGen with 30 min and a calculator...
It was very parallel. Mechanically, it was closest to TNE.

It was a bit of an art, building those characters. That was often the first couple of sessions when we played - long ago in high school.

I loved the setting for it, too. One of my "I've got to use that somewhere" items comes from it: the Azuriach Imperium. Scary bunch, that.

The setting was analogous with several mainstream media and literary sci-fi settings, but they were pulled together in a way that gave it its own timbre in the end.

Some years ago we reduxed SO by unifying the mechanics and creating a task-based system off the characteristics and skills as they were in the original system. That seemed to work quite well, but the setting viewed from a decade later seemed not quite the same.

 

[77topaz]

Basically, at 0.1c it's 326 years per parsec. With 2 weeks fuel, that's only 163 years per parsec; one could assume that low berths have radioisotope generator backups that might last that long.

You made an order-of-magnitude error here: one parsec is 3.26 light years, so at 0.1c travelling one parsec takes 32.6 years, not 326.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Good catch; thanks!

 

[Ishmael]

EABA + Stuff + Fires of Heaven, but cherry -picked

 

[Tiikeri]

Fading suns should be on this list.

 

[aramis]

At the moment, I'm digging the Alien RPG from Fria Ligan.

 

[BwapTED]

Of all those games I've only played/run two : Star Frontiers and WEG/D6 Star Wars.

WEG Star Wars is pretty good. But I have found I'm not really interested in gaming with many of the major conflicts and elements of the Star War 'saga': the Force, the Jedi, the Rebellion vs the Empire, etc... The stuff I do like about Star Wars is well-supported in WEG books: droids, 'Cantina' aliens, smugglers, etc.

Star Frontiers is easy and fun (Alpha Dawn rules). The variety of weapons and defenses makes personal/skirmish combat interesting. I always play with critical hit rules because it's otherwise too hard to quickly kill or disable characters in combat. The races are all game-able and fun.

Knight Hawks uses 'vertical' star-ships with reaction drives, which is something I like.

 

[Tiikeri]

At the moment, I'm digging the Alien RPG from Fria Ligan.

Jones as a playable character or we riot.

Back in the day I was digging the Aliens rpg form leading edge games.

 

[aramis]

Jones as a playable character or we riot.

Back in the day I was digging the Aliens rpg form leading edge games.

Don't even have stats for Felis familiaris. But that's simple: 1 HP, no armor, Mobility between 8 and 10, Observation same range, small target.

It does note that interaction with one's signature object once-per-session knocks off a point of stress, and Officers have the ship's cat as a suggested signature item.

 

[mike wightman]

My latest guilty secret is my like for the Infinity game.

 

[Old School]

At the moment, I'm digging the Alien RPG from Fria Ligan.

Haven’t picked up Aliens yet, but I thought they did a really good job with Coriolis.