Is there any notable spacefaring or sci-fi enough to be spacefaring system that isn't 40k?

>pathfinder in space

jesus christ no

Pathfinder is

I liked the idea

but jesus christ it's just SPLAT BOOKS: THE GAME

It just exists as a medium to sell splats.

Somehow they've turned a PNP TT game into a moba, complete with buying OP new characters every update

...

Traveller is old. It's like, 30 years old. Mongoose Traveleler 2e is the newest edition.
It was at one point famous for it being possible to die in character creation. I happen to think 'character creation' is one of the best features of the system, as it makes the actual character creation a game in itself. That's pretty metal.
It can be used for anything from cyberpunk operators to space opera mercenaries to midlife-crisis-in-space, traders a la Firefly.

Honestly, fuck it; 1d4chan.org/wiki/Traveller

Cons: It's huge (almost as many splats as 3.x or Pathfinder) , crunch-heavy (there's a rule for everything) and fairly lethal. Automatic weapons ain't nuttin to fuck wit.

Pros: Classic scifi, ships, working economy, supports a variety of playstyles, A+ inspiration material/setting (60s/70s scifi, Nicolas Van Rijn)

Stars Without Number: it's ad&d retroclone, ported to space. Wait, no, keep reading. It's got lethal combat (again, guns dangerous) boring, but inoffensive base mechanics, and then REALLY GOOD mechanics for everything from space navies, space merchant princes, space merchant hobos, mass conquest/mercenary companies, and more. And better than that, it's got really system-agnostic subsystems- so if you like any one of those REALLY GOOD rulesets, you can port it to pretty much anything else with minimal effort. Its kinda-boring core system also supports similar importing; you could take Tomb of Horrors, fluff it as an unbraked AI getting loose on a research station, and then run it as a scifi dungeon crawl if you wanted. Creator is cool an deliberately designs it for the purpose of being able to take cool shit from other systems and use it here, or cool shit from his stuff and use it elsewhere.

Oh, and it has the best one-page default fluff I've ever read, I think.

Yeah traveller is great.
There's a general up now I think.

>It's going to be based off the pathfinder rules

Since we're looking for less crunch (shadowrun burned us once), Stars Without Number actually sounds interesting.

How is combat and battlefield interaction like?

Only played it a bit and it was a while ago; looking at it for a friend's new campaign, but haven't played recently.

>d20
>you roll 1d20+BAB+attack modifier+enemy's defense; 20+ is a hit
>EW do a little less damage but get +1 to hit
>SP do 1 or 2 more damage on average
>burst fire gives you a +2 to hit, I think.
And then other stuff. Like I said, the core system is kinda simple, but so it goes.
Skyward Steel - Space Navy campaigns
Starvation Cheap - Ground combat/mass combat/massive campaigns
Suns of Gold - Merchant hobos/princes
>Darkness Visible - Space cults, illuminati, espionage, etc
>Engines of Babylon - expanded vehicle rules
and then some random martial arts supplement in case you want to play as jedi/space wushu. Like I said, good sub-rules, modular.

Traveller's basic mechanics are 2d6+[stat mod]+[skill mod], and not terribly hard- it's just that there's rules and stats for *everything* if you look through enough sourcebooks that have come out for various editions in their thirty years plus years. Think of it like GURPS and include no more than you need.

Speaking of:
GURPS - GURPS

Coriolis - Sinbad the Spaceman (haven't played, heard the system is good. Think Firefly, but 'western-meets-arabia' instead of 'western-meets-china'.

Ashen Stars -- I know literally nothing about it, but I saw it on the shelf at my LGS, seemed to have decent production values. You play as Space Texas Rangers in the battered frontier after a massive war and the good guys pulling out. Hobo around being lawmen, and weighing upholding justice vs being able to top off your tank tomorrow. Certainly has a good premise.

Star Wars - Star Wars. D6, SAGA, Edge of the Empire, I'm sure there's more.

Oh boy I like Coriolis but that ain't cheap

I don't know what's worse.
That this is actually being made, or that it's my best bet to get my group to play a sci-fi game.

Best part? Starfinder is said to be backwards compatible (for the bestiary not sure about classes but it probably is)!

Time to sob in a corner.

>I've never heard of it.

Seeing as Traveller is 40 years old, I know you're lying but I'll help anyway.

There's a Traveller General thread on the board about 99% of the time. Here's the current one: There are archives linked in the first post where you can get nearly all of the 40 years of stuff published for the game.

The Mongoose version, or MgT, is the one currently being published. It's in it's 2nd edition, but it's (mostly) backwards compatible. There's a lot of good and bad in the Mongoose version.

There's a free OGL version called Cepheus Engine (CE) which nearly all 3rd party publishers are using these days. It's the easiest for your player to get into and it's designed for you to easily bolt on bits from other sources. Think of it as an OSR rules set for Traveller.

Mongoose tightened their licensing requirements so everyone told them to fuck off and migrated to CE.

Previous versions are Classic Traveller (CT), MegaTraveller (MT), Traveller: The New Era (TNE), Marc Miller's Traveller (T4). There are also GURPS, d20, and Hero versions of the game among others.

T5 is Marc Miller's latest version - he created the game and still owns it. It's more of a RPG kit than a playable set of rules.

Forty years means there's a shit ton of canon (lore for WH40K kiddies). All that canon doesn't mean a thing (unlike WH40K). As the GM you can use a lot, a little, or none depending on your needs.

If you've any other questions, the guys in the general will be happy to answer them.