Sci-fi tabletop RPG

Hey Veeky Forums what sci-fi system/world do you favor? I'm thinking about Numenera but I heard the system blows, Shadowrun looks pretty cool but the system looks a bit confusing and Star Wars seems like a boring world at this point..

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wwweeeellll??

Can't go wrong with Traveller. Classic or Mongoose edition is fine.

What sort of sci-fi setting are you looking for? Heroic? Gritty? Exploration? Hard? Soft?
What are your limitations on rules?
Heavy? Light? You say Shadowrun looks confusing, but what about it seems that way? Is it due to the crunch or the way it interacts with itself?

At the very least, I will second

Gritty, eploration, hard.

I wouldn't mind a heavy system.

I think Shadowrun is a bit confusing because of the way it interacts with itself. Creating a character seems a bit difficult also but I think I might give it another try. It can't be too hard, right?

Try Alternity.

Shadowrun's rules are well known for being the archetypal crunch-worshiping 90s clusterfuck.

YOU WANT TRAVELLER

GET SHOT YOUR ASS GOES DOWN

MAKE AN ENTIRE SECTOR OF SPACE TO EXPLORE

RULES FOR JUMPING AND RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

Numenera isn't even sci-fi. It's DnD under a see-through veneer of reversed Clarke's third law, with a mandatory gimmick, and hipster mechanics that do worse job than DnD.

The gimmick (cyphers) is conceptually serviceable, but is implemented poorly.

Now, as to sci-fi, some of the stuff that I have personally found decent or better.

Traveller. To sci-fi, it's what DnD is to fantasy. The daddy. There are quite a lot of versions of it, but for starters it's probably worth it to check out Mongoose Traveller first.
Traveller is pretty old-school all round, it feels like 70s, when starship computers looked like early IBM PCs, that kinda mood.

Eclipse Phase is the transhumanist RPG. It's got a kitchen-sink setting with a lot of modern sci-fi tropes thrown in, a bit too much of a kitchen-sink to my taste. It also has a very cool concept of conscience being separate from your replaceable physical body. Mechanics support this concept.
Overall, mechanics are... inelegant, if not clunky. The resolution is a plain d100, but much like 3.5/PF the clunk is in the 'superstructure'.

Fragged Empire is a very fresh RPG, it feels very 2016/2017, for the better or the worse. It's 3d6, quite crunchy (especially with the resource economy, around which the game kinda expects you to build a campaign). While there are few crunchy games with this recent fad of everything rules-light, I do think Fragged Empire does its crunch well.

Some of the games that I have no personal experience with, but that I heard generally positive opinions on: Firefly RPG (Cortex+), Alpha Blue, Stars without Number (neo-OSR), Technoir, Uncharted Worlds (PbtA), Coriolis.

Now, there's this thing, called Mindjammer. It exists in two versions: under Fate rules, and as a supplement to Mongoose Traveller. Now, I don't like Fate at all, but I do like Traveller. But this is not about rulesets. Holy shit, that setting. It's probably the only TTRPG sci-fi setting that I thought was good (I have a very bad habit of applying the same criteria for an RPG setting that I do for books). Just have a look at it, the ruleset doesn't matter.

Some of the things that I personally dislike for one reason or another:
Nova Praxis (if transhumanist sci-fi could be generic, that's it; also it's either on Fate or Savage Worlds: eww).
Diaspora (because Fate).
Star Wars games (I don't like the setting at all, but you probably should check out Genesys, it's a pretty decent generic system).
Starfinder (Pathfinder in space, equipment levels, you can survive half a dozen point blank grenade detonations and other asinine stuff).
Savage World probably has a ton of sci-fi settings.
Warhammer stuff (now, WH is its own thing, it's not bad, but you don't want WH if you want 'something' sci-fi, you want WH if you want WH, it's got its own vibe, you know).

I specifically avoided cyberpunk stuff, because I think it's its own genre.

>Can't go wrong with Traveller.
Agree to disagree, I guess.

Well, you can play a bad session of any game, but Traveller's a solid choice mechanically speaking.

Great game but really dated. Written by two true giants of the hobby, though.

2300 AD

I can vouch for SWN. Even if you don't like OSR the sector generation tools are sublime and its other tables and such are A+ too

>Gritty, eploration, hard.

You want Traveller then.

There are several versions dating back to the 70s and the latest versions from Mongoose update it mechanically somewhat. (Stay away from Miller's T5, it's a RPG kit and not a rules set.) There's even an OGL version now called Cepheus Engine which is seeing a lot of 3rd party publishing. If you don't like Traveller's mechanics there are GURPS, Fudge, Hero, and d20 versions too. There's also 2300AD written be the same company and is can be thought of as Traveller's step-cousin.

Traveller's strength from the start was that it was easy to homebrew and sandbox with - not that those terms were even imagined in 1977. The game has always been easy to remove what you don't like while adding stuff you do from other versions, other sci-fi games, and even other genres. Parts of SWN and 1000Suns, forex, are often used with Traveller.

Read William Hope Hodgeson's The Night Land.

It's probably the ultimate dying earth story, and certainly one of the earliest (published 1912).

The setting is the unimaginably distant future, earth is a nearly dead husk, the sun is a long dead thing of the past, the world is a dark, dismal, terrible place, terrain similar to fallout's wide spaces of mostly barren desolation, and, it gets even worse, the great old ones are awake on earth, but, by the struggle of humanity's very advanced technology, they are temporarily hindered by being forced to remain completely still, yet they will, definitely, eventually, be free.

It is a fascinating world of strange and exotic life forms and terrain in which an adventure campaign could easily be done, though I don't know of any specific system that has ever attempted it.

Have some aliens.

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So I guess Numenera is out of the question?

>Have some aliens.

I think you meant to write "cliches" instead of "aliens".

Could I run a dystopian future with Traveller?
Are the mechanics in Traveller heavy or light?

Traveller is very tool-boxey: you have your core mechanics that are very light-weight (like, really, it's 2d6), but you can expand them with tables and subsystems and stuff however you see it fit.

And yes, you absolutely can run a dystopian future with Traveller.
I would even go as far as saying that the default Third Imperium setting is rather far from rainbows and fluff.