I have a feeling Traveller will win here. But let's see what theRPGsite members consider their favorite sci-fi RPG? And why?

The choice for me is Classic Traveller. And by Classic Traveller I mean Traveller Books 1-3. (I've been blogging extensively about Classic Traveller using only Books 1-3 for the last couple of years.)

Why I like Classic Traveller might not be so obvious. Some reasons I've been thinking about lately:

STATE BLOCKS FOR NPCS AND ALIENS
Do you know how easy it is to stat an NPC in Classic Traveller? This easy:
5468A7. Rifle-0. Mechanical-1
Boom. That's crazy easy.
As someone who really wants to spend more time just making shit up with my friends in response to the ideas, plans, actions, and choices they throw at me.
I cannot overstate the brilliance of Marc Miller's design in this regard.

STAT BLOCKS FOR BEASTS
Sure, it's a bit more complicated, but watch this:
Gatherer 50kg Hits: 11/2 Armor: jack-1 Wounds: 7 teeth+1 Responses: A9 F8 S2
Still, sweet!

TERRIFIC PROCEDURAL GENERATION MATERIAL FOR THE REFEREE
The dense layer of procedural generation of Worlds, Encounters (NPCs, Animals, Legal, Patron), Encounter Range, and NPC Reaction lets me generate content on the fly and help me come up with new ideas, locals, and situations I would never come up with on my own.

THE SITUATION THROW SYSTEM
A preposterously straightforward but crazily flexible resolution system to handle any situation that the PCs get into that the Referee wants to hand off to the dice for adjudication.

• The scale is simple: a 2D6 bell curve. A Referee armed with a table showing the odds from 2-12 on 2D6 is good to go.
• The Die Modifiers are intuitive: +DMs for skills, high characteristics, tools, character history, or situational modifiers the Players come up with. The -DMs are just as simple.
• The trick is to take the system for what it is: A Referee driven simulation rather than a failed Skill System of later RPG design. But once you do that the game is excellent.

STRAIGHTFORWARD PLAYER CHARACTER DESIGN FOR MAKING ADVENTURERS
The game doesn't try to present you with every type of person from every walk of life that could exist in an interstellar setting. It's built to create characters who have the chops and the wherewithal and the focus to go on adventures in an adventure driven interstellar adventures.

The PCs can't do everything, of course. The character generation tables offer a limited set of skills, and PCs will only have a few of those per PC. But this means that if the PCs don't have the skill set available they will have to come up with adventure-driven schemes and shenanigans to keep going: steal the part they need to fix their ship because they don't know how to fabricate it; get to the professor of ancient languages held against his will on the estate of the noble to translate the alien tablet they found; sneak into the government building using a clever ruse because this group doesn't have someone with Computer skills; and so on.

IMPLIED, ADVENTURE-DRIVEN SETTING DETAILS
While the rules have implied setting details they do not provide a setting. This allows me to build the cool setting that I want. And as for the implied setting details, what are they? That the distances between the stars matters, communication is slow, tech levels will vary greatly, space travel between the stars is expensive, dangerous, and a big deal. What does this give us: Implied setting details that support exotic, novel, adventuring environments with lots of space and room for adventures to go get into trouble, take risks. The procedural driven setting generation material, along with the random encounter material, all define a setting ripe for adventure.

INCREDIBLY FLEXIBLE
Ultimately Classic Traveller at its core isn't limited to being a SF game. It is, instead, an awesome RPG engine with tools to build the setting you want and allows the Referee adjudicate clearly and the Players have an infinite latitude as to how handle problems and situations.

Want to use the rules to play a game set in WWII? You can do that. Want to use them to play cavemen? You can do that. Want to use them to play modern day Cthulhu? Why not? All one needs to do is come up with rebuilt character creation tables and you are good to go. (For the CoC you'll want some sort of mechanic for insanity or insights or whatnot... but you're a grownup. You can figure it out.)

Remember that the Psionics rules are a template for anything from Psionics, to magic spells, to magic weapons, to alien or monsters effects. Combined with the rules for Drugs (as well as the flexible weapons and armor rules) one can mix and match the rules to reproduce the effects of everything from cyberware to trans-human bioengineering. This flexibility allows a Referee to create truly alien SF worlds and technology in the standard "Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future" play mode... or use the game (as mentioned above) for completely different settings shorn of all SF trappings.

Classic Traveller is one of the most pure iterations of RPG play and design that I have ever seen. The fact that most people don't (or can't) see the game for what it is strikes me as odd. But that doesn't change how amazing the game is.

Traveller is the best. Classic is the most significant in terms of design history, with Mongoose Traveller the most accessible for a modern audience (and a variety of good settings, including Mindjammer and 2300AD). Versatile, elegant system, easy to pick up and play but retains a nice sense of physical realism in its world design. Lots and lots of support and still the seminal sci-fi game that many have imitated since.

Other sci-fi games I like:

Paranoia
Space 1889
Cyberpunk 2020
Mutant: Year Zero
Star Wars (the WEG version)
Eclipse Phase (in certain doses anyway; other times I find it a bit overbearing).
Over The Edge - actually very good at doing Phillip K Dick stuff.
HoL: Human Occupied Landfill
Doctor Who RPG

Classic Traveller for me as well... all the more so for having reading ChristopherKubasik's bloggings regarding it over the past while, which have revitalized my interest in its earliest form.

Unless I want to make a case for Call of Cthulhu as a science fiction game, which it kindasorta is... but like a lot of other scifi games I like, it's not as open-ended in that spacefaring direction.

Star Frontiers: Still my go-to for a great SF RPG, especially once you add in starships with Knight Hawks.

Albedo: A fairly hard fiction RPG with a rather unforgiving combat system. Great for its War is Hell theme that runs throughout. But also can make for viable espionage, and other themes.

Universe: Still fond of this one. I like to use the star system generator system from it for Star Frontiers.

The one, the only: Classic Traveller.

Classic Traveller is my favorite.

However, if I had just gotten into gaming and discovered both MongTrav and Stars Without Number, I would probably go SWN.

I've also had great fun with lots with Rifts: Phase World and Mechanoids (Invasion & Homeworld).

Quote from: Omega;972085Star Frontiers: Still my go-to for a great SF RPG, especially once you add in starships with Knight Hawks.

Please start a thread on Star Frontiers, especially what you've been doing with it. I love the races, but I found the system wonky.

SF Games I actually GM'd a lot of (ca 1988-1991):

WEG d6 Star Wars 1st edition
PARANOIA

Unfortunately I've not GM'd or played much SF since then (bit of Traveller The New Era, bit of Mutant Future); I spend nearly all my time running various versions of D&D.
SF Games I would love to run/play:

White Star
Mini-Six, space opera setting

[Plug warning] Like a broken record I'm going to say Icar because I wrote it and it is inextricably woven into the fabric of my life and friends. I always like the version that I'm writing at any one time.

I like Paranoia, I played the original to death with all the source books. I have the new one too, read not played. I've always enjoyed the humour and the situations that the players get themselves into.

The only other one I really like is SLA Industries. It's so dark and gritty while having some silliness to it.

I like classic Traveler for sure... I think it was the third game that I ever played (after D&D and Call of Cthulhu).

I think my favorites are (in no particular order):

The Void - Lovecraftian horror meets Dead Space. Relatively low tech for a sci-fi game. That is to say, there are no Warp drives. So, everything takes place in our solar system (or just beyond). The rules are a die pool but they are elegant.
SLA Industries - Bitchin' setting one of the most original. Pity the system is krud.
D6 Space (nice generic ruleset).
Cold & Dark - I like this probably for the same reasons as the Void. A Nice oppressive atmosphere with a sense of dread. But there is FTL travel.
Savage Worlds Slipstream - Basically Flash Gorden with the serial numbers filed off. Although a much cooler setting.
Starseige Event Horizon - a Great little toolkit for building your own Sci-Fi stuff. Uses the same engine as Castles & Crusades (which I like).

A trifecta of Traveller, WEG Star Wars, and Mekton are my favorites. I feel that these three games emulate their genres incredibly well, so well that they are gaming cornerstones. Traveller has the play of written science fiction that I grew up reading. WEG Star Wars has the roots of the Star Wars franchise in its very DNA and is an easy to learn intuitive system to boot. Mekton gives me my Anime/Manga mecha fix with all of the things that I love best from that genre.

Favorite: D6 Space/WEG Star Wars-First system I ever played so there's nostalgia and familiarity, plus I think it's pretty elegant, and very easy to teach.

Second Favorite: Stars Without Number-Capitalizes on my familiarity with D&D, and provides many tools with which to build a setting and plan adventures.

Honorable Mentions: X-Plorers and Tales of the Space Princess, the former because it also works with my familiarity with D&D and is even simpler/lighter than SWN, the latter because it's just different enough from D&D to scratch a different itch, and I really just love John's writing style.

Cyberpunk 2020 - In its time and place, relative to my own interests at that time, the game and its mechanics were a complete revelation for me. It's kinetic, "no holds barred" assumptions, the themes, it's one of those games whose conceits completely encapsulated the good and the bad of the genre it was portraying. Being a murder-hobo in CP2020 never felt so good, but never lasted very long. It taught my players to be more tactical *and* strategic not just in combat, but in social aspects of the game. It taught them the implicit values of working together despite their character differences of outlook. It made them *better* players.

Take this in context with the first sentence.

Edit: And the system, while it's aged and could use some pruning and tweaking, it still rocks mightily.

Traveller lite, I mean Thousand Suns. I have not played it though, but based on read I really want to one day. It represents real classic sci-fi to me, that I have read from the great classics - and with minimal rules burden. I wish there were more adventures for it, but I'm sure I can steal them from Traveller.

Traveller. My current iteration of choice is Mongoose 1st, for:
1) skill system - easy to use but goes beyond the ad hoc nature of CT's.
2) chargen - provides a wide variety of options with just-right detail lifepath without the unbalanced zaniness of the CT and MT enhanced systems
3) support/setting. Still fundamentally the same system as CT, so I can plug into decades of material people have been churning out for it.
4) gritty edge. I like sf settings that aren't just space fantasy with no regard for harsh realities.

Though it should be said, I don't see Traveller as the ideal sf game. If someone marketed a game that had as good a system but a notch better realism (say 3d starmaps and no assumption of patently implausible gravitics), I'd switch over.