Looking to recreate the feel of Firefly, The Outer Worlds, The Expanse, or similar, in a ttrpg that is somewhat leaning to the hard sci fi side. Any thoughts?
I’ve been poking Traveller but it’s hard to tell what the definitive versions are. Also Stars Without Number looks interesting.
I’m particularly looking for ship based stuff – where the ship is statted and you can have ship to ship combat.
Running starfinder now, and I love it… But it is a lot more fantasy sci-fi than the IPs OP mentioned. It’s a great “dnd but in space” setting, but it is mostly based on og Pathfinder so it’s quite a crunchy system and ship battles can be a slog and kinda unbalanced from a “what each player gets to do” perspective. Really sucks to be the engineer or science officer as far as excitement goes compared to the pilot or a gunner.
We’ve had good luck with atypical ship encounters though, like trying to chase down and board a ship before they escape or some people are on the enemy ship during the fight. Having to be fast and loose with the rules about ship roles though when you’ve only got 2 or 3 people on the ship. It feels like it is really designed to have a minimum of 5 people strictly RAW. We’ve also played with concepts from other systems, like allowing the Bard equivalent to use influencing spells on enemy ship crew despite being wildly out of range (but not being able to use ship actions in the same turn).