For a very long time my answer to this question was the same, the D6 System as seen in West End Games' Star Wars, The Roleplaying Game.
At this moment in 2023, for the first time since I started running the 2nd Edition of Star Wars D6 (1992), I think the system might have some competition: The ALIEN RPG by Free League and Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius.
ALIEN, which uses a variant of Free League's 'Year Zero System', is so simple, flexible, and perfect for the setting it depicts I am honestly stunned. I played the Leading Edge Games version at a convention about 30 years ago and though I had fun, the system was a mess. Like many games of its time, the ALIENS Adventure Game went for complexity, while Free League's ALIEN cuts out all the fat and just gets down to what matters. It's absolutely brilliant. I love it so much that I've used it to make two of my most successful homebrew/kitbashes: Ghostbusters and Red Dwarf.
Star Trek Adventures is now my favorite way of playing my favorite subject matter for a game. I've played FASA, LUG's Icon System, Japan's Enterprise RPG, and others, with each giving gamers its own spin on the very familiar setting of Star Trek. At the same time, all the various Star Trek games shared many things in common as well. All these games had the same objective - emulate what it would be like to live and work as a Starfleet Officer exploring the Final Frontier.
Star Trek Adventures embraces this same goal but does it through the lens of this all being based on a TV show. STA fully stands behind the meta-understanding that it is a game about a popular Science Fiction media franchise. Even though I feel like it shouldn't, this dynamic works extremely well. It lets the GM and players relax and just go with the story, have fun, and not worry that they haven't memorized the Star Trek Encyclopedia. Your campaign can pay as much attention to canon as the Lower Decks writer or the website Memory Alpha or as little as STD or Strange New Worlds (Zing!).
Yes, there are bit and pieces of the prior Star Trek games I do miss and occasionally incorporate into my current games but overall I absolutely adore how Star Trek Adventures treats Star Trek and how it lets you play in that universe.
It is impossible for me to decide which one I like more. If I had to pick one, maybe ALIEN as it has the benefit of being adaptable to other settings (I especially like how it helps improve my Ghostbusters rules).
Well, that's that. Next...
AD
Barking Alien
What Star Wars d6 is missing today is two decades of development (and movies, series, etc.). By now, it could be easily in it's 5th edition or so, and it just needs a few tweaks to be fantastic. That said, I prefer the simpler first edition to the second.
ReplyDeleteI like STA, but the fact the Year Zero Engine seems to hate me makes Alien less fun for me :(