2300 AD vs Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game
Compare 2300 AD and Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| 2300 AD | Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Scifi | Scifi |
| Tags | Career-Based, Skill-Based, Simulation, Combat-Heavy, Tactical, Crunchy, Ship-Based, Exploration, Random Tables, Strong GM Support | Space Opera, Licensed IP, Ship-Based, Sandbox, Skill-Based, Tactical, Strong GM Support, Exploration |
| Core Mechanic | For a task, roll d10 and add modifiers from applicable skills and characteristics; meet a difficulty target from 2 for Simple to 18 for Impossible to succeed. A natural 1 fumbles, while failed checks use a separate roll to determine whether the character may retry or suffers a mishap. Hasty, hazardous, uncertain, and cooperative tasks modify time, failure risk, information, or group participation without changing the core check. | Roll a d10 and add your Skill bonus (one-tenth of your skill score, rounded down): equal or exceed the GM's difficulty number to succeed. A natural 1 always fails and a natural 10 always succeeds, within reason. The same roll plus a weapon's Accuracy bonus drives combat at all three scales (personal, vehicle, and spaceship) against a target's Defence score. |
| Dice | d10 | d10 |
| Complexity | High | Medium |
| Availability | Paid | Free quickstart |
| Runnability | 4 of 5 book tools | 3 of 5 book tools |
| License | All Rights Reserved | Proprietary (Frontier Developments licensed IP) |
| Third-Party Publishing | Noncommercial only — Mongoose Publishing Fair Use Policy | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | GDW | Spidermind Games / Modiphius Entertainment |
| Year | 1988 | 2017 |
| Languages | English | English |
| Best For | Groups who want career-shaped crews exploring a politically divided interstellar frontier where starship operations and hard-science constraints drive missions. | Groups who want to play freelance starship commanders trading, exploring, and dogfighting their way across the 34th-century Milky Way. Particularly suited to fans of the Elite: Dangerous video game who want to expand the experience with crewed ground missions and off-ship intrigue. |
| Highlights | Career terms turn pre-play service into skills and organizational ties, giving each crew member a practical history that feeds later missions. Space combat uses hex movement and signature-based detection, making maneuver and sensor discipline as important as weapon range. Linked world-generation and mapping procedures build planets down to regional terrain, giving exploration campaigns playable locations instead of setting prompts. | Three integrated combat scales (personal, vehicle, and spaceship) share the same d10 resolution but each has scale-specific actions and damage rules. Spaceship combat uses a two-zone abstract flight system with zone-restricted actions (joust, dogfight, broadsides, ram, and others), so manoeuvre matters without a grid. Sixteen ships from the video game (Sidewinder through Anaconda) are statted with full component, weapon mount, and modification rules. The Random Generation System provides d10 tables for generating star systems, missions, encounters, and military objectives between or during sessions. |
| Considerations | Character creation can end when a turning-point roll fails, leaving a concept in its current career before the player intended. Combat routes each hit through location and damage-type tables, adding several lookups to a fight. The future history assumes a World War III and French hegemony, so campaigns are tied to a specific 1980s vision of the 24th century. | Spaceship combat has more moving parts than personal-scale checks: shield recharge, equipment actions, floating bonuses, component criticals, and ammo all need tracking each round. The conversational prose style is approachable to read but slow to navigate when looking up a specific rule mid-session. Single-pilot ships are the default; running larger crewed vessels with multiple PCs at the same console takes GM adjustment. The setting is locked to the video game's 34th-century three-superpower politics, which constrains departures from established lore. |