Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game vs The Expanse Roleplaying Game

Compare Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game and The Expanse Roleplaying Game side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Elite: Dangerous Role Playing Game	The Expanse Roleplaying Game
Genre	Scifi	Scifi
Tags	Space Opera, Licensed IP, Ship-Based, Sandbox, Skill-Based, Tactical, Strong GM Support, Exploration	Licensed IP, Space Opera, Ship-Based, Crunchy, Social Combat, Investigation, Faction Play, Social Intrigue, Strong GM Support, Tactical
Core Mechanic	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.	Roll three six-sided dice, two matched and one differently colored Drama Die, and add an ability score plus a focus bonus of +2 if applicable. The total must equal or beat a target number set by the GM or an opponent's result. Rolling doubles generates stunt points spent on combat, exploration, or social effects. The Drama Die's value sets the degree of success.
Dice	d10	3d6
Complexity	Medium	High
Accessibility	High	High
Runnability	Medium	Very High
License	Proprietary (Frontier Developments licensed IP)	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Spidermind Games / Modiphius Entertainment	Green Ronin Publishing
Year	2017	2019
Best For	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.	Groups who want a character-focused science fiction campaign of crew jobs, faction pressure, and danger across the Solar System. It suits tables that want structured action, investigation, and social encounters alongside ship travel.
Highlights	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.	Backgrounds, professions, talents, and focuses build characters with mechanical ties to their lives before the campaign begins. Action, exploration, and social encounters each use dedicated stunts, giving different kinds of scenes procedures beyond a single skill roll. The Churn turns accumulated complications into escalating story events, giving the Game Master a structured way to introduce setbacks.
Considerations	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.	Combat stunts are drawn from six separate category tables covering roughly sixty options, requiring both players and the GM to check charts mid-fight to keep pace. Ground and air vehicles receive no example statistics, leaving their combat rules almost entirely improvised. The forty-page setting guide summarizes the solar system's factions and history at a survey level, so groups wanting deeper political detail need outside reading of the novels.