Honor + Intrigue vs The Expanse Roleplaying Game

Compare Honor + Intrigue and The Expanse Roleplaying Game side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Honor + Intrigue	The Expanse Roleplaying Game
Genre	Historical	Sci-Fi
Tags	Career-Based, Cinematic, Social Combat, Social Intrigue, Heroic, Fast-Paced, Martial Arts, Ship-Based, Pirates, Theater of the Mind	Licensed IP, Space Opera, Ship-Based, Crunchy, Social Combat, Investigation, Faction Play, Social Intrigue, Strong GM Support, Tactical
Core Mechanic	Roll 2d6 + Quality (Might, Daring, Savvy, or Flair) + Career rank vs. 9 to succeed. In combat, Combat Abilities (Brawl, Melee, Ranged, Defense) replace Careers. Bonus Dice roll 3d6 and keep the best two; Penalty Dice keep the worst two. Fortune Points let heroes escape death, add bonus dice, invoke dramatic license, or press the Advantage in duels. Advantage tracks momentum in melee: characters start at 3 and lose Advantage when hit, becoming Defeated at 0. Nine Dueling Styles (Spanish, Italian, French, and more) each grant unique maneuvers and a Final Secret at mastery. Social Combat uses the same framework, targeting Composure instead of Lifeblood.	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	2d6	3d6
Complexity	Medium	High
Availability	Paid	Free quickstart
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	5 of 5 book tools
License	Proprietary	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Basic Action Games	Green Ronin Publishing
Year	2012	2019
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want cinematic swashbuckling in the style of The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood: dashing swordplay, court intrigue, and sea battles with a fast, career-based system.	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	Nine Dueling Styles with distinct maneuvers and masterable Final Secrets provide deep fencing differentiation. Social Combat and Repartee use the same mechanical framework as physical combat, targeting Composure. Over 30 period-specific Careers from Musketeer to Temptress replace skill lists. Includes ship-to-ship combat, battlefield rules, and a 17th-century gazetteer covering Europe, the Americas, and beyond.	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	No free quickstart or SRD available. Advantage tracking adds a subsystem on top of basic BoL resolution. The gazetteer and setting material assume 17th-century Europe as the default, limiting out-of-the-box use for other periods.	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.