My group and I have only had experience with DnD (burn me at

>>50487147
Traveller is the best option for something that's familiar-ish to D&D players.

The Mongoose version is probably the most noob-friendly edition.

>>50487147
What parts of dnd did you and your group like? What parts didn't they like?

The new starwars games by fantasy flight games are pretty fun, but have proprietary dice and star wars, depends on how you feel about that.

Savage worlds is a generic that can be set for scifi, works for pulpy violent adventure. If you all liked the combat grid part of dnd, this will be familiar to you.

Traveller is a classic, and there's some neat shit there, but it feels old. If tables, very random generation for characters, and high lethality semihard scifi with spread sheets for spaceship design sounds appealing, this might be for you.

Stars Without Number is a strange mix of dnd and traveller. It has really good stuff for building maps and populating sectors with neat stuff. Might be worth looking at just for that part. Also free.

Can't say much about gurps, but someone will probably recommend it as a simulationish generic.

Fragged Empire is the new hotness for space opera. Looks neat. Haven't played it though.

If the story-telling dramatic parts of the game were what your group went for, you could look at Diaspora. Its FATE powered, so more cinematic story telling based, but still a shout out to classic Traveller in a lot of ways. The character generation and solar system generation being woven together is pretty cool.

>>50487359
In terms of DnD most of my players are Roleplayers more than anything, they like making characters that get to experience the world and go on grand adventures while growing and fleshing out their own personalities.
But some of my other players enjoy Mechanics more than anything and arent as into the Roleplay, so it's a careful tightrope walk between the two.
In essence, I need a system that panders to both sides, sufficiently fleshed out mechanics to appease the Rollplayers and sufficient world building and character generation and progression for the Roleplayers.

>>50487806
FATE has mechanics, they're just geared towards cinematic adventure and triumph. I'd actually suggest taking a look at Diaspora then.

If its not meaty enough, Stars Without Number has a lot of neat things you can get into with procedural (random table generated) story telling.

They're both variations on the same theme. SWoN is dnd based so it might just be easier to swing into. FATE is free too, but you'll have to acquire a copy of Diaspora separately.

Just spoke with my players, one described what they'd like to experience in a space game to be "A combination of Firefly and Guardians of the Galaxy" so, fancy space adventures with shootouts, spaceships and exploration seems to be pretty important to them.

>>50487898
I would recommend the new Bulldogs! for a Fate based game (or just refluf Deep Dark Blue as it's just Firefly under the sea).