Traveller character creation

I’m running the Keith brothers’ classic 1981 Traveller adventure, Legend of the Sky Raiders, for my regular group. I recently wrote a first-impressions review – ie, I’ve only played it. To begin, we are creating characters.

Setup

We started our first session with me explaining the basic setup (the Travellers are down on their luck on Mirayn, accepting a job from an archaeologist) before we rolled up characters.

(After my last post, you might wonder why I didn't give my players pregens. Well, partly it's because the adventure doesn't come with interesting pregens, and partly because I wanted to try Traveller's character generation, partly and because I wrote that post after we generated characters, and partly because I was lazy and didn't want to do the work on top of all the other prep, but mostly because I chickened out.)

The players each had a pdf of the rules, while I had a paper copy and the pdf. I had the flowchart on my screen (why isn’t that on a single page?) and flipped back and forth through the careers as I answered questions and guided them through character generation.

The players rolled real dice and told me their results – we didn’t use an online dice roller.

Generating characters

Character generation took us a little over two hours to generate a single character for each player. One character mustered out after four terms, the others five. I’m sure this would be quicker were we to do it again – none of us had rolled up Traveller characters in decades, and certainly not with the new rules. For a first-time player, character generation isn’t super-intuitive – there is a lot of flipping back and forth.

We were running late by the time everyone had mustered out, so we didn’t do the skills package. We’ll do that next time.

Afterwards, one of the players shared a couple of online character generators (here and here). We all agreed that while they would have made things simpler and quicker, they weren’t necessarily better. I suspect doing it by hand will give the players more ownership of their characters.

In trying out the generators, I discovered I’d missed a rule (about gaining an extra roll when you achieve a commission), so we’ll do that. (That rule makes no sense to me. People generally still develop, regardless of whether they advance or not. So everyone should get a second roll – but those who advance get a wider choice of tables.)

The Travellers

So here’s our group:

Felix "Dusty" Pygrin 478CB7 Age 38

Admin 0, Animals 0, Art 0, Broker 1, Carouse 1, Deception 1, Drive 0, Electronics 1, Gun Combat (Energy) 1, Investigate 0, Medic 0, Navigation 0, Persuade 2, Pilot 1, Recon 0, Science (Planetology) 1, Science (Archaeology) 1, Stealth 0, Streetwise 1, Survival 1

University dropout, drifter and occasional broker. Has a weird Ancient artefact.

Sir Sidderon Dubois 775ACC Age 34

Admin 0, Carouse 0, Language 0, Drive 0, Vacc suit 0, Engineer  (J-Drive) 1, Athletics 0, Gun Combat (slug) 1, Broker 1, Explosives 1, Leadership 1, Medic 1, Melee 0, Heavy Weapons 1, Pilot (Starships) 2, Stealth 1, Recon 1, Tactics (Military) 1

Graduated from university, joined the army. Left the army to become a space pirate. Has a cat – apparently, IMTU Terran cats are as widespread as humans.

Timo Sosak  8A9B84 Age 38

Pilot 4, Survival 1, Science 1 (Archaeology), Gun Combat (Slug) 4, Melee (Blade) 2, Electronics 1, Medic 1, Engineer 1, Recon 1, Vacc suit 1, Astrogation 0, Mechanic 0, Carouse 1, Seafarer 0, Language 0

Five terms in the Scout service – mustered out with a Scout ship, which I need to take away at the start of the adventure. (He also rolled six weapons during mustering out – hence Timo’s high weapon skills.)

Hmmm, Mongoose 2e Traveller characters have many more skills than I remember…

Observations

My thoughts on Traveller’s character generation:

• The minigame is very Third Imperium-centric. We’re playing in the Far Frontiers sector, centred around the League of Suns. Do they have the same careers? Are the assumptions the same? For simplicity’s sake, we assumed so, but “realistically”, a mini-empire like the League of Suns probably doesn’t have much need of a scout service.
• The players created connections with each other during character creation, but in hindsight, I think that would be better done at the end. This is because we all started at the same time, and so everyone was going through each term together. However, the characters mustered out at different ages, so events that seemed to occur at the same stage for the characters turned out not to be the case. (This isn’t a big issue, but I would do it afterwards later on. It also means that if anyone joins the group later on can also create connections. Interestingly, this character generator creates connections after mustering out.)
• Judging by how the rolls went, there are clear bonuses for sticking with a career rather than flitting between careers. Probably like life.

I can’t work out how much I like Traveller’s character generation. On the one hand, it spits out interesting characters with a backstory and history. On the other hand, it’s hard to steer a character in a particular direction (without fudging die rolls) if you have specific game needs (which is my personal preference). 

The players seemed to enjoy it, though, and that’s probably what matters most.

Coming soon: Preparing for the first proper session.

Previous parts in this series: #1 My first impressions review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.