Running Traveller - Part 2: Characters
The Players create many characters only to watch most of them die.
Creating characters in Traveller is so much fun. I am not the kind of person to write backstory for a character unless specifically prompted and required to. I donāt enjoy doing it, I donāt enjoy acting it out, and it is challenging to force my brain to work in that direction. Honestly even doing point-buys kind of bores me and is a reminder Iād rather go play a wargame instead. I either want character creation to be Troika-style, or an entire session and a fun standalone experience.
Traveller is a perfect execution on the latter: a fun mini-game with unexpected results that produce unique and imperfect characters. Really, the outputs of Troika-style and minigame character creation are the same, which is just something unexpected that I then have to work with during play.
Anyway, this session was simple from my point of view. After I introduced the game and the world, the players created characters. Everyone is howling in delight and anguish as a well-statted character eats shit on a survival roll, and then going āok THIS timeā¦ā. The aging rules even had a funny effect where by lowering a stat a character no longer would qualify for a survival roll bonus, which was a very fun and dangerous realization.
The core Traveller book has an assumption that most people doing the things youāre doing are former military, with lots of delineation between Navy, Marines, and Army, and two rather lumpy categories of Merchant and Other. We also used the Citizens of the Imperium which adds several more prior service tables for added flair. The idea that you had another life that whether intentionally or not youāve left behind is interesting and created some really interesting combinations our characters.
The Crew
Our resulting characters are an interesting lot:
- Talas Cask, an ex-Scout exploring this new subsector.
- Marvelous Youngblood, a former Pirate Sergeant.
- Krylon Yadabian, a very rich criminal.
Talas exited the Scout service with a veritable gold-mine, in Traveller terms: an entire ship, free of charge! Normally when players have a ship, they are on the hook for mortgage payments to the tune of hundreds of thousands of credits each month, and so are required to do a lot to make ends meet. All Talas has to do is perform some Scout missions as required and pay for the upkeep on the ship itself. Welcome to a cushy early retirement, Talas.
Not so fast, punk. Marvelous is a pirate, specifically one who failed their reenlistment roll. Interesting, what happened there? Marvelous' player decided that they lost out in an internal pirate power struggle. Rather than languish in the middle ranks of piracy, they struck out on their own. And conveniently, this pirate outfit had just captured a scout ship with a single pilot freshly exiting the scout service and newly arrived to the subsectorā¦ a nice off-ramp to hopefully greener pastures.
Lastly we have Krylon, who did some unspecified business in the Other prior service, but with skills like Gambling, Forgery, Streetwise, and Brawling, we can safely assume it was on the wrong side of the law. Krylon enters our story with a very jingly coin purse, weighing in at 120kcr. Presuming they are a financier of some kind for Marvelous, they are now joining whatever this gang decides to get up to.
These three characters provide a very interesting set of stakes. At first I was shocked to learn that the scout ship is given to the character free gratis, and my head started spinning on various annoying or complicated scout missions that theyād have to do. But once we decided on the pirate absconding angle, we now have a situation where both the Scout service and the Marvelousā pirate clan will be hunting these three across the subsector. Sure, they donāt need much hard cash to keep the lights on and the oxygen flowing, but stay in one place too long and multiple different threats will emerge in sensor range.
To wrap up, Traveller character creation is a blast. While this is a set of stakes we could have easily determined we wanted, it is more satisfying for us to be given a set of numbers and try to figure it out from there. Reading meaning into the outputs of a system is fun and rewarding and I look forward to doing it a lot more.