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subplotkudzu) wrote2010-10-26 08:56 pm
Traveller Reign
For those not familiar with the One Role Character Generator, you roll 11d10 and, as with all One Roll Engine stuff, look for matches. Each number has a general feel to it (in Reign 1s indicate skills as a beggar, 2s are thieving, 3 is performing, 4 is merchant, 5 is sailor, 6 is soldier and so on) and 'wider' matches (three ones, or 1x3, is wider than two ones, or 1x2) indicating higher levels of ability in the area. Any unmatched dice are compared to a set of 'waste die' tables that give one off life events (such as a sudden windfall, being robbed, being the center of a mix up identity 'prince and the pauper' event ans so on). Once you know the outcome of all the dice you lay the events out in the order you like ( (so 2x4, 4x5, 2x6, the Robbed! and Unexpected Windfall events might be "I spent several years as a struggling merchant, but when I was robbed blind I was forced to become a marine in the merchant service. Much to my surprise I was picked out by the captain to inherit his ship and have forged a successful career as a ship's captain" OR "when the astrologer told the captain of the HMS Matilda to give his ship to the first person to cross the threshold I was suddenly elevated to command of a warship. Much good it did me as I was roundly mocked by my crew and forced to turn into a sword-wielding pirate just to impress them, but impress them I did...until the day when the mutinied and left me for dead. Still, I was able to escape back to port, where I was able to get a job as a petty merchant, waiting for my opportunity for vengeance." etc.)
In any event, I'm looking for advice from Classic Traveller players. My read of the classic lifepath is that it determined Longevity in the Service, Commissions and Promotions in the Service, Survival of Fatal Events and Mustering Out benefits. The Psionics rules were, either by accident or design, a mechanism to balance out PCs who had rolled poorly and mustered out too early (the cost of getting tested for Psionic strength is within reach of most characters even after a 4 year term, must be done after mustering out and diminishes with age) and so to my eye should be included. The Services are Navy, Marine, Army, Scout, Merchant and Other (which is described as a sort of general neer do well profession).
Now, my first instinct was to let the player pick any one set and apply that to Longevity in the Service, selecting the service table of their choice (not doing so would mean being in the Other category). Other sets would determine
Survival (the wider the set the more combat/life or death experiences you've seen, increasing you coolness under fire, leadership skills and intimidation, with a 1x5 meaning you 'died on the table' but were revived by advanced medicine),
Promotions (decoupling this from actual experience means you can get Mal Reynolds style sergeants who are insanely skilled with no width in commissions vs. minor gentry who purchased their Captaincy with a 2x5 roll),
Mustering Out (with 3x4 or 3x5 meaning the Traveller holy grail of your own ship or major status bonuses)
Psionics (with a selection of options based on width, with teleportation limited to a 4x5 roll)
and the remaining 6 numbers for things like Extra Combat Training, Extra Technical Skill, Extra Social Skills, and so on.
This would keep the Classic Traveller design of the character being in just a single service, and therefore feels more "Traveller"-y to me. It does, however, mean that you can't mix and match your lifepath order, since everything is occurring during your Longevity in the Service or shortly thereafter.
The other option is to have each service merit its own number? There's room for the 5 classic services (maybe removing Marines, making them people with both Navy and Army training?) plus Survival, Promotion, Mustering out, Psionics and one or two other areas (Science, which is something sorely lacking in the original rules). This does mean the possibility of someone rolling sets in Promotion and Mustering out without having any time in a Service (though waste dice options could account for that somewhat), but it also means that the character can get a more varied lifepath - several years in the Navy, followed by a short tour in the scout service, with a near death experience, etc.
Bear in mind that I'd be building the tables from scratch, and the odds that I'd actually run this in ORE are pretty slim.
Alas, I never played Traveller, so I'm curious about other people's thoughts on this.
Classic Traveller
(Anonymous) 2010-10-27 05:13 pm (UTC)(link)I've played a significant amount of Classic Traveller (CT) over the years, probably my second most frequent RPG and the only one where I have experience as both player and GM. It remains an elegant system, still eminently playable, and never superceded by its successor games. Some would argue it was never improved upon by them either - I am in that camp. I'm assuming from what you've written that you're only using the first three Little Black Books (LBB). Also, I am completely unfamiliar with the Reign system you're describing, so I can speak only to the CT points.
Your general impression is correct to a point. When CT was released, there was no plan to release anything else. Marc Miller intended a standalone RPG that could be used to generically game any science fiction milieu. Hence, the first three LBBs are very spartan, and by themselves, very difficult to GM. Every CT campaign I've known or heard about has used the subsequent releases such as Mercenary, Scouts, High Guard, and Merchant Prince to develop characters. Other occupations were initially released in Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium, and many of those were expanded in the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society (GDW's in house zone devoted to CT.) Your exercise is interesting a laboratory sense, but it would be useless for an actual CT campaign. For that you'd have to include at least the above LBBs, and I suspect the complexity there would outrun the capability of the concept. You'd be a better judge of that, of course.
The original Book 1 character generation system had the player roll six attributes on two six-sided dice: strength, dexterity, endurance, intelligence, education, and social standing. These attributes might help in enlisting in a given service (the ones you note above), in obtaining a commission, promotion, and survival. Each four-year term provided one skill roll (two the first term), plus an additional roll if a promotion was obtained. Some skills accrued automatically for a service, the dreaded cutlass for the Marines for example. Assuming the character survived, the player might muster out or attempt to reenlist. If reenlistment was successful, another four-year term was adjudicated and so on until muster out. In nearly all cases, these results were determined by the roll of two six siders. Skills and muster results by one six sider. Attributes were capped at 15, though skills are theoretically unlimited. (I've never seen a skill higher than 8, which would be almost impossible in the Book 1 system. In the latter, 3 would be a high skill number.)
Other than bad rolls, there was nothing to check a player from staying in service as long as possible except the aging tables. Starting with the fourth term and increasing in severity over time, the character would need to roll to preserve the strength, dexterity, and endurance of the character. In the Book 1 system, aging was very severe, since a set of bad rolls could debilitate a character. (Note again, this is theoretical, no one has used the Book 1 system to generate these characters since the 'advanced' versions of Books 4, 5, 6, and 7.)
The other issue you raise - psionics - doesn't ring true for me. Rather than a balance for rolling a weak character, they were intended to be rare, difficult to obtain, and illegal. Various unpleasant options are listed in Book 3. In fact, the reason for gearing psionics to younger characters was to prevent your seven-term killer character from obtaining psionics in any measure and becoming too powerful. I've only seen one PC with psionics in the games I've been in.
I hope that's helpful. Be happy to comment further if you feel it would be useful.
Cheers,
Matt
Re: Classic Traveller
As for Psionics, I had somehow missed that in addition to the 5k cost for getting the test there was a 100,000k cost for actually _getting trained_! I do think that, even if my accident the idea of offering a one term army grunt with Rifle 1, one other skill and no mustering out benefits to speak of a couple of more rolls to see if they are psionic enough to get the free training would let you salvage an otherwise highly iffy character. I know it wasn't _played_ that way, but it makes sense in a 21st century design paradigm.
Following with the laboratory experiment, do you think that it's key to the CT feel that the character only have experience with a single service, or should the options be more expansive than that?