Day Nine: Traveller

It's time to take to the stars with Traveller!

Traveller is one of the oldest RPGs, first coming out in 1977 - just three years after Dungeons & Dragons. This has been one of my 'holy grail' games for years, and recently I finally got my hands on a copy. (Maybe one day I'll even play it...) Characters are generally working-class people who are trying to make their way in the galaxy so they can afford the mortgages on their spaceships. It has a simple 2d6 task resolution system. Several aspects of it are like solo RPG mini-games, like the world creation or starship creation systems. The most notable minigame is character creation. Traveller was the first game with a lifepath character creation system, where you roll to discover the background of your character. I've done it a few times and it's a lot of fun! The most infamous thing about character creation is that in earlier editions it was actually possible to die in character creation, which is now thankfully just an optional rule!

Character Creation: I decided to create a character called Allany Hars. I rolled for her stats, and she was pretty average across the board, except for a slightly higher than average Education score. I decided that Allany would start by attending University, where she learnt Profession (Polymers) and Engineering. I rolled for her random event at university and found that she was a bit of a party girl, earning the Carouse skill. 

Once she left university at age 22, I had to choose a career for Allany. I decided she'd become a Citizen with the Worker sub-career, so she could use her university training. Every year in a career, you gain Benefits, and roll Survival and Random Events. Allany picked up Mechanics, and then failed her Survival Roll. She was injured and lost her job as a result, but made a full recovery.

Time to start again! Allany changed her career to become a Citizen - Colonist. I thought she might like to try a new start. She's now 26 years old. She learns Survival, and she also learns a secret and illegally profits from it - I think she found out that the colony's leaders were working with smugglers and blackmailed someone about it! She gets Deception, and a bonus to her future Benefits roll (to see what she's managed to save up when she leaves her career). In the next period, she picks up Jack of All Trades as a skill, and fails her Survival Roll once again. This time, the colony is shut down due to off-world interference. I think a corporation discovered the smuggling operation and took over. Allany spills the beans to the corporation in exchange for a career with them. She's pretty self-serving, our Allany! She also gets a big pay-out - I roll and find she's managed to squirrel away 10,000 credits.

At 34 years of age, Allany starts over again, this time as a Citizen (Corporate). She gets a promotion to middle management a few years later, and picks up some new skills - Admin, Language, Broker, Persuasion and Leadership. She also learns another corporate secret. I think she stumbled across the last one, but this time I think she actively went digging for dirt. The years start catching up with her something fierce over the next twenty years she spends with the Company, and her physical stats start to plummet. Finally, when she's 54 years old, she has another injury, this time a serious one. Is this one a result of her meddling with corporate secrets? She goes to hospital and the Company picks up most of the bill, and she's able to use her savings from the colony to cover the rest, but her health is wrecked now. She gets offered a promotion to manager, but she finally decides it's time to go independent.

Once she leaves the Company, Allany makes a last set of Benefit rolls to see what she's got. She gets another 57,000 credits, a share in ship ownership, a gun, and a pension of 10,000 annually. Her health is wrecked but her mind is sharp and she has a wide range of skills from her extensive life experience. 

Finally, we have a Skills Package, where the game allocates a set of essential skills amongst all the players to make sure all the key bases are covered. Allany picks up Gun Combat here so she can actually use her firearm. Still, with her appalling Dexterity, she's only breaking even. She'll team up with some other spacers and combine her resources with theirs to get a small ship and take to the stars, her own boss at last. 

Final Thoughts: Traveller's character creation is a joy. This is a really good game that was years ahead of its time. I look forward to playing it one day, and I look forward to trying some of the other minigame sub-systems. I've heard that one of Traveller's campaigns, Pirates of Drinax, is supposed to be phenomenally good, maybe I'll pick that up one day down the line and give it a whirl. Too many games, not enough time!