RPG Working vs Real World Working

Everyone plays RPG games for a different reason. For me, I love playing games in general, but lack any real tactical or strategic abilities. Growing up, my neighbor would play games with me and, despite being a few years younger, always won. So I moved into RPGs where there are no real winners and losers, even when you die. And of course, in classic Traveller, you can even die before your character even gets to play!

One of the aspects that is covered in few games is working outside of the adventure sessions. For Traveller, you actually have a career before deciding the 9-5 life (or the equivalent of that in the far future) was not what you wanted to be doing. Traveller has a LOT of potential careers, though originally really the basic 6 were covered. You can work your various terms, get some credits and skills, then face the universe head-on.

You too can be a stockbroker in the far future (JTAS 6)

The Fantasy Trip handles jobs between adventures as well. There are a few tables that break down the various jobs available based on experience and how dangerous they are. Like the real world, there are job requirements and pay commensurate with the level of danger and your skill set. To be a spy and get 250 silvers a week needs a lot of skills: stealth, silent movement, disguise, literate, 3+ languages, streetwise. Even more interesting there are notes about raises and all that based on your IQ and a few things. And I thought just Traveller was accountants in space!

And the classic Dungeons and Dragons, at certain levels, certain classes had basically a more permanent job aspect: fortresses, land holdings, your own temple. At least from what I've read: I actually barely played D&D, and have only managed a few sessions in D&D 5. My group tends to play different games. But I am planning on running OSE and those rules are based on the original B/X rules, and there are some examples there of long-term self-employment essentially once you reach a certain level. Assuming you live that long!

the paladin's starter fortress. A bit cold in the winter

I've picked up a few games over the years, and the Space Gits game works similarly to Traveller: you have 1-4 4-year terms, end up in prison, and are part of basically a suicide squad in a dark future. The fantasy version works in the same way: you are a guard or something, end up in a pit.

There may be other games where you have to work for a living in between things (in fact, probably a lot more as I recall my Cthulu character was working as well, and our Fate Vigilante game we all had jobs). Hmm, guess more games reflect the real world a bit more than I thought! Though the one hero game I played in recently, my character was actually a street person, playing his guitar for spare change and living in an alley. And like Uncle Heimlich, Verner ends up in a lot of my games as it turns out he is a doorkeeper between worlds. And possibly immortal, though he does not recall much past a few years. I need to work up both Verner & Uncle Heimlich for the OSE game come to think of it.

Of course, this comes up as I am job hunting again. And while I would love to get some sort of job that had to deal with gaming, I'm also a person who is pretty good at software development and I also really enjoy that as well. What I don't like is the transition between jobs! Despite my characters being brave and willing to risk it all, I'm a bit more introverted and like my security. And insurance. 

There are of course, professional DMs. But I lack the self-confidence to do that. And, as my original employers liked to say, working for yourself is great - you get to pick which 80 hours of the week you want to work! Of course, I did spend 60+ hours a week the last 6 months working, and still got laid off.

Sorry - digressing to the real world. I have been working on learning MAUI which is the .Net stack that will run on Windows, Android and iOS. Thinking I may start, for the 14th time, a Traveller trade program. But this time start really small: you enter a UWP and it will generate the available cargos. I know some versions of Traveller you need to know the destination worlds to generate the various cargo and passenger lists, but pretty sure the original was just the world you were currently on mattered.

I would love to get that in the Android store but I'd have to check with the various stakeholders, primarily Marc Miller and Mathew Sprange at Mongoose. But pretty sure I can release the Windows version as a single executable. And yes, it would be free. Long term I'd like to be able to resurrect my original version, which was really just about feature complete honestly.