Traveller5.10 - Book 1, Part 4

Book 1: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

Characters and Careers

57 pages into the book, and we finally get into the mechanics of actually creating characters. I've several posts during the last three January character challenge posts showing just how challenging the T5.10 character generation is to me. I understood the advanced and MegaTraveller skill sets, but T5.0 has this thing with knowledges vs skills. There is a ladder system there, but I feel it makes things far too complicated without giving enough benefits for that level of complexity. Oddly, as I am playing a Fate game, that technique of a ladder of skills makes sense and is easy to understand and use. Anyway, character generation consists of 5 steps, which really have not changed since classic: generate stats, decide on a home world (an option without meaning until a later version that had home world skills - maybe Mongoose?), education and training (pretty sure the 1st instance was in High Guard), career and muster out to have a character that hopefully survived!

It is noted that you work backwards from the date the game starts to figure out what your birthday is. Oddly, a post I was reading (and sorry, cannot recall now where!) was talking about characters birthdays. I don't think we've ever celebrated a character's birthday in any games I've played or run. Something I feel I may want to change.

The education, pre-career options have been greatly expanded. And, given enough social stat, you can re-roll with waivers so it is not a binary succeed/fail. And now we have remedial schooling, trade schools, training courses, college, universities, law and medical schools, honors and of course, a few miliary schools. And more tables so that you can have the Imperial University of Regina if you wish. Of course, with the skill explosion (well, personal view there!), education can give you some really good knowledges and skills. Another handy table indicates which skills and knowledges are available at which kind of school. 

We have a few pages doing an example of the education process, as well as the training process for those without the EDU characteristic but rather the training or instinct characteristic in that slot. 

We also have the table indicating that some skills have knowledges, for example the Engineering skill has jump drives, life support, maneuver drive and power systems as knowledges. I think the progression is 2 knowledges, a skill, 2 knowledges, a skill, and so forth. How a knowledge vs a skill plays out mechanically I am hoping to discern in reading through the books.

oddly in the education section, but as there is a human graduate I suppose it fits

Then we get to the meat of the career system, which as always is another minigame in Traveller. There are 13 careers to choose from: Craftsman, Scholar, Entertainer, Citizen, Scout, Merchant, Spacer (aka Navy), Soldier (aka Army), Agent, Rogue, Noble, Marine and Functionary. What started in High Guard continues here: you can adjust your risk to better increase the reward. What is different is that you go through a set of your characteristics each term. This is usually C1 -> C4 (Str, Dex, End, Int). The risk roll is 2D less than that characteristic.  Depending on your initial rolls, you can determine that you can risk more. For instance, if you have a strength of 12, you may feel pretty safe in taking a mod of 2 or 3. Then you can apply that in the other direction on the reward, increasing your chance of success. Not all careers use the same system but a variation of that or not at all. You can pick any of the characteristics but cannot re-use that one until you have used the others. If you fail the risk, you may get injured or suffer other consequences depending on the career. And they did bring back death: if the controlling characteristic is reduced to 0, you die. You can't beat the basic Traveller premise of your character dying before you can play them! Though I think this is the basis of the Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel system. Or the Fantasy Trip's Death Test. Anyway, even if you fail the risk, you still roll for the reward. I think that is where I got confused the first few times. It is not sequential per se, but independent tasks. 

Then you roll for skills. Generally, 4 skills per term, it can be adjusted depending on the career, promotions, and the regular Traveller things. 

We have a couple of pages covering promotions and some example generation for that sort of thing, followed by 3 pages covering mustering out and its various permutations that of course depend on your career choice. Two pages of charts for the various mustering out benefits, including the Imperial medals for those that have a high success roll in the military careers. Another 2 pages to cover the "master checklist" which is a summary of everything in the preceding pages. And each career has its own icon or logo. 

medals! In color in the PDF, B&W in the book

The next 13 pages have a career per page, each with their own quirks and special things. Creating noble characters, for instance, you actually have return and intrigue rather than risk and reward. And you can get exiled and have to roll to get back into the good graces. Not sure I did it correctly, but here is a noble character created that way. The craftsman career uses fame (as does the entertainer) and you can end up being known across known space.

The next few sections cover some specific mustering out and career-based ideas. 

The next section in the character generation process lets us understand how land grants work. This is for nobles (and T5 backers!) and can give you some recurring credits coming in. Or more responsibilities depending on the grant and your social ranking. Of course, that also brings up why would you be gallivanting across known space when you could be safe and sound in a comfortable home? But that is gamers for you!

We cover aging, which is similar to classic. Every 4 years you roll against your current life stage starting at 34 (which still feels too young as I was actually in my best shape in early 40s, between the gyn and running marathons. I no longer run marathons but do go to the gym about every day). Anyway, ages 34-41 you want to roll above 5 for each of the 3 physical characteristics or else take a -1 hit. So just about the same as Classic I think.

Ship shares (pretty sure introduced in Mongoose Traveller. I'll note I was a big fan of Mongoose 1e, but 2e not as much. I really thought 1e did a good job of modernizing Traveller but keeping the "Traveller" part intact. 2e, for me, went off the rails a bit. And to not get me started on those isometric and useless deck plans! Thought they finally switched back to something you can use. T5.10 says that 1 ship share is worth 50 dtons of ship. So a 100-ton ship is free and clear if you have 2 ship shares. Of course, one thing that is consistent with Traveller is that running ships is EXPENSIVE. So a ship can be a white elephant sort of thing.

Fame is explained, and ranges from 0/unknown, 1/parent all the way through all future realities. Oddly medals is half the page. Any successful roll for rewards and you automatically get the medal for that roll based on the raw roll, no mods are applied. Officers get an automatic +1 on the table though. However - those medals do give you extra fame. Which explains why it is in this section. I am assuming that the fame is accumulative, but that is a guess as it does not saw one way or the other.

And we are not done with character generation: we now dive into background information. We have several pages to generate school names. guilds, projects, military mission names, and so forth. Thes section alone is useful for more than just Traveller and could be used in any game, though it is oriented to SF or modern games. I had forgotten about those charts, and they can give a lot of character to your character's background. 

A couple pages cover the character cards, which is useful if you have the PDF so you can print them out. Not as useful in a book other than for scanning and printing. One of the reasons I always try & get both book and PDF when getting gaming books!

We then have a couple of pages for life pursuits. This is sort of gaining experience: you can have a pursuit if you have the basic requirements and can improve your skills. You then get tested, and depending on the pursuit, you achieve certification. While I like the fluff and experience rules, it almost feels too much like real life. There are even rules for cramming, assuming you have the study materials (and now, PSTD from college strikes!) However - if you actually USE those skills you are wanting to improve, each year on your birthday (see, a birthday IS important!) you can see if you improve or not. 

We have 4 pages on genetics. Useful if you want to save off a clone of yourself. Genetics are one of the 2 dice for each of the physical and intelligence rolls.  As I'll never use this, I'm just skimming over it. The list of 81 genetic profiles just sort of hurts my brain. We do have a lot of symbols for various genders, which seems oddly relevant to today's world.

Of course, having said that, I have created a family history which is basically the same thing as the genetic tree in T5.10.

a paladin's family

We then cover chimaeras, synthetics, clones. Now we actually had clones in Classic Traveller, or at least MegaTraveller. Now we have detailed rules on how to use them. Again, not really something I'll use until I do, and then I'll dig into those rules if we needed to. 

Next up, task resolution! Now that we have a character, we need to know how to use those knowledges and skills. And just how many dice we need to Traveller 5.10.