The First Game
You've volunteered to run a replacement Convention game in 2 weeks. What now?
Goal
A faithful Classic Traveller '77 experience for 6 players
Scope
- Character Generation
- Post-Career Training/Education or "Experience"
- A complete adventure scenario
Scale
3 hours, 6 players
Pre-Reqs
None. Someone who'd never played in a role-playing should be able to walk up to the table, sit down and play.
Character Generation (char-gen) Requirements
- Death must be on the table. It's a key feature of the game.
- Players must be offered some choices of skills. Skills musn't be entirely random.
- The process must flow smoothly between players. The spotlight must keep moving.
Death in CharGen
Death was easy. Isn't it always though? Fail your survival roll and you die. It's built-in to the game. The game is infamous for it. I had to have it.
Congratulations! You have died in Character Generation! Sorry for your loss. Roll up a new array and we'll come back around to you.
Simple, polite, and with hope for the future. Done and done. Playtesting would prove me out on this.
Skill Choice
Random skills suck. They just do. Book 1 offers alternatives from the get-go. Choose maybe. Or roll. Or adjust as you need, says Book 1. I thought why not both? Traveller's default mode is random selection so I felt obligated to keep some of that.
There are four skill columns for every career, Basic, Advanced, More Advanced, and Most Advanced. I've abstracted quite a bit here from what Book 1 really is, but abstraction of complexity is important to a successful game session. It enables flow.
Based on those four progressive categories, I came up with an algorithm to use at the table.
- At survival, you get a skill from Basic. If it's your first term (or you're a Scout) you get a second one from Advanced, too.
- If you succeed at a Commission, you get another skill, but this time it's from More Advanced.
- If you are Promoted, you receive a skill from More or Most Advanced, depending on your Education stat.
This constraint alone saved several minutes per term for each character being produced.
This algorithm set up my char-gen loop nicely. When a character acquired a new skill, I had the player roll 2d6. I would use those numbers to look up skill results on the appropriate tables and then offer the player a choice, "Do you want Skill A or Skill B?" and never more than one choice at a time. It is easy and satisfying to make an A/B choice. You get the advantage of direct comparison paired with a tight constraint. Most brains love that! Apple or Orange? Pizza or Taco? It's fast, and it flows.
Based on play testing at home with my wife, who feels that the best part of Traveller is char-gen, and my son who was 11 at the time, and does not share my adventure gaming passion, I worked through this stuff and came up with a "beat list" to run char-gen by.
Char-Gen Beats
- Stat Array & Homeworld.
- Application to Career.
- First Term Survival, Commission, Promotion, Re-enlist.
- Bring out your dead. New Stat Arrays and Homeworlds + Application to Career.
- Subsequent Term Survival, Commission/Promotion, Re-Enlist, + Aging every term after Term 4
- Subsequent Death to New Stat Array & Career.
- Muster Out for Money and/or Stuff. You get up to three money rolls. Choose which and roll.
At each of those beats, I moved the spotlight right to the next player around the table. Everyone gets everyone's attention for a few minutes. Everyone is there for the drama of the survival roll, and there is drama, because someone is going to die in char-gen and that's really the first bit of lore your table is going to generate. Everyone is there for the skill rolls because someone is going to say, "Oh take Medic! We'll need a doctor!" or, "My character has electronics, so if you take mechanics we'll be totally covered." The coordination between players develops early, and relationships between characters can be formed prior to starting the adventure because the choices that drive those things are being made together, in a group. It's a built in Session Zero.
Emergent Lore
This activity also produces lore specific to that group, which is the best kind because the table owns it. That young Navy officer with such a promising career ahead of them suddenly snuffed out in a space battle, far, far away. They sent that player's next character a Clue to the scenario you have planned to run. I'm glad I noticed the lore self-generating early and had the foresight to take notes.
I'll go into detail on the mechanical specifics in future posts. Next time: The Scenario