In part 1 of this series, I described how Mongoose Traveller’s
spaceship mortgage rule becomes the drive for adventure and action in a
spacefaring sandbox, and the ‘autonomous’ gameplay loop that follows.

In part 2,
I talked about how Traveller’s Patron
system gives the DM a tool to pull the party out of the 'loop’ and into more
traditional adventures.

In this
part, I’ll talk about Traveller’s unique
character creation system, and how it supports the previous two systems.

Brief Overview of
Character Creation

Traveller’s character creation is weird, and it was the first thing house-ruled away by my old DM—and
I can see why.

Traveller character creation is a minigame of sorts, in which
you first generate ability scores (much like in D&D), then pick a career.
You make a stat check to qualify for the career, one to 'survive’ the career
(more on this later), and one to advance. Every time you qualify for the career
and/or advance, you get a random skill or stat boost from a table related to
your training. In the Army and Marines, for example, you’re very likely to get
combat-related skills, while as a Merchant you’re more likely to get something
like Broker or Admin (which tend to be more useful, surprisingly).

You also
roll once on a life event table, in which your character might fall in or out
of love, make friends or enemies, study abroad, and so on.

You then
advance four years in age and try again, and continue for as long as you want.
If your character gets too old, they start suffering physical ability score
consequences, though these can be bought off with semi-legal anti-aging meds,
the consequence of which is starting with high amounts of medical debt.

Rolling to Survive

If you fail
a survival roll, you’re permanently expelled from your career (but can start
another one), and often suffer major debilitating
injuries in the form of sweeping permanent ability score damage, though this
can be bought off by going deep into medical debt. It’s technically possible to
die in character creation if your physical ability scores are reduced to zero
in this way, in which case you would start over. For that to happen, the player
would have to decline treatment—basically, they’re making a choice to give up
and start over. This is a kind of extreme “safety net” against
playing truly worthless characters, I suppose, though I haven’t seen it happen
yet.

Why is this Good Again?

This way of
creating characters is shockingly different
from any that I’ve seen before. The character that you end creation with might
not have any resemblance at all to what you sat down and intended to create,
which was a huge source of frustration, as a player, in my last two campaigns.
It’s more common than not to, for example, come up with a concept for a dashing
space pilot and end up with a 98 year-old-that-looks-34 white-collar office
worker who’s got a laundry list of grievances against various corporations who
have fired him over the years.

When I’ve
seen this system work well, it’s because players went into it with different
expectations that they would in D&D. For a D&D campaign, you usually
come to the table with a more-or-less fully-fledged character concept, then
roll stats (or point-buy) and fill in the boxes. In Traveller, it’s more like spinning a wheel and seeing what you’ll
get.

For the kind of campaign that Traveller assumes, however, this is perfect, and here’s why.

First, it sets the tone of the campaign. Traveller is very different from most
D&D-esque RPGs. It doesn’t provide any guidance for or benefit from, for
example, balanced encounters. By creating mechanically unbalanced,
unpredictable characters, it is telling the players from the start that there are sharp
edges to this game and they have to stay on their toes.

Second, it generates crucially important NPCs for
the campaign. Those life events—and some fail-to-survive rolls—often create
allies, enemies, rivals, and contacts: NPCs that are guaranteed to be met
during the campaign. The book provides tips to the DM to ensure that these NPCs
have access to spaceships, as they can be found on the random encounter tables.
But here’s the fun bit: the Player will be just
as pissed at their rival, Captain Morgensen (or whatever) as their
character is supposed to be, as he was (according to the events table)
instrumental in getting them fired from their career as a space scout. By
generating these characters during character creation’s life-simulation, it
gives them a real, emotional connection that leads to a lot of fun during play.
These NPCs can easily function as Patrons (which, as explained in part 2, are
the keys to adventure), or can provide paths to Patrons.

Third, it has the potential to start the characters
massively in debt. The clear optimal path in character creation is to pay
off any injuries by going into medical debt, and chug analgesic anti-aging
pills like they’re Skittles in order to keep advancing down your career paths,
or start new ones. As explained in part 1, Traveller’s 'loop’ functions best when the PCs are swimming in as
much debt as possible. The more debt, the more motivation to travel, and thus
the more space pirates and space dragons and space princesses and whatever that
they’ll meet.

Fourth, it familiarizes them with the setting. The
book provides quite a few career path options to the Players, and uses the same
to generate its NPCs. Thus, just by reading through the career path options
available to them, Players learn a lot about the world of Traveller and the kinds of people they might meet, without having
to read lengthy setting handouts or pages and pages of lore or anything like
that.

Fifth, it creates gaps in the party’s expertise,
which encourages hiring NPCs. It’s virtually impossible to end up with an
adventuring party that can cover every skill required to operate a spaceship,
for example. This encourages hiring NPC crewmembers to fill in those gaps,
which really helps make Traveller 'work’.
A lot of the party’s time is going to be spent on their spaceship, so the more
people who are on there, the better from a roleplaying standpoint. Also,  

That said,
it’s not perfect, as…

There Are Some Real Limitations

Mechanically,
the main issue that’s come up with Traveller’s
character creation is that it’s entirely possible for the party to be missing
one or more vital skills, or for a character to be lacking something that would
be key to making them 'work’. Traveller’s basic dice mechanics harshly penalize untrained skill checks
compared to attempting even slightly-trained ones, and some roles can’t be
easily filled in by NPC crewmembers. If your character never rolls to learn the
Gun Combat skill, for example, they’ll more likely than not miss every attack
they make in the whole campaign. The party
can overcome this by hiring marines, for example, but the player might still be bored every time a
gunfight starts.

This can be
mitigated by, say, letting that player control their hired NPCs in combat
directly, but as the game doesn’t really provide a lot of guidance for who plays hired NPCs (the DM? the player
that hired them? The party as a whole, by vote?), the DM and player will have
to come up with their own solution. Since they might not even realize that
there is a problem that needs to be
solved, this can easily lead to traps (for example, if the DM assumes full
control over hired NPCs, many battles will lead to the DM just rolling checks against
himself/herself over and over in front of an audience) that generate
frustration.

Mechanics
aside, there are some narrative implications for character creation that might
strike many Players as quite weird. Most D&D
Players default to making their adventurers whatever their races’ equivalent of
early-20s is. Sometimes there’s an old wizard thrown in to spice things up, but
I’d say 9-in-10 characters I’ve seen are 'college-aged.’  

Traveller strongly rewards old characters. Sometimes very old. Don’t be surprised if the
average age of the Traveller
characters is the same as the summed age
of all of your Players. This isn’t necessarily bad—immortal, eternally-young
sci-fi characters are kinda neat—but it’s also pretty limiting, and may not be
within the Players’ expectations. If a Player wants to make a character who’s a
young hotshot just starting out, the rules will punish them severely. They’ll have virtually no
skills, no money (or debt!), no ship shares (units that track ownership of the spaceship),
and no NPC connections.

Making it Work

I’m not
going to change these rules until I’m more familiar with the system, but my gut
says that many of the game’s skills (such as Computers, Comms, and Sensors, or
the two skills that govern two different, but similar, kinds of
environmentally-sealed armour) could be consolidated to reduce the odds of a
missing skill torpedoing a character. I also think flexibly passing back and
forth control of hired NPCs between the DM and Players will solve a lot of
problems, but deciding on the fly who is in control in a given scenario will
probably take some experience as a DM. I’m vaguely aware that there’s a second edition of Mongoose Traveller, which may have done some of these things, but I haven’t played it and as such can’t comment on it.

I think for
a satisfying experience, you have to make it clear to your Players not to try to build their characters to
a pre-imagined concept, but rather come up with a concept as they play through
their character’s life. Also, tell them upfront that, in this particular sci-fi
universe, anti-aging technology has allowed for the rich and powerful to stay eternally
young, and that they can expect to have already retired from one or more full careers before the campaign even
begins.