traveller chargen

TRAVELLER Character Generator

Traveller Character Generator

Welcome to my Traveller Character Generators based on the Mongoose Rule sets.

Click the links below to start creating your character.

You can also follow the links below to see more of my work and other interesting Traveller content:

A ToolSet is a Traveller game mechanic, an organized system for generating game components other than player characters . [1]

• The player character generator is known as CharGen .
• ToolSets exist as hardcopy in-rulebook creation sequences and as automated, online utility programs.
• 1 Library Data Referral Tree
• 2.1 T4 ToolSets
• 2.2 T5 External Link/s
• 3.1 The Perils of CharGen
• 3.2 Goofy Gearheadery
• 4 References & Contributors (Sources)

Library Data Referral Tree [ edit ]

Please see the following AAB Library Data files for related information: Traveller Core Support Sites :

• FFE Homepage
• Traveller Map
• Traveller RPG Wiki
• Traveller5 World Builder

Description ( Specifications ) [ edit ]

The T5 Core Rules contains ToolSets for the following functions:

• CreatureMaker (In version 5.09, " BeastMaker ")
• Traveller Sophont Creation System ( SophontMaker )
• VehicleMaker
• WorldMaker AKA T5 WorldMaker

T4 ToolSets [ edit ]

T4 has ToolSets derived from Book B Fire, Fusion & Steel

• Quick Ship Design System
• Standard Ship Design System

T5 External Link/s [ edit ]

• Armor & Gun Maker at Traveller5.net
• Omni Vehicle Maker at Traveller5.net
• Plant Generator at Traveller5.net
• Robot Maker at Traveller5.net
• Traveller Worlds: Maps & Systems
• Vehicle Maker at Traveller5.net
• Word Generator at Traveller5.net
• World Builder at Traveller5.net

History & Background ( Dossier ) [ edit ]

CharGen and various simulators for making various things across a broad spectrum from NPCs to objects to armor to weaponry to vehicles to starships and more have been a consistent feature of the game since 1977. [1]

Many ToolSets have been converted into online calculators and similar programs. [1]

ToolSets are a major part of T5 and many were created throughout the development and playtesting of the T5 Core Rules. Not all of them made it to the final cut and not all of them are featured in the T5 Core Rules. [1]

ToolSets, or their equivalents (which continue to be ToolSets even if not named thus), are one of the main points of divergence for different versions . For example: [2]

• Every version has some type of CharGen . In most versions , it is possible for a traveller to die during CharGen due to random dice rolls. In Mongoose Traveller , both first and Second Edition , this is at most a choice, never forced: if the rolls would have resulted in death, a traveller can instead go into medical debt to stay alive. GURPS Traveller does not use lifepath-style CharGen , avoiding the issue entirely, instead substituting a point-buy system.
• Mongoose Traveller Second Edition allows one to designate an arbitrary hull size, with simple formulas to calculate maneuver drive and jump drive requirements for a given performance (and power plant requirements for those and other systems, particularly energy weapons). The New Era and GURPS Traveller have more complex formulas, allowing for finer detail. Most other versions require one to pick among pre-made sizes of hull, maneuver drive , and jump drive , then look up the performance on tables, and select power plant to be at least equal to those (usually with no regard for other systems, including weapons). Some find one of these approaches far easier to use, or better suited to their use cases, than the others.
• For many, deciding between versions is primarily just deciding between ToolSets.

The Perils of CharGen [ edit ]

Traveller is very well known for the possibility of a character being killed before it leaves CharGen . Some might say infamous... This eventuality has become the butt of Tshirts and comic strips. [1]

Goofy Gearheadery [ edit ]

Starship and vehicle generation, in many cases, grew quite complex and became known as gearheadery with the self-obsessed fans becoming known as gearheads . [1]

References & Contributors ( Sources ) [ edit ]

• Marc Miller . T5 Core Rules ( Far Future Enterprises , 2013), 537-630.
• Robert Eaglestone . Xboat 1 ( Robert Eaglestone , 2019), TBD. ( Xboat 01 )
• Traveller Wiki Editorial Team
• Author & Contributor: Master Scout, and former Naval Architect CRHensley of the Ministry of Science
• Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master Technologist Adrian Tymes of the Ministry of Technology
• Author & Contributor: Lord (Marquis) and Master of Sophontology Maksim-Smelchak of the Ministry of Science
• ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Information provided to the library by Maksim-Smelchak
• ↑ Information provided to the library by Adrian Tymes
• Articles at advanced completion state
• Community Resource
• Game Mechanic
• Terminology

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Payn's Ponderings Traveller Chargen

• Thread starter payn
• Start date Nov 22, 2021

He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...

• Nov 22, 2021

Greetings, This is the third installment of a series on the Traveller RPG. You can find one on editions , and another on settings with those links. This thread is all about my favorite thing in Traveller; Character generation! Whats chargen like in Traveller? So, first of all, let’s address dying during character generation. It’s true, it’s possible, and no it’s not easy. Stats are rolled with 2D6 in most editions. If you go right down the line, it’s possible to have very low physical stats. When endurance, along with strength or dexterity reach zero, the character dies. Combine low stats with possible accidents during careers, and aging, it’s possible to reach zero and have the character die. Why push your luck? There is another lesser known joke about Traveller chargen, “it’s a game of geriatrics in space”. In Traveller characters gain skills, connections, and benefits by living through periods of careers (4 years per career period). The more careers a character has, the more opportunities to learn things. Obviously, the older the character becomes as well. As the character ages, thier physical stats may take a hit, while their mental stats may get a bump. This is to reflect becoming wiser while becoming less agile in game terms. One of the biggest issues folks new to Traveller have, is thinking of careers like other TTRPG classes . That is not the case in Traveller. Careers simply serve as a way to gain skills and experiences. Getting kicked out of the military and having to take a second career is not multi-classing. The chargen systems is an attempt to model the typical life path of any individual. You are likely to make 1 or more career changes in your life. When new players join my groups, I encourage them to look over skills and decide the type of things they want their character to be able to do, and more importantly, be good at. I encourage them to pursue careers then that will get them the skills and experiences to achieve their goals. My impressions of Traveller chargen. Where a person chooses to stop in character generation is going to vary between tables and editions. Most my experiences are with Mongoose Traveller. My players, typically, stop chargen around 38-46 years of age. That is around 5-7 career periods. A career period is 4 years and offers new skills and possible experiences. The character may end up getting married/divorced, or stopping a crime (or being involved in one), getting promoted, or possibly flaming out (failing a career survival check and having to move onto a new career). I, typically, do not like random character generation in TTRPGs, however, Traveller breaks the typical combat role requirements found in a number of TTRPGs. Since Traveller can accommodate all kinds of characters, and is skill driven, I find randomly rolling up PCs to be a fun and rewarding process. Also, im a fan of having less detailed backstories in RPGs. My belief is that the PCs are about to engage on their life defining adventure in the campaign. Traveller, has a nice baked in way of providing acquaintances, allies, rivals, and enemies. These moments can help create NPCs to thread the PC into the campaign setting. The biggest reward is this happens at the table with everyone together. Mongoose even went so far as giving the players a benefit if they link their PCs via life events. Traveller has been designed over the years to be very homebrew friendly. Even the official settings are left fairly vague for the Referee to fill out. I do wish at times that there was more encouragement to link PCs to actual setting places. Also, events that are less generic and more specific to the campaign they are about to play. Some Traveller aficionados may see this as a cardinal sin, but I would love to see more players guides published by Mongoose in this area (Pirates of Drinax offers this but in a less concentrated and intuitive place). I full heartedly endorse any Referee to take this on as part of their campaign prep. I think it will give extra legs to your game for your players. How do you roll? So, I’ll turn it over to you fellow Travellers. What do you like or dislike about Traveller chargen? What are your experiences with it? Any advice or fun homerules you have taken up that other Referees might want to test out? Any uninitiated out there want to hear from us geriatric Travellers? Thanks for reading. -Cheers  

• Nov 23, 2021

We created PCs for our current campaign as a group and everybody enjoyed the "minigame" of character creation. I don't know if there is another RPG that creates such an atmosphere of laughing and cheers during character creation!  

My Classic Traveller rules uses the 6 Book 1 professions (with "Other" rebadged as "Drifter"), the 12 from Supplement 4 (but with "Scientist" rebadged as "Tech" to better reflect their actual skill set), and 2 homebrewed: "Face" which is adapted from an old Dragon/Ares "Cleric" profession and also a "Journalist" found in a MegaTraveller supplement; and "Security" which is adapted from the "Law Enforcement" service found in MegaTraveller. There are 40+ skills on my charts, which are adapted from but not identical to the original ones: the skills from the original (1977) Book 1, plus several from Books 4 to 7. But not all: I don't use Gravitics (Engineering covers it) nor Legal (Admin covers it) nor Trading (Broker covers it). To accommodate the extra skills in PC build, I use the MegaTraveller "Special Duty" line on the Prior Service table, with a minimum throw to get an extra skill roll and with a throw that is 4 higher than the minimum allowing either two extra rolls or a choice of any single skill. For weapons and vehicles I use a mixture of Cascade and Included that is adapted from the various Books (1 to 7 plus Supp 4). I don't like the MegaTraveller skill list, as I think it (1) has too many Cascade skills, overly diluting the random rolls, and (2) has too many skills - especially knowledge and social skills - that for me don't fit comfortably with the system. We use EDU to determine knowledge, with the PC backstory plus development in play being used to help get a sense of what sort of specialisation the PC has. The Survival rule I use is that a result of exactly one less permits survival if the player desires, but with a short term of 2 rather than 4 years, no Mustering Out benefits gained for that term, no chance of a position or promotion, but the normal base skill gained and also a throw for Special Duty with a -1 DM. When we did PC gen for our current game, we had one death in 9 PCs (a Belter, of course) and another one of the 9 forced out by injury in her first term (ie missing the throw by one). I agree with @pogre about PC gen working well as a group activity. But it's tricky to interweave PCs' backgrounds during the process in Classic Traveller, because until it's all finished you don't know who has served how many terms and hence who was at what point of their career when, relative to the other PCs. We do find, though, that the lifepath process suggests a relatively "thick" backstory for individual PCs, and makes it fairly easy to drop in NPCs that relate to that implied backstory. There is a system for points-buy Traveller PC gen in one of the old White Dwarf magazines - The Self-Made Traveller in WD 25 (1981). I think I might have used it once or twice back in the mid-80s. But these days I regard the random lifepath system as pretty core to the Traveller experience.  

There is a lot of rolling in Traveller chargen. My houserule during chargen for my players is that the dice results are the dice results, however, I offer two mulligans during the entire process. These can be used on anything. A stat roll, skill table, survival check, muster benefit, etc.. I assumed that folks would use them on failed survival checks, but I'm often surprised that they use them in other ways mostly.  

Not your screen monkey (he/him)

Back in the first edition of Traveller, you could die just with a bad survival role for a term - good physical stats and the ability to soak up a little more injury were completely bypassed. So we'd lose a pretty fair number of characters just in generation. Subsequent editions eased that a bit including survival equating to career-ending injury rather than just death. But yeah, we enjoyed the character generation mini-game. Can we push things far enough to rate better end benefits like a starship or get the skills we think we want?  

pemerton said: I agree with @pogre about PC gen working well as a group activity. But it's tricky to interweave PCs' backgrounds during the process in Classic Traveller, because until it's all finished you don't know who has served how many terms and hence who was at what point of their career when, relative to the other PCs. We do find, though, that the lifepath process suggests a relatively "thick" backstory for individual PCs, and makes it fairly easy to drop in NPCs that relate to that implied backstory. Click to expand...

payn said: Where the events in classic Traveller specific? Click to expand...

pemerton said: There are no events - it's all implied. For instance, the Navy PC who never gets a commission, but whose EDU grows to D, was clearly working on his PhD (in Xeno Archaeology, we decided) rather than putting his heart and soul into his profession. The Merchant who got the (easy) position as a 4th Officer but who was never promoted after that was obviously bitter towards his employer (a NPC who came into play and is the lady-friend of another PC). The fact that his STR stayed stable or even grew a bit as he aged, while his END kept dropping, showed he was juicing far more than was healthy for him! The Army Lt Colonel with INT 3 and EDU 9 was clearly an absolute stickler for the rules, having memorised every handbook and passed every exam but having no initiative at all. Also, I was wrong in my earlier thread: we have two PCs injured by just-failed Survival checks. One was a Noble, whose skills were Bribery and Gambling an who started with a Type Y Yacht. Obviously he had won the Yacht in a card game, and then been beaten to within an inch of his life by the people he won it from ! (Who also turned up as NPCs in our first session.) Etc. I hope I've made sense! Click to expand...

• Mar 2, 2022

I bought the 2022 core book by Mongoose last week. I'm liking the chargen minigame. Hopefully, I can get the players to do a mini-campaign.  

Mezuka said: I bought the 2022 core book by Mongoose last week. I'm liking the chargen minigame. Hopefully, I can get the players to do a mini-campaign. Click to expand...

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Classic Traveller Chargen

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Freelance Traveller

Quick Character Generation for Conventions

by Marc Miller with Jeff Zeitlin

This was one of the featured articles in the November/December 2017 issue .

The process and tables here are Marc Miller’s and are taken with permission from the workshops that Marc ran at TravellerCON/USA in September 2017 (“Can You Survive Traveller Character Generation?”). Commentary, explanations, and analysis are Jeff’s work.

Introduction

It has often been said that Traveller character generation is a game in itself. However, the normal process (especially when using the advanced character generation represented by Classic Traveller Books 4-7, or MegaTraveller , or later versions where birthworld or homeworld characteristics can affect character development) can be time-consuming, especially as some of the target numbers for rolls can change if a character attribute changes.

Such processes waste time when you are playing in—or refereeing—a “one-off”, especially when you have hard limits on the available time, such as at a convention. But, players tend to like characters that are rich in skills, rich in money, and/or rich in possessions—one reason for the popularity of the advanced generation processes. How do you reconcile the seemingly opposed desires/constraints?

Marc Miller has worked up a process for character generation that maintains the “feel” of the standard character generation, but produces results much faster. With his permission, it is described and reproduced here.

As written, it only handles human characters, only in Imperial service, and no psionics.

For convenience, there is a Character Generation Record Card (form 1A) that you can use and reproduce, or you can record the information in any convenient format you choose.

The handout for this process at TravellerCON/USA 2017 included a worksheet similar to the one below. Use it, or whatever convenient method you choose for tracking your character’s progress through the process.  

The Process

You will need two six-sided dice. A roll that is done with both is notated as ‘2D’; a roll that only requires one die is notated as ‘1D’. You should have a pen or pencil and some scratch paper to keep notes on your character-in-progress.

• Select a Name. Even if your character dies during generation, he or she deserves a name to be remembered by.
• Roll Characteristics. Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, Social – each is rolled with 2D.
• Choose a Characteristic. This is called the Controlling Characteristic (CC) for the term. You must choose a different CC for each term, and may not use a characteristic for a second time until all characteristics have been used once.
• Survival: If you succeed, your character has not died this term, and you may continue character generation. If you fail, immediately go to D. and choose skills.
• Commission: if your character has not been commissioned, and this roll succeeds, your character is an officer from this point forward, and uses the Commissioned Rank section from table 4. Scouts do not have ranks, and do not roll Commission.
• Re-Enlist: If you succeed, your character may serve another term. Go back to C.1 and choose a different Controlling Characteristic. If you choose not to serve another term, go to D. and choose skills.

Jeff’s Notes and Comments on the Process

Because the player chooses the order in which to use the characteristics as Controlling Characteristic for a term, he/she can manage the choices to maximize the probability of survival in any given term, or to maximize the length of the career. This will have an effect on the number of skill levels that can be earned over the career. Note that, unlike MegaTraveller , there is no cap on the total number of skill levels that may be earned; even a character with low Intelligence and Education can end up with a comparatively high number of skills, if other characteristics are high and the character has a long career.

When I was at TravellerCON working through this process, the other players at the table all used the same decision process I did for choosing the Controlling Characteristic for each term: We started with the highest, and worked our way down. This maximizes the chance of survival in early terms (minimizing dead characters), but it also “encourages” the player to decide to retire before weak characteristics become the Controlling Characteristic for future terms. You end up with more characters that survive, but they may not be as skilled.

An alternative that some players might wish to consider is the reverse – start with the weakest characteristics, and work up to the strongest, if the character survives the early terms. You’ll probably end up with more dead characters, but those that survive will probably be more skilled. In a sense, you’re trading between quality (high skill levels) and quantity (greater number of characters that survive). There’s no downside – on a per-character basis – to going for quality, the way there is in most versions of the game, where characters must also worry about losing characteristic points due to aging.

Table 5: Skills

The skills listed on this table are from Traveller 5 . It is certainly possible to rework the tables to reflect the skill set from other versions of Traveller . If this is done, the referee may also wish to customize the skills to fit the particular adventure or campaign, and if the version includes skills for which a subskill must be chosen (e.g., Gun Cbt or Vehicle , from the MegaTraveller skill list), remember to have the player declare the subskill for each level earned.

Skill Eligibility

When selecting skills, players may choose skills from the following columns:

The five career service columns ( Army , Marine , Navy , Merchant , Scout ) are open only to those characters that went through the respective careers.

The Non-Officer column is open to characters that have not received a commission. Referees may choose to allow characters who have received a commission to choose from this column to a limit of four skills per term before the character received a commission – for example, if a character received a commission in Term 2, the character may choose up to four skill levels from the Non-Officer column, because the character was a non-officer in Term 1. It is up to the referee’s discretion whether to allow Scouts to choose from this column; it was not clear at TravellerCON whether this was permitted.

Any character may choose from the Anyone or Everyday columns.

Only characters who have received a Commission may choose from the Officer column. If the referee chooses to use the suggested modification for the Non-Officer column, the ‘reciprocal’ modification should be used for this column (that is, only allow choosing from this table to a limit of four skill levels per term in which the character received or previously had a commission). As with the Non-Officer column, it is up to the referee’s discretion whether to allow Scouts to choose from this column.

Table 6: Benefits

The weapon and medal benefits were handled by Marc at conventions through drawing cards from a custom deck, which is not reproduced here ( Freelance Traveller neglected to get permission to do so). Referees are encouraged to come up with their own alternatives. Some possibilities:

Weapon Benefit

Allow the player to choose from a list. The process as written doesn’t have any personal combat skills other than ‘Fighter’, so the field is wide open.

If you alter the skill list to include personal weapons skills, and especially where you need to declare the weapon the skill applies to, simply granting the weapon that the character has the highest skill in might be the way to handle this benefit.

Medal Benefit

Have the player roll 2D and compare to the Controlling Characteristic for term 3 (the term that the medal is a benefit for).

If the roll is higher than the CC, the character gets the low medal (in standard games, the Meritorious Conduct Under Fire (MCUF)).

If the roll is less than or equal to the CC, the middle medal (Medal for Conspicuous Gallantry (MCG)) is awarded.

If the roll is less than half of the CC, award the high medal (Starburst for Extreme Heroism (SEH)).

Alternatively, calculate the average of all of the characteristics, and use this as the number to compare a 2D roll to, as above.

Ship Benefits

Scout Ship On Loan and Scout Ship Grant do not seem properly cumulative the way the other Scout benefits are, and neither has been properly defined. Previous versions have treated a scout ship benefit as a ‘permanent’ loan, with the ex-Scout and the ship subject to recall, but while not on recall, the ex-Scout may use the ship as he/she sees fit for his/her own purposes, but may not sell, give away, or lend the ship to anyone else, and may get fuel, maintenance, and repairs done for free at any Scout base. I would read this as Scout Ship On Loan , and treat Scout Ship Grant as similar, except that the ship is removed from the Service’s rolls as an active ship, and no longer subject to recall – but the fuel, maintenance, and repairs are still free.

Merchant Ship Shares are not clearly cumulative – a reading on whether a six-term Merchant owns 30% or 60% of a ship was not requested during the session I participated in. Recommendation: If the referee wishes to have other shareholders able to exercise restraints on what the character does, make the Merchant Ship Share benefit non-cumulative (six terms = 30% share); otherwise, make it cumulative (six terms = 60% share).

Characters who have received a commission and are not already noble receive the knighthood if they complete five terms. This raises Social to 11. Characters who have not received a commission, or who are already noble, will receive +1 Social instead. After six terms, all characters will receive the +1 Social. This may make a character noble or raise the character’s Noble title if the Social becomes 11 or higher.

Customizing the Process

Some ideas for customizations have already been discussed. Other customizations are possible, but you want to keep a few things in mind:

The idea with this process is to be quick and easy, without a lot of calculation or table lookup. Most non-humans in Traveller have advantages or disadvantages in characteristics; to address that in this process would add complexity. However, if you want to, you can make that change – or, just change the skill tables to reflect species-specific skills (such as dewclaw for Aslan, or scrounging for Vargr) and ignore the characteristic differences.

The setting is assumed to be compatible with the official Third Imperium setting. If you wish to use this with a different setting, check the available careers and skills, and adjust them if necessary.

In the official Third Imperium setting, psionics are discouraged. If you wish to include psionics in your campaign setting, you will need to modify the skill tables, and you may want to modify the career tables as well. Make PSI a seventh characteristic. You would then treat it like any other characteristic, and allow it to be used as a Controlling Characteristic for a term. Then, add another column to the skill tables, ‘Psionic’. This column would only be open to characters who have psionic ability above a certain level. Alternatively, add ‘Psion’ as a career, and make the ‘Psionic’ skills available only to characters who choose this career. The details of the Psion career would be up to the referee.

Some versions of Traveller impose limitations on the number of skill levels a character may have, or make it more difficult to accumulate skills. This process can be used to generate characters compatible with those versions simply by adjusting the number of skills awarded in each term – perhaps only three, or even two, would be enough.

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A LITE version of Traveller CharGen.

ShawnDriscoll/PyTraveller-NPC-LITE

Folders and files, repository files navigation, pytravlite: chargen for traveller.

PyTravLITE is a Python 3.11 program that generates NPCs for Mongoose Traveller 1st and 2nd Editions in a web browser.

Read the PyTravLITE Guide at http://pytravliteguide.readthedocs.io

Download the PDF from https://readthedocs.org/projects/pytravliteguide/downloads/pdf/latest

Requirements

It has been tested for Windows 10.

Python 3.11

PyTravCalc was written using the C implementation of Python version 3.11. Also known as CPython.

bottle 0.12.25

bottle testing has begun with the release of 0.1.0.

New in version 0.2.6

Things To-Do

Known History

Updated to Python 3.11.6. Some tweaks made in the random names generator.

Updated to Python 3.11.0.

Removed most of the generic skills in favor of specialized ones. 199 NPC's can be generated at once now. Some NPCs will default to speaking Vilani instead of Anglic.

Restored skills back to their original Mongoose Traveller names.

Removed requirement for colorama.

Default dice roll choice is now 2D6 if left blank.

Quirks have been added for NPCs.

Questions? Please contact [email protected]

The Traveller game in all forms is owned by Far Future Enterprises. Copyright 1977 - 2023 Far Future Enterprises. Traveller is a registered trademark of Far Future Enterprises.

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Death during character creation

• Thread starter Count_Zero
• Start date Jun 7, 2005

Game Master

• Jun 7, 2005

Okay, I have heard in several threads about games that make it possible to die during character creation. What games are these and how, exactly, do they manage such a... talented feat?  

Shining Dragon

Listener-swaying argument.

Traveller. You roll to see what happens to your character during the creation process. I think one of the results is death, I know another one is "spend 20 years in prison".  

In some games that use lifepaths as part of chargen, there is a chance of death or injury at certain stages. The classic is Traveller (in the original version -- I don't know if it's like this in T20). In Traveller chargen, the proto-PC starts at age 18 and enters a service (e.g. the Marines or the Navy) for a series of four-year terms; for each term, there are rolls for things like what skills the character can pick up, what kind of missions they were on, what medals they won, and whether they survived. Eventually the character either dies, is discharged or reaches retirement age. Discharged and retired characters become PCs, and the game begins. Some people hate it, others just ignore the chance of death, and others still find it a fun mini-game in itself that helps to build a believable character.  

Crime-Fighting Gorilla

The game you're thinking of is the original version of <i>Traveller</i>. It has a character creation system with a tremendous amount of randomness. You start with a basic series of stats, then fill out skills and such as your embryo character serves four year "terms" in the military or other services. One of the things you roll for is "survival". This is because you're playing a trade-off game. You get more skilled as you serve more terms, but since surviving terms isn't automatic, you might want to stop even before the aging rules kick in if you've got something you like. Considering that the whole random process takes about two minutes per character, it isn't a big deal. Often, you'll generate a dozen or so characters and then pick the one that's closest to what you want to play.  

Evil Dr Ganymede

Classic Traveller, specifically. In later editions that had random chargen, they changed that to 'gets injured, or some non-fatal calamity happens' But it remains in the CT rules. It is explicitly OPTIONAL in CT to not die but instead be injured, but this is left to the GM to decide. I should also point out that CT chargen is about 95% random. You get VERY little choice about what happens to your character. If you want to join a career then you have a chance to do so, but if you fail to get in, then that's that and you have to try something else (or get drafted). Even your skills can't be chosen. Some people like this. Some people think of this as a 'game within a game' and spend a lot of time just rolling up characters. Personally, I loathe it - I have better things to do with my time than spending ages rolling up characters that either die halfway through or end up being useless cripples or careers that I absolutely don't want to play. YMMV.  

Ben Brown said: Considering that the whole random process takes about two minutes per character, it isn't a big deal. Often, you'll generate a dozen or so characters and then pick the one that's closest to what you want to play. Click to expand...

Evil Dr Ganymede said: Of course, if you do that then you may as well just do chargen once and pick whatever you want and screw the randomness Click to expand...

David Johansen

The problem is that it's such an integral balancing point in Traveller. Got great stats? Well pick a nice safe career and don't press your luck. Got crappy stats? Well the marines will whip you into shape or kill you. Really it's a vital aspect of the system that prevents a great many (but hardly all) of the really unbalanced characters that can result without it. Still if you don't want to lose at craps don't play craps...  

Evil Dr Ganymede said: It is explicitly OPTIONAL in CT to not die but instead be injured, but this is left to the GM to decide. Click to expand...

Universe GM

I always liked the character generation system in Traveller as a little game in itself, complete with the risk of death. It's a solo RPG within a multi-player game. Great fun for what it is. SPI Universe is my SF game of choice for the way it took the character generation of it's much better known forefather and expanded on it giving the players more control of their character's design, but without removing all randomness the way that points only systems do. To me it's the best combination of the nurture and nature models as a simulation of life. The only thing wrong with it, that Traveller was supperior in, is that it just takes incredibly long to create a character. This has been allieviated in modern times by my friend Jim Goltz's online Univerese character generator which does all the die rolls and math for you and lets you focus on picking what you want to study, what career you want to be in, for how long, and which skills you choose to learn. With it you can generate a few characters and pick the one you like best, which is what Traveller players have usually done since the beginning. Of course that was one thing that negated the whole "die in generation" Traveller thing, that of course you could keep trying until you eventually got the super-scout you wanted to begin with.  

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TSR veteran Jim Ward, creator of  Greyhawk Adventures and Metamorphosis Alpha , co-writer of  Deities and Demigods  and founder of  Fast Forward Adventures , has passed at the age of 72. He will be dearly missed. 

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• Traveller/Cepheus Faster CharGen?

Author Topic: Traveller/Cepheus Faster CharGen?  (Read 2112 times)

• Hero Member

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• Now even more Toxic

Here is why this forum tends to be so stupid. Many people here think Joe Biden is "The Left", when he is actually Far Right and every US republican is just an idiot.

Shawn Driscoll

• Role-Play Purist

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Use a web app? They're fast.

• Knight of Common Sense

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Just what the title says, any CharGen system that doesn't take 35-40 minutes and can end with your character dead? Or do I have to houserule it?

• Toxic SocioCat
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• Semper Qvantvm Potes

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Serious suggestion: just write some stuff down that seems reasonable. Takes about one minute. Also, it only took me about 45 minutes total to roll up 10 Traveller characters the other day for a Solo game I was gonna run...why is it taking you so long to do one? I think some familiarity with the tables helps speed this up quite a bit.

SavageSchemer

Navy Starman Luke Sato   973944    Age 30 3 terms                        Cr22,000 Skills: Fwd Obsvr-1, Jack-o-T-1, Ship's Boat-1

Because I'm not that familiar with the game, also I might be exaggerating a bit, but it took me way more than what it usually takes in other games. Admittedly I'm way more used to play those games.

And if there's no internet? Something we get a lot here in México, or no celphone coberture. Thanks but I would rather have to roll the dice but not waste 45 minutes per character.

Point-buy then. Quickly build your character how you want.

Thanks, seems this will be the only way, much as I dislike point buy systems.

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