As a few people have mentioned railroading players is never popular so could we ask what it is you intend to happen in the game that requires the characters be reduced to brain wipes.
How do they know that they have skills if they cannot remember names or details? Is this some sort of hand wave Psionic selective memory wipe. Option one is PANIC for a very good reason, who remembers they can fly the boat before it crashes, can they remember if they could fly if they remember how to fly? :shock:
Memory wipes to the point where you have no skills are annoying. Is it your intention to reduce the characters to 18 without any terms of skills even though they are clearly older than this. Do you intend for them to regain skills and memories over time, who decides what they get back and when?
A few suggestions.
Don’t mind wipe. They should know who they are and what they have done, what is the point of rolling all those terms in the navy, scouts or merchants only to start with no skills, money, equipment or ship. The characters may not know why they are in the ships boat but they should remember who they are and what they can do. They may not know each other but should know themselves.
A long time ago I ran an adventure that started with the players waking up after a night of heavy R&R ready for a meeting with a client. However they very quickly noticed it was 8 months later when bio clocks, implants etc all began to reset to the correct date and time.
They were on the wrong planet and had no idea how they got there. Their ship was docked at the high port and the battle damage was being repaired but they had no memory of the battle.
Months of investigation and adventure led them to find out what had happened where upon the secret Imperial agency who hired them for the super secret mission in the first place caught them and gave them the same choice they had after the end of the super secret mission which had gone wrong and allowed them to find things even the Emperor wasn’t allowed to know. Selective memory wipe or execution.
They chose selective Psionic memory wipe and woke up in a hotel only to find it was now 15 months later than they remembered and there was a note signed by all of them saying “Don’t investigate what happened over the last 15 months”
The characters retained all skills, they had all those hard earned items and the whole thing was actually entirely logical. Of course one bright spark declared as they woke for the second time that they should ignore the note and investigate why they couldn’t remember the last 15 months which nearly led to them getting shot :twisted:
If it is your intent to run the players with no skills to start with why not start them as first termers and run through their lives. Start them in the first time with starting skills, they are all on holiday or leave or whatever reason brings them together. Run the first adventure. Then they all roll a second term. Fate brings them together again for another adventure. Then roll the third term and so on. They could be a bunch of kids who gain access to a trader and form a crew of 20 year olds or it could just be that every few years they find themselves together when adventure calls.
A Traveller character does not need to start adventuring after he has finished character generation. You can easily do an adventure or mini campaign between terms. Weaving the characters histories together with both shared adventures and character generation. They may have each other as contacts but they have done the adventure where they all met as 20 somethings. Much deeper backgrounds and a lot of fun because you can see your characters grow adventure by adventure, not just getting money or paying off the mortgage but having new skills or a stat increase since the last adventure a few years ago.
Basically players don’t like having all their toys taken away from them as a plot point. Not understanding what is going on is much less of a problem as long as the characters can do stuff with skills and equipment. :wink:
