Beginning Play After Chargen

[alex_greene]

Are there other ways to begin an adventure than "So the five of you are the crew of some Type A Jump-1 Free Trader" or, worse yet, "You're a Scout crew on detachment from the Scout Service, plying the spacelanes in a Scout/Courier"?
Other than being ex-military crew hiring out your guns for heists and assassinations, or ex-Scouts living with the Service's noose around your neck, or merchants tied to your ship with a mortgage which will outlive your grandsons, what other ways can you begin your crew's adventures?

 

[Condottiere]

In a foxhole in the ground there lived a Vargr scavenger.

He currently shared it with a shot down Scout pilot, a Navy engineer, an Aslan mercenary, and a Zhodani princess.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Traveller does not require the group to have a ship, in point of fact the vast majority of the Traveller games I have run were not based around a ship crew.
What I do with a new group is encourage the players to come up with ways their characters meet during their prior careers.

 

[dragon3r]

Connections in session 0 will be telling for what style game people want. Generally given the choice though space pirates, or pirate hunters, seem to edge out the others in popularity.

 

[AndrewW]

You all meet in a tavern and share a corner table...

The City of Waterdeep dragged a bunch in and have this little job for you down in the sewers...

If it is ship based could be the owner of the ship is looking to hire a crew. Perhaps they have met previously, a military character might be mustering out on that planet while a merchant was picking up their ship there and so forth.

The scout met the navy guy while they where both stationed in a system with both a navy and a scout base. The marine saved the life of a corporate type during a firefight.

 

[Condottiere]

ShadowRun is the easiest.

So, CyberPunk setting, where everyone has something to hide and they're united by the need to get paid, recruited individually by Mister Jay.

 

[Vormaerin]

There's literally no limit to how you can start a campaign. Or the type of campaign you want to run. Except what you and your players find interesting. I rarely run campaigns where the players start with a ship, unless being merchants is the point. Which it usually isn't, because even though my players generally like the Firefly concept, its not because they have any interest in being David Falkayn.

I started one campaign with all the players on the same survey crew of a new colony.
I started one campaign with all the players as prisoners on a prison planet they had to escape.
I started one campaign where they woke up out of cold sleep on a ship that just crashed in the wilderness.
I started one campaign where the players just mustered out after war ended and were invited to visit their old CO's frontier estate.
I started one campaign where the players were all down on their luck residents of the same crime ridden neighborhood.
And lots of times I just have the players tell me how they know each other.

My current campaign has been running for six months and the players don't have a ship. They have adventures on commercial transport and on planets. Mostly planets. In theory, their plans involve getting a ship. But those are unlikely to come to fruition for another six months or more, depending on how things go.

 

[Shadowblayde99]

I have a similar problem with the starting adventure for new characters.

My players have an Imperial Navy Captain and a Scout (ex Trader). I have the 5 Marches adventures and wanted to run Mithril (they'd done hign n dry as an intro with other characters) but I keep wondering why the characters are going there or even why the 42 year old Captain of a Navy ship would decide to quit the Navy in the first place.

In general, why do any characters decide to leave their old career and just travel around looking for adventure?

 

[alex_greene]

I keep imagining some Agent types quitting their service, and packing their bags to head off to some resort, when some undertaker pumps gas through a keyhole into their apartment, knocks them out, and then they all wake up in some village in North Wales.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Subzero001]

I liked the European version best compared to the neutered American version.

 

[alex_greene]

I like the idea of the Travellers' leader having to recruit all the other members, one at a time. "I'm puttin' together a team."

Each intro has the recruit involved in something related to their chargen. e.g. facing off a Rival one last time / collecting their shiny new TAS membership from some utterly tiresome stuffed shirt / almost escaping the law (and being stopped by the recruiter just as they are about to be hauled off in cuffs) / escaping a fire threatening to burn down their lab, etc.

And then they are taken in a shuttle to go to the ship where they will spend the campaign, sitting there in Spacedock awaiting the command crew. And it's some custom job, one of a kind, with tech the Travellers couldn't even have imagined, and a small crew of staff.

The ship itself is so new, the paint hasn't even dried, some of the furniture is still covered in plastic sheeting, there's not even so much as a scrape mark on the landing deck, and it doesn't have a penny owed to the bank in mortgage.

What name will they give the ship? What is it designed for? Exploration? Trade? Passenger liner? Warfare? Flying tattoo studio? And how come it doesn't have a mortgage? Did somebody pay for the thing with a lorryload of cash? If so, who, and what tasks will she want the Travellers to do?

 

[Saladman]

And lots of times I just have the players tell me how they know each other.

This is my preferred approach in every rpg now.

...I keep wondering why the characters are going there or even why the 42 year old Captain of a Navy ship would decide to quit the Navy in the first place.

In general, why do any characters decide to leave their old career and just travel around looking for adventure?

That's a question more for the players than the GM. If I play Shadowrun I make a character willing to do crime for money, if I play D&D I make a character willing to go down in holes in the ground and fight monsters, if I play Traveller I make a character who's willing to Travel. The character who wants to stay in the Navy or the Merchant Marine is as much of a player failure as the character who only wants to farm or run a shop in D&D. If you insist on writing them up I'll consider them as an NPC, and ask you to start again with a clean sheet of paper.

Two things that help: tell the players they're making Travelers not well-adjusted regular citizens before anyone begins rolling dice, so they can keep it in mind. And mention taking an authorial stance rather than an in-character stance sometimes. If someone wants to write in a career-ending mishap, personal heartbreak, or business failure at the end of their character creation process without it being rolled, and without being penalized for it mechanically, I'm happy to have them do so.

 

[alex_greene]

Good way to transition between career and play - get them to pick something from the Mishaps, Events, or Life Events table and declare that to be the straw that broke the camel's back. That's the event which disillusions them with the career, and sets them on the long road to adventure.
Even if it's a good event, such as a promotion, something happens in the course of that event - which the player can elaborate on, or leave it hanging unspoken until it needs to come up in the course of an adventure - that leaves the Traveller with wandering feet.

 

[CordwainerFish]

I like the idea of the Travellers' leader having to recruit all the other members, one at a time. "I'm puttin' together a team."

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Seffix]

I keep imagining some Agent types quitting their service, and packing their bags to head off to some resort, when some undertaker pumps gas through a keyhole into their apartment, knocks them out, and then they all wake up in some village in North Wales.

"Be seeing you."

My current campaign opened with the scientist calling the journalist in a panic because, for no reason she knows, she's been made captain of a lab ship (based on benefits rolls). Neither of them know anything about running a starship. Adventure/comedy ensues.

 

[Vormaerin]

I have a similar problem with the starting adventure for new characters.

My players have an Imperial Navy Captain and a Scout (ex Trader). I have the 5 Marches adventures and wanted to run Mithril (they'd done hign n dry as an intro with other characters) but I keep wondering why the characters are going there or even why the 42 year old Captain of a Navy ship would decide to quit the Navy in the first place.

In general, why do any characters decide to leave their old career and just travel around looking for adventure?

Just looking at real life reasons why people leave the Navy at that point:

1) promotion isn't gonna happen. Its not reflected in the chargen rules, but once you get around Commander/Captain level, the jobs above you start getting pretty thin on the ground. And, many of them ARE on the ground if you get one at all. Like desk jobs, not commanding ships.
2) Got your pension. Time to go make some REAL money/enjoy life/control your own destiny.
3) Got a better offer from something in the civilian world.
4) Demobilization because war's over/budget cuts/radical peace party takes over local government
5) Bad boss/sick of it/all the reasons people leave jobs at any other time.

As someone else pointed out, this is really the player's problem to figure out. People always ask "why is my character adventuring if they have X money/are a retired admiral/whatever." And that probably makes sense to them as a question, since we are people who play games about going on adventures, not people who actually go on adventures (generally speaking). But your character isn't like that. Your character has a reason they are out on the sharp edge, risking their life trading on backwater planets or doing crimes or just going places sane people don't go.

Classic Traveller, you had to roll for re-enlistment in addition to rolling for survival. So, usually, you got out because that was the only option. Though sometimes you rolled a 12 and you stayed in whether you wanted to or not. Mongoose Traveller combined survival and re-enlistment in the mishap table.

 

[Geir]

Classic Traveller, you had to roll for re-enlistment in addition to rolling for survival. So, usually, you got out because that was the only option. Though sometimes you rolled a 12 and you stayed in whether you wanted to or not. Mongoose Traveller combined survival and re-enlistment in the mishap table.

Actually you also have to roll more than your number of terms on the advancement roll or you get the boot (p. 18):


(I I got that wrong from memory... I thought it was less than, not equal to as the cut off)

 

[Arkathan]

Flatline
Your characters wake up and know nothing about themselves. At random intervals, you allow one player to remember something, such as their name, or another players name or a connection to another player, at which time both players choose their connection skill.
This worked well in our game, and provided fodder for in-jokes for months about everyone's CRS condition.
After the drugs had time to completely wear off, and the characters were flying back to their home system, we did a flashback to a year prior to the start of the campaign and they played out the sequence of events that landed them on that system transport in a lake.