How many terms?

[Edsan]

Howdy,

Just out of curiousity, what is the limit in PC Terms of Service you folk currently runnig MGT enforce; if any?

3 to 6 as the Core Rulebook suggests? Mandatory retirement at 7 terms as per Classic Traveller? Or do you allow 100-year old anagathic-using methuselahs in your campaign?

An inquiring mind wants to know.

 

[Treebore]

I strongly encourage 5 Terms. That way they should be 38, with plenty of years left to adventure, if they don't get killed.

 

[Matian]

I cap it at three or four, mostly because I hate dealing with aging. I also have a flexible approach to skill packages, but that gets more into the "house rules" category.

For my current group, it's capped at three, as they're all new players and I don't feel like dealing with aging. For campaigns with more experienced players, I cap it at four or five. I find that by the time six terms comes around, most characters are firmly entrenched in a life somewhere and unlikely to go planet-hopping.

For mishaps during terms I do count it as only two years, or "half a term", so you can theoretically get up to ten or twelve on that scale, but around the fourth time everything explodes around you, most people start looking for any escape from what they were doing before.

 

[The Chef]

we natuarally stop the process at 4 terms, no laws or arrangements, but that seems to be a good place to end

Chef

 

[TrippyHippy]

Depends on the campaign.

I actually find 2-3 terms perfectly acceptable for gritty, military games. A more involved political or scientific themed games could have much older characters (no limits). For 'classic' freewheeling, trading games about 5 terms is about right.

 

[rust]

The maximum age in my campaigns usually is about 60, but most of
the characters are between 35 and 50.

 

[Edsan]

For mishaps during terms I do count it as only two years, or "half a term"

Ah, like in Megatraveller. That ruling makes a lot of sense in MGT I think, considering a mishap robs a character the chances for Event and Promotion that term its a good trade-off. Not to mention the age DM modifiers for some careers in MGT.

Heck, in MGT the Term structure is even laid out in a way that makes the half-term ruling very sensible if we follow the order of the dice rolls:

Year 1 - Gain Skill
Year 2 - Survival
Year 3 - Event
Year 4 - Comission/Promotion

So if you are booted out, you're at year 2 of that term.

 

[B_Steele]

My playtest/play group run a manditory 3 terms but have to stop at 5.

Also, as a house rule that I use, the last term a character runs is actually only 1d4 years; that way not everyone on a ship is 38 years old (which is unrealistic).

-Bry

 

[Paladin]

I've yet to enforce a limit. Most of our players are scared enough of the aging to stop between 4-6.

 

[TrippyHippy]

My playtest/play group run a manditory 3 terms but have to stop at 5.

Also, as a house rule that I use, the last term a character runs is actually only 1d4 years; that way not everyone on a ship is 38 years old (which is unrealistic).

-Bry

I've done a similar thing for non-military careers - each term is D6 years long (not a fixed amount).

 

[Treebore]

I have been thinking about this and I probably got stuck on the 5 terms thing due to my own military service. 20 years and out, baby! Which is 5 terms in Trav. Combine that with my starting to play Trav while I was in, and everyone else was also military. I think that is why 5 terms stuck with me.

 

[TrippyHippy]

There is also the notion of doing 'troupe' play. This is where each player rolls up multiple characters, in order to populate an entire ship crew, and then chooses which character to play for each prospective mission or scenario. The other characters would be considered to be in 'downtime', while all would contribute to the overall campaign.

In this case, the referee could stipulate one character with unlimited terms, one with 4-6 terms, and one with 1-2 terms. Not that the low term characters have more room to develop and advance than higher terms also.

 

[Elysianknight]

We don't cap: I had a 7 termer, most seem to naturally stop between 4 & 6

 

[BP]

Never capped - with results like Elysianknight, with most stopping within 5 terms.

 

[Dave Chase]

Had a nine termer once. I rolled 12 on term 7 and 8, the the GM just for the 'fun' of it rolled the last one (term 9) and the character was still required to stay in the Navy.

Never got to play the 'old' man, Admiral. We did have fun making up a back story for him along with all the stat rolls.

GM used him as a Major NPC for the Sector we were playing in.

But that was an extremely rare case of that ever happening.

Dave Chase

 

[Infojunky]

In terms of terms I don't generally cap the what the players choose to do. Though in 30 some-odd years of ref-ing games the average has been 3 or 4 terms.

The most term on a character I have played was 5 terms..... He was the infamous "Doc Tranc" MD and itinerant freelance psychoactive researcher.... On the run from a very vengeful Ex-wife and her lawyers.....

 

[Jame Rowe]

Most of us in our group (which seems to be fizzling) tend to play between 3-6 terms, though I think one of our characters was a 7-termer.

In our first campaign together, the Ref at that time capped us at 3 terms for backstory purposes.