How to let players generate the characters they want without letting them min/max?

Role playing games allow great latitude to interpret RAW, to the point of mutating them mid session.

Wargaming tends to a stricter adherence, and keeping them as universal as possible, and because of time pressure, disputes can be resolved by chance.
 
Condottiere said:
Role playing games allow great latitude to interpret RAW, to the point of mutating them mid session.

Wargaming tends to a stricter adherence, and keeping them as universal as possible, and because of time pressure, disputes can be resolved by chance.
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Very much so. A wargame, after all, is essentially a competitive experience. It's also supposed to be fun, but generally speaking it's designed to produce a 'winner' and 'loser'.
There are more competive RPGs - where the GM has strictly limited resources and abilities; stuff like Heroquest and Imperial Assault, or very strict balanced-encounter-level driven D&D dungeon crawls.

Traveller isn't one of those - the GM's job is to produce a 'positive gaming experience', whatever the table collectively agrees that is, and if the story is best served by introducing TL27 body armour, weapons and augments, then I believe the Secrets of the Ancients campaign included all three.
 
Sorry to necro, but I think my system is pretty solid for giving players the ability to make Travellers they like without wholly abandoning the random nature of the original system:

Characteristics: I use a standard array of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, which players can assign to their characteristics as they desire. After applying any racial/background modifiers, they may choose to apply a +2 bonus to one characteristic OR a +1 bonus to two. If they do, they must also distribute a like number of penalties to other characteristics.

First Term: Players gain Boon on any Entry, Graduation, or Survival rolls they make in their first term. After the first term, all rolls are made normally.

Skills: When rolling to gain a random skill on the "Skills and Training" chart each term (and after successful advancement), players don't have to pick a table ahead of time. They roll 1D and may then choose the skill/improvement in the corresponding slot from among any of the tables available to them.

Mustering Out: Players are not forced to use bonuses to benefit rolls and may choose whether or not to apply them AFTER rolling the die.
 
Annatar Giftbringer said:
No random skill-gains, since if your character is gonna be a cruiser pilot they’d better have the necessary skills for it :) unlike regular games where your role might be decided by what skills you manage to pickup during creation.
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I briefly played an Agent character with JOT-1 and Deception -3 who served as the ship's only jump drive engineer without having the skill. If you can make a fake license and lie very convincingly, you can get away with it. :)
 
My method is that players can roll up another character, if they don't like the one they have when they're done. So far, everybody has always found their way of loving the character they rolled up. The whole back and forth with the connections and skill packages seems to capture their imaginations, and help them get behind they one they have.
 
I'm a fan of rerolling until you have at least 42 points for stats. And reroll until you do. Lifepath always remain random but with some system mastery, you're much better as massaging it to get the character you after even if it wasnt the character you actually wanted.
Then you make it with the gm. Mostly just raw, sometime change up for the sake of narrative or play.
 
It's my experience that if your players come in with character concepts about what they want to do in the campaign, it is basically impossible to not get the character you are looking for, especially with the Connections and Skill Package top ups. However, if your players have a character concept based around "who they used to be", that's much less likely to happen. That ought to be something addressed before you start character creation, so your players know what to expect.

"I wanna be the Engineer in the group" is easy to make happen without messing with the rules. "I wanna be a former Imperial Navy Engineering Officer" is much more hit and miss.

Obviously, if you are playing a campaign that requires the characters to have a specific history, you need to massage the rules to make that history happen. Such as if you are a naval ship bridge crew.
 
If players don't enjoy playing their characters, there's little point in forcing them to.

Experienced and creative ones, generally can figure out a way to tweak them to fit their vision, if they want to make that effort.
 
If a player has their heart set on a particular character then I just let them.

If you want the illusion of character generation then let them roll boon for every dice roll during character generation, and pick rather than roll for skills.
 
Ultimately, this is the same discussion as whether you should let someone play a tiefling in your Middle Earth campaign. If you have a friend who can literally only play one specific thing, you either decide you want to play with that friend and change stuff to make sure they can be that thing or you let them decide the game isn't for them and catch them in another game. If your whole table wants to play specific things the game isn't likely to produce, then yeah house rules or a different game are the solution. But that assumes everyone wants the same kind of game play experience.

If your players are going to min/max if you give them control of their character design and you think min/maxing is bad, then that's a thing that should be discussed and resolved out of game. Because it's not an issue of game design. It's something that will keep coming up over and over during the course of play as well. It'll just shift from chargen to gear to situational effects and so on.

It's in no one's interest for someone to play a character they don't enjoy. Everyone having fun is what makes games fun, not the game mechanics themselves.
 
In terms of characters, what it can be seen is the minimum required to either achieve a certain optimal result, or the minimum required to play a certain archetype, which could be a question of minimum characteristics to qualify for a specific class, or profession.

The difference between the two is between a power gamer, and a character actor.

In Traveller, having a characteristic of three is not particularly good, but it might be possible to mitigate that minus one penalty, essentially creating a minimum feasibility to play someone with that handicap.

Whether that would work out, that way, in real life, is another issue.
 
My perspective is different to many, as 1977 edition Traveller was my very first RPG. Roll and play is my instinct.

I find the issue is mostly one of perception. Players have more ability to guide a character through the prior career sequence than they think they do. You're constantly making decisions in reaction to how the rolls play out. Especially with Mongoose and the term Event, which usually gives you a choice.

It's a habit that needs to be unlearned from point allocation and even other random stat games like old D&D where your choice is basically race and/or class.

But my advice is to leverage the joy that is Traveller character creation. Let players roll several characters and choose the one they want to go with. Often as not, the one they originally didn't want ends up with the coolest life story.

It's also worth educating (especially new) players on what the skill values and stat values really mean. One level of skill means more than one more point of Dex. Skills are more important than stats, and a character with low stats can do just fine. And there's always the personal development tables and mental stats from mustering out benefits to buff things up.
 
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Without the experience actually playing Traveller but having played around with the system I'd say one thing that will "hook" some players is when they create the characters background story based on events and do the same with allies they roll up.

I was just recently creating a background NPC for my hypothetical players to encounter as a owner/operator of a one man trading ship and it is a perfect example.

He and his allies (I planned none but the dice said otherwise) have a much more complex and full background than I originally envisioned, even if he didn't have great ability scores I'd love playing him for the back ground. The same for his allies as far as I've gone at creating them. A female Agent (corporate), a female Merchant Academy graduate and broker (for the same company as the original character) and a Doctor (based on a Hospital ship beyond the Imperial borders). All with reasons why they are close to him. His story became such that I added his former Captain as a contact even though that never rolled, it was just NEEDED by the background. The 2 women were allies of each other and the doctor an ally of the Broker as well, making a tight knit group. Each has REASONS to be allies with the others (not the agent and doctor so far but I haven't completed rolling them up and as yet they aren't allies just acquaintances helping save the life of the Broker/lover of the central character (Jack Solo). Even that character name Jack Solo ended becoming a name change after he retired to avoid the notoriety he gained in saving his lover and become allies of the doctor and abandoned his original name that I had to create, changing the planned background one again.

There is so much more to this character than I planned and if players did the same when creating their own and interlinking them it could easily make them much more attached to even a character they would normally reject as "too wimpy" just for the background.
 
Fluffy Bunny Feet said:
Without the experience actually playing Traveller but having played around with the system I'd say one thing that will "hook" some players is when they create the characters background story based on events and do the same with allies they roll up.

I was just recently creating a background NPC for my hypothetical players to encounter as a owner/operator of a one man trading ship and it is a perfect example.

He and his allies (I planned none but the dice said otherwise) have a much more complex and full background than I originally envisioned, even if he didn't have great ability scores I'd love playing him for the back ground. The same for his allies as far as I've gone at creating them. A female Agent (corporate), a female Merchant Academy graduate and broker (for the same company as the original character) and a Doctor (based on a Hospital ship beyond the Imperial borders). All with reasons why they are close to him. His story became such that I added his former Captain as a contact even though that never rolled, it was just NEEDED by the background. The 2 women were allies of each other and the doctor an ally of the Broker as well, making a tight knit group. Each has REASONS to be allies with the others (not the agent and doctor so far but I haven't completed rolling them up and as yet they aren't allies just acquaintances helping save the life of the Broker/lover of the central character (Jack Solo). Even that character name Jack Solo ended becoming a name change after he retired to avoid the notoriety he gained in saving his lover and become allies of the doctor and abandoned his original name that I had to create, changing the planned background one again.

There is so much more to this character than I planned and if players did the same when creating their own and interlinking them it could easily make them much more attached to even a character they would normally reject as "too wimpy" just for the background.
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I agree that this method works well for those of Us who do not like to actually write a character. I have a character that I have played on and off for 30 years. I must have had 60 or 70 pages of character history, friends, family, distant relations, lovers, exes, teachers, influences, heros, philosophical leanings. Took Me a few weeks and We did it together as a group so that our backgrounds could overlap. The first game session was amazing! We never made it out of the bar as characters and as players never rolled the dice the whole night. No rolls were needed. We were just 4 jackasses telling warstories (lies) to each other in a bar. Best opening game ever and still My favorite character 3 decades later.
 
As I was playing online I decided to forgo dice rolls for characteristics. Instead I allowed the players to use an "average" spread. Since they are the heroes I replaced the two 1's with an extra 3 and 4. They could then distribute the 6,6,5,5,4,4,4,3,3,3,2,2 in pairs across the 6 characteristics however they wanted. Some players chose to be better in some areas, others flattened them out. No-one chose an entirely average character with all 7's and 8's and no-one chose to set a stat to 12 (or 4). No-one felt they had been cheated by the dice before they had even started the game.

Missing rolls during the game is one thing, effectively taking a hit on every roll for the rest of your life because of a single roll during character generation is another.

I am also making sure to allow the full gamut of characteristics to be useful in the game. This is easier for some stats than others. The biggest issue has been the similarity of INT and EDU, but I think they have figured out the nuances. I allow them to make a case for the stat they are adding if it is not the obvious one.
 
There can be trade offs.

You could insist they first have to proof themselves by (temporarily) playing an underpowered, and/or pregenerated, character.
 
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