"Get ready to play an aging boomer, because this is a game system that only generates retired characters!"
This does actually matter. Most young people can't imagine what being 40 is like. It's hard for them to identify with it. Most of them don't even make characters over 30. People want to make characters in the prime of their lives, when they're free of the supervision that runs young people's lives but still filled with strength, vitality, and an adventurous spirit, and still recognizable to them as players. Middle age to them is a time of doom, of sameness, of balding, getting fat, paying bills, and never having time to do anything. A teenage player might think of his character as a mature gentleman of 25. A player still in middle school might think of his character as a wise old man of 20. Young people strike out on their own, go on adventures, and take risks. The world is new to them. Middle-aged people are done with the nonsense, and they know that adventure ain't nuthin' but trouble misspelled.
Consider older Traveller characters.
They're middle aged, they're still working, taking on dangerous thankless jobs, no family, no children, and no fixed address. Their lives are failures if you think about it. They might have some savings, a share or two in a space motorhome, and a Vargr-skin jacket, but all they really have are their badass skills they got in the military, on the merchant ships, or drifting from star system to star system picking up work. Building up a stake. Drinking a cup of Basic on the starport tarmac after leaving the women they knew the night before. It was her last cup of Basic drink mix, too. It could've kept her going for a day. Getting in a couple gladiator fights between the duty free shops and the boarding concourse, you know how it is. Or, they're really just perennial losers who can't get their lives together enough to use their badass skills to keep a job.
But, Traveller's character generation system incentivizes the creation of venerable elders and ancient worthies.
Consider:
The 10,000 hour rule (but that's debunked the pundits of conventional wisdom howl, yeah yeah, I don't care and I refuse to argue). Check my math:
8 hours a day x 20 days a month x 12 months per year = 1920 hours on the job per year, with 10 days a month for days off, days not at work, days when work was meaningless routine, whatever.
So, in 5 or 6 years, or two terms for 8 years, a character will reach 10,000 hours of working at his job, be it an infantry soldier, a starship pilot, a mechanic or electronics tech, etc. He's going to be damn good at his primary job, unless Traveller posits that a lot of the time he spends at work is meaningless and that it takes 16 to 20 years to get really good at anything. Something I always found frustrating about Traveller's character generation system is that it was exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, to make an elite soldier who's both an excellent rifleman and an unarmed combat expert, who is also a capable field medic, and who speaks another language. This is not particularly unusual, but it's very difficult to create such a character in Traveller. It's very difficult to make that 26 year old space marine commando who's tough, strong, and skilled. It's like your character is a space pilot but he gets pulled off the flightline and told to do admin work for 4 years. He doesn't fire his weapon, he doesn't get any flight hours, he doesn't do the job he was trained for. Or a drifter mining asteroids who ends up spending four years getting Grav Vehicle 1.
"in Traveller you start off as a bright-eyed 18 year old with the whole universe at your feet." But then you go work a job for 20 years and then you're getting ready for retirement,
Bewmer!
This so needs to be relooked.
There's point buy, but that's in another book, and having that in a separate book,
that needs to be relooked.
Perhaps adjusting the character generation system so that 1 term creates a serviceable character with a solid foundation of skills, 2 terms creates a solid character who is competent enough to be a respected professional (like someone with 8 years of experience as an electrician, a maritime diesel mechanic, an airline pilot, etc.), and 3 terms creates a multiskilled highly capable character, and let 4 terms or more create the ancient masters. Focus the character generation system on people achieving peak performance between the ages of 25 and 35 rather than skill increasing with decrepitude. Make the years spent in a character's career mean something, because right now they seem like he's spent years doing routine work where he doesn't learn much. Of course that's realistic, but we don't need that in our science fiction adventures in the far future. Let's leave it behind in the 21st century along with crap school systems and debt bearing currency notes.
