On thread topic first, here's a couple more ATVs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfiqbpvOGbE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_26tzou_-c
Now for the rabbit hole!
Moppy said:
Many of the generated characters are "super rich" because of ship shares and other things - or they should already getting a pension and don't need to work.
I know it only matched how people were playing anyway so I don't primarily blame Mongoose, but dropping death in char-gen without capping number of terms was always a mistake. In the original game character creation was a gambling game - push your luck and risk losing it all and starting over, or keep what you have and enter play with something good enough. The number of rich noble retired admirals under that scheme, rolled honestly, should be vanishingly low. And in support of that I've talked to critics of Traveller from back in the day who claim it took hours or whole sessions to get a character to survive creation - which is entirely believable if they wanted Admirals and weren't stopping in time.
I like a five term maximum in Mongoose, and I'm considering getting fiddly with a three term max to start, one extra term for every two failed survival or advancement rolls.
(And ship shares are a separate topic, since they can't be turned into cash it's more about "you got this money in batches and spent it as it came in" or "you were owed a debt or a favor and this is how you got repaid" than "you're rich but inexplicably decided to go back to work".)
Moppy said:
I don't know what referees to do fix that, or maybe travellers are just all lost toffs, roaming the spacelines like common folk because they rejected the conditions of their inheritance, or they have a % in a freighter but corporates don't buy ship shares for "reasons"? Another of those things I don't understand about Traveller.
Sometimes you need a shareholder on board to protect everyone's interests. Once out of port there's little stopping a crew from keeping the ship for themselves, if you don't trust them to stay in your polity and to want to come back home one day.
A number of merchant ships turned pirate in our world back in the day, just because they could once they were at sea. Sometimes even a ship commissioned to hunt down pirates turned pirate, though hopefully in someone else's waters. Sometimes they kept the ship (or lost it) and you never saw it again, but often they actually came back to their home port and paid off the owners, and if the crew kept a bonus, well, things could have gone worse. If you've set things up right, things should be a bit less certain than a 21st century ship owner watching their cargo ship on GPS. (One reason I don't like a strong Imperium, but that's another topic.)
Moppy said:
Everytime someone asks, in character generation, "Why do you Travel?" then this cartoon comes to mind:
Why do people drive ice trucks in Alaska, or work as deep sea fishermen in cold waters, or join the French Foreign Legion, or go back to Afghanistan as contractors after their time is up in the military? Or, most relevant to Traveller, go to sea at all prior to the modern era? It's not entirely rational when you could have a nice, safe, boring, lower-paying job in your hometown, yet manifestly people do sign up for these things. So, play as one of those people.
It's like playing D&D with someone who makes a character that won't go down into dungeons or fight monsters. That's rational enough for an NPC, but when you've gathered to play a game about monster slayers and dungeon divers it's not on point.
