Your Traveller Character Generation

[Stormraven]

Brand new Traveller player here.

After some thought and generating some characters, I am going to allow players to roll 2d6 7 times. 6 of the rolls go into the standard 6 stats. The 7th roll gets divided between Psi, and a new stat called Luck.

Luck will work pretty much like it did in the old Cyberpunk game: you can spend Luck each game session to improve a roll. Luck regenerates between game sessions.

You can also, in character creation, permanently spend 1 Luck to re-roll 1 stat, Skill and Training Table result, Events Table Result, or Mishap Table Result. So it's a tradeoff: permanently lose 1 Luck to avoid a crippling injury or lame Skill selection, at the cost of being better able to accomplish awesome things later?

Psionic characters will also thus rely on their powers, and not on their inner strength and good fortune. Another point of difference between the Imperium and the Zhodani?

"Minor" NPCs will have no Luck stat, but "major" NPCs like the campaign's main villain probably will.

I like that. I was wondering how I could do the 'Mageworlds' series in MT, and now I know. Give everyone Power - some just call it luck.

 

[Scorpion]

Why not simply make the Psi stat useable as a luck stat?

I thought about that; but that would be implying that only psionic strength can give one that extra "oomph" they need to see an action through.

There are some character concepts that call for Luck, but not psionic capability (Han Solo?).

In the case of Luke and the Death Star, I would argue that that was an example of (a postulated) Psionically Enhanced Dexterity, although it could be combined with Luck.

In fact, Luck might not even be the best name for the stat, but it sound better for the kind of game I want to run than "Destiny" or "Extra Effort". I'm planning on running a Free Trader/Merc (Firefly-style) campaign in the standard Traveller Universe, circa the "golden age" after the Fourth Frontier War. Other Referees in other campaigns might want to do something different.

 

[JimG]

I have my players add together their DM's (negative and positive) if the resulting number is positive they keep the character they have rolled. If all the DM's together end up as a negative they can re roll.

This was how I handled it for my campaign. One guy did reroll three times, but I can't see how a guy with 3 End and 2 Int is going to be much fun to play...

I also had them roll the 6 stats in order, but allowed them one swap.

I had considered making the aging rolls a little less scary, but ended up keeping the basic rules (and disallowing anagathics)

It worked out pretty well, so far everyone seems happy with the character's they rolled.

 

[cbrunish]

I let the players roll 2d6, 7 times then place the best 6 where they want them. I tried to the 3d6 drop lowest, 7 times but that seemed to make for too high characteristics.

With the CT I gave every character 4 skills for first year and 2 skill for every term after that. Services that had no commission or promotion would get an extra skill every term. This kept the age of the part down to 30 yr old average. Seemed too work well. Haven't yet made characters for MGT.