Traveller HERO: Character Creation using CT Advanced Lifepaths

[AlHazred]

So, this is too late for me, since the PCs in my long-running Traveller HERO campaign have been in-play for five-six years, but I got to thinking about the actual game-within-a-game of character creation.

 

In Classic Traveller, the system was infamous for the completely random way you generated your PC. You might have joined the Army, but you could come out of the service with a decent Computer skill, or entered the Navy and become an Air/Raft driver -- if you came out at all. The Survival roll each four-year term (or each year if you used the advanced character generation tables in Book 4: Mercenary, Book 5: High Guard, Book 6: Scouts, and Book 7: Merchant Prince). However, at the end of character generation, you know how many years your guy actually saw action, or traded on other planets.

 

HERO System, on the other hand, is highly customizable character creation system. You spend your points exactly where you want to (assuming the GM lets you) and you play exactly the guy you intended to. But the character has no actual history but what the player made up -- if the player is unfamiliar with the Traveller setting and assumptions, the character's intended background could be wildly at odds with Traveller standards (one of my players made a cyborg ex-marine, assuming Traveller space marines would be much like the Space Marines in Warhammer 40K...)

 

If I had to start again, I'd have players go through the advanced character generation tables for their selected service. Several articles were published in RPG magazines in the 80s and 90s providing advanced character generation for CT players in non-military careers. I'd keep track of the character's history, and make a note of skills rolled each year. Then, when the player was done (mustered out, or failed a survival check and "invalided out"), I'd collate all of the skills and provide a list of potential skills for the player to spend their "profession points" on. I've been considering either a 25- or 50-point profession pool out of the starting allotment, with another 25-50 points as "hobby skill" -- other things the character picked up on the side.

 

This would provide a character a relatively detailed history -- especially so if the GM does the homework of applying the various "police action" / "counter insurgency" / "trade war" results to his campaign's history and determines what places the character has been and what people have been met. Additionally, the character's skills will correspond to the events in the character's past.

 

And there's plenty of room for character modification to the generated history. A player who previously had no real idea what his character's history was like might say, "Actually, I thought he'd see more combat." Then the GM and player can work together to modify the random history into something more meaningful and relevant. It beats the old "my character has been bumming around Regina for 20 years doing nothing to nobody" cases that I had...