I died in c-gen!

[pyat]

I rolled up two Traveller characters the other day. It was an interesting process. The first one was a Scout Service Bureaucrat with medical training, and the second an Imperium Naval Gunner.

The first guy (a pudgy blue collar genius) died at the age of 29 during assignment to a field mission. The second (a burly, though clumsy, fellow from the upper classes) died at the age of 22, during a planetary siege.

Ah, fun times.

Comments

[bandersnitch.livejournal.com]

Strange that the game system allows for the characters to actually die before they are ever played.

I must be missing something

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, it was 1977, and the world of RPG was strange and new...

Just the fact that they have these extensive and random history charts was innovative. And yes, the dying bit was something of a downer, but character generation was something of a game in itself. Should you muster out, or try and re-enlist for another four years, knowing you might die or get crippled?

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Traveller and ... wasn't there some other popular RPG system of that general era that suffered from the same possibility?

I am reminded of how Mutant Chronicles. No, you couldn't die in character generation, but there were certain dead-ends in the character generation process whereby the system basically went, "Okay, you've gambled enough and lost your big chance to play an uber-hero. Now you're down on your luck. Time to start adventuring!" So the gamble came in the form of: If you keep going, you may get higher social standing, more career points to spend on skills, and better starting equipment. OR, you may get a combat injury or suffer a major setback and suddenly - BOOM - you have to start playing. No chance to recover with more lucky die rolls.

If you were allowed to keep rolling up characters until you got lucky, or if you had a too-generous GM who would let you ignore the "bad" rolls ... well, it wasn't hard to end up with some overpowered characters - particularly if you signed up with certain overpowered factions. (I shall resist the urge to get too great into detail about that.) It isn't that I think it's really a problem to have an "overpowered group" as a whole: In that case, the GM just needs to chance the scope of the game. But you could end up with grossly mismatched player characters: One person is a Doomtrooper, the ultimate superhero with tons of skills and abilities and the best equipment ... while someone else is a washed-out nobody who is "On the Dole".

If you wanted to, say, start a campaign with the premise that the PCs are actually supposed to come from the same walk of life (E.g., we're all going to be Doomtroopers, taking on the Dark Legion! We're all going to be corporate marines from Corporation X, defending against corporation Y!) you just couldn't go with the rules as written. If ever I dreaded the prospect of running a campaign where players chose characters who just had no really good reason to have anything to do with each other ... it was made even worse by the randomization of career paths in the original Mutant Chronicles system.

And yet, it was fun to generate characters and see what you'd end up with. The character generation system was kind of a mini-game in its own right.

I suspect that the character generation system was only there to entertain people who would buy all the sourcebooks but never actually *play the game*. For GMs who wanted to actually run campaigns (if they existed), there was no choice but to simply declare by fiat that the players shall play from this limited set of roles, have this many career points to spend on skills, and that's that.

And, really, it wasn't that hard to do. They just never officially suggested it anywhere that I could tell.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

*nods* The only other game that I can think of that can have something similar happen is Hackmaster, and even then it's more likely you'll pick up a missing finger or debt rather than just DIE...

I don't think I've met anyone who played Mutant Hero, but I always liked the cover art!

Wow

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

That's something that was missing in the various point-based character creation systems - gambling. I like the idea that the player can keep pushing his luck by saying "yes, I want another randomly-rolled feature".

Re: Wow

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, it was missing in the traditional random-roll systems like D&D and Palladium as well: There, you roll the dice, you get your stuff. Not really much of a gamble - just luck of the draw to start off.

At least in theory, I can respect the "gambling" aspect of a system like this.

But as a GM and player, I've been in campaigns where great PC power disparity was a point of contention. (E.g., PCs who can do everything everyone else can do - only better - by virtue of an amazingly lucky roll they made ... and usually while nobody was looking, and it wouldn't be proper to question the veracity of the player's claims.)

So, I can really see the appeal of point-based, too.

Re: Wow

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree - I was saying that the gamble was interesting, whereas I consider point-based games to be the default. And in D&D/Palladium, the stats were dull anyways. I know in Palladium 99% of stats didn't matter at all unless you had a value over 16.

I mean the fun of having a player aspect that's actually a gamble, where you start with a midding player and can push your luck.

And yes, I've had campaigns - ones where dice never entered into it, where players designed their own characters from scratch - where I've had one whiny-assed player who complained about his crappy character from day 1. And dice just make it worse.

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

That's innovative. Kill them at rolling, and you save a lot of time playing. ;)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

As any gamer knows, the idea of the character is almost always more interesting than your ability to portray the character. This way you get all the happy memories, with none of the exasperating inability!

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Haw! So sad but true. (Angst!)

Yeah, some of my "best character ideas" will probably remain that way only insofar as I am unlikely to ever play them (which would only tarnish my memory of those inspecific possibilities).

That's kind of like my feelings about various movies that I see trailers for. If I see a movie with a really good trailer, I probably shouldn't go see it, so I don't spoil the endless unfulfilled possibilities. It's so rare that any movie can actually be cooler than the trailer, after all.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

There is, actually, a use for the "died in character generation" feature. Since Traveller's character generation system was used to create PCs and NPCs, the Referee could use the feature to create NPCs that were part of the world history (i.e. PCs find a murder victim and start looking into her background: the chargen system is a sketch of the person's entire life story; without much work, as Pyat has point in out in recent posts, those experienced at "reading" the character generation artefacts can intuit fairly rich backgrounds for characters), and, the Referee can use the feature to create NPCs that are "doomed to die" in the current adventure.

Death is really a way of enforcing a stopping point for character generation; in effect a way of saying "we've reach the current point in time for this character" as well as a way of saying "this is when the character died".

And it was so obvious and trivial to house-rule around PC death through this system: my personal house rule was to enforce a "half-term muster out", without benefits, and with an interesting story as to why the character was forced to leave in a hurry (injury, disgrace, etc, etc). In other words, a way of assisting the player to come to providing a /kicker/ for a character (to borrow a jargony rpg device from Mr Edwards that seems to have fallen in to fairly common usage in the hobby, much as I hate the term)!

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

Being the world that Traveler and related game is in, it's entirely workable to play a character in their 60's. I quite liked the concept of rolling your character's past, since I can't ever come up with a decent background in any rpg ever.

I remember my character, a Vargar (what else would I play, really?), who started out rather pathetically and slowly made his way to an anagathics-chugging space pirate who people were *terrified* of. He wanted a break, so he decided to work as a navigator for a while.

So, I ended up being both 'the token furry' and 'the silly bishonen who is actually a badass' in one swoop.

The times we did run into Vargar pirates were always hilarious. I'd be barking over the radio with something along the lines of "Don't you have any idea who I am?" while the human crew wondered how I always managed to make them go away.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Your characters rock, Jirris. :)

What version of Traveller were you playing?

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

I was playing MegaTraveler. It was the best Game Master I've ever had.

Trust me, for every awesome character I have, I have at least half a dozen who suck big time. Thankfully, they all seem to happen in one or two games. The downside is that I never have fun playing these games. I *want* to like Exalted, Heroes Unlimited, and Rifts (which I've had a mixed bag with rifts), but the games focus too much on min-maxing with the people I've played with. I'm not so great at min-maxing.

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

HOL and it's supplement to make it playable, Buttery HOLsomeness, had a part in char-gen where you could die. Roll bad and you get "Cornholed by God." Of course, at the opposite end of that chart was, "You ARE the Second Coming...."

That was a fun book to read, but I can't imagine anyone actually playing it. :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yeah. HOL. I had that. :) And I know people who played it, they just didn't play it for very long.