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

[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)!