A Painful Traveller Character Generation Experience

I’ve been taking a break from the blog, watching tons of baseball instead of posting here, but we have still been playing our S&W and OSRIC games. Nothing terribly post-worthy has happened in those games, so I’ve refrained from writing up any detailed session journals here. In our S&W game, Aleger the dwarf rejoined the group - turns out his brother was killed by kobolds a while back when the two had sought to investigate a mine they’d inherited. Aleger had been frequenting prominent taverns in the Dordogne before finally stumbling upon Wagstaff and his mostly newer, local companions.

Tonight Nick and I got together online via Skype to follow up on the idea of our Traveller game via email. Character generation turned out to be a real drag, as Nick’s dice throws continually ended up killing his PCs before they could muster out of service and actually become playable. None of them got into their 3rd term. He tried first with the Merchants, then the Army, and then “Other.” I haven't gotten around to picking up Citizens of the Imperium anywhere - I’m reluctant to invest any money on this Traveller experiment before we find out whether we can have any fun with it. Using “Other” though, we decided that one character was a famous musician/band member. He survived his first term (age 26?), learning the Electronic and Jack-of-all-Trades skills, before once again failing his survival throw. So we decided he’d overdosed and tried again. What the hell!

On his next attempt, he finally mustered out alive (albeit after only one term of service) but still managed to reap a 50,000 CR cash allowance as a Scout, along with an automatic pistol. Nick didn’t like any of this, being totally unfamiliar with classic Traveller. He seemed really unimpressed so far, but still agreed to do a one or two-shot. I tend to think that if we'd tried to roll up several more characters it might not have been so bad, but to be safe I just suggested that we use some pre-gens.

At that point I decided to describe X-P to him in some detail and how it was very similar to OD&D’s simplicity and he seemed more open to that. What he really wanted to play, turns out, was a post-apocalyptic game. Soooo, I got out the Mutant Future rules and we quickly rolled up two characters there. I became a little worried when he rolled on the mutations table and one character got Weak Will and the other Pain Sensitivity, but at least they’ll see gameplay.