As you may or may not have heard, in Traveller, your character can die in character creation. For this read through we're going to skip the homeworld creation (and thus the background skills) for now because I don't want to side track nor dig up pre-exisitng world info.Īdditionally, let's talk about that Survival check. You should be able to roll up a character (minus a new home world) in about 15 minutes. This looks like a lot (and compared to Classic Traveller it is a bit more) but once you've done it about once, it's pretty fast an easy.
First up is our creation check list:Ģ) Homeworld / Background Skills (Optional)ĩ) Re-enlistment (back to 5 for each term) Each term gives skills and benefits to the character as well as providing us with data for backgrounds. Characters start at age 18, join a career and serve 4 year terms. the jump from 1d6 hours to 1d6 days is too large to me, I would probably add 1d6 half days or quarter days as an increment in between.Ī few more basic core rules and a glossary of some key terms and we're finally on to character creation. Personally I would add a few more increments in places e.g. So if you need to fix the ship's engines because of a jump failure, that might take 1d6 hours, but if you take 1d6 days, you get a +1 DM. We're referred to the Skills chapter in the book which has a table of time units and rules for going faster or slower (essentially +/- 1 DM for every time unit slower or faster). Speaking of time taken, the next paragraph notes the the in game time a given action should take (when relevant) should be 1d6 $TimeUnit where the time unit is determined by the GM. I'm not saying that everything has to be "failing forward", but as a rule I wouldn't be asking for skill checks any time you can try again and again without failure, at that point you should assume the success and have the roll use "degrees of success" to determine either quality or time taken. No consequence (good or bad) skill checks.
We then get the paragraph whose version in some form or another has caused some of the most boring moments in TTRPGs. Personally, I would rather they have skipped the hard numbers and simply noted that the further in either direction, the more exceptional the failure or success as appropriate.
Failures by -6 or less are exceptional failures, +6 or more are exceptional successes. There is also a chart for degrees of success (how far from the target of 8 the roll was). Difficulty modifiers come in +/- 2 DMs ranging from "Formidable" at -6 (impossible without other modifiers) to Simple at +6 (guaranteed success without other modifiers).
So without modifiers, the standard success rate is just a shade over 40%. A roll of 8 or better is a success, less is a failure. Task resolution is 2d6 + DMs (Die Modifiers, from characteristics, skills and circumstances). So the system starts out like most do these days, a basic introduction, a "What is Role Playing" section that's about as generic as they come and then some quick introductions to core game concepts. So without further ado, let's get rolling. I chose the Cepheus Engine rules because they're freely available on DTRPG so folks can follow along, but the rules are pretty broadly applicable to Traveller standard. The plan is to run through some character, world and ship generation and see what the system gives us. A few folks have been asking about Traveller recently and inspired by An Enemy Spy's FATAL thread, but for a system that won't give your eyes cancer and cause your brain to attempt to strangle you, thought we might take a look at the Cepheus Engine, which is a Traveller clone that is a mashup of some Classic Traveller style ideas and Mongoose 1e Traveller.