Game Schedules

This area will be to post the schedule of the game, when it will be played next, as well as "office hours" to consult live for character generation.  Also possible:  planet design sub-contracting.  You make the planetary system and define it, I include adventures for it. I have so far slogged through the first 400 pages of the Traveller 5th-ed. core rules.  It has amazing potential, but some things are so complex they lend themselves to "Rules-Light" treatment, especially if you haven't likewise read all of it. I apologize for having no action on starting a game yet, but it is indeed an astronomical undertaking.

No need to apologize...  I got my .pdf several weeks ago and am still working my way through it.

Likewise. I do not understand why I am not getting emails with updates but never the less, I am very interested

I've been reading reviews of T5 and there's a lot of chatter about obscene complexity and being tough to grasp if one is not a Traveller vet. Any chance we could sked 'office hours' so I can make my character with you? I still very much want to play but I"m not sure how long the CD-ROM I ordered today will take to get here to Malaysia. Flabbergasted there's no option to buy and download a PDF version... Looking forward to getting into this!

I don't think the buddy Marc Miller had the best release system for T5.  There were problems with errata (but maybe no worse than similar large RPG projects), he was hand-packing and hand-signing 1,500 Kickstarter orders himself which took a while and gave me a 114-day wait for my order, etc.! I think this will indeed be a hard road if a player has no experience in any TRAVELLER version, but I can certainly assist for the character generation design.  They had 13 nice systematic pages about rolling up a character's 4-year terms in any of 13 possible careers (you start at 18 and then for as long as you want, go through career terms, but don't get too old or you start to roll for decreases in your basic characteristics) -- BUT there were a lot of typos in the skills tables AND the order of steps! Many careers have "officers" and "rank and file" (enlisted) so the correct order SHOULD be as below (*).  Otherwise, people might get one Promotion and one Commission in the same term and that's a bit much (each action adds a new skill).  Reaching certain ranks and coming from certain homeworlds also give automatic skills. Roll to enter a career Risk and Reward roll (You must use alternating basic characteristics and roll under 2D (2 six-sided dice) to avoid "risk" (accidents, wounding) and then roll for a career reward with the same roll.  You may modify one roll by anywhere from -2 to +2 but then you have to likewise modify the other roll in the opposite direction.  Eg. if you make things riskier, your reward would be more likely.  Make things safer (if you are forced to use a low characteristic that term) and you will avoid accidents but your reward is LESS likely.) (*)Roll for Promotion if you're an Officer (*)Roll to attempt a Commission that term (Change from Enlisted to the lowest Officer rank) (*)Roll for Promotion if you're an Enlisted Make 4 1D skill rolls on the columns of your choice [pay attention to the errata published on Citizens of the Imperium] Roll 2D to be able to Continue in the career.  (You may choose to leave a career and start a different one, but if your roll is exactly 2 you are FORCED to stay in the career (e.g. war broke out and your services in the military are still needed.)  If you Continue, return to Risk and Reward. When all terms in the career are done, you get Mustering Out benefits. [Also apply any Age Effects every 4 years on your character's birthday.  At age 34 (after 4 terms) you start to check for possible -1's to physical characteristics; at age 66 you start to check for possible -1's to MENTAL characteristics as well!] Anyway, I am willing to start the "office hours" but for that to be meaningful I have to produce an online character sheet form to fill out.

I got an email letting me know the CD-ROM shipped. Once it gets here I'll have a go at developing a world and writing up a character. I found a step by step tutorial on YouTube for character generation. In case you haven't seen it: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElO4dKQNbyY&amp;list=PLOnQa6svxgzQCedXQteLg5F__5bZM2rg-&amp;index=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElO4dKQNbyY&amp;list=PLOnQa6svxgzQCedXQteLg5F__5bZM2rg-&amp;index=1</a> I'm going to give this a go when my CD gets here, unless there's a different way you want us to proceed. Cheers

Oh, yes, I know the video. YouTube user "Hemdian" has made 3 videos about T5 so far and I already posted them up top in my Looking for Group (LFG) game description. I will add a photo-album I made taking a lot of page screenshots (I posted it on my Facebook but most friends have not a clue what this means.) For someone who has the book or CD-ROM, here is my suggested course of action: 1. In the file on the CD-ROM called Master Text Old, a version made just before their release, you may want to print out a one-page table called Small Craft (for VehicleMaker) and a chapter on Terrain (illustrating the terrain types). These were omitted from the final book. 2. Get a hold of a tentative Errata .pdf file . Currently they are up to version 0.71 . You can get it from <a href="http://travellerrpg.com" rel="nofollow">http://travellerrpg.com</a> by registering with Citizens of the Imperium and going to the Traveller5 forum. It's at the beginning of the sub-forum called Traveller Errata and it is compiled by Don McKinney, subject to final approval by Marc Miller His Own Self. 3. Note that some important errata has to do with Character Generation . The Citizen Skills table has been completely revised. I had to handle that by printing the corrected table and pasting it on in my book, but you may not have to go THAT far! There are also a few careers with non-officers who can get a Commission to turn into officers. The order of what you have to do every "term" of character generation is not quite correct, for Merchants, Soldiers, Marines and such. The correct order is, after checking Risk and Reward: --check (for an Officer) for Promotion to the next-highest Officer rank first, --then check for a non-Officer if they get a Commission (to be promoted to Officer), and then --check for a non-Officer for Promotion to the next highest non-Officer rank. The order must be this way to prevent someone getting a benefit for both Commission and Promotion in the same term. I am going to add "annotations" and "comments" to the .pdf file to keep track of these errata and have a still-readable .pdf that is correct. 4. A player's priority is to read the following chapters (others are more the GM's concern:) Dice , p. 22 (Never mind the big, long probability tables. If you have to ask for your chances, chances are bad!) Characters and character generation , pp. 58-111 Tasks (p. 128-141) Skills (look up descriptions only as needed) Personal Combat (p. 210-235) Some Skills are actually Knowledges. If you gain one you are only gaining a sub-set of the skill on the first and second award of that skill. On the third award, you get Skill level 1 (in every sub-set). For example, if you are learning to drive and get a lot of Driver skills, you may pick the first one as Wheeled-1, then next you can either learn to drive Tracked vehicles as well to get Tracked-1, or take Wheeled again and get Wheeled-2. On the third round, you can pick the entire, all-inclusive Driver-1 skill, but you will always be better at driving wheeled vehicles if you end up with Driver-1 Wheeled-2. Since you can combine the skill levels for skill+knowledge (called in many games a "cascade"), you get a positive modification of 3 for driving wheeled vehicles, and 1 for any other type of ground vehicle.

Pierre, Was this below a personal correction or in the errata: "The order must be this way to prevent someone getting a benefit for both Commission and Promotion in the same term."

That was a personal statement of mine, as changing the order of steps has the result of not getting a skill from both a Promotion and a Commission in the same term. I believe that is their intention, correcting it that way in many of the Careers where "officers" exist.

Yippee! Got my CD-ROM today. Now I can go about making a homeworld and character :)

Hey Pierre, I take it you are going to want to generate charaters on Roll20 with you?

Yes, I should probably announce some "office hours" to generate characters. Or if you have the rules AND you noted the errata which make corrections to your chosen character career (either in pencil in the book, or with annotations and highlighter on the Adobe .pdf file of the book), you can do a character generation yourself and let me have it.&nbsp; I will give your character a Homeworld, which would be good for a skill or two, but for the moment you can leave that pending. For consistency, and to help find the right type of skill during play, skills should be ordered by category as on p. 142.&nbsp; I will make a general character sheet to use online with those categories.

Hello Pierre, I was one of the Kickstarter backers, so I have both the book and the CD, so I can make a character, but I don't mind if rolling up, and maybe prefer rolling up in front of you to remove any questions. Lastly, I have been gaming so long that generating stats are not necessary, so if you want to roll up my status too, that is fine. Just let me know when you want to do your Office Hours. Also, I am in to character concept, so can you give us what type of campaign that you will be running? For example, this is a very much classic Traveller game with a motley crew, running a space freighter, a mercenary game, a military, or maybe a scientific expedition? This will help character development. Thanks for your time, Mike Wittek

Probably the motley-crew idea is the closest.&nbsp; This border area I have as the setting is not at war, nor are there necessarily local insurrections to be military with. I will declare a meeting time for character generation, people can roll up characters in front of me.&nbsp; I suggest they&nbsp;"pencil in" the errata for the particular career-choice they want.&nbsp; But first, there has to be a character sheet form to store the data on (public-access to all players).&nbsp; I should work on that, so don't move until you see one placed there.

I have worked out a character sheet stored online, in each of your names. They are each entitled "For [your name]". Okami did his, and he found he could edit everything except the character handout name. I can edit that once you write further down what you want your character name to be. Okami went one better and reproduced an exact diagram of the boxes from the actual character sheet. He has his sheet in both my layout and his graphical layout. If someone prefers that, you can ask Okami how to do it, because I don't see any way to copy the template from one character sheet to another.