Character Concept/Preferences

Mike W. said:
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

Pierre S. said:

Probably the motley-crew idea is the closest.  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.  I suggest they "pencil in" the errata for the particular career-choice they want.  But first, there has to be a character sheet form to store the data on (public-access to all players).  I should work on that, so don't move until you see one placed there.

When you roll up a merchant in T5 you can get "ship shares", first 1, then 2, then 3, added up cumulatively it seems a middle-aged merchant can many times end up with their own ship.  Non-merchant characters then "buy in" to obtain a "corporate share" in the business.  The ship-owner is basically mortgaging their ship in a joint venture to raise the cash for a trading enterprise or other adventurous venture.  So I envision a kind of crew with greater and lesser share in the enterprise.  But there should not be too much disparity.

Captain:     3 shares  (the person who inherited a used ship or who got one lent from the Scouts or the Navy on condition that the ship can be mustered in an emergency need.)
Merchant or financial characters or professionals with more money invested:    2 shares
Military or muscle or lower-class characters with less to invest but who furnish the necessary staffing.  Maybe they contract to work for their share.  They do get basic room and board out of it.:      1 share

It is easy to "unify" the game-group, each one has different reasons for joining the ship but now they are all employed in the same "corporation" revolving around the ship.  They contract to work for the merchant venture and they profit-share according to their corporate shares (not the same as the original ship shares.)

Yeah. That new mechanism does do a good job of helping prevent the situation of multiple ships but it still won't help if people are going off in different directions and not pooling their ship shares. What I was really looking for was whether someone actually wanted to be a merchant trying to run trade or a scientist running a lab ship or something.

Those are two different sorts of campaigns I guess.  I'll have to grapple with the very long starship design rules (unless some free T5 starship designs come out), but the first thing it asks you to settle is the ship's purpose, so campaign type is of some importance since an all-purpose ship would not be good at any particular thing.

I can help you with Starship design rules. I've got several variants of the Scout/Courier that I've worked up (http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=30481). I'm doing some playing around with the A2 Far Trader as well but I discovered that the original T&G map is horrible off (something on the order of 3-4 times the volume it is suppose to be). Still, I've got basic calculations done on it that retains most of the 'spirit' of the original map.

I can probably work up any other ship designs you might want to do although we would probably have to work out some of the specifics of the design (how many staterooms there are, etc.) as the details given in T5 are extremely light.

I've been rolling up a lot of Hydrographic "A" planets.  Better ensure the thing can do water-landings.   :-)

The Scout/Courier I've built can (actually, any ship with a lifting body design can). In the case of some other ship I'm sure I can work something out.

Hello Okami,

I don't if you paid much notice to the number of players of this game, but even if you place everyone double occupancy to a room and hot rack it, you will not have all the players to fit on a Scout/Courier ship comfortable. Long missions would be misery.You might slid up to a Corvette. It is a four hundred ton ship, and will hold the players. :-)

73,

Mike W.

I know that with all the registered players there wouldn't be enough room but I suspect not everyone registered will be playing (and I don't think Pierre will actually be able to run his game if everyone who is registered is playing). I believe I'm on the 'standby' list myself, though I'll still be happy to help out with ship design if I'm unable to play.

That is why I posted to see who would be interested in running. A friend and I both will be setting up to running T5 on a VTT. That is why I am here. I want to see how Roll 20 works for T5 from the player perspective. If it does well then we will use this platform.

From a player's perspective it looks like the biggest problem Roll 20 has is that it could use more development on character sheets. It would be nice to design sheets with multiple tabs, better organization of abilities and attributes and a separate inventory section.

For GMs I think the biggest sin is that it lacks the ability to share resources. I understand there are some concerns about copyright material but it seems like their stance on sharing resources between people is a little bit too heavy handed. That might have changed a little bit, however. It might be possible for one GM to 'hand off' a campaign to another GM and then the second GM can use the transmogrifier to move maps from the shared game to their own.

It is possible to clone an entire campaign and then pass control to someone else, or to create a new campaign based on the same info as the old.

If anybody has mastered the Traveller 5 rules before me, they are welcome to steal any players registered here!  Some may no longer be interested as it's taken a while just to set up a sector.  I still have a character sheet template to store here, and also some background handout.

I think when you pass control to someone else they are in a sort of 'secondary GM position' from some of the things I've read so I'm not sure if they can use the Transmogrifier to move assets from the cloned campaign or not.

Perhaps we can run a test on it in the next couple of days.

Pierre, if you need a computer program to generate a sector, I can speak to a friend of my which has developed one to create the whole sector on the Travellermap.com called the Mikhail Sector. Let me know.

Traveller Map

No, I already found a utility and generated 3 sectors already.  The utility is also good at viewing and rolling over planets, and showing the orbit distribution of an individual system.  A preliminary sector is viewable now, particularly the home sub-sectors E, F and G, in another message.