Character Generation

[Antony]

Has this ever happened in your TNE game. Player X says he will use skills a,b and c in a game. Player Y thinks a moment and says to get that combination of skills Player X's character must have been through the following careers to generate the character?

After playing TNE for a verrry long time now this has become almost commonplace in my games.

Don't get me wrong I like the career path system, but there are times when a skill purchase system would be useful. In this case players would have to decide what the character was and then design it without resorting to the career templates and random dice.

Has anyone come up with such a system? As I don't want to abandon TNE and all the FF&S equipment I have designed but a more versatile CG system would be very helpful.

 

[far-trader]

Happened all the time, in most rules systems that didn't include some house rule.

Never did a full skill purchase system for TNE but it shouldn't be too hard.

To keep things mixed up I usually allowed free skill selections. Typically no more than 1 per term. They represented hobbies or other personal pursuits.

You could just allow an extra roll for any skill acquisition. Make the roll and the player gets to pick a skill from anywhere. Limit it to once per term or make it very hard to succeed. After all the needs and exposure of the career should come first.

 

[jfetters]

TNE does allow this. You choose from whatever skills you have available based on your career, term and whatever happens during the term. Then you also get one skill per term in any skill per the referee. I think I upped that to two on occasion, but there you are.

It's not much, but if you are looking to do something "outside the norm" for a character on a particular path, the tools are there.

 

[Antony]

Its basically the CG system which has resulted in my players wanting to move away from Traveller and frankly looking at the other Traveller systems available, all of which we have used in the past and including the one in Mongooses play test I need a full purchase system to stay with Traveller. Mongoose does not seem to cut it as yet. I'll see how it develops though before deciding.