Character Generators

[far-trader]

....With the CT Utility ...Survival is done using the Optional Survival Rule.

Ah, hadn't used it enough to notice. Got quickly tired of characters rarely making enlistment in a service and ending up as a Barbarian or Doctor or some such

I'm sure you'll recall I'm a firm believer in the Hard Survival Rule as well

 

[far-trader]

Well, to digress a little more...

...I've seen too many aged scouts that wouldn't have been produced if the players had taken the risk of their characters' death during chargen seriously!

I've got an old tale you may have missed me telling

The SOP for "failed" stat generation in our old CT games was "Enlist in the IISS, see the stars, die in space!" (i.e. roll up a new character).

We ruled you roll stats you have to roll career and if you live you play it. Scouts enlist and reenlist pretty easily so it's just a matter of failing that survival roll to make a new character with (hopefully) better stats.

Early on one of my first characters shaped up rather poorly in the stats. Naturally it was off the the IISS. I kept cycling through and making the survival roll. I wasn't even really picking the skill tables with much thought but by the time he was busted out of the service after 6 or 7 terms he had skills up the wazoo, his stats had muchly improved (made the aging throws pretty often and added some in skill rolls), and he was on Detached Duty with Type S at his disposal. A pretty fun and awesome character in the end. One that I wouldn't have gotten from putting through the risk of dying if he'd started with decent stats

That's a big part of why I've always liked the Hard Survival Rule. It makes all the characters that much better.

So in my experience, there are no short term ex-Scouts, just dead Scouts and old Scouts.

 

[Supplement Four]

Ah, hadn't used it enough to notice. Got quickly tired of characters rarely making enlistment in a service and ending up as a Barbarian or Doctor or some such

Yeah, you mentioned that in your original post, so I didn't address it. But, I don't like the "draft" in the CT Utility including the careers from S4. That's another "author's preference" departure from the official CT rules.

Note that, under LBB1, failed enlistment means the character will be drafted into the Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, or Other career. The Other career, if you look at it, is really kind of an underworld type.

But, if you look at S4, those characters aren't required to use the draft after failed enlistment. Failed enlistment into the Belters doesn't mean the character has to participate in the draft. The character can just try another career.

These types of changes in the official rules can make a difference. If they are included in a program, then they need to be included as optional rules, allowing the official rules to be used unless the program user decides to go with an optional rule.

 

[Jeffr0]

[edit: and that's why I brought up the table thing: I've had to maintain systems where they hard-coded tables into software, so that when you had a change, you had to recompile. And these were originally COBOL programs and could take a while to compile! Or even find the tables!]

10-4

All tables will be definable via a a simple text syntax... the data will be viewable during code execution-- and editable on the fly as well. Individual subroutine-scripts can be viewed and edited even while in the middle of creating a character. And you'll have little messages being output so that you can validate that the correct die rolls are being made and applied correctly. (I hate black box code that makes executive decisions about rules interpretation without providing a way to audit it.)

In other words, I'm thinking not "just" a scripting language, but a development environment as well.

Enough talk for now... my life is pretty full right now and I have little spare time... but this overlaps enough with my job that I think I can cram it in...

 

[jawillroy]

Jeffr0, Soldier on! You are made of awesome.

Love the Scoutstory, Far Trader! I've had similar experiences, and indeed, have used the scout service as a character-killer.

Whenever I used S4 characters, i always assumed that LBB1 procedures ruled. So if I had a character fail enlistment as, say, a bureaucrat, I'd put him up for the draft in one of the 6 LBB1 services. Dunno why I assumed that, just did.

 

[far-trader]

Whenever I used S4 characters, i always assumed that LBB1 procedures ruled. So if I had a character fail enlistment as, say, a bureaucrat, I'd put him up for the draft in one of the 6 LBB1 services. Dunno why I assumed that, just did.

Yep we did the same, it just seemed natural

 

[watti]

Just curious, why would you want the first six and not include all eight? Or if you do not like the robots, then at least the complete seven. Why only six?

Daniel

I have nothing against 7 or 8. Personally, I'd like to see 7 also. I'm not too sure about robots as part of the program because the coding would be different than character generation, and more like a ship construction, no? For a coder its like a separate program. But is some could by all means add it.

Still I get the impression that what I thought is true, there is none that encompass the entire books. what I have found, faulty as it is, appears to be it.

 

[watti]

Another language choice is HTML + Javascript. It's easy to deploy and, with a bit of effort, cross platform. I've built a couple of tools with this, mostly for 2300 and TNE.

Argh. I hate this. I have found for Traveler and other RPGs far too many online generators which disappear when the authors loses his geocities account. Someone mounts and hosts a site and then it's gone.

I would like it to be downloadable, and I really like the proposed idea of tables with text files the GM can alter. The reason I like generators is that some of my games are solo and I hate rolling 5 - 6 crew members.

the reason I asked for LLBs out to 6 (or 7 or 8) is I think scientists and nobles and bureaucrats are good additions to the game. Even if they were only to be rolled as patrons.

 

[deniable]

Argh. I hate this. I have found for Traveler and other RPGs far too many online generators which disappear when the authors loses his geocities account. Someone mounts and hosts a site and then it's gone.

I would like it to be downloadable,

Well, that's fine except it's not what I'm talking about. Let me provide an example.

This is a downloadable zip file. It contains html + javascript to generate a sector. It's a quick and dirty prototype, but it shows the idea.

The Megatraveller Basic Character Generator is another example. Both of these run locally and have everything contained in one html file.

 

[Icosahedron]

Argh. I hate this. I have found for Traveler and other RPGs far too many online generators which disappear when the authors loses his geocities account. Someone mounts and hosts a site and then it's gone.

I would like it to be downloadable, and I really like the proposed idea of tables with text files the GM can alter. The reason I like generators is that some of my games are solo and I hate rolling 5 - 6 crew members.

I'm with you 1000 percent there, Watti.
I'm hoping to still play Traveller in another thirty years time, and how many of those online resources will still be there then?
Of course, there's no saying the Windows stuff would still be readable either, but I think a download has a greater life expectancy than an online resource.

GM alterable files are a must. EVERYBODY uses house rules, and it is SO much more user-friendly to enable the GM to customise his CharGen.

Some people want a 'hard' survival rule, others don't, etc.

 

[Jeffr0]

I have coded a language tailored especially for doing char gen.

I had Snapshot characters as of Monday a week ago. This weekend I got Book 1 running (except for the fidly rule about turning additional Blade/Gun benefits into skill levels, etc.)

I left easy overrides for the user interaction bits-- users can write simple code directives to handle obvious choices for chargen. This speeds things up a lot if you want to roll up twenty characters or so. I notice that the way I roll up a dozen characters is very different from how I roll up one or two by themselves; most char gen sample lists probably don't reflect this. (I mean, rolling up 100 Navy characters is different from rolling up 600 characters and sending folks to careers that make a good fit.) My new game is to attempt to roll up one character for each career in sucession and have a good mix of skills and abilities.

It's nothing anyone else would want to use just yet, but I'm ready to start on Advanced Char Gen. I figure if I can get that done, it will be worth investing in other aspects of the program.

(Just checking: no one has made the "Heaven and Earth" of Traveller char gen before, have they?)

I think I can make the leap to cross platform when the time comes....

 

[Jeffr0]

Mercenary characters are implemented now. Sure, there's some debugging to do probably and some clean-up on the presentation, but it's there. It took about 700 lines of code to implement Book 1 and 1000 more to implement Book 4. Now I wonder (a) how many lines can I save by doing some trivial language improvements and (b) how many lines will it take to implement Book 5 on top of this.

The dilema at this point is whether to...

I: focus on making the program useable for average joes (Not interesting because of irritating copyright issues and there's probably not enough here yet to be worth sharing/supporting)
II: focus on improving the language and development tools (Not interesting because there's no immediate application to play with resulting from this)
III: focus on implementing the rest of the advanced char gen (Not interesting because copyright issues mean I'm mostly wasting my time)

I'll probably start on Naval characters though... maybe add in 5 or 10 of the most useful language features that I'm hurting for... and then steadily address the presentation issues as Scouts and Merchant Prince come into focus.... After that, each corner of the application will have enough critical mass to make it worth investing in the other issues I've been ignoring.

 

[robject]

If you're using Arc, then a web interface should be a shoo-in...

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

Okay, I'm willing to take the plunge...

I examined the online MT generator, and I must admit it is impressive. I like the transparency so I can see what is actually going on.

My real question is...where can I learn other languages, like HTML, at least? Still programming in QBASIC, of all things...

A couple of questions for the other CT purists--

My other character generators did not assign specific gun or blade skills, leaving that up to the player. Does that violate canon?

I also did a rough method of weighing which table the character selects based on his performance during the term. Should I keep it as an option and implement the pure random selection?

Still going to write one for my own uses, but if I can get one to work with a high level language, I will post it.

 

[Jeffr0]

Just looking at Book 1, it appears that Marc intended for us to select from the cascade list when the skill is received. For instance, in weapon skills:

"Weapon Expertise: Expressed as a general trait, such as brawling, blade combat, or gunnery. When acquired, the character notes the area of expertise, and immediately selects the specific type of skill received. Thus, if the weapon skill received is gun combat, the character must select which type of gun the expertise is in. Gunnery and brawling do not require any selection because they have no subdivisions." p 16

From a mini-game standpoint, you don't necessarily know how many more aging checks you're going to make, so you might choose weapons a little differently.....

 

[casquilho]

I have one request for those who are doing the Chargen programs. If you are going to do the original LBBs 1-3 then just do them. If you are going to add in book4 then add in all of the advanced books 4-8. It drives me nuts those who use the first book for all of the characters except for book 4 and the military types.

Either all or none in my opinion.

Daniel

 

[jrmapes]

It of course is probably asking too much but if someone really wants to do a By The Book char gen then there should be two distinct programs.

One that is strictly by the book, LBBs 1-3 - basic char gen with a Sup 4 Option that wouldn't screw up the LBB 1-3 only selection.

A second, that is strictly advanced char gen

Now if you could do both within the same program and have a tick box saying use one or the other and it REALLY only used the basic char gen from lbb 1-3 when you chose that option and REALLY only used the advanced char gen from the remaining books when you ticked off the Advanced Char Gen option...

and it had a tick box to use or not use Sup 4 without screwing up the others...

and it wasn't web based only...

THEN you would have some real magic!


Jerry

 

[Jeffr0]

My program is a non-web based.

COTI will be a separate career track-- if you fail to enlist there, you can keep enlisting in the other COTI careers until you get into one, but you cannot ever go back to Book 1 after that.

After enlisting in a standard Book 1 service, you are prompted for whether you want standard or advanced char gen. You can turn this prompt of if you have a preference, but by default you'll be able to choose after you've rolled your stats. In fact all prompts are "defaultable" and programmable-- you can set it up to always answer "Service Skills" for choosing a skill table... or to automatically choose the Basic Scout career if you have two or more attributes at 4 or less.

 

[Hal]

Beware. I've tried every Classic Traveller character generator on the net (that I could find), and not a single one of them represents true CT generation as detailed in the books. All of them take liberties with the system either out of author preference or coding necessity.

If you want a "true" CT character, you still have to do it by hand. Some of the skewing I've seen with characters generated using the programs available on the net is far from acceptible (imo).

That almost sounds like a challenge - to create a strict CT generating utility. Hmmm. I wonder how difficult it would be to craft such a program?

 

[Hal]

Question?

Which would you rather (as a user of a program) see?

All six career potentials with:

Navy
Marine
Army
Scouts
Merchant
Other

or

All Six Career potentials with:

Navy: enlist 8+ Bonus +2
Marine: Enlist 9+ Bonus +1
Army: Enlist 5+ Bonus +0

etc

or (using the example above)

Navy: Enlist 6+
Marine: Enlist 8+
Army: Enlist 5+

???

Or - would you rather I set up the program to include as part of the options menu, the ability to include such "options" as "show all bonuses for enlistment, survival, and promotions" along with an option to "show all computer made die rolls" versus "hide all computer made die rolls".

Just thinking aloud as it were. I'm already thinking about how to implement the problem for keeping track of skills as they are generated - up to and including keeping track of Education+Intelligence limits on the total skill levels known by a character.