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Great Beginnings: or how do you avoid clichés

Ask the players: a new-seeming way to do it is to have players write a three-line biography for their character, and have them note what their character's goals are.

Then riff on that.

The key is that players tend to do a lot of problem-solving. That's their job, after all. Your problem is coming up with situations and problems. Problem solving is parallelizable. So make that a problem-solving exercise... And sometimes they come up with the problems, too.
 
New here, but not new to Traveller. I played the classic game when it was new on the shelves and always found it easier to start games of Traveller than other RPGS. This looked like a good place to make my first post, so here are a few beginning scenarios I have used that have been fairly successful:

1) Players start in LowBerth only to be shocked awake when an automatic emergency cryostasis interruption system kicks in. When they wake, they find the crew dead, life support failing and some adversary to contend with. Work together or die :)

2) Players start on a transport shuttle and come under attack of either pirates or mercenaries intent on kidnapping one of the passengers who begs the players for help. If the players decline the request for help, I just have the enemies start shooting at them as 'sympathizers' :)

3) In trading oriented campaigns, the players are all bidders for a desirable cargo. The patron/ owner of the cargo offers each of them a portion of the cargo explaining that it is likely that there are elements out there that will likely try to intercept and seize the cargo and by splitting it into several lots it is more likely that the majority of it will get through. The players are then given a rather unsubtle clue that the cargo is not at all what it seems.
 
My IMTU start McGuffin is that they are all semifinalists in a Design Your Own Starship Reality Show/Contest.

I took one education point from all of their characters and converted it to a knowledge skill, Starship Design-4. Not the equivalent of Naval Architect, but definitely Naval Architect-0 and definitely Ship Nerds, which is what they are in RL anyway.

The winner of the contest effectively gets the Naval Architect fee for each ship sold, so eventually if their design is popular enough and they wait, they can get a ship for free. There is a time limit though so they may want to take it at some odd percentage and finance the rest.

So I expect they will hang together just to run around in the winner's starship, and there will be patrons wanting them together on missions while the ship is building out- for their own purposes......
 
I'm very lazy, so I usually just say to my players: "You're all the crew of a small freighter; Josh [or whoever] owns it. Why are you part of the crew?"
 
Sifu stops in mid stride...

Very interesting discussion, all!

I have to admit that it has been years since I actually played TRAVELLER, though it continues to be a source of inspiration for me. Ever since I bought it, that summer of 1977 when I was out of boot camp and went to that tiny game store a long bus ride away.

The source is a D&D game staged by some long forgotten friend. He used a chalkboard to draw on, used miniatures on the chalkboard, and rather than having us all start off together, he separated us and had characters appear at random times during the first hour of gaming.

Even though we were all sitting around a large table, the DM encouraged us to ignore the tabletop events if our character was not present. Imagine my surprise when my PC arrived on the scene, witnessing an attack on a defenseless person. I responded with my own attack, only to find out that the 'berserker' I attacked was a dwarf with seizures that caused random actions. They were only trying to restrain him!

It was a fantastic six hours, filled with great roleplaying and recreational narcotics. I remember little else of that evening, but that beginning impressed me greatly.

By the way, that event occurred over thirty years ago.
 
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That's an interesting approach, must have been great to still remember it 30 years later!

I typically don't do the bar or carousing starts, my games begin in the middle of a scene, going for that opening of SW A New Hope kind of impact.

I'm currently running two groups that play off each other, games are different days, the players don't directly interact.

First started with an fists flailing argument while landing a safari ship between a browbeaten crew dealing with a fancy Noble hunter and retinue. The second group started as a scout group during an out of control orbital injection to the same planet. Actions by each group have repercussions for the other group. Trouble ensues and the first group ends up as the second group's exit strategy.

It's a bit of book keeping and continuity coordination but it's been working well.
 
One alternative is to step outside the "norm" for Traveller. That is have one or more of the characters employed by a corporation or still in the military and they are given something their employer wants done.
That can set the group up with the initial resources to go the "job" but at the risk of earning the wrath of their employer for damaging or losing those resources. It can also lead to new interactions with those same employers or rival employers.

For example, you have a ship and crew employed by a corporation given some quasi-legal thing to get done. But, there are potential problems with a few rival corporations (you can't go to system xyz because it is "owned" by a rival company with out risk of being jailed just for showing up...), law enforcement (what you are doing isn't exactly legal but it isn't totally illegal either), the military, local nobles, etc.

Here they (or at least some of them) start out in a corporate manager's office, a commanding officer's office, some official messenger showing up and handing them orders (sort of like getting a "challenge" on Top Gear with expected equally disastrously funny results), or the like.

So, while the norm is for the players to have "mustered out" I would allow one or more of them to still be in the service and doing Traveller-like stuff.
 
As a GM (or DM in another venue), I don't believe in 'first-level' characters, I like to prop-up any newly created player-characters with an additional bit of coin, a few acquired possessions and some skills that would contribute to the campaign ahead.

Having all the PCs muster-out together in a linear fashion lacks the charm and opportunity of staggering such a bit, the more experienced players able to make best use out of that post-muster interval.

A personal favorite meeting place for as-yet acquainted Travellers is the drunk-tank or holding cells of a local municipality, 'assembling' a crew for a vessel in this fashion has often been more expedient than conventional methods.

If not meeting the owner-operator of a starship outright, then said group being bailed-out by a proxy or agent of such. The captain's daughter often a most useful NPC able to 'motivate' the PCs into action of raising ship than other devices.
 
Patron Zero said:
As a GM (or DM in another venue), I don't believe in 'first-level' characters, I like to prop-up any newly created player-characters with an additional bit of coin, a few acquired possessions and some skills that would contribute to the campaign ahead.

Having all the PCs muster-out together in a linear fashion lacks the charm and opportunity of staggering such a bit, the more experienced players able to make best use out of that post-muster interval.

A personal favorite meeting place for as-yet acquainted Travellers is the drunk-tank or holding cells of a local municipality, 'assembling' a crew for a vessel in this fashion has often been more expedient than conventional methods.

If not meeting the owner-operator of a starship outright, then said group being bailed-out by a proxy or agent of such. The captain's daughter often a most useful NPC able to 'motivate' the PCs into action of raising ship than other devices.
Click to expand...

Kind of the Guardians of the Galaxy approach?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B16Bo47KS2g
 
You can avoid a lot of clichés by reminding them that they, as players, have a responsibility to the game.

Quoting myself from another thread:

A Traveller in game is a person who has had the epiphany that what they have been doing with their lives so far is over and they have to head out on their own.

Their old career is gone, and the society they were part of no longer wants them in that role. Rather than lie down and wait for the end they break with society norms and begin to travel. They adventure, seeking to gain rewards that actually matter:
a sense of worth, money, reputation (not social status since they are now living outside societal norms)... that sort of thing.

Remember what it says in the Final Word to referees:
The players themselves have a burden almost equal to that of the referee: they
must move, act, travel in search of their own goals. The typical methods used in life
by 20th century Terrans (thrift, dedication, and hard work) do not work in
Traveller; instead, travellers must boldly plan and execute daring schemes for the
acquisition of wealth and power.
Click to expand...
 
I once had a liner misjump and crash into a gas giant. The players were either High or Low depending on what their characters mustered out with as a benefit. If no ticket, then they bought one.

When the liner was "going down" in the GG atmosphere after impacting some floating icebergs the players had time to get to the lifeboats and try to save themselves. This threw the group into instant co-op mode so they could get through wreckage and other problems quickly and using their collective skill pool. Some NPC's were with them and helped out some, but mainly they were there to confirm any of the players' fears about what happens when someone fails a roll. Or to provide some Poseidon Adventure type moral dilemma.

Sp anyway, they all made it to the lifeboat and off the liner more or less alive. Introductions all around - "Oh, you just got out, too? Where were you stationed in the last war?...blah, blah, blah". Now we had a group to play with that had a shared past, reasons for not having known each other before, and without anything of value except what was in their pockets when the alarms went off.

As I recall it worked pretty well for that campaign, but since then I pretty much just embrace the corniness of the "Old Scout Bar" type of beginning where the players are sitting around waiting for their ship to be fixed after supposedly having been knocking around doing odd jobs until the decided to get serious about what to do to make some money. They may or may not have all been working together, but regardless are all in the place and start talking to each other while waiting for the Yardmaster to call about the ship.
 
My current campaign started with only a few of the players on the first couple of sessions, though we knew when some others were going to be able to attend at a later date. So I started it off with the first four together at the bar next to the repair yards where the PC that just mustered out was having his ship re-certified for flight after receiving it from the service. The Yard wouldn't release it until all the safety tags were up to date and being that it was a typical 50+ year old Scout with who knows how many parsecs on the odometer it was a hair-raising wait at The Pit.

We assumed that the others, who with the exception of one Marine were also playing Scouts, were all part of the same Deep Recon Team that was attached to the ex-Marine's Jump Troop unit. They were pathfinders and ELINT guys who knew the grunt since he had some artillery skills so he was the combat air controller. So that's how they knew each other.

When they found out the ship needed a perfectly good (and expensive) part replaced or this world-without-a-Scout-Base wouldn't let them leave they despaired of ever getting out of the bar. Fortunately The Pit is run by an old Scout named Sheng who keeps a capsule hotel upstairs for them to sleep in for next to free, and acts a sort of postmaster and message guy for the scouts who wander around the subsector with no place to call home but the two far-between bases there. Sheng puts them onto a job ferrying a new research ship someone a couple of jumps away had built and needs delivered. They agree to do it - the money is pretty good, but mainly they were bored and wanted time to figure out how to get the part for their ship and charge the Scouts for it when they were pretty broke.

Along the way they picked up another player on crappy waterworld where shrimping massive algae mats and processing thousands and thousands of tons of the crustaceans is the only business other than sport fishing. The PC was a former ship's surgeon who liked to drink and play cards and unfortunately lost pretty badly while roaring drunk on one world. He challenged the other card player and the two got into a drunken duel - the doc won but the guy he sabered turned out to be really well connected AND of a higher rank. SO his buddies got him even more drunk and when he passed out bought him a ticket to this shrimp-reeking world (Kuklakan IMTU) in a Low Berth so he wouldn't wake til he got there. They picked it because they knew he was "getting some kind of stock residuals or something" from one of the shrimp canneries so they figured he'd be OK there.

By the time the other players showed up with this research vessel to tank up on fuel for the last leg of the trip the doc was so sick of rotting shrimp smell in his clothes, air, food, even the color of the water was pinkish, that he practically begged the crew to let him sign on. That got that player into the crew with a backstory and rationale.

The last joined because he started as an NPC employed as an engineer for the new owner of the ship. Originally he was to go along with the players while they went through a shakedown cruise to specifically test certain features of the ship - and the patron couldn't go due to business. By the time they completed the tests this guy was a PC and part of the gang.

It took about 5-6 sessions to get through all that what with the assorted mini-adventures along the way, but it pretty solidly locked the players together with a shared history before they started on the core storyline of the campaign. Any time a new player has since joined - or a new character for a player who's last one was killed or wounded too badly to continue, we've used a similar mechanism to bring them onboard. The last one was a colonist among the group the players helped out in a fight and was tired of scratching out a living growing mutant wheat, corn, and dwarf cattle. After the fight was won he asked to join and the previous character being run decided to he'd had enough of dodging lasers and bug-eyed monsters with weeks and weeks of jumpspace in between, so he stayed to be a colonist. It turned out to be a fun swap.
 
mike wightman said:
You can avoid a lot of clichés by reminding them that they, as players, have a responsibility to the game.

Quoting myself from another thread:

A Traveller in game is a person who has had the epiphany that what they have been doing with their lives so far is over and they have to head out on their own.

Their old career is gone, and the society they were part of no longer wants them in that role. Rather than lie down and wait for the end they break with society norms and begin to travel. They adventure, seeking to gain rewards that actually matter:
a sense of worth, money, reputation (not social status since they are now living outside societal norms)... that sort of thing.

Remember what it says in the Final Word to referees:
Click to expand...

Of course, you can also flip that and force that change. That is, by circumstance a person is forced into a situation that changes their life. Their old career is either gone or severely altered. The forced change is one that makes them into a traveler, willing or not.
 
rzg6f said:
I don't know about you, but I am getting really, really tired of the Regina Imperial Out-processing Station and the "Help Wanted" boards in the Transition Office.
Click to expand...

Cliches aren't always bad, in fact embracing some cliches results in a lot of fun times. However, "you all meet in a bar" is pretty old.

Before character generation begins, as a GM, I give the players players a general outline of the kind of game I want to run, the kind of resources the players will have, and so on. I give them a list of skills and positions that must be fulfilled (usually in regards to ship operations).

Within that framework, after discussing the kind of game we want to play, I put a lot of the burden on the players for a change:

* They must make characters that "play well together" - no merchants who'd sell the rest of the party out for a few credits, no secretive spec-ops lone wolves who never socialize and sit in their cabin all day long polishing their sniper rifle, and usually no flamboyant noble debutantes with nothing but 'face' skills designed to hog all the RP moments while sleeping through any confrontations. This "no cliches" thing runs both ways.

* They must be able to fulfill the skills and/or positions requisite for the game. Usually this is a pretty minimal list, but sometimes it can be pretty exacting (especially if the next game is going to be a military-based game or something).

* They must have an explanation of why they're all together before the game begins. They don't need to be long-time BFFs since childhood (they can be if they want, though), but they must have met prior to the game starting (even if it's just a few weeks or months) and feel reasonably comfortable around each other and willing to make an effort to pull together.

Using this method here's what one group of players came up with:

- A youngish Free Merchant without a ship of his own is offered a ship from his uncle. The ship is not really space-worthy at the moment, having been used as a kind of mobile home for an invalid friend of his from the Frontier Wars. Said friend drifted off / passed away, and the starport is now saying that the uncle needs to do something about that derelict or it'll be sold for scrap. So the uncle offers the ship ("it's a real fixer upper") to the merchant.

- The merchant has a childhood friend who joined the Imperial Marines who's recently left the Marines but isn't really interested in doing a conventional career, so is willing to pitch in money to be a partner in the ship.

- The Imperial Marine has a friend he made aboard the troopship his unit was assigned to a lot, a guy who worked in the engine room of the transport and helped operated the ship's illicit still. The guy's good around machines and the Marine is willing to vouch for him, so gets hired on as the engineer.

- A safari guide lives aboard a safari vessel in the lot right next door to the merchant's new ship. He was hired on by a noble to act as a guide and so on and in return was allowed to live on the safari vessel. As the noble actually inherited his father's position, he's had less and less time to go on safaris. The guide as a result has a lot of free time and basically hung around the merchant ship out of boredom, struck up a friendship with the crew, and started helping the merchant and his friends out. The safari guide is well aware the noble only allows the situation out of a sense of noblesse oblige and feels like a fifth wheel, discussing the situation with the noble, the noble was more than willing to front a few tens of thousands of credits to help buy replacement parts for the merchantman to secure a place for the safari guide as a partner in the ship and to secure the fellow a future job - meanwhile the noble could sell the safari ship he no longer has the time to do anything with, and due to changing tastes as he grows older, no longer any interest in.

The game begins as the ship ... well it's not really in top condition yet. There's tremendous amounts of work that still needs to be done. However, it is at least in a condition where it passes certification to be flown. Well okay, it passes the infamously lax inspection of Federation which allows the ship to do business in the Imperium for a year before it must be certified to comply with Imperial inspection codes (which are much more strictly enforced). This kind of "dodging" is common in this area but it gives the players a years to raise further capital to allow them to actually get the ship pass inspection the Imperium (their immediate goal).
 
Dark Matter - differing personalities who've lost their memories, but have to hang together, because they'll hang separately, since the universe is more or less against them.

So in other words, recognized interdependency.
 
I just saw a similar thread elsewhere, and one beginning stuck with me: "The wedding was nice, and you met so many interesting people at the reception...."

Lots of people come to weddings with different connections to the happy couple (threesome, foursome, depending on world, of course).
 
I get some inspiration from book writing sites, I've found good suggestions on how to start and progress through a story. I'd think some videogames would have good beginnings too.

Part of this is the kind of group you're playing with. The players have as much of an investment in the stories told as does the referee and I see no harm encouraging them to come up with an opening scene.

"Hey, ref, just a heads up, next week we've decided to import and install a fusion power plant on this here TL4 world, maybe see how to locals do with building an Orion Project spacecraft."
 
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