Marc Miller interview

[Stargazer]

I posted a rather long interview with Marc Miller on my blog. I am pretty sure, most of you guys already knew most of the answers already, but I still thought I share the link here.


http://www.stargazersworld.com/2017/05/15/interview-with-marc-miller/

I hope this is the right forum for this kind of post. If not, please let me know.

 

[Nightwind1]

I read it just a short bit ago. Very good job. You should come around here more often.

 

[FreeTrav]

Thank you for sharing the interview with us; please check your private messages here at CotI.

 

[Cryton]

Lol, Thanks Stargazer for posting this, as I said, I was just tagging it for him!

 

[Stargazer]

I read it just a short bit ago. Very good job. You should come around here more often.

Thanks. And yes, I should visit the forums more often. Until now I was merely lurking, but I might write a post or two in the future.

 

[Stargazer]

Thank you for sharing the interview with us; please check your private messages here at CotI.

No need to thank me. You should have a reply in your private messages.

 

[mike wightman]

There is some interesting stuff in that interview, thanks for posting it.

 

[McPerth]

Thanks. And yes, I should visit the forums more often. Until now I was merely lurking, but I might write a post or two in the future.

If your posts are going to be like this one, I hope you will not wait over 2 years again to keep posting .

Welcome to the board, BTW.

 

[Stargazer]

Thanks!

 

[Quint]

LOL, I'm glad you posted this here. I follow you on your blog and was going to point to it but was pleased to see that you had done so already!

D.

 

[Stargazer]

I am pretty amazed how many people are still interested in Traveller and its creator. At the time of this writing, the interview has been viewed about thousand times. It's among the most popular posts on my blog, and that's just after two days.

There's obviously still a lot of love for Traveller on the net.

 

[Supplement Four]

I love the part about PCs dying in chargen.

Marc Miller: When we first started playing (and testing), many players were creating experienced retirees with loads of skills and loads of money. I had an intuitive understanding that there had to be some risk they faced in this pre-generation system, and I added the chance that they could die.

This is a wonderful argument for the hard survival rule (where the characters who fail the survival throw are dead, as opposed to the soft survival rule where a character who fails that throw is just injured and mustered out at that point). It put risk in the game to where characters can attain more experience and wealth at the risk of losing the character completely.

I'll add to this that rolling for character survival is a brilliant method to allow some player choice in a fairly random PC generation system. If a player does not like the character he is developing, there's nothing stopping him from rolling and rolling until the character fails a survival attempt. Then, he can start over to see what he gets with the next character.

Refs should never mind doing this for a player because the player who kills a character or three in generation is creating wonderful NPCs for the Ref to use later in the game.

 

[Condottiere]

Great for pregenerated characters or established non player ones.

 

[rhialto]

Thanks for taking the time to do the interview, and thanks to Marc for agreeing to do it: always nice to see what authors intend, and how they view their work from earlier in their careers.

 

[BytePro]

Adding to the Thanks!

And looking forward to other posts - both here and on your blog!

 

[SanDragon]

If a player does not like the character he is developing, there's nothing stopping him from rolling and rolling until the character fails a survival attempt. Then, he can start over to see what he gets with the next character.

Yeah, well...

I was rolling up a Droyne for a PbP here and kept getting mustered out/dying before I had the skills I wanted... until I couldn't muster out!

Droyne draw a coyn as they finish a term. A positive or neutral result means their oytrip still needs them. A negative result means "bye!" At which point they must roll their caste or less on 1D6 to avoid ritual suicide, basically.

So, I ended up with a 19-term Sport with, perhaps, too many/much in the way of skill(s)!

 

[Supplement Four]

Yeah, well...

I was rolling up a Droyne for a PbP here and kept getting mustered out/dying before I had the skills I wanted... until I couldn't muster out!

Yessir. That's an awesome part of the system. You can actually try to kill the character in Survival and not be successful at it.

You probably will be successful, if your goal is to kill the character and start with a new one. But, you can fail re-enlistment.

It's the chance players take.

I think that's part of the fun of Trav Chargen.




A 19 term Sport? Is there no max terms on Droyne, like there is on humans? Where you can't re-enlist unless you roll mandatory re-enlistment with boxcars?

 

[SanDragon]

As near as I could tell, reading the module, no. there was no maximum number of terms.

 

[Cryton]

As near as I could tell, reading the module, no. there was no maximum number of terms.

Heh, there isn't. While there is generally (dependent on edition) a cap of around twelve terms for character generation, this is not so for Droyne, who can actually die of old age while in character generation.

It is one of those little things that helps make them non-human.

 

[Supplement Four]

Heh, there isn't. While there is generally (dependent on edition) a cap of around twelve terms for character generation, this is not so for Droyne, who can actually die of old age while in character generation.

12 terms?

A quick peek at Starter Traveller says that humans can serve a max of seven terms voluntarily. Retirement is mandatory after Term 7, and the only way to make it to Term 8 is to throw boxcars for mandatory reenlistment.