mega-characters

[flykiller]

traveller generally offers little support for mega, uber, or monty-haul characters. most powerful traveller characters are powerful only in the sense that they control the actions of others, and while even godlike ad&d2 weapons pale in comparison to high-end traveller military equipment it is not practical for a character to walk around with (say) an fgmp-15, let alone use it without attracting the attention of a great many others similarly equipped.

nevertheless such characters may be approximated in traveller. below is an abbreviated example of such perhaps to inspire something similar in your own games.

lora lei
798BCC, age 18, strouden

service

imperial scout service, 7 tours

schools

flight school - pilot
intel - sidearm
contact - equestrian

tours

tour 1 - general flight
tour 2 - general intel
tour 3 - intel assignments
tour 4 - general service
tour 5 - general service
tour 6 - general service
tour 7 - scout academy instructor

final

lady lora lei, imperial knight retained, strouden baronette
9BBBDD, age 47 actual / 43 awake / 21 physical
(telepath, level 12 (imtu ct terms))
(telekinetic, level 13 (imtu 6 tons for 1 minute / day))

awards

pilot wings
academy instructor pin - pilot, equestrian, firearms
mission lead pin
purple heart
wilderness ribbon
Traveller's

skills

space skills         level
    soft vacc suit / 0-G 2
    pilot                3* (hull size A +1, hull size K +1)
    navigator            1
    engineer             1
    mechanic             1
    damage control       1
ground skills
    equestrian           3* (horse +1)
    wilderness           1
people skills
    leader               2
    liasion              2
    instructor           2
    interrogation        2
weapons skills
    personal tactics     1
    field recon          1
    sidearm              3*(revolver +1)
    combatives           2

thrown out of college in her first year for subversive activities and shunned by her noble-class family on strouden, lora found a good home in the scout service which was glad to get even a reject of the disciplined and focused strouden culture. she proved suitable for the more serious intel tasking of the scout service and served admirably (meaning silently and without comment) for several tours, acquiring a reputation for handling people and for anticipating and avoiding or neutralizing bad situations. pictures of her from that time show a significant scar over her right eye from forehead to cheek.

records of lora's fourth, fifth, and sixth tours are generic and vague.

between her sixth and seventh tours lora is known to have spent three months in hospital. after that she was assigned to the scout academy as a pilot, wilderness, and firearms instructor, achieving an unusually high student success rate.

on conclusion of her service she was awarded full rejuvenation, bringing her to a physical age of 20. this award is allowed only for extraordinary service, which in her case seems absent. she kept a remainder of the scar over her eye, as she says, "to remind myself". she also was offered the status of imperial knight retained, which she accepted.as a knight retained she is a full noble and a full citizen of the imperium proper, though she is not assigned to any particular duty but rather is subject to imperial tasking as needed. in pursuit of this she is authorized ready access to 4MCr on her own recognizance, 40MCr when authorized by a full noble, and requisition (with captain's approval or at noble direction) of any imperial or strouden naval or scout ship 400 dtons or less not engaged in a specific assignment. she also is authorized requisition of any civilian jump-capable ship of 400 dtons or less on her own recognizance (as per imperial law imtu).

lora is a calm, unpretentious, and pleasant woman and seems usually to be thinking that something is amusing. when serious she can be disturbingly focused and is equally at home with rational persuasion and necessary force, though she may later regret the latter. she is implaccably loyal to the imperium and, equally implaccably, to strouden.

lora will NOT come looking for employment (unless an undercover assignment requires it). she may be encountered at a very competent gun shop, considering that it's time to stop repairing a worn-out scout service-issue revolver and to buy a new modern one. she can also be seen at a high-end sparring gym, teaching young men how to efficiently anticipate an opponent's moves and to fight people bigger than themselves. and she definitely can be seen at a barrel-shoot competition training ranch, handling her horse with just her knees as if it's part of her and racking up unusually impressive target scores - she seems happy here and has won and placed in several tournaments, some broadcast throughout the imperium on fornice's sports channels. she also may be encountered in a strouden embassy with a member of her family seeking to know when she will return to be assigned a husband and family, or as a high- or noble-class passenger on a luxury liner, though she is not above mid-passage on any reputable ship should such be required. though it seldom happens now she may still sleepwalk and be found bedded-down with nothing more than a sheet in front of a ship's emergency equipment locker.

 

[Whipsnade]

While I used uber/mega NPCs as a referee, I would never let one be played as PC for all of the reasons you alluded to. I've blathered about a few here over the years.

One was the result of an extremely well rolled naval chargen session. The resulting character was too good to be a PC and too good to throw away. I fashioned a back story for the character in which he was the "Golden Boy" son of a regional mercantile clan who had a "good" Fifth Frontier War. He was caught in the usual postwar RIF and became his clan's "commodore"; that is the fellow in charge of the clan's shipping.

Apart from the statistical flukes produced from chargen, I also simply "hand fit" any uber/mega NPCs I needed. One was Javier Blanco, a direct rip of the Lance White character Tom Selleck played to perfection on The Rockford Files. I gleefully used the Perfect Mr. Blanco to bedevil my players with such success that they began laughing every time he showed up.

 

[flykiller]

I would never let one be played as PC

well it would depend on the game. if she's sent to the vast continent of Open on tech 4 pagaton to investigate and if possible disrupt piratical economic predation from tech 9 fornice she could be a bit underpowered. the psi could be uber-mensch, except she herself is not invulnerable, and leader 2 may actually play a greater role than most of her other skills.

became his clan's "commodore"; that is the fellow in charge of the clan's shipping.

now that sounds like a great game.

 

[Whipsnade]

well it would depend on the game.

That's very true.

Sadly, I could never quite wrap my head around "high level" campaigns and thus never tried to run one. While I was lucky in that regard that my players never asked for such a campaign, it also meant we never got to try such a campaign.

now that sounds like a great game.

He usually showed up as "scenery". You know, the people and places you take care to repeat so that the setting seems alive.

He showed up most often in the "Fixers" campaign I've written about. I recycled him in other campaigns and adventures, but those were not actually linked to the "Fixers" campaign. Along with being too lazy to create everything anew for every campaign or adventure, I was wisely re-using a good NPC I already had a "feel" for.

 

[mike wightman]

I run a Culture based game every now and then, and every PC so far has been an uber mary sue that I would not allow in my normal campaigns.

They roll their stats on 3d6 (the lowest becomes a d3), but can adjust any physical or mental stat by up three depending on the type of augmentation (the d3 roll) they describe. Edu must always be a minimum of their Int and is raised to be so if it is lower.

As a culture citizen they have drug glands that grant them the use of any of the drugs in CT and the awareness psionic talent.
Their equipment can often be best described using the psionic rules too, displacer fields become teleportation, sensor drones become telepathy and clairvoyance and the like.

Aside - having now read AotI until my eyes bleed (and looking stuff up in T5) I can't help but thinking a TL15 Imperium could do an awful lot more with wafer tech, synthetic organisms, clones and the like than we have so far imagined or seen...

 

[Quint]

...Aside - having now read AotI until my eyes bleed (and looking stuff up in T5) I can't help but thinking a TL15 Imperium could do an awful lot more with wafer tech, synthetic organisms, clones and the like than we have so far imagined or seen...

No kidding!

D.

 

[Whipsnade]

I run a Culture based game every now and then...

That's an excellent example of Fly's point: Some games/settings demand/require mega characters.

Aside - having now read AotI until my eyes bleed (and looking stuff up in T5) I can't help but thinking a TL15 Imperium could do an awful lot more with wafer tech, synthetic organisms, clones and the like than we have so far imagined or seen...

IMHO, AotI is the latest of the "Wheels within wheels" and "Robots are usually beneath notice" moments Traveller does so well. The Zhos are mind rapers, then the largest/longest stable benevolent human polity, then something more thoughtfully frightening. The Aslan are a Major Race, then frauds, then it doesn't matter. The Hivers are cowardly master manipulators, then self-deluded frauds, then passive-aggressive genocidal monsters. The list goes on and on.

Looking back, there have been hints regarding cloning from the first and, as the game progressed, those hints became dope slaps. Apart from Norris' daughter Seldrian and Stephon's doubles, look at the first few centuries of the Emperor's list and keep cloning in mind.

As for wafer tech, AotI casually mentions some rather significant drawbacks. There's a "Use too long/often risk brain damage" risk. There's a "Must be the same sex and species" risk. Bland mentions subtle errors effecting wafer-wearers' abilities like the clerk who's "solution" for every equation was either 1 or -1. (Which should sow some doubt about Bland himself, right?)

Then there's the fact that the manufacturing process - manufacturing, not copying - requires the death of the subject. Sure, the Imperium contains trillions but how often will a terminally ill person of the right sex, the right species, with the desired skills and experiences, and close enough to the necessary technology volunteer?

Bland's depiction of how he "became" a wafer suggests the tech isn't something the Imperium disseminates willy-nilly either. While there is the anecdote about engineers aboard a mis-jumped ship using wafers to make repairs, it doesn't necessarily follow that such capabilities might be available to every Tom, Dick, and Eneri flying a Beowulf. The ships in Bland's anecdote could be IN or IISS vessels, vessels that already have both wafer "vaults" and "Break glass and use wafer in case of emergency" procedures.

OTOH, the almost blase reaction of the people Bland interacts with to the fact that Bland is wafer personality "riding" a host suggests that wafers and their use aren't uncommon. Perhaps, subject matter wafers are commonly used while "gesalt" wafers like Bland's are an extremely rare exception.

Naturally, the "answers" to all my blathering will depend on the individual TU in question. For some, AotI destroyed their conception of the 3I/OTU. For others, AotI enriched and expanded their conception of the 3I/OTU.

I'm in the latter camp.

 

[JimMarn]

Apart from the statistical flukes produced from chargen, I also simply "hand fit" any uber/mega NPCs I needed. One was Javier Blanco, a direct rip of the Lance White character Tom Selleck played to perfection on The Rockford Files. I gleefully used the Perfect Mr. Blanco to bedevil my players with such success that they began laughing every time he showed up.

I believe that was James Garner on The Rockford Files.

 

[Quint]

I think the big RE mega-characters is that the campaign simply has to support it. I've run campaigns explicitly designed for megacharacters and I've run them dirt-scrabble trevellers barely able to make ends meet.

Honestly, people found the megacharacter version much more fun.

That said, I also think it takes a certain type of player to play an effective megacharacter, otherwise it simply devolves into (metaphorically) smashing obstacles like bugs. So in the last game where I did so, one character had the megacharacter (highly competent Imperial knight, reporting directly to the Emperor, with warrant) while everyone else was the people she had recruited or picked up along the way to make her job easier. The scout with scout-ship was reactivated, etc. It was a heck of a lot of fun, skipping past all the normal obstacles and then throwing diplomatically complicated, Red Zone-invoking things at them.

D.

 

[Whipsnade]

I believe that was James Garner on The Rockford Files.

Garner played Jim Rockford. Selleck played a character called Lance White in a few episodes. The show's Wiki page explains it better than I:

Rockford's style influenced a number of detective characters, most notably Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum in Magnum, P.I.. Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, also created by Cannell, was another detective modeled after the Rockford character. Selleck made two guest appearances on Rockford in the comic role of private investigator Lance White, a character who was everything Rockford was not — wealthy, highly educated, debonair, irresistible to women, and ethical to a fault.

As the article notes, White was the "perfect" PI and the contrast with Garner's Rockford was played for laughs. The show's writers used appearances of a handful of other PIs of differing styles to contrast humorously with Rockford. There was an "old school" Mickey Spillane type, a naive trusting young type, a streetwise borderline fraudulent one, and a hopelessly incompetent one. IIRC, many of them appeared in an episode set at a PI convention and award show.

Anyway, I used Javier Blanco(1) IMTU to humorously bedevil my players as the "perfect" free trader captain with a "perfect" ship and "perfect" crew. Blanco & Co. were noble, clean cut, cinematic, and given to grand philosophical speeches. People, even bad guys, respected Blanco & Co. where they shunned or snubbed the players. Bad guys ceased their evil plots, made amends, swore off crime after Blanco & Co. simply spoke to them. People eagerly did Blanco & Co. favors with not expectation of recompense. Everything Blanco & Co. did rebounded in them in a manner which made you believe in karma. And no one IMTU except the players saw anything wrong with that!

Blanco & Co. were so completely over the top, so incredibly noble, and so impossibly virtuous, that it drove my players absolutely mad when they weren't laughing themselves sick. My players even talked in character between themselves about where and when they'd bump into Javier Blanco again.


1 - Lance => Javelin => Javier and White => Blanco. Get it?

 

[Enoki]

I have one like this: Kai Lei Hao... The usual line is "What's she done this time...?" Or, "She didn't do something like she did at university again did she...?" What she did is never specified.

 

[flykiller]

it takes a certain type of player

a certain kind of game, player, and referee ...

otherwise it simply devolves into (metaphorically) smashing obstacles like bugs.

... who gives the players bigger bugs.

 

[Hyphen]

That's an excellent example of Fly's point: Some games/settings demand/require mega characters.

<cough> GURPS: Lensman 2000-point PCs... <cough>

 

[Hyphen]

Honestly, people found the megacharacter version much more fun.

I played Strephon in a convention scenario once. Does that count?

;-)

I was escaping Capital after Dulinor's coup attempt (long story). The only annoying part was the notation "Credits: Unlimited (Unavailable)".

 

[aramis]

<cough> GURPS: Lensman 2000-point PCs... <cough>

That's the STARTING level for lensman... Full bore is more like 5K...

In Traveller, the lens simply reduces the cost and increases the ability to learn psionics.

 

[Leitz]

I guess my opinion is different. People like movies and it's fun to watch them. i like to play movie level characters sometimes because you can skip all the "scraping for copper/credits" stuff and play what the players and characters dream about; what happens when they do get rich?

I've done the 1st level/0 level "do we have money for a torch" gang in fantasy and sci-fi. I'm tired of it. I liked the R&K version of 7th Sea because it make me work to think of cinematic things my character could do. In 7th Sea the PCs rarely died, which encouraged a cinematic style of play. You even got points for over the top actions. Quite fun.

If I play a Traveller game I tend to pay attention to the DM's style and be clear about what I'm trying to do with the character. I'll bend some, the DM bends some, and we come up with a workable plan. Or we don't, and life goes on.

I find it hard to believe that the collective expertise here couldn't come up with a challenge for most any "high level" character that could be rolled in the (CT/MongT/T5) game. I'm not as familiar with the point based versions.

 

[flykiller]

I find it hard to believe that the collective expertise here couldn't come up with a challenge for most any "high level" character

we can. finding players, however, is the choke point.

 

[MThompson016]

For point based (read GURPS here), the ability to build a VERY powerful character is right in the rules. It would be based on the desired 'power level' of the campaign.

GT: Ground Forces recommends the following point buys for military campaigns; all are for GURPS 3rd Edition
100-Average Soliders. Typical starting point value for GURPS 3e characters
150-Newbies in a commando unit, hardened veterans. Standard starting point for GT characters
300-Cinematic commandoes, or other heroes.

 

[Whipsnade]

I've done the 1st level/0 level "do we have money for a torch" gang in fantasy and sci-fi. I'm tired of it.

That's a fair complaint. I think the popularity of ACKS or similar systems has to do with more and more people wanting to explore answers to the question you raised: "What happens when they do get rich?"

I liked the R&K version of 7th Sea because it make me work to think of cinematic things my character could do. In 7th Sea the PCs rarely died, which encouraged a cinematic style of play. You even got points for over the top actions. Quite fun.

Not quite fun, more like a helluva lot of fun!

However, such a play style is, to borrow Lew Pulsipher's terminology, reward-based gaming and not consequence-based gaming. Traveller and designs of similar vintage are consequence-based games. They were designed with consequence-based gaming in mind. That doesn't mean they cannot be used for reward-based gaming, it just means you'll have to make a some tweaks. Play style is more than just tenor or intent, many times it's baked right into the rules.

And before anyone's panties get wet, reward-based gaming and consequence-based gaming are equally valid and equally fun. Neither is better or worse than the other. They are different, however, and it pays to acknowledge those differences.

I find it hard to believe that the collective expertise here couldn't come up with a challenge for most any "high level" character that could be rolled in the (CT/MongT/T5) game. I'm not as familiar with the point based versions.

I know I've quite often read about "high level" games here at COTI. Wil mentions one he ran involving Imperial nobles which he describes as almost a "corporate" game with the player sessions resembling board meetings more than firefights or tavern brawls. We also have regular threads concerning how to run "noble" campaigns.

There's also T4's "Pocket Empires" and "Imperial Squadrons" plus, to a lesser extent, MgT's "Dynasty". In that those books help referees place PCs in high level situations, they're much like the ACKS and ACKS-style rules I mentioned earlier.

(When I moved to Williston for work several years back, I missed out on a multi-year PE/IS campaign a local minis group ran. This group had always run a high level strategic game to create DBM match-ups between players. Mulling over strategic moves, talking about alliances, and writing out orders had been a nice way to fill time between FTF matches during weekly game nights. I'm told they enjoyed the game, which lasted a couple generations. It didn't create DBM battles, however, so they went back to the old system.)

My "problem" with the character Fly posted and the one I wrote about is how to best "mesh" them with more normal characters in the same game. The problem is akin to the one we see between PCs created with basic chargen and those created with extended chargen. The commodore I routinely used as a NPC was created with HG2 yet he's very much overpowered when compared to "normal" HG2 characters.

It's more a question of a "What to do with a high-powered PC in a low-power campaign?" than "What to do with a high-powered PC?" or "How to run a high-powered campaign?".

 

[Leitz]

Ah, I see what you mean. The disparity issue. I joked a bit about this with atpollard in his PbP Traveller game. My character was the least potent in a few ways. However, due to some fun events and persistence, my character is now a political player and has some clout. He's gone from bodyguard to world rescuer in the last year of real time. In game it's just been a few weeks.

I may have to look for those books you mentioned. I'm trying to figure out how to play a noble. Pointers would be useful.

On the difference between reward based and consequence based, can you expand a little? I understand the words but I thought a reward would be a consequence. So maybe I don't understand quite so much.