Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
So when you have several new characters being created there is a pretty good chance for somebody to have a ship at the start of the game. Maybe multiple players!
In my case, one character started with a Free Trader. OK, fine. I had a couple or so sessions pre-prepared, and it involved characters not having a ship of their own and also very little of the money they ended up with at the end of the creation process. So I basically just told them that as it was the frontier rim they had a certain amount of credits handy but their many thousands of dollars in savings would take some time to transfer to the more local banking institution (First Bank of The Greater Continuum). They didn’t really know Traveller, so they didn’t care really. As I had built into the scenario that they would be passengers on a Free Trader going to a Harvest Belt planet, the Merchant player with the rolled-for ship and I hit more or less simultaneously on the idea that this would be the ship he was waiting for. I already had in the scenario that the NPC Captain was an older man and the ship was 20 years old, so it made sense. The character was there to be present for the Captains last trip (he would be retiring on the planet to own a large farming operation) and to take possession of the ship and the debt.
OK, fine. It was easy to move the campaign in the direction of the Merchant player having a ship, and the other players being crew (he got to know them on the initial trip). No problem.
So it seems that you have a couple of options as a GM in a new campaign. One is to have little prepared to wait and see what comes out of character generation (such as ships), or to basically control what they get. Maybe you want them to be broke and with minor possessions at the start of your campaign. But clearly some players who rolled up a ship or maybe tens of thousands of credits at muster could be a bit miffed at not having what they got in the creation process.
Anyway, I was just wondering what thoughts you seasoned CT GM’s have on this subject. Who knows if I’ll ever do another new Traveller campaign (this one is just an alternate for when our D&D games have a low players count and we’ve played maybe 4 sessions of CT in a year), but it would be interesting to get an idea of how I might approach preparation for a campaign that could include ship ownership but not necessarily. I got lucky and it worked out smoothly, but I imagine it is not always thus. A player having a ship could undermine your plan for having them be out of work mercs looking for a few bucks planetside, for example. Do you just tell the player who mustered with one “sorry, no can do. I’ll let you pick a skill you don’t have instead.” A player could consider that cold comfort.
In my case, one character started with a Free Trader. OK, fine. I had a couple or so sessions pre-prepared, and it involved characters not having a ship of their own and also very little of the money they ended up with at the end of the creation process. So I basically just told them that as it was the frontier rim they had a certain amount of credits handy but their many thousands of dollars in savings would take some time to transfer to the more local banking institution (First Bank of The Greater Continuum). They didn’t really know Traveller, so they didn’t care really. As I had built into the scenario that they would be passengers on a Free Trader going to a Harvest Belt planet, the Merchant player with the rolled-for ship and I hit more or less simultaneously on the idea that this would be the ship he was waiting for. I already had in the scenario that the NPC Captain was an older man and the ship was 20 years old, so it made sense. The character was there to be present for the Captains last trip (he would be retiring on the planet to own a large farming operation) and to take possession of the ship and the debt.
OK, fine. It was easy to move the campaign in the direction of the Merchant player having a ship, and the other players being crew (he got to know them on the initial trip). No problem.
So it seems that you have a couple of options as a GM in a new campaign. One is to have little prepared to wait and see what comes out of character generation (such as ships), or to basically control what they get. Maybe you want them to be broke and with minor possessions at the start of your campaign. But clearly some players who rolled up a ship or maybe tens of thousands of credits at muster could be a bit miffed at not having what they got in the creation process.
Anyway, I was just wondering what thoughts you seasoned CT GM’s have on this subject. Who knows if I’ll ever do another new Traveller campaign (this one is just an alternate for when our D&D games have a low players count and we’ve played maybe 4 sessions of CT in a year), but it would be interesting to get an idea of how I might approach preparation for a campaign that could include ship ownership but not necessarily. I got lucky and it worked out smoothly, but I imagine it is not always thus. A player having a ship could undermine your plan for having them be out of work mercs looking for a few bucks planetside, for example. Do you just tell the player who mustered with one “sorry, no can do. I’ll let you pick a skill you don’t have instead.” A player could consider that cold comfort.