NPC - Personalities

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

Further to a sidebar on the 'Traveller' CCG concept.

'spice of life' sounds interesting.

Failing that R.Talosorian's games often inculded a 'lifepath' system. that allowed you to generate some random plot hooks and backstory elements.

The Mekton (a Giant Robot game system. Intended to capture an Anime feel) Life path had some oddities. (polychromatic hair colours etc.) and if you just took raw die rolls you could end up with romantic rivals of the opposite gender and former lovers of the same gender. Among other interesting things. Sometimes the raw die roll thing can be quiet amusing and take the character your generating in unexpected directions. You always have the option of ignoring the rolls.

It had sections for Family, Friends, Romantic links, Enemies, Goal in Life, Favoured .. uh.. thing. and if you wanted, hair and eye colour.

I find it an interesting way to flesh out a character. Especially an NPC, figuring out motivations and rationale's for ...ODD ... results sometimes resulted in a very 3dimensional character.

heh.

 

[T. Foster]

I always loved the RTG lifepath system -- along with the AHL-esque 'Friday Night Firefight' rules from Cyberpunk it was my favorite thing about their games. At one point I had intended to adapt the lifepath system for Traveller (it's a very good fit with Trav's cycling-through-terms char-gen system -- which RTG actually used in early editions, before moving towards a more 'standard' point-juggling system in the 90s) but never got around to it and eventually forgot all about it until you brought it up just now.

Obviously some of the specific entries would need modification to fit the Traveller milieu (as opposed to the Mecha Anime or Cyberpunk milieux) and strictly as a matter of taste I'd demand the tables all be reformatted to 2D6 rolls (IIRC the RTG tables are based on D10s), but I don't see why it wouldn't work. And I'm willing to help with any conversions/adaptation effort as much as I can considering all my RTG games are packed away in storage in another state.

And as for those same-sex romantic partners from the Mekton tables, that's actually not at all out of line with the source-material (although those elements tended to get edited/bowdlerized when the shows were/are imported to American TV)!

 

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

They are less bowlderized than they used to be. but at the time I bought Mekton, Robotech (the Carl Macek Version) was the height of my Anime knowledge.

Hmm... actually making a Lifpath type NPC-Plothooks tables??? that's ... an idea. heh.

I'll talk more about it if you like.