Social Standing in Traveller

[rancke]

Originally posted by Fritz88:
So, a MT character starts with a SOC of B. He joins the Navy where he gets a +1 for making Captain. (He also got a +2 for mustering out - haven't decided to keep that one, yet. Heck, he got enough 6's on his skill rolls to be Emperor!) He's now a Baron - what do you do?

How would you handle his fief, his stipend (if any), etc. (Bummer he didn't get a yacht - you have to actually be a layabout (you know, a Noble career) to get that prize.... )

They way I handle it is to say that SOC 12 is not an Imperial baron with a vote in the Moot and the ear of the subsector duke, a man who'd be able to address any ruler on a world similar to 21st Century Earth by his first name. He is a member of a minor Imperial knighhood that meaks him the social equal of a planetary-level baron. He'd certainly be treated with respect if he called on the president of a nation with 200 million citizens, and he'd probably get to meet some mid-ranking flunkey, but he's unlikely to get to meet the president himself.

IMTU social levels goes up to 33 and you don't become an Imperial baron until you reach SOC 24.

One advantage to this approach is that you can let PCs climb to SOC 15 through the character generation system without having to make him a relative of an Imperial duke.


Hans

 

[The Oz]

How I handled such things was to say that Soc was not just rank in the nobility but also fame/notoriety in galactic society. So a character who started at Soc B was born a minor noble but most of the increases from character generation become +DMs for the character to be recognized by "the man on the street."

Which can make it very hard for a character to be inconspicuous, at times....

 

[Lord Iron Wolf]

In a magazine, quite a while back, they had an article titled: "The Other Three Stats," dealing with IQ, Edu and Soc. For the life of me I can't remember the magazine or issue. I don't believe it was JTAS though.

Maybe one of the other grognards remembers this.

LIW

 

[robject]

My campaigns tend to be "ordinary Joes in space", so nobility are difficult for me to handle. Yet, there always seems to be one in the crowd. I try to throw nobility things at them, generally from the blood-feud and administrative-horrors categories, while giving them an easy way to bully people around.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Lord Iron Wolf:
In a magazine, quite a while back, they had an article titled: "The Other Three Stats," dealing with IQ, Edu and Soc. For the life of me I can't remember the magazine or issue. I don't believe it was JTAS though.

Maybe one of the other grognards remembers this.

LIW

That would be DGP's Travellers' Digest issue 7

The section's title is "Characters With Class" and is part of their Gaming Digest series of articles.

I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned it...

 

[Fritz_Brown]

robject, most of my games (player OR ref) have tended to be the same. However, I am sitting here playing the chargen part of the game (hoping to use them some day...), and came up with that character. Having never really encountered that before, I had to ask the wonderful community here.

Hans: 33!!

BTW, in the homebrew I'm cooking up, SOC is replaced by "Standing" (to get away from it being just a measure of nobility), and is relegated to a secondary status. Appeal replaces it in the primary 6 as a measure of presence/charisma/looks - the things that make that first impression when your character walks into the room. (And, I avoided calling it Charisma so as not to make folks think Vargr

)

 

[Fritz_Brown]

And, of course, Sigg, that DGP stuff is all the out-of-print/will-never-see-the-light-of-day-again products, right?

 

[mike wightman]

Unless someone altruistic can win the lottery and buy the rights it certainly looks that way

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Cause I don't see much of it on eBay, currently.

 

[Ptah]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Unless someone altruistic can win the lottery and buy the rights it certainly looks that way

Sigg do you know what these rights are going for, ballpark? I haven't won the lottery but the numbers I've seen for the pen-and-paper RPG industry (minus WoTC D&D) are pretty abysmal. Making me think that they may not be worth all that much. A determined group of investor/enthusiasts might be able to do something. :this is where the pie in the sky graemlin goes: