Characters
Classic Traveller introduced a 'lifepath'-style character generation system which helps it stand out from other role-playing games. Traveller characters get their skills and experience in a mini-game, where the player makes career choices that determine the character's life up to the point right before adventuring begins.
Characters range from "everyday Joes in space" to crack mercenary teams, and the game often draws from pulp science-fiction for its aliens (the Aslan are similar to Kzin, the Hivers to Pierson's Puppeteers, and so on). Some character "classes" are military-oriented, while others are civilian. A character can be human, robot, alien, or of a genetically engineered species.
In character generation, players take their characters through a career where the player rolls randomly on various tables that provides assignments and life events from which new skills, ranks and benefits are gained. There was also a risk that a character suffers injury (or even death) during the course of a career.
A character can be a young cadet or a tried-and-true veteran, each with strengths and weaknesses. Keeping a character in service longer leads to more skills and benefits, but could also mean that basic attributes (such as strength and dexterity) begin to degrade with old age.
Read more about this topic: Traveller (role-playing Game)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)