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:
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has....”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)