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:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)