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 first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Children pay little attention to their parent’s teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)