WARNING: unrestrained nerdism ahead.
I’ve been trying to get a Traveller campaign together for my gaming group. For those of you who may not be familiar, Traveller is a tabletop role-playing game similar to D&D. It takes place in the far future, in a setting where there is an interstellar government that spans not just worlds themselves but thousands of solar systems. Players can choose from a wide variety of goals either of their own choosing or at the whim of the Gamemaster or GM. The GM is the guy who’s in charge of them game and decides what happens in the universe the players are interacting with.
It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve run an RPG, so I’m not sure how well I’m going to do. Luckily my gaming group is pretty forgiving and won’t bust my chops too much.
The system we use is Gurps: Traveller, which is based on Gurps 3rd edition. There are a number of dramatic differences between the two, most notably in character creation. The timeline is all different also, but I’ll discuss that in a later post.
In the original Traveller, or “Classic” Traveller, also Abbreviated as “CT”, you came up with a set of numbers representing your character’s physical characteristics (via die rolls, GM conference, or pulling them out of your ass, depending on the type of campaign you’re involved in). To figure out your character’s skills and whatnot you would go through and select “career terms”. In the version we played back in the nineties a single character term would represent either two or four years of the character’s life, and the job he or she was performing during that time. This also including whatever schooling your character went through. Certain careers (doctor, pilot, nuclear physicist) would require that you had taken a certain amount of school earlier in your career. During Character creation, dice rolls would indicate when certain things happened to you. For instance, if you chose something like “Corsair” as a career term, there was a die roll to see if you ended up in prison at the end of it. When you’re done with career terms, you tally up the years and that’s how old your character is.
In Gurps (and Gurps Traveller, abbreviated HT) each character is valued at a certain number of points. The more points the character is worth, the more powerful (in theory) the character is.
the GM (Game Master) would say something like “This is a 150 point campaign”, which means you would get 150 points to spend on your character. You can spend points to do things like raise your intelligence, make your character stronger, give him or her skills. You can even get points back by giving your character disabilities or other negative traits- a short temper may be worth 5 points, no legs could be 10, stuff like that.
The career based system was (in my opinion) charming. At the end of character creation you had a character you’ve “lived with” a bit and you have an idea of where you’ve gone and what you’ve done. With the Gurps system, you end up with a bunch of numbers. In my opinion, a fresh Gurps character has all the charm and depth of an AP spreadsheet.
So my old GM decided to fix things for another campaign he was running a few years back. He basically converted all the numbers from the old system into Gurps numbers.
This works well enough, but it doesn’t completely solve the problem- What if you’re done selecting career terms but you’ve still go points left? You can spend them at random when you’re finished with all your careers, but this breaks the “career” analogy- where did the bonus expertise come from? You could do some GM handwaving and make the player account for it with a backstory, but this is till kind of a cop-out.
So my next step is to take the original document my GM produced and break each career term into chunks of points- a quick run through indicates that each term would be worth roughly 13-18 points. Evening this out so that all the career terms are roughly equal shouldn’t be too difficult.
I’ll post periodic updates on this as I work on it.
