TROS: Quickest character death RPG ever?

[Tywin Lannister]

I was creating a character, kind of an elderly hedge knight, and he died during character creation (while applying the aging penalties). What other RPG can boast of such quick character deaths?!

[Tash]

Well in several White Wolf games you start off dead...

[Malechi]

Classic Traveller...

[nsruf]

Um, aging penalties apply if your character ages after creation. If you create a feeble old guy,  just give him a low priority on attributes.

Dying of old age during character creation is just wrong on several levels:

1) logic: you create a PC, so you know in advance that he will be alive at least during the opening scene of the campaign - he can't be dead already!

2) fairness: character starting abilities are not randomized, so forcing some players to randomize their attributes is seriously unfair

3) waste of precious game time

I thought this thread would be about the unforgiving combat system. Dying of old age during character creation! Honestly, use some common sense;)

[Malechi]

perhaps Twyn was being a little sarcastic?

While I agree and don't use the optional death in chargen rules for Traveller in some games (especially Traveller) character generation is half the fun for some people and in the end, what have you wasted? Fifteen minutes? ;)

either way I don't think its a major biggy ...do the rules state you don't apply ageing penalties in chargen? Just curious as it may be something not mentioned...

[nsruf]

Fifteen minutes? ;)

Chargen took way longer for my group. But it was the first time playing TROS...

either way I don't think its a major biggy

I do...

Seriously, it would be a major design flaw. There are many ways somebody could have died before reaching the point where the story starts. But you just assume they didn't, and any penalties a character accumulated duting life are chosen during chargen:

You don't roll randomly to see how many limbs you lost - instead, you decide to take the Amputee flaw or not.

You don't roll randomly how many attribute points you lost when you survived the plague - you put an E in attributes.

It's about choice, not randomization. And age should be the only exception? I think not.

...do the rules state you don't apply ageing penalties in chargen? Just curious as it may be something not mentioned...

I don't have my book here, but I would even bet they don't. The rules also don't say you shouldn't play out every battle your character has been in to see if he survived. It's just obvious (to me at least).

[Mike Holmes]

I agree with nsruf's interpretation of the rules.

That said, perhaps Malechi was refering to Traveller in terms of the potentially wasted fifteen minutes. In any case, I think the death rule from Traveller is too much maligned, and misunderstood.

1. From one POV, chargen in Traveller is actually play. That is, Traveller chargen tells somewhat of a story about the character, and, from that POV, it's interesting to have death potentially occur there.

2. From another POV, it's a simulation. That is, the idea is to give the idea of the actual sorts of things the character comes up against in the time before normal play begins. In Traveller, that, in theory, includes death.

3. From yet another POV, the death rules work as a counterincentive to allowing your character to stay in chargen forever. Feeling the mortality that the character poentially faces, the player liking the character that he's generating may decide to end generation and move on to play. As such, it's a remarkably effective device.

In actual fact, players wanting the character that they want, would just roll and roll and roll until they got the character they wanted. As such, this voided the death rule. So, even during that first edition, the rule was changed in a supplement, to mean that if you missed your survival roll, that you actually were injured. To be clear, in the main text, it's not an option, you die when you miss your roll. But this was altered to suit player tastes very early in the production of the game.

Now, what does this have to do with TROS? Well, if you really were into making TROS characters, and wanted to try something a little different, then I could see making the aging rolls. For any of the above reasons.

Again, as it stands, I don't think that you're supposed to do this - if you are it should say this in the section on chargen that your character might not survive. But it's an option that I think people discard out of hand without considering it. The question is what chargen is for in your game. Is it a part of the character's story, or is it just the means of coming up with a character so that we can play. These both have some merit to them, and I'd leave it to each group to decide for themselves before I'd make a suggestion one way or the other.  

Mike

[Tash]

I've never really liked the idea of rolling characters in an RPG, I realy prefer a system like TROS where I come up with a concept and build it.  To me its counter productive to come to the table with the idea of playing a role and end up with something completely idfferent because the dice didn't go my way....too much like real life :)

It is fun sometimes.  The first time I played Cyberpunk (which has optional rules for rolling pretyt much everything, and our GM made us use them) I ended up with a rather interesting character:  rolled the equivalent of a fighter for profession, rolled good stats with particularly good perception, toughness and reflexes (good for a close in mix it up with handguns and knives kind of fighter), got a few choice peices of cyberware, so far all is well.

Then I rolled personality traits and income: flat broke and an ardent nudist....I did my best but its tough to survive in that line of work when you are too poor to buy any gear and won't wear clothes. :)

[nsruf]

I agree with nsruf's interpretation of the rules.

That said, perhaps Malechi was refering to Traveller in terms of the potentially wasted fifteen minutes.

15 minutes might be possible in TROS if you are familiar with the rules. I was surprised it took my players so long, but then they agonized over every decision... I'll post a "first impressions" thread sometime this week, it should be fun.

In any case, I think the death rule from Traveller is too much maligned, and misunderstood.

<snip>

Good points, all. But TROS isn't geared towards that sort of thing. It has no life paths or randomization anywhere in chargen.

Oh wait: with an A social priority, you get 1d10+2 soldiers serving you. So there is *one* random element.

Now, what does this have to do with TROS? Well, if you really were into making TROS characters, and wanted to try something a little different, then I could see making the aging rolls. For any of the above reasons.

What if I want to leave chargen to chance but play a character who is only 16 years old? Using the aging rules as only source of randomness just doesn't make much sense to me. Now if somebody created life/career-path based chargen rules for TROS, that would be interesting.

[Valthalion]

Classic Traveller...

Traveller now there is a name from the distant past.

Don't tell me its still around.

Valthalion
Night against Kaos

[Edge]

after reading the first post my immediate reaction was "Traveller" then malechi piped up :)
i used to piss myself laughing everytime my character died in char gen.
i vaguely remember a similar thing happening in pendragon... though i could be on drugs.

[Tash]

OK I'm curious.  Anyone want to give me a basic rundown of how chargen worked in traveler so I can image how you regularly killed off a character while making them????

[Muggins]

Traveller. or Megatraveller as my version is, has a complex set of tables about your past. You roll for each year, and various things happen. As I recall, most PCs are in the Fleet, and the rolls involve you going on training, gaining (or losing ranks), being reassigned, and so on. However, you only get released from the Fleet after a while (unless you get bounced). So you can go along, pass into middle age (you can take rejuvenation potions or something), take aging penalties, and die, all before you get any say so over your character. I think some career paths were optional, but in general, what goes into the tables comes out very different.

James

[Mike Holmes]

Actually, death from aging in Traveller (any edition) would be pretty unlikley during chargen. Not impossible, but damn unlikely. The character would have to have started with really craptastic physical stats.

OTOH, there was a pretty frequent way to die, in the first edition of Traveller (1978?), often refered to now as "Classic" as you can get the books reprinted with that title from BITS, I think. In that game there was a similar lifepath system to what James describes above. Blocks of life were called "terms of service" as they usually represented military service (or, if civilian, four years of life). Note that the four year "term" reflects that back in the 70's this was commonly the only term available to regular soldiers so it made sense at the time. Anyhow, at the end of each and every term of service, you had to make a survival roll. Missing it meant that the character died in the course of his service, plain and simple.

Now, again, this was the way the system was presented in the first three "basic" books, numbered 1 thru 3. Soon thereafter, Book 4: Mercenary came out, and added a whole slew of options to how generation worked (and accidentally made mercs the most potent character type in the process - but that's another topic). They followed this with the fifth book (High Guard) about the imperial navy including chargen options for it that matched the mercenary ones. It was in that book that they stated that the survival roll failure meant that the character merely was wounded badly enough to have to quit his military career, and become a PC. This was much more effective for those people who saw chargen as merely a means to obtain a character to play. It was somewhat redundant with the "re-enlistment" die rolls, but still it worked.

The reason, from a game design POV, for the survival rules was, again, to disincentivize playing certain character types. Scouts, for instance had to roll a 7+ on 2d6 to survive. Meaning that living through 8 terms as a scout (the max allowed before manadatory retirement) would have been just a bit over one percent. So, what this meant in action was one of two things: either the design succeeded, and players would get out of the scouts as soon as the character looked viable, or the player would say "damn the system" and keep rolling new characters, and rolling, and rolling, until they finally got that geriatric scout character that they'd been trying to get.

Combined with the aging rolls, the survival rolls really did get you thinking like real life about getting out of the service and into the private sector relatively soon. What this prevented was all characters from being really old and really skilled. Again, in theory. Some players just wanted what they wanted, and would doggedly ignore the effects of aging and survival. Meaning lots of dead characters would occur.

So the change in High Guard was probably a good idea, but it somewhat radically altered the system. Basically, at that point, everyone did try to stay in as long as possible. Another reason for this was the existence of "Anagathics" or age effect reducing drugs, which all players would persue, finances allowing, when they got out, thus eliminating the problems with aging.


Yeah, I kinda agree that if you were to apply this sort of logic to TROS that you'd want to make it more than just aging rolls. In that case, see some of the work done on the TROS/Burning Wheel crossovers.

Mike

[Edge]

as usual mike you have summed it up perfectly :)