<gloom> Just getting to some email now. 11 days later. Sorry.
The PCs' merchant ship arrives out of Jump only to find that system control are quarantining them. So much, so normal on occasions. It happens. However, this time the quarantine period is a month rather than a few days or a week. At the end of the month it's extended to another month. Roll STY *now*. [Why, oh why, does the new Referee's Companion Sanity characteristic not get abbreviated to SAN????] [Did the writer fail a STY check?!]
Because some other game probably used that one. And Mental Equilibrium was to long.
Yes, I did wonder about that. Although I'd have kind of thought SAN as an abbreviation for Sanity was so obvious and reasonable that it just 'is' rather than being peculiar to one game system.
Which reminds me to ask, has anyone messed with Cthonian Stars and done something there as horror Traveller? I don't recall seeing any love for it, (I mean, not hatred either, just no mention) of in, say, Freelance Traveller.
(Look at all the 3D6-ish games that have chosen slightly different names than Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.... wouldn't want to use the same thing.... (Others have done so using various clean room designs or SRD contents).
I think STY is terrible as well.
Back in the old days, in the rarely mentioned D&D 2.0 Players Option rules, they actually split each stat into two chunks (Strength broke into Muscle and Endurance, Intelligence broke into Reason and Memory, etc.) with the idea being that two characters who have a 16 STR might be 16/16 on the substats or 17/15 or 18/14. It was a neat system. But you needed quite a range of descriptors.
Yes, there's a bit of me that really loves the options Traveller Companion gives for additional characteristics - and indeed, I've been guilty of producing my own, very specialist, ones. (See Into the Unknown). Then again, there's a bit of me that rather loves the simple elegance of the six original stats and just using them to derive anything additionally needed OR just using a local throw at the time something additional is needed. I'm a bit torn...
tc