> On Dec 29, 2017, at 4:46 PM, Niels Kobschaetzki <xxxxxx@kobschaetzki.net> wrote:
>
> Is there any character generation in Traveller (we play 2nd Edition
> Mongoose) that allows this? Or at least some kind of modification that
> bring characteristics and skills of some chosen profession closer
> together? Maybe a character generation that isn't that randomized?

Yes, but it’s deeply heretical.  “Let your players define who they are”.

http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/slug.html

This is a ROLE-playing game, not a RULE-playing game.

If the rules get in the way of the object of the game, throw them out.

My most favorite Traveller character ever was “generated” as short account of his life, and a series of transcripts of his conversations with his court-appointed psychiatrist discussing his  actions post liberation from a Zhodani POW camp (he returned to his Scout base and nearly killed another scout who abandoned him and his recon team to their captors by chickening out and leaving before they got to the transport.)

 Of course it wasn’t that simple…he also came back from a POW camp to find his wife had been killed, completely randomly (traffic accident) just before he came home from the “last mission” he’d promised her.

The entire character generation was just a story, which my eternally competent GM, Eris, turned  into a character that worked.

A Role Playing game isn’t a game.

It’s a story made up and told by the participants, one of whom (the GM) is tasked with keeping the tale within some kind of framework.

Somewhere in my myriad archives (many of them aging CD’s labelled ‘Stuff’, alas) is Ricardo Luz O’Brien’s origin story…I should publish it sometime just so I can find it at need...

But in short, let your players create their characters, not their character sheets; then you bring them into your story.

Your marine should damn well be a better shot than most everyone else, and your cop will have a lot of skills to bring to bear that don’t require vacc-suit training...

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs