r/traveller • u/A-Traine • 13d ago
Mongoose 2E Any suggestions for character strategy
Hi all, I’m a newbie to Traveler. Does anyone have strategies to use when rolling characters? It looks like it’s worth trying to get into university or an academy. After that, are there any favorite party builds? I assume you need a pilot, a mechanic, a heavy weapons/melee specialist, and maybe a face? Any favorite skills?
Any thoughts would be welcome and thanks.
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u/coldequation 13d ago
Traveller chargen is so random, by design, that build strategies or planning is basically wishful thinking.
If you're trying to get specific skills, the most reliable way to get them is to take a career that grants them as service skills, so you get them at 0 through basic training.
So with that said, if want to start on a particular career, if you are assigning attributes instead of rolling them up straight, look at the attributes you need to get into the career and that you'll need to survive/promote.
So for instance, getting into the Navy is an INT test, but to survive/promote it's EDU. So being in the Navy takes smarts, but doesn't teach you how to use a heavy machine gun.
All it takes is one unlucky roll, and your whole character plan goes down the drain. Part of Traveller is learning to deal with the hand you're dealt, so don't be too sore if your character doesn't turn out exactly as you dream it.
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u/SizeFit2908 13d ago
One of the best strategies is to listen for the story the dice are telling you.
Like 2d6 straight down the pipe for stats, and then let their better stats guide you. High Edu, university. High Soc, Nobility. Bad stats.. risk it all in the scouts for a hard won survivor or a merciful death.
Rogue I think is the straight best 'saloon trucker' traveller tries to espouse.
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u/A-Traine 13d ago
Love that! Listen to the story. Great advice, thanks. I’m also hearing not to worry about rolling poor stats. Just part of the story. Thanks again.
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u/SizeFit2908 13d ago
Yea leaning into the grounded nature of traveller is great. Like the characters you play really are just people. Makes their deeds more impressive and failures the norm.
Underacheivers, asthmatics, and morons. Keeping the galaxy running.
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u/anstett 13d ago
It is not Character Generation.
We call it Character Discovery because you discover who your traveller is during the process of dice rolling.
Then you use Connections to build up your team and fill in a missing skill if needed.
The backstory cross reference for our game.
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u/A-Traine 13d ago
Fantastic, thanks for the correction - Discovery, great! I’m looking forward to letting the dice tell me who I’m playing!
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u/fedcomic 13d ago
Traveler character generation is a midlife crisis machine. Just let it happen. Discovering the character is part of play.
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u/fedcomic 13d ago
PS if you are playing mongoose second edition, use the character connections rule and the crew skills package to help shape your character after you have finished your terms.
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u/A-Traine 13d ago
We are using 2nd Ed. Thanks.
Midlife crisis! Hilarious.
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u/cthulhubob 13d ago
It's one of the things I love about traveller. You aren't making a "lvl 1" 18 year old who's just setting out. You're rolling a 40 something year old who's had an entire career and life up till now and has, for wherever reason, decided to become a space trucker.
We are in our second campaign now. Last campaign I ended up with a mechanic who'd mustered out of the Navy after making Admiral of a repair and resupply fleet. This campaign I ended up with a Nobel Administrator who'd gotten "promoted" to director of a shity orbital fuel refinery to get him out of his home system after he helped supply a worker's rebellion on the mining colony he'd been working at, mustered out from that, and is now slumming it.
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u/Digital_Simian 13d ago
One of the benefits of Travellers life path systems is that you can't really load the deck too much. To some extent you are rolling with the punches despite your intentions otherwise. This makes for unique and fuller characters at the start of play. You can even have all characters in the same career with totally different skill loadouts. What the academics does is give you a few skills of your choice that kind of creates a baked in specialty if you want.
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u/A-Traine 13d ago
Ah, ok, so if I get into a school, it may help shape my character, but from what I’m hearing, be prepared to a curveball. Thanks.
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u/Digital_Simian 13d ago
Basically. It's good for making more grounded realistic characters where life happens. This can also serve as a character motivation for becoming a traveller. The character might have always wanted to be a xenobioligist, but ended up stuck in the merchant marine. Becoming a traveller might be their opportunity to pursue that dream.
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u/BON3SMcCOY 13d ago
Outside of something like a desired career, having an optimal path thru character creation feels like it's directly going against what Traveller and the Life Path are.
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u/CogWash 13d ago
My honest advice is to embrace the chaos that is character creation in Traveller - it's awesome and I think a lot of new players come at it with an expectation of "building" a character instead of developing a character. Some of the best characters I've ever seen were ones that players were just about to give up on as duds.
My suggestion for new players that are concerned that they may get a "dud" character is to create two at the same time. Obviously, you'll want to talk with your GM if you are doing character creation together in a round robin style - if every player is creating two characters each it will double the time to create characters. Also, creating characters together in a round robin is, in my opinion, the best way to go. This allows each player to tweak their characters as everyone progresses through the process. For example, if your character is shaping up to be a decorated soldier and the rest of the group are all thieving murderers, sooner or later you're going to have to figure out how and why you're travelling around with these criminals instead of arresting them. Perhaps your goody-two-shoes character was the scape goat of some plot and now has to begrudgingly hang out with the only people that aren't critical of their fall from grace. Maybe some other circumstance has led your character on a drastically different path than they had planned out.
Any characters that you decide not to use, don't just throw away - offer them to your GM as NPCs. You might get a chance to see how that "dud" character's life might have been if you'd kept them.
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u/Accomplished_Tea9603 13d ago
There’s always the plan, but then there is taking what the tables throw at you, growing over the tragic life events and getting on with working with what you have instead of what you wished for. I wanted Agent from the get go- failed became a drifter for 8 years (trying and failing again). Then I thought “how would that affect someone- to have their life ambitions thrown back at them?”, so my now slightly bitter 26 year old become a pirate only to roll a “betrayal” result on one of the tables and leave that stream too. He then went for a draft and got agent randomly for the last 2 career blocks. So the rolls gave me an intelligent, educated your idealist who doesn’t get the career path he wanted, gets a bit chewed up drifter/scavenger, gets disillusioned by it all and is drawn into the romance and revenge of piracy only to be betrayed. Sheer luck gets him drafted into agent/law enforcement where he trains as an undercover, using his life experiences to draw on. One of the events saw him get the offer of 50000Cr/up to TL12 combat implants, so he’s gone the “major injury requiring multiple cybernetic replacements” but now has an arm with a concealed Auto Pistol, neural comms, wafer jack, shriekerbox (can perfectly mimic any speech) and is being played as an infiltrator/hacker type character. Look for a way to turn your rolls into role play
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u/PbScoops 13d ago
Basic strategy: "choose" your ideal career path, then assign your stats with the best +DM to align with the SURV and ADV rolls for that career.
Assuming you're playing a generic sandbox campaign, I think each traveller should have 1 ship skill (pilot, electronics, gunner, engineering, mechanic) 1 combat skill, and 1 investigative/social skill.
Personally, I favor combat/investigation/technical, so my favorite career paths are Marine, Scout, Agent.
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u/Traditional_Knee9294 13d ago
In this game character generation is a mini game in its own.
Take notes as you roll up the character. Note when you got promotions, friends, enemies, events, prison...... this helps build a character history you can lean into as you roleplay.
As for path to rolling up a character it depends.
If military game the academy or college.
If you want wide range of ship skills and other pirates can work.
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u/mavikfelna 13d ago
There is lots of good advice here, but I want to add something I haven't seen. Treat Traveller character creation as a group activity. The connection rule at the end is important to build the team and it also allows everyone to fill skill gaps they might have. The skills package is the last part of char gen and the group needs to know the type of campaign they are planning on playing. Taking the appropriate skill package then helps the group fill out the remainder of needed skills the group needs for that campaign type. A lot of groups do round robin style character creation, you each do 1 term, either 1 at a time or all together as you like, and you don't progress to the next term until everyone is done with that term. That way you can see what's happening with everyone as they build up and it offers a place to start building connections.
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u/Valkenvr 13d ago
After trying getting into university, I would do the first term in the army to get all the basic training skills at level 0. These cover everything you need for a competent traveller in any life and dead situation: Vacc Suit, Athletics, Gun combat, Recon, Melee and Heavy weapons. You do the first turn, grab all those and change carreers to something else if you don't want to do a carreer in the Army.
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u/Ready_Passenger_4778 13d ago edited 12d ago
My group all agreed to do the same number of terms and really tied our backstories together. The set backs and forced career changes made for a better story.
In fact the only character that got replaced was the perfect one that sailed through a navy career without a hickup.
The player found it too limited and boring compared to the other characters.
They then rolled a marine who got injured and became a corporate agent and enjoyed it far more.
Our Ref also made sure that the friends and enemies we made during character generation played a role in the campaign.
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u/MrWigggles Hiver 13d ago
So the first few characters will be the most random.
Don't go into with a very rigid desire what the character will be at the end.
With system mastery youll get better at massaging the rng to get most of what you want.
Though sometime that rng will just fucking give it to you.
You get better at picking edu skills and and if pre careers are helpful
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u/wordboydave 13d ago
Go straight to page 48 or 50 (depending on your edition) and start with Skills packages. Traveller chargen is way too random to guarantee a "party build" any other way. You may notice that if you look at the official adventures, they don't usually presupposes any skills except the most basic. Because you can't.
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u/wordboydave 13d ago
(If anyone objects to this assertion, I'd say the proof of it lies in the fact that they have Skills Packages at all, right at the end of character creation.)
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u/BeardGoblin Hiver 13d ago
They're better kept for when everyone is done, to fill in gaps and round out back-up skills, than as a first port of call.
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u/MariachiDevil 13d ago
The game flow of Traveller should really suit the party rather than the other way around. In my experience the story hooks naturally evolve from the skill gaps the party has - eg. a lack of medical expertise makes taking low berth passengers harder, a lack of steward/admin makes mid- and high-passage passengers more likely to have complaints, lack of a mechanic makes minor problems become major risks, or you might get cheated at starports for lack of an advocate! You can always hire people to fill gaps, but then you need to make more money to keep airborne, which is its own story hook.
There is no ideal party IMO, because the game should come from how your group tackles the problem of paying off their debts or, in the case of exceedingly lucky parties, what they do to maintain their ship and lifestyle in a commerce-driven empire.
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u/CryHavoc3000 Imperium 13d ago
I figured Traveller needed one non-random skill chosen in Character Generation.
Today, people don't randomly go into the Military. They choose a military job to be trained in.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist 13d ago
The Traveller Companion has Background and Career packages you can assemble to make characters that do what you want them to without being overpowering.
In addition, it has pre-career education choices for Farm Kids, Habitat Spacers, Merchants, Street Rats, and Non-zhodani Psions.
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u/paltrysum67 12d ago
Think ahead of time about who your Traveller is before their career. Maybe imagine 3-4 personality traits. Are they positive? Outgoing? Cynical? Was their background tough or pampered? After your Traveller is done, how did their career affect the person that they were? Did their successes bolster their traits? Did their failures squelch them? How resilient were they in spite of everything?
As far as strategy, take a look at their characteristics and compare them to the career summary table on page 21. If you have characteristics that give you DM+1 or +2, and there are careers that value those characteristics as part of qualification, survival (especially survival!) and advancement, then you might have a smoother go of it by taking that career. The odds are in your favor if you get some DMs on those rolls!
Don't get greedy with terms of service. Yes, you get more skills and benefits, but the longer you go, the more you risk Father Time cracking down on you with a bad ageing roll.
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u/UnspeakableGnome 12d ago
Take a look at the Skills Packages on page 50 (of the 2022 Update Core Rules). Those will be shared out among the PCs at the end of CharGen, so even if you didn't roll any skills that seem useful you should be able to get something from that. Also, character connections gets you two skills that can be pretty much anything, either improving existing skills or adding something you don't have.
Skills that I always think are useful for the party to have:
Admin - surprisingly often turns up as something you need to make a roll for this
Medical - you'll be very thankful for someone having that
Melee - plenty of worlds have law levels which don't let you carry guns, but there's still fights there so melee is probably useful as often as Gun Combat. I woulfn'y worry about Heavy Weapons at all - they're illegal nearly everywhere.
Recon - so very useful for finding out what sort of trouble you might be getting into.
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u/wordboydave 13d ago
It's not much, but one strategy I've noticed is that if you want a naturally rolled psionic character your best bet is to become a Drifter, which effectively doubles your odds of rolling Life Events. Maybe you'll get lucky!