The Excellence of Random Character Generation

Traveller character generation is a lot of fun. Maybe the best session of character generation I've had. Feng Shui was kind of a trip, too, and character generation for Is This Fair? went well, but this was a unique experience.

I went into it thinking that I was going to run a default Traveller game. A little trading, a little exploration, a little running for their lives; I didn't have any specific ideas about what I wanted the campaign to be like, and I figured that sounded fun. If the players really took to one adventure or another, I'd move the campaign in that direction, but to start with I was going to keep things standard.

Then one player rolled a twelve. I pointed at that he could automatically qualify for the nobility if he put it into Social Standing, which he promptly did. Five terms later, we had a character with a Social Standing of 15 and a bunch of Yacht share. Add that to the pirate who has slept with half the party, the drifter who wandered onto the ship in a drunken stupor, and the physician with a crush on another guy the pirate once slept with, and we had the makings of a pretty distinctive campaign.

They've all gotten very excited about the idea of running a "space cruise ship." They're planning on doing the usual missions and trade and so on, but they're also hiring several stewards and taking full advantage of their noble's Duke social standing. They've taken very well to the "jump and try to make as much money as possible before jumping again" standard Traveller game play and given me a great excuse to have all kinds of weird NPCs show up to bother them. I couldn't be happier.

And this, without any planning on anyone's part. We rolled some dice and came up with an entertaining explanation for the numbers. A most promising sign.