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Post by The Barney on Mar 13, 2012 18:30:09 GMT -8
Since everyone was so great at answering my character gen questions on another thread, I have another question. When a group is starting out, how many terms* do you tend to start your players with? I saw the notes in the book saying 5 would be right for a skilled and competent PC, but what have you guys discovered?
For my game, I'm thinking of doing an average of 5. Anyone that wants to stop before 5 can give their extra terms* to another character to maintain the average. I hope this will encourage linked backgrounds like teacher/student or parent/adult children. I'm stealing the idea from a D20 star wars game I once played in. Starting level was 7, unless you wanted to drop down to padawan(4) and bump someone else up to master(10) to be your mentor. *This is for Mongoose Traveler.
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Post by gandalftheplaid on Mar 13, 2012 19:23:41 GMT -8
I want to be sure I follow your question.
Are you talking about Mongoose Traveller? Also, when you talk about numbers of careers are you actually referring to numbers of terms?
Assuming your answers are Yes and Yes: My relatively inexperienced opinion is 4 terms is a good minimum. While 6 is a good maximum.
That being said, some day I'd like to play a character that uses the anti-aging drugs to go for 8 or 10 terms. I think it could lead to a interesting background and RP. Lost of skills, but also lots of skeletons in the closet.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2012 4:39:55 GMT -8
I'm slightly confused. You're *setting* the number of terms?
With my players, I left it up to them. They could stop after their first term (technically, if they wanted to stop at 18 years old, I guess I'd let them.. but that seems bad), or they could go until they couldn't handle the debt from all the anagathics anymore. I left it entirely up to them.
What ended up happening is, of my four players, two did six terms, one did seven terms, and one did eight terms. One of the characters just retired, and the players new character did eight terms.
--Pukka Tukka
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Post by The Barney on Mar 15, 2012 1:35:20 GMT -8
Since it's my first time running the system I figured I would set the terms like the book suggests so I could control the power level. This should make it easier to build encounters. It will keep the PC's from being such high rank that they have motivation to be out and about.
Would you stop someone from showing up with a 400 year old character? Since you can start in dept, what would stop a character from getting that old? I know a noble with a soc of 10 auto qualifies and auto survives..... They could go on FOREVER!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2012 4:18:06 GMT -8
Does the book actually recommend controlling the terms? I totally missed that!
I don't know at what point before 400 I would suggest a player stop. It's one of those weird hypotheticals I don't come across. I have players who I trust to not abuse the system, and if I didn't trust them, I wouldn't play with them.
If one of my players came up with a compelling reason to make a 400 year old character, billions in debt, who basically is held together by anagathics and willpower at this point... I would probably go with it. There could be a compelling story out of that. It'd be weird, though, that's for sure...
--Pukka Tukka
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2012 5:40:27 GMT -8
I found that the aging checks at the end of each term combined with the urge to keep going works really well to cap character age so I don't impose anything (yet).
As far as anagathics, there's a pretty good hook in the book for characters who use them. Anagathic use is a stigma, the character has to continuously obtain it, it's illegal everywhere, it's expensive, rare... plenty of ideas for drama there.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2012 9:17:17 GMT -8
I usually advise new players in Mongoose Traveller to stop at 3 terms before the aging rolls kick in.
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Post by gandalftheplaid on Mar 15, 2012 17:24:36 GMT -8
It's true that anagathis are "hard to find, expensive, and illegal or socially unacceptable in many parts of the Imperium". I like the potential hooks created by this. The 1d6 times 2500 credits a term cost will also help keep the resources of a long running character at bay. Also the extra survival roll could easily be used as a special hook in that if one fails it. I figured the mishap might be able to be interpreted as being caused by the use of the drugs. (Whatever bad thing was going down was happening while you were working on maintaining your drug supply. Or you were working in an area where it's use was not welcome...) So yeah, extra plot hook potential.
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willh
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Post by willh on Apr 9, 2012 9:01:33 GMT -8
This is why mishaps are bullshit weak sauce. A failed survival roll should mean character death. You should be able to take as many terms as you want, but every time you do you risk killing your character and having to start over.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Apr 9, 2012 11:12:00 GMT -8
"Kids, in MY day we killed off a guy who failed his survival check! And we LIKED it!"
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Post by gandalftheplaid on Apr 9, 2012 20:21:53 GMT -8
This is why mishaps are bullshit weak sauce. A failed survival roll should mean character death. You should be able to take as many terms as you want, but every time you do you risk killing your character and having to start over. I'll grant you that calling it a Survival Roll is a bad label for what actually takes place. Perhaps call it a Stork Check instead. Regardless of what you call it, I just don't see the appeal in going through the exercise of generating a character and then being randomly told you have to start over. The removal of sudden character death during generation doesn't bother me a bit.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2013 10:09:28 GMT -8
I run the T20 variant of Traveller and I kept my players down to 6 terms max.
To me it was a matter of balance, I am running a longer term campaign and I didn't want anyone to start whining about how their skills were sub-par because they only did two terms. That being said I also have have two players with min-max-ish tendencies (controllable) and giving them a free hand with terms seemed like a temptation.
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snoman314
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Post by snoman314 on Feb 20, 2013 21:50:47 GMT -8
This is why mishaps are bullshit weak sauce. A failed survival roll should mean character death. You should be able to take as many terms as you want, but every time you do you risk killing your character and having to start over. You do have a point, in that the original way of balancing the benefit of ever more career terms was the constant potential to kill your character. It was a push-your-luck minigame, that balanced itself automatically. But I think that gandalftheplaid is also correct in saying that having to do character creation all over again can suck pretty hard. My take on it depends on the players and the situation. On one occasion I spend two evenings with a couple of friends just making up characters for fun. We were having fun just doing the character creation process, so these we killed if they failed the survival roll, but I also didn't set any career term limits. The surviving characters made it into the subsequent game. With those guys if we had less time, I'd do the same but make the mishaps way harsher instead of killing the character. I reckon that'd achieve more or less the same thing, but keep things moving quickly if there's no time or your players just want to get on with it. When I went through chargen with some guys online for a G+ game, I went with the rules as per the Mongoose rules, but set a limit to career terms. Time is definitely an issue online in my experience, and in that case it was with people I didn't know as well, so dealing with killing or totally messing up characters may have been more problematic. I was playing it safe basically. In this situation I agree 4-6 is a good guideline.
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Post by Kainguru on Feb 21, 2013 4:24:23 GMT -8
"Kids, in MY day we killed off a guy who failed his survival check! And we LIKED it!" +1. Aaron
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Post by Deleted on Feb 21, 2013 18:28:05 GMT -8
go for the Cheese do 8+ terms then if you die have your mind copied into a robot body figure after 6 terms you can afford 1
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