Traveller T1 School Bus
Irmgard Rossie
I'm trying to implement a Travelleresque lifepath character creation system (thanks once again goes to Soltakss for the idea) and I'm running into a little snag in regards to education. I have no idea what it actually means. I mean, yes of course, the higher the stat the more education, but at which point does it represent, say a Bachelor's Degree, or graduating high school. Or am I looking at it wrong? I never really grokked the Education stat in BRP, either.
I think it was years of school somewhere I read, EDU 12 would mean high school graduate. But I think you have to take it with a grain of salt. You could rationalize it and say it's whatever education you've absorbed, so you could have an EDU 5 and still be a high school grad, if that's what you wanted. Avg edu for the culture should be the usual 9-12.
If it is straight years of school, then an average person might have between 10 and 12, starting school around 5-6 and finishing around 16, so that makes sense. A holder of a Bachelor's degree in England would probably have EDU 16, a Master's EDU 19 and a PhD EDU 22.
As for the LifePath idea, it looks good, but I didn't really understand it well enough to give it a full treatment. When I played Traveller, I was guided through it by experienced hands, so didn't need to understand the whole process. I only rolled up 2 Traveller PCs when I played and that was over 20 years ago. Having said that, it should b e easy enough to do. I suppose I should buy the Traveller rulebook, to see how it works properly, as the Mongoose Traveller SRD is not that complete.
6E COC says this about EDU: A score of twelve 'suggests' a high school graduate. A 16+ indicates graduate level work or the equivalent. So, yes, in a industrial/post-industrial society with a formal, institutionalized educational system the EDU score does pretty much map to 'years' spent in the classroom.
There's probably not much you need to change really: Traveller will have a range of 2-12 vs. COC's 3-18; but Traveller's career track really starts with the characters just coming into adult-hood at age 18, so your 1st term would begin with each character as they leave 'high school' or its equivalent. As Traveller is very militaristic, there's few career tracks that would require an EDU 12+, and I assume that undergraduate and graduate coursework is included in the 'Scholar' track.
So thinking a little more on the topic: each four year 'term' yields 80 skills points to be spent among a list of select skills particular to that service/career track. So think of each 'term' as a kind of occupational block. You could, for some career tracks, even allow characters to exchange skill points for characteristic increases (20/+1, for instance); i.e., a character on the entertainment track could buy APP (Charisma).
No help to the subject at hand but I am really interested in the mechanics of this. I love Traveller and have thought about a port / term advancement for skill progression. I would really be interested in your final results.
Cdr Vimes: I'm actually doing an overhaul for the system that grew in the doing... what started as a couple of tweaks is turning into a pretty big project, including: lifepath character generation, adding a penetration mechanic to weapons, importing and tweaking the Madness Meter from UA (and integrating it with character generation), a magic system heavily influenced by Traveller's Psionics and The Elder Scroll's magic system, streamlined skills and a more codified implimentation, and generally formalizing exactly which optional rules I'm using and what tweaks I've made to them. Once/If I got done, I was planning on making it available to this board, but if I finish the Character Generation, I'll PM.
2 - Low literacy, little to no knowledge outside of their personal sphere of contact. Any schooling was lost on them.
4 - Functionally literate. Personal knowledge is limited to their regional culture and personal subculture. Some knowledge of family professions.
6 - Literate. Experiences periodicals of personal interest on occasion. Has a functional knowledge of their world culture, but focuses on their regional culture.
8 - Educated. Well-rounded personal education with continuing educational interests. Good knowledge of their world culture, basic science, history, and local systems.
10 - Very educated. Actively seeks out news and knowledge. Broad knowledge of home world local systems both current and recent historical, good knowledge of humaniti cultures.
12 - Highly educated. As 10, but with greater depth of knowledge, and some basics of uncommon technical knowledges. Actively analyzes news of current events. Within their personal field(s), they are a walking source of knowledge regarding impactful events, their implications, and the people involved.
14 - Cutting Edge. As 12, but to the extent that they rapidly become an influencer in any relevant society, often sought out by journalists for their perceptions.
I've got a PhD and a lot of experience from various areas not covered by my study path, but I'd hesitate to say that my Edu is 22 (it may be so when speaking of education sciences etc. areas that I'm interested in, but I have very little interest in current politics or pop culture figures, for example). I think Edu represents a more general education role - a person who is interested in and follows the current worldwide news, science papers (or at least magazines targeted at general audience) meticulously enough to accrue a vast general pool of knowledge and understanding.
There are usually separate Science skills for specific areas of science and I see them as representing Masters, Licentiates or PhDs etc.
On one hand, it allows you to design a life path system that takes into account the political and cultural changes in your game world right before the beginning of the campaign. The players get to learn where their character was during "that coup" and whether they joined "this war" or how they fared during the "recession" (or whatever happened in the world right before the start of the game). Of course, it also means that you have to spend a lot of time making the system really take into account all of these things: the game should be set in a specific time and location, so that you do not have to create a lot of different versions of the system for characters born and raised in different countries, for example.
On the other hand, it is not to be used if you have a strong idea of what kind of a character you want to play, because the system always destroys those plans one way or another. Your character is created through random dice rolls - you might have thought to play a scholar, but it turns out that you plagiarised your first essay and was kicked out of uni. You think of turning to another profession, but random dice roll tells you that you were not accepted into the necessary school etc.
The Traveller system is great for quickly made characters not meant to live long or mean a lot to the players, but it is less good in situations where you, as a player, really want to create/imagine your character's life path in your own way.
It's a very old-school vibe.
There's a train of thought that one "should" random-roll a character and play what you get; that's part of the challenge, part of the fun.
Horses, as they say, for courses.
True. As I said, I have mixed feelings about it. I think RQ Glorantha's character creation takes the great from the Traveller idea, but still allows the player to design their own character. Of course, as I said, it is a very demanding process to design for the game designer / GM, and is currently designed only for human players coming from a certain geographic area in games set in a specific time.
Traveller has it easier, since it is a relatively stagnant universe (only changing from one edition to another) where randomly generated backgrounds don't have to follow a specific history or timeline.
The best way to get there is by car (driving on Oahu is easy and largely traffic-free). My compact rental comes complete with a GPS system that includes a guided tour and no volume control, so I now know the complete history of absolutely everything I passed along the way.
Christian missionaries moved in next in 1832, building a mission and school for girls; then came wealthy businessman Benjamin J. Dillingham at the tail-end of the 19th century, who built the grand Haleiwa Hotel, which was demolished in the 1950s.
Haleiwa (pronounced Ha-lay-ee-vah) presents as the ultimate beach town almost from the first minute you arrive. Every second car heading through town seems to have a surfboard either attached to its roof or sticking out of a window, while teenagers on Schwinn Cruisers peddle in the hard shoulder, one hand on the handlebars, one holding a board.
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