Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Characters & Combat, Page 5

I'm going to add the specific book that I'm going through in the post title, since there are three in the whole set. Don't want to confuse people, do we? On to Page Five.

Okay, so now we’re told that new characters are basically useless, with no survival skills…and to get the skills they need, they’re going to have to join a service. The six mentioned are Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts (the suicide squad), Merchants, and ‘Other,’ which I guess is a catch-all for anyone who didn’t get their experience from one of the first five. No air force, which makes sense in a space-society; that would be the Navy’s purview, most likely. The inclusion of ‘merchant’ as a service is interesting; are merchants going to have some ties to the military? Or is it just a convenient way to lump it in as a career choice?

Okay, so you get to choose your service…or do you? They might not want you, because the very first thing you do after rolling ability scores and naming your character is find out if you actually get into the service you want. The roll is modified by a relevant characteristic, with the Navy being used as an example. It looks like getting into the Navy requires brains and education, which makes sense; the Navy today is a very technical service, so a star-spanning Navy would be even more so. The Navy’s enlistment roll is 8+, which means that unless you’ve got the brains and education, you’ve got less than a 50-50 chance of actually getting in.

If you fail on your enlistment roll, you don’t get a second chance; instead, you’re going to be drafted into one of the six services…which could very well be the one you tried to get into in the first place. The only difference between enlistment and drafting is that draftees can’t be commissioned in their first term of service (but can later). I wonder how you get drafted in the Merchants. Press-gangs are usually military-oriented; I suppose a big merchant conglomerate might feel the need to draft people into service, but it seems counter-productive. On the other hand, that could very well lead to merchant ships being taken over by a mutinous crew full of draftees, who then turn it into a pirate ship or something. Hmmm…

A term of service is 4 years, whether you’re drafted or you volunteer, and regardless of the service branch you’re in. And subsequent re-enlistments are also for four years. Maybe there’s some social significance to a four-year term. Or maybe it just takes that long to learn the basic skills needed to do the job. Or it’s just a convenient short-cut to give characters a base level of experience.

Of course, as we all know, there’s no guarantee that your character will actually survive the experience, as the next roll is for Survival. Throw the dice, and if you roll too low, your character is pushing up the space-daisies. And so we get Traveller’s infamous ‘die in character generation’ segment. There’s no ‘raise dead’ in Traveller, either; roll up a new character, because this one is toast. Well, at least it doesn’t take long to roll up the stats for a new guy.

Of the services listed, I think either Marines or Army would be the best fit for Jamie Rollinson, since the book mentions that Intelligence and Education are important stats for the Navy, which might leave JR in the dust. I’ll see what these careers entail later, before I make any final decisions.

Okay, so what do we see so far? Half the characters will have military experience, while the scouts and merchants make up a third of the adventuring population (with ‘Other’ being the catch-all, miscellaneous group). The idea that you could be drafted suggests a long-term, military conflict of some sort, or that the services are all chronically short of personnel and need to find warm bodies, so the government (or the conglomerates) grab them off the street. I can see characters of high social standing getting more of a chance to avoid the services they don’t like, or that are too dangerous; maybe the roll for drafting might get a modifier depending on Social Standing, so you can have a better chance at something less dangerous. A logical order might be the following: Scouts (too dangerous for noble scions), Army (not very glamorous), Marines (better than the Army), Navy (the aristocratic service from time immemorial), Merchants (where the money is) and Other (Nobles have more important things to do). Then modify the roll from there. Maybe even a negative modifier for the lowest classes.

Anyway, I’m not rewriting the rules yet; I still don’t know them. I might even be anticipating what actually is going to happen. Mostly, though, it’s just some spitballing going on. Next up, Commissions and Promotions.