Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Let's Read: Traveller, 1977 Edition, Characters & Combat, page 8

Okay, the next thing I see is the ‘Universal Personality Profile,’ or UPP. It’s the six characteristics listed in hexadecimal notation, 0-9 and A-F. So, a character can be summed up in six characters. That certainly makes the character sheet easy to put together. You could put a character sheet on a Post-it note with the UPP being that compact. There’s a note that it’s not required, but what’s the point of NOT using it, since it sums up the character at a glance? I like this idea, and more games should use it. As for my PC creation, Jamie Rollinson’s UPP would be 59A769, based on the rolls I made earlier.

Next up is a few paragraphs on NPCs, noting that they should be created as regular characters are. Even though it’s really quick to generate characters compared to other games, it would still take time to generate a hundred or so for quick use. Especially since, as the next paragraph indicates, the referee should roll up characters until one with the required skills pops up.

It’s things like this that make me love spreadsheets and software. No wonder people were writing up BASIC chargen programs for Traveller back in the day.

There’s also a quick note on NPC loyalty, including a reference to the character reaction table in Book 3, which I’ll eventually see.

Finally, there’s no restriction on gender or race. Does that mean any alien race, or any human sub-type (African, Asian, Caucasian, etc.)? So far, there hasn’t been any mention of aliens at all, so I guess this is referring to skin color? Well, it was the 70s. Jamie’s gender is undeclared at this point, but I’m inclined to go with ‘male.’ I’m not worried about skin color, so I’ll just leave that blank for now.

Next up, tables!

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