Built from Birth 1 – Traveller (1977)

Last week I tried out Burning Wheel character creation to mixed success. The aspect that really appealed to me, though, were the lifepath mechanics. Inspired to learn more, I’ve decided to do some history. This post is the start of a series where I’ll be surveying RPG lifepath systems since the 70s, roughly in chronological order.

As far as I can tell, the earliest system with lifepaths is Traveller, a sci-fi RPG first published in 1977. Traveller character creation has a reputation; I’ve heard about the lifepaths before, and the risk of death. I’ve even heard claims that Traveller’s character creation is a fulfilling game in itself. Other than that, I’m going into the system totally fresh.

Cracking it Open

There have been a lot of editions of Traveller, and it was a little challenging to pick one. I decided to prioritize finding a system as close to the original 1977 rules as possible, so I’m using the second edition of Traveller, Book 1, Characters and Combat from 1981. As far as I can tell, it’s the same system as the original release.

Initial thoughts: the game is pretty fun to read! It’s straightforward, it’s concise, and it explains all its relevant concepts as they’re introduced. It’s also got some legitimately funny moments of dry humor, like this part explaining campaigns:

In most cases, the scenario is intended to be a one-time affair, with the characters and situation to be discarded at the adventure’s end. Strangely enough, players generally become attached to their characters and usually want to continue their lives in further adventures. To this purpose, the campaign is designed.

The game recommends creating several test characters to learn the system. Since death during character creation is very possible, a single playable character might take multiple attempts anyway. For this post, I’ll roll up characters until I have a small crew’s worth. I’ll walk through the first one carefully, then just summarize the rest.

A Traveller, Step by Step

Despite the title of this series, player characters in Traveller start at the age of 18, where they receive stats and a name. They then perform one or more 4-year “terms of service,” either in one of several military branches, or as a scout or a merchant, or “Other.” If they survive, they eventually muster out, taking skills and some material benefits with them. There’s a lot of dice involved and fairly limited choices for the player.

Step 1 – Characteristics

A Traveller character has six stats, called “characteristics,” determined at age 18: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing. Each is generated from a flat 2d6 roll, with no way to modify or reroll results. For my character, I roll:

• Strength: 3
• Dexterity: 10
• Endurance: 3
• Intelligence: 4
• Education: 10
• Social Standing: 8

Values range from 2 to 12 with an average of 7, so this character is very physically weak, easily tired, and not very clever. They’re of more or less average class position, and pretty coordinated and well-educated.

Note: The rules specifically forbid rerolling or abandoning a character if they have bad stats. Instead, in another dryly funny passage, Traveller suggests you try to get them killed in character creation:

Obviously, it is possible for a player to generate a character with seemingly unsatisfactory values; nevertheless, each player should use the character as it is created. The experience procedures and acquired skills table offer a genuine opportunity to enhance values, given only time and luck. Should a player truly consider the character so poor as to be beyond help, the low survival rate of the Scout Service may make it the best career choice.

At this point I also have to mention Traveller’s Universal Personality Profile or UPP. In an extremely self-indulgent and scifi-bullshit move, Traveller provides a system to express all of a character’s stats succinctly in hexadecimal. If you’re not familiar with hexadecimal, it allows one digit to represent numbers up to 15 by having the letters A-F stand in for 10-15. I can’t really think of a problem the UPP solves, except to seem more computer-y. This stat block’s UPP is 3A34A8, for what it’s worth.

Step 2 – Name (and Pronouns)

My go-to source for random names, especially when the setting calls for a lot of real-world cultural diversity, is Behind the Name’s random search. After a few rolls, I settle on Ivet da Costa (she/her).

Step 3 – Enlistment and Draft

The lifepaths of Traveller are terms of service in various institutions, or the “Other” category which represents all other ways to spend your life. A character chooses a service and applies to it with a 2d6 roll; each service has a threshold for acceptance, with conditional modifiers based on characteristics:

From this table, the Other category requires only a 3+ roll, making it almost impossible to fail enlistment. On the other hand, the Marines requires a roll of 9+, much harder.

Given that Ivet has such a high Education characteristic, she gets a +2 bonus to the Navy roll, and I choose to have her apply there. I roll a 7, which is a 9 with the +2 modifier, so she is accepted into the Navy.

Step 4 – First Term of Service

In each four-year term of service, a few things can happen to a character. They can die, they can be commissioned to officer rank, and if they’re an officer they can receive a promotion. They’ll also gain skills and grow older. At the end, they can attempt to reenlist, which might not be successful. They also might be forced into another term, even if they want to leave the service.

For Ivet’s first term, we can demonstrate each of these steps individually, then summarize for future terms.

Step 4a – Survival

The first and most important question for a term of service is whether the character survives. In the Navy, survival requires a 2d6 roll of 5+. There’s a +2 modifier if the character’s Intelligence is 7 or greater, but Ivet doesn’t meet that criterion. I roll an 8, which means Ivet survives.

Step 4b – Officer Rank

All characters start as non-commissioned service members. If Ivet had been drafted, she wouldn’t be eligible for an officer commission until her second term. But since she applied and was accepted, she’s eligible for a commission on a 2d6 roll of 10+. I roll a 5, so no luck this term for Ivet. Until she gets her commission, she won’t be eligible for a promotion either, so I skip that roll.

Step 4c – Skills and Training

Each term, a character can learn skills. By default, a character learns one skill per term, but the first term of service allows two skills instead. Additionally, whenever a character is commissioned or promoted, they learn an extra skill.

To determine which skill a character will learn, the player picks one of several tables and rolls 1d6 on the appropriate service column. Two tables are the same for all characters:

The remaining tables are for “advanced education.” One table (left) is available to all characters, while the other (right) requires an Education characteristic of 8 or higher.

At this point, my highest priority is improving Ivet’s characteristics, so my first roll is on the Personal Development table. A roll of 4 boosts her Intelligence to 5. That worked well, so I choose to roll on that table again. A 6 boosts Ivet’s Social Standing to 9.

Step 4d – Aging

Four years pass in Ivet’s life and she turns 22. This won’t have mechanical effects until she turns 34. At that point, a character has to succeed on rolls or lose points from Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance each term.

Step 4e – Reenlistment

Having learned no skills, Ivet decides to apply for another term. I roll 2d6 and get a result of 7, which clears the requirement of 6+ to reenlist in the Navy, so Ivet can serve another term.

Step 5 – Subsequent Terms

At this point, I’ll summarize each of Ivet’s terms until she dies or musters out of the Navy.

Second Term (Age 22-26)

Ivet survives another four years, but still doesn’t make Officer despite her increased Social Standing. She learns how to Pilot ships and successfully reenlists for another term.

Third Term (Age 26-30)

Another four years, still no commission. Ivet’s Piloting skill develops further, presumably as she’s been relegated to cargo runs for 8 years. She’s more relieved than anything when her halfhearted application to reenlist is denied.

Step 6 – Mustering Out

Upon leaving service, a character collects some severance. These are represented by one roll for each term served, with bonus rolls based on officer rank. These rolls can each be made on either a cash table or a benefits table, with a restriction that cash can only be rolled three times.

My first roll for Ivet is on the benefits table, which earns her membership in the exclusive Travellers’ Aid Society. This will allow her to use their “hostels and facilities at all starports,” as well as occasional free travel tickets. That’s odd, given her dull Navy career, but maybe all that Piloting was actually under-the-table work for the Society using Navy equipment. That’s not legit work that earns you a commission, so maybe membership is the Society’s way of making it up to her.

Next, I roll on the cash table, netting Ivet 50,000 credits. That’s a very tidy sum, so I go back to the benefits table for the final roll. Ivet gets another +2 to her Education, bringing her up to 12. Traveller doesn’t provide a mapping for Education values, but I figure 12 must be some kind of advanced degree.

Here’s what Ivet looks like at the end of character creation:

Ivet da Costa, Pilot (Age 30)

Strength: 3	Dexterity: 10	Endurance: 3
Intelligence: 5	Education: 12	Social Standing: 9

Gear: Travellers’ Aid Society membership

Finances: Cr50,000

Skills: Pilot-2

A diligent student with excellent reflexes, Ivet da Costa took quickly to flying. While her twelve-year career as a Navy shuttle pilot was totally unremarkable on paper, she walked away better-connected and better-funded than many distinguished officers. It seems commissions and promotions aren’t the only way to advance during service.

More Characters

I’m going to run through a few more characters until I have something like a party/crew. For every character who survives, I’ll provide a stat block like I did for Ivet above. For characters who die, I’ll narrativize a little.

Jono Jain, Medic/Guard (Age 22)

Strength: 12	Dexterity: 7	Endurance: 6
Intelligence: 6	Education: 4	Social Standing: 4

Gear: Low Passage Ticket, Broadsword, Auto Pistol

Finances: Cr5,000

Skills: Medical-1, Vacc Suit-1, Electronics-1

Built like a bull, Jono had a promising career on Merchant ships. Proving himself useful fixing up both crew and circuits, he made Fourth Officer in his first term of service. Everyone was shocked when his application to reenlist (all but a formality) was denied. Maybe a powerful Merchant took some offense to the young man? Regardless, he was given his pick from the ship’s armory on the way out, so an auto pistol and a massive sword should see to the burly medic’s safety.

Val Zieliński (Deceased)

With their education, Val was quietly put on an officer track soon after joining the Army. Kept out of dangerous assignments, they were sure to rise through the ranks. Unfortunately, a freak accident (I rolled snake eyes) cut their career and their life short at the age of 18. RIP.

Silvia Dam, Engineer (Age 38)

Strength: 7	Dexterity: 11	Endurance: 8
Intelligence: 8	Education: 6	Social Standing: 10

Gear: High Passage Ticket, Blade

Finances: Cr60,000, annual Cr4,000 pension

Skills: Engineering-3, Electronics-2, Vacc Suit-1, Ship’s Boat-1

Drafted into the Navy after being rejected from the Marines, Silvia spent two decades keeping ships afloat. It was a pretty thankless job, only making Ensign after fifteen years of service, and clearly no more promotions were coming. With her experience, she should be running her own engine room, and the burdens of military life were starting to take a toll on her body. After one last term without a promotion, she took her work knife, pension, and twenty years of skill to find somewhere her talents would be valued.

Major Baron Oscar Albini, Leader (Age 26)

Strength: 9	Dexterity: 7	Endurance: 5
Intelligence: 7	Education: 11	Social Standing: 12

Gear: Middle Passage Ticket, Low Passage Ticket

Finances: Cr5,000

Skills: Tactics-3, Admin-1, Leader-1, Medical-1, Rifle-1, SMG-1

A natural leader, it’s only fitting that Oscar was born into the ruling class. In eight years of Army service, his excellent education and upbringing saw him commissioned and promoted twice to the rank of Major. He took immediately to leadership and proved to be quite the gifted tactician. This promising career was cut short by the unfortunate reality of peacetime, as Oscar’s request to reenlist was rejected. There’s always adventure to be had in the private sector though, especially with the right person to provide vision and direction.

Seong-min Quintana, ex-Marine (Age 34)

Strength: 8	Dexterity: 6	Endurance: 7
Intelligence: 10	Education: 6	Social Standing: 4

Gear: High Passage Ticket, Low Passage Ticket

Finances: Cr10,000

Skills: Cutlass-3, Brawling-2, Revolver-1, Mechanical-1

Seong-min was never anyone special before ze joined the Marines. Hir career from that point was pretty standard: ze made Captain after eight years then stayed there for eight more, ze learned to fight with sword and fists, picked up a smidge of gunplay and ship maintenance. More than anything though, service made hir clever, pushing hir to think quick and in ways ze hadn’t before. But life as a Marine is grueling, and after sixteen years Seong-min could feel that hir body couldn’t keep up like it used to. In service, that gets you killed. So ze quietly declined to reenlist and set out for a slightly less strenuous life.

I’m not a huge fan of the Traveller character sheets, which are designed to look like bureaucratic forms and so look like nothing. They also give a lot of space for stuff not covered in the lifepath system. Instead, I created a very basic spreadsheet here. There’s a template page, and then worked examples for all the characters after Ivet.

Reflections

I had a good time with this system! There was a little bit of hunting for rulings, but considerably less than Burning Wheel. The process was overall pretty consistent, not too fiddly, and led to some fun, surprising results. It was also quick, with each character being easily generated in 20-30 minutes.

A Shallow Funnel

Maybe not surprisingly for a system from 1977, it did seem a bit shallow after a few characters. A character only gets one branch of service, which is one lifepath, before they’re complete. Compared to Burning Wheel or other systems I’ve heard of, it doesn’t generate idiosyncratic characters through odd lifepath combinations. That makes the characters a little samey and the system feel a bit repetitive overall. Having done it a few times, I don’t really buy the claim that Traveller lifepaths are an engaging game on their own, despite enjoying what’s there.

Constant risk of death or discharge gives a texture of suspense and uncertainty, but also pretty severely limits the player’s input on things like the age or experience level of any given character. There’s really only a handful of player choices throughout, with dice making most of the decisions. I came to see it as a sort of “funnel” (DCC’s level-0 play, see page 7) approach to character creation, where a lot of characters won’t survive or won’t accrue an interesting backstory through the process. The tradeoff is that characters who do survive and succeed feel hard-won, which has a certain OSR (or rather, just OS) sense of fun to it.

Highlights

Traveller makes rolling the same result on a table multiple times into a fun experience. I really enjoyed when a character rolled an additional level of specialization in a skill; Ivet only learned Piloting, Seong-min received two +2 Intelligence boosts when mustering out, Oscar rolled leadership skills and promotions almost exclusively.

I was also surprised to find that some of the best narrative generation in the system came from apparent failures or dead-ends. Ivet’s pretty boring career ending in a huge payout and membership in an exclusive society produced a lot of intrigue, and Jono’s sudden critical failure to reenlist provides an interesting hook for a powerful enemy somewhere in the Merchant service.

Maybe unusual for backstory generation, I felt a lot of resonance between player and character desire. At 8 Endurance, Seong-min could only be killed by a 2 or a 3 on the survival roll; when ze lost a point of Endurance due to aging and lost that bonus, ze was a lot less likely to survive another term in the Marines. The decision not to reenlist felt very natural both in and out of character. Similarly, after seeing Silvia get largely ignored for advancement over 20 in-game years of becoming an expert engineer, I was as ready for her retirement as she was.

What Can We Steal?

As a GM and designer, when reading through a new system I’m often on the lookout for interesting ideas to adapt or reuse in other game systems. I plan to ask this question for each of the lifepath systems I look at here, and eventually I might try to design some systems using these ideas. Or if you’d like to implement anything I theorize here, go right ahead.

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to rip off in Traveller. The structure of terms is pretty rigid, and it’s all deeply infused with a particular military theme that doesn’t feel portable to other settings. And while I enjoyed the system, it’s mostly just a handful of random tables and some 2d6 rolls with set difficulty.

The element where I do see room for expansion is the idea of lifepaths as a funnel. Leaning into and amplifying Traveller’s tendency for failure, and enforcing that each player creates multiple characters, you could replicate the dynamics of a level-0 funnel. DCC, the origin of the funnel concept in OSR, describes characters coming out of a funnel as “a motley crew of survivors.” I think you could get similar death-defying oddballs out of a lifepath funnel.

The largest change I would make for this sort of funnel would be replacing some of Traveller’s outright deaths with non-lethal disqualifying events. This keeps the characters active in the world, ready for use as NPCs. This is really just an expansion on a suggestion Traveller already provides:

Most players new to Traveller spend some time in the generation of various character types. It is recommended that the referee save these characters for future use as non-player characters, hirelings, and other types.

At peak GM-systems-bullshit, these could serve as the key NPCs for Technoir-style adventure generation. Like a lot of systems to solicit player input for GM characters, I’m pretty high on this concept. It saves prep, increases player buy-in to their own NPCs, and generally working with another person’s creations can provide really interesting wrinkles and texture to GM prep and output.

What’s Next?

Next week I’ll be jumping forward to 1985 to look at Pendragon, another game I’ve heard a lot about but never engaged with. And if you know of other lifepath systems from the 70s or early 80s I might have missed with this jump, don’t hesitate to suggest them!