Introduction
A little bit about me before we begin. I've been role-playing since 1984, and I've played a wide variety of Rpgs over the years. My uncle collected Traveller, and it's always been a favorite for me. I haven't had many opportunities to run it, and even fewer to play it.
When people started talking about Dungeon 23 this year, I decided to try and create at least one thing for Rpgs per day. I know I haven't succeeded, but I eventually started developing my own star sector. I settled on the Foreven Sector, since it is adjacent to a lot of the cool sectors in Traveller lore, but is conveniently left blank. I spent quite a lot of time with the Traveller Map Poster Maker until I was satisfied with the results.
Once I had this playground to explore, I decided to roll up four characters to see what kind of ship they could afford. They ended up with four ship shares between them, so I decided to that a 300 ton far trader would be fun. All the cargo capacity of the Beowulf class, but with the expanded jump 2 capacity of the Empress Marava class. Based on the Dione Class from Moon Toad Publishing. I needed two more crew to fill out the roster, and here I am, ready to start adventuring.
Principles
I'm new to solo role-playing, but I will do my best to keep things fair and impartial. I won't fudge die rolls for skill checks or other game mechanics. I may tweak things I generate when they are story prompts. For example, I rolled that Dr Phạm hates Baronet Neuberger and they constantly bicker. While I want some conflict on the ship, I'm going to adjust that so they annoy each other and bicker frequently.
My primary sources for canon will be Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller. I may adapt from other sources as well, but those are what I consider the foundation of the universe.
House Rules
I am primarily using Traveller 5 for the rules. I know it's not the most popular choice, and I do wish it was easier for a new player to jump into. It's dense and hard to parse if you aren't already familiar with Traveller concepts. But it's also got a lot of good ideas in it, and a lot of flexible procedures for generating content on a myriad of worlds. There are a couple things I am tweaking.
- I don't like Jack of All Trades. Never have. So when a character rolls up JOT, I treat it as an open skill choice. Still makes it a strong result, but doesn't make it an overly powerful one.
- I'm changing the "This is Hard" rule so that it only kicks in if the difficulty is more than double the character's skill rating. This means a character with skill 1 still shouldn't try hard (3 dice) or worse tasks, but an experienced skill 3 or 4 character will rarely take a penalty when trying something out of the ordinary. This helps mitigate the loss of JOT, but also keeps characters from avoiding even attempting difficult tasks.
Thanks for joining me on this journey, and I hope you find it entertaining.