Firefly Traveller Characters

Wednesday, February 11, 2004 3:26 AM

I was going to keep plugging away at the backstory but I think we have enough base in technology and history to work on game mechanics for a bit. I think you need a base of tech and story to do the mechanics because I agree with Marc W. Miller (the guy who designed Traveller) that game mechanics are based on basic large scale assumptions. MWM earned an MA in Sociology before he designed Traveller, and I think part of the reason the game is so good is that he understood that Character Generation in an RPG is a model of how society affects people’s lives. You have to have a picture of how the society works before you can make rules about what kind of people it produces.

Characters in Traveller are not 18 year olds setting out to conquer the Universe. They are adults, with years of experience behind them, trying to survive in the Universe (sounds a lot like the crew of Serenity).

So, to generate characters I think the basic Classic Traveller with one tweek from Mega-Traveller is pretty much on target for the Firefly ‘verse. This system breaks a characters life down into 4 year blocks of ‘prior service’ to give them the skills they need to survive. This site has a good basic outline of how it works with the tables you need to generate the original 6 character backgrounds:

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Atlantis/3631/Traveller/Rules.html

There was an advanced system developed for Traveller, but I think that system is too tied to the Official Traveller Universe (OUT) to work for Firefly. Your mileage may vary though.

The one tweek I would add is to use the Mega-Traveller system of Special Duty, an extra roll for each term to give you an extra skill per term. I’d also add ranks and promotion for enlisted and bump the commission roll for the Army up to 8+ (otherwise Mal would have clearly been an officer instead of a Sergeant).

I’d also include all the 12 extra careers from Traveller Supplement 4.

Next: Serenity’s crew as Traveller Characters.

COMMENTS: 5

Back to Blog Roll