House Rules

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Creating and Modifying Characters

Character creation follows the standard procedure as laid out in Book 1 except for the following modifications.

Generating Attributes

Rather than rolling 2D for each of these, players may divide 45 points between the six attributes as long as no attribute is allocated less than 2 points or more than 12 points.

Failing a Survival Roll

Character muster out on failing a survival roll. This represents some accident which prevents the characters further service rather than the character's death. Examples could be a merchant who is automatically sacked and blackballed for oversleeping and missing the take-off of his ship or a scout crippled in an accident on an unexplored world.

Skills and Experience

Because modern roleplayers have trouble with the idea of a random character, players may select skills from the appropriate skill tables rather than rolling for them. this allows the player to tailor their character's abilities rather than accepting what the dice give.

Mustering Out

This campaign involves characters living close to the edge and struggling to find the next meal, the next starship part, the next starport authority bribe, etc. As such, I will only allow one roll on either the Cash or the Benefit table on mustering out regardless of the number of terms served. Any result of a ship is ignored and re-rolled.

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The Benefits of Nobility

Coming from a noble family has its benefits and drawbacks. The best description of these can be found here. Any character with SOC attribute of B (11) or higher may elect to use this procedure.

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Modified Skill Resolution

The classic Traveller skill resolution system is a little too freeform and arbitary. This represents my attempt to impose a little order on it. The system described here is a combination and re-working of the GDW Task Resolution profile and various additions by Sigg Oddra on the Citizens of the Imperium forum.

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2d6 roll required
    Simple task          4+
    Routine task         8+
    Difficult           12+
    Extreme challenge   16+

DMs + relevent skill
    + attribute derived bonus/penalty
    +/- equipment derived modifier
    +/- environmental/situational derived modifier
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The attribute derived bonus is +1 if the character's attribute is equal or greater than the next higher task difficulty, +2 if character's attribute is equal or greater than the task difficulty two higher. The same applies for negative penalties except that it is calculated for lower difficulties.

The penalty for an unskilled attempt at a task is DM-3. Some skills such as Gun Combat may at the referee's discretion use a skill level of zero to avoid the penalty for unskilled used but without receiving any positive bonus.

In melee combat, a character may choose to fight normally, adopt a purely defensive posture (inflicting a DM-3 penalty on the attacker), or to choose a purely offensive posture (gaining a DM+3 on his or her attack rolls).

Three skills have special uses. They are pools of points which can be added to other skills in certain conditions. The number of ranks a character has Jack-o-Trades can be added to other non-combat skills to boost the effective level of the skill. For example, a character with Jack-o-Trades-1 can add this rank to boost his or her Electronics-1 to lectronic-2 for a particular skill test. The character may do this a number of times each session equal to the number of ranks the character has in Jack-o-Trades.

Tactics skill is used in a similar way for combat-related skill tests. Leadership allows the Jack-o-Trades and Tactics skill pools to be used by other characters in the group.

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Abstract Wealth System

The abstract wealth system removes the fiddly account associated with keeping track of income and expenses in Traveller. basically, it converts all sales and purchases into a task of typical difficulty based on the book listed price of the item in question. The relevant attribute is Social Level.

To determine the difficulty of the task resolution roll, determine the exponent of the price of the item. For example,

an item costing Cr8 has an exponent of 0;
an item costing Cr12 has an exponent of 1;
an item costing C845 has an exponent of 2;
and item costing Cr1298 has an exponent of 3;
etc.

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