I’m sitting at our former lunch table. These days it usually doubles as my home office. Behind me is the bookshelf, and right next to me Claudia is trying to find a hotel for a few days in March. We want to go cross-country skiing. It’s not easy to find a hotel with free rooms, apparently.
Today we did you first session for the Fantasy Traveller game “Halberts”, in English, three players and me. We created characters by taking turns: everybody rolled the six attributes in order; everybody applied for the career of their choice; everybody rolled for the four skills learned; everybody rolled for the twist of fate.
The survival roll gets harder as you grow older; plus old age has detrimental effects as well after a while. So there’s always some trepidation when you roll for the twist of fate.
Now, in Traveller games this roll is called “survival roll” that’s exactly what you roll for. If you don’t make it, the character dies. It’s fixed and depends on the career you picked. When I rolled a scout character, I risked going for a second scout career, that’s how bad the odds are. Halberts is more lenient: you get to use the character’s best ability, at least in your first career, and so it is easier to make the roll when your character is young. Plus, if you don’t make the roll, there’s a table to roll on (instead of instant death). Half the results are not crippling, but there’s at least one result where you are lost or imprisoned and spend time trying to free yourself, resulting in ageing rolls, and there’s at least one other result where you die immediately.
So we were rolling up characters… and then at the end of the third career, when the last player went, a twist of fate was rolled up. And when that fateful table was consulted, instant death it was. 💀
We debated for a second what to do in this case. Should the rules at least have a clause saying that if it happened again, the player could ignore it? We decided against it. Death during character creation is something that’s special about Traveller-like games. Advancement being a gamble that you risk is one of the things that sets these games apart. It would seem to me that surrendering this would lose some of its “charm”.
(This happened as part of the Montag in Zürich project to play a lot more games.)
#RPG #Halberts #Traveller