Traveller!: First thoughts

So from reading a bunch of old-school gaming blogs and being bored with all my usual systems, I've decided to try out Traveller, a system that's pretty much the opposite of my usual taste in games (and somehow, also the opposite of games I hate). The big thing everyone knows about Traveller is that it's The Game Where You Can Die In Chargen, although recent changes have modulated that down to The Game Where You Can Merely Be Horribly Injured, Go Deep Into Debt To Pay Your Medical Bills, Rack Up A Bunch Of Enemies, And Maybe Also Get Dumped Why Not In Chargen*. And that's part of Traveller's loopy appeal - character generation is startlingly randomized. Aside from some basic choices about which numbers go to which stats and what jobs to take, the fall of the dice decides everything about your character, from whether you get promoted to what skills you have to whether you get kidnapped. What this means is that a character can get completely hosed by a series of bad rolls, or conversely become a walking god on the whim of the dice.

While this kind of inherent power discrepancy between characters kind of makes me itch, I do enjoy how it's the opposite of the everything-must-be-balanced-attitude of, say, 4e. Traveller characters emerge from the gauntlet of randomness almost always having had something totally unexpected happen to them (I've made six or seven at this point just for shits'n'giggles, each of which had something to make them stick in my mind). This is especially true when you include the supplements and their expanses of tables - Two characters, starting with the same stats and taking the same career paths, are almost certain to be unrecognizable in the aftermath. It's the promise of 3rd edition D&D - Feats make every character unique! - but even more so, because the uniqueness has been taken out of the hands of minmaxing players and given over to total randomness. It promises to make for a hell of a game.

* Which is, if anything, even crueler. A dead character just means you need to restart - it's having to actually play that poor bastard that really smarts.