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I like 'lifepath' mechanics in roleplaying games, so I've decided to do a series of reviews of games with such. Traveller was the first game I encountered with a lifepath system, so it seems appropriate to start the series off by looking at the modern edition of the game.

Summary

The career-path based character creation is the best part of this game, but that's hardly faint praise.  The lifepath system is an excellent combination of choice and randomness, while the rest of the system gives you what you need to play a decent sci-fi game.

Setting at a glance

This is the "Core Rulebook" and as such is mostly rules with only an occasional bit of overt setting information here and there.  I wholeheartedly approve of this decision by Mongoose; the primary audience for this game is going to be gamers that are already fans of Traveller and have been collecting books for the past 30 some years; they don't need any more setting info.  The decision also creates a secondary audience, mainly gamers who simply want a decent, generic sci-fi system and don't want to be bothered with the default setting.

That said, there is a lot of implied setting information simply in how the rules work.  There are starships that can travel from one star to another at speeds faster-then-light.  Many of these stars have planets with some form of life, and some of this alien life is intelligent.  There is a human civilization spanning many, many star systems, and well as several interstellar alien civilizations as well.  Despite all this, thing look pretty familiar, in that people are still people (many of the aliens are people as well), they have jobs and worry about money and some of them resort to criminal activities to get said money.

System at a glance

You do most things by rolling two six-sided dice and adding them together, then adding or subtracting various modifiers; if your total is 8 or above you succeed, otherwise you fail.  You usually add a skills and stat modifier, as well as various difficulty modifiers.  It's a pretty standard system; there's not much to love or hate about it, but it's perfectly functional.  There's a robust combat system for both personal fights (on foot and in vehicles) and a starship combat system for starship fights.  There's elaborate rules to generate starships and figure out how much they cost.  There's tables to help you design planets, rules for animals and environmental dangers you might encounter on these planets, and there's even some rules to cover trading goods from one planet to another.  In short, the rules cover much of what you're likely to need for a "travel around and do stuff in space" campaign.  There's even a section of psionic rules if you want to run a "science fiction with weird powers" campaign.

Characters at a glance

A quick look at the character sheet reveals that player character have stats and skills; armour and equipment (with space set aside to write down various values of both); allies, contacts, enemies, and rivals, and finances (broken down into pension, debt, cash on hand, and monthly ship payment.  There's also space to list your career history as well.

The six stats are generated by rolling 2d6 and assigning them as you see fit.  They exist on a scale of 0 to 15 (for humans, aliens generally have get +2 or -2 to a couple of stats), but stats are mainly used to generate a modifier between -3 and -3 (depending on where they fall between 0 and 15).  A character's stats will fluctuate as a character progresses through their careers; training can improve them, and age and injury can degrade them.  In play, they can be increased through equipment and augmentation (and age and injury can still degrade them).

If your education stat is high enough, you'll get to pick a few skills before you worry about careers, based on what sort of environment your character.  After you've finished progressing through you careers, you can round out your character with a few more skills based on what sort of campaign the group decides to run.  Everything else is generated by progressing through various careers, which form the bulk of Traveller character creation.

Career system

Your character starts their professional life at 18 and from there you advance her through her own personal timeline in 'terms' of four years.  You spend each term in a career, which will give you at least one skill (or stat) bump and at least one roll on an 'events' table.  Each of the 12 careers is broken down further into three 'assignments', which are really just specialties within that career (each has it's own picture, which I rather like).  There are plenty of important decisions to make as you go through the process, but there's a lot of randomness as well.

Before your character can enter a career, you have to make a qualification roll (2D6 and add a stat).  You generally get one randomly rolled skill, but you get to decide which table to roll on (your first term in a career you get to pick a skill, and the first term ever you get six basic skills automatically).  Each career has a 'development' table (which generally raises a stat), a 'service' skills table (gives you one of the basic skills of the career), and three specialist tables (one for each assignment).  If you have a high education stat, you pick up another skill each term by rolling on the 'advanced education' table.  You then make a survival roll (another stat roll).  If you survive, you can then roll for advancement (another stat roll), and if you succeed you get yet another skill roll and your rank in that career goes up.  At some ranks your character gets a perk of somesort (often another skill).  Finally you get to roll on the 'events' table for that career, which is where you pick up enemies, allies, contacts, and rivals.  You can also decide you made a connection with another PC and through that connection picked up yet another, another skill.

Still with us?  Good.

If you fail to qualify for a career, you can apply for the draft (where you randomly enter a military-ish career), or just spend the term as a drifter (which is much like the other careers, except it has no qualifications but generally doesn't pay well).  The more careers you've had, the harder it is to qualify for the next one.  If you fail a survival roll, you're forced to roll on the 'mishaps' table.  These range from bad to worse, but they all get you kicked out of your career.  Injury (involving stat loss) and betrayal (involving friends becomming enemies) are quite common.You can also get kicked out if you roll to low on your advancement (though you don't suffer a mishap in this case).

When you leave a career you get some rolls on the benefits table (the higher your rank, the more benefits).  This is where you pick up credits, starting equipment, ship shares, or other odds and ends.  If you lasted long enough in a career you might even get to retire from it and collect a pension.  You can then (attempt to) enter another career, or decide it's time to start adventuring.  You start making rolls on the aging table at age 34, at the end of the fourth term.  Aging can lower stats, but with a bit of luck you won't feel the effects for the first few terms.

Got all that?

As should be apparent, character creation in Traveller is a lengthy and involved process.  What's probably less apparent is that it can also be a lot of fun, at least when approached with the right attitude.  I find the randomness actually increases involvement.  You decide what your character wants, but fate may rule something else happens, but then you get to decide how your character responds to this.  The events and mishaps make your character's background more interesting, and also give you further opportunity to think how your character would react; many events require a choice or a skill roll, with multiple outcomes depending on your choices and competency. The 'connection' rule is also good fun, since you and another PC get to narrate a little mini-adventure between yourselves, and you're even rewarded with a skill for your efforts.

On the other hand, it can be frustrating if you have specific goals in mind, but are unable to reach them.  Experienced Traveller players are pretty good at massaging the system to give them what they want, but there's still no guarantees.  One trick is to set up your stats to maximize your chances at qualification, survival, and advancement rolls.  Another trick is to always have a backup plan in case things don't work out just the way you want.  You might try and join the scouts with the hopes of being a hotshot pilot, but if they refuse you, hope you get drafted as a navy pilot.  If a quarrel forces you out of the navy, you might try your hand at piracy.  Still, the randomness means you can't necessarily get the skills you want.  Picking up low levels of a skill is easy, but higher levels depend on rolling the same number multiple times on a D6.  Mishaps can be devastating to character concepts as well, reducing good stats to poor.  To enjoy the system you have to be willing to "roll with the punches" (or "roll with the rolls", as the case may be) and modify your character concept as the situation demands.  It's set up so you can build your character around events, not tailor events to fit your character.

The system does work pretty well, in that it usually gives you an interesting and reasonably competent character, even if it wasn't the character you were expecting.  You tend to average 1-3 skills per term (I think you could theoretically pick up seven, but this isn't going to happen every term), but these will be spread across a variety of skills, so most of your skills will be ranked 0 or 1, with skills ranked past 3 being quite rare at character creation.  You can keep cranking through the terms, but this eventually becomes counter-productive as age and injury catch up with you.  Still, most players find it worth it to risk a few aging roll to finish off a career, so it's not unusual for characters to start in their 40s or 50s (and older characters are possible, though some group will want to put limits on this).  There's also not much incentive to take less then three terms.  The career system doesn't produce especially balanced characters, but any character should be able to fill some useful niche in a group, especially if the characters are made together (and I suppose you always have the option of starting over, if you get a character you just can't stand).

Aliens

The above character creation rules implicitly assume you're making human characters, but with slight modification you can make aliens as well.  The Traveller universe contains hundreds of aliens, but only six of them are considered 'major races', in that they developed jump drives independently and have established themselves as a major force in the galaxy.  The five other major races are given specific write-ups (complete with a bit of overt setting info), and there's a good list of generic alien traits that can be used to builds.

These rules do a good job of representing human-like aliens, but the system isn't really robust enough to handle some of the weirder alien races in the Traveller universe (much less what gamers can come up with on their own).  Aslan and Vargr (cat-people and dog-people, respectively) are just fine (as are the Zhodani, which are really just another human culture).  The Drone are OK, but the system glosses over some of the finer aspects of their culture and physique (they work like small flying humanoids, which I guess they essentially are).  The K'kree, on the other hand, are a centaur-like race, but they work mechanically like any large humanoid.  The Hivers are a non-humanoid, starfish-like race, but they function like humanoids that can see in the infrared spectrum.  There's no good way to represent extra limbs or flexible limbs or an inability to stand upright, much less different ways of metabolising or thinking.  I find this to be one of the more disappointing aspects of the game.

Aliens use the human careers, which is functional but passes up a golden opportunity to detail the difference between alien cultures.  I'd definitely like to see some supplements giving us specialized alien careers.

The rules for non-sapient aliens are given under the 'encounters' part of the game, and are much better (or perhaps I just have lower standards for non-PCs).  There's a bunch of tables to generate a creatures based on habitat and behavior.  It's what you need to generate a quick alien-life-form encounter, though I wouldn't try and use it to build a realistic ecosystem.

Optional character creation

There's two variant character creation methods that are worth mentioning.  One is that there's a point-based system for players that hate the randomness of the default career system.  It makes min-maxing much easier, but is otherwise as balanced as the default system (which isn't very balanced anyway).  You get more points the older your character is, and these points are used to buy stats, skills, rank, and benefit rolls.  No random events, which means you're not going to make any contacts (but no enemies either).  It seems like a perfectly functional system, but lacks the excitement of the default system.

There's also an 'Iron Man' option, which has a character die when they fail a survival roll (rather them ejected from a career with a mishap).  This hearkens back to the old-school Traveller games, where death during character creation was quite common.  Oddly enough, this may results in more balanced characters, in that if you roll good stats you don't want to risk them, so you only take a few terms and you get a high-skill low-stat character.  If you roll mediocre stats you take more risks and get more rewards (or you die and stat over again), making a low-stat high-skill character.  Of course, some people will just keep plugging through the process until they get great stats and just the skills they want, but you can always drive these people from your table with cries of "munchkin!"

Systems

Descriptions are given for each skill, as well as some modifiers for common situations.  When you first get a skill, it's at rank 0, and you raise it from there.  Skills are only acquired in play through training (there's no experience or 'learn by doing' mechanic).  Training takes weeks, and it takes even more weeks the more ranked skills you have.  This is some compensation for younger characters, in that their lack of initial skills let them train in just the skills they want (and given the way space travel works, they'll be some downtime in which to train).  The skills are mostly what you'd expect from a sci-fi game.  There's forty-some skills, but many are broken down into specalities that have to be taken seperatly.  Many of the skills have to do with life in space, starship operation, or trade, but there's a variety of other skills as well.

Personal combat is pretty generic, but works fine.  It's skills based, like most everything else.  Each participant rolls initiative then takes turns beating on each other, using a variety of weapons provided.  Damage is taken directly off of the three physical stats, and you die when they're reduced to zero.  There's a variety of tactical actions for characters to take, and a bunch of things (such as conditions and cover) which might complicate things.  There's a nod given to high-tech combat variables like senors and communications.  Vehicles work much the same, except they have different actions they can make, and they take damage in various locations with various effects (mainly involving parts of your vehicle breaking, until the whole thing is broken).  On the whole, the general combat system is a good system, but there's dozens of other games out there with equivalent systems.

Starship combat is more exciting for me, since I feel many games don't do this well.  Characters on a ship fill different positions: the captain is bellowing orders while the gunner is shooting stuff while the marine is trying to repel borders while the engineer is trying to repair the engine.  The system is set up to give a bunch of people something to do, which should keep most of the PC occupied and entertained.  The weapons are pretty much what you expect to find in a sci-fi game, mostly consisting of missiles and various types of beam weapons (my favorite is the 'sandcaster' which fires a cloud of grit designed to scatter lasers and protect the ship).  Like vehicles, ships suffer damage to specific ship's systems.

There's psionic rules, but they're presented as an almost optional system.  To develop psionic powers a character must be tested, at which time they roll to determine their psionic strength.  You subtract your terms from this roll, so younger character have more psionic potential.  If you have a positive psi strength score and access to training, you make checks to see what talents you can pick up (each check gets more difficult, so you might not get all you want).  Talents work much like skills, in that they have ranks that can be increased through training.  The talents are: telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, awareness, and teleportation.  Each talent has several powers, but using them requires spending from a pool of points you get from your psionic strength.  You get these points back on an hourly basis, but only if you don't use your powers for a few hours.  There is a psionic career, but you generally can't take it without the referees permission (though one of the life events will let you contact an institute and enter the career).  There was some attempt to make these powers seem scientific (for example, a teleportor need to worry about both momentum and potential energy differences), through they're still one of the 'softer' aspects of Traveller's sci-fi.

Technology

Traveller assumes that different planets have access to different degrees of technology, and so categorizes technology by 'tech level'.  TLs range from: stone age (tech level 0); through modern earth (between 7 and 8); to 15 (black hole generators and functional immortality).  Equipment is always given a tech level, and worlds have a tech level to determine what they produce.  The tech level is linear, in that there's no rules for (for example) a society that focuses on bio-engineering rather then mechanical engineering, though planets will generally focus on some goods over others (giving them ample reason to trade with each other).

Generally, the high tech equipment list is pretty tame, with most things being an extrapolation of things you can buy today.  There's laser weapons (as well as more exotic beam weapons), but these function much like modern guns.  Computers are smaller and/or more advanced, such that you can have an 'intelligent interface' which allows you to access 'expert' program that pretty much mimic skills.  There's 'augments' that raise stats and skills, as well as some simple cybergear like built in weapons or computers.  There's robots that are pretty advanced, but no strong AI or perfect androids.  There's anti-grav technology, which eventually gets small enough to be used on a personal scale (allowing characters to jump around wearing a grav-belt).  There's generally no nanotech or transhuman technology, or at least such things aren't emphasized.

There's comprehensive starship rules, allowing you figure out exactly what components your ship will have and what they'll cost.  One of the common benefits you can get from a career is 'ship shares', which give you partial ownership of a starship.  The PCs are likely to pool their shares and start with one or more ships, and they're welcome to take out a loan to get a ship even if they can't afford one outright (this gives them a perfect excuse to adventure from planet to planet in an attempt to pay off the mortgage on their ship).  There's several well-illustrated (complete with maps) sample ships provided.  Faster-then-light ships use a jump drive in the default Traveller setting (though there's some brief rules on different flavors of drives for different settings).  Jump technology is pretty distinctive to the Traveller universe.  Each drive has a rating (generally between 1 and 5) which determines how far (in parsecs) your ship can go in a jump.  Each jump takes a week (you spend the week incognito and isolated in jump space), and uses 10% of the ship's tonnage in fuel per parsec.  Most ships don't carry enough fuel for multiple jumps, so they plan on buying or harvesting fuel from their destination.  Any fast ship, or any ship that needs to make multiple jumps in a row, is going to have to devote much of it's space to fuel.  The fastest ships can't make multiple jumps, and any military ship is likely to be outgunned by a slower ship (so planetary defenders often don't have jump drives at all).  There's also no FTL communication in the default Traveller universe, other then courier-by-jump ship; so you have mail ships that are nothing but a cockpit, some engines, and a huge reservoir of fuel.

Campaigns

The rules could be used to play a variety of science fiction campaigns, but there is additional support for a campaign that involves travelling from place to place, trading goods and doing odd jobs on the side.  To run this sort of campaign your PCs need places to go, so there's a world creation system involving deciding: size, atmosphere, hydrographics, population, government, law level, and technology level.  There's even tables to randomly generate a planet if you need one quickly.  Your PCs will need people to meet, so there's a list of traits (which can also be rolled on) to make them more interesting (this also comes in handy to flush out the allies and enemies that are generated through character creation).  There's a list of sample patrons, each one having something for the PCs to do, a reward they'll offer, and six 'complications' to make the PC lives more interesting.  Finally, there's pretty comprehensive trade rules.  You can transport passengers, freight, mail, or more illicit goods.  The price you'll get depends and where you're traveling from and to, your skills at making a deal, and the danger you're likely to face.

Rating

I don't really know the intent of the separate 'style' vs. 'substance' rating, so I've come up with my own definitions for each.  I use the 'style' rating to describe the general "wow" factor of the game, thus it's a measure of how excited I was by the premise of the game, and how easy I think it'll be to get others excited by that premise.  Appearence and easy of use can be a factor as well. I use the 'substance' rating to determine how well it delivers on its premise, thus it's a measure of how well the game plays and if it has any mechanics I think are especially neat.

Style=4  The book has a classy, dignified look that I'm quite fond of, but it has little to distinguish itself from the myriad of other editions of Traveller out there.  It deserves 4 stars for it's presentation but only 3 for originality.  I chose 4 stars because Mongoose's webpage has an System Reference Document to download (as part of their developer's pack), which gives you an invaluable rules reference.  I feel this is a pretty stylish thing to do (at least stylish enough to serve as a tiebreaker).

Substance=4  This is one of my favorite character creation systems, and I don't usually like random creation, so I'm tempted to give the game five stars.  I try to reserve five stars for games that are the best of the best.  This is a very good set of rules, but it's not the best sci-fi game out there, nor is it unequivocally the best Traveller game out there.  Specifically, I equivocate on the rules for aliens, which GURPS Traveller does quite well.  Still, it'd recommend this to anyone who wanted a nice generic scifi game, or who likes the Traveller universe but has been unhappy with previous editions of the rules.  If you like a randomly generated character background, add another star.