Thursday, July 27, 2017

Hard to be a merchant Captain with a ship:

Hard to be a merchant Captain with a ship:

Merchant Senior Captain Haruto Shin C97C59 Age 42
6 terms Cr80,000

Skills: Broadsword-3, Jack-o-T-2, Laser Carbine-3, Pilot-1, Steward-1

Benefits: 6,000/yr Retirement Pay, Broadsword, Free Trader (new with a 40 year mortgage)

Service History:
Number of resets 323
Rolled attributes: 8A9B49


That's 323 attempts! Still, highest ranking merchant Captain there is. And why does a merchant Cap need all that broadsword and laser carbine? What sort of ship are you running?

14 comments:

  1. Your attempts to get what you want are excellent examples of why I've come to hate random character generation. I pretty much always come to the game with expectations of what I want to play, and I don't want to have the dice tell me "Nope!".

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  2. I remember once I was plahying Traveller with Bill White at Nerdly. I had rolled up two characters. The first had one term and one skill: pilot-2. Her stats were nothing to write home about.

    The second had several skills, several terms, was an officer, etc. Bill convinced me to play the first one -- the schlub.

    All I could do was fly, and I did that really well. It was a glorious adventure.

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  3. That sounds like something I would do, out of principle. What persuaded you, though? Just that that's what I wanted you to do?

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  4. "Merchant" Captain, aka Scourge of the Spinward Marches, Blackjack Chin the Gentleman Pirate

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  5. I do remember that adventure, though, and that character. At one point, you were maneuvering around the General's mansion in your shuttle, looking to make the pick-up, peeking out the open door of the shuttle at these tech-ninjas who are screaming towards you in an air/raft. What do you do? "Um...I close the door." Beautiful! ;-)

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  6. memory of past mental states is inherently fault, but I believe it was the novelty. That part of the experience as you sold it was disparate abilities, social ranks, etc of the characters and that this character would not only add to that for the group, but force me (and you, to a lesser extent) to find opportunities where a flyboy would be useful.

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  7. Oh gosh yes! And Ira was in that game, with the sort of in game logic only accessible at around ten.

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  8. I still remember your reaction when I shut the door. Momentary pause, then guffah and omg. I think I surprised you!

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  9. Which, is all fine but not /really/ what i'm talking about. Of course people can have fun with random characters, and "blah blah creativity is better than yours cause I was forced into it" and all that... but if I'm being forced into being a schulb cause of creation dice rolls when i had a specific other character in mind, I'm probably not going to be having an ideal time.

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  10. Sounds good, Matt. No more random character creation for me!

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  11. sigh Did I say you couldn't use it? No, no I did not. I was trying to point out why William's posts illustrate why I dislike random generation... but fine, I'll just shut up then.

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  12. My schlub was fantastic.

    At this point in my life, I'm pretty sure of a couple of things:
    a) The fun I have at the gaming table has little if anything to do with the power level I'm playing at, or even how this relates to other PCs.
    b) The skills and crap that a character have distort the conversation that is the game.
    c) Having a smaller set of skills/moves/whatever is tremendously easier, as the degree with which I interface with the system goes down by about a million percent. I can instead focus on the evolving conversation.

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  13. As I'm fairly sure I've observed before, we have very different goal/ playstyles when it comes to games.

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