Even before the first adventure the characters can improve a base stat, a given skill, or a couple of combat skills. In that game, Experience only comes into play once adventuring has begun.)īut here’s a fact: Characters can begin using the Experience system as soon as they are created. (Given that I was comparing the game to Dungeons & Dragons at the time, this expectation sort of made sense. But in my imagination, the layout implied that character improvement began after adventures had begun and the characters were already rushing around on spaceships. I understand why it was done this way: I’m sure it came down to a matter of layout and page counts per book. The Experience chapter really would have been a better fit in Book 1 (Characters and Combat) rather than crammed into the end of Book 2 (Starships). It wasn’t until The Traveller Adventure that these rules were added. Given the tactical nature of the personal combat, this is a crazy oversight.
But how to integrate the canisters into the vector based combat are never described.Īnd here’s another thing: The 1977 rules, the rules I first bought, along with the revised 1981 edition, never covered rules for cover or concealment in personal combat. Here’s the thing: The rules never describe how the sand works in the midst of the tactical game. For example, in the rules for starship combat a ship can launch canisters of sand-like material that can refract incoming laser fire and reduce the effectiveness of said laser fire. Last year I really dug into the game, sorting through the rules, looking at different editions, reading blogs of those who had done the same. (No art for Traveller! We we sitting down to get this shit done!) I assumed at the time that I simply wasn’t grown up enough or sophisticated enough to play such a sparse laid out game. I would turn to it time and time again over the years, trying to sort out the modifiers, trying to figure out how to make characters who could accomplish anything given the meager number of skills the left a service with.
I fell in love with the look of the game, the promise of tense personal and starship combat, and the promise of traveling from world to world in search of adventure.īut the game also baffled me. It is a stripped down version of the TAS form, simpler to read and more focus on in-game play information.Īlso, I have move the DMs for weapons off the character sheet and have created Classic Traveller Weapon Cards which combine the DMs matrixes for range and armor for each weapon on a specific card.Ībove is a lovely Classic Traveller Character Sheet.īack in the 70s I picked up a copy of the boxed set of the Little Black Books for Traveller from the Compleat Strategist in Manhattan. Update: I have produced my own version of a Classic Traveller character sheet.