Hailing frequencies open (Intro & OOC chat)

Welcome everyone! This is the Out Of Character (OOC) thread. Use it for anything not related to the current game situation.

Golden rules
Be courteous, respectful, and avoid offensive or derogatory posts. Communication among all should be polite and one of mutual respect.

This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. All other rules are only to help us know how to work together to have fun. If it isn't fun, something is wrong and we need to fix it.

Conventions
I use the following conventions:

- "Character communication is in bold"
- Character thought is in itallics
- Sometimes, I use colors for additional emphasis, like on a characters nameIf you don't know how to do that, there is this helpful formatting guide from Adam

Dice
After character generation, feel free to roll a skill anytime you think there is a risk or interesting result in failure, so the game keeps moving. If its not necessary, I'll simply hide and ignore the dice.

But don't worry if you don't know what / when to roll. I'll ask it or may even roll it for you sometimes, so we don't have to wait.

If you don't know how to roll the dice, there is this helpful guide from Naatkinson.

I'll create a custom sheet for the game this week, but if any of the veteran players that I invited wants to volunteer for it, I'll be very grateful. =)

PS: If you're new and don't have experience in submitting a GP character sheet, don't worry, we will help you soon enough. But you can start rolling the dice in your thread in the meantime. ;)

Thank you for accepting the invite! =) Your next step is to go to the character generation thread with your name and start rolling your attributes =)

Can I play an android whose programing is so low that 'she' is regulated to doing custodial work but can kick in as a member of ship security when necessary?

I don't think that fits the Character Generation rules. You must be human, sorry. Synths are usually NPCs and very advanced (and expensive) property of the ITC

Just for comparison's sake, what is the rough Traveller/Cepheus tech level equivalent of the setting?

Do we have flying cars (aka flitters or air/rafts)?
Do we have laser guns?
Do we still have slug throwers?
How about the space suits?

Just trying to get a feel for the setting.

We can detail that together.

We need to keep computers, usability and AI pretty low, gritty sturdy spacecraft from the 80s movies, but we can have laser guns, Gauss weapons, advanced spacecraft, etc. Think Star Wars and Aliens, I guess. Something along those lines:

Perfect!

So flying cars and blasters!

(I recommend "blasters" instead of lasers to keep things more undefined. When you use "lasers" people can tend to want to do weird things with mirrors, "reflec" and whatever. Using blasters eliminates all of that, but still keeps the "ray guns" feeling.)

On the computer front, one weird thing about Star Wars is that they don't really have any sort of "wifi" as we know it. Sure, they can use giant antennas to blast information from one spot to another, but for a lot of stuff you have to put the info on a data card, pull the card out, then put it into the destination system. Can we keep that kind of thing?

Oh! You mention Star Wars. Does the Force/magic/psionics exist? Or, more properly, does it exist as a player option? My preferred answer is "It may exist or it may not exist, but *you* don't get it." So, maybe there is an NPC race of sorcerers somewhere, but they are an NPC race, not the PCs. (The reason I ask is because while I recommend not having/using it, I can tell you right now that if I can be a sorcerer or jedi, I will try to be a sorcerer or jedi. Just fair warning. :) )

1- Blasters it is.

2 - Let's have data cards as well. I will miss the wifi, but I think it makes a more interesting adventure.

3- Psionics and magic... It may exist or it may not exist, but *players* don't get it.

I've just run some simulations here with the aging rules... Even though, on average, they were balanced... There were some unlucky simulated souls that were "crippled" by this.

So I reduced the frequency and increased the required ages. @daryen will be happy to know that he won't need to roll it anymore at 31 =D

Yay! Hank performs a small happy dance, though he doesn't know why yet.

Hey everyone!

I should have checked that before, with the messy and complicated world that we live in, with plenty of wars, greedy and lack of dialog... Specially in Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

This game is definitely not about wars, not about the suffering and the terrible things that happen... But some player characters may want to apply for military careers and go through Boot Camp and Academy. There may be Tour of Duties and related military operations. There may be coups and revolutions. All of that only during character generation, and only for those PCs in military careers. When we reach the main adventure with the crew, our focus will be in something else.

I know that even reading about those things, in other players threads, can bother some people. I respect that. Some of you praised my writing. Thanks! But it may be too realistic in this case (my grandfather was in WWII and I read a lot of Robert A. Heinlein as a teenager). So that's not great...

In essence, if that's not your kind of game, feel free to DM me. Military sci-fi is a very specific genre and I know that it can be offensive.

A game system question that is also relevant to chargen: is EMPATHY the same as CHARISMA, or it a derived attribute? In a similar vein, is DEXTERITY the same as AGILITY, or is it a derived attribute? In the section on the potentially debilitating effects of aging, there are four stats listed that you need to check against to see if they've diminished over time:
Strength
Dexterity
Wits
Empathy

I'm sorry if this has been covered elsewhere; I looked and didn't see it in any of the reference materials.

Sorry, those were typos. Those names were from a previous version of the rules.

I fixed it now: Agility and Charisma

More playtesting feedback: I like the aging mechanic: the idea that the higher an attribute you have, the more you have to lose and the more likely you are to lose it. It is very elegant, mechanically, even if it means there's a good chance for a mediocre character to deteriorate into decrepitude before play even begins. I guess that's better than dying in Traveller chargen!

But that's how I feel about the mechanic. What's the in-game reason that characters would lose attributes at such a young age as 33? Do people in this game universe age at a much faster rate? Life is really, really hard in the ITC? I can see losing STR if a character was in a particularly sedentary career, but if a person was actively working as a warrior...the way the game is set up now, they'd be more likely to lose STR than someone with average STR, regardless of physical activity. Similar question for AGY. But for WIT and CHR, I don't see how they would diminish at all with people so young as 33 (and the 4d6 makes it much more likely that both WIT and CHR will decrease); IME, both thinking and charisma increase as people age through their forties.

Yeah, I agree with you. It was created from a mechanical point of view. Many years in chargen give you a lot of skills, so I was trying to balance it.

Moreover, because you lose if you roll below, 4d6 actually makes it harder to lose Wits and Char, I guess.

I've been thinking on trying to balance that with negative events, somehow, and remove aging altogether.

Quite right! I got that backwards completely!

I think I found a way to balance that with events. Thank you for your feedback spaceseeker19.

Removed aging effects from character generation and updated that section to further describe events.

And I have added a custom character sheet for us. See the chargen thread.

I tried to make it so you don't need to mess with the code, just click on Create Character, fill in the text fields and submit it for approval.

If you have any suggestions or improvements, feel free to do so. =)

Updated your character sheets to include Health and more skills slots. Any issues, just let me know. :)