On 5/08/25 03:44, David Johnson - piperfan at zarthani.net (via tml
list) wrote:
> The expanded skill list is great -- and welcomed -- but "expanded" character generation didn't really grapple with the fundamental "simulation" shortcomings of the original character generation heuristic.
>
> It's still enormously focused on an era when people spent most of their careers in a service with specifically identified "military occupational specialties." That works, perhaps, if you're generating career military characters but it became apparent with Scouts and Merchant Prince that the heuristics simulated service in these careers less effectively.

It's not focused on an era, but on a setting where this is the case.
It's explicit that the PCs are unusual, not in their stats, or their
skills, but in that they've given up their nice, 'safe' careers for the
unsettled life of a 'traveller'. A PC party is a bunch of people who,
whatever their age, are experiencing some sort of 'mid-life crisis'.

Mongoose Traveller doesn't hew so closely to this, though swapping
careers often is a good way to end up forced into one of the 'Drifter'
careers. TNE didn't either, especially if doing non-random chargen (i.e.
you just choose how old the character is and what careers they went
through).

> It's also why there has never been a robust expanded character generation for the "Other" career, which would be a better simulation of the sort of broad, "whole of life" (and contemporary "gig worker") experience Tom describes. (Expansions for "Other" have typically been for a "criminal career" of one sort or another.) Instead, the focus of additional expanded character generation has typically been on an ever-increasing diversity of specific "careers." You can be a "noble" or a "journalist" or a "secret agent" or a "clergy-member" or even an "android" but you can't be a "jack of all trades."

There's nothing that says that a 'Worker' in MgT2 isn't a 'gig worker'.

--

Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>