On Creating a Frictionless Traveller, Part II: Character SheetsThe character sheet that comes...

On Creating a Frictionless Traveller, Part II: Character Sheets

The character sheet that comes stock with the edition of Traveller I own (Mongoose Traveller1st edition, 2008) leaves a lot to be desired, although that almost doesn’t matter: I don’t own a scanner and can’t find it online, so I needed to make my own anyway.

With no scan available, here’s a grainy photo so you know what I’m talking about:

Here’s a few issues with the built-in sheet:

1. Traveller doesn’t use hit points. Instead (like Numenera, and other RPGs), damage reduces ability scores directly. The built-in character sheet doesn’t have a good way to differentiate current ability scores vs. maximum ability scores.

2. Similar to D&D, ability scores grant a die modifier to skill checks. When ability scores change, so does the modifier. Unlike D&D, ability scores in Traveller can change every round. The algorithm for calculating the modifier isn’t immediately obvious, so this has to be looked up every time someone takes damage.

3. Weapons and armour tend to change more often in Traveller campaigns than in D&D campaigns because many weapons are illegal on many worlds (see Post I). However, each weapon (particularly ranged ones) come with quite a lot of information associated with them, as in addition to any special rules they might have (and many do), they have damage, heft/recoil, ammo, rate of fire, and range modifiers at various distances. Armour isn’t as complex, but is still annoying to change frequently.

4. As a sci-fi game, a lot of gameplay comes from neat gadgets PCs can purchase. However, space for equipment on the main character sheet is tiny.

5. Character creation involves going through several four-year terms. This generates a ton of information, but the default character sheet relegates this to a tiny corner.

My homebrew character sheet uses the following solutions to these problems (don’t print these screenshots, PDFs will be available below):

1. Each ability score now has much more space, and separate boxes for the modifier, the current number, and the maximum number.

2. To solve problem #2, the table that converts ability scores to modifiers is printed directly on the sheet.

3. Instead of making players copy down the many, many numbers associated with each weapon, I made playing-card sized cards for each weapon in the book and have space on the character sheet to paper clip them in. When weapons change, it’s as easy as swapping a card. Armour gets an extra mini-card for ablative or reflective overlays.

4. There’s much more room for equipment on my character sheet, made up for by shrinking the Skills section. Traveller characters tend to only have a few skills, so they can write in the ones they have, rather than listing all available ones.

5. The entire back page is for character creation information.

A few things that came up since creating these character sheets that I ought to fix for a later one:

· The blank section for “Weapons” should probably have “unarmed combat” stats on it.

· There’s no space for recording Rads a character has absorbed

I’m not an artist by any means. There’s no question that my character sheet could be prettier. But (for my purposes anyway), it’s much more functional than the one that comes with the book.

I’ll include download PDFs of the weapon and armour cards, and the new character sheet, below. Margins were determined based precisely on what my printer could print, so YMMV.

Traveller Character Sheet

Traveller Armour Cards

Traveller Weapon Cards