[Traveller OOB] Player Characters
While Out-of-the-Box Traveller leaves a lot open in terms of technology and setting detail, it does make a particular kind of player character. Traveller PCs are not first-level characters. They're experienced, grizzled, been around the block a few times. They put in one or more tours of duty with a spacegoing service and then were forced out or mustered out, or maybe chose to leave for reasons of their own. It's not a game for playing the wide-eyed new kid.
Traveller chargen is almost completely random. As mentioned, one of the game's themes is "playing the hand you're dealt". Normally this isn't what we want in a roleplaying game. We want to choose who our characters are. But I think that Traveller's "random lifepath" approach can make an interesting change of pace. There'll always be a next game where you can go back to the usual way of doing things, right?
Players should bring no preconceived ideas of what kind of character they want to play. Let the dice fall where they may, and then figure out who the character is from the results. Instead of hoping for a hotshot pilot and being disappointed when you roll Streetwise instead, don't bring any expectations until you're done, and then ask yourself, "What kind of person spends four years in the Navy and comes out a black market wheeler-dealer?"
Also, you'll have more than one character. One old-school touch of OOB is having multiple characters per player. Right now I'm thinking four PCs per player--including the ones that die during chargen. (I don't need to tell you that PCs can die during chargen, right? Traveller is famous for it.) Combined with the structure of a West Marches campaign, there'll be maybe 30-50 PCs, 4-8 of whom will go on a particular session's adventure.
In the way of a West Marches campaign, some players will say, "Let's explore the ruins on Planet X this weekend". Everyone who's going to be available that weekend picks which one of their two or three surviving PCs they'll play, and shows up for the session. Adventure happens, and afterward they go make in-character posts to the campaign's email list, in which their PCs show up at the spaceport bar and brag about their exploits to those who missed that adventure (or toast a fallen comrade, depending on how things went).
In the Traveller RPG, "travellers" are an actual group within the fictional setting. Like shadowrunners in Shadowrun, they're part of a community, composed of people who have chosen (or fallen into) a particular lifestyle. They mostly know each other, at least professionally or by reputation, and there's a sense of camraderie. To quote from another of the Traveller OOB blog entries, the PCs "might well have known each other (either in the same service, or in some operation involving several branches), or know someone who knows someone. They have skills. And, most importantly, they have each decided to head off into a subsector beyond the reaches of the civilized sphere of space. Going back home and settling down isn’t for them. They’ve got a spark of the wanderlust, of a desire to make more of themselves, of not fitting in where you just sit around with a job. The PCs spot these qualities on each other. They sniff them out. They know, 'You’re one of us'." My idea to have frequent space travel result in travellers aging differently from the planet-bound would only further reinforce that sense of community and shared experience.
Another principle is that there shouldn't be NPC adventurers, because the spotlight should be on the PCs. Combining that with the large West Marches player pool and the mulitple PCs per player, and we get a rough idea of the size of the traveller community in the Trailing Marches region: about 30-50.
I imagine these 30-50 kindred spirits hanging out together at the spaceport bar between missions, buying each other drinks or playing darts, or having cookouts on the tarmac between two parked ships, where everyone shows up with a folding chair and some booze and food and just shoots the shit for an evening.