COVID Character: Echo Kennedy

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Echo Kennedy

Aliases: None
Pronouns: She/her
Character Concept: A badass space pirate
Character Stats: A space pirate of questionable badassitude
Campaign: The Pirates of Drinax
System: Traveller 3rd Edition
Campaign Status: Abandoned

I have had intermittent interest in Traveller over the last while, so when someone expressed interest in GMing a game, I was happy to jump in and make a character.

Traveller character creation is interesting, fraught, and semi-legendary. It's game where you can die during character creation. At least, you could in earlier editions. Now you just have expensive surgery, live, and start the game even deeper in debt than you were previously.

(Cue that faction of the OSR gnashing and screaming about how "the wokes" have made Traveller into a kiddy game, I guess.)

Echo was one of the rare characters who started and ended character creation with her chosen career. I had heard that we were playing The Pirates of Drinax, so I made a space pirate. Easy peasy. I came out the other side of the process with some decent stats, gear, cash, and some ship shares, as well as one of the dullest backstories of the group.

I was slightly envious of "Two-Toes" a guy in our group who had washed out of the military, been a cop, was a drug addict, had a very sketchy background, and lost most of his toes due to frostbite on some backwater planet. Now that's a guy with characterization you can sink your teeth into!

Pirates is a classic, sandbox campaign that is (I think) also a good introduction to the game and the setting. the first part of it was pretty fun, if a bit "lead by the nose," (common with introductory adventures). We were given an awesome ship by the king of Drinax to go and do stuff in his name, ostensibly to Make Drinax Great Again. We spent most of our time planet hopping, trading to buy fuel for more planet hopping, and tracking down information on this other group of pirates that were causing problems.

Echo nearly died when she did not move quickly enough to avoid being shredded by something analogous to a Vulcan cannon. But our (very dodgy) doctor pumped her full of drugs and slapped her in a suspension tank, so she got better.

Despite the fun we were having, the game did not cater to the needs of the group. We prefer a lot more freewheeling, role-playing ridiculousness in our games, and Traveller is...not that...The biggest point of contention was that doing trade deals hinged entirely on making skill rolls and not on chatting up customs officials, befriending merchants, or finding good deals. It also required a lot of math and record keeping, so much so that we started calling it, "The Spreadsheet Minigame."

We wound up making a decent amount of cash money for our exploits, but we felt the storytelling elements of the game were rather thin. So we switched to Patfhinder.