What if?

There are reasons why I have always gravitated towards TRAVELLER as a game.
The foremost reason is character creation.

The thing with D&D and Pathfinder and all those style of games are... LEVELS.
(What does levels have to do with character creation Mr 28mmRPG?)

In D&D (and all thats common), in most cases you start as a level 1 "nobody" as in general
which is kind of the meat and potatoes game-play that we see with all starting campaigns.
{NOTE: yes you could play making a higher level character, but I'll get into that}

We see a lot of cringe-worthy player-driven exposition, explaining how special your character is in the current world... or none but sullen brooding, thus Edge-Lords are born, lol...

If players just accepted the fact that your character has just emerged from the cloister, left the chicken farm, or just left the nest of Mommy and Daddy's coddling homestead (like they SHOULD), things will go as GM and Players accept them, building your character as you go... you are not a hero yet, but you could become one, with time, game-play and experience.


TRAVELLER is a little different...
YOU ARE that Space Pirate that everyone fears, that grizzled half-cyborg with a mean streak...
YOU ARE that Super Spy from Cyron-12, with deadly silent hand-to-hand skills that can break necks in a second.
YOU ARE the Hyper-Marine, space-battler, Gunned up, smoking a cigar, sporting an eye-patch, with the fresh smell of napalm in her hair.
That is how you start, now how does it play out from here on-wards?

What would be really cool... for D&D (and all thats common) is if you play with higher level characters, adopt some kind of TRAVELLER-like system to build your character each level.
Now I don't mean with Feats and abilities, those naturally come with your levels as you advance.
What I mean is building a background like TRAVELLER does, introducing life-experiences, developing contacts, allies and rivals that you encounter throughout.

TRAVELLER does this well, but with a DM/Ref that will work with you to fill in those blanks with the player rolling their results with each level the player gravitates towards.

TRAVELLER does this in 4 year intervals, D&D could possibly use an interval of 1 or 2 years per level... 3-4 or more for those long-lived species of humanoids.

This would make things very interesting for say, a group of level 3+ Characters. A random life-table for each class with options to be chosen for special instances that will gain an ally or enemy, gain a special random item, or lose one. A quest won or lost? Gain a love, lose a love... build a relation-hook with another Player-Character... just like TRAVELLER does.

If I had the extra time... I might just create something like this for my Castles & Crusades games...  but it doesn't stop YOU from possibly doing the same as well.

But there again, I just might work on this.