IMTU Home rule
Char (Charitability) is a copy of D&D's Good-vs.-Evil alignment.
Traveller universes, IMO, should be more flexible than D&D's. A
basically good person can still do bad things IMTU. But there is, I
believe, a core characteristic which describes a person. I know this is
a gross simplification of life (but then so is boiling a person down to
a hand full of numerical values determined by dice throws...), but it's
meant to curb irrational or unlikely behavior. I don't like it when
players can rescue and care for a young girl found in an asteroid shaped
starship, and then go off and wipe out a small village of indigenous
people in order to get some gold. The problem with RPG's is the NPC's
are just pieces of paper. They're not flesh and blood, living, breathing
people standing in front of you. NPC's in a RPG are easy to kill. Real
people (thankfully) are not*. The Charitability stat is a
way to keep some control over this element.
IMTU this figure is determined during the character generation phase of
the game by either dice throw (2D), or player/GM discussion (a player
may want to play a particularly nasty or nice character), or by modified
dice throw (e.g. you don't want an evil character, but you do want some
chance in determining your fate) such as 1D+6 (or maybe 1D+4 or 1D4+6)
to simply avoid the extremes.
The Charitability stat is to be used as a guideline. If the GM thinks
the players are about to engage in some uncharacteristic behavior they
can simply remind the player(s) of their Char stat(s). If the players
wish to proceed anyway then the GM may require a die throw against the
Char stat (a failure, for example, might produce the typical Hollywood
scene of the good-guy holding a gun to the bad-guys head, about to
shoot, but then sighing and dropping the gun down unable to shoot), or
possibly the players might be allowed to proceed with the action, but
then later suffer remorse (admittedly a challenging thing for a GM to
produce).
Note also that, like D&D, groups of characters travelling together
should be of roughly the same charitability. That's not to say opposites
can't travel together, but fights may be more likely, or there may be
other consequences.
Examples:
Char=2: Hitler
Char=12: Mother Theresa
* (I wrote this before the WTC and Pentagon terrorist attacks, sadly this sentence is not as true as it once was).
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