This time out we are looking at the Sailor career from COTI.
Sailors: Members of the Nautical Force Command (the wet navy) of a world.
Naval Force Command is informally called the Wet Navy, to distinguish them from their space-faring counterparts. The descriptive text gives us nothing else about the service.
Any world with a Hydrographic rating above 1 could have a Wet Navy, and above Hydro-5 is likely to do so. Worlds technology levels at or below contra-gravity would still make use of sailing vessels. The conventional wisdom is that a new settlement will go next to a body of water. Transport of people and especially goods by water is an order-of-magnitude less expensive than by road, rail or air. even in the Far Future, sailing the ocean blue will be a thing. And we all know that sailing the seas can lead to Adventure.
Career Figures
Enlistment throw is 6+ with DMs for END and STR. Not a difficult career to get into. Survival is 5+ like the Flyers, with an END DM. Not too dangerous, but more risky than Doctors.
Getting a Position/Commission is also 5+ with a DM for INT 9+. Promotion is at 6+ with a DM for EDU 8+. These numbers are not high.
First observation: of 40 pregen characters, there is only one Admiral (rank 6) and three Captains (rank 5). Odd. 22 of the list are unrated ordinary seamen, including several with four or five terms.
I have no explanation why half of the sample PCs are petty officers. Maybe it was simple probability doing that weird thing it does. COTI was written before the days of chargen programs. All these were rolled by hand, I assume. This is old-school gaming; let the dice fall how they may.
Reenlistment is set at 6+, not difficult. I saw one sample Sailor who was unrated after five terms. Unlucky.
Skills!
Sailors do not get an automatic skill. This is an oversight by the editors; the adjacent service Flyers get Aircraft-1 as a service skill. At my table, a Sailor character would gain one level of small watercraft upon enlistment. Would not that be the reason for choosing the Sailor career, to have a PC who can, you know, operate watercraft? The skill description says this includes sailing vessels and submersibles. This should also cover yachts and motorboats as well as unpowered boats like canoes.
The variant Vehicle skill also impacts the Sailor career. The cascade skill Vehicle allows only Wheeled or Tracked vehicles or contra-gravity vehicles. I cannot fathom why Mr. Miller did this. If one of my players wanted a Sailor PC, I would ignore this ruling and let Vehicle cascade to watercraft.
As printed, there is ONE skill entry on the skill tables for watercraft. Why? The sample PC list shows two characters with watercraft skill of two. None have higher. Most (27 of 40) have NO watercraft skill at all. This may make sense for a Big Ship industrialized Navy where most sailors are not on the bridge. What about the small boats and auxiliary craft?
Among the other skills, notables include:
Gambling, Brawling, Carousing – seems legit for sailors.
Battle Dress. Huh. Did not expect that. Swap this out for another Watercraft slot. Or Combat Engineering?
Forward Observer – makes sense. What is a battleship if not a floating artillery platform?
Gravitics – I've mentioned in the post on Flyers that this skill is too specialized. Swap this out for another Vehicle slot.
Demolition – unexpected, but sure, why not?
Commo – another very specialized skill. Swap this out for the Tactics skill. How can one become a Horatio Hornblower
From reading the novels about these two seagoing Travellers, I can add another historical reason for increasing the incidence of watercraft skill. Aboard a sailing ship the officers needed to understand everything about how a ship operated. Guns, sails, masts, the hull, the steering, navigation, everything. In a battle a lowly lieutenant could find himself in command if the senior officers went down. He'd better know how to run the ship. As a skill, watercraft represents knowledge of the ship/boat and what it takes to run it. Sailing ships are complex systems.
The rest of the skills available are a grab bag from the Technical cluster and the Social cluster. All good. A sailor character, whether a helmsman or not, will have a solid set of skills to use on adventures by water or land. It is strange to me that the career as presented makes it so hard to stand out for the very activity that is the job description.
The Swag!
Taken all together, the Sailor career will not make a PC rich or high-skilled. The Sailor is a specialist. Important when the need arises, but not outstanding.
Cash outlays are exactly the same as the Flyers. This is neither good nor bad. Benefits are also the same. Which one copied the other? Sailors will come out with 10,000-30,000 credits on average. Not enough to buy a motorboat outright maybe, but enough to get acquire one with a mortgage a la starships.
Material benefits are passage vouchers, weapons receipt and an EDU bonus. The rare Captain or Admiral may get a +1 SOC. The mustering out benefits are not the reason a character goes into the Sailor service.
Something I had not noticed before: the page for sample Sailors includes this bit of advice: Mustering out benefits have been specified, but can be altered quite easily to suit the whim of the referee or the needs of a specific situation.
The same text appears (with variations of wording) in the headers for most, but not all of the COTI careers. Doctors, Nobles and Barbarians are not accorded this flexibility. How odd. Referees, make of that what you will.
The Sailor career is a niche. That niche exists on worlds with some amount of standing (usually) water and a lower tech level. Once contra-gravity is established as a means of transport, water transportation becomes far less important. It may not go away entirely, as watercraft are still far less expensive to build than CG.
Traveller's world creation mini-game produces many worlds that fit the profile for having a Wet Navy, so it is possible to encounter Sailors often.
Real history and historical fiction provide many famous sailors, too. If there's one that a Traveller NPC should be modeled after, who would it be? Leave your ideas in the comments.
Image credit: Pixabay
Image credit: Pixabay
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