About the same time I was discovering the White Box Little Brown Books, folks over at the Illinois State University were putting together a game company they called Game Designers' Workshop (GD, later GDW). Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner, Marc Miller and Loren Wiseman started out with hex maps and then produced some very fine game products including the monster game Drang Nach Osten, which started the Europa series of WWII mega-wargames, and Traveller, the first role-playing game set in a science fiction rather than sword and sorcery milieu. Traveller (using the British spelling), is a first generation old school RPG product imitating the packaging (3 digest sized booklets in a box) and philosophy of the world's first published role-playing game. Like the original LBBs, Traveller assumes the referee will make lots of rulings and presents the rules as written as suggestions for play and inspiration, encouraging deviations whenever desired.
Traveller, designed by Marc W. Miller, advertises itself as suitable for solo play and group play with or without a supervising referee. Two six sided dice are all the dice that are needed and most rolls involve adding them together, along with some die modifiers, to get a total. Character generation is an involved life-path exercise that is a mini-game in itself and one where your character can famously die as a result of occupational hazards encountered during the rolling-up exercise. Traveller allows (encourages) the player to advance their starting character through an entire career prior to beginning group play.
Traveller carries a 1977 copyright date. That was before hand held tech and the internet and before transhuman designer evolution theories became a thing, so there really isn't much in the rules as written to cover such, although Traveller is an easy to adapt system. Personally, I don't feel the absence. It is easy to explain away why these are not common in the future...maybe people became bored with their smart phones and social media, or the infrastructure to support such technologies doesn't yet exist in the frontier regions of space where Traveller likes to play. Perhaps a religious or ethical ban prohibits transhuman modifications, or maybe they are common elsewhere in the galaxy, but not where the game action takes place. It's really your choice.
By default, the Little Black Books (LBB) assumes all characters are humans entering military service. Most characters start their first enlistment at age 18 and advance along a career, usually in one branch of the military, rolling dice on a number of tables acquiring rank and money while learning skills and aging, but also undergoing some risk of crippling injury or death during deployments and assignments. The starting character may therefore be quite old by the time the player decides to muster out and take the character out adventuring, especially if the player chooses to put their character through several enlistments prior to starting play. Older characters start with more resources. Advancement during play is quite slow and the character may study a single skill for several years before acquiring an advancement. Adventuring is therefore more about the stories our hero is involved in and accomplishments in the galaxy than about personal improvement.
Traveller uses the roll of two six-sided dice for attribute scores ranging from 2-12. There are three mental abilities - Intelligence, Education and Social Standing and three physical abilities - Strength, Endurance and Dexterity. These abilities may improve with training or decline with aging as the character goes through their career life paths. Traveller is a skill based role-playing game system, perhaps the first such system. Skill with individual weapons makes up a large number of the potential skills which can be mastered. Many of the non-combat skills are quite broad in application such as medical, computer and mechanical. One might use their mechanical skill to repair a broken jump drive or pick a door lock. The computer skill covers mechanical knowledge of computers as well as operating and programming ability.
Traveller is simple, old school adventuring and the combat encounter is assumed to take place frequently. Skill task rolls, including those made with weapons in combat, are success/failure. Combat is fought in rounds, with each participant able to move and attack during the round. Die modifications (DMs), including skill and environmental factors, add and subtract to a basic two die roll and a final adjusted score of 8+ is needed for success. If the attack is successful, damage is rolled and is recorded as a wound by subtracting the amount from one of the physical attributes, Strength, Dexterity or Endurance. Each round that a character is involved in melee, they also accumulate fatigue and when this score equals their Endurance, they may only inflict weakened damage until rested. Death only occurs if all three physical ability scores are reduced to zero.
As an old school game, Traveller draws heavily from the literature which inspires it, the genre of science fiction which frequently includes a description of future technologies and advanced powers of the mind. In Traveller, those futuristic powers of the mind are called psionics and allow travelers to perform feats of telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and other even more fantastic feats. Traveller assumes all PCs are humans and therefore psionic ability is not universal. Not all adventurers have the potential for developing these skills and both early detection and training is required to use psionic powers (which work something like this game's version of magic).
This being a game called Traveller, travel plays a major role in the rules as well. Travel between worlds as well as travel across the surface of a world is assumed to be part of the adventure and the LBBs include rules for the economics of travel as well as the physics of the matter. Traveller has been referred to as "space trucker" and it certainly can be played that way as there are complete rules for buying, selling and transporting goods from one planet to another. (Point-of-fact, that can constitute a character's entire adventuring career and is not a bad way to play this game solitaire.) Navigating the trade customs of various cultures can also provide a backdrop for extensive role-playing (and I assume many Traveller games have been centered around just such drama.) Communication travels at the speed of a starship in Traveller and this important fact makes the vastness of space manageable in game terms. One cannot simply call 911 and get an immediate emergency response. Adventurers are largely on their own.
If exploration is desired, Traveller provides a number of easy to use tables for randomly determining what the adventurers find as they burn ship fuel exploring new planets and charting the unknown reaches of space. Traveller is by default, an outer reaches, fringe area of space game. Traveller spends a lot of ink on tables to create the characteristics of new worlds while saying very little about the known universe. Later editions of the game incorporate the (Third) Imperium setting which is comparable to the best classic role-play published game settings, but that all comes later on. In the Black Box we get possibilities.
One of the aspects I have always liked about Traveller is the approach Mr. Miller has taken to technology in general and particularly starship design. (Maybe I should confess I am not a gear-head.) The standard hull designs and near light speed jump drive hits the sweet spot for me regarding play-ability and detail. The standard hulls have a simple beauty and adaptability which sets them above many of the fantastic imaginings of various game authors and movie visionaries who have presented competing ship designs over the decades both before and since Mr. Miller penned Traveller. Traveller gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.
Traveller is set-up to be the game you want it to be. In that respect, it is both similar to the original LBBs of White Box and because of the nature of space exploration, yet so much more than White Box. As I read through these LBBs, I can imagine using Traveller to dungeon delve on a low tech world with sword and shield (making up the rules for shield use of course). Such an exorcise might be fun!
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