Yesterday was the 46th “birthday” of the Traveller roleplaying game (RPG).
I first discovered Traveller in late 1979 when I found the boxed set of Little Black Books in Fascination Corner, a small FLGS1 (before there was such a thing as FLGS) in the upper level of Southglenn Mall in southeast Denver.
I’m not in either of the photos above as I was a bit younger (at the time) than those seen. But to answer @mangozoid’s question far above, the maths in Traveller didn’t scare me but instead drew me in. In school I was bored…I was having a hard time seeing how math was relevant to my life. In my gaming world, however, maths were essential. From computing travel time or vectors in Traveller to “accounting” in Star Fleet Battles (S.V. Cole, Task Force Games, 1979) to understanding armor thickness in Panzer (Jim Day, Yaquinto, 1979), math was brought to life—and it excited me. Learning the math behind roleplaying games and wargames invested me in the games; I felt as if I was part of the game and not just a passive receiver of information.
That active engagement in learning in part explains why these days I tend to be a “systems analyst” when it comes to roleplaying games. That is, I tend to “analyze” the core game mechanisms and try to discover how they communicate the “physics” of the particular setting. This may also explain why heavily narrative RPGs don’t resonate with me. To be clear, I am not saying I dislike narrative games but instead I enjoy what I call blended RPG systems. To me, blended RPG system are like the Cortex System or Genesys (powering the Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG) or the Year Zero Engine from Free League Publishing that powers Twilight: 2000 4th Edition and ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game as well as the Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game; each of these systems has strong narrative elements but still relies on a die-roll mechanism—often with thoughtful mathematical analysis behind it—to introduce chance into the resolution system.
Happy birthday, Traveller. You have been with me most of my life and I fully expect our gaming journey will continue until the end. You started me on the path of learning and have kept me there ever since.
RockyMountainNavy, 23 July 2023
Feature image courtesy retrogameon.com. Yes, I had an early TI-30 calculator that I used more for Traveller than I ever did in school.
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RockyMountainNavy.com © 2007-2023 by Ian B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
Traveller was the 1st RPG I bought but not the 1st I played. Got the Deluxe Edition straight from GDW by mail, but did not really understand it other than I really wanted to play. Finally a couple years later in college, a guy down the dorm hall played and I got sucked into the entire RPG world in the early 80s. Still have that original boxed set, though the box has a fair amount of tape to hold it together! Wrote a lot of software for Traveller as my computer science degree used hexadecimal a lot and it seemed just a natural fit.
I was in college and no fan of math, but I sat down dutifully and worked through the procedures. Because THAT was how much I wanted to play Traveller.
BTW before reading this I’d thought only the British used the term “maths.” 😉