My books are CT, the very first printing. lol.
I've got a 1977 edition but probably second rather than first printing. Whatever shipped to Australia c 1978.
Anyone here into any version of Traveller? Sing out if you are.
I've got a number of Traveller actual play threads on these boards. Here's the most recent:
Classic Traveller session
I prefer the 1977 to the 1981 rules, although I also have my own PC gen tables that include the Supplement 4 careers/services, add the Book 4 skills and some of the Books 5 to 7 skills (not all - I fold Gravitics into Engineering, Trader into Broker and Legal into Admin), and add a MegaTravelle-style line for special duty, which beefs up starting skills a bit.
In play, I like to approach resolution in a way that is similar to Apocalypse World's "if you do it, you do it". The maths is not as tight as AW, but I nevertheless like the system. These were my reflections 5 years ago:
Given that this is a 40 year old system, I think it holds up really well. (Although the original generation rules give very low-skill PCs - whereas I thought the addition of the special duty roll made our PCs, even the ones with only a term or three, interestingly well-rounded.) We didn't have any combat yesterday - and Traveller combat is ridiculously brutal, hence the need for two PCs - but the rules for social encounters, dealing with officials, and the like all worked smoothly. The only source of complaint was from Vincenzo's player - "I didn't want to play an accounting game!" An abstract resource management system would probably make the experience of running a starship a bit smoother.
The other thing that I was struck by is how bleak the default setting of Traveller is. The chance of dying during low passage transit is 1 in 6 for an ordinary person (1 in 12 with proper medical personnel overseeing the process). That's really high, and yet the rules are full of starship with low berths and passenger tables that show plenty of people willing to pay to travel in them. So the impression one gets is of worlds full of poor people willing to face a really high risk of death in order to travel to worlds that offer better prospects (but only 1 jump at a time!), while nobles lord it over the populace in their ridiculously expensive yet largely pointless interstellar yachts.
And this bleakness came out even in the worlds I generated - who would want to live in the universe of Ardour-3, Byron and Enlil?
For what it's worth, I recommend this system.
The only real complaints I have, after having run the system regularly over the three-and-a-half years between making that post and the other actual play post I linked to above, is that the rules for onworld vehicle-based exploration don't work, because they depend on map-and-key resolution, which in my view is simply not viable in a game of hopping from world to world.
The only player complaint I've had was put best by one of my kids, after running an ad hoc session for her: it calls itself "Science Fiction Adventure in the Far Future", but people still drive cars and use walkie-talkies rather than even mobile phones. But for me the weirdness, relative to the actual world, of Traveller's technological accomplishments and technological limitations, is part of its charm.
