Traveller is a pretty cool game
I've long had an anxiety of appearing ignorant, especially in an area I've spent much of my life on and have some small amount of expertise in. This is silly! I don't feel like I need to know every game to make my own or speak my thoughts on them. I think this has been heightened by the main character effect of social media, providing an endless feed of people being confidently wrong.
I am most aware of this anxiety in tabletop RPGs specifically. I played my first game, D&D 4e, around the time Apocalypse World came out in late college. I didn't learn the term OSR until a few years ago. Sometimes it feels like everyone else was born into this medium, the first thing their soft newborn eyes saw being indie-rpgs.com, their first word was THAC0.
Recently my friend modality suggested I check out Traveller, a game he was running and having a good time with. I was aware of Traveller but assumed it was a fussy space-D&D – cut to my pleasant surprise at how straightforward it is. Yes it has a page for starship acceleration formulas and startlingly accurate loan schedules, and the organization leaves something to be desired, but there's an expansive toolbox there that is not overly bloated with inputs. A lot of Traveller (that I've read, The Traveller Book, 201) is 'on the page' so to speak, in that the game focuses on creating an interesting character with a relatively simple ruleset, standing in contrast with D&D's pages and pages of stuff your character could do... once they gain more levels.
My mental perception of RPGs is weirdly distorted by my first two games: D&D 4e and Edge of the Empire. My starting point were these huge games, weighed down by attributes and skills and feats and talents and stances and spells and and and. I grew quickly tired of these games, and my tastes have skewed simpler since. So, my mental model defaults to everything preceding my starting point is bloated and awkward. Which isn't true! Of course it's not, it's not even an opinion I hold, just a default mental categorization of mine.
Anyway, ahem, have you heard about this Traveller game? It's pretty great, that's what I learned this weekend. It's been a long time since I sat down and read this big a game from cover to cover, and I'm loving it.