It might have been Traveler. Anyone it was a game where you entered the Space Army and built your character, then you went out and had adventures similar to Dungeons and Dragons.
For some reason, it has been stuck in my mind today. Is it still played today?
I remember it being popular in Ohio around 1980ish or so.
Oh, Hell yes. Traveller was a great RPG. One of the originals and still one of the best.
And the single greatest character generation system ever.
Played it for years through high school and college. Never a dull moment.
“mayday…mayday…”
Traveller begat MegaTraveller, then Traveller: A New Era. Then GDW let the license lapse and the rights reverted to the original author, Marc Miller, who tried to put out a fourth edition through Imperium Games. Imperium went under and the fourth edition died. Steve Jackson published GURPS rules for the game, then Marc Miller republished Classic Traveller. There’s now a D20 edition as well.
All from here.
With the small-ish black books? Yep, that’s Traveller. It was one of the very first RPG’s. Famously, your character could die while you were rolling him up.
I never played the game myself, although I read through some of the books years ago. It always seemed pretty interesting with its modular approach. I know that over time it’s been modified (MegaTraveller was popular in the early '90’s, when I was playing Paranoia and TORG).
Here’s the game’s Wikipedia entry, and you can purchase reprints of the old booklets from the current owner, Far Future Enterprises. (Their site is damn hard to navigate, but all the material is there.)
–Cliffy
The funniest thing about Traveller was the longer you stayed in service when creating your character the more skills you’d get. So all the characters were grizzled old scurvy space dogs in their 50s. If your character got mustered out of the service early…like in his 20s…he’d have almost no skills and would be worthless compared to the other guys. And characters could start the game with starships if they got lucky during character creation.
Traveller had an interesting setting too…an Imperium composed of thousands of worlds, but most of them pretty low-tech, having been settled thousands of years ago by the first Imperium.
I remember megaTraveller - never played it, but I’ve picked up a couple of MT rulebooks largely because they’re a great store of potential ideas for writing. 
Ah, Traveller. Many happy memories. Don’t forget Traveller 2300AD, where the weapons were heavily influenced by the film Aliens.
I’ve never played Traveller, but I did read it when I was surveying science fiction RPGs to see how they handled space travel.
Traveller makes the “approximation” that gravity doesn’t exist, IIRC.
Except that Traveller 2300AD was related to Traveller purely for marketing purposes. It had no links at all to the original system or the original concept. It was actually a sequel of sorts to another game called Twilight:2000. Eventually GDW sidestepped any confusion by renaming it 2300 AD.
Not sure you’re correct there, at least for the concept. It was a spacefaring RPG and until they introduced the Kafers, combat was really secondary to the roleplaying milieu.
I played a lot of Traveller and I still have loads of books for it somewhere. Fun game and lots of fun adventures. I haven’t played in over 10 years now.
Jim
Just because it was spacefaring doesn’t mean it was Traveller. I don’t believe the milieu was the same, which is what I meant.
Anyone else used to make custom ships up using the rule set?
We actually had trillion credit fleet battles.
This was great until the Star Fleet Battles Bame game out.
I recall it.
Character creation was actually fun, rather than a chore.
Tinkering with ship designs was fun, too.
Remember the alien race called the Aslan?
Ooh! The lion-people! There were also the wolf-people, the Vargr.
I loved the add on rules from the Journal. The addition of Robots and robot design was very welcomed.
There was also add-on FASA rules and some other company like Sorag? The had some good sectors. I think they made the one called Beyond. They threw in a Dyson sphere.
Well, the tech level was vastly lower, of course, and Earth is just one little planet on the Solomani Rim IIRC. But both were games that de-emphasised combat, because it was very lethal, and emphasised use of the brain and the tongue. So the style of the game was very similar.
Okay. Agreed, in that sense. My problem is that I’m a setting fiend. I tend to internalize canon (doesn’t really matter the genre, the show, the game, whatever) and find myself somewhat offended when it’s ignored or downplayed. The Dune prequels made me want to smack the heads of Anderson and Herbert fils together. Hard. I’m even obsessive about Forgotten Realms canon, fer Og’s sake! So Traveller:2300 was kind of like “that fake Traveller game” to me…
I remember playing Traveller in the early 80s, there was a close combat module called Snapshot that was a lot of fun, too. You could play it as a separate game, just set up a spaceship hijacking or what have you. We were playing a lot of RPGs around that time, as well as Steve Jackson’s Car Wars.
Character creation in Traveller was my introduction to Hexidecimal, as character stats used letters for values above 9. Nice geeky touch.
I remember Snapshot. I keep thinking it was a 3 book set?
We didn’t use it much. We also played “Space Opera”. It was my intro to EE Doc Smith and one of the more obscure Usernames on the board.
Jim