Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Retrospective: Mayday

These days, I find myself missing the late, great Game Designers' Workshop a lot. Maybe it's the recent release of a new edition of Twilight: 2000 by Free League or maybe it's just another manifestation of midlife melancholy. Whatever it is, I've spent much time over the past few weeks poring over GDW's impressive output, not least of which being its many fine Traveller products. 

As I never tire of saying, Dungeons & Dragons may be my first love, but Traveller is my true love. No matter how many years pass, my admiration for it remains stronger. If anything, it's only gotten stronger with the years, as I came to appreciate better many aspects of its design. One of those aspects is its modularity, something I've commented on before. Though Trtaveller is a complete science fiction roleplaying game, its three constituent books contain numerous systems and sub-systems that could very easily be games in themselves – and, in a few cases, were presented as such.

Mayday is an example of this. Originally published in 1978, a year after the initial release of Traveller, Mayday takes the RPG's starship combat system and turns it into a two-player wargame playable in, at most, a couple of hours. The original edition came in a ziplock bag, like the other "Series 120" games released by GDW (so called because they could be played in 120 minutes or less), but later editions came in boxes, a digest-sized one in 1980 and an 8½" × 11" one in 1983. In my youth, I owned the 1983 edition but, like so many of my older games, it fell apart and I replaced it with the 1980 edition I still own to this day.

The contents of the box are few: a 16-page rulebook, a sheet of cardboard counters, a single six-sider, and a handful of blank black-and-white hex maps. Anyone already familiar with Traveller's starship rules will find little surprising here, but newcomers might be surprised by several aspects of it. For example, each turn represents 100 minutes of time and each hex represents 300,000 km or one light-second. This is not a game of fast and furious tactical dogfighting of the sort one sees in science fiction cinema, but rather of slow, almost strategic combat over large distances. This, of course suits the style of SF that inspired Traveller, but it might take some getting used to if you're not well versed in the classics of older science fiction literature.

Another noteworthy aspect of Mayday – and indeed of Traveller starship combat in general – is its use of vector movement. The distance and direction a ship moves during its turn is based on the distance and direction moved in its previous turn. This means that even vessels with high acceleration ratings cannot simply turn on a dime but must slow themselves before being able to change course. This whole process is further affected by the presence of gravity fields from massive objects like planets. The end result is a game where mastering the movement system is even more important than mastering its weapons rules. It's very fun but I must confess that it took me a long time to wrap my head around how it worked. Even now, it still takes me a while to get into the proper frame of mind to play it.

That's a good thing in my opinion and one of the reasons why Mayday, much like Traveller, continues to appeal to me. Unlike other starship combat games, which, while fun, are little more than diversions, Mayday also manages to be thought-provoking. I don't mean that it makes me think deep thoughts about life, the universe, and everything, but rather that it demands I pay careful attention to the all the starships' vectors in relation to one another. I won't go so far as to claim this is a "thinking man's starship combat game," but there's little question in my mind that Mayday demands some brainpower to play enjoyably, never mind successfully.

I really do miss GDW.

20 comments:

  1. GDW's output, and Frank Chadwick's in particular, was quite good. Their rules-writing in particular was top notch.

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    1. Agreed. I honestly can't think of a GDW game I truly disliked. Some of the historicals weren't my thing (Europa - just too big) or (particularly the 120 series ones) were kind of dubiously accurate as sims, but the scifi was consistently excellent. I was turned off by Twilight 2000's theme but mechanically and in terms of setting it was rock-solid.

      Oh wait, I'm lying. Dangerous Journeys sucked, and I do my best to forget it. The setting was kind of okay, though. Enjoyed the novels.

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  2. Hard to imagine what space combat would be like, but launching AI enabled missles and drones from very far away and then working to stop you opponents missles and drones is what I envision. But who knows.

    Either way computers calculating the physics is a most. Only with magic would you dare turn off the targeting computer....

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  3. I never tire of hearing science fiction written when I was a child described as “older science fiction”…

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    1. Ditto. For that matter, the utterly bizarre decision to re-categorize some of it into "Children's Literature" leaves me scratching my head. I mean yeah, Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth setting isn't a heavy read by any means, but stuffing the Pip & Flinx series in the kiddie section feels really wrong to me.

      There's also plenty of "modern" scifi that uses reasonably accurate inertial physics (albeit always with some magic tech - impossible reactionless drives, inertia dampeners, etc) for its space combat, you don't have to go back to the Seventies and Eighties. Campbell's Lost Fleet was pretty good for that, as were the Honor Harrington books - and Drake's RCN series plays pretty straight with STL physics in a fight, even if its FTL system is literally based on Age of Sail elements.

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  4. Talking of inertia and vectors, FASA's Interceptor had advanced movement rules based on that. While I wouldn't call it a "deep" game, our group found it very entertaining at the time.

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  5. "Traveller is my true love. No matter how many years pass, my admiration for it remains stronger."

    Mal, it's been 10yrs since your last Tubb/Dumarest post. How about a few more? Moorcock is a big Tubb fan, BTW.

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    1. Never too much Dumarest out on the internet. There's a series that deserves more exposure. If I didn't dread what an adaptation would do to it I'd even suggest a streaming series would be in order.

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  6. A counterpoint to the over-a-decade-old Knight Hawks review - it is ridiculously simple to throw the weird movement rules out and replace them with a proper inertial vector system, at which point the game's biggest flaw vanishes. I use the system from the (free) Full Thrust minis game (with ADR being main thrust and heading changes by MR), but using Mayday's movement rules wouldn't be significantly more difficult. Much as I like both FT and Mayday, KH has a really good damage system that's very hard to "read" and differentiates well between different types of weaponry when it comes to effects on the target.

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  7. For those who want to experience realistic space combat there is a computer game called Children of a Death Earth. It pretty inexpensive at $20. Also has a decent tutorial series that gets folks going.
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/Children_of_a_Dead_Earth/

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  8. One of the things about Traveller I never got my head around was space combat. I couldn't really make sense of the rules as written, there were no examples of play, and I had no elder player to show me the ropes. Does Mayday do a better job of explaining the rules than the LBBs?

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    1. If the presentation in the LBBs isn't clear, I don't think Mayday will be much better, sadly.

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    2. Does this video help any?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hFAuJMpNlA

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    3. Or if you want the modern Mongoose Traveller version, Seth Skorkowsky has an excellent series over here, with part 6 being specifically focused on space combat:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdCq91MP9wE&list=PL25p5gPY6qKVUg6ys5N1oRlsBI7DTByyI

      He's also quite a bit better at presentation than that the guy who did that Mayday vid I linked to. Seth's one of the best gaming content creators on youtube IMO.

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  9. One of my favourite hex-based vector movement space combat board games was Shooting Stars by Yaquinto. Used a 12 impulse type system that was nicely adaptable to Traveller's mechanics. includes facing and the fact that thrust can only be used to move you forward. uses a similar mechanism to Mayday to calculate drift, by referencing where you were at the start of the turn with where you are at the end.

    Of course the really fun space combat starts happening in orbit, since the lower your orbit the faster you have to go. Only Aerotech (Battletech) and ASAT have attempted to model this in a game. Still, most Traveller drives are powerful enough that the ships are operating at velocities greater than the escape velocity for that orbit (which is where the radius of the orbit tends to infinity), which means the ships are effectively operating in free space anyway.

    And the standard constant acceleration assumed for Traveller spaceships makes actual combat only really viable at the start or end of a journey. The instantaneous velocity mid-journey actually makes interception hard and any combat last microseconds before both parties are out of range.

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    1. Attack Vector: Tactical is a fully--3D vector movement game with accurate displacement from acceleration. While it is primarily about free-space combat, it has highly accurate orbital combat rules--thrusting prograde causes your altitude to increase instead, for example, and the orbital system rather elegantly produces elliptical orbits. Making a full orbit it typically outside the duration of a game, but it's there!

      https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6767/attack-vector-tactical

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  10. Traveller is so good. Like you, I find it to be my first true love.

    It's so good that I have been making sure that I lay the Traveller books around as I run a 1e AD&D campaign for my family.

    This way, when they discover that the Greyhawk they are campaigning in is a surviving Ancients plaything and that the artifacts they are collecting are parts to a crashed pre-Ziru Sirka spacecraft (The Pegasus) that the descendants of the crew--now almost totally interbred with elves--are collecting so they can do battle with the three compe-cooperating factions of the Temple of Elemental Evil (Llolth, Tzuugtmoy, and Iuz) who do not know that the power their obscure patron Tharzduun seeks is actually the world's off switch.

    If the characters don't win, the world will wink out. If the characters win, then the world continues. If the characters want to depart, they will become Traveller characters.

    So, at some point I might need to revisit Mayday.

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  11. Squadron Strike: Traveller is a fully-3D vector system in a box that's chock-full of background, fiction, and scenario goodness.

    https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/265910/squadron-strike-traveller

    https://www.adastragames.com/products/squadron-strike-traveller-standard
    https://www.adastragames.com/products/squadron-strike-traveller-deluxe

    There are also lots of miniatures of ships from Supplement 9, plus Zhodani and Aslan warships.
    https://www.adastragames.com/products?category=Traveller

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