The Hard Realities of the Mechwarrior Campaign

I'm approaching a confluence of variable factors when it comes to our ongoing RPG time and I'm going to have to make some decisions.

First, Con Season approaches. Four of my eight regular players are involved with putting on a convention  - and have been for years so this is not really a new problem - and it nukes their availability for part of the summer. The variables here are "when does this interference start?" and "how long does it last?" and now I know these details so I know July is going to be thinner and best case is that for about 5 weeks I will have 4 players at most. We non-cons will keep playing but it will probably not be "the main game".

Second, We are nearing the end of the opening situation for the Mechwarrior campaign so I need to decide how to proceed long-term: Are we going to keep on with the Battletech thing or are we going to do something else? For July we will need to do something else anyway so can I lay the groundwork for a new thing there or is it just an interlude until the full crew re-gathers in August? More details below but I will probably start a new campaign with another system & setting and think about coming back to Mechwarrior down the road. 

Here it comes ...

Third, I really am not enjoying the MW 3rd edition as a system and my players are not terribly attached to it either. The first part of the campaign was intentionally mech-heavy and we used the Battletech rules directly for most of that. This past weekend was a zero as far as mech content but involved meeting some other members of the unit, exploring the local city where they are stationed, and getting into a bar fight. They had a good time but the rules kept getting in the way and I am ready to replace them. More on that below.

So I have these factors all coming together at around the same time.

In addition I have realized that I am not quite as much of a Battletech Universe fan as I was. All of the later metaplot stuff after 3060-something means nothing to me. I have a ton of material for the earlier era and I still know it well enough that it's the era that makes the most sense for me to run but when it comes to fictional gaming universes there are others I enjoy more. This doesn't mean that I don't like it enough to run something in it - just that running it for a year or more straight might not be the way I want to go. BT also suffers from something I have seen in way too many game settings: namely the "lore" tends to be page after page of dryly written history and dates and names and none of it really means anything nor does it add anything to the campaign I am running right here and now! 
(More on that in another post)

Catalyst, while I have a problem with some of what they do, has at least gotten the game back into circulation with decent support and a new line of miniatures that might actually be better then the metal line we've had for decades. The boxed sets are nice, the art is decent, there is an alternate set of rules for tabletop Battletech -Alpha Strike - and two sets of RPG rules as well. So the support is actually pretty good after a long gap. 

The problem may just be that my tastes have changed a lot since I played and ran these games years ago.

  Wow, how insightful, your interests as a teen to twenty-something may not be the same ones you have at 50+, yeah, applause all around for this discovery. 

I know, I know, but a lot of my tastes have not changed that much - keeping it to hobby topics I still like RPG's, and miniatures, and board and card games. In fact, I like a lot of the same ones I did back then. Despite that Battletech feels decidedly old-school rules-wise even with a modern wrapper on it. Alpha Strike is no help as it loses almost everything that makes BT unique, like hit locations and all of the details on the various weapons. Sure it plays faster but it plays nothing like Battletech to me so why bother? 

Star Fleet Battles has this issue too but they came out with Federation Commander years ago which somehow manages to keep 90% of the look and feel of classic SFB while streamlining it and modernizing it in important ways. I think that was a goal with Alpha Strike but it just does not work for me.

The Battletech RPGs have a similar problem. Mechwarrior 3rd edition is from 1999 but it feels like a much older game. The basic core mechanic is a lot like Traveller with d10's: 2d10 + skill level vs. a target number of 10, roll high. Typical skill level for most people is 1-2 with some getting to a 3-4 and not many going over 5. It is possible to have a "0" skill level in something representing training with no real experience. Just reading through the initial system mechanics I thought it was decently playable. The issue is that they then go and add the old-school-list-of-comprehensive-modifiers that makes every roll a checklist scan prior to the actual roll. For example for combat the base target number is not ten but it's not a set stat or skill or anything else either - there are 4 different "base target numbers" for each of melee and ranged ... here, take a look at it yourself.

Also the damage system  -after you jump through the hoops with all those modifiers then damage is another chart where you compare the damage rolled to a set of numbers to find out what you actually did to the target. Imagine if you were playing Mutants and Masterminds but still rolled damage based on each attack but then still had to consult a chart to find out the actual effect:

I'm sure it would play faster if we spent more time on it but the problem is that after taking up much of a session just trying out personal combat I am not terribly excited about doing it again and neither are my players. I'm going to run the campaign in this system to it's planned end point but if we pick it up again I'm probably going to run it in another system. Right now I'm actually looking at GURPS as a strong candidate for this and I haven't run GURPS in 20 years. However, if you want mostly normal humans in a setting where they are terribly vulnerable to modern weaponry it's a solid candidate. It would take some customization to things like the skill list and some of the equipment but it might just be worth it. Savage Worlds is on the list as well as we know it pretty well and it would be another easy adaptation. Heck, I have half a mind to tweak up a version of Star Wars d6 system just to see how well that would work.

"But if you're willing to mod GURPS or Savage Worlds why not just mod this game?" - well, because having run it again now I just don't find this game all that appealing. Somehow it worked for us 20+ years ago but it just falls flat for me now. It's not just the skill system - character generation was lengthy and involved and I thought having all of those house books with specific background tables (it has a kind of lifepath system) would really immerse my players in the setting. It sort of did that but it mostly just took forever and drained everyone at the table's life force away right when they should have been getting excited. Then there is a convoluted system to convert the point system used during character generation to the different point system used during play and for XP.  Then the XP system turns out to be terrible too so it just fails to shine for me. The novels tend to be fairly cinematic yet the RPG mechanics do almost nothing to reinforce that feel and so there's nothing about the game that really "feels" Battletech the way Star Wars d6 feels like Star Wars or the Warhammer Fantasy RPG feels like the gritty universe of old school Warhammer. There's just nothing special about it. 

Pretty much every subsystem of this game feels like it has extra - and unnecessary -  steps and I'm ready to try something else for our out-of-mech action. 

This probably came out a little harsher than originally intended and this is by no means an "unplayable" game - I've been running it for months now. It is totally playable but I don't like playing it as much as some other systems I know and there are probably other rules that will do this in a way I like better. So that's the plan now. More to come on this journey ...

The Promise of the Long Term Mechwarrior Campaign

 

So why did I choose to run a Mechwarrior campaign? Regardless of rules, the setting has a ton of potential. Let me focus in on 3 things that put it over the top for me:

1) The particulars of the setting:    

• It's science fiction but there are no aliens and no psionics. This does limit things somewhat in comparison to say, Star Trek or Warhammer 40,00 but it is nice sometimes to dive into a straight-up-human-centric universe with no supernatural weirdness.
  (Was this a reaction to running Deadlands for the last few years? Why no, certainly not!)
• It is set in the future of the real world. Granted it's 1000 years in the future and there are things like FTL travel and giant robots with directed energy weapons but there are recognizable cultures and languages still present. It's usually easier to explain House Kurita as being heavily influenced by Japanese culture than say to explain Klingon culture if someone is unfamiliar with Trek. Earth is still a place you could go and English is still a language people speak - among many others.
• The aforementioned giant robots! This is the major part of Battletech's appeal, right? Tons of designs, tons of art, the ability to modify them or just make up your own with a heavily battle-tested set of rules - this is the main draw!

2) The support: There is almost 40 years of material tied to this setting from boardgames to RPG's to videogames to novels to comic books to at least one mediocre animated series. If you want to do your own thing you certainly can but if you want to dig into the place and see where you could hang your ideas on to the setting there is  likely to be a time period or planet or faction that works for what you have in mind. From toppling interplanetary governments to locating where that one particular battlemech model was produced before the early Succession Wars blew up the factory to fighting in mech-based gladiatorial arenas there are a ton of campaign options out there. Finally, if you want to run a war story from infantry to tanks to mechs to aircraft to space battles there may be more supporting material here than for any other RPG.

3) The timeline: This is a very strong point to me. There is a bunch of history sketched out for a GM but the most interesting part is where the game started: a post-apocalyptic era of damaged and limited mechs that are nowhere near what they once were ... mostly operated by noble families where much technology has been lost and resources are scarce. Then we begin a slow climb upward where technology is slowly rediscovered, factories reopen, and life gets better - just in time for the leaders to start a major war. technology continues to progress as planets change hands and mechs come into play and then just as things settle down the Inner Sphere gets hit with the clan invasion which upsets the whole apple cart and then some odd stuff with ComStar getting too big for their britches. 

This roughly 50 year stretch gives us a big, global backdrop to run whatever kind of game we want with some major events to hang things on and it's pretty easy to see the campaign as being about much more than one group of PC's. As the back of the 20-Year-Update said "don't think of your character as being 20 years older  - think of his son as being ready for battle". This sets up an interesting potential mix of ongoing war story across several generations. You don't have to use any of it if you don't want to but it's all there if you do. Once you pick a  starting point your mission is to let you players mess up the timeline as much as they want to! Sure, if you want to the Clan Invasion still happens - or maybe it doesn't! maybe there is a different Davion on the throne when it does ... or a different Steiner!  Maybe your players lead an expedition Beyond the Sphere and run into the Clans first!

The cool thing is that you have a timeline laid out to follow or ignore as you choose and if your players have some familiarity with the setting it only gets better as they recognize things and then eventually figure out you've left "canon" behind and it's a whole new world out there.

This was part of my vision when I started this operation: Play a group from 3025 on up through the next succession war and eventually into the Clan Invasion and beyond, likely through at least two generations of PC's and possibly a 3rd.

There's the big upside of a Mechwarrior campaign. 

Tomorrow the not-so-up parts ...

Mechwarrior 3rd Edition- Our Campaign in 2024

 

This has been the main RPG for this year so far - even if I haven't been posting much about it here - so I thought I would pause and talk about it a little bit. 

We started in February with a character generation session after playing several one-off Battletech fights over the last few months. Since then we've had 7 playing sessions. I've had from 4-8 players each time. I implemented a "5 or more players = Mechwarrior" rule (4 or less means we play Marvel Heroic) though I broke that for the last session because the cancellations were last minute and I knew we would have a break this week anyway. 

Most of sessions so far have been in-mech combat and I can say that 8 players each running their own mech vs. 1 GM running all of the opposition is a challenge though there are several things that help. 

• Using various markers including those fancy modifier dice to show mods for both the attacker and defender are a big help
• Writing down things on each mech sheet - other weird modifiers, planned target or course of action, etc. - help keep things from getting lost in the table-wide back and forth discussion.
• Colors - putting a sticker or something on the mech and the mech sheet stands out more than small print.
• Having a player who is more up on Battletech's rules and current background than I am means I have a mechanics sub-processor to help expedite the turns for everyone so I can focus more on what the bad guys are doing.
• Use one or at most two kinds of opponents - either all mechs, mechs + tanks, or tanks + infantry. Don't try to work in a massive combined arms force with artillery and air support dug into some fortifications - at least not early on. That way lies madness ...

The campaign is set in 3025 and the premise is that a group of experienced characters (MW3 has a very thorough lifepath system for chargen) is joining a medium-sized merc unit. They get to know each other on the dropship but as they approach their destination they are forced into an unplanned combat drop before they even meet the rest of their unit. 

At this point we are past the initial combat and the PCs have made an important discovery on their way to finally link up with the rest of the Battalion. We have spent way more time with the BT rules than we have the MW rules thus far but that started changing last session and should continue next session. 

The MW3 rules still feel fairly clunky to me but we will give them a good run-through for now. My concept to start this campaign off is from notes I made 20 years ago in preparation for a game I never actually started. I found them in the ol' binder, looked through them, still liked the idea, and decided to go with it so HANG ON TO THOSE NOTES! Sometimes it does pay off!

Once we've covered the initial scenario we may have a forced interruption due to half my players being part of a convention crew and afterwards we will have to decide if we want to continue this campaign or switch to something else. There is a lot of interest in making this a long term game and seeing our party face the Clan invasion and all of those future upheavals. If we do continue I will seriously consider changing to another set of rules based on what I have seen so far. That could be Savage Worlds, Traveller, or it might be a good reason to dust off GURPS and see if that works for us. Shaking off the rust has been more of an effort than I expected.  There is a chance further MW3 experience might shift my opinion but right now I'm not in love with the system. 

Eventually I will post up some session reports here or link to it on Obsidian Portal as one of my players is taking in-universe session notes which should be pretty entertaining.

Looking Forward

So, there's been a lot of superhero stuff on the blog lately, and not much D&D or 40K or any of that other stuff. What the heck is going on? Well, I write here mainly for myself, so even though the blog has kind of a D&D look to it it's not always about D&D.

The theme I chose for the April A to Z thing pretty much forced me to live in my ICONS, M&M, and Marvel rule books for the month and that tends to focus my "gaming head" in to that space. With another summer of superhero movies coming and new Marvel and M&M campaigns kicked off with the Apprentices the superhero thing will continue to be a major player here.

There are still several D&D campaigns going on around the house - 4E and Labyrinth Lord. I am still working on session recaps for the main game and I will post them up as I get them done. Still not terribly interested in Next either other than following the design columns - and crossing my fingers and hoping that it ends up somewhere I like more than what I see right now.

The Warhammer side of things has been ... quiet. I'm not hearing much from the boys about it at all and there has not been a whole lot of painting either. I really thought with the new edition last summer we would be digging in deep by now but we really have not and I blame two things: Magic and Battletech.

• Magic has become "their" thing for Red and Blaster. They constantly talk about their decks, they've been to a couple of local release events and some local tournaments and it's their fill-in game at home when they have a few minutes to spare.

• Battletech is mainly Blaster's thing but he's dragging Red along with him too. Mechwarrior Online is really feeding this as it's even pulled him away from XBox Live more than I expected. The only painting I've seen in a month was Blaster working on his Battlemaster mini. It's feeding their whole miniatures/robots/tech thing better than 40K at the moment.

So I'm no sure where 40K stands now. If a new Codex came out for any of their armies I'm sure it would jump start our scene but it's been a whole lot of "don't care" here lately.

With Red I'm also fighting the triple threat of job-girlfriend-driver's license and he was a pretty involved kid before all that. He was free exactly zero nights this weekend, which is perfectly normal for a teenage boy but does interfere with our games. Fortunately Apprentice Who is getting more interested in them and he has a few more years before any of this stuff will be a problem.

So to work around this (here's the practical part), I came up with a rotation that seems to be working for us now: When I have Blaster and Red available we play Stonehell (with 4E ToEE as a backup). When I have Blaster and Who available we play M&M (with old-school Marvel as a backup). When I have all 3 available we play New Marvel. Not sure about Red & Who because that doesn't come up a lot, but while writing this I asked them to figure out what they would like to play. Much discussion but no firm answers yet. One new wrinkle is that I picked up BESM a while back and gave it to him since it covers some ground he likes and he's talked about possibly running a game of some kind. We shall see.

The Mechwarrior Decision

The Apprentices have been digging into Battletech more the last few weeks. Part of it is that Blaster is reading some of the old novels, and part of it is that Blaster and Red are both playing a lot of Mechwarrior Online. They've been poring through the original rules and the 3025 technical readout, designing mechs and rebuilding the ones that suck, just as my friends and I did years ago - it's quite a bit of fun to watch.

The thing is I know that eventually they are going to want to play the RPG - partly because I've told them about our old campaigns - and frankly the RPG rules for all 3 editions are pretty clunky and not really anything I want to mess with anymore. So I've been looking at alternatives.

Option A is to run it in Savage Worlds. I like the rules and it plays fast and there are analogues of pretty much all of the weapons and armor available in various sourcebooks. It may be a little more cinematic than MW campaigns typically are but I think it's manageable.

Option B is to run it in Traveller. This one feels more like the older MW rules and the gear is there, so it's another strong contender. Plus it would give me an excuse to pick up some more Traveller stuff. The downside is that I would need to sit down and come up with a career table for the various career types - mechwarrior, tech, aerospace pilot, tanker, trooper. That's not a huge downside as I like the idea of doing it, but it will take some time and probably some tweaking to get it right.

Option C is to run it in GURPS. One of my groups played MW in GURPS years ago and there were several guides to it on the net back in the late 90's. I know it would work, but I'm still hesitant. I have pretty much let GURPS drift off of my "current games" radar for the last few years and I would have to get familiar with it again. Also, I'm not sure I'm all that fired up about GURPS anymore when I have these other lighter rulesets available.

Those are the 3 main options in my head right now. They aren't ready to start a new campaign right now anyway between our D&D and our Supers campaigns. This is good because it will give me time to come up with a starting situation and look through my old BT/MW material for ideas. The basic idea right now is "mercenaries" where they roll up all of the members of the unit as characters then play who they want in each session. Oh, and they also need to round up some more players too. This may end up being this summer's extra campaign, but the wheels are already turning.

The 7 Games You've Played the Most

This article over at Gnome Stew got me to thinking about this, and I thought it was interesting enough to do myself. Anyone who has been reading the blog for any length of time can probably figure out most of them but I wanted to go through it myself and see if there were any surprises. I'll do the "played" today and the "GM'd" tomorrow.

The 7 Games I've Played the Most: (this assumes "DMing" doesn't count as "playing")

1 - AD&D  - I spent a LOT of time on this one, getting my DMG about 1980 and the rest of the books  the next year and a regular set playing group the year after that - one that stuck around for decades. This was THE game for me in the 80's, all others were secondary, and I obsessed over it like nothing since.

2 -AD&D Second Edition - Yeah this kind of surprised me, but we had a full 11 year run on this as we started the day it came out in 1989 and played it regularly until the 3rd edition launch in 2000. The center of this time was a nice long ongoing campaign set in the Forgotten Realms that a friend of mine ran pretty much this entire run, which was basically "the 90's".

3 - Gamma World  - I'm cheating a bit by lumping all editions together here but it was really one ongoing campaign that started in 2nd edition with one set of characters about 1983 and continued through 3rd edition (convert and move on!) and 4th edition into the 1990's. Run by the same friend, this was set from the ruins of Louisiana up to the Great Lakes over the years.Part D&D, part Western, part Superheroes, we had a lot of fun with this game.

4 - D&D 3rd Edition - I'm going by hours here, as over the years I played this quite a bit but never in a good long sustained campaign. Added up it's probably the fourth most-played game but it tended to be in very small chunks here and there. The biggest problem here is that I was running so much I didn't have time to play 

5 - Mechwarrior - I am again lumping all editions together here. This game came out in 1986 and we jumped on it immediately, having a fondness for the giant robot war story campaign that never really went away. Again, a friend of mine ran it, and a group of about 4 of us played it in sustained bursts for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions, through the original succession wars, and into the clan invasion. We painted the mini's, read the novels, and waged war on a planetary scale at times. Most of our Battletech games were tied in to our Mechwarrior campaign, wherever it happened to be at the time. It's a whole different way to play the game as having to consider "what happens next" gives one a different perspective on combat, from character fates to repairs, to transportation - it was a lot of fun.

6 - Twilight 2000 - I was pulled into a campaign of this in the late 80's run by one friend and it became a regular part of the rotation with another friend running campaigns of it as well. It's a fairly realistic game - there are no magical healers, radiation kills you instead of granting superpowers, and there are no giant robots, zombies, ninjas, or wizards.It's just a group of relatively normal humans trying to make their way in a broken world. Overcoming those challenges makes for a fun game though not  everyone likes that kind of thing. We played 1st edition, 2nd edition, 2.2 all back forth from about 1987 into the 90's and even had a short run of 1st edition just a few years ago.

7 - Star Trek - Fasa edition. Besides the various D&D's this is the only entry that covers only one edition of a game but it was a lot of fun. Creating a single character and running him over most of a decade (on and off) is something I have not done before or since. There have been other Trek games but this is the only one I experienced as a player.

After this we get into a long tail of Traveller, Boot Hill, Marvel Super Heroes, Champions, Shadowrun, Warhammer FRP, Rifts, Gurps, B/X D&D, Star Wars, 4E D&D etc. I've played a lot of games but the ones listed above form the core of my playing experience. One thing should be clear from the above: There is always a D&D game, then are the side games or temporary diversions. I don;t expect that will change anytime soon.

Summer Slowdown

We had a pretty good run for June & July but as we close out August things have been pretty light in the gaming department around here. I haven't run anything in about a month and I am feeling it.

• I downloaded the latest D&D Next playtest pack and I haven't even opened it. Just not feeling it right now.

• Picked up Civil War for MHR right before the move and I have yet to finish it. I can't seem to sustain my focus on it and while it's a pretty lengthy document it's one I was waiting for! Hard to say what's up here.

• I picked up High Space for Savage Worlds which looks pretty promising but it's kind of been lost in the shuffle here.

I've mostly been reading old school Champions and old school DC Heroes which are unlikely to be the basis for a sustained campaign anytime soon but they are pulling in my interest so that's where I've been spending my time. BA's August of Star Trek has had me cracking open the old ship manuals and other books too, which isn't helping.

The only thing we've played is Battletech and it appears to be a hit with two of the Apprentices - I'll call that a win but it doesn't scratch the RPG itch. They are asking about playing the RPG version so I've dusted off Mechwarrior 3rd edition and skimmed it and as much as I liked it 10+ years ago I'm thinking Savage Worlds, Traveller, or even GURPS would be more to my taste now. It's looking like a research project for the near future. 

Not running the 4E game for over a month and the release of what is likely the final book for 4th Edition (Menzoberranzan) has me fighting some apathy there too. I don't normally care a great deal about whether a game  is "dead" or not but I'm feeling it a little bit this time. The new house combined with the start of a new school year has me feeling the urge to cut ties with the old and start something new which is a good way to annoy the players - I'm fighting it guys, let's not panic just yet. I'm not feeling the whole fantasy thing right now so Pathfinder and old school D&D and Next are all gathering dust too. It's more of a genre thing than an edition thing.

A lot of this is the move - most of the boxes have been emptied, but not all, and that has taken up a lot of time. As we move into more of a routine then I expect things will start to get back to normal. This weekend we should have time to play a few things, especially with the holiday on Monday so I'm going to let the Apprentices pick what they want to do. More to come.

W is for: Wolf Blitzer!

The cover sheet for my Mechwarrior binder

Wolf Blitzer the XXIIIrd that is, who is by far the most memorable of my many Mechwarrior characters over the years. He was created back around 1991-92 when the first Gulf War was big news and this one reporter with the most awesome name in the world stood out from the crowd. The second edition of the Battletech roleplaying game had just come out (cleverly named "Mechwarrior 2nd Edition") and looking for a hook for a new character beyond just "noble who fights in a giant walking tank" I had a flash of inspiration and decided that "combat reporter" could be a fun and interesting direction to go, and I knew just what name to give him. Here's his sheet:

His stats are decent and his skills are good and very focused - piloting 4+ is a notch better than the average Battletech pilot of 5+, while his gunnery meets the standard at 4+. He's decent out of his mech too with good skills in unarmed combat, stealth, security systems, small arms, and med tech. His career skill in broadcast media and his comm systems skill mean he can run a one-man field reporting operation without much trouble.

I approached his choice of skills and mech with the idea that there were really 3 schools of thought on how a combat reporter would work in the age of war in the 31st century:

• Be a non-military reporter, forgoing the mech option and going for something like a helicopter and taking extra skill in stealth and infiltration
• Be a military reporter and going for the light and fast approach - a light speedy mech like a Locust or Hermes or one of those hovercraft with a speed of 10/15 - and rely on speed to get in, get the story, and get out. 
• Go all-in on heavy combat capability with a heavy or assault mech and rely on being in the thick of the action for the biggest stories and most vivid combat footage  ' "Here's where I personally destroyed the mech of the Marik commander when he challenged me on the field."

The first option was a no-go as a primary character as it would leave me out of the big mech fights. The second one could be fun, but everyone wanted to play a heavy combat unit, not a scouting or recon or raider unit so I would be a fifth wheel with a light mech in that scenario. No, the obvious way to go was big, so I went with the biggest - an Atlas.

3025 Atlas

The Atlas is a 100 ton mech, the biggest size allowed in the game and the top of the "Assault" class mechs* which are the top dogs of the game. They are rare, at least in the early days of the game, carry the biggest guns, the most armor, and are the slowest mechs in the game. Each weight class of mech has its attractions, but sometimes you want to play the biggest and baddest and if you do this is the way to go. The Atlas was the first 100-tonner in the game and to me has always been one of the best looking and most effective types. It carries the biggest long-range  missile launcher in the game and the biggest gun in the game, giving it both a very good ranged attack and a strong close-in punch. it also carries the heaviest armor of any mech in the game, meaning Wolf lives longer and can do more broadcasting during a fight. Now the game was set in 3050-something during the Clan invasion, a pivotal time in the Battletech universe.  He started off the campaign with an old AS7-D Atlas from the 3025 era which was a solid, reliable mech without a lot of the fancy (and expensive) new technology from the 3050 era. That mech lasted precisely one long adventure, including our first encounter with the Clans (Jade Falcons if I remember right) and at the end the unit was awarded some new tech and mech upgrades and his Atlas was rebuilt as an AS7-S (Steiner variant) model. He renamed it "Skeletor" and spent most of the campaign piloting it in this configuration:

I never liked only having 5 shots for the main gun or only 6 shots for the LRM's like some Atlas models so I preferred this one as he could often get through 2 or even 3 fights before running out of ammo. This is hugely important in an RPG campaign as the DM does not always let you rearm and reload and patch up armor after every fight, unlike playing unconnected battles with the boardgame. Mechs that seem "sucky" or underpowered for a one-shot battle become much more attractive when you're going to have to live with them over time. Conversely many awesome mechs for one-shots look a lot less attractive for an extended multi-battle campaign - I'm looking at you Hunchback! This model also skips the XL engine, a common feature in many later mechs that frees up a ton of weight to add more guns but makes the mech die much faster when taking internal damage. They're also a lot more expensive, another consideration when running a merc unit that's involved in regular, active combat missions. Wolf also turned the SRM-2 Streak around to shoot forward instead of to the back. 

3050 Atlas

Wolf eventually got caught in a bad position during a clan assault and Skeletor took a serious beating, losing a leg and one side of his torso - major damage. Wolf was knocked unconscious and injured during the fight too. While recovering, Wolf decided that perhaps fighting in the middle of a melee was not the best strategy for a combat reporter and that a new approach was needed. Somewhere along the way the unit had captured another Atlas, one of the newer models with an endo-steel internal structure which freed up some additional tonnage without compromising the toughness of the mech and so Wolf began to design an new configuration, the AS7-X:

This version pulled the AC20 (it was hard... sniff) replacing it with a Gauss Rifle that did 3/4 of the damage at more than double the range, plus 2 big long-range lasers (that also do not run out of ammo), and retains the LRM-20. This means it can drop triple the damage of the old model at long range while still doing more damage at short range too!  It's more efficient and less susceptible to ammo shortages. It plays somewhat differently than the previous version, but in a long-term campaign I finally gave in and it made him a monster in combat - he was able to take on clan mechs on much closer to even terms than before. Wolf named it "Stormbringer" and used this mech for the remainder of the campaign, which was not all that much, but it was fun and refreshing for the time it lasted.

The campaign lasted for more than a year with 3-6 players during the game, some dropping in and out depending on availability. We fought many battles, mostly against the clan invaders in Steiner space. We didn't always win, but we avoided any disastrous leave-your-gear-behind-and-run type defeats. Wolf's main camera was mounted in the nose-hole of the Atlas skull and he unfolded his satellite uplink antenna on many different worlds. Having a media connection helped the unit keep a higher profile than it might otherwise have had too. 

The very first session involved am orbital drop onto a hostile spaceport and even with his ace piloting skills Wolf was hit by heavy laser and missile fire several times on the way down, landed badly as a result of the damage (hip actuator) and spent that first battle limping around at 1/2 speed - thank goodness for the LRM as it at least let him shoot back at things he couldn't catch. The whole campaign on that planet saw him with some kind of leg damage as there wasn't a lot of downtime and it was damned annoying as an Atlas is pretty slow anyway, and leg actuator damage only makes it worse. This proved nearly fatal at the end as he could not participate in the unit's tactical withdrawal at a crucial point so he made a ferocious last stand until he ran out of ammo and his mech overheated to the point of shutdown. The video was awesome though. That did set some of the tone for the campaign though and at least once during an action on a new world he would have a run of bad luck, usually involving leg actuators. Wolf is the character that made me a lot more open to taking the bad luck advantage in some games - if it's going to happen anyway you might as well get points for it. 

The high points of the campaign in many ways were the "Battalion Battles" we ran every so often. In Batteltech the basic unit is the lance, a team of 4 mechs comparable to a modern tank platoon. A company is 3 lances and a Battalion is 3 (or more) lances, or 36 mechs. Throw in some infantry, recon vehicles, aerospace support, and supplementary local tank forces and you're looking at 40-60 units per side which requires a really big table's worth of maps makes it an all-weekend affair and a huge blast to play, especially when one side is your unit where you know all of the names of the pilots and their mechs and most of them have a character sheet that someone rolled up during the campaign. Now when that pair of Falcon Vultures blows away your recon lance in one turn you actually care whether the pilots live or die and whether it's a shot-through torso or an engine or ammo explosion that takes out the mech! It's really a different game from traditional one-shot Battletech and one I highly recommend.

In the end we were not defeated. "Dante's Hitmen" (I never liked the name - our 1st edition group went by the much cooler "Death's Head Assault Group") came to a good stopping point somewhere around 3056 and decided to take a garrison duty job to refit with new tech. As player interests and attention wandered we just let the campaign go and never went back to it. As far as I know Wolf is still sitting out there in his Atlas X, talking to local contacts and practicing his gunnery. When Mechwarrior 3rd edition came out about 1998 we started up a new campaign but it didn't last as long as this one, which didn't last as long as our 1st edition game with the D.H.A.G. , so maybe our attention was waning even then. The mechanics in all 3 versions were just terribly clunky looking back now. GURPS, Hero, Savage Worlds - any of those would work better now for the out-of-mech action while keeping Batteltech for the heavy metal bashing. I have no strong desire to fire up those old systems again but writing this does make me miss the universe quite a bit. It also makes me miss the groups we used to play with, too. 

For the future I have started to introduce the Apprentices to Battletech. We haven't played much yet but we will, probably this summer. Considering the ridiculous number of pained mech mini's I have sitting out in the garage it's a crime. I started off painting individual mechs, then I went to painting up lances as a unit, then I went to companies, and at the end of our playing time around 2000 I was painting them up as whole battalions with shared paint schemes, so we have the toys - we just need the time, not unlike so many other things in this hobby and life in general. If we do play a decent battle, or even start up a campaign, I'll post it here. Who knows, maybe they'll have the chance to be interviewed by the famous Wolf Blitzer and the amazing Atlas-Cam!

*Lights are 20-39, Mediums are 40-59. Heavies are 60-79 tons, and Assault mechs are 80-100 tons 

Some Love for the Science Fiction Game

I know I have posted some sci-fi stuff but it's mostly been Star Wars so I thought I would spend a post on other non-Star Wars RPG's that I have liked over the years.

Traveller was my first non-D&D RPG and I encountered the "3 books in a box" back in  1981. I never ran much original Traveller but I spent hours and hours generating subsector maps and planets, rolling up characters, and designing spaceships. The fun toolkit aspect of it cannot be overstated and I spent much time at the library photocopier ensuring I would have the proper sheets to record my experiments. There wasn't a lot of "chrome" or fluff back then, just hard-science mechanics and economics. I doubt many kids are asking their parents what "amortization" means at the age of 13 but if you got into Traveller it was important to know. It's not only Hard Science in the Traveller universe, it's Hard Economics too. We played through some of the original adventures and there was a fair amount of support in Dragon as well - remember, it wasn't always a WOTC house organ. There was an article on robots around issue 64 that I used far more than the official supplement.

Megatraveller came out in 1987 and it was huge - finally Traveller had a unified task system and full vehicle construction rules and even more detail on planets and systems and I ate it up. I ran and played a lot of Megatraveller and had a blast. It was backwards-compatible too, similar to how 2E D&D games could easily use 1E modules with about zero changes. This is the version I have played the most over the years. Despite having some interesting adventure material published for it, we pretty much always played our own campaigns, albeit set in the Spinward Marches. It was very much the classic "Merchants and Merenaries" type gaming that has been used with Traveller since the early days. Most memorable character was Sonny Crockett, former space detective (Hey they had a "Law Enforcer" career that was interesting and gave some good skills like Stealth, Intrusion, and Pistol.)

Then Traveller the New Era came out about 1993 and crashed hard - people hated the background, people hated the new mechanics (it was completely incompatible, mechanically, with the 15 years of prior material). I liked it as an environment and I had already seen the mechanics in Twilight 2000 2E so I still thought it was a good game it just wasn't Traveller as we knew it.  We played it a little but if anyone brought up "Traveller" in this period it  pretty much meant "Mega" not "New Era".

Traveller 4 came out some time after this and sucked. Ugly books, pointless changes to the mechanics, the worst editing I've ever seen across an entire product line - there was just nothing good about it. There were some interesting ideas like the Pocket Empires supplement that let players run a space empire (kind of like the dominion rules in the D&D Cyclopedia) but the execution was so bad that no one wanted to give them a try. T4 was so bad that it has the distinction of being one of the few games I have completely disposed of after purchasing. I got it, picked up most of the supplements, realized it was a dog, and dumped it. Bleah.

GURPS Traveller was another version that overlapped with TNE and T4 and if you like GURPS it's a cool game, using the technology and background of Traveller with the mechanics of GURPS. I've played it briefly and while I like GURPS fine for many things, it has a different feel than the original Traveller mechanics which puts it in a position similar to TNE - some people like Traveller for the system and if that's the case then you're not going to care for GURPS. My crew was never all that into GURPS so when I suggested it one time the response was that we could just play Mega and not bother with yet another system.

Eventually Mongoose Traveller came out and I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality - it went back to much of what made the original popular, smoothed out the system from the original books but didn't get as detailed as MegaTraveller and found that magic balance in the center of simplicity, elegance, familiarity, speed, and effectiveness that is so rare among game systems. It has a unified mechanic of 2d6 + skill or stat vs. a target number of 8 - that's it! There might be some modifiers to fix the maneuver drive if you're under fire and venting atmosphere, but the core mechanic is darned simple and works well. It brought back semi-random character generation and much of the good stuff from he original version without focusing solely on the Third Imperium universe. I've only played it a few times and I have not run it but it rally impressed me and I hope they keep making it for a good long time.

The second sci-fi game I picked up was Star Frontiers and it was very much the "light science" counterpart to Traveller. More playable alien races, more weapons (but still oddly fixated on current tech like Jetcopters and ATV's and bullet-guns) it was more Star-Warsy in feel but still went for some level of realism. The original box was packed with basic rules, advanced rules, a two-sided poster map, counters scaled for the map, and a starter adventure that was good enough that I am using it to kick off my Star Wars campaign 30 years later. It was awesome and much time was spent one summer fighting off the escaped hydra and chasing down smugglers on the big city map. It didn't have the subsystems like Traveller did, but it had its own kind of cool.

A year or so later the spaceship expansion came out, Knighthawks, and it was pretty cool too since there were no space rules in the original game. There was a whole series of adventure modules too, many of which didn't suck. SF as a whole continued to receive really good support in Dragon magazine as well, including a set of vehicle combat rules that we adopted instantly and never let go.

After about a 4 year run Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space came out, tried to convert the whole thing to a color chart system ala Marvel Super Heroes and Gamma World 3E and pretty much killed the whole thing. TSR was under new management and went off after Buck Rogers as their new space game. We never used Zeb's guide and we didn't think much of Buck Rogers either.

The other space RPG of my "Big 3" is Star Trek the RPG, mainly the FASA version. From 1982 on thorough the rest of the 1980's this was Trek for me. It had great production values, the system felt like it fit the universe, and it was well supported with adventures, a starship combat came, miniatures, and magazine articles.  When a new movie came out, we got a new supplement describing it. It made Klingons (and later the Romulans too) interesting and multi-faceted characters instead of orcs in space. People used to rave about Trollpak for Runequest as an example of a home-run monster supplement, but my standard has always been the Klingon supplement this set. I played it with my Captain character for years either in a party or even solo if no one else wanted to play sticking with the same ship and some of the same crew throughout that time.

It's the only game I can remember where "Luck" was a stat. It served as a sort of hero point mechanic in that you could take a luck roll at times as substitute or a backup for a bad roll or a low skill. humans were the only race that did not have a negative modifier to their Luck stat, which explained quite a bit of their success as trusting to your luck was actually viable for many human characters, unlike many aliens.

Combat used an action point system, counters, and a grid map and could be very nasty - as it should be when you can disintegrate opponents in one shot. Ship combat had several levels of detail and used counters on a hex grid plus the very cool control panel approach. In combat each character (running a bridge crew member presumably) ran a different panel - engineering for power allocation, navigation for shields, helm for weapons and movement, etc so that each player had something to do during space battles. This is something many space games have struggled with yet this effective system was published 30 years ago!

At the end of the 80's Next generation was the cool new thing and FASA lost the license. Eventually Last Uncorn came out wit ha new Trek game and I just didn't like. Decipher came out with one a few years later and I do like it, but I've never run or played it. I have all the books for it and they sit on the shelf and await their baptism of fire. If I had a choice to run a Trek game I'd go for Fasa first, then the Decipher version.

There was also "Prime Directive" - I played a whole lot of Star Fleet Battles and I know the universe pretty well and would love to play in it, but PD has been cursed with bad mechanics since it firat appeared in the 90's. The GURPS version isn't bad but I would probably go Savage Worlds for mechanics. Heck, Mongoose Traveller might work too with some customization.That's an interesting idea.

The last entry in this list is Mechwarrior, or the Battletech RPG. The 1st edition came out in 1986 just as BT was getting popular and we jumped on it right away. It was a fairly limited RPG as it was totally focused on having the players play the guys who drive the giant fighting robots used by various noble houses in an almost post-apocalyptic universe 1000 years in the future. If you were into the premise then it was awesome. if not, well, you probably didn't like Battletech either. There was a 2nd edition in 1990 and a 3rd edition in 1998 and all were heavily supported with regional supplements, unit supplements, and of course books of new mechs and other vehicles.

The problem with Mechwarrior was that most of the RPG rules kind of sucked. It's not even so much that the rules were bad it was that they were very narrowly focused and pretty clunky. Sure, we played them as they were the official game at the time, but we also converted them to GURPS (with one group anyway) and experimented with other systems too. Today I would probably use Savage Worlds (I know that's a real surprise to anyone who reads the blog regularly). Sooner or later I will be introducing the apprentices to this game but not just yet.

Campaign-wise we usually played mercenaries - less interference that way. We usually started out with 4-6 characters with 1 mech apiece and built our unit up over time - or died horribly, depending  on how the battle went. When the Clan invasion happened we stayed with the inner sphere and slowly built up our tech whenever possible.  Most memorable character: Wolf Blitzer the XXVIII rd "reporting to you live with the famous Atlas-Cam during our orbital drop on Galtor" -yeah I made him a freelance combat reporter. With an assault mech. He was fun.


Some of the others:

Babylon 5 - a mechanically dull d20 game with a ton of background from an awesome show. Had it, never played it or ran it, eventually dumped it.I had hopes for the Traveller version but it was so full of errors that I skipped it entirely.

Shatterzone - kind of cool from West End Games that kept the card mechanic from Torg. Never ran it, never played it, still have it.

Space Opera - friend had it, tried to run  it, gave up and went back to Traveller as it was complicated for no good reason. Had some interesting ideas but that was about it. This is one I've never bothered to pick up.

Star Hero - I like the Hero System, I like sci-fi games, but I've never played or run it

GURPS Space - played some, but weapons get very deadly and GURPS out of the box is not particularly cinematic or forgiving of severe injuries. If you want gritty in space, GURPS works very well.

Robotech - the game where Mega-Damage first appeared and where it was a good idea. We played around with this a little bit and it was a lot of fun. This and TMNT were my introductions to the Palladium System and I thought it worked just fine at this level. It never took off here as we were a Battletech group but we didn't hate it and broke it out every once in a while for short scenarios.

Anyway, there's a bit more background on my gaming past- it hasn't ALL been D&D. It is funny though how the focus has narrowed over the years. In the 80's I would say Traveller not something we played much more than Trek or Mechwarrior but since then it's been the only consistent sci-fi game in our rotation. Even then, it doesn't get played a ton. These days I can't get anyone interested in Star Trek (I thought the new movie would help there -nope) and Babylon 5 was a non-starter even though a) everyone I know liked the show and b) everyone liked d20 games. I'm not sure why.

I would say maybe we don't like playing in other people's universes, but Star Wars has made a few appearances over the years. I would think maybe it's not playing in places where the main story has already been told but again - Star Wars always has at least some interest. Maybe it's the action element that makes the difference, but B5 was pretty much about a war and didn't lack for action. With Trek I blame the Next gen to some degree - back when all we had was Original Trek there was a fair amount of butt-kicking going on but then the later version got all righteous and decided that meetings were the best way to resolve conflicts. I'm pretty sure FASA Trek didn't have Facilitation or Presentation in the skill list so maybe that killed it for my guys. I suspect the later versions of the show also started to look like playing a Paladin in D&D - there are a bunch of rules you're supposed to follow and to many that equals unwelcome restrictions on what they can do. There's enough of that in real life so they would rather play something where they can cut loose like D&D. I think it's the biggest brake on Jedi players in a Star Wars game too - some don't want to deal with the Jedi Code anymore than they want to hear about the Prime Directive, so they will take a smuggler with an old beat-up ship and a 100,000 Credit debt over cool powers if they are likely to get lectured about them.

So maybe that's my insight from thinking through all of this: People (my people anyway) want to play games where they have a great deal of freedom of action and potentially important choices, even moral choices - they just don't want to be harangued or lectured or berated by NPC's for those choices. The restrictions should come from the player's head, not from fear of (or the hassle of) NPC disapproval. 

I've never really broken that down in quite that way but it does fit the pattern over the years.  Now I have to figure out how to use it. I knew this was a good idea!

Anyway if you have a thought or an insight here, or if you spent time with one of these games, post it down below.