Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[Darq666]

[kronovan]

Darq I hear what you're saying. At first that aspect of the Medieval flavoring was missed by me, but the family heritage part of it became a bit more apparent as I read some of the sourcebooks. I'm much more comfortable with the Medieval elemant of the setting now and have in fact grown to really enjoy it.

For the setting, the ComStar sourcebook was what sealed the deal for me. There's so many elements of SciFi noir intertwined with that organization that I doubt I could ever put together enough adventures/mission to even get close to the bottom of it.

[Darq666]

Personnally, I preferred the old school Battle tech, where Mechs were rare. A lot of times early games were around finding spare parts and working with what you had.

[Darq666]

So Peregry - really likin what I see so far, but have you considered making 'Mechs just big people and going all in with SW rules set? One of the things mechs share in common with people is they are very complicated systems.

Use the same rules for combat. They have armor, by location (covered in the rules), you have weapons stats you can extrapalate from with regards to figuring out armor and weapons - Cannons can be used to extrapalate auto cannons, as your base damage the M2HB is in the main rules.

The main rules cover the effects of damage to the overall system, targetting individual locations, etc. Take the healing rules, use Tech skills and make them repair rules.

[peregry]

We did consider that, but decided against it for a few reason.

The first is we like the way BattleTech handles damage and such, and much of the tough, walking tank feel of Mechs come from that damage system. We love Savage Worlds, but its damage system leads to more fragile, characters and very swingy, rather than steady, damage that often results in sudden dramatic kills rather than a grind down that often occurs with BattleTech.

The second is the amount of balance work that goes into all the various weapon systems. As it stands, BattleTech is pretty balanced, not perfectly mind you, but enough so that we would not be able to convert all the weapons in a balanced manner, especially when you consider figuring armor into it. Using the SW weapons as a base also leads to some ridiculous numbers. Modern tank guns in BattleTech are statted as being Light or Medium Rifles. Being generous we'll say a 120mm Cannon (5d10 damage, AP 68) is a medium rifles, which does 6 damage in BattleTech. This gives 1 BattleTech scale damage coming out to about 1d8 damage per point. So this means an AC20 has to roll 20d8. This means that resolving damage using a SW style system actually ends up taking longer due to the amount of dice being rolled. Its obviously impractical, and so we couldn't use SW numbers as a baseline, and instead we'd have to come up with our own damage scale. Where we then face even more complex balancing issues.
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- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[Darq666]

I guess the question is did you want to do an RPG universe for Battletech or a combined RPG / Miniature game. If its the former, balance doesn't matter and combat can remain nebulous. If the latter then yes I see where you are going.

Keep up the great work!

[peregry]

We set out to do a combined RPG/Miniatures game from the get go, similar to how the MechWarrior RPGs published by FASA back in the day approached it (not sure if the new one does). Our group likes the tactical gameplay with its more concrete damage for Mechs, while more abstract damage for characters and feel it works out pretty well.

Glad you're liking what you see, and feel free to ask design questions or give feedback.
_________________
- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[Darq666]

[peregry]

If you mean a pure SW conversion, I don't mind. If you want it included in the SBT documents in the optional rules section, I'll even integrate it, with you credited of course.

I think there may already exist SW mecha rules in one of the supplements, so I would suggest finding out and if they do use them as a starting point. No need to recreate the wheel, after all.
_________________
- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[kronovan]

Darq - I briefly attempted Mecha as characters in my Inteface Zero setting, but reverted back to the SW vehicles style mechs in the setting rules' due to my players not caring for the character approach. I think vehicles as characters works well for spaceships (I've experimented using Chaosmeister's Savage Space rules), but not that well for Mechs. If you want to create Mecha that use the Savage World rules for vehicles, I'd recommend using the examples in Clint Blacks Basic SW Mecha Rules doc at savageheroes.com or the technique in the Sci Fi Gear Toolkit.

As to not using some BattleTech rules in a SW conversion; I'm not sure there's that big of an audience for it. Since getting into the BT tabletop and exploring SBT, I've participated in a number of threads with fans discussing the different MechWarrior RPGs. Those threads were on the official BT forums as well as on RPG.NET site, so not just current fans. A recurring theme in all of those threads was that fans liked 2 different scales and they all liked some BT crunch. At the same time, there were a lot of comments that using standard BT rules (and the adapted rules in most of the MW RPGs) for mech combat scale bogged things down. It was almost a unanimous consensus that pure BT (or something very close) rules within a RPG was far too slow and crunchy to support the fluidity of an RPG adventure. I think you have to take an approach like peregry and his team have, where you balance some of the crunch of BT with the better elements of Savage Worlds like movement and the combat to-hit game mechanics.

As to having PCs and mechs on the same scale (not sure if you're inteding that) its far trickier than it at 1st seems. Even in Interface Zero where mechs are much smaller and far, far less powerful than BT 'Mechs, they seem truly omnipotent when placed amongst PC's. As a GM you either have to put every PC in a mech (very tricky in that setting due to costs, backgrounds and potential NPC retaliation) or be very careful how you structure the action sequences in adventures. From what little exploration I've done in putting together some SBT adventures, I can say its far easier to handle the transition to a different scale for adventures in which MechWarrior PCs mount up.

Anyhow, just my own 2 cents.

[Edit] BTW, I'm with you on the earlier periods in the BT canon - or at least the earlier part of the 31st century. My campaign is going to begin in the late 3rd Succession War (starting 3020) and run to the War of 3039. I'm still not sure what house PC's will be in, but Im leaning towards Davion or Kurita - favoving Kurita so I can involve the Ronin War and the Free Rasalhague Republic. In particular within that timeframe, I find the years around Tiepolo's reign as ComStar Primus to be very dark and interesting. I'm defnititely going to have some ComStar draconinan antics figure into some of my adventures.

[Darq666]

Can you ellucidate on why it didn't work well? I would be interested in what pain points you ran into.

With regards to the setting, I think one of the big roleplaying factors missing from "Neo-Battletech" is the irreplaceability of mechs, ammunition and components. I don't see anyone these days ceding the battlefield to avoid trashing their irreplacable mech or scavanging battlefields for ammo. Those were the good old days!

[peregry]

Darq,

Hate to break it to you, but the days of BattleMechs being completely irreplaceable was gone back when the game first became known as BattleTech, rather than BattleDroids. Canon wise, the Great Houses could build repair parts and ammo with impunity (I'd never heard of ammo being in short supply before, merely Mechs) throughout the entire history.

Anything else that you've heard was, quite simply, wrong.* ;p

From a design standing point, we've been trying to ensure that everything within the system we can convert, is converted. To our playing, we're actually playing through the game's history, though our campaign started in the mid-3040s and we're in the original Clan Invasion right now. The Clans are a great antagonist from a GMing perspective, so long as they perceive the PCs as honorable opponents they will only attack with a force just good enough to threaten, but not enough to overwhelm the PCs. This is the opposite of the Great Houses, who once a group becomes a sufficient threat will simply unload overkill and be done with it.

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* In regards to BattleTech canon, newer ALWAYS trumps older unless you're dealing with a 3rd person omniscient viewpoint (ie novels). Most source books, especially those with a lot of setting fluff, are actually considered to be written "in universe" and subject to the in universe publisher's limited knowledge, or just flat out misinformation. In fact, one of the reason the earlier source books paint the Inner Sphere as worse off than it actually was was because ComStar wanted it to look like that in an effort to undermine the Great Houses.
_________________
- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[Darq666]

[peregry]

That was definitely the status quo in 3025, but things had picked baxk up in time for the 4th War.

Basically the 1st and 2nd Succession Wars were total war with Star League era weapons (and WMDs in the 1st War). The 3rd, which lasted the longest, was at the lower level intensity, and by the end of it Mechs had been teched down and were becoming more rare. The Helm Memory Core and NAIS began reversing the, seeing the return of full scale troop movement in the 4th War and then the reemergence of some tech in the War of 3039. It was not until after the Clan Invasion the Inner Sphere had gotten, militarily tech wise, to the same level as the Star League.

ComStar never sold tech, as far as I remember, except when they sold the Dracs Star League era mechs in the lead up to the War of 3039, and that was purely a move to spite Hanse Davion and the fledgling Federated Commonwealth. Other than that, if they had it, they kept it. Of course, perhaps they did sell things occasionally and we never heard about it, they kept the records after all...
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- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[kronovan]

[Darq666]

Thanks for the detailed reply!

[kronovan]

[Darq666]

I don't think I explained correctly where I want to go with this (of course I'm not sure exactly where that is so...). I don't want to treat the mecha as characters, per se. I want to handle combat and movement like character combat and movement, not vehicle combat and movement.

Player A in his Warhammer shoots a dual PPC shot at a Marauder. Player A makes a ranged attack using his Mech Shooting skill instead of his shooting skill. Everything else works as normal.

The Marauder has armor and a Toughness (though they will be much bigger than normal characters (like 50)) and the PPC does damage of 10d20 (MG does 1 point (2d10 for M2HB) and PPC does 10 points damage (Which scaled up to match the M2HB would be 20d10, which I took the liberty of changing to 10d20 - same upper limit, more damage likely). Then go on as normal.

Mechs can be shaken and incapacitated, managing damage without getting into all the fiddly minutia, they can recover as the Pilot overrides burnout systems etc - you can do a lot with the narrative! Injury table represents systems knocked out by location.

I picture applying healing / medical rules, using Astech skill, etc. So you don't need to track the specifics, just generalizations - The left arm is out.

My thoughts are this allows more role play, less crunching.

[peregry]

I'm not sure how abstracting damage will enhance RP, I also think that your idea might actually be slower than what we use in SBT. The only thing that it sort of allows is a more seamless transition between normal SW and Mechs.

As to speed, let us consider the attack scenario you presented, that of a single PPC attack.

Step 1 is to roll the attack roll, this is the same Gunnery vs TN. This is quick and painless, so long as everyone knows their TNs.

Step 2 in SBT is to determine hit location. 2d6 and consult a table doesn't take long (moreso if you have a hit location roller app like we use). This is probably the biggest slowdown in SBT, but not where a single big hit weapon is concerned.

Step 2 for you is Roll Damage. For small weapons this won't be bad, but for the PPC with 10d20 this will take quite a bit of time.

Step 3 for SBT is apply Damage to location.

Step 3 for you is apply Damage vs Toughness.

Step 4 for both is determine results of Damage, deal with "Wounds" or Criticals. I have no idea how these would compare. In SBT this can be as quick as "nothing/not happening" to quite a while due to resolving crits, using bennies to "Soak" etc. I imagine this could also be as quick as the similar nothing of SBT or a long drawn out process.

Please don't think I'm trying to discourage you or criticize the idea, rather I'm just trying to point out complications and am curious your opinions of things.
_________________
- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[Darq666]

1) You don't have two sets of rules (Biggest reason)
2) You don't have to track armor in 10 locations
3) You don't have to track damage in 10 locations