So, in preparation for playing Battletech with friends, there's been some contemplative talk about supplementing it with some TTRPG. It's already been covered that aToW is terribad, and I've either managed to browbeat or convince the others to feel the same way. This feels like a prime opportunity to cook up a homebrew system to experimentation; but to do so, I need to decide on goals.
Design Constraints
Loveless Genre - While we can have the RP segment focus on relationship dynamics like something out of Maid, we don't actually want that for pure personal preference.
No Logistics - Strategic Operations already has rules for maintenance/salvage, so making the RP segment focus on that is redundant
Constrained Time - Giant fighting robots are the stars, so the time investment absolutely cannot overshadow the BT scenario itself
Unchanged Resolution - Shifting dice mechanics is not something we want, so the RP rules will use the same 'format'
Consequential - The events of the RP need to have measurable influence on the wargame portion and/or vice versa
There are still decisions to be made that can create wildly different games, even with those constraints. Here are a few ideas I'm thinking of. I want to know if you think any of the ideas are bad, any are absent, or there are flaws when mixed with the constraints listed above.
Game Ideas
Battlerun - You play the bothansspecial ops in preparation for the upcoming BT scenario for some material advantage
Mech Janitors - You play the support personnel beneath the Mech Jockies, and run into conflict on a distinctly smaller scale; acting as both prologue and epilogue to each scenario. Distinctly lighter in tone because of the scale of your character's trials.
Song of Heat Sinks & Flamers - You play Social Intrigue as nobles & generals among the Great Houses or whatever; you angle for better resources, delegate your spy network, and other large-scale strategic advantages
Last edited by virgil on Mon Oct 19, 2015 9:21 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
Isn't Song of Heat Sinks and Flamers typical Battletech? The nobles and Houses play their games for their own advancement culminating in battles and wars? So it seems that would fit best.
I think MechJanitors would be fun if it was a merc campaign. You lie, cheat and steal to scrape together the best resources for your pilot/lances mechs vs. all the other guys trying to do the same.
Shady314 wrote:
I think MechJanitors would be fun if it was a merc campaign. You lie, cheat and steal to scrape together the best resources for your pilot/lances mechs vs. all the other guys trying to do the same.
"Ren Shabor from Delta 3 Maintenance slid on some lubricant going down the stairs and fell to his death, and the schematics aren't on his corpse!"
Last edited by Maxus on Tue Oct 20, 2015 6:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Hrm . . if you still want the MECHS to be the stars, none of the above will really work i am afraid.
Because if you make characters, your characters will take over because they are the characters and the Mechs are just their vehicle of choice, in which they spend as little time as humanly possible, because it's either annoying work or straight up dangerous . .
You can't really have the Mech Janitors do the fighting either, which means again that the Mechs are not the Star of their own Universe anymore.
Same goes for political intrigue . . There IS the Term Gun Boat Diplomacy, but spygames and playing nobles against each other really is kind a "not now please!" thing when you are actually in a Mech at the time. So again, you play mostly outside and this relegates Mechs to being . . somehwere over there.
If you make an RPG in the Battletech Universe, you can not have the Mechs be the Stars. They simply won't get enough face time, or it feels too bland to play the characters just to get to the next unbelievable point of Mech-Combat.
If you are in a Mech, you are, de facto, at war. In such a campaign, there is little else but sleep, eat, try to survive in your Mech, rinse and repeat.
For an RPG, you need to take the characters and have them not be Mech-Pilots. You need to make them:
Liao Death Command / Maskirovka,
Steiner Loki,
Davion Heimdall / Rabid Foxes,
Kurita DEST or O5S or ISA or MAYBE Nekokami.
Marik has some kind of secret Service, but nothing like the other houses do if i remember correctly. Closest they have is their Knights of the Inner Sphere Order, and that is still just basically a Combat Unit in Regiment size made up mostly of Mechs that has a bit higer Standards and Morals . .
Power-Armor < = THAT can be used in an RPG. Anything else? Nope. No dice.
What happens when the characters go somewhere and battle starts?
Does the whole Group make a run for their Mechs from wherever they are?
Does only one of them, because the others are not Mech-Pilots?
How does the rest of them hold out while he gets his Mech on?
And once he arrives, what do the other characters do while the Pilot takes care of what is probably not a Mech-Grade enemy anyway . .
And if it is a Mech-Grade Enemy somehow, how did they survive long enough to get Mech Reinforcements?
And how do you explain all that to the Authorities after the fact?
And then there's the Problem of a not unconsiderable ammount of time taking place in Spaceships where Mechs are not viable.#
Take a look at the WH40K RPG.
You can't really play Spess Mehreens or anything you know and love from the Universe as a character in the RPG, because it would not make any sense.
Same Problem with Battletech sadly.
And as soon as you are at that point . . why bother being in the BTU at all?
It's sad and i WANT a good RPG in Battletech . . but the MECHS that make the Universe simply do not fit into an RPG <.<
If you want to play with Mechs with your Friends . . Try and come up with a War Campaign and simply play Battletech. That can and probably will get boring pretty fast. Especially seeing how CBT COMBAT with 4v4 Mechs can and will take up the Better part of an Evening . .
Last edited by Stahlseele on Wed Oct 21, 2015 12:49 am, edited 2 times in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Meh, Stahlseele's reasons are the issues of least concern, as those are problems I can think of several ways to circumvent. The real issues I'm running into are the fact many BT scenarios involve just two people, and RPGs with that few are a challenge; oh, and half of the players are opposed to each other, so any influence the RP has on the 'Mech scenario itself is going to be implicitly adversarial. Battlerun can technically be done, but it would be a two person boardgame in a lot of ways. Something like Mechjanitor circumvents the adversarial role by having the 'Mech fight influence the RP session, but that whole scenario is a generally story-based game, and those don't necessarily work as well with just two people; even then, I suspect my work would produce something similar to Shab-al-Hiri Roach.
So, on the whole, I'm currently at a loss for dealing with the tiny number of players and still maintaining legitimate attempts at RP that is more regimented than Munchhausen. The Song of Heat Sinks & Flamers probably has the highest chance of being something I could do...but it requires a robust social minigame, and that's super hard.
Last edited by virgil on Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
