Shadowrun had Gibson, Battletech had Niven and Pournell

[souran]

I recently bought the battletech harebrained schemes video game. While learning the system I went back and read a lot of SARNA and battletech lore.

I originally got into battletech in 93-94. I had the blue/purple "compendium rules of warfare" and the boxed set with the Atlas on the front. My background with setting always included the clans. Regardless, after a few attempts at playing mechwarrior second edition my group gave up because any competently built mech pilot was off the scale for the wargame.

Anyway, reading up on the lore again, I was a little surprised at how much battletech owes to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournells sci-fi novels, especially their "codominium" works. Even the method of FTL is basically a straight rip of Niven's drives.

There are, obviously, other inputs. Bolo and Hammer's slammers were clearly well known to whoever wrote the future history for the setting. In some ways there is more "Bolo" to the mechs of mechwarrior than their is anime influence.

However, the political situation and the broad brush of the sci-fi arc of Battletech owes as much to Niven and Pournell as shadowrun owes to Gibson or 40K owes to Dune and 2000 AD.

One thing I will say, is that battletech fiction tends to be substantially better written than warhammer fiction. I listened to a couple of Dan Abannet books on audible. He is considered one of their better black library authors and as military sci-fi goes his writing is... less than the quality I was used to. 40k tends towards the star wars end of the military sci-fi pool where it is basically adventure stories with the military parts having no idea about scale and scope. So you get things like colonel's with personal super heavy MBTs who are also the highest ranking officer in a whole sector.

Battletech is probably helped by the fact that their are command and control mechs and that each mech is valuable enough that it isn't unreasonable for members of the aristocracy to not want to lend there mech to a another person. Regardless, the writing in general seems like maybe they occasionally had people who had at least studied how armies and navies work.

That said, I personally think that the sci-fi fiction that goes along with "drop zone commander" is the best. The story is interesting and unique, gives plenty of reason for each faction to fight each other faction, and mostly avoids things having dumb stuff happen in terms of scale and scope.

[Stahlseele]

Yes, Niven and Pournell were pretty good.
But Battletech also had some real stinkers.
Mostly in the newer books of course. But there is also FAR COUNTRY.
And . . there IS a reason why a FUSION REACTOR GOING INTO A CRITICAL EXPLOSION is called Stackpoling . . And that one was around in the beginning as well.

Battletech is the Universe that gave rise to the term FASANOMICS.
Because the numbers made no god damn sense whatsoever no matter HOW you looked at them.
Even if you basically mind caulked ALL of it . . you think a bit further than the 5 minutes of in universe you are reading and your brain goes:"wait . . those numbers are off"

As for WH40K, it too has good and bad authors.
Dan Abnet can write very well, if the subject he is writing about is of his interest.
The Astra Militarum / Imperial Army is basically his playground and he writes them better than most but . . Chaos . . he tends to write those as just too cartoonish villains being evil for the sake of being evil . .
For well written chaos you need to look up other Authors.


Edit:
Aand i just remembered that english is not my native tongue after going and checking and actually seeing no Battletech Novels written by either of those two Authors.
Which means i completely misunderstood the whole meaning of your post -.-

[souran]

Edit:
Aand i just remembered that english is not my native tongue after going and checking and actually seeing no Battletech Novels written by either of those two Authors.
Which means i completely misunderstood the whole meaning of your post -.-

Sorry if there was confusion, what I mean is that much like how shadowrun imports a lot of concepts and conceits from William Gibsons neurmancer wholesale, there is a lot of the battletech universe that is basically copied from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell novels.

Battletech FTL is basically identical to Larry Niven's Aldersen Drives.

The Terran Hegemony IS the condominimum, and the tech level of the inner sphere, where tech level is slowly moving backwards because of constant warfare is the same asthetic as found in things like "falkenburg's legion" and "the mote in gods eye".

I guess my bigger point was that the authors who write for stuff for battletech tend to do a slightly better job of mirroring the style of the source material. Especially in the fiction attached to rules or other gaming products. 40K tends to skew towards the saturday morning cartoon level in this respect.

[magnuskn]

The Terran Hegemony IS the condominimum, and the tech level of the inner sphere, where tech level is slowly moving backwards because of constant warfare is the same asthetic as found in things like "falkenburg's legion" and "the mote in gods eye".

Eh, the "tech slowly going backwards" thing lasted, what, four novels, before the Gray Death Legion found a Star League cache and after that it was off to the races to upgrade the tech level of the Inner Sphere back to Star League levels. It took about 40 years in-universe, but by 3065, the Inner Sphere was fielding better mechs than the Star League (of course helped along by the Clan invasion).

I loved the Stackpole novels back in the day, since they gave a larger scale picture of the whole Inner Sphere. By now I realize that some of his dialogue is pretty cringey, but he still manages to deliver a lof of knockout punches when I re-read the novels.

[Stahlseele]

Yes, this is due to BT trying to be more or less hard sci fi i think.
And aside from the Mech Acrobatics in the novels, there is very little in the combat scenes that actually contradicts or can not be explained by the rules.

[Mechalich]

I loved the Stackpole novels back in the day, since they gave a larger scale picture of the whole Inner Sphere. By now I realize that some of his dialogue is pretty cringey, but he still manages to deliver a lof of knockout punches when I re-read the novels.

Stackpole is a rock solid writer by the standards of shared world fiction, which are otherwise very low, especially when there's a military focus. Having Stackpole get in very early with the BattleTech novel line, and especially giving him the BIG TIME early novel set in the Blood of Kerensky trilogy where he got essentially write the entire story of the Clan Invasion put the overall BattleTech novel line on very solid footing in terms of political power blocks and actually writing out both tactical and strategic level mech combat.

I mean, yes the numbers are stupidly ridiculous, but they are at least consistent within that ridiculous frame.

BattleTech as a universe may have stolen a lot of ideas from Niven and Pournelle - which makes sense since they were big names at the time it was being made - but at least in terms of the novels Stackpole set the tone for how those stories would be told.

[Stahlseele]

Fun fact:
the whole clans thing happened by accident more or less.
appearantly while talking at gen con i think, one of the group had a sort of epiphany about one of the major minor factions/mercenary units.
The Wolfs Dragoons.
"Oh my god, they are not Wolf's Dragoons, they are the Wolf Dragoons!"
And from there on they basically went to invent all of the clan stuff . .
Also, much much much later when the word of blake war was going on, they nuked the grey death legion by accident . .
The process of progressing the setting is basically going around planet names, decding what happens where . .
And they did that. And they decided a certain planet was going to get nuked.
And after they were done they went over to major and minor factions like the bigger mercenary units.
And then they came to the GDL.
a) "So, now where they at?"
*shuffling of papers*
b) "Ah, there they are on INSERT NAME OF NUKED PLANET HERE!"
a) "Why does that name sound familiar to me?"
*shuffling of papers, notes being checked*
b) "Oh . . . Um . . . Because when we went over the worlds we decided that world would be nuked . . ."
a) "Oh. Right. Well. So DO we actually nuke the GDL then?"
b) "Can't think of a way to plausibly get them out of there before it happens"
a) "Okay. Right. Moving swiftly on then!"

[Thaluikhain]

40K tends to skew towards the saturday morning cartoon level in this respect.

Generally, yes (especially later stuff), but they've have loads of writers who've gone about things in very different ways. William King, Matt Farrer and Gav Thorpe come to mind. Abnett dominates 40k, but he's not the only voice there.

[OgreBattle]

Damn Abnett adds marvel superhero shit to 40k, they’re good for hitting Th by Disney audience but just dilute the 40k setting in the way that’s Moebius liked to spit in marvel

[Iduno]

The Terran Hegemony IS the condominimum, and the tech level of the inner sphere, where tech level is slowly moving backwards because of constant warfare is the same asthetic as found in things like "falkenburg's legion" and "the mote in gods eye".

I guess my bigger point was that the authors who write for stuff for battletech tend to do a slightly better job of mirroring the style of the source material. Especially in the fiction attached to rules or other gaming products. 40K tends to skew towards the saturday morning cartoon level in this respect.

I think some of that is that FASA and the SciFi writers were both using ideas from things that historically happened. Wanting to recreate age of sail travel times with FTL is difficult.

But also, probably some "we want to do this, and this person already came up with a solution to that problem, so why reinvent the wheel."

[SeekritLurker]

It's worth noting that, while Niven was a passable SF author who was basically at the median level of "white engineers are the best and willl drive the future" that was the go-to modus operandi of his cohort, Pournelle was actively noxious and terrible.

You can see it in Lucifer's Hammer, say, where the black POV characters are "inner city gangsters" who spend the entire immediate aftermath of the apocalypse chasing a van full of "expensive European liquor." Or the Falkenberg novels - The Mercenary has our "hero" rolling in and massacring a bunch of impoverished locals who are seeking land reform and singing "Power To The People" at the behest of the local land-owners, with the tacit blessing of the Co-Dominium government.

I only add this to the conversation because I have thoughts on Pournelle - I'm only moderately acquainted with Battletech.

[Stahlseele]

Battletech is a sadly often overlooked IP . .
As discussed previously, it has some good fluff writing but there is also terrible stuff in there. Mostly the newer stuff, but the older is not free of critique either.

The Game itself . . Depends.
It is a wargame that can be done relatively quick . . for certain values of quick.
The one main disconnect between the "fluff" and the "crunch" is that the game is very much about movement and cover and stacking modifiers on the enemies to hit number instead of slowly plodding around doing a stand and deliver fight.

[OgreBattle]

The shadowrun rocker, can they use social and media influence to make noise to cover shadowrunner signals? Like say physically or virtually holding a concert to distract corporate security with mobs

[Whipstitch]

Rule of thumb is that if it sounds useful the Rocker probably can't do it with any methods unique to their idiom. My favorite thing about Rockers is that they had a complicated and swingy songwriting mechanic which meant that the average successful band tops out at one good album then proceeds to disappoint their fans. Realism!

[Harshax]

How's the game play? I've watched some videos, which immediately unlocked a lot BT rules gathering dust since the late 90's, but I hadn't got much of a feeling about the degree to which BT and MechWarrior combine over the course of the campaign.

[Previn]

How's the game play? I've watched some videos, which immediately unlocked a lot BT rules gathering dust since the late 90's, but I hadn't got much of a feeling about the degree to which BT and MechWarrior combine over the course of the campaign.

If you know the rules, Battletech the table top game goes 'pretty quick' by which a 1 vs 1 fight may take 30 second of actual play time, or 30-40 minutes. A 4 vs 4 or 5 vs 5 which is more common usually takes 2-3 hours (if you know the rules). It's decently fun if you're into the minutia of what exactly is happening in combat, but since the rules effectively haven't been updated since the 80s (and no that it NOT an exaggeration), you have a lot of cases where the game can be broken, and only a gentlemen's agreement can prevent it.

All that being said, you can get some crazy fun games and crazier stories.

Mechwarrior and Battletech doesn't really intersect. You play mechwarrior when you're out of mechs, and Battletech when you're in mechs.

While I'm not sure of the CGl forums outside of the Battletech ones, for BT it's fascist and the 'moderators' are garbage. They often actively drive away new players. Give the small community for the table top game, this is an issue to be aware of.

If you want to play Battletech, I recommend Megamek. It is 100% accurate to the board game rules, can be played online for free and has a passable AI if you don't try to exploit it.

Edit: To Stahlseele, that's not what happened. The 'story' for Battletech was more or less planned out from the beginning to Word of Blake stuff. Exact details not written, but the Clans were hinted at from the start, and a lot of the 'whoops we nuked faction X' was just bad book keeping on FASA and CGL (while not being exonerated) actually trying to keep track that and make everything fit.

[Stahlseele]

Mechwarrior . . THE PEN AND PAPER RPG . . is a horribly broken Mess.
Because they try to do everything with 2d6 same as Battletech does it.

[souran]

How's the game play? I've watched some videos, which immediately unlocked a lot BT rules gathering dust since the late 90's, but I hadn't got much of a feeling about the degree to which BT and MechWarrior combine over the course of the campaign.

Battletech the video game is pretty good, but the weapon balance is totally different than the pen and paper game that I remember.

Battletech the wargame is decent. It has a number of similarities to Steve Jackson's "GEV" and O.G.R.E. but has some of its own unique features as well. The thing that has always been at odds with the game is that most people want to fight with Mechs (duh) but the ficition assumes that there are lots of tanks and IFVs and shit for them to stomp on.

As I recall, the 90's version of the game (Compendium Master Rules era) some of the tanks were actually pretty good in terms of cost/effectiveness but nobody bothered to ever take them in table top games because nobody got into battletech to play squat ass tanks that can get stepped on to be instantly destroyed. People did take the armored infantry because if you put soldier dudes in super armor people will take them because super armor is cool.

Mechwarrior (at least 2nd edition) was a weird bastard hybrid of shadowrun support rules and Battletech core mechanics. You roll 2D6 and try and get above your attribute. Skills and modifers are beneficial if they are negative. However, if you know shadowrun you know basically everything else about mechwarrior when out of your mech. The health system/combat system is a straight rip from shadowrun 2e, you have 2e edge, you have priority based character generator (including "race" but here it refers to if you are just an inner sphere person or in the clan heirachies) and your initial battlemech is the substitute for wealth. Characters attributes and skills are assigned like 2e shadowrun which means that it is better to START as an expert at something than it is to try and become an expert at it latter with XP.

So if you play a mech pilot in Mechwarrior 2nd edition your character can (and should unless you are a fucking moron) start as a better pilot and gunner than even super elite pilots from the wargame. When you actually want to USE a battlemech in Mechwarrior you break out the battletech rules and use those and convert your pilots stats into those that are used in the wargame. Since you will start off the charts for the wargame unless all the oposition is rewritten as well the wargame part falls to pieces because the wargame was bounded and the RPG was not.

Mechwarrior 2nd edition has the same issue as the Heavy Gear RPG. A wargame by its nature does not need to account for advancement. However, an RPG is stale unless characters can grow and change. Warhammer Fantasy roleplay had this same issue. Its "conversion" method for porting characters over to wargame was divide all your percentile stats by 10. This had two really weird ass effects. The first was that starting characters tended to be less effective than even basic soldiers. This sucked but was at least in keeping with the "you are a guy who cleans horseshit out of the streets of altdorf" feel for the game. However, if you could live for a few sessions and grow you tended to end up with human characters with bloodthirster type stats. I played the Heavy Gear RPG as well and it had the same problem. If you had stats that were "green" for the wargame you would suck so hard at the RPG that you would give up on the game. If you optimized your character you broke the wargame half.

What sucks is that coming at this from the other side (Make the game an RPG) tends to be even less satisfying. When it became clear that Mechwarrior as a rpg was unsatisfying to do mech piloting stuff in, half my gaming group followed the lead of a guy who wanted to play the paladium Robotech rpg. That fucking travesity of a game was no better because palladium is a cat shit burrito with slathered in dog vomit salsa. Additionally, its rules for piloting mecha didn't feel like piloting anything. I have seen things like the mech rules for 3.x DND have the same issue. If you don't have a combat system that does anything to make it feel like your operating a vehicle then it just seems like a fancy suit of armor with dumb weapon names.

[Stahlseele]

The ATOW Mechwarrior RPG is still broken as shit for mostly the same reasons.
You are likely to cripple your character in creation.
You can either have the skill to use it OR the Mech to use your skills on, but because of point restraints not actually both in most cases . .

The REASON WHY nobody uses Tanks in CBT is mostly because of Gentlemans Agreement . .
Because even if you look at some of the Mech Designs and go:"Who the fuck allowed this abomination to be created?"
You are just as likely to look at certain tank designs and figure out that for the cost of one medium Mech you can field FOUR TANKS which EACH can kill said Medium Mech . .
Tanks are still pretty damn reliable and i used them to great effect last time i was given some to play with in a scenario . .
Heads up: be clear what you want out of the board game as well and tell people that.
The other side and even some on my side were not too happy with me actually playing the objective of the mission and not doing fun honourable battles . .

[Hicks]

Two words: Savannah Master.

[Stahlseele]

Oh yes, the bane of any light mech.

[Previn]

Two words: Savannah Master.

That's a boogie man for new players. First, if you bring those to a map with rocky terrain, 2 levels of elevation change, or any decent amount of woods they can be absolutely useless. As hovers, with 4/5 pilots, a lot are going to get wrecked when they fail piloting skill rolls on turns, unless they're going 'slow' which negates most of the advantage. On top of that, the higher you go in tech levels, the easier they get to be to deal with.

Really that only worked before BV when people tired to do really blatantly stupid balancing like matching tonnage of forces.

The REASON WHY nobody uses Tanks in CBT is mostly because of Gentlemans Agreement . .

Tanks alone aren't that great, you typically stick them as a turret somewhere and use them as area denial. They're very situation dependent and can be fragile with so few hit locations, and once the armor is gone on a site, they go down extremely quick.

There's a handful of tanks I'd actually stop to worry about unless it's a wide open map or a city in a double blind game.

You are just as likely to look at certain tank designs and figure out that for the cost of one medium Mech you can field FOUR TANKS which EACH can kill said Medium Mech . .

I'm going to need an example before I believe this. An average IS medium is (not going for over BV'd units) about 1250. The cheapest BV tank that has a chance of 1v1ing a medium mech without extenuating circumstances maybe a Hetzer at 553 BV with an AC20 could fit the bill, but it's wheeled, and not that fast, and lacking a turret. That widens a bit as we go up in tech levels, but it's still only a handful, and I don't think there is a tank at 1/4th the BV of the average medium that's going to do what you claim reliably.

If you really want to destroy a game you learn the aerospace rules and bring aerospace fighters.

[Stahlseele]

Appearantly, i am a bit spoiled by the Clan and higher TL IS Mediums that i have to deal with more often than i would like and thus grossly overestimated the BV of Medium Mechs. <.<

But still:

Shrek PPC Carrier. 900BV for 3x10DMG that will hit you across the board.
This is basically an Awesome.

SRM Carrier. 816 BV for 60SRMs. That is a DMG Potential of 120, if you can get those rolls going.
Not Many Mediums have that much Armor / Internal Structure.
Not to mention the ridiculous Crit Chance and the pure stability DMG being done.

LRM Carrier. 833 and 60 LRM coming at you across the board as well.
Same Crit Chance just because of the number of hits one can expect from that cloud of boomex.

[Previn]

Appearantly, i am a bit spoiled by the Clan and higher TL IS Mediums that i have to deal with more often than i would like and thus grossly overestimated the BV of Medium Mechs. <.<

But still:

Shrek PPC Carrier. 900BV for 3x10DMG that will hit you across the board.
This is basically an Awesome.

And costs more BV than about half the medium mechs out there. It's the higher end of the basic vehicles for damage output, but a lot of mediums on an appropriately sized map with terrain could deal with it as a 3/5 tank.

In intro Griffon could deal with it for only 1272 BV, possibly without ever taking a hit in return. The mech is more maneuverable, more difficult to kill (both in terms of Armor and IS and higher to hit modifiers for movement and does about 16 damage on average at the same range brackets.

And since any hit can kill the motive system on a tank, it could be down and out in a bad spot right off the bat.

SRM Carrier. 816 BV for 60SRMs. That is a DMG Potential of 120, if you can get those rolls going.
Not Many Mediums have that much Armor / Internal Structure.
Not to mention the ridiculous Crit Chance and the pure stability DMG being done.

Most mediums do have a weapon longer than 9 hexes and a much better movement profile than the SRM Carrier at 3/5 as tank, as well as it having pretty poor armor, limiting it's use to highly confined areas such as a city. Most mediums given time could destroy it without ever taking a shot in return. If you're in a city, or double blind and can hide it, maybe then.

LRM Carrier. 833 and 60 LRM coming at you across the board as well.
Same Crit Chance just because of the number of hits one can expect from that cloud of boomex.

Honestly the LRM carrier is the only one out of these 3 that I'd worry about, mainly because of indirect LRM fire (which I use to a high degree myself).

Still none of these is 1/4th the cost of a medium.


Edit: should to could

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, as i wrote, i grossly overestimated the BV of Medium Mechs . . .
As for indirect fire . . that can literally go die in a fire in my opinion <.<
The ONE TIME i get to play something more to my liking (Assault Mech)
And i get peppered by swarms of LRM from i can't even tell where x.x

And of course, Tanks are highly situational . . But that means you will usually get
to meet them on their turf where they can deal with their problems a bit better.

If the player is not a complete moron at least.