Author Topic: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material  (Read 2728 times)

rabindranath72

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Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« on: 20 October 2016, 03:21:32 »
Hi all,
so I finally bought the core book a few months ago, and only now I have had the time to actually read it, and I have decided to give it a go as soon as possible (being married with a day job and children the scale of the "soon" word is very flexible...)
Anyway.
The first thing I noticed is that the game's contents are very "sparse" compared to MW 2e and MW 1e, when it comes to actually implementing the "classical" Mechwarrior tropes (i.e. unit design, assets, repair, management etc.) Ideally, I'd like content along the lines of MW 1e+Mercenary's Handbook 1e.

So, my question is: how well do the AToW rules "interface" with older material? I appreciate the game uses the d6 mechanics, and looking at the Tactical Combat chapter I see it tries to interface with the Battletech tactical rules in a consistent way (though it refers to Total Warfare; not sure how it would work with previous editions of the Battletech rules?) It seems doable in principle, although I don't have a good "feel" for how it actually works in practice.

Note I don't plan to buy any other of the "modern" books (so, no Total Warfare, no Strategic Operations, no Tactical Operations etc.), as I'd like to use the following:

1) Battletech Compendium (product code 1640; love it because it's compact and fairly complete)
2) Battlespace
3) Mercenary's Handbook 1e and/or MH 3055
4) TR 3025, 2750, 3057, 3050 (original printing)

I am still undecided on the setting, it will probably be Reunification War or 4th Succession War.

Thanks in advance for any comments!
Antonio

Lorcan Nagle

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #1 on: 20 October 2016, 05:17:55 »
There shouldn't be any real issues linking into any of those books. The Tactical Combat section details how ATOW skills map onto BattleTech ones, and the only change to how skills work didn't chang target numbers at all.

If you want to directly translate MechWarrior 1st, 1nd or 3rd edition characters to AToW, the Time of War Companion has rules on how to do so.  The companion is well worth picking up for AtoW play anyway.
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rabindranath72

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #2 on: 20 October 2016, 06:13:03 »
Thanks!
I suppose the key factor here is whether the difficulties assumed for, say, Repairing Damage are the same (or similar); given that combat-wise things haven't changed as you say, I'd hope that's true also for other aspects of the game.

I don't have any characters to convert, we'll start from scratch. What else is in the Companion which may be of help in a "typical" MW campaign? I already see a lot of "redundant" stuff in AToW which I wouldn't use or severely limit (e.g. too many Traits, life modules etc.) so if it's more "generic" stuff I may do without it.

Thanks,
A.

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #3 on: 20 October 2016, 06:35:37 »
Thanks!
I suppose the key factor here is whether the difficulties assumed for, say, Repairing Damage are the same (or similar); given that combat-wise things haven't changed as you say, I'd hope that's true also for other aspects of the game.

I don't delve too deeply into the campaign rules, and while I know the unit creation and maintenance rules in Strategic Operations and Campaign Operations are different from the old mercenary handbooks, I don't think the way the RPG integrates into them is very different so you should be fine.

Quote
I don't have any characters to convert, we'll start from scratch. What else is in the Companion which may be of help in a "typical" MW campaign? I already see a lot of "redundant" stuff in AToW which I wouldn't use or severely limit (e.g. too many Traits, life modules etc.) so if it's more "generic" stuff I may do without it.

Thanks,
A.


There's a small number of additional general and combat rules; an expansion on how ranks and titles work in-game; more gear; expanded BattleArmour and ProtoMech rules for tactical combat; Archetypes and Templates to ease character creation; rules for creating creatures and also using them in BattleTech, plus a large number of pre-generated ones to use in-game; World creation rules; guidelines for running different types of campaigns; and guidelines for creating powerful NPCs as enemies and allies.

I don't play AToW often, but if I was to run a campaign I'm sure I'd find a lot of useful stuff in there.
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guardiandashi

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #4 on: 20 October 2016, 12:32:59 »
my 2 cents is that while there are a few differences in essence you can take any of the rules for the MechWarrior 2nd edition and essentially drop them directly into ATOW with little modification.

guns will need to be adapted, because for example the 1st/2nd edition weapons had variable damage codes instead of the fixed damage of ATOW but that's not really a big deal.

but if for instance you wanted to use the repair and salvage (page/pages) from say MechWarrior 2nd edition 90+ % of it could be directly dropped into ATOW as "close enough"

monbvol

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #5 on: 20 October 2016, 22:27:05 »
As noted a whole lot hasn't changed so much that the old books are still useful even if they might need a little more work to integrate than the modern versions.  So probably the only thing you'll run into that may prove any real issue are changes in traits and skills between RPG rule sets.  Even then a little of your own best judgment should see you through as I feel like I'm overstating how much of an issue it will be.

Atlas3060

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #6 on: 21 October 2016, 09:25:52 »
Exactly, AToW is pretty version friendly compared to some other games out there.
The companion book specifically has a chapter on how to convert things, just as previous iterations of the RPG have in the past.
It's not about winning or losing, no it's all about how many chapters have you added to the rule books after your crazy antics.

rabindranath72

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #7 on: 24 October 2016, 10:55:38 »
Thanks for the feedback everyone!
I am slowly delving deeper into some parts of the game. Indeed there don't seem to be any parts of the rules that scream incompatibility with previous material

I'll probably streamline character creation and introduce a simpler system like in MW 2e (i.e. Fields of Study and Military Occupation Specialties) built on the Skill Fields. Complete freeform is too "free" whereas the life modules are way too cumbersome.

skiltao

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #8 on: 27 October 2016, 12:31:41 »
I suppose the key factor here is whether the difficulties assumed for, say, Repairing Damage are the same (or similar)

MW2e assumes that a "green" technician has a base target number of 6. That should be easy enough to convert into the aToW skill system (although I personally have forgotten how  :-[).
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guardiandashi

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Re: Integrating AToW with older Battletech material
« Reply #9 on: 27 October 2016, 14:49:23 »
MW2e assumes that a "green" technician has a base target number of 6. That should be easy enough to convert into the aToW skill system (although I personally have forgotten how  :-[).
ATOW would put the "green" tech at an approximate skill of 2 or 3 to bring the target to 6 its basically a base target of 8 or 9 (I forget which atm) you then apply the skill level as a modifier effectively reducing the target (although it technically doesn't affect the target it just applies a bonus to the check, which has the same effect)

additionally several adjustments such as the time taken and the like are based not on the check target but the trained skill level IE if you have tech 1 you take x time to repair an issue, f you have tech 2, its a different time, up to skill level 6+ at which its 0.20 or 0.25 % of the listed time.