I want to start this off by saying that I’ve by now run an on/off MechWarrior 2nd edition for more than two years. Granted, it’s played over skype with a lot of help from MegaMek. My players have gone through victory and defeat, through bad luck and toil, through life and death…and I feel like I’ve gone through my own trials of struggle and confusion trying to deal with this system. With time, I felt I’ve gotten a good grip on the strengths of the system, and the many weaknesses too. Hence, I felt the need to vent about what is good and bad, and maybe discuss what can be done about the weaknesses.
First off, let’s start with the positives. Character generation and the archetypes is what I really do love about this old system. It makes it easy to make characters and easy to make NPC’s in a pinch without having a big ‘monster manual’. It actually resulted in getting the game started, as we lacked a GM one day. I had never GM’d before, but knew you could just pick archetypes, and as such, MechWarrior was good for a one session stand in.
Of course, I love the integration with BattleTech too. It allows switching between sitting in Mechs and running around on foot fairly easily. It has created the strange dichotomy that personal combat is very lethal, and Mech combat is comparatively safer.
In general, the game tends to run fairly smoothly, as the system is neither too simple, not too complicated (unlike its wargame big brother at times ;)).
There are a lot of things that do not work in favour of the system however. Since personal combat tends to be on the short and brutal side, the regular play order, with the one with the highest initiative going last, seems unintuitive and strange. It tends to be better to shoot first, and as such, it would result in everyone using the ‘sieze the initiative’ rules if possible.
The book can be downright contradictory in places too. In one place it says there is no skill for using grenades…and yet they have a scatter table for when you miss the roll, how is that supposed to work? Luckily, the MechWarrior companion clarifies this, stating that the Throwing Weapons skill is used for grenades.
There are also places where there obviously has gone very little testing into the mechanics. The running skill states that if one doesn’t have the running skill, you will have to do an athletics saving roll (roll 3d6, take the two best). This means that taking the running skill will in my experience make you less likely to succeed. Going into cover has the same problem in some ways. The modifiers work well against enemies who are fairly mediocre shots, but if they’re good marksmen, going into cover will just make it more likely that you will be shot in the head.
One of the things that has bugged me the most, is the lack of a dedicated skill for bluffing and lying. I started out as a player on Pathfinder, and when the roleplay really got going, the bluff skill got a lot of use. There are some skills that overlap with this area, like impersonation, seduction and such…but for example, if you’re trying to give a false reason for an action, like trespassing into an area, I have no idea what skill to use.
I’m sure there is more, but I think this is more than enough ranting for now. I do own A Time of War, and have drawn inspiration from it to solve several of the problems (They solve the use of cover much batter, and it has the acting skill for deceit like the above mentioned case). I’m curious though, which problems have you encountered with the various Battletech role playing systems?
(PS. If this is in the wrong subforum, please move it to the correct one.)
