Its an RPG; individual character resource use is important. Dropship limits..are not. They hold whatever the GM needs them to hold for the game. General descriptions about travel time are there; exact transit chains simply are not important; an RPG's focus is very micro in scale, on the individual level.
Except, they are, because this literally is at odds with the way the rest of the book is written; there are hard TNs for every repair, and BattleTech's own resource books have knocked things down to the point where every jump jet or gyro has a slightly different weight.
And yes, this stuff is important on a micro scale. If you are playing a merc unit that wants to go from the LA to FS, that's a -several month journey-, which can be off-set a number of ways. I'm not talking "I want per-planet charts!" - not at all. I am saying that important universe concepts should take precedence over incredibly nuts rules surrounded in walls of texts. Previous editions of MWRPG were much cleaner.
"In a game that tracks your carry weight down to the kg of your underwear, not a single person will care that transit times aren't even addressed with a single paragraph in a book about running an RPG, where most of your time will be spend on dropships." That's what this feels like.
Funny. I've GM'd plenty of them. ATOW is about all you really need. Common, easily available sourcebooks help.
MekHQ is not a tool for the RPG. An RPG is not an extension to a wargame campaign, which is what you seem to be talking about. Transit times estimates can be ballparked, and no one will care.
I am not sure if peacetime campaigns are all that common in BattleTech. I'm not even sure if peacetime is all that common in BattleTech.
As a GM of a player sized RPG group, not at all. Those details are not important for a role playing game. Those are logistic problems for a detailed (far too detailed) wargame campaign. If playing a wargame campaign, I've got other logistics system that don't bog down painful soul sucking, boring details of absolutely no relevance to anyone's enjoyment of a game
Some basic lip service of what to expect or some various levels of information would be welcome, but again, largely due to the context of everything else and how down-to-the-inch it's tracked. It feels like focus that's all put in the wrong places.
Its missing as tables of dropship storage capacity and endless pages of weights of innumerable items for a scale of play not suitable for the RPG have no place in an RPG rulebook.
Except that the books are filled with precisely that; including references to at least basic information on how the universe worse this way. A lot of rules could be brought down to just a few paragraphs or a page at most to fit more useful stuff (even if it's not that stuff). Have you even looked at how insane taking damage is in the book? I've never seen an RPG need nearly 5 pages to explain the basic concepts without actually providing bits of missing info at the same time. It's crazy.
What are these rolls? Playing in game, the average calculation you are making is the margin of success of failure for a target number on a 2d6 roll.
Once you have people rolling modifiers like +7 as par for the course, the system forces you to just start sending TNs through the roof or expect people to win, always, at everything.
They aren't ridiculous. They are pretty straightforward. If they seem unrewarding, its because RPG's are centered around actions and play, not long periods of training. If it seems too much..then don’t award the points.
Then that's all the more reason for them to be simple. If it's centered around actions and play, then why have the rules at all? It's not an excuse for a ludicrously over complication of what should be a simple rule set.
And again, if you're trucking around in a dropship in the IS (while AToW doesn't tell you this, of course) it takes MONTHS. Taking a new contract makes this come into play all the time, in the smallest of games. But nobody does it because it's horrible as presented here.
What did you need to know? You make up an appropriate target number if the players are trying to disarm it, or repair one. Its not like you need the damage rules for RPG scale play. Strategic nuclear weapons rules are not naturally located in an RPG.
You can make up TNs but making up increasingly ludicrous TNs to make the game interesting at an ever creeping attribute bonus is something that all modern systems have shyed away from hard, for a good reason.
Ok, they directly convert the dice to match battletech, and target numbers..and its still to hard? At what point do you cease having an RPG and just are playing a slightly more detailed game of normal battletech?
2nd Edition was the last system that used BattleTech style rolls. But it goes beyond rolls; everything doesn't mesh between the boardgame and RPG. The only detail in the book given is "Eh it takes 2 minutes to do this, but on board, it takes 1 turn. Deal with it" more or less.
It's just not integrated well in the system or the fluff; again, previous editions were more integrated this way. Even 3rd Ed.
You pick an era. You get the era sourcebook. That's plenty of information for players to be able to play the game. How does ATOW make the game impossible for new players to understand? Perhaps its your approach to running the game that is doing it..like loading dropships and worrying about nuclear weapon mechanics on a personal character scale.
It's because every single rule is a labyrinth of text that spans multiple pages and chapters. Most break out fractions and multiplications. God help you if you want to resolve a grenade.
The irony of all this is, I'm mostly looking for base guidelines, and while you seem to think I want an accounting simulator - that's what AToW /is/. I would gladly, and I mean GLADLY, sack many of these detailed rules for some more comprehensive universe information - not even a second thought. A combat system shouldn't take hours and hours to figure out in an RPG.
Clearly I'm not insane on this; there's a torrent of people who have literally jumped away from this system but played the setting. That's a sign things aren't good in the system.
The appropriate era sourcebooks have RPG modules for affiliations and eras. Print and PDF sourceboosk for the time, including detaisl on conflicts are available. What’s so confusing about it?
There is almost NO master list of rules/books right now that's reliable. Finding specific books for specific factions or mechanics is literally impossible.
Ok..I’m completely at a loss how anyone could consider converting from a system firmly rooted in the same dice mechanics, success numbers, and provided rules for creating characters to a completely alien system (with horrible scaling problems for non superhuman characters) could be easier. You don't make anything easier. You have to reinvent damage rules, equipment rules, and still look up everything you were complaining about before..unless White Wolf snuck out sourcebooks for Battletech while no one was looking.
Because in the end, the equipment rules, damage rules, and everything I was complaining about is -unusable- by most everyone, and in my experience the few people who think the system is usable are actually miscalculating stuff. It's pretty much a hot mess.
Shadowrun has been recommended to me a few times, and I might have gone that way if I thought about it; it's at least a little closer. And the Shadowrun RPG is vastly easier to use than AToW, with probably more details that actually work for it.
... just about everything in AToW except the lists - mostly drawn up from other books - is just a confusing wall-to-wall mass of rambling text and I think that's how almost everyone feels; combined with the really, really dated art (that is far inferior to what came before or after) it's the biggest new-player roadblock I've ever seen.
Keep in mind this is coming from someone who digs just about everything about BattleTech. I really think if this book was re-written from the ground up with an RPG designer today, it could be a MUCH better book. Hence why this thread says we need a 5th Edition, and not that we need to abandon the idea. heh
