Injuries and being in the mech.

[Stallion12]

In my campaign, two of my players got injured in their left arm, should I have the minus one affect them in the mech?

[skiltao]

I think yes, generally. For flavor, you could apply it only to piloting rolls but not gunnery, or only to weapons on the left side of the 'Mech.

[Stallion12]

In the fluff, what arm usually controls what?

[abou]

I think a lot of stuff can be assigned or toggled to different keys. In theory, you can shift a lot of things over to the right-hand controls or group weapons together. You could introduce learning curves for doing that.

About the only thing you can't do would be shifting moving and piloting controls from the left to the right. If the the legs are okay, I would not do any piloting penalties except maybe when avoiding pilot damage when falling on the left side.

Depending on the injury, you could do introduce a penalty to shooting at targets in the left arc or give an opponent a to-hit bonus when shooting at a target in the left side.

[Stallion12]

Thank you, I'll have the left side weapons with an extra plus one to hit, till they get surgery on the left arm.

[skiltao]

Our pleasure!

Controls vary from 'Mech to 'Mech, and I don't know if there's any consistency to their layout. If the players haven't described where stuff is in their cockpits then I guess you have free reign.

[guardiandashi]

in one of the older novels, I want to say it was in the warrior series, a pilot who normally ran a warhammer was commenting about how his left arm had nothing to do while running a panther because all the weapons were run from the right arm "stick"

the impression I always had based on that was that for something like the warhammer, there were essentially 2 hotas joysticks one attached to the right and left side of the pilots seat, that you controlled the weapons with.  so you would have 2 main aiming reticules (mostly for the ppc's in the warhammers case) and then you would have various triggers, such as a finger trigger (typically for the ppc) and additional triggers like thumb triggers, such as you get on a good joystick that would be used for additional weapons, although it would be reasonable for the specific triggers to be assignable, but you might have 4 or more separate triggers for different weapons.