I saw someone suggested a 3D6 roll for to-hit. That is interesting. But does that make things more complicated or do you need to muck with modifiers to make it work?
It could potentially increase the benefit to medium and long-range combat. However, does that open another can of worms?
You might (or might not) need to boost the base to-hit numbers by +1 to balance it out, otherwise Lights kind-of die when anything heavy even glances in their direction. We've already got that problem now with lower gunnery skill numbers and pulse weapons; the larger dice range would make a 1 increase in gunnery skill less catastrophic against light opponents. The odds of hitting on 4 or 5 when stuff sits still is probably more realistic, since that's target practice odds, but movement modifiers would almost certainly need to be bumped up slightly to preserve speed as a valid defense. To cover that, I'd love to see a streamlined set of movement modifiers, where you get a +1 for every 2 hexes covered, rather than having to memorize or look up the 3/5/7/10 hexes to get a +1/2/3/4 modifier. New players ALWAYS struggle with that. With 3D6 and a base of 5 to-hit, getting a +6 modifier would give you 11+ at short range, and 15+ at long: a difficult shot, and firer movement and terrain could STILL take it up to 18 to hit (a true "Hail Mary" shot), but you don't get "impossible" shots in the open as in the current system (4 base, +4 range, +4 target movement, plus shooter movement = 13+).
As mentioned in several previous posts, cleaning up the odd range-bands for some weapons would go a long way: 1x/2x/3x times the base range, not something like 3/7/10 that has to be memorized for each individual weapon. I'd also like to see a few items to fill that odd intermediate 4/8/12 gap between the ML/SRM and LL/AC10 ranges. It might even pay to make "extreme range" a standard rule with the larger 3D6 dice range, so shots out to 30 hexes can be taken with many of the larger weapons, closer to what can be done with most modern day heavy equipment, although at relatively poor odds. Infantry small arms should be an exception, where the odds of hitting at significantly longer ranges than at present should be POSSIBLE, but the damage should fall off dramatically. If you've got 28 guys shooting, the odds of ONE hitting should be relatively decent, but getting most of the platoon's shots to hit at more than point-blank range would be asking for a miracle. Perhaps it could use a cluster hit table with a -2 to the roll per range band (or even -1 per hex) with a minimum of 1 damage, so the odds of getting a point of damage out to 6 or maybe even 8-9 hexes would be fairly high, but getting much more than that would be increasingly unlikely at longer ranges. Modern infantry ideal engagement ranges are generally in the 100-200 meter vicinity, but occasional kills are made at up to a kilometer or more. Current BT rifle infantry combat begins at less than 100 meters, and then inflicts full rated damage for the entire platoon if you hit. The rules for it seriously need to be reworked.
Maybe there's a better and faster way to mark off damage, but the concept of locational damage has been a winner, so reducing that to anything below 6 hit locations (1D6 instead of 2D6) would be a real mistake, and I'm fine with the current roll, just not with having to memorize both the front and side hit location charts. Use one chart, but just make any shots to the OPPOSITE torso side hit the facing torso side instead. You can still hit the more distant arm or leg past the closer one as it swings back and forth, so that's not an issue in my opinion.
So far, there have been no other good systems that deliver the granularity and detail that BattleTech manages to convey. Clearly, it needs some updating and streamlining to reduce the number of charts and things to remember, but NOT at the expense of the detail, cinematic factor, and RPG flavor that it currently has. Don't break what's positive about the game to chase some nebulous "ideal" solution that ends up leaving the current player base behind.
