BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => General BattleTech Discussion => Topic started by: wolfspider on 22 October 2019, 08:53:02
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So on Sunday my gaming group gave Mechwarrior destiny Mech Combat system a try and I have to say it flowed really well. We did make some changes because we do like to setup a gaming table. We used the Alpha Strike range and movement and the TMMs for the mech modifiers to the dice rolls also we each roll initiative to determine what order each unit activated and attacked.
Our lance consisted of the following mechs: Rifleman, Thunderbolt, Guillotine and a Shadow Hawk.
Our first opponent lance consisted of Catapult, Clint, Firestarter and Locust. We dispatched the Cat first followed by the firestarter and then the clint and locust. Our next opponent lance consisted of a Dragon Vindicator Jenner and Wasp. We destroyed all the lights and the dragon withdrew. Total combat game time took less then an hour. I think Catalyst is on to something with this new system and I hope it develops into something bigger down the road!
Well done Catalyst Well done! :thumbsup:
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That sounds great!
Out of curiosity, did anything seem to work less well than expected?
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Total combat game time took less then an hour.
Ohhh, that's where my ears perk up.
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That sounds great!
Out of curiosity, did anything seem to work less well than expected?
It really seemed to flow pretty well, but I do think we could adjust the time down further when we learn the system better. One of our players running the Guillotine really pushed the heat curve and had to jump away to cool down when he ran into the fire starter which was a stressful time for him a turn or two. But the flavor of controlling a mech was there and our GM even made us roll when he brought the second lance onto the board. He used wood blocks as counters until we could ID them. It really felt like we were playing the battletech computer game.
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Awesome!
Glad to hear that you guys had fun with the test rules.
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I really wish that Catalyst would post a youtube video of a group running the cue system so that we could get an idea of how that runs.
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Agreed.
Since the system is so different from what people are used to, the finished version of Destiny really needs a lot of gameplay examples.
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He used wood blocks as counters until we could ID them. It really felt like we were playing the battletech computer game.
See that is something I have thought about b/c I like the sensor set up from MC2 . . . it REALLY made having a fast scout important.
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thanks for this. i've been curious to see the first reports. glad it seems to work as intended
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So on Sunday my gaming group gave Mechwarrior destiny Mech Combat system a try and I have to say it flowed really well. We did make some changes because we do like to setup a gaming table. We used the Alpha Strike range and movement and the TMMs for the mech modifiers to the dice rolls also we each roll initiative to determine what order each unit activated and attacked.
Our lance consisted of the following mechs: Rifleman, Thunderbolt, Guillotine and a Shadow Hawk.
Our first opponent lance consisted of Catapult, Clint, Firestarter and Locust. We dispatched the Cat first followed by the firestarter and then the clint and locust. Our next opponent lance consisted of a Dragon Vindicator Jenner and Wasp. We destroyed all the lights and the dragon withdrew. Total combat game time took less then an hour. I think Catalyst is on to something with this new system and I hope it develops into something bigger down the road!
Well done Catalyst Well done! :thumbsup:
Glad to hear this!
One of the things that I'm still developing, based on beta-testing player feedback, is the range modifiers. The AS ranges model is partly what I was going for with this system, so it's not that far off base from what you modified it to.
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Glad to hear this!
One of the things that I'm still developing, based on beta-testing player feedback, is the range modifiers. The AS ranges model is partly what I was going for with this system, so it's not that far off base from what you modified it to.
That is pretty awesome that we are thinking in the same direction! ;)
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Happy someone found the rules workable (even with significant tweaks), and that you have a group that can work with these rules. The main problem I see is that it really takes a particularly well integrated group to work. Not something I see working when you're picking up random people at a game store...
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Curious... when you're using TMM's, are you using those for both Alpha Strike and Destiny, or just using one?
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Curious... when you're using TMM's, are you using those for both Alpha Strike and Destiny, or just using one?
Good question, we used the TMM in place of the max movement modifier, if you used a plot point to run your mech we adjusted the TMM by 1, it really worked out pretty good.
Happy someone found the rules workable (even with significant tweaks), and that you have a group that can work with these rules. The main problem I see is that it really takes a particularly well integrated group to work. Not something I see working when you're picking up random people at a game store...
We do have a pretty decent group to work with but our next run we hope to recruit 4 more players with limited CBT experience to see if we can bring them along unfortunately it will be after the cut off for any tweaking of the beta rules but I think we can get new blood into the game 😉
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Is the cue system at all like FATE?
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Cues seem to take some inspiration from FATE's character aspects
though i'd be loathe to let players seize the narrative as a FATE GM
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So on Sunday my gaming group gave Mechwarrior destiny Mech Combat system a try and I have to say it flowed really well. We did make some changes because we do like to setup a gaming table. We used the Alpha Strike range and movement and the TMMs for the mech modifiers to the dice rolls also we each roll initiative to determine what order each unit activated and attacked.
Our lance consisted of the following mechs: Rifleman, Thunderbolt, Guillotine and a Shadow Hawk.
Our first opponent lance consisted of Catapult, Clint, Firestarter and Locust. We dispatched the Cat first followed by the firestarter and then the clint and locust. Our next opponent lance consisted of a Dragon Vindicator Jenner and Wasp. We destroyed all the lights and the dragon withdrew. Total combat game time took less then an hour. I think Catalyst is on to something with this new system and I hope it develops into something bigger down the road!
Well done Catalyst Well done! :thumbsup:
Hey, Wolfspider, what was it you changed? I tried the combat system as per the book, only modifying it to a hexmap and it took 2 hours or more for a lance-on lance battle (and was so grueling that one of the players quit the group).
I'd like to find something that is truly fast-playing as your experience obviously was.
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Hey, Wolfspider, what was it you changed? I tried the combat system as per the book, only modifying it to a hexmap and it took 2 hours or more for a lance-on lance battle (and was so grueling that one of the players quit the group).
I'd like to find something that is truly fast-playing as your experience obviously was.
I sent you a PM ;) Also what issues did you have running your game?
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Pat Payne when you ran it on the hex board did you try to run like TW or AS on the hex map? If you are trying to run like TW I can see that it would take a lot longer.
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Pat Payne when you ran it on the hex board did you try to run like TW or AS on the hex map? If you are trying to run like TW I can see that it would take a lot longer.
It really wasn't the movement that was an issue, though my trying too hard to map the AS short/medium/long range bands into the MW:D movement scheme made for some fairly goofy translations :)
Like I'd mentioned in the email to you the big deal (and the dealbreaker for one of the group members) was that the sequence of combat being "roll to hit for a weapon/weapon group, target rolls to defend, repeat until shooter fires all desired weapons" was becoming tiresome and really bogging the game down.
I was thinking, thanks to a suggestion from one of the guys in the group, of fixing that issue by scrapping that second roll and having the defender just have a semi-static AC or Defense Rating. I was thinking of going the route of:
Defense Rating: Piloting Skill Bonus (Skill plus RFL, or straight RFL if the character has no points in Piloting)+6 (the idea being 6 is roughly the average roll on a 2d6), modified by target speed and terrain -- the attacker wouldn't have to take those into account in his roll.
With this, a hypothetical bog-standard pilot would get around a 12 (assuming 3 points in Piloting and a RFL of 3 + 6) and a top of the line MechWarrior would max out at 17 before speed and terrain were taken into account (6 points, 5 RFL +6).
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So then it appears if I read it right you were firing each weapon individually instead of running them in TICs if that was the case then it would get bogged down a bit. We setup all our mechs to fire by TIC and rolled once to hit and then one damage roll. Which gave the game a Mech Pod feel to it.
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TICs take me back to MPBT and MW2
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What is a TIC? *prones behind partial cover*
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What is a TIC? *prones behind partial cover*
Target Interlock Circuit
its was used in the solaris 7 boxed set originally. Basically think of it as hitting 1 trigger, and all the weapons set to it fire as one
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Hmm. Maybe there should just be one target roll per attacker?
Thunderbolt (attacker) can fire each weapon individually at a Wolverine (target). The Wolverine makes a single target roll and the Thunderbolt compares all it's attacks made at the Wolverine to that one target roll?
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Hmm. Maybe there should just be one target roll per attacker?
Thunderbolt (attacker) can fire each weapon individually at a Wolverine (target). The Wolverine makes a single target roll and the Thunderbolt compares all it's attacks made at the Wolverine to that one target roll?
That may work, everyone in our group were watching the heat curve, (heck I was driving a 3N) except for our Guillotine pilot who was burning up his mech. Plus if my reading of the rules is correct grouping your weapons causes all damage to be applied to 1 location as opposed to spreading the damage all over like in TW which if you have heavies vs meds and lights then overall you should beat them.
PatPayne what mechs and Era did your group run?
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That may work, everyone in our group were watching the heat curve, (heck I was driving a 3N) except for our Guillotine pilot who was burning up his mech. Plus if my reading of the rules is correct grouping your weapons causes all damage to be applied to 1 location as opposed to spreading the damage all over like in TW which if you have heavies vs meds and lights then overall you should beat them.
PatPayne what mechs and Era did your group run?
It was a mixed-weight group set in 3027.
One side was running:
A Shadowhawk 2H
A Archer 2R
A Wasp 1A
A Wolverine 2R
The other side (NPCs plus one player, the battle was framed as a training exercise) was
A Blackjack
A Catapult C1
A Shadowhawk 2H
and a Locust 1V.
We were using weapon groupings (for most of the mechs it was already suggested in the Warriors Arsenal section, for the Blackjack, I grouped the two ACs together in one group, and then the MLs on either side in two more groups) for the battle. There were three kills in the battle by the time we finished -- the Archer's pilot was not paying attention to his heat and failed an ammo explosion save, and one Shadow hawk and the locust were destroyed.
Hmm. Maybe there should just be one target roll per attacker?
Thunderbolt (attacker) can fire each weapon individually at a Wolverine (target). The Wolverine makes a single target roll and the Thunderbolt compares all it's attacks made at the Wolverine to that one target roll?
That might work also -- it really was the sheer number of rolls that everyone said was bogging combats down.
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TIC ... so back to MW2: so having your weapons fire-linked (all at once, per group) versus a chain-link (one at a time).
TIC example one: Fitting your marauder with ALL machine guns (and enough ammo) for the hunt and kill mission in one of the city maps ... everything was close up anyway, and having too many MGs to count turned any opponent into scrap after about 2-3 seconds of firing. I mean I just ran straight towards my target, fired, and kept going.
Chain-link: dropping my Nova to 8 ER ML (and all spaced out too) to fire one right after the other and a get a moments worth of DHS keeping you cool-ish.
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Hmmm... it strikes me the more simplifications made to a system, the more catastrophic any singularities are. The all MG machine cited above could break the Destiny system in SO many ways... I fear even fielding a Piranha... All that damage for no heat at "Short" range on a fast machine would be fatal in short order for almost all 'mechs boiled down to Destiny stats. There's a point beyond which simplification is a detriment, and I think the current version of Destiny has found it. The "Long" range weapon on a fast machine problem pales in comparison to this one.
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It was a mixed-weight group set in 3027.
One side was running:
A Shadowhawk 2H
A Archer 2R
A Wasp 1A
A Wolverine 2R
The other side (NPCs plus one player, the battle was framed as a training exercise) was
A Blackjack
A Catapult C1
A Shadowhawk 2H
and a Locust 1V.
We were using weapon groupings (for most of the mechs it was already suggested in the Warriors Arsenal section, for the Blackjack, I grouped the two ACs together in one group, and then the MLs on either side in two more groups) for the battle. There were three kills in the battle by the time we finished -- the Archer's pilot was not paying attention to his heat and failed an ammo explosion save, and one Shadow hawk and the locust were destroyed.
That might work also -- it really was the sheer number of rolls that everyone said was bogging combats down.
What were the skill levels of your pilots?
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Here's an issue that's been bugging me with all every edition of Battletech's RPGs...how do you handle campaigns where not every character has mechwarrior skills? Forcing everyone into taking the mandatory Piloting and Gunnery skills seems very heavy-handed, and essentially ruins the flavour of any "techwiz" or smuggler/rogue characters.
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What were the skill levels of your pilots?
The player party was all regular skills -- I don't have the total stats at hand for them. The NPCs were all at Veteran skill, with fairly high skill bonuses.
Here's an issue that's been bugging me with all every edition of Battletech's RPGs...how do you handle campaigns where not every character has mechwarrior skills? Forcing everyone into taking the mandatory Piloting and Gunnery skills seems very heavy-handed, and essentially ruins the flavour of any "techwiz" or smuggler/rogue characters.
Given the rules (and they could be clearer on this point) it seems to be assumed that just like in a TV show or movie that the party will not necessarily all be together at any given moment and it is OK to run two different scenarios at once if part of the group is somewhere else. For instance, that techwiz might be trying desperately to fix or disable a certain critical piece of equipment while the MechWarriors outside blast each other to pieces.
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Here's an issue that's been bugging me with all every edition of Battletech's RPGs...how do you handle campaigns where not every character has mechwarrior skills? Forcing everyone into taking the mandatory Piloting and Gunnery skills seems very heavy-handed, and essentially ruins the flavour of any "techwiz" or smuggler/rogue characters.
I always tried to set it up so that the player would run a friendly NPC in certain times. That way the players were always engaged in the battles/ story even if their characters were not.
The tech wiz would run a NPC mech at times, and the mechworriors would be making rolls for non combat actions where an NPC was involved.
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I always tried to set it up so that the player would run a friendly NPC in certain times. That way the players were always engaged in the battles/ story even if their characters were not.
The tech wiz would run a NPC mech at times, and the mechworriors would be making rolls for non combat actions where an NPC was involved.
One solution would be to have the players have a primary and secondary character.
So the player who wants to have the tech as their primary character, has that, but for combat focused scenarios either plays a secondary combat character, or helps the gm play the opposition forces.
And vice versa
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One solution would be to have the players have a primary and secondary character.
So the player who wants to have the tech as their primary character, has that, but for combat focused scenarios either plays a secondary combat character, or helps the gm play the opposition forces.
And vice versa
That was actually what they suggested in the very first edition of Mechwarrior. I'd actually go further and do something like Ars Magica's covenants. Everybody does a primary and secondary character - get them to be in different spheres - and then create a supply of quick and generic extras: Astechs, Infantry privates, reserve pilots etc. Then, if the Chief Tech and the techwiz are working to fix the Dropship engine in time to take off before the Fedrat scum arrive to blow your mercs away, the other two players get to play the extras for a bit (probably an Astech or dropper crew). Likewise, if your 'Mech lance is in a running battle, have the tehcwiz player run the vehicle commander.
Now, I have no idea how complex the character creation rules are for Destiny (I didn't Kickstart the Clan box), but maybe this needs there to be a simplified version for doing the extras? Might be useful as an optional rule.
Actually, isn't this what Star Trek Adventures does as well? And 2e Werewolf: Forsaken.