Trying MW 4 again

[Drop Bear]

For me the B-Tech RPG will always be "Mechwarrior" making AToW MW4, in the past we have tried to do the new system, but have got like a third of the way in to character generation before shelving the book and closing the PDF and going back to MW3 or MW2.

now to make me not feel so bad about spending over 100 Oz bucks on books and PDFs we are giving it an other go, is their any way to make it through character generation without "Rage Quitting" and going back to something we know works?

[Chris24601]

I've got a very simple character builder Excel spreadsheet that will take the XP values you gain from the lifepaths and chug them out into the attribute, trait and skill ranks. It also takes into account age modifiers, phenotypes, and the fast/slow learner traits. PM me and I'll e-mail it to you.

Alternately, I'd perhaps try doing straight point buy with the life path stages serving as guidelines for what will be good ideas for your character to have. This lets you avoid the messy optimazation stage of character building which was the source of much frustration before I came up with the spreadsheet.

Also, if you prefer MW3, you might want to houserule the combat rules a bit as AToW's have proven far more lethal than MW3's (at least in my experience). We used both the improved armor rule (included in the combat section) and added an opposed acrobatics/single attribute Reflex check to ranged combat with the acrobatics MoS reducing the attacker's MoS.

[Drop Bear]

I've got the one Monbvol did a ways back, didn't help much with making characters who could do more than walk and chew gum with any level of competency and had gear worth mugging them for that weren't either Gutter Scum or disabled mental out patients.

[Chris24601]

I've got the one Monbvol did a ways back, didn't help much with making characters who could do more than walk and chew gum with any level of competency and had gear worth mugging them for that weren't either Gutter Scum or disabled mental out patients.

I've found that starting the characters at the age of 26 (instead 21) and 5500 XP (5000+100/year per year past 21) solves a LOT of said problems in terms of competence.

[Drop Bear]

Going Clan and mid 20's, unfortunately I'm trying to make a Sub-par Fleet Officer turned SaR team leader, unfortunately the new rules set isn't geared to turn out Clan Fleet Officers yet, we've shelved the characters instead of giving up on them, but we have turned around and done them in MW2 as kind of place holders, we wasted most of the session going nowhere with MW4 then broke out MW2 got them all done in like half an hour (due to not enough books to go around), then most folks went home early because their wasn't enough time to start anything, some stuck around to have an other go but that lasted only an other hour before we gave it up.

we are trying to set a new points base, 7500 looks to high 5500 still could be a bit tight so we may look at 6K

[guardiandashi]

5k to 5500 with aging xp works fairly well

ie you want to be the "young noble" @ 21 (IS) you get 5500 xp, if you bump it up to 22 you get (50 or 100 xp) extra so 5550 or 5600, also I look at the path modules age as the MINIMUM age you can always add a year or 2 without adding a module if it makes the char concept work better

also you can add up to 10% of xp worth of disadvantages not counting the disadvantages from the modules

[Drop Bear]

When the "Companion" comes out they should include a Character Generation sheet, and rules options for variable points levels along with the new Fields and Paths.

[Daryk]

Chris' spreadsheet sounds similar to mine (posted here).  I've had no trouble cranking out competent NPC's below a 5,000XP baseline, but I suppose it depends on your goal.

[Nodachi]

The character I'm running right now is pretty decent, though he ended up at 31 based on the paths. Did Mil academy, Intel training and covert ops. Decent mech pilot and good outside of mech too. More or less been the groups goal with characters since MW2.

[Tslammer]

Our group uses 5500 and everyone uses their 550 points of disadvantages. Most can come up with 500 points worth of disadvantages with out crippling themselves.

While I do agree that the ATOW creation system is like doing my taxes. After having made a few characters I have managed to get better and faster at it. MW2 it is not but MW2 had many issues that few had the GM skill to correct.

One thing our group did was to adopt the MW3 Solaris mech combat system modified to fit 2D10 and ATOW. This places importance on attributes in mech combat. We also changed the ATOW core skill targets for 2D10.

[Tslammer]

Oops forgot to add we use the MW3 Solaris rules modified for 2D10.

[JamesPryde]

For me the B-Tech RPG will always be "Mechwarrior" making AToW MW4, in the past we have tried to do the new system, but have got like a third of the way in to character generation before shelving the book and closing the PDF and going back to MW3 or MW2.

now to make me not feel so bad about spending over 100 Oz bucks on books and PDFs we are giving it an other go, is their any way to make it through character generation without "Rage Quitting" and going back to something we know works?

I'm in the process of trying to convince our GM to go from his MW2/MW3 hybrid system to AToW (MW4 for you) It is listed many times that GM's can mod anything they want in MW4. Our GM complained the charecter generation process lost it's random roll so I just explained to him to add the roll in it works fine. Showed him a few test runs too.

[Drop Bear]

when MW3 came out the Events roll kind of threw us since in MW2 we just played around with our remaining skill points and came up with our own story elements that explained anything too unusual or that was just that bit interesting. we came to except them as part of MW3 and think it's no great loss to see them go with MW4.

random tables are more for NPC's and players stuck for ideas anyway, part of the fun of character creation is spending your points and hammering out your story elements with your GM as you develop your back story.

[JamesPryde]

when MW3 came out the Events roll kind of threw us since in MW2 we just played around with our remaining skill points and came up with our own story elements that explained anything too unusual or that was just that bit interesting. we came to except them as part of MW3 and think it's no great loss to see them go with MW4.

random tables are more for NPC's and players stuck for ideas anyway, part of the fun of character creation is spending your points and hammering out your story elements with your GM as you develop your back story.

I'm not a big fan of it either it was his thing to throw your charecter off of your intended path at generation. His words I don't like it cause everytime you roll it's 50/50 somthing bad happens and there is always the chance you can't do the job you want i.e. can't be a pilot if your arm got cut off at age 5 you never get enough cash for a replacement etc...

[Drop Bear]

nothing against them too much, but we've found in 99% of games they are unnecessary, we allowed re-rolls of any event that killed the original concept, but had to keep anything just a little bit sideways.

[monbvol]

I do like the idea of some element of randomness.  My problem with the MW3 random events were that they were very poorly balanced and produced often undesirable results.

I decided to add that back in with a bit more reason.  In my House Rule thread emporium there is a random event table.  I'm pretty sure I made it a zero sum affair so XP awards should balance out to 0 and no events force the player into certain modules nor unduly restrict entering planned modules.

Oh and Dropbear even though I'm not sure which version of my sheet you tried to make use of still feel free to give me some feed back.  Not many people have and I haven't completely given up on trying to improve it.

[Drop Bear]

jump in your Way Back Machine, because it's the one I down loaded on 1 October 2009, indubitably it's come a long way in the past two years.

[monbvol]

Ah.