I've been trying to get my boys, ages 11 and 5, into board games lately. We've tried Mouse Trap (a pain to reset the traps), Pathfinder (too open), Mouse Guard (too... mousey), Mice and Mystics (some success here!), and BattleTech. My eldest has played World of Tanks and I recently showed him MechWarrior Online and he loved it so that got me thinking in re-introducing him to BattleTech. I say "re-introducing" because we've played one QSR game when I got the box set a year or so ago and it never really clicked.
Today, my wife and my youngest spent some time with the neighbors so with the house all to ourselves, we played the game again using QSR and the simple mech record sheets. I had him pick his mech and he took the Enforcer.... great! I love using the AC 20! We got a copy of the modifier tables, opened the Open Terrain map, and started playing. He got a handle on counting movement really quick and grasped the shooting rules even quicker. He went back to being afraid of being shot (he did this in Warhammer 40K until he realized what armor saves do) until he realized he out-ranged me. Next thing he did was to try to stay outside my range so I explained to him that for the most part, I could run towards him faster than he can backpedal away from me. So he decided to stop running around and fight. The next turn he got a MLaser and an AC20 to the center torso. Game 1 over.
He did like it and was eager for more so we fought again, his Cicada and Enforcer vs. my Hermes II and Hunchback. His Cicada went down on turn 1 and by turn 3, his Hermes had lost a leg and under QSR rules, he couldn't make facing changes so we ended that fight. He was hyped despite his defeat. He knew it was a battle for position and luck of the rolls, so we went again using the reverse side of the Open Terrain map but I decided to make it more of a teaching fight so we went back to just Enforcer vs. Hunchback. We looked at rear-torso shots and how he shouldn't position his mech to give me the advantage. We looked at partial cover -- I seem to remember hating partial cover but I guess it was the old rules as when I read that hits now strike cover, it was like an "aha!" moment for me. Unfortunately, my mech made quick work of his Enforcer and that fight didn't last long as well. AC20 on "no internal structure" rules is deadly!
So I told him how the full record sheet would've allowed his center-torso'ed Enforcer to survive the MLaser and AC20 of the first fight, or how his Cicada could've probably lasted longer --- due to more hits needed before a location was taken out. The "increased survivability" seemed to thrill him and even when I said that battles tend to last longer, he didn't mind. I guess our battles were too quick for him anyway so anything longer wasn't too bad.
Armed with my TW book, some printed-out record sheets and a handful of pencils, we took the battle downstairs and set up on the dining table. Two more fights ensued, one with just the Enforcer and Hunchback and another with the CDA-2A Cicada and the HER-2S Hermes. We talked about target movement and how it was best to move FURTHER rather than just random walking/running about and also talked about playing to a mech's strengths. I'm no expert on this but I showed him how the Hunchback was built to take damage and close in to give some AC 20 love and I also showed him how one mech can keep another busy while the other mech circled around to do more damage from the rear. I also showed him that sometimes, it was necessary to expose a few mechs in order to concentrate fire and destroy a target. It is almost impossible to escape unscathed so the idea is to do damage quicker than the other guy.
I could tell that throughout all of this, he was very interested and taking everything in so I told him about the "story side" of things. I said he could be a mercenary and we could start doing "missions" and track kills and improve skills and buy more mechs. He couldn't wait to try it so I printed out a couple of pages from FM: Mercs, Mercs Supp I, Supp II, and Total Chaos and built a one-mech-lance merc unit. Four mechwarriors (including the founder), 3 techs, 1 medic, and 1 administrator. He picked his mechs and ended up with the Hunchback (AC20, slow mech but tough and packs a good punch), Panther (mobile due to jump jets, PPC), Spider (scout), and Trebuchet (LRMs). Watching him debate whether to take this mech or that mech, consider movement values and armor points and tonnage vs. what he could "afford," I was very happy that he could process that info and make comparisons and make decisions based on what he wanted to do vs. what the mech could offer him. His merc unit ended up with about 75,000 CBills worth of debt but then we rolled for contracts and things got interesting quick. I had to spend a lot of time reading and referencing stuff (and this reinforced my hatred of PDFs!! nothing like flicking through an open book and having 2-4 of them open at one time) and we easily spent 5 hours just finishing off his merc unit and drafting his first contract. During this time, my wife and younger son came home and as soon as he saw the "robots," he was all over them and was looking at all the pretty pictures on the TW book.
The night ended with us negotiating the terms of his contract with ComStar for an Extraction Raid. He wanted more details on the mission so I made things up quickly --- enemy forces are 3x more than his lance (12 units total) but at least 50% or 60% of them were vehicles. Employer intel suggests two, possibly three sites of interest so he could reasonably expect half of the enemy (if there were two sites) or maybe a third at the target location, which was a research & development compound. The task was to take out the defenders to allow a ComStar hacker safe access to a building wherein he would download/copy the needed info, protect the hacker while he does this, then make sure he escapes safely with the data. He loved it and we ended up with a 3 month contract, House command, full compensation, full transport, 45% shared salvage in exchange for both straight support and battle-loss compensation, and upped his base pay to 5.5 multiplier. On the back-and-forth negotiation alone, his eyes were twinkling with excitement and he kept asking questions about the pros and cons of each option he had, especially the salvage options. When I punched in the numbers, he had about 45,000 CBills in advanced pay and was set to make about 180,000 CBills which should be more than enough to bring the merc unit back to the black.
He's looking forward to tomorrow's mission and the little brother is eager to roll the dice. Should be great fun as I am going to throw in a surprise or two tomorrow. Maybe jump him while the hacker is working, depending on how badly-damaged he ends up.
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I had thought of shifting from the FM:Mercs Revised system to the Warchest system from Total Chaos but since that system hand-waved in a starting bonus of 1,000 WP, 100 WP per month limit, 1 WP = 10 SP, and 1 SP = 10,000 CBills, I didn't like the idea of him having 100,000 CBills out of nowhere especially since the merc unit is technically in debt. I hoped to be able to transition to the Warchest system later on, but I cannot wrap my head around the idea that a merc unit simply has 100,000 CBills per month to spend. I also don't see a way to determine how much WP a particular mission will cost, although pages 30-38 seem to be a good starting point. I do love the detail involved in the FM:Mercs system although I'll probably earn a Master's Degree in basic Maths at the end of this, or at least have a few Excel sheets set up. I like the quick-and-easy system of the Warchest, but I don't like losing the "contract generation" aspect of a merc's existence. Sometimes there simply isn't a contract that the unit can accept and the unit will have to live off its savings (or go deeper into debt) and I don't think the Warchest system models this --- as long as the unit has WP to pay for the track cost, that's it.
I'll probably just leech of the Warchest, especially the skill advancement table and SP Activity Cost Table 2. I feel like the suggested rate on p.40-41 of TW is just too slow but a cost of 2M CBills (200SP x 10,000 CBills per SP) should just about be expensive enough that it isn't too fast or too slow. I don't think I like the SP Activity Cost Table 1 though --- an Atlas with 5 points of armor missing will cost the same SP as an Atlas with 5 points of armor remaining. Converting to CBills, both repairs cost 1M.
Looking a bit deeper into the Warchest system, I'm starting to get the feeling that this would be perfect for a House army unit but would feel odd for a merc unit....
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At this point, I am looking for things that'll help me generate colorful missions/contracts. I expect the fight tomorrow to be over quickly so we'll be drawing up some new contracts soon. I'm also looking for era-specific tables to help me generate the opposing forces quickly. As a game master, I'll be using a mix of tanks and mechs but I have little knowledge and experience with vehicles so anything that could help me pick out armored units, even if just random, would be good.
Oh, and remember when I said he was interested in doing salvage? I looked at my TROs and I see no mention of a salvage truck, but I distinctly remember there was one or two variants of these. I'm not sure if I remember it from an actual game or maybe MegaMek, but we were hoping to be able to buy one or two trucks to help out with the salvage in tomorrow's raid. Any help?
Thanks for reading this far! I will update this thread with my BT experiences with my boys and hopefully, this will help future fathers/uncles/grandfathers influence the next generation of mech heads. Please feel free to suggest or share experiences as well! I am eager to learn and try things out to make this more fun. Once my eldest has got a good grasp of the basics, we might bring in a couple of his friends and see if they'd be interested in some mech combat as well.
>:D
