BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => A Time of War => Topic started by: Ice_Trey on 18 May 2012, 11:27:30
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I know we're right on the cusp of the A Time of War's supplement coming out, but there was something that has always concerned me about AToW, although I absolutely love the game itself, there are a few things that always caught me as off.
First and foremost is the modules system - while slow, that's not the issue I have. The concern I find is that while the archetype characters have a very limited number of skills, taking the modules route gives you a ridiculous amount of skills. It gives you so many, in fact, that I found many of my players having to use second sheets of paper just to contain all the skills they'd acquired from the initial character creation - and that's including the rules for optimization, since you can't optimize away skills once they've reached a certain XP level.
The other concern I had was regarding consciousness modifiers. The info for how to track wound and consciousness mods are printed in the book, but for something that players would be referencing mid-combat, I'm a little surprised that it's not something that is included on the main damage display.
In this game, weight is a large concern, but there is no column for tracking weight on the inventory sheet.
Lastly, the Biography and Vehicle Data sections seem to be a bit of an excess - a component used during character creation, but when space is as limited as it is on the character sheets, mostly unnecessary. I'd sooner see them moved in favor of skills slots.
Anyway, these are just my two cents to the operation. I'm sure they've already been brought to attention, but I would just like to bring it up prior to the release of the AToW Companion.
(Also, recovery of consciousness points while unconscious pretty much means that your character automatically regains consciousness a turn after being knocked out)
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There are a few fan made character sheets in this forum.
http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,17864.0.html
http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,228.0.html
See if any of these helps out.
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I haven't ever run out of skill space, but I have consistently found the traits list to be insufficiently large.
Edit: This is with life paths, and optimizing skills at less than 20XP to 0. If you don't optimize it could probably get pretty hairy.
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Even with optimization, I find that I still spill over by a significant amount.
Loads of little tidbits like Interest/Blah and Career/Useless end up clogging up so much space that I could afford to see an additional 50% or more skill slots whenever I have a character made, and yes, that's WITH optimization.
Alternately, the attributes all end up being brutally low. I can usually max them out with 400 to all stats but Edge (which stays at 100), but that's with the purchase of negative traits, as well.
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Do you really find Career and Interest to be useless and uninteresting skills, or were you just making a joke? Given the large number of skills and traits that can be produced on certain approaches to character generation the space on the sheet is often woefully inadequate, that's for certain. We haven't been able to use them in my campaign. We use Excel instead.
I do not find that there are any useless skills, and often have Career rolls in game. Going through the life modules leans toward collecting a lot of skills, but if a player wants to focus on raising key attributes beyond 4, that is certainly possible. To generate a high attribute plus high skill mix may require just going with a point-buy approach, though, depending on how far you want to go with it.
In your mention of consciousness, did you mean Stun?