Proposed House Rules for Mechwarrior Destiny

[Dahmin_Toran]

With Mechwarrior Destiny out, I was thinking of coming up with a few changes to incorporate with Life Modules and other rules from ATOW:

     Ignore the Characteristics

     Use the Traits as a list of potential Traits to choose from in CharGen

     All the Skills with Positive points put them on the sheet as Level 0 Skills (can use with Hard skill checks)

Here are a few other changes I wanted to incorporate some other features of ATOW:

     Use Skills/Traits from ATOW

     Limit Positive/Negative Traits to 3 for Green, 4 for Regular, 5 for Veteran, 6 for Elite

     Include Extra Damage which would be a extra point of damage per 4 points of MOS (round down)

     Include Burst Fire which would be a extra point of damage per MOS (limit to ROF - use ATOW stats)

Finally here are some things I would like to do to incorporate Destiny with BT/AS:

     Use Destiny dice rules

     Use Gunnery/Piloting mods as negatives

     Instead of number of hexes moved, use the rules in Destiny to hit.

Please tell me what you think. Too OP? Too many Skills?

In addition, I would probably add a Trait and Skill from the Origins (i.e. Federated Suns) as well for additional flavor.

[Bulletmeat]

I was comparing the skills of ATOW to Destiny and personally don't think you need to incorporate the others.  The Destiny lists seem more cleaned up then the others.  That's just my quick review and thought.
I do like your ideas about extra damage & burst fire.

Don't know $#!+ about the other stuff though.

[OpacusVenatori]

Hi there. I didn't play the game yet. But I don't like how the armor works as extra hit points. I thought about use it as damage reduction. And also add the extra damage by MoS.

[Chris24601]

My only real complaint with the rules is with the Mech scale combat completely ditching the armor/structure of the side torsos in calculating the torso’s values while dumping the side torso hit chances onto the center torso (taking it from 1-in-6 hits going to the center torso values to 5-in-12).

Basically, as written, you’re almost always going to destroy the Torso before a unit ever loses a limb.

It also really heavily favors designs that use a single main gun over those that use batteries of smaller weapons due to its requirement that secondary weapons be split as evenly as possible across the interlock groups (so instead of a clean 4 medium lasers and the 14 sinks to fire them at a run you have to group them as, at best two groups of two and four wasted tons of sinks you’ll never come close to needing.

Throw in other idiosyncrasies like XL engines having effectively zero downsides (no side torsos to cripple/take out the mech) and it’s just rife for abuse (find a fast mech built around a single headcapper… bonus points if it skimped on rear/side torso armor… and you’ll be leagues ahead of the guy piloting a unit with good armor coverage for the sides/rear and a battery of lighter guns; generally considered a better unit in regular Battletech games).

My thought is to replace the hit locations with something akin to Battleforce/Alpha Strike’s single armor value based on total Armor Factor with TACs for very good rolls (something Destiny allows via its opposed rolls).

My other thought is to use MoS for salvos of multiple similar weapons instead of the disparities that the “everything hits or everything misses” approach causes. Basically treat salvos like they’re a cluster weapon.

But, yeah, the Mech combat rules are about the only thing in Destiny that I think needs any serious houseruling.

[idea weenie]

One thing to do is make sure the various Power Packs are in line with each other.

Using MW2 as an example, the Micro Power Pack provides 15 pts of power, and masses 15 grams.  So it gets 1000 power per kilogram.  Compare that with the Standard Power Pack which provides 20 pts of power and masses 250 grams.  So it gets 80 points of power per kilogram.  In MW2 the Micro Power Pack is 12.5 times as effective on a per-gram basis for storing power.

Has this aspect been considered, and some solution found?  (I.e. house-ruling that the Micro Power Pack's power value is for non-combat uses such as radios, and it would be the equivalent of a single power point in a Standard Power Pack)