My first semester ended with an A and a B+, and now, in week three of the new semester I'm enjoying both Anthro and Intro to Military History. Damn, but these 8-week semesters move FAST. I feel like I just got started, and one prof has already posted about the mid-term...
OK, most of you (that is, two out of the three readers of this blog) come here to see me post about gaming stuff. So here's what I've been tinkering with, MechWarrior-wise. I think I've sussed out that I want to borrow lots from Traveller, some from MechWarrior 1e and 2e, and then tack on some concepts from FATE. When all this comes together, it should be the MechWarrior system I've wanted to play with.
After some consideration, we'll be stealing bits of the Traveller character gen, and the concept of UPP. Something else I like is with the Mongoose tweak of Traveller, the attribute bonuses are on a fairly tight scale, which might help keep high attribute scores from creating supercharacters. One of the issues with MechWarrior 2nd Edition is that any character with a 6 ITN was godlike in pretty much anything but social interaction. The flip side was that an 'average' person with 3s across the board needed a skill level of 4-5 just to be competent at something. University Education only gave a max skill level of 3. Your PCs won't be 'average' for the most part, but unless you're going to decouple PCs from NPCs for determining skills then you want the system to reflect some sort of internal consistency... Hmmm... perhaps you COULD simply rule that the average NPC as the skill roll of a military regular at whatever it is they do and just ignore the math...
OK, next thing I want to steal from Traveller is the lifepath system. I want to find a way to make it interesting and useful, but not the amazing monster it became in MW3. I think the big problem in MW3 was the way skill points worked. If the lifepath is going to grant skills, it needs to grant skills, not skill points that must later be rectified into something else. Mongoose Traveller even has a notation for granting a skill level and no higher. I like that as well, as it allows for someone to reach a given experience level without exceeding it for certain things or types of training. As an aside - I'd like to also borrow planetary UPP codes as well.
From MechWarrior 1e and 2e I'm taking the personal combat system. I think personal combat should be very close to 'Mech combat to keep the paradigm from shifting too much for players. Also - I love hit locations in personal combat. Gives a bit more flavor to the fighting. We're going to go for a straight +1 damage per MoS in combat, avoiding the math in AToW of 1/4 point here and 1/2 point there. Armor will be handled like it was in MW2e, since the whole BAR/penetration system is linked to AToW's system. I don't think scaling will be as much of an issue as to require us to use the whole gamut of BAR.
Skills give me pause. AToW uses a 0-10 skill level scale. I'm not sure we are going to use 10 skill levels. I'm almost tempted to use untrained, green, regular, veteran and elite (with possibly one or two levels above this) as skill levels to keep things simple. It also allows a quick assignment of target number to NPCs. OK, stream of consciousness here, in MW1e, there were 8 skill levels. If we go with 8, that means keying Regular to a TN of 5, green to 6 and untrained to 7 or 8...
I really have to stop with the stream-of-consciousness notations... I always lose focus and end up tinkering with stuff that has no direct effect on the project at hand...
OK, so chargen and skills etc. What about FATE integration? Well, we're looking at replacing the EDG attribute with something like the refresh mechanic used in the Dresden Files RPG, where the GM sets a refresh rate and 'powers' are subtracted from that number. For the purposes of MW, a 2nd Edition or AToW-style natural aptitude (roll 3d6 keep best 2) would be a power. Most advantages might be considered for powers, like sixth sense, etc. Have to make a list, I s'pose. We're also going to leave SOC and EDU as aspects. Like "Swordmaster of the House of Dencourt", which would have a value assigned to it by the GM, or "Graduate of the DeChevalier Military Academy" which would have a number assigned likewise. Why do it this way? These things I want decided on based on style and character background, not balancing a pool of points.
Hmmm... I'm starting to see a White Wolf-style character sheet for some reason... No, wait, eight bubbles next to each skill would be a bit much. Speaking of skills, the skill list needs to be pruned a bit. AToW gives for a skill list so long that every character in our party needed more space for skills and required me to make a custom character sheet to deal with it. And then a sheet of JUST skills for two of the nine PCs in the party. This will bear looking into...
This is almost making me want to... yep... I'm going to go tinker with a character sheet... I will try to post more soon...
