The Search for "Our" Battletech

  So... THIS is why everyone told me I'd never sleep again once I became a Dad.  I'll spare you the details, dear readers, but sometimes it's frustrating to be loved so much not only do your children try to climb into bed with you, but they fight over who gets to be next to Daddy and inevitably wake up when you try to put them back in their own beds...

  OK, so... the search for "Our" Battletech.  As most folks who know me and read by blog know, I am an officer of the Austin area Battletech club known as the Royal Dragoon Guards.  Right now there's around 10-12 of us on the rolls, and a metric buttload more folks who follow us on Facebook.  Realistically, we usually have 7-10 at meetings due to real life encroaching.  We're looking to grow the group, and I find it personally satisfying that the "kids" who I taught Battletech to at age 12-13 that are now 19-20 are bringing in a new group of teenagers to train.  Some of these young folks are really "getting" the leadership and initiative I've tried to teach youngsters in my hobby activities for years and that, too is satisfying.  What's more, about half of the membership are also soldiers in the Texas State Guard - so the training we do to enable the players to accurately portray professional soldiers comes in very handy.  Case in point?  The Dragoons who chose to become TXSG members have been praised for their ability to march, their military bearing, and of the entire unit of 30+ soldiers the guidon bearer and backup guidon bearer were both selected from the soldiers who came out of the RDG.  Neat, eh?

  So we love our Battletech.  We have a campaign that has been running for three years, and have added a lot of our own backstory and detail into the published Battletech universe.  We've also started an alternate timeline beginning in 2914, and as of the current campaign date of 2917 we've launched the Clan Invasion early... from the inside out... without any Clans...  long story.  Basically, we wanted to see the Battletech universe proceed in a different direction with a far, far lower explosion of tech than the official game now contains.  Speaking as a lover and player of Battletech since 1986- it's just too damn much.

  When I got into Battletech, I was amazed by the world that was built around these giant robots.  The Houses of the Inner Sphere were fascinating to me, and just enough snippets of info could be found in the saddle-stapled thin rulebook from the 2nd Edition Battletech boxed set to get my imagination going.  Almost immediately, I declared myself a supporter of the Lyran Commonwealth for life.  The system was simple (for an 80s game) and it contained the things that captured our game group at the time - rules for advancement of pilots and a reason to track histories, rules for creating our own BattleMechs, built-in storylines.  We then discovered Battletechnology Magazine, and whoa, did that blow us away.  I'm still a fan of the BattleAxe to this day thanks to the article on it in Battletechnology.  "Why use a blunt Warhammer when you can have the keen edge of a BattleAxe?"  Thanks to all the in-universe stuff in Battletechnology - including the grainy pictures taken of model kits and toys representing the Unseen along with pieces of Robotix to simulate destroyed buildings - I was hooked.  We played for YEARS using just the boxed set, and slowly adding TRO:3025 and MechWarrior the RPG.  We even gave the Autocannon/20 a range of 6/12/18 and heat of 1 since the Technical Readout 3025 showed us it weighed more, and presumably did more damage, but said nothing about its heat and range.  The line on the weapon table in the 2nd Edition Battletech rulebook simply says "Autocannon."  So we made it an 18-hex 20-point hit for 1 heat...  Huzzah.

  What some now derisively refer to as "Mad Max" Battletech, when technology was on the decline, company-sized raids were the order of the day, and the Third Succession War was still winding down- THAT was the battletech my group knows and loves.  Even our players who weren't born yet have looked at the old material and the new material and universally prefer the older game.

  What went wrong?

  Well - consider for a moment the sheer size of the current game.  Put "The Battletech Manual : The Rules of Warfare" or even the later "The Battletech Compendium" together with the MechWarrior RPG plus The Mercenary's Handbook and you still haven't gotten the pagecount of the massive "Total Warfare" tome.  And that is one - ONE - of the five core rulebooks for modern Battletech.  Add in Strategic Operations, Tactical Operations, A Time of War and the insufferably long-awaited Interstellar Operations and you get over 1,800 pages of stuff without Interstellar Ops.

  I know, I know - a lot of that is optional material, stuff you're not going to be able to use in a given campaign etc.  Thing is, just the size of these massive rulebooks starts to scare away players.  And here's the real rub - what do we get for that complexity?  Battletech, at its core, is still the same game it was in 1986.  The only real changes to the core rules I can think of off the top of my head is the elimination of the reaction phase nobody used anyway and the change to the partial cover rule.

  Let me put it this way.  A Time of War, at over 300 pages, gives me more complexity in character design and combat ules than it does utility as a roleplaying game.  Why on Earth would I want a system where I have to keep track of Margin of Success to remember that each point of MoS grants an extra 0.5 or 0.25 damage points?  Also - I get the whole penetration rule for armor and how it makes things more compatible with Battletech in theory - but in practice my players are just not grokking what weapon damages mean by looking at them, or how effective armor is.  This system may be more "realistic" or "better" than the MW1e or MW2e systems, but is it more playable?  Not in our experience.

  So the complexity is not our friend.  And it's not just me holding this opinion, it's the majority of our gaming group.  We basically need a spreadsheet for each PC to keep track of their stuff, and we're ready to look elsewhere.  Sadly, this seems to be a trend.  I saw a LOT of Battletech stuff in the inventory clearance sale at one of our two Friendly Local Game Stores, and the other store barely carries any Battletech product at all.  If something is in the inventory reduction sale, it means it hasn't moved a copy since last January.  Tons of sourcebooks, TROs, and even a couple of rulebooks.  This is not the sign of a healthy hobby.  When we were at Millennium Con last November, the sanctioned BattleTech tournaments had a teeny turnout, and were over in three rounds due to a small player field.  The scenario games were attended by... us.  There was the scenario GM, and members of the RDG.

  So why is Battletech not as popular as it once was, despite our having a good-sized local Battletech club?  Well, there's the size of the books and the complexity.  There's the time it takes to play Battletech.  Even a lance-on-lance game takes hours to play.  We play company-on-company and it takes 6-8 hours to reach a decision, sometimes we don't even get that far frustratingly enough.  There's the rules bloat - so many new weapons and equipment it's hardly recognizable as BattleTech anymore.  And then there's the storyline...

  OK, so it starts out as Dune/A Game of Thrones with giant robots, right?  Then they rediscover tech, and 'Mechs become high-tech tanks again.  The nobility of the MechWarrior takes a back seat, and we're talking about Divisions and Regimental Combat Teams instead of a lance of 'Mechs garrisoning an entire worlk by holding the one or two objectives that would be worth taking.  The Clans come in with tons of new tech, better than that of the Star League.  I'm not a total hater of the Clans, or of the new tech up to this point.  TRO:3050 brought some intersting stuff to the table, and it was still more or less the noble Houses of the Inner Sphere plus the Clans to shake things up.  This is, however, where things begin to come apart for me, and many other players.  A side problem with this is that the current keepers of the Battletech flame at Catalyst Games are openly derisive and dismissive of the 3025 crowd, despite there being quite a lot of them on the message boards.

  OK - my issues with the Clan stuff.  The timeline jumped ahead from the 4th Succession War in 3028 to 3050.  This was done with the book "20 Year Update" that outlined the War of 3039 and the events leading up to the Clan invasion, such as the creation of the Free Rasalhague Republic and the absorbtion of the Tikonov Free Republic by the newly created Federated Commonwealth.  Why the jump?  The official answer is "to sell books" and we get the party line trotted out constantly that "if the writers didn't do something, nothing would sell."  Bullshit.  Catalyst kept the Jihad storyline running for FIFTEEN YEARS.  The original setting of Battletech wasn't good for more than five?  Cop-out.  More weapons and equipment needed to keep players interested?  Well, I don't see them adding ER Pulse Short Swords to D&D to keep people interested.  I digress.

  So they brought the tech back.  And how.  They reduced MechWarriors back to soldiers driving expensive but replaceable war machines.  They wrote themselves into a corner.  So what did they do?  Twice?  The Dark Ages storyline created for the clicky-game and the destruction of the Jihad cause - you guessed it - a re-set to scrounging for tech and a rarity of 'Mechs.  Trying to get back to the older feel of the game through plot changes.  Why not just revisit the original era?  "We've moved on..." they say.  Well, Catalyst released Shadowrun 2050 for their cyberpunk-fantasy RPG allowing players of the current edition of the game to use the setting and equipment from the 1989 version and guess what - it sold like gangbusters on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow.  It is in the top 2.6% of all products on RPGNow/DriveThru as of this writing.  Wouldn't an Era Report : 3015 or 3025 be a good fit?  Sure, the latest BattleChat said they would release one - in 2015 or so.  This should have been one of the first Era Report products done, to support the introductory boxed set.  There is an Era Report : 3052 and 3062, but the technology and fluff from these eras is not really covered as much by the Introductory Boxed Set.  It seems a no-brainer to us in the RDG that this product should have been prioritized. 

  Think it's just us?  The folks developing MechWarrior Online and MechWarrior Tactics both set their games in the pre-Clan era.  Before MechWarrior Online became an MMO project, it was slated to be a PC release set in 3015.  Someone, somewhere still thinks the original storylines and setting have some life left in them.  These people are not apparently in charge at Catalyst.  Two of us RDG folks looked through the entire glut of unsold Battletech stuff to see if there was anything that would be useful to the club - and even at 75% off we found nothing.  Not a thing.  Everything was post-period for us and nothing we could use.

  To be fair, some of the Age of War stuff from TRO 3075 has made it into our games, as well as the PDF-only releases that support the Succession Wars.  Every now and then Catalyst throws us a bone, but we see questions constantly on the forums at bg.battletech.com asking for Succession Wars-specific era data.  We're still waiting.

  So we've got complexity, storyline, lack of interest in current products... 

  That leads Bobby Dean and myself to start a quest to make the RDG's Battletech run better.  This means we're retiring A Time of War at the end of this campaign arc, and switching to a new game system.  The front runner right now is an adaptation he and I have written of MechWarrior 1e and 2e.  It moves fast, it's intuitive to our players, just what we need.  We've also looked at using, either in totality or for inspiration Savage Worlds, Stars Without Number, Mongoose Traveller, FATE, Interlock, FUSION and even D20.  We need a simple, intuitive game system that meshes well with Battletech.

  For Battletech, we're working on house rules to speed up play.  Static defense modifiers for fast 'mechs, group-firing weapons, stuff like that.  I'm sure we'll post our house rules when they're done.
 
  The sad point is, there's not much on the Catalyst horizon right now - immediate future - that we're very excited about.  Our group could just as well play with books published during the FASA era and still have more fun than we're having now.  We're already cobbling rules together to fill in the blanks since A Time of War, despite having a massive page count, did NOT include tables for currency, factions, etc for the various eras of play.  That was left to a book that may or may not ever see the light of day.

  We will continue our search.  We will keep playtesting various changes, various character systems, even various mecha systems in the search for something more Battletech than the the current Battletech...

 

 

WotC gets it all wrong again... maybe...

  Hah!  I remembered to post today so as not to screw up my NY Resolution within the month of January.  Today has been kinda exhausting.  K got her ear tubes put in today, which meant getting to the surgery center by 0645, a quite early morning on the heels of a week of crappy sleep due to Z and K both having issues sleeping through the night.  Ugh.  It's so amazing - I mean, everyone who has had children keeps telling us this, but until you've lived it...  Z is sharp as a tack, and is falling in love with Star Wars, without much prodding from me.  I just showed him the movies, he decided he wants to watch them all the time.  He asks me some very interesting questions about the films, it's interesting the details a three-year-old can remember from films.  I've still not gotten around to explaining to him about Qui-Gon falling asleep at the end of Phantom Menace.  Yes, I showed him the prequels - but he saw the original trilogy FIRST.  Twice each.  My wife is the one that insisted we introduce him to the prequels...  K amazes me by not being a baby anymore.  It seems like it was just the other day she was an infant who would only fall asleep on my chest, and now she's walking, learning new words every day, using utensils when she eats...  wow.

  OK, so, gaming.  Two things had me extremely excited about D&D products over the last two days, but one of them is only a possibility and the other may turn out to be totally disappointing to me.  First of all, Wizards of the Coast, following on to their successful reprints of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition and the 3.5e corebooks have decided to reprint AD&D 2nd Edition.  This had me pretty excited.  2e is quite often either ignored or downplayed by the D&D community.  There are quite a few people who feel that 2e lacked flavor, since TSR removed demons, devils, assassins and half-orcs from the 2nd edition.  Some say the Dungeon Master's Guide was inferior to the first edition version.  Some think it was either too far from 1e, or not far enough.  For me, 2nd Edition was the game of choice when I was in high school.  1989 was my freshman year, and by that time I'd been playing D&D and AD&D for three years, with D&D taking the lion's share of that gaming time.  My BECMI books and later the Rules Cyclopedia (more on that later) were most of my gaming where D&D was concerned.  Now, don't get me wrong - during this period I played Traveller, Palladium Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Price of Freedom, Gangbusters, Gamma World, MechWarrior, Star Frontiers...  lotsa stuff.  But as it was for many other players, D&D and AD&D were our bread and butter.

  Back to 2nd Edition.  When it came out it was pretty awesome to our high-school eyes.  Visually, the Easley covers were striking, the glossy interiors with some pretty iconic paintings - like Elmore's dragon hunters - were inspiring.  The rules were cleaned up, things like initiative actually made sense...  At the time we called it a win.  The DMG was thinner, and it was missing things like Gygaxian prose and artifacts.  The Monster Manual came in a three-ring binder, kind of odd, but I did later get some of the expansions that clipped into the binder.  With 2nd Edition came some of the campaign settings that drove us for years.  I was a fan of Ravenloft and Al-Qadim.  I still keep them both on my bedroom bookshelf for before-bed reading.  I loved 2e.  I didn't realize at the time I was supposed to hate it...  We didn't have the internet back then.  Oh, and don't get me started on how amazing the actual content of the monster book was - ecology, society, behavior.  You had more than a paragraph and some stats, there was real flavor to their monster writeups!

  Around 1995, 2e got a revision.  The covers were re-done, the interiors re-done, the errata worked into the text, and a lot of extra rulebooks like the Player's Option and DM's Option books came out.  THAT, we hated.  The new trade dress was just... not as heroic, not as inspiring somehow.  The interiors of the books had red text on white backgrounds for section headers.  Ugh.  The art had changed, the "feel" had changed, and what the hell were all these extra rulebooks?  No thankee.

  So, I find out WoTC is going to be reprinting 2e as premium collectibles.  Sold.  Put me down for a copy of each book.  Maybe extra copies of the PHB.  But wait - is it the iconic 1989 version they're reprinting?  Nope.  It's the craptacular 1995 version.  The one none of us played, as we were playing MechWarrior, Shadowrun, Vampire, Traveller : The New Era and a bunch of other stuff by then.  The black cover books hold no nostalgia for me.  I hated them when they were new, I avoid them at Half-Price Books.  I'm not shelling out $50 per book for that interior layout, or that cover art.  Just... no.

  So... disappointment.  Now for the part where I get excited.  WotC has a poll to find out which product we're interested in seeing get the premium reprint next.  On the list is... THE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS RULES CYCLOPEDIA.  Yes, folks, my single favorite D&D book of all time.  With this volume I could run campaigns from now until doomsday and never need another book.  Characters levels 1-36, mass combat, domain management, even a basic overview of The Known World and Hollow World.  It's all there.  THIS book summed up D&D for me.  It compiled the Basic, Expert, Companion and Master's rules into one sturdy tome and delivered it for fast and easy play.  Huzzah.  I own three of them.  There's one more at Half-Price Round Rock for $40 that I'll score if I get a 50% off coupon before someone else buys it.  Why?  Because my extra copies await the day some needy young gamer comes along and needs to have one bestowed upon them.  In the last year I have given away copies of Star Wars D6, Shadowrun, D&D 3.0, Basic D&D, Marvel Superheroes and MechWarrior.  I buy spare copies of my favorite games when I can find them cheap, and I gift them to folks who would benefit from having them.  My way to propogate the gamer species.

  So there's my thoughts for the week.  AD&D2e, sold, but only if they go with the orignal 1989 material.  Rules Cyclopedia?  Definitely sold, if they decide to do the reprint.  I fear if they reprint the black border 2e and it fails to sell, as the reaction of my fellow gamers on www.therpgsite.com and www.rpg.net seem to indicate it might, more reprints may not happen.

  I've got a lot more thoughts, but it's late, I've gotta get to work early tomorrow, and I think I just heard K wake up crying... again...

  Until next time, True Believers.

I suppose there's a first time for everything...

  First of all, second Monday of the new year, and Huzzah, I'm posting.  Heh.  The title of this post refers to the fact that after many years of viewing Games Workship's Warhammer 40,000 universe with a yawn and a distinct lack of interest aside from the stellar realtime stragetgy computer game Dawn of War, I have finally found a glimmer of interest in one of their RPG books.  Don't get me wrong, I get grimdark.  I've played in enough dark game worlds to say that I can definitely enjoy grimdark for what it is, and dig a storyline or campaign setting that is gritty and distinctly lacks the sort of thrilling heroics often associated with the roleplaying game hobby.  That said, the 40K universe just never clicked with me.  Is it some form of twisted humor that what turned me off to the 40K background is that it was endless war after war after war... and yet the title of the book that caught my attention is "Only War?"

  OK, so Space Marines seem one-note and cartoonish to me the way they are portrayed in 40K.  No, I've not read any of the novels or other media, I just know what little I've been exposed to from Dawn of War and my limited knowledge of the 40K miniatures game.  Ho-hum.  Yawn.  So said I.  When I began playing Dawn of War, I fell in love with the Imperial Guard.  These folks at least *looked* like human soldiers.  Their equipment, while still a bit space-Gothic, was still recognizable.  They had weak but plucky infantry, and good armor and artillery.  I dug them.  When FFG started releasing the 40K roleplaying games, I found myself disinterested in the various lines for different reasons.  Rogue Trader looked neat, but I was put off by the scale of the vessels the main characters were assigned.  Dark Heresy?  Mildly intriguing, but I didn't see that my game group would get a lot of milage out of it.  Death Watch?  Same thing.  Why, then did I find Only War so interesting?  Well, I blame my interest in World War One.

  The Imperial Guard are almost always overmatched, under-equipped, and in for a good shellacking.  They make insane charges against superior foes and do so out of love of their Emperor.  For some strange reason this reminds me of Tommys in the trenches of World War One, and I find that kind of endearing.  These poor bastards join the Imperial Guard to fight for their Emperor against incredible odds, most of them knowing they'll never make it home, and yet they fight.  They're not genetically engineered super-soldiers like their Space Marine counterparts, they're just people.  I started doing some reading about the Imperial Guard, and I came across the Imperial Infantryman's Handbook - which is, amusingly enough, designed to look like an early 20th Century book, at least looking at the cover design.  The grain of the cover reminds me of my great-grandfather's 1943 Bluejacket's Manual, or the 1914 Manual of Military Training I have.  I wonder if the analogy my brain drew between the IG and the poor bloody infantry of the past is intentional?

  From the reviews I've read, this book is an in-universe artifact that the soldiers of the IG are required to have on them at all times.  The book is written from that perspective, and is supposed to be kind of humorous in that someone in the real world reading the book can see the blatant lies and propaganda being fed to the lowly trooper of the Imperial Guard.  At $16 on Amazon, it might be worth my checking out.

  I suppose that's what interests me about Only War.  I've spent the last two years finishing up a degree that saw me reading a lot about the plight of the lowly soldier.  I took a special interest in the experiences of soldiers in the First World War, but the reality of the conflicts of human experience and the viewpoint of the common trooper was always forefront in my mind.  When I began this course of study, I fancied that I would be thinking about things fromt he perspective of the generals, admirals and marshals that planned and executed these massive campaigns- but instead I found myself much more engrossed by the view from the bottom, where what we would call the "Commander's Intent" was usually impossible to determine.  Where the scope and focus of the Warhammer 40,000 universe would usually turn me completely off to the game - it is that possibility for being totally lost in the shuffle that leads me to find something interesting in Only War.  I find the idea of telling the story of a group of soldiers that fight they know not why to be a very interesting one.  Perhaps, through the perceptions of my players, I can gather some insight into the minds of the kinds of average people who find themselves in decidedly nasty circumstances with very little background on why they were there.

  If I can fit these books into my budget, maybe I'll post some further thoughts about them.  Being a Dad means not having as much income to spend on gaming stuff.  My grandmother asked me what I did with the Christmas money she gave me and was dismayed when I said "car payment."  Being an adult often sucks in a financial sense, doesn't it?

 

Happy New Year, Dear Readers.

  Today is Monday, 7 January 2013.  I am going to try valiantly to publish something worth reading every week of 2013, and Monday is my target day to do so.  At my day job, Monday is the day I generally take stock of what needs to get done over the course of the rest of the week, with work, home life, hobby life, etc.  The rest of the week is for implementation, especially Friday as that's the day that our classroom utilization is much lower allowing me to do the maintenance that is my main function.  So Mondays are when I plan to blog, and I'd love to make sure there's something fun here to read for the whole seven of you who like The Old Dragoon.

  So, how was my Christmas and New Year holiday?  Exhausting is the first word that comes to mind, but amazing is the second.  This was in many ways our first real Christmas as parents.  Last year we were beset with water leak issues, getting used to being parents, living in a hotel... there were lots of things that made the Christmas season a blur.  This year, Z and K are both firmly entrenched as "our" kids and Christmas felt like Christmas - and now I can see why parents all over find magic in the holiday.  The Z-Man is now a confirmed Star Wars fan.  I mean talking about lightsabers and Obi-Wan and Luke and wearing a Darth Vader mask around the house and everything.  Oh, and I did get him the Playskool Millennium Falcon like I said I would.  The hinge breaks a lot, but we still have fun with it...  I digress.  Christmas was awesome.  Playing with the kids, taking them to visit family, listening to K sing "Purr, purr purr..." when we sing Soft Kitty to her.  More of those magic parent moments that are so deeply touching.

  New Year's Eve?  Gaming, what else?  We played Cyberpunk.  The original Cyberpunk 2013 boxed set.  Why?  Because it's 2013, chombatta.  I own two copies of CP2013, one of which is my battered and well-loved copy from 1987 and the second is a PRISTINE copy I got at Half-Price Books for $7.98 a few years back.  On Ebay now that would cost me over $100 - I checked, I wanted to score one for my players.  Not at those prices.  Luckily, I have PDFs and a printer.  Anyway, the game was a lot of fun.  We rolled up characters becuase everyone present enjoys lifepaths.  I always love how a lifepath gives players some roleplaying meat to chew on for a brand new character.  In example - Bobby Dean's netrunner PC rolled life events that indicated he was accused of murder, and imprisoned for ten years.  That became a backstory in which my wife's PC was his younger sister, and he was recruited by the mob while in prison.  Mary's PC is dating the cop who put her brother away, in order to get information to clear his record.  Coupla die rolls, and a lot of roleplaying material for two of the PCs involved.  We had a blast, thanks to Clint, Dixie, Randi and Bobby for helping Mary and I make NYE 2013 memorable.  Z and K slept through the game, thankfully... GRIN...

  What can you expect from The Old Dragoon's blog in 2013?  Well, I hope to do what I've been doing, only better and more frequently.  My top ten games seemed to generate some interest, so I've been asked to do some more in-depth reviews and visit some other games on my also-ran or honorable mention lists.  I've got a lot of 'em, lemme tell you.  There's also some things I'd like to post about GM concepts, the Royal Dragoon Guards and our associated projects, story inspiration for gamers and other things.  Whatever comes out, I promise I'll try not to make it read like stereo instructions.

See you next week (crosses fingers)...