Revenant
06/19/04 08:06 AM
152.163.253.36
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Hi, I'm new here, but not to the MW/BT universe. I have just picked up my old ('ancient') MechWarrior 1st Edition rpg campaign and started GMing it again after a decade or more of real time. My campaign started in 1986 with the release of 1st edition MW and in 3026 game time and reached 3039 before we stopped playing previously.
I should nail my colours to the mast right off the bat, by stating I do not like the Clans and never have. I feel they are too 'space opera' 'high fantasy' type villains and they are not credible in the previously very believable Inner Sphere setting. I wont elaborate beyond that at this time, but don't intend to use them.
My campaign used to be centred around a merc unit named Gray's Condotta, who fought from '26 to '37 through most of the major campaigns of those times. The primary pc was one Kenzuko Tokage, an exiled (at the start of the campaign) Kuritan who went on to servce as a Condottieri under the disreputable Colonel Robert Gray for many years. We played over 80 adventures (in and out of 'Mech as we used to say) in the late eighties and early nineties, ending with Tokage having achieved 59 straight kills and numerous assissts, having won the Solaris Open Class championship by defeating Bao Zhan Fu in '38 and then rejoining the DCMS as a battalion commander of Ryuken-ni during the War of '39 where he was shot down during the assault on Steel Valley, Quentin. It had been a great, epic rpg campaign and the loss of Tokage kind of ended our Battletech days and we went on to other games.
However I never forgot Battletech and held on to my (large) collection of BT books and magazines. Recently we decided to ressurect Tokage, that he'd merely been injured and captured by the AFFS on Quentin and started the campaign afresh. Tokage began on Purgatory Prison Station, in Davion's Jessup system, deep in the Brockton Void...from there he has successfully escaped and is presently in the Hyades Rim.
We intend this new campaign to centre around the Great Game...that is the intelligence war hinted at in the Davion sourcebook, where Fed Com agents secretly struggle with agents of House Kurita, the Taurian Concordat and ComStar for dominance of the Hyades Rim and Outer Sphere planets. Tokage is sick of war and shocked by near dying and seeks peace unsuccessfully in the lost worlds that the original MW book states exist in that region of space (bearing in mind there are 100 or more lost Outworlds Alliance planets not on any map I've seen).
Anyway, I was wondering if;
a) Anyone still plays 1st edition MW.
b) Anyone uses the Heavy Gear worldbooks? (Which I intend to use as independent worlds in the Hyades Rim region - minus the 'gears' of course. Gear regiments will be armoured regiments, perhaps with a lance or two of 'mechs.)
c) Anyone's character ever reached elite (100 000 xp)? (Tokage played as I say 80 odd adventures and ended on 55 000 - we changed xp status to;
0-3000 - Green
3001-15000 = Regular
15001-50000 = Veteran
50001-75000 = Elite
75001-100000 = Double Elite
100001-150000 = Superelite
150001-200000 = Legend)
Look forward to talking BT with you all.
Adam France
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Cray
06/19/04 02:13 PM
67.8.147.182
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I have MW1, I played it a bit, but now while I hold onto the book and use it for reference (it came in handy for reviewing the CBT:Companion), I haven't touched the game in years.
And, while I don't like the Clans for much the same reasons as you, they are one of the more plausible factions in BT (in the sense that their economy makes sense and their culture would function).
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Revenant
06/19/04 03:47 PM
64.12.116.210
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Quote:
I have MW1, I played it a bit, but now while I hold onto the book and use it for reference (it came in handy for reviewing the CBT:Companion), I haven't touched the game in years.
>>>And, while I don't like the Clans for much the same reasons as you, they are one of the more plausible factions in BT (in the sense that their economy makes sense and their culture would function).
--Perhaps I'm the last player of 1st Edition...I have always liked simple rpg systems that have deadly combat systems and a slow reward progression and MW 1E is certainly all that.
Their economy might be plausible (I'm not sure it is personally but there you go), I do not believe it's plausible they could develop jumpwarships when the best scientists in the IS couldn't...and then if they did not even use them! Their whole military structure and tactical style is ludicrous imo, clearly their invasion tactics were laid out to fit the game rather than plausibility.
Anyway I don't want to argue about the clans here. Do you know if anyone else has used the Heavy Gear worlds in BT? I think with a bit of snipping and tweaking they make very interesting BT planets and really show up a weakness in the published books...that BT planets are grossly underdetailed and need a lot of work.
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Nightward
06/19/04 08:18 PM
203.134.41.242
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"Their economy might be plausible (I'm not sure it is personally but there you go),"
You mean the massive civilian base and really tiny military arm? As compared to outfits like the AFFC with the REALLY REALLY HUGE military arm?
" I do not believe it's plausible they could develop jumpwarships when the best scientists in the IS couldn't...and then if they did not even use them!"
The Clans didn't develop WarShips. They took Star League vessels with them. And some of the most formidable scientific minds of the Star League, too.
Meanwhile, the IS was busy bludgeoning itself back to the stone age whilst ComStar assassinated anyone who even got close to re-discovering Kearny-Fuchida hyperdrive technology. It's pretty easy to see why the Inner Sphere didn't have WarShips- they could barely maintain their JumpShips.
The Clans did, in fact, use their Warships. The Bears did, the Jaguars did, the Falcons did. When the Wolves merely threatened to, it so cowed their enemies that they surrendered rather than face orbital bombardment.
Additinoally, the Clan ethos focuses on ritualistic combat. Vapourizing your enemies from space, though highly effective, lacks the style of a tactical engagement where individual Warriors can prove their worth. Of the Clans, only one (the Snow Ravens) focus on WarShis, and aside from the Cloud Cobras, all are highly geared towards ground conflict.
The novels would have been very boring if the Clans fought as effectively as they could have- they would have barrelled through all opposition and be sitting on Earth right now, for a start.
"Their whole military structure and tactical style is ludicrous imo, clearly their invasion tactics were laid out to fit the game rather than plausibility."
Not really. The Zellbrigen style was probably concieved for game balance, but when you look at Clan history, it makes a lot of sense. Ambushes are bad because it's how Aaron DeChevalier and Andery Kerensky died. Large battles are bad, because the Clans don't have the resources to waste on them. Ditto long battles. Trials are good because you have clearly defined objectives instead of clouding the area with half-arsed politicking. And so on. YMMV. I'm a Clanner.
"Do you know if anyone else has used the Heavy Gear worlds in BT? I think with a bit of snipping and tweaking they make very interesting BT planets and really show up a weakness in the published books...that BT planets are grossly underdetailed and need a lot of work. "
HG was an RPG first and a tactical game second. BattleTech was a tactical game first and an RPG second. This goes a long way to explaining why the worlds were never fleshed out. Secondly, nearly all the worlds in BT (except the Clan Homeworlds, which we never see anyway) are very much Earth-like, because they didn't settle anywhere else succesfully. The Star League may have colonized borderline worlds, but typically these enclaves failed during the Succession Wars when people lost the knowledge to maintain them. Exceptions like Twycross and Defiance exist, but these are because there were substantial advantages to maintaining them.
So when you're dealing with a world that's basically Earth with a few modifications, it's not very productive to flesh them out. Most BT fluff, by the way, occurs in the novels and not in the source books, which really only detail the capital worlds. HG, by comparison, devotes entire books to them- The South, The North, The Badlands, Life on Terra Nova...
HG is also a very anime-ish game. It would hardly be anme if Terra Nova were 100% Earthlike.
Finally, HG is centred around a single world-Terra Nova. BT is set on hundreds, maybe even thousands of worlds. It's easy to write about how different one world is, but cataloguing every planet in the Inner Sphere would be a Herculean task.
That said, Terra Nova is a really great world. Icy North, Jungle South, vicious Badlands in between, the McAllen Cave Network...it's all really great stuff. Then again, bringing BattleTech to Terra Nova prompts me to ask: why not just play Heavy Gear? Why play BT? (Well, MW as the case is here.)
"Perhaps I'm the last player of 1st Edition...I have always liked simple rpg systems that have deadly combat systems and a slow reward progression and MW 1E is certainly all that."
MW3rd Ed is a little less lethal than other systems, but doesn't fall to the extremes of, say, DnD. It also offers excruciatingly slow character advancement; XP costs for anything are HUGE, so it takes forever for anything to increase. It's also not level-based, which is something I like; YMMV.
Yea, verily. Let it be known far and wide that Nightward loathes MW: DA. Indeed, it is with the BURNING ANIMUS OF A THOUSAND SUNS that he doth rage against it with.
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tgsofgc
06/20/04 02:15 AM
209.110.231.235
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Well I started when 2nd edition was already out, and hence was the first system i ever played with. Since that time I have picked up the older system and browsed the newer one multiple times. I can't bring myself to like the major overhaul that is third edition, though I like some aspects of first. Unfortunately I still favor 2nd, to me its like a polished version of first edition.... and the is oodles of material out there for it.
As to HG it always seemed very animeish to me, and hence I never pursued picking up some of the stuff (though I know it is popular among many battletechers.... especially those converts from anime giant robot obsessions). I'd recommend to develop your own lore on the go. Battletech at least as far as the sourcebooks (ps. I don't read the novels, and don't plan to....) the universe is basically filled with very similar planet/environments (not that, that needs to be your universe) with small changes (slightly different gravity, different native plants/animals, amount of water, etc.) Though these are usually fairly basic too.
A big plus about 1st edition, imo, I really prefer that mercenary handbook (despite the excellent artwork and lore that was in the books around then.)
As to the clans, I agree they are kinda lame to an extent. The thing to remember is to simply run the game how you want, while trying to create a good experience for players. You can always take alot of the concepts and play with them till they are more believable for your uses (for instance they could be a periphery that found a stockpile of advanced star league equipment and are driving into the innersphere.... of course this setup eliminates the hug resources to drive through the innersphere and the skill levels while still folding in an air of advanced technology and mystery.)
I find that 'pinpoint' accuracy during a bombing run increases proportionally with the amount of munitions used.
-Commander Nathaniel Klepper,
Avanti's Angels, 3058
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Revenant
06/20/04 06:15 AM
64.12.116.210
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Their economy might be plausible (I'm not sure it is personally but there you go),"
You mean the massive civilian base and really tiny military arm? As compared to outfits like the AFFC with the REALLY REALLY HUGE military arm?
...How many citicens do we guess there are in the Fed Com? Perhaps hundreds of billions? Citicens to military personnel the AFFC is ludicrously small and will in my campaign be much larger (mainly with conventional units, but also noble houses 'Mechs).
" I do not believe it's plausible they could develop jumpwarships when the best scientists in the IS couldn't...and then if they did not even use them!"
The Clans didn't develop WarShips. They took Star League vessels with them. And some of the most formidable scientific minds of the Star League, too.
Meanwhile, the IS was busy bludgeoning itself back to the stone age whilst ComStar assassinated anyone who even got close to re-discovering Kearny-Fuchida hyperdrive technology. It's pretty easy to see why the Inner Sphere didn't have WarShips- they could barely maintain their JumpShips.
The Clans did, in fact, use their Warships. The Bears did, the Jaguars did, the Falcons did. When the Wolves merely threatened to, it so cowed their enemies that they surrendered rather than face orbital bombardment.
Additinoally, the Clan ethos focuses on ritualistic combat. Vapourizing your enemies from space, though highly effective, lacks the style of a tactical engagement where individual Warriors can prove their worth. Of the Clans, only one (the Snow Ravens) focus on WarShis, and aside from the Cloud Cobras, all are highly geared towards ground conflict.
The novels would have been very boring if the Clans fought as effectively as they could have- they would have barrelled through all opposition and be sitting on Earth right now, for a start.
...Yeah...I can see when you're winning honourable ritualistic combat might be the order of the day...however once you start losing at that then the nukes would be wheeled out. Your final point is valid yet proves my point...used realistically the Clans couldn't lose, so they had to be unrealistic and fight implausibly.
"Their whole military structure and tactical style is ludicrous imo, clearly their invasion tactics were laid out to fit the game rather than plausibility."
Not really. The Zellbrigen style was probably concieved for game balance, but when you look at Clan history, it makes a lot of sense. Ambushes are bad because it's how Aaron DeChevalier and Andery Kerensky died. Large battles are bad, because the Clans don't have the resources to waste on them. Ditto long battles. Trials are good because you have clearly defined objectives instead of clouding the area with half-arsed politicking. And so on. YMMV. I'm a Clanner.
"Do you know if anyone else has used the Heavy Gear worlds in BT? I think with a bit of snipping and tweaking they make very interesting BT planets and really show up a weakness in the published books...that BT planets are grossly underdetailed and need a lot of work. "
HG was an RPG first and a tactical game second. BattleTech was a tactical game first and an RPG second. This goes a long way to explaining why the worlds were never fleshed out. Secondly, nearly all the worlds in BT (except the Clan Homeworlds, which we never see anyway) are very much Earth-like, because they didn't settle anywhere else succesfully.
...Not sure that last point is true, in the House Books and elsewhere in BT books there are occupied worlds mentioned without earthlike conditions, domed cities on worlds with no breathable atmospheres, worlds where everyone lives underground in tunnels, worlds where it's always night, worlds with extremely long daylight hours, worlds with orbiting artificial sun stations or inhabited space station-cities and so on.
The Star League may have colonized borderline worlds, but typically these enclaves failed during the Succession Wars when people lost the knowledge to maintain them. Exceptions like Twycross and Defiance exist, but these are because there were substantial advantages to maintaining them.
So when you're dealing with a world that's basically Earth with a few modifications, it's not very productive to flesh them out.
...Err why not? We're talking about a rpg here (not specifically the boardgame), why wouldn't it be productive to detail the setting your characters will be playing in? The more info I get as a GM on what the pc's will see, hear, smell and interact with the better. ...
Most BT fluff, by the way, occurs in the novels and not in the source books, which really only detail the capital worlds. HG, by comparison, devotes entire books to them- The South, The North, The Badlands, Life on Terra Nova...
HG is also a very anime-ish game. It would hardly be anme if Terra Nova were 100% Earthlike.
>>>HG may use a unified anime style of artwork, the game itself is no more 'cartoony' in feel than BT. Like (pre-clan)BT it's designed to feel like a real setting, where people are morally grey by and large.
Finally, HG is centred around a single world-Terra Nova. BT is set on hundreds, maybe even thousands of worlds. It's easy to write about how different one world is, but cataloguing every planet in the Inner Sphere would be a Herculean task.
>>>A task I wish FASA had taken up.
That said, Terra Nova is a really great world. Icy North, Jungle South, vicious Badlands in between, the McAllen Cave Network...it's all really great stuff. Then again, bringing BattleTech to Terra Nova prompts me to ask: why not just play Heavy Gear? Why play BT? (Well, MW as the case is here.)
>>>Because I think BT is better. BT is vast, it has hundreds of occupied worlds to explore and fight over, HG has 9 or 10 (and some are considerably less interesting than Terranova). I will use some of the HG planets for a while in BT to show my players that any largely populated planet is in fact A PLANET...anywhere you have millions (or billions) of people there will be interesting people, places, occurances and culture (even if a Successor State's imposing it's own culture over the planet's).
"Perhaps I'm the last player of 1st Edition...I have always liked simple rpg systems that have deadly combat systems and a slow reward progression and MW 1E is certainly all that."
MW3rd Ed is a little less lethal than other systems, but doesn't fall to the extremes of, say, DnD. It also offers excruciatingly slow character advancement; XP costs for anything are HUGE, so it takes forever for anything to increase. It's also not level-based, which is something I like; YMMV.
>>Hmm I've read 2e and didn't like it, I think I'll stay in the stone age and stick with 1E.
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Cray
06/20/04 10:00 AM
67.8.147.182
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About all I've done with HG is borrow a few names and concepts, like low tech protomechs. I don't know anyone using HG planets.
Quote:
I do not believe it's plausible they could develop jumpwarships when the best scientists in the IS couldn't...
The Clans didn't develop them. They kept the warships that their founders, the Star League Defense Force, brought with them, and they also kept the necessary technology, unlike the regressed Inner Sphere. Basically, the Clans have always had the equivalent of the Helm Memory Core (or, rather, suffered no technological losses), while the Inner Sphere just recovered all that Star League technology beginning in c3025.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Cray
06/20/04 10:01 AM
67.8.147.182
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Quote:
You mean the massive civilian base and really tiny military arm? As compared to outfits like the AFFC with the REALLY REALLY HUGE military arm?
Sarcasm? The Clans have a reasonable balance between military size and economic strength (given they have such a crappy economy). The Inner Sphere is just wonky, with a tiny, tiny military for the population.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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Nightward
06/20/04 08:10 PM
202.141.218.2
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What I think a lot of people don't think about is how incredibly good you have to be to fight as a MechWarrior. These days, I'm sure we've all played the MW computer games, and it's pretty simple there. But if BT was real life, it wouldn't work that way. You've got to have perfect balance for the neurohelmet. Fast reflexes. Be able to tolerate incredible heat stress. Tactical minded. The list goes on (and on and on and on).
Next, you've got to train at an academy. The SZMA graduates about 600 MechWarriors a year, and the DCMS doesn't grow by very much. These graduates must then mainly be replacing battle losses.
Next up, the SW-era 'Mech factories are very low on output. I think the AFFC could make like one or thre Atlases a year. That's barely enough to keep up with combat losses.
Jump travel was a lot more dangeous back then, because they often didn't know how exactly to repair things when they broke. Look at the JumpShips with the hydroponic booms for just one example.
Finally, even if you did have a "correctly sized" military, you can't train enough people to fight as MWs, or give them all a machine, or even transport them around. I think that the House military strength represents a fairly good equilibria in the 3020s and onwards. The length of time it required to rebuild the units shattered at the hands of the Clans points to all these things playing a part.
If you look at things from a modern perspective, it doesn't make much sense. Looked at from inside the game and it's history, though...
Yea, verily. Let it be known far and wide that Nightward loathes MW: DA. Indeed, it is with the BURNING ANIMUS OF A THOUSAND SUNS that he doth rage against it with.
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Greyslayer
06/21/04 01:43 AM
216.14.192.233
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Quote:
Finally, even if you did have a "correctly sized" military, you can't train enough people to fight as MWs, or give them all a machine, or even transport them around. I think that the House military strength represents a fairly good equilibria in the 3020s and onwards. The length of time it required to rebuild the units shattered at the hands of the Clans points to all these things playing a part.
If you look at things from a modern perspective, it doesn't make much sense. Looked at from inside the game and it's history, though...
I think that military strengths were wrong. Not from a battlemech point of view mind you, but from a tank point of view. Considering the time of the 4th succession war was mostly considered feudal, you could say apart from mercenaries then most of the times nobility would be piloting mechs (which knowing what we know about tanks surviving level 2 combat not being very high would make them the peasants of the battletech universe).
This would mean multiple regiments of tanks going about. Few would be experienced due to the high turnover of tanks, thus the highly trained mechwarriors often being able to outgun and outsurvive a tank in combat. The records of tank units were very sketchy in all the updates.... least of all records for say a all-tank merc unit or several that surely should've existed throughout the periods detailed in battletech (the game is called battletech not mechtect afterall).
You fight on a earthlike planet you fight a multitude of tanks, not agromechs, not really infantry as they in general during this time had no anti-mech training... still divisions of infantry on a planet with access to field guns would be nasty for a smallish mech force.
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Nightward
06/21/04 01:58 AM
203.134.40.227
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AFAIK, the units listed in the Field Manuals and so forth were the House Regulars- ie, the 'Mech Regiments.
Anything else outside the House Regular chain of command doesn't feature- which would include garrison outfits like conventional regiments. Conventional Regiments came out of the woodwork during the Clan Invasion, where they were the primary defence of the FRR.
Defensive tank units would also be primarily deployed close to the borders, and on capital worlds. Spreading your force does let you protect a greater region, but it's pretty unlikely that anyone would attack the back edge of nowhere. It's been done, but as the exception rather than the rule.
I personally think the backbone of every military would be Infantry. It's not a huge investment to send a bunch of peole off for training, and the expense of creating Infantry units compared to others is quite minimal. Then again, with the lethality of combat for Infantry in BT, you can't even really use them as meat shields. Infantry without armour get the rawest deal of anyone in BT.
Yea, verily. Let it be known far and wide that Nightward loathes MW: DA. Indeed, it is with the BURNING ANIMUS OF A THOUSAND SUNS that he doth rage against it with.
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