Refining The Essence Of Classic BattleTech With Keith Hann

Something monumental is happening in BattleTech right now. As we speak, a playtest is underway that will determine the fate of a brand new rulebook that will replace Total Warfare and the BattleMech Manual. The playtest is looking at some of the most substantial changes BattleTech has seen in well over a decade, marking a return to what Catalyst is referring to as “active development.” To get the lowdown on what’s going on, I reached out to BattleTech‘s Head Rules Wonk, Keith Hann, to talk about the ongoing playtest.

Sean (Sarna): I would like to start by saying thank you so much for agreeing to be Sarna’s next interviewee. We’ll begin by asking: Who are you?

Keith Hann (CGL): I’m Keith Hann. My formal title at Catalyst is—I had to look this up—Associate Developer of Play Design, but essentially I’m the rules wonk, the guy who does the rules stuff. Not all rules things; sometimes there’s something specialist for something else that is handled by someone else, but broadly I do the rules stuff.

Sean: I’ve heard you described as the rules guru.

Keith: Whatever you prefer. Yeah.

Sean: Let’s get your BattleTech bonafides. What is your BattleTech story? What got you into the game, and what keeps you playing?

Keith: It was 1991—school’s out for summer. I grew up in a very small, isolated mountain town in the middle of nowhere. Basically, all there was to do was to run around in the woods and play games. Well, and copious amounts of underage drinking, if you were inclined that way. It was very isolated. 

A lot of games. We were playing mountains of First Ed. D&D, I was running a first edition Shadowrun campaign that I’d just gotten the new book—new to me, anyway. I was very excited about this. Listening to a boatload of eighties thrash metal, the new Guns N’ Roses cassette single, stuff like that. All this is etched in my mind as this image I can just instantly reflect back to. And we played a mountain of games—we played Star Frontiers and a lot of Palladium stuff and all sorts of things. 

One more game that came out that summer, someone had a copy of the Second Edition BattleTech box set. As best as I can recall, I had a Marauder, I got head-capped turned two, and I was just hooked for life. I loved it. It was a lot of fun. 

A lot of games back then were much crueller to their playerbase. It was just sort of a given. You miss a turn, you don’t do anything, you’re dead, start over, you’re dead, you’re out of the game. Have fun watching everyone else play. So in that sense, the idea of like, oh, you’re head-capped? Who cares? That was cool, just play again. 

We didn’t play a lot of that group, but I was hooked, so I spent my second-ever paycheck when we finally went to the big city entirely on BattleTech. My dad was furious that I wasted all that money. I didn’t care—way too awesome. I got to have all the giant robot stuff. I got a lot of the really cool books that are very hard to find now, and were, in a lot of cases, on clearance in the stores. 

Yeah, I was hooked ever since then. Even when I wasn’t playing, I would still read these books because I immediately found the lore incredibly fascinating—even over and above the gameplay.

Sean: How did you then go from just being a BattleTech player to being the rules guru for Catalyst?

Keith: Well, back before social media fragmented the internet into a thousand isolated hellscapes, things were much more concentrated. There used to be a lot of different BattleTech forums, but there was always the big one, which was whatever the official forum was at the time. 

I took a break from around 2000 after FASA decided to fold up shop until about 2008. When I got back into it, joined the forums, and something that immediately struck me was that there were all of these books, all of these ’Mech designs everywhere all over the place, but there wasn’t really a cohesive way of deciding in a game what you were going to get, what you could use for your faction, your timeline. 

I started compiling all of this stuff, scouring all of the various canon references, trying to reconcile them, trying to take something vague like “this is common”—well, what the hell does that mean? What’s common for a ’Mech? Stuff like that. I tried to make this system out of it, so I made these—if you’ve ever played the old Warhammer Fantasy, there were two books, Realms of Chaos and Lost and the Damned; they had D1000 mutation tables in there. I was really struck by the idea of the D1000.  

So, I’m going to make a RAT with D1000 in it, and it’s going to have all in that way. That gives me enough design room to go, okay, this is common, so it gets 250 out of the thousand, but this thing is incredibly rare, it gets like five there. Giant charts. I made all these RATs, and I started getting a little fanbase around this group of people talking about it, contributing their own fan projects. 

Eventually, someone from Catalyst contacted me, Joel Bancroft-Connors—he’s not really with the company anymore, he was known as Welshman—he sent me an email saying, “Hey, we could use you. You did this thing and this thing.” 

And I said, “Well, actually, that’s fan work posted in my thread, but it’s by someone else.” It was actually by Joshua Franklin, the guy who does Alpha Strike now. I’m like, “No, you actually want Joshua Franklin.” 

He was like, “Oh, okay. Well, what about this? This is really cool.” 

I was like, “Well, that was actually also worked by Joshua Franklin. You shouldn’t be talking to me. Go get Joshua Franklin.” But they wound up hiring us both, so that worked out nicely.

My first ever job was one of the old XTROs. I got a $10 paper check. It was pretty sweet. I never cashed it—I kept it. I’m sure that threw someone’s accounting into madness somewhere. I still have it in my drawer of strange BattleTech oddities. And from there, that was the rest of it. I went into the MUL Team, eventually made head of errata, then was assigned to the rules team, and eventually became head of that in 2015. I was asked to head up the BattleMech Manual project, and that’s what really moved me into heavier projects, whole books, and more prominent rules.

Sean: We’ll talk about some of those books later, as well as more rules stuff, but we have to get the all-important question out of the way. What is your favourite ’Mech?

Keith: I’d have to divide into two. For starting out playing 3025, it was always the Cyclops. The lore for the original ’Mechs was so strong. This is a piece of crap, this is really interesting, this was made to do this, but didn’t do it all well, but it’s better at this—they really worked in making it not just a collection of war machine stats. Here is this thing that’s no longer in production that is meant to command. It’s the ‘sit back, direct the show’ sort of thing, and that really appealed to me in the sense that it’s not the greatest of fighters for its weight, but it had such a clear role that made it interesting. At the same time, it also gave us a sense of a larger universe. 

I got the chance to make the Juliano for the modern era. That’s what I created, and the artist knocked it out of the park. The mini looks great. I love that thing, and I’ll play it all the time whenever I can.

Sean: Well, CGL has already remade one of your favorite ’Mechs in plastic, but is there maybe another ’Mech you’d like to see remade in plastic? Maybe from the 3050s or 3058s?

Keith: I actually don’t care. I have no idea what’s been made in plastic and what hasn’t. I know there’s tons of it out there, but for me, I started in the early nineties, and I was broke, and I always had more hobbies than money. I could buy expensive minis, assuming I could find any in a hobby store, which was not easy until I moved to the big city. But I wanted to spend my money on CDs or books, and so I had very little money left over for pewter. 

So instead I bought standies. I got every copy of the old Second Edition box that I could. When I finally got my hands on the reinforcement boxes, I bought two or three copies of Reinforcements One, or two of Reinforcements Two. I have mountains of those cardboard standies from those old boxes, and that’s mostly what I still have nicely organised. I’ve started getting the new minis because they’re beautiful and they’re affordable and they’re easy to get now compared to some of the days where distribution was harder, but yeah, I just don’t track that. 

For me, I’ve always liked the aesthetic for BattleTech is like, whatever you got. A gummy bear and the other guy’s got a quarter—as long as the facings are marked, go at it.

Sean: Would you really love to see a return of the cardboard standee?

Keith: Well, they tried, but I think there were some flaws in the implementation. The old ones were perfect rectangles; they folded up, they were clearly labelled, and you could store them very easily. The new ones are a giant mishmash of unfortunate, sort of oddly-cut, not-stackable, or easily implementable ones. 

They’re what I grew up with, they’re what works for me, but realistically, we’re in a new golden age of BattleTech, and that is far and away because of these new minis. Because of this consistent scaling, the new art, the widespread distribution, people are buying into BattleTech in a way that they never would have before and wouldn’t have without these new pieces. So while I like them and I can always think back fondly on them, their time’s done.

Sean: Let’s go to another question for the rules guru. What’s your favourite piece of rarely-used equipment?

Keith: I actually had a hard time with this, but I think my brain kept going back to the Chameleon Light Polarization System, the old Exterminator cloaking device thing. And again, that was thanks to the magic of the old books, when you could only get one book at a time, maybe one a year. For my case, we would only go to the city once a year to go to the bookstores, so when I got my hands on that, I would read it fifty times. They’re all falling apart on me. 

The lore attached to this very specific niche role—much like the Cyclops—is that this thing is meant as a headhunter ’Mech, and it uses this now lostech cloaking device to do so. All of it really appealed to me. When it wasn’t in the BattleMech Manual due to, well, sort of rules-level issues—there’s nothing wrong with it, but it has always stuck with me. It’s all the same as something that just appeals to me from not just gameplay, but an aesthetic sense.

Sean: We have you working on pretty much every major sourcebook/rulebook since the 2010s, except for IlKhan’s Eyes Only and Dominions Divided. Which of your previous works are you most proud of?

Keith: Well, ‘working on,’ I got to say first, is pretty relative. I mean, I was part of the MUL Team. The MUL Team rapidly turned into the major fact-checking team, so a lot of stuff would just come through here, and I would be part of fact-check. Later on, I probably got grandfathered into a few books that I actually didn’t really work on. And then in other cases, I might have just done the RATs, or I might have just done a very small rule section for the rest of this book, which has been written by someone else. 

So ‘working on’ can be all over the place, but I’d have to pick two. The BattleMech Manual, and I’m just very proud of that book. Really liked that book. It’s been well-received, and I think it does what it’s supposed to. There’s always room for improvement. Now working on the new core rulebook, part of me is trying to improve even on that, which was an attempt to improve on Total Warfare. 

The other one, not yet out, dying to have it out, desperate to see it out, is the Brush Wars book for Operation Guerrero, which has been in development hell for many years. I finished it in 2022. But I mean, that’s nothing compared to Assistant Line Dev Aaron Cahall, who did one even older. It’s also still been sitting. The schedule is what the schedule is; things fit or they don’t, or get bumped. There are always enough writers, there is never enough art time, and especially enough layout time and enough lead developer time. So there are things that get finished and then set.

That one, though, I got to treat it as a historical research piece, trying to untangle all the messy lore of Guerrero. There was a storytelling aspect—you’re trying to write the story of all these individual conflicts. There was an actual full fiction piece, which I got to write. There were spotlights on various small units—I got to do those. There’s this whole section of the universe that I really got to make my own that is waiting. I’m pretty proud of it, though. I like it. I like the result. Hopefully, people feel the same when it eventually appears.

Sean: Operation Guerrero and the subsequent Chaos March were probably one of my favorite times in the BattleTech universe. It’s very similar to the current Hinterlands, except it’s all around Terra, so these are all worlds with real populations and industrial bases, and tons of money to pay for mercs.

Keith: Chaos March was obviously a big inspiration for the modern Hinterlands. There’s a lot of opportunity, but not enough resources for anybody. It allows small-scale players to do things. There was a realisation, obviously, that there’s a metaplot and then there’s gameplay, and the metaplot is whole armies, whole regiments, many regiments smashing around. But when you focus on that too much, you start to move away from what the player can do because the player’s not like, “I moved my 3rd Crucis Lancers over here. Tune in next week for the movement phase to be completed.”

So we want to get this back to a player level. Chaos March was excellent for that. We’re hoping to see more of a focus on the lower level, to focus on the fact that it’s a game played by individuals first and foremost.

Sean: Let’s get into this new rulebook you mentioned. What’s interesting is that Classic BattleTech has not really seen active development for quite some time. It has famously been… I’m not going to say ‘stuck’ because there have been errata and other changes over the years, but it has a reputation for being as it’s always been. So let’s get the obvious question out of the way: why are we changing the rules now?

Keith: Why now? I dunno. The stars aligned? There’s no special reason that I’m aware of. 

I’m the rules guy, I’m not the business guy. So why was something decided to be done? Now, I’m sure this was desired for a long time, but again, speaking of Brush Wars, there are only so many resources. There’s always something else that needs priority. The Kickstarters, especially, really sucked all the air out of the room. It was all hands on deck for that, for good reasons. They were a lot of work and they’re very important, but I’m sure that this is something that could have been done anytime in the last five to ten years, and should have been, even. 

There’s stuff that could have been done when you start getting into the 11th, and now I think the 12th printing of Total Warfare is coming up, each one with its own individual errata changes. If it were just straight reprints, whatever, but we’re not. We’re changing it all the time—BattleTech’s rules do change. It’s just ridiculous. We really should stop pretending that someone who has the first printing and someone who’s going to have the upcoming 12th printing are playing the same game, because in many ways, they’re not. The closer you are to ’Mechs, the more stable it is. The further you move away from ’Mechs, the more things get a little hinky.

Sean: As mentioned, the core rules have remained mostly the same, but with those errata in different editions, is it a daunting task to start tinkering with BattleTech’s rules in the more substantial way that is being proposed with these playtests? 

Keith: God, yes. It’s very, very daunting. That’s something I think about all the time. It scares the hell out of me in some ways. But I don’t make any decisions alone. 

First, let’s be clear: Ray and Randall aren’t just going to close their eyes and sign off on anything I do. It goes through all of the senior development, and demo agents sound off, other players, other CGL members sign off. But I’m the lead of it; I don’t want to be the guy who ruins BattleTech. So yes, daunting, very daunting.

I’m constantly trying to think, is this a good rule? But as a subset of that, is it a rule that people will like? Because even if I’m convinced 100 percent this is a better rule, if no one likes it, it sucks. Then it automatically becomes a bad rule. You have to have something that broadly matches the fan base’s idea of what BattleTech is, and that’s vague. It can be a moving target.  All sorts of people have different ideas of what BattleTech should be, but you can broadly say there’s a consensus on certain things, with a little bit of movement at the edges. 

We’re constantly trying to do something that not just works at the table, but works for the fan base. As part of these playtests, we’ve seen they’re like, “It works, but to me, it doesn’t match how I think BattleTech should be,” and that’s not contradictory.  There are some things I’m probably going to back out of solely on the basis of popular votes.

Sean: We have some questions from people in the Sarna Discord as to what the aim of these new rules is. I remember in some of your previous interviews, the goal was to replace the current Total Warfare and also the BattleMech Manual. Is that correct?

Keith: Both. Yeah.

Sean: So is the aim to have this under a single book, or is there still going to be two books? What is the end-goal here?

Keith: The goal is two steps. One is to make a better rulebook. We have errata; there’s stuff that Total Warfare and the BattleMech Manual are missing. There are things we’ve learned in the way of organisation. We can just make a better book. 

The other is that our core line is very, very messy. It grew organically, and that’s like a lot of organic things. It’s looking back with the full benefit of hindsight. Why is it like this? Well, that’s how it turned out at the time. That’s how dev resources, time, and people writing it all came together. We can make a better line, and even the concept of what is core could be worked on. 

For instance, BattleTech calls every rulebook core. I don’t know why that was decided on. Pretty much every other game goes, here’s your rulebook and here’s a supplemental sourcebook, or the fan base likes to call them splatbooks. Why not do that? By calling everything core, we’ve given a strange idea of how BattleTech is played. We’ve given a strange idea of what people need to have to play the game. So we’re going back to an idea of there’s one core rulebook. This is what you need to play BattleTech at the heart of it. 

Now, there’s no way that can be one book. It wasn’t possible in Total Warfare‘s time because then TacOps was already being planned and was going to come out. TechManual had to be broken off. It couldn’t have been done 20 years ago. It certainly can’t be done now with TacOps out, with Interstellar Operations and all of the gear in there out. So you have to think of sitting back, knowing all of the material that we have, how can we make a holistic line out of it? Something that organises all of these books into a way that when people buy, they’re like, okay, I get what I’m buying. I get whether or not I need this or not for my personal play purposes. 

So that’s the other one: a better rule book for the table than TW and even BattleMech Manual, and the foundation of a better line for all of BattleTech‘s rules.

Sean: You also indicated in previous interviews that you want to get classic BattleTech back into “active development.” What does active development look like?

Keith: Well, I think for a lot of people that would be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—which is to say, it’s going to be very small stuff. BattleTech’s core ’Mech rules have been so static, other than expansion via errata and interactions with new gear, that any change looks kind of radical. But if you’re from the outside and you don’t already play BattleTech, nothing here is going to make you want to play BattleTech. 

This is small stuff, but active development does mean being willing to look at something and going, “Well, could we change this one little thing? Do we really need this to work that way? Do we have to have alternate firing arcs being quite so punitive to ’Mechs? I want to shoot multiple targets. Can we add an extra terrain or three into core?” Small stuff like that. 

So if you think BattleTech is too crunchy or whatever else you don’t like about it, this isn’t an attempt to convince those people that they should play BattleTech. It’s more for people who actually play it already, can we make that experience better for them? Some people will say, “Well, no, that’s not what I want. This doesn’t work. Don’t change anything. It’s perfect.” But a good example is—and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later—the ammo explosion changes.

People have complained for decades about how ammo explosions work in BattleTech. At the same time, some people also say, “No, it’s fine. I like it. It’s great. Everything explodes in a giant fireball.” At most, you might get a reluctant confession that maybe machine gun ammo shouldn’t quite be the most explosive component in the universe. There are people completely happy with that, but there are enough people who are unhappy with how it works that we felt, yeah, we can look at that small aspect and slightly change how it works. 

That’s active development. I don’t want it to sound like we’re going to throw out all the critical hits or something and change everything to roll D30 or roll D2 or whatever. It’s just about being willing to tinker a bit carefully, slowly, and with a lot of review.

Sean: I honestly think the ammo explosion changes came as a bit of a surprise because, as you mentioned earlier, BattleTech seems to appeal to the guys who get headshot on the second turn and say, “Let’s play again.” That kind of catastrophe is part of the charm.

Keith: It may seem contradictory that we might only want to somewhat mitigate ammo explosions. I mean, they still suck. If you actually play and you take 20 points of damage to internal structure, it’s terrible. Your ’Mechs are in a world of hurt. But we’re not doing anything about head caps—it happens—or the golden BB three crits and there goes my engine or there goes my gyro. We don’t want to get rid of that. That is BattleTech. It was just that very specific mechanic and the way it annoys certain people. My impression is that the majority of the fan base was unhappy with how it worked, so we decided to look at that specifically. 

But something like your headshot-and-your-dead, the only way to really address that is to fundamentally change what BattleTech is, at least as I saw it. Anything you would do would be, well, let’s give you a second chance, or let’s remove that, and that just really didn’t appeal to any of us. We weren’t really interested in doing that. You could have maybe made it so that if you take a hit to the cockpit, you take three automatic hits or something. I suppose if we were really interested in it, we could have done something, but we weren’t. We’re okay with BattleTech being harsher than a lot of modern games still.

Sean: Right now, there’s a playtest underway, but I assume there are other tools in your rules guru toolbox? Are there a ton of spreadsheets, or do you have some computer programs that run through a proposed rules change to see how it affects the wider game? Do you have a custom version of MegaMek running with all the new rules so it can be tested internally?

Keith: Smart people who are packed very tightly into a small box and want to get out.

Sean: Haha!

Keith: No programs, yes spreadsheets in individual cases if made by individuals. 

My approach was I create two separate teams of very experienced players, one of them being the entire official rules team, one of them being a bunch of players drawn in from forums and Discord, and other things. Just people whose conversational abilities I’ve been paying attention to, and who seem to know what you’re talking about. You’re not hopelessly reactionary. You can see that things can be good, things can be bad, have give and take, and are not obnoxious. Some people are brilliant but also don’t play well with others, and so you can’t really use them because then they’ll make your team fall apart. You’ve got to get people who can work together with other people and be willing to be told no.

So I created two teams completely in isolation from each other. I wanted to avoid any sense of groupthink you can get when really powerful personalities come out and they can start dominating the conversation through no fault of their own. That’s just the way they are. So I created two groups. Neither of them gets to talk to each other or even know who they are, and I run all the proposals I had past each group in isolation, then collect the feedback. 

That was the idea: to get this sense of multiple levels, critique all these different angles, and try to avoid a real sort of silo where everything is just crammed together and everyone has the same idea or arrives at the same idea. I found it very fruitful—a great way to get all sorts of different perspectives and to maximise the number that I get. 

I’d been collecting proposals since 2016. I knew there’d be a new edition eventually, so I just started writing them up like, man, when this happens, I want to be on the ground floor of this baby. So I wrote ’em all my explanations, all these changes, and then they’re like, “Well, you’re in charge.” 

I used all that stuff as the basis for the initial proposals, and then immediately about half of ’em were destroyed as soon as they got in front of other people. We argued about things for weeks. If it held up to the argument, we started running limited playtest games, small pools, limited time, just enough to see if it survives contact with the tabletop, and if it passed all of that, then it made the formal proposal list. 

But if it still seemed sketchy, radical, if I had the sense that there were a lot of unknown angles still, then I isolated it for the public playtest list. Not everything goes on there. If we tried to test everything, no matter how small, we’d get too much data. I really needed to limit it to something I could process myself. Some individual things were absolutely math-hammered (answered via a mathematical approach) if the case warranted it, but I really tried to focus on play.

I was constantly saying to people, “Look, we’re not after realism.” It was just a fundamental focus on BattleTech as a game. We can make the lore work within reason. There are some fundamental things you can’t mess with, but if we need to, we can make this work for the lore. Don’t get bogged down by what a sourcebook says unless it’s everywhere. We’re not changing ‘heat is bad,’ that’s too foundational, but ’Mechs move like this, well, is it possible that they could also move like this? A lot of BattleTech is abstracted, right? It’s an attempt to simulate a separate world. So we said if we can make it work within the rules of the universe as we understand it, it could work as a game piece. It’s only if it completely breaks the rules of the universe do we say, “No, that isn’t going to work at all.” That was our broad approach: gameplay first.

Sean: Again, in previous interviews, you’ve said that one of the golden rules of this playtest is that there will be no changes to ’Mech record sheets. But how much would you really like to be able to change some of those fundamental values? For example, basic autocannons so that the AC/2 and AC/5 aren’t completely garbage weapons?

Keith: Well, everyone would like to do that. I did actually; I ran a 10-year-long campaign with some friends of mine. We played BattleTech with very, very limited accounting-type stuff as a mercenary group, and I used the Hero system for the role-playing game. We knew Hero very well, and part of that, I redid all of the weapons, and then I rewrote TRO 3039. I laid it out and everything in Microsoft Word, which is not something I advise people to use as a layout program, but I got very good at it. I’m a whiz at making Microsoft Word do stupid things it was never intended to do.

I rewrote the whole TRO in landscape format. I even found a fricking landscape binder I had ordered from the States, and that was our ’Mech bible for the game—it had all of the altered weapons I’d invented. We played that for a good 10 years, and it was really enjoyable. 

But for the real world, for actual BattleTech, can’t be done, right? We just can’t. I was saying in another interview, there is no such thing formally as a new edition. We say it’s not, but others might say it is. I’m not going to argue with people, but our criteria for it being a new edition or not was, are we revamping the record sheets? Can we start playing with that? We can’t. 

So I’m looking at other avenues for those sorts of weapons, which won’t appear in this round of playtesting, but I have some concepts for the AC/2 and AC/5 that will, hopefully, fit in with the established lore, but make them work by giving them alternate paths to play. They’ll still suck as ’Mech level weapons, but what else can they do? Why were they invented? Why does the Vulcan have an AC/2? I think we can come up with a good reason for that.

Sean: I think it was specifically to shoot at infantry that were really far away,

Keith: It’s not really that good of a weapon for that kind of thing, but we could maybe do something along those lines, and that’s why it’s not here because we’re looking at ’Mech rules right now. So we can add rules to things as long as it doesn’t appear on a record sheet—we can’t change foundational values. When the gear playtest comes out, my introduction for that goes into that. 

The whole problem with the foundational weapons is that they’re essentially collections of record sheet values. You can’t really do much with that, but in the same way that BattleTech’s core ’Mech rules haven’t changed too much—but they’ve had a lot of stuff added to it—we can also look at some weapons and go, “Okay, we can’t change that, but can we add something to it that only applies in certain circumstances so it doesn’t affect the record sheet?” 

Sean: This reminds me very much of the solution in the MechWarrior games to the autocannon problem. No, you can’t change the weight, but you can change how fast it fires. 

Keith: Yeah, they have a lot more freedom to play around with stuff like that. They can bloat all the values to get more granular and then start tinkering with stuff inside that. I’ve always envied their ability to do that, but on our side, it’s not open to us.

Sean: So we are doing playtests now, which are allowing players to get into some of these proposed rules changes, but I’m assuming there’s going to be some rules changes that everybody agrees are just a good idea. Maybe it’s been something that players have been asking for years. Are there going to be any rule changes in the new rulebooks that aren’t going to be playtested first?

Keith: If I just said yes, that’d be boring, but if I explained, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

There are definitely a lot of items that aren’t going to be in the playtest stuff. I mentioned that in the first two playtest packages. I mentioned we’re deleting the one heat for a standing attempt, because who cares? Why is that there? You can run up hills, you can run down hills, you can punch and kick, and you can do everything in movement, and it doesn’t make extra heat. It’s just this one thing, and it’s one point—it’s totally pointless. So we’re getting rid of it. We don’t really feel that needs to be tested. 

Some of these playtest changes leaked, and a lot of people are like, “I didn’t even realise that was a rule. I never use it, or I always forgot about that,” and I don’t think anyone will miss it. But again, that is also active development. That is a change. It is not a very big one, but it does save us a line on the table and one more thing for people to remember. 

Something that I’m actually excited about that’s also currently not slated to be playtested is a whole new set of environment and urban combat rules, rewriting those from scratch. The original city rules are from CityTech. Much like the rest of BattleTech, they’ve been expanded to cover more cases to the point that skidding is now many thousands of words and pages of text,  because every edition, someone found more problems with it in terms of timing issues and things.

And the building damage where you have to track it on a per-hex basis, and the damage to ’Mechs inside the building is modified by the damage that has been dealt to the building—it’s incredibly crunchy. Worked great in MegaMek, but we would like to have something that people can play at the table. I always remember going to my first-ever official, Demo Agent-hosted game, and then they had buildings on the map. I’m like, “Are we using the building rules?” And he just laughed at me. “Are you mad? Nobody got time for that. We’d be done sometime next week.” 

It’s not that they don’t work; it’s that they don’t really work well at the human scale. This is a game played by humans, so maybe we should do something about that. So we’ve made a much simpler, easier-to-track, easier-to-use ruleset for urban warfare. I’m really happy with it. A lot of the weather and environment rules in TacOps just give you mountains of to-hit penalties, so no one can hit anything. They’re not really a lot of fun, even though they do a decent job of simulating what might be a sense of weather.

To go an aside, that’s a good example of what I was talking about earlier with playtest changes and what you can conceive of as fitting in lore. You can conceive of the current weather rules and TacOps as fitting into the BattleTech lore, but they’re not fun, and we can conceive of a completely different approach that gives the same sense of ‘it’s really windy’ or ‘it’s really foggy’ that still works and still fits lore. So we’re trying to make new weather rules that don’t just layer on the hit penalties, but actually give you a feel that you’re in that environment without making you pray for death when the rules come out.

Sean: The next playtest coming out (probably well before this interview is published) will be “gear” changes. What are some of the changes coming to gear?

Keith: We just got rid of jamming for the Ultra Autocannon. Everyone hates that rule, and there were a lot of suggestions along why not just let it unjam like the Rotary Autocannon? I just thought we could be bolder. Autocannons are bad. Nobody wants unfair bad, but they should be cool. So we can delete a bunch of rules text and make that a decent weapon, so we’re just going to get rid of it—forget it, fire it all day, have fun. 

That goes, I think, into the broader philosophy of the gear changes. A lot of the stuff we couldn’t mess with because it’s a collection of stats that appear on the record sheets. But there’s a lot of stuff that has rules text that doesn’t appear on the record sheet, and so we can mess with that all we want. Most of the stuff we’re playing with is later technology because the foundational stuff is just stats. But you look at something like the Ultra Autocannon, it’s an old piece, but it does have game rules. Game rules are fair game, so we can mess around with that. 

That really then becomes our focus for all of the gear changes. Is this a good weapon? Well, if it is, maybe the rules text is fine, or maybe we can shorten it a little, sand off some edge cases, or something, make it simpler. But if it works, it already works. There’s a lot of gear that is bad and requires text to make it bad. It’s not just sucky, but we’ve written a bunch of text to ensure that, so maybe we can take away that text, making the weapon easier to use and having fewer rules text along with it. 

Extended LRMs are a good example. They’re heavy as all hell, they have an enormous minimum range, and then they have this big chunk of extra game rules that have half-cluster size if you’re within the already obscene minimum range. Why do we need that? This is already a bad weapon. We could get rid of the rules text, and I’m still not sure people are going to necessarily use it.

So there’s a lot of stuff like that where we just went through all of the gear that had game rules and tried to think about, can we play with this in a way that will make more people want to use this given piece of gear?

Sean: After gear will be the missions playtest, which I’ve been told is going to include a sort of mission generator rather than a campaign or scenario. What can you tell us about this mission generator that is being proposed for the missions playtest? Is it just going to be rolling dice to see what kind of enemy you face, or is there going to be more to it?

Keith: Well, yes and no. I’m not putting in giant assignment tables or anything like that.

Sean: So no D1000s?

Keith: No, sadly. I think Ray might kill me if I try that. 

Games like BattleTech typically have three kinds of gameplay: your campaign game, your pickup game, and your historical game. Your campaign game is something BattleTech has tried to do a lot—we’re playing a series of engagements that are linked together gameplay-wise, so it’s both lore and mechanics working together. There’s a connectivity there. 

Pickup games are the complete opposite of that. No stakes, it’s just you and me—let’s fight. Done. And then the historical can be a subset of either of those two, but it’s the idea of focusing on the lore of the game. It can still be just a pickup game, but we’re playing out a skirmish on Galtor 3022, or we’re doing a full historical campaign. 

BattleTech has done a lot of campaign stuff, and it has not always worked. How many different mercenaries books were there back in the day, everyone with its own modified ruleset? But we kept trying because people kept being interested in that. We’ve done tons of historical stuff. Historical stuff has been the absolute bread and butter of BattleTech; if you want to fight on X world with Y unit, you can do that over and over. 

We have traditionally failed on the pickup angle. Total Warfare has three very rough scenarios, as I recall, that let you do pickup games. But let’s you and me fight, I don’t know you from Adam, we both have a copy of the rulebook, set it down the table, let’s blow each other up—that’s foundational to a lot of games, and in some ways, it’s really how BattleTech started. BattleTech always had lore, but in the end, it was just a box set with some maps, some ’Mechs, let’s shoot at each other.

There are still plenty of people who want to just be able to play a game, especially if you’re new. We shouldn’t be expecting new players to go download all this lore, figure it all out, master it all, because if you dare show up with the wrong striping on the pauldron of your ’Mechs… 

It’s easy to get reductive, but the point is we should be encouraging BattleTech to be played as a game first and foremost in a simple fashion. Not rules-wise, but let’s just start playing. And then from there, if they like the mechanics, they appreciate BattleTech for what it is. They get more and more into it and can branch off into historical games, branch off into campaign games. I feel over time, we’ve lost a sense of BattleTech as a way to blow each other up. So that’s what this mission generator’s focusing on. 

I haven’t started writing it yet, besides the most basic introduction. I’m thinking with a lot of games, here’s your deployment zone, here’s the hazards on the table, here’s the weather (if any), here’s special rules: this fire starts on turn five. And it just doesn’t matter what you’re bringing, which is why there wouldn’t be assignment tables—bring what you want. 

I just want to be able to go up to someone and—because I’ve done this with a lot of other games with people I’ve met once or meeting for the first time—want to play this? We’re at the game store, want something to do; flip to the mission generator, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s our objectives or whatever—now we can just start playing. I’d like that for everybody in the BattleTech core rulebook.

Sean: I think that’s important too. How are you supposed to get people into the game unless you have really easy pickup game rules?

Keith: I think we focused a lot on the rules aspects. How can we make certain aspects simpler? We have Alpha Strike as a good way of doing it, from a rules perspective. We have Battlefield Support for assets to make certain unit types simpler. We’ve worked at revamping the rulebooks themselves. A Game of Armored Combat rulebook was heavily workshopped to try to make it easy to use. BattleMech Manual, entirely written around ease-of-use at the table. We’ve really focused on those things, and those are good things and necessary things, but we shouldn’t ignore the fundamental set-up-a-game-and-play aspect.

Sean: Speaking of Battlefield Support, the other new thing that’s going to be coming is aerospace. Will the aerospace playtest rules be sort of like how they work in Alpha Strike? 

Basically, draw a line across the map, your fighter can strafe/bomb anything along that path, and units can return fire freely because there’s no cover in the air? How will the aerospace playtest work?

Keith: I would say a different version of that. It’s still heavily abstracted because it’s Battlefield Support—the whole idea is this is for people who deliberately do not want the full ruleset. I think it’s really important to understand that when you think of what Battlefield Support is. Some people are like, “I hate this stuff. I don’t want to use it. I want real units.” And whenever I hear that, I always think, “Yes! That’s mission complete.” Because they’re designed to exploit an entirely separate gameplay space. 

People who want the full rules will use the full rules, and that’s perfect—they’re not going anywhere. We are not getting rid of those. But some people are like, “I kind of like the concept, but I just can’t be bothered to do the full rules aspects of it. So if you could give me a simpler package, a quicker package, yeah, sure, I’d give it a try.” We don’t expect much overlap between these two groups of players. 

It would be similar to what you described for Alpha Strike, but obviously a little different for Classic BattleTech. There’ll be a dogfighting portion, which, based on your description, wasn’t really involved there. But in this, there would be, I’m sure

Sean: There is dogfighting in Alpha Strike, but it’s essentially just pointing off into space and rolling dice to see who wins. None of it appears on the board.

Keith: As I recall, they use the radar map, so this would be similar. There’s no point in putting you on the board when you’re fighting in the air with no relation to the board. So you just kind of put ’em to the side. You can duke it out, though. Still, if you go on the board to do ground support, you actually place a mini on the board. The idea was to make this much more concrete than the current Battlefield Support stuff for air, which is essentially just air-flavored damage blobs: I hit you with an air strike for 10 damage. This is an attempt to get something more specific than that, but still nowhere near the full ruleset that air has traditionally given us.

Sean: Will this aerospace playtest have any relation to the new aerospace game in development?

Keith: No, not at all. This would be a good example of saying I’m the rules guy, but I don’t do all the rules. Aerospace was given to aerospace fanatics, of which I am not one. That’s just never something I’ve really explored, so why not give it to someone who’s got a lot of experience, who really has a passion for it? It will be revamped in some way, but I haven’t even seen it.

But in the same way that Battlefield Support, the asset rules for tanks, and the actual full classic tank rules—totally separate things—both exist, there’ll be this, which will be in the core rulebook, and then there’ll be a later aerospace product with full rules. 

Sean: You’re starting to get some data from everybody who’s giving those playtest feedback forms. What playtests so far have resulted in the wildest difference between what you expected and what actually happened?

Keith: I’m not really sure I had something like that. There wouldn’t necessarily be one surprise because I have to be very careful to take any one report with a grain of salt, right? However it worked, it’s still just one result, so I couldn’t take great enthusiasm or great negativity in isolation. 

I would say the biggest surprises for me took place in the pre-public playtest phase. Actually, the proposal stage, as I think of it, when we were throwing stuff at the wall, trying to see what would work. When I sat down originally to write up stuff in 2016, I had two things that I thought no force on Earth would stop me from doing.

They were how BattleTech handles cluster allocation. If you have ever been forced to resolve an attack from an SRM Carrier or something that has two LB 20-Xs, the delightful joy that is our cluster allocation system. We are a game that says you should go to the hardware store and buy some fishing tackle to resolve one of our core mechanics optimally. I think it’s terrible. It’s just awful.

And then critical hit transfer. That was simply because, boy, am I tired of answering rules questions about how critical hits work again and again. Ray put together this beautiful diagram in the BattleMech Manual, trying to illustrate the flow charts of critical hit allocation. That’s a simplified form, and it’s not simple—people get hung up on it all the time.

I think there are strong, strong user cases for heavily revamping both of those things. You may have noticed neither of those things is in the public playtest. They’re not changing at all in any way, shape, or form.

This was a good example of what we’re talking about, by what BattleTech is. How much can you change with BattleTech? BattleTech has to still be BattleTech. It has to play the way you expect it to play. So no matter how annoyed I was with cluster allocation, or writing yet another rules answer in the forums for how, yes, critical hit transfer does work like this, or no, you missed the sub clause 17B over here…

We spent two weeks straight trying to hammer out a new cluster allocation system—just two weeks of arguing, yelling, putting up proposals, and alternate forms. The thing is, the rules in BattleTech for cluster allocation give you an amazingly interesting gameplay result at the table. Nothing—at least nothing we ever found—can duplicate that. There are all sorts of ways to make it simpler, but I told my playtesters ‘simplicity’ is a dirty word here. We’re not just looking to simplify the game; otherwise, we could just throw out half of it. 

Sean: Then you just result in Alpha Strike.

Keith: Or less, or you’ll even be more stripped-down—we could just flip a coin and say, “Who wins?” There has to be reasoning behind simplicity. It’s got to be simplification if it gets us better gameplay; otherwise, you’re putting the cart before the horse. 

So we tried and we tried and we tried to get something that has that really interesting sense of crit-seeking, the chance to get the head hits or the cockpit hits, all of that sort of stuff, and we just couldn’t figure it out. So right after this, I swore a lot, and I went and built my first box of doom. I have to admit it, I can’t figure it out, and I’m not willing to take away that core gameplay element of BattleTech without putting something in its place that gives the same results. So we’re sticking with it. 

And the same with critical hit transfer. We removed a variety of clauses from it in our early playtests, tried it, and then it turned out all of those exceptions are what I call ‘load-bearing’ exceptions. They’re there for a good reason. You pull them out and you’re like, “Actually, this kind of sucks,” or, “Oh, I see why that’s there. This is actually really unpleasant now.” You can see why each one was added along the way. So, nope, got to stay. 

I rewrote the damage chapter a little more to try to make it clearer, but I’ve just resigned myself to another five, ten, fifteen, whatever years of critical hit transfer answers.

Sean: Well, we all appreciate your Sisyphean efforts. 

Let’s get into your first playtest, which is ammo explosions and CASE changes. These changes are relatively big, since big booms are a part of BattleTech. For those who haven’t seen the playtest materials, what’s happening is that ammo explosion damage is being limited to 20 damage for non-CASE, 10 damage for CASE, and one damage for CASE II. 

Keith: You have to take one damage to set it off. If it were even two, then that would still destroy the head, so it has to be one. CASE II is a little weird.

Sean: In general, this is going to result in smaller ammo explosions. There have been some concerns on the playtest forums that these smaller booms seem to heavily favor larger ’Mechs since most heavy and assault ’Mechs can survive a 20-damage blast, while medium and light ’Mechs typically cannot. Are there any plans to address this advantage in a future rules proposal now that you’ve seen it in the playtest?

Keith: Yeah, absolutely. We knew it was going to obliterate light ’Mechs; we were just okay with it. When we originally looked at it, we noticed that if you take a side torso ammo hit, you’re dead automatically up to 35 tons. Well, that’s a convenient breakpoint. That’s really nice, but it’s the tyranny of pretty numbers: it looks nice on paper, but does it work in gameplay? 

There are plenty of people saying, “But I like light ’Mechs and I don’t care how aesthetically pleasing where your damage cap goes off, my light ’Mech is dead.” Which is a totally fair point. We were being pretty crass to light ’Mechs with the idea of, well, you’re dead, too bad. That’s back to that idea of we’re okay with disaster, but as you put it accurately, disaster probably should be evenly applied. 

Do we really need to be rewarding assault ’Mechs more than light ’Mechs? Probably not, so we are looking at a variant. We picked 20 because it was a compromise value. If you up it more, you delete even more light and medium ’Mechs. If you lower it, then even more things survive, and it feels even less important. So we thought that would be a good middle ground, but I don’t think it quite works. 

I do have an alternative proposal, which I don’t want to go into here yet, but a variant that would hopefully work for everyone and penalises everybody roughly equally. Still feels bad, but isn’t going to annihilate any ‘Mech. We’ll see how it goes. It’s difficult to introduce changes at this late stage. You want to make sure they’re tested. 

Something I worry about is that we do testing, we realise something isn’t working, now we have to do the alternative. We’re pretty sure the alternate works, but we don’t have the same chance to test it like we did the original. So I’m deathly afraid of introducing some late alternates that turn out to fail in some other way that we only discover once it hits print. 

Sean: Another thing that’s coming with the survivability changes is a proposal to the side hit tables. It’s been a long time since I played Classic BattleTech, but I believe this is to represent the fact that when you shoot at someone from the side, you’re not necessarily going to hit them in their opposite side. Is that right?

Keith: Yeah, it’s the idea. It’s about encouraging flanking more with the most fundamental aspects of old wargaming: I flank you, that’s bad. You do not want to be flanked. So we thought it was something interesting that worked in both an offensive and a defensive perspective.

Sean: The current proposal is to instead use the standard hit table and just take out the possibilities of hitting something on the opposite side (by rerolling the dice for any invalid hits), essentially doubling the odds of hitting a particular location on the side you’re shooting at. There are some reports on the forums that this makes Inner Sphere XL engines exceptionally vulnerable, as you’re much more likely to hit a particular side torso. Do you have any possible solutions to this issue? Will there be tweaks based on the playtest, or will this vulnerability be entirely addressed by adjusting Battle Values for XL engines?

Keith: That was all stuff we considered. We didn’t necessarily see it as it should be impossible to hit the other side, because if you’re shooting at someone on the right side, they can have their arm out on the other side, and you can hit that. Yet another case of we could make this work in the lore either way if we wanted to. 

This was a proposal by Bryn, Randall’s son, and it was really interesting, the sense that we can actually get flanking into the game more. It kind of exists now, but because you can easily hit those other sides still, it’s rarely as rewarding as you’d like it to be. Whereas here, if I can get on your side and you fail to deny that to me, I can be rewarded by pummeling a relatively small number of locations, and so I can concentrate my fire a lot more. But similarly, oh no, my right side is open—I want to guarantee that no one’s hitting that right side. I am repositioning to try to get only my left side exposed. That was all the theory behind it. 

We knew XL engines would be in danger. We thought two things: one, is that it tends to get you more speed, which should aid you in being able to reposition your side the way you want it, and two, we were prepared for a small Battle Value adjustment to make it so that those things gave you a bit more of a penalty to the fact that yeah, you were more vulnerable. But I think the playtests are showing that it’s still too dangerous. 

All of that being said, all the tactical rewards, the possibilities of denial, it’s not compensating in my mind for the ability to really just hone in on someone and work ’em hard from one side.

So yes, there are things we’re looking at to tweak it a bit. Just like ammo explosions, too early to say at this point, but it is something we’re absolutely aware of, and I’m personally convinced that in its current form, it’s too dangerous and it needs to be altered. 

All of these things were tests. We felt pretty sure about it; that’s why we put them out there, but we knew there were things you could miss. If there’s anything that doing rules for BattleTech over ten years has taught me, oh man, there are things you miss. 

When we were doing the BattleMech Manual, I realised that the rules for jumping in water had never been made crystal clear. The basic box set has water on its map and jump jets, but it had never been properly written out. There were certain things you just had to guess, and people just worked it out their own way. Similarly, here we thought this worked, but we knew there was a very decent chance we could be wrong. And as I don’t want to be the guy who ruined BattleTech, we’d better make sure we get that out there. Hammer at it—the more players, the better. The more scenarios, tables, ’Mech types, as much data we can get. And the data has been really, really helpful. 

I love the playtest process. I’ve always been a big proponent of getting people in because you need all of those voices, you need all those perspectives, people who would do things you would never even remotely consider. And also, to a certain degree, just a weight of numbers. One guy says this, good or bad, not really helpful. Fifty, one-hundred? Now I’m really starting to get a sense that this is absolutely a thing.

Sean: Speaking of people saying things, one of the largest complaints I’ve ever heard of Classic BattleTech is pulse lasers and very jumpy ‘Mechs. What’s going to happen to pulse lasers and ’Mechs with seven-plus jump jets? Will Battle Values be adjusted to address this longstanding meta issue?

Keith: I’ve already rewritten Battle Value. I did that years ago as well. We realised it was not the kind of thing you just want to throw late in the life cycle of Total Warfare. We already have TechManual—we’re not relaying out that book to put in a whole bunch of new Battle Value tweaks. It’s something that belongs with a new core rulebook and a new line. It’s been deliberately sitting around for quite a while, and that’s fine. It’s given us more time to play with it.

Pulse lasers are easy. BV in its current form does not adequately value pluses to hit, and neither does it properly value penalties to hit. It just doesn’t really properly take into account the 2D6 scale. So, anything that’s more accurate will go up in cost, and anything that’s less accurate will become cheaper. Pulse lasers, especially any of the plus two variants, will be significantly more expensive. 

Specifically concerning jumping seven ’Mechs, that’s a little harder because you don’t want to penalise guys who can just make seven while running on the ground. That’s not broken. And it’s also a common problem with Battle Value that people who have excessive speed through boosters like MASC and superchargers cost too much for their movement. So we got to find something that just hits seven jumping organically, because it’s all tied into a single thing called ‘speed factor’ in the current Battle Value rules. You have to be careful playing with that formula not to break other things. 

We’ll probably add another load-bearing exception to make it work. That’s the one thing I haven’t done yet. I think it’s a series of patches to the existing system rather than a whole new Battle Value system. So I call it Battle Value 2.5 rather than 3.0 because it won’t throw out all of your old expectations. Every value will probably change, but in a lot of cases, it might be by two or three points—mostly rounding error type stuff. It’s mostly designed to hit the things that everybody knows are broken. Almost everything that goes wrong in Battle Value is overcosted. There’s only one thing I can think of that’s really overvalued, and that’s really low armor. 

But a lot of stuff is fairly straightforward. People have been talking about it for years and even decades. Everybody knows this is a problem. We can address that without having to throw out the whole system and hope we get every element of it right.

Sean: Let’s get to the mobility playtest. The biggest controversy I’ve seen on the forums is the changes to leg destruction rules, which currently have destruction of the leg act as a sort of amputation—the leg is gone, you’re falling over, you’re a mess. But the proposed rule changes seem to more closely follow what happens in the modern MechWarrior games, where leg destruction is more of a massive inconvenience than a total mobility kill. The leg is rendered inoperable, but you can still drag it along to make slow progress. 

However, this also means that you’re not going to have severed limbs littering the battlefield. I know that Classic players really love picking up severed limbs to bash other ’Mechs, so if these leg changes go through, will that change how arm destruction works? Will we still have Chargers coming at Locusts and beating them to death with their own severed arms?

Keith: I love that conceptually. I always ask, though, have you ever actually done that? We think of something like the Game of Armoured Combat cover that is just a great piece of art, right? It’s Hanse Davion laying waste with a severed arm, beating the crap out of a bunch of Death Commandos. It’s cool, it’s awesome, and because of that, clubbing is still in the new core rulebook. It doesn’t matter if almost no one really does it. 

When you talk to someone and say as a selling point, “This is a game where you can take your opponent’s severed arm and beat him to death with it,”—I’ve heard that repeatedly as a selling element, and I agree that’s a good one—then you actually play it and you’re like, “I’m not going to do this.” It doesn’t matter—you’re in, you’re hooked. 

Nothing’s changing with arms because it didn’t feel anything needed to change with arms. With legs, the changes are for a specific reason: the idea that lying around flopping on the ground, being unable to do anything but technically still being alive and still in the game, is kind of dull. If we can get you back up on the ground as an active participant, it’s more interesting gameplay-wise than you’re the turtle on your back, have fun there. I just don’t think it’s very interesting gameplay. 

We don’t really need to do anything for arms. Arms work fine as they are. They can be blown off. They will stay exactly as they are now. Legs might still be blown off. Well, actually, that whole thing might change anyway—again, I’m still mulling over playtest data on that. There is a vote currently underway in the playtest forums as to whether or not you want to still see legs being blown off so you can pick them up as clubs. I put a specific poll just for that in the playtest packet. 

I started writing it out and realised you’ve got two different versions of leg destroyed now. One, it’s just smashed to a useless thing dangling off your hip, but it’s still kind of there, and then two, surgically gone, blown away. It’s much cleaner to just have one version. So that was irking me, but at the same time, I didn’t want to pull away too far from what people actually want. So that’s why I put up that vote. 

Go and vote if you have an opinion on this, but that whole thing also might change based on people’s preferences. I think people broadly are okay with it being friendlier in terms of piloting skill roles. I’m not sure people are as enthused about the concept of the leg that is destroyed, but still kind of there. For me, it’s conceptually fairly straightforward, but that’s what happens when you work inside of your own little silo. I may pull that back after consultation with some of the other devs here and change it to something else that works a little more as it did before. 

I think the more important part is to enable people to get back into the game. The ability to have a lot of movement points while doing so is less important. It might be okay to say, if your leg is blown off, you can reliably still stand up again. You’ll get knocked back down really fast, but you can get back into the fight. Because the real problem we had with all of that was just the flopping about, and you’re like, “Let me know when it’s my turn again so I can say I do nothing or I prop fire. Is anything in my arc? No? Okay, I do nothing.” It’s really dull, so I think we could do better in that. 

Sean: I’m very interested to see how the playtest turns out since, to me, it seems very similar to the evolution of the MechWarrior games. Initially, you lose a leg, you’re face down in the dirt, and you might as well quit. That changed in MechWarrior 4 such that a destroyed leg works similarly to the playtest—it’s not severed, you’re just really slow. It’ll be interesting to see where Classic BattleTech players fall on that scale. 

This next question comes from Jason Hansa, because he just seems to always ask about this sort of thing. Are we going to have any rule changes to QuadVees or battle armor?

Keith: Probably, but there’s a reason we’re just doing ’Mechs. BattleTech’s an enormous game: you cannot redesign the entirety from scratch and expect to do it all in one go. I’m pretty sure there’s a Lovecraft story where the guy tries that and goes insane. I don’t want to do that. It’s not happening. So I have no idea. I haven’t got there yet. 

Battle armor, off the top of my head, they seem fine. They seem to work pretty good. I don’t think there are a lot of people having a huge number of complaints about them. There are probably ways you could simplify their various swarm attack stuff—swarming has a lot of rules text. Total Warfare just goes on and on and on. But overall, battle armor is cool, and battle armor works fine. Conventional infantry, I have a lot more problems with. I imagine they’ll be heavily reworked.

QuadVees, I have no idea. Jason, you and three other people play them. We’ll see when we get there, but that would be pretty far off. The main focus after this would be traditional combat vehicles, traditional infantry, and the full rules aspects, because the new core rule book will have asset forms of those, but then we want to make sure that the classic versions are done well. I think currently, conventional infantry is far too fiddly for what it does. It’s like, these are really terrible, and here’s an ocean of rules to make them that way, and why am I rolling on thirty level-cluster tables to handle a platoon-level attack? I think there was a feeling that you wanted to start with the rules and then see what the results were. I’d rather start with the results for what people want out of infantry and then try to make the rules fit that.

Sean: We’ve been talking about this proposed rulebook, but we still don’t know what the new books will be called. Do we have any names for the replacement on Total Warfare? I’m suggesting Totally Total Warfare.

Keith: Totalist Warfare: Two Total, Two Warfare. No, I have a working title that I use. Again, not my department, I just handle rule stuff. Even the working title was proposed by Ray. For me, that’s really not my concern. That’ll be something for guys who have been naming books for 20, 25 years, thank God. I just get to write the rules. 

I am not sure if they’re going to stick with this interim one or move on to something else. I know there was a really short-lived thread on the dev side of things to see if we can come up with some fun names? It kind of went away because people had more pressing things to do at the moment. But it will resurface, and we’ll see what happens.

Sean: That’s the last of my for-real questions, but nobody gets out of this without having some fun. This comes from part of the internal Sarna Discord. As head of the team that’s updating Classic BattleTech, if you could have a song that plays every time you walk into a project meeting or a lead team chat, what song would it be and why?

Keith: I’d probably pick the one that, for me, is eternally in my head whenever I think of that summer, which would be Savatage’s ‘The Dungeons are Calling,’ which is a great piece of obscure eighties shred. The guy was hosting us that summer; he was older than a lot of the rest of us by about four or five years. So he had an incredible tape and CD collection, and Savatage. That tape was being played all the time, so that stuck in my head. Whenever I hear it, I immediately start thinking BattleTech.

Sean: Next up, if you could choose the title of the in-universe autobiography of any one canon character, who would be that character and what would be the title?

Keith: Anastasius Focht – Terra: It’s Not That Important. That one always kind of stuck in my head. You could tell that he’s a victim of shifting canon. “Oh no, Word of Blake has taken over Terra,” and he’s like, “Eh, whatever. Not really a big loss.” And then later, they’re like, every factory in the Inner Sphere is on Terra, and they make 400 million ’Mechs a year. They even have space yards. But the poor guy got caught by a continuity shift. I always laugh at that. It would be funny to see a later continuity shift where Focht has to justify that decision in light of what we know now. 

Sean: And last one: if you could introduce any one kind of megafauna into the BattleTech universe, what would it be, where would it live, and would you like to be canonised as the first person in the BattleTech universe to tame one and use it as a mount?

Keith: Maybe a Mothra. A Mothra would be cool, off the top of my head. But you’ve already got giant dinosaurs, and you can fight them with ’Mechs! I was very happy with that. I once had some guys crash land on Dinosaur World, and then they had to punch out the T. rexes while they were trying to repair their DropShip. Super T.rexes—enough that they could do a little more ’Mech-scale damage. That was a fun game. But beyond that, I’ll take Mothra. 

Sean: Alright, that’s everything I had. Thank you so much for talking about Classic BattleTech, and I hope everything goes well for you in the future playtests.

Keith: Oh God, me too. Thanks very much.

Sean: Thank you.

Keith: Cheers.

Want to take part in the BattleTech playtest and let your voice be heard? Head over to the official playtest site here to download the proposed materials and then sound off on the forums.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.