MekTek 4: The Final Issue

Dave Hardwood drew issue four's cover, a friend from days when I lived in Southend-on-Sea who also drew the cover, and a bunch of interior illustrations for OHMU War Machine. 

 

This turned out to be a bumper final issue with articles by Bob Nicholls, Dayfdd Neal Dyar, Helen McCarthy & Steve Kyte, Mike Timbers, Marcus Rowland, Glenn Wallbridge, Alex Stewart, and me. 

Mechs at Large my editorial promised that the next issue would have the article on cybertanks, and I promised the next issue would come sooner (Oh, how I laugh now). You can blame money, and me focusing on OHMU War Machine, which was my answer to the problem of introducing cybertanks into BattleTech.

The editorial also included a battle report of the 1988 Boston BattleTech Competition by the late Bob Nichols, the man behind Mechforce UK. RIP Bob, you were a force to be reckoned with.

Finally, I added a quick note about the then Panasonic NTSC VCR that could be rented in the UK. Those were the day when renting TVs and video recorders was still a thing. 

Japanima Dayfdd Neal Dyar provided an extensive article on the genesis of BattleTech's mechs. He described how they were drawn from several anime series including 1981s Sun of the Fang Dougram, 1982s Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, and 1983s Crusher Joe. Dayfdd's thoroughly covered the three shows plots, and their characters various story arcs. 

Snapshots Short one paragraph reviews of five fanzines that fell into my hands.

Animé Contact List Helen McCarthy provided a list of useful addresses for beginning to get into animé. This covered magazines, shops, clubs, and organizations promoting animé.

Hover Mechs Mike Timbers delivered an article on adding hover mechs to BattleTech as a way to address the weakness of hover vehicles. 

Warnography With three reviews. The first was Alex Stewart write up of his experience playing Palladium's Robotech RPG. Describing it as a fun game beset by problems with how the rules were presented, and the restrictions of the setting. The main focus of the game was blasting alien battlepods, limiting  play focused on character development.

The second piece was a short offside review of the Robotech RPG by Simon Kemp who was less satisfied with the rules, which he found unsatisfactory for a game of mech combat.

And finally, Helen McCarthy reviewed the Panasonic NVL 28B NTSC VCR, which would play NTSC video tapes on a PAL TV monitor.

Manga, Manga I was reading the following manga: Cobra; volume two of Crying Freeman; Yukinobu Hoshino  2001 Nights; Black Magic and Dominion, both by Masasume Shirow;  the Lost Continent, by Akihiro Yamada; and last, A Plague of Angels by two Western artist's – Adam Warren and Toren Smith –  delivering the third outing of their homage of the Japanese Dirty Angels.

I mentioned in passing other manga I'd seen too: Captain Harlock; Lensman; and Broid, which were all disappointing for reasons of availability, or other issues

I was also reading Aliens Earth War;  Revolver a Dan Dare comic; Give me Liberty by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons; and the wonderful Starstruck by Elaine Lee and Mike Kaluta. With the passage of time I'd forgotten how many comics I was reading back in the late 80s, early 90s. Those were the days.
 
A Question of Identity Marcus Rowland provided an article for the Mechwarrior RPG, which would add to the 'fun' of piloting a mech.

House Rules had two contributors. Mike Timbers gave a list of tweaks he made when playing BattleTech and AeroTech, which he found useful to clarify the rules. Glenn Wallbridge wrote about anti-personnel guns, high explosive and armour piercing ammunition, and indirect fire, also adding starting fires too. 

Mech Modelling  Glenn Wallbridge provided an extensive seven page article on how to convert mechs, how to cut and pin limbs for more dynamic poses, and finally, how to paint and base them. Given that Glenn had sculpted a series of mechs and vehicles for a manufacture he brought a wealth of experience to the topic.

MekTek LOCs Twelve pages of letters and replies to questions, which showed how much the game had grabbed the players back in those early days of BattleTech. 

Mechforce Finally, a two page advert for MechForce UK run by the late Bob Nicholls.

So, that's it, the last blast from the past.

MekTek 3: Letter's of Comment Explode

The final piece of artwork generously donated by Steve Kyte adorns the cover of issue three.

Again all uncredited articles and artwork for issue three were me, while Alex and an article by Helen McCarthy. 

 

Mechs at Large editorial rant about shenanigans in the media and how not to inflame opinions, and an announcement of the 1990 Eastercon having a Japanese anime stream run by Helen McCarthy (it was great).

Japanima Helen McCarthy talking about what animation was available to buy and watch on video cassettes. Titles available included Robotech, World of Taisman, Speed Racer, Once Upon a Time, Crushers aka Crusher Joe, Warriors of the Wind a cut of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Space Cruiser: Guardians of the Galaxy a cut version Space Cruise Yamato.

Manga, Manga  Me talking about Akira, Appleseed, Grey, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Cyber 7, and Outlanders by Johi Manabe, which has nothing to do with Sean Connery, or Scottish romance. I covered a lot of comics this time, including Dirty Pair by Toren Smith, not Japanese but a homage to Japanese manga, Dark Horses Aliens, and Alien Legion, which all interested me.

Adepticus Titanicus reviewed by Alex Stewart, praising the big box of toys, and the introduction of mecha-on-mecha action in the WH40K universe.

Not listed in the contents was a one page cartoon by me called Saucer Story. 

Little Big Mechs was me taking the BattleTech rules and showing how to convert them for playing on the tabletop with terrain etc. Today that would be unnecessary, but this was the early days of BattleTech, and we had to make do with home made rules. I discussed the problems of converting an area based ground scale hex game into a free-form movement.

Snapshots by me looked at some wargame fanzines that were available in the UK. 

Mech Force was a long article by me about how to expand the game by converting the BattleForce rules into representing single mechs rather than a platoon. Think of this as Alpha Strike done thirty years ago. It was running games using these house rules that spurred me to go on and write Oversized Heavy Mechanized Units aka OHMU War Machine.

PBM Campaign I wrote up the rules I'd written for a campaign game that I had run for the wargame club I was a member of when I lived in Southend-on-Sea.

MekTek LOCs Ten pages of letters from the readers of the previous issue of MekTek. My readers had opinions, and were largely enthusiastic about what they'd read. The next issue would showcase a lot of the ideas discussed here.

Anyway, hope that brief glance of the past has been of interest.

Catch you all on the bounce. 

 

MekTek Issue 2

Again another beautiful piece of artwork from Steve Kyte adorns the cover of issue two.

All uncredited articles and artwork contents for issue two were again me, and was again joined by Alex Stewart, and Simon Kemp who read the first issue, sent me a couple of reviews too.  

Mechs at Large editorial offering pointers to what I was interested in and what I would be writing about.

Japanima Talking about mecha animation shows on American syndicated TV, and how this fed back to influence what the Japanese animation studios were doing.

Manga, Manga  Started with me praising the American mecha comic Dynamo Jo by Doug Rice, which should be much better known that it is, followed by his four issue mini-series of Star Blazers. Also, mentioned were the translated Japanese properties Xenon, Area 88 manga, and Mai Psychic Girl.

Warnography Alex Stewart reviewed Price of Glory by William Keith, and The Devils Hand by Jack McKinney, with again a harsh, but fair review of the latter.

Encounter on Ice was a scenario inspired by watching Mad Max with four mech designs by me for the intruders to give Max's lance a hard time.

Snapshots Simon Kemp reviewed Aerotech, Technical Readout 2, and the Succession Wars Battletech boardgame. While I reviewed Stardate Vol 3, issue 2, and my thoughts on the first three issues of Battle Technology (buy MekTek instead).

Meka of Design was a long article by me breaking down the battlemech construction rules.

MekTek Trio I reviewed the BattleTech Manual comparing the rules against the original BattleDroids and BattleTech box set rules.

MekTek LOCs I published a letter by Sam Lewis of FASA, and two letters by readers of issue 1.

The plan is to put all four of the MekTek issues on DriveThruRPG at some point this year, along with the revised OHMU War Machine rules, which requires some work to make if a PDF.

MekTek: A BattleTech Fanzine 1

MekTek was a British BattleTech fanzine produced by me, which came out in 1988. The cover of the first issue was by Steve Kyte.

All the uncredited articles and artwork in issue one were done by me, while the Warnography article was written by Alex Stewart, aka Sandy Mitchell author of Ciaphus Cain.

Mechs at Large was my 'raison d'être' for producing the fanzine, bemoaning the direction FASA focusing on setting, rather than game mechanics (oh boy, did that change later with excessive rules bloat).

Japanima I looked at mecha in Japanese animation, describing the three series that were combined into what became Robotech.

Warnography Reviewed the William Keith's first two Gray Death books, and Ardath Mayhar's The Sword and the Dagger. Alex wasn't kind to the latter.

Thundering Guns described a number of new weapons (Gauss gun; disruptor; fusion cannon; grenade launcher; two sizes of auto-flechette shot guns; medium range missiles; heavy missiles), with a table defining their stats.

Heavier Metal added two variant mech types. The first was armless bipedal mechs, which added the internal arm structure to the torso. The second was the Tetra mech, which was a different way to record a quad mech structure (a record sheet was included). Tetra mech records sheets made it possible to construct quad mechs up to 200 tons (divided into weight classes).

Grunts'n Groan'n When Rock'n Roll'n expanded the infantry rules (mechanized; body armour; platoon organization), and added troop quality too (militia; conscripts; regulars; veterans; elite), and a mechanism for tracking combat experience. A table defined the stats.

Apocalypse Choppers was my way of adding helicopters to the game. At the time this was written, CityTech had just been released, and I had opinions.

So, I'm noodling whether or not to put MekTek up on DriveThruRPG as a PDF, but I'm not sure an old British fanzine from the late 1980s holds any interest for todays BattleTech fan.

This is Madness, This is BattleTech!

I've been thinking again about BattleTech, and what I think slows the game down.  In my not so humble opinion, I think now more than ever that the original game played better before they added so much chrome on top of the basic rules.  This in my opinion turned a fun game of giant battling robots into a bloated monstrosity with five plus volumes of rules that added nothing to the fun from playing the game.

So I've culled all the current core rulebooks but the A Time of War from my collection, and I've only kept that just in case I find myself in need of the opportunity to learn another set of rules.  I am aware of the irony involved in this decision, given that the core rule books would be ideal for all that extra added gribbly detail that RPG campaigns thrive on, except that when I GM sessions I tend to play fast and loose with tech, being much more interested in the plot and story, rather than the technical aspects of the weapons as such.

If I could go back and change the basics of the BattleTech rules I would do the following:

1.  Fix the ranges of the weapons by the simple expedient of making all the long range limits from the current stated start and extend them out to line-of-sight.  So a machine gun shoots at one, two and three plus hexes at a base to hit of four, six and eight.  Given the addition of movement modifiers this will make hitting with a machine gun a rather unlikely affair, and in my opinion will not adversely affect play balance.  Just to be clear I would apply this to all the other weapons too, and allow dice probabilities decide the outcomes, rather than imposing artificially short ranges on everything.

2.  No double heat sinks period, ever, full stop.  The one big game breaker that renders auto-cannons less than worthless is the double heat sink.  Get rid of them, end of problem.

3.  Ammo explosion rules amended to reduce the damage to be one round cooking off, and applying the this first to the armour of the section, then the internal structure, and only carrying over any excess to adjacent section after that.  Yes I like targets that go boom, but mechs are supposed to be state-of-the-art weapon platforms, so they should be at least as capable as a twentieth century Abrams MBT when it comes to containing an ammo explosion.

4.  Internal hits on mechs should take into account the volume of the mech, in that there is a lot of space inside a mech, which means harder to do damage when something gets through the armour.  So no re-rolls on empty spaces, armour allocation etc.  Battlemechs should soak up damage.

5.  Vehicles are meant to go boom, and therefore should not in my opinion be allowed to use anything to soak up critical hits.  In addition, the construction rules for vehicles should result in vehicles that are less capable than mechs, otherwise what is the point of having mechs in the first place when one can build vehicles that make more sense?  Otherwise you might as rename the game HoverTech.

6.  All weapons post 3025 should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, with in my opinion those that add rules requiring more dice rolls, or shooting modifiers etc. being eliminated.

7. While we are at it, the missile launcher rules need simplifying with less rolls of the dice to calculate number that hit and location.

What I want is a game where one pilots a battlemech with a platoon of infantry and one, or two vehicles per person that plays at BattleTech's sweet spot, which in my opinion was always at the tactical come gladiatorial level of mecha-on-mecha level of play.  YMMV on this, but you youngsters can get off my lawn is what I say.
   

Scale 3: Hex Maps Versus Tabletop Terrain

Carrying on a bit late from the first and second part of this articles, I'd like to conclude my musings for the time being. For me, there are three basic things that one can do when, for instance, when playing BattleTech using miniatures on a tabletop with wargame terrain:

1) Change the size of the area fought on
2) Field more models
3) Change the range of the weapons. 

Area

Using a smaller table is by far the easiest solution that comes to mind. Playing a game on a table top of 2' x 1.5' offers little advantage over using the map boards of the same size. However, making the table larger means that you will probably want to have more models on the table, otherwise four mechs per side tends to look a bit lost.

More Models

BattleTech combat tends to slow down as you add more models. So much so that I wonder whether there is much to be gained from the effort required for the work to set everything up? You need an awful lot of time and patience to play a very large game of BattleTech. So if you want to field more  models you would need to streamline the rules to allow a quicker resolution for each turn.

Weapons Range

Altering either the ground or time scale appears to offer some hope.

Changing the time scale will increase the movement distance, but not the weapon ranges. Whereas changing the ground scale increases the weapon ranges, but doesn't alter the time scale.

However, this can lead to problems, as related earlier, with changing the emphasis of the strategy and tactics. It can all lead to the situation where either mechs race around the battlefield unable to hit a target, because they're not in range, or targets can be hit, but it takes so many moves to close that shooting has become far more effective than the original game designers intended.

If it takes ten turns to close on a target, each turn say is only 5 seconds long, then you've effectively doubled the weapon damage, since you are now firing the equivalent of twice per turn.

Conclusions

As  can be seen, from examining the the various factors above, the increase of space needed can preclude, for some people, the opportunity of having the ground scale the same as the figure scale, because every hex would translate to four inches. This would mean that a table would have to be 60 inches by 68 inches per hex map board.

This only leaves the time it takes to play a game and the scale time it is supposed to represent.

I think the ideal miniatures game would be one where the actual time to play was equivalent to the time the game turns added up to, where the ground scale were equal to the figure scale, and each model represented one of its kind. However, I wouldn't hold your breath trying to achieve this goal. The last point is one that we are unlikely to be able to resolve, so we will have to live with a compromise.

One out of three hardly seems a good batting average, but I think you have to remember the nature of what we are trying to do.
   

Scale 2: More About Scale

The trouble with using a ground scale smaller than the figure scale is that  models will be bigger than the terrain features. This is especially true of buildings that are in scale with the vehicles, because what appears by linear measurement to be quite large area often ends up as just enough room to fit three small buildings. Hardly the town it is supposed to represent?

Put another way, a village scales up as having multi level hovels!

On the other hand buildings to the same scale as the terrain will be dwarfed by the vehicles, and the problem is made worse in games like BattleTech, because the mechs already dwarf buildings as a matter of course. Then there is the problems of representing roads, rivers and woods when ground scale to figure scale generated distortion. At the end of the day it can all look ludicrous, and undermine the purpose of having the miniatures and terrain in the first place, which is of course to make playing the game easier and things look more realistic.
  
Let us consider the problems in detail and go back to our hypothetical 6' x 4' wargaming table. At 1/300 ground scale it is the equivalent to an area of 18 x 12 hexes, whereas a similar hex mapboard equivalent in 1/900th scale would be an area of 2' x 1.5'. Therefore a six by four table is similar to using four Battletech map boards at 1/900 ground scale, but only one map board at 1/300.

Now if we took the Atlas, with its auto-cannon 20, and placed it on the table at 1/900 ground scale the range of its weapon is 30 centimeters, but if you were to use 1/300th,  then the range would leap up to 90 centimeters. At the larger scale the Atlas would dominate the whole table with its 180 centimeters (six foot) diameter of fire, which would mean that the emphasis of the game had changed. The area to move in is such that all the combat is now taking place at very close range from the start, and this leaves no room for manoeuvre.

This would cast a different light upon the the types of mechs it would be advantageous to field and change the nature of the game.

However, using the 1/900th scale also has its problems. Since the ground scale is so much smaller than the model one, there are going to difficulties when fighting in and around towns, for reasons stated earlier. Also, our table has now become much larger which is not necessarily the advantage it first appears to be.

This is because play testing has shown that there is a relationship between the size of an area to weapon ranges at the sort of model densities which are fielded. Battletech slows down considerably when you get much above a dozen models on the board. The use of 1/900th scale on a six by four table means that the game will literally eat a dozen models, and you'll wonder where they've all gone. Most of the action will take place in the centre with everything milling around each other.
  

Scale 1: Scale Conumdrums

Setting a ground and time scale for a game allows one to calculate movement rates, and furthermore provide a frame work for the number of actions that can take place within a turn; whether it represents one minute, or one hour, or one day. However, one problem that emerges from this basic process is that table top wargames almost always end up with a discrepancy between the figure scale, the ground scale, and the time taken to play a turn versus the time the turn represents. This comes from the desire to have games that are not just small skirmishes, or gladiatorial fights, but rather play out large-scale clashes between armies.

In BattleTech for instance, the rules state that each hex is 30 meters across, and serendipitously each hex on the map board is approximately 32mm across the flat sides, which means that the ground scale approximates to 1/1000 scale ratio. If the models were to the scale of the map boards then a man would be around 1.8mm high, and a mech would be about 12mm tall.

For comparison, in OGRE/GEV the hexes are stated as being 1500 meters, or 4950 feet across. Now let me see that would make the scale of the vehicles, very, very tiny indeed. Quite clearly the models are being used as counters in this game, as they are much larger than the ground scale. Whereas in BattleTech the use of models makes it feels very much more like a miniature wargame.

Even so, we still see that the models in BattleTech are are three times larger than the ground scale. However, this is not unusual thing to see in table-top wargaming, as using a smaller ground scale allows the game to represent a larger area on a table. The traditional wargaming table is often six foot by four foot (1.8 x 1.2 meters), and the use of a smaller ground scale to figure scale often goes hand in hand with another concept of having a model represent a multiple of itself.

Still, one can see that there are quite a few problems that stem from any decision that changes the ground to figure scale.

When game rule really start to break down is when trying to represent fighting in cities with large numbers of units. This results from the disparity between figure and ground scale that  breaks the verisimilitude of the game.

Let's look at why this happens? Take for example figures at one three hundredth scale that are approximately six millimeters high, representing a man six foot tall. If you then play a game on our hypothetical standard six foot by four foot table, then you get an area of approximately eighteen hundred feet by  twelve hundred feet in size. Sounds enormous. It isn't, not when you think for a moment about how fast a vehicle that can move through it in under thirty seconds when travelling at a modest thirty miles per hour.

This is why the ground scale is usually smaller than the figure scale.

It's a typical catch twenty-two situation where the solution leads you back to the problem. Never more true when trying to fight in a built up area, as ground-scale comes and bites you on the leg like a demented pit-bull terrier.

One answer is to keep the disparity between the figure and ground scale to a minimum by using smallest figure scale possible, because this will keep the ground scale reasonable for the area you wish to fight over. The other answer is to write the rules so that the problem disappears as an abstraction. Neither answer is right, and neither is wrong, but when you have rules that try to account for everything, you end up slowing down the game, and that is a problem.
  

Little Big Mechs

  
There are several problems when converting playing a game of BattleTech on a hex board to playing the game on scenic terrain boards that are at once obvious, subtle, and often bogged down by hidden assumptions.

The obvious point is that very few terrain boards have hexes drawn over them, so you have to convert the movement point allowances of BattleTech into something that works with miniatures on an unmarked playing surface. This is not too hard, and there are various well established rules that have stood the test of time. Unfortunately the specific details will have to be changed, since they weren't written to represent mechs forty feet high.

However, the subtle problem is quite a fundamental one. Boardgames deal with hexes which are measures of area. Miniature games deal with linear distance.

Let me put it like this.

On a board, if two mechs are three hexes from each other, the nominal distance is ninety metres, but a mech is not thirty metres wide and could therefore be standing at one edge of the hex, as could the other mech. Hence they are nominally ninety metres apart, but potentially between sixty and one hundred and fifty metres away from each other.

Of course this doesn't actually matter in the boardgame, because the ground area is clearly defined by the hex pattern, so that there is no confusion over what is implied by the weapons range, and the players know that the rules are fair to both sides.

This is not the case with a table top game where such looseness would cause problems, so a measure is normally defined as the centre-to-centre distance between models.

The final problem is one that has weighed down the traditional wargame for years, as it makes underlying assumptions about the structure of a wargame. This is something that I am very concerned with. The lengths to which the arguments have gone have caused ructions amongst miniature wargame enthusiasts, and have been going on and off for some quite considerable length of time. Put simply, what do the models represent?
   

Battletech 2.5: Manifesto Tight & Fast

Since I started discussing on this blog the problems that I have with some of the game mechanisms of BattleTech, my favourite wargame in the whole wide world ever, I have become more focused on how to address my need to tinker?  Realistically, there is no way that CGL would rewrite the core BattleTech rules to satisfy me.  I'm under no illusion about this. 

I also think that any house rules that I write will always been seen as something that stays in any group I play or communicate with.  At best one might get a general consensus that some idea is worth adding to a game, but not everyone is going to agree.  Especially those that prefer to play the rules as written on the tablets brought down from CGL on high.  

So where does that leave me?  What I want is a true quick play version of BattleTech.

Well, I've decided that instead of trying to rewrite the BattleTech rules, hubris and arrogance beyond belief really for one person to attempt.  I would instead try and write an introductory quick play version of the rules instead. 

The reason for this choice is that I think that the current quick play rules for BattleTech that come in the starter set cut too much out, and that the Quick Strike variant rules for BattleForce are conceptually not BattleTech, but a higher level game. that creates its own niché within the CGL product line; an alternative game to play, rather than a rewrite of the core rules.  So now I need to set the agenda for this project, my six point manifesto is as follows:

1. These rules will not be a top down rewrite, but a bottom up process, so as not to conflict with the BattleTech's overall approach.

2. Must look like BattleTech e.g: record sheets must be similar even if simplified.

3. Must feel like BattleTech i.e: initiative, target to hit and location rolls, even if the charts are changed.

4. Must be compatible with all pre-generated units designs that exists now, or may be introduced later by following the current construction rules in full.

5. The rules must allow two players to be able to control six units each, and play four turns an hour minimum, and ideally up to twelve units each.

6. Speed of play scales consistently up to six players and six units each indicated by no less than three turns per hour i.e: BattleTech tends to slow logarithmically as the number of players and units increase, while these rules will be designed to slow proportionally as game friction increases.

Of course now I've got to go and write this, but how hard can it be? 

Oh I've just noticed that I've hit the 10,000 views.  Thank you all for taking the time to read my blog.
  

BattleTech 2.3.1: The BattleTech Reader

A riposté to The BattleTech Reader post. As always Steve's awesomeness in spending his time to think about this stuff amazes me. :-)

Moving on rapidly from evolving language jokes, to the meat of the post.

Even Bigger 'Mechs

Steve’s reply, "What players choose to field is going to be limited not by what the company provides in the way of ‘canon’ designs, but what the rules support... I know will not start churning out 400 ton machines just because they found a nifty set of add-on rules for it out on the net [snip]."

You are absolutely right on this account.

Steve’s reply, "First, the game has been tweaked and balanced to accommodate ‘Mechs and other machines of the current tonnage range [snip]."

I agree again, but will add the caveat that the balance in the force (game mechanics) can be restored, there is still hope in the galaxy.

Steve’s reply, "Second, who wants to allow such a beast in a game that is supposed to be over in hours?... The Ares is interesting and yes, cool, but only time will tell whether or not there will be rules to permit such a machine... I wonder if they are even going to bother with a set of rules for what is, admittedly, the only example of a +100 ton machine in the game – and which came from a spin-off game at that. It sets a precedent for something quite unpleasant to consider – the complete overhaul of a good portion of the TW rules. And once a foot has been wedged in that door, only God knows how and when they’ll get it shut again."

Not my call and the rules for the Ares have been announced as in the works. I think you are being to pessimistic here. YMMV.

Steve’s reply, "Finally, controlling the background setting of BattleTech is what keeps it BattleTech and also something they can put up for sale in the shops. Would you have them hand everything over to us (ugh!) fanfic writers? We’re a pretty shady lot. Someone has to set the limits, after all. Why not the folks who have the license and practically invented the game as we know it?"

Why not, but as many people have pointed out, just because you own the license to the game, doesn't mean what one writes will not unbalance the game?

Quad 'Mechs  

Steve’s reply, "[snip] I think that the idea behind leaving turrets off the standard quad is intentional. It is in the interest of game balance, which I mentioned before.

Six legs – visually, quite impressive, but what effect in the game? Why would more legs help?... I can see it in a movie or an anime series where the Rule of Cool is king. But translating it to a game where physics are paid a little more than lip service (not much more, I grant you), it just won’t wash.

The Centauroid ‘Mech is another product of the Rule of Cool... But I cannot think of anything, even a ProtoMech, which would benefit from that body plan in terms that would be meaningful in BattleTech [snip]."

Turrets have always been FUBAR'd ever since the construction first came out.  IMNSHO after 25 years I think it's time to fix them.  More legs, simple answer, it's a two for the price of one deal.

If you are adding hexapods, then Centaurs are just an easy variant.

As a Dougram fan I want hexapods so that I can field Desert Gunners, to go with the Crab (Goliath) and Tequila Gunners (Goliath variant).  As for Centaurs, it is a logical design progression from biped with arms to quadraped with arms.  Heck, one could even have a tripedal mechs with arms!  Oh yeah, we are going to get one of them in a year or so. ;-)

As for in game benefits, more locations to cover (downside), but more internal spaces (upside).

Steve’s reply, "Moving the engine, gyros and such inside a battlemech would, I believe, break some fundamental rules in the game... There is something about the game’s insistence on placing the goodies in a location represented by a ‘7’ that says to me there is more going on there at the game’s structural level than meets the eye. A ‘7’ is the most commonly rolled number on two six-sided dice."

Your point is taken, but let me turn it around.  Quads are too good at present, or would be too good if changed, is an argument I've seen used on the official forum.  If the internal allocation for the engines and gyro were spread across all three torso locations it would make the quads more vulnerable to internal hits, which would balance out any perceived awesomeness of the changes.

Steve’s reply, "Some kind of balance is kept on the tabletop by this arrangement, I don’t understand it and as a consequence, I am loathe to screw with it. There is no telling what will happen, good or ill. Mayhap Mr. Eastwood could look into this?"

It would be great if he would, as it will take the skills and contributions from more than one person to rewrite a set of rules that are as much loved as BattleTech.

Steve’s reply, "Flexibility is fine, but the more detail you have, the more things slow down. I am not sure the addition would be worth the eventual cost. There’s a break-even point and I believe the game’s designers know where it is better than I do."

That last sentence is total hubris Steve, because by that argument I can turn it around and just say that the game designers haven't done a 3063TRO, because they know best what to write for the market.  Sorry if that offends.  Perhaps you were being the Devil's Advocate here?

Breaking the Game with TarComps

Steve’s reply, "Slow moving assaults move slowly because they are armored out the ying-yang and have a significant warload... Stationary opponents automatically gain an effective –2 bonus against targets that are running as a ‘Mech that stands still does not have a movement modifier to add to it’s own gunnery [snip]."

Calling EastwoodDC, calling EastwoodDC. What do you say?

Steve’s reply, "Furthermore, the lighter machine’s warload is not likely to hit hard enough to match that of the stationary target – who, even when hitting less often, hits much harder with guns only a machine of his size can carry – and usually in quantity."

As you well know using light mechs is not something that occurs in isolation. So your point while right, is rather largely academic. Light mech users, like myself, tend to be doing "pea in a pod" tricks, dividing the audience's attention and generating chances to roll dice for critical hits. A very metagame approach to playing BattleTech.

Steve’s reply, "Finally, the lighter fast ‘Mech is nearly always much more lightly armored. The hits from those big weapons that do land are going to get through pretty fast."

They sure do, no disagreement there, but academic, because when I play you will always be faced with a dilemma; shoot the little mech, or shoot the bigger mech.

Steve’s reply, "Yes, the big stationary pillbox can use a tarcomp to tip the balance. Many do. However, not many pack pulse weapons and the reason is simple – they don’t move fast enough to compensate for the shorter range. Now that light, fast ‘Mech?  It practically begs for pulse weapons, as it needs something to offset the penalty for running with the throttle slammed forward all the time.   And a lot of them have such weapons."

However, as I'm the kind of player that parks right behind your assault mech to get the kick in, you having pulse lasers or a targeting computer can mean "Big trouble for a little mech in BattleTech town".

Steve’s reply, "Die re-rolls replacing gunnery bonuses?... In any case, how will you translate the ability of the targeting computer to select a given location – at a +3 to hit – and slam it with every direct fire weapon that makes the to-hit roll?"

Not going to argue this as my comment was an off the cuff proposal meant to illustrate options, rather than a specific game mechanism I had in mind.  

Not you, but people have somehow got it into their heads that I've already got this house version of BattleTech already written and ready to roll.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I have some house rules I've used in the past, and some I've stolen, but as these blogs progress I'm realizing that house rules to achieve my goals will need much more work that the little fixes that most house rules cover.

Electronic Countermeasures, Sensors, Networks a Waste of Time

Steve’s reply, "If they were standard on every ‘Mech, THAT would be a pain in the tuckus.  Can you imagine trying to figure out the effective ECM bubble for every machine?   When would C3 ever be effective?  When could you field hidden units?

The one thing about the game that I think really reflects how much electronics are packed into the average machine is this: all players, at all times, can see what units are on the field of combat.  They can identify them, determine their state of damage and furthermore, know exactly where every machine is – friend or foe - even if it is behind cover.  Unless the unit is specifically Hidden or the game is Double Blind, we all take this privilege for granted."

I think you are absolutely right, but these additions are IMNSHO things that have been added to the game that break the spirit of the original rules.  If one is to keep them, then it requires some more digging into the core mechanics and assumptions of the game to make them fit better.  YMMV on that opinion.

Steve’s reply, "I see the ECM, ECCM, Beagle, etc as just specialized gear designed to get around unusual starting conditions or to counter special link systems – such as C3... Would you deny us the one piece of gear designed to combat it until such time as all machines can boast of having ECM?"

No I wouldn't.  I might deny you both, but not just one thing. :-)

Gentlemen Do Not Fight With Anything But Ranged Weapons & Their Bare Hands

Steve’s reply, "Ah, but the Solaris comment was supposed to elicit the understanding that physical weapons also appeal to the Rule of Cool – note their popularity with the gathered throngs – even when they are not strictly practical."

Agreed, which is why I wouldn't ban them or anything like that.

BattleTech 2.4.1: Music Metaphor for Rules

In my previous blog I wrote about house rules for games of BattleTech. I removed my first comment I made there, because after other comments were posted, it seemed natural to expand it, and to discuss the links I posted.

Reminder; last time I compared the process of digital encoding of music to how it could be used to compress the time it takes to play a game of BattleTech.  Now I'm going to expand my ideas with an extended, and somewhat tangential discussion on music, inspired by comments made by Bradley & Farady77, with a links to threads on the CBT forum about house rules etc. for BattleTech.  I want to use the analogy of a "cover version" in music to discuss the process of rewriting of a set of gaming rules.

Let me start first by going of on my tangent about music and ask you to listen to Bear McCreary's rearrangement of All Along the Watch Tower used in Battlestar Galactica the TV series by using this link.

Now compare it with Jimi Hendrix's version, here.

Arguably the Jimi's is most well known version, but the original song is actually by Bob Dylan.

That link pushed my GoogleFu on YouTube to the limit, just so many dam covers. Would you all agree that they are just different versions of the same song, and recognizable as such? if not what was it that made it a totally different song?

Now for my second example let's listen to "Mad World" from the Donnie Darko film by Garry Jules.

The original 1980s Tears for Fears version is here.

And just to complicate matters Tears for Fears recent live version of their own song, which IMO appears to be a response to the success of the Garry Jules version here.

Still the same song? What do you think?

And my third example is the cover of Kate Bush's Running Up The Hill for the film Daybreakers by the group Placebo.

Kate's original here.

I would argue that fundamentally that all of the above examples are intrinsically the same song, which have been re-scored for different singers, or instruments. After all, the last time I heard Kate Bush sing live, she openly admitted that she can no longer sing Wuthering Heights the same way she did when she was a teenager.

Now my next example is of what I would call a rewrite of a song. I've chosen a reggae version of Dark Side of the Moon called Dub Side of the Moon by the Easy Star All-Stars.

Versus the original Pink Floyd here.

Now I think, if not this song, then the album by the Easy Star All-Stars, is sufficiently different that though I recognise themes from the original, it is no longer IMO the original song.  OTOH one could just argue that it is a terrible cover of the classic.  What do you think?

So how about listening to this classic version of My Way by Frank Sinatra.

Versus the Punk rock version of My Way by the Sex Pistols.

I would argue that both of these versions are classics.  However, the Sex Pistols version of My Way, is far truer emotionally to the content of the lyrics than the original version of the song, because they really sung the song in a way that was "their way"- Punk rock.  For me BattleTech is all about having fun from playing games of giant stompy robot action.  This was epitomised in the original second edition rules.  Since then there has been a slow, but inevitable layering of extra rules to address perceived shortcomings that has ended up slowing the game down.  So I want to go back to a faster paced game and have a version of the BattleTech that has the energy of Sex Pistols version of My Way, rather than the slow Frank Sinatra version.

Finally, a reach out to Professor Jamie Angus, all of the above links were of course digital recordings that have been compressed, so none of them are exact replicas of the original live performance of said songs.

In gamer speak, we are talking about a game where the ultimate war machines used are really not all they are made out to be, due to unintended consequences of how some of the rules have either shadowed the original intent, or have compressed the affective (fun) component of the game through excessive optional rules IMO.  Now let's move to the comments made on my previous post.

[snip] Bradley said, "The core idea and subsequent extrapolations: First make the turns express 1 minute of time. This allows the hexes to be 6 times larger, and range 6 times greater, to better simulate a longer ranged ground conflict. Second, thanks to the 1 minute turn length, all weapons will fire 5 times in a round. Thus, armor/structure on a mech will be 1/5th. This allows the record sheet to be shrunk to the size of a playing card,... [snip] Third, because damage is being inflicted 5 times as fast, game length will be reduced to 1/5th the duration. So a duel that lasts 20 rounds in BattleTech will be concluded in 4 rounds in BattleCommand... [snip] Forth, and this part really pertains to your post: Change the dice rolling conventions. 2d6 as a mechanic has the advantage of a bell curve, but in practice with modifiers and such requires numerous individual rolls and doesn't make use of the bell curve distribution well... [snip] [snip]... the initial reaction was that if I wanted to speed up BattleTech I should play BattleForce (despite my dislike of BattleForce for stripping too much personality of the mech away); also people were very adamant that their was nothing wrong with the 2d6 system, you just need something like a box of death to handle lots of 2d6 events."

Looking at the description of the comments that were made about BattleCommand, I would infer that the the consensus was that this was no longer a game of BattleTech.  I can also agree with Bradley's comment that BattleForce strips too much of BattleTech's personality away ("personality" here being define as "look & feel"), and that I would have no problem with the house rules as written.  However, the question is more what is it about these house rules that provoked people into labeling them as not BattleTech?  All I can see is the change of dice rolling conventions, because logically none of the other modifications change the mechanics of the game.

Moving on now to the second poster.

Farraday77 said, "There are many ways to streamline the game, and they all boil down to personal preference.   For my own, I i.e. cut down on irrelevant stuff (like FF and ES crits written on the record sheet when they're only relevant in the construction phase), took the good old medium lasers heat and damage as baseline for other weapons as well as armor and internal structure diagrams, and gave the players the option to switch to a 1d8 mechanic and a base THN of 0." 

Looking at the this comment what I see is not so much a "cover version" of BattleTech, but a change in the core rule mechanics, which while perfectly logical would be a new game.  I assume that people on the forums have said as much, assuming Farraday77 has posted them up for discussion?  

If not and if Farraday77 wants comments/feedback, then these house rules they could be posted on the CBT forum, assuming that Farraday77 is a member there? Also, talking about ultimate house rules and new editions of BattleTech try reading this thread, link.

"After skimming through the BattleTech: Omega rules from 1992 (not to be confused with FASAs 1999/2000 Omega rules), IMO they seem to me to be more like extended house rules rather than a completely new version of BattleTech, but YMMV."

Or, if you want to see what people think about changes to the BattleTech rules then go here.

As can be seen this topic is discussed quite a lot on the CBT forum. It seems to me, that any new version of the rules would have to feel like the original (so as to keep the diehards happy), but be new, which is a pretty tall order when you come to think about it.  However, if we use the analogy of re-scoring a song for different instruments versus rewriting a song, then perhaps one could end up with a more successful "cover version" of BattleTech that overshadows the original?  More like Bear McCreary's All Along the Watchtower rather than the Easy Star All-Stars album Dub Side of the Moon.

Then the question becomes how?  What can be changed when any change will be seen as not being true to BattleTech?  The only approach that I can see working here is one where basic "look & feel" of the game mechanisms are kept, but streamlined so as to speed up the time it takes to play a game.  Sounds like a manifesto to me, and I'm reminded of my April Fool I posted here.
 
Talk about full circle etc...

Disclaimer.  All posts are condensed & abbreviated summaries of complex arguments posted for discussion on the internet, and not meant to be authoritative in any shape, or form on said subject, T&CA, E&OE & YMMV.

BattleTech 2.4: Purpose of House Rules

Why have house rules? Or a more helpful way of phrasing this question, what purpose do house rules serve?

From a purely pragmatic perspective house rules are the players of a game system using their power to audit what has been given them, by saying "yes but" to the rules of the game.  However, as soon as one enters house rule territory one has to get others to agree with you about your "yes but", which often leads to a reversion to a "yes but, let's just use the rules as written".

Now I've made it clear in past blogs that I'm an OSR kinda gal, and for me realism and BattleTech are not synonymous, which means I can accept I'm just playing a game.  However, the pedantic wargamer in me also wants the rules to touch some sort of base with reality.  Fickle female I suppose?

This also touches on some science fiction mantras that writers use when creating new universes for their stories.  Change one thing to the reality of your universe to allow your story to work, but follow the laws of physics etc with the rest.  Of course it's not that easy to do this, and writers end up using a combination of unobtainium and handwavium at times, but in principle less is more.  Stories where the writer moves further away from "keeping it real as much as possible" tend IMO to be writing science fantasy, rather than hard science fiction.

Like most things though, there is a continuum from hard SF to soft SF to pure science fantasy.  Hard SF tend to limit things like tractor beams and anti-gravity usually, because they indicate soft SF by having consequences to the universe that are conveniently ignored.  Scantily clad women and muscle rippling heroes with swords tend to fit better in a science fantasy setting.

Where does BattleTech fit then?

Well it's not ultra hard, despite of having no anti-grav and tractor beams, because too much unobtainium and handwavium exists around the size of the ships (mass to volume ratios too low), and having ludicrously high thrust drives with handwaved reaction mass.  For more on this I can highly recommend the Atomic Rocket's website.

Therefore I've decided I'm going to put BattleTech in the soft SF category, especially since the literary form of the universe is predicated on telling stories within a pulp fiction/juvenile rite of passage mix.  So it's a bit borderline to science fantasy, but on the whole BattleTech keeps itself in the middle-lane.

So what leads me down this tangential path from my starting position of house rules.  It's the "yes but" part.  The rules of the game do not simulate the novels particularly well.  To some extent it's good that they don't, because games follow rules, whereas stories are about emotional and physical responses by the characters to situation the plot has landed them in.  Both have logic driving them, but the purpose of games is to play, whereas stories tell a tale about people.  Of course games can also tell stories too, but that really would be going off on another tangent.

Either way both stories and games require people to spend time to enjoy the pleasures that each offer, and this is where my "yes but" comes from.  I no longer have the time to spend playing a game that will require more than a few hours of my time.  Long gone are the day where I would stay up until the early hours of the morning involved in a role playing game, or a weekend playing a wargame.

Books are easy enough to put down and pick up.  Films generally don't run more than three hours or so, but wargames can run for 10 to 15 hours, and what is worse not have been played to a satisfactory conclusion.  Large games of BattleTech fall into the latter category.  I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying it is hard to pull off without a lot of preparatory work by everybody involved in playing the game, and the thing is that I don't have the time to do this anymore.  Again I'm long past the time in my life where I can rattle of chapter and verse on any set of rules, let alone BattleTech.

So what's my plan?  KISS; Keep it Simple Stupid.  Seriously, simplify the games and then simplify some more.  The problem is not only how, but by what has to be be simplified?

One evening this week I went to a lecture by Professor Jamie Angus on compressing sound recording through digital encoding.  She was a fascinating speaker, and even though I have little interest in audio engineering (I just like listening to music), when the presentation moved into system analysis and statistics I saw the same patterns I recognise in the probabilities from using dice to generate outcomes for games.  Fascinating stuff, and most of of it way above my head. Link. 

She described a three stage process for digital audio encoding, which is about reducing the number of bits of information it takes to record a piece of music.  The first stage is the use of lossless compression, which leads to the second stage of "quantitative entropy" that can allow music to be compressed further, but with various levels of information lost depending on format choice.  Running in parallel is an intermediary third stage, the "psychoacoustic components" to the digital encoding, which one can then use to massage the music.  Psychoacoustic modeling accounts for things like how loud music shadows underlying tones that precede it, which can then be removed with no audible loss.  Thereby saving a bit of information in the process.  This allows the encoder to take into account masking of sounds that occur due to the biological limitations of the ear's acoustic range, and the brain's processing of music and people's affective responses to sound combinations.

As I listened to her talk about this I had an eureka moment about applying this to games.  If you agree that games are based on information theory, then what we want is for the outcomes to be calculated with the minimum of loss: all be it of detail resolution, realism and time among many things, rather than soundwaves.  In this case I'm going to target one particular loss that BattleTech manages poorly, and that is the time spent by player's resolving each turn of the game, which increases as the number of battlemechs and players rise in a game for my examples.

From EastwoodDCs Giant Battling Robots I know that 2D6 encodes 3.27 bits of information, link.

I also glean from then same article that 1D6 rolled twice encodes 5.17 bits of info.  Both of these are relevant to BattleTech, because both mechanisms are used in the game to generate combat results.  The first 2D6 for one's to hit number, and 1D6 rolled twice when damage goes internal (Ed. correction, except that in BattleTech the first 1D6 roll is actually a 1D2 roll, so instead of this encoding 5.17 bits of information, it only has 3.58 bits, assuming I've got my maths right?).  These rule mechanisms tell us the maximum amount of information that can be encoded, or in game speak the granularity of the detail that can be resolved, or accounted for.  For instance as Steven Satak in his blog The BattleTech Reader made some relevant comments about the limit that the groundscale imposes on the game, link:

His comments were about the 30 meter hex size and how the game rules breakdown, and this is a good example of granularity in a games resolution of underlying detail, and illustrates what the game designers assumed could be ignored, discounted, or waved over.

Now if I've understood EastwoodDC & Professor Jamie Angus right, then approximately three bits of information is all that you can encode when rolling 2D6. Now I put my neck on the line and see how stupid I can be made to look on the internet. This means that rolling 2D6 encodes just a little bit more than rolling one D8, and I'm now going to round down and treat them as synonymous to each other, because it allows me to use heuristic analysis based on 8 bit computer systems.

Now when one applies modifiers to a 2D6 roll, if one knows that it only encodes 3.27 bits, then a modifier of one is equivalent to one bit.  If I'm correct then a modifier of three is equal to three bits of information, which has the effect of reducing surprise in the diced for result?  Such modification of the base 2D6 roll is therefore highly significant, which seems to me to support my proposition about the modifiers for targeting computers and pulse lasers in the BattleTech game being too coarse.

"Yes but" I hear, but what about the modifiers that you get from movement that make it harder to hit a battlemech, aren't they the same?  Yes they are, but they add to the granularity of the game, not take away from it.  By granularity I mean that more bits of information are added to finesse the combat results, whereas reducing the information in the 2D6 combat roll coarsens the granularity of the combat resolution results.

For instance, my hunch (WAG), is that if BattleTech had used 1D6 rolled twice to resolve hits, and 2D6 to resolve internal damage then the minus three modifiers of having both a targeting computer and pulse lasers would be far less unbalancing, because 1D6 rolled twice encodes 5.17 bits of information, rather than 3.27 that the current 2D6 system can encode.  Now if I've not just made a complete ass of myself, which will then require me to edit and delete said parts of this blog, where we go next is to look at "the what" consumes time when playing BattleTech?

Reducing the amount of time it takes to resolve the action each turn will streamline the BattleTech game resulting in either quicker games, or more turns in the same time period.  So what is the first step?

First we start by identifying where dice rolls, or modifiers are not needed, because if you can reduce the number of things one has to do in a turn, then the game will go faster.

Secondly, using the concept of digital encoding would allow the compression of game data, while still retaining the original granularity of the game play.  Where this choice comes into conflict with the need for speed, the encoding model would indicate the appropriate game mechanism (choice of dice to roll, or rule) to use so as to be able compensate for any loss granularity from the reduced number of dice rolls.  I imagine this will be equivalent to the concept of reverse shadowing in psychoacoustics; where a sound is revealed that was previously hidden by the change in timing of a louder passage in the score.

However, big problem number one.  Taking the standard BattleTech rules and rewriting them using this model of information coding goes way beyond any set of house rules that I've encountered in all the years I've been playing the game.

Quite frankly this really would be BattleTech 2.0, the next generation, or re-imagined game universe, and I can't see anyone from CGL reading this and saying to themselves "you know what, why don't we let her do this?"  I'm under no illusions here, as after all CGL have said that no outside contributors are being sought at this time, and as and when they do seek new freelancers, it will be to fulfill their long term business plan for the game.  Given that CGL have not yet finished their six volume core rule set, one which is rumoured may/has been cancelled, I'm not so much holding my breath, as waiting for Hell to freeze over.

So do I now go back to my metaphorical drawing board and rethink my approach to house rules, or do I run with the idea of compressing the core rules of BattleTech?  The former is quick and easy, the latter not so much.  Time is probably going to dictate what I do next.

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