AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Once you've achieved the age with which you want to start the game, you add up all the XP under each individual skill, attribute, or trait and convert them over to specific skill rankings (+1, +3, etc). As you progress through your character's background, you purchase additional packages representing different stages of their life early or late childhood, higher education, military service, and so forth. Some are mandatory - if your character is from the Lyran Alliance, you have to take the Lyran Alliance Affiliation Package to begin with (costing you 150 of your 5000 XP). The first type is called the "life module" system, in which you purchase "packages" of skills and traits (advantages or disadvantages) for a given amount of XP. In both cases, you start the game with a certain amount of XP, determined by the GM (usually about 5,000). Other BattleTech games include Total Warfare (giant stompy robots and what is considered to be "BattleTech" proper handles about 4-12 Mechs per side on average), and the built-in support for AeroSpace Fighter and WarShip combat ("AreoTech"), and the large-scale BattleMech combat game found in Strategic Operations called "Quick-strike" (handles 24-36-ish Mechs per side with ease).Ĭharacter generation is relatively simple, but uses two different systems depending on the proclivities of your group. The current BattleTech character-level RPG is called "A Time of War", and was released in dead-tree format about a month ago after a lengthy PDF-based Beta-testing cycle. Check inside your front cover for Beta-testers, and I'm there ("Darrian Wolffe"). No, don't even bring it up, we don't want to talk about it, it didn't exist. Mechwarrior: the Dark Ages was a click-based collectible miniatures game created by WizKids, which got bought by Topps, and then Topps more or less killed it, I think. I don't think any of those titles are still being supported/developed. The Mechwarrior computer games are owned by Microsoft, which released several X-Box and PC titles. FASA closed its doors shortly after that, and I'm not sure if FanPro did anything with the RPG. Still, loads of fun.ģrd edition was much more of a departure from the previous editions, but featured character generation that was a little like trying to do integral calculus in your head while gargling napalm (about as enjoyable, too), and somewhat obtusely did not include any rules for piloting battlemechs. 1st edition I think was based on one of FASA's earlier RPGs (Prime Directive?), but from what I've been told it was klunky and not particularly useful.Ģnd edition integrated much more seamlessly with the tabletop rules, and worked really well if every PC was a mechwarrior, but it got very unwieldy and wonky if you tried to do anything that couldn't be easily resolved by jumping into a battlemech and melting it down into slag with a barrage of medium lasers. The Mechwarrior RPG had at least three different editions. Battleforce was infantry, or was that the bigger combined-arms game? There was also a big strategic board game, "The Succession Wars", that I think took several weeks just to go through one turn. There were several expansions: Aerotech (aerial combat), Citytech (vehicles/buildings), Battlespace (interstellar spacecraft), and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. The tabletop miniatures game is the original, much more of a tactical wargame than an RPG (although most die-hard Battletech players get so wrapped up in the backstory and history that a lot of roleplaying starts to bleed into the tabletop game). Battletech is actually a family of all sorts of different games.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |