20 replies to this topic

[Riffan Pryde]

This is just a question. I can go into detail about mine if others want me to. Does anyone play their games Mixing their rpg game *long term, multi year campaigns* with the tabletop. Acting out major battles. Altering history and running with the story as it goes? Possibly having friends go from individual players to whole units? Please lets discuss this.

[Slade Deleportas]

I'm currently running just a TT campaign. The unit is two companies, one fully Mech, the other combined arms. The player (4 to 6 players depending in who shows up for battles) are Command Lance of the combined arms company. So far though its just been the mechs on the field beating up on pirates (which I run on my own). Once I get A Time of War I'm gonna have my players sit dow and make characters etc. From there we will see what happens.

I'm bending the timeline/universe to fit my own needs also. Since I'm one of two that knows the timeline/fluff well I can do this freely and no one knows the difference. Basically we are in 3048 and we will roll into the Clan Invasion period and go from there.

Edited by Slade_Deleportas, 19 December 2011 - 11:47 PM.

[Riffan Pryde]

In my game. We started everyone in 3040. More or less A group of freelancers looking to mob up and make some C-bills in the lull between war of 3039 and what will soon be the clan invasion. They ended up taking a pirate's job in the upper reachs. (fans will know this as the first waves of the clan attacks) They ended up Nearly getting wiped out. a Group of them ended up Forming up with alot of the pissed or half killed pirates and boosted off planet with a nice amount of salvage and a few Clan tech items and a few bondsmen (or as one called them "those crazy people who speak like its the 1300's) from there they ran to the outer Perphiery on the other end of the outworlds allaince (near port krin) Then while attempting to make a home on a run down, half backwater mining world that's being harrased by pirates and raiders .. One of them spent every nickel to his name to hire an IS merc lance to come and help. *they'd gone from over 2 company's to just under 6 functioning units. On the next pirate raid the lance (All IS assault mechs) Wiped out the pirates and took their mechs and drop ship for themselves. The Jumpship was the next thing they stole (pirates didn't know what happened till they docked and flooded it with pissed of puesdo marines. (i can go on. this is lirterally all just a matter of 2 years i got alot that happened till 3058 (date they are currently)

[God of War]

In the MW:RPG campaigns i mastered and the ones will master in the future i just use the TT-maps and mechs to point out postions lose for Mch combat. Everything else is rpg-style.
It simply not fits the abilitys/skills of the Chars and the rgp felling to just let them play a round of battletech when it comes to conflict.

[Riffan Pryde]

oh thats the thing. We don't just run around with mechs its a full campagin like running a old version of romance of the three kingdoms. Gotta do everything from large scale planning to indiviual tatics per squad. It's indepth

[Renegade]

Running a TT game now, though we bashed Savage Worlds into running Battletech. Works well for our purposes.

The game I was playing in previously was Clan Invasion era, and looked like it was going to go all the way into our rewritten Jihad. The game I'm running now is set in the deep periphery in 3501, primarily to avoid complaints about my violating canon from the two diehards.

[Riffan Pryde]

The trick to dealing with die hards is to get group agreement over what is gonna happen, and to be a GM willing to lay down the law. If you do a mission that ends up blowing up a HPG.. it will have effects. if you take over a jumpship carrying a kuritian noble You might end up with a death warrent or worse. There are million and one ways to handle a die hard who feels he knows more about the verse or is unwilling to push things. You punish them with creative ways to deal with that....pirate raids...A noble offering a down on their luck merc band a contract that is really a job that is gonna get them all killed just to he can get more prestige in the courts. blah blah blah

[GreyGriffin]

Here is the problem that I have - in tabletop RPGs, the assumption is that you are going to have a close emotional connection to the character you are portraying. That character is your window into the universe, your creation,and someone you should have a stake in.

Battletech, as it stands, is a game of attrition. 'Mechs get wounded, get sacrificed for strategic advantage, and typically suffer pretty horrendous damage over the course of a single round of play. This means that your character's only salient possession, for the duration of those sessions where you are rocking it in giant robots, is going to get blown up at some point, potentially killing the pilot, and turning that character that you have invested in into a bloody smear, as the result of a single lucky roll with a guass rifle. Edge can help to a degree, but it's certainly not a cure-all.

[Slade Deleportas]

GreyGriffin: That's why any good Gamemaster ALWAYS rolls his dice behind a screen. Fudging rolls is the most important skill a GM can have.

In my campaign's first battle I didn't have use of a screen and through sheer bad luck I head capped a "good guys" mech over a few combat rounds with SRM hits... And the one other time I didn't have a screen, got TAC to an ammo slot on another player, gah... Oh well. Learned my lesson I will ALWAYS use screen from now on.

[Riffan Pryde]

That, and BT allows for the GM to change the rules to fit his game. Disallow headshots..Fine.. Allow them but make it a +6 roll.. by all means. And you have to keep in mind. say your players do well or play their cards right and end up with alot of cash or in charge of alot of men and mechs. Are they gonna feel that same sense of dread when they have 12 unit's to their name versus the single Heavy mech he's in? Even the best of commanders get that detached feeling of "he's just a number" Your job is to Keep them in mind of even that 20 ton wasp could save their company if used right. And if any players get to ****. Who's to say a game of overwhelming numbers isn't in order. A 5 to 1 odds game or worse...2 to 1 odds against pure clan tech. Something that even when given a face slapping. The mere fact of surviving will feel like they are He-man more so than being in a "fair" fight and wiping the floor with their oppents.

[Riffan Pryde]

To be fair. What my game ended up doing was something a tad cheap but legal by the game rules and allowable in canon. The merc band pooled all their rescources and gathered up over a regiment of other mercs. (all other plays. and even forced them into full contract agreements and pricings). the mission was to attack the Capallen Production world of "hold" i believe One of the major production planets. They planned it from 3048, till 3049 as they took the long jump travel to the st ives border. then, As they worked on an under the table deal with the local comstar garrison. In exchange for some of the now called "clan tech" they'd stolen from the pirate king. They attacked the planet as they heard the clan's commited an un offical cease fire and all the house lords were called to outreach. The force jumped in. using their EMP on their main dropship they kept quite long enough for the over 40 aerospace fighters to gain air supperiorty. than as they slip up into 3 forces. one force attacked the space port, Their by gaining full air control and keeping any other planetary forces in the dark as the 2nd unit attackked the warrior house unit that was the garrison force. (i beleive it was fujita, i'll have to look it back up. Meaning they had less that a full battlion of mechs and half of them where stationed on another planet. while the 3rd force struck the mech planet. The comstar deal kept all hpg traffic moving normally..but any mention of attack or requests for help where "buffered" not to be sent till they'd take off 4 days later. They wiped out the remaining house warriors . Stripped the factory of as many data files and literal items used to manufacture mechs as they could load onto a "mule" drop ship. then. Surpsing us all, they ended up beign asked by over 2000 of the planets people to be taken with them. Most of them being from the Planet and related company's.

In all they stole plan's for the cataphrat. raven, and a few other cappellan mechs. having the Production tools to make fusion reactors (the heart of the mechs) and well and plenty tech's to work and help keep it going. This is just a fast run down. but in the canon. They had in fact attacked several months after the out reach meeting and attacked day's before Romano was assassinated in her own bed. Which did help in their ruse working in all the chaos of sun tzu taking over. and The fact that feel back to their world over 15 jumps away in the assend of the out worlds allaince. To date now. Half the merc's took their pay and went off doing their own things. One took his money and started up a small stable on solaris. another went to work for a draconis march lord. 2 are leading that "*** end world' and used all the stuff they stole to rebuild the world and sell the mechs to other lords in the perhery. and even founded a small training academy. (they secretly can be 3 times more mechs than they sell and have over 3 regiments of mechs of many makes, and half of the trainers from the school are their clanner bondsmen. While the last member of the attack force went back to his home world and took it over. Kicking out the puppet ruler and Starting up a true mining operation that sell's half it's ore to the combine at market value and the other half is sent to the other 2 men making their war world.

All that is an example how you can work within the cannon and not affect it directly yet still, if one looks deep enough make the world their own. The effects of the raid on hold would be felt all over the confederation. Perhaps postponeing sun tzu's attack on St. ives or hastening it? how many of the refugee's where loyal? Who gave them the idea to attack "That" world? Why could comstar take such an odd deal?

[Renegade]

Riffan Pryde, on 23 December 2011 - 12:58 AM, said:

That, and BT allows for the GM to change the rules to fit his game. Disallow headshots..Fine.. Allow them but make it a +6 roll.. by all means.

In our hack we allow folks to roll agility if they get hit in the head, or spend a bennie to eject. Basically to represent the pilot realizing at the last possible second that the bad guy's gauss rifle is lined up to nail the head. So headshots still suck, but it's not the end of the character.

I can't really fudge my hit locations. I wrote a Droid app that does that for me, and the thing vibrates the phone when I roll snake eyes or towers. So they know something bad happened.

Edited by Renegade, 23 December 2011 - 07:17 AM.

[Riffan Pryde]

yah.. i really gotta get back in the habit of hiding my rolls at the same time i do not mind letting them see a bad roll agianst them. Though i'll say this. You get a crit hit with a small laser on a victor's ammo bin. In the first round. Alot of people are like "**** this i'm done...match over"

[VEDRFOLNIR]

Riffan Pryde, on 19 December 2011 - 08:04 PM, said:

This is just a question. I can go into detail about mine if others want me to. Does anyone play their games Mixing their rpg game *long term, multi year campaigns* with the tabletop. Acting out major battles. Altering history and running with the story as it goes? Possibly having friends go from individual players to whole units? Please lets discuss this.

In the BT/MW campaign I GM'd, I mixed the TT rules for BattleMech combat and used the MechWarrior PnP rules for everything else. I leaned pretty heavily toward the MW aspect, in order to give the players some investment in their characters - usually I staged it so that every 3rd or 4th game there was a 'major' combat - and since the TT rules tend for longer games, I devoted an entire gaming session for just the combat.

For the most part, my players played one specific character - since they were MechWarriors it worked fine. However, one player wanted to run a mixed combat unit of vehicles, so he RP'd the lance's CO in the MW sessions, and played the vehicle unit on TT. It worked pretty well.

I had my players' unit stationed on Wotan in the Tamar March in 3048, acting as a quick-strike unit against Periphery bandits that struck the border worlds to the 'north'... and yes, there were enough Lore-savvy folks in the group that there were a number of groans heard around the table when the assignment came down...

That campaign lasted for 4 years (real-time and game-time) and yes, I did fudge plenty of rolls from behind my GM screen - especially when the Clans hit the border. While it was pretty obvious at times, my players always (and I do mean always) been very attached to their characters, and so while I had no problems with them suffering potentially life-ending injuries, only very rarely did any characters actually die in my games.

[Dev909]

Ive played 1st and 2nd edition mw combined with tt mechbattles.
I like 1st edition for char generation. Our gm modified the universe completely too.
My best mechwarrior ended up having a 0/0/4 gunnery 3 edge but still had skills for non mech combat and repairing.

[RangerRob]

I don't really get into the rpg that much with my year long campaigns. I do however add in some skills for the mechwarriors to use as they advance to keep them from being 4/5 clones of each other.

My Operation Bulldog campaign...I was running the Smoke Jags against 12 players each running one mech. Here are the skills the players could get as they advanced. Let them specialize their mechwarrior to be better in some mechs than others.
http://operationbull...ech-skills.html

Current campaign is Solaris7....free for all averaging 10 players per battle. Tweaked the Solaris tournament rules found on the Btech webpage downloads section, to make it a year long campaign. Stables, sponsors and faction bonuses and penalties.
http://solarisseven....escampaign.html

Next campaign will be Tukayyid using the Quick Strike rules from the Strategic Ops rulebook. Two players per clan, others will be running Comguard when their clan is not on the table. Each player will be running two stars or a company (2 level 2's for comguard units) Still a work in progress....
http://tukayyid.blogspot.com/

Edited by RangerRob, 01 January 2012 - 05:01 AM.

[Riffan Pryde]

Impressive mate.. impressive

[Riffan Pryde]

So, just a bump. Anyone come up with anything new?

[LaHyenne]

I'm starting a TT campaign with some locals this Sunday. All combat will be handled using Total Warfare/TacOps, while the out-of-'Mech action will be using Savage Worlds because it is possibly the simplest RPG system in existence. Might start a thread chronicling their exploits here when we get started.

[Robert Silverton]

most of the games i run combine the RPG and TT. keeping it balanced can be a pain but it lets me and the player's enjoy it alot more than 4/5 skill set the TT provides. And i will admit to fudgeing a roll now and then for a player to survive i have no prob killing a player that was stupid.