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[Lars Von Danzig]

I wanted to share something that my friends and I have worked on over the last couple of years that we use to play with extensively. It is a frame work designed to create random games among ourselves, and plays using the core rules found in Total Warfare, most of TacOps and some StratOps as well.

This is a campaign designed for a -very- slow progression, wherein each player maintains a stable of mechwarriors for each of five Houses. At the beginning of each game, teams are randomly decided, broken out as evenly as possible, followed by a random roll to determine which House is being represented by each team (this often results in canonically incorrect pairings, but keeps things fresh).

Once teams and houses are determined, we determine when the fight occurs. We have the game broken out into four major time periods: Succession Wars, Clan Invasion, FedCom Civil War, and Jihad. We allow our mechwarriors to "time travel" between periods, as the entire system is meant to be an abstract rather than a literal campaign.

The hundreds of hours of development have come through extensive random mech and vehicle generation charts, broken out by House (including Clan / Periphery / etc.. salvage) and time period, with frequency of any given mech being decided by number of variants with a decreased weighting as time goes on. That being said, its possible to be playing in Jihad and still be the sorry fool who rolls a Succession Wars era dinosaur while your friends and enemies are touting Heavy PPCS and VSPL's. However, we use a strict BV system with Support to fill in any glaring gaps and try to balance every game as closely as possible. It usually works out well, but even the unbalanced games are fun. As we all know It's amazing what a lucky floating crit can do to change any game.

The key difference to the way we play that differs from most TT rules is that each player only controls ONE mech in any given game (lance on lance fights occur, but are rare). Initiative is determined by Player, not side, and it adds a very cool dynamic that works out well.

After each game the pilot that participated gains experience, which is used to better PS/GS skills, and may even rank up or be eligible for medals. Rank is an entirely different element that impacts mech assignment, gains individual and team initiative bonuses, and offers additional flexibility in requisitioning alternative munitions and / or better or different support options. Pilots can and do die, get captured, get rescued.

To give any interested a sense of the scale of progression, I've personally played over 550 games logged onto my roster, and have only a handful of pilots that have skills better than 3/3 (and those are pilots who have participated in > 25 games and lived to tell about it) or have officer ranks.

Sorry for the wall of text; this is and has been a passion for me and other members of our group for years, and there is a lot more to see. We maintain a Google site wherein all this is housed; please let me know if you have any questions or IM me directly if you would like to have access to the spreadsheets and other collateral that we've developed.

- LVD

[Sychodemus]

It looks like it is quite fun and OCD.

(I'm glad I am not the only one.)

Sorry for the short reply - but it is late. The mind is willing but the fingers are not.