Maintenance

One of the major factors I have to contend with running a game with months of in-game time is the problem of maintaining any complex technology the party possesses. I am planning on running with the Advanced Maintenance rules in Strategic Operations (p. 174). The part that gives me pause is the maintenance cycle, which per page 166 is a day long. Early and late in the campaign, sessions will only be separated by a few months, but in the mid-game as we go bounding through the late 3060's and early 3070's, I fully expect a year or more to pass between sessions. So let me examine how maintenance is going to play out.

I don't expect any of the characters' vehicles to survive the Case White landing, but if they do, or if they get new vehicles (definitely an intended action over the course of the campaign), they'll need to maintain them, likely without the benefit of a 'Mech Bay. Let's take Henry's Hawk Moth as our example for a moment, because it is the simplest vehicle to deal with.

The Hawk Moth is a light vehicle. It requires 30 minutes of maintenance per day to keep it up and running. Under the maintenance rules, each maintenance window involves 5 armor location rolls, 5 internal location roles, and a roll for the Light Gauss Rifle and another roll for its ammunition component, making twelve rolls all told. The internal structure rolls are fairly easy -- they have a Tech Rating of B, and I'm presuming all the ComStar-provided gear has a quality rating of E. Bert's character would likely be leading the maintenance teams with +4 in Technician/Mechanics, meaning that those rolls would be at a base target number of only 4. With the Tech Rating modifier (-2) and the Quality modifier (-1), that's rolling for a 1 on 2D6. Ah, but we've forgotten the penalties.

The team doesn't have so much as a Mobile Field Base, so they're looking at +2 right there. There are only five of them, so unless they can find some NPC AsTech's, they're looking at another +1 for Team Casualties. Finally, they get a -1 because we're using the Advanced Rules, putting their target number at 3. 3 on 2D6 is pretty easy -- that's be considered a sure thing in most circles. Indeed, on Quality E equipment, they need to fail by 3 to actually damage the internal structure. So the metal frame of the Hawk Moth is pretty safe. The engine has the same roll -- practically unbreakable.

The armor is only marginally more difficult -- its Tech Rating is one higher, but that's only worth a modifier of 0 rather than -2. The team needs to roll a 2 on 2D6 to damage it. Still not a huge concern -- that translates to losing a bit less than five armor points a month -- that can be repaired if they can get a supply of armor.

Now, the hard bits. The Light Gauss Rifle all that engine and armor is intended to maneuver and protect. TechManual p341 tells me Light Gauss Rifles have a Tech Rating of E (+2). The Quality Rating still applies (-1) as well as Field Repair (+2), Team Casualties (+1) and the Advance Maintenance Bonus (-1). Overall, +3, not terrible. But there's another issue. We're not rolling Technician/Mechanic anymore. This is Technician/Weapons, which Bert's character doesn't even have. We pass the baton to Morgan's character, who only has Technician/Weapons at +1, yielding a base TN of 7. Adding it all up, the Light Gauss Rifle needs a roll of 10 on 2D6 to keep it from becoming damaged. Every day. Statistics suggest it will be entirely destroyed within a month, possibly as little as a week. The ammunition bin doesn't have a Tech Rating, which is handled as giving it the unit's Tech Rating, which is E because of the Light Gauss Rifle. It won't last long, either.

The problem is exacerbated with the 'Mechs, especially Bert's ClanTech Black Hawk (ISRN Nova.) Anything with a Tech Rating of C or lower that's mechanical is easy -- car, trucks, etc. Maintaining weapons, especially 'Mech-grade weapons, will be virtually impossible. The party lacks the Technician/Nuclear skill entirely, meaning that maintaining anything with a fusion plant will be neigh-impossible -- their 'Mechs will be junk in weeks after they lose their connection with their ComStar support chain.

Cameron's character took Interest/Do-It-Yourself as a kind of catch-all skill I might let him leverage to help with the daily maintenance of things, as the gaps are large enough that either something is very easy to fix, or it is destroyed in a month. Otherwise, I believe the party will have their hands quite full just trying to keep their equipment together.

From a GMing perspective, this gives me obvious adventure hooks -- any high-tech requirements they have, like the Hawk Moth's Light Gauss Rifle, need to be obtained, installed, and used in short order -- they cannot maintain a standing ready-action vehicle force under the restrictions they'll have. This provides much more the flavor I was hoping for with this campaign. I just need to make sure I don't frustrate my players with the degradation of their toys, or push them into something rash before they're ready.

Virtual Worlds

One decision made early in the planning for this campaign, and one that I have never tried before, was that we will be running the 'Mech-scale combat in Ten Years on Terra entirely in MegaMek, the open-source BattleTech engine. I am of two minds about MegaMek. It frequently has glitches in seldom-used mechanics that are confusing and affect and slow-down gameplay. It also prevents me from house-ruling on the spot to handle bizarre circumstances. It does, however, offer some advantages.

First, it makes sure that players always get their bonuses, and in its most recent incarnation, it supports most of the RPG elements that A Time of War introduces. Bert is taking two SPA's from the Tactical Addendum, both being supported by MegaMek. MegaMek also makes it abundantly clear to my players that I'm not pulling my punches with the dice -- it reports faithfully what happened to all players simultaneously, eliminating the somewhat meta-game presumption many parties are prone to falling into that the GM won't let anything too bad happen to them.

One of the features I was most impressed with in the most recent revision of MegaMek was support for Edge. Edge, of course, is the "luck" attribute in A Time of War, and characters may spend a point of Edge to reroll a die. This is critical in enhancing PC survivability in the extremely deadly BattleTech universe. MegaMek now allows characters to have an Edge pool, which it will automatically expend on key rolls, such as head shots, through-armor criticals, and ammunition explosions. This feature probably sold me more than anything else on the MegaMek-as-a-mapsheet-replacement for this game.

The decision to go with the virtual environment has yielded other dividends. I can now pre-program scenarios and have them standing by on a moment's notice, so the party can tell me at the start of the session which mission they're going to run and I don't need to spend half an hour setting up the maps and enemy force locations. I also am grateful for something that will help my newer players see the calculations that are happening without having to wade through the tables themselves. I expect to see a radical increase in combat resolution speed with the computerized system.

Finally, with the ability to generate and save maps not only for play but also as images, I can give the players detailed charts of the areas they have intelligence on, so that they can plan their operations. There are still a few issues that recent testing has brought up, especially as relates to the party spawning all together despite being controlled by different players. Still, despite it means my maps and my minis will be sitting idle, I think its the right choice for game immersion and timeliness. I'll be sure to keep commentary on how well it works as a replacement.

Fast Learner, Slow Learner, and Downtime XP

Two of the most controversial Traits in BattleTech are Fast Learner and Slow Learner. Depending on who you talk to, they are Amazing, Necessary, Broken, Terrible, or even Discontinuity. I'm not terribly interested in weighing in value judgments on the design of A Time of War as a roleplaying system based on these two traits, but they are something that I need to address as a GM, because if you're playing with them (I understand some GM's simply convert them to Flex XP if they come up, and I admire the structure of A Time of War that it can seemlessly handle that) you need to be aware of the effect they will have on your party.

First, the math. The description of Fast Learner says that it provides a 10% discount on skill costs. That's something of a misprint -- the table on page 85 clearly shows a 20% cost savings. Slow Learner does the same in reverse. There's no compiled errata for A Time of War, but the word from Catalyst is that the table is correct and the skill description is wrong. Fast Learner costs 300 XP, while Slow Learner rebates 300 XP. The practical upshot of those two bits of information can be used to calculate that a character that spends more than 1,500 XP on skills can take Fast Learner for "free", while a character that takes less than 1,500 XP in skills might be well-served by the 300 XP granted by Slow Learner, presuming that they did not intend to apply XP past 1,500 to skills over the course of their campaign.

For reference, I have data at hand for three of my five players (the other two haven't turned in final drafts of their characters), and they are spending 2402 (Cameron), 1846 (Morgan), and 3008 (Henry) XP on Skill Points. Morgan saves about 160 XP, Henry about 400 XP.

Interestingly, Cameron isn't taking Fast Learner. Even after having the mathematics explained (It would free up some 180 XP on his character), he was still uninterested in the Trait for roleplaying purposes. The reasons for this have to do with the various different playstyles and goals my players bring to the table, and I'll cover that in another post.

The danger I hear repeated over and over again with regards to Fast Learner is that it sets the pace of the campaign -- if one player has Fast Learner, everybody else needs it just to keep up with the power curve. I disagree. I believe that Fast Learner is helpful for skill-based characters, but less so for characters who spend most of their XP on Traits and Attributes. Also, as mentioned before, A Time of War, as the games before it, are a fairly low-XP-granting system. Rather than speculate, let me do some math on how much XP I expect my characters to earn.

Going off the guidelines on page 332, I can expect a character to earn 14 or so XP per session, on average. In addition, I am implementing an after-action report system that should grant 10 more per session, I can envision each character getting 24 XP per session. Anticipating the campaign runs a bit long (20 sessions), we can expect each player to get 480 XP over the course of the entire campaign from session experience.

In addition, and because this game is expected to take a decade in-universe, we'll be using the Downtime XP rules (p 334). The Downtime XP rules are tricky, because the depend on three major factors: the character's intelligence, the character's Fast Learner/Slow Learner Trait, and the character's career.

I only expect the Resistance members, Anthony and Cameron, to get the 2x bonus from being able to pursue their careers while in the campaign. Averaging the roll values, we can expect Anthony and Cameron to get 0.61 and 1.33 XP per month, respectively, from practicing their careers.

Projecting for each character over the course of the campaign, we can calculate the following expected downtime earnings per month:

Player	Points From INT	Points from Career	Monthly Points
Cameron	3	1.33	4.33
Anthony	7	0.61	7.61
Morgan	4	0.00	4
Henry	5	0.00	5
Bert	4	0.00	4

The game is expected to run from December 3067 to August of 3078, 128 months. Downtime XP for the players thus comes out to: 974 (Anthony), 640 (Henry), 554 (Cameron), and 512 (Morgan and Bert).

This makes the campaign somewhat interesting in that the bulk of the XP earned will be downtime XP, roughly doubling (or in Anthony's case, tripling) the amount earned from the previous session. I'm debating whether I should amend these rules to try to bring the players closer in line with each other, or let the amounts stand.

Training is another item I'll have to manage, and provides even more of a complication in data management to properly execute, as it requires multiple character to be acting in concert on the intersession timescale. That, however, is a post for another day.

Location, Location, Location

As mentioned before, the party for Ten Years on Terra starts in two pieces -- the elements of the 394th off-world, and the resistance members on-world. As such, I gave the Anthony and Cameron, the two resistance fighters, the opportunity to decide where they would like to live, and by extension, where the campaign's home base is. The drop pattern of the 394th covered much of the United States, which is convenient, since all the players are Americans, although universally from regions not included in the Case White landings. Anthony, however, lived in Colorado for a year and a half after college, so he thought the foot of the Rocky Mountains would be a good place. Cameron agreed, and now I have a rough site to be setting my adventure in.

The Rocky Mountains and associated foothills provide a solid location for a BattleTech campaign, if for no other reason than BattleMechs are well-suited to operations in the rather heavily broken terrain. Under the rules of the game, a ledge rising twelve meters over thirty is a very minor obstacle for a BattleMech, but poses serious problems for ground vehicles. My landing party includes two 'Mechs and a VTOL, so they should be well-suited to the terrain for the few engagements they are in their original vehicles.

I am debating whether I want to set the party's home in a major city (Denver) or further out. A major reason for this is the sidebar on Jihad Hotspots Terra p. 111, which could cause something of a downer ending for the campaign, but also there are interesting challenges associated with a rural vs. urban environment, especially in terms of hiding major assets. In the backwoods, you can trust cover of night and sheer obscurity of location to cover the movements of, say, a BattleMech, but nobody's going to miss a Warhammer striding down Seventh Avenue. The latter becomes an exercise in disguising the unit (made easier by the fact that TerraSec and the Word of Blake militia both field 'Mechs that might patrol civilian areas), but it is still an exercise in brazen audacity.

I am also considering the missions I want the players to be running. I'm taking a bit of inspiration from the quest hub system in modern computer roleplaying games, providing the resistance team with the first three sites that will provide reasonable objectives to the group's capabilities at the start of the game, and provide both equipment to replace that gear the landing party lost and clues to where else they might find resistance objectives within their grasp. The goal is give them some choices in what they do, while not requiring me as the GM to be prepared for any random task they decide to go on. This also allows me to provide them with detailed intelligence on their objectives at the end of a game session, to give them a week or two to plan their mission before we run it in-session.

In a city environment, it is simple to provide them with a location and means to get there: give them a cross-street and lay out the building they'll be working in. Outside a city I need to do the building as well, but I also need to create the surrounding terrain, which is not so very difficult, but provides more challenges in terms of how they get there and more options if they have access to vehicle-scale assets. There's also the option of a suburban environment, but that seems to be more the worst of both worlds -- difficult to hide in, inconvenient to urban targets.

At time of writing, I haven't decided which way to go. I'm leaning rural based on Anthony's and Cameron's character concepts, and really, I don't have to decide until fairly late in the process (so long as I have a decision by the first session of the resistance party.) In cases like this, I generally solicit player input, which seems especially good in this case, and I'll also see what the printed material on Terra has to say.

Auditing Character Sheets: Not As Easy As It Sounds

Because the character creation process in A Time of War is such a math-intensive activity, and its easy to end up double-counting costs or bonuses, I set up a spreadsheet to audit my players. I based it on the principle of double-entry accounting, which I was already familiar with from other parts of my life. That was a mistake, and wildly overcomplicated, and I want to take a moment to touch on what I did wrong and how I'm doing it correctly now to prevent others from falling into this particular trap.

My issue was I presumed that the cost of a Life Path was equal to the number of XP it gave out. I spot checked the major affiliations we were using and a few Life Paths in Stages 1-4, and that seemed to be correct. The major glitch was Fields -- a Field adds six points per skill to the player's XP pool when they take it, so it is critical that you add those points to the player's XP budget when you audit them.

The second tripping point is the optimization, and accounting for the points that drop off of skills, traits, and attributes and get returned to the XP pool. You need to be very careful how to handle these points. They've already been counted in the budget by the original XP allocation and the field discounts. There are two ways to handle these points, but I found by far the easiest way is to just add them back into the available XP pool, which doesn't change the XP budget by double-adding and double-subtracting them at audit-time (although you'll need to do that during character creation.)

To properly calculate a character's Total XP Pool, you need to know two pieces of information:

1) How old that character is (represented as Age below.)

2) How many skills were in fields that characters has taken (represented as Fieldskills below.)

The total XP pool, and therefore budget, of a character is:

XP Pool = 5000 + (100 * (Age - 21)) + (6 * Fieldskills)

Unless that character is Clan, in which case:

XP Pool = 5000 + (100 * (Age - 18)) + (6 * Fieldskills)

NOTE: This is the XP Pool before Aging XP is applied (from the Aging Table on AToW p. 333.) If the character has already applied the Aging effects before you audit the sheet, add the appropriate XP modifier to their XP Pool.

Now, you have the character's true XP budget. Simply add up all the XP applied to all traits, skills, and attributes, and make sure the value equals the budget. Remember that in A Time of War, characters are not allowed to bank XP, or carry it in an abstract pool, so every XP must be accounted for somewhere in the skills, traits, or attributes of the player, even if that places one of those values between levels.

To help the auditing process, you can also have your players report the following values during their character creation process that allows you to make sure they're still on track. This helps immensely if you're managing a half-dozen players simultaneously creating characters at the same table at the same time:

At character concept, have them give an age. This might not stick, but it gives them an initial pool to work with, and as long as they land near it, it shouldn't be an issue. It also gives them some idea of how many life paths they have time for. Their starting XP Pool should be 5000 + (100 * (Age-21)) (Non-Clan) or 5000 + (100 * (Age-18)) (Clan).

Next, have them check in at the end of Stage 3. This is where they should have taken all the fields they're going to take. Get them to count up all the skills that were affected by fields (remember if the same skill is found in two different fields, it counts twice!), and add six times that number to their XP pool.

When they've finished all Life Paths and come to the Optimization step of character creation, have them report the combined cost of their life paths and the number of fall-off points that they've been rebated. This is important, because those points are getting credited back to the XP pool, along with all the other left over points, to be spent on changing skills, traits, and attributes. Note that this is when the Fast Learner and Slow Learner traits make optimization math complicated, but that's a whole different blog entry.

If you subtract the cost of all their life paths (including the field costs) from the budget you had at the end of Stage 3, the add back the number of points rebated by Optimization, you get the total number of discretionary points the player has to work with. If they make sure that they subtract from this pool all their elective skills, traits, and attributes, then when they are done, they should have zero points left, and the character should pass audit.

When you're done, you just need to get from each player the list of skills, traits, and attributes with their associated age and how many times each skill was included in a field, and simply make sure the XP Available equals the XP Spent. If so, the character is good to go.

Assuming the attributes are in the legal range, and the vehicle choices are valid for the character's affiliation and traits, the Enemies and Connected traits are lined up, Wealth has been spent or entered onto the sheet, Extra Income has a source that's reasonable, and a laundry list of other things, but I'm already up to 947 words...

Vehicle Selection

Right now my party is trying to work out what vehicles they each want to have for the game. Bert and Morgan are taking 'Mechs of different flavors, but Henry's character doesn't have the points available to be a 'Mech Pilot, so he's going down a different road: he's getting himself a VTOL. The selection of ComStar VTOLs in 3067 are fairly limited, so I thought I'd talk about his choices a bit today.

Henry is a new player, so I want to make sure he has a good time in the first few sessions and doesn't get too hung up in the mechanical details of the game, or get himself killed immediately. That seems to make helicopters a terrible idea, but experience with the game system has shown me that as combat vehicles go, VTOL's are surprisingly resilient. The big unique rule that distinguishes a VTOL from other combat vehicles is its rotor. On all three hit location tables (Front, Side, and Rear), there's a bit over a 30% chance that the rotor will be hit. This seems like a terrible thing at first; the rotor even on the scariest gunship has 2 armor and 3 structure, usually less. The rotor, however, has a special rule associated with it; all damage applied to it is divided by ten, round up. When a Heavy Gauss slug that would otherwise wreck the craft comes crashing through the Rotor, it only takes 3 damage rather than 25.

Because of the 1-damage minimum, the solution to this particular tactical problem is to fire a bunch of low-damage weapons at the VTOL, but from a GM perspective, they're great -- I can fire a big, scary gun at this thing, and as long as it isn't capable of piercing the body of the craft and destroying it conventionally (by destruction of internal structure), I can give the impression of real risk to the player's character without actually endangering them greatly. This is especially important for players new to the system -- having their character killed off in the first session or two causes many a player to just drop the system, especially on in which character creation takes as long as A Time of War.

So let's talk gunship selection. Henry's primary character concept is a special ops character -- he's got a +7 in Martial Arts, quite an investment, but he's a green 'chopper pilot (Gunnery 4/Piloting 7). With piloting that low, nobody's going to want to be his passenger. He's enamored of ECM and TAG from the flavor text, but in actual game play, neither of those produce the flashy or impressive damage that wins players to the game. ECM cancels the effects of Active Probes, Artemis FCS, Narc Beacons, and potentially break C3 and C3i networks, all of which are useful, but without experiencing the effects of those systems, breaking them feels empty. TAG is a little better; you're clearly giving another player or NPC a bonus on their rolls, but still, it is only a modifier (usually in the -2 to-hit range) on another attack. Again, very tactically useful, but unless you have aerospace fighters overhead dropping laser-guided ordnance, it won't have the "BOOM" effect it feels like it should from the movies. Semi-guided LRM's just don't pack the punch in 3067 they did in 3025 (or, I suppose I should say, they pack the same punch, but armor has gotten a lot thicker.)

So if I want to give my newbie player a long-range 'Mech-busting capability (without the actual Mechbuster aircraft) I want something with serious power behind it. In Battletech, that device comes in two flavors: the Gauss Rifle and the ER PPC. There's no ComStar-available (or really, any except for an obscure variant of the Ripper) VTOL-mounted PPC in the game, but there are two models that bring Gauss Goodness aloft.

The more conventional choice is the 3058 Yellow Jacket Gunship, essentially a VTOL body wrapped around a Gauss Rifle. Very simple, very straight-forward. Fast enough to outpace anything it can't one-shot, it would allow Henry's character to sit back and take shots while the more experienced players were mixing it up on the ground. It is also unlikely to chew through its ammo reserve in a single engagement, but doesn't carry so much that if it survives the Case White landings, it will be unbalancing to the rest of the campaign.

The other choice is the 3060 Hawk Moth Gunship, essentially a smaller version of the Yellow Jacket. The Hawk Moth is a VTOL wrapped around a Light Gauss Rifle. It comes in two versions: the base with a 32-round magazine, and the uparmored variant with a 16-round magazine. The Hawk Moth is also about 33% faster than the Yellow Jacket, but even its more rugged variant has considerably less armor.

I think either of these would make a fine vehicle for him, so I sent him a quick summary of these two, along with the Sprint and Mantis Light Attack VTOL (the only available VTOL-mounted TAG and ECM in ComStar's 3067 inventory, respectively) to help him make his vehicle choice. As of this writing he is still deciding, but now he, as a new player, has only four choices to weigh instead of wading straight into the source material to locate a helicopter on his own.

Building the Enemy

I have a few rules of thumb about constructing BattleTech engagements when I have PC's sitting in the cockpit. Generally, the enemy force is larger, but not equipped to deal with the particular unit combination the PC's have (for instance, if the party is all lightly armored, the opposing force won't have any pulse lasers or other hit-number-reducers, if party is all thick-armor 'Mechs, the enemy won't have any through-armor crits weapons, etc.) The result is usually a punch-up that make the battle feel like a real threat, but rarely takes such a statistical excursion as to place the PC's in real danger.

There are a few always-rules, as well. No long-range head cappers, like the Gauss Rifle or the Clan ER PPC. AC-20's I feel like they can dance around, and headshots and even cockpit shots are going to happen, but at least the players can mitigate those with tactics. I roll on the table, so I can't take the gloves off or handwave an obvious cockpit critical, so I try to avoid those as much as possible.

In the beginning of this campaign, the enemy is very easy to place: the 9th WoB Militia, and probably elements of the 10th. The Blake Documents gives very convenient Random Unit Assignment tables for both groups, and with some idea of what restrictions I need to place and the Master Unit Lister - Battle Values to plug any gaps in the formation, I have great confidence I can build the primary antagonists for Sessions 3 and 4, and put up a good fight for the PC's without worrying too much about killing a PC outright.

The latter part is trickier: the primary villain when you're resistance on Terra is TerraSec, about whom very little is written in canon. They field BattleMechs, but they are primarily a law-enforcement agency, and do not have a convenient affiliation code that I can reference to find out what equipment they might be using, so mid-game vehicle encounters are going to require considerable research to set up. Giving TerraSec military-grade hardware seems overkill, even in the post-Case White world, but there exists precious little law-enforcement canon material in the Technical Readouts. This may require some unit construction on my part, but at least I have a few weeks to deal with the question.

Character Concepts

It happens in every game -- a player get their hands on the basebook, or some expansion book, and fixates on some device or ability at the mechanical margins of the system. They begin to create an entire character based upon this one item or capability, and by the time they get to running it past you, they are very invested in this idea that simply doesn't fit in your campaign.

This is a problem I've had as long as I've been a GM, and I see it as one of the major challenges I keep encountering. In the business world, we have a concept called "expectation management", i.e., making sure that everybody is expecting roughly the same thing to happen. When I fail to properly manage the expectations of my players, I end up with somebody coming to me with, to paraphrase the excellent Classic BattleTech Companion, an ER Pulse Ultra Rotary Heavy Naval Gauss Cannon.

Now, as a GM, I hate saying "No" to my players. I feel like if I'm in a situation where I'm flat-out saying "No, you can't do that," I've done something wrong as a GM. Even if I'm right, either I didn't adequately explain my vision of the rules, or the setting, or some other criteria that makes it obvious to me this won't work, but didn't make it obvious to my player. So let's talk about what happened here.

Let's start with Bert. Bert has some knowledge of the history of interactions between ComStar and the Word of Blake since Operation Odysseus (the Word of Blake capture of Terra in 3058) and Case White. His first question, knowing he was going to be playing ComStar, was "Can I be a Manei Domini?" My first reaction was an unqualified No, for several different reasons of plot, timeline, and sanity. On further reflection, my answer was still no. Close the book.

Next, Cameron, who was bouncing some ideas around, came to me. His character concept as a resistance fighter was to be a veterinarian who would serve as the team's doctor once they got ground-side. I thought this was a great idea. After a bit of flipping through the book, and doing some life path, he discovered the branth. He immediately asked for one as a pet. I vaguely recalled the name, so I flipped to the appropriate page.

The first sentence of the entry on the branth (AToW, p.243) reads:

Resembling the mythical flying dragon of human lore, the branth has appealed to the imagination since its discovery on the Marik world of Lopez.

Now, Cameron is new to the system and I don't want to discourage him, but giving him a pet dragon the size of a horse that breaths not only poison, but poison acid, was not something I was interested in starting the party out with. I pointed out a few issues in the rules text, such as their immune issues off their native world, and suggested that this was something he studied and had expertise in, but wasn't viable for him to personally own. This seemed to satisfy him, and we agreed that his character did his post-grad work on branths, but doesn't have ready access to one on Terra.

About this time, Bert came back to me and flipped A Time of War to page 317, where he excitedly showed me the Elective Myomer Implant (Full Body), a Capellan-only option that boosted his attributes by a net of about 500XP (+2 STR, +1 RFL,-1 CHA, Toughness (3 TP).) I had already handed him a flat-out "No" earlier, so I wanted to find a way to make this work without giving another straight No. The implant was Capellan-only, and he was a Terran Belter, so I had grounds to just say no, but I wanted to try to meet him halfway so that he'd know I wasn't just shooting him down because he wasn't conforming to some vision I had. I offered him the upgrade for the XP cost, less the Trait Gremlins, which he would also take. The particular way in which Gremlins interacts with Myomer Implants introduces the possibility of his character simply locking up during a mission and suddenly becoming a major liability and raising a serious conversation among the PC's over whether the affected character should be left behind to be captured or killed rather than risking the whole team to extract them. Bert realized that was a very poor situation to put himself or the team in, and didn't want to eat the 500XP on an already XP-strapped character, so he elected to forego the implants.

Finally, Morgan came to me with his Custom Vehicle Battle Armor Suit. The suit itself wasn't that impressive -- Mimetic armor based off pre-FCCW ComStar tech, but it was enough that if it survived the Case White landings, it would be fieldable and unstoppable to anything other than more battle armor at the RPG level, which would mean I would need to be sure to destroy it during the Case White landing. The problem with Battle Armor is that its pilot survivability is very low -- if I destroyed the suit in the tactical game, Morgan's character's chance of survival would be very low, indeed. Morgan is a veteran player, so I explained this concern to him fairly directly, and that if he ran with this idea, he'd have to be prepared to be rolling up a new character for Session 4. I had no doubt that he might do such a thing, because he historically has run crazy character concepts and shrugged it off if catastrophic things happen to them, but in this case he decided the drop the battle armor in favor of a more traditional and protective JR7-K Jenner.

So these were three very different examples of how I worked with my players during character creation to set their expectations to a certain level, minimize the number of things they brought to the table that would serious interfere with my general plan for the campaign, and got them the plot hooks they want. As a GM I now have a new plot challenge, too: How am I going to give Cameron an opportunity to use his backstory branth skills? Should be an exciting (and potentially hilarious) session.

Character Creation

On Sunday, we had our first Character Creation session. Everybody but Anthony made it, so we had a good crowd. One thing I did before running this game was buy six more copies of A Time of War, an investment that paid dividends during Character Creation. Let's talk about what worked and what didn't.

The first thing I noticed about A Time of War is that it has no separate character worksheet the way MechWarrior 3rd Edition did. We briefly considered using the character record sheets themselves as worksheets, but that was obviously going to become an unmanageable mess very quickly. Every grabbed some blank paper and started compiling their life paths on those. Very soon, though everybody was plugging away on laptops into spreadsheets.

My players largely agree that the new character creation system is both extremely elegant, in that everything is expressed clearly in XP and can be molded through XP into interesting delineations of what are normally boolean values (-25 Illiterate for example, doesn't represent you're actually illiterate, but you're inclined that way if later life choices push you down that road), but equally unwieldy as the lists of skills, traits, and attributes (both values and pre-reqs) quickly grew to consume multiple columns of number printed in small, neat letters on their scrap paper. I took it upon myself to create an audit tool to make sure everybody's XP actually added up, and I was glad I did -- nobody got their totals right on the first pass.

The character creation process took five hours, and only two of the five characters were really "Ready to Play" at the end of that session. Amusingly, Cameron, the player with the least experience, was done first. He created a purely civilian character, and used Optimization to flesh out the skills he was likely to find useful in the campaign. The Life Path system handed him a few surprises as he created his Veterinarian, such as Advanced-Tier Computers (Bert, a physics grad student, simply nodded at this and said, "Yep, grad school does that.")

The big win we got out of the session was getting everybody almost everybody onto a Google Spreadsheet so we could quickly share the sheets back and forth, and I could copy and paste their Skill, Trait, and Attribute values into my audit spreadsheet and find any issues they might have. In retropect, we should've done that from the outset. A few things took a while to figure out (Attribute Link Modifiers, for example, are referred to in numerous places, but the actual table to find out what they are is in the second section of the Action Check Modifiers table on page 41 of A Time of War.)

As has historically been an issue in MechWarrior, the Skills section on the Character Record Sheet doesn't have enough entries for characters the Life Path System produces, especially if those character elect to be older than the recommended starting age of 21. Both Bert and Henry have characters in their late 30's, and have co-opted sections on the back of the sheet to continue their lists. Which reminds me, the Personal Data block is mysteriously devoid of an Age field, but I suppose Extra covers that. I may end up adjusting the Character Record Sheet to more appropriately handle the large number of Skills and Traits my players seem to be accumulating. I suspect if I do so, there will be an article here about it.

This covered the blocking-and-tackling of the mechanics of Character Creation. Tomorrow I'll talk more about fielding the more... creative character concepts, and how I handled those.

Players

There are five players currently enrolled in this game. I think it worthwhile for the reader to have some idea of who they are, so you have an idea of the diversity of players I'm running with. I'm afraid I'll have to use pseudonyms to protect my player's privacy as best I can while still being able to distinguish them from their characters.

One of these players, we'll call him Morgan, has been in every MechWarrior campaign I've ever run except for the fifth. He's at least as well versed in the history of the universe as I am, and has read many more of the novels than I have (although I think I'm ahead of him on the Sourcebooks.) Fortunately, he understands that the moment game starts canon becomes, if not expendable, at least something that won't stand in the way of the players having a good time. He tends to play fairly absurd character concepts, but plays them straight and somehow manages to make them fit. He's by far the strongest MechWarrior and BattleTech player in the group, and one I can trust to pick up on subtle plot developments and explain them to the rest of the playerbase.

The next player in the primary party, we'll call him Bert, has never played MechWarrior on a table before, but has played BattleTech, BattleForce, and is a big fan of the various software incarnations of the franchise. He is by far the most excited person for this campaign to be running, and often needs to be reigned in a bit when he gets going on a topic, and starts webbing out to other topics in a rant that threatens to consume hours if unchecked. Fortunately, he realizes he does this and stops as soon as I say something gentle.

The final current player in the primary party, Henry, has never played MechWarrior or BattleTech before in any capacity, and is in this game largely because it is now replacing the D&D4E game I was running prior to this. He is rolling with the new system, and largely has to go on historically my 10-minute briefing on the history of the Inner Sphere as most relates to the game I plan to run, and the introduction in the A Time of War book. The more-or-less 20th century feel of the majority of the universe has helped greatly with his gaining a rapid intuitive understanding of the system.

In the "ground party", i.e., the resistance, there are two current players. The first, I'll call Cameron, is very similar to Henry -- he has almost no experience with the universe at all. He is, however, an outstanding roleplayer, and one I can trust to make sure the non-combat parts of the plot and story get explored in the level they need to be. He is an actor, and thrives both on playing his character and driving the story forward. He is also playing a non-tactical combatant (he has only personal combat skills, and little to speak of there.)

The final player, Anthony, has also been in all but the fifth of my campaigns. He is also much less enthralled by the 'Mech-scale combat portion of the game, but finds the logistics and coordination part of the game to be very fun and interesting. Because of that, I placed him in the ground party that's entering the game later (which also helps his schedule over the next few weeks) and brings him in about the time the main party's 'Mechs and Vehicles are degrading past effective use and the campaign really becomes about infiltration, resistance, and more sneaky intelligence-like games.

So that's the who of this game. Tomorrow, we'll talk Character Creation.

A Bit of Background About Me

I've been playing BattleTech since middle school, about the time the Clan Invasion arc started (must've been about 1995 or thereabouts.) I'm a student of naval history, and so I got wrapped up pretty tightly in the first version of BattleSpace, was disillusioned with AeroTech 2, and came back with Strategic Operations. I'm a big fan of the plot and the universe, but for some reason the novels have never really gripped me. I've probably spent nearly as many hours tracing through the sourcebooks for plot clues as I have actually playing.

I've run four games of MechWarrior 3rd Edition. The first two had (roughly) the same party. The first set in 3063 and was something of a planet-hopping murder mystery game with exceptionally little combat, except for a few sessions. The second took place in 3064 on a tiny low-population world on the edge of the Lyran Periphery, and had the genecaste in it. I have since repented.

The third game took place in December of 3067 over Tharkad. The party ended the campaign stranded under the Word of Blake blockade planet-side, although they did deal the Wobbies a few black eyes while they were there. The fourth and final game was set during the height of the Star League, as a massive epic-scale game with each character either the captain or the CAG of a WarShip (this was shortly after TRO3057R was released.) That game was interesting, and I'll likely refer to it in the future, but suffice it to say, each player's cheat-sheet was a 40-50 page bound booklet printed at Kinko's.

Professionally, I work in databases. I'm one of those guys who has a +8 or +9 in Computers/Databases, and I fly around the world configuring systems for major corporations. As with most people (I think) my job and my hobbies tend to merge. I use computers to keep track of my RPG information, a lot. Databases full of character information, programs to generate and cross-reference information to make sure I'm getting the details of the campaign right, that sort of thing. I may post some of the more portable work that I do here for people to access, but unfortunately, a great deal of it leverages programs and software I don't expect your average user to have available.

Finally, I am an exceptionally poor fiction author. I make no promises or warranties about the quality of the story lines I kick out, but after the pass through the player's filter, I hope that they are much more interesting.

Weeks Away

This is a blog that I'm keeping to retain and share the adventures and lessons learned from a BattleTech: A Time of War campaign I'm running in a few weeks. I'm writing because I recognize that first, there are precious few running accounts of games from the Game Master's side of the table (I looked for them before I started running this game), and second, I find that writing these sorts of actions both cause me to realize things that I might not have if I didn't try to explain the ideas to somebody else (no matter how hypothetical that person might be.) I may also use a run-on sentence now and again. You'll have to forgive me -- I went to engineering school.

In a few weeks I'll be launching Ten Years on Terra, my first game in the A Time of War (MechWarrior 4e) rules set. I have five players now, and I'm looking to pick up a sixth from my local group of gamers. The premise of the story line (that the players know at this point) is that the bulk of the party is playing elements of the ComStar 394th, landing on Terra during Case White in March of 3068. Of course, Case White goes sideways, and they are one of the few groups to make planetfall. The current plan calls for two sessions of "Exercises" in the final days of 3067 and early 3068, Case White to happen in the third session, possibly one more session of ground combat with the surviving elements of the 394th as they get gr0und up by the WoB 9th and 10th, and then the ComStar party elements and whatever resources they have left being rescued by the other party members, who are on-planet resistance. After that, the game settles into about one game session per year (i.e., the 3069 session, the 3070 session, etc.) gradually transitioning the party from a "hiding" to a "resisting" to finally becoming a forward party of the 3078 landings, paving the road for Devlin and Victor. The final few sessions will be supporting the Coalition landings, and wrapping up any plot lines that fell out. The entire campaign is expected to run 15-20 three-hour sessions.

That's the plan, anyways...