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.
What use are you planning to make of the Tactical Addendum in A Time of War?
ReplyDeleteThe exact delineation between what gets handled in Total Warfare and what gets handled in A Time of War's Tactical Addendum is largely going to depend on what the unit composition is on the ground. I really prefer TW or vanilla ATOW, if only because executing a round of combat in A Time of War with the Tactical Addendum using more than one vehicle takes a prohibitively long time, even with players who are very comfortable and well-versed in the system. I expect to only be using the Tactical Addendum in circumstances where one character has brought a vehicle (or 'Mech) that they're using to support the party; otherwise they slow down the tactical pace of ATOW combat a bit more than I like at my table.
ReplyDeleteThat said, Bert is taking select SPA's, being a 41-year-old veteran of Tukayyid, but for reasons that will become obvious in a post next week, I expect to have combat broken into "Total Warfare" and "A Time of War" pretty cleanly.