One problem I had during Session 12's combat was sorting out the appropriate modifiers for the vehicle's turret on the fly. Ultimately, I worked off my GM screen's Combat Modifiers table, but that was clearly not meant for the job; I ended up winging it with the modifiers I could find in under 30 seconds. I'm certain I missed something. My first impulse in reaction to this was to put together another flowchart detailing how vehicular combat works, and given that my previous PDF's are some of the most popular entries on this blog, I may do that yet, but there's a deeper problem here that goes into how the rules in the new BattleTech core books are written as something between a design document and a treatment, especially in A Time of War. They are not laid out in a way to provide a GM or a player with a step-by-step method of executing an attack; they are more general than that.
The problem that made me realize this is the same problem I had the first day I started playing BattleTech 15 years ago; there's no easy way to verify that you've added all the appropriate modifiers to your roll. Certainly, A Time of War isn't unique in this problem. Anybody who has player a D&D boss battle, especially in 2nd Edition or 3.x, has a memory of a caster flipping through the rule book looking for that one modifier that's going to make the difference in a boss battle. It breaks flow. It snaps the player out of the moment and back into the minutiae of stats and searching for one line they thought they read somewhere about two thirds of the way through one of these sourcebooks...
Anyways, we've all been there. This is a non-trivial operational problem often glossed over in the rules with the words "determine the TN." I've occasionally tried to solve this problem with flowcharts, modifier grouping, or a number of other methods, but one of two things always happens: first, I end up with a lot of special-case scenarios that are as general as I can make them, but somehow real game situations always seem to fall somewhere in the middle, and the end-all list of situations ends up becoming just another tool of approximation. Second, I can get the problem down to a bunch of categories ("select the range modifier", "select the target size modifier", "weather", etc.) but this is how the book does it, and like the book, I always end up with a worrisomely long list of "Miscellaneous" modifiers, usually tied to specific pieces of equipment that have an asterisk in one of their fields on the Equipment tables (I'm looking at you, missiles.)
Vehicular combat again threw this issue into sharp relief because it had me jumping between A Time of War and Total Warfare. I understand why this is; to avoid reprinting rules and to make sure that the core rulebooks sell each other, but it greatly exacerbates the problems of trying to find all the modifiers that apply to a particular roll.
Unfortunately, this issue is more of a statement of a problem than a proposed solution; the kind of statement that would get me kicked out of boss' office. I've tried a number of different ways of getting around this problems and all of them come up short. I'm sure there is a way to do it, because there are a finite number of modifiers in A Time of War, even in the Tactical Addendum, but giving a player or GM confidence that they've found them all quickly and efficiently has thus far eluded this game, and that needs to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment