Hard Against the Wind

My experience with a hurricane this weekend has left me in the mood to think about weather effects in A Time of War. Pages 236 and 237 covers the mechanics of weather conditions, but they are pretty much exclusively focused on the combat effects said weather has; visibility, to-hit, and maneuvering penalties, mainly. The rules are quite summary and short, and provide little guidance on what kind of damage the weather might do to buildings and vehicles and what not. I expect a great deal of this vaguery is to allow the GM to have the weather do whatever he or she wants it to do, but what if you are, like me, a creatively bankrupt individual with a need for a major storm? It turns out, you take advantage of interconnected nature of the BattleTech games, and dig out your copy of Tactical Operations.

To mix my example cases in a hilarious way, let us suppose a particularly ambitious and terribly lost hurricane stumbles upon Clark's ranch in Colorado. Clark's home has previously been established as a light building for tactical purposes -- sturdily built, but still made mostly of wood. Per the Advanced Building Construction rules in Tactical Operations, the house would be considered a Standard Medium building, with a CF of 20 or so. There will be two major effects on the house -- wind and rain -- plus potentially the thread of lightning.

Wind effects are covered on page 61 of Tactical Operations. We're thinking of a major storm here, so let's use the wind type "Storm." In this case, the building takes 20 points of damage base every turn, after being scaled per the damage scaling rules on page 126 (x1, which reduces the damage not-at-all.)

Well, that's worrisome. By these rules, Clark's ranch house will collapse roughly 10 seconds (1 BattleTech-scale turn) after being exposed to sustained winds at that level. That's more the effect I would expect a tornado to have. Let's re-examine our choice for wind.

Strong Gale, the step down from "Storm", does 10 points of damage per turn to the house -- it doubles the building's survival time to a third of a minute, but still not exactly the effect I would want for my game.

Next is Moderate Gale, which produces no direct structure damage at all, and only applies a +1 piloting modifier to VTOLs. That sees like a particularly strong breeze. It seems the level of damage we're looking for isn't here. Curses. Let's look at rain.

Heavy Rain and Torrential Downpour are the two weather types that best exemplify what we're trying to accomplish. Again, these have combat effects (best to use the rules in A Time of War rather than to try to adapt the Tactical Operations rules) and the terrain effects here convert clear spaces into mud, and cause water hexes to become torrential. That's kind of cool -- I can see that adding a great deal of tactical ambiance if the party ever needs to defend the ranch house. It doesn't threaten the building itself, but makes it rather a haven in the storm.

The real risk to the house would be lightning strikes. The rules for lightning are on page 59 of Tactical Operations, but are somewhat confusing from a game design perspective. There is a 1 in 3 chance of 1D3 lightning bolts striking the ground every turn (10 seconds), in randomly determined squares. The practical upshot is that the larger the map you're using is, the less the risk of lightning is. A large lightning strike, however, could do as much as 15 points of damage to the house, though. Not something to be ignored.

The lesson for this particular post is that as I have stated before, BattleTech, and A Time of War, are not simulators, but games. The weather rules are clearly overbalanced to make sure that weather has an effect on the game in the timescales that 'Mech battles are fought in (often minutes.) I think the developers did the right thing in not laying out specific rules for weather effects in the A Time of War rules -- the weather is a dramatic effect used for narrative and plot progression, not as a major element of your mechanical gamespace. Unfortunately for me and those like me, it looks like if we want to use weather to threaten our party or create a sense of risk, we'll need to do it with creative language and perhaps a home-brewed rule or two. The Tactical Operations rules applied to the A Time of War scale will just kill your party dead.