[Battletech] Want to GM a Campaign again.

kaliyama

Hello:
I'm interested in GM'ing something again for the forum. We had a good first run of a marik civil war campaign, but it petered out as it was too hard to get the dozen+ people to show up at the same time, on time, reliably. My preferences and time availability mean i'm more inclined to want to run a strategic campaign that is light on RP, but with elements of choice for players. However, I'm really uncertain as to the format and approach we should take. Ideally I'd like to be able to run it as a players vs. players campaign where I handle double-blind movement and large-scale events but don't have to run a lot of fights. It also lets more people play if both sides are run by players.

A few targeted questions:

1) Amount of units each player should control. I'm thinking the total engagement scale will be a combined arms battalion for each side. About a company of playable units for each side - so I can run it where each player has command of just one mech (up to 24 players), or over a lance (up to 6 players total). The one-player one-mech approach is more RPG-ish, and makes games more exciting to watch. It also means that players will be watching a lot more because games will take longer to finish and exponentially longer to get set up. Is two mechs for each person a good compromise?

2) Campaign format. If I make things very open-ended (a double-blind planetary map with some objectives), I have some concerns. It can mean a lot of strategic turns where nothing happens. It also means, depending on how I structure it, that each team will be forced to patrol the entire map with their battalion as a roving gank squad. The more freedom the campaign offers at the strategic level to make game-affecting decisions about force allocation and objective priorities, the more it opens up the possibility that we will see uneven fights in megamek due to each sides' strategic decision-making. That's OK, i'm just trying to think about the optimal game experience for each player.

3) Solaris? Another option i'm thinking about is a Solaris arena season. Lots of appeal to this - each player gets a mech or a lance, many factions can be represented, it can handle any number of players representing different stables, and each week offers a rotating fight along with the ability to track resources over a campaign. The problem is that in this format, attrition inevitably takes players out of the rotation due to real life problems, and it's much easier to have someone sub in for a week if it's a simple red vs. blue setup than a league. We end up mid-season with 75% of games played or whatever because players make games work intermittently. I also am less enthusiastic about this b/c the strategic side is less exciting for me as a GM, but I could find ways to make it neat, I suppose.

Any other feedback or ideas (or interest in playing) is appreciated.

MegaMek

I personally like the "one mech per person" deal, but would be fine with up to a lance. Gotta remember tho, what we save in set-up time (if anything) for using lances with less players, we lose in game where people have to figure out where they want that lance to go (not just an individual mech).

Solaris could work nicely. Would probably appeal to a wider group of players, would be exciting. I understand your desire to have more of an overarching goal or story tho. Personally, I would go either way.

Making the campaign as open-ended as you apparently wanted to last time seems kinda hard to to online where people probably don't want to devote so much time. I think that if you want to go that route, you're gonna have to do something simpler.

kaliyama

MegaMek wrote:

I personally like the "one mech per person" deal, but would be fine with up to a lance. Gotta remember tho, what we save in set-up time (if anything) for using lances with less players, we lose in game where people have to figure out where they want that lance to go (not just an individual mech).

Solaris could work nicely. Would probably appeal to a wider group of players, would be exciting. I understand your desire to have more of an overarching goal or story tho. Personally, I would go either way.

Making the campaign as open-ended as you apparently wanted to last time seems kinda hard to to online where people probably don't want to devote so much time. I think that if you want to go that route, you're gonna have to do something simpler.

Thanks for responding. It would likely be one player for each side making moves on a strategic map. I think doable, but point well taken that requiring a lot of upkeep each turn would be problematic.

MegaMek

I also want to point out that I had a blast with the last campaign, and if/when you get another up and running, I would love to participate

DaMoonRulz

I would like to participate but I've never played the tabletop game before. The rules are accessible online, right?


What about everyone controls their own mech on Solaris and it's a league with different types of matches? One match could be FFA, another could be two person teams, or even one lance versus another. And to make it more Gladiatorial we could have two groups re-enact a famous battle (one house vs another, or a clan vs IS battle)

MegaMek

The basic version of the rules can be found, free of charge, here.

precisionk

I'd be interested in participating. Never played the tabletop, but did read the books quite a bit. What is the time commitment?

Morkath

I prefer the one mech per player route myself, makes it more personal and you are less likely to do stupid shit with your mech.
I would be down for playing depending on when the games were.

Enigma435

If such a thing gets going I'd definitely be into playing.

MegaMek

Morkath wrote:

I prefer the one mech per player route myself, makes it more personal and you are less likely to do stupid shit with your mech.
I would be down for playing depending on when the games were.

Also changes group dynamics a bit. If every mech in a lance is a unique player, there's more room for RP, people might not get along, might not follow orders or act in the interests of the whole, etc. Much more exciting to me.

RiemannLives

I really didn't care for the one mech per player thing. At least using the tabletop rules for BT. Maybe if this was using an actual RPG system that would work. But the assumptions of the bt tabletop game just don't mesh well with the style of play that was aimed at last time.

If nothing else, sitting there while 12+ people played through even a single phase of a single turn was pretty bad.

What would be ideal from my point of view would be a campaign that provided a framework for people to play normal(ish) scale games of battletech (eg: usually 2 players, maybe more on occasion, with somewhere between a lance and a reinforced company) that affected the larger game in some way.

edit: a big problem with "one player per mech" is the nature of the game is that if the battle is even close to fair then casulties are going to be extraordinarily high. It doesn't matter if you "do something stupid with your mech" or not. Odds are you are not going to survive a fight with equal battlevalue per side.

And if the fights aren't fair, then that's a whole different set of problems.

RiemannLives

DaMoonRulz wrote:

I would like to participate but I've never played the tabletop game before. The rules are accessible online, right?


What about everyone controls their own mech on Solaris and it's a league with different types of matches? One match could be FFA, another could be two person teams, or even one lance versus another. And to make it more Gladiatorial we could have two groups re-enact a famous battle (one house vs another, or a clan vs IS battle)

probably should put these in the OP:

Lore / setting / background for BT: http://bg.battletech.com/?page_id=23
Free PDF with the tabletop rules (doesn't include optional / advanced stuff but all the basics are there): http://bg.battletech.com/?page_id=27

edit: so beat'd. Didn't notice that megamek had already posted this

Morkath

RiemannLives wrote:

I really didn't care for the one mech per player thing. At least using the tabletop rules for BT. Maybe if this was using an actual RPG system that would work. But the assumptions of the bt tabletop game just don't mesh well with the style of play that was aimed at last time.

If nothing else, sitting there while 12+ people played through even a single phase of a single turn was pretty bad.

What would be ideal from my point of view would be a campaign that provided a framework for people to play normal(ish) scale games of battletech (eg: usually 2 players, maybe more on occasion, with somewhere between a lance and a reinforced company) that affected the larger game in some way.

edit: a big problem with "one player per mech" is the nature of the game is that if the battle is even close to fair then casulties are going to be extraordinarily high. It doesn't matter if you "do something stupid with your mech" or not. Odds are you are not going to survive a fight with equal battlevalue per side.

And if the fights aren't fair, then that's a whole different set of problems.

That's when you use tactics to make the fight unfair.
Distract the enemy force with your scouts while you pick off the rest one at a time, set up an ambush, etc.

Also as long as you eject you should be fine, shooting ejected pilots in BT is a nono, and should only be a problem against pirates or something.

Anon the Felon

I'd love to play!

I'm of the opinion that each person should have a single mech, and perhaps build a hanger that they can pick from in a fight. Maybe, if there's room for it, players could hire pilots for their extra mechs...but I'd say no more then 2 hire-able pilots (making it so a really well to do player could get up to 3 mechs on the field, but it would take great expense and risk...if one went down without ejecting you'd be losing a lot of your c-bills...).

I'm in favor of a campaign, gives everyone a story to work in and perhaps create a reason to fight beyond the obvious.

Regardless of how you want to do it, I'd really like to play.

kaliyama

I'm leaning towards assigning each player a lance, for a total of six players, and doing linked weekly scenarios with maybe a limited strategic map. I'll throw up some proposed rules later today. I think the people who want one-player one-mech are really hankering for an involved RPG campaign, which i'm unfortunately not in a position to provide.

susan

Did anything ever come of this? I just stumbled into the Battletech books and have been dying to play in a game.