Recently, I have begun a campaign of MechWarrior 2nd Edition with a couple of friends, combined with the Alpha Strike rules from Catalyst Game Labs and some random tables from various old Battletech Field Manuals. So far, it has been an eventful first few sessions that I'll be happy to relate - but first, some observations.
First, I will note that I am using the online role-playing game service Roll20 (roll20.net). This is an extremely robust system for gaming with custom tokens and all sorts of music with friends at a distance. It's not as kinetic or - I would argue - as easy to pickup and work with as actual miniatures, but it has definite advantages as far as space and resources go.
Two Lances, having just met at the Hiring Hall on Outreach, square off to determine who will be in charge of their newly formed Mercenary Command
In real life, there is a cost for every duplicate 'Mech you want to field, that means I will almost never have doubles of anything. Similarly, I only have so much table or floor space for laying out battlefields in reality. The virtual world has far larger limits where space and terrain are concerned as well. Roll20 also allows for fairly easy play with Probable Enemy Forces (by hiding unit information until LoS is established), meaning our Cooperative play is feasible with a minimum of off-table bookkeeping.
Roll20 has some downsides as well, though. The interface does not always allow for every option I would like - tracking Heat, Armour, Structure, Critical Hits etc are not nearly as easy as they are with printed Unit Cards, but printed Unit Cards are impractical when playing at a distance as far as sharing information goes. This can be mitigated by using the available status bars for tokens, but takes a bit of work. Additionally, where it comes to laying out terrain in large amounts, the slight lag in the site both in terms of controls and the site's likely not having been designed for large numbers of tokens makes it frustrating to make large areas of terrain - so far, we have not had a battle on an area of a size that would really take advantage of the digital medium. I'm planning to try compensating for that by just using photos of my mapsheets from the tabletop in the future, but these do not quite line up properly when adjusted for the site, and their textures differ quite a bit, so tiling them may look somewhat incongruous. We will see!
The last mechanical factor I want to discuss is the MechWarrior 2nd edition character creation system. While I like the ideas of the Skill selection and academy packages, and I can see the "balancing" aspect of the priority system, we did not like what it did to our characters. Random character creation is a feature I like quite a bit, as taking away some control from the players can make for very interesting characters. This priority system, however, gives a large amount of control to the players, while simultaneously seriously limiting them. It seemed to us that the only way to get someone half-decent (even if they had attended a prestigious combat academy!) was for them to drive a Light 'Mech! By prioritising 'Mech in order to get an Assault or Heavy, they seriously compromised either their Attributes or Skills and condemned themselves to a 7ish+ target number (!), that would easily be compounded to a 10 or more when the enemy did literally anything to earn them some defensive modifiers.
Two Lances of the newly-formed Gunmetal Gladiators engage in a simulated exercise on Outreach against two Lances of AI-controlled opponents
Referencing the Alpha Strike Manual, a Target Number for Regular force soldiers should generally be about 4... 7 is the cutoff for absolute newbies, which we all agreed should not have been the case for Academy-trained MechWarriors! As such, we adjusted all Attribute points allocated to all characters up by 4. This objectively made them fairly overpowered from MechWarrior 2nd Edition standards, but at least made them worth playing in Battletech/Alpha Strike...
The other resources I have been using are No End In Sight and FiveCore, both by Nordic Weasel (FiveCore Company Commander has previously featured on this blog! https://darkageaaron.blogspot.com/2017/04/bledore-vs-sablenoir-skirmish-on.html ). The random tables and guidance for Solo Play AI behaviours, combined with some common sense and unguided rolls between decisions, mean that even though we are playing what should be a Game Mastered system, all three of us are participating as players. I am able to serve as a Pseudo-Game-Master while not compromising my own ability to play and be surprised by the events.
On to the game itself! Each player (3 of us) generated four characters, coming to a Lance each. Many of them were randomly generated, with everything from Priorities to 'Mech assignment rolled for, with a few items cherry-picked to taste.
This resulted in a lance composed of a Kuritan Baron, away from the Draconis Combine, and his entourage, one lance composed of the cast and producer of a 'Mech-based reality show from the Magistracy of Canopus aiming for stardom in real combat before hitting the Solaris VII arenas, and one lance (my own) composed of an unlanded Baronet from the Federated Commonwealth, a servant and two Knights, all undercover and on the run.
Our game takes place in June of 3063 (though we are not paying too much heed to authentic timelines), when all three Lances, with whatever Battlemechs they managed to filch or inherit, meet on the mercenary world of Outreach. The world of Outreach, granted to the Mercenary group Wolf's Dragoons after the Fourth Succession War and having only gained in renown after the invasion of the Clans, calls to any aspiring mercenary, and its multi-spired Hiring Hall offers the location for strangers or old friends to meet and form Mercenary Commands of their own in search of money or freedom.
(It's worth noting that the Field Manual: Mercenaries has some rather scathing statistics about the lifespan and salaries of most mercenaries - if we manage to stay solvent and survive more than a year, we will have beat the odds by far!)
Our characters come together in matches in the simulators, and ultimately the leader of the Drac Baron's entourage, Cat, pilot of a mighty Orion, is appointed leader of the newly-minted Gunmetal Gladiators!
Cat's Light and Medium 'Mechs, a Spider and a Trebuchet respectively, sweep around the holovid stars' Southern flank and bring down their camerawoman in her EW-equipped Raven. They will shortly cut apart the rest of the Lance - in the simulator of course!
Tune in next time for the next phase of their story - their first live-fire encounter with Capellan forces on Brighton!
