BattleTech & Star Fleet Battles

What makes BattleTech and SFB so dang popular? SFB might only be accurately called a cult hit, but BattleTech is a veritable phenom. Clearly these two games have their differences. BattleTech lacks a hit TV show propping up its popularity and SFB's massive rulebook is its own worst enemy, scaring away potential players. But setting those things aside for the moment, these two games have a lot in common. And these commonalities are things that should be lauded.

One Trick Pony Resource Management

Both BattleTech and SFB focus on a single important resource. Cleaving unto its source material, Star Fleet Battles makes allocating your energy points a Big Effin Deal. Do you power all your weapons, move fast, or reinforce your shields? Most SFB vessels can't do all three at the same time. BattleTech is kind of a weird one, as you actually manage a critical 'anti-resource', heat build-up. As the inside of your giant robot gets hotter, your machine's performance degrades. At high heat levels your ammo might cook off or your engine can shut down altogether. Many, many mechs (especially prior to the large-scale adoption of Clan technology) cannot prance around the field, indiscriminately firing all available weapons. You literally have to play it cool. In my mind the textbook example is the original Rifleman battlemech. It had dual large lasers, but can you afford to fire both in one turn?

But by sticking to only one big resource to manage, both games made it possible for non-geniuses like me to enjoy playing. Regular gamers could massage the system enough to get some fun results. Two ridiculously important resources would have been one too many for average Joe Gamer. I try to imagine a world where BattleTech has both a heat track and energy allocation. It's a hurty place.

Silhouette Damage Displays

SFB has the so-called SSD (What the hell does that stand for? Ship System Display, I think) and BattleTech has the Mech Sheet. Both of these devices combined good functionality with great (for their time, at least) presentation. The silhouette provides just enough of a visual cue to jumpstart the imagination, the way even a poorly painted miniature can say a lot to the inner eye. And marking off each individual point of damage can be fun. It's not quite as fun as whomping on the opposition, but one should not underestimate the tactile and visual pleasure of marking off boxes on a nice damage display. It's like a consolation prize that can keep the player in the "hey, we're having fun" feedback loop, even though they might be losing. And after the game it's fun to pass around the sheets, comparing how shot up everyone got. In my experience these sorts of post-mortems are an important part of a complete gaming experience, just like you can't have a real lodge gathering without refreshments after the formal meeting.

[Maybe I'll be able to post some examples showing what a mechsheet and SSD look like. Right now Blogger is not cooperating.]

Fields of Fire and Range Bands

Different weapons having different ranges is nothing new. What both games do well is combining multiple different weapons systems on nearly every unit. The end result is that different ships/mechs are ideal at different ranges. Similarly, lots of game have rules for fields of fire but BattleTech and especially SFB turn this concept into an art form. Which way you and your opponent are facing determines what weapons you can bear and where damage will go when you are hit.

These two factors combine to form a system in both games where you can put yourself in a position such that you can shoot the enemy but they can't shoot back. Real world navies of the wooden ship era had an ideal situation called 'crossing the T', where the line of attack is perpedicular to the line of defense. The result: one side can fire its cannons while the other cannot. Neither game makes it simple to achieve that stark of a contrast in temporary relative firepower, but opportunity abounds for creating conditions where your fire is better and the foe's is worse. In BattleTech the classic case is a duel between Particle Cannon equipped mechs and Lone Range Missile carriers. The particle cannon units want that throwdown to happen at a range of 4 to 6 hexes, while the missile robots achieve maximum efficiency at 7 hexes. In SFB, the Federation is notorious for its forward-firing ship-busting Photon Torpedoes. You're aces if you can close with the Feds facing away from you.

'My Guy' Wargaming

Although BattleTech and SFB aren't roleplaying games in most senses and under most definitions, they are in a hybrid category of wargames with rpg-like aspects. Other notable games in this group include the various Old West shoot-out skirmish games, Car Wars and Dawn Patrol. (Dawn Patrol was arguably the first actual RPG, but that's a different post for a different day.) Most wargames put you in command of 50 counters or miniatures each representing five or fifty or five hundred soldiers. BattleTech lets you pilot a one-man fighting robot. Star Fleet Battles puts you in Captain Kirk's chair. You can look at one chit or mini on the board and say "that's me". I simply cannot achieve that level of identification or immersion while pushing around 60 pieces of cardboard. Even if I'm not part of a larger campaign, right here right now I become the guy sweating in the cockpit of that BattleMaster or the Klingon shouting to his crew to fire all forward disruptors.

You can play any of these games with each player running multiple units. (I seem to fuzzily recall one caffeine-fueled highschool weekend wherein two friends and I attempted to each run a 12-mech company.) But I've never really seen a game radically improved by someone running more than one ship or robot. Indeed, that immersive quality is lost in the process.


Can anybody think of any other games that have similar qualities?

links X 5

The Tall Man - Levi Kornelsen's excellent gaming livejournal

World Creation - a broad outline for setting makers (the author, Richard Staats, has some other articles at the same site)

Avery Sign Kits - there's got to be some good gaming applications for these

The Worst Dungeon Master Ever

Monty Python & The Holy Grail - script & other stuff

Guardians of Order RIP

This time the reports of GoO's death do not seem to be exaggerated. From George R.R. Martin's website:

I regret to announce that Guardians of Order, the Canadian games company that issued the GAME OF THRONES role-playing game last fall, is closing its doors and going out of business.

Although the GoO website remains open and there is some fan activity on the message boards there, it would appear that orders are no longer being fulfilled and emails to Guardians itself are going unaswered. The company's office has been vacated, and the company phone has been disconnected, When I finally reached GoO's owner and president Mark MacKinnon last week, he confirmed what many had come to suspect -- that he is shutting down operations.

I first heard this news from RPGpundit and Dorkland. Dorkland also linked to this thread at the Mongoose boards discussing the fate of some GoO properties.

worship the box

Starship Combat News posted this awesome pic from Hasbro, showing the starter set for the new Star Wars ship-to-ship collectible minis game. Dig those two capital ships, baby! With huge vessels like those included, I could actually see myself buying multiple starters.

A Minor Nitpick

I'm going to pick on OgreCave.com a little in this post, but I want you to know I heartily recommend the site for gaming news. Not to drive my own readers away, but if you come to this here gameblog for my occasional industry news (I sure hope that's not why you're here) you need to understand something: I get that sort of stuff third-hand from sites like the Ogre Cave.

Now on to my gripe. Our hobby has a lot of websites with awards and pseudo-I'm-pimping-my-fave-products-and-calling-them-awards. Some of these are more credible than others (*cough*Origins suck*cough*). If you've got the kind of page that pushes a particular list of awards-winners, please do me a favor. Link the winners and nominees so I can check out and/or buy the product. I'm kind of embarrassed to even have to point this out, but why go to the trouble of pushing a list of award winners if you're going to make me google all the products? Seriously, WTF? I want to know more about all the shiny products listed in the Ogre's Choice Awards 2006 and I think the Cave wants me to want to know more. Why not make it easy for me to get to that information?

I know I'm singling out the Ogre's Choice Awards when that's unfair. But I expect the people running the Origins to screw everything up, so I don't even need to look at their page to know there are no links. (I just double checked and I'm right. No, I'm not going to link to the page. In case you couldn't read it earlier when I was being coy, the Origins suck.) I think even the awesome Diana Jones Award needs to get on the ball with this problem. Their page could use a lot more nominee links. And the ENnies, which has its shit together far more than most other awards I've seen, could use some more linkage in their archives of past winners. The nominees for this year's ENnies are all linked properly. Kudos for that.

So if you are thinking about having some sort of industry award, please link the nominees and winners. You want your winners to prosper, right? Then make it easy for Joe Surfer to get to them. Joe Surfer probably isn't going to vote (if you have open voting) and he probably won't go to the awards ceremony (if you have one), but he sure as hell is the guy driving any largescale commercial success. Don't make him find the product you're holding up as an example of excellence.

The 3 Round Massacre

A couple weeks back I posted a picture of the set-up for my next session of my D&D campaign, wherein our heroes were scheduled to fight almost a hundred githyanki. I had feared a total party kill but instead my bad guys were mercilessly slaughtered. Partly this was my fault for putting too many complicated NPCs on the field. I was not up to the task of handling four 19th level spellcasters and a pair of dragon riders. But mostly these guys fell down due to the sheer unrelenting power of four 16th level chrome-plated Gestalt killing machines. Jon happened to have his camera with him and snapped pictures as the event unfurled. Here's the beginning of round 1, with one of the dragon's flying over the mass of Gith to attack the PCs. Notice my awesome purple d30 in the foreground.

Next we have the general bum rush of Gith moving in to swording range. The poor fools.

Darwane (Stuart's PC) drops a pair of fireballs, one of which is Maximized and Empowered, leaving a smoudering crater where a bunch of Gith once stood.



One round 2 Jon's cleric, Gregor Gunthersson, dropped a dictum spell, paralyzing all but 2 of the mooks for 9 minutes. Since they were essentially 'mobility kills' I pulled them off the board. One of the dragonriders was ganked as well, so I swapped the mini for him to a riderless green dragon.



The other dragonrider was elminated, leaving the opposition down to the 4 big bad NPCs and the dragons. None of these guys had enough AC or hit points to stand up to the party, a lesson I will not soon forget!



Gregor grows to large size, just 'cause he can. So we replace his figure with a troll. Why a troll? I just love that mini. I like in this pic how a ghostly halo appears around Angus the Half-Orc and his dwarvish cohort.



The dragons, the beguiler, and the blachguard are all slain. The sorcerer and duskblade get away thanks to the Gith plane shift ability. The PC party is all that remains standing on the field.



And finally, here's the corpses piled up next to the map!



Nest session: using the special Githyank silver swords acquired from this battle, our heroes take on the leaders of the Infernal Legion. Can the PCs save the Wild Coast from the diabolic invaders?

Here comes the Cavalry! Or not.

Quiz time, folks! How many figures in the D&D Minis line are mounted cavalry? Times up, pencils down. Out of eight releases of 60 figures each, only 8 of the little suckers are cavalry. And fully half of those appeared in the most recent set. Extra credit: If you want a figure to represent your PC knight on his horsey, how many choices do you get? Two, but only if you count the Blackguard On Nightmare as a viable option. Otherwise you are stuck with one lousey Mounted Paladin. What is going on here? Back in the days before so-called Collectible Whatever Games every fantasy army fielded huge troops of mounted figures. Heck, some of the best bad guys I've ever seen sculpted are the Chaos Knights from Citadel/Games Workshop. Is the armored knight on steed not cool with the kids these days? Is it a mechanical issue? No version of D&D has ever done as good a job handling mounted combat as Pendragon, and maybe there are too many other better options for the 3.5 fighter types. Am I the only one who thinks it odd that the mounted warrior is so under-represented in DDM? Heck, I got better choices when picking kobolds than when picking knights. Something's wrong with that.

Here's my opinion: Wizards should put out a DDM release emphasizing mounted combatants, even moreso than the most recent batch. Include a dismounted version of each rider in the set. In tandem with this release Mike Mearls or some other mechanical wonk should be given the task of writing more oomph! into the mounted combat rules of both the minis game and the RPG. I want to get medieval on some orc asses and the present state of affairs is not conducive to that goal.