I forget what happens when I ace a to-hit.
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Max pushes his mech's servos to the max and moves another 18 feet in the direction of the enemy, before unleashing the full fury of his autocannon.
He has a little luck afterall, the light lasers hit.
I'm not suggesting we do heat. I'm only saying that it is a brilliant foil for energy weapons, which are otherwise superior. I am coming right and saying that the damage dice, despite AP being a solid mechanic, allow for too much inconsistency. On the other hand, the players should hit more often with the wild dice. I truly believe that a lance of light mechs should be able to take down a larger mech if they are smart about it, but with the drastic speed limitations to even 35 tonners, and with TarComp, your average Shadowhawk will be killing Panthers all day long. Do you plan to have an economy in the game?
The Umech charges forward 18 feet and unleashes its pair of quads.
It is woefully ineffective at this range.
A Quad linked Medium Cannon can do 40 something, but it could also do 4 something. It's not damage, it's potential harm. The difference between 40 and 4 is representative of I don't know what, but figure the mean is 22 something and if I am above that then dicebot did well by me. Battletech is very clever. Heat management is so critical specifically because energy weapons are both precise and deadly. Missiles are mostly just gobs of random damage, but to offset that perceived deficiency relative to energy, there is Stability. The balance is remarkable. It's not fair to compare BT, with the thousands of hours of thinking and playtesting that shaped that system, to SW, which was probably done on the fly by scaling the existing system. SW is fine. I personally find all the previewing for aces a little taxing, but its probably a better fit for pbp than whatever I am thinking more closely resembles BT. You seem sold on SW, and that's cool.
Where are the stats for the mechs? Can you put them in a slide?
I won't learn it that way. I'll take the Urbanmech and you can go first.
I know that if I stop moving, I die, so I continue ahead at full throttle.
= 7
= 22
Translation: This isn't that complicated, Mike - why can't you figure it out? No worries. My brain is so bogged down with work right now I can't keep anything else straight. I guess I would say that if the rules don't work well for small mechs then they probably don't scale well, either. We could try larger mechs but what we're looking for is the point where the guns reliably defeat the toughness+armor. That may not be better. I started the BT video game over in Career mode and I'm about 900 days in. My favorite mech is a frickin Firestarter that I have equipped with two Arm Mod+++ for a total Melee attack of 165, and then fully decked out with ER, Pulse, and Small Lasers+++ and of course Jump Jets. That little 35 tonner has aced several assault mechs from behind because they mostly ignore it until its too late. They could turn around and swat it like a fly, but then they'd be turning their back on my King Crab, Highlander, and Black Knight. The Firestarter is by far the most fun to play - it's like having a Jedi Master on the battlefield in mech form. Can we replicate that experience here?
You know me and dice. Have I shared with you my philosophy on armor? I believe strongly that the concept of "to-hit" as it relates to armor has been a disaster from the start, going back almost fifty years now, and as it is represented in almost every rpg ever made, is the most influential and stupidest aspect of gaming in general. I can only imagine what Gygax and Arneson were thinking. Why on Greyhawk would wearing a set of full plate armor made of iron make you more difficult to-hit? Whatever sense that makes is betrayed by the fact that if you do hit you deal full damage. Like, I guess I found a gap in that armor! Where, in the neck? Saving throws for armor served as flaccid acknowledgement that there was a serious problem here, but what DM has ever imposed them? Of course we also have hit points and random damage represented by dice. All of it feels like it was cobbled together to compensate for that one tragic blunder of THAC0, and then it became gospel before anyone could say, sure but what if... For some time I have thought Ability to Hit needs to be decoupled from Ability to resist the effects of taking damage. I totally get that these are the kinds of rabbit holes that can seriously f*!@ with a system. IMO, Star Fleet Battles was a model system, and BT also does this natively, albeit with more complexity. I do like a lot of what SW brings to the table. I find the pbp interface to be cumbersome for this system because you have to preview every roll for the possible ace, and it's a lot of paizo xml to write. My strong preference for BT would be to find a way to normalize damage and leverage actual armor in the BT sense represented by Armor Facing Points. Toughness goes away and instead we would have wound capacity by mech size category. That would introduce the tactical element that is mostly missing. Ability to-hit is still what it is, but when you hit you do X damage, where X is a firm number by weapon. A Raise = possible Crit, exactly like Pathfinder, and a crit = wound. If all my armor facing points are gone and I take another hit to that facing, it's an automatic wound. This idea stops short of managing hit locations because who says I can't hit your left leg when I'm shooting at you from your right side? I like that Armor is free but it has weight, so when building mechs we need to balance defense and offense. What we're already seeing with stock rules is the feast-or-famine combat flow that is often just frustrating.
If you insist!
That doesn't look promising.
First I move my mech at max speed in your direction! I think this closes the range to 100', but I don't remember how SW counts diagonals. Miss! Miss!
Well, it's easy when I don't hit. Relaxing, almost.
Alright, I'll spend a Benny to attempt to soak the wound.
Now I gotta go back and review the notes about the Wasp.
Yes, the stats were messy and I did my best to decipher them. We're in no rush - take your time and make everything really obvious. I'm not in this to win it, so let's start over and do it right. You can go first, then tell me exactly how to respond and why.
I move my WASP 6 squares west then alpha strike at 27 sq/135' distance to target. Raise! = 18 Total Raise! = 29 Total Hit! = 23 Total 1 Miss, 1 Hit! = 26 Total
You should go first.
Congratulations to your mom! I used to have SWADE - might have even paid for it. Not sure I've seen the sci fi rules and do not seem to have a digital copy.
I see the map slide. If you could recap the basic rules once, that would be helpful.
No, I'm not getting it. I have no idea why missiles are faster but worse than lasers, or why that last mech just fell over if we didn't breach its armor. The pace of play is the biggest hill to climb with a combat system that has so many variables - it's hard for any newb to pick up and then set it aside for a week and expect to remember every element. If there's a campaign with roleplaying that's one thing; players could carry on while GM does his thing, setting the stage for roleplaying each week, but I don't see this working as a tabletop pbp, given opposed rolls and the overall density of the combat rules, on a once a week cadence.
Max - you might want to re-think your build, now that missiles are much less effective Ok
I shoot a Quad linked M Laser.
3) No, I don't like that. A bonus to hit, in SW, is MUCH more favorable than a bonus to damage. I propose that we keep the rule that we know: A raise grants +1d6 damage. The reason this is so is because generally, in other applications of SW, you don't have hit locations or systems which are more critical than others to be hit. When my dude with a sword attacks a big monster, SW doesn't care where I hit the monster, and the extra D6 damage implies that I hit it somewhere vital. In Battletech, because you are also factoring in critical systems and hit locations, then because I was more accurate, the damage goes against a more important system. If I shoot you in the arm vs the head that's where the difference is.
"Eat shit and die, motherf@!*er!"
And why was your last roll 7d6? Raise on my too hit roll with the wild die.
So, no penalties for speed, range, or size? I am all for that. What the hell does a missile care about any of those things. But what if I get a raise on a to-hit roll? Or a couple raises? Does the enemy still only need to roll a success at -4 +2 to evade? That seems wrong. Are you waiting to spring Heat on us until the end or are you scrapping heat from the game? I would be cool not having to think about that.
We haven't said anything about heat yet.
Tweaking stats based on the realization that missiles are the end all and be all and nothing else matters. What comes after d12?
More missiles!
The Wasp DASHES forward 30' and looses a brace of short SRMs at Darwin in his Commando! The f#$%? Feet, seriously?
Cowboys from Hell
@MAx, what do you propose we call a square in the tabletop map grid? If it were up to me, I would call a square a square, and have it equal 10 yards. 10 yards feels like the amount of space any single mech occupies on the battlefield at any given moment. Does this help? Yes, this is pretty interesting.
This has just been an example of how my brain works. I stand by my position that Inches makes no f+$@ing sense in PbP, and should be stricken from Paizo, and the Internet, and the English language, just to be safe. The compromise on Missile combat seems like a good improvement.
Sorry - I set out to learn this system today, but I may be complaining too much. Feel free to put me in my place.
I finally read the "Walker" rules in SW Sci-Fi. Whoever wrote that should be sacked. I think I know less about how to play this game for having read the rules. What happens when I fire a laser? What are the modifiers?
Or, if we are deadset on sticking with SW philosophy, we could just validate hits. If I roll four missles and get 3 successes, then I roll three more dice to "validate" the successes. The result is the number of missiles that hit. I don't like this idea, but it's faster than opposed rolls. This does have the side benefit of making it harder to "game" the Paizo dice-roller, which is too easy to do and can be frustrating to a GM. Incidentally, I think SW is particularly vulnerable to this. If I preview my roll and know I'm getting a 6 or an 8, then I can change my action - taking multiple actions which incur the -2 penalty knowing full-well I will succeed anyway and be awesome when all I really did was manipulate the system to my advantage.
I can forsee missile combat being a bottleneck to the overall flow of combat. The opposed-roll idea is generally bad in PbP, as it slows everything down by the cadence of posting. I'm sure you have thought about this but, being a complete novice to both Battletech and Savage wars, maybe I bring fresh eyes. Is there a more efficient way to prosecute missile combat that does not include an opposed roll? You know what's weird about Battletech is that the game system is 40 years old, so these futuristic mechs feel low-tech. Missiles in BT must not have any kind of guidance system. It's like shooting old bazookas where you have to actually aim them and then they fly along a straight trajectory until they run out of fuel. I'm not going to build a $100 Million Mech and put four bazookas on it. Translating that to the rules, if I'm attacking, first I miss because I'm a bad aim, then I miss some more because you stepped to the side. (I don't hate the idea of that, but it's the sort of thing that works fine when we're all standing around a table and doesn't work at all when we're waiting 2 days for a forum post.) Since you are making Knowledge the Initiative skill, why not just combine Initiative and EW and have both apply for the duration of combat? For example, combat begins, and I roll d8 (Knowledge) for Initiative. In a real sense this represents my ability to prepare for combat, which is also a measure of skill and experience. As part of that prepapartion, I'll tune my Electronic Countermeasures given the variables of the current engagement. Hence, I set the difficulty number against which the enemy must exceed in order to strike my mech with a missile. There can be an appropriate feat, like say umm, MechWarrior, that grants +2 to the Init/EW roll, and also improvements to hardware and software that can increase this number. An "Anti-Missile System" wouldn't just be a stock modifier of 2, but could scale depending on the quality (cost) of that technology. I know that flies hard against the entire philosophy of SW, that a "4" represents a success, but with opposed rolls, that's not exactly true anyway. Each Mech could have its own Init/EW attribute - sort of a Autopilot. So if I roll d8 and get a 2, which means I'm gonna die, I realize I miscalculated and flip the "Auto" switch, and the mech's attribute value supercedes my roll. So let's say that's a 4. Lots better. These are just ideas off the top of my head, but I think we may get a little frustrated with missiles as they are today.
Savage World "Feats"? What the hell are you referring to? What is Mass Combat?
Also, I must absolutely insist that we eliminate either "Inches" or "Yards" from the game lexicon. One or the other is acceptable, but not both. To me, "Inches" is not relevant in this forum. I don't care how many inches something is away - that means absolutley nothing. Yards = the actual range of a weapon, and 1 square = 10 yards. That makes for very simple math. I vote to never use the word "Inches" again in this game. Ever.
Trying to make sense of all the rules. I believe the following summary is correct for Missile combat: Missiles
I don't know if the result of a roll exceding 4 for any missile attack makes any difference in the outcome. Please clarify.
Atlas or ZenFox, please explain the value in rolling greater than a 4 on any roll. Like, why does it matter if I string three aces together and end up with a 29 to-hit for a missile.
Do I need to roll something else? |