The Nightgaunt's page

I'm getting ready to run Mechageddon and I came across some confusing rules regarding mech upgrading in the adventure path.

On page 4 of Mechageddon the book is clear that credits are supposed to be used for character gear and UPB for upgrading mechs.

"Credits are intended to help the PCs purchase new equipment, while UPBs are provided as material for upgrading their mechs."

And throughout the adventures the players are rewarded with vast hordes of UPB. Many encounters in act 3 rewarding tens of thousands UPB per encounter. And the purpose of UPB is repeated multiple times throughout the book. ex "...pays each PC 25,000 credits for completing the job and approves a work order worth 6,250 UPBs each for mech upgrades and repairs."

But in Tech Revolution, mech construction and upgrading is done via the Mech Point system. By level 20 a PC will have 300 Mech Points to spend on building their mech. The ONLY mention of UPBs is for repairing mechs, and even then, the normal cost is 10UPB per HP. So a tier 14 mech with 170hp would only cost 1,700 UPB to repair from zero.

So there seems to be a gap here.

TR has mechs created and upgraded with Mech Points, a level based build point system. Mech parts only have prices listed in terms of Mech Points. And usually not that many mech points. A chainwhip costs "tier x3" so a Tier 20 mech would have a chainwhip that costs 60 Mech Points, That's not a lot compared to PCs getting rewarded with close to 60,000 UPB at one point.

Mechageddon has mechs upgraded with UPB, a currency used as an alternative to credits. And it's clear these are meant to be used to upgrade the PC's mechs.

But I can't find where these two rule system meet. It seems like something is missing.

I've seen a comment on a reddit thread where someone thought that maybe PCs are supposed to use the "Scaling Equipment" rules from Starfinder Enhanced to calculate the cost of mech upgrades. But that seems to just be a guess as Mechegeddon doesn't seem to recommend using it.

Also there's no indication if the UPB upgrades are meant to supplement Mech Points, or be a replacement for Mech Points (a currency to buy, sell and trade mech parts in a mech based campaign. Like how it works in Mechwarrior).

Am I missing the part in Mechageddon where this is explained? Is there an errata?

How have you dealt with this in your own Mechageddon campaigns?

I've been running games almost constantly for about 15 years now. We've changed games, players, real-life cities, but GMing has been a constant that whole time. So just this last year I started GMing a Pathfinder game and I am both thrilled by the material and sorely disappointed by it.

As modules the Adventure Paths are fantastic. The art, writing, and challenges are great. But from a campaign perspective they are CRAP. Sorry, but they are. Let me explain, then please prove me wrong. I would like to be wrong here because I really like the game. ^_^

Now the issue might be that there's a book or resource that I don't know about, please tell me if that's the case.
As a GM I like to know what the point is for my campaigns. I plan out the villains, their goals, and how they plan to achieve those goals. I layout clues like bread crumbs for players to follow. But the Adventure Paths don't seem to be designed with that style of GMing in mind.

Take Carrion Crown for example. The first module sets up a very vague idea of what the main plot of the campaign will be, but it fails to setup anything on the NPCs that are meant to drive the conflict forward. The main antagonist is vaguely described and his plans are not elaborated on at all. In order to get even a vague idea of what's going on, a GM needs to read through every single adventure module before running that first adventure. That's a very tall order, especially if you're not sure that a game will last long enough to make buying the whole AP worth it.

As the GM, I have a slightly better idea of what's going on than the players, but the gap is not that large.

What would help and what I would really really appreciate is a GM Guide to each AP. I would happily pay for a GM version of the Players Guides that Paizo produces for each AP for the players. A book laying out who the main Antagonists are, 1-2 NPCs of note from each module (the most important ones), what the Antagonists plans are and an outline of the events that will occur during the AP. I would like to have that core knowledge beforehand so that I can plan the transition from module to module so that it's an almost seamless move.

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this thread. If it's better suited for a different forum on this site please let me know.

I'm looking into self-publishing my own setting using PDFs, and it looks like my best bet would be to follow in Pathfinder's footsteps, so to speak, and use the "no actually d20" OGL.

I'm a big fan of Pathfinder and I've looked at how they incorporated the OGL into the design of their system and made it wonderfully unobtrusive in the design. They haven't had to segment off OGL content in grey boxes or format it differently, instead it's all covered by the first page of the Core Rule book in 2 paragraphs defining Product Identity and Open Content.

So does anyone know if that's ever caused the Pathfinder folks any issue? Most of the advice I've come across has been to explicitly set apart all OGL content within your book. But it looks like that's exactly what they didn't do with Pathfinder. Or are the rules just different for a decent sized company like Paizo?