Mechwarrior

I've been contemplating the Mechwarrior RPG, specifically 3rd Edition and A Time of War (in many ways the same game with slight, but necessary, improvements in rules).  It has become relevant to me to consider it again, so you get a blog post. 

In many ways Mechwarrior is a fairly bog-standard RPG in a well developed setting, which is generally the way to go to get my approval. Clever rules in generic settings is ass backwards and probably no fun to play... though with a good GM you might get a good setting out of the generic one.

As a general rule I hate seeing external aspects of a character, like wealth or allies, being 'bought' with character resources. Often the cost is so significantly high that the character is objectively poor at doing whatever characters are expected to do, making this external trait extremely dominant at the table. More importantly, however, in real life many people who are highly capable earn these sorts of external factors (rank, wealth, privilege, allies and contacts... whatever), while relatively incompetent people who start with those sorts of things lose them... making games exactly backwards.   Certainly there are any number of highly wealthy buffoons who inherited vast riches and no talent, of course... and the peter principle would suggest most people with high rank in any organization are often in over their heads, but...

Mechwarrior, I should note, takes this idea and runs with it. Half your character 'traits' are external things, like the giant robot you drive or rich farmlands on some distant world.  In fact, at the high end many of these external traits can represent as much as 20% of your character, at which point it is axiomatic that the cooler your giant robot is, the less qualified you are to use it.

Let me do you the math to illustrate how extreme this can be. 

Lets have a custom vehicle, which is player designed from clan tech (6 'TP', which does NOT include the actual vehicle, merely the right to custom design it with clan tech). For extreme illustration, you also give it the maximum in positive quirks (5TP). A vehicle can cost up to 10 TP, +2 for owning it outright. Now, as a practical matter, anything above 9 (for aerospace fighters only) or 8 for a battlemech, less for the others, is a waste of points as vehicles are designated by weight categories, and a 10 is an upgrade from 9 in exactly 0 categories, but we're taking it as written... ten points, plus 2 for owning.  This particular custom built Assault Battlemech, of clan tech, owned by the character outright, is about as bling a thing as you can have (we could do the same with noble titles, wealth and property, which can be even more broken!, but we won't), costs us a grand total of... 23 TP, or 2300 xp.  Since you start with 5000 xp, that is almost exactly half your starting value as a character (and seriously difficult to pull off with the minimum requirements of the life path, but we'll assume point-buy build here) 

Mind you, not only is it axiomatic that you will be a crappy mech pilot at that point, but this is all for something that can be taken from you, even destroyed outright. 

Now, to be fair, the assumption is that you are starting out young, dumb and full of cum, rather than a seasoned veteran, so a lot of those higher value traits are presumably expected to illustrate what cool shit you will one day earn.   I mean, it is nearly a tenth your character's value just to earn the right to be called Sergeant... a trait with absolutely no value beyond role-playing itself... 

Yes, there is an argument to be made for using character build assets for non-mechanical Roleplaying value, but a: Its purely preference to do that, and b:there is a strong argument to be made against that mentality that is far too in depth to throw out in the middle of this other post.  Comment if you feel like hashing it out in detail in another post. 

Now, this all seems like bitching. Really I'm just picking at a nit, for the most part the system works as it should and in support of the setting. Ideally I'd like to see a divided creation pool, rather than the half-assed life path division of traits, giving you specific assets to purchase these traits with (the shining light of White Wolf's design, the only thing they did well enough that I can praise rather than condemn it, is dividing up character creation assets to create well rounded characters), or at least a guideline on how many starting assets should ideally fall under, well, bling-traits.  

I do have one beef here, one that goes back to a recurring theme I see in well developed settings especially... the Mary Sue GM character trait of doom. 

Now, as a general rule I don't object to having NPCs filling such useful roles as 'local king' and so forth, and if you have a noble title trait for characters, it might be useful to figure out where on that chart the local king actually falls, without making it viable for a standard character. I'm for that, though it is superficially terrible and often arbitrarily drawn lower than necessary. 

However: Mechwarrior includes a trait for Bloodnames, for the Clans. I won't bore you with the ill conceived horror that is Clan Society, but 'Bloodnames' are the genetic legacies of the leaders of the Clans, the coolest of which is objectively Kerensky (named after the old Russian General from the Bolshevik Revolution, though the actual In Game Kerensky is somewhat different).  To have the name Kerensky means you rock, dude. Its not the exact same thing as being the leader of the Clans, but it would put you in contention. So far, we can treat kerensky like 'King', and be done with...

What was that? There are some seven or eight major NPCs in the game fiction all named Kerensky, having clan backgrounds, and running around doing cool 'Player Character type shit'? 

Fuck you, game designers. 

See: we now have this trait that is a: Priced right the fuck out of character design (1300 xp, or a quarter of your character), and is explicitly forbidden to player characters in the rules for it (at start anyway), and if you have any lesser Blood Name you can never, ever, upgrade... despite a handful of prominent NPCs (Phelan Kell/Ward/Kerensky?) who have done exactly that.  

In short: A trait written for the express privilege of the Game Designer's special snowflake NPCs, not for you grubby players who paid hard earned money for the game. 

Which is obnoxious on the face of it.

What's more, that special rule about Bloodnames indicates a serious lack of understanding of genetics and breeding. Yes, Clan Warriors are bred in tanks, but they aren't clones, so every warrior is the mixing of two genetic lines. Higher ranked Names have more 'breeding privileges' to go with them, if not sexual privileges (due to the whole tank bred thing...). Thus, weirdly enough, the more prominent the name, the MORE people would have access to it, genetically. True, that also means more competition for it (since you have to fight for the right to it... no, it doesn't entirely make sense...), it also means that any given warrior, after a century or two of this sort of breeding program (with their shorter generations due to extreme ageism and generally violent lifestyles), its a good bet that most Clan Warriors can 'Challenge' for any one of a half dozen Bloodnames at this point, something that will only get worse over time.... not that Clan Society is at all sustainable on any level beyond writer's fiat...  

So, what, other than a clearly negotiable social convention, prevents a warrior from working his way up the chain of bloodnames as he gets more skill?  Never mind that conventionally (since they are all robot pilots of one sort or another), the older you are when you challenge, the better your chances are... so blowing your wad at 18 and never getting another shot because you settled for a crappy low rank name seems to be a recipe for severe unrest in a generally meritocratic society...  So a guy who could total challenge for Kerensky, both as a matter of Genetics and as a matter of developed skill, is stuck with the crappy peon name Smith (or whatever) he settled for at 18 (better than being unnamed, mere cannon fodder fit only to die for the glory of a good death), and will never progress beyond 'squad leader', while some young punk with half his ability who got lucky in an early challenge is given command of an entire battalion, with little experience in how to use it? 

And these are the people who ran the much more sensible and organized Inner Sphere to the ground for a decade plus? 

I have only scratched the surface of the flaws that is Clan Military Dominance (defenders may point out, hollowly, that Clan Tech Is Better... which means that my notional 16 year old cousin could take my cool 2005 Nissan to a 1970's Le Man's race, and beat all those professional drivers with their crappy old style cars, right? RIGHT?), but since I don't feel like gutting the entire setting tonight, I'll let it go.

Back to the rules: I find the equipment section of Mechwarrior to be a curiosity of composite design. I mean, the old illustrated leafs in the Mechwarrior First Edition book were my first introduction to the grander world of RPGs that lay beyond D&D... pictures of a dude with a rocket launcher and another dude with the awesomely named Cone Rifle (It was awesome when I was 13. Shut up.).

Four editions later, and twenty five years of real world technological development (and some seriously convoluted setting progress and novelizations) has seen almost every one of those old items retained, often alongside half a dozen near indistinguishable copycat items that have appeared over the years. Just trying to figure out which portable missile launcher is the old classic I remember from the color plates of my youth is an interesting exercise in parsing rules minutia... then you realize that there is a functionally identical, except for one improved characteristic, version right there with it and you think that only an idiot would look at half the entries seriously.  Cruft. 

The artwork is awesome, because game designers are cheap. Art commissioned and drawn thirty years ago appear alongside art from twenty years ago, alongside art from last year. Clear differences in quality are apparent. Its a little like being an archeologist, only with paper and ink instead of mud and rock. 

But the end result is ugly and quirkily out of touch with most Sci-fi settings.  Assumptions and common ideas from the seventies don't hold up well in the face of progress sometimes, but nothing is ever ditched from the Battletech setting.  PA(L) suits stand alongside conventional ballistic plate armor that is essentially equivalent, and alongside lumbering mechanized behemoths with built in jump packs and anti-vehicle lasers that so throughly overshadow it that only truly old school fans even understand why the PA(L) existed in the first place... when it really was the only armor option for the man on the ground in a world of 50 foot mechanical monsters, before the Clan Invasion changed everything. 

Or, you know, people like me who collect old trivia and gaming lore like some people collect stamps. 

But it is the fans that are holding things back here.  No one dares go in and rewrite the old equipment chapters to make them fit the new assumptions of sci-fi because the old fans will complain that their favorite widget went missing.  So each new edition sees all the old pages photocopied and copy-pasta'd into place with only the necessary tweaks to the rules, and the collection of out of place oddities only grows with each game generation. 

Think I'm exaggerating about the fans' complaining? I play Traveller, and one loud complaint about the Mongoose edition was that starships no longer required room sized, seventies era computers. Old 'Grognards' boycotted the game over that particular charge, despite most people agreeing that the edition was, in general, very good.  

Their other complaint was that dying during character creation was now merely an option relegated to a sidebar rather than the default assumption. That's a vastly different school of complaint that mostly falls down to bitching that 'other people are playing it wrong'... and despite the semantic similarity to conservativism, I rather prefer to think that they illustrate the sort of intrusive 'Progressive' mindset in action.... the one that tells you that you put too much salt on your french fries... but that is my bias showing.

In general, going back to my initial theme of Traits, I will say Mechwarrior does get something right in that the designers generally don't seem to want your character to be festooned with major advantages but rather sticking to one or two defining traits. They get it right in that they don't force this 'vision' of the game on you with bold pronouncements and hard clad rules, but by simply pricing their traits progressively enough that each one is a fairly significant sacrifice.  There is a fine balance struck, and while I personally prefer my characters to be festooned with nifty traits like 'sixth sense' and 'wicked pissah badass' or what have you, I respect their ability to allow me to festoon my character thusly (though... sadly I can think of no game that actually includes a 'Wicked Pissah Badass' trait. The original Deadlands did, however, have one called "Grim Servant of Death" which is almost as cool), at the cost of being a weak, fragile clumsy and stupid fellow with few skills, social or otherwise.  Even an old hand at maximizing like me has to thread the needle carefully to pull of even half the rules based awesome I usual do. I respect that, and more I respect their ability to do it with subtlety and panache. 

So lastly this: The biggest flaw I see is a minor structural detail. In practice all 'costs' could be divided by ten, making the general numbers much more manageable... excepting only the fast and slow learner skill costs... and both are functionally disposable.  Thus, instead of spending 5000 xp, you spend 500. To us math geeks its a trivial change, but to ordinary bums it makes the entire process much more manageable. Seriously, people get intimidated by the sheer volume of zeroes they are working with. Look it up. 

Oh, sure, there might be a few tweaks here and there, but seriously: Attributes and Traits are both 'bought' in iterations of 100, and the default for skills is by units divisible by ten (but not iterations of...), so the tweaks are minimal.  I can't say this is something that can be done 'at the table' unless you skip the life path, since the life path is chock full of odd numbers (mostly divisible by 5, which is somewhat more work intensive for people to convert on the fly. Even math geeks like me find simply chopping off the last zero preferable to 'chopping the last number and doubling, keeping an eye out for stray halves..., or whatever method you prefer to get to the same place.