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. 

RPGs

I thought about putting up a second post on the Star Wars game, but I don't want to hammer a dead horse.

So I thought I'd talk about rocket propelled grenades...

No, wait. That's not right.  I mean... Role Playing Games, specifically the design of


I've noticed a trend in recent years for Game Designers to get all quirky and gimmicky, and for fans of various games to talk up the quirks and gimmicks as if they are 'good things'.

My first real experience with this was "Weapons of the Gods", which  was hyped on RPG.net for months, maybe years. They talked specifically about The River mechanic and... um... Sheets.

It was all a bunch of hooey.

Actually, my first experience with this was Harn, which came in a three ring binder so you could add and remove pages, but Harn is/was a functional game with some serious thought behind it. (and TSR's AD&D 2nd Ed did that with the Monster Manual even earlier, but I digress...)

Weapons of the Gods was a terrible game.  The River was a really crappy 'pool' of dice you built throughout the game session by taking dice out of previous rolls so you could end the session with super-badass moves at the end of the session.  In order to make it work, it meant that most of the kung-fu mechanics had to be essentially impossible to do using randomizers so that you had to draw on this river of pre-rolled dice to actually pull them off.  In other words, all those cool powers and moves you gave yourself in character creation? You won't be using them hardly ever, instead you'll be stuck using the dull and underdeveloped 'regular fighting' all night while you build up your 'river'.

The Sheets thing? That was just another bit of hype, as each Kung Fu had its own mini-chapter/sheet describing it.  Part of the hype was that, as I recall, some were written by R. Sean Borgstrom, a triumph of style over substance, if ever there was one.

Further compounding my troubles with WoTG was how garishly UGLY the book was.

But this isn't about Weapons of the Gods, its about game design.

Lets talk Edge of Empire again, briefly.  So you have to have special dice, right? In fact the entire book is written as if the designers had an aversion to numbers.  This is simply a gimmick. Its not a selling point (quite the opposite), but I'm sure the corporate masters thought it was great, since they can squeeze their customers for even more bucks, but it doesn't really work like that.  

At their hearts, all Role Playing Game systems are nothing more than flawed Reality Emulators. They serve, essentially, to recreate a Reality, and things in that Reality, in a way that makes them not only understandable, but useable at a table.  They serve, in essence, to provide an agreed upon framework for solving basic disputes.  This is why almost every successful RPG includes an Initiative Mechanic... not because Initiative is something that 'real world' people discuss and use, but because the rules of the game require some method of determining 'who goes first' that is consistent and understood.   These rules don't have to be incredibly flexible, realistic or manipulable (for example: I recall one game that simply insisted that initiative is resolved in seating order around the table...), or they can be all of the above (Shadowrun's entire Combat seems dedicated to Initiative, or so it seems sometimes...), but the rule itself must still be there. When it isn't, people notice (Serenity the RPG fell down and went BOOM in part because someone forgot to include initiative rules...)

Gimmicks get in the way of that.   Weapons of the Gods, or the designers of the game anyway, forgot that one appeal of RPGs is that players love to question why someone doesn't use 'awesome power X' all the time, or why people in horror movies do such dumb things, like go walking into scary, serial killer infested woods, at night, alone.

Since Kung Fu Movies (and presumably, the Weapons of the Gods comic books that the game was based on) tend to have the Hero and Villains holding back from using their 'doom kicks' right at the beginning, the game had to force this mentality on players.

Forgetting, of course, that Players play RPGs so they don't have to make the same dumb mistakes people make in the fiction sources.

Take Call of Cthulu, for example.  It is the single longest running, most successful Horror RPG out there, and that isn't because HP Lovecraft is the go-to source for all horror in the world.  One interesting thing that separates out Call of Cthulu from other horror games, such as Chill, is that it doesn't try to cram horror tropes down the players throats.  The long running gag is that CoC players never, ever, read a book. Any book. Not even the bible.

But, of course, in HP Lovecraft's Mythos people read books all the time. Then they go insane. Because literacy is SPARTA!

So, Call of Cthulu has rules about going insane, and a frequent source of insanity is, well, reading books full of things Man Was Not Meant To Know!

But you don't have to read the books to 'win' at the game.

Its a subtle difference. Players can chose, or not chose, to read the books... to buy into the setting tropes whole heartedly or subvert them.  Weapons of the Gods doesn't leave you that option. Your powerful Kung Fu demigod will spend an hour punching the villain in the face uselessly before he unleashes his Doom Kick of Doom!. And if that doesn't work, he's back to another hour of mindless face punching before he tries again. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.


That's not the only sort of gimmick. I have Cthulutech, a game I dearly want to love.  Its fucking Pacific Rim, for god's sake! The rules are reasonably simple on the face of it... then you get to their gimmick.

See: They weren't content to be the one game that let you punch Cthulu in the face while wearing a fucking Evangelion suit (an Engel in the game's terminology), they decided they had to stand out from the pack by having the most incomprehensible dice mechanic this side of WotG.  You have to build winning poker hands out of dice rolls.  There are different rules for pairs, straights and flushes and how they interact...

In short, its a fucking mess.  Look: The original (and superior) Deadlands played with Poker tropes, and they even had you use fucking Cards for shit (like... Initiative!!!!), but they didn't try this level of insanity, and they at least had a good reason for it to be there. Cthulutech? What the hell does giant mechs vs. Elder Gods have to fucking do with Poker???

The point is, after a few abortive attempts to run Cthulutech, it sits alone and unloved on my shelf... wasted potential. All because someone thought being able to punch Cthulu in the face wasn't enough to distinguish his game.

There are only so many ways to resolve dice rolls, people.  There is no shame in using a tried and true resolution mechanic rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

So, the very first rule of thumb when designing an RPG is to leave gimmicks and quirky tricks alone. They will not improve your game, and may even destroy it.  (The second rule of thumb, the WotG rule of thumb is that while pretty and colorful books do sell better than boring cheap books, you still have to be pretty, not just colorful. Ugh...)

So that takes us to the meat of the matter.

There is a ill defined Sweet Spot in game design between heavy and light rules.  A game that is too light with the rules is too simple, too easily mastered, and the players grow bored with it.  The poster child for this is Big Eyes Small Mouth, also known as Tri-Stat, because you only had three stats to manipulate.  Later Editions tried to play up the idea that there was more to the game that the three stats, but it was too little too late (rumors that exchange rates between Canada and the US leading to the demise of the company are entertaining, but miss the point: If the game was selling well the exchange rate wouldn't matter so much. Someone would have bought the property and kept it going).

GURPS does well with only Four Stats, but then GURPS has a hell of a lot more going on under the hood than Tri-Stat ever did.

A game that is too heavy handed with rules becomes too complex to play. D&D often drifted into this territory. 3rd Edition D&D was heavier with the rules than AD&D, but AD&D had 'micro rules' for everything, while 3E had a unified mechanic, which simplified play despite the heavier rules.

Of course, even 4E D&D sold well, so we have to look elsewhere for our poster child.

How about FATAL, which is an acronym. Never heard of it? Well, it has been well and truly savaged by sharper tongues than mine on the internet, but they focused on how... evil... the game is. A sort of banal, juvenile evil, but evil.  They got caught up in how fucked up it is for a game to detail how wide your fist is, so that you will know if you rupture someone else's anus while fisting them, and overlooked the fact that someone, somewhere, actually thought it was necessary to resolve this with detailed measurements of fists and assholes to begin with.

One of the more illustrative, and less controversial, examples is in 'stat generation'. FATAL uses random generation, which is fine. Apparently the process goes something  (depending on editions and updates, with the later example being even more... more) like 'roll seven D1000's, divide by seventy'...

In case you struggle with math, this is a very long winded way of trying to arrive at a number between 1 and 100.  It is also very likely to produce extremely average results across a large number of rolls. Apparently it wasn't average enough, as I noted that later versions were reputed to be even more 'averaged', as in rolling ten d1000's (adding them together) and dividing by 100 and going up from there.

Aside from an amazingly fetishistic dedication to preventing unusually high or low rolls during character creation, what is so fascinating about this method is how very unnecessary it actually is to produce the desired results.  It is, to be blunt, crunch for the sake of crunch.

More mainstream, and related to the Star Wars post, is the entire line up of 40k RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games. Here you have reasonably sensible resolution mechanics (percentile based, using the Stats as the core testable values), saddled with a massive list of exception based mechanics (the talent system) that made generating 'bad guys' improbably hard, and pregenerated villains difficult to evaluate or use.

The point is simple: A too light game gets boring very quickly, a too heavy game tend to bog down play and eventually get discarded... either entirely, or piecemeal.  Thus: The vague Sweet Spot of crunch.

Too light a game is simple death, so we won't dwell further upon it.  Its the various permutations of failure of Heavy Rules that are interesting, even educational, to look at.

So, back to 3E D&D for the moment.  There are any number of people who view 3E D&D, in some form or another, as perfect. This is disregarding the various permutation (3.5, Modern, and Pathfinder), and sort of lumping them together.   But why were there so many permutations?  Why is D&D essentially competing against itself?  Why did WOTC essentially stop producing new, quality game books to spend most of a decade reprinting and rewriting older game books for a new version of the same game, choking the fandom for years until they exhausted themselves and turned to 4E? Why is Pathfinder so different from 3.5 while still being essentially the same game?

Crunch.

Oh, we could look at the money. Shadowrun has gone through much the same cycle, and people love to talk about money, but I don't quite buy it. RIFTS is twenty odd years old and its still selling new books and making money instead of producing new editions. The life cycle of a game isn't so easily fixed.  We can argue that the QUALITY of RIFTS books has dropped noticeably in the last few years, but then again, Palladium/Seimbeda may surprise us with something awesome... who knows?

Money may explain why companies find it attractive to produce new editions every few years, but it doesn't explain why they are necessary, why they become necessary.

However, when you are writing big, massive rule sets that try to cover every eventuality, it is inevitable that you will produce a few bad rules. Sometimes those rules are truly broken, sometimes they merely seem broken when you forget Rule Zero.

Pun-Pun is one example of the later.  It is vaguely possible, using a combination of rule synergies never intended by the designers, to create a self reinforcing power loop (Pun-Pun). However, to do so requires a very permissive Game Master, as most of the in-question rules are not simply available to players under normal circumstances.

On the other hand, having a single, mid level spell that is available to any player character of a main class that is far more powerful than even the highest level combat spells is an example of the former.

So, bad rules and bizarre synergies creep into large, complex rule sets. Eventually the weight of the errors becomes too much to ignore and a new edition is born.

More: Such large, growing, rule sets often are too big, too crunchy, to be released all at once, so new rules are scheduled for later down the line, the game is released piecemeal, and as new parts are developed it occasionally occurs that the new stuff doesn't quite work with the existing rules. This seems to be more Shadowrun than D&D, mind you... not that Shadowrun is necessarily 'rule heavy'.. though the third edition was reputedly just that (I skipped three...).

So, if I may be so bold, the rule of thumb here is that if your rule set is too big/long to be developed and released holistically (as one piece)... even if you only develop it holistically, and chose to release it piecemeal, it is too heavy.   Chances are, your customers will wind up ignoring half of what you write though they may never admit it.

So, there you have it. Two good rules of thumb for any budding game designer. Avoid gimmicks and keep your ruleset small enough to fit in a single, decent sized game book.