Like the title says.  Did you ever play the Mechwarrior RPG?

I'm going to put a little restriction on this.  I'm only asking about first or second edition.  I've never seen third edition or later.  I understand third edition changed the system dramatically?

I had the first edition version back in the day.  I remember the game expected you to play troupe style and make separate characters for each role in the mercenary unit the campaign revolved around.  For some reason that really rubbed me the wrong way, despite it being pretty common for me and the people I played with to have multiple characters in a single campaign which we switched between.

The mecha combat system was to haul out Battletech and play a game.  I had mixed feelings about that.  It definitely made Mechwarrior the RPG of Battletech, but...  I guess in the case of Battletech I always viewed it as a competitive game not as a resolution for RPG combat.  

I can't think of anything I actually liked about the game.  But just thinking about the presentation of the 1e book gives me the nostalgic fuzzies.  It's just that mid-80s formatting and that 80s FASA art with heavy emphasis on unseen mecha.  Second edition never did anything for me, as it struck me as very bland.

No, I never really played it.  I did make characters and my group would occasionally talk about a campaign.  We'd always end up simply playing a regular Battletech game instead.  I did use the repair roll rules as inspiration for some repair rules in Mekton II which all my players loathed.  I think we'd sometimes use the random Lance charts in the book to come up with ideas for our Lances in Battletech games.  That was about it.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1040590Like the title says.  Did you ever play the Mechwarrior RPG?

No, I never really played it.  I did make characters and my group would occasionally talk about a campaign.  We'd always end up simply playing a regular Battletech game instead.  I did use the repair roll rules as inspiration for some repair rules in Mekton II which all my players loathed.  I think we'd sometimes use the random Lance charts in the book to come up with ideas for our Lances in Battletech games.  That was about it.

I played the Mechwarrior game for PC online from 1989, and it was phenomenally good! I always wanted to run a campaign for that, but never got around to it, and was going to use Traveller as the game engine to run the game. The PC game was originally based on the Mechwarrior RPG that came out in 1986 from FASA.

I ran a game of MW2e for over a year. This version may have been somewhat "bland" but the mechanics were very simple and got out of the way much as the D6 system (also called "bland" by some) did. The killer for us was the BT/MW crossover, because then everything slowed waaaaaay down. A simple battle with 4 PCs (each controlling a mech) vs an opponent with a handful of (typically inferior) mechs and supporting conventional forces could take hours to resolve.

I believe this was the first RPG I ever played. I am not 100% sure, the GM said we were playing Battletech. But in hindsight, when I looked into it, I think he cobbled something together from MechWarrior. The game was in 1986, so I think the time-frame lines up (unless I have the release dates wrong). I remember liking it. But this was the kind of campaign where the GM really took liberties with systems and the point was much more about adjudication of what we said we wanted to do, than whatever limits the rules might place on us. He was also a particularly good GM.

I have played it. I do not remember much about the system (other than you could reverse engineer the pilot and gunner skills into the Battletech system).

I seem to remember thinking (even at the time, as a kid) that it was an entire TTRPG designed because 'well, why not? We know these things have pilots. What do they do when out of their mechs?' And that kind of is the problem--we know what these guys do that is interesting, and we already have a ruleset for it. Now I suppose if you stretch those definitions out a bit, you could say the same for oD&D to Chainmail and Warhammer to WFRP, but that seemed to be a bit more organic in how it happened (and y'know, they actually made playing below the squad level to be significantly fun, different, and have a solid 'why you would want to play this' going on.

If you mean this one, then yep.
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I played 1e along with Battletech. I honestly do not remember anything about the RPG except that we had fun with it. That is probably because we loved Battletech. I must have lent it to someone along with my RoleMaster books because those are the only ones I can't locate. I miss Battletech.

Nope, the entire premise strikes me as rather silly. A mech is about the most dumb un-military application of technology you could dream up, tanks and aircraft would murder them.

I did have fun with the old PC game Mechwarrior: Mercenaries a long time ago, I'd always take out Elemental battlesuits (the only sensible thing in the game) and have fun zipping around disabling mechs legs while they couldn't hit me because I was so small.

I played MW religiously for a year after the original Crescent Hawks game came out. All the important fights were done using Battletech, which meant pretty much every weekend there was a marathon game session. We used 1st, then 2nd at some point. I have all the editions, and have to say 1st is probably the best, the Time of War, or whatever it's called, is terrible. At one point I converted everything to d6 because it lined up perfectly with Battletech and was way easier to run.

Of course, this was all in high school, with ridiculous amounts of free time. I do have an expansive MW campaign in my brain, with all battles done using Megamek, probably 1st or the d6 conversion. I doubt it'll ever happen, but I'm hopeful. I will say 3025 is the best era. Pre clans, everything is old and clunky and fantastic. Just giant robots beating the shit out of each other for literally some street cred.

Agreed, Clans did to the BT universe what the Yuuzhan did to Star Wars.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1040605I ran a game of MW2e for over a year. This version may have been somewhat "bland" but the mechanics were very simple and got out of the way much as the D6 system (also called "bland" by some) did.

My comment about blandness was oriented more around how 2e just never jumped out at me in terms of presentation.  IIRC, the rules in 2e were pretty much the same, just polished up a bit.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1040609I seem to remember thinking (even at the time, as a kid) that it was an entire TTRPG designed because 'well, why not? We know these things have pilots. What do they do when out of their mechs?' And that kind of is the problem--we know what these guys do that is interesting, and we already have a ruleset for it. Now I suppose if you stretch those definitions out a bit, you could say the same for oD&D to Chainmail and Warhammer to WFRP, but that seemed to be a bit more organic in how it happened (and y'know, they actually made playing below the squad level to be significantly fun, different, and have a solid 'why you would want to play this' going on.

This is basically why the suggestion for troupe play in Mechwarrior annoyed me.  It was a statement that the only possible interesting thing that a mecha pilot could do was represented on the Battletech board.  The only possible thing a tech could do was make skill checks to repair a mech.  Maybe that wasn't the way it was meant.  Maybe it was only meant as a way to avoid a "netrunner" problem where one type of character got to do things while everyone else sat around doing nothing.  But the way it came across to me back then was that certain characters were only good for one thing.  I didn't agree with that at all.  I definitely saw the Mechwarrior characters I had in my imagination as being worth playing in far more situations than in a Battletech battle.

Quote from: Brad;1040659I played MW religiously for a year after the original Crescent Hawks game came out. All the important fights were done using Battletech, which meant pretty much every weekend there was a marathon game session. We used 1st, then 2nd at some point. I have all the editions, and have to say 1st is probably the best, the Time of War, or whatever it's called, is terrible. At one point I converted everything to d6 because it lined up perfectly with Battletech and was way easier to run.

Of course, this was all in high school, with ridiculous amounts of free time. I do have an expansive MW campaign in my brain, with all battles done using Megamek, probably 1st or the d6 conversion. I doubt it'll ever happen, but I'm hopeful. I will say 3025 is the best era. Pre clans, everything is old and clunky and fantastic. Just giant robots beating the shit out of each other for literally some street cred.

Why was 1st edition the best?  I agree, but since I never really played my ruling is based entirely on presentation, and just the fact that I owned and flipped through 1e the longest.  

The d6 conversion sounds interesting.  I once converted Robotech/Macross II to d6, and it worked great, but my work has been lost to time.

I also agree that 3025 was the best era.  I also felt the clans ruined the setting and the game.  I had been playing some open games at the time, and it was fun.  The the clans hit, and the play at the local comic shop became stupid.

Quote from: Gabriel2;1040717Why was 1st edition the best?  I agree, but since I never really played my ruling is based entirely on presentation, and just the fact that I owned and flipped through 1e the longest.  

The d6 conversion sounds interesting.  I once converted Robotech/Macross II to d6, and it worked great, but my work has been lost to time.

I also agree that 3025 was the best era.  I also felt the clans ruined the setting and the game.  I had been playing some open games at the time, and it was fun.  The the clans hit, and the play at the local comic shop became stupid.

1st edition was the best because it was a game specifically about Mechwarriors: you get to roleplay the dudes in the Battlemechs. The book is written as almost a travelogue of the Inner Sphere and sets the scene for taking battles a bit more personal, meaning the focus is on the mechs and the people inside them. It doesn't offer a bunch of bullshit, boring character classes to "flesh out" the world, unlike other versions of the game...it's strictly about piloting robots. The limited scope of the game means the PCs literally are just a group of warriors doing stuff because some noble told them to (or paid them to); they don't have any influence of the events that caused a battle, or anything that happens after the battle. Paradoxically, the PCs' performance can change the entire landscape of the Inner Sphere if they happen to win key fights, impress the right noble, whatever.

I guess it's like if you wanted an rpg about being in the Army, so you got one where everyone was a grunt and the games were about squad level skirmishes. Then, another version came out after that added classes to deal with talking to Senators and trying to gain influence with the President. Later, half the players are running aides to a Congressman and all their skills are focused on bureaucratic paper pushing or making coffee. The grunt PCs are still around, but trying to go on missions to blow up some terrorist base camp is fucking stupid because two of the main characters don't even know how to use a gun, much less have any military rank. That's the best analogy I can make.

Quote from: Brad;1040760I guess it's like if you wanted an rpg about being in the Army, so you got one where everyone was a grunt and the games were about squad level skirmishes. Then, another version came out after that added classes to deal with talking to Senators and trying to gain influence with the President. Later, half the players are running aides to a Congressman and all their skills are focused on bureaucratic paper pushing or making coffee. The grunt PCs are still around, but trying to go on missions to blow up some terrorist base camp is fucking stupid because two of the main characters don't even know how to use a gun, much less have any military rank. That's the best analogy I can make.

While not an exact recreation of the problem, I saw this kind of thing over and over in Shadowrun. We all know that most deckers should have just stayed NPCs, but players also try to bring their face characters in on ops where they don't belong (they do fine in the pre- and post-ops scenes, and the players tired of losing out in these because, well in SR you always get screwed in these stages).

We tried it when the first edition came out, but it just didn't grab our game group like Mekton II did.

Quote from: Kiero;1040643Nope, the entire premise strikes me as rather silly. A mech is about the most dumb un-military application of technology you could dream up, tanks and aircraft would murder them.

Yes they are unrealistic. But so are lots of things...fantasy giants (cube-square law), giant insects (ditto, plus problems with breathing), Superheroes (radiation doesn't grant superpowers), Godzilla (see giants and superheroes)....

I loved the computer game.* Never played the RPG though. Read a fair bit of my friends setting stuff and I concur about the diffusion of focus in the later books.


* I especially liked how the game handled difficulty settings. The computer used a bunch of spheres to represent the various locations of the mechs - both yours and your opponent's. In effect, the mechs were represented by a humanoid figure made up of a bunch of connected spheres. Raising and lowering the difficulty adjusted the size of the spheres. So in effect, you became a better shot on easy settings (because the spheres you were targeting were bigger) while and your opponents became worse shots, i.e. you became harder to hit (because the spheres on your mech were smaller).