Classic Battletech: A Whole Cluster of Problems

I wanted to expand on a point after the other night’s Battletech rant and that is the idea of Battletech as a slow game; one of the primary reasons that my friends stopped playing it for a while and one of the focuses of my current attempt to fix what I see as some of the problems with the game.

See Battletech requires a great deal of book keeping. This is integral to the game, more so than something like Warhammer 40,000 or even Necromunda, where much of the actual book keeping is backgrounded in favour of focusing on the battles. In Battletech two parts of that book keeping and particularly the way they interact create moments of some of the least satisfying gameplay in the game.

Let’s start with Hit Location, and to talk about that we need to discuss how to resolve a damage roll in Battletech. I promise I will try and make it quick.

When you hit a mech with an attack in Battletech (itself an intensive process I will catalogue at a different time) you then need to decide where it hits to apply the damage to that section. This means after the roll to hit you must then make a second roll to determine where the shot lands by rolling 2d6 and rolling on a chart, picking from three columns depending if you’re to the left, right or directly facing the mech (which includes behind where mechs usually have less armour) then take that damage off the armour value of that section.

Every mech has two legs, two arms, a left and right torso, center torso where the engine sits and a head, which is synonymous with cockpit in this context.* If you punch through the armour you then cause a critical, rolling one dice to determine if you hit the upper or lower part of the location and then rolling again to see exactly which component you destroy. This can be everything from the actuators of the arms to Heat Sinks to weapon magazines that erupt in violent and often fatal fashion.**

All of which is complicated enough, but then you can also get criticals from your location roll and the more locations you’re rolling the more likely you are to score a catastrophic hit.

Which brings us to the Cluster Hit Table. 

I hope you like numbers.

This table exists to help easily track weapons that fire a large volume of munitions, Missile Launchers and Autocannons mostly, and determine how much of their volume of fire actually hits their target. Naturally this is another dice roll because of course it is. 

The largest common weapon tends to go up to 20 hits, which is usually broken down into 4 groups of 5 damage each, meaning when you hit with an LRM-20 you roll once to hit, once to determine cluster size and then up to four times in order, resolving each hit and critical individually, and then rolling critical damage location and applying its effect before moving to the next cluster.

If that sounds like a lot of rolling I want you to bear in mind that the CPLT-C1 Catapult, a long range fire support mech, mounts two LRM-20’s. My own personal favourite mech, the VKG-2F Viking mounts two LRM-20’s and two LRM-15’s meaning I can end up rolling dice about thirty-six times every time it opens fire.

Then, twelve rolls in, you score a Head Critical and kill the pilot.

This is time consuming to do, but it is far, far worse to be on the receiving end of it. I have never seen one of my friends want to kill me more. I felt intensely guilty.*** He forgave me, but I found no particular satisfaction in killing his mech. It didn’t feel like a hero moment; it felt like I’d just nickled and dimed his mech to death.

So how do we fix this?

One option was to stop playing the Viking, which isn’t really a solution so much as evading the problem. The other was to rehack the rules, however this is a dangerous prospect. As we saw with Alpha Strike, the rules light Battletech game, taking the numbers management out of Battletech actually renders it a rather dull game. What I wanted to do was keep the clusters and possibility for critical hits, but make them more manageable and less dependant on rolls in sequence.

The first step is to take out the cluster hit roll. Not do away with it completely, as the clusters achieve something different to the straight up high damage that a Gauss weapon might cause, but tie those clusters to a roll that already exists; the to hit roll.

The Battletech to hit roll is as complex and arcane as it’s hit location system, so I will spare you that, what I will say is that you work in factors to provide a Target Number to hit on 2d6, which means that if you equal that number you hit. By borrowing a mechanic from roleplaying games though we can make that Target Number do more for us, that mechanic is MoS or Margin of Success.

MoS is simply the number by which your roll beats a target number, it represents not just succeeding, but how well you succeed. Equalling the target number gives you a MoS of 0, beating it by 1 gives you an MoS of 1. If we use an LRM-20 as a base and keep its damage divided up into clusters of 5 we can then tie those directly to MoS numbers, like so:

Protip: The more gooder you shoot the more betterer you hit.

Meaning that the better the roll is the more of the cluster will actually hit the target. At the same time by tying Margins of Success to the hit roll, which is made on 2d6 with its rather juicy Bell Curve, means that hitting top clusters becomes less likely, and smaller weapons such as LRM-10s, become more viable if mapped under the same rules.

However as it stands we’re still rolling groups of locations for clusters, we’ve removed a single roll from the process and in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t mean an awful lot. Now it’s time to make some more drastic changes.

The first was a rewrote the Battletech hit location table to prioritise hits to the arms and legs as opposed to the torso, and to cause all hits to strike against the closest limb.

We do add an extra roll to randomise side, so shame on me.

Now this might seem counter intuitive to Battletech veterans who are used to the torso, and as such center mass, being the hit location for the most common rolls and I will agree that there is a certain amount of logical sense to the idea. However given how often attacks come from angles and how damage transference travels inwards, it was more fun to have most hits strike the arms and thus often the primary armament first, before travelling in to cause the kill shot. It also simulates even a mech that is hit as trying their best to avoid a killing blow to the center mass, which could hit the engine or cockpit.

Plus it’s going to matter for the next step.

When an cluster weapon hits they roll their initial location as normal, this determines the point of impact, the idea being that ‘clusters’ hit from the same trajectory and are most likely to hit locations adjacent to the initial point of impact. Therefore if we make a 2d6 roll for the initial point of impact every roll after that can just be 1d6, like so:

All locations for the cluster are determined at the same time and all hits against the same location are resolved as one. The initial point of impact damage is resolved first and then the attacker may choose the order in which they apply the rest. If the roll produces a result at either end of the table it’s my intention for it to loop over, to a Center Torso hit on a 12 can cause damage to the head.

So if an LRM-20 scores 3 clusters and rolls a 6 on their location roll they would score a hit on the Nearest Arm (let's say it’s the left, for argument's sake), so they would then roll another d6 for each cluster after the first, in this case rolling a 4 and a 5, the 4 hits the same location, meaning that the mech will take a whopping 10 damage to its Left Arm. The 5 indicates that this cluster will cause damage to the next location up, which looking at the table is the Near Leg, which suffers 5 damage.

This takes reduces the number of critical rolls, allows damage to the same location to be resolved quicker and caps the number of critical rolls for penetrating armour to a maximum of 3 (with an additional one possible for the initial hit). It’s not perfect by any means and there needs to be some playtesting to see how it affects Head criticals and the like.

Is it perfect? Oh god no. Aside from rebuilding the entire system from the ground up (which for better and worse would stop it from being Battletech) nothing will really make Classic Battletech easy or accessible, which is a shame. However it feels like a move in the right direction and, more than anything else, I really enjoy hacking the rules. Taking apart the systems, turning them over and choosing where to cut, where to keep and where to add is fascinating to me, especially on older systems.

The results might not be amazing, design wise, but if they can make the game a little more manageable and take some of the tedium out of certain tasks, then I’ll consider them a success.

Until next time!****

-JP

Notes:

*This is, of course, unless it’s a four legged mech. Or not a mech at all.

** Damage is transferred when a location is destroyed, so blowing up a Magazine usually means killing the mech. In later Eras of Battletech they introduced CASE, a technology that stopped this from happening- Mostly.

***Full disclosure; my Viking in this story was on the other side of a mountain, stood in a lake, firing indirectly with another friendly mech acting as a spotter; the penalty for which is not as severe as you might expect. The upshot was not only did I carpet bomb his mech into oblivion, I did from a position in which he could neither defend himself nor retaliate.

**** Where I will be rewriting movement (at the request of my friend), to hit modifiers and installing the Battletech video game’s rather brilliant weight Initiative system. God help me.