The point of the game would be the people not the mechs. Tried to do this a little bit ago. Didn't work as well as I had hoped. Got bogged down in the Mech and that was that. I'm not trying to go full Harlon Ellison realism with gravity rules and players that are far to literal. I want to set it during the Fourth Succession War right after Hanse offers the entire Cappellan Confed to Melissa.

I would think the best way to keep it from getting bogged down in 'Mech combat is to prevent the PCs from starting as 'Mech pilots. If you want them involved in warfare, have them do so in another capacity -- maybe infantry, or part of an armor division.

Or maybe put them behind the scenes, with technicians and medics and other support staff. Let them deal with cleaning up the aftermath of warfare, rather than man the front line.

Or pull them away from direct conflict. Make them in charge of the tactical side of deployment, managing entire lances or battalions. Give them the logistics of handling a 'Mech unit, or a mercenary team, and put them in charge of the Big Picture. In fact, if you have a way to abstract the results of a conflict, this might be preferable to the minutiae of tactical fighting.

Or scale it back down even further. Make the PCs recruits for one of the big houses, going through an academy to learn 'Mech piloting. Let them take practice runs on piloting and gunnery and things like heat management and sensors. Then, maybe, throw something dangerous at them and leave them scrambling for a way out. Maybe a rival House attacks the planet.

Attempted this a while back, would be interested in playing

Same here!

You could try something like the Soumi Warders stories.

Those are my absolute favorite battletech stories, and the neat thing about them is that the stories spend as much if not more time out of the cockpits than in them, yet the battles are still exciting and intricate parts of the stories.

  Tried the school approach doesn't work well from my point of view here on RPoL. Lot of interest not a ton of effort from the players. So no I don't think that is a good way to fix that.

  Battletech is rules intense mishmash of headache at level 4. Which is not anything I would do on RPoL ever. When you have players trying to be level 4 and you want level 1 at most it drives me a little nuts.

  For instance I had a zero-g training op because no one had any Zero-g training and I had to rationalize the how and why the NPC trained them in it. Because the final battle of the first arc was to take place on the hull of a McKenna class warship. To say that we ever got past deployment for the training run is being kind. Which is why I said either no real Mech combat or light Mech combat. And to be clear I was really looking forward to the McKenna fight. I thought it would have been awesome.

If you want to avoid the whole Mechs bit just have the PC be spies, scouts, elite units sent behind the lines, diplomats or civilians caught in the cross fire.

In any Mech battle the PCs will be part of they would be in a suit of flesh surrounded by giants metal monsters that can hail death from above (think Saving Private Ryan).

You can have all the PC be civilians drafted to the war effort with little combat training just tossed into the fray as cannon fodder. This would give the game a survival, horror/terror feel.

As it happens I created a game a while ago that I have yet to advertise because the Mech side of the game is not quite ready.

If you would be interested in collaborating with you running the story side of things I would gladly help arrange and or script the mech side of things once we want to put the game in that arena.

I have not already done this because I am a terrible GM when it comes to telling an ongoing story, I tend to be able to manage 6 months of passably interesting events at most and then I just run out.  Mech combat however I can do for all eternity.

In reply to Hendell (msg # 8):

I've run a five year Exalted Sandbox on RPoL. So story is not a problem for me. Relearning tournamemt rules on the go because of uberrealism PCs never a place I wanted to go.

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 21:25, Sun 17 Sept 2017.

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was moot, at 04:24, Mon 18 Sept 2017.