Thursday, October 8, 2009

Announcing microMW

microMechWarrior is an adaptation of 1st edition Mechwarrior™ RPG, microlite20 and microlite20 modern. In 6 pages, it covers chargen, task resolution, combat, healing, equipment, advancement and conversions to use your characters within the Battletech™ boardgame. You can get the digest/booklet sized mMW.pdf here. (Update as of 10/9 - this link has changed as the file has been updated. Errata and skill/task resolution mechanic changes)

From the designer notes:
These rules are best used for quickly adding an RPG “rules-light” component to a Battletech game, for playing a convention game that combines RPG and the Battletech boardgame, or if you simply wish to have a quick alternative to the current Mechwarrior role-playing games. The idea is that these rules are simple and that the Game Referee will usually say “Yes” or “Roll dice” to most situations. Not all situations are covered by these rules; a certain amount of flexibility and Game Referee creativity needs to be employed.

To have the best “rules light” RPG/board game experience, my recommendation that you combine these “micro” rules with the Classic Battletech Introductory Rulebook and the Vehicle and Infantry Combat rules from the Classic Battletech Quick Start. No attempt has been made to include any of the other vehicle types, such as conventional aircraft, Aerotech or Starships. The GM should employ their best judgement and houserule as they see fit to make the characters work within the boardgame in a straightforward fashion. I’ve also left out a lot of things that are going to be campaign dependent, such as creating a unit, figuring out Battlemech assignments, dealing with salvage and a 101 more things – but these are all things that you as a GM would want to figure out either on your own or from existing source materials.
Now, having said all that, let me say that these rules ARE NOT FULLY PLAYTESTED! I've rolled up a few characters and run a couple of simulated combats, but I will be shaking these out over the next couple of months to prep for WinterWar. Your comments, suggestion and feedback will be immensely helpful and earn you some credits in the book. After looking at the size explosion of Mechwarrior RPG rulebooks, I wanted to go back to something simple and microlite-ish. So here you go. 6 pages of rules, 1 page of blah blah and one page with a paragraph of legalese.

Further legalese - Battletech and Mechwarrior are trademarks and copyrighted IP of Whizkids, FASA and Microsoft. This is a fan-derived set of houserules that I'm sharing for the general interest of others and to bring value to the Battletech game universe. In other words, I ain't makin' a dime on this and please don't sue the crap out of me.

9 comments:

RolePlayGateway said...

Wow! We love these "micro" games. They're super fun, easy to assemble, and the players love 'em. Great for one-offs.

We want more! We're going to bring a copy of this to tomorrow night's Raleigh RPG Rendezvous to distribute among our players. :)

Chad Thorson said...

Madison Games Day is next week, I'll see if it can be included!

Michael S/Chgowiz said...

@RPG and Atom - highly recommend you playtest before using. I can't guarantee they'll play out well enough yet.

Michael "Stargazer" Wolf said...

Wow! Those rules look sweet and for a micro game they are pretty complete. I will have to try out those rules as soon as I have the opportunity.

By the way, do you think it would be possible to use those rules for tactical mech combat, too?

Michael S/Chgowiz said...

@Stargazer - thank you!

I intended on using the CBT Quick Start and Introductory Rules available from Catalyst Labs as "micro" boardgame rules.

Will Douglas said...

Looks pretty spiffy to me!

I haven't had a chance to read them in detail yet (at work, you know!). But at a cursory evaluation, I like it.

Ekimus said...

Nice, short and sweet. I'll have to give these a go.

Thanks!

Pukako said...

Very nice - I agree that MW has gotten so word-heavy, and all you really need are mech, a bit of salvage and brawling skills.

Frankly, I think 1st Ed MW had too many useless skills...

AndreasDavour said...

The only think that could make this even nicer would be to cram in a section about how to create adventures, or a mission generator.

Looks really nice. If only I could find someone who wanted to play test it...