longtime Battltech fan here, these are my thoughts on the RPGs...
OK,
Mechwarrior first edition -this is better thought of as a supplement to the wargame than a self-contained RPG. It''s very much geared to playing out what happens in between battles, and as such is almost entirely focused on Mech pilots. This isn't a "bad thing", but going in expecting the equivalent of WFRP is going to leave one disappointed. It is functional, as a system, but historically ultimately the value ended up being in it's role as one of the best overall primers of the BattleTech universe at the time, when the lore was startg to get quite in-depth. For a while, any new player wantng a crash-course overview of BT history and political overview of the setting during the Succession Wars would find the RPG book the best option for a succinct but comprehensive collation of information otherwise spread between multiple sourebooks and novels.
Ultimately,
Mechwarrior 2nd edition was an improvement over the first edition in every way - fleshing out and foocusing on roles for characters besides Mechwarriors while still prioritizing easy integration with the wargame, and devoting a third of the book to setting info, at that point progressing past the Clan Wars up to the Jyhad IIRC. However, Mechwarriors still outshone every other character type, and it was perhaps too easy to create elite mechwarriors out of the gate (this is analogous to the issue of Jedi in Star Wars games - it is setting appropriate for them to be much more capable than other characters, but that can lead to an "Angel Summoner and The BMX Bandit" sort of disparity between characters).
Mechwarrior 3rd tried to address the "balance issues" with second edition and de-powered the Mechwarriors (at least as starting player characters), but this game was more restrictive insofar a playing characters within the ongoing storyline at the time, with the lifepath-esque character creation system placing a large emphasis on character's homes and factions. Which is fine, if you want to play in the setting at that point in time, but as someonee who prefers to stick to the Succession War era, it's frustrating in that it doesn't offer any real support to choosing between the multiple (and very different) BT eras. It's worth noting that this edition of the RPG was published three times by three different companies - originally by FASA, then by FanPro, and finally reprinted by Catalyst, retitled The "Classic BattleTech RPG" - though the content of the game remains the same.
System-wise, all three editions of Mechwarrior are known for having complex, Traveller-inspired lifepath-base character creation rules paired with a relativelly simple task resolution during play (2d10 vs TN). They are all generally about as compatible with each other as TSR editions of D&D, and smooth integration with the wargame remains a focal point for all of them. Overall, I'd recommend Mechwarrior 2nd edition as the best of the bunch, especially if paired with the second edition Mercenary Handbook, which goes into great detail as to the practical process of forming and operating a Mercenary Lance, including navigating the interplanetary economics of the BT setting.
Then we get post-FASA's
A Time of War, which has about as much in common with the Mechwarrior RPGs as Shadowrun 4th edition does to Shadowrun 2nd edition. I'm going to be honest, I gave this game one read-thru and waa like "nope". It is crunchy as hell. I doubt very much that any playtesting was involved, or if it was, it wass done by a gaming group that prefers calculators over role-playing.
OK, OK...that's just me being flippant and sarcastic... it's no Phoenix Command, but it is way beyond my personal crunch threshold. But if you regularly play an enjoy games like Pathfinder, that may not be the obstacle for you that it is for me. In which case, you' probably be better than I to judge the quality of the system in all honesty.
Finally, perhaps due to complaints like mine about ToW, Catalyst revamped Time of War as
BattleTech Destiny. Which is a very "narrative" RPG - uh, sorta. OK, this is going to come acrosss mean, but know that I don't have any particular hostility towards Destiny - I'm more bemused by it, and I dunno, I sorta look at it as "the Brave Little Toaster" of BattleTech RPGs. You see, I don't think the writers at Catalyst actually understood how Narrative RPGS generally work, or even what that really means. It just feels like they took parts of the game and said "OK, now be Naarrative and StoryEngage to tell stories!" It's really a hodgepodge of classic rules and randomly some "Narrativy wibbly-wobbly" thrown in. It makes me smile, albiet patronizingly.
OK, so that's my overview of the various versions , now let me say why I think all of them completely miss the mark for a truly great BattleTech RPG. And I am also going to completely contradict myself, because I'm of two minds here.
So let me start with the contradiction and say that, for what the Mechwarrior RPGs are, they'd have been better hyper-focusing on the approach of the first edition - especially, as I mentioned earlier, directly paired with the Mercenary Handbook. Hmm...let me share a picture...
I love this picture. It is in frequent rotation as the Wallpaper on my laptop. It evokes and captures something so appealing to the idea of BattleTech from a worm's eye view of the setting. Just a bunch of folks hanging out in between actions, on a random planet, with their Mechs. A self-contained vehicle/starship/weapon of war that is the whole of these character's lives, an extension of their personality, their jobs, their roles in society, etc.
And that, I think, is a great premise for an RPG in the BT setting - a mercenary contigent of Mechwarrior pilots, making their way in the universe, with their individual Mechs as a stand-in for say, The Millenium Falcon.
But the more that the games moved away from that (admittedly very myopic) singular premise, the more it threw into stark contrast how - how do I put this? I guess, how little the player characters mattered to the setting.
I love BattleTech's setting (well maybe not every era, but overall). In fact , I think it is one of the greatest science fiction settings of all time. It's as detailed and expansive as Warhammer 40K, without the grimdark and over the top satire. It's as rich and morally complex as Dune, without the anti-Messiah narrative. And it's a holdover of a view of the future from the lens of the 1980s that is both optimistic and practical in a way I find endlessly endearing.
But it's not Robotech or Gundam Wing - where a team of plucky ace mech pilots decide the future. It's not Star Wars where the course of the Galaxy revolves around family issues and friendgroups. It's not Exo-Squad, where even though the antagonists are understandable and empathetic in their motivations, there is still clearly a good guys vs bad guys overarching narrative.
Instead BattleTech is...well, it's
Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
Comparisons to a ridiculously long , old, expensive, and never-dubbed anime aside, what I'm saying is the setting of BattleTech is expansive, and Mechs are actually just a tiny part of that, and ultimately, about as relevant as tanks or B-52s to the history of WW2. Sure, they are visually the main selling point of the BattleTech games, and of course they are the focus of the wargame, but ultimately they are, individually, insignifcant to the wider picture, a sprawling political landscape where ancient aristicratic houses, post-communist industrial machinees, fuedal lords, and anarchic coalitions all play a constant deadly game of diplomacy. It's Game of Thrones on several thousand times the scale. And while I'm not saying every PC should have the option of playing Prince Davion or an equivalent, note my earlier use of the phrase "worm's eye view"...
I feel like the RPGs don't ever even touch on or come close to involving the PCs in 80% of what makes the setting so engaging and unique. There seems to me a vast unexplored potential for role-playing in the BattleTech setting that doesn't need to shackle itself to what is eseentially the role of dogfighters in WWII and their engineers.
Back at the begginning of this (getting really long) post, I made an unfavourable comparison between Mechwarrior 1st edition and WFRP. Let me unpack that a bit. In the Warhammer Fantasy wargame, you take on the role of the movers and shakers of the world - princes and kings of various races commanding vast armies of myriads of fantastical troops, encountering numerous inhuman creatures and weapons, all vying for a slice of the Old World. WFRP's basic premise was to flip that on it's head, casting players as the dregs of society within the Empire, compltely insulated from the over the top fantasy of the wargame, and in doing so, illustrated and opened up for gaming a whole side of the world as-yet uexplored by players. This is, in a way, the opposite of BattleTech's set-up, where in the wargame you play the grunts of the military....and in the RPG (in all iterations) you play the same; you are stuck in this same small slice and perspective of the setting.
Imagine if you did, like WFRP, flip that notion on it's head, and instead of members of the military, the RPG was set up to play interstellar diplomats, deeply-entrenched spies, Royal courtesans, petitioners for a Periphery coalition, electors of a fallen noble house trying to regain status, Comstar powerbrokers, etc. There are endless possibilities to be explored in the vast setting.
And to me it just seems like a missed opportunity.
But then , maybe that wouldn't capture an audience. It's likely that most people, when they turn to a BattleTech RPG, do so because they want to play Mechwarriors. Which is why I say that perhaps first edition had the right idea, with it's hyper-focus on Mechwarriors alone, it just needed more to it (like the aforementioned Mercenry Handbook providing a framework). But I'm not writing this to appeal to popularity, or maximize profits by trying to antcipate the LCD of any gaming population. I just can't help but think that one could, OTOH, open up this vast universe to a new audience who haven't read 30+ game novels, most of which are OOP, and expose to the gaming world the vast, sweeping space opera underpinning the BattleTech universe that I can assume most casual viewers remain completely unaware of.
I dunno, that's my thoughts anyways
