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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheHand" data-source="post: 9800936" data-attributes="member: 88835">The first edition! Cool! I last played it in the early 90’s so my memory isn’t super great with it. It didn’t have ways to totally cheese characters like 2nd edition had, though I feel like it was easy to nerf characters during creation, so you may want to hand out extra starting points if people feel incompetent. We tried to split mech and human playtimes about 50-50, with usually only 1 mech battle in a 4-6 hour session. We did have a few games with no Mechs or all Mechs, depending on where the story was taking us. We’d use MechWarrior rules for human stuff and full BattleTech for Mech combat. It’s easy to get the pilot and gunnery stats from MechWarrior 1st edition to BattleTech. Usually our Mech engagements were lance vs lance, with each player controlling 1 Mech. Sometimes there would be allies or support units which I would let the players also drive. They didn’t usually get bigger than 12 units per side. I think we did Mech progression kind of naturally through salvage or purchasing through c-bills (as opposed to using XP). We also house ruled in Mech specializations for Medium and Light Mechs, so if you really liked your Phoenix Hawk you could stick with it and get extra bonuses rather than upgrade to that Marauder. One of my played also really preferred tanks and VTOLs so he got some bonuses to help with the handicap.  When we did play against Clan mechs they would have to have engineering skill checks to successfully integrate Clan tech. Sometimes I’d let a Clan weapon work partially but fail on a “2” or do slightly less damage. I think the light BattleTech game you might have seen mentioned is Alpha Strike. It’s designed to play large scale engagements and plays almost more like a traditional war game (where units have a few “wounds” and static attack numbers). And as far as troupe style, here you can let your players make up characters for drop ship pilots, MechTechs, ground troops (marines, commandos, ninjas, what have you), and even aerospace pilots if you want there to be air support. Yeah, very similar to Ars Magica with MechWarriors standing in place of your mages. However, in most of my campaigns the players wanted to just focus on their hero characters, so they were kind of built to be action-hero/Mechwarrior, and the other members of their company would be NPCs with simplified stats, but we’d usually give them names and bio’s. They could also use their money and influence for temporary support, like artillery or tanks.  In one game they hired on a driver with coolant truck to follow them around. I think with a session 0 you can toss some of these ideas at your players and see what excites them the most!</blockquote>

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