Battletech implementation of Fate RPG- constructive criticism
 

Hey, I could use some constructive criticism on the rules set i'm developing over here, and some tips on non-mech and political operations would be great. Ideally I'd like the game to be somewhat gritty, but usually surivable.

I guess nobody has anything to say? :(

Quite a bit of info in there, not familiar with the fate system myself. Fan of BT though. Need to take some time and read it all before offering critique or suggestions.

Just popped over to take a look. I love me some FATE and have always wanted to play a Battletech game, but am not a fan of all the rules.

So... where's the beginning? What should I look at first? I thought maybe the "Basics" thread, but that didn't have any rules.

Clicking around I found Character Creation, which seems to have all the rules in it.

At first blush, it all looks pretty good! It's interesting that the skills are divided into the 5 sub-sections, but still build the pyramid that goes with FATE.

I have some observations: While I know the Battlemech is an extremely important part of the game, I don't know that it needs a lot of Aspects. Taking a page from Bulldogs, I'd have it just have a 'Concept', a 'Strength' and a 'Weakness'. Then, it can have the Speed, Armor, Weapons, Sensors, etc. Also, I'm not entirely sure how 'Economy' comes into play.

The economy skill sets the base difficulty for repairing a mech; they don't recover naturally. More difficult repairs add to the base difficulty. So for instance, to repair the armor on a Mad Cat (a Clan, Heavy, Ammo-using 'mech, with an economy of 5) the player needs to roll at least a 6 to repair one point of armor. They need to roll at least a 9 to repair a serious consequence. In contrast, a Hunchback-9P (a medium, introductory-tech mech that doesn't use ammo with an economy of 1) needs to roll a 2 to repair one point of armor and a 5 to repair a serious consequence. The tradeoff is that the Mad Cat is a lot more deadly, but the HBK is far easier to bring back to full after a stiff fight.

The rules are dumped in the sticky All About Operations, where it goes into detail for each of the operations types.

I kind of agree that the mechs don't need many aspects. I put 'Red Paint Job' on the example mech as a joke (Red makes it go faster!) but now half my players have their paint scheme as an aspect for the mech. Which is not wholly bad, but not really what I had in mind.

I did skills the way I did because I know it's fairly easy to wind up with a very specialized character who's amazing at one thing but crap at everything else; since this is a battletech game, I figured all the characters were likely to buff their mech skills as much as possible. As a consequence of spreading the skills out, though, I wound up with a fairly high number of total skillpoints to get the effect I wanted -- a total of 35 skill points, mostly ranks 1 and 2 (8 points in Average skills, 14 in Fair skills).

The way I set the skill pyramid up guarantees that, no matter what, every character has at least a moderate spread of skills, with a couple ranks here and there even in the things they're worst at, and I think that also helps give the characters some depth. The guy who's a great mechwarrior and is also a science nerd is going to be different from the guy who's a great mechwarrior and also Mr. Popular, and they're going to be different from the guy who's a great mechwarrior and also likes to get into barroom brawls...they're all great mechwarriors, but they've got enough supporting skills to differentiate themselves.

I do actually have one character (out of six) who's only a decent mechwarrior, not a great one, but they have strengths elsewhere that'll probably prove significant.

Nice. Thanks for the explanation. I like what I see. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on it and what tweaks you make after playing it for awhile.