I'm looking into running a Heavy Gear campaign and I'm wondering what people who have run Heavy Gear campaigns think is the best edition and what their reasons are.
I also see that there are several different miniature lines and I wonder which type to use.
I'm interested specifically in using it for an extended roleplaying campaign.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
2nd edition, without reservation. 1e is good too. Stay away from SilCORE. Some neat ideas, but it breaks more than it fixes.
Generally, I didn't use the minis of any edition for rp-ing. I ran heavy gear campaigns for about 12 years. I ran lots of extended gear battles using rough maps or theatre of the mind style games. Second edition clears up a couple of small issues in 1e that aren't worth mentioning. It also has some really great books which are essentially the same as 1e.
For extended campaigns, I'd do the following:
1. No complex skills. All skills are simple, and reduce the number of skill points available at character generation to about 32-36, depending on your tastes.
2. For character advancement, you might want to keep track of two experience point pools: Skill Points, which can only be spent to increase skills or attributes (rare), and Experience Points, which can be spent as per the rules, and keep characters alive.. Only give a single skill point as reward per session (maybe two for awesomeness), and encourage players to spend their normal XP to get their characters through tough spots, all the while reassuring them that they will get between one and three XP per session. This will slow advancement down to saner levels, but still allow players to do dynamic and awesome things as their characters collect XP.
3. Enact the Attacks of Deception rule from SilCORE, with a 2-dice cap.
4. Allow two skill dice to be exchanged for a +1 bonus to the role, with a 2-dice cap.
3 & 4 are designed to give veteran characters a reason to advance their skills or use XP for specific stunts, justifying higher level skills. Without these rules, Heavy Gear has very little use for skills beyond level 2.
5. A more extreme move: move the agility-linked skills that can also be linked to reflexes (Perception) or Creativity to those attributes. Agility is the god-stat, and it's a bit ridiculous. Alternatively, merge Creativity and Perception, and make an attribute called Reflexes, which governs Dodge, and all the piloting skills, and anything else that depends on response time (but not the small arms and melee skills!). This way, Agility is not the god-stat, and hotshot ace pilots need Reflexes and Perception, and aren't also melee combat munchkins too.
6. For fast combat, treat NPC gears and other vehicles as characters, and only track detailed damage for PCs.
7. The math on movement points is great. 1 vehicle movement point = 10 meters of movement in a 6 second round. So a Hunter can walk/run at 40m/70m in a single round.
8. To make vehicle combat sane, use the highest modifier of the pilots's attribute or the vehicle's maneuver score, don't add them. This makes heavier armour slightly more useful than it was previously. For vehicles with negative maneuver scores, ignore this rule and add the attribute to the negative score.
9. Give larger sized gears (size 7 Spitting Cobras or Grizzlies, for example) a +1 bonus to hit when engaging in melee combat against a smaller gear (size 6 Hunters for example). Bigger gears should be melee monsters, all other things being equal.
10. Avoid the 2nd edition duelling rules. Avoid the 1st Ed duelling rules. Just no.
This is making me want to run my Heavy Gear (2e) book that's been sitting on my bookshelf for ca 15 years... I guess I'm deterred by the need to create an actual setting before I can run it, the published stuff is far too high level overview. I'd want to make a little Badlands sandbox, I think would be the best approach. Something like 100 km across maybe? A part of the front line small enough to be dominated by a single fire base, roughly equivalent of a D&D starter town.
Quote from: S'mon;1061303This is making me want to run my Heavy Gear (2e) book that's been sitting on my bookshelf for ca 15 years... I guess I'm deterred by the need to create an actual setting before I can run it, the published stuff is far too high level overview. I'd want to make a little Badlands sandbox, I think would be the best approach. Something like 100 km across maybe? A part of the front line small enough to be dominated by a single fire base, roughly equivalent of a D&D starter town.
You basically just did it. Homesteads, rovers, lunatics, sandstorms, and then a polar army comes in to wreck everything as the climax of the campaign. Some of the published stuff is perfect, like Into the Badlands. But others do require the GM to fill in tons and tons of gaps.
Personally, I've never run a "sandbox" style Heavy Gear game. Usually, it starts with a couple of dangling plot threads, and the players start doing stuff they like. I had a memorable "teenage kids doing an underground gear racing league" campaign that was good clean fun. And then there was the "it's TN1918 and you've come back to Baja, where you last saw your good friends from the war..." Which basically ran as a western with gears mashed up with some strange twilight 2000 survivalist themes, and then turned into a travelling caravan hunting CEF war criminals and setting up the groundwork for the KADA. Fun times that, for a while.
I've thought about doing a short campaign on Terranova again, but I don't know how well the system has aged, and I don't know if I want to risk my nostalgic good feelings... Heh.
Is the Heavy Gear Blitz miniatures line the best one to use?
Or is one of the older lines better for some reason?
I quite like Silhouette and SilCORE, but these days I'd probably roll with Heavy Gear D6.
https://banzaidyne.wordpress.com/heavy-gear-d6/
2e was really good.
Quote from: RPGPundit;10617452e was really good.
Concur. If you buy in, OP, get 2e.
I have most of the 2e books, the 1e core book and the SilCore books. I do recommend 2e since before pawning off the RPG rights, DP9 sorta went back to it. And I do kind of like it a bit more. But f you like SilCore, by all means go for it. The bones are the same so it's no to minimal work to modify existing material to any edition of the game.
Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;1061793Concur. If you buy in, OP, get 2e.
I still never liked it as much as Robotech. Though I did like it more than Mekton.
Quote from: RPGPundit;10617452e was really good.
I will third this. My favourite version of it.