Battletech: A Time of War

I first began playing Battletech twenty years ago.  The first book I owned was the House Steiner book.  I quit the wargame when they launched the Clan invasion, but I always remained fascinated with the RPG, the potential of the setting, and so I have owned at one time or another every single edition of Mechwarrior.

In some ways Mechwarrior Third Edition was the best and worst of the lot.  I mention it because there is no way to review A Time of War without discussing Third Edition... at least not to do it justice.

In many ways, a Time of War is Mechwarrior Third Edition, revamped.  I was most impressed with the changes between the two, to the point where I would recommend a Time of War over Mechwarrior 3 any day.  However, it is not without some serious flaws, most of them avoidable.

I didn't want to buy this book. The legal and ethical problems behind Catalyst give me pause, the shoddy work on the Shadowrun lines make me question every product they release now.  I'd like to say they exceeded my expectations, but the best I can say is the book doesn't suck.  I'll leave it to the details to sell you one way or the other.

To start with, the book is big and heavy, hard bound, heavy glossy pages, lots of color and artwork.  Each chapter starts with a bit of in setting fiction, three or four pages on average, all chapters of a mini story.  Since I last looked into the setting apparently the Word of Blake ( a faction I've disliked at least as much as the Clans...) has gone apocalyptic jihadist on the setting and gained super cyborg commando units.  Each chapter of the mini story was written by a different author (they are all credited individually), and they vary wildly in quality. The best written pieces, ironically, also tend to be the boring ones where the characters are mostly moving around, rather than 'doing stuff', but that's not a universal rule.  This does serve to highlight an issue with the presentation, however: Our characters work for a Devlin Stone, who has a fleet of warships and troops called Stone's Legion, and they are fighting a bunch of Blakists... including Domini. Now, I assume there are lots of Battletech Canonistas who could clear up the eighteen or so questions that description provides, but for people like me, or worse, people utterly unfamiliar with the setting, it doesn't do a heck of a lot to explain much of anything.   Why does this one guy have a legion and why is he fighting the Blakists?

But most of us don't care for game book fiction, so lets move on, shall we?  As I said, the book is sturdy. Its also fairly well organized. There are little tabs on the side of the pages to tell you what chapter you are in and what the next chapter is (all of them, really), though sadly they are not visible when the book is closed. There is an index, though it is a little hard to find, and a lot of things are cross referenced with page numbers.  There is a mix of classic artwork that has been recycled and new artwork to pretty it up, and mostly its all good.  

Chapter one is a rough overview of the setting. The first two pages (four?) are four color geopolitical maps covered with 'cards' explaining in brief each of the dozens of factions.  While the map itself is useless, a backdrop, the cards themselves are excellent. I hope people with other vastly detailed settings take note of this and use it. Each card details important information for the players and GM alike: the ruler (by name) the number of worlds, capital, currency and even the founding year and local languages.  YES!!!! At last I don't have to read an entire book on a sliver of a setting to tell my characters who the local king is!!!   Sweet fucking Jeebus, at last!  Get it? I like this, do it more.  

After that it has a couple of pages describing what an RPG is and how to play... like 'sit around a table with buds and roll dice'. I generally find this stuff excess but every game has it so there you go. Then we get a thumbnail description of each of the major faction history. This is a quick gloss, the clans are detailed as a whole, the periphery is detailed as a whole, and it adds nicely to the data card map we just had.   Then we get a picture of the different 'ages' of Battletech, with the idea that we can set our game in times we prefer, though aside from geopolitical situation there isn't much to change apparently.  There is a three page glossary of setting terms, which manages to omit an insulting word repeated a dozen time in flavor text, so...

Then, right there in the book! Advertisements! Okay, it's actually a reference to all the historical documents that have preceeded this book, the old core books, the metaplot books, the novels, complete with cover shots. My bad, I thought they were trying to sell me something...

Chapter two is, more or less, the rules. I say more or less because the bulk of the rules fall into combat, which is a different chapter all together.  I actually missed this little chapter when I first skimmed the book, it wasn't until I tried to make sense of the Combat rules that I realized I had missed something.   As a highlight, the rules have been made compatible with the table top wargame, at least according to the book. It is a simple enough system on the face of it: Roll 2d6, add your skill and the various modifiers and compare to the difficulty.  The problem is when you look at that difficulty. There is a small and simple chart that gives you half a dozen numbers ranging from 7 to 18. No problem, right?  Well, I'll give you the problem: which line of the chart you use is entirely determined by what type of skill you are using. Sample Entrée: Skill Check (Complex-Advanced Skill) TN 9.  What is a complex-Advanced Skill?  Good question. It gets even better when you realize that there are tiered skills that change categories as you get better at them; specifically they get harder (more advanced) when you go from +3 to +4, which means all the tiered skills (Melee, Martial Arts, Computers and Prestidigitation) have a dead spot where you actually don't get any better just because you raised them. Caveat: they MIGHT get better if your linked attributes are all 'good enough'... but we'll cover that later. Lets just say that there are probably more reasons NOT to raise a tiered skill above that threshold than there are reasons TO raise it.  Oops.

Having four different target numbers for skill checks, that are dependent upon the skill itself, and two for attribute checks just smacks me as needlessly complex and, well, fiddly. It's the sort of thing that can drag a game down quickly if people don't pick up on it quickly.

And Whoops! Its time for character creation! Remember when I said I couldn't possible review this without Mechwarrior 3? This is why: The character creation chapter is a direct port of the Mechwarrior 3 character creation chapter.  There are parts that seem almost verbatim lifts. They aren't, of course. In fact, I would say that the first and most fundamental change is such a significant improvement as to make the purchase of this book entirely worthwhile.  It is not, however, with some significant blemishes.

Mechwarrior 3's character creation system did not hand you 'skill points' or, honestly, address your attributes in any meaningful way. Instead you got some other sort of points that where collected and compared to some chart, used once, to determine final value. Excess points did not translate into much of anything at all, though if your GM was generous you could move them around a bit to get a bit of much needed personal choice.  Seriously: I think there are several skills and 'traits' that it is utterly impossible to get in Mech3's character creation system if you follow the book.

A time of War does something I had only heard about, but never seen directly outside of direct point buy systems:  Each stage of the life path give you XP in each skill, attribute and trait, from a starting pool. I do mean XP, these are the same points you use when growing your character in game play.   Its actually quite nifty, age old questions like 'What about my attributes?" are finally answered.  This is the good, the great even. Honestly, if I was so wedded to Mech3, I'd still use this 'lifepath' to make the damn characters just because it is so much easier for players to grasp.

The execution, however, isn't quite as elegant as I'd like.  It is obviously a direct port, and there are some artifacts of that porting that frankly don't make sense, either because they weren't addressed clearly enough or because they shouldn't have been addressed at all.

For example: Every Lyran Alliance member MUST HAVE glass jaw or combat paralysis, and every NOBLE has to have Glass Jaw.  Is is possible to stack both?  What if your concept is a dedicated professional soldier-noble from House Steiner? Can you buy them off? I'd say yes, but I'd like the book to cover that.  And why do 6 of the 11 childhood paths include Illiteracy as a trait... and if half the galaxy can't read, why do so many options insist that you can't be illiterate?

Worse is the 'rule' for repeating a 'real life' path.  In an XP spending system, repeating a stage four path is a newbie trap, a stupidity tax. These are the most expensive paths to take, and the primary point sinks (Attributes and traits) are not stacked, while in some cases you also gain a disadvantage for no points break. You are essentially paying full price for much less than half the value.  Given that you are essentially using a color system to give flavor to your character (as it is possible to directly spend your points and skip the lifepath entirely), a tax of 10-15% of your characters total 'worth' is cruel and utterly unnecessary.
There are other flaws as well.  The very first step in character creation is, essentially, to buy your first point in every attribute (so you don't start at zero), and a facility with the English language and the ability to spot on-coming cars.  Only, this is not that well explained and is easily missed. It should be a lifepath 'block', especially considering its roughly 20% of your character.  The fact that your first ever lifepath choices will almost inevitably REDUCE your starting attributes to less than 1 (which must then be bought BACK up!) is also a problem. In Mech 3 it wasn't, as the 'attribute modifiers' only changed the threshold  for costs, not the actual value of the attribute itself.

Less of an error in design and more of a nuisance in presentation is the 'field skills'. Rather than waste space re-writing, say, Basic Training skills for half a dozen entrees in character creation you get 'basic training' as a field. No problem, and still a direct port from the previous edition. However, in the previous edition the field cost you nothing. In the new edition every change to the character has a value, including the field skills. However, rather than tell you flat out what the cost of any given field is, they insist you add up each bonus individually each time you take a field. The worst example is Officer Training, which is its own school entry (costing 500 points plus Field), it only has one field in it (officer training), no other choices.  Now, every time a player takes Officer Training, he's going to have to remember to add up the number of skills in the field, multiply by 30 and realize that he paid an additional 210 points for that entry in his life path.  Seriously: If you go to college or take a military profession (90% of all characters will probably do one of the two) you will have fields, and at least two of them if not more, and you will be adding up all those skills manually each time.  At the very least including the total value of the field in the field table would have been called for. People give up on games where they have to repeat tedious tasks, so removing all the unnecessary ones would seem like a good idea, right?

On a personal note, I miss the random chart rolls from M3. They were a little too punative initially (seriously: Any roll under a seven was generally VERY BAD (including loss of limbs on nearly every chart, somewhere), and you'd be rolling roughly 10 times (based on pregen characters...)

One thing that can be easily missed is that there is no 'good time' to quit taking life path choices (in the real life stage), other than your pool depleting. Seriously, you probably should never take more than one 'real life path' unless the GM is boosting the starting points total.  You can't just spend all your points, because if you do your attributes will be pathetic (and in fact may not even meet the minimums required by your lifepath!!! Yes, they don't tell ask you to buy those up as soon as you hit them...).

Lemmee explain: You have 5000 points. You have 8 attributes that all start at 0. It take 100 points to raise an attribute 1 point. Attributes don't start being positive until they hit 7... so if you want to be, say, Smart, that is your threshold. At 3 or less they are actually negative. To avoid negative attributes you need to spend 3200 points at a minimum.  A normal character will hit stage 4 with maybe 2000 points left, and is unlikely to have any attribute higher than 4 (and will probably have a few at 0 or, god forbid, negative values).

Traits are almost as bad, though unless you plan on being a mechwarrior you can probably skip most of them (seriously: there are three, linked, vehicle traits. To get a decent starting mech you are looking at 1000 points, give or take...)

Character creation ends with the pregens. I'm not going to add up all their XP costs to tell you if they are good or bad, they look fine at first blush. They are useless for showing you how the system works. The artwork is pretty decent, all the same guy as far as I can tell. I do however, feel compelled to comment: Every character with any exposed skin aside from the face is heavily tattooed.  This tells me that the artist is a fan of tattooing, or it tells me that body decoration is much more common in the universe of battle tech than our own.  Seriously: Out of 8 sample characters I can say definitively that three have both arms sleeved, and a fourth probably does. The other four are completely covered (the elemental is an exception, his armor is open and we see nothing on his bare chest or neck... just to be perfectly accurate). Its not offensive, but it is a little heavy handed, and it does make be question the art director's attention to detail.

Attributes don't get their own chapter, by the way, despite having eight of them. The list COULD be collapsed some, but its tradition. At least social status is no longer an attribute.

Traits, however, do get a chapter.  Traits, to be blunt, are expensive. To get a bonus on your initiative checks is comparable to 10% of your character, for example. Like so much else they are direct ports from Mech3, but the change in character creation makes them seem much more expensive to me than they used to be. Several have been removed, particularly negative ones, or so it seems to me. No more amnesiacs wandering the countryside, alas.  Weird balance issue: Attractive and Unattractive traits are directly opposed and provide virtually the same effect on the character, only reversed. Attractive, however, is twice as expensive as unattractive now. Typo? Cultural statement on the relative merits of being pretty? Design philosophy designed to minimize nice things and prevent collecting munchkin points? Who can say?

On the other hand, taking a clan Phenotype is, as all things clan, simply better than not taking it. It has a zero cost, provides phat attribute bonuses and cool skill bonuses.  I seem to recall that they were at least a LITTLE more balanced before, but since my Mech3 book is currently wandering around the house somewhere I can't check directly.  

Given the sample characters and my own experiments with life path character creation, you will probably have more negative traits than positive. If you don't use the lifepath, on the other hand, you will probably not have many of either unless you really really want them.  You are limited to 10% of your starting total (500 points by default) in negative traits, not including the ones you start with from the lifepath. While I could easily spend 500 points in negative attributes, there were few that I'd actually want that could fill up the points. This might be a good thing, its hard to say.  By way of illustration: 500 xp worth of 'bloodmark' means your head is worth millions of dollars to half the galaxy.

There is some schizophrenia here too: the Alternate ID trait (which you can easily get in the lifepath...) seriously expects you to buy separate positive and negative traits for each identity you have, yet they cost so much that you could never actually afford to DO it. Also: If you are ever caught, they will all collapse into your main identity anyway, so why bother?  

But lets move on to the Skills chapter.  Skills are rated from +0 to +10, though the actual range is more limited to about +4 or so. Skills are much cheaper than attributes or traits, at least at first. A +4 skill is 120 points total.  The Fast and Slow Learner traits alter the cost of skills in 10% either direction, which officially makes fast learner a trap in character creation, as it costs 400 points, meaning you won't see your value back until you've spent 4000 XP on skills alone.  Natural aptitudes, thankfully, no longer much with skill costs, and are also now open to combat skills.   Skills have been streamlined from the previous edition, which is a good thing.  Its still pretty easy to have more skills than you have easy room for on your character sheet, but now you don't have to look for three or four different gun skills, chose from half a dozen martial arts and so forth.  And while I disagree that various skills should have different target numbers for basic success, at least the skills chapter has a single table that gives you all those TNs for each skill.  While I think it could still use a little streamlining, I have to give credit for doing it at all.

Combat is broken into three chapters, which ought to tell you a little something about it. I will say, first of all, that it does seem an improvement over Mech  3, it is still somewhat fiddly.  Skill based task resolution is great with me, and Margins of Success is also fine by me. But when you start having different values for the same Margin of Success depending on what type of attack it was I start getting Flashbacks to Shadowrun 1 and then my therapist has to lure me from under the couch with candy.   What do I mean? Well, if you shoot someone you have to succeed by for,  that is an MoS of four, to get an additional point of damage, but if you fire a burst, every MoS means an additional point of damage... and so on.  Weapon damages and armor values seem to have been ported over directly, and how they interface is... complex.  If the AP of the shot is higher than the armor than the damage is unchanged, if the AP is lower than you don't just subtract the armor from the damage you... divide the damage by the difference.  Gah!  Apparently there is a separate value for 'tactical armor' that only applies to the miniature wargame version.  

Here is the thing: When Heavy Gear tells me that combat works the same in personal and mech scale combat they actually mean it. They really do work the same. When Battletech tells me the same thing what they mean, apparently, is that the basic task resolution is the same, but there are a bunch of special rules that only work one way or the other (tactical armor values for battlesuits, special 'attributes/feats/skill' that only apply while driving  a mech in 'tactical combat' and so forth.  In fact, the second Combat chapter is essentially the 'how to run tactical battletech', complete with artwork made of mostly painted miniatures standing around. Ugly miniatures, honestly.  Its not all bad, if you are willing to adapt and work a little some of the Special Pilot Abilities could be adapted to a game of dudes running around without mechs just fine (like, say the Sniper SPA...). They even have XP costs, so they fit right in.
The third combat chapter is really the 'Adventuring chapter'. Its actually called the Special Case Rules, and is mostly dedicated to critters (seriously, the short story has our benighted recon commandos fight off a tiger!) with a side of disease. It is very short, actually, and mostly ignorable.

The last chapter is equipment and this chapter actually pissed me off, if only mildly. Human beings are tool using animals, and very little helps define a culture and society more than their tools. Gamers, being violent little sociopaths naturally gravitate towards the weapons as an indicator of this.  It isn't just the all important numbers that make up the various implements, but their actual descriptions, their history. What makes a Nambu pistol different than a Hawk Eagle?

Battletech has always been good for this. Images of a Draconis Veteran with a cone rifle helped inspire me to look into the game, technical manuals with lots of drawing and descriptions, sometimes of the most innocuous of items, kept me interested.  A Time of War doesn't exactly toss all of that, they happily use the names, and the vast store of artwork they've got, and even build up some new artwork (or at least art I've never seen before) on top of that. However, there is not a single word of text about any of the entries in the vast tables that actually make up the equipment chapter.  We get a description of what a melee weapon is, or a laser, but not a word on why there is an entry for a Nambu. What makes a Medusa whip different than a neural whip?  Well, I have some numbers here, a handful of rules in a chart, and there is even a nice drawing that make it look like a bullwhip with a rattler tail for a tip. Peachy.  Its fucking lazy, however, and irritating as hell when you stumble across something and want to read a bit more.

Morever: after putting elementals in your book, having a host of rules for the hows and whys of battlesuits, including fairly pricy 'traits' so you can actually start with one (this is, after all, a Battle tech game...), when you get to their entry in the equipment chapter they essentially tell you to fuck off and wait for another book.  

Luckily for me, however, is that the equipment chapter shows that the old Mech 3 books are completely compatible equipment-wise, and I happen to own the Mech 3 Lostech book that has all the battle armor in it, so fuck you Catalyst!  Let me tell you something, there is nothing about the power armor that could not have been squeezed into the existing format for equipment just fine.  Yes: People like me really like the full page artwork of each suit, and the 1-2 page description of the design and development history. But since you already shat on all of that, there is no excuse to claim you can't fit it in now!

Anyway: The last chapter is game mastering tips and guides. It's a good enough chapter, with some adventure seeds, a few planets are detailed, and there is a good overview of various cultural elements... all told it seems pretty solid.

What is missing here is a good solid chapter on the setting as a whole. This is the thickest Mechwarrior book by a large margin (three to one, at a glance), and it gives the least setting information of any of them, yet without actually giving that much more for the page count in other areas. Baffling really.

It does, however, have a really nice appendix and a 'character sheet' for mook NPCs.... Er... random troops? That can be used by the GM (or maybe the players too) to track minions and bad guys and stuff.

So, the pros: Largely back compatable with the previous edition without much work, meaning you don't have to spend a lot of time converting while you wait to spend money on newer versions of shit you already own.  A vast improvement in character creation process makes it a worthy buy even if you think you have everything you need to play Mechwarrior.  Its pretty and sturdy and even contains a few gems for designers (and players?) to steal for future products.  It is well organized, and that is always a plus. Not having to search for a rule reference is a Good Thing ™

The Cons: for a book with a massive, well developed setting behind it, it seriously fails to deliver the setting.  The Writing is generally less than stellar. There were a few cases where I and my 'test player' had to re-read a paragraph or two to parse a rule or fill in some obvious gaps on our own.  The idea behind changing character creation to a much more streamlined, integrated system was a good one, the execution was a little slap-dash and sloppy, evidently lazy work in some cases.  Good things were stripped from the source, leaving it slightly inferior in areas to the thinner, cheaper, older book.  The company is populated by dirty thieves, sycophants and untalented hacks filling in for the better talent that fled... so you are essentially rewarding their bad behavior by buying it.

Spike's verdict: when combined with the older Mech 3 books at the table this is a very worthy game book. On its own its pretty good, but slightly more generic than it should be.   While I crave the coolness of the Limited Edition, I think the gall of those dirty thieves to sign my numbered book would have caused me to do it irreparable harm, so its just as well I saved some money on the slightly gaudier regular book.

Did you mean a seven instead of a one?

Um.. I didn't put anything in that block.  

If it doesn't auto populate I must have accidentally done something.

Very useful, thanks Spike!