The last hurrah of the Ronin Wars - Battletech

Today I played in the last battle of our narrative arch of the Ronin Wars. In the setting plot for the Battletech universe, that was a rebellion by old hardliners when the stellar empire of house Kurita let some worlds seced to form a new stellar state. I played the old guard, and this was the last fight as the war was lost.

I knew I wanted to try some of the combined arms aspects of Battletech, so on my side I had once light lance and one company of mechanized infantry. Add to that some buildings, and you have quite a mouthful of new rules if you've only played mech against mech before.

We decided my force wanted to extract three caches of information from the buildings before retreating off world. I sent in my three platoons of infantry towards the buildings and my opponent decided, without knowing, to concentrate his force of heavy mechs on just that cluster of buildings where two of my three caches were. Ouch!

The first platoon ran in, and ran out. While retreating off map they suffered serious losses. Lucky me we had no morale rules! Then they managed to escape they secured a marginal victory for me. After that my commander, in my only mech with any firepower to speak of, got hit by ten long distance missiles in the head. He died, quickly.

After that we diced a lot and my mechs became punched and shot at a lot. In the end one was mobile, but with no weapons left, one was running around with reactor hits and the torso a gaping hole and the last one had no arms and a leg that would fall off if someone looked at it angrily. The last of the infantry died on the edge of the map, gunned down by autocannon fire.

I have no idea of this was how you create a scenario by the book, since I don't own the full rules. Also, I have no idea of this was a scenario where the battlevalues matches up at all. Some guesstimates indicate my force was outgunned somewhat. It was real fun, though!

I really love to play Battletech, since the scenarios become small stories in themselves. Small epics of miserable shots, clumsy pilots and daring escapes. Great drama!

A shot of science fiction feel

(edit: I managed to mess up the line breaks. Hopefully it looks better now)

I will continue on with the science fiction theme from last post. Now I want to focus on mood and atmosphere, the sense of "being there".

Many years ago I read an article in a gaming magazine about how to evoke the mood of fantasy. One thing that stuck in my mind was how the author had once been running a game for his friends, and when they were packing up for the night one of his players got to see the cover of the module they were playing. He gasped (I'm paraphrasing) "Oh! I didn't know that place was so fantasy!", which for me was very interesting.

That story show how important it is to try to plant the right picture in the minds of your players. Now, some of you might protest that it's the players own business what kind of mental perception they have of the game world. Maybe they just want to roll some dice and hang out, right? True, but if you are playing a game where mood is important, like horror, it might be crucial. Also, it will probably help to give the players a better picture of what to do in the world, and what actions migth be appropriate. Since I wrote that I was going to keep talking about science fiction, I'll start doing that now.

Imagine you quickly, and forcefully want to set the mood for science fiction, and to get the message across that "you're not in Kansas anymore", what do you do? In fantasy you could always resort to having something to do with magic, gods or weird monsters happen. Travelling through the woods, the characters have an encounter with a faun. Fantasy Feeling(tm). Keep trekking and you encounter some standing stones, and the place makes you feel a icy feeling run down your spine and a shimmering haze can be seen around the stones. Fantasy Feeling(tm)!

How about science fiction?

Weird aliens show up! Nah. Too much like fantasy. Weird technology! Isn't that just like magic by another name? I have some trouble with this, actually. For me, things that can happen in science fiction is the vast vistas of space, the impact of science and technology on society. Kind of hard to put into play unless it's a long campaign.

All the time I have tried to start a sf campaign it have fallen apart. Maybe not that surprising, considering the confusion that have come clear from thinking about it this way. It will take some more work for me before I try to run sf again. I did find a page about Star Frontiers which almost made me want to do it again, at once. We will see.

Starship settings?

We were talking after our last session of 3:16 about science fiction
in roleplaying, and settings for gaming in general. It have struck me
that even though most games are fantasy games, there are some other
genres covered. Looking at those other genres, it seems like mostly
it's the indie games that covers the odd ones. I guess you have heard
of Contenders, right?

So, my question about settings is about starships. One of my friends
told me that when we have played sf, we have spend most of our time on
a spaceship. He suggested that was why it wasn't working out, since
most books and tv shows are not set on a ship all the time. But let's
think about gaming where that is the case.

Have you ever seen a game where the setting is a generation ship?