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View Full Version : Anyone played Battletech: A time of war?



mishka_shaw
2012-11-23, 06:39 AM
Aloha

Okay first off I love Mechwarrior games however I never really got the hang of the whole Battletech game since I had no idea which book I needed to start (local shop sold an ass ton of stat sheet books for various vehicles but none seemed to have any rules on what to actually do).

Anyway I was looking at Battletech: A Time of War and downloaded the little free-booklet from their website and I have to say that it looks quite fun, if a little complex.

So my question is has anyone played this game and can give a summary on how good it is? Also does it merge well with normal battle-tech as I would quite like to add in mech’s at some point, so would Strategic Operations, core construction and other core-rulebooks be cross-compatible?

king.com
2012-11-23, 10:55 PM
I've started running a game of it recently and while fun.....the system has problems.


The character creation is unnessarily complex and really provides very little of the freedom relative to the amount of work you need to do to create a character. You can generally get what you want but theres so much ultimately pointless number tracking that ends up justing meaning either a +0 or +1 in a skill.

The combat system is pretty brutal, so be warned if you dont like that. You really want to be avoiding combat. The rules for using vehicles are not terrible but not the best i've seen. Ultimately even the rules recognise "you should just play battletech if you want vehicle combat". If you want to use the table top rules it works really well for combing the two systems, lots of cool special rules for pilots and the like.

Its not the best system around but it really seems designed to be an attachment to the tabletop game and works fairly in that regard.