26 June 2019

DRAFT Conversion of Battletech 'mechs for Stars Without Number, Troika! and other games.



I think any game that can interface with a 2d6 skill-like resolution can probably just bolt on Battletech.

This conversion guide is just a way to drop the Battletech rules on top of another game that uses a 2d6 resolution for things. It can also be further extrapolated to apply to any other RPG.

This idea came about to turn Battletech in a more knights etc with mecha instead of horses, with the mecha being ancient heirlooms. I want to capture the slow deliberateness of the way 'Mechs feel without having to use Mechwarrior or A Time of War. These are ancient lost and degrading tech. This is was also intended as an aid to melding a mecha combat game to King Arthur Pendragon for Cataphrakts, Courtly Love & Kaiju, and possibly through Alpha Strike help with the development of Kyuun Kyuun (pretty unlikely), although to be fair, the Traits and Passions are a pretty standalone system.

This all assumes you have Battletech rules.
The base to-hit Target Number is 7, add all the modifiers to the TN per BTech.

For Stars Without Number characters, add skill+attribute bonus to the die roll. Resolve per Battletech rules.
For Troika characters it's a normal Roll Under with the Btech modifiers being added to the die roll. That is the Skill+Advance Skill roll under. Compared to the base Gunnery TN from Battletech of 4, which is a roll over TN with a 83.33% base success, the average Troika character has 5 Skill plus 2 Advanced Skill, based off the assumption that a base adv skill of 3 is a master of that skill,  average base chance is 58.35% bumping up to 72.23% with Adv Skill 3. So the average knight has a lower base chance than the base Gunnery Score, putting a Player Knight on par with a Green Mechwarrior.
For games like D&D that do not have a 2d6 based skill system, characters/monsters get a base TN of 7 minus one-half of character level/HD.

As a general rule, I think that if you want to use Btech for clunky stompy robot fights in your rpg, if it's a a roll high vs a target number, then the SWN method should be a good starting place, eg DnD base TN is AC 14[7]. If it's a roll under system then I think the Troika! method should work. I think that since it Piloting ranges from 7 to 1 and Gunnery ranges from 7 to 0, my conversion for d20 games probably works.

These are my very very rough ideas on converting Dungeons and Dragons monsters to Battletech to create megafauna and kaiju for CCK.

This whole thing is predicated on treating the points of armor on a blank 'mech sheet as the max armor/structure per location.

The Armor Class of the monster turns into a percentage of the armor in each location. 10[10] 0%. 5[15] 50%. 0[20] 100%. If you get wild you can push into the negatives/21+ ACs just making -5[25] 150%.
The Hit Dice of the monster is multiplied by 5% to give the percentage of internal structure in each location. Treat all HD below one as one. You could either cap structure at 100% or allow it continue past for more and more structure.

I honestly don't know how well this will work in practice as I've only played a small number of games of Btech, and I have not tested these ideas out.