Battletech: It's Hard To Be a Mechwarrior

Wednesday April 26, 2017 at 12:14pm gaming, battletech Comments (0) »
Battletech: It's Hard To Be a Mechwarrior Image

Some barriers to break down.

Battletech has a pretty significant "barrier to entry".  This fact is pretty well-known amongst gamers.  The rules of the tabletop game - even if you don't get into some of the advanced/optional stuff - are crunchy and fairly complicated at first blush.  There's like 3 different steps to do anything.  Also, the fiction and history of the setting (which is awesome) is pretty vast and somewhat convoluted.  And there's just so much stuff out there pertaining to Battletech, that it can be intimidating to anyone wanting to pick it up (I know, I was there a couple years ago) - I mean, where do you start?  But there is another aspect to this barrier that I hadn't previously considered.

First time in the cockpit.

Tim and I introduced Rucht & Tony to this wonderful world of giant robots last night.  It was our usual night to play Rucht's D&D 5e game (which is fantastic, by the way - we're a party of halflings!), but a few people had to cancel and we didn't reach critical mass for the game to occur, so I brought my Battletech stuff and we decided to blow up some stuff.

I set up a map with my spiffy hex terrain, some of my best painted units (color coded by teams), and got out the sheets, dice, etc.  I have a pretty solid setup, I think.  We played 2-on-2: Tony and I against Tim and Rucht.  A Catapult, Enforcer, Rifleman, and Dervish, respectively.  I think our side had a slight edge in battlefield value, but I've found balancing lances in Battletech to be really, really difficult, so I don't usually agonize over getting it perfect, and I didn't choose the sides.

Rucht likes minis games and, I think, enjoyed this one about as well as any other.  He would probably play it again on occasion, but didn't seem super enthusiastic.  Tony tends to like games that are a bit more straight-forward.  He really liked kicking Tim's Rifleman in the shins of course, but I think he would have prefered a bit less computation in order to do so.  He said he had a good time with it, but wasn't something he'd be interested in as an ongoing thing.  We only got through about half of the engagement, but we all had fun and I think it was a decent intro.

After the game, Tim and I were talking about how it went.  Tim is, so far, the one person I've introduced to this game who is really into.  He and I have been doing a kind of single-player strategic-level merc campaign - Aralakh Company - using some companion rules I made to handle non-mech-combat stuff.  We're about 15 sessions in, and we've been absolutely LOVING it.  We got to talking about why the game didn't seem quite as fun to our friends as we think it is.

And then, we remembered.

Before you walk, you have to crawl.  Really, really slowly.  Over gravel.

It could simply be that the game is just not their thing, but I think there's a little more to it than that.  

Here's the thing we decided about Battletech: You have to like some crunch in a combat system for sure, and you have to have some guidance as to where to start (thanks to Dan, Chris, and Fear the Boot, by the way), but you ALSO have to have a fair degree of patience.  You just have to really like the idea of Battletech in order to get far enough into the game to fall in love with it.  

Many games become increasingly fun to play as you get to know the rules, but Battletech takes this to a certain extreme.  Not only does the game not reach "peak fun" until you know it well enough that the phases and calculations come somewhat naturally and chart-referencing is an "only some of the time" event, but learning it that well takes a while, and the game can be almost oppressive before you get to that point.  I totally get how many people would feel that the slog just isn't worth it when there are so many other games out there that are a bit easier and more fun up front.

Tim and I both agreed that when we first started playing, the games were slow and clunky and not nearly as much fun (even if we were playing with people who knew the rules pretty well), but we both loved the concepts around the game so much that we put up with the less-than-smooth gameplay long enough to get to the point where we knew it well enough to enjoy it as much as we do now.

Unfortunately, if you're not truly enamoured with the ideas from the start, you're probably not going to stick with this game long enough to really enjoy it.  If the game has a flaw, this is surely it.

~PS

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