Anatomy of failed design : A Time of War

[Juton]

A Time of War (AToW for short) is the current version of Battletech's RPG system. Battletech a tabletop wargame with a sci-fi setting, the setting is loosely based on a dark ages Europe where most battles are resolved with 40 foot tall mechs fighting with guns with less range than civil war cannons. There is a lot of content written for the setting, which means it isn't the worst choice for an RPG setting. CGL found a way to shit the bed though.

Resolution Mechanic
Roll 2d6, they found a way to make that complicated. I can't see anyone playing AToW who hasn't played Battletech. Battletech has a system where each mech has a basic target number, modifiers are added to it and then it is compared to straight 2d6 rolls. So in Battletech penalties are positive numbers, bonuses are negative.

For whatever reason, AToW flips that. In AToW modifiers are added to a roll then compared to a static target number. Except that the target number isn't always static. So penalties are negative numbers and bonuses are positive. Completely counter intuitive to their established fan base. This isn't a random change, because they decided to tack on a margin of success (MoS) mechanic for certain actions and opposed checks. They took a game (Battletech) with an already steep learning curve and they decided to make it even steeper, kudos.

Besides being more complicated, it is fucking unnecessary. If you really want to include a margin of success mechanic you can do it with Battletech's resolution mechanic. Which literally 100% of AToW players will know by heart. Different skills also have different target numbers so players will have to remember the 2d6 roll, the base modifier, all the situational modifiers the target DC and whether they have to calculate the MoS.

A house is only as solid as its foundation, the same with TTRPGs and its resolution mechanic. One of the big triumphs of D&D 3.0 is that it streamlined all of 2e's disparate and clunky mechanics into one unified mechanic. That mechanic works, so the things built on it could also work. AToW's mechanic works for shit and it mires every other part of the game. What's really telling is that it may not even be the worst mistake CGL makes in this book.

Even more galling is that there is a previous Battletech RPG that uses Battletech's resolution mechanic and was fairly successful. Instead of fixing its flaws they have decided to start from scratch two times and they have failed two times. CGL could have also used Shadowrun's mechanics, but for some reason they've constantly refused to do so for. In fact every previous version of the Battletech RPG has refused to crib from Shadowrun despite things actually working fairly well in that system.

Style
Intermittently through the text it reminds players to work with the GM about certain topics, like character motivation and negative traits. Players don't have to consult the GM all the time, only some of the time. Either this is because character creation is so Sisyphean the GM doesn't have the time to help everyone with everything or because they couldn't decide how much the GM should be involved in chargen.

Some things are ambiguous, introvert characters get penalties in social situations but leaves what a social situation is up the GM. Some things are very explicitly spelled out, like downtime training which makes me think the book was written by two or more people with very different philosophies and then poorly edited.

So what we end up with is a game that is in parts both rules light(ambiguous) and rules heavy(explicit). Having read the book and played some sessions I can only imagine the rules light parts are a mistake. This game tries to have a rule, a skill or a trait for every common to semi-rare situation so there usually isn't much room for GM interpretation. Maybe it's to establish that the GM has a right to be a dick or to change the rules? I don't know why they didn't just bring up rule 0 and call it a day.

[Juton]

Character Stats and Character Creation
Characters are made up of four basic parts, attributes, traits, skills and equipment. Attributes range from 1-8 with human average being a four. Attributes at 1-3 give a -1 to skill checks (by far the most common checks) while 7-8 gives +1 to skill checks, that's not a lot of variance for the entire range of human ability. Since this is a point buy system you can expect to see a lot of 4s and 7s.

Traits almost get a pass from me, but lurking in here is some bullshit. Since this is the Battletech RPG you'll want a mech, but they make you pay a bullshit tax to actually start with you want instead of rolling on a table. If you want to actually own the mech, not merely be assigned it then you have to pay another bullshit tax. Similar with things like equipment, you can spend 10% of your starting point buy on traits that let you kit out your character in a way that they could almost function in the system. Except if you complete one mission you can buy all that stuff anyways and you've just wasted that 10%. You can also take negative traits for extra points you can spend anywhere. Since you get to choose your negative traits, expect every character to start with the maximum number they can take.

There are way to many skills. There are close to 50 before you start considering subskills. It also uses that wonderful decision where Streetwise(Faction A) is a skill you have buy separately from Streetwise(Faction B). Skills are what a character will be rolling a majority of the time, they wisely decided to price them exponentially. However, other than cost their is no real upper limit to what a character can start with, you can make a starting character who is one of the best Mechwarriors to have ever lived and still have a few points to spare. Included in this is the bullshit of tiered skills.

Basically if you get good enough at punching you graduate from basic to advanced. In the core rules this means that going from a 3 to 4 does exactly nothing, since advanced skills have a target number one higher than a basic number. There are some optional rules in an expansion book for some of these tiered skills that make them less of a ripoff. Splitting tiered skills and making them not worthless into two books is some bullshit though.

I'm not going to quibble about equipment. Any failing in here I'm going to ascribe to the game mechanics and not how they balance flak jackets versus ballistic plate.

Lifepaths
Oh boy, this is something. Each character takes a minimum of 5 lifepaths, each life path has a cost and between 10-20 benefits. Where you decide your character is from makes a very small difference in how your character will look since you can buy off any flaws in chargen. Each benefit in a life path is a number of points assigned to an attribute, trait or skill. Since there are so many traits and skills you can't have all of them on one sheet, so you going to have to write down the skill name and the points. Sometimes you won't even get enough points to buy a skill, so there is a lot of micromanaging. The work sheet for a character will take more than one standard sheet of paper. There are some unofficial excel sheets on the forum that can help, but you are basically on your own.

You'd think that after all that work, after the last life path you'd have a finished character. Incorrect.

After your life paths and figuring out your age you have a character with very low attributes (2-3 in most), rank 1-2 in their important skills and not enough points in the traits they want. The only upside (from the GM perspective) is that they have all the little bullshit skills like Interest:Pop Culture or Knowledge:Hometown. Also each character doesn't start with a language, so everyone has to spend points learn English or another language. So after completing your lifepaths you still have to use the regular point buy method to have a viable character. Meaning that lifepaths are only good for reminding you to put points in the uninteresting skills like protocol. Using lifepaths and spending all your points will probably take over an hour, at least, especially if you are new to the system.

There is a straight up point buy system fortunately, but it isn't recommended for building PCs for some daft reason. I guess they want to make sure that all PCs pick up Interest:Military History. The point buy system is much simpler and quicker, but with it you run the risk of forgetting some of the small details. If you are familiar with the system you can make a character with point buy in about 15-20 minutes, you can bang out a quick character though in a few minutes if you need a replacement.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Can you die in chargen?

[Juton]

Can you die in chargen?

Not in core, but I believe you can with an optional rule in the expansion.

[Juton]

Speaking of replacements,

Combat
Wow, combat is bad in this. I want to say deadly, death comes along easily but it's more likely you'll be knocked unconscious and bleed out slowly. So it's deadly if your medic isn't around or botches the stabilize check. It is incredibly swingy though if one side doesn't eclipse the other in equipment and training.

Instead of just ranting I will walk you through how the combat system works. Say you have a nice pistol and you want to mow down some thug trying to mug you in an alley way. You need to find the range, lighting conditions, cover, encumbrance, injury modifiers, lastly target and attacker movement. I think it's even more complicated than Battletech.

So our sample roll would be 2d6 + 1 (3 skill, +1 point blank range, -1 dark, -1 attacker moved, -1 defender movement) vs a target number of 7. Say we roll a 12, which becomes a 13 for margin of success of 6. We then divide our margin of success by 4, round all fractions up and add that to the weapon's base damage. So our pistol goes from a 3B/4 (armour penetration, type/ base damage) to a 3B/6. Say the thug has some personal armour, a flak jacket which has a ballistic resistance of 5. We compare the armour's resistance to the bullet's AP, if the armour's number is higher we subtract the difference from the damage. So the Thug's armour reduces the damage from 6 back to 4. An average human can take a max of 8 damage before dying, so our Thug is at 50%. There is no way to stage down damage aside from armour, so if you get hit by a pistol without armour it is always at least 4 damage.

It doesn't end there though, every time you take a hit you have to make a consciousness check. It's a 2d6 roll modified buy your body and willpower (basically CON and WIS) link modifiers, fixed target of 7. Not even the full attributes, just the link modifiers which vary from -1 to +1 for regular humans.

Like Shadowrun characters have penalties to rolls depending on injuries, having taken 26-50% of maximum damage gives a -2 penalty on all rolls. So our thug has to roll 9+ to stay conscious, he will probably fail. He also has to make a bleeding check, 2d6+BOD-Wound penalty vs 12. If he fails he will take one more point of damage per round until he dies or someone staunches the wound.

That's just one simple action, a character gets two per round, I can see combat just flying by.

TL;DR. A simple attack roll is too complicated. There are a lot of factors impacting the roll that need to be recalculated turn to turn. Damage is too granular. The consciousness and bleeding checks are too difficult to make consistently.

Ranged combat is a relatively simple affair compared to melee combat though. Same types of modifiers on attacks. The attacker and defender make melee combat checks against one another, so the defender has chance to damage anyone attacking them. The highlight being each combatant lowers their margin of success by their opponents' MoS. A newly modified negative MoS is still considered a success with just 1/4 of the negative MoS subtracted away from their base damage. Sounds like fun right?

Basically don't ever get into combat outside of your mech unless your GM is a total softie. Especially when you consider things like grenades are cheap and plentiful and can one-shot even a prepared character with a near hit.

There is also a section which talks about the PCs acting on the battlefield with things like tanks and mechs. A GM would have to be a sadist to do this, even the smallest mech weapon will turn a PC into a greasy smear or a cloud of ash.

Equipment
This sections contains a lot of very similar weapons with only slight variations in a category. Some players enjoy choosing a Nakijima laser pistol over a Sunbeam laser pistol, more power to them I guess. This section is pretty short for all the content it has, it's pretty innocuous.

Character Advancement
This section starts off talking at length about XP awards. It takes 3 pages to convey 'give them X xp if they done poor, Y xp if they done good'. Going by the rules in the book advancement seems like it would be pretty fast for a point buy system. A player can probably advance an important skill one rank every 3-4 games or purchase a new skill every game. There is nothing stopping a character from just maxing out an important skill though. There is even a section about training during downtime, so a character can become a better mechwarrior even when they are not seeing combat.

Age affects a character's stats, but in AToW getting older actually raises your stats until you're in your 40s. The increases come in fractional amounts, but instead of coming every year you get half an increase at 25 and another half at 31. Since you can start at whatever age you'd like 31 is going to be a popular starting age because 6 out of your 8 stats get a bonus.

The section on NPCs is very brief, I think 4 broad archetypes are presented. The problem is that the 'Thug' archetype is roughly as powerful in small scale combat as a Mechwarrior PC, but the book suggests using 2 thugs per PC. If the GM follows the book's advice a TPK is pretty likely, especially if the PCs aren't familiar with the combat system. Hell, if the GM plays his NPCs as anything but orks sitting in a room waiting for the party PC death is pretty likely.

Gamemastering
The usual spiel. It fits in 5 pages, compared to the steaming shit they took with the combat and character creation systems nothing in here is too interesting or objectionable. Next is 8 pages dedicated to how nobility works in the universe, the different ranks and so on. Battletech seems to have been quitely ignoring any of the space nobility beneath Grand Duke for the last 15ish years. Then there are 15 pages describing the universe and the important planets.

Fiction
There are 8 short stories scattered through out the book. Each about 2-4 pages long. CGL has been doing this lately in some of their rule books, I really hate it because instead of actual content we get unengaging filler.

Conclusion
People give Buhlman a lot of shit for what he's done in Pathfinder and what he didn't do. Reading this book reminds one that there are worse developers working in the industry. The resolution mechanic awful, chargen is way too much work and combat is a hot mess, practically everything this game sets out to do it fails at. If people want to role play their mechwarriors then Magic Tea Party is seriously a better system.

How could they fail so hard in so many categories? My only guess is that a lack of experience combined with only getting positive feedback from their yes-men forums/play testing groups is responsible. If the same people who wrote AToW (Bills, Beas, Sjardijn) write Shadowrun 5th edition, well, it's not going to be pretty.

[Username17]

I never read the "real" book, because the pdf "quick start" rules sampler was so amazingly bad. You're tracking 4 digits worth of character points but the entire RNG only has 11 numbers on it. So to convert from one to the other they have a two-step condensation. CharPoints to Stats, then Stats to Modifiers. And there are levels of buy-in for both condensation steps that don't make any difference because the actual RNG affecting modifiers are so big and the charpoints are so small.

Now personally, I disagree with the assessment that flipping Battletech's action resolution system is bad. I mean, BattleTech comes from the 80s and basically works on THAC0. When you are skilled your positive modifier is subtracted from the target number, and when you are faced with a difficulty that negative modifier is also subtracted from your target number (remember that negative negatives are positive, so the target number goes up). That is stupid 80s bullshit, and it should have been streamlined a long ass time ago.

The issue with AToW is that they fail to streamline anything. When you make an opposed check, you roll against a target number and take the difference between your roll and the target number. Then they roll against a target number and take the difference between their roll and their target number. Then you take the difference between your difference and their difference. Why aren't we just comparing your roll to their roll? The whole thing should only have five things: Your Roll, Your Modifiers, Their Roll, Their Modifiers, Comparison. But it has more than twice that: Your Roll, Your Modifiers, Your Target Number, Your Target Number Modifiers, Comparison 1, Their Roll, Their Modifiers, Their Target Number, Their Target Number's Modifiers, Comparison 2, Comparison of Comparison 1 to Comparison 2. What the shitfuck?

There was a previous discussion about this "game", Here. I never got into the nitty gritty of the failure of this stillborn piece of shit, because why would I? Why would anyone? Even the basics of chargen and action resolution are a warcrime.

-Username17

[Taharqa]

AToW is an absolute mess. One of the biggest problems is that they kept the +0 to +10 skill level bonuses of 3rd edition while changing the dice mechanic from 2d10 to 2d6. So its pretty easy to fly right off the scale of the RNG. Then there are the chunky attribute bonuses where is no difference between 4 and 6, but a huge difference between 6 and 7 because you get a +1 bonus (which is large on a 2d6). I once asked on the forums, for one of the developers to stat out someone like the Black Widow and they refused, because they know the game is totally broken at that level.

As for the dice mechanic, I agree with Juton. Its algebraically equivalent, but reversing the dice mechanic just makes it confusing to keep track of in your head when you move between mech combat and rpg stuff. And it is not like THAC0, its more like BAP. Your skill level *is* the basic target number and then you add situational penalties and subtract bonuses.

[Stahlseele]

I let myself be suckered into playing this "game" by my buddies without doing any research on it . .
it's every bit as stupid and broken as it was described here sadly -.-

We are all playing clan ghost bear mechwarriors and stupid me actually thought it'd be a viable choice to go with an assault mech as my choice of machine.
Well, there goes 25% of my starting ressources in one. Single. Go. Mostly.
Which means the character is absolutely useless and actually defenseless outside of his mech, because i, compared to all other players who only went for a heavy mech and thus only paid half or less of what i paid for their privilege of commanding a slightly less powerfull but more mobile machine, simply did not have the ressources left over to make him a viable for survival in that society character.
I nicked 2 copies of other players character sheets for comparision purposes and that is really the only big difference in characters it seems.
The attributes are a set ammount of points, so everybody spent the same ammount on different values in the attributes but then comes the surprise.
Not going with the assault mech seems to mean that had more points left over and thus have more and higher ratings in their skills than i do.
And for some reason, i thought it would be a smart idea to invest into some usefull skills like first aid, stealth, survival, tracking, small arms . .
While they decided to basically just up STR and close combat skill because obviously, in the clan society everything is decided by fisticuffs. Meaning yes, i am going to play the sissy boy, who should have been unable to actually survive in a society like this, and as soon as anybody decides he likes my mech better than his own, chances are good that i will actually lose the thing i had to pay most of my starting ressources for in character generation . .

I am half and half contemplating having my character walk out of an airlock in space and to make a new character that only spent the ressources on a light mech and then put everything i have into close combat and simply beat up the whole clan ghostbear untill i have what i want and fuck everybody else . .

And THEN we get to the hillariously over complicated actual in game playing rules. Which i still don't fully grasp. The next time people complain about how unarmed combat works in SR(3), i am going to point them at this abomination.

[nikita]

ATOW's first problem lies in fact that game works on principle that you pay points for equipment and status/wealth/rank. Thus you have a noble woman or assault mech pilot with tremendously poor stats while they are nominally best and brightest of the lot...

and this in a game where you are supposedly active and meaningful participant in a feudal setting.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to use for making a character that actually works . .
And yes, you can lose limb and life in the chargen, if you don't go with clan i think . .

[nikita]

I was quite surprised to learn that since my character comes from one of the five giant interstellar empires (Lyran Commonwealth) locked in eternal war she is also either coward or someone who can be punched out with a couple of blows.

Additionally all nobles in background are soft and have same problems (as mentioned above) despite the fact that all these factions are ruled by warrior aristocracies and should have pile of nobles who are essentially raised to be leaders since day one.

Free tip to people designing life path systems: they should match universe description. In my view the life path system should be redone to give people with noble birth a ton of enemies and family responsibilities to match their superior equipment, training and status.

[Stahlseele]

it's disgustingly broken. and not in a fun way either.