Another Battletech-MFZ Adaptation

 (I love the work of Pasukaru76. They are better at building lego sets than I will ever be. Check out their work on Flickr.)

In many ways, I prefer Francisco Duarte’s earlier adaptation of the Mechs from Battletech to Mobile Frame Zero. The later one has some appeal, but it actually changes the rules for light and assault Mechs to give them abilities you can’t normally get in vanilla MFZ.

By contrast, the earlier version doesn’t change the actual rules at all. You can build any Battletech Mech or other vehicle and use it in a regular MFZ game purely run with the rules as written. Consequently, I’m going to switch to using those rules for my adaptations. If you want to switch to his updated rules, just give light Mechs the green movement D8 and say they’re destroyed when they lose the first white die, and give assault Mechs with a blue defensive system one blue D8 replacing a blue D6, and don’t ever give them the green movement D8.

Light Mechs have up to three systems, usually including at least one movement system. Medium Mechs can have up to three systems of any type. Heavy Mechs can have up to four systems of any type. Assault Mechs can have up to four systems, and one is usually an armor system.

Land-Air Mechs (LAMs) are always light or medium, and they always have Jump Jets (1G) and always have a fourth system, Fighter Conversion (1G). They are always considered Advanced Tech.

Light and medium vehicles have up to two systems, and heavy and assault vehicles have up to three. Assault vehicles usually can’t have a movement system. VTOLs are light vehicles and normally have up to two systems, but that must include a movement system that must be the last system to be destroyed. Aerospace fighters must also have a movement system that is the last system destroyed. Light fighters normally have up to two systems, medium have up to three, and heavy have up to four.

I still use my modification for technology - in battles that involve units with Clan, advanced, or Star League technology, units using 3025 tech (I.E. without such advanced technology) normally can have one less system than the normal maximum. For light Mechs that have a green (movement) D8 because they lack ranged weapons, I generally let that count as a movement system for that purpose.

As an example, the FLE-4 Flea and FLE-15 Flea from my earlier post have 2RD/1Y/1G/2W normally and 2RD/1G/2W in a battle including advanced or clan tech. The FLE-17 has 2RD/1Y/1G/2W against all opponents.

Note that for all of these guidelines, the limits NORMALLY apply, but you can be flexible if it makes sense for the particular Mech or if it’s an edge case. If I have an Urbanmech (max speed 32.4 km/h) that I modify by removing the jump jets and adding Targeting Acquisition Gear, I probably wouldn’t require a movement system when I adapt it to Mobile Frame Zero.

Also, just like in MFZ, systems are based on what the Mech physically looks like. An Archer doesn’t normally carry melee weapons and is generally pretty weak in hand-to-hand combat, but its huge battle fists look like they could destroy a light Mech, so it probably gets one or more Battle Fists (2RH) in Mobile Frame Zero.