Damanor’s Lair: a Gaming Blog

 For the Americans out there, Happy Thanksgiving! Of course, holidays by this name are celebrated on different dates in other countries (states in political science terms). In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated the second Monday in October. Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia celebrate Thanksgiving on various days this time of year. There are festival holidays with similar names in Germany and Japan. There is a harvest festival in the United Kingdom during Autumn, and I understand that some people in the United Kingdom celebrate what they call Thanksgiving on July 4 . Other places throughout the world celebrate it differently. Regardless of where you are and what you celebrate, I hope you have many reasons to give thanks.

 A less complicated and more straightforward way to model pilot inexperience is to just say that the less experienced pilot just doesn’t have the ability to use all the systems or avoid enemy fire as well as an experienced pilot. Just remove a system to model that. For example, let’s say that a green pilot is supposedly piloting a frame with a Soldier loadout (2RD/1B/1Y/1G/2W). However, since they’re inexperienced, they don’t have a spotting (Yellow) system. The reason the inexperienced frame pilot doesn’t have a spotting system is that he or she doesn’t know how to use a system to spot enemy frames as effectively while doing too many other things such as attacking an enemy frame and moving their own frame. On top of that, the less experienced pilot isn’t as good at keeping the frame out of trouble under fire, so they can’t take as many hits. Basically, I’m using my existing house rules for inner Sphere pilots against advanced or Clan tech to instead model pilot inexperience. A less ex

 One thing that was interesting about Battletech was the idea that pilots could improve their abilities to pilot a vehicle or make weapon attacks. (I’m not sure it’s a good rule, but it was interesting.) So how can we model this in Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack? At the beginning of each clash/skirmish/battle, identify the pilot of each frame on your side by name. Determine their experience level. During each conflict, a pilot whose frame is destroyed may die. You have to decide whether a pilot automatically dies when their frame is destroyed or if they can somehow eject to escape. I suggest giving them a 3 in 6 or 4 in 6 chance to survive, but that chance may vary or even be zero depending on environment conditions. All players must agree to change the chance of surviving ejection before the game begins. Now for the difference between experienced and inexperienced pilots. One option is the Ace Pilot rules as adapted for Rapid Attack from pages 22-23 and 41 of  Intercept Orbit (pdf l

 One reason I like frankenmechs  is the same reason I liked the original Battletech setting: it’s like lots of the Mechs are built, or at least reassembled, in a repair shop. Your Mech has been in your family for three or more generations, and it can’t easily be replaced. If it gets beat up, you take it in and repair it as much as you can or you just fight with a broken Mech. Technicians are worth more than tanks, and nobody has any idea how some advanced machines like jumpships work. This was emphasized in the early Gray Death Legion novels. Mechwarriors always doubled as technicians, and when their base was captured, the worst part was that they couldn’t repair their Mechs. It was also front and center in the early scenario packs, where you had Mechs with permanent damage that couldn’t be repaired for lack of parts or permanent structural damage. One very cool take on it was the novel Double Blind, where Avanti’s Angels made a point to always collect what battlefield salvage they cou

  To celebrate sarna.net’s latest Bad Mechs feature, here’s my assessment of the Quickdraw . Let’s see if it fares any better in Mobile Frame Zero. The Quickdraw was designed to replace the Rifleman , but frankly is does a poor job of it. The Rifleman was designed as an anti-aircraft Mech but is also used for fire support. It has considerable firepower and great medium- to long-range damage-dealing potential, but also has paper-thin armor, has average speed for a heavy Mech (which is to say it’s slow), and tends to overheat. The designers of the Quickdraw wanted a much more versatile Mech and focused on fixing the Rifleman’s weaknesses, but this was at the expense of the Rifleman’s strengths. The 60-ton Quickdraw has SLIGHTLY more armor than the Rifleman and is 33 percent faster. It also uses jump jets for added mobility. Just these features took up half the weight of the Mech, however, and that’s not including other essentials like a cockpit, gyro, and internal structure. As a result

In 2492 Earthwerks developed a new 60-ton mech, the Griffin. This heavy mech was designed as a close assault mech to fill a gap in weight class and function between the 20-ton Wasp and the 100-ton Mackie. It combined significant firepower for its time, but eventually became obsolete in the face of newer designs. Still, it was popular enough that Earthwerks continued the line, reducing its weight to 55 tons and changing its armament to handle long-range Fire support. Its primary weakness was a lack of close ranged firepower, as well as tendency to overheat (though less so than many other mechs). The Griffin remained common throughout the Succession Wars, being found in the armies of all the great houses and in the periphery. It’s a real workhorse design, one of a trio of 55-ton mechs found everywhere, along with the Shadow Hawk and Wolverine. GRF-1N Griffin: Size Medium (55 tons), Speed Average, Armor Medium. Particle Projection Cannon (1RA/1RD), Long Range Missile Tube, Jump Jets. 3RA

To get in the mood to race frames, just watch an episode or two of  IGPX . Watch the long promo on YouTube.

 is a stop-motion series on YouTube . My kids were all very impressed. Recommended.

The Charger is one of my favorite Mechs, for the usual reason that it’s a massive underdog. Seriously, the original version of this Mech is TERRIBLE. It was designed by Wells Technologies to be an ultra-heavy scout Mech for the Star League Defense Force. With only average speed and medium armor and loaded up with five small lasers with a maximum range of 90 meters, it can easily be destroyed by scout mechs weighing as little as a quarter the tonnage but having three times the weapon range and far higher speed. With such terrible prospects for survival, the SLDF stopped using the Charger and Wells Technologies was left with warehouses full of assault Mechs they couldn’t sell. So how did the Charger survive? In the First Succession War, House Kurita was so desperate for Mechs that they bought a large part of the Wells inventory and made a long-term contract to produce them. Pilots discovered that a Charger could take on many Mechs if it could get close enough to, well, charge the enemy.

My first Rooftop Racing frame I recently noticed some posts about a Mobile Frame Zero variant called Rooftop Racing (previous link now dead). It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like - a bunch of frames race around on rooftops trying to reach all of the checkpoints before their opponents do. You could probably play it with straight MFZ, but someone actually developed an alternate set of rules for it. I’m looking to track down a copy of the play test rules so I can play a (slightly) less destructive game with my son, who seems a bit fixed on violently destroying everything in sight. Here are some pics of someone’s Rooftop Racing playtests.

 Played a round of MFZ with the kids last night. 2 frames and one station each, plus a neutral station in the middle of the map. Some thoughts: 1. I tried out some alternate rules for Really Big Mechs(TM). It was my son’s suggestion. I doubled the number of dice I rolled - 4 white dice, 4 red d6 and 2 red d8 for double attack systems, stuff like that. It still had a total of four systems, but every time it took a hit it lost twice as many dice. Even with 6s and 8s across the board my monstrous frame went down within one round, mostly because it’s such a big and scary target and all three of my kids were targeting it. The fact that you have a ceiling on dice rolls means that even if you are more likely to get a 6 on defense, it isn’t enough to stop a high spot/high attack combo. Interestingly, half the damage my big Mech took was from an attack on another frame that was in cover behind it. I’m suddenly more interested in taking double defense systems than I was before. 2. One way to han