Before I got caught up writing about making pacts with monsters, I had a few ideas for BCG play aids and supplementary material. Right now, all these projects are on hiatus until I finish Monsterpunk. Some of them may be finished after that, while others will probably never happen.
The first of the play aids would be a GM screen. For simplicity's sake, it would come in the form of printable inserts to use with something like this: The main reason that I never made one is that BCG already comes with a fairly comprehensive quick rules reference. There are a couple of things that aren't in there (mostly expansion material like new terrain and the transpatial randomizer tables), but overall I thought there wouldn't be much of a need for one. The subject of a GM Screen does come up every now and then though, so I figured I would make one. To the five pages of the quick rules reference, I was going to add Ally Reinforcements, Troubleshooting and the Transpatial Randomizer tables. Adding up all this stuff made it go to a total of 13 pages - a little bit more than a GM Screen is meant to handle. It might be possible to trim it down to 6 pages with some creative summarizing, we'll see.
The second set of play aids I thought of were a number of random idea tables. These were pretty fun to make at first, including Character names that would be right at home in any Gundam or Tomino series, such as Tetsu Terfing and Akasha Apostolo. Mecha names forged in the fires of mount ham like God Grangunner and the Wingbein Powered. Weapons of every shape, color and flavor like the Lunar Gunblade and the Atomic Shotgun. Unfortunately I ran out of ideas around that time. I was going to try writing disguised company and product names (like WcDonalds and Starducks) when I got caught up in other things.
The third idea was to make a couple of ready-to-play missions that could be used for oneshots or as a starting point for longer games. The problem here is that BCG is a setting-agnostic system where the plot revolves around the character's goals and needs. Any given Operation should be tied to one or more PC Themes and help advance a larger plot which... Doesn't work well for a standalone oneshot concept. These issues, incidentally, are why BCZ features five operation scenarios without any plot to them. One way to go about this would be to use the setting in the core book, including premade characters and writing a story arc for them to cover multiple episodes rather than just one. This would be a much larger time investment though, I'm not there's enough interest to make it worth the effort.
There was also an idea to print a deck of ability cards listing what all the abilities in the game do, reminiscent of what D&D 4E had. The main problem here was one of production costs: The game has around two hundred Powers, Upgrades and Weapons between BCG and BCZ - not counting enemy or character-scale abilities. Illustrating all those cards isn't free - on the contrary, it is quite expensive. This is one of those ideas that were discarded and will probably never happen.
The last and possibly most ambitious of these ideas was to put out there a Custom Weapons Creation system. The big problem for custom weapons is that the system is inherently an exploitable mechanic and begs to cause balance problems. I originally thought this could be fixed by writing pages and pages of guidelines and advice for what to allow and what not to allow... But I really, really wouldn't hold my breath hoping for that to work. If it were to be released at all, it would come with a huge disclaimer saying you're on your own if there's any balance problems.
In the end I set all these ideas aside to focus on Monsterpunk. If there is interest for these, I may change my mind and go back to them earlier. If you want them and want them this year, drop me a comment.
Until the next update, Gimmick Out.
My GM disallowed Transpatial Randomizer, and to be frank, I'm hoping to start a campaign of my own, and I would disallow it too. As you noted somewhere else, in a game with action economy, any "free action" is very very powerful. ... I can see that, in a campaign where transpatial randomizer was allowed, it would be necessary to have the table at hand... cause there's a fair chance that ALL your PCs will get 1 each! ;)
ReplyDeletePerhaps I would balance it by lowering it's cost to 15, but it has a 15% chance of doing NOTHING on 01-15 roll. ..
That's a pretty good idea. A significant chance of getting a blank result would do a lot to balance the Transpatial Randomizer.
DeleteIt is something to keep in mind for future takes on the same idea.
Oddly enough the thing I want the most out of all this is the Custom Weapons rules. The lack of custom weapon rules is pretty much the only thing that keeps me from calling BCG my #1 favorite mecha RPG.
ReplyDeleteYou shouldn't really care if it's TECHNICALLY exploitable since a GM should have no problem telling their players "no" and working with them to make their creations fit better, that's just part of the unspoken social contract of playing RPGs. Just adding a "use at your own risk, and work with your players" disclaimer should be more than enough.
Plus MZ+ was ridiculously exploitable and didn't care since "GM's word is final" was an explicit part of mecha construction, hell pretty much every game with a construction point system does exactly the same.
Noted. I think of the social contract as a fallback, because in an ideal system you wouldn't need it, so I'd rather avoid it. There is also the problem that, by the time people have realized something was broken and should be banned, the damage was already done.
DeleteWith that said, I also think that an exploitable system can be worth the risk if it is good enough when used responsibly. It remains a possibility.
Wouldn't mind seeing a revisiting of the G-book's Beam Weapons, myself. Even the ability to do both melee and ranged with an experimental reactor doesn't really make up for their costs and risks most of the time.
ReplyDeleteFor example, an Assault Rifle doesn't require you to buy (and *risk* using in certain situations) 2 more energy or 1+20pt upgrade just to get its long range and semi-suppression abilities. The energy techniques are rather hungry too: Just using the two technician upgrades with Reactor Overdrive puts the minimum firing cost at 9!
Another nice addition would be a smaller expansion, like the Macross FAST packs: 20 for 30 is good stuff, but it's also very expensive; a 10 for 15 alternative (no stacking them) would be a good touch somewhere.
However, custom weapon creation could certainly allow/replace the issues on the first point, as long as Beam is considered a half-ability to compensate the costs.
At low levels there is a big opportunity cost to using beam weapons, yes. The cost lessens with each power level though, to the point where at high levels it is the most effective way to stack offensive advantages. The power ceiling is much higher as well and you can double up on specializations (say, beam + melee, beam + shooting, beam + area...) to become death incarnate. The reactor overdrive here deserves a special mention because it is the single strongest weapon in the game, and isn't meant to be spammed but rather to be used as a finisher. Buff it up with some genre powers and it is the bane of boss enemies.
ReplyDeleteCustom weapons would let you mitigate the opportunity cost of using beams, but the cost is there by design so they wouldn't get cheaper than the vanilla saber and rifle.
Smaller expansion packs were considered for the expansion but scrapped. At a low cost all their versions were a combination of clunky, not worth taking or didn't make lore sense.
Forgot to say, scrapped mechanics are something i want to write about when i do the BCZ retrospective. Coming soon!
ReplyDelete