Battle Century G Remastered Release

It is done.

At this point I think I've said enough things about the Remaster, I should simply let you see it for yourselves.

You can get the SRD here.

You can get the full version from DTRPG if you want a discount on a physical version when that gets made.

You can also get the full version from itch.io if you are a digital gamer and want me to get a bigger cut (the widget to the right uses this store).

I wonder how many misspellings, grammatical errors and confusingly worded sentences will have been reported by next month? Find out next month, same gimmick-time, same gimmick-channel.

Gimmick Out. 

BCG Remastered SRD Update (Final?)

Come one, come all, to the hopefully final update to the BCG R SRD. It's taken a while and I'm sure I'll have to make a few correction for typos and the like in the future but now, as of this moment, the rules of Battle Century G Remastered are set in stone.

The full version of the game is going to have about twice as many pages. I'm still working on the rules modules and the setting, but the bulk of the written work is done and most of what's left to add in is art. Speaking of art... The SRD has some art now! It's at the end with the example PCs and NPCs for the introductory mission.

Dropbox Link.

Anyway, here's the rules changelog from v1.5 to v1.6: 

• Added the "Critical Failure, Failing Forward and Exceptional Success" Rules Module to Page 13 as a sidebar.
• Simplified the rules for Cores. Now they lack a Speed score and are explicitly a fifth level of Threshold that protects the pilot from harm until it is destroyed, at which point they take 2x Damage from Mecha as normal. 
• New General Trait - Skill Synergy: Gain a bonus to a trained Skill roll once per Episode equal to 1 per 10 CP you've spent on Skills.
• Readded NPC-exclusive abilities that were somehow still missing from the SRD
• A million non-rules small things like adjusted flavor text, examples of character/mecha gen, more advice, etc. 

If you want a complete changelog of what changed between v1.2 (aka Errata Edition) of the game and the v1.6, here's the earlier posts for reference: First Post and Second Post.

I guesstimate that the Battle Century G Remastered manual will be done around January. I should know better by now than to give dates that assume nothing will go catastrophically wrong in the near future, but, dangit, I want to believe.

See y'all soon with good news, hopefully.

Monsterpunk is out.

Here is the updated System Reference Document.

And Here is the DTRPG link to the full version.

I'm not gonna lie, this game is a blast to play and make and I love working on it, but I'm just bursting with inspiration with ideas for BCG and can't wait to get started on writing about giant robots again.

I have a bunch of stretch goals to fill out first though, and by this point I think you know me well enough that I'm the type to take my time and try to get things done right rather than rush to get them over with, so... It'll be a while.

I have never wished to have multiples of me this much, that's for sure.

Monsterpunk v1.11 (aka Errata Edition) is now out!

I'm going to wait until January for the physical release to keep making corrections - you know me, I make a lot of typos and often word things in a way that isn't entirely clear. The PDF version can be edited and updated in a matter of hours, so I don't want to delay it any further.

Here's the System Reference Document. Like the BCG one, it's got the whole of the core rules. Unlike the BCG one, it's also got a bunch of alternate rules for character customization, character art and is in full color.

You can get the full version from DTRPG as usual as well.

The physical version will probably go up sometime in mid to late January. I'll take one to two weeks to look for things to fix and then submit it to the printer, then the process should take two or three more weeks after that to be ready for release.

Until then, Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk v1 Release

Oh right I had a blog.

I was scrambling to keep up with the regular updates on Kickstarter and I uh... Kind of forgot about this for a while.

But heyyy I made a game! Here's the System Reference Document!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ifwxvi6kd8i09m/MonsterpunkSRDv1.pdf?dl=0

This is just v1, I'm going to be updating this with errata before the end of the year. During that update I'll also upgrade it to color. Also I'm looking into making a phone-optimized version but I need to do a little bit of research for that and I'm not sure the way the book is laid out is going to make that, well, not be a pain in the ass. So no promises there, but it's something I'm interested in.

So that's that.

Gimmick Out.

The Battle Century Errata, Troubleshooting & Balance Changes Documents

Monsterpunk is on the horizon, but before I fully reveal it to the world I want to do one last thing for BCG. That's these three documents here:

Errata

This is the most important document and the one that will could get integrated into the books proper. Most of it are fixes editorial mistakes, clarifying complex rules text or rewrites to rules that just plain didn't work properly. There are a couple of mechanical changes, but they're the kind that address multiple issues with the game rather than being pure balance changes. It saves me time to change a general rule as errata here instead of adding a bunch of balance change suggestions in its place for the documents below.

Troubleshooting

This section is too large to add it to the books, so it's going to stay as a google document. As the name says, it is basically a FAQ, mostly involving quirky rules interactions. Most of the questions come from the comments section and the discord server. Some of the answers may contradict things I've said in the past, and if they do, you should consider what is in this document to be my final word on the subject.

Balance Changes

Last, but not least, a bunch of suggestions to improve your BCG + BCZ experience. They're just that, though, suggestions. Most of them are strict improvements to the rules, but if there's something you don't like in them, you can just pick and choose what to use what to leave in there. Want to nerf Absolute Barrier but don't want to cap Tension? Cool, that's why this is a google doc of suggestions only.

And now a quick FAQ:

Are you going to make more content for BCG?
No. Consider these documents a parting gift to the game, at least until I decide it is time to rebuild the whole system for a second edition.

What if the errata needs its own errata?
The documents are open to comments, so if you spot a typo, are confused about a ruling or have a suggestion about a balance change, leave it there.

So you will be updating these documents?
I'll probably do a round of typo fixes later at the least and continue to answer more questions for eternity. Mmmaybe I'll add some additional suggestions or tweak existing ones later, but no promises there. If I do it, don't expect it to be a regular thing.

I found another typo, can you add it to the errata doc?
Leave it in the errata document as a comment somewhere and I will get to it eventually.

When can we expect the PDFs to be errataed?
Probably by the end of the year. I want this to be the last errata update, so I'll wait to make sure that we won't need future errata fixes.

That's it! I may do the rest of BCZ as a Retrospective at some point, but the next thing I want to talk about is my new game. With any luck, the next post will be about Monsterpunk's open beta.

Until then!

Gimmick Out.

System Reference Documents are up and BCZ is on sale.

Dropping by in the middle of the week for this bit of breaking news.

SRD 1.2 update

The SRD had an error where Adaptive Morphology was listed twice, featuring an earlier version alongside the final one. That's now been fixed to clear up further confusion.

The rest of the expansion has been coming along great so I'll have news for you on that front soon.

Here comes the errata

Welp, it was inevitable there would be things that needed fixing. There were several mistakes in the released version of BCG so here I give you a pdf to address the whole of them. The whole one page of them: Here is a link.

Yes, it is just one page, so I might as well sum it up here:

First, in a twist of irony, the troubleshooting section is not clear enough or uses pre-kickstarter beta rules text in some spots. Those have been rewritten as appropriate now.

Second, the book never actually states that you can't get both the generalist and specialist versions of the same skill. Now it is explicit that you can't.

Third, it is likewise not stated anywhere that you can't stack equipment together to get as many advantages to your skill tests as you want. Now it is made clear those don't stack, only one piece of equipment applies at a time.

Also there was a typo somewhere. Yes, really. I'm horrified too.

On top of that there was a mistake in the SRD that didn't mention how to calculate Mecha Defense (Guard + 5) which has now been added to the 'Damage and Maiming' section of Operation rules. All changes have been rolled into the System Reference Document.

I Fixed Some Things

A handful of paragraphs transitioned incorrectly between the full and srd versions. Fret not, the only one that was actual rules text in need of fixing was just the range of Supports (from twice Systems to just Systems). The download link has been fixed already, but here you go anyway.

Battle Century G System Reference Document is up

You can get the BCGSRD (Quite a mouthful of an abbreviation, isn't it?) here.

Like I said before, it is a slimmed down version of the book with only the rules. I've taken the various betas of the game down as well, partly so it is not a confusing mess for anybody new to the game, partly so you have an incentive to buy the full BCG manual from Drivethru when it goes live.

This is where a joke about me selling out goes but I think I've run that into the ground by now.

Sooooo on another note, this took a whole lot longer than it should have had and I apologized. At one point I was trying to make a wiki to go with the pdf, plus a GM companion to help run games and also a custom dicebot because dreaming is free, right?

It was going to end up taking way too long to be worth delaying the part that matters: the game itself. Of course, now that this is out I'm more likely to focus on other things instead (like the expansion) so all that other stuff is getting shelved indefinitely.

It's been a really long and weird ride, going through three similar yet different rulesets to end up with something I'm comfortable publishing as a core rulebook and is worth building upon, but here we are. To those of you who have been around since the beginning, thanks for doing so and I hope you feel your patience is rewarded.

We'll have some expansion previews with more Game Design Chat soon.

It is good to be back.

They say no plan survives contact with the enemy, and I was prepared for one week of delays, but not three. I am still getting ready all the elements of ~=|The Plan|=~, but the manual has been locked in and ready to upload for a few weeks. I don't think it is worth delaying it any more, I'll just execute ~=|The Plan|=~ in stages instead of all at once.

So! For you today I have the a v2 Beta. The v2 numbering is because it is a noticeable jump in quality from the previous one but also the last beta there will be. Way back in early June I was going to do this with a v1.3 that implemented the experimental mechanics and called it a day. But in between then and now was when ~=|The Plan|=~ ran into the most complications... Yet that also gave me more than enough time to try out actual gameplay tweaks.

I could have made another experimental pdf, but that would have added another week (or more) to the delays and it would have been really awkward to cross reference with all this stuff. I'm not happy about changing the rules twice mid-beta, but the wait was supposed to be six months instead of twelve. As a whole, it looks like my work rate is at its best with one year test periods rather than six anyway, so I will plan for that in the future. Everything is a learning opportunity.

The grand majority of tweaks are simple buffs anyway, which is a pretty easy thing to adapt to. There's a couple of buffs-as-rewrites, nerfs, or things outright removed/replaced... Though the number is higher if we count the experimental mechanics like Beams. Ultimately it should open the playing field to more varied PCs and NPCs, and that's a good thing.

Anyway on to the actual game stuff. Below are the customary pdf files with a simplified epub/mobi System Reference Document that has only rules and no images whatsoever. I have spent way too much time trying to get those to look passable, and the formatting is still weird in places, but they will do.

And now, a summary of changes: Behold the walls of text! For the sake of simplicity these assume you never bothered to look at the experimental mechanics handbook, thus they list anything from that file as well.

General Changes:

• Redid the layout to improve readability in digital and printed formats.
• Prettier. Art still TBD.
• Altered the wording of several abilities to make some interactions more clear. For example, most abilities that boosted or lowered Guard now alter Defense directly instead to simplify the math involved in recalculating Defense.

Playing the Game:

• Reworked Matches with more Action types and more mobility for Characters.
• When Maneuvering (as Character or Mecha) you gain a flat Defense bonus. You no longer get a chance to escape through Maneuvering, however.
• Simpliied Terrain. Defensive Terrain is a flat Disadvantage to all attacks. Extreme Terrain Tests Systems or Speed instead of both as a Mixed Test. Difficult Terrain halves Speed.

Character Creation

• All Player Characters now have 100 starting CP to use without restrictions. The four teamplates are full Level 0 PCs.
• New Miracle: Phasing. Lets you pass through solid objects while active, including attacks from Characters and even Mecha.
• Replaced Snipe Shot and Aerial with Range Booster and Flight Pack Equipment respectively. They are pretty self explanatory.
• Multiple pieces of Equipment associated to the same skill can all be made into one single item.
• New Deathblow: Called Shot. It inflicts a Disadvantage to all Tests for a Round.
• Removed Got You Where I Wanted, Sniping the Targets and Cool your Jets.
• Three new Powers. I'm Breaking Through makes your current attack bypass Active Defenses at Reaction speed. I Cannot be Defeated lets you survive lethal hits a la Invincible Alloy but only once per Round. This is my Battlefield creates a four-Zone square of a Terrain type of your choice that lasts three Rounds.
• Buffed Believe in Myself, The Tacticool Approach, You are Going Down and Don't Give Up.
• Slight common-sense nerf to Take One for the Team and a more considerable one to Mind Over Matter.

Mecha Construction

• All PC Mecha now have 100 starting MP to use without restrictions. The four teamplates are full Level 0 PC Mecha.
• Replaced Weapon Master with Duelist Model and Sniper Model. Duelist Model is a free attack when Enemies Disengage and grants 1 Advantage to Melee attacks. Sniper Model grants twice your Systems to Long Range Weapons and 1 Advantage to Shooting attacks.
• Two new General Upgrades: EWAC (Early Warning Aircraft Control) automatically resupplies Support Upgrades with a cost of 5 or less for 4 Energy without consuming Restorations. Guardian of Steel is the team-shielding function of the old Stealth Field.
• Tweaked two General Upgrades: The Beast removes the innate Disadvantage to Default Weapons but now it costs 2 Energy to bypass Active Defenses. Experimental Reactor reduces Weapon Energy Costs by 1 and grants 1 Advantage to Beam attacks.
• Buffed Comander Type, Stealth Field, Expansion Pack and both types of Combiners.
• Slippery Chassis is now an Internal Upgrade that costs 10.
• Integrated Weapons, Invincible Alloy and Assistant cost 15.
• Removed Remote Hotfix and Flash Analysis.
• Resupply and Jury-Rig both have a Range of 5 Zones and cost 10.
• Antigrav costs 10.
• Buffed/Tweaked Overcharger, Airstrike, Fire at Will, Electromagnetic Detonator, Ensnaring Trap and Interference Bomb.
• New Upgrades: Surprise Minefield is a Support that creates 1 Zone of Extreme Terrain and costs 5. Secret Equipment grants 10 bonus MP when Tension is 5 or higher.
• New Weapon ability: Crippling. Only technically new, grants the benfits of Suppression.
• Tweaked Dueling Blade to grant an Advantage if you started the Turn in a Duel.
• Buffed Finger Net, Zweihander and Missile Massacre.
• Tweaked all Beam Weapons with reduced cost to 5 MP with optional Energy costs to Boost them for an Advantage and other possible bonuses.

Running the Show

• Grunt NPCs start with 50 XP and gain 30 XP per Power Level. They cannot have more than 50 CP in Skills/Traits or 50 MP in Upgrades/Weapons though.
• Grunts have the Storm Action. One Grunt may grant another identical unit right next to it a +4 Bonus to their next attack.
• Bosses start with 100 XP plus their usual free stuff, but only gain 15 XP per Power Level and may only spend said XP on Attributes.
• Boss Characters have their own unique progression. They get up to 110 CP for Skills and Traits and 3 Boss Traits.
• Buffed/Tweaked Invasive and Elusive Form.
• Combat Profiling and Spectral Body have a fixed 3 uses/Rounds.
• Replaced Come forth my Minions and All Become One with I Accept your Offering and We Are Legion respectively.
• Slight nerfs to Useless!, Constrict, Adaptive Morphology and Afterimages.
• Tweaked It Keeps Coming Back, Phantom Predator, Merge, Suicide Swarm and Telekinetic Strike.
• Nixed Graviton Wave.
• New Boss Weapon: Tentacle Lash. Long Range Melee area of effect attack.
• Renamed Biomechanical Leeches to Technoleeches.
• Rewrote Allied Reinforcements.

Well, that was long. There's a lot to take in and you'll need to read the actual manual to see the details so here's some commentary to help digest it and discuss a few other things.

Miraculously Untouchable

The game's new Miracle (Phasing, turns you insubstantial) represents something of a personal achievement for me, because I have been trying to figure out how to get this kind of mechanic into the game for a while. The power to go through solid objects is not one of the first things that comes to mind when you think of action anime, let alone Mecha action anime. But it exists and, somewhat more importantly, it is a pretty cool option for PCs and NPCs.

The funny thing is that I had all but given up on the idea until, while designing Boss Traits, I came up with Spectral Body to represent monsters like the Gnosis from Xenosaga. I realized a while ago that a Miracle variant this would let me give this kind of power to PCs without making them genuinely invincible. The end product is a Miracle so powerful it naturally makes PCs immune to giant robots, and it would be completely bonkers if it didn't slowly drain their Plot Armor and use up their Actions while at it.

The GM's ideal "invincible monologuing asshat" enabler.

I was going to reserve this Miracle for an expansion but I wanted to make up for the loss of the Speed Miracle and also there was some free space in that section. I figured it would be a somewhat risky (IMMUNITY TO MECHA!!!) but worthwhile inclusion.

The True and Final form of Dueling Blade

When you have a Melee Weapon that is at its strongest when you do with it what all Melee Weapons want to do anyway, it tends to trump the competition. Dueling Blade's entire concept is that it Duels Gud, so making it somewhat comparable in power to all the others was tough. That I messed up the wording with the first iteration of the Weapon and it was even stronger didn't help.

I tried several variants to get the concept to stick. Having it grant the Advantage if you are already in a Duel by the start of your Turn is really powerful but deceptively conditional. If you Engage a Grunt and it explodes after that one attack then Dueling Blade does nothing for you, for example. It is fantastic for frontliners that draw the attention of Rivals and Bosses, particularly with Duelist Model.

This was originally going to grant the Advantage only if you won the Speed Test at the beginning of your Turn, but this plays faster and is already conditional enough in my opinion. For instance Slippery Chassis renders it useless.

It also makes a good backup for generalists with a primary ranged focus.

Grunts and Teamwork

Grunts now have a new Action available to them: Paired Attack. Pairing lets two identical Grunts within 1 Zone to make a single Offensive Action with two Advantages. Pairing bonuses do not stack, because that would kind of go against the whole point of the thing. It also feels like they are doing a Synchro Attack of sorts, which is cool. Paired Attacks are a lot more effective than stacking Assists in both terms of gameplay flow and raw power, and that is a good thing.

Q: How many attack rolls do you need for 24 Balls? 

A: Just 3 with Squadron and Paired Attack.

This is one of those things that might not seem like much but is a fantastic addition to the game. Individual Grunts are much more fearsome when they have a +4 to their first few attacks, but it also cuts down the amount of total attacks effectively in half, which also means they take less time to get through all those Turns. In one fell swoop Grunts are more threatening, play faster, and are easier to take out because they need to bunch up.

I put a lot of effort into getting Player options just right because that is what gets the most attention. I spend just a fraction of that time into Grunts and Bosses, even though those are just as important as PCs. One of my highest priorities is that the game should be easy to manage for the GM, so it is little improvements like this one that I'm often the most proud of.

What's Next?

My short term goal is to explain/commence ~=|The Plan|=~ next week. My long term goal is to have the finished product ready within 6-ish months. My midterm goal is to have one more pdf of experimental mechanics in 2-3 months, because I'm sure you awesome people will find something that can be improved. We can't aim for perfection but we can certainly land within the ballpark.

We are charging full speed ahead, ladies and gentlemen. This is going to be a good ride.

BCG April Update

Ah, Easter. In my corner of the world, it is known for being the year's one four-day weekend, making it perfect for meeting friends and family, taking a mini vacation trip somewhere close, and writing roleplaying games.

That is how people usually spend their holidays, right? Shutting themselves in and writing stuff, no? Anyway.

Today I have for you a middle of the road update. The text has less typos, is better organized, and in general things are clearer. There's still a lot of layout work to do (the current page backgrounds and sheets are placeholders) so I will probably do another of these updates with 'quality of life' improvements in 1-2 more months. Hopefully after that the game will be finished.

A few weeks ago I brought up what you were going to see today, and the grand majority of it remains the same. A few things did change between then and now though, so let's go over them quick.

Two Promotions and two Demotions

The grand majority of changes are buffs, and they are either pretty inoffensive buffs or obviously necessary. Those are 'Stable' changes, while the more adventurous and dramatic changes are called 'experimental' and have their own separate pdf.

Two supposedly Stable changes stood out in discussion as being perhaps more strong than intended: Interference Bomb and Electro-Sapper Pods. To ensure that their power level is fine they'll go in the experimental manual for now. In the meantime, Interference Bomb will halve the Might of all Units in an Area, while the Pods remain as-is because a bonus 1-3 points of Damage isn't a bad deal anyway.

Two Experimental changes got promoted to Stable: Powered Rifle and Your Fate is Sealed. They aren't really significant enough to warrant months of testing, though they are quite powerful if you make the most out of them. Your Fate is Sealed which denies Tension and healing entirely but only for one Round. Powered Rifle which takes a bit from its Boosted counterpart and has improved Range when you Aim (A Range of 20 is not too difficult to get), but can only be used against targets at least at Range 5.

Because sometimes you just need to shoot beyond the horizon.

Changes I Forgot to Mention

Tweak things back and forth while testing them out long enough and you will forget to note down some of them. While checking out feedback and comparing it to my notes I realized that I forgot to bring up a few more changes. Here they are:

-Experimental Reactor got a slight nerf to cost 2 Energy instead of 1.
-Got you Where I Wanted lets you move the target a number of Zones equal to the entirety of the Damage.
-Take One for the Team lets you redirect all of the Damage towards the user.
-Bloodlust was missing its Level 2 buff, now it grants 5 Might.

Two are welcome buffs, one is a moderate nerf to basically the game's best damage increasing ability, and the last was kind of obligatory. There really is not much else to say.

An Absolute Barrier works pretty well with Take One for the Team.

Expanded Experimental Material

Three weeks was more than enough for me to notice some of the more obvious problems with the first draft of the Experimental Content I posted. It was also enough to come up with some more things to try out. The most dangerous change (yet also the most exciting) was by far the buff to Commander Type, I did say that it was potentially extraordinarily powerful... And that's basically what it was.

At the end of the day the only way to effectively counter a Commander Type User was to cut off their energy supply...  Through another instance of Commander Type. In consequence I retouched and weakened it a little. It is still very powerful though, so be careful if you want to allow it in a game.

That's the bad news. The good news is that there are two new buffs: Don't Give Up now restores an amount of Threshold equal to the user's Systems and Overcharge costs 5, so that you can combo it with the Experimental Commander Type.

Closer and closer to a viable Mecha concept.

And last but definitely not least...

Attribute Advancement Changes

All PCs under the Experimental rules start with 100 Character Points and 100 Mecha Points to spend however they wish at Power Level 0. Each Power Level also grants them 20 Character Points and 20 Mecha Points, plus a Genre Point and a Genre Power. Attributes start at 0, and you Enhance them in instances of +2 each, as shown in the table below.

I pinky swear that any resemblance to mechanics from GGG is coincidental.

Let's quickly go over what this accomplishes:

Elimination of leftover points: The way the math worked previously it made getting 4's and 5's the one surefire way to avoid having a leftover of points. I was aware from the beginning that low PL characters would look a bit same-y Attribute-wise, but even after that the increases tend to come in '15s' (4 to 6 or 7 to 8) because otherwise you'd have 1-4 spare points you can do nothing with. With everything coming in multiples of 5 that would no longer be a problem.

Starting characters have more XP and can spend it on whatever they wish: This allows for a little bit more variety in what starting Characters and Mecha can do. The total XP at Level 1 is basically the same amount, but being able to do whatever you want with it does help. It is also less confusing because you don't have to manage a predetermined amount for Attributes, a predetermined amount for abilities, and then the amount you can do anything with. This one is all upside as far as I'm concerned.

High Power Level characters have less XP: This one is half upside and half downside. On one hand it cuts down on some of the more powerful strategies that PCs of PL 4 and 5 could get away with... On the other hand, that's not always a bad thing. Having less XP at the high end makes things easier to balance and also weakens Grunts and Bosses, not just PCs and Rival NPCs.

Your Attributes can only be in even numbers: Again this one has its pros and cons. The con is that there is less freedom in how you can distribute your Attributes and you can't really make a Character with slightly under or above average Charm, it has to be strictly average, bad, or great. The game already grades your Attributes by twos, though, so it is not really a big change in that regard. Also, by having all Attributes be always even, we could reinstate the old rule of always rounding halved values up. I'm not entirely sure this is the right call yet, but the main reason BCG roundes values down is that there is a lot of Attribute halving going around and the balance of the game is better when Attributes are rounded down, not up.

Attributes are slightly cheaper to increase and more convenient to manage: Even if there is less XP to go around, Attributes are actually cheaper to increase now so endgame PCs can end up with builds that are pretty similar to the ones in the current version of BCG. It might sound like a loss of 40 points, but it is really more like a loss of 20-30, and it is spread through five Power Levels. It does not hurt that much, but it does mitigate the commonality of some late game obscene combos.

There's a few more side effects, and honestly I should go more in depth into the numbers there, but I think it should get a post of its own if I am going to do it justice.

That it feels similar to this is a nice bonus.

One More Thing

Terrain. Yes, that thing is Terrain. There has been some (quite a bit of) confusion over how Terrain and Terrain-like effects work. The troubleshooting section does clarify this, but it keeps coming up so perhaps I ought to rewrite how they work so that they're more intuitive. Currently abilities like Flyer and Anti-Gravity let you ignore Terrain, but not Terrain effects like those of Incinerator or Ensnaring Trap. Terrain effects also do not stack, so you can't be set on fire twice but you also can't be set on fire while having mines detonated under you. Well, you can, but the second effect will not do anything.

The general idea was that I could let the effects be stronger if they couldn't stack, for example Ensnaring Trap halves two Attributes when I originally was going to make it only halve Speed. I do like the way Terrain itself works, but the abilities that cause Terrain effects might be in need of a touchup. Hence the poll you see to the right.

I could rewrite abilities like Incinerator or Ensnaring Trap so that they create Zones of Extreme or Difficult Terrain, thus they would function in the way that seems to make the most sense, without having to change any other rules. But I could also change Terrain slightly and make the negative conditions stack if you apply multiples of them on the same Zone or target.

I hope to get the production gears spinning a little bit faster in what is left of this month and the next. I have a schedule more or less planned out, so there'll be lots of things to discuss in the near future. The schedule itself should be the subject of a post coming soon, as well.

But that's for another day. Today Easter awaits. Have a Happy Easter if you celebrate and a Pleasant Sunday if you don't.

Let the Games Begin

As of today Battle Century G v1.0 Beta is available for download. Let's talk briefly about what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn't.

Expect

Fully playable rules: The rules for Pilot Characters and their Mecha are complete and you can use them to play or run an entire campaign, or just to take a peek at what the finalized version down the line will look like.
Advice to help you visualize how the game is meant to be played and run: If you want to change the way the game is structured, there are also guidelines for doing that.
Three scenarios sharing a single setting: There is a pretty big setting ready for use, but because it is divided to focus in three different factions with their own battles, it is relatively simple and you don't have to worry about internalizing all of it.

Do not Expect

Art and other visual assets like Pilot and Mecha Sheets: They'll take time to get done, so for the time being you get a barebones black and white pdf.
Layouting and an index: The layout work is about halfway done, but there is the odd page here and there that could use some improvements, it also bears mentioning that there are bookmarks in the pdf and a table of contents to compensate for the lack of a comprehensive index at the end.  
Editing: The manual went through a quick editorial skim, but the comprehensive and detailed editing process will have to be later.

If you've read or played Giant Guardian Generation, and if you've been following the previews, you'll see a lot of familiar faces in there. Some things have changed slightly since the previews, but it is very much not GGG with a different coat of painting. So y'know, don't expect that. Here is a quick rundown of the manual's contents.

Chapter 0: Introduction - A more detailed version of what you're reading right now.
Chapter 1: The Rules - You'll learn how to play the game in this first quarter of the manual, this has pretty much every rule you'll need during a game session.
Chapter 2: Character Creation - This chapter has everything you need to know about your Pilot Character and what they can do. Probably the section most similar to its GGG counterpart.
Chapter 3: Mecha Construction - The same as above but for Mecha, with a big emphasis on having flexible rules to cover all types of Mecha or Mecha-like things.
Chapter 4: The Genre Master - The How and Whys of GMing Battle Century G have advice to help you pace your game, create memorable enemies, and more. There is a lot of that, to the point I actually printed it out for a friend who just needed general GM advice using an entirely different system.
Chapter 5: The Fluff - A game world divided into three scenarios each evocative of different Mecha genre conventions, plus a lot of example NPC Allies and Enemies. This one is pretty similar to the GGG version too, but it has a slightly tighter focus and tone.

That's the v1.0 Beta in a nutshell. I figure it will take half a year or so to finish it for good, maybe more, hopefully less. I will probably do one or two small updates in between to improve the layout and fix issues of clarity, spelling, or the like. But there won't be any gameplay changes until I've deemed the beta period to be over.

In the meantime, there are lots of things to talk about concerning how the game works. What it does very well, what it doesn't, what is balanced and what could get out of hand if you're not careful, and so on. Until next week it is!