Ep 101: Running Campaigns 101

Hello, mech warriors and welcome to the mech bay where we fix your mech and fix your game

What's going on mech warriors? I'm your host Steve. I've got my co-host lore master denim

Howdy, howdy and we are the mech bay podcast your number one source for all things casual to competitive battle tech and today's episode is sponsored by

mech warrior Ned McDermant and cadets Brock and Mac Ronan call sign seawiz in his black Python along with chad holes and subtle calm

We thank you guys for your continued support and really appreciate you

help it us out

You may have noticed that Josh is not here today and this is because Josh has locked himself in the supply closet taking refuge from all those

Adoring fans pounding on the doors asking for blue chips the rare blue chip

So elusive so secretive

I must have for any true mech bay podcast fan

Today

We're talking about campaigns

Welcome class to campaign running 101. That's right. It is episode 101

It oh my goodness. It is yeah, I was gonna make some other joke. I like that one way better. This is episode 101

How to run a campaign. It's a correct campaign. It's rudimentary. How we run our campaigns. I think this is gonna be a great episode

denim you've done a lot of this I've done quite a bit myself

But before we dive into it

Let's get started with news hobby progress games played and even a little bit of fan mail

ooh

For news today we have silent assets a new book released by Daniel Eisenburner

And it should be out extremely soon if it's not out by the time this happens. It's been announced a little while ago

We have seen the release of both the carita ranger and carita command lance

Which is pretty exciting denim. I know you play a lot of carita

Oh, I'm super excited about both of these the avatar alone

Is is amazing

We've got multiple mechs with swords

um

It's it's I'm super super happy and we'll get into that in hobby progress

But uh, but we've got some problems in my office because of that

But um I like both lances. I like the iconic mechs. They picked out

Um, I'm not too sure about the panther because it looks so similar to the other panther

They've done that a couple of times with some of the reposes like the morgan kel archer is just like a torso twist with an arm raised

We got a couple different black checks that are minimally reposed

But I am glad they included the panther in this box because if you didn't it would feel wrong

Well, yeah, yeah, I'm a little surprised they didn't have a gender

Um, the grand dragon needed to be like you needed to have a model for the grand dragon

But it does look really similar to the regular dragon like super similar

It's just like the weapon ports that are different sure sure

Well, we'll talk a little bit about that uh more in

hobby progress for sure

Other news we have force manual mercenary is now available through cgl

I believe fortress miniatures and games has them as well

Uh, I'm not sure if he has a pre-order setup. I have to look into it. I

Don't know if I'm going to get a copy of this um, I know it's been looked at for a while people

I'm kind of excited for it, but from what I've seen

Uh, it looks very similar to the previous mercenary handbook

Yeah, it's super similar to the combat manual series uh, because they did a mercenary one of those um and a credo one

and

To be honest a lot of it is it feels like it's copypaced like word-for-word exactly what what it was before there are some new things

They have a push the era forward a little bit. So if you don't have the combat manuals. Yeah, you should pick it up if you do

Um

I mean you know me Steve. I'm going to have it on my bookshelf next to all of my other ones

So I am I'm definitely buying a hard copy um

But that's because I got a catch it all yeah personally. I

I'm kind of the opposite. I do not have a lot of the books. I don't have any of the arrow books

I don't know of any of that stuff. I've got the rule books

The couple of fiction novels that I have been interested in but a lot of the other stuff I pass on mostly because

Lore's not my jam. Do you have the the Spine Art uh books? I think I'm only missing total or not total war. I have that one um

A time of war time of war. Yes that one. I think that's the only one I'm missing that one doesn't have any timber wolf on it

So if you're gonna miss any of them, that's the one to miss but but I definitely have all of those. I like the Spine Art books

Yeah, it's pretty cool. You just gotta make sure you put them back in the right order. Otherwise, they'll just be annoyed

Yep

Do that on purpose to throw people off their game

It works

Things to note about the first manual mercenary there was a slight hiccup with a digital release

I believe that has been repaired and they should be available on CGL's website

So yes, if you're interested go check it out

It's always nice to see new

Books coming out at least you know it means that the printers are still working

Sorry CGL's website and drive-through RPG both of those places if you purchase it from them

If you if they ever put out an update they will automatically allow you to download the updated PDF for free

Are they updating drive-through RPG now? I think originally they weren't oh they have been for for it almost a decade now. Yeah, I've I've done that

before

When I first started getting back into battle tech about seven or eight years ago

I got a lot of stuff off of drive-through RPG and I have routinely updated you know downloaded updated versions of my PDFs through that

No great great

Any of the news that I missed

I'm sure there's news out there, but I don't I don't know it's been a busy week you know tournaments and stuff

sure has been

Hobby progress

denim

What have you done up to oh?

My

Hobby desk looks like a crime scene. It definitely looks like I have murdered multiple people on there

um, I have both of the new

Corridor Lance packet actually I have two of each of both of the new Corridor Lance packs

And because of the avatar I grabbed some inner-sphere elementals and everything is being painted red

Um, there are splatters spills

Uh speckles from from dry brushing. It is a red mess on my desk

It would be wouldn't it? Yeah

Gross actually I painted them all blue and they all turned red due to the blood of my enemies. I have defeated

I think that's the wrong IP denim

Something something blood god

Corridor mechs swords equals blood spray everywhere

Does my armor bleed? Um, my armor bleeds red

steed

I must have missed that part of the lore. Would you gotta kill a mech first?

I am with the way I've been rolling that's hard to come by man

I too have acquired both the Corridor Ranger and the Corridor Command Lash thanks to Bobby at Fortress Minatures and Games

Thank you Bobby

Yeah, Bobby's great man. He's a great supporter and

Bobby is just about everything that you could imagine regarding battle tech and other related games

He even helps feed Josh's halo addiction, which I don't think is healthy

But uh, I've also started painting my Corridor models um, which is

I guess really a surprise to no one if there were one inner-sphere faction that was not a bird and talked about honor all the time

They're about as close to clanders as you can get in the inner-sphere real there. It's so honorable

But not too honorable and there's certainly not humble

But just the right amount of humble

Absolutely not

But no, I started painting mine. I did not paint my red

I'm going for ganyoshia, so I'm gonna be doing that ash gray

um

Which

I'm kind of excited for I got a I got a recipe that I'm going to try to follow and it's looking good so far

Nice the problem is

I didn't

Really do the part where you like do a test model with like one or two or even four or eight

Nope, nope. I built out two full companies that I'm paying 25 models already because I hate myself apparently

This is the way I just dive in face first into the shallow end and you know go from there

But it's slow going more than half of her

Kind of a mess, but um, I don't have anything to show for him yet

But it's been kind of fun experimenting with colors that are not yellow or white

So getting back to normal paint colors has been a breath of fresh air. Hey koreeda is a fun faction to play

It is look. We've got all these things with swords now. I I cannot pronounce it, but the row

Row could be

Sure, I just keep calling them bryobies like my tools in the shed, but

My bryobie gang no, but they the models are nice man. They got like swords going every which way you get an extra arm

Yeah, in case you want the four the sword going forward or the or the proper

The proper hand yep, yeah, yeah, you know what I'm gonna do. I put the reverse hold on mine

So he's got it like sword down, but it is with a very specific reason

I want to take the regular arm with the sword upright

And I want to use it as a terrain piece

And I want to paint the arm

Because that arm looks extremely similar to a certain faction's logo

So I want to paint it in the liao arm color right with the sword

That's amazing and I'm gonna stick it underneath the next foot

Because it's gonna be gross and rad all at the same time the kids don't say rad anymore. Do they done?

Well, you know what we're bringing it back bringing it back rad right here. I'm gonna back rad sick

That's that's kind of better than what I'm doing with that extra arm

All I'm doing is taking one of the um the chimeras and and one of those the jumps seven

Um has a c3 and a sword

So I'm going to just pop that on to the right arm and and give it a sword on my model as well

Oh nice doing a little bit of wizzy wig. All right. Yeah

Um

Trying to think of this any other progress

I am helping my son build his very first pinewood Derby car

Nice. So that's a gas land style

No, I let him pick he wants like a

Like an old school racing kind of car with a big you know nose and like the little

Welled out seat with the dude in the goggles and like a little windscreen the old school. Let's go a little scarf

Yeah, exactly. That's that's the that's the look he's going for he showed me a picture

What he wanted to be and I've butchered it horribly because my skill saw skills are

Not great

But I am using your brush. He's supposed to be doing that. You're just supposed to be helping

He is five if you think I'm letting a five-year-old anywhere near a skill saw you sir are insane

I bet he still all has all of his original fingers still to he he does and I have most of mine. So we're we're okay

Um

No, so it's been it's been good man. We've been

Doing some hobby stuff. It's been low pressure for brawl in the bluegrass. I did not paint a single model

I just used out anything I had laying around so it's been pretty stress-free. I'm not

You know racing to get anything done. It's been

Kind of nice. I'm trying to

Get over a little bit of hobby burn out and I'm trying to ease my way back into it by

painting two full

Companies of getting you know sure, but that that aside we're we're easing our way into it. We're getting we're getting

But next up

denim

Steve games played

Have you played a game? I

Can't have these two new

Forcebacks out without

Feeling some serious Karita and my friend Thiel local guy awesome guy love Thiel

Yes

He he did the same thing, but with the the Davian forcebacks

So he challenged me publicly

Uh, with his fanatose forest falconer 8R Hellspawn 9F and the enforcer 5R very Davian force however

That force has a lot of MRM's and a lot of

Heavy lasers of all sorts

Also more than one Gauss rifle. I think there's two Gauss rifles in that list

Oach

Yeah, yeah, it was scary

So I wanting to have some fun

Took the the Akuma 1x the Shiro

SH1v the grand dragon dr g7k and your favorite Roku Roku b rk 4t

Yeah, the royal favorite because you don't know how to pronounce it. Yeah, right precisely

The drill the rio b the skill saw he's got blades and

Vibrates hang on

So all of his have jump jets none of mine have jump jets. That's a problem. It it

We played on the badlands map. So there's a lot of terrain

But I lost initiative

A lot but that gave me the opportunity to control the battlefield

Um

So I made it so he had to follow me over to where I wanted if he wanted to get any kills

So I was able to set up like

ambushes stuff like that

Uh

I will tell you those Karita max especially the ones with the swords like the Shiro and the Roku Roku b

They don't have a lot of firepower especially four max of their size Roku Roku b has a single light

Auto cannon five

I did put the proper ammo in there because it has two tons of ammo. So I have one ton of precision one ton of armor piercing

Groose yeah, yeah precision

We'll pack at anybody moving too fast and the armor piercing will uh

Will make people hesitant to stand still

But maximum damage is five points in the shooting phase

Maximum damage is five points with that sword in the in the melee phase

Uh surprisingly weak

Yeah, yeah, uh the Shiro's got four LRM tens and an LB2X

But they're playing LRM's so no no uh

No minimum range that's something

Um

Those two though the Shiro and the Roku Roku b may not have a lot of firepower, but they both have hardened armor

And they're pretty fast for their size

Um then the other one of the akuma is just a tank. It's just there to to absorb hits

And the grand dragon is just to get into position

I don't think I've ever had a grand dragon last more than four or five turns ever really

But

But he serves a purpose he's out there to to get in front have everybody shoot at him while everyone else gets into position for the kill

Um

Yes, Thiel's Davians put out an incredible amount of firepower gals rifles heavy improved lasers

MRM's uh

But the hardened armor and just the massive amount of armor in the akuma at weighed one the day

The grand dragon did go down. I think he fell unconscious turned three

um

So he was unconscious all of turn four turned five. He went to stand up failed his piloting role

Um impaled himself on a tree

Uh with the embarrassment he had from that he committed sepecu on turn five

So he was technically out by turn three, but he finished himself off on turn five

brutal

Yes

Yes, absolutely brutal. I will say I love the akuma's model

Oh, yeah, it's got like the mask thing going on. It's got like a little only face

I think that's that's great. I'm really excited to paint mine. It was modeled after the atlas. So it's a it's creed as budget atlas

And it does its job. It has it has a lot of firepower just like the atlas. It's got max armor just like the atlas

It's slow

But it doesn't need to be fast

um

So with the with the other three this year or the rokuro kubi and the akuma

Yes, they were undergunned

But they could absorb so many hits that you know gals rifles in the head

Oh, look, I still have internal structure left things like that. Wow

Yeah, the Davian's just couldn't couldn't

Put out enough damage before I got in there and uh and got a few kills this hero did run over because the

Show's got the four LRM's and the LV2X, but it also has a sword and

um

It ran over and uh and decapitated the Thanos when it fell to the ground

Uh, it attacked it while it was on the ground sliced the head clean off

So and Thanatos or the prototype from Marvel both

Both excellent. Okay. Both. Yes, the Thanatos

Who is being piloted by Thanos? Don't confuse me. Well, I don't know

Okay

Denim next time you paying a Thanatos. Can you please paint one arm gold with a couple of different colored knuckles for you?

I will yes, I'd be great. I want a Thanatos with a infinity gauntlet. Thank you denim. Yes done consider done

um

Right

All that was left on his side was the health spawn

Uh, who tried to DFA my akuma and was just obliterated by by everything

That's a bold move. It was it was

Fantastic game

Carito won feel did admit to be later because he is also a huge Carita fan

He tried his hardest. He wanted it to be a big fight. He was secretly happy that Carito won

I mean feels a very good player

So he may have lost on purpose and you didn't realize he absolutely did not we had that discussion, but he may have lied to you denim

He earned a chip. So good. That's good. He has he has a red Carita colored chip

Excellent

Yes, excellent

But you and he games

Got a couple got a couple uh, we played a campaign day in a local shop which went relatively well

I can talk about that little more later when we talk about our um

You know our campaign stuff, right? Uh, but I did have

Possibly one of the best Fridays. I've had in a very long time

Work has been kind of keep me down and uh been really stressed out recently, but

My son had a

My son had his first

Field trip for school, which was very exciting

So I went as a shaperone to the zoo

And I have not been to the zoo

In a surprisingly long time and it was very exciting

Steve how does this relate to battle tech well after the zoo

We came home because I was a shaperone so we didn't have to get on the bus

I could just take him back to the house and we have all afternoon to hang out and do whatever we want

And he's like dead can we play battle tech and I'm like absolutely

What is he want brownie points probably he got an extra helping words. Yeah, absolutely

um

But you know, I know a while ago

I'd mentioned that I picked up the clan command star with him because he'd come with me in the the shop

So he had his you know, dire wolf and his um, you know summoner and

Shadowcat and all that stuff that was in that box and we'd we'd put base coats on them

And he was happy and often didn't want to meet a fuss with him anymore. So they're just bright colors

um

So I made an equivalent force of Jade Falcons, right?

And so I took like a Turkina a summoner

Fire Falcon Helbringer and

And

Might have been a black laner was my other one. Mm-hmm. So I just tried to bring like very Jade falcony falcon max just something fun to do

And easy on the kid I see. Yeah, well

For the first several turns I was kind of concerned my dice luck were not very good and he was smoke

And we played with single attack role so he could just do you know, seven damage with his dire wolf at a turn

You know deleting things always a kid fox is what it was

I took a kid fox not a black laner. I apologize very very different. Yes. Well, no, no

I I couldn't remember the other one was but I remember now because the

Dire wolf just consumed it whole

But what ended up happening is he started to miss and I started to get you know behind him and start to take some shots

Um, and it really came down to his summoner and needing to roll a five plus to kill my fire falcon and he would have tabled me

He rolled a three

Now dear listener

You may be asking

Steve

You didn't table your five-year-old did you?

Wait, wait, wait, you were playing Jade falcon weren't you? Oh yes

Lessons must be taught

Jade the Jade falcon tomon has no place for weak-willed warriors friends

Say what? We use this as an object lesson

and

Really trying to teach him that you can still have fun

Even if we lose

That's right and as I say it not as I do right

Absolutely. I need to learn that lesson 100%

um

But oh he he kind of I think he understood man. It's good. You know we're we're trying, you know

And we're doing our best here. So uh, I think he he he was bummed

But he said he had fun and he wanted to play later

And I said do you want to play again now? We got enough time before you know mom and your brother come home

And he goes no that's okay

Can we play gas lands instead?

And I'm like absolutely buddy. We're playing gas lands and I once again learn the lesson the yellow cars can jump when confronted with you know cars trying to block their path. So

Um again news to me, but I got to play gas land so I didn't complain too hard

That's right. I see why he wanted a pallet cleanser after that and gas land seems to be more uh

More friendly to him winning

Well, when your yellow cars can jump over obstacles. Yes. That's a

Yeah, we tell you learn to about the yellow mechs

But no, um, that was a great Friday. I got to go to the zoo. I got to play battle tag

I got to teach my child lesson and we got to play gas lands. Oh, that was a

Did you get to pet the rhinoceros at the zoo?

I highly recommend it. Do you know how hard it is to chase

Three children two of which are not yours around the zoo and make sure that everybody comes home with other fingers

Yeah, I used to I used to do that for school kids

For my kids all the time at school. I was the I was

I was the chaperone all the kids wanted because I would you pay the little extra money to let them go into the

To the petting parts or whatever whatever was it took extra money and the other parents would be like no

We're not doing that. I'd be like everyone go

So they almost me. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. No, I was the um

I was a slave driver on that trip

I'm the one who's like you get off the railing you come over here everyone's standing together

These are the rules no running sit out and I was

The children I was in control of were well-behaved

Watch what happens when Jacob falls in the lion pit go Jacob

Oh, I had to ask all the kids, you know

What's the one animal you want to see so we could make sure all the kids got to see what they wanted

Of course the kids picked the three animals that were furthest apart in the freaking zoo

Uh-huh. We spent a lot of time walking but the kids were tired, which is good. So

Any tales from the hiring hall

Uh, none that I am prepared to talk about right now. I did start a new a new mercenary unit

Um, and uh spoiler alert. I have to start another new mercenary unit. So

Oh, you're gonna make us wait until next time. Yeah. Yeah, it's a story

I'm I'm excited to hear it

I have one track left in the wicked hogs

And I may wrap that up

Thursday this week. We'll see

Um, I'm hoping to

We've been installed for a week or two. We haven't had a chance to play our contract

So uh when I finish that up, we'll we'll have a report

Nice

We do have some upcoming events coming um

Several over the next several months and these are just the ones that I was able to think of off the top

My head and sticking this list if I miss something

Food free to email us at the mechbay podcast at gmail.com

And we can make sure the your event ends up on the calendar or at least in the announcement section of the discord

Upcoming march 25th through the 29th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have a depth to come

Should be a good time. It's a big deal. It's still a new place

So it works out uh the trash panda open is April 12th

Um, sorry, April 11th and 12th in new port news, Virginia

That's close to me

Are you going? No

Well, okay

We have the Richmond opened that is May 1st through May 3rd in

Wait for it

Richmond, Virginia

Okay, I I want to just be clear that that I'm not not going because I don't want to

It's because my April is already full. I realize that my nose sounded like no

No, I would love to go, Steve. I absolutely would

Um

Just people keep uh

Scheduling these tournaments for for days that I already have stuff. So it's not very nice

I never doubted you for a second denim. Yeah, but they might they don't know me like you do

It's fair

Uh next event as one I'm particularly partial to motor city mayhem is May 16th in Farmington Hills, Michigan

Which is just north of Detroit for those of you that don't know the area

uh motor city mayhem is

Filling up we got 42 people signed up already down. That's pretty exciting. Wow. That is that is fantastic

Yeah, we're not even all the way through March yet

So I've got lots of space if you're interested in coming to the new venue

It's in a hotel you can walk from your room to the venue very nice

Um, I'm excited. We got some new missions that we're working on for this year uh, we're print and swag already

So should be a very good time

We also have wars on Atlanta, which is May

I think 20 second to the 24th

Um, and that's in Atlanta, Georgia

We also have strategic comm which is May 22nd to the 25th in Los Angeles, California

And we have

ACO the Atlantic City open, which is a battle tech and alpha strike event from June 12th to June 14th in Atlantic city

New Jersey

That one is run by Brad Nichols who is a wonderful guy and if you have the opportunity to go hang out and play a battle tech with Brad

You should absolutely do it. I've played him twice now and I have learned something new every time

So if you're in that area or have the ability to travel and your calendar is open check out any of these great events

I'm sure you will have fun

For the first time in a long time denim

We have some fan mail

Mail man got some mail here

It's exciting stuff

We did get a listener from the ua e uh, his name was john

john want to appreciate all the kind words you sent us and we will address her question

But we need some additional time because we want to make sure that we put it in an episode that it is well suited for

But we will tackle the subject of your email soon

TM

Yep

Yep, yep, yep

We also got an email from Jacob s

Jacob writes

Hello there

General canobi

Just getting hidden put that part in there

No, but I was about to until you said it

It's just a reflex. It's just a reflex can't help it

He says figured I'd make this an email instead of a discord message since you guys need more emails

I'm hosting a game night for my work next week

I've heard rumors that some co-workers do tabletop and RPG

And it's a pretty nerdy group there are much a satellite engineers apparently

So I'm gonna try and get a few games of battle tech again

I don't play very much and I haven't done an intro game with more than one person before

You guys have much more experience introducing players

And I'd love some advice on how to set up and run an intro game for a few people

I've got the 2014 introductory box the alpha strike box and the merc box plus the battle mic manual

I have 3d printed maps in terrain

And the game should probably run less than two hours

What is the best way to hook a few new players? Thanks Jacob

I have a go-to mission. I noticed that you don't have the game of armored combat box

But inside there is a mission and

I'll list the becks that it it recommends, but you can use anything that's similar

But it checks all your boxes

It can be played in less than two hours. It looks great if you've got maps with 3d terrain

Um, and it works with several people. I tend to play it with up to four players

So on one side you have an assault class mech in the box said it's a it's a battle master

Um

That battle master is trying to make it back to his unit. He got cut off

So you put the two maps short edge together. So it makes one long map

So that guy starts at one end of the map and his objective is just to walk all the way over

It doesn't have to walk you can run a few ones and get off of the other edge

Um, the other mechs in the box that are coming after you

Uh, those would be the locust the wolverine and the commando

So

You can have up to four players in this one

It's really good about teaching the differences between likes mediums and assaults

Um

It's really important to show off the uh, how how melee works and how zoning works

So it's it's not a kill mission because the battle master is just trying to get off

And the other three are trying to stop the battle master

so

I would put the most experienced person on the battle master

and uh

And use it as an intro to teach the other people to play which means that if it's intro came and they've never played

It's a great game to just pause and say okay

Let's go over this here your options. What do you want to do or I see you moved over there?

Um, your locust only moved one the locust's armor is speed not armor

So even if you want to go one you should run the long way around and have that one hex move take seven hexes to do

And get your modifier up there. It's great for learning stuff like that

Um, I've always had a lot of fun. It is my go-to

Intro game at hangry team. So that's my advice

You know one of these days. I'm gonna read the actual stuff that's in those boxes

Some of them are really good. Yeah, I just pull the plastic out and

I should probably start reading that stuff

But no, that's a great option denim and you know Jacob if you were to ask me

I normally recommend

Like a two on two style game. I'd recommend using mostly mediums if you don't want to do denim's game idea

I'm sure by the time this gets out there your event will have come and gone and I hope

that the email response we said earlier helps you

um

But this is you know

Another option for the next time you and your co-workers get together, but normally when I do intro games I do maybe

You know

Two on two maybe both mediums

Try to give them no case try to make them explosive right have something exciting happen

Get those ammo crits and and watch things explode

Rather than giving everything case and pulse lasers and watching them all do it out for 10 hours

So that's always another option recommended minion backs would be stuff like like hunchbacks things that

Have big guns. So when they hit you know it

And so it makes for an exciting and short game

Which is good because if they like it then they can take the other max that can take more punishment

Uh later on, but yeah, yeah, nothing gets a person hooked faster than getting kills

I I agree um

Jacob I hope that information is helpful to you and I'd love for you to write in and tell us how it went

With that said

We're gonna take a short break here and we'll come back with our main subject

How to run campaigns

Good evening. I'm chipdarrington

It is well known that plan jade falcon has been reduced in both size and number after their catastrophic bid for terror led by the notorious

Melvina hazen

Since then jade falcon holdings have been rapidly dwindling and the need for fresh mac warriors has been marked by an increase in jade falcon claimed

Tonight we focus on one such group of said bonsman they call themselves the desgro luchadors

The former DCMS mac warriors were involved in what is now known as the battle for the bay

The group was reportedly defeated and claimed by a star captain only identified as Steve

former chute of the group chris tebow stated that initially the luchadors were not well received by the falcons

Not only due to their free-birth status, but were labeled sohama given their age

They are named for their fondness of the old terran lucheliebrae style of wrestling and have internalized those lessons and flare

When in the cockpit these mac warriors don their colorful leather masks and have a penchant for physical attacks

seen as desgro by the falcons their tactics prove strangely successful

And thus they are permitted to continue operating within the clan

As the jade falcons continue to consolidate their power in the hinterlands

It can be expected that more mac warriors will be claimed as bonsman in the near future

This has been chipdarrington, signing off

Welcome back class to campaign day 101

We're going to cover what to do when you want to run your own campaign

Now we did already cover campaign operations in episode 21

And again cast campaigns in episode 61

So we are back after another 40 episodes to take another look about how we run our campaigns

denim

You've had a very long running very successful campaign you run out of hangar 18

And I've had not to do it my own horn some success the my own local game shop

Yeah, but it's going to get better because as we'll touch on

I've been doing my campaign. I think I'm on year seven now

Um, and what we'll explain why that matters later, but uh yours is doing fantastic for how long you've been doing it

Yeah, I'm I'm very pleased um

Technically running about three-ish years

I had a kid somewhere in the middle of that so things got slowed down a little bit

It does close things down

Yeah, it's amazing how busy your life gets when you've got two children running around

um

But

We did this episode a because it was funny to do one every 40 episodes and we felt like we had two

The 101 the 101 is just it's just perfect just icing on the cake. I thought so I thought so I thought it was fitting

So um not to mention that people have also been asking for quite a while we get quite a few questions on

denim how do you do your campaign or Steve you were running an alpha strike one? What do you do?

What's your rules set? How do we how do we emulate what you guys do that you talk about on the podcast so much?

And we thought we finally had enough stuff

To really do a decent episode about you know, what are the five top things you're gonna need for running your own campaign

And how to go about doing that to hopefully

Have the most success possible

um

We should start off by saying that there are many many different ways to do campaigns

You can do you know

campaign operations you can do cast campaigns like we talked about those other episodes

You know you can do whatever you like and whatever your players enjoy just because we talk about what we think works

Well for us and our local groups does not mean that it will be a perfect fit for you

So don't feel obligated to copy everything we do you are welcome to take bits and pieces of whatever works for

us and

form it and mold it into something that your group will enjoy

exactly because

You could absolutely do a whole different direction like a like RPG campaigns stuff with destiny and a time of war

And these are not the campaigns we're going to be talking about today. We are specifically going to be going over

Just tabletop based mech action

In type of campaigns there will be some persistence in them, but it's not like

It's not like the indie roll the dice type of type of campaign

Right

And I guess we should probably double back to the very beginning and how did we get started

In our campaign settings and and and what worked for us. So dental. How did you I just started this seven years ago

Right, I didn't have anyone to play battle tech with but I really really enjoyed it

This was even before the new game of armored combat box that came out

But I had gone to dragon con and they I still saw they had battle tech there. They had this group called the CDT

The catalyst demo team and I was intrigued by by what they did

And then I'd gone to a store and

And

They had some interest in battle tech like I found a store hangar 18 actually had battle tech on the shelves

So I wanted to make it

Something more legitimate something more more permanent. So I asked if as the owner of he minded if I ran some games

Um, I wanted to lend some legitimacy to it. So I became a CDT agent

You do not have to that is not a step that you have to do for this

But but I did that so that he could say that he had a CDT agent

At his store and then

I started looking for inspiration to do more than just pick up games because we played some pickup games

And people wanted wanted more they wanted to talk about the stories of their pilots

But since her pilots changed every game

They they didn't have that persistence

And since there wasn't really anything out there that that took you

There were books out there that gave you tools like the campaign operations book

But none of them walked through and said okay. Here is step one. Here is step two. Here is step three

It's more like here's the toolbox. Just go figure it out. You'll you'll be fine

So um, I started

Figuring it out

That old added fake it till you make it. So I just did things that were interesting to me

And in the end it worked out and we'll go through a little bit more in detail

How that how that happened. How about you what what got you started into that

So

Similarly, right

We had been doing quite a few pickup games locally. I had a decent group of people that had started

Right, I mean we were getting people for games pretty much every other Friday

is when we like to play and

You know, we had wanted something that was a little

Like you said a little more, right? I mean, it's fun to smash robots together and blow things up

But at the end of the day, you know a lot of us at our local shop

We did play a lot of engines and dragons. We did play a lot of other role-playing games

and we wanted

Something to tie these

Episodes together, right? We could have the same pilots fight week to week to week

um, and I looked into cast campaigns and I didn't

Like the feel of it at all

So I I'd want to do something in alpha strike because that's how it was more comfortable with at the time

And I reached out to Ed Stephens or metal ed right he's been doing a lot of play testing and work on everything

That's a great guy. He is a fantastic guy very knowledgeable love ed

So ed thank you for kind of giving me some basic framework

To work off if and I made quite a few changes to ed's, you know

Structured what he had been running locally

Because I wanted to simplify it a little bit and make a little bit more digestible for the local group

So we ran several missions for alpha strike

um

And I discovered very quickly how much work it was

Get things ready for month to month

Uh, and eventually, you know, I had a had a second kid and that kind of put a slow on that for a while

Um, and then when the kids got older, I

Decided we were going to pick it back up and I asked everybody hey, would you rather play alpha strike or would you rather shift over to classic and

While there were some holdouts most people voted to move over to classic because I feel like you get a little bit more of a

Simulation feel you get a little bit more granular play with classic which

Lends itself better to more narrative storytelling rather than well you lost four pips of armor and now you're crippled

It's you've lost a large laser you've lost you know a leg actuator and now you're hobbling off the battlefield right you don't quite have the same

granularity and alpha strike right so so for that I would say that uh

Classic battle tech is you tell stories about the pilots

Alpha strike you tell stories about the unit. So it's more it's more about the collection

It's it's a group of mac warriors

You're focusing on the larger picture and not necessarily the individual pilots with their individual machines

precisely

So that's how I got started that was really there was really the majority of it um when you were putting your

Kind of packet together. I guess if you have a packet or at least your rule set that you were going to use

What inspiration did you pull from you know? I like I mentioned earlier. I did not care much for cast campaigns um

They were okay, but there was a lot of

Paperwork and a lot of conversions between war chest points and other stuff that I said you know what I'm not dealing with this no. Thank you

Um, what did you end up pulling from what what did you really lean into so

To begin with since I've really had no idea what I was doing

I went looking for other people who had done that and uh this CDT agent named James curtley

Had a campaign system that he was running and was willing to to share and allow people to run

Which was fantastic

Um, it was a great starting point

however

His campaign didn't progress past uh introtek like it's just by design and

He did not allow for custom mechs and as a as a player who played in the in the 80s

You know when we started we only had 16 mechs

So you had to custom make mechs to have any sort of variety

And uh and I had a lot of fun with that

And I wanted to make a campaign system that allowed the people who wanted to make uh custom mechs to really just go wild and crazy with it

So

James curtley's missions did a great job of getting people into the store and then one they wanted more

I

Took a lot of inspiration from campaign operations like a lot and uh less or so the the uh

chaos campaign

hinterlancid didn't didn't exist yet

Uh the mercenaries box set was now it wouldn't be out for years

But I took those rules and like is the war chest points are weird

And doing the conversions from sea bills to war chest points to supply points and back

Was a lot of paperwork

So I had done things like I just

I just used supply points. I didn't use war chest points at all. I just had the one system. There's no conversions

And it's just the abstraction of money

And this was before hinterlands you said this was before hinterlands. Yes. Oh look at you first mover advantage

That's right

It it it worked out surprisingly well

I love the idea of supply points where it's an abstraction where it uh

It encompasses everything like sea bills um

bribes opportunity

luck

So it's just a general pool of resources that are ambiguous

So so you don't have to worry about exactly

What you're paying

And to whom you just know that that you're using these supply points to get what you want

You're in lear in space, but don't have enough wooden nickels to buy this large laser you will only have merit dollars

And yeah, so it supply point is a good

Catch all for yes

Yes

So yeah, I took I took campaign operations

Chaos campaign and and a few things that were just in my brain from from playing for 40 years

And I created a packet out of that and it's gone through several revisions

I think we're at version 2.2 right now and I admittedly

Put more in there than I ex

Then I needed really

But I'm okay with that because

I guess

I guess what I started to do is I was excited about campaigns

And I knew that other people were excited about playing more

And I knew that there wasn't a product out there that took you step by step

But I wanted to show people how to play the campaign

So I started this with the intent

That um as people came into the shop and played it they would get excited about it

And there would be so much stuff in there that they could say well

I like this, but I don't like that or this part is cool

But I want more granularity there

And they would find like-minded people at the at the tables who agree with them

And then they would break off into permanent groups where they would just run their own campaigns

Whether it be at the store or at their houses

Where they would just come to my campaign day to learn about campaigns

And then break off and and go do their own thing

Now denim that is not what happened

Of course not you have to know

That the vast majority of people are lazy

They are

And they would simply show up and play

With your hard work to design the mission

With your hard work to come up with the story

And your hard work to do all the running

And the providing of mechs and maps and tables and terrain

And they'll just play

Why would they have to do all that work when you're willing to do it for them

You are not wrong

You're not wrong at all

Because we did we started with three players

And seven years later we have

Three time slots with four tables for each time slot

And approximately 60 people who come every month for this campaign

We even have makeup games at a different store for people who can't make

That date or that location

And we have

Other people in three different states who are using my my rule set to run their own campaigns at their own stores

So they're using my rules and my missions and just just running them

And I'm happy to say that all of the supply points are

It all works together. So if somebody from from Tennessee brings their character over to my game

They can pop in seamlessly

See denim

Working is intended other people are taking your system

But you still have 60 players because no one locally wants to do that

So that is that is true. That is working mostly as intended. We'll say

Do we just want to dive straight into

The things that players need to know to run their own campaign or is there anything else we should cover before we get into it

No, I think I think a lot of this stuff will definitely fall under those categories and we'll

We'll have our little blurbs and stories about about how we handle certain problems or or opportunities

All right

Well class get your notebooks take good notes and if you need to this lecture will be recorded and you can listen to it as many times as you need

We're going to address now

I'm gonna say that the test at the end will comprise 40% of your grade. That's true. That's true

Now

What are the five things that you need for running your own battle tech campaign

Number one you need a rule set

Two you need players

That's kind of important

Three you need to design missions for a campaign

For you need to be prepared to resolve issues that occur at your table and five and possibly the most difficult one

Scheduling yes, so we want to go through these five topics in some detail

And hopefully give you guys a little bit of a flavor as to what we do and other options that you may decide to use or come up with your own

And then um, we'll just kind of see where the episode takes us. How's that sound? I sounds fantastic

Number one rules

So you want to run your own campaign?

First thing you're going to need to do is figure out

What bounds and what boundaries are you going to put for your players?

Uh things you need to consider are

Game feeling right what is your goal of the campaign?

Uh, so for me

I like a game that is

I guess if you were to put it on a scale it would be more on the realistic and or gritty end of that scale

I want my players to sweat. I want my players to bleed and I want my players to struggle and suffer in order to achieve success

Because I am a firm believer

That victory is sweetest

When you have to work the hardest to achieve it

right

Does that frustrate my players? Sometimes

But by the same token

A work exceeding the hard to make sure my missions are more or less fair

And that the players are duly compensated for the problems I put in their path, right?

Um

Then I know you have a different

Kind of philosophy when it comes to game feel I do um and part of that is because of how many people are there and the fact that my campaigns

Um are have multiple tables and so it's a drop-in drop-out campaign

You may not be playing with the same people you played with last month

So it's very hard to coordinate you know who's bringing which mech all the time

And to counter that I make the feeling of my game more like like my players are the heroes of their own story

So uh, I I want them to be challenged

But in the end like they are the heroes even

Even getting a cockpit crit like having your cockpit shut out like they always make their their ejection rule

They might be in the hospital for a while, but they're they're never completely dead

And they're allowed to have multiple mechs and multiple pilots

But they're only allowed to bring one of each per game

So they do get to pick and choose like well once in the hospital they can bring in their their uh their second string mech warrior

So there's no fear of death in denim land

and

That's true the early on when I started doing it

We had quite a few people who would die to headshots in the first turn or two

And then they'd just sat there for three hours and watched everyone else play

I don't want that to happen until at least turn five or six

So I make sure that everybody starts the game with an edge and I warn them that that is there to

Protect their pilots not necessarily to get those early hits in on the op 4

I do I do challenge them like I said and I do uh scare them and I am not afraid to take out mechs or or mech warriors

I just don't make it permanent for these drop-in drop-out campaigns. It's very hard to do that level of persistence

Went when I don't know who's going to be at which table every month so

Well, maybe we'll dive in a little bit more into that um in a few minutes

But let's cover what kind of options exist out there for rules for people who may want to be

Running their own

So we mentioned previously that there is campaign ops there is also the chaos campaign

Nowadays you have the hinterlands rule set which is what my campaign is based on right

And that goes with the mercenaries box set like that's the that's the core box for that correct

Now I have heavily modified the hinterlands rulebook slash mercenaries box set for my own tables use just for simplicity and ease

um

I use that mainly because I'm trying to tell a consistent story

With my players and in my local group

I have an announcement channel that I simply just post updates for you know in universe updates for what's

Going on with them

They're all part of a group called the motor city mech warriors. They all run their own little companies. It's almost like

Like lone wolves type thing right? There's like one group

But they're all consisting of smaller units within the larger hole right

And they all keep track of their own sp

And I picked the contracts. I tell them what they're gonna get paid permission. I tell them how many bsp's they get

I tell them what you know salvage rules are and you know what repair costs are covered

And then I give them a mission and then they get to decide what next they want to bring

I give them a point value for the mission per table

And they have to decide amongst themselves. We're getting about 18 to 20 people

So I'm running between three and four tables. You know when I do my campaign nights

And you know we we let people kind of like you know you have 8,000 bv for this table

You get 32 bsp's figure it out between you

So if you want to bring an atlas somebody else has to bring something way smaller

So they got to work it out between themselves

Hindsight. I really wish I had done that

You can always start over denim pull the plug

That's right. Okay, man. I could

But what that does is that allows people to get a small stable of max

We have I have a maximum of one edge per player

They can buy more edge using their sp in between missions

And if it is extremely important

If it is extremely important that they have an edge and they need it right then and there

We play in a bar

They can go buy me a gin and tonic and they can get an edge

And this is how I have a great Friday evening

Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot

I'm not about bribery sometimes

but um

No, so I think the hinterlands

Unadapted hinterlands campaign works very well for

That type of that type of campaign and then the players just show up all they have to do is bring their max

I have the mission set out. I have the op force laid out. I have the terrain setup

And they just play the mission and then they earn sp based on what they accomplished during the mission

Now we can talk about this a little later when we talk about missions

But something that I've started doing that has been very fun denim

Is I have one overall operation that the players are playing

But sometimes different maps have different objectives that will affect other players maps

So if there is a base that they're charging into

They have turrets on the outside of the base

If table one can blow up the generator that's on that table it will shut off the turrets on table two

Right

That's amazing. I like that a lot

So all the players are working towards the same objective

But

You know table one's goal is not blow up the generator tables one mission is escort some trucks somewhere

But if they do the secondary objective and blow up the thing it's gonna make table twos job way easier

So I like to do that kind of intermixed mission stuff where every table is a little bit different

And this also allows players

to

Look at their stable and say I'm really well suited for x job

I'm gonna go on that table because that's the mission for that table right versus

You know, I'm an analyst. I should not be doing the escrow mission

I'm not fast enough to keep up with the transport or whatever you know what I mean

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense

Because I I also have like with the multiple tables

I give them all the exact same mission

But we do have because I don't have bv limits

Which is another thing that you know hindsight. I absolutely probably should have done

So you have uh

My table is the beginners table that's for people who've got a back that's like less than 3000 bv

Including their their pilot gunnery skills and and no crazy tech

So or who have not played ever or have played very little or it's like their first three campaign games

So they will sit at my table very friendly table

much more relaxed

Um, and I I allow things like oh

I didn't know that's how that rule worked. Can I take that back and I'm like absolutely let's let's go back

Let's uh, let me erase that and then let's just go

And start again and this is how that works the race you're not playing a pen

No, no, no, not at that table and then we've got like the medium tables and then we've got the advanced table

And that's the people who've got like mechs whose whose individual mechs are are in the 8000 plus bv range

And the the game master on that table

They're allowed to go like wild at crazy and and uh and just have all sorts of fun

Um, so we yeah, we have different tables and you go to whichever table

Uh, it's it's basically what kind of challenge you want

Sure, that sounds nice gives players a choice right how hard did they want to work that day

It's interesting to hear that you say that you don't

do um

Or rather they they pay for pilot upgrades

Uh, I just do hinterland stuff where every mechs bv is valued at four or five and then their pilots

You know, they can upgrade over time and spend SP on but I also don't I mean if they blow an edge and they take a headshot

They're cooked there's no

Magical fairy from the sky that'll pluck you out of your cockpit and set you down nicely on the ground

No, you

You're done right and yeah, we have a wall of heroes that people can post

The poster mech warriors on and what mech they were riding in and how they died and they can you know

Write a little epitaph for them in the in the discord and people can look at that and

You'll remember all the folks that have died along the way

Um, that is again super cool and I love that what one of the issues with with me

Not doing that way is because again hinterlands didn't exist yet

I also unlike James curtley which again his missions are fantastic

And if anyone's looking for just a quick easy thing they should absolutely check him out but

I wanted to have a system that if people went off and did their own campaign game

They could say oh hey

What books do you use and my answer isn't well? I made this part up and then I made that part up

And then we changed all these rules over here and then we modified this so it's really difficult to tell you

I wanted to make a system that worked well that I could say here are the three books you need

Done like everything that I do

Are in these books and and you just have to like read this chapter that chapter in those two chapters and you're and you're good to go

So that did put some limitations on

On some of the things I was willing to to do for it

Okay, so

Just to do a quick recap here, right? But I don't want to move on yet

But I just want to make sure we're summarizing because I feel like

We've covered quite a bit of ground. We've talked about what you've done. I've done

But we really haven't talked about like rule

Sats so we we mentioned right campaign ops

Yes campaigns hint or lands. I think mercenary's handbook has some stuff as well

Pick if I if I were to tell new people who wanted to do this

pick your

Basis right pick you pick your your your seed

And then tack on whatever auxiliary things you'd like

For me

We do not use

SPAs

All right, this is something that you need to decide whether you want SPAs in your game

Do you want edge in your game? Do you want permadeath in your game? These are all plug and play options

You can kind of flick on and off what optional rules do you want it right? We have a short list of optional rules

We always use we use

You know walk backwards up and down hills

We do tax

We do it enhance flamers yep enhance flamers is key we do

Sometimes I think we do careful stand, but not always right the one rule that I insist that everybody play with

They're not always happy about it, but I insist we play with stack poles

Or whatever advanced to engine explosions or something like whatever the technical rule is they're called stack poles and we use those two

The house rule

Is it if a table has a stack pole happen at their table

They'll have to go to the bar and get a shot of fireball

Oh, man, I have to I have to get Brian to open up a bar at a hangar 18. Yes. Yes, you do that

Yes, you do because there's nothing quite as exciting as watching an enemy mech explode

Take out the orphanages standing next to having everybody cheer

And then everybody leave to go get a shot at the bar

That is great because we have had several stack poles over the years. They're exciting, aren't they?

And it is always it is always the whole table cheers no matter who it happens to bad guys or good guys

It doesn't matter everybody cheers

Yeah, so now you have to pick what optional rules you want to use

Just make a short list of ones you like don't get into some of the crazy ones unless you really want to do them

Yeah, and just to

Just read it. I know we have something else to talk about here. And that is

special pilot abilities

I don't like them. I don't think that they're balanced and

It's funny because you would say Steve

SPAs are great for narrative campaigns. You're

Playing in a narrative campaign. You're running an narrative campaign. Oh, why wouldn't you want to use these things

In the exact scenario you know, it's the exact scenario they're designed for why aren't you using these things?

And I I think they're just not balanced well enough and I think that they turn the game into a little bit of

Almost a circus, right? You've got everyone's gonna take jumping jack everyone's gonna take a bleak attacker

Then the next mission everyone hides behind a hill and no one wants to go poke their nose out to spot to fire all this stuff

Because they're the only ones who even get shot and killed and no one wants to have their pilots die

So you get a little either a lot of same choices or people kind of fighting who's gonna be the star of the show

And then someone takes fist fire and then they kill two max and everybody wants to fist fire because they wanted to do the same thing

I don't like SPAs so I elected not to use them. I know denim that you do and I like to hear about

Why why you allowed them and be how it's worked out

All right, so first of all you have no secret. What's that

First of all, they were not made for narrative campaigns

We actually know the person who wrote those SPAs were written by a Jason Hansa

Specifically for the RPG games. They are there for

D&D style role-playing where you do play the heroes and it's not even like for narrative campaign

Specifically for role-playing games

Which is kind of a narrative campaign. I wasn't totally wrong. Yeah, no

But but they weren't they weren't designed to be balanced by on purpose like they weren't supposed to be balanced

So this is just something else we can blame Hansa for right? Well, no because he's not the one that grabbed them and put them into the campaign

Operations book

I'm gonna blame whoever did that because that's where I pulled them from because originally they were in

One of the like a time of war or something like that

But somebody put them in campaign operations as if they should be part of these campaign games

Because I was picking and choosing and stuff. I made the mistake of both picking SPAs and allowing quirks

Mm

Because I wanted my players to have a lot of choices. I wanted them to see what what they could do again

Assuming that they would take the stuff they like they would cherry pick the bits

They liked and didn't like with other like-minded people and split off into into their own permanent group

So mine was supposed to be more like a showcase like a buffet and then people were supposed to

To find

People who thought like them and go off and have their own adventures

Very with you know much more granularity much more specificity and they didn't and you're exactly correct like

Everybody picks any mech that has that has a narrow low profile

Because they want that quirk they they pick any mechs that have like like medium range master or whatever

They pick mechs with stabilized weapons because all of these give give

Minus ones to hit they all take the jumping jack and the the melee master or melee master with fistfire or

Obliq attacker with with like different range abilities type stuff

So you do have those people groups of people entire tables of people who have almost nearly identical builds

We have talked about that with the players

And through conversation I'm like I'm not taking these out yet

But I might I would like some more diversity and and people did start listening and they did start picking uh

Different ones just to try them out and that that has added some diversity in there

But I would say jump jumping jack uh with targeting pewter and puls lasers is still the worst offender

So in the immortal words of Michael Keegan key

You done messed up a run

Yeah, uh

Yeah, if there was one thing that I could go back and not allow from the beginning

It would be quirks and SBAs. That's what I would just say. Don't we're not doing that and and quirks are an interesting one mostly because

I feel like quirks are less

Broken than SBAs

But still I mean they're still very clearly winners and losers, right? Yeah, well they took out um

The no torso twist so any mech that has a no torso twist quirk that does not exist anymore

So they officially eroded that one

But there are a few that are just more powerful than others and therefore that's the chassis that everybody gets and since I allow

Mech customization

Um, which I stand by completely. I love that rule and yes, there are some broken builds

But that's easier to compensate for on the back end with the op 4

Then some of these quirk slash SBA combinations

Yeah, customs is something that I am working on broaching with my local group

I've been asked several times

Can I modify this can I change a variant can I do this and I said look

I got to figure out a way to balance this cost-wise at our tables based on how much you're earning first done

You know how what the coffers look like

Because I don't want everybody running out and slapping pulse this is all over everything, right? Yeah

It's gonna happen. I'm sure a will but it just means that I'm gonna have to get a little bit nastier in my

In my mission balancing then if that's what they're gonna do so

We will see when I get a good solution to that problem

Anything else under rule set decisions the new game runners may need to consider before we move on

I like to like rule spec set specifically

Uh, especially since I allow custom mechs

My first rule is it has to be in the battle mech manual

Um, it just makes it easier. I only need to have a one

Equipment book on the table when I need to look anything up

I know that there's a lot of really cool stuff and you're like like shields and so I mean

I know that shields will eventually be in the battle mech manual and that's fine when it is because then it will be in the one book that I need at the table

So when they're designing mechs when they're buying mechs when they're taking mechs it all has to be

Battle mech manual type stuff and I do allow any optional rule that is in the battle mech manual

so

We tend to run with all of those

But that's that's my big thing is it uh just just one book, please

Yeah, it really simplifies things at the table, so

I think that's a good idea

So I guess in short

Find a set of rules that you like to use

Customize those to fit your game play style

pick a feeling for your campaign and uh

You know don't allow quirks for SBAs

Yeah, yeah, I mean they make sound cool and they they might come out with some balanced like some balancing later

They've been talking about that there's rumors, but until then I would I would just avoid them. They're they seem fun

They're going to be more trouble than it's worth down through it

Hopefully we can talk about the new balanced SBAs in episode 141 when we come back the campaign. That's right. That's right

So the second topic in our five things you need for a campaign is

players

Yeah, literally the reason why I started doing it is because I like battle tech and I couldn't find anyone to play with

That's it. I said you need to find these players you need to dig up the rocks in the garden and get them out from underneath their hidey holes

And then we need to talk about

How many work for you right how many is too many so

You know, I think

Big thing is gonna be

Putting word out there, right?

Put up a sign in your local game shop. Yes, be present

Talk to the people that you normally play with and just float the idea see if you can sell them on it

Ask them if they want a little bit more out of their battle tech experience, right?

And obviously when you finally get your players

You're gonna have to have an open discussion with them say this is the rule set that I had selected

And this is what I was thinking of doing. This is the vibe I want to go for either a gritty or heroic type game mode

Would they be interested and you may want to run a very bright and happy

Look at us. We're all the big heroes. We can never do anything wrong

Nothing bad can ever happen to us type of game and your players may say look

This isn't my this isn't my speed. I want something more realistic

I want something more dark. I want something that's gonna make me struggle to win

And that may make you either change some of the rule sets that you have selected or

You're gonna lose some players and you need to decide which of those options you're happier with

Yeah

Again, that was a big thing of mine where I just wanted to present them with options assuming that they would decide what they like and break off

I didn't ask them a lot of questions. I more just said here is the campaign we're running

Feel free to take what you like and go play somewhere else whenever you want and their response to that was no we're fine

So you know don't don't

Don't tweak and modify your rule system trying to make everybody happy

You're not gonna make especially as you get more players. You're not gonna be able to make everybody happy

A lot of people come over and say hey, I've got a great idea

What if we do this or can we allow this and I'm not gonna say tell them no, but I'm not gonna say

agree to everything either

You should say let me think about that and and you give it a week or two and you actually think about how that would

How that would react in your campaign before just adding it in because some of those things seem like a good idea to begin with

But then you have to think how can this be abused? How can people take advantage of this if I wanted to be very disruptive

How would I use this to do so and sometimes you're just like it's not worth it's not worth the trouble

Yeah, so one of the things that we had in our local campaign is there was a mission and I admittedly botched the balance

I gave the enemies like

maybe

for

Six too many turrets on their side of the map

But we're not counting those

But at the end of the day they were the BSP turrets right and the players were having a really hard time taking these down

They just kept failing you know destruction rolls and everything else and one of the things in the packet or the rulebook states that

You know when you do enough damage and they fail a check they get a permanent minus one of the role

it had been proposed

that

If they had gotten the damage very high

Right on a turrets say they did enough damage to invoke a negative four modifier on the BSP destruction roll

They had suggested well if it survives that should receive a minus four

So their next check and not just a minus one because there's a ton of damage. It's going to waste

And they were having a tough time destroying them now

I think a lot of this was born out of the fact that I had botched the balance of the mission. That's on me alone that one

um

But I had to think about it and I kind of said no, we're not going to change our BSP's work

Despite that being an incredibly interesting idea

Right that if you get the negative modifier two to three four high

I mean all that armor's been stripped from the tank from the tower from something you're shooting at

Why would it revert only to a negative one?

Right why wouldn't it maintain that minus four for the next time you shoot at it

Maybe it makes them too weak. I don't know if that was play tested or worked on or what made it a permanent minus one

But it was something to consider and at the time

I didn't want to modify the rules for simplicity. I didn't want to start making more and more exceptions to my rule set

Right right take you mentioned before I want to say here's one book. Here's the packet. Let's play

But you know, I thought about it and it's not

Totally out of left field so don't be afraid to say no to your player sometimes

But sometimes they do have a good idea or two

Yeah, I agree with your decision there

The way that I get around that is that I do allow airstrike BSPs for purchase

So I have a list of how much these all cost and each player is allowed to call in one per turn

So with like six players at the table we get have six airstrikes going

And then so if they're really close on a turret or a tank

They can hit it a bunch of times to make sure that that number gets to to you are going to to blow up

Like there is no role because it is too high. I'm going to adopt that. That's a great idea

Let them spend SP to get stuff on the table exactly

So so at the end of the campaign at the end of the game when they're tallying up all their points

Then I'm like, okay, here's the bill and this is how much support points you use bringing in these airstrikes

So let's subtract them from your total and they go home with less

But it's a it's a cost offset like am I am I going to get enough points in salvage to to justify me

Calling in a few more airstrikes or artillery rounds

Now you did mention salvage and actually this is something this is a mechanic that I put into my game

That I really enjoy and I guess I should have mentioned this

Earlier in the rule set section, but I'll bring it up now because you mentioned it. I have

The concept of a salvage tag

Because people drop in and drop out they play some some play more missions some play less

But every time you come you get a plus one to your salvage tag count

When they manage to salvage max right either they drag them off the table or they get them as a reward

They you know do whatever they do to get them

There are maybe 12 players that participated in that mission

Who gets first crack and buying that destroyed mech

So that could be a fist fight. I'm not going to allow them to fight over it

The first rule is that you had to attend the mission

In order to be eligible to get that mac

Secondly

If more than one person would like it

They can bid any number of their salvage tags for first claim

And then they spend them right so if you go on four or five missions

And I've got five salvage tags and you've only been on three denim and that timber wolf shows up

I really want that thing

I'm going to use four of my salvage tags to guarantee

That I get first dibs on that versus your three right and it encourages people to attend

It encourages people to continue to show up and that way the players that show up more often are more likely to reap the benefit of their hard work for salvage

Now do they self to pay for it?

Absolutely have to buy it and then they have to repair it so they don't get it for free

But it does incentive by showing up to play more often so that we if something good does show up you can you can get it

So I think that's any idea that is um I of course want to very

Much more abstract way because especially because they can they can design their own mechs or purchase their own chassis

I just took salvage and I converted it all down to supply points

So they don't get any specific mechs

They just get X number of supply points for the mechs that they

Crippled or destroyed but not totally destroyed because again zero points for that

And then I split that up amongst the players who are at that table

That's a good way to do it too. Yeah. Now how do you allow your players to buy new mechs?

You just let them buy whatever they want or do you have rotating

Um, because what I do is I do a random assignment table

I roll three or four times for every player and I say here the 20 mechs are available

This is what you can buy them for and we have a we have a traveling merchant that we call cousin miloche

That cousin miloche, you know, he

He finds these mechs that fall off the dropship. They're a little dinged up

But they're perfectly good. It's cousin milo. She has good deals. I like it. I like it a lot

No, mine is is they they start when you start the the campaign

You get either a light or medium intro tech mech like you get that for free

Everything else you have to buy you can start modifying those mechs

The most expensive things of course being excel engines clan excel engines being the most most expensive

But yeah, they they just save up their their supply points

But but mechs are expensive so it does take quite a few sessions

Especially if you want that timber wolf like I know people took about six to eight months to be able to to afford that timber wolf

Now to make it easy if they have a favorite mech, you know people who like the shadow hawk

But want to make it a good mech. They're gonna modify it every year

Or so I tend to do it in April that campaign mission is just like a salaris style

Like a grinder or a salaris match

Some place where they can earn prizes and like the grand prize would be you get a free clan excel engine upgrade to one of your mechs

Oh, wow sure we'll fight to the death for that

Yeah

Now we did not cover

Back to the player section this is supposed to be an order and we're we're doing a poor job with this denim

We're being confusing for our listeners. We talked about how to find your players how to get them to the table

How many's too many when do you cut it off do you cut it off?

Yep, I start when I started but we had three players that was okay a little bit light

Once we got up to seven

The turns were starting to get very very long

I do I don't know how you do it, but how I do it is we have a table

All of the players are on one team and then I control all of the op 4

So whoever is the game master of the table controls the entire op 4

Everyone else controls one mech what once you get to seven and above it just takes so long

We weren't hitting our our three hour time limit that I had put out

Some of the games were running very very long

So I started saying look if we get up to two to seven

We're going to split it up into two tables one of three and one of four four to six players is my ideal number

My missions are balanced for four to six players

I don't like less than four and anything above six is just

Just too many so we do something similar we do

one GM per table

And then four players per table right so they're all in the same team and the GM runs the other side

So when we have 15 people show up we have four players at each table and one GM at each table

And we'll run three tables at a night you know

Occasionally we will allow five players at a table in order to you know if I've got three tables going

I can have five players at each table

But as soon as one more person shows up we'll put them all at a new table

You know what I mean? We'll try to try to keep those numbers down for faster turns and everything else. It does it helps a lot

now

We've got our rules

We've got our players

What are we going to make these players do right? Let's talk about mission design specifically for campaign play because this is different than a tournament

setting which we

Are going to talk about at some point. I do want to do a a

game theory

episode about

Mission design and we can do a little bit about what we did for Southern assault and everything else there

That would be a good topic. Yep very different mindset those right this this and that very different

I think the first thing you need to keep in mind when you're doing a mission for a campaign game is

You are hoping to lose at the end of the day you are not trying to grind your players into the dirt because they won't come back and that is

Counterproductive for what you're attempting to do by growing your battle to community locally

So but also on the flip side of that coin you want them to think that they're going to lose yes

Yes, make it as close as you can

The last mission that Iran I put the absolute hurt on a rhyme otter

And that rhyme otter had taken two engine hits

Center torso was open right torso was open and it has reinforced structure

right

And if I had done two more damage

Anywhere on that Mac it would have floated into one of the torsos that was open

And it would have destroyed that permanently

That player was sweating

And I like to pick on Howard Howard's a nice guy

but

You know he was he was sweating and I'm like good. This is this is what I want

I want you scared that you are about to lose your Mac

Not all the time, but occasionally

And that is what makes

That's what makes it exciting. That's to get your adrenaline up right yes

How do you balance your games denim and what do you think are the important things to do?

This and this is from years of experience that I've that I've

Cultivated

These ideas that I do first of all I like to make the opt for about 80 percent

Um 75 to 80 percent of what the players bring

I don't tell them that but that's just what I do therefore be as the opt for I'm already fighting an uphill battle

But then again, I play way more than they do

So if they were even bvs the games would go poorly

A lot more often I

Similarly do I think I'm about a 70 percent is what I do for mine

But I often have extra reinforcements waiting in the wings a lot of my missions are timed

So if they start to dilly-dally or they start to try to like

Get cute and salvage stuff or intentionally like shoot off legs to drag max off the field

That's when an extra guillotine will walk in off the field. There's you know something

Oh, there's another heavy that we now have to it's time to go yeah

I try to incentivize my players to play smart and play quickly

Turn wise right so they're not making this a 20 turn game

Yep, another thing I do is I've had a lot of experience playing dnd

I was at gm for for many many years

I will make changes to my mission on the fly if their

Dice rolls are going super poorly. I will change my tactics based on that

If they're doing super super well

I will have reinforcements come out of buildings that were always there of course. They just didn't know that

Or I will have landmines. I will have like artillery come in like I can change that and I can I can modify it

So that it always keeps them challenged

Whether they're doing super well or super poorly. I like to make sure especially since I run the beginner table

That everybody gets shot at I don't want anyone feeling like they're being ignored

So I will take shots at certain people even though they're not they're not ideal

I'm certainly not trying to min max any games. I'm not being super efficient

But I'm there to have fun and I'm there to make them feel like I am paying attention to them

Which makes them feel that I think they're a threat which makes them feel good

So a lot of my decisions are there to drive the story and the player interactions

That's a good way to do it. I do something similar but not quite the same

Depending on what they're doing

Right if they're trying to blow up buildings

The enemy units will try to block those shots stand in front of those buildings and

Normally they will attack the person doing the most damage to the target

Right and that tries to force that person to fall off that also has the desired effect of letting the other players step up and become

More threatening or they get if I'm punishing the marauder to that hanging out on a hill

You know the the poor guy in the blackjack can run up and actually do something like oh

I'm not getting shot at great blah blah blah look at me go dad

You know it's it's that type of equal participation that you're really looking for

When it comes to mission types

I think there are a couple

Go-tos right

Obviously there's the fight right just destroy the enemy force

Go nuts right that one that one can actually take longer to play than most other ones

Whenever we have games that run long it's oftentimes because I have some sort of a brawl or stand-up fight

Mission and I did not

Calculate something correct and those are the ones that just drag on

Yep, so keep in mind if you're gonna run those games a lot for a little bit of extra time

Scouting missions are always fun run out scan an objective get off the board those are great

I try to put secondary conditions in there such as

You know

Try to stay three hexes away from any enemy max so they can't identify you or they don't know who you are

Right

And they get a couple extra supply points if they manage to do some of these secondary things right

Destroy all enemies on the map or rather don't destroy any enemies on the map right just trying to like leave no trace type

Secondary objectives. Those are always kind of fun to do

Other missions can include escorts

Hold the fortress hold the line type things right don't let the enemy get through

Escape is always an excellent game mode their goal is just to get to the other side of the map and

The op-force waiting for them to catch them in a net, you know

So all sorts of mission types that you can really use as a

Basic framework to kind of tell your story

Denim did I miss any or do you have any that you like the one the one that I use a lot as well that you didn't specifically mention is the

Like like go to a building pick up a person of interest

Or something of interest and bring it off the map so a fetch a fetch quest basically

Sure, like capture the flag almost

But yeah, but you know, you never want to say capture the flag in a in a campaign mission like that's fine for a tournament

But but you want to have a story behind it or whenever but yes, absolutely capture the flag

Well, right right the go out and grab a thing and then come back to it. So here here's a secret

There are only like five missions

That's it everything else is flavoring

It's it's what flavor is this is this recon mission, you know, what flavor is this capture the flag

But but yeah looking through all the missions that I've written

There are just

Maybe maybe there's six five or six distinct types of missions and everything else is just variations from those

And you can get really creative because this is not a tournament setting

It doesn't have to be fair. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was gonna be another one my points

We're not looking like yes balanced fair no

We don't have to make it fair for either direction

But you have to be willing to make those changes on the fly as well

But yeah, you can just do something that's totally like like that's not how the rules work

And you're like yeah, but I don't have to follow the rules. I'm the GM

I'm here to make it interesting and fun and exciting

Not fair

Yep, yep, like you said either hidden units surprise units my favorite is

You know if they if it's after turn four or five

They all of a sudden pick up a whistling over their comms and a hex explodes right like oops

You took too long time to leave

And they go hey wait a minute. That's not fair and maybe

Maybe they get hit really hard for a couple of turns and then

Maybe they ran out of artillery shells

Yeah, they only had a couple solos. They only had a couple. That was it

You know, you can kind of balance it that way

Sometimes the players see through it

But I think as long as they're in it for the story and they're in it for the ride

They won't mind too much. Yeah, I know

So you got to consider balance you got to pick your mission type you got to think about what kind of mechanics

You can throw in there to make it different fun interesting

You got to be flexible to adjust it on the fly

I think the last point with mission design here is really like

One of the major cruxes and then I might be curious to get your take on this

How do you as a GM play to ensure that all your players have a good time?

I know you mentioned a little bit about how you engage with everybody you shoot everybody

But what do you do if someone at your table is just not having fun?

Well, obviously you can't

Make everybody happy all the time. There are gonna be some people who just aren't gonna have fun no matter what you do

and engaging story is is

Like like on the table not in engaging not so much like the overall story about what the mercenary unit is doing

But on the table itself my pilots like I said I'm not playing for efficiency

I'm not playing like like my tournament brain is not on so all of my pilots out there have their own little goals

And they'll do things even if it means it's like a slightly inefficient play or it allows like a fast mech to to flank me

Stuff like that. I want to make sure that everybody has something to do

The light fast mechs get a chance to do flanking maneuvers or get into that scouting position

Even though I could probably stop them if that was like my goal

The big heavy hitters want to have a chance to hit something

hard

The medium mechs want to have a chance to to get in there and grab the objective

I try to give little openings to let people shine. I want everybody to shine just a little bit

Again, not making it not making it super easy for them

Uh, so it's got to be challenging

So you've got to do a little bit of yes and you've got to do a lot of adjustments on the fly

But basically it's the engagement. I want everybody to feel like they're doing something

Yeah, everybody has that like like five minutes to shine at the table

I find that yeah, you call it shine. I you know

For me, it's everybody gets their turn on the spotlight. I want everybody to do one cool thing during the mission

That's my goal. Yes, if everybody gets to blow up like hey

I took all the armor off with a couple of really good PPC hits and then my buddy shot an SRM cell phone hit that engine, right

The PPC player gets to go yes, I ripped off all that armor to help my teammate

And then the SRM trebuchet gets to go yeah, and I got the kill. How cool is that high five, right?

Yeah, you want people to kind of feel like they're participating and doing something now

We have balanced our missions. We have chosen our mission type

We've figured out how to be flexible. We figured out what mechanics we want to utilize and we're trying to make sure everybody's having a good time

This is the next step for running your own campaign. You have to be able to resolve

Issues at the table because like you said denim

Not everyone's going to be happy all the time. Can't do it

I want to talk real briefly about

Some of our top issues that we run into

And how do we kind of resolve those what do we do at our tables to try to keep things moving smoothly

And we'll just kind of see where we go

It is the hardest topic I think like we're going to have some ideas

We're not going to have all the answers and you and I both still have problem players

So it's not like we it's not like we know everything here. So and I think you have to anticipate having problem players, right

Sometimes these problem players take different forms and we'll talk about some of them as we go through this

But these problem players

They're not necessarily bad folk

They're not bad people they just

Maybe don't understand what they're doing at the table or how it's affecting other players

So don't come down on like a sack of bricks instead maybe

You know either work with them or do things in your game to try to just sway that type of behavior

So I think the first type of person that we run into most often

Are your power gamers. Yes. You're going to get people that I want that use the LAS

I want you know those you know

You know, give me those four heavy PPCs give me all those headcappers

You know

Give me the jump nine max that just are untouchable. What do you do to try to curb the power gamers, you know

Yeah, because this is what I messed I messed up on early on with some of the these power gamers

Because I'm like, okay, I can I can adapt I can adjust I will just make sure that I focus them down because they're just so powerful

They've got their jumping jack they've got their they're seriously 14 medium pulse lasers and the target and computer

And and all of this stuff like they need zeros to hit and so I would do things like

Use reflective armor

Use pulse targeting myself target them now and even if I have better

Other targets all that does is make them very very angry

Yeah, because then they think that you're picking on them or you're targeting them which I am and it's it's a lot of well

This isn't fair and what's that's happening is

Those people are now not having fun and they're causing other people to have to not have fun and and it's it's

It spreads like somebody not having fun can really contaminate an entire table

Yeah, I do find

That the best way to handle them

Is to give them something to do which comes into the whole being adaptive and being creative

So now I have a like I've got the mechs that I tend to choose from

For for the up for but when I see some people like that I do have a separate stable of of mechs or objectives that I can throw out there

To make them

Really feel like they're doing something, but it also distracts them from the actual mission

So that other people have fun doing the mission and this person has fun taking out these these incredibly hard targets

For you know, but it benefits the whole table because everybody gets extra sp

Right, yeah, it's like it's like throwing a shiny ball to distract that the overly excited dog

Sure, and that's a good way to handle it right you can you can give these people certain tasks

But I think the other thing that DMs or GMs or whatever we want to call the

The person running the table right the campaign runner you need to not be afraid of

Confrontation and I don't mean go, you know meet them in the parking lot with a tie iron type of confrontation

What I mean is you need to just have a direct and open conversation with them say hey

I appreciate that you've got a modified hardened armor

Oozio lat s with you know

Three targeting computers and extra coupons pods right you're having a negative effect on the table

And what we'll say is your pilot

Get selected for some crack commando unit within the lear and Commonwealth

Great congratulations. You're no longer a mercenary now. You're some you know guard, right? You're you're a hero among among the

Your countrymen or something you've made it as a legend on Solaris good job. You know, you can you can move on now

let's

Roll it back a little bit and see

How we can kind of work a little bit more together with the rest of the tables

And this kind of brings me to my next type of player which is similar to the power gamer, but not the same

Who I was going to say that that all all of these examples like yes Steve communication is the best answer like

Like if we can all communicate better that's going to solve a lot of these things. So yeah, sure

But some people are definitely afraid of telling somebody hey

You're negatively impacting the table and you got to be prepared to do that

And I'm not saying got to be mean about it. You can find all sorts of ways to talk to people

But you really got to be it's your campaign

You're running it at the end of the day the onus is on you to deal with problems, right?

And sometimes that's also responsible for making sure that your tables are not disrupted

Or that they're having fun, right? It's on you, but very similar to the power gamer

You have the selfish player these the type of people who are this is my fantasy versus our fantasy they focus on

Them having fun them doing the objectives them getting the kills and they don't necessarily want to

Share the excitement with their fellow players, right? This is anybody who yells at someone else for saying you stole my kill

Not knowing that the whole table benefits from the kill nobody counts who got that last shot

But it's very very important to them

And this one I think is a little bit harder to deal with than the power gamer right the power gamer

You can either set caps or limits or you know, maybe target them a little bit more or you have a conversation with them to do it

The selfish player it feels silly to say this but

Sometimes they don't recognize what they're doing at the table

You know, maybe they've always been the center of attention

Maybe they've always had a little bit of a blind spot for for other people

They may not know

Right and and then I'm how do you deal with someone who is more focused on their own good time than making sure that everyone around them is having fun

Yeah, like say it's super hard

Step one of course is to explain to them that I am here to make sure everybody has fun

And I would like everybody to have those moments and have their time in the spotlight

It would be very nice if they would also allow that to happen

Otherwise they are being very disruptive. So you're right. Yeah, maybe they don't understand that

First step is to explain to them

What your plan is and why you're doing what you're doing the problem is is when that has no effect on them

Because then then what do you do because then it's about all wheels and I don't have time for that and by table

And you know this

Was gonna talk about this little later when we wrap up the section, but I guess we'll cover it now because

To answer your question and what do you do with that situation sometimes you have to

politely yet firmly

Ask them not to come back. Mm-hmm. If they really are

super problematic

Sometimes

They come up with the idea themselves sometimes you got to explain it to them say hey

You know, I've noticed this for last couple of months you have actively

Been detracting from other people's good time

Um, I'm glad you like playing battle tech. I'm happy to play pickup games with you where we can be as as sweaty as we like

But I can't have you at my tables anymore

Right you explain to them that maybe this is not the outlet that they're looking for just yeah

Like luckily for battle tech there are many ways of expressing yourself and and picking and choosing what game modes that you prefer to play

So yes, you are no longer invited at my table please partake in one of these other many options and and

And maybe though one of them will will fit your your persona better

Yeah, and that's an extremely difficult conversation to have because you never want to be the bad guy no one likes being the jerk

But sometimes you have to excise the cancer right you have to remove what's harming your players so keep that in mind as well

This next problem

Is always a tough one. I mean we're talking about like resolving issues at your table. This one's kind of fun

You don't have this problem denim based on your rule set, but I call it the

Oops, you died problem

Sometimes headshots happen sometimes your pilot manages the skin of the teeth ejection and you're sitting in the hex behind your mac

And then your engine goes critical and while you get a shot of fireball you're still dead

You know denim obviously you use edge and you also have the automatic ejection rule, but

Right, but you still have the problem of of again your dead

What are you going to do for the next two and a half three hours?

First of all

Permadeath

Is absolutely something that should be talked about before the campaign starts and he new players need to be told here is how we handle death

So it's not like they're going into that blind. They can't say I didn't know or well, I didn't understand

Anything like that they know what they're getting into so if they have a problem with that

That's something they need to talk about

With the game master beforehand my frustrations or the frustrations I encountered are

Like I said people who whose mech goes critical for one reason or another in the first two turns of the game. I don't like that

The things that I do to prevent that of course everybody gets an edge

If you want to use it for for an aim shot location or anything like that wait till after turn four is what my advice is

Also, and this is something not all of my game masters do but as the beginner table I specifically do this

None of my mechs have headcappers not a single gouse

Single Clanny or ppc not a single ac 20 is on my side at all none of my mechs will take out another mech with a single shot to the head except for a tack

Even the tax that's what the edges for well, no I get I understand that but my point is

Headcappers won't one shot ahead

But if there is a tack and they're out of an edge say you get lucky so you get two headshots in a game and the first three turns well

Bad news right you've used your edge and now something bad might happen right so tax are still a constant threat

Even if you don't have headcappers on the field yes

The point stands right you can do some those are so rare that sometimes it's a laughing point where we'll be like look

Here are the odds because we can calculate the odds of that happening and we're like you know

This is like a one in in in 10,000 chance literally

Welcome to battle tech like this is how that works and sometimes they get a big laugh at that and if it's super early

Like I'm running a field of six mechs on my side

Come on over to this side of the table you are now in charge of these two guys while I'm playing these four guys

Let's have it absolutely keep those players engaged if something tragic does happen to them right

Yeah, get revenge on your fellow players

Now this is something interesting that I wanted to bring up because you you mentioned it again

And we I realized we didn't talk about this earlier

Everybody says we use edge at our table

Hmm, I said we also use an edge and I've called it edge, but in reality it isn't

Truly edge as written in the book

Because edge can be used to make the opponent reroll a die

Right yes

I dislike that immensely

I have a personal aversion to

forcing the other person to reroll something because

And this is a little bit broader in scope. This is not just for campaign games, right?

If I'm the GM and you want to make me reroll something

I still don't like it because I'm trying to make a thematic and exciting game

But especially in a tournament setting

If I roll a 12 and you say yeah, yeah, no, you don't do it again. I get real mad because you've taken away

You know a statistical unlikelihood that I was about to benefit from right

I agree with that so much. I do not think edge should be like that in a tournament game at all

I have very different from you in my

Campaign games if they want to make me as the GM reroll a headshot or or something else cool

I am a hundred percent okay with that. I will even make up something like like oh

I had you dead to rights and then right as I pulled the trigger. Oh looks like I happen to sneeze

You know, I've got stock all over my screen and I will make something up. I have no problems

Separating myself from from from the op 4 and and having them miss those shots

I would rather the players cheer and have fun or laugh than

Maybe inconvenienced by a shot that that would have been really really cool

On the other hand with the tournament

I never want to make my opponent have to reroll a headshot or something like that

They would have insta killed me. I that's that's such a bad feeling on both on both sides

Do not like that. So instead what we use is a little bit of a blend between lucky

And edge right it does a little bit more than lucky so lucky you can reroll miss shots

You can reroll critical hits you can like you can reroll certain things from you right

I need this to to benefit my shooting. That's all perfectly allowed in our tables

What we use edge for I say edge and air quotes you can't see this in this audio only format

But what we use edge for here is you can reroll a miss shot

You can

Relocate you can shift a critical hit so if I roll a critical hit and I hit head

You can spend your edge and it will float down through the damage float chart

Into the center torso

Right or if you've got ammo in your arm and you still have armor in your left torso you can float it

More central right you can readjust where I am hitting you to somewhere that you have armor

Yeah, so you can like change the direction a little bit

But a hit is a hit you're gonna take damage

But you can kind of mitigate where it's going. Yeah, that's that's how we use edge in our in our campaigns

So it's like a yeah, it is a mitigating factor, but not a get a jail free card

Yeah, so and mine again because I wanted it to be

Accessible to everyone and easily look up a bowl. I just took it straight out of the book at the time

Yep, and that's that's fine

You know and again a different different solutions for different players, right?

And I wanted something's a little bit more gritty than heroic

So we said you're getting hit sometimes bad things happen

Yep as long as you know that to begin with I'm totally fine with that

Yep, I mean it's it's right there in the packet

So the oops you died problem is a big one for us, you know, we're doing a hinterland style game

So you can just get another pilot obviously the loss is sad, but you put them up on the wall of heroes

And keep going because sometimes people die in combat. I love the wall of heroes

I want to introduce permanent just so I can have a wall of heroes. You should I think you should do that

Maybe a little poster board and everything people can put little pictures up

Then and we've been at this for almost two hours at this point

We need to talk about another type of problem player

The socializer versus the player

How do you deal with chatty kathies who are there to talk to friends rather than play

man

It's rough. It's rough. I try not to yell at them because again, they don't know what they're doing

The 99% of the chatty kathies as you call them that I've encountered have no idea what they're doing

They're excited. They want to talk they sometimes are talking about battle tech sometimes they're not but when you have

Four tables of people running games it gets loud in there and when other people are trying to hear what's going on

It's it's very difficult and and you have to be

You have to communicate and you can't do it mean

And you have to just be aware that you're going to have to remind them several times during the game

I don't have a permanent solution

So I'm curious to see what you come up with because I'm looking for ideas

So it's not super common at my at my tables

But I I could point out one or two that I'm like those people you have to make sure that they don't get out of control

Yeah, so we have some of that we have a lot of regulars that are showing up to the game tables and

Shock collars are not the answer

And no comment

No, but I mean for real we we've got a lot of regulars and we're all becoming you know the more we hang out the more we get together the more we play

Everyone's genuine to be coming friends with one another which is great to see you're building a community which is amazing

Uh, we have one guy name is Jesse

Jesse is

He's our lore master. I mean he's read almost every book he's read in this guy's got a mind that's a steel trap

He can pull up whatever lore book he read and he can tell you the exact passage and get the words most of the way right

It's scary impressive

unfortunately

Jesse will oftentimes get on tangents and talk

Jesse also has a self-awareness to know this and he has told us multiple times to our faces he goes if I won't shut up

Just walk away from me

Just walk away and I'll get the message and it won't be offended

I just he loves battle text so much and I hate to do that to him

It's good to have that self-awareness though that is that that's the best case scenario I think

So occasionally what we'll do with Jesse is we'll be like hey, you know clap clap like

Let's focus up chance. Let's uh, you know keep our games moving smoothly and you get Jesse a lollipop

No, he's a super nice guy. I love hanging out with him

But it's like, you know, what do we do about Jesse and

It's the gentle reminder and when it gets later and

Some people have needed to purchase a couple of edges throughout, you know the evening my patients wears a little thin

Sometimes and maybe I'm not as gentle as I ought to be but the occasion like hey you let's go

You know kind of keeps people on track, but

This is one of I think the least offensive

Problems that you're gonna have on a table because it means that people are having a good time. Yeah

so

you deal with it

gently remind them

Maybe give them something to chew on so they can't talk but overall, you know, it's it's just something you got to deal with but

Annoying nonetheless

But again as long as you're aware that things like this could happen

It's less likely to disrupt your game than if you just had no idea that uh because this will happen at your table

It just will the longer you play the more the more likely all of these will happen. Yep. Yeah

Now

How frequently these issues occur?

I think is the last of the five things that you need to worry about when running your campaign and possibly the hardest

Yes, scheduling

Yep, how and when do you run your games?

Denim you do

Once a month. Yep on a Saturday the second Saturday of every month and

The hard part was that that's not the day that we started

But because of scheduling with other games we had to move it at some point like a year and a half two years in

That was one of the worst things to ever happen

If you can talk to the talk to the place where you're where you're running it like if it's a games shop

It or whatever find out what works for them and do your best to make sure that that never changes because people are

Are habitual and if you change one thing

You're you're going to we lost players because of that we game some for some who couldn't make it to the other one

But but I think that was the biggest loss of like one one time loss of players was because we changed it to the second Saturday of every month

Instead of whatever it was before

Yeah

Like I mentioned we normally play on Friday nights for our pickup games

My general schedule allows me to go to the game shop twice a month

One Friday I hang out just play whatever I want and one Friday I run the campaign

Which Friday is which changes month to month to month because my schedule is ever changing

But it will always fall on a Friday game night

So the players know I announce it in our discord

They get a mission update

They get a couple of days to plan what they're going to bring and who can make it I get kind of an idea is to how many players

We're going to have and then we go from there like I said is drop in drop out all the players get you know mission updates

They get you know mission recaps I lay everything out for all the other players who couldn't make it

So they're keeping up with the story and they kind of learn what happened

So yeah, I think the first thing you got to do is consistency right

Yes

You got to keep it the same try not to change it if you can but that's that's the best way to grow your player base too

Because like I said, I started off small it it only got up to like seven players probably the first

six to eight months but the longer it went even if even on the days where you look

It's campaign day and I've got everything set up and like nobody's there or one person shows up

But they're not there for campaign

So you play something else, but you leave everything set up and people will get used to seeing it

And people will start making time and people will be like well, I want to try that out

And it will start to grow and that's how you go from three people to begin with to

60 people seven years later

That's its consistency you have to pick a day or you know a Friday or whatever

You have to just keep doing it every single time

Yeah 100% if you can't be there get someone who can cover for you

Yeah, yeah, just having bodies that sit there with battle tech out right have the little poster saying hey learn how to play

Battle tech or come join us right yeah

And you got to have someone who's friendly and open you really got to put on you know

Your your friendly cap in order to kind of entice people over now you also

Want your games to be exciting right because

We have a thing where if somebody's using an LBX or they get a lot of cluster hits

Literally will have 15 people chanting box of death

As we rummage around to find who's got their their box of death handy right yeah

And all the match of the gathering players and I just out of the store look over us going what the heck is going on over there

And you know we've had people literally walk up to something like

What game you guys playing play battle tech they're like

Why is everyone chanting like oh we're just having a good time and someone's about doing a lot of damage to somebody else

It's really exciting. Yeah, you say hey, do you want to roll some dice? Do you want to see us from robots move and like uh okay

And then you slowly just kidnap people from magic the gathering and you bring them over to check step one for that is

Well, I don't have time to play that's fine. You don't need to play. Let's see. I've got six guys

Just just roll the dice for this guy. Please don't you don't have to move them or anything

I just need to make these attacks you get to roll those dice and that gets more people addicted than anything else

Just the simple rolling of those dice the first roll is free. It's that it's that dopamine rush. It's that yeah

It's it's it's like crack it is

Couple of things about scheduling real quickly

You got to have a conversation with your group as well first things first pick a day that works for you

Don't think it's inconvenient for you, but then you really want to say hey

I can do the second Saturday the third Saturday or the first Saturday

What works best for people?

And try to accommodate you know, you're gonna lose some sheep along the way

You're never gonna get 100% attendance and you can't lose sleep over that right

I mean people are blowing the flock are gonna fall off for something's gonna be inconvenient

And it's gonna be okay, right? You'll find other players, but

Do try to be again like we talked about for mission design

Influxable right try to our solution for that was was steel again

Field steel stepped up he runs my campaigns on a different day during the month at a different shop

So it's anybody who can't make it to mine for any reason

They can make it over there to his and it's just fantastic

Same missions same packet same everything

Just a different day with a different person and it makes a lot of people happy

And that's something I didn't do that that branched off naturally

So that was not something that I set up

I'm just super happy that it did

Perfect. Well, that's great. It's great to have dedicated, you know

Effectively co-toes or yeah, I mean, you know officers or whatever you want to call them to to really help kind of

Keep things moving right especially if you can't be there. So um, I think

That's the majority of what is important to get your own campaign off the ground

I mean pick a rule set find some players

Design your missions for campaigns to be fun balanced and you know, pick some fun mechanics to make them different and unique

Have a plan to resolve your issues with players that are gonna come up even if they don't come up all the time

And find today they works find some scheduling works for your players and then

I mean really step six the secret step six is just get out there and roll dice right and a big thing is make it your own

Like yeah, I have my packet you have your packet. I took it from certain things find find what you like

Not even your players find what you like

And then you will attract players who who think like you and you're gonna have a lot of fun that way

But if anybody is interested in our packets

I'm gonna post mine on the discord so you can get to it

You can get the the the whole packet that I wrote and any of the missions that I've done

I've got I've got years worth of missions that I've written in a google doc folder

I'm not gonna say that all of them are like super pretty or well edited

But they're they've all been played

So um, you know, I have my favorites, but feel free to draw for my things and modify it

As much as you want you will not hurt my feelings if you're like well

This was a fun place to start, but I you know, I didn't like this and I wanted to change that I encourage that super awesome

Yeah, I mean, I'll see if we can figure out a way to put those in the show notes so people don't have to go digging the discord if they don't want to

Um, but I can post my alpha strike packet as well if you want to run a campaign an alpha strike

And I'll dig up my classic one so people can kind of see what I'm doing with the hit line style campaign

Um, we can certainly put those out there and if you guys have any questions please

Campaigns are something that we hear a lot about. How are you doing yours? What's your rules?

What do we do? How do we do this? This is why this episode came into being

Yes, send us

emails

And we'll either answer them in other episodes or we'll try to squeeze them into episode 141 when that comes around

Or if it's a very specific question, we'll just we'll just reply to you. Yeah, we can just do that too

Because yeah, we we covered a lot of of the generalizations

But I'm sure that some of you trying to start it up will have very specific questions like what would you recommend for this specific situation

Just just send us a message and you know, we will do our best to answer that in a timely fashion

Yeah, you can shoot us emails at the macbaid podcast gmail.com

You can find us on discord, you know, and and encourage your fellow players

To give campaigns a chance. They're a great way to have laid back fun

Storytelling experiences

That you can make a lot of memories doing it's a totally different way to play if your traditional method is a regular pickup game or even

You know, mainly campaign play so I think I think campaigns are great

They will take a lot of your time

There's no doubt about it. I mean between building up for building missions trying to balance things trying even trying to figure out

Where the story's gonna go or like what do you like what are you gonna bring you have to decide that

What are you providing other players like for me? I provide everything somebody could come in off the street

Not have anything and I will provide everything for them

But that's not viable for everyone because not everybody has three or four of every single mech put out

They just don't have the resources

So figure out what

What you have what you can provide what they have to provide and make sure that they know that before before showing up

Yeah, and you have to anticipate the unanticipated right

For example, I had a I had a mission where the bad guys were trying to break their leader out of prison

This is the base defense mission and we had some

Carnob's coming in that we're gonna land inside the prison walls and they were going to

snatch their leaders off the roof of the prison and take off well

One of my players said hey, that's weird. They're these like helicopters or v-tools kind of hanging out over here on the side of the map

We should prioritize those and shoot those down

Well the next three missions that I had written revolved around that bad guy boss being out of the prison

And it totally messed up my narrative because they shot all the planes down. I I can't I can't unshoot those plans down for them

I'm not gonna rob my players for a job well done

So you just have to be able to adapt and maybe your maybe your plot art gets cut short

And then they move on in the next contract or they have something else happen, right? So be flexible

I mean being flexible. I could not agree more with that that I think that is a

Overall strategy that I've mentioned several times

Anything else done before we wrap up this episode

I mean we could probably talk about it for another hour or so just giving little stories or or

Anything like that, but I think I think we've done some good work here today

And again folks if you have any questions reach out to us send us an email

We're more than happy to

To try to help you guys out and get your campaigns off the ground because if there's one thing I want to see

It's more people playing battle tech

Well, come on back next time where Josh and I are gonna cover our experience at brawl in the blue grass

You hear about that tournament and all the fun things that happened when we were down there

Want to thank you for listening and thanks to all of our patrons who helped keep the lights on

And I certainly want to thank Bobby from Forch's Minatures and Games for being an absolutely fantastic support network for the hobby and helping the community at large and of course helping

Adam and I and Josh getting our hands on the latest and greatest plastic that our hearts desire

Feel free to join in the conversations. We have every day on our discord and send us your questions at the mechbay podcast at gmail.com

Also

Get out there and tell your friends about us. I keep writing into people who don't know who we are or what we do

So go ahead and spread the good word

Don't forget to support your local game stores and get out there and roll those dice

Thanks for listening and remember through salvage all things are possible

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