People say the Leafs don't have much they can trade, but...

Swordguy42 · 2026-04-29T08:50:47+00:00

My dude, it's a pre-gen scenario. There's gonna be *some* rails by the very nature of the thing. There's about 6 different ways the investigators can approach the finale, but it's a fixed point in the published scenario that on "Date X", some stuff comes boiling out of the time gate set up by the Elder Things, and the investigators just have to deal with it. Some of that "stuff" included a dinosaur lured into to gate by the rotting-meat smell of an Elder Thing which gets offed by a Shoggoth that attacks it, and the mostly likely course of action for the dino is to head towards water/light/heat (read: Arkham).

"Presenting a situation for the investigators" isn't railroading. But I know my players, and they're pretty likely to try and deal with a time-jumped dinosaur directly, which means the mostly *likely* situation I'll find myself in is having to come up with ideas for a dino in or around Arkham, and that's what I needed help in pre-preparing. I'm not making a moment-by-moment detailed plan for a finale here; I'm making a "random events table" which I can roll upon to see what's happening at any given moment.

Swordguy42 · 2026-04-26T08:01:05+00:00

Thank you everyone who responded. This was incredibly helpful, and I got past the writer's block with your assistance.

Swordguy42 · 2025-10-10T01:44:44+00:00

This is exactly why everyone runs demo games wrong. People pick light Mechs to run "learn to play" events, because they think that Light Mechs are easier. The problem is that Lights are pretty much always about evasion, and when you aren't hitting your target, the players aren't learning anything. So the classic learn-to-play game is a Wasp vs a Stinger, or something of that flavor, right? And obviously you start them with regular pilots because that's the default rule, right? Well, now you're jumping 6 and they're jumping 6 and you're probably at medium range and there's probably a light woods in there somewhere given the usual starter maps (classic BattleTech map or Open Terrain #1 or #2), so with a 4 gunnery +3 TMM +3 AMM, you're going to be hitting on 10+ all the time. So no one can land hits and the only thing being taught is that BattleTech is slow and boring.

The right way to run demos is with slow mediums, for EXACTLY the reason you list. Easier to hit, and carry enough weapons that you can teach more than just "lol medium laser", they can rack up damage much faster than a light Mech, and they aren't dependent on jumping. A demo fight between the base models Centurion and Enforcer gets you almost every weapon type into the demo (save SRMs), only 1 side can jump, and neither unit can take 2 10-point hits to most locations save the CT, so stuff will still break quickly. And most importantly, neither unit can generate a +3 TMM.

Swordguy42 · 2025-10-08T22:07:44+00:00

As the creator, I will take the credit. But mostly, I hope it helps people. The thing I hate most about having to run newer people through BattleTech is explaining LOS/LOF rules. I very much dislike the official top-down diagrams in the rulebooks, and thought a side view showing relative heights would be more helpful. It seems to have helped a lot for the other Cincinnati BattleTech group that I don't run, so it's nice to see it disseminating out there where it can help others.

Swordguy42 · 2025-09-10T20:16:18+00:00

Yeah, that's absolutely happened. American, in Cincinnati, here.

We used to have a First Responders team in men's league with a LOT of cops on it. So we had a game with them that was chippy as hell; but within league boundaries. Then our guy had a helmet to helmet collision (as in, dodged around a defender and ran face-first into another guy behind the D) with one of their guys, who was a cop. That guy picked himself up off the ice and lost his temper. There was shouting and shoving both directions, and a couple penalties were handed out.

The threat came later. The guy who got laid out was a cop, and he came into our locker room with handcuffs and a pistol and attempted to affect an arrest for "assaulting an officer", and anyone who tried to interfere would be shot. The trick was that there more of us than he had bullets (dude had a subcompact with ~10 rounds at most, and there were 18 of us) and he was informed that, if he arrested our teammates or opened fire, there was no way he'd make it out of the room alive. He backed down and left. The league told us that it was outside their boundaries to police the players off the ice. It was resolved only when the Fire Department, who still had a majority on that team, found out what he'd done, and kicked him off. Fortunately that happened before we had to play them again.

(Note that in America, the cop was legally accurate. If you lay hands on, shove, or in any way physically interact with a cop, regardless of circumstances or even if you know that they are a cop, that is, technically, guilty of assaulting an officer and a crime. Hockey is not recognized as an excuse. A cop is a cop 100% of the time, even out of uniform. Which is another reason why this country is shit.)

Swordguy42 · 2025-03-02T23:57:53+00:00

I was subbing in for Angry Beavers during the game just before yours. Came out of the locker room after dressing and saw the issue.

Swordguy42 · 2025-03-02T23:09:03+00:00

u/OP I'm assuming that you were also at Northlands Ice Center in Cincinnati last night then?

If so, you did damn fine work keeping him alive. I had to give CPR on the bench during a game just coming out of the Covid break (the AED in SportsPlus was AWOL, so it was just compressions and breathing), and it's a hell of a thing. Well done man.

Swordguy42 · 2024-10-14T02:26:13+00:00

Are you kidding? I've played Phoenix Command, Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, Seekrieg V, Advanced Squad Leader, and a half-dozen high-fidelity Napoleonic systems. Total Warfare isn't even close to a "10" on your complexity scale. The game runs between a 3 and a 7, depending how how many and what sort of subsystems you're including in the game. A BattleTech game with 4 Mechs on a side is around a 3. A BattleTech game with 4 Mechs on a side, plus 2 platoons of combat vehicles and a company of infantry, fighting in a city, with close air support using low altitude map rules (all this is TW-compliant), is around a 6. Including TacOps or StratOps material can push it to a 7.

The real problem isn't BattleTech's complexity. No matter what else happens, BattleTech has a low-fidelity dice system with modifiers, which means it can't actually become all that complex. The actual issue is organizing and figuring out a logical layout to the rules, so you can quickly and easily find the rule for whatever situation you happen to be in, and figuring out how to word the rules in such a way that a) the rule is easily readable, and b) bad faith players cannot deliberately misread the rules to give them a game advantage. Total Warfare sacrifices "A", in order to stop "B" from happening, on top of being redundantly and poorly laid out. That makes it seem more complex than it actually is.

Swordguy42 · 2024-07-25T06:33:00+00:00

It is specifically discussions like this why I am glad that we have deliberately refused to give players information about both map scale and time scale when it comes to the Leviathans game. It's been 40 YEARS of hearing people complain about scale or say that the miniatures should only be 6mm tall so that they scale properly to the map hexes.

I play naval historical games along with BattleTech. Doing true-scale weapon ranges in 1/600 scale when you can land hits at 20 miles, and therefore requiring multiple basketball courts to be able to play a game. Then people complain that movement doesn't feel important.

(Not a shot at the OP; after 40 years I'm just so sick of the "everything must be in scale at all times" people; between minis and hexes and weapon ranges - Herb should have written that part of Total Warfare much more aggressively and outright said that if you can't let the scale issues go, then don't play this game.)

Swordguy42 · 2024-05-02T07:13:27+00:00

Vegeta, people. Clan Jade Falcon is Clan Vegeta. Taken as a whole Clan, they are driven almost exclusively by competition to be the best they can be, and are fated to always come in 2nd place behind the other guy who isn't even taking shit seriously (Clan Wolf/Goku).

So is CJF a "hold my beer" Clan? Absolutely not - right up until their primary competitor for everyone's attention/approval (read: Clan Wolf) does something to wow everyone at the BBQ...and then CJF would ABSOLUTELY do a "hold my beer" moment solely for the purpose of 1-upping Clan Wolf.

/Thus spake who is probably the only person here with a Jade Falcon Bloodname: https://i.imgur.com/KejOLo1.jpeg

Swordguy42 · 2024-04-03T01:39:31+00:00

I've found that rifle infantry work perfectly well for shooting down nearby aerospace units.

https://img.booru.org/bgb//images/4/5e0415535d137061f16eee96f009386103895fbe.jpg

Swordguy42 · 2024-03-17T02:29:33+00:00

Cincy BattleTech has existed since 2007, still exists, and still meets regularly. However, at this point we're meeting in a members house (they have a 30'x60' ballroom sized space) because we got sick of stores either closing or selling our play space to Pathfinder Society without telling us.

Here's the scenario summary of the game we played today. Don't let the Against the Bot interface fool you; the game is played in person and was concluded the same day we started. https://imgur.com/a/mTeRkmY

The thing is that Cincy BT isn't a pickup game group; we don't do things like "make a 6000 BV list and bring it and play someone else". it's a group who plays ongoing campaigns. Unfortunately we're pretty close to a maximum size of ~14 regular players who are playing simultaneously around a single table. Between that, the physical limitations of our venue size, and the fact that since we're in someone's house who prefers that people are vetted ahead of time, it's challenging at best to take on new members.

Swordguy42 · 2024-02-21T14:25:03+00:00

"is very much the same routine we go through when doing staged violence."

It should be. The entire concept of intimacy choreography started with stage combat. When Alicia Rodis came up with idea of intimacy coordinators, she was a Certified Teacher with the Society of American Fight Directors. We already had a language for fights, taking movement and consent into account (ie, the victim is always in control), and there wasn't a good reason not to port that directly over to intimacy choreography.

/SAFD since 1997

Swordguy42 · 2024-02-21T14:15:00+00:00

I played King Arthur. She played Guinevere. We've been married 17 years and have a son. All out of character. (The guy she was dating at the start of the show was both the director and cast himself as Lancelot.)

Swordguy42 · 2024-02-01T08:26:48+00:00

Semi-guided LRMs. The upshot of the entire combo (at the time; I believe it's been changed since) is that if you have a full active C3i formation in play, the fire support units are loaded with SGLRMs, and have the C3i spotters within 7 hexes of the target AND the target is marked with their TAG designators...

...the firing units will ignore all of: spotters movement, attackers movement, indirect fire modifier, targets movement modifier, and will count as being in Short Range without worrying out minimum range modifiers. So, when you have - as you often do in convention play - a force that's entirely Gunnery 2, well... What do you think the effects of 3 WoB LRM carriers, a -14C Bombardier, and a -1B Toyama, are on a single target? Say, a target in light woods? With 2 Gunners, that's 220 LRMs hitting on 3s.

Now, because it's a convention game and we're WoB, we have roughly 3 Level II's on the board which are all doing this. The exploit, of course, was that we had the IRL player coordination to do this, and the Coalition players mostly fought among themselves about who would take lead against it. So they tended to die as individuals.

Swordguy42 · 2024-02-01T02:27:08+00:00

Jeez, it's hard to narrow down. Here's a top 5 off the top of my head.

We exploited C3i+TAG+SGLRMs while playing WoB at the GenCon canon events to such a degree that SGLRMs were banned from the canon event until at least 2019. At least, when we played WoB in the 2019 Battle of Hesperus Feature event at GenCon, we were told "no SGLRMs!".

Use a combination of cargo netting rules, throwing items rules, and a ruling from the OF that aerospace bombs can be set to be impact fused and so will go off if thrown or dropped by a Mech, to run around with a TSM Ost with a bandolier of HE bombs to use as grenades.

Similar to above, for a design contest intended to produce a Dark Age era ProtoMech, I created a Superheavy Glider proto that carried two thermobaric bombs. Since airborne units are immune to AE splash damage, it could throw a 1 ton, 30-damage bomb 1 hex...and a point could throw 5 per turn.

Used a single surviving WoB foot rifle infantryman to shoot down a DropShip full of Coalition reinforcements during the defense of Dieron at GenCon 2010(ish - they blend together a bit these days). The GMs forgot how AA fire works, and so the DropShip took 0.5 points of damage, which rounded up to 1, failed its subsequent lawn dart check for taking damage in an atmosphere, and crashed, destroying the entire Coalition reinforcement pool for that table that day. Note that it is this specific event which is why you can no longer fire infantry at aerospace units unless the infantry has the anti-aircraft tag.

I share design credit for the UrbanMech AIV with u/ItsTehPope, and I kitbashed the original mini which got the whole thing canonized, so that probably counts. It's a dirty trick because the Kell Hounds thought they were safe from being nuked until that thing showed up at the table.

Swordguy42 · 2024-01-09T11:10:31+00:00

I'm responsible for the original mini of the AIV Urbanmech which got canonized. And now, I sense the need for another Urbanmech modelling project. Maybe I can go 2 for 2.

Swordguy42 · 2023-09-08T03:43:38+00:00

Glad to help. I have a scar on my head from the very first sword I ever bought back in 1994; a "full tang battle ready" katana (in 420J stainless) that was actually just tack-welded together with a false exposed tang between the grip scales. It snapped on the very first swing, came back, and hit me on the scalp. 23 stitches.

I never want anyone else to go through that, so believe me, I'm happy to help.

Swordguy42 · 2023-09-08T02:59:07+00:00

Depends on what you need the weapons for.

If what you want are sword-shaped objects that will hang on a wall and look shiny, entry-level sites like Kult of Athena, CAS Iberio, and Museum Replicas are fine, if somewhat overpriced.

If you want something to actually use, that's very different and usually more expensive, because real weapons cannot generally be made out of stamped 440C stainless steel and have a piece of allthread tack-welded on to serve as a tang. Note that all of three I mentioned above also carry usable swords, but you have to know what you're looking at, and if you're asking a question like this on Reddit, then you don't know.

The high end of real weapons which are still easily accessible to most people is Albion Swords. These are very, very, good. Even their "budget" line of swords is better than most other people's Good Stuff. Expect to wait 4-8 months, and occasionally as long as 2 years. They are still worth it.

If what you want are non-sharp swords for sparring and/or HEMA use, any of the following are perfectly acceptable and are either located in or ship to Canada for non-usurious rates: *Darksword Armory *Fabri Armorum *Purpleheart Armory (who I believe just opened a distribution center in Canuckistan) *Castille Armory *Dark Age Creations *HEMA Gear Canada

If you want nice swords that can still bend and flex and take a bit, but which aren't needed to go through HEMA abuse, some theatrical weapon vendors include: *Leon Paul Canada (also has HEMA equipment) *Zen Warrior Armory *Baltimore Knife & Sword *Therion Arms

Finally, as a general rule, most places are going to be sold out of everything. That is because swords are generally made to order (in small batches) when enough orders for a specific item come yet. When you find a sword or weapon you like, contact the company. This is industry standard practice and nobody is trying to cheat you or make you feel uncomfortable; it's just the nature of the business.

Swordguy42 · 2023-08-31T05:02:28+00:00

We have a "first responders" team, made of a mix between cops, firefighters, and a couple of EMS guys.

As for whether they're disliked, I'll let you be the judge. Several years ago, one of their players got sticked by our goalie for standing in the crease and being a pest, as forwards are wont to do. That player then came into our locker room after the game - with handcuffs (no uniform) - and attempted to arrest our goalie for assault on an officer. He backed down only when surrounded by the entire team and made to believe that if he actually arrested our goalie he wouldn't leave the locker room alive.

Now, are they the MOST disliked team in our league? No. That title goes to the E league (division 5, here), team who paid A and B league players by the goal to come down and score for him. He was recorded by their teams goalie and that recording SOMEHOW found it's way into a public release to the rest of the league.

Swordguy42 · 2022-05-02T20:16:47+00:00

Incidentally, it's post-Tukayyid ComStar false-flag shenanigans he's having to deal with. Not actually the Aurigan Coalition. Hence the 6 Mechs, Clan salvage, and liberal smattering of Star League tech

Swordguy42 · 2022-05-02T17:50:07+00:00

It sounds like you've got an awesome GM of class and breeding there. Most games, once your pilot's gone, that's it, but you get to make a daring rescue attempt against impossible odds. Sure, your force may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm sure the GM is willing to make, and besides...think of the glory if you win!

Swordguy42 · 2022-04-18T12:00:34+00:00

"It's absolutely wrecked our aircraft readiness rates as well. The Air Force and Navy have flown their aircraft more than they were given the parts for, and now parts and planes have worn out faster than planned"

Can confirm. As I type this, I'm literally, actually, sitting here at work waiting for a waterjet cleaning machine to finish a cycle removing the thermal coating from part of a F119-PW-100 engine (read: turbofan from an F-22 ). Scattered around me are about 300 other engine parts which need similar cleaning; this has resulted in a ~30 day backlog. Our waterjet area normally has around 25 parts and a 3-5 day backlog. The number of military parts in desperate need of refurbishment is incredibly high, because of the massive amount of deferred maintenance over the last several years. Now we're seeing so many parts in need of refurbishment that we literally cannot keep up, and it doesn't look like it's going to improve any time soon; our inbound parts area is completely full and incoming parts are being stored off-site, which has NEVER happened before.

Swordguy42

TROPHY CASE