LOW-RES ROLEPLAYING RULES Coming To BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome

What’s good, fam?

So here’s the plan, man. Next version (version 0.8)of Beyond Electrodrome is going to incorporate several new things: leagues, starting ‘mechs, winnings, ways to spend your hard-earned skrilla, and a whole goddamned RPG module. Not a frank RPG. Not a game for the sake of a game, more of a hat upon a hat. A game within a game. The next Matrioshka doll down.

I’m taking the rules from MechWarrior: Destiny, boiling them down into a rich demi-glace, and pouring them all over the glorious Beyond Electrodrome expansion.

As always, they will be OPTIONAL, an extra layer of complexity for the people that like greater depth of play. Which seems like an obvious inclusion for people that are coming to the gaming table to play a crunchy-as-fuck, lore-sodden atavism like Battle-Motherfucking-Tech.

The RPG rule set, which I have initially dubbed “Pixelated RPG” is going to be a simplified way of using your pilots’ various skills to interact with the Electrodrome world in between bouts, gaining resources, leverage, experience, narrative progression, and screw over your opponents.

So what is this actually going to look like?

Time passes between bouts, right? Shame to leave that kind of money on the table.

Each day will be considered a “pixel”, which is the currency of action. A pixel can be thought of as a point, and these points can be spent on a wide variety of intra-stable, inter-stable, and extra-stable activities. These activities will include brawling, carousing, negotiating, tinkering, repairing, sabotage, training with the boys, inspirational speeches, and even <gag> giving back to the community.

If you’re familiar with MechWarrior: Destiny rules, you know that difficulty is broken into easy (TN is 2d6), average (TN is 3d6), and hard (TN is 4d6). My idea at present is to use the selected difficulty to inform the value or scale of the outcome: selecting hard difficulty when vandalizing another player’s stable/mechs will be much more impactful than succeeding with an easy roll.

Rather than taking specific actions, players can alternatively choose to generate different kinds of points.

NARRATIVE POINTS: will be useful for progressing your character’s self-described story arc. Think experience points, random equipment, contacts, quirks, and all that good shit. A more wide-open, general purpose kind of point.

NEGOTIATION POINTS: useful for forcing outcomes, improving pay-outs, gaining more sponsorship points, and otherwise putzing with the actual rules of a bout. See if you can negotiate your way to victory. I dare you.

SHADE POINTS: can be spent on all manner of criminal and dastardly deeds. Anything from assassinations, poisoning, scoring drugs, booby-trapping the arena, hiring sheisty bastards to do your dirty work, paying off enemy units, spreading rumors, and straight up casting shade.

TECH POINTS: can be spent on equipment, research, tinkering, vehicles, jury-rigging gear, gathering intel, improving deployment or first-turn initiative, single-use equipment, or simply repairing your units.

Most of us barely have time to play BattleTech as-is, and the great shame there is that we for sure don’t have time to play the BattleTech RPG, which I always found deep and rich and wild. With the Pixelated RPG, I want to give you the option of using your characters as if they are still a part of the RPG universe, but from a zoomed-out enough distance that it will only take you and your crew ten minutes (or less) to rip through. It lets you add color and depth and background and context (remember context?). All without breaking the time bank.

So the question I have for you is this: with everything I’ve described here, what would you want to have included in the Beyond Electrodrome Pixelated RPG? I know I’m not the first to come up with this idea, so what ideas are already out there that are dying to get incorporated? What would this system NEED? What rules are begging to be written here? What pitfalls must be avoided?

Come on, ya Canopian Catboys: lets hear what you got.