One evening this week I went to a lecture by Professor Jamie Angus on compressing sound recording through digital encoding. The problem is not only how, but by what has to be be simplified? Seriously, simplify the games and then simplify some more. So what's my plan? KISS Keep it Simple Stupid. Again I'm long past the time in my life where I can rattle of chapter and verse on any set of rules, let alone BattleTech. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying it is hard to pull off without a lot of preparatory work by everybody involved in playing the game, and the thing is that I don't have the time to do this anymore. Large games of BattleTech fall into the latter category.
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Films generally don't run more than three hours or so, but wargames can run for 10 to 15 hours, and what is worse not have been played to a satisfactory conclusion. Long gone are the day where I would stay up until the early hours of the morning involved in a role playing game, or a weekend playing a wargame.īooks are easy enough to put down and pick up. I no longer have the time to spend playing a game that will require more than a few hours of my time. Of course games can also tell stories too, but that really would be going off on another tangent.Įither way both stories and games require people to spend time to enjoy the pleasures that each offer, and this is where my "yes but" comes from. Both have logic driving them, but the purpose of games is to play, whereas stories tell a tale about people. To some extent it's good that they don't, because games follow rules, whereas stories are about emotional and physical responses by the characters to situation the plot has landed them in. The rules of the game do not simulate the novels particularly well. So what leads me down this tangential path from my starting position of house rules. So it's a bit borderline to science fantasy, but on the whole BattleTech keeps itself in the middle-lane. Therefore I've decided I'm going to put BattleTech in the soft SF category, especially since the literary form of the universe is predicated on telling stories within a pulp fiction/juvenile rite of passage mix. For more on this I can highly recommend the Atomic Rocket's website. Well it's not ultra hard, despite of having no anti-grav and tractor beams, because too much unobtainium and handwavium exists around the size of the ships (mass to volume ratios too low), and having ludicrously high thrust drives with handwaved reaction mass. Scantily clad women and muscle rippling heroes with swords tend to fit better in a science fantasy setting. Hard SF tend to limit things like tractor beams and anti-gravity usually, because they indicate soft SF by having consequences to the universe that are conveniently ignored. Like most things though, there is a continuum from hard SF to soft SF to pure science fantasy. Stories where the writer moves further away from "keeping it real as much as possible" tend IMO to be writing science fantasy, rather than hard science fiction. Of course it's not that easy to do this, and writers end up using a combination of unobtainium and handwavium at times, but in principle less is more.
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Change one thing to the reality of your universe to allow your story to work, but follow the laws of physics etc with the rest. This also touches on some science fiction mantras that writers use when creating new universes for their stories. However, the pedantic wargamer in me also wants the rules to touch some sort of base with reality. Now I've made it clear in past blogs that I'm an OSR kinda gal, and for me realism and BattleTech are not synonymous, which means I can accept I'm just playing a game. However, as soon as one enters house rule territory one has to get others to agree with you about your "yes but", which often leads to a reversion to a "yes but, let's just use the rules as written". Why have house rules? Or a more helpful way of phrasing this question, what purpose do house rules serve?įrom a purely pragmatic perspective house rules are the players of a game system using their power to audit what has been given them, by saying "yes but" to the rules of the game.