Kagetora wrote:
ScarletRose wrote:
A friend of mine wanted to get into Battletech with the Mercenaries kickstarter so I dug out a copy of Clan Invasion and Total Warfare that I got a long time ago. I gotta say as a newbie Total Warfare needs a lot of reorganizing and streamlining. Just trying to wrap my head around the to hit modifier for moving targets was a huge pain.
I'm not sure I understand this statement? I know I've been off the tabletop for a while, but the relative movement between the miniatures on it was fundamental to the game and figuring out what you needed to roll to hit with a given weapon. Your movement (walk/run/jump), and your target's speed (in hex ranges, i.e. 0-2, 3-5, etc.), coupled with terrain and the range in-between, was basically the entire game. Could you elaborate?
Sure, a lot of it is the formatting and density of an important rule being one paragraph. Let me break down how that goes, from page 108 of Total Warfare:
A moving target is harder to hit
Ok good so far, that's pretty intuitive
an attacking unit's to hit number is modified by its target's movement using the values in the Attack Modifiers Table.
And here's the first stumble. Where is that table?
It's not on either page 108 or 109, you know the pages I'm looking at as I read the rules.
There's no other page number referenced.
It's not in any of the preceding pages of the Combat rules.
So now I'm breaking from reading a rule to flip through the book to find this table.
If the target moved backward and forward...
As far as I'm aware Battletech doesn't allow shooting during movement so this whole part of the paragraph, that a new player is reading, is dedicated to an edge case. It doesn't help clarify anything.
IMO it should be a separate paragraph after the italicized blurb explaining the movement diagram (which is on the adjacent page, where stuff you're talking about in a paragraph should be, right where the reader can see it).
Again
IMO drop the underwater line of sight table, put that in a separate place for underwater fighting and put the movement to hit modifier portion of the Attack Modifiers chart on the page where you introduce the rule. Then keep the full Attack Modifiers table on page 117. Yeah, it's slightly duplicative but you're putting the table in front of the reader as they read about rules for it.
