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Saturday, May 10, 2008

I Want to Play BattleTech

Well, I finally got to see Transformers. Unfortunately it was on TV, but it's well worth viewing even then! Actually, I saw the Fantastic Four sequel and Transformers the past two weeks and both were really great on TV, even though they were obviously made for the theater and I'm sure they play better there. But I'm not here about any of that.

I just watched Transformers and now I want to play BattleTech. This is why nothing ever gets done in ManoDogsLand! I'm not going to be able to play BattleTech because there's no one to play with, but I went ahead and pulled out the books, just to flip through them. Honestly, I don't remember much at all about the mechanics or anything else and I have at least 234971290477 other projects that must come first, but I am definitely going to flip through the books just for the heck of it.

Honestly, all I can remember is that it's played with 2d6 and I usually used light mechs because I liked jumping. The first mech I played was a Lotus. I always wanted to play an extended campaign (MechWarrior) but never got the chance to. However, we did have a lot of near-starts and tons of battle scenarios to our credit.

BattleTech was an immensely popular game in its time and its time was far too short. Of course, like all RPGs, they flooded the market with miniatures, sourcebooks, and every other thing they could think of until it got to the point that no two groups were playing the same game and no one knew what the official "history" was, who was playing "the right way," and so on and so forth, and basically killed it. Of course, like many of these same popular RPGs, they then turned it into a computer game which I played once or twice and was not nearly so impressed with - but not because it was bad, mind you, just because video games are not my Thing.

Anyway, I want to play BattleTech and I can't, so I'm going to flip through the books, which means something which should be getting done... you know, isn't. Don't blame me, blame the movies!

© C Harris Lynn, 2008

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Holy Crap man! You have missed a lot! Battletech is alive and kicking. It is seeing a renaissance of sorts and is still as great a game as you remember.

Links!
www.classicbattletech.com <- official game site
www.classicbattletech.com/leap <- Tons of free material for the game. Quick start rules, Universe book, and record sheets
www.commandohq.com <- Player and venue database, to find people to play against
http://megamek.sourceforge.net <- Play Battletech ONLINE

Check it out.

Manodogs said...

Great! Thanks, man! I actually had looking up record sheets on my agenda!

I think I have watched Transformers 8 times since Friday. It's on as I type.

George Blouin said...

There are some other good sites too:

www.battlecorps.com - Subscription site for fiction in the CBT Universe
www.solaris7.com - Community resources for CBT (my site)
www.camospecs.com - Regimental paint schemes for CBT Factions and Units(Official Resource)

Manodogs said...

Wow guys, thanks!

Just so y'all know (I've had requests before, as well), you are more than welcome to leave live links in your comments. Comment Moderation was enabled a long time ago to fight spam, so I have to manually read and publish all the comments. So long as it isn't spam, I don't mind posting links to your sites/blogs/profiles, et.al.

To create a live link in the comments, simply type-out the link in HTML. For example, to make a live link to a fledgling site that has tons of great resources for all manner of RPGs (though most of it remains unpublished at this time), you would simply type the following - without the asterisks:

<*a*href*="LINK">*TEXT FOR LINK*<*/*a*>

Make sure to put the link in quotes. When published, you will see:

The Weirding RPGs

Thanks again for the great BattleTech links, guys! I'll definitely check them out.