My BattleTech Story

I have seen Transformers at least 20 times this week. Of course, I haven't actively watched it every time it's been on, but I have tuned-in pretty much every time it's been playing. Why not? I really like it and there's nothing else on when I click over.

One of the great things about Transformers is that it reminded me of BattleTech.

I am a purist when it comes to role-playing games: I play RPGs that allow for total immersion. I spend hours creating characters, weeks developing campaigns, years constructing gaming worlds. I don't do the hack-n-slash and never have; it isn't anything so hoity-toity, they just don't appeal to me. I find those types of games completely unsatisfying and this is why I generally do not enjoy wargaming.

The thing about this is that I do run wargames in conjunction with campaigns - for example, I have always wanted to develop a fantasy campaign with a war backdrop by playing through the battle system. Unfortunately, the only one for which I have all the necessary components is Rolemaster and while I love Rolemaster, some guys I used to game with called it "CPA-master" - for good reason. I've had War Law for 15 years and to this day, it intimidates me; I've never read the whole thing.

Anyway, this is why I never played BattleTech until the weekend I did.

On that weekend, I came downstairs at my friend's house (where we stayed as often as possible and gamed as much as we could) and found the splinter group setting up the table. Like most gaming friends, we'd begun as a central group of x people and somewhere along the way, we splintered into two distinct groups which rarely got along (for all sorts of reasons, but in this case, it was because the main guy who splintered the group had serious psychological issues and he caused all sorts of problems specifically to see who would "remain loyal" to him - remember, we were all kids then, but it was still really disturbing and he later spent time in the hospital and finally evened-out a little once they got him on medication - but the core group never got along again and that was kind of sad). There were a couple of independents who roamed between groups and one of these owned BattleTech.

Greg got the BT bug and wanted to play over at our house (my friend's mom's house, technically, but I say "our" house because that's where the original group hung-out, both before and after all the drama) because there was more room and it was more conducive to gaming, so he invited the splinter group over. When I came downstairs and saw them, I wanted to be part of it because I missed those guys - specifically my friend with the problems, who (after all the smoke had cleared, somewhat) was embarrassed by his behavior and felt let-down by most of us, so he didn't come around much - but when I saw they were playing BattleTech, I wasn't too keen. They convinced me I would enjoy it, and the other guys were gearing-up for some football game, so I had nothing else to do and dropped on in.

And I did enjoy it! I enjoyed the hell out of it! In fact, we all did - by that afternoon, the entire house was running mechs and we'd been at it since 9:00 that morning! My mom finally had to come inside the house and pull me out at around 8:00 that night because I had school the next morning and hadn't been home the entire weekend!

For weeks after that, we were supposed to pick the game back up. And we did once, for about an hour. The friend with the issues betrayed the entire group and led us into a trap, then went home. I heard not too long ago that he was getting married and I guess I wish him well, but when I got older, I realized that while he definitely had emotional and psychological problems, he was also just kind of an asshole.

He demanded to be the center of attention at all times and continually sought to create dissension in order to splinter every group so he could become the de facto "leader." He became increasingly passive-aggressive and jealous of others to the point that even those who had chosen him over the rest of us drifted away and no one heard from him again. This is not an uncommon gaming personality, sadly. In fact, I spoke with a psychologist several years back who told me a lot about the various personality types that take gaming too far and this guy was literally right out of a textbook!

But I never forgot that incredible day - that morning I walked down the stairs and entered a game we expected to last " a few hours" before the football game and ended-up spanning 11 hours straight! I remember that day exactly the way they portray Christmas mornings in movies. Many years later, I bought my own copy of BattleTech, but the game had changed dramatically by then and I had no one to play with. A couple years back, I got MechWarrior and the Master Rules Book and even though I still had no one to play with, I read them through and poked about as though I were going to design some sort of campaign.

And I might one of these days. Of course, I have a thousand other things on my plate and all of them are further along than this, so don't even look forward to it for now. But make sure to check out the great links other readers left! BattleTech is incredibly fun, deceptively simple, and thoroughly engrossing and it's one game I wish I'd gotten to play more often and would love to play more in the future.

As I said, I'm a RPG purist and one of the few RPG experiences I missed-out on was playing a MechWarrior adventure/campaign. BattleTech is such a great game for that: the wargaming aspect is replete and when you add MechWarrior to the mix, I can only imagine how that game opens-up! To experience the world so completely - from the highly-skilled MechWarrior to piloting the 'mech - it's got to be brilliant, a truly unique gaming experience! Talk about immersion; I believe it would rival - even exceed - live-action (for a host of reasons).

It sucks living so far away from culture and the like, but once I get more of the stuff already underway taken care of, maybe I'll throw a little something together for BT just to check it out. I've always wanted to play a BattleTech/MechWarrior campaign, so why not design one, since I can't actively play one? It's as close as I get to gaming anymore...

© C Harris Lynn, 2008