Further Notes on the Core Rulebook

While the playtest documents had a variety of designer notes as we worked towards the new BattleTech Core Rulebook, as will the rulebook itself, I was offered the chance to talk a bit about some of things that had not yet been covered.

One of most important details of the revision was understanding just what kind of game BattleTech is in the first place.  The difference between a house rules document (change X, change Y, change Z) and a proper revision is that a revision has a vision: a set of goals larger than any number of rules changes.  Beyond those goals we’ve already discussed during the playtest process (most notably, backwards compatibility), there were several other goals I had in mind as I worked on the writing, organization, and rules changes that the Core Rulebook features.

TALKING TO THE READER

I mentioned in previous posts that I started with the text of the final printing of the BattleMech Manual as the basis for this project.  That book was designed from the ground up to clean up the presentation of Total Warfare, and it in turn was iterated over the course of eight printings to clarify items and tweak the layout here and there over and above the usual errata correction.  But once I had converted that last printing to text and started going through it once more, opportunities for further improvement came to mind.  I’d like to talk about some of the things I decided on here, to show how the new rulebook works to be more usable at the table.

Until now, my main efforts at making things easier to understand have focused on organization (i.e. putting things in their logical places) and wording: trying to make sure that the concept gets across as best as possible within the limits of technical rules language.  However, it occurred to me that whenever you see someone try to explain a concept that they get to an audience that doesn’t, they don’t pick up the book and start reading it.  Instead, they just paraphrase, putting the concept into everyday language that’s easy to parse.  Of course, there’s limits to this, which is why rulebooks are usually not written this way: natural language is slipper and imprecise, able to cause as many if not more misunderstandings than the approach solves.

And yet, the Common Misconceptions section at the back of the BattleMech Manual was a chapter that I heard again and again was extremely useful, and a big part of that was that it spoke to the reader in generalist language.  For the new rulebook, I decided to take some of the most difficult to grapple concepts—ones that either are missed despite the rules, or more meta elements that don’t jump out at you just by reading the rules—and explain them in natural language callout boxes.  That way, you have the precision of technical language and the approachability of natural language working in tandem.  Placing such material in callout boxes also serves to keep it out of the main rules text, ensuring that when you’re just trying to find the precise wording on a rule, an elaborate explanation isn’t getting in your way.

Speaking of sidebars, I think it’s also worth delving into how the rulebook delivers storyline information.  This is an extremely tricky element to juggle.  On the one hand, a major part of BattleTech’s success is due to its rich universe, with its elaborate history, diverse array of factions, and the stories this all enables.  I still get a thrill from leafing through the second edition rules booklet and reading the universe snippets that drew me and thousands of others into the dark days of the Third Succession War (as pictured on the left).  This tradition was carried on in various ways through each of BT’s main rulebooks, sometimes perfunctorily, sometimes with a lot of page count dedicated to it.

Total Warfare fell into the later category.  Wanting to immerse readers in the universe of the Inner Sphere, it included a dozen short stories, each serving as a thematic introduction to a chapter it preceded.  However, while these stories succeeded in giving readers a taste of the BattleTech universe, they also worked against Total Warfare’s primary function, which was as a reference tome for gaming at the table.  When you’re in the midst of a game and trying to resolve a rules dispute, you don’t want anything getting in the way of that, and unfortunately those stories often did just that.

Our solution in this case was to look back, following the example of second edition and Compendium: Rules of Warfare.  The Core Rulebook is first and foremost a gameplay book.  Rules take priority.  At the same time, the BattleTech universe is still featured proudly throughout.

LEVELS OF LEVELS

Lastly, I want to talk about the notion of rules levels.  BattleTech, when taken as a whole, is a complex game, and one of the biggest ways developers have attempted to wrangle the mass of rules and tech complexity is through the rules level concept.  Beginning with 1994’s Tactical Handbook, all BattleTech rules were classed as Levels One through Three.  Level One BattleTech was what is commonly called “introtech”: the base rules of the game, couple with only those technologies available in 3025 (e.g. no Star League or Clan elements).  Level Two was the game’s baseline: the full advanced rulebook, including all technologies in it.  Level Three was “go wild”: all the elements featured in the advanced supplements: Land-Air ’Mechs, artillery, and other advanced concepts.

Total Warfare changed the gameplan.  That book was written around the idea of being the “tournament player’s rulebook”.  As Randall explained it twenty years ago, “no matter where you might play … if you’re sitting down to play an ‘official’ tournament – or to play using the ‘standard’ BattleTech rules at a retailer venue – then they should be all the same.”  The goal here was about standardization and ease of everyday play, rather than a focus on tournaments per se.  That is, the new rules setup wasn’t so much about providing a host of new tournament rules as it was a level playing field, one that featured rules you could expect to need in a typical game and that wouldn’t bog things down when brought out.  Thus, the three-level structure was replaced by a two-level structure:  tournament (standard) and non-tournament (advanced).

However, new products immediately started appearing that began complicating this clean foundation.  TechManual added Tech Bases (Clan, Inner Sphere, and Mixed), C-bill costs, plus Tech Ratings (how advanced in general a component was) and Availability Ratings (defining in-universe availability of components and unit types across time and state boundaries).  Tactical Operations added a formal Advanced rules level, as well an all-new Experimental level, which while a rules level was based on in-universe rarity as of the year 3075.  Jihad Secrets: The Blake Documents added the Primitive Tech Base (which was sometimes treated as a rules level) and its Retrotech cousin, while Interstellar Operations expanded the Availability Ratings to the Dark Age and added a new “Common” flag to components.  Lastly, Technical Readout: Prototypes and Record Sheets: 3145 NTNU added separate Technological Advancement Tables, each of which had a separate set of shifts to the rules status of many components from Experimental to Advanced, and from Advanced to Standard.

The sum of this is that every single piece of gear in the BattleTech universe had an ever-shifting series of codes.  For example, Artemis V FCS (Tech Base Clan, Ratings of F/XXF, F/XXFE if you have Interstellar Operations) had a Rules Level of Experimental for games set between 3085-3089, Advanced for games set in 3090-3144, Tournament Legal for games set in 3145 and up, and was Common as of the year 3093.  Repeat this for several hundred items, and sift through every last one that appeared on a given unit to arrive at a unit’s final values (don’t forget to account for base rating for the chassis type itself, and any structural components usually ignored such as basic myomer).

Suffice to say, the vast majority of this material was never used at the table, serving primarily instead as something to keep fact checkers and the errata team (i.e. me) busy with corrections.  Most of it feels like work created to create work; one of the design elements I think is most destructive to the health of a game (which BattleTech is first and foremost) is the tendency to begin creating rules whose primary or even sole purpose is be simulationist: rules not to game with, but to help people in modelling and codifying the universe the game is set in (simulationist compiling is equally disastrous when dealing with stories, but that’s another issue).  In particular, I feel that tying the game concept of rules levels with the in-universe concept of shifting dates made for a terrible mess and a lot of confusion.  Almost no one was arranging game missions on the basis of Availability Ratings or shifting Experimental and Advanced rules levels.  The primary ways by which people organize missions are Battle Value, in-universe date as a whole, and unit type.  That is, X BV is allowed, and perhaps no unit that according the Master Unit List was manufactured after X date, and here’s a list of the units we’re permitting, which itself usually breaks down into 1) ’Mechs only (the most common scenario), 2) combined arms but not aerospace, and the rare 3) everything goes.

Ray and Aaron (BT Lead Developer and Assistant Lead Developer, respectively) were unhappy with the mass of books that the old core rulebook line had generated and the resulting confusion as to what exactly was needed to actually play BattleTech, a question that should never be difficult for a potential customer but was surprisingly so for BT.  The new Core Rulebook is meant to address this whenever possible: from its unambiguous name, to the new structure for BT rules in general (Core is one book only and standard, everything else is optional).  The existence of tools like the Master Unit List, which could only be dreamed of back when Total Warfare was being put together, allowed us to simplify this issue from within as well.  Knowing that a free, easy to use, readily accessible online tool is available to do a lot of the work of creating lists and organizing the vast flow of information, I felt we had less of a need to rigidly define rules levels within the Core Rulebook text.  It’s expected that people will organize games based primarily on whether or not the unit contains only technology found within X book, with the Core Rulebook being the most common tome referenced in this case.  At the same time, we’re not telling people how to organize their games.  The addition of the new Missions chapter to the new rulebook, which provides a structure for generating a variety of pick-up games, gives more guidance on how to play basic games in general, but when it comes to the makeup of the forces involved, that is being left to the players to decide, the people who know better than we do how they themselves want to play.

A final note on tournaments themselves.  I have seen some mentions online that the new rulebook reflects, in some way, a new emphasis on tournament play.  I’m not clear on where this notion came from, but I thought it was worth addressing.  Total Warfare itself had no support for tournaments besides the concept of Tournament Legal as a rules level.  As I mentioned, this is now gone, and so the book has fewer nods to tournament play, not more.  In general, I hate the idea of tournaments as a driver of rules writing.  I firmly believe that, unless you’re writing a separate tournament structure, they should never, ever have the slightest bit of influence on generalist game design.  I think it’s well understood that several otherwise successful games have shot themselves in the foot in an effort to shape their base design and play structures around the tournament, damaging how enjoyable they are for everyday play and their long-term viability in general to appeal to the tournament player.  Tournaments are artificial environments: they’re intended to take the base state of play and warp it into a constrained, competitive version, where victory is the overriding goal.  The vast, vast majority of BattleTech games are not tournament games.  As such, the idea of shaping the base rules towards something that makes up a fraction of a percent of all BT played is something I am actively avoiding, not aiming towards.  There has been some extremely preliminary discussion of a separate book that might, far down the road, specifically provide support for tournament play—just one more option in the toolchest—but whether that happens or not, the core rules are not looking in that direction.

- Keith Hann