Battletech to Gurps

[drhippensteel]

Has anyone done a conversion of the system to Gurps? I found a set of fan rules for Star Wars but I'd like to go into the BT universe using Gurps. Does anyone know if someone did house rules for it?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by drhippensteel

Has anyone done a conversion of the system to Gurps? I found a set of fan rules for Star Wars but I'd like to go into the BT universe using Gurps. Does anyone know if someone did house rules for it?

It's a fairly frequent subject. Changing BT Skills for Gurps skills is simple. Using UT personal gear instead of BT stuff is only a little more involved but doing 'Mechs in Gurps is a major project.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's a fairly frequent subject. Changing BT Skills for Gurps skills is simple. Using UT personal gear instead of BT stuff is only a little more involved but doing 'Mechs in Gurps is a major project.

Doing mecha in general in GURPS isn't that big a deal - we've got vehicle rules, hit locations, all that. There are some helpful supplements available but I'm not sure any of them are at all required. I guess you want to apply partial injury of sorts to your vehicle to account for the way mechs suffer limb damage.

Doing battlemechs in particular becomes more of a challenge due to the strangeness of Battletech weapon behavior. If you want your mech engagements to be anything like actual Battletech, you need ablative armor and ludicrously short-ranged weapons that play along with the ablative armor. And potentially some kind of scaling houserules to stop small arms from being a better counter to mechs than Battletech's anti-vehicle weapons (without being useless, because small-arms fire does harm 'mechs).

[drhippensteel]

I was more interested in a non mech game. So I figured that the option of mechs wouldn't be applied. The most would be vehicles and those rules are already covered in other books.

When it comes to drop and jumpships I was also going to ignore them for combat. Basically the game would be run without mechs and the ships would be used for transportation. There might be missions to raid one but that would be the extent of it.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by drhippensteel

I was more interested in a non mech game. t.

Then it's a Gurps SF game with core worlds mostly at TL10, Periphery worlds at TL9 or even lower and the Clans coming in at TL11.

[drhippensteel]

Pretty much. I tried playing A Time of War with other people but they were always about mechs. Instead of having a game about all the other things you can do in that setting.

I enjoy BT but running around with mechs just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. That is a tactical tabletop game and if I wanted to play that I'd just do Necromunda or something similar.

[AOTA]

I used this for a number of years. RP for using GURPS and a modified Battletech for mech combat. Should be pretty easy to do in 4th edition as it was in 3rd.

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/Rolepla...onversion.html

[David Johnston2]

I used the Battletech wargame pretty straight except with GURPS skill rolls, reversing the sign on dice modifiers and increasing them by half again.

[Prince Charon]

Probably a good place to link to GURPS Spaceships 4: Fighters, Carriers, and Mecha. Admittedly, I haven't tried to make specific BT BattleMechs with that book, but I think it's possible. not sure about converting the heat sink rules, though. Kind of wondering if that's already been discussed elsewhere.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I used the Battletech wargame pretty straight except with GURPS skill rolls, reversing the sign on dice modifiers and increasing them by half again.

Honestly, you don't need to change the value of the modifiers. I tried both ways and found that just reversing the sign on the modifiers was sufficient. Not changing the modifiers allows for characters to pull stuff off from the fiction.

I do Pilot damage as 2d pi from impacts, and 2d burn from heat-based injuries.

If necessary I do 1 BattleTech point of damage as 100 points of character-scale damage. Works pretty well. In general, getting hit by 'Mech-scale weapon is a "that looks bad--you should return to character generation" moment.

But, the basic answer is "GURPS for characters and BattleTech for 'Mech combat."