Wise Turtle Publishing

Yay, new blood. I think my slow schedule has mostly lost the interest of the older fans.

Essentially, when I finally finish a good draft of the rules, it'll be a tactical type game that'll be the focus of playtest efforts. So yay for any Battletech experience.

But there will be new Abilities and rules, even for those who shy away from square-to-square gameplay.

I mentioned it to my group at large - I get a fair amount of say, since I'm the principle GM - and everyone is interested, for various reasons. Even if you take a while, don't worry... We're patient.

So...

When are you going to get the Fantasy supplement going?



Although, I'd suggest shying away from the square-to-square type of thing. One of the beauties of OVA, in my opinion, is the fact that I don't have to set out a battle board and put everyone's miniature down to show where everyone is.

I personally think that anime-style mecha combat can be done in the same vein as the 'regular' combat: Range is almost immaterial, since one can usually close with an enemy if one needs to in a 'dramatically appropriate' amount of time.

If range is necessary, I prefer to handle it in abstracts like close, mid, and long. But, as with most things, these are personal opinions. I've certainly played my share of BattleTech on the hex grid.

Hello, this is me again Tokyosteve.

I really like both mecha and fantasy. I have a game group that meets regurarly, and would be interested in being part of a playtest group. Mecha is very interesting genre to me, and I oringally got all the DP9 stuff but hated the ship rules (too confusing) so sold them all. However, I have made and played many D20 Future type of games including my own setting combining 16-17th Japanese Civil War, with 12th-13th century samurai fighting styles (the Kamakura age - replacing bows with guns and horses with mecha) with Mecha in a gritty sci-fi setting, where there was just as much importance in the characters as the mecha. About a third of the game was gun-fu duels (we used pistols insteads of swords as the ancestral weapon of choice), mecha fighting, and third invistigation/talking.

Without going on too much, one of the key premises of that world was that jump gates that allowed FTL travel had a limited diameter, so almost all of the ships that could FTL to another part of the universe for raids and attacks and such were smaller. It lent itself to justifing why mecha and small fighters were used (and analogous to the idea of the importance of Mounted Warriors in the Kamakura period). I would like to try that out in OVA.

Cheers for now,

Wolfson wrote:Although, I'd suggest shying away from the square-to-square type of thing. One of the beauties of OVA, in my opinion, is the fact that I don't have to set out a battle board and put everyone's miniature down to show where everyone is.

It's a completely optional component. The only reason I want to stress it in playtest is because it's completely new and, as such, possibly completely broken.

^_^;

tokyosteve wrote:Setting details

Sounds pretty cool! The pack in space-opera for OVA mecha also uses gates as a means for FTL travel. Your rationale about limiting armies is a neat twist, though!

Clay wrote:It's a completely optional component. The only reason I want to stress it in playtest is because it's completely new and, as such, possibly completely broken.

Heh. Well, it doesn't end up by having to be too complex, I guess... On another post, you guys are talking about WizKids' Pirates game, which I'm a big fan of... I use it for playing Skull and Bones, since I didn't want to hassle with the D20 mechanics for ship to ship anything.

I'm curious to see what you've got worked out, anyway. I'm hoping I won't have to go out and buy a battlemat, or some such, but then again, I'm sure my wife's mom wouldn't appreciate me drawing squares all over her coffee table...

The GM does what he must...

The default setting takes place in space...so a simple series of papers taped together with a 1 inch grid would suffice fine.

I will also be uploading custom map graphics to the website upon the book's release.

Clay wrote:The default setting takes place in space...so a simple series of papers taped together with a 1 inch grid would suffice fine.

It's all good... I'm sure it will be easy enough to adapt, although I'm sure my players will find some way to complicate it ("Let's hid in that asteroid field...")

Hmmm... Here's a question: What type(s) of mecha are you interested in playtesting? It occurs to me that, if you want a 'space' test, I've got a campaign that I wrote for BESM which would be easy enough to convert to OVA for that purpose... It was one of those 'humans have reached out to the planets, but are about to get their butts kicked by invading aliens' kind of things. Remeniscent of Robotech, I suppose. Mostly I was just using space-capable fighters, with some capital ships as a back drop.

Clay wrote:I will also be uploading custom map graphics to the website upon the book's release.

Cool... That's a nifty and useful thing to be able to grab from the site

Nice to know that you're thinking of all of us poor, deprived people who can never find a battle mat when we want one

Hmmm... I think one of my players actually has a battle mat, but I also think that some fool used a permanent marker on it at some point...

Here is a way to make cheap and easy battle mats. One that my game group uses.

Went to an office supply store and got the largest piece of graph paper they had. For me that was 2xA3 size of paper (close to 11x17). Then went to kinkos or similar place and paid a few bucks for them to laminate it.

Instant battlemap. The nice thing is if someone accidentally uses permentant marker, you just trash it and make a new one. The dry erase markers work fine on it, have been using these two "battlemats" for close to 6 years now.

Good idea... Thanks

I've just been lazy, and resort to descriptive combat, rather than minis... Mostly because I just don't have the time to paint the little suckers - at least to my satisfaction.

Everyone in this thread has been Private Messaged with the OVA mecha playtest wiki.

The information there is straight from my (admittedly garbled) notes, and is by no means complete or consistent. Please take apart and do with them as you will.

I encourage you to make comments directly into the wiki pages (standard HTML code works). Please do not actually change any content however, just place a note with your name and preferably in a different color from the main text. Maybe we can all pick a color? *laughs*

Again these rules are rough and unplaytested. That's what you're here for.

Cool!

My players will be ecstatic... as soon as they get over the shock of me announcing that we'll commence playtesting ASAP. The last they heard, I had no time frame, so I was telling them not to stress over it.

I'm going to go check it out now...

Hello! I just discovered OVA, but I'm a _huge_ Battletech fan, and the notion of having large mecha fights is incredibly appealing to me. Is there any way I can get in on this as well?

just got into OVA and have always been a fan of Mecha... is it still possible to get in on the fun??

Sorry guys, but OVA Mecha playtesting is over. We finished up with that a while ago.

TBP

Although the previous playtest session did peter out, it's not officially over. I just had some other work to attend to and work on OVA mecha took a back burner. Something our playtest group never managed to do was actually get some people to try some tactical rules I had written for the game. If either/both of you are game for trying just that one aspect of the new game, I certainly could use the help.