Topic: Has anyone tried a Battletech/Mechwarrior conversion to Harp Sci-Fi yet?

[pyrotech]

I am a big fan of the battletech universe and despite the system's failings really enjoyed running a Mechwarrior 3rd ed game at one point.  Lately I've been feeling the urge to play again, but the combat mechanics of the system still cause me concern.  So I took a look at the newest edition, which helps a lot, but unfortunately turns the combat into a much more tactical affair that requires maps an minis.

This got me to thinking about how hard it would be to switch it over to a better rules set (combat wise) without sacrificing the more abstract combat option.  Harp Sci-Fi came to mind early on because many of its mechanics are vaguely similar to the Mechwarriar 3rd rules (open ended percentile checks, margin of success on hit roles directly relate to additional damage, charts for the damage effects) but much easier to use.

Does anyone know of any efforts to make this conversion before?  The Sci-Fi Xtreme rules for vehicles easily handle Mechs fine, weapon conversion shouldn't be too hard but will lose some of the differentiation between weapons, personal armor conversion should be easy, skill conversions should be easy (and largely unnecessary), life paths will lose a lot going to Harp (which is a real shame because although complicated and a huge page sink they are really good for fleshing out characters in a setting with as much history as this). 

The biggest hurdles I see are the Mech conversions (Nicholas has too many higher priority issues to deal with to get the vehicle construction rules out any time soon) and the battlesuits.  Once again I'm running into a hurdle on how to address the battlesuit because it is a crossover between personal armor and vehicle. 

Thanks for any help or feedback on this.  And please forgive my rambling writtings (I tend to do this when I write without lots of editing).

-Pyrotech

[sunwolf]

Hadn't considered trying it but I have all the Core rulebooks for the current version of BattleTech so I already have the reference material needed.  Off the top of my head I would say that the Lifepaths could be approximated by a combination of Culture and Training Packages.  I would say that each Path as an adult is one level and can have one Training Package.  You have intrigued me with the idea so I will be looking more at this over the next couple of weeks.

[pyrotech]

I like the idea of training packages being used to reflect late life path entries, that in combination with the Culture should give a decent reflection of a characters backstory.  It may not even be too much work to build a few training packages from the lifepath entries from the Battletech/Mechwarrior books.

I'm still noodling the battlesuit issue.  Maybe if I get too deep into it I will write up something for the Guild Companion on it.  This isn't the first time battlesuit issues have come up for HARP Sci-Fi.  That depends on me finding an elusive "round to it" however.

I've come up with some general guidelines I might use for mech conversion however.  Based on the stuff in Sci-Fi Xtreme, I'm thinking:

light mechs should be in the 20 to 25 hits range, with about 5 armor, between 0 and 10 EW (mostly 0 in this universe with a few exceptions), and 0 to 10 PD (again mostly 0 with a few exceptions).  Shields are not a part of the technology base so should be 0. 

medium mechs should be 25 to 30 hits, around 10 to 15 armor, and have the same PD and EW as light mechs.

heavy mechs should be about 35 to 40 hits, with 15 to 20 armor.

assult mechs should be around 40 to 50 hits with 20 to 30 armor.

Weapons can be fairly easily converted to the Sci-Fi Xtreme standards I should think.   Small lasers being tiny, medium lasers being small, and large lasers being medium.  ACs, PPCs, and the like should all fall in line pretty easy from there.  Pulse lasers should just be burst fire lasers.  LRMs and SRMs should probably be burst/salvo fired missles with tiny/small warheads.

Issues I'm seeing so far are:  no shields means the guns to armor ratio isn't going to be as favorable to the target as Battletech cannon - I may need to up the armor some.  Heat management isn't taken into consideration, perhaps replace the engineering phase of vehicle combat (shield management) with a heat management phase.  Heat management would mean each mech would need either a heat rating applied to it in general or for each weapon.  I'm not sure how the missles will play out with as little EW and point defense as is typical in Battletech.  I may have to assume a basic level of EW for all mechs with advanced for ones like the Raven.  Otherwise a single LRM20 is likely to turn an Atlas into a smoking heap.  May have to reduce the "regular" missle warheads even smaller than tiny - perhaps huge personal scale instead.  Thunderbolts would be much larger warheads.

Despite the challenges I still think this would be doable and probably even benefitial.  If I wanted to play a game of Battletech I would - but if I want to resolve a small scale combat between two Mechwarriors having the fight end in only a few rounds of combat is probably a good thing.

I'll continue to muse on this topic.

Thanks,

-Pyrotech