Play Review - Mechwarrior: Destiny

You've got 50 tons of steel wrapped around you, two mechs on the ridge charging up their PPCs, your heat levels are reaching critical levels, you're low on SRM ammo, and the loan shark you're in debt 200,000 c-bills to ain't gonna take excuses when his payment comes due. It's time to push it to the limit. Good thing your friends have your back!

BattleTech is a classic tabletop miniatures game of big stompy mechs, rustpunk aesthetics, and soap opera politics. Set in the 31st century after humanity has spread to the stars then spent 400 years grinding ourselves down to a quasi-industrial era through endless political wars, the universe of BattleTech is ripe for antiheroes, scoundrels, knights, thieves, and mercenaries riding into battle in their centuries-old rusted out battlemechs, sometimes for honor, sometimes for territory, sometimes just for the payday.

In addition to a painstakingly detailed tabletop miniatures game, the world of BattleTech has been detailed extensively through hundreds of novels, several notable video games, and a number of different role-playing games: the Mechwarrior series of games. I played the Mechwarrior RPG in the 90s and had fond memories, and after picking up a box of miniatures and the tabletop rules last year, I decided it was time to run the RPG for my friends.

There are many versions of the roleplaying game. The version I played back in the 90s - Mechwarrior Second Edition - is no longer widely available, and it was always a little janky. There are two games that are currently in print: A Time of War, is a major revamp of the Mechwarrior Third Edition role-playing game, and is a very crunchy, rules-heavy game. The other option is Mechwarrior: Destiny, a rules-light game with narrative-focused mechanics that is even GM optional.

Since I was interested in a short-term campaign and I didn't want to grapple with learning a complex rules system, I opted for Mechwarrior: Destiny. I spun up the soundtrack to the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal and we dove into a five-session mini-campaign. We ran the game using Discord. I had a couple of regional maps that I displayed using Owlbear Rodeo, but didn't use any other virtual tabletop features.

Storywise, the game was set in 3035, after the Fourth Succession War but before the Clan Invasion. I pulled in lore bits from the universe but it was mostly flavor - the PCs didn't need to really understand politics to know they were in trouble. They found themselves the inheritors of a poorly outfitted mercenary company that was deeply in debt to the Capellan mafia, and took the closest merc job they could find that would keep them from going bankrupt. 

In the first session, the party went to meet their client at a sleazy bar, found out their client wasn't who he said he was, took the job anyway, got jumped by said Capellan mafia, and made a daring escape after a fun firefight in a warehouse. The next several sessions had the PCs investigating a mining town that had been seized by pirates. Masquerading as laborers, they met up with former administrators of the town who'd been jailed or silenced by the pirates and figured out who their enemy was. The campaign culminated in a multi-part battle involving 'mech skirmishes at several locations.

I found the rules for basic skill checks and personal combat to be really straightforward and easy to use. The abstraction of wealth was a little difficult for the party to wrap their head around, especially since they were focused specifically on making money, so I wound just using c-bills as currency and winging it, only occasionally looking things up in an old copy of Mechwarrior 2nd Edition I had on the off chance that I needed a price for something specific. None of the personal equipment had details, so we just improvised how those things worked. The positive and negative traits system worked well - several PCs took fun negative traits and I had a good time leaning on those during the game to complicate their lives. 

The mech combat system worked surprisingly well. It has a lot of the same elements as the tabletop minis game (hit locations, heat management), but stripped down to a very simplified version. It's not exactly compatible with the tabletop game, but is close enough that it feels like the tabletop game but plays much faster. A big mech battle took about an hour and a half instead of 4+ hours like it would have in the miniatures game, and the players didn't have to learn a bunch of rules to have fun. Don't get me wrong, I quite like the BattleTech tabletop minis game, but when I'm running an RPG, I want to keep the story moving, especially when playing virtually.

I was referring to a PDF of the rulebook as we played, and I found the organization of the rules particularly painful to jump around in. Everything was indexed, but the way the chapters were laid out meant there was a lot of jumping around during play between the combat rules, the skill rules, and the list of equipment and mechs. Part of this was certainly my unfamiliarity with the rules, but I couldn't help feeling the rulebook could have been a lot better organized.

Mechwarrior: Destiny purports to be a narrative, rules-light game, and it is designed to be run without a GM. The idea is that each player is supposed to "make a narration" and then pass the ball to the next player. There are some rules about using cues, which are basically short phrases that define your character, to build narrations, which are effectively scenes. Players have a metacurrency called Plot Points that allow them to 

Despite reading the whole section about building narrations multiple times, I wasn't convinced it was going to work well at the table. I didn't really get it, I knew I would have trouble getting my players to adopt it. My biggest concern is that being able to introduce narrative elements requires an understanding of the setting and the tropes as a whole, and most of my players were new to Mechwarrior/BattleTech, so I knew they would struggle to find narrations that would work. It also seemed that all the mechanical rules would work just fine if I ran it as a rules-light trad game rather than a GM-less storygame, so that's what I did. Maybe that invalidates the review for you, since I didn't exactly run the game as designed. But what GM isn't a tinkerer?

My players enjoyed the game quite a lot, I think, though I realized belatedly that I waited too long to put them in a situation where they needed to get into their 'mechs and shoot stuff to solve a problem. I probably should have opened with some stompy robot action and then got down to the investigative nitty gritty, but lessons learned!

If I was going to run Mechwarrior again, I'm not sure I'd use the Destiny rules. Instead, I might take a harder look at A Time of War or maybe try Lancer or the Mecha Hack but just set them in the BattleTechuniverse. Destiny's core task resolution mechanic was great and I loved its adaptation of the mech-to-mech combat rules, but the rulebook layout and the confusingly-designed storygame mechanics didn't work for me.

Have you played any Mechwarrior RPGs? What did you think? Did you have success with the storygame elements? What did I miss? Share your thoughts in the comments below or hit me up on Bluesky @thenovelgamemaster.bsky.social‬.