[Mechaton] Scenarios

[Uriel]

So I'm gonna run Mechaton at a Con soon, 36 hours in total, and I was thinking about running some scenarios with special objectives as well. I think I'll run a race scenario, but otherwise I'm kinda empty on ideas. So if you've got any suggestions for how to run a Mechaton game differently or how to spice it up, please let me know.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Is the fighting fun in mechaton? You could do "King of the Hill".....
  Or capture the flag?

  Plus don't forget a design contest. Let ther players vote on who made the "coolest" design?

[David Artman]

Maybe I'm confused, but couldn't you run basically any scenario from MechWarrior/BattleTech? As Mechaton doesn't speak to a "campaign" mode or advancement (or even repair), you'd have to bolt on something from another game, for anything ongoing. But aside from that, just about any minis scenario should work fine, it seems to me. Defend The Base/Take The Base, Capture All Checkpoints, Protect The VIP from Point A to Point B, Get the McGuffin and Bring it to the Base, etc....

For ongoing play, I have thought (a VERY little) about salvage rules: basically, to repair a mech, you have to recover your "lost" attachment AND some other (probably opponent's) attachment--source of replacement parts and materials--then get back to "base" and stay there for X rounds. Advancement is tricky, though--all I can imagine is some Kill Count which, when it reaches X, allows the mech to gain an additional attachment point. Or maybe at X Kills one could upgrade an attachment to d8, even if by default it would only be d6. Maybe one could "reconfigure" existing attachment points before each engagement/scenario (makes for a good reason to design a versatile mech with a suite of attachments).

Hmmm... and don't forget the object damage rules--they could be leveraged for a "Destroy the Rebel Shield Generators"-type of scenario. You'd just have to figure a fair number of bricks that must be knocked off the Objective to render it destroyed--a minor balancing act (consider that the mechs committed to destroying the Objective can't really also attack, and will be all-but sitting ducks, unless they run-and-gun).

HTH;
David