:)
Welcome Ladies. I plan on having everytihng ironed out in the next day or two. I wil lbe sticking to the 3067 starting year, though I may or may not use the Jihad stuff, since it has just recently been released and not many know the details of it. I had highly consdiered going back to the start of the Clan Invasion(3049-50), as it seems that many of you know the game up to that point at least. However, sopme people like to play a clanner, and since the clans would be enemies, that would mean players having to fight one another. Not necasarily a bad thing but I'd like to keep you all on the same team.
As for dice rolls. I can go either way. If you have an idea of how to keep the dice rolls and everyone agrees I will go with it. Otherwsie I wil lstick to the DM roll to determine the battle winner, and leave it up to you al lto tell the story of the battle. since many of you have never played Battletech before here is a breakdown of how a normal round of combat would....roll out.
Initiative: Each player rolls 2d6. (alternately some players would be Lance/Star commanders and roll for their lance(4 mechs/5 for clans)
Movement: the player with the lowest roll moves his mech. Then the next lowest roll, etc, etc
Fire: Same as with movement: You roll 2d6 for each weapon you wish to fire(dpending on the wepaons and heat sinks this could range from 0-10+ weapons..thats alot of rolls)
Physical attacks:2d6
Damage: Damage does not go nito aeefect until after the firing/melle is over. This means that even if your mech is destroyed you stil lget to carryo ut your actions for that round.
Heat Phase: all wepaons, and movement build up heat. at the ned of the turn the mech dissipates heat, depending on how many heat sinks it has. Normally it is okay to have a few heat left over. However, they carry over and continually overheating wil leventually put you high enough on the heat chart to force you to shut down, or even worse suffer an ammo cook off. (Big boom)
In addition to those rolls, there are rolls for when a pilot takes damage(hit to the mech head, ammo explosion, falling), Piloting rolls for some special manuevers like a Death From Above, or charge attack, Piloting rolls for runnign on pavement to avoid Skidding, Piloting rolls for taking more than 20 damage in one turn(fairly common), Piltoting rolls for moving through rubble or rough terrain, and also for entering a water. Obviously we do not need all of these rolls. But, as you can see even keeping just the attack rolls would involve alot of rolling.