The Downtime rules are only 3 pages and mechanically consist of a single Extended Action that spans the period between Episodes. Yet, they accomplish a lot with very little. With one Test you can repair your robot, spy on the enemy or write a book that connects with thousands all over the world and makes you famous. The mechanic helps with...
2024-02-25 12:25:59 +0000 UTC View PostFor today we've got a grab-bag of all the Operations mechanics leftovers, totaling 6 different subjects. That's a lot! So without further ado, let's get started.
Given that the game plays without maps, you'd think that there wouldn't be Terrain rules, or that they'd be barely relevant, and I would be lying if I said t...
2024-02-18 12:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostIn BCG there are 10 general Action types, not counting things like Combine, Restoration or Lightspeed Assault that are abilities which are their own Actions to use. Meanwhile in BCS there's 5 Primary Actions and 11 Secondary Actions, which can be combined a number of ways, giving you a ton more options every Turn.
While there's some ...
2024-02-11 13:09:41 +0000 UTC View PostThe rules for Operations are more than twice longer than those for Intermissions so we're splitting them into not two but THREE updates, because there's THAT MUCH to talk about here. Without further ado, let's get started.
For the first time in many editions and updates, the Operation Structure is in two-column ...
2024-02-04 15:05:29 +0000 UTC View PostIntermissions are a rather large part of the game. Often, the longest part of the game. They've always been rather simple on the mechanical side though, and BCS doesn't change that. It does improve how you play them, though.
The general structure of Intermissions is the same. You roleplay until you run into some kind of conflict, at which ...
2024-01-28 15:10:21 +0000 UTC View PostA.K.A. "The rest of the general rules overview."
Pilot Levels, renamed from Power Levels, now have a larger mechanical impact than they used to. Each Pilot Level offers 1 Ace Trick, 1 Ace Perk and a +1 to all Tests. With this, PL makes pilots switching mechs feel like you actually get to carry over your talents from on...
2024-01-21 14:49:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe most important change to how BCS works compared to BCG, along with the mapless play, is the new core mechanic. From Monsterpunk I learned that I strongly prefer degrees of success/failure to binary pass/fail resolution systems. However, BCS is a little bit different compared to other systems with degrees of success/...
2024-01-14 14:51:19 +0000 UTC View PostI'm starting a new series where I'll be going in depth on the design of BCS, in the vein of the old BCG Restrospective, but instead of doing it for a finished game it's for one that is still in development instead.
We'll be going in the order that the content is presented in v0.1b. Because it's a beta, some aspects of the game may ch...
2024-01-07 13:55:29 +0000 UTC View PostBut I haven't had the time to write something this month. I've been thinking of going over all the mechanics in BCS a la the old retrospective series but the stars have been aligned in the opposite direction of me sitting down to write for a while. We'll get started on it next month, hopefully the beginning of next year is a little more helpful ...
2023-12-31 09:20:52 +0000 UTC View PostHello friends, rivals and assorted gentlepeople, don't mind me, I'm just going to drop the public beta of a whole new system at the same time that I'm announcing it.
I've been holding to this baby and making small tweaks for a long while, and I've got quite a bit of storytime to share alongside the basic intro to what it does, so let's get...
2023-11-19 17:19:12 +0000 UTC View PostThe thing I originally was going to upload this month could benefit from a few more days of prepwork, so in lieu of it I'm going to do something related, but a little bit different from the usual. In the vein of blog posts of old, and particularly of the BCG Retrospective, I'm gonna do a bit of game design chat, talk about things that worked as ...
2023-10-29 13:26:01 +0000 UTC View PostBarring any unforeseen bursts of sudden inspiration accompanied by a notable fiscal irresponsibility, this is the last art update for BC79. What could still happen is that I'll make a print version, which is enough of a pain and far removed enough from the design process that it's not something I'm interested in doing at the moment.
Anyway...
2023-09-29 11:27:51 +0000 UTC View PostI've just updated the module with new art, which is a good opportunity to post an update about it, show that art off, and talk more about the campaign itself.
This is the official AMB-01 Trawler art. Originally, it was ...
2023-08-18 13:12:57 +0000 UTC View Post
It almost had to be pushed into August, but we made it to the July deadline! If only barely, and only for some timezones.
We changed main artists. For the past 2 months the man who's been my main artist for 4 years has been unfortunately tied up w...
2023-07-31 17:54:15 +0000 UTC View PostI just realized that its the end of the month and I haven't yet posted an update, so here I am. My plan for this month was to post the finalized cover, but, well, as the title implies, I don't have it yet.
What I do have is the logo!
I added...
2023-06-30 14:02:31 +0000 UTC View PostThe anthology is finished! It's currently sitting at 70 pages and 6 Episodes. I'm gonna take another month or two for the editing and proofreading process, and also to wait for art. By the way, the anthology has a name now: Battle Century 0079, or BC79 for short, named after the year the anthology takes place in.
If you've seen earlier pos...
2023-05-28 16:50:05 +0000 UTC View PostWork on the anthology continues. One of the highlights of doing this kind of project, at least for my personal sensibilities, is that I get to make custom mechanics. Take these three Features, for example:
Dogged Determination
Internal Upgrade (0)
Effect: 2023-04-30 18:30:14 +0000 UTC View Post
The rewrite is at 2/6 Episodes. I'll admit that I wanted to be further along by the end of this month, but it is what it is.
For a little bit of context, on March 1 the power grid went down for half the country because one of the cables coming out of our largest nuclear power plant caught on fire. Then we spent the next three weeks r...
2023-03-30 19:46:24 +0000 UTC View PostI've been slowly chugging at the Campaign Module. However, I realized it was being harder than expected, and that was early while I was still writing the simpler Episodes. Worse, a part of me kept saying it needed to be longer and have more Episodes, for pacing reasons, you see.
The project was both growing out of control and lacking...
2023-02-27 19:46:48 +0000 UTC View PostOne of the coolest things about publishing your own games, is that the homebrew content you make for a specific campaign is only an editing pass or two away from becoming official content.
The Gemini System was originally going to just be a variant of the Allied Reinforcement rules, but those rules didn't do everything I needed them to do....
2023-01-15 14:40:26 +0000 UTC View PostAs foretold by the prophecy, I don't have much to show this month. I wanted to show at least a new mechanic for the campaign I have almost finished, but I lost a hard drive to a power outage two days ago and it was the boot drive, so I spent an entire day getting the ex-slave drive in working order and that really took the wind out of my sails s...
2022-12-30 12:21:32 +0000 UTC View PostSo last month I promised a campaign scenario. Here's some numbers to give you an impression of what that'll be like:
The updated version is out wherever it is that you get your files from. That's the final content update to the core book, but not the end of BCGR as a project. There are things left to do before I can call it fully complete, the first of them all being a premade campaign scenario.
Whatever I make next for the game will be free. Don't expec...
2022-10-23 01:44:37 +0000 UTC View PostIt's done! The last few illustrations are in and I've gotten in the last clarifications into the rules (if you're curious, the specific clarification is that shared/transferred Maneuvering bonuses are canceled if the recipient moves away or is moved away; this was implied in the writeups for the shield grunt and shield rival, but not explicitly ...
2022-10-16 13:45:29 +0000 UTC View Post"No news is good news" goes the saying, supposedly coined by James I of England.
Clearly the king never felt obligated to give other people progress reports.
Alas, no news is, indeed, bad news for us. The last pieces of artwork are taking longer to finish than expected, so unfortunately this is an update just to say that there'...
2022-09-26 00:49:38 +0000 UTC View PostWhile all the new art is a great addition, the best thing about the decision to take most of the year to upgrade the book is just how many errors in the text I've managed to fix. Eight months, three game updates and two sets of proofreaders later, I'm still finding typos, double spaces between words, and the like.
At any rate, THE ARTENING...
2022-08-28 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostAll the relevant download sites have been updated, so here I am for the status/roadmap post!
These are the final two high priority pages in need of filler art:
P175: Faction Wealth Tests.
P194: Solar Grid Energy, Religion, Law and Labor.
Last month I said the next update would come when I had the art for those, but those ...
2022-07-17 22:21:04 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's art goes for the Exemplar Themes pages, and it was the trickiest art to conceptualize so far.
Exemplar Themes are for characters who represent an ideal, often gaining power from it, like GaoGaiGar's Guy Shishio whose G-Stone is powered by courage. These often work best when there's multiple characters in the same group standin...
2022-06-26 17:55:54 +0000 UTC View PostSlow month, compared to earlier ones, but we did get some art. First, here's three portraits for the Phantasm and Phasing Skills page:
I had the plan, a while ago, to show a Mycotypal human before and after using the gender change ability. For spa...
2022-05-29 19:25:27 +0000 UTC View PostI've just uploaded this month's update to both DTRPG and itch.io. In addition to the two pages I showed off in the last post, I filled a few additional pages with stock art (thank you leftover store credit) and wrote a few extra sidebars. I even expanded the NPC Contact table on the Lifepath section a little.
This results in a not-insignif...
2022-04-24 11:09:35 +0000 UTC View Post