You can find the
Battledroids rulebook on The Trove. It is remarkable how similar to BT it is. The movement rules seem to be the same, the biggest difference is weapons and combat:
Every mech uses the same range brackets (ie: short is always 2-3 hexes), but every mech has a different damage value per bracket. When you hit, you need to check a table to compare damage value to armor value (which changes depending on facing) and then roll against a target number according to the table. If you succeed you roll for damage effect and that can range from halving the targets MP to destroying it.
Flip through that book, it's amazing how similar it is and it doesn't look half bad. There's even a short part with fluff at the end, where you can see that all basic ideas of the setting were already in place, even in this early stage. A lot of RPGs have really goofy and awkward first editions, this looks like a totally solid game, from crunch to lore.
I'll have to try that game out one time. It kind of looks like you could turn it into a "CBT-2-Go" kind of thing.
I picked up CBT 4th Edition almost 20 years ago, played for a while and stopped due to time issues.
Got back into it last year (thanks to Tex's videos) and the biggest change in terms of rules that I have found so far:
Partial cover no longer gives +3 (iirc) and uses the punch table, it gives +1 and leg-hits are ignored.
Yep, they have a remarkable amount of rules consistency going on. If they fuck up beyond what a simple errata can fix, they try to compensate in ways that don't invalidate previous work. The biggest changes to BT through the
centuries decades were the implementation of Battle Value (and Battle Value 2.0) to balance out Clan gear and C3 networks, and the implementation of Alpha Strike as an alternate ruleset, neither of which changed how the dice are actually rolled.
Always made me wonder, was one setting inspired by the other or was this coincidence/just a popular topos at the time?
I fully believe it was coincidental. ComStar was cultish, but they weren't worshipping technology itself. They worshiped the Word of Jerome Blake (as told by Conrad Toyama) while jealously protecting the working secrets of interstellar communications. So they were a weird high-tech cult, but the "high-tech" and "cult" parts were well-defined and separate from one another and most importantly:
they knew what they were doing. As opposed to the Mechanicus, who can't take these two elements apart without breaking down and who can't put a toaster together without the correct canticles.
You can tell this difference when
good ol' Freddie S. Anastasius Focht and Sharilar Mori secularized the organization. Sure, it caused the schism that spawned of the Word of Blake, but they managed to drop the robes and the incense
remarkably quickly. One would wonder whether a lot of their agents and technicians were really in on Blakism, or if they were just paying lip service for the sake of ComStar's
epic dental coverage.
I think the designers created ComStar as this mysterious order of mystics with a grudge just to have a decent excuse as to how people didn't just bomb all the HPGs to oblivion in the
First Succession War (plus it was the 80s, people liked hooded mystics back then). Since no one else truly knew how the HPGs worked, it was relatively easy to make spooky noises and threaten a communications blockade and get people to leave you alone. That it put ComStar in a great narrative position to play kingmaker and puppeteer as the story evolved was just a happy little accident.
This is also literally the only way to play tabletop Shadowrun.
This is midlly off-topic, but I love when people assume Shadowrun requiring too many D6 is "just a meme". Bitch, I reused the D6 I bought for Shadowrun in Warhammer 40,000 and I still had
dice to spare.
