OBT Forum

I always enjoyed both for fleshing out the parts of the universe either was incapable of doing alone. The novels gave life to characters and events of the BattleTech universe, while the TROs gave life and perspective to the machines they rode into combat. Taken together with the ubiquitous sourcebooks and you have BattleTech. 

TRO fluff, not numbers, along with sourcebooks is what brought me into the game. I'm an RPG person at heart, not a wargamer. In many respects, I could care less about the tabletop game representation. So I'm a sourcebook/storyline person first.

Considering I'm one of the folks that feels the Battletech setting makes so much more sense if you pretend the novels don't exist at all (at least until some of the later Dark Age novels), I'm pretty much okay with saying that I feel the novels don't hold up well at all. They make the setting more dated, more one-dimensional, and they do a strong disservice to a number of integral players on the setting's stage.

Edit: Hanse Davion is probably the prime example of this. Going by the sourcebooks, you have a very nuanced character who exemplifies the shades of grey that make Battletech interesting. A man trying to avoid his brother's mistakes by having exclusionary focus on one opponent, who also wants to avenge his brother's loss. He is intent on forging ahead in his romanticized vision of a rebuilt Star League under Davion guidance, but continues to resort to the wrong options because of his infatuation with a warrior ethos. He returns to war, time and again, finding a justification no matter what. That's a fascinating character. That's somebody I could actually get behind. This is the guy I discovered in Handbook: House Davion, the singular book that made me at least appreciate the faction after a decade of rolling my eyes in distaste at the boring white-hats.

Unfortunately, most of the fan base seems to have fallen in love with the Hanse Davion of the novels. The one who completely sets aside the FedSuns Romantic and Arthurian basis for a hatchet job of a story that uses 80's American jingoism to talk about how evil the Chi-Comms Capellans are. The novels go on to explain in very specific detail how the 4th Succession War is directly the result of Hanse's "horror" over the doppleganger's treatment at Max's hands. Yes, because millions of deaths for two nations is absolutely worth that. I guess they forgot to tell Hanse that doesn't make you a white-hat, and that the AFFS actually does have SpecOps troops to handle something like this.

For similar examples, read the story of the Clan Invasion from sourcebooks alone, particularly from the more recent ones. Without the trite story lines found in the novels, it actually reads as a pretty fascinating story of the results of conflicting philosophies, both arising from a very specific historical event. The sociological viewpoint of seeing how this has played out over a century or three...that's the kind of stuff that needs to have more time in the spotlight. Respectfully to Mr. Knightmare, I couldn't disagree more. The sourcebooks and TROs do a beautiful job of showing the nuanced, shades of grey that make this setting fantastic. The novels simplify and personalize the story arcs overzealously.

Of course, this all probably explains why most of my AU work focuses on the big picture. I tend to think a view from the ground is a wasted opportunity. With a setting this big, the only view I want to see is the view of my players and their interactions in the setting.

Edit 2: On a side note, this is why I'm so happy that Herb finally struck down the strangle hold the novels had on canon status. Novels don't trump anymore. Of course it never made sense in the first place that they were the trump card.

Fox to Hedgehog, the devil is in the details.  You can have all the big picture in the world but with no specifics you have nothing.  Data without context is useless.  A lack of detail does allow an RPG freedom to go anywhere but it limits overall development of the (I shiver to use the term) brand.  I say this from a historical perspective.  You can talk about WWII all day long but if you don't have Ernie Pyle or Eugene Sledge or a host of other first hand accounts you have no REAL understanding of the events.  Yes, those accounts are limited and simplified and many times flawed because of their lack of perspective but they let you crawl around in someone elses head and see what they saw.  The TROs, like Jane's, are great for information on the equpiment but thier fluff is too limited.  The source books as well are great for understanding where everybody is coming from, but they don't let you know where they are going.  That being said I got into the game because of the novels and the tabletop game.  Pen, paper, map sheets, mintures, dice, and a crap load of time; what more do you need?

And Hanse singling out the Cappis as the focus of stupid evil (up to this point the FS was self centered evil, the LC was greedy evil, the FWL was disorganized evil, and the DC was scary evil) fit with his character of going to war when it looked like other means would work better and it smudged that white hat somewhat.  Though it did give us the SIC for awhile.

I only read one novel Wolves on the Border but I read nearly all the TROs.

Fiction brought me into and keeps me with the game.

Always loved some of the novels, although others... the TROs on the other hand I've loved pretty much all of them.  So I'll go TRO

There pieces in each of the novels that strike a cord somewhere, quite often there's about 10 in each TRO + we get the units to act.

Always found the novels mind-numbingly boring, if not overly facile and hardly immersive.  I'm a much bigger fan of the sourcebooks. 

To be entirely fair to the Battletech novelists, I hate most novels.  It's a rare novel that I read where I don't feel like there are huge logic holes and I actually find the characters likeable and interesting.  My biggest beef with most of the Battletech novels simply revolve around how uninteresting I think the Steiner-Davions are, and how little is done in them to distinguish 31st Century Inner Sphere living from 20th Century American living. 

Most of the novels for Battletech I read, it feels like some guys in Illinois or Michigan just decided to get together one day and take over the world with their BattleMechs, and then they did and lived happily ever after, lather, rinse, repeat.  None of them seem to have any great motivations or goals, they're just ordinary guys who happen to have 'Mechs.  The 'Mechs are cool, but the characters aren't.