The Culture: The Well-Known Game That Can Only Justify Its Tabletop Existence Via Clubhouse Campaigning

Despite my complaints, criticisms, and the current ownership--if you missed that, see Razorfist's video--BattleTech remains a suitable clubhouse game.

Tex's intro the Inner Sphere video demonstrates why.

The issue is that the videogame adaptations, including the most recent ones, are far easier to get into and enjoy and yet deliver equal or superior experiences.

Therefore, it is only BY going Full Clubhouse Campaign that you get an edge over the videogames.

How?

You go hard on the Patron Tier.

A Clubhouse Campaign using this game demands to be driven by the top powers' machinations doing a Diplomacy game on top, supplemented by more players getting in on the fun by playing out the wargame scenarios that these shenanigans are going to produce.

This is not just the lords of the Great Houses, the Phone Company, and the Clans. This also includes all of the various corporations--you think Discount Dan isn't above putting out hits on Despucito Manuel?--and all levels of ambitious warlords, pirate gangs, local officials, and mercenary groups (often the same people at different times)--each of which want their own piece of the action.

Steiner wants a new Aerospace Fighter? You better believe that there's going to corporate fuckery of the lethal sort going on to ensure that Your Guy gets the contract. The Phone Company denies any involvement in the disappearance of a notorious mercenary company? Someone may pay well to get some straight answers. Why is that old guy doing the perpetual traveler thing showing up at places just months before some major person, place, or thing blows up?

God forbid you end up in a nasty pocket war on the Periphery over someone's recipe for banana bread that somehow got misinterpreted as a Star League technical cache. (Yes, something like that can happen.)

You get the idea.

This game comes to live as a clubhouse campaign for tabletop play, especially with all the Combined Arms goodness that can be had, like Car Wars can (and should). That's why tabletop seems so lame otherwise; the videogame versions do that faster, easier, and with absolute dominance in convenience. Only in a big clubhouse environment can tabletop hit its full potential.

Not that Catalyst is even trying to do this, and neither did Wizkids, with FASA half-assing it via convention stunts as so many did back in the day.

Now excuse me. I'm aiming to inflict a new horror on the Inner Sphere: The Urbanmech LAM.

Yes, it's both a reference and a joke.