With the impending release of Robotech RPG Tactics (impending meaning sometime before December 2014 at this point ... *sigh*), I took to looking at Rifts as Table Top War Game. If the initial game is set during the Coalition's "Crusade" against Tolkeen, it makes a lot of sense. The basic game would ship with a squad or two of CS troops and a similar point value of Tolkeen forces. Expansions could bring in the Vampire Kingdoms, Triax/NGR, Japan, Atlantis and the Splugorth, etc. I think it would work out great!
There's a few issues, though, mostly doing with scale. Palladium's high tech settings are notorious for ranges being ... eyeballed is the best description I can come up with. Even assuming consistent ranges, speeds, etc, there's still the issue of those ranges and speeds being far to great for a 6'x4' table. I know RRT made some hand-waves in the name of playability on this topic, and I imagine a Rifts RPG Tactics game would have to do the same thing.
Let us first consider scale. There's really two scales people will play out: 25/28 mm and 6 mm. 25/28 mm is the scale of the big boys. Warhammer 40k is in this scale, although their scaling itself is a bit strange. Robotech RPG Tactics is done at 6mm scale. Roughly speaking, this means a 5' 7" tall "standard" human would be 6 mm tall in the game. For this discussion we'll talk about the 6 mm scale, for reasons that will become obvious and for inter-connectivity with the Robotech RPG Tactics game.
Assumption: 6mm = 5' 7" (1/285 scale)
Assumption: Standard TTWG board is 6' x 4'
Assumption: Game round = 15 seconds in-game (per Rifts RPG)
Problem: Infantry shooting off the board.
Let's look at the CP-40 Pules Laser Rifle, the new standard infantry weapon of the Coalition. It has a range of 2000 ft. At the assumed scaling, this gives the CP-40 an 84" range, just over 7 ft long!.
Average CS Grunt speed? Well, the average human SPD is 10. The CS Grunt gets Running, which adds another 4 to 16 points. Call it an extra 10. Your average CS Grunt has a SPD of 20. Crunching the numbers in the book gets us an overall speed of 300 feet per melee round. At scale, that's a movement of just over 12" per round. So, not terrible.
At this scale, grenades with the standard 12 ft radius of AoE will have a radius of a little over half an inch.
Ok, so obviously the RAW won't translate completely to the table top. What if we fudge the distance metric a bit? 6 mm is still equal to 5' 6", but let's cut weapon ranges down to 25% of their true range (range / 4). The weapon's max range may be 2000 ft, but in combat conditions that's going to drop drastically.
So, CP-40 has a 2000 ft range. For our purposes we'll call that 500 ft. That's roughly 21 inches, or a foot and three quarters.
How about our Mr. Speedy grunt up there? Do we want to nerf him as well? Well, that depends on how we handle vehicles. Let's look at the Mk V APC (CS) - it has a top speed of 90 mph, which translates to 1980' per 15 second round. At scale, that's just shy of 7'. How about no? Okay, so movement speeds need to be addressed as well. For vehicles, it looks like the same quartering needs to happen. Our APC will move at 21", with an option to move 42" as full out move. If we use the same process for infantry, that'll give us a grunt with a base movement of 3", with an option to move 6" when running.
So, in general, it looks like ranges of all kinds need to be reduced to a quarter of the listed values.
Other options might be to use the ratio of 1 Game Round = 5 seconds (1/3 of a Rifts Round). This would put the troop's movement speed at around 4 inches, and the APC at 28" (call it 14" for combat, 28" all out). This is, again, more viable. It doesn't help with weapon ranges, though, as those can be considered more or less instantaneous and aren't affected by round length considerations.
I'll read over the stats on the Robotech RPG Tactics stuff and see if I can work out what they did for their movement values.
Oh, for people curious about Rifts at the 28 mm scale ... that CP-40 would have a range of about 37 ft. Not really doable. The best hand-wavium I could come up with would be to peg 2000 ft = 12 in for weapon ranges and go from there. That's roughly 166.67 ft per inch on the board. The board would represent an area 12,000 ft by 8,000 ft (2.27 miles by 1.5 miles). Now, with that math, the CS grunt would only be moving about 1.8 inches per round. However, if we assume that one game round is equivalent to four Rifts melee rounds (a full minute) then his speed is 7.2 inches. Scale it back to 6 inches for "caution" and we might have a workable system. Let's see what a pistol does at this scale:
C-20 Laser Pistol. Range: 800 ft. Table Top Range = 12/2000 * 800 = 4.8 inches ... call it 5 inches. The CP-30 (pulse pistol) would range in at 3.6 inches ... call it 4.
The C-29 Plasma Cannon (big damager) ranges in at 8 inches.
Mmm. I think the ranges would still have to be tweaked. But they look better. So, looks like 28 mm might work better than 6 mm, but 6 mm would allow the game to interface with the Robotech RPG Tactics game.
*shrug* That's all I got for now.
