CincyBattletech

How Cadre Missions Work And You: A Short Guide to Getting Angry At Someone Else Besides Your GM

Cadre Missions simulate a group of experienced and competent mercenaries (theoretically, you) providing on-the-job training and protection for the young and tender state troops just coming out of some academy or training program somewhere.  As such, in a similar fashion to Garrison Duty or Guerilla Warfare contracts, your skills out of the cockpit are just as important as the skills within it.

First, the primary Lance Role in a Cadre Mission is not scouting or fighting or defense.  It's Training.  A certain number of lances are required to be assigned to the Training role during the contract.  These Lances, which are assigned at the beginning of the month, are not available for scenarios or reinforcements.  They are working a full-time job training the students.  The only way a Lance which is in Training can participate in any scenario during that month, is if they're involved in a Solo Mission involving...well...them.  And probably a bunch of raw recruits they have to also care for during the Solo.  And because it's a Training role, it means that you're almost certainly going to start the fight with powered-down weapons and/or training ammo loaded. On the bright side, at the end of the month (or portion thereof, for the first and last months of the contract), you and all your lance members get +5 XP, even if you didn't actually have a Solo Mission that month. 

Second, everyone ELSE who isn't training actually has to go fight.  The usual caveats apply, but there's also generally going to be an escort of trainees in every mission, which you have to keep alive - and who have to actually score hits on the enemy during the fight.  You can't bury them prone in a heavy woods on the corner of the map in the basement of a septuple-hardened building.  These trainees also require skill checks, usually Leadership, during the scenario, to keep them from panicking and running away under fire.  Other skills do sometimes apply, Bureaucracy or Administration rolls are possible at the end of a scenario, or else it hits you with a small VP penalty.  These seem to always appear in the scenario briefing, so if you don't see an Admin roll required after a scenario, you don't have to worry about it.

Third and finally, everyone who is doing Training ALSO gets to do skill checks.  EVERY CO doing training is required to succeed on at least 1 Skill check at the end of the month, indicating that hopefully you have taught them something worthwhile, valuable, and have done so correctly.  This can be ANY skill, except for Piloting and Gunnery.  To complete your Contract successfully, in addition to VP, you need to accumulate a certain number of successful Skill Checks.  I'm not sure how many you need, and won't know until we've advanced to the last month of the contract; I think it's a percentage of however many rolls you need to make.  A unit with 3 lances doing training for 6 months would generate a different total number of Skill Checks (~18 checks) than a 10 lance unit who puts 5 lances on Training role and stays for 5 months.(~25 checks); this is what makes me think it's a percentage.  So, go about your business, make your Skill Checks when prompted (unless something says otherwise, TNs all seem to be an 8, or pass/fail based on your skill rating.  So a 5+ Mech Tech skill needs a 5 or better on 2d6, while a Strategy +3 rating would need to roll a 5 or better on 2d6 in order to pass the TN8 requirement.), and we'll all see about figuring out whether we've screwed up or not at the end of the contract.

And before you ask, no.  Like all non-combat die rolls, you cannot spend Edge on these.

(Now edited with the correct image - preview is for plebs)
 
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Enemy is AIRDROPPING onto the center of the board.

Unit Market

This topic has been moved to Contract Logs.

https://cincybattletech.com/index.php?topic=1725.0

I am not sure exactly how the skill checks will work. Are they a combination of being at the table in mission or are these going to go heavily into forum die roller?

I'm not entirely sure. I've never done a Cadre mission in any version past 0.36, and we're using 0.48.  The way they USED to work is that it tested a die roll against people who had specific assignments every month.  "Defense COs roll admin, TN X", or "X lance has been chosen to do small arms training, X Lance CO rolls small arms TN Y".  And then during missions you'd get things like "X number of allied units must survive; allied units will run away (counting as destroyed) unless the Local CO passes Leadership TN X after the first allied unit casualty."

Essentially, because it called for checks both during and between missions and not only from company-level officers, there's no way to game the system to ensure that a specific Local CO is attempting a specific roll.  The upside is that it tracked the number of rolls over the course of the contract and, VP aside, you only had to pass a certain percentage of those checks, so unless a roll screws up a mission, having SOME failed rolls is ok.  60% success rate, IIRC.

But again, that's all very old stuff, and it may well have changed significantly.