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[Death or Glory]

I just wanted to get everyone's opinion on this since my A Time of War campaign just officially ended with the players all getting killed or captured on this scenario and there were some complaints that the scenario was too difficult.  In all honesty, I think it was more the dice gods frowning on the PCs today than the scenario being unbalanced, but I just want to get a more objective opinion to make sure that I didn't screw things up on my end.

Smoke Jaguars:

Active on Turn 1:
2 Gunnery, 3 Piloting Mechwarrior with Enhanced Imaging, Jumping Jack, and Sniper in a Summoner D (pilot will strictly adhere to zellbrigen)
3 Gunnery, 4 Piloting Mechwarrior in a Warhammer IIC (pilot will make an attempt to adhere to zellbrigen)
3 Gunnery, 4 Piloting Mechwarrior in a Stinger STG-3Gb (pilot will make an attempt to adhere to zellbrigen)

Active on Turn 3:
3 Gunnery, 4 Piloting Vehicle Crew in a Donar Assault Helicopter (crew will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
3 Gunnery, 4 Piloting Vehicle Crew in a Donar Assault Helicopter (crew will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
4 Gunnery, 5 Piloting Vehicle Crew in an Anhur Transport (crew will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
4 Gunnery, 5 Piloting Vehicle Crew in an Anhur Transport (crew will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
3 Gunnery, 4 Anti-Mech Skill Elemental Point with Small Lasers starting in an Anhur (point will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
3 Gunnery, 4 Anti-Mech Skill Elemental Point with Small Lasers starting in an Anhur (point will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)
4 Heavy Buildings mounting a single Clan ER Medium Laser with a Gunnery of 3 (crew will not interfere with any formal duels the Summoner D is fighting, but is otherwise unconcerned with zellbrigen)

Player Characters:

Active on Turn 1:
0 Gunnery, 0 Piloting Mechwarrior with Sniper and Range Master (Long) in a Summoner Prime

Active on Turn 2:
1 Gunnery, 1 Piloting Mechwarrior with Sniper in a Woodsman Prime
2 Gunnery, 3 Piloting Mechwarrior in a Timber Wolf A

Active on Turn 3:
2 Gunnery, 3 Piloting Mechwarrior in a Cauldron Born A

[serrate]

It certainly looks winnable by the PC's, but there's a lot we don't know, such as size of map, map features, and objectives.  And of course, an early cockpit kill to a PC would change the balance tremendously.  We also don't know what tactics your players used.  I think I would've gone for something like this:

Turn 1: Summoner prime pilot challenges Warhammer IIC to combat
Turn 2: Timber Wolf pilot challenges Summoner D, Woodsman attacks static laser emplacements unless Stinger challenges him
Turn 3: Cauldron-born and Woodsman commence cleanup on clan support forces, looking to place themselves into good ambush position on either the Warhammer or the Summoner, but not obviously so.  This should go on for a few turns until the perfect opportunity presents itself to...
Turn ?: ...break Zell and crush one of those two mechs

If by some chance, the clan pilots challenge first, you can try and taunt them into accepting a different challenge, OR you can just go with it and do your best.  It's really about keeping Zell going until the perfect timing presents itself, such as support mechs in the back arc of the target, or the target stays stationary for a turn, or whatever, but regardless you should be in position to break Zell within a few turns.  But whenever that happens, you do what the Inner Sphere does, and concentrate fire to kill stuff.  Likewise, the clan OpFor should not be able to concentrate fire (other than the support forces), until the turn after the IS breaks Zell.  Fire is simultaneous, which would generally allow the IS to get the jump on 'em when they first break it.

As a test, you could offer to play it again with you running the PC's and them running the OpFor.  If they can beat you soundly with the OpFor, it might be reasonable for you to agree that the exercise was in fact an un-winnable Kobayashi Maru virtual reality training session, and they couldn't tell the difference due to the drugs that were administered to them at their last meal.

On the other hand, if you win, while playing their PC's, you can roll with your evilest GM laugh and explain how their failure was the crack that caused the entire failure of Operation BirdDog and changed the timeline. 

[Darrian Wolffe]

That is absolutely winnable by the PCs...unless you aren't compensating for numerical disparity during initiative.

Barring bad luck or horrendous tactics, the PCs should have cleaned up.

[Death or Glory]

Additional details about the scenario:

This scenario was basically part 2 of a mech heist.  In part 1, 4 of the PCs attempted to infiltrate a Smoke Jaguar Repair and Refit facility in order to steal some of the mechs currently parked there.  Unfortunately, they were detected ("what do you mean there's too much blood to clean up before the patrol arrives!?" "YOU DECAPITATED HIM WITH A VIBROSWORD, THERE'S BLOOD EVERYWHERE!") and in the ensuing firefight one of the PCs were killed and the other three were badly wounded, but they were able to make it to the mech hangar.  As a result, the mechwarrior in the Woodsman Prime, Timber Wolf A, and Cauldron Born A all began the scenario with four pilot hits.  The PC in the Summoner Prime was the designated back up/distraction, unfortunately in order to remain out of sensor range he was unable to arrive at the Repair and Refit facility until after the AToW firefight had concluded.  The game was played on a 31x25 hex board (I proposed using a 50x31 hex board instead, but the players didn't think it would be necessary).  The map set up had the repair and refit facility in the center (12 hex by 10 hex mostly paved area with lots of buildings and surrounded by a fence with one gate on each side) with the rest of the terrain being fairly generic (mix of small patches of light woods and small hills, with a clear zone surrounding the facility).  The PC Summoner Prime entered from the Southwest corner of the board as the players reinforcements on turn 1.  The Smoke Jaguar Stinger entered from the center of the northern map edge on turn 1.  The Smoke Jaguar Summoner D started on board patrolling along the western edge of the repair and refit facility.  The Smoke Jaguar Warhammer IIC started on board guarding the southern gate.  The 4 VTOLs began the scenario parked on the ground in the western section of the repair and refit facility.  The two points of elementals began the scenario loaded into the two Anhur transports.  The PC Timber Wolf A, Woodsman Prime, and Cauldron Born A began the scenario parked in a hangar in the northeastern section of the repair and refit facility.  The PCs were unaware that the Guard Towers were equipped with battlemech scale weaponry at the start of the scenario.

The PCs made some questionable tactical decisions (ignoring the VTOLs and guard towers, engaging the Warhammer IIC head on, focusing on elementals when there were still active mechs, not interfering in the two Summoners dueling), but suffered from bad luck as well.  In particular, the damage distribution gods favored the Smoke Jaguars to a frankly ridiculous extent.  For example, roughly two thirds of the damage the Summoner Prime took was to the center torso and the Woodsman Prime took a fatal ER Large Laser to the head on Turn 4, in contrast, the Summoner D and Warhammer IIC died with almost all of their armor gone and all of their limbs still attached.

Fortunately, this was session 7 of a 9 session campaign that was scheduled to end in mid-August, so we didn't miss too much.  In addition, scheduling for session 8 and 9 was proving to be fairly problematic, which contributed to everyone agreeing to end the campaign there instead of having the next session be "you've all been captured, go plan an escape."  Comments from players between when I originally made this thread and today has lead me to believe that most of the balance complaints were just general bitching about losing instead of people seriously questioning whether or not this battle was too difficult.

[phlop]

WHAT, gamers bitching about losing. ( looks in the mirror )