Rob, will war chest points be able to convert to xp to purchase SPA's at a later time?
No. However, since almost everybody likes advancement systems, there will most likely be a way to advance your Avatar's stats. If there is, to keep things simple, it'll most likely be a combination of "you have to have your Avatar participate in X scenarios, AND must have Y number of kills to advance one Category upwards by Priority Level." So, for example (EXAMPLE, NOT SET IN STONE RULE) you play 5 scenarios and have scored 3 kills with your Avatar, so you may advance any single Category - in this case Logistics - from Priority D to Priority C. If you took SPAs from Priority B to A, you'd get the difference in XP to spend, but obviously you'd have to meet any pre-requisites for the new SPA.
Oh, and I'm going to arbitrarily raise the price of the Jumping Jack SPA, likely to 250 or so.
For a clan WoR campaign we should probably add proto mech to the rules system. Treat them like battle armor with higher repair costs?
There was a reason I didn't include them, but I can't remember right now what it is. IIRC it was a combination of "Society Protos are bullshit" and, "the table doesn't have a lot of room to include them as additional options." The latter can be adjusted - most likely by allowing a direct substitution of an ASF point for a ProtoMech point, or allowing you to swap up to 1d3 Mech points for ProtoMech points (Light Mech = 2-4 tons Proto Point; Medium = 5-6 tons; Heavy = 7-8 tons; Assault = 9+ tons). But then we get into the issue of you can mix and match Proto types and masses inside the same Point, and it just gets very complex, very fast.
Protos are cool and add a new dimension to gameplay. They're just complex as hell to implement, and I'm more than a little nervous about stuff like, "everyone replacing all Mechs under 45 tons with points of all Sprites."
I think the rules are looking pretty good overall. I would like to see the repair of customized units be addressed a little more finely though. Would it cause too much trouble to break customizations into 2 or 3 categories...
Kind of, yeah. A really big thing in Warchest is simplicity - a repair of your Mech is always its tonnage in WCP, whether it's got no limbs, no head, and 1 point of IS on the CT left, or whether it's taken 1 point of armor damage. Breaking down repairs like this both adds a ton of complexity, and it's always going to be frankly arbitrary where we draw lines between "minor" and "major" refits. I appreciate making the player prove the difficulty, but the practical effect of that is to punish our players who have relatively full "real" lives (between kids and work) and don't/can't spend the time to min/max refits vis a vis WCP costs; we've learned that in our full-on AccounTech-style campaigns.
Edit: Can we reorganize points after unit generation?
No. The point of the rolling and allowed post-roll unit adjustments is to provide a little customizability. However, Clanners mix weights heavily in most Stars; full Stars of light or Assault Mechs are rare, and that rarity is intentionally modeled in the table. The middle of the bell curve are the mix-weight medium-heavy units msot commonly found in canon material. What I
don't want to see is people organizing 15 Mechs into a Star of 4 Assault and 1 Heavy, a Star of 4 Heavies and a Medium, and a Star of a Medium and 4 Lights...and then always bidding away the Medium/Light Star first thing because they're not comparatively giving up that much firepower. Again, that's not how Clanners operate. There's no way to freely allow point reorganization without that becoming an issue, so folks have to work with what the dice give them (allowing for the various ways already allowed which you can modify what the dice give you).
