Lego Set 33 — Owens

The Owens was among the first OmniMechs made by the Inner Sphere. After the success of the Clanner battle technology on the field, the Great Houses spared no expenses in attempts to reverse-engineer it. In order to cut development time, the first few Spheroid OmniMechs were also either very simple in design or repurposed from older machines. The Owens is one such example, being developed from the Jenner chassis. In a similar fashion, I developed this set from my prior Jenner build.

This week I also wanted to talk a bit about my further contemplation regarding ways to use my builds in Mobile Frame Zero for those who want to do so — do not forget that I started making them for that very reason.

What has been troubling me the most is how to give each weight class some personality without breaking up the natural balance of the game. So, see this as a revision to the prior options. These are just slight changes to the base ruleset that ought to keep the balance to some extent — a simple mod. As you will see, for the most part, it plays like normal MFZ, and you can easily ignore these extra rules when playing with my models should you want to.

So, there are four weight classes of frames: light, medium, heavy, and assault.

Light frames have 3 systems and receive the bonus d8 movement die from the start (they do not need to run out of ranged weapons systems). However, once they lose their first white die, they are destroyed. This should keep their maneuverability while also emphasizing their fragility.

Medium frames have 3 systems, without any changes to the rules.

Heavies have 4 systems, without any changes to the rules.

Assaults have 4 systems, but as long as they have one blue die, they can roll ONE blue die as a d8. Once they run out of blue dice they lose this ability. If they have two blue dice, they roll a blue d8 and a blue d6. They also do not benefit from the bonus green d8 should they run out of ranged weapons. Again, this is a way to emphasize the assault class’ armor and ungainliness — this also makes movement dice extremely important for the assault frames that use them, like the Highlander.

As previously, light vehicles only use one system. Medium and heavy vehicles use two. Assault vehicles use three systems but cannot mount movement systems.

VTOL vehicles use two dice, one of them a mandatory movement die.

Aerospace assets must always include at least one movement die among their systems and it must be the last system to be destroyed (prior to the white dice, as per standard rules). Light aerospace assets use two systems in total. Medium aerospace units use three. Heavy aerospace assets use four.

As you can see, there aren’t many changes. I mostly changed the way to handle light and assault frames, as I wasn’t too happy with how it was before. Let me know what you think.