Interview: Wargamer’s Tim Linward’s Questions (and Max’s Answers)

This time, it was my turn for an interview! Wargamer’s Timothy Linward was kind enough to reach out for a piece about Precipice, and asked some very insightful questions about my work background, as well as the origins of the game. You can read the article on the Wargamer website, and with Tim’s permission, I’ve transcribed the questions and my full answers in this post. If you’re curious about the mecha anime that got me hooked (surprisingly, not Gundam!), design lessons from past games, or my opinions on Robot Jox, read on!

Timothy Linward: What was your role during the development of Star Wars X: Wing and Armada?

Max Brooke: That one's sort of a long story, but I think the background is useful, so bear with me here!

In 2011, I was hired at Fantasy Flight Games as an RPG producer. Basically, "producer" meant wearing a lot of hats, from project management to game design. I worked for several years on Warhammer 40,000 RPG (mostly Rogue Trader and Only War) and Star Wars RPG. It was a really good education in the games industry that cut across a lot of different areas.

Because we were all minis gamers, the RPG team members often served as playtesting pinch-hitters for the growing Miniatures department. This started with Dust Warfare (FFG's first foray into minis games in that era), one of the first projects where I got to work closely with folks like Michael Gernes and Alex Davy. And it continued as Star Wars: X-Wing spun up. I participated in some of the Wave 1 playtests, and we were very involved in the early testing of Star Wars: Armada. 

Around five years into my time at FFG, a spot opened up on the Miniatures team. By then, I had a good bit of experience collaborating with the people on that team and a couple years of design lessons from RPGs. Meanwhile, Alex Davy and Frank Brooks had both been chugging away on X-Wing for several years, and wanted to get some variety in their creative diet. So I stepped into a design role on X-Wing for Wave 9 of 1st Edition (including the Shadow Caster, Fang Fighter, TIE/sf, and ARC-170). 

The first wave was sort of an apprenticeship under Alex and Frank, but I also started to develop my own signature style on X-Wing. One of the first upgrades I designed was Seismic Torpedoes. Destructible terrain has always been something I've enjoyed, I guess, and that has obviously resurfaced in Precipice. In subsequent waves, I'd also work on ships like the Quadjumper and Skurrg Heavy Bomber, which had interesting movement and position considerations of their own. One of the challenges of X-Wing 1st Edition was that the design space was incredibly tight. There were barely any levers to pull, and you had to really think outside the box to create interesting new content.

Then I got the chance to be part of the X-Wing 2nd Edition refresh, which was an amazing opportunity to revisit everything we'd all learned about the game and bring together an edition with the design space to last as long as we needed it to. I remember we spent a ton of time working on a "Color Pie" to better differentiate the different factions, and on assessing which fundamentals we wanted to elevate (flying the ships, rewarding positioning) and what game design elements of 1st Edition had impeded those things. I've definitely taken those lessons in design space planning forward into other games I've had the chance to design, including Star Trek: Into the Unknown and Precipice.

In terms of Armada, I never had much formal involvement beyond helping playtest and sitting in on brainstorming sessions as a member of the Miniatures team. But I did get to work closely with Michael Gernes and Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, both of whom are friends to this day and close collaborators on Precipice!

TL: Your love for mecha is incredibly clear in the rules for Precipice. Which mech universes are your favorites? What about specific mechs?

MB: I fell hard for mecha when I was about 11. I saw a couple of episodes of Vision of Escaflowne, and I was obsessed. It felt so fully realized and yet so mysterious, because it was pulling from an incredible well of influences I hadn't yet experienced, from older mecha like Panzer World Galient to literary classics William Blake.

From there, I went from Gundam Wing into the US TV broadcast of Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), then setting my VCR to record all the Universal Century OVAs when they played on late-night Toonami. There was a pretty good series of Gundam action figures released in the US around then, and I had a bunch of them. For a couple of years, I watched pretty much any anime I could, but especially if it had mecha. One of my oldest friends got really into the hobby side of Gunpla around then, and turned out some really amazing stuff with the Master Grade kits and garage kits of that era. I had a couple of HG kits, but I wasn't really patient enough to do hobby stuff yet.

Around the same time, I was first exposed to MechWarrior 3. I was a bit behind the curve on video games, and the simulationist nature of MW3 made it pretty hard for me, but I was still trying to load up a Firefly with missiles and jump-jet around. It rarely worked in the game the way it worked in my imagination, of course. I didn't actually discover that BattleTech was a thing until much later, oddly!

I actually fell out of the habit of watching anime for a number of years in high school - not because I was too cool for it, but because Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40,000, and World of Warcraft ate up all my spending money and spare time. Mecha still slipped into my life from time to time, though. I designed some custom Magic cards for Escaflowne, and I scratch-built some pretty weird dreadnoughts for my Space Wolves.

Then, in college, a more anime-aware friend of mine said I should check out this show called Code Geass, and the mecha roller coaster kicked off all over again. But this time, I had a lot more patience, some basic hobby skills, and a strong interest in fitting my renewed fixation into my interest in games more directly. I also had access to a lot more old series at this point, thanks to a much wider net of localization being cast.

In terms of mecha series that stand out as my favorites, I think it's pretty hard to beat Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), but there are a few contenders. Vision of Escaflowne shows off some of Shoji Kawamori's most memorable and evocative visual designs and has that amazing Yoko Kanno score. Fantasy mecha still really speaks to me. Broken Blade (sometimes localized as Break Blade) is probably my favorite fantasy mecha series at this point, though I do wish more of the manga had been adapted.

More recently, Aldnoah.Zero and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans really impressed me with their clever takes on mecha genre meta-history and the competing mecha subgenres like more grounded "Real Robots" and more fantastical "Super Robots." They also both feature battles based on problem-solving tactics and some really standout mech designs. I have more than a few Gundam Barbatos kits.

It unfortunately doesn't have any model kits, but Re:Creators also explored different genres (including mecha) clashing with each other. That concept, of characters from different mecha worlds coming together in a single story, really stuck with me as something I wanted in a game.

In terms of Western properties, I think Pacific Rim remains the one to beat. It's just a perfect movie on top of being extremely targeted at my interests. I thought Pacific Rim: The Black was fun, and I even like the much-maligned sequel film. The Rooster Teeth series gen:LOCK was also something pretty special, at least in its first season (I never watched past that). I did finally watch Robot Jox at Michael Gernes' insistence a couple years back, and was pleased to discover that it actually rules!

TL: Which is your favorite line of mech minis or Gunpla? I'm aware you're developing your own for this game!

MB: There are too many to count, honestly! Obviously Bandai is in its own world of production wizardry with its fully snap-fit kits and multiple colors on sprues, but in the time I've been playing Warhammer 40,000 (well over 20 years now), I've been amazed with how good they've gotten at producing large plastic kits of their own. The Imperial and Chaos Knights range have some gorgeous mecha. And although I've never built one, I'm quite fond of the Wraithknight! Infinity also has some really cool mechs, and I like the way they blend anime and cyberpunk aesthetics.

Precipice will have its own minis available, first as STLs for home 3d printing, and hopefully in other forms in the future. Getting to see the original designs for the game realized is utterly magical, and the artists and sculptors I've had the pleasure of working with are an amazing bunch! 

As excited as I am about our original designs, the game is very much meant to be playable as a "Bring Your Own Mech" experience, too. Part of the reason I wanted to make this game was that I have a lot of amazing kits I'd love to put on the table, if only I had a game where they really fit in. Fortunately, in the last few years, we've seen a lot of folks in wargaming really embrace minis-agnostic play again, which is perfect for games that have both their own original sculpts and also encourage you to get imaginative with things you already have!

TL: What core fantasy do you want the rules to facilitate?

MB: Most of all, I want Precipice to guide players into the headspace of their pilot, controlling their mech through a chaotic and dangerous battlefield. Controlling the mech should be fun and rewarding, but also varied and challenging enough to keep players coming back. That's the balance I've tried to strike with the design. 

TL: You've put a lot of emphasis on movement and momentum. What led to that? What were you inspired by, and what earlier designs that you or others have made fed into it?

MB: As I alluded to above, I want both the fun and the challenge of Precipice to be the control of the mech. Most mecha miniatures games put the player into a "command and control" role, and abstract a lot of the piloting. For an army-based game, that's a totally reasonable design decision. But I wanted to do something different with Precipice. I don't just want to make a game about mechs, I want to make a game about piloting mechs.

One of my biggest inspirations was that early experience playing MechWarrior 3. It was hard to get the mech to do what I wanted, but it was incredibly rewarding when it worked! I hope that Precipice will have somewhat less friction than I had with MechWarrior, but I want people to feel like they're improving, mastering the system, and becoming more adept as pilots as they play!

Playing later piloting sim video games, from later MechWarrior entries to Strike Suit Zero to Gundam: Battle Operation 2, I noticed that there was often an intentional degree of friction inserted into the way the game played, forcing you to consider your moves in advance of trying to execute them. This resonated with what a lot of people reported liking about both X-Wing and Armada.

TL: Wargames with just one unit per player are very rare - can you point to any other games that informed your design here?

MB: Just as a small point of clarity, Precipice does sometimes feature multiple miniatures, depending on the encounter and your specific mission. But you're absolutely correct that the spotlight is always on one unit. By design, you always interact with the world through your pilot, and your pilot is usually in a mech (though they can get out).

I would say the biggest influence in this regard is probably my experiences watching people play X-Wing. Consistently, from the most casual tables to the top table at Worlds, players just love flying the ships. "Ace" lists, in which players would focus on a pair of ships (or even a single ship with a disposable wingmate), made up an incredibly popular playstyle. People want to feel like they're in the cockpit. Strategic and tactical level games are fun, but I could tell X-Wing was scratching a different itch for a lot of people, and I realized that I felt it, too.

With that said, there were also a lot of elements of X-Wing that still hung on the idea that you'd have multiple ships. I wondered: could a game be fun with just one primary piece on the table?

The answer I've discovered is that it can, but it also pays to start thinking expansively about what a game piece is in a miniatures game. In Precipice, terrain is an active, destructible game piece. This is partly because it's fun to have your mech smash buildings, but it's also partly because it's good for the gameplay loop to have numerous things to interact with on the table. And what might be inside those buildings? The game gets more interesting if your actions might have larger consequences than you originally intend.

Thinking of the battlefield as a set of resources and threats (rather than as a set of modifiers) was critical to designing a game with a single primary miniature that still feels dynamic and has a progression familiar to players.

TL: How's the community developing so far? Are you getting consistent feedback, or is it split?

MB: I've been seeking feedback from all kinds of players, so unsurprisingly, I've gotten a wide array of responses. In general, people like the Input-Action System quite a lot. People like the mech parts on cards, with equippable gear mini cards - and keep asking me for more variety! 

I'm always looking for more feedback, though! If readers are interested in participating in the Open Alpha, the resources are available for download, and they can sign up for updates here:

https://www.wildplumgames.com/get-precipice-updates

Players on our outreach list can also get access to our Discord for testing!