I like mechs and the various anime and video games that contain them. I haven't talked a lot about them on this blog, but in pretty much every other venue where I post about stuff they are a running theme of mine. The main reason I have not talked about them on here that much is that I have yet to find a ttrpg for mechs that I like. The ones I've seen are either too fiddly in a particularly 90s way - build points and all that - or are some of the more modern rpg designs I can't stand - pbta, blades in the dark, 4e, that kind of thing. I am also reliably informed by an expert that the particular niche I want for a mech game isn't currently being filled.
So what's a girl to do? Well since I am ostensibly a game designer now (gasp!) I guess I'll at least think about designing a game. So I'm going to list some stuff I'd want and try to express the general tone and hope that either gives me an idea of where to start or that some brave and intelligent reader will stop me from tilting at windmills by pointing out my expert was wrong and they missed or x or y game I should try.
- The series I most want to emulate with this is Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team and Fang of the Sun: Dougram as well as other real robot type anime like Patlabor and probably a variety of other UC Gundam series such as the original, Zeta, ZZ, and the other two in the gritty gundam trilogy, 0080: War in the Pocket and 0083: Stardust Memory.
- I want the PCs to be members of some sort of military org - whether regulars or irregulars - who perform various missions with action being both in and out of the cockpit. In researching for this I found out that there is actually some real world equivalent to the out of mech scouting we see in some episodes of 08th MS Team in the form of people dismounting British WWII cavalry tanks to scout. Neat!
- Sandro referred to this as the "Ace Combat" type after the series of jet fighter video games and yeah that sounds about right.
- I don't want heavy mech customization at the start but I would like some system where damaged mechs need to be jury rigged or refit with various new parts based on the campaign. Mech customization happens as the mech develops a story in the fiction of the game world.
- Rules wise I'm currently split one of two ways - either a version using the Cepheus Engine or some variant or one using BRP with some influence from the old and out of print BRP Mecha book.
- I do see the campaign idea as very similar to "what if you ran a traveller merc game where everyone were members of various tank crews" and I do think Cepheus has some pretty robust vehicle combat rules. The problem is figuring out how to make combat machines that act like they do in the shows I want to emulate and still function within those rules.
- I think I need something like both Dougram and Gundam have that explains why these machines can do things like make surprise attacks in an assumed technologically advanced future. Gundam has Minovsky Particles which jam stuff* and the planet from Dougram passes through a nebula which interferes with electronic communications - though apparently not the controls of mechs. I think having a planet be honeycombed with tunnel systems that mechs could retreat into (and which they were partially developed to navigate) might be a good idea.
- In my head I'm largely imagining the campaign frame I tried way back in college for a mech game where a proxy war is being fought on a far away planet with an imperial power fighting an insurgency on it and the insurgency being secretly armed by a rival power. The PCs in this old campaign were members of the insurgency who stole some mechs and then were going to use them to carry out quick but devastating attacks on the imperial flank.
That's it for now and I guess is not much but maybe someone will save me from having to write my own system by suggesting something I'll like in the comments!
* I think the initial fighting of the One Year War also seems like it would've obviously destroyed a great many satellites required for the normal kind of surveillance we're talking about.
You're obviously dissing Lancer with that 4e crack (which is your loss) but I don't see anything that suggests you've looked at Absolute Tabletop's Mecha Hack. The game's a mod of the Black Hack and thoroughly OSR when it comes to design approach. It isn't quite what you want as-is even with the (vital) Mission manual expansion, but would serve as a good starting point to build from - or perhaps better yet, use the more recent Aether Nexus version of the rules, ditching the anime-fantasy setting but retaining the new mechanics for resources.
ReplyDeleteArmor dice are way more interesting than armor points, and you could do some AT VOTOMS/New Type stuff with the Nexus Surge mechanics. Swap out the kin types with actual military specializations that grant the pilots differing abilities and make the boons more skill-like and you'd be off to a good start.
How does Mecha Hack do skills?
DeleteNone as such. Anything that you might make a skill roll for is likely to be an "aspect test" where you roll under one of four broad aspects (your core character stats) on a d20. If you really wanted to append a skill system, it's be easy enough to homebrew. Me, I'd do a skill list with whatever I wanted to be significant in my campaign, let the players pick one or two during character creation and buy more using "arsenal points" (the games XP system) at a fairly low cost - maybe 2-4 points. Having a skill would give you favor (advantage in D&D 5e terms) when testing for something involving it, which might not always be on the same aspect.
DeleteProbably best to keep them fairly broad, so something like "Roguery" instead of a cluster of fiddly-ass thieves' skills like OD&D had. That's a good example of using different aspects for different things. Stealth might test on the aspect that covers agility/speed/grace, while running a con game would be the social/presence/brass balls aspect and collecting info to put together a grand heist scheme is the perception/knowledge/smarts aspect. Mugging someone in an alley doesn't really need a Roguery skill, but it's probably easier to intimidate your victim into giving up their wallet if you test on the big/strong/tough aspect.
Easy-peasy if I can do it off the top of my head like that.
If you want a (slightly outdated and inaccurate now) read-through and review, there's one over here:
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/aether-nexus-anime-fantasy-mecha-rpg.923477/
You can have fun mocking my countless typos. I must've been drunk while I was typing most of those posts. Which is worrying, because I don't recall being blotto for a week.
I wrote some mech game mechanics that I'm really happy with, that find a good balance between "feeling" like mecha, without being super crunchy, and also being quite flexible.
ReplyDeleteThe core idea is a mechanic that can bolt-on to games that are amenable to that sort of thing, called Concept Crafting. A mecha consists of a Core and three pieces of Gear, where each piece consists of two Words (or can be modified with additional words), where the Words are like the crafting materials.
In this blog post I basically collate all the previous concept crafting posts, including the mecha stuff. The original Concept Crafting idea came from the blog Tarsos Theorem.
https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2024/07/game-design-pattern-concept-crafting.html
Never published the mecha game I was working on but if I had it would have been called Maximum Recursion Depth Volume 2.