Battle Century G

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Let's talk about Battle Century G.

BCG is a mecha RPG with a heavy focus on "genre emulation," where the giant robot battles play out like they would on the screen in a show or vidya. Whenever the subject of mecha RPGs comes up, multiple anons WILL eventually recommend it.
And the shilling is pretty well deserved. The combat system plays fantastically fast, and mecha construction is based more around spending points and selecting special effects, fluffing them how you want with all the technobabble you desire, instead of working as an engineering simulator trying to calculate and balance hardpoint spaces, weight, power, ect.

BCG works best for campaigns where the PCs each have personal signature mecha that they upgrade over time. The biggest flaws of the system, in MY opinion, are it doesn't handle campaign styles where mecha are just vehicles that all perform the same barring customization and PCs can acquire any number of completely different machines they can hop into whenever very well, and that a pilot's skill doesn't matter one lick in mecha combat, only a PC's genre powers have any affect on how mecha battles play out, which creates something of a disjointed experience if you think about it too much.

Discussion kickoff:
Are there any good fan resources for this game? More weapons, upgrades, powers, campaign resources ect? Google fails to bring up much of anything but people hyping it up but not actually creating anything NEW for it.

Other urls found in this thread:

gimmicklabs.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I want it. Got any PDFs?

gimmicklabs.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html

The author gives away the SRD for the game for free. Otherwise if you want a PDF of the full book it's not TOO difficult to find via google, I'd rather avoid posting the link I found directly since lately I've noticed a lot of links on Veeky Forums have been getting DMCA'd.

Plus it's made by just one guy who put a lot of love and effort into a game, and in the end he made a legitimately good, quality product.

It's worth supporting.

What kinds of campaigns have you seen run with it?

Can it handle Organic Mecha? I have a bit of a joke I want to pull on my players.

>What kinds of campaigns have you seen run with it?
I've seen people run everything from Evangelion, to UC Gundam, to Super Robot Wars. It's pretty versatile despite some shortcomings. I'm personally probably going to use it fairly soon for a campaign set in the IBO universe post-season 2's ending.

>Can it handle Organic Mecha?
Absolutely. It even has some special powers/upgrades for organic mecha.

Cool, let's see how well I can make it handle high school hijinks with a Giant around.

So, it's more for Gundam Wing than for 'normal timeline' Gundam? It does 'military' only when each character has their own special mecha?
(I know, I'm oversimplifying Gundam to the extreme, and probably getting it wrong, I just hope I'm conveying the difference in 'military' games.)

Name one 'normal timeline' Gundam where the MC doesn't have a special snowflake prototype or something similar.
>and probably getting it wrong
Completely wrong.


Basically it does Gundam perfectly fine, what it doesn't do very well is VOTOMS where Chirico will go through a dozen different machines before the series ends and blows up half of them, or Mechwarrior where PCs will probably buy and sell dozens of mechs before the campaign's end.

Said much better, thank you.

>Name one 'normal timeline' Gundam where the MC doesn't have a special snowflake prototype or something similar.

If all medias count, then there's Rise from the Ashes where you're only goes on bunch of GMs, Zeonic Front where you're only goes in and out of mass produced MSes, and Revival of Zeon where the Mains only use a GMified (i.e. mass produced/dumbed down) version of the Special Snowflake.

Its the exceptions that prove the rule.

You could still do Rise and Revival though since the main characters are still using the same or similar machines throughout the story, even if they're not "special snowflakes" by Gundam standards.

Zeonic Front is a good example of the kind of campaign BCG isn't so great at though. I mean it COULD do it, but it'd be jumping through a lot of hoops.

Bumpo

Still looking for some good resources, or at least a decent guide for making custom weapon systems.

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Man I wish I could play this just to play a hot-blooded character and ham it up to 11

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The rules even highly encourage it.

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So how would one make something like the AV System in IBO work?
In a setting where pilot-connected control systems are the standard I can see it just being fluff, but when it's not as common (like in IBO) and having or not having the plugs can make a huge difference in combat capability, how would you make that matter in BCG?
The easiest way I can think of is just leaving it a fluff thing as to why the PCs are more awesome than NPCs, and basically giving AV equipped opponents higher stats than ones without.

That seems like the best idea and its also the simplest one. Plus it allows for wiggle room when building NPCs and also also for a wham moment when you have a super strong enemy that doesn't have one.

Bump

Is the 'Z' supplement worth picking up?
(I'm assuming the SRD only includes stuff from 'G')

If you want to run off-kilter stuff like Eva or even Escaflowne, absolutely.