Mecha Power-Armor game

Greetings,
I was wondering if any of you fine gentlemen can point me in the direction of a good Power armor RPG. Me and my group tried Armored Decent but the rules are a mess so decided to change. I was considering making the rules for it in the DH rules-set but that can prove to be near impossible due to the levels of power involved.
If you can't point me to anything that is not GURPS can you at least give some advice on the rules for the PA?

Other urls found in this thread:

docs.google.com/file/d/0B4wWV7MNJDLjcnJwd0tTZUljN1U/edit
sendspace.com/file/ijrlvh
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>power armor RPG
>DH doesn't have power armour
????
Savage Worlds' Sci-fi Companion has rules for creating pretty tough Heinlein-style power armour suits that can still die.
Alternately 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars might work.

Do you expect characters to be out of power armor?

Cause you could just take any RPG with "more powerful than human" characters and say "but you are actually in powerarmor".

GURPS is rather good for it. Ultra-tech has a lot of examples of power armour by tech level, though in general they could use a bit more armour.

They work quite simply. As an item, it grants various stat boosts, then armour, environment control, and a lot of technological devices.

As an advantage, you build it for yourself as a gadget. That lets you have greater control of statting it up - but it depends on the genre if it's appropriate. Better for something like Iron Man or Guyver than Starship Troopers.

Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun had some fun orbital-drop (rescue) troopers.

Oh, the spoiler was no-GURPS...

Well, this was a waste of advice...

GURPS doesn't really have PA specific rules, they're just very sturdy armor that increase some of your character's stats. And if you use Ultra-Tech, with the way it's made, your PCs'd ever walk over any kind of opposition without scratching their armor's paint, or they'd die not ten seconds in. There isn't really a middle ground, UT kinda sucks for everything weapon/defense related.

Mutants and Masterminds have additional rules for big mechas. Power armors run like any other set of powers

Do you count spartan armour from halo as power armour, if so then halo mythic might be up your alley.

Battle Century G lets you make power suits.

Otherwise virtually every supers system allows you to make any kind of not-Iron Man/not-Warmachine you want.

OP here sorry was at work here is what we're using now docs.google.com/file/d/0B4wWV7MNJDLjcnJwd0tTZUljN1U/edit

Possible. So far the campaign is like EVA but with suits of armor.

Just like that but with more stuff on it. Imagine Vanquish but with more suit variation

Thanks. I am not familiar with any supers systems but I'll check those

>Cause you could just take any RPG with "more powerful than human" characters and say "but you are actually in powerarmor".
I mean, you could extend this idea to just about any sci-fi system if you expect everybody to be in power armor almost all the time. Just have all the physical stats represent abilities of the armor and make the PC's suck at everything if they're out of it for some reason.

Well, I came here to say this.

What's your game focusing on OP?

If it's mostly combat, and you like the grid based tactics kind, I'd recommend Strike!, it's quite good at that.

Fuck off, the only thing Strike is good at is being shitty for everything.

Isn't there a guy on tg doing this?

Why the salt?

Game focuses on role-play out of combat and free movement and team tactics out of combat.
As for strike i don't think it will be that good of a fit

>Game focuses on role-play out of combat

That's kinda not saying much...

> and free movement and team tactics out of combat.

Positioning and movement, as well as teamwork are pretty important in Strike!

>As for strike i don't think it will be that good of a fit

Hmmm... someone mentioned playing Warframe using VeloCITY a while ago, since it's very movement based.

Also, looking around my library, last time in a similar thread someone recommended Last Stand; it's about human agents using alien powerarmor to fight monsters. Actually not a bad fit for an Evangelion-like.

link here: sendspace.com/file/ijrlvh

>That's kinda not saying much...
I am sorry but I can not disclose this any further on account of losing any and all cred I may have on a anonymous image board full of nerds.
Suffice to say we are military cadets and that the ratio of in armor to out of armor play is 40/60

Tell me more about GURPS.

>Hmmm... someone mentioned playing Warframe using VeloCITY
Now that I think about it that's not that bad of an idea. It will require making rules about all of the armor bits and pieces but it can work.
And desu half the fun is getting a suit and decking it out with a bunch of cool gadgets and weapons and stuff.

GURPS is love, GURPS is life.
GURPS can do anything.
See that mountain? With GURPS, you can climb it if you succeed your hiking, climbing and survival rolls.

Last Stand could be good then. One of the main mechanics is looting alien tech and adding it to your armor. Sometimes while in combat.

Valor, M&M, HERO could also work for more pointbuy approach.

I meant on what he said about the power armor, both opinions differ so much.

Just recently getting into GURPS

It's a generic universal system that supports multiple types of play. It covers everything from knapping flint to make a spear to commanding an intergalactic empire. The system's default has been called "heroic realism" because it has for the most part a realistic approach to things like combat with odds slightly favoring survivability, but GMs can tweak this to be as grittygrim or high-powered cinematic as they want. It's also classless and point-buy, giving people a lot of freedom in how they make their character.

It requires competent or at least conservative GMs, though; it has a ton of optional rules, variants, campaign switches, etc., and applying them inconsistently or going full 110% gritty realism tends to tank games FAST. This, along with some outdated memes stemming from the vehicle creation rules from the previous edition, has given GURPS a less than stellar reputation.

If you used GURPS for a power armor-heavy campaign, one benefit would be the system's innate lethality really highlighting the vulnerability of un-power armored humans; a dude with heavy power armor and a properly-sized melee weapon would be fucking devastating (though watch out for dudes with anti-tank weapons). Additionally, GURPS has one of the better approaches for firefights and gunplay; if you want operators operating operationally (in or out of power armor), I recommend giving GURPS a shot.

If you've ever played D&D3.5, it's like the issue with negative HP at mid level and beyond: if something deals enough damage to take the fighter from 60+ HP to 0 HP in a reasonable time, it will basically instantly take the fighter from 0 HP to -10 (the insta-death threshold). Similarly, if a weapon deals enough damage to get through a space marine's DR200 sci-fi armor, it will easily take out their 10-20 HP as well.

There are some solutions though, and my favorite is armor as dice.

The big issue is that DR is static but damage is variable: something that on average penetrates DR200 armor can easily roll well enough to burn through whatever HP is under that armor. Armor Revisited, and article from the Alternate GURPS issue of SJGames's monthly e-zine, talks about replacing static DR with dice of DR. You don't roll DR dice (that would make things even more swingy!) but instead subtract DR dice from damage dice. For example, 10d DR armor (35 DR armor originally) negates any attack of less than 10d, reduces an attack of 12d to 2d, etc. For comparison, when a guy in DR35 armor is with with a laser rifle that deals 12d burn, he'll take anywhere from 0 to 37 damage, averaging 7; on a bad roll, his ass is OUT, no question. When we convert his armor to 10d, the laser is down to 2d and 1the guy takes anywhere from 2 to 12 damage, averaging 7; the average is the same, but we've made the extremes MUCH less swingy and much more likely to hit that sweet spot between no damage and OHKO (assuming the weapon has a chance to breech the armor in the first place).

Isn't GURPS a bt too hard to get into?
Also similar to how responding with "GURPS" has become a must on any "What is the best system for X?" tread, so has "What is the best system for X(pls no GURPS)"

>Isn't GURPS a bt too hard to get into?
Sort of, hence the "you need a competent or conservative GM or else everything will be fire"; a great GM will make things *super* easy for the greenest of greenhorn players, but a sub-par one will make it grueling even for old hands.

However, this is a power-armor thread, not a GURPS thread, so I'll stop talking about GURPS unless it's in the context of power armor (which is why I deleted the previous post).

This actually leads me to a question on power armor and the squishy bits inside.


How the fuck you handle the squishy bit inside? Namely, in 40kRPGs the armor had HP per part and it could be broken (again the thing inside isn't squishy, but eh), if we go from there it shouldn't be a problem with the pilot blowing up as he IS a squishy human, the problem would be the armor not being 'superhealth' so to speak protecting his real health, or having a forcefield of health of somekind, mostly for gamistic reasons as if we go for realism, a character suddenly dying when his armor is breached (like the example user did) is realistic (there is a reason for the power armor) but game-wise it's a horrible design suddenly blow up from RNG

Bumping with mecha suit/hard suit/exo armor/power armor/whatever

This can make for an awesome game where combat is handled as a strategy rather than a tactic with part managements and so on.
This can also lead to awesome cripple mechanics and it can be handled with a very modified DH rules set.
I will probably borrow elements from some of the games mentioned here like VeloCITY and other

Yeah that's me but it's in GURPS so I didn't think OP would want to hear about it.

Since there's a conversation going, here are the issues:

First, Ultra Tech is the sourcebook we're talking about here. But the problem is that UT has a lot of fixed worked examples but not a lot in the way of customizeable tools for building power armor. So I'm having to create those rules from scratch. The example PA does help in that regard, and GURPS is pretty robust because it's designed for tinkering like that.

Second, UT's other problem is attack/defense scaling. Spaceships has this issue, too. There are articles to fix this, like the Square/Cube of doom. IMO the real answer to is that without some kind of specific ejection rule, you're simply not going to survive a hit that kills the suit. Which is realistic: how many people survive planes, helicopters, or tanks that are shot down? So you build a defense system that gives the PC a chance of surviving (wounded) the destruction of his suit. The suit has its own HP and might die, but that's separate from the occupant. To me that's the only sensible solution for the survivability issue regardless of what system you use.

Third, if your game revolves around PA, then you NEED a construction system. Even if the players can't build their own in-game, you need a GM or the setting author to be able to whip up a nice variety of suit types. Which is what I'm working on. GURPS makes this pretty easy once you make some critical setting decisions.

Anyway, that's where I come down on this.

...

Goddamn masamune
Not everything you draw needs to sex everything else you draw!