Mecha RPG

Can we talk about /m/-related RPG systems?

Giant robots, badass vehicles and tanks, power armors, manned mecha, self-aware mecha, anything goes.

Post your favorite mecha games, mecha pictures and table stories.

Other urls found in this thread:

discord.gg/J7TyZg
youtube.com/watch?v=nPou5WuE-Y4&feature=youtu.be
1d4chan.org/wiki/ChromeStrike
tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4810:79alax.6.5
banzaidyne.wordpress.com/heavy-gear-d6/
docs.google.com/document/d/1-rs__06lBfEOuAQHXKjt69XHNkKYEYk0gstvzA3sV00/edit?usp=sharing
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

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Battle Century G is my favourite mecha RPG. It's pretty much Super Robot Wars with dice, but you can adjust it to a lot of subgenres. Especially if you have the supplement book.

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That's the Thai game, huh?

>Battle Century G

I've seen it get some mad praise around Veeky Forums but I don't really know what the system itself is like. The drivethrurpg reviews don't help much either.

I know that a fairly long running quest on /qst/ has been using Mekton Zeta.

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spaceships can be /m/ too

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I'm a massive, shameless fan of Mekton Zeta. It's clunky, but great fun. There's a discord server I made dedicated to Mekton, though it's pretty turned into a mecha and hangout general, if anyone is interested in the link.

I'd be down, post that shit son.

Oh, obligatory reminder. Don't play or support Battletech/Mechwarrior in any way. The entire company is populated by criminals and fraudsters. They've been stealing since the very first day of the game back in the 1980s, and they're still stealing company profit to line their own pockets.

discord.gg/J7TyZg
Got a surprising number of people in there, though only a few regulars tend to talk. I'm Forever a GM in there, and I'm always down to talk shop. Check the pins for resources if you need em.

Neat, I'll check it out.

Huh?

Probably an asshurt Macross fan.

Ok, so if we're going to have a first class mecha game system, then we need a few things.

First, we have to be able to handle wildly different scales. You have a man-sized character moving at human speed, giant robots walking as well, tanks going faster, and supersonic jets. Different sizes, different speeds, different weapons ranges, and yet it all has to work together. And then you get into space or under water, and suddenly that's a whole different set of challenges. So what's the time scale? How does damage work?

And what about when you have gestalt mecha that merge into a supermech?

Next, you want piloting rules that make sense but aren't overcomplicated. Preferably with room for add-ons and cyberware and such.

And, ideally, a construction system so you can have a wide array of types, plus the ability to customize player-owned mechs.

Now normally, right about now I'd be singing the praises of GURPS, because in that system most of the problems are already solved. But currently your mecha choices are either to play the clunky 3rd ed which has a full write-up and connects to the shitty vehicle design system, or a custom system for fourth edition that you'd have to mostly roll yourself. GURPS Spaceships is a fantastic, elegant system for creating and running spaceships. There are even partial rules for mecha already in there. But it's not very far along.

So at this point I'd recommend a dedicated system and hope that GURPS gets more complete mecha treatments in the future.

I'm doing one myself but it's nowhere close to ready.

At a bare minimum, Battle has done all of these things:

Battletech stole the name "Droids" from Lucas and got sued.

Battletech stole all of their original mecha designs from Japanese sources and got C&D'd.

Battletech got sued by Harmony Gold over stealing the Macross designs in the early 90s and lost.

Battletech got sued by the authors for non payment in the 90s. Look up Michael Stackpole.

Battletech got sued AGAIN by Harmony gold in the 2000s for using the stolen Macross designs even after the first case.

Battletech got sued by authors and artists in the 2000s for non payment.

Battletech has $800,000 dollars in cash (intended to pay the above authors and artists) stolen by the company owner to make home rennovations. That owner STILL RUNS THE COMPANY.

Battletech employs an anime loving, child rapist who goes by the name of "mad capellan' on their forums who represets the company by posting with loli images on their official forums.

Battletech is currently being sued by Harmony gold for a THIRD TIME because they're trying to use the Macross artwork again. See this video: youtube.com/watch?v=nPou5WuE-Y4&feature=youtu.be

The entire company is sick. Don't support them. Destroy their fan base. Get their employees to quit, it's already happened to their last line developer and assistant line developer. Real mecha fans can and should drive americans out of the mecha genre entirely, and the battletech franchise is the perfect place to start.

I remember having a hand in playtesting Chromestrike, which is more in the vein of a rules-lite Armored Core or Front Mission style of mech, if you into that sort of thing.
1d4chan.org/wiki/ChromeStrike

Really enjoy Chris Perrin's Mecha. Its more rules light story game, trying to get across an episodic mecha anime feel. Does a neat interaction between the pilot stats and mech stats. Takes a generic approach in terms of building, components, etc. that has some customization but more abstractly than a lot of people prefer but I've found is easier to teach people than any of the more accountantech style. The battle map is an interesting idea, we had to add terrain houserules to make it a bit more varied.

I can believe some of the other stuff but the clashes with Harmony Gold I suspect are Harmony Gold being asses rather than the guys doing Battletech being shifty. Though Asshole vs Asshole clashes are still a possibility.

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>Real mecha fans can and should drive americans out

Someone's extremely salty.

>Battletech stole the name "Droids" from Lucas and got sued.

>The term "Droid" was first used in the science fiction story "Robots of the World! Arise!" by Mari Wolf, published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction in July 1952.

Lucas arts got the copywrite, but they did not create the word.

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I want to run a Jovian Chronicles campaign but the way it handles difficulty checks and how insanely lethal guns are in combat is a bit hard to manage. I quite like how mecha damage against humans is on a 10X scale though

I own the book for Mekton II. Is Zeta any good? Because II looks incredibly clunky.

To be clear, Lucasfilm owns the -trademark- for the term.

Which probably no longer exists.

Um, what? How did you come to that assumption?

Don't let players design their own mecha if you play Mekton, or at least police them heavily. It's fun to stat mechs, but some options are just flat-out broken.

How would one acquire Battle Century G?

To be fair it runs with bullshit houserules and some things scrapped entirely to make it easier to run as a quest.

Kaiser Glare is the most broken thing ever.

It's very simple d10-based. It's fast and easy to play. It has some major flaws; there are certain options that are just BETTER than others, and higher-level play turns into a bit of a damage race/rocket tag game. Certain builds also crack the game wide open. The on-foot stuff is absolute garbage, but it's not really the point of the system, so that hardly bothers me.

I believe it's still free on the guy's blog, unless you want the version with artwork, in which case it's on DriveThruRPG.

Would running a game using pre-made Mechs be better?

I'm also really interested in playing JC, but could never find a group. There's also very little talk about it.

Because normally after a word becomes part of normal speech it can no longer be owned.
Case in point gw loosing ownership of Imperial guard, and space marine and thusly changing the names of those factions.

Honestly, the more you make in advance, the better...but there's a caveat. The FIRST mech I designed for Mecha Space Pirate Quest, the Pumpkinseed, ended up being very underpowered for its role (I played that off with plot as a lesson on corporate shenanigans, it still had a few strong points and was mostly designed to fight pirates anyway). It also just wasn't very exciting. The second version, Pumpkinseed II, ended up being a lot of fun to fuck around with both when the players were piloting it and when I used it as an enemy elite mook, because by that point I had some idea of how combat tended to go and how to customize weapons. That said, I still have a really noticeable problem with power creep and fights being over in only a few rounds, so...

Open D6/Mini Six is actually really good for mecha games, look up Heavy Gear D6 for proof. I also wrote a home brew for Jovian Chronicles in D6 that I'll post later if the thread is still around because I'm phoneposting at the moment.

>Because it happened to a relatively unknown British game company it happened to one of the largest, most iconic, media studios in the United States.

>tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4810:79alax.6.5

They still have several different living trademarks on the term for various different mediums and purposes.

Add Disney to the picture and those trademarks aren't going away any time soon.

I both love and hate BCG for a lot of reasons, I love it for its simplicity and fast paced action, it probably has one of the best combat systems of any mecha RPG I've ever seen. But I also hate it for its surprisingly limited customization options, anemic weapon selection, maiming rules that disable EVERY upgrade/weapon in an ENTIRE location (and BOTH arms are ONE location, it becomes stupid for Gundam type games where 90% of weaponry is handheld so everyone just shoots each others arms first and foremost), the mental gymnastics you have to play in order to justifiably refluff the completely fucking out there upgrade options, and all the things listed in I also think that Mecha vs Kaiju for Fate is a greatly underappeciated mecha system, so take that as you will.

I can at least solve the Gundam problem. I played in a Build Fighters campaign, and the GM had use "Right Arm, Left Arm, Head, Torso," and then if you had some weird setup, like Backpack or Legs or something, you could have those instead of a different slot.

Basically that at least is easily fixable without shattering the system. Maiming isn't THAT bad if you design your robot with options in multiple slots and are willing to rename the slots to make sense.

>Real mecha fans can and should drive americans out of the mecha genre entirely


Ahhh, so this is what he's going on about.

This depends on the distinctiveness of the trademarked term. In GW's case, the courts ruled that the term space marine wasn't distinctive enough because it's used by too many other media. Essentially, they never owned the trademark in the first place.

GW didn't wait for court challenges to clear the decks of faction names that weren't trademarkable.

Unlike copyrights and patents, trademarks don't care about prior art. Also, two companies can own the same trademark if they're in different industries.

IMO droid is probably still a Lucasfilm property.


Btw ownership issues can be hairy too. Macross's us distributor licensed FASA to use its designs. Then years later, it turned out that they never owned the rights in the first place, so the sublicensing deal was void. This came to light when FASA sued a minis company that had a license from Japan. It turned out that they not FASA had the valid license. So FASA pulled the art.

Fast forward, and there have been repeated deals and counterdeals to try to straighten this all out.

And harmony gold has actually just received a court decision that they actually don't have any rights to the stuff they're suing the Battletech publishers over

>IMO
Your opinion isn't really needed when we can look up and confirm that their trademark is still alive and kicking.

While that might change in the future, it is still very much the property of Lucasfilm.

Alright Veeky Forums, shoot me your best custom mecha names. Whether they be official designations, or just nicknames your pilots give their personal rides.

Always have some kind of theme going, don't just name shit whatever. You can have different themes for different factions, but it makes things feel more consistent and can say something about the faction in question by their naming scheme.

Nicknames are an exception, since those are individual they reflect more on the individual who named it, obviously, so those don't necessarily have to fit the faction theme or any theme in particular.

Nope, actual Macross fans are angry about Harmony Gold and sympathetic towards Btech, we're all well aware of how that all went down.

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>The entire company is sick.
>CGL is the same company as FASA
You are a silly little man. That said, CGL are trash, so steal all their shit. In the immortal words of /srg/, do not buy CGL books.

When HG shills the board.

New developements show HG getting fucked by Tatsunoko from the get go as Tatsunoko did not have the rights to the 41 macross characters to begin with.

Will need to wait to see what the fallout is from this nugget of information.

Nicknames should be thanks to extraordinary acts. Like how Char only got his nome de gurre after Loum.

For instance, an ace named 'The Needle' earned the name after he shot down five enemy suits in a particularly clustered patch of the asteroid belt.

I'm an Armored Core fan, so I've got plenty of these. Barring the ones named after mythical weapons, of course.
Horse With No Name.
Spearfisher.
Powdermilk Biscuits.
Vagrant Cannon.
Ghost of Taka.
Crocodile Rock.
18-Pounder.
Six Special.

Heavy Gear d6

Someone took the good, yet clunky Heavy Gear system and setting and adapted it to run on the West End Games d6 system, better known for the popular Star Wars and Ghost Busters games.

banzaidyne.wordpress.com/heavy-gear-d6/

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Please do

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I'm home, here's JCD6, based on some formulas and shit that were used for HGD6.
docs.google.com/document/d/1-rs__06lBfEOuAQHXKjt69XHNkKYEYk0gstvzA3sV00/edit?usp=sharing

I was going to tweak some numbers a while ago, but never got around to it and just sort of stopped working on it completely.

>Battletech stole all of their original mecha designs from Japanese sources and got C&D'd.
That's not at all what happened. They licensed those designs, just like Hasbro did for Jetfire, but Harmony Gold decided to be a copyright troll, causing them to technically lose the rights to the Macross stuff (and I think they pulled the other anime designs out of fear of being sued again? not so clear here)

The irony being the Harmony Gold doesn't own the rights to those designs anyways, just the distribution rights for the original anime

>The irony being the Harmony Gold doesn't own the rights to those designs anyways, just the distribution rights for the original anime

Its this weird problem where Harmony Gold swears they have the rights for almost anything Macross related. The transformable Super(?) Valkyrie toy used for Jetfire is one of the rare exceptions and Hasbro is big enough that HG can not bully them (and even then Hasbro does not include any official instructions on transforming the retro style Jetfire toys into gerwalk mode).

Harmony Gold is the primary reason companies can't do international releases stuff related to 7, Zero, Frontier and Delta.

Recent developments, specifically earlier this month on the 16th, have completely fucked HG over. They've accepted a ruling that they own nothing of those mecha designs, character designs, nothing but some distribution rights, and in 4 years that's running out and there's no way in hell they're getting any licenses from the Japanese renewed with how much the Jap side hates them for the legal bullshit they keep pulling.

Robotech is dead, HG's claims are done. They get nothing. They lose. Good day, sir.

What are some of the most broken mechs you've seen players make?

Not him, but there's some crazy bullshit you can pull with infinite burst beam weapons and one-shot solar system destroying nukes, real Pun-Pun levels of broken but all perfectly legal by the rules. It's pretty infamous stuff among oldschool mekton grognards, and why none will tell you to just let plays build without HEAVY GM oversight.

I mean, Robotech might survive if they can actually manage to pool together all the stuff they designed for themselves and reboot it or something, but I can't see them doing that since they tend to just bank on nostalgia bucks and lawsuit money and the last time they tried to kickstart an original project, it didn't get funded.

HG treats Robotech the same way Hollywood treats Fantastic 4.

No one has any real interest in doing anything with it, and anything that does get tossed out is just a token effort to hold on to rights.

The problem is that HG has the trademarks and the TV footage of original TV, and other parties have everything else. It's extremely likely to be why Frontier and Delta did their best to completely scrub things like the VF-1 design or the UNS logo.

Now, things could be done if the American anime industry was less completely fucked. HG's trademark troll toll, while sizable, isn't outlandish by toy and cartoon standards; USMC paid them off for Plus, as did Animeigo and ADV for original TV (I'm guessing Animeigo got favorable terms in exchange for unfucking the masters, and ADV was just burning boom era cash.) But the industry is so fucked that that's not an option. The anime industry, and especially robot cartoons, is so fucked that just releasing Super Space Fortress Megafrontier and Super Space Fortress Walkuere Delta has been considered but passed on by at least two separate companies with no real thought to lawsuit issues. Remember how Code Geass was a runaway hit for the medium, never mind the genre? I've seen warehouses packed with it like Indiana Jones sequel hooks.

>It's extremely likely to be why Frontier and Delta did their best to completely scrub things like the VF-1 design or the UNS logo.
Both the VF-1 and all of its variants and the UN Spacy Logo were in the designs that Big West says Tatsunoko didn't have rights too. Hell, there was a whole episode where they flew around in VF-1s for training in Delta

Trademarks are use-it-or-lose-it by country or customs union, not a matter of assignment. It's why I can have chalky Smarties and you can have chocolate Smarties, but cross the streams and lawsuits happen.

The training ep in Delta is a thing, but Satelight's also heavily invested in being able to rerender on the cheap, so...

Worth mentioning that apparently they have good relations with the company that made Mospaeda, so those designs will probably remain accessible as well(and I could see them retaining the Southern Cross designs as well if only because that series is incredibly obscure in Japan)

It's only the Macross designs that are potentially problematic for them

Look, we've got enough "fuck Harmony Gold" threads between Veeky Forums and /m/ talking legal speculation and all that jazz.

Let's get back to talking about actual mecha gaming, yeah?

Gundamfags: When you ran a Gundam game (you all did, admit it) did you use UC, and AU, or your own full blown OC Donut Steel AU?

It'd want to run a UC, After War or Donut Steel game.

I an an OC Super Robot Wars setting where the players were Shadow Mirrors who came in and fucked everything up, and wound up running afoul of Gilliam taking a break between Hero Senki and OG.

Then I played in a Gundam Build Fighters game that was super fun, where I played the guy who knew nothing about Gundams and made Knight Gundam Quixotic, which was a Knight Gundam glued to a horse.

I've always had a fascination with scout/forward air controller/command vehicles, and logistical support vehicles.....but I've never run into a mechanism system that you can make this function without inverting its own asshole. Either they wind up far too expensive, totally ineffective, or impossible to account for with the rules....or all three.

Anybody with some thoughts/advice?

SilCore.

If there's one thing SilCore is well known for, it's being one of the only, if not THE only, mecha RPG system that does combined arms almost seamlessly.

How do you simplify it down mechanics-wise? Or do you just ignore all the small modifiers?

I'm not sure as to what you're talking about. It's pool of D6 pick highest, add mods, figure out margin of success if needed. It already is super simple.

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Whe read the all the task modifersand subres threw me.

Do you recommend Heavy Gear or Jovian Chronicles? And what edition, 3 and 2 seem to be published respectively.

>All the modiers and subtables threw me

HG3 and JC2 are the same system, along with Tribe 8 2e, Gear Krieg 2e, and Core Command. The way it works is that you have the Silhouette Core Rulebook (SilCore Deluxe v3.1 is the latest version), and then the Player's Guide from the setting/game line of choice is there to tell you how to use those core rules to play in Heavy Gear/Jovian Chronicles/whatever.

>All the modifers and subtables threw me
Not sure why they would "throw you," they all basically amount to "small advantage: +1, big advantage, +2" and there are less of them than your average d20 OGL game. You kind of want to keep those "small modifiers" because milking mods is basically how you stay alive, whether that be through a good defense or killing your opponents first.
Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, Silhouette is INCREDIBLY deadly.

>Do you recommend Heavy Gear or Jovian Chronicles? And what edition, 3 and 2 seem to be published respectively.
HG and JC are the same system, just different settings. HG 3e and JC 2e are both Silhouette Core, aka SilCore, and are probably the most streamlined combat rules but the most retarded skill system. That you'll want to rip out of HG 2e/JC 1e. It ports over directly so don't worry about too much legwork.

Thanks user, I'll take a look at this.

For reference, a friend tried to run a game using an amalgamation of GURPS Space (mostly crunch) and Jovian Chronicles (mostly fluff). I tried to build a scout craft that focused on providing enhanced targeting for other craft, with a secondary function of providing some point-defence screening and/or ecm......the primary failing there was the seeming lack of rules for providing benefits to other PC characters or ships. Or maybe I was just stupid, that's always a possibility.

When running Jovian Chronicles or Heavy Gear, how do you do military campaigns? Do you have battle after battle with role play in between?

Ran an okay Armored Core oneshot. I should have thought more about the plot though. We only had a few hours so they did one mission, found some stuff and that1s about it.

I'm a forever DM's that pretty sick of fantasy in general, so I'm looking for a good mech RPG system.

Is there one that's on the simple side (when it comes to actual play) but still provides a lot of choices during mech generation?

here

I used Strike!

It combat system is a class based, setting neutral game, but using it for mech generation worked really well.

You don't have much freedom in setting the exact parameters, but you get to lots of choices to make.

1) Watch lots of war movies and mecha anime where the protagonists are military (mainly UC Gundam, especially 08th MS Team)

2) Kind of depends on the faction. In HG the South I always felt worked better for PCs because of the autonomy the MILICIA gets on ops and their surprisingly loose organization (compared to today's military standards). War in general on Terra Nova is very oldschool, with a very Wild West feel to it. Hell the Southern MILICIA is even given minimum supplies and are EXPECTED to resupply themselves in the field through either scrupulous or unscrupulous means.

In Jovian Chronicles just due to the sheer vastness of space and the fact any communication to anyone of significant rank is going to take tens of minutes to hours just for a reply, fleets are given a strong degree of autonomy. IIRC Officers in the Jovian Armed Forces are trained to make split-second command decisions that would get a modern soldier court-martialed for acting well above his station, and their command structure in general encourages hot-shot individuality like it's a fucking reality TV show, it's great recruitment propaganda. It's even a thing in-universe that the JAF licenses model kits of famous ace Exos.

All this could make for compelling situations depending on how you use it. It's all intentionally written in such a way that the command structure and military discipline doesn't come down too hard on any PCs that act like, well, PCs. You just gotta read the fluff.

3) Most published adventures are written from the standpoint that most if not all PCs will be military. Check them out for some ideas.

I would go for that d6 system, pretty good adaption and has the lore concentred in a good way. It seems D9 approves too.
banzaidyne.wordpress.com/heavy-gear-d6/

>The entire company is sick.

Ok . . .
Well at least let's enjoy mech
Well at least

Jovian chronicles and heavy gear all day everyday.

Has anyone an idea of how to fix the crap low damage scores for lasers and beam weapons?

It would be vastly easier to understand the appeal if their were campaigns, but there's not a single play report on the internet, except some Russian guys play HG as a wargame.

Guy who wrote that here.

One of the ways I was thinking of to fix that was give all the beam/laser weapons just another whole damn die of damage.

The problem was I was going by the HGd6 conversion formulas which doesn't take accuracy into account when determining damage dice, but in Silhouette accuracy and damage are intrinsically tied because damage is multiplied by MoS, which makes them far more powerful in Silhouette than in HGD6's math.

Additionally there's an optional rule in Open D6 and I think also Mini Six where for every 3 or 5 you beat your opponent's defense by you deal more damage, which would give beams an added benefit for having a higher accuracy.

So try that.

I think you mean the brilliant mecha + robots + vehicles construction systems of 3rd. GURPS 4th over-complicated character creations and oversimplified vehicle creation, not to mentions that 4 future TLs are a little to tight to work with.

Does anybody know if there are any good mecha RPGs translatet or written in german ?

I got some new players and i want to show them the glory of giant mechanized german kraut magic.

Or will i have to make-do with Shadowrun or Traveller ?

Do either of those allow customization of mechs?

They share one of the best customization systems out there.

....do enlighten me