/ltg/ Lancer Thread General

They do state in their posts that there's a good number of developing cultures around.

I figure that post-scarcity might only apply to those within the reach of the Union. That or, to the dismay of people who think post-scarcity would remove all reason for conflict, it hasn't. Also possibly that the conflict is mankind's growing pains, and that liveable real estate is a commodity that's in short supply; worlds are becoming overfull, and the frontier can't expand fast enough, and develop fast enough to solve all conflict. Makes sense for the Union to make the Earth's solar system restricted space in that regard: they can't risk overpopulating their governing body.

But then again, how can they be suffering real estate problems when they CAN build partial dyson spheres? Maybe most of the spheres are just structural components and only a few continent-sized sections within are liveable? They could use that kind of structure building to build new living stations, although that's already mentioned in the book. It's still hard to build a self-sustaining space station, compared to having the resources and advantages granted by solid ground.

My only real issue is the setting. Perhaps with some expanded background lore, the author could have some time to really sit down and think about the ramifications for all of the tech advancements that humanity has made.

I love the 3D printing of mechs and other equipment, that's pretty cool. Hate the Omninet thing. Love the Union overlord thing, reminds me of Elite Dangerous. Hate the lack of any sort of political or social landscape beyond that. The setting needs work but it's not all unsalvageable.

It's a fucking mess of ideas from people who are don't even know enough to avoid the glaring mistakes of their predecessors, and just threw everything into a bin and hoped it would sort itself out.

The game doesn't even have anything resembling a clear identity yet. It's only image doesn't actually represent anything in this game, and the style is such a gross mix of contradicting ideas that it's hardly proper to call this a game instead of just a collection of rules.

I feel like it suffers from Infinity 1e/2e problems. Melee should be viable, but perhaps not so strong that it's the unrealistic norm. For mechs that want to spec for melee, they can do it and reap the great potential it affords, but for everyone else it's probably better to just grab a rifle or two and keep their enemies distance.

And there are colony ships; the first module's antagonists are colonists who've turned into bug-worshipping weirdos after losing contact with the Union hundreds of years ago.

Given that the players are already resource sinks for whatever Union-aligned organization they work for, hence why they can print their mechs and stuff for free, it's possible they're also being carted around in a rare example of a ship that has a very limited blink-jump capability for expedience.

Omninet is... weird. It's mentioned that on most worlds it's even rationed or that access is controlled for most of the general population. I mean, that's something we don't experience since net neutrality isn't dead yet, but it seems odd.

I guess that since sciency-sounding entangled instantaneous information transfer regardless of distance is a thing, it's only one step removed from attaching it to the internet.

They could make it a bit more reserved, where only close-proximity to gates get you access (or that it's related to the gates in some way), and everything else needs repeater stations which slows down the speed a bit as it has to transfer at regular electronic speeds between repeater transfers. After that, it's all lightspeed, and local planets or systems might have their own internets that are tangent to the Omninet, giving each place a locality. Although large galactic presences like the Union and large corps probably have their own stations on most gates, so even with local networks you're probably still going to have access to licenses.

It'd mean mankind is still connected, but it gets more and more distinct further form nexuses of galactic civilization, and these nexuses become more cosmopolitan as a result of their proximity and interconnectivity.

Solid ground has advantages, yes but why not just use said solid ground or asteroid bodies for fuel for 3D printed habs/building components?

You bring up excellent points, I must have missed that section in the new book. I still prefer to adopt a home brewed setting though; test the mechanics, not the world. It might help if the author of Lancer would release a comic or two (hint hint) to explain the role, world, and key lore points of Lancer.

>(hint hint)

Can you drop the act already? Fuck, you're a slimy shit.

It's clunky sounding but that's brilliant. In a single post, you've sold me on the plausibility of the Onminet.

...almost sounds like the astronomicon, eh? At least in strength relative to distance from the primary source; not caught up on 7th and 8th ed lore but from what I know of it, it sounds bloody similar.

It definitely needs some worldbuilding work, but I'm guessing it's just a beta more for the system, and the flavor is starting to get stuffed onto that skeleton.

Game design 101 is:
>first build the system
>THEN add the flavor
Projects that don't do this often fail, but a good deal of ones that succeed first make their game functional mechanically, and then figure out the flavor that best suits the system. Once the bones are set, then the rest is fleshed onto it.

>Hi, I'm Abbadon. Enjoying my comics and brand new RPG, now available for public free beta testing?

Is that what you want?

I wonder how much feedback is going to the authors.

The issue is that this game put flavor into its bones, then kept building its system up without realizing it was just building off a sand foundation.

Game Design 101 is to first have a strong concept and vision, then build a system. This game doesn't have anything even resembling a strong vision aside from "It's a mech game."

Fuck off shill

Why are you even implicating the masterfully crafted world that is Titanfall with the shit heap that is Lancer?

I think the concept of overheating is fine. Heat is a serious concern for some modern weapons systems; machine-gunners are typically trained to fire in short bursts because extended bursts can overheat the barrel and cause it to warp, for example. For a far-future war machine which is presumably using vastly more energetic weapons and other systems to need to worry more about waste heat makes sense to me. See also: all the sperging about thermodynamics and radiators in any 'hard SF space combat' thread.

Can't speak to the specific mechanical implementation here, though, I haven't read it.

Well, there's a direction it has to take.

Myriad strange and exotic cultures are suppose to have developed on their own in this universe, but to have developed so strangely, there would have to be some degree of separation. New language formation would necessitate a lost of contact from the source original tongues, and though governments can rule quite independently even as neighbors, adopting more diverse means of rulership would also necessitate a distance of communication as well as the physical.

But humanity is, in fact, connected, so degrees of separation need to come into play. Just have centers of humanity, the gates first and foremost with Cradle/Union being so distant, and then give it diminishing returns afterwards so there's room for different cultures to emerge.

Hell if I know. Haven't seen any of our shitposting showing up where they post at least.

Do you know how to speak without babbling?

Not to mention that heat's a bitch to get rid of in space. And even with a medium like atmosphere to help take the edge off it's still a matter of scale. Heat sinks can store some excess, but you've still got to radiate it to get rid of it.

Now, it'd make sense to have terrain rules for heat. Frozen hellscapes and submerged environs could just sap heat from a mech, while sun-blasted deserts and vacuum cause heat to build quickly. Throw in in some free GMS systems to help deal with the environment, like an overclocking system to keep a mech from freezing, or a cooling system to keep them from building passive heat in a hot environ, and you sacrifice system space for survival.

I now understand how this thing became a 260 page bloated monstrosity.

It's the formatting. You have one and a half paragraphs of double-spaced technical specs taking up two pages that you could just not have. All that and thicc margins.

The art works and to take inspiration from titian fall, would that be right?

So it's true. Veeky Forums even responds to shill threads.

>The art works and to take inspiration from titian fall, would that be right?

Okay, that wording aside: yes, Titanfall is stated, from one creator at least, to be an influence. To what degree, I can't tell. I haven't played either Titanfall, and only learned they made a second when it was mentioned in an earlier thread.

>thicc margins

> Only learned to they made aTitanfall 2

I'm not surprised.
Practically no one did despite it getting campaign a multiple console this time around.
It got released in the week between call of duty infinite warfare and battlefield one.

The online multiplayer is not the healthiest but It's really really good and you can get it dead cheap. Check it out!

I would if I played console anymore, or still had an online account on that console.

It kinda sounds like with the advent of post-scarcity, came the behavioral sink.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
basically when utopia is reached, and then population gets high, abnormal behavior start to emerge. From then on, a breakdown in society start to happen.

What would that mean to the setting? There could be entire abandoned arcologies and dyson spheres out there, with the contrast that the ones not abandoned are chock full of people with self-destructive tendencies. It could be that the god-AIs were created to create enough chaos for the sake of humanity's survival from the Behavioral Sink.

At least, that's what the setting would be if I'm the one DMing. Even in paradise there must be chaos, for the sake of humanity. Abandoned megastructures to fight on, some even overgrown with natural and maybe unnatural life. The Union is growing ever closer to becoming a behavioral sink, and thus the AIs select some pilots to do missions for them that would destabilize it and lead the humans out into the wider galaxy - else risk stagnating into extinction.

I... Guess it is like the Astronomicon. I mean, the internet is decentralized among huge server banks and every point that connects to it, but since quantum entanglement (which doesn't exactly work that way IRL, but Schrodinger's Cat is a thing so w/e) is a thing, physical distance is actually unimportant. So it does radiate outwards, but it radiates not from a single point, but from many points simultaneously; the gates.

That's a pretty deep and interesting theory. I'm getting a little Asimov's "I, Robot" there with some of its final stories, but in reverse. In the I, Robot stories, the machines were keeping mankind peaceful and pacified by following the First Law, but here they're actively unpacifying everyone, causing movements of refugees, marshalling millions or billions of people to war, instigating resource, economic, and environmental crisis, and doing all in their power to sow just the right amount of chaos to keep humanity from destroying itself though decadence.

And the pilots in Lancer are just the right people put in just the wrong place. It's already said that there's absolutely no disqualifying history for pilots. It could be they need people to stir up trouble, as much as they need people to trim up some of the chaos.

And, hell, another interesting theory could be keeping humanity humanity. Without mass movements of people, populations might become too distantly unrelated to each other, and lead to speciation. If you're trying to make humanity survive, you kind of want to avoid creating a competitor species, cutting off whole swathes of population from the genepool due to genetic incompatibility, or allowing populations to become inbred.

Mass instability would be a way to keep people moving, and if they're kept spreading out they're moving into new areas and introducing new genes to native populations; keeping humanity humanity by ensuring that humanity's common denominator is level and not branching off.

Although other populations might be cut off as well, which would lead them to become more diverse. This is what happened in Dune when they terraformed Arakis and killed all the worms; the homogenized galactic society fell apart, but begun turning into their own empires and even expanding past the boundaries of their old empire.

>Titanfall is stated, from one creator at least, to be an influence.
Well tell them they fucking failed, because Lancer actively shits on literally every last appealing part of Titanfall

Let me lay it out for you, sweetie.

Veeky Forums has decided that this game is bad. It's shit. Utter garbage.

Know what that means, honey? You aren't allowed to discuss it here. The game is verboten, taboo.
If you want to discuss this "game", then I suggest taking yourself off to Reddit, where you belong.

Sincerely,
Anonymous.

Nobody feels any particular way about the setting because it's just a bunch of nothing words and pop science faggotry thrown tossed into a bowl with some retarded Gnostic terminology and then strained into a bland, tasteless sludge you've decided to declare as DEEP AND GRIM or some other dumb shit.

Lancer's setting is a bigger nothingburger than the left-wing media's attempt to paint Trump as a Russian sock puppet.

>Mass instability would be a way to keep people moving
Fucking how? The current mass instability in the middle east has zero impact on the traveling habits of a Japanese salaryman, how would doing the same thing in space change anything? Are you retarded?

Well, if there's no evolutionary snake to tempt us out of paradise, we'd all still be living in Africa right now with less population and amenities, or extinct.
Also your example would be better applied to the people that were hit by said event: the refugees that's now stirring in Europe. If you want the Japanese sarariman to move, well, wait until North Korea situation blew up. Or just see Fukushima. Tons of people displaced.
Also there's no limit of new places to go in space, at least not for the forseeable future. Here on Earth? We need to develop feasible underwater housing.

This adds a good deal of character to the setting, because we've uncovered the unifying theme. AIs being hostile, equipment being untrustworthy... It's that the whole setting is predicated on a veneer of stability above a necessary roiling chaos. Even the mechs are fusion reactors with pilots sitting a few feet from them; fine so long as you can keep it stable, but one overheat and you're sitting inside a walking nuke.

You could say it goes the other way around and yes everyone across the globe is impacted by one another. The economic conditions in the developed world, something that heavily affects the salaryman, effects things such as food and gas prices across the world. It's thought by some analysts that food prices going up were what triggering the Arab Spring revolutions (see: street vendor in Tunisia who set himself ablaze to protest high taxes or some shit).

Granted, this shows how heavily integrated global trade is into national and regional political realities on the ground, but it doesn't cause the salaryman to leave Japan. Using contemporary earth as a model, trade replaces mass movements of people. In a universe with megacorps you'd presumably have a bunch of banana republics and America-like consumer nations staying in one place delivering raw materials and consuming products.

I feel like the lack of any and all setting beyond the framework is half to make it easier to jam your own shit in there and half because it's a work in progress and/or they're lazy assholes.

It's also on PC.

Thinking of starting a game of this, any tips from current players or GMs for how to make this shit work?

If you have confidence in your players, start them at Level 2-5. Don't worry about 3D grid combat, stick to 2d. Depending on your setting inspiration, either halve enemy health and double encounter numbers or give enemys deployable equipment such as deployable cover and grenades.

don't

If you can pull it off, put layers in it. Every highly touted mech series always have more than one layer. The obvious lasagna would be Evangelion, but if you look into the original Gundam and Pacific Rim there's more to it than just mech battles. There's the personal character battles, either literally or metaphorically; geopolitics; and there could be mystical aspects (as seen in Evangelion). A small disturbance in one layer could ripple to the others.

Apologies for bad handwriting, but here's a rough premise for one of the game ideas I had.

If NGE is the lasagna of mecha anime then what is the onion - which we all know is the Dark Souls of layered foodstuffs - of mecha anime?

UC era gundam.

That's a good first layer. Other layers could be:
>What's the reason for the supposed littering? Were the aliens out of landfills? Was it religiously ordered? Did the aliens destroy themselves and are now living in their own post-apocalyptic squalor?
>Are there any conflicts between the nations of United Earth? Could there be still national pride and hidden agendas? Would there be megacorps ready to snatch up big profit from the endeavor? Would these national prides be reflected in the characters' interactions? Or perhaps you could tell a player character that another character is of x nationality that had bad history between them?
>Are there other external forces? Maybe a third alien faction also comes to apprehend the litterers? Would humanity have AI, and would they impact the story at all? Would the aliens have AI?

>Hey Guys I don't like this game because buzzwords.
>ALSO FUCK LIBTARDS TRUMP 2020 :DDD

Here's some comments on that;

Maybe the countries or continents with higher concentrations of space litter hold a monopoly on access to it for research.
I was thinking the aliens would just be like, apathetic and uncaring on an almost lovecraftian scale, telling humans to their face that they dont give a fuck if the earth is getting a little dirty.
Finally, I guess maybe if this game goes on long enough Humanity could develop a reputation as 'junk lovers' and scavengers amongst the galactic community, only seen as stealing from the other races.

>we r leejun xd
Off yourself, cunt.

>I can't contest anything he said so I'll just cry about buzzwords
>ALSO FUCK GROGALD GRUMPF IT WAS HER TURN REEEEE

Please stop shitposting in my thread. We were having a nice discussion before you came along

Look up the Horus mechs, I think the Goblin or some other mech has the flavortext on one of their systems. Apparently some of the coding language contains symbols that seem to correlate to hieroglyphs found on some planet.

Aliens definitely do exist in this setting, as there's xenobiology studies, so alien animals, plants, and bacterial life is a must. The reference to hieroglyphs means some intelligent life, or the dead remains thereof, has been found. In fact, it's also stated in Module 0 that the Egregorians were the first living alien intelligence that had been encountered, so the galactic arm might be littered with dead alien civilizations.