MECH RPG thread

AWWW yeah rifts. Insane setting, top tier art, shitty rules.

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like shit rules has ever stopped people from playing a game, I mean look at D&D

>like shit rules has ever stopped people from playing a game, I mean look at D&D
Different user here, shit layout is an additional bar to entry when making a character requires you to jump back and forth between chapters instead of the linear progression through the chapters from front to back that D&D usually features.

I ran a Crossbone Gundam inspired game in FATE once. Super fun but it was mostly just improv

Can we please not have this thread derail into a tirade against D&D? You have every other thread on Veeky Forums for that. The least courtesy you could show is posting a picture of a mech.

Anyway, what's the threads favourite mech:human scale?

Does anyone know of any systems that are focused around super robots, rather than just your regular, pragmatic western style mech?

Landmates to Wanzers it's the scale I love, HG, Votoms, Knightmare frames, Gasaraki, anything than lets you pilot big robots and tanks together.

I will agree that layout is a big rifts problem.
Not goin on a triade, just pointing out a similarity based fact. As for mecha I got ya senpai

It's a great setting. Now if only it had mecha rules that made a lick of sense.

>favourite mech:human scale
1 human per 1 mecha for me.

I'm not really familiar with mecha games. How do they usually handle things like stealth, ECM, EW, hacking/firewalls and long-range sensors?

Mekton Zeta is an oldie but a goodie.

rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15511.phtml

Did someone say Lancer?

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There are less super robot systems around, and no particularly good ones to my knowledge. I think part of it is that the premise of super robot shows is often focused on a single individual, while real stuff more commonly focuses on a team, with the latter being easy to make an RPG from.

Is 1.5 out yet? Still pondering testing the system to see if it's any good in play, but I wanted to wait one more round of revisions to see how they'd polished it.

Battle Century G works.

It's a welcomed game as long as any of the sweeties or shills start shitting the thread.

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Heavy Gear has and forever will be my favorite mecha game/setting. I got into it my senior year of Highschool back in the early 00's and got all my friends to play skirmishes but could never get a campaign rolling.

I finally got one going in college, and it was a blast. The players were members of a disfavored MILICIA gear cadre in an occupied Badlands town.

Since the players weren't too familiar with the setting, I made the Earth invasion a big twist. The first time they encountered a Kodiak scared the shit out of them too.

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user said scale, not ratio

I love HG too. If only they got a competent publisher.

Vital suits are love, Vital suits are life.

FATE with modifications works well for it.

Working on a homebrew hack I'm due to test on monday this very moment actually.

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Mecha is such a massive genre that there is no way one system can do them all justice.

What type of campaign and story do you want to tell, that matters a lot more and is the question I'm putting out to everyone here.

I wish I had a GM like you user

I like a frontier like, bug hunting, merc hiring adventure. Space ships, outlaws, mechs and ordinary tanks, operators operating, bug killing games.

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Sounds like a fun campaign, kinda of comfy too.

Pew pew!

Yeah yeah, I know
>D&D
But I played a mech focused D&D campaign with the "Dragonmech" supplement, and to this day it is still some of the most fun I have ever had playing a roleplaying game.

You mean the d6 system from West End Games?

This one user.
opend6.wikidot.com

Who also loves bio-tek mechas?

Does anyone have any largeish Tachikoma-like quadrupedal tank mechs?

I prefer mechs that are closer to large power armour capable of flight, stuff like pic related: Not a big fan of giant robots that require a large crew to manage or 'realistic' mecha like mechwarrior style walkers or whatever.

I do think fantasy mechs are underrated.

I have some quadruped tanks, if you don't mind. Some tachikoma like too, but I don't remember ones specially big.

Anything like that would be great, I barely have anything.

I'm putting together a Rigger in SR5, because the GM gave us fucking Sum-to-Twelve and Prime Runner.

SR5? Do tell I don't know what is that.

I wrote a thing called Raidan Z that handles literally everything Mecha. It's in HERO System, so I doubt Veeky Forums would enjoy it, but it is comprehensive.

Shadowrun 5th Edition, the Cyberpunk RPG by CGL.

There's a general thread on the board, over at boards.Veeky Forums.org/tg/thread/56693833#top

>CGL.
I see, it's the fantasy cyberpunk game, isn't it? I'm irked be CGL because how poor they are at making BT a good game but if it's true to old fasa probably isn't a bad game.

It's... acceptable enough, and it's the only real cyberpunk game around until Cyberpunk 2070 releases.

Nah, CGL's lack of editing and use of freelancers who don't know the setting or rules mean it's a theoretically OK game held down in the "isn't there another option" bin.

Pathfinder game, we accidentally made battlebots a sport and are now abusing it to build mecha to invade a floating city.

I see. How are the mech rules?

>Quadruped mechs are cute, CUTE!

Rigger rules work fine.

AI rules are a clusterfuck of poorly worded bullshit that was never edited at all.

That sounds pretty wonderful, color me jealous.
Did they have one-sided conversations with El Presidente?

Sounds like CGl al right.

I always did love Front Mission's use of combined arms.
I've wished for a version where the player actually got to use and customize the tanks, helicopters, and infantry, not just fight them.

Yeah, that would be cool, but I don't know a good game that does it now. HG as a wargame, battletech doesn't quite do it but at least you have a shiton of different units.
Also Dog Soldier is the best mecha comic I had the pleasure to read, perfect combination of war, mechs and human drama.

Something like the Gekkos from MGS series is fascinating. Artifical CNT muscles that bleed when you cut/damage them but have the ability to repair themselves with nanomachines, son.

>HG as a wargame
HG is also an RPG.

I now, and was a good one. RIP.
At least some dudes are trying to maintain it alive.
banzaidyne.wordpress.com/heavy-gear-d6/

Something like that was my idea, half alive half machine mechs, with some self healing to help with maintenence etc. Not nanomachines ala MG fast tough, nor EVA psychic fuckery, simply a mix of tech and bio weapon.

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You know what’s funny?
With the exception of Knightmare Frames, ALL of those shows were directed by or based off of (in the case of Heavy Gear) the world of Ryosuke Takahashi, who apparently loves his realistically sized “roller” mechs.
They always make that same glorious sound while skating around too.

>vvvvREEEEEEEEE

Battle Century G can do all styles of robot, but its default flavor is somewhere in between super and real.

Interface Zero is one.
It’s not it’s own unique system admittedly (Savage World’s and FATE), but seeing as SR is it’s own unique system and we see what a shining clusterfuck that is that isn’t an argument against it.

He is too good for this world, he even did my preferd BT mechs (the Shadowhawk and Battlemaster, from fangs of the sun), I even liked some of his animes without knowing, like blue gender (shame the last parts) and other less know.

Blue Gender’s ending actually isn’t too weird for Takahashi’s work. His stories tend to be extremely grounded using realistic mecha and rather downbeat at times, but they frequently get surreal as fuck at the end.
>VOTOMS
Basically a story about a man coming to terms with his own war torn past and trying to find a reason to live during peacetime while unraveling an interstellar conspiracy, ends with giant invisible towers in space and meeting God, who is a computer somehow.
>Blue Gender
The bugs are actually planet Earth, and the hero merges with planet Earth and all the guys in space die, or something?
>Gasaraki
I won’t even try to explain WTF that was.

You can always tell his work;
Grounded mecha, stoic protagonists with hidden parts you (and often they) gradually learn, tough female leads who definitely are not useless but are often fairly frigid or remote, and heavy on the surreal ending stuff.

>Ryosuke Takahashi, who apparently loves his realistically sized “roller” mechs.
>They always make that same glorious sound while skating around too.
>vvvvREEEEEEEEE
Skatemechs a best.

Ryosuke Takahashi really is a product of 1980’s Japan and it shows; he likes realistic violence, grounded conspiracies that rely on human corruption and human failings, and his protagonists are stoic badasses rather then whiny pacifists.

>I won’t even try to explain WTF that was.
A fucking acid trip is what it was.

I guess that’s what happens when you’re a genetically cloned descended of an ancient race of shamans who use kabuki to summon organic samurai mecha from another dimension to dealing with a plot about securing Japan’s financial and cultural independence from globalist economics.

I'd want some acid to take the edge off from all that, yes.

...fucking what now?

The TAs (mechs) in Gasaraki were (I can't remember which) either reverse-engineered based on some Oni this clan of Kabuki dudes could summon, or were Oni themselves but cyborg'd up.

Gasaraki is a weird show, okay?
And yet despite all of that, it’s actually extremely grounded; there’s less mech combat then any other mech show I’ve seen, and while the origins of the mecha and their...unique artificial muscle systems are certainly odd, their capabilities are fairly realistic and believable, with much attention being paid to the logical consequences of the deployment of this new type of weapon.

Sick opening theme too, I actually used it as the “intro” to my group’s old Heavy Gear game to drive across the serious and downbeat nature of the story.
youtu.be/jWXBug4B8BA

The Originals (their name for the Oni mecha) were the basis for the Fakes (TA’s) that their corporation built.
Re-watching the first episode, a lot of what Kirito’s older brother makes sense now because he talks about how frustrating it is having access to a new material that as far as they can tell doesn’t follow any existing natural materials sciences and yet having only one practical use for it, namely making mecha.

I love bipedal mechs with tank turrets. They need more love.

It’s not the mecha thing man, it’s the mecha thing combined with that socioeconomic shit.

Amusingly, the socioeconomic stuff actually takes up more screen time then the highly technical and advanced mecha built with artificial pseudo-organic muscle fibers from another dimension.

tankmech

I always liked the idea of running a game where mechs are the commonplace Main Battle Tank and that surface to surface missiles are easily countered by onboard lasers, so artillery strikes are pretty much nill. However, a big thing is that they all run on alternating current and lightning strikes that go off of recharging stations. The game wouldn't actually follow mech pilots, but instead a group of combat engineers who are constantly running between the combat mechs and occasionally escorted by combat mechs in order to repair these recharging stations.

Repairing field lines and dodging debris with giant robots in the background smashing into each other and killing each other. It's supposed to be a terrifying experience with high lethality.

Sounds fun, Heavy Gear is a bit like that, Aircraft and stuff are very limited in the main planet, but MBT etc are important too, and you can do lots of grunts/Special force/mercs infantry deeds with ease. If you haven't done already, I would recomend than you give the setting books a look, I'm sure you could steal a thing or too.

That's pretty dope.

>That sounds pretty wonderful, color me jealous.
>Did they have one-sided conversations with El Presidente?

Sort of? The concierge bot has a high HumanCom so it's very perceptive of human emotions (just not enough to recognize death). At one point there was a fork in the road and they didn't know which way to go so they stopped and asked El Presidente, who sat motionless for a few minutes before the skull tilted a little to the left (definitely not just from settling after the bumpy walk through the favelajungle) and the little bot exclaimed

>"El Presidente says to go left!"

Before that the walker was pretty sure that El Presidente had just been contemplating (the human version of compiling) for a very long time. He hadn't even requested a cigar for years, even though Pat kept proffering them (PAT had a human-scale arm in the cab that could light a cigar or swat the flies off of a non-moving El Presidente and a storage compartment with some primo cigars).

Conciergebot had inherited virtual ownership of the hotel and adjacent properties as other more highly-placed robots (like the androids that used to run the front desk at the hotel) stopped working and passed their credentials onto the next-highest robot. Eventually everybody else had died and left it in control, and in the meantime other robots had shown up looking for power and had started working at the hotel as temporary replacements for the positions of the broken hotel robots.

That was actually part of the main plot because there was an unfinished hotel expansion where the big construction bot got the girders and other raw materials to make a bridge with, and conciergebot signed off on the repurpose of the materials (since it was building a bridge to get to the mainland to alert the hotel owners that there had been a few problems at the resort, it was OK to use material that had been originally allocated to improving the hotel).

Been running jovian chronicles these past few weeks and the game is an odd mishmash of cowboy bebop, firefly and soon gundam. First couple sessions were mech free but this one They finally get one, The Spatha, a hoplite(the basic mech of the setting thst others stem from) modified for combat.

HERO is good. Post it, please~!

>Dog Soldier is the best mecha comic
This one? Looks very 80s.

I really like 80's style animes and mangas, perhaps is that why I loved that one. Give it a try user, isn't for everyone but it's well done.

D'aww, that was exactly the kinda thing I was imagining.
I really do love a nice comfy post-apocalypse.

The last arc still hasn't been fully translated in english, has it? The one with the Shepherd?
Oh man, the refugee camp arc though.

Yes please, HERO is a great system.