I Dig Giant Robots

Mecha RPGs are a niche topic among a niche commercial environment. But I’ve owned and played a few of them. This will be very short.

Lancer

I backed the original Kickstarter. Very tactical and I love it for it. While the fact it takes hours to resolve one combat, a good mission should only have 3 or 4 of them. Still a pain. COMP/COMP is great as a tool, even if jumping between the pages to find all the parts can be a chore. Some people don't like the lore, I'm fine with it. It's conceptually Star Trek meets giant robots, don't tie yourself in knots too much.

The issues with it are of course it lacks the flexibility to go off script, like its inspiration Shadow of the Demon Lord. All the moving parts confuse players who aren’t into that. And the devs have been so bound up with other work, I’m still waiting on Kickstarter goals to be fulfilled.

Mekton Zeta and Mekton Zeta Plus

The most in depth and most obviously flawed Mecha RPG. No other one I know can boast the flexibility to build any mecha from Power Ranger monsters and EVA-01 to VOTOMS, but it’s true scale shines at Gundum scale, even if Roadstrikers meshed more mechanically with Cyberpunk 2020. On the other hand, measuring out parts for the bots was an exercise in tedium and it had to be done for every NPC as well. MECH REF was the godstat, just like how REF was in Cyberpunk. The rules for each edition jumped about making it hard to convert, even requiring calculation between MZ and MZ+. The psychic powers though can be ported to Cyberpunk 2020 and those are useful. So, some use out of that.

Heavy Gear 4E

Another Kickstarter, more narrative if one could say that of any of the Silhouette system RPGs. Still very tiny text as in all their products. Heavy Gear started out as Not-VOTOMS, someone upset at the inclusion of metaphysics in their gritty small-mech war drama. Tera Nova remains as distinct as ever, even if the metaplot has been kicked back and forth repeatedly. Weirdly, despite its new inclusion of narrative elements, it was the Silhouette system that keyed me into a problem that D&D and even VtM don’t have. For a whole swarth of late 80s and 90s games, they have all the detail one could ever need to simulate life in the game but no gameplay loop. You need to have experience playing D&D with its measures and XP before you know how to innately apply the game logic to other RPGs.

The metaplot gets a little unclear when they stopped the Plot Books and the first iteration of the wargame lore getting decannonised.

Jovian Chronicles

The classic Silhouette system RPG and one that suffers all the same problems. The setting is far more familiar with it being closest to The Expanse in scope and style. While compared more to Mobile Suit Gundum over Heavy Gear’s Armored Trooper VOTOMS, it actual channels a lot more of Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, with a bit of a veneer of Canadian politics. Lot of potential never realized due to Mekton II supplements being cut. So, there is this big gap in terms of plot and adventures between the first, somewhat sparse entries and the main books.

This kind of just compounds the problem in that the game didn’t go anywhere. You have Mekton II (two unrelated campaigns), the remake in their magazine (no stats). The world books (lore) and the start of the big war which disrupted all the lore they had been building. And nothing afterwards than a wargame that also never went anywhere and had not further metaplot.

Heavy Gear D6

Adapting Heavy Gear 2E to WEG D6 was the work of a dedicated poster on RPG.Net who had done work for Dream pod 9 before. However, it ran into a problem. Star Wars D6 did not work well when everyone was driving around vehicles which all had the Blaster-Proof Wookie problem.

Damage was versus Strength/Armor. So, while the rules had biological characters taking light damage and slowly degrading. Vehicles didn’t get stunned as characters did if damage fell into a normal range. Wookies had high enough STR to ignore many attacks outright. Combine that with most converted Gears and vehicles having slightly higher defence than damage, as Heavy Gear worked on damage multipliers as opposed to WEG D6’s dice ranges. It meant most mecha action became plinking with no damage, with the occasion massive lucky dice roll. Still a fun campaign though.

Heavy Gear D6 Bravo

I haven’t yet played but very much looking forward to a tweaking of damage to make it its own RPG variant. And not just Star Wars D6 1E/1.5E but with Mecha action. Does mean that I can’t use them as filler for weird Star Wars planets, but I already did that for FFG Star Wars.

 

I would eventually like to complete my Jovian Chronicles collection and the Heavy Gear 2E collection. This post also intersects with Fabula Ultima, a “TTJRPG” I am interested in. Being based on JRPGs, naturally they have a Techno Fantasy genre book with giant mechs.