The Gaming Den

I'm looking doing a redesign of DragonMech, including the base system, but I have not, in my limited experience, seen a decent system for handling people in mechs. I have heard good things about some iterations of BattleTech, but other than that, everything I've seen has disappointed me in some way. Does anybody here have incredible mech rules squirreled away or some advice on where to find some?

My big problem with Battletech is that the weapons aren't supposed to be balanced. A lot of weapons are simply superior to others and deliberately so. You'd have to throw numbers around a lot if you wanted people to actually use different armament layouts on purpose rather than "Because I haven't looted a Clan ER PPC yet."

-Username17

I'd be throwing out most or all of the weapons and such, so that's not really much of an issue. How well does it work in conveying the feel of big slow clanking mechs without having a big, slow, clanking system?

zeruslord wrote:I'd be throwing out most or all of the weapons and such, so that's not really much of an issue. How well does it work in conveying the feel of big slow clanking mechs without having a big, slow, clanking system?

Most of the system is contained on this piece of paper. About the worst thing you have to do in the game is fill in little bubbles on your hit locations to indicate damage. But I regard doing that as essential to the idea of 'Mech battles, so I don;t think you're getting away from that.



-Username17

This page used to have a 64-page pdf abridged rulebook available for free download, but it looks like they took it down, made it longer, and are now selling it in a boxed set.

The quick-start rules don't have water or elevated terrain, or jump jets, or heat management, or critical hits, or much of anything for detail, really, and the scenarios aren't well-balanced, but if you try them you can get a feel for the gist of the system before spending money on it. I have Total Warfare; I think it's worth the money. If you have to choose between it and the introductory set, get it, and then print out the pdf intro record sheets (although they don't use any of the advanced tech in TW).

Reminds me, I need the Tech Manual.

The record sheeet Frank posted is really complete. I don't see the gunnery modifiers, piloting modifiers, or terrain movement costs tables on it, but those are really the only things I reference frequently that's missing.

Battletech looks like an interesting source of ideas, but it may have the same problem as the core fighter - these things are meant to appear in groups, not as solo characters. I'm thinking of having a character-scale combat minigame and a mech combat minigame, and characters need to be interesting in both. The problem I'm encountering is that some archetypes, the Mech Jockey and Champion in particular, are really restricted to one combat minigame.

They are intended to appear in groups, but that's really because they're intended to be played alongside other players on the same team who are also driving mechs. It's not a scaling problem where their individual contributions stop mattering later on because everyone in the game is the same class, just decked out with different equipment. If cost/access is a limiting factor, they're probably even be on the same power level.

Can you explain the difference between a champion and a mech jockey? I can see a reason for npc foot soldiers and npc pilots, but not a reason to seperate the pc roles. None of the source anime that comes to mind really differentiates between them either. Still, if your redesign isn't particularly combat heavy and has other areas where characters will need to be competent, you could probably get away with splitting the roles and having them be less awesome in combat that's out of their specialization (in the same way characters in shadowrun can still contribute even if they lack some combat skills).

The redesign is of Dragonmech, which does not have anime source material. I can fling down the beginning of the Design Flowsheet if you want, but it's going to change.

The Champion is a warrior of the old ways, an exemplar of a dying tradition. Although the Paladins, Knights, and Free Companions of the world are individually mightier than ever before, the Orders and Companies are failing. Champions struggle to remain relevant in a world where a street urchin with a few weeks' training and a steam gun can kill a man-at-arms with a lifetime of experience and ancient weapons handed down from his forefathers.

The probelm is that the Champion needs to be mechanically relevant in combat between mechs and dragons, preferably without needing to become a mech jockey.

Fair enough. Not that familiar with Dragonmech as a game, and just went with the closest stuff I was familiar with. I still think you've got a shot at working the jockey out as long as you have sufficient non-combat sections of the game, but from that description the champion sounds more like an anachronism than a player character.

The idea of the Champion was that they would be individually effective, but were losing power as a group. This is at most a single generation after the introduction of the mech, and society is still reacting to the change. If you've got the Warmachine book, take a look at the Menite Paladin of the Wall fluff; that's really what this guy is based on, but the role also includes Conan-like characters who are in the same situation.

If I remember from my BattleTech years the system was fairly simple to follow but could get slow if you had someone who didn't know all the tables and or was poor at doing simple arithmetic in their head.

A mech jockey can always be reasonably expected to be competent in small arms and able to handle herself in a barfight on some forgotten backwater planet.

I'm not familiar with the source material but it seems like the Champions are like Samurai seeing their obsolesence or what have you. To make them interested in mech combat seems at odds with what they are.

I'm not sure if what you want is for some individuals to be personally more powerful than giant robots.

zeruslord wrote:I'm looking doing a redesign of DragonMech, including the base system, but I have not, in my limited experience, seen a decent system for handling people in mechs. I have heard good things about some iterations of BattleTech, but other than that, everything I've seen has disappointed me in some way. Does anybody here have incredible mech rules squirreled away or some advice on where to find some?

Just some basic questions.

-Do you want the mechs to be competitive with normal characters, or are you just assuming everyone will be a a mecha pilot? Is it okay to have a wizard or a swordsman without a mecha traveling with someone who has one?

-If the mecha is designed to travel with other nonmecha people, what are the desired advantages and drawbacks of being the mech pilot?

-If the group is expected to be all mecha, then what differentiates two characters if anything? And do you expect the entire game to take place with the characters piloting the mecha or is there reasons where they should have to get out of their mechs?

Zerus, if one could somehow retro-engineer an RPG from the (extinct) cardgame, it would be...

... awesome.

Otherwise consider d20 Future.
If you have a vendetta against d20 for whatever reason, do Shadowrun and treat mechs as giant characters. I suppose the latter would be more effective if you multiply defense and offense values by 10 when compared to conventional weapons, but that's all theory.
d20 Future has worked for me and friends but there's a lot of material to sort through from within, be prepared for that.

zeruslord wrote:The probelm is that the Champion needs to be mechanically relevant in combat between mechs and dragons, preferably without needing to become a mech jockey.

Their shtick can be "smallest package for that much damage" or "relative size". Essentially champions can do Mech scale damage but they're only human. They might also get something that allows them to actually get to the combat - if Dragons are going to be flying then the Champion needs to have some way to get to them.

Their small size (relative to a mech) means that most dragons or mech pilots won't see them coming when their side includes even a single mech. Or even otherwise. Mechs make you feel pretty damn invulnerable, and you're up high. You might just ignore the puny squishy human with the outdated weapon rushing at you - surely he can't damage you.

Mechwarrior has room for people running around outside of the mechs. After all, the pen is mightier than the large laser, and a bit of intrigue can add or subtract several mechs from a battlefield.

I think it's a fool's game to try to make people without giant steam powered robots to matter on a field of battle that is specifically dominated by such.

About the best you could do is to have multiple combat "worlds" that are interacting, kind of like Shadowrun. If there are intangible spirits that can directly attack the mech pilots, then having someone running around doing anti-spirit detail could make sense, even if he was flitting around on something that was perhaps more suited to a seven year old girl than a steampunk tank battlefield.

Now personally I find Dragonmech to be stupid. It claims to be medieval and it clearly isn't - a fact so glaring that it makes every part of it lack verisimilitude so hard that I've never been able to cover to cover a Dragonmech book. So I don;t know if they have anything that could vaguely stand in for Matrix combat to give depth and division to essential team members who didn't have a giant steam powered tankasaurus. But whatever, I'm sure you can think of something.

-Username17

There was a system that was written up for D20 that appeared in an issue of Polyhedron....I own the issue, but it's in a box at home.

If you want, I could try and dig it up and scan it or something?

I never used it, and it probably needs tweaking, but it used a system that allowed the creation of mechs from Power Armour sized, all the way to Super Robot sized.

The creation process was something like this:

1. . Determine Budget: There's a table with budgets pertaining to character level. You can stick by them and have the PCs mechs powerup/evolve/eat angels/whatever, and thus get power. Or you can pull a Megas XLR and just give a pair of low level characters a level 20 mech budget and have them fill it up with a doomsday device or perhaps, several.
2. . Pick Size : This determines how many "locations" you have to place equipment and ammo in. You need at least ... 1 (or 2?) locations for your cockpit, and can place it in two possible places (the head and torso. Some of the larger mechs have lots of head slots, while with a smaller mech you'd be forced into taking up torso slots. A mech's size determines how much Str it has, plus other things probably.
3. . Pick material: You have a bunch of arbitrariums to pick from. Their costs increase as they provide more hardness, or special resistances.
4. . Buy and allocate equipment: Buy stuff; it can be either placed anywhere that has sufficient slots remaining, or in specific locations. Most items need to be placed in their entirety in one section of the mech (no cutting up the `slots`that a massive energy cannon takes up into both of your arms). I think that you could overlap item slots a bit (like a gun-arm being part of the torso). Some items require the mech to have hands, while others will remove hands (hands took up a slot, so you could lose them to get arm-cannons I guess). Ammo could be placed where ever.
5. . Fight: Ranged weapons don`t have massive ranges, nor do they do massive damage, and shields (and forcefields) that can soak up tons of damage also exist, so a melee-mech was supposedly viable. I'm not sure if that was actually true of the rules though. I'm betting that a small flyer with a decent energy rifle could kite a bigger mech that had no, or weak ranged attacks.

Actually, AFAIK the biggest problem with Dragonmech's that it claims to not be Homeric and is - barbarians specifically take "city-killer" hits to the face and laugh. So that's a fluff problem to solve - all the crap about technology displacing the old ways doesn't make a fvcking lick of sense in D&D, except for the broketastic elven mechs, who win only by virtue of being (wizards++)++, not anything vaguely related to technology.

As for mechs and people without them: my interest in Dragonmech's some parts of the fluff and the steam power concept, so call me biased, but you might obtain best results by scrapping the mech jockey class (perhaps keep various piloting PrCs and almost surely feats, but make Pilot accessible to everyone) and keeping the wealth by level table in mind - yeah, mechs are equipment, period.

That the mechanics don't support the storyline is no big surprise to me. It's a rather poor d20 port, so the fact that things work like they do in D&D rather than how they work in the background fiction is disappointing but not unusual.

My real problem with it was just the thing where the background material was written by people who seem to have literally no idea of what "medieval" means, so I couldn't really make a set of rules to generate it even if I wanted to.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:That the mechanics don't support the storyline is no big surprise to me. It's a rather poor d20 port, so the fact that things work like they do in D&D rather than how they work in the background fiction is disappointing but not unusual.

It's specifically worse with Dragonmech than, say, Craperron, as it makes a big deal of "guns/mechs > individuals". And I thought it was made for D&D.

FrankTrollman wrote:My real problem with it was just the thing where the background material was written by people who seem to have literally no idea of what "medieval" means, so I couldn't really make a set of rules to generate it even if I wanted to.

Explain. Sure there's a lot of anachronism, but I guess much of it was entirely called for. And it might be of help here.

Bigode wrote:Explain.

No problem. The Dragonmech website makes special note to call itself medieval at least 3 times. Their very first hanging sentence fragment on the leadin is:

Dragonmech wrote:Medieval fantasy mechs powered by steam, magic, or the labor of a thousand slaves

Meanwhile, webster's defines Medieval as:

Webster wrote: of, relating to, or characteristic of the Middle Ages

Do you see the disjunct here? People live in steam powered flying fortresses! The countryside is uninhabited because it is uninhabitable. There are no yeoman farmers, no land serfs, no nothing. Even the final remaining knights of the old order are modeled on late shogunate samurai.

I can't name a single thing that is Dragon Mech that is characteristic of or related to the middle ages in any way. It's just not even connected there. That's the part that really offends me. The damn thing has three key words in it:

Medieval Fantasy Mechs

and it can't even live up to that.

-Username17

It still doesn't look like making rules for it'd be impossible. And don't you see? "Medieval" == "not weeaboo"!

Suuure.

I agree, Dragonmech isn't medieval, the world before the whole moon-getting-closer thing was a generic fantasy world, albeit with some stuff mixed up. As I recall right, most of humanity was plains-dwelling nomads, elves had a big focus on magic, dwarves were, well, dwarves...

Then they got what's pretty much a planet-changing apocalypse, and the various cultures have been broken and then patched back together. So, yeah.

FrankTrollman wrote: I think it's a fool's game to try to make people without giant steam powered robots to matter on a field of battle that is specifically dominated by such.

Well it depends what you're simulating. Generally in a fantasy world, you want people without mechs to be competitive. It's like in FF3, where you fight off those magitek suits at some point. A mech really gives you an edge, but if you're badass enough, you can take one out.

Though in a battle tech style universe it just wouldn't work.

It'd work in a Shadowrun style game. Being a super death bot pilot wouldn't make you the best character in a game where noncombat stuff really mattered.

You could take a leaf from Armageddon 2089 and have some class specialise in EW (reflavoured to be magic).