Optimize My Fluff: Romance of the Star Kingdoms

[angelfromanotherpin]

Thinking about a new game, plot of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a retro-feudal sci-fi setting.

My first thought was of course to draw inspiration from the Dune setup, but one of the players wanted mecha, so I had to think bigger. My second thought was that I'd declare mecha to be the equivalent of horses in the ancient frame (expensive, requires special supplies and support staff, increases mobility and grants advantage in combat; but still eminently defeatable with normal combat practices).

This of course means that normal handheld weapons must be able to kill a person in a mech, and also that such weapons should not be disproportionately effective against infantry. That's fine, either infantry are hardened or the weapons are narrow-beam things that hit one target and don't particularly care how hard it is.

The question I have is how, in this setup, I can have badass heroes rolling around the battlefield kicking extensive ass - without relying too much on gear. The idea is that if a hero and a foot soldier exchange equipment, it should not really make much difference in who's ass gets kicked. So I need an offense/defense setup that strongly rewards individual ability.

[fectin]

Mechs require you to physically pull a giant robot body into the positions you want. It amplifies your motions, but it's still super exhausting. Depending what system you're using, something like:

Adds 10 to Str, and a -5 penalty to hit. -4 dex, +2AC. Counts as carrying 400 lbs, and your mech strength bonus doesn't apply.

[ishy]

So you basically want mechs to be jet-packs?

- Edit: What kind of difference do you want there to be between non-heroes in a mech and non-heroes not in a mech?

[Avoraciopoctules]

- Edit: What kind of difference do you want there to be between non-heroes in a mech and non-heroes not in a mech?

He said that mech units = cavalry, infantry = infantry.

So, a mech might look like the exoskeleton/power loader from Aliens.

You've got jets and/or inline skates that let you "run" fast, and maybe jump high. You can smash things up with your claw hands. And maybe you have a single-shot close range laser beam that needs a minute to cool down before you reuse it. A "lance" if you will.

[Username17]

if you're doing retro-future China, then obviously mecha take the place of chariots. All scions of noble families are expected to practice the six arts:

• ]
• Rites - 禮
• Music - 樂
• Sniping - 射
• Mech Piloting - 禦
• Calligraphy - 書
• Mathematics - 數

-Username17

[ishy]

But then you'd just be murdered by infantry with beam weapons?

[hyzmarca]

Here's my suggestion: Personal shields that are stronger the smaller that they are.

Think of it like the Dune set up only more. The shield turns the fast blow but permits the slow knife. Only instead of blowing up when you shoot them with lasguns, it stops that cold. In fact, a infantry shields scale up to the point that you can drop multi-gigaton nuclear bombs on infantry formations and they won't notice it (except for the fact that they're now fighting in a giant crater). Infantry would be equipped with power armor with internal life support and battles would be fought up close with sword and spear.

In this scenario, mecha would be motoslaves. They're vehicles that become a second layer of power armor. Notably, they're extremely effective against small infantry formations. They're less effective against large infantry formations that stand their ground and they can be overwhelmed. Statistically, they provide armor and mobility bonuses but would still be killable by someone with a power spear



Lu Bu, of course, just murders you no matter how many dudes or what equipment you have.

[angelfromanotherpin]

You guys are tackling the wrong problem. Let me see if I can be clearer.

• The players would like mecha. Like walking tank with jump-jets mecha.
• My solution is to declare those equivalent to cavalry and scale everything else up.
• So 'infantry' carry weapons that can take out mecha.

That's not the problem. The problem is:

• On a sci-fi battlefield with hundreds of thousands of anti-mecha weapons, how does a highly-skilled individual personally kick dozens or hundreds of asses without being blown to bits or relying on better-than-ordinary technology? (this is a key part of the genre)

That is, I think, a question of basic offense/defense interaction.

So one answer I've considered is that weapons are psionic amplifiers and attack people's minds, which is only moderately blunted by passing through tank armor. So the epic badasses have crazy strong minds, crushing lesser psyches ten-at-a-time, and able to shrug off huge numbers of normal-quality attacks. That's not uncool, and I may include it as a facet of the larger whole, but by itself it's unsatisfying in that I would prefer more variety.

edit: oops, there was development while I was writing. This should be considered a response to Av's post and above.

[angelfromanotherpin]

if you're doing retro-future China, then obviously mecha take the place of chariots.

Chariots were almost entirely superseded by cavalry by the Three Kingdoms period. Chariots were mostly a status symbol, or a mobile command post. None of the serious badasses of the age use chariots, but people do get respect for having awesome horses.

[Avoraciopoctules]

If you can't have arbitrary super-science, then you still need some kind of booster. If you make Dynasty Warriors into an RPG, people will actually want to know why Zhuge Liang can fly around and shoot lasers.

If "highly-skilled" is the only force multiplier heroes are allowed to have distinguishing them, then they need crazy magical kung fu techniques that let them arbitrarily dodge lasers.

[Whatever]

If you want to make heroes better than everyone else, then you have to remove ranged weapons from consideration. No blasters, no lasguns, no rifles. All of those are totally ineffective against whatever basic stuff infantry and mecha use, and combat has to be conducted hand-to-hand. At that point, there's plenty of ways to set up combat so that the hero has strong but plausible defenses (high armor, high soak, high dodge, whatever) that aren't tied to equipment. Just make it so that there's no reasonable way to attack someone further than 10m away and every large scale battlefield turns into dozens or hundreds of individual fights, each of which the heroes can win easily.

[Wrathzog]

how, in this setup, I can have badass heroes rolling around the battlefield kicking extensive ass - without relying too much on gear.

If "highly-skilled" is the only force multiplier heroes are allowed to have distinguishing them, then they need crazy magical kung fu techniques that let them arbitrarily dodge lasers.

Basically this.

I would recommend using New Types or The Force, which both amount to Sci-Fi Space Magic.

[angelfromanotherpin]

If "highly-skilled" is the only force multiplier heroes are allowed to have distinguishing them, then they need crazy magical kung fu techniques that let them arbitrarily dodge lasers.

I have in fact considered magical kung-fu skills, but that's not actually necessary. If skill at field manipulation makes your force field more effective, you can just use the standard force field better than other people. Similarly, I can totally see a person who was a virtuoso with standard-issue GEV or jump jets and could use them to actually fly.

I'm not totally opposed to having people Jedi it up like animated Mace Windu, but I would like to explore less fanciful options because they are less cliche.

If you want to make heroes better than everyone else, then you have to remove ranged weapons from consideration.

I reject your premise. Bows and repeating crossbows totally existed in the Three Kingdoms period and are in the related fiction. If ranged attacks are (for instance) hard to aim, then they can totally be effective on formations and ineffective at sniping commanders.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well this is more on the mechanics side than the fluff side but

you could make "highly skilled" = advantaged in the action economy

and then you could make "in mech" = gets larger distances out of actions spent on movement

in then you could use a system with meaningful range penalties / active dodging / useful cover rules


So, to use 3.x D&D terms to outline this:

• your PC types would get something like an extra standard action each turn for being "highly skilled"
• being in a mech gives anyone substantial bonuses to movement speed and or additional movement modes to use
• then either weapons have a meaningful limit like very short (compared to movement) range increments or a full turn activation time (allowing for mech-assisted PCs to safely pull hit and run kiting against large mook formations)
• and/or characters can use something like Combat Expertise to gain a defensive bonus by spending an action. (This works best if, like Combat Expertise the value of the defense goes up with character combat skill)

Then you'd have a system where single badasses would be advantaged over mook armies and mecha would serve as a bigger multiplier for such single badasses than for the mook armies.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Heroes need to be able to do at least one of the following when faced with massed enemy fire.
- Be tough enough to just take it.
- Block/dodge all the shots that would normally hit them
- Instamove right out of the target zone

If you actually let heroes have nanite injections that boosted people with the right prior combat conditioning, you could probably justify dramatic boost in performance with seemingly conventional gear.

But saying "He's so good at modulating his suit's forcefield that he took 3 volleys of laser fire when it would normally fold after 2 hits" is gonna stretch suspension of disbelief.

[virgil]

Give them weapons that are more skill based than brute force. Lots of rapier energy swords, guns with accuracy inversely proportional to stopping power, etc. Another idea is for the advanced weaponry/armor to explicitly force-multiply off of the user's natural ability; tapping into their life-force or requiring a level-based minigame to activate to set the power level.

The other option is to have the tech advance to create a situation closer to swashbuckling, where any weapons good enough to punch through personal shielding/armor are either skill-based (laser swords or beam-battles) or horrifically inaccurate. The rest of the tech went on an architectural level, so ship-blasting cannons can only really hit other ships or geographic features with enough charge-up time for a heroic PC to run the hell out of the way. This does set it up for mechs to work more like awesome looking chariots and jetpacks.

[Vebyast]

One of the biggest issues with man vs army engagements is time. If every engagement takes ten seconds, then your hero can't fight that army for the simple reason that it would take him two weeks just to kill all of them. So you need a way to speed things up. The most common is area-of-effect (note that, in Dynasty Warriors, you can usually hit entire mook formations at once), but that gets boring in an RPG. I find that super-speed provides much more satisfying visualizations of man-vs-army engagements.

Given that, I think that the answer here is "precision versus speed", as Virgil and Av have suggested. Every weapon available can generate OHKOs and provides huge volume of fire, but defense is ahead because powered skeletons give users jedi-like evasion. Super-Skilled Characters just have the special power to aim while dodging, which means they can waltz around the battlefield mowing down entire enemy formations.

[Cynic]

I'm throwing out an idea out just in the vein of the original Dune inspiration.

Why not do something along the idea of just replacing or emulating the Worm from Dune but with Mechs?

I understand that currently this runs counter to most of the things you've already stated but here's a variant if you are interested.