How do *you* build Mechas?

[SteamBub]

Haven't read it yet, but you might want to look into One With the Ship from Pyramid #3/30. It has templates for characters that interface with ships, but I would imagine that it would work with mecha.

[PTTG]

The terrain consists of many small, rocky islands in a dangerous and monster-infested sea. Fighting the monsters in the ocean is suicide, even with a massive battleship, as the monsters can fight entirely submerged while the (dieselpunk) technology can't even detect them until they breach the shallows.

Mecha are small enough to travel by sloop or corvette, and mobile enough to patrol an entire island no matter how steep. Modern designs can ford shallows out to two fathoms, allowing one unit to travel between nearby islands and even finish off a wounded kaiju that has retreated into the sea. And importantly, unlike an emplaced gun, Mecha can be easily moved from island to island and can't be used by a local island to declare independence.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

A spider can function with two crippled legs, a tank cannot function with even one crippled tread. Depending on the design, crippled legs are also much easier to replace than crippled treads. In addition, you can lower or raise the body of the spider by adjusting the angle of the legs, allowing for better performance on angled surfaces (and even allowing the body of the spider to remain level despite the angle of the terrain).

High ground pressure, almost certainly higher minimum height, probably wider, with the legs having joints that are exposed and almost impossible to armour (at least tracks are low and close in to the tank...

And as you noted, more complex, which means harder to maintain, and tanks already have a huge maintenance time requirement.

Oh, and that's for a spider-tank vs a tracked tank - 'mecha' traditionally implies a single or possibly two crew, and that means they're most likely massively over-worked.

As for fish-mecha vs submarines - submarines are already fish-shaped. Making them flexible, and/or powered by fins, not props is a technological advancement in the development of subs, not a change from 'sub' to 'mecha'.

[scc]

I wouldn't play mecha games in GURPS, the Vehicles/Mecha rules take too long to design and as a rule of thumb each player needs a different Mecha and you'll want at least that many enemy designs.

Spaceships is faster, but you'll want distinct designs and I don't think spaceships can manage that.

Building by character point (even as Allies) is likely to run into balance issues, because the guy who takes a recon Mecha is going to be spending a lot less points then the guy who wants an artillery Mecha.

If I absolutely had to I'd build them like power armor, just bigger, but after designing all the vehicular weapons of the setting separately.

[mlangsdorf]

Do multiple mecha using Vehicles 2e take that long to design? I think my first design took two hours or so, and a lot of that was figuring out the sensor and comm suite.

After I had a design, tweaking it to be lighter and faster took about 30 minutes, same for adjusting it to be heavier and slower. That gave me three designs that roughly matched my previous mecha designs. I don't think creating a fourth design would have taken a lot longer.

That's still about 3 times as long as it took me to design and write-up all the designs when I just fiated them. But it's not so long that I couldn't do Vehicles 2e write-ups for a bunch of mecha if that was something I wanted to do.

[Jariel]

Since you want them to be an extension of the pilot you might want to look at Pyramid 3-24 Biotech. It has bio-mechs that you could take inspiration from and the examples could be used for some of the monsters for them to fight.

[JoelSammallahti]

If everybody is a mecha pilot, then you don't have the problem of balancing characters with mechas against those without. In that case, what I would do is this:

Treat the mecha as a separate character, bought on a separate budget, with no IQ or skills. Don't worry about pricing this as an Ally or Alternate Form or anything: every PC gets the same deal, so the cost is irrelevant.

Furthermore, for the mechas, I would rescale ST, HP, damage, and DR at a factor of 1:10 (D-scale) so a mecha with HP 15 and DR 12 functions as HP 150 and DR 120 when hit with an infantry weapon. If it punches a human with its 1d cr fist, multiply damage by 10. Same goes for the giant monsters.

There are two reasons for this: firstly, the point costs of ST, DR, etc. are roughly balanced against other traits in the human- to slightly-superhuman range, but once you get to three-digit numbers, the balance breaks down. If you've got HT 12, DR 4, and 10 points to spend, buying your HT up to 13 and upgrading your DR to 6 are both valid options. But if you have HT 12 and DR 100, you'd be crazy to buy DR 102 over HT 13, because the marginal benefit of those extra two points of DR is minimal.

Secondly, rolling the dice and doing the arithmetic is a lot easier when the numbers aren't too big. Adding up 30 dice, or even adding up 6 dice and then multiplying by 5, gets old real fast. (I've run a 2000-point supers game. It was exhausting until I started house ruling this stuff away.) It's a lot more convenient to keep the scale manageable.

[AlexanderHowl]

The real problem comes from scaling DR versus Innate Attack. A 2d Crushing Attack costs 10 CP while DR 7 costs 35 CP. Of course, you can combine Damage Reduction with DR to balance things, but you never really catch up. DR 4 with Damage Reduction 4 costs 120 CP, which would get you a 24d Crushing Attack. With an average of 84 HP, your resistance and reduction reduces it to 20 HP, which is better than the 60 HP that would penetrate DR 24, but you are still suffering massive damage with each hit. In effect, GURPS focuses on creating glass cannons that depend on defense, not resistance, to survive attacks (especially when you reach high levels of damage).

Of course, the damage from Spaceships weapons does not scale quite as horribly, but neither does the resistance. Giving vehicles Damage Reduction equal to SM does help though, as the damage from Spaceships scales slowly enough that you stop fighting like glass cannons and start fighting like living creatures, but it is just a house rule. Even so, it is better to depend on defense than resistance.

[PTTG]

Anyone have recommendations for balancing (and, for that matter, running) combat against the kaiju? I have a clear idea of the level of lethality and the pacing of combat -- I want it to be a tactical puzzle, which means that it will be a bit of a stalemate at first, with a kind of strategic toggle: if you commit to a good strategy, you'll probably win with moderate damage but no casualties. If you instead commit to a poor strategy, you will likely lose a mech and possibly a PC, and that's if you can't escape.

At this point as long as the mecha are reasonably tough compared to humans, they can be any point value, and I have even more flexibility with the kaiju. The first couple combats will feature one sole kaiju, but (naturally) later ones will see two or even three. It's also possible that there will be a mecha rebellion, so the PC mechs may fight NPC mechs... or each other. Those fights will probably be easier to balance and harder to run.

Let's see, other considerations... generally a mecha should be much harder to destroy than it is to disable, with killing the pilot being possible but difficult.

[AlexanderHowl]

In Horror, they deal with kaiju. They treat finding the solution to the kaiju as a unique invention. Combat with a kaiju is difficult because their ST and HP is in the thousands and their DR is in the hundreds (along with Damage Reduction). I would have a small kaiju possess SM+10, ST 2000, DR 200, and Damage Reduction (10). It would kick for 201d+201 crushing damage with Brawling at DX+2 and throw hills 2000 yards for 201d crushing damage.