Has Anyone Ever Given Their Players The Construction Rules In A Mecha Game?

[scc]

So the bug to run, or at least work how the details on how to run, a Virtual Mekton game in GURPS. Virtual Mekton for those who don't know is a fan setting for the very old Mekton Zeta RPG that applied the Yu-Gi-Oh Serious Business formula to piloting Mechs in online multiplayer, and allowed players to customize their Mechs.

As GURPS Mecha is naturally one of my options for actually designing the Mechs I need to know people experiences with it, particularly with the construction rules in players hands.

[mlangsdorf]

I've gamed with people who know Vehicles 2 better than I do, and I've given players construction options in mecha games, but I've never said "here's Vehicles 2, get back to me with your designs." That way seems like it would lead to madness.

Instead, what I've done is create a reasonable range of chassis, weapons, and other vehicle equipment, and set out guidelines for modifying things. So a scout mech chassis has so much speed and armor and can carry 1 light and 1 medium gun, and you can increase speed by X by reducing armor by Y or reduce speed by Z to add another medium gun.

If I had players that were more interested in vehicle design and we had a common set of tools like Vehicle Designer, I might be willing to collaborate on designs. But I wouldn't do that for everyone, only the most avid designers, and everyone else would get the pre-approved designs and guidelines for modification.

[Anthony]

Honestly, I don't think using vehicle construction rules does a good job of emulating the mecha genre -- better to just treat it as a supers genre using character creation rules.

[Greg 1]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Honestly, I don't think using vehicle construction rules does a good job of emulating the mecha genre -- better to just treat it as a supers genre using character creation rules.

It depends on the mecha genre in question. It suits something like Mechwarrior.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Honestly, I don't think using vehicle construction rules does a good job of emulating the mecha genre -- better to just treat it as a supers genre using character creation rules.

That's heavily dependent on what flavor of the genre you're trying to emulate. Something that's more Super Robots - Gundam Wing, Voltron, etc - is probably going to be more appropriate to handle as Supers. But I've played several mecha-based video games where customization of your mecha is a pretty big part of it - different motive systems, weapons, subsystems, etc. Sure, those don't let you build your mecha quite from scratch (all the parts - including the base chassis - need to be picked from a premade list), but there's a substantial level of customization.

That said, I do think essentially making a simplified design system for your players to interact with, rather than having them build things themselves in Vehicles, is likely to be a good idea. Particularly if not all of your players are hardcore gearheads.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That said, I do think essentially making a simplified design system for your players to interact with, rather than having them build things themselves in Vehicles, is likely to be a good idea. Particularly if not all of your players are hardcore gearheads.

Given that the 3e Vehicles rules were allegedly based on real physics, there would also be a significant risk of your players discovering that the best mech design for any given task is unlikely to be a humanoid mecha and thus wondering if every NPC engineer in the campaign setting is bad at their job, while they design vehicles that kill tall and easily targeted, as well as comparatively lightly armoured, mecha at ranges where the mecha pilot can't see a tank that is much closer to the ground.

[rkbrown419]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Honestly, I don't think using vehicle construction rules does a good job of emulating the mecha genre -- better to just treat it as a supers genre using character creation rules.

GURPS Mecha includes a subset of the Vehicles rules tweaked for the genre along with a lot of genre specific design options of it's own. That said, I wouldn't completely turn the players loose to design their own mechs. If a player wants to do it let him but tell him you have to approve anything before it goes into play, and you reserve the right to put it in the enemies hands instead of his character. If you have a PC who bought enough wealth to bankroll his own custom design for his machine you can always let him do it but give it all the problems prototypes are prone to.

[Rolando]

As I'm usually the rules guru for most of my group, when I gamemastered GURPS Mecha! I didn't gave the full rules to the players, I did allowed them to upgrade but I asked what they wanted to do and I suggested some solutions.

In that particular campaign none of the player characters where engineers nor anything similar, so it was mostly roleplayed with the engineer and technical NPCs, a good attitude and I influence roles allowed for more changes to the original chassis.

On of the players was a bit of a programmer and battlesuit nuts, inspired a bit by Chirico from AT-VOTOMS and I allowed him to fine tune the different control programs in his battlesuit to get some bonuses, but was not really any change in the construction process...it was more like downtime investment to get some bonuses during the next mission type of upgrades.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Given that the 3e Vehicles rules were allegedly based on real physics, there would also be a significant risk of your players discovering that the best mech design for any given task is unlikely to be a humanoid mecha

Well, it has some very generous rules for arms that make them generally less punishing than they should be, but that has the weird effect that your optimal design winds up being a tank except instead of a turret it has an arm on the top :)

[Rolando]

Due to armor weapon mounts instead of arms is better.

To help with the absurdity of mecha in my setting I made all mechas TL9, meanwhile most vehicles were TL8 and spaceships TL9 with some TL10 components.

So mechas are advanced tech that don't translate to other vehicles...because of some advanced physics concepts that work in a mecha universe.

Even then vehicles where not pushovers, all my players feared the big tanks, land frotresses and swarms of cheap vehicles or infantry when they dealt with them. I designed it that way to have the right feel of the setting for me.

If you allow players to create things with no constrains you risk them breaking the setting, not just because of abuse of the rules but because some things will stop making sense if allowing some options.

Ultra tech settings are a delicate and balanced echosystem. Specially mecha and space opera types.