29 November 2013

The genesis of Cataphracts and Kaiju, and the three sessions that have been run of it. Much over due.


This is essentially how my Cataphracts & Kaiju game started. That it is on hiatus I blame on the fact that this last quarter of college has been stressful on me, my wife because of my stress, and our two friends because one is a fellow student.

The first: The party will be knights in a post apocalyptic world without horses. Instead of horses, knights use mecha powered by ancient nuclear whatsits. I will be using a combination of Basic Roleplaying and Pendragon.

The first session synopsis. This was very little adjustment to the mecha rules and ported KAP to BRP, and using the intro adventure in KAP 5.1. The bear was two-headed because that was the miniature I was using for it.

So I ran the first session of this on Thursday. The party consists of my wife playing a more reasonable mechaknight, my friend from college playing a 14 year old magical girl who is also a mechaknight for unknown reasons that will probably never be pinned down, and her boyfriend who is playing a "Chaste as fuck" mechaknight. On their first official adventure they tracked and slaughtered a gigantic twohead mutant bear that might have been infected with ancient nanotech. Their spoils included its hide, made into an armored cloak for chaste knight's mech, its two skulls as a helmet and pauldron for the magical girl's mech, and a bit of a claw for a drinking horn for my wife's knight. The magical girl basically nuked it with magic because my on the fly adjustments made it practically impervious to normal attacks, something I will be taking into account next time.

They then saved a peasant and his herd of cattle from a trio of robber knight in mecha that had seen better day. My wife's mech went down when magical girl fumbled her attack and critically shoved her lance through the torso of my wife's mech's torso. All three of the player knights did score rather impressive blows. Almost every time they successfully hit the robber knights a limb got disabled. As it is, I may have to adjust the lethality of mech scale weapons as an unblocked hit is currently DEMOLISHING mechs. After some quick field repairs they traveled to the village they had just saved from the megabear had their mechs repaired more fully and we stopped there.
The second session was using the Curse of the Spectre King adventure. Still using my original rules conversions.


 And if my game was on rails it will never ever be on rails again.
Cliffnotes version of tonight's session.
Wife character: Challenged a dude to a duel so that the party could continue in their quest. She fails, so the entire party is honor bound to stay at the castle to possibly die a pointless death. Goes mad at the end of the session due to a fumbled Passion (Honor) roll just as the BBEG shows up and runs off.
Friend's character: seduces the dude to distract him so my wife's character can slip out to continue in the quest. Is now pregnant, and in love with the knight she seduced.
Friend's BFs character: is forced to ride my wife's character's mech as she had ridden off with his mech. He renamed the mech "Retribution." He might be mad at my wife's PK.

I decided to chalk this up as they successfully defeated the Specter King, despite them all having lost honor.

But there has been additional side-quest that happened due to my wife's PK going Mad.

She wakes up in a strange place, a strange sterile place. Which turns out to be a special sickbay on a carrier. A space carrier filled with space fighters that transform into mechs. She discovers that she and her crew volunteered for an experimental training problem using VR and then something went wrong, her crew, the other two PKs are still trapped, just like she was until she spontaneously awoke screaming. Not only that but the captain of the ship is extremely shocked at the description of what is going on in the VR system, guess it wasn't supposed to be some bizarre Arthurian fantasy, but merely a simple accelerated training program. Turns out she and the rest of her flight are rather excellent pilots, and she is now the flight commander as their original one died being plugged into the system. Additionally the techs that installed the equipment are missing. Which is essentially where the campaign is stalled because of life.

31 October 2013

Standard knightly mecha for Cataphracts and Kaiju: a Mechanized Pendragon Campaign

EDIT: I removed the inline images because they got broken somehow.

As I am avoiding writing about the poetic structure of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, here are the Pendragon stats for the knightly mecha. Evidently I went through and did this, but promptly forgot. I utilized Macross Mecha Manual for the technical specs needed to derive these stats. Next up will either be a rework of these stats, or stats for ancient Labors from the Patlabor franchise.



 
 This is an ancient MBR-07-Mk II Spartan Main Battle Robot from Macross/Robotech

STR 44, SIZ 81, POW 147; Size Class 2; Move 3; Armor 4 + shield 6; Damage 2d6
Zone
R Leg
L Leg
Torso
R Arm
L Arm
Head
Melee
01-04
05-08
09-12
13-15
16-18
18-20
Missile
01-03
04-06
07-15
16-17
18-19
20
Armor
4
4
4
4
4
4
Hit points
3
3
6
3
3
3
 



This an ancient VF-1A from Macross/Robotech stuck in Battroid mode.
 

STR 39, SIZ 73, POW 130; Size Class 2; Move 3; Armor 4 + shield 6; Damage 2d6

Zone
R Leg
L Leg
Torso
R Arm
L Arm
Head
Melee
01-04
05-08
09-12
13-15
16-18
18-20
Missile
01-03
04-06
07-15
16-17
18-19
20
Armor
4
4
4
4
4
4
Hit points
3
3
4
2
2
2

29 October 2013

Conversion Notes from BRP Mecha to Pendragon

The first two sessions of my Pendragon and BRP Mecha mashup were conversions from Pendragon to BRP, with percentile skills, a damage bonus, and a fuckton of differently stated out weapons, for both human scale and mecha scale.

I felt that this was annoying, for me, I don't really think my players cared as two of them are essential still noobies to table-top rpgs and the other is my wife who like Pathfinder more than I do. But in the interests of making things simpler, I decided to go back to the way Pendragon determines damage with melee and thrown weapons, strength plus size all divided by 6 to give a number of d6s to roll for damage, with some weapons adding or subtracting one or two dices. Very simple as now the only distinguishing thing between one weapon or the other is its name and the skill of the wielder. The problem is that I did not want have the way mecha determined damage be too radically different from the PKs, as the formula is damage of weapon plus damage bonus, and the armor values differ between Pendragon and BRP.

Anyways, too much rambling?

As I know that BRP and Pendragon have different armor values for the same type of armor, I assumed that I would have to change the way that mecha calculate armor if I change the way that melee damage is determined, and that I would have to convert the damage for ranged weapons as well. As an aside, who the hell wants to roll a d2 for damage?

I decided that since mecha scale is explicitly stated to be 10 times human scale, that I would determine damage similar to Pendragon for PKs.
Strength plus Size divided by 60, because I would rather not be rolling 10 to 30 d6s for damage per attack every combat round.
Then I through the magic of picking a baseline of how much I want a ranged weapon to deal at the size of mecha I'm doing created this handy dandy chart for the ranged weapons.



Basic Roleplaying Mecha
King Arthur Pendragon
1d2
2d6
1d4
3d6
1d6
4d6
1d8
5d6
1d10
6d6
2d6
7d6
2d8
8d6
3d6
9d6
4d6
10d6
5d6
11d6
 
Next I puzzled out how I want to convert armor, once again I just picked a starting point.
There are 5 grades of mecha armor and 9 grades of knight armor. Then I decided that since the mecha I have stated out for this campaign did relatively less damage than a knight would be expected to do, I matched up the armor that would be most commonly worn by a knight, mail with an armor value of 10 with 5d6 of damage from an average knight, with the level of armor I wanted the rundown ancient mecha in the campaign taking into account that these mecha would be expected to do 2d6 of damage. However I  had to take into account that in BRP Mecha armor is also determined by the size class of the mecha, or kaiju. Additionally, a chivalrous knight applies their armor of chivalry bonus to their mecha.



Type of armor and expected uses for it
Armor per SIZ Class
Scales and Fur, only for kaiju and other large living things
1
“Steel,” the default of knightly mecha
2
A well to do knight’s mecha
3
The armor of a perfectly maintained mecha found abandoned in the wastes
5
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
6
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
7
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
8
Definitely magical
9