I've been wracking my brain on how
to implement all the things I want to include in what is essentially The
Knights of the Round Table, the Giant Stompy Robots They Pilot, and the Nasty
Monsters They Slay: the Tabletop RPG.
The game doesn't need, but I most
certainly want, the Traits and Passions subsystems from KAP. Sure I could use
the Motivations subsystem from BRP Mecha, but I prefer the brievity of Traits
and Passions as well as their commonality across characters. In my last K&K
campaign, sadly years ago, the players and their PKs all acted in suitable
anime manners using the basic shell of Pendragon.
Giant stompy robots should have hit
locations which should lead to limbs blowing off like all good giant stompy
robot animes, and battle tech, have demonstrated as being good. (Un)Fortunately,
almost all mecha rpgs feature this to an extent, and all the ones I've directed
to examine do. Of the four games, BRP Mecha, Mekton Zeta, SilCore, and
BattleTech, I've been looking at integrating in either direction, only SilCore
is the least obvious but might be the most interesting regarding the lost of
mecha limbs and similar concerns.
I want the mechanics to be as simple
and consistent as possible across the two main mode of campaign play, the
courtly human-scale and the stomping around in stompy robots-scale. I want the
primary resolution mechanic to be the same. While there might be value in
having the way a human-scale combat resolves vs a mecha-scale one by dint of
them being conceptually as well as mechanically different, I would rather
reduce the inevitable confusion that will arise from switching mechanics. I've
a large amount of time just reminding new players which die to roll to deal
damage in D&D.
This leads to a problem with using
SilCore because damage is determined by the amount an attack role exceeds the
defense and is then multiplied by the Damage Multiplier. I really like the way
in SilCore constructs and resolves mecha combat, but it requires using its
whole resolution and possibly stats systems to keep from ridiculous one-hit
destruction that could easily result from using KAP's roll-under w/ a d20.
There is also the slightly cute way SilCore works, the die pool plus modifiers
but you only keep the highest roll adding modifiers, which is conceptually
complicated when compared to KAP's "roll this die and you want to get the
highest number without going over your skill/trait/passion; if you get exactly
the number it's a critical hit."
Mekton Zeta would be less
complicated, as mecha-scale damage is fixed, and I could just work out a
different way to detail how the mecha affects the skills of the pilot.
Similarly, BattleTech is fixed damage and would require some modicum of
conversion. Naturally, the simplest thing to do is just do what I have already
done before, use BRP Mecha and continue to ignore the swathes of rules I don't
need.
The problem with using BRP Mecha,
and to a lesser extent SilCore, is that BRP Mecha isn't intended to allow
players to design their own mecha. The onus is on the GM, and the intention is to
be emulating extant mecha franchise mecha in your game. It has no "build a
mecha from scratch" section; instead, it has a "convert a mecha from
your favorite anime" section. SilCore, Mekton, and BattleTech, on top of
having loads of ready to go mecha, also has "build a cool robot"
built into the game. Of course, I could ignore my desire for the players to
have custom mecha, it's not like PKs in KAP can customize their horses, and
decide what I want a rouncy, charger, sumpter, and sundry other mecha to look
like. This was what I was doing a couple of years ago, but got frustrated with
the lack of difference between derived stats with even large differences of
base stats. That was because I wanted to stick as closely to how the book was
written and the intentions behind the rules as I understood them. This an
exercise in futility. BRP mecha is not well organized, seems skewed towards
certain mecha anime genres, super robot, and has a large amount of cruft in the
rules.
The only reason to not use BRP Mecha
is that it has very few pre-built mecha in it, but that is a problem I solved a
few years ago with a spreadsheet that automates the stats portion of the mecha
building. I have a folder full of mecha cards that I did as practice, so it
would be a relatively easy thing to get basic mecha to use for a Knights and
Kaiju game.
The reasons to use something that
isn't BRP Mecha are that they are all much older games, that are ironically
still in print, unlike BRP Mecha, and there are communities available to ask
for advice. BRP Mecha's short life-span along with total lack of other
supporting products mean I have to work without a net, which is so unnerving
and part of why I stopped doing on any campaign work for it.
I can, as is my right, take those
things from other games I want and use them to help me craft my personal mecha
system. To wit, I like fixed weapon damage on the mecha-scale, I like the slow degradation
of armor by attacks that penetrate it like in Mekton Zeta, and I like the heat
management aspect of BattleTech, all of which should bolt into BRP Mecha, which
in turn should bolt easily into KAP. I
just have a problem with things like the cost of upkeep and the like, or rather
the lack of them in BRP Mecha. I'll probably steal pricing from BattleTech.