Back in college in the late 80's I ran a Robot Hero game. The campaign was based on a near future Earth when Islam had grown to dominate Russia, China, central Asia, half of Africa. Although still radical it had developed a respect for factory production, new technology and the like. Finally some crackpot dictator believed it was time to have a final war with the West for world domination. Giant robots were the weapon of choice. Just for kicks I included battle for various colonies around other planets (Mars, Neptune) and moons. And after a certain point mysterious alien spacecraft were seen passing through the solar system.

The PCs were all mech pilots, members of the U.S. military. I liked to toss in some variety of missions to keep things lively and the players guessing. So half the missions were straight mech vs mech battles while the other half were spy missions and the like outside of the mechs. Sometimes a mix of the two. One PC was hated by the American Autoduel Association so occasionally they showed up with a plot or simple interference.

The Robot Hero rules were alright but after the mechs became too large the numbers broke down. Space ship design wasn't thought out well either (this was before the Space Hero rules came out, which was an improvement.) And as usual with Hero the GM has to be careful what attacks he allows else a player can design a mech that can easily wipe out everything around it.

Overall though it worked well. The players all had a great time. Probably the best campaign I've run. No idea if Hero ever revisited the rules and updated/improved them since the 80's.

Was this Star Hero 5th Edition?

-Brandon F.

As far as settings go, Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles are the best by far. I have all of the 1e HG books and about half of the 2e books as well. Great setting.

I've got the first couple of books for Jovian Chronicles, but then they got harder to find locally so I pretty much stopped collecting them. I was a fan of the setting when they released the first adventure modules for Mekton II.

As far as system goes, I wasn't overly fond of the rules for either HG and especially Jovian Chronicles. JC made it worse with the realistic space movement, which is great and all; but seriously more math than I wanted to track during a game session...

Mekton II and Mekton Zeta are great systems for anime Mecha games. Zeta Plus adds a level of complexity and detail to Mecha creation, but lets you create just about any Mecha from any anime series ever. I fell in love with Mekton due in large part to my growing distaste for the Robotech system... Palladium is not for me...

For anyone interested, Mekton is getting a new edition with Mekton Zero. They did a Kickstarter, for which I backed. Its behind schedule, but I expect that from any Kickstarter. It should be on shelves some time after the Backers get theirs. Should be worth it.

Star Hero? Yeah, that sounds familiar, not sure which edition. I bought a copy of the rules back in the mid 90's I think. I remember it had space ship design rules that allowed for any amount of armor and hit points.

I really like Mekton Zeta and it really shines once you have Plus.

The system is actually pretty straightforward and essentially a point buy system to make about anything you want within the point limit and any setting limits.

It even works for making custom weapons and gear for PCs.

And that is an interesting feature of Mekton. You can use it to make more mundane settings, even a fantasy world with no giant robots.

The setting books were interesting too. The original Algol world, Empire and the later invasion book which I lack.

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;748679As far as settings go, Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles are the best by far. I have all of the 1e HG books and about half of the 2e books as well. Great setting.

I've got the first couple of books for Jovian Chronicles, but then they got harder to find locally so I pretty much stopped collecting them. I was a fan of the setting when they released the first adventure modules for Mekton II.

As far as system goes, I wasn't overly fond of the rules for either HG and especially Jovian Chronicles. JC made it worse with the realistic space movement, which is great and all; but seriously more math than I wanted to track during a game session...

Mekton II and Mekton Zeta are great systems for anime Mecha games. Zeta Plus adds a level of complexity and detail to Mecha creation, but lets you create just about any Mecha from any anime series ever. I fell in love with Mekton due in large part to my growing distaste for the Robotech system... Palladium is not for me...

For anyone interested, Mekton is getting a new edition with Mekton Zero. They did a Kickstarter, for which I backed. Its behind schedule, but I expect that from any Kickstarter. It should be on shelves some time after the Backers get theirs. Should be worth it.

Kickstarter page and some art from Mark Simmons (someone I'm familiar with from his independent work on Gundam images) here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1888572386/mekton-zero/posts

Quote from: Doughdee222;748686Star Hero? Yeah, that sounds familiar, not sure which edition. I bought a copy of the rules back in the mid 90's I think. I remember it had space ship design rules that allowed for any amount of armor and hit points.

I have a download of the 5th Edition Star Hero, very big on planets and how to build them up as well as construction of solar systems, goes in depth on all the different possible species and kinds of creatures you could make with all different bases for lifeforms.

Quote from: Omega;748687I really like Mekton Zeta and it really shines once you have Plus.

The system is actually pretty straightforward and essentially a point buy system to make about anything you want within the point limit and any setting limits.

It even works for making custom weapons and gear for PCs.

And that is an interesting feature of Mekton. You can use it to make more mundane settings, even a fantasy world with no giant robots.

The setting books were interesting too. The original Algol world, Empire and the later invasion book which I lack.

The link I provided above and that YSIM mentioned goes back to Algol.

-Brandon F.

played Mechwarrior cos I liek the background but peoples comments here on it are spot on.

If I played Mecha now I would use a similar background to Mechwarrior graft it onto my homebrew engine and add my own Mecha creation rules pinched from car wars (ie weight, cost and slots. A chassis can carry x much weight and have x many slots. Armour, weapons, power plant all cost weight slots and money. Chuck all the stuff you can think of into a list and cost out armour etc. then its powerplant vs cost for speed etc)

we did something similar for a space combat engine for the campaign I just ran and it was awesome, largely due to my players who have the time to put my ridiculous ideas into practice (sheet steel covered in felt for the play surface, each ship on an extentable black arial to give height attached by magnets to the play surface and the ships which have a ball and socket joint out to the engine thrust which indicates direction of thrust and velocity.

Robot Warriors by Hero Games was our go-to Mecha RPG. We played the hell out of that game because you could play it as a RPG or a battle game and we did both.

Robot Warriors was published around 1986, so long before Hero became an overwrought mess and overly complicated. I ran RW a couple years ago and it was fun, but I've kinda burnt on point based games for some reason.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;748622Mechwarrior 1 was so clunky I don't even think about it at all.  It barely meshed with the tabletop game.  I've often wondered if they bought someone's ideas because they wanted an RPG to go with Battletech.  IIRC it was largely d6 and occasionally percentile based.  Mechwarrior II was more elegant but still had holes big enough to walk an Atlas through.  Again, did not mesh well with the mech combat, but was slightly better.  d10 based.  I ran 3 MW2 modules, two of which were linked and all three were set in the Solaris-7 "game world" (it's the IS in miniature; a giant city with battlemech arenas in each, and five sectors of the city controlled by the 5 "great houses", each with its own culture, etc.)  They were all "investigation" Type games that led to big mech fights at the end, so actually not a lot of mech-jock stuff.

While I agree Mechwarrior 1st was super clunky, Mechwarrior 2nd didn't use a d10, that was Mechwarrior 3rd (see http://www.sarna.net/wiki/MechWarrior_(RPG)  ).  Mechwarrior 2 actually integrated with the tabletop rules best IMHO (also 2d6).  I ran a number of games with it (almost all also set on Solaris 7, though not using any modules, but using the Solaris Dueling rules for mech combat).  I skipped everything after 2nd because I thought it was a horrible idea to use a d10 for the RPG portion of a wargame that used 2d6.   Nowadays I'd just use Traveller, it would be trivial to convert.


As for the Mekton recommendations I keep seeing in this thread, I agree.  It's, bar none, the best of the bunch for Mecha games.  I also liked Heavy Gear in theory but I never got a chance to play it.

Quote from: The Butcher;748510Who's ever played one? I don't mean "a RPG that has mecha" like Rifts or even Traveller. I mean a RPG in which all or most players play mecha pilots and spend a significant amount of time inside the machines: Mechwarrior, Robotech, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Mekton, etc.

What game did you play, and what's the system like?

What does a typical session and/or campaign looks like? Is it a mission-based, military squad deal? Is there a significant amount of play away from the battlefield, outside of the mecha?

I ran a Heavy Gear campaign about 9 years ago. But that doesn't really count in this thread, since I used the Paxton Gambit module. There was only one 'scene' in that campaign that involved mecha combat; the rest was investigation and 'personal-level' firefights.

The only 'true' Mecha rpg I've played was CthulhuTech. A friend ran this Rpg in 2011, and it was an enjoyable experience (though I wasn't a big fan of the system). It was very much a 'mission-based, military squad' type of game, with out-of-mecha experiences while en route to locations on some kind of carrier craft.

Quote from: Spinachcat;748712Robot Warriors by Hero Games was our go-to Mecha RPG. We played the hell out of that game because you could play it as a RPG or a battle game and we did both.

Robot Warriors was published around 1986, so long before Hero became an overwrought mess and overly complicated. I ran RW a couple years ago and it was fun, but I've kinda burnt on point based games for some reason.

Robot Warriors! Yes, that was the name I was searching for, that's what I ran. Damn, I gotta stop posting so late at night, I suffer from CRS. Good to know someone else ran that game. I felt like I was the only one who knew about those rules, never see them anywhere.

I've played Heavy Gear, plus I've got a couple of armies in miniature for it. I haven't played any other dedicated mecha game, although I've considered trying Jovian Chronicles.

I've played Mekton since the blue Mekton book (not quite the first edition, which was a white boxed set). Played a metric ton of it (mek-ton? OK, that was bad).

Mekton II + the Mekton Techbook gives me the most warm-fuzzies, as we played that version more than any other. You can literally do anything with it - after a brief dalliance with the Robotech rpg, we migrated the whole thing over to Mekton II and kept right on trucking.

Jovian Chronicles was, BTW, originally a third-party setting for Mekton II. Typically they're referred to as "The Green Books". I prefer the art and designs from those to the Silhouette version of Jovian Chronicles.

Ironically, when I ran JC using Silhouette we rarely had full-on mecha combats - they were more prevalent in my Heavy Gear games. We ran HG and MZ+ concurrently in two different games for a little while, so I got a good feel for the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Silhouette is an extremely fast system, even running mecha battles. While it has a mecha construction system (outlined in the Jovian Chronicles Companion and later slipstreamed into Silhouette Core), I feel that it works best with designs that use the system as a baseline and are manually tweaked for balance and whatnot. In other words, GM provides the mechs. That said, you can create pretty much anything with it, as long as you don't mind some of the costs (particularly Miscellaneous TV) getting a little wonky.

On the other side, MZ+ has a much more involved constructions system than Silhouette - but it's a lot of fun. It's the type of game where I would (and have) let players create their own mecha - give them some guidelines, then let them go to town. We've actually used Mekton as a big old mech-basher. One time, a friend of mine and I got into a disagreement whether or not a dedicated anti-armor aircraft could beat a single mech so we dragged out the books, set a CP budget, designed the mecha and slugged it out. My anti-armor aircraft won, multiple rounds.

I really wish that there was a really good rules light-medium mecha game, but it just doesn't seem to exist.

And every time someone tacks mecha rules onto another light-medium game it feels just a little off.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;748906I really wish that there was a really good rules light-medium mecha game, but it just doesn't seem to exist.

And every time someone tacks mecha rules onto another light-medium game it feels just a little off.

With the overall popularity of BRP on these boards I expected someone to have checked out BRP Mecha. No idea how tacked-on the mecha rules for BRP are, nor how light-medium it is.