A "recent" (necro'ed) thread on 90s games had a few people mentioning Heavy Gear as one of their favourites.

I played it for a single session in 1999 when I was in grade 8. And I don't remember much besides thinking it was cool, and I've always vaguely wanted to give it another go. What do people think it did well? Was the setting or the system what you liked about the game?
Would you play it again? Did you play or run it?

The last iteration I played was Blitz! second edition of the Wargame at 2008-2010 (Caprician Spider-walkers were fun). The RPG in my opinion, and fading memory, had waaaay too much relevant skills in the list (although not as much as its sister game Jovian). Thus your party had to have several dedicated specialists which kinda took away from the enjoyment anime/mech-aspect of the game. Setting was pretty awesome with tropes from the American civil war, colonial history, and wildwest frontier baked in (although I remember some of us in the group came in from the CGI TV show, so there was some confusion of the fluff.)

I think the best way to go at this setting & system was to have the group start as a south/north/merc grunt, and slowly level up their specialist skills. 

Terranova is one of the richest settings you can find. It's not that it's perfect, it's that a large preponderance of the books are written to inspire character ideas, adventure ideas, and campaign ideas. It's all hooks, all the time. This applies especially to the 1st and 2nd ed Rulebooks, Life on Terranova, Into the Badlands, and most of the North/South leaguebooks. All excellent.

In terms of the game itself, it's fast, lethal, and has a tendency towards god-stats for combat monkeys. The task resolution system works quickly, and damage is integrated into the roll with a bit of multiplication--that's either a feature or a bug, depending on your math skills. Mecha scales well from personal combat. Skills are fine, though it's got a late-90s "all the skills" science fiction feel: there's a skill for lots of rather individual niches, and then some pretty blanket skills for a bunch of tasks. There's Small Arms, Heavy Weapons, Melee, Unarmed, & Dodge as the main personal combat skills. But then there's Gunnery (X/Y/Z/AA...) and Pilot (X/Y/Z/AA...) for a variety of vehicles and situations. There's Mechanics, Electronics, Tinker, and then Mechanical Design and Electronic Design skills... it gets a bit much, especially when nothing is really well-defined. Is Tinker for modding your equipment, or is it for jury-rigging repairs? Ah well.

I thoroughly enjoyed running Heavy Gear (hence my moniker) for over ten years and three major campaigns. I've run one-offs here and there in the past decade, and it's been fun, but I haven't had the urge to return to Terranova for a long sojourn. If I did, I'd Tinker with the rules to alleviate some of the skill bloat and god-stat-ism. Those mods have worked well in one-offs, but have not seen long-term play.

TL;DR: great game. System works until you get sick of the wrinkles.

Quote from: Thondor on July 03, 2021, 02:48:25 PM
A "recent" (necro'ed) thread on 90s games had a few people mentioning Heavy Gear as one of their favourites.

I played it for a single session in 1999 when I was in grade 8. And I don't remember much besides thinking it was cool, and I've always vaguely wanted to give it another go. What do people think it did well? Was the setting or the system what you liked about the game?
Would you play it again? Did you play or run it?

I GM it for a while back in the day.

Loved the art and the stetting, did not like the system. It wasn't granular enough for me.
I would play it again, but not sure if I could stick with it for any kind of campaign. Maybe as a wargame/RPG lite once in a while.
If I were to try and do a serious campaign, I would probably try to use the setting wtih the Mekton rules.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 03, 2021, 08:53:06 PM
Terranova is one of the richest settings you can find. It's not that it's perfect, it's that a large preponderance of the books are written to inspire character ideas, adventure ideas, and campaign ideas. It's all hooks, all the time. This applies especially to the 1st and 2nd ed Rulebooks, Life on Terranova, Into the Badlands, and most of the North/South leaguebooks. All excellent.

In terms of the game itself, it's fast, lethal, and has a tendency towards god-stats for combat monkeys. The task resolution system works quickly, and damage is integrated into the roll with a bit of multiplication--that's either a feature or a bug, depending on your math skills. Mecha scales well from personal combat. Skills are fine, though it's got a late-90s "all the skills" science fiction feel: there's a skill for lots of rather individual niches, and then some pretty blanket skills for a bunch of tasks. There's Small Arms, Heavy Weapons, Melee, Unarmed, & Dodge as the main personal combat skills. But then there's Gunnery (X/Y/Z/AA...) and Pilot (X/Y/Z/AA...) for a variety of vehicles and situations. There's Mechanics, Electronics, Tinker, and then Mechanical Design and Electronic Design skills... it gets a bit much, especially when nothing is really well-defined. Is Tinker for modding your equipment, or is it for jury-rigging repairs? Ah well.

I thoroughly enjoyed running Heavy Gear (hence my moniker) for over ten years and three major campaigns. I've run one-offs here and there in the past decade, and it's been fun, but I haven't had the urge to return to Terranova for a long sojourn. If I did, I'd Tinker with the rules to alleviate some of the skill bloat and god-stat-ism. Those mods have worked well in one-offs, but have not seen long-term play.

TL;DR: great game. System works until you get sick of the wrinkles.

When you say "god-stats" do you mean certain attributes/skills are obviously the best for combat while others are unimportant?
I'd love more details on the dice/resolution mechanic. Nothing wrong (necessarily) with a little multiplication. How'd it work?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 03, 2021, 10:11:00 PM
I GM it for a while back in the day.

Loved the art and the stetting, did not like the system. It wasn't granular enough for me.
I would play it again, but not sure if I could stick with it for any kind of campaign. Maybe as a wargame/RPG lite once in a while.
If I were to try and do a serious campaign, I would probably try to use the setting wtih the Mekton rules.

Can you elaborate on what wasn't granular enough in the system for you? Character options etc?

Quote from: Thondor on July 06, 2021, 10:13:37 AM

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 03, 2021, 08:53:06 PM
Terranova is one of the richest settings you can find. It's not that it's perfect, it's that a large preponderance of the books are written to inspire character ideas, adventure ideas, and campaign ideas. It's all hooks, all the time. This applies especially to the 1st and 2nd ed Rulebooks, Life on Terranova, Into the Badlands, and most of the North/South leaguebooks. All excellent.

In terms of the game itself, it's fast, lethal, and has a tendency towards god-stats for combat monkeys. The task resolution system works quickly, and damage is integrated into the roll with a bit of multiplication--that's either a feature or a bug, depending on your math skills. Mecha scales well from personal combat. Skills are fine, though it's got a late-90s "all the skills" science fiction feel: there's a skill for lots of rather individual niches, and then some pretty blanket skills for a bunch of tasks. There's Small Arms, Heavy Weapons, Melee, Unarmed, & Dodge as the main personal combat skills. But then there's Gunnery (X/Y/Z/AA...) and Pilot (X/Y/Z/AA...) for a variety of vehicles and situations. There's Mechanics, Electronics, Tinker, and then Mechanical Design and Electronic Design skills... it gets a bit much, especially when nothing is really well-defined. Is Tinker for modding your equipment, or is it for jury-rigging repairs? Ah well.

I thoroughly enjoyed running Heavy Gear (hence my moniker) for over ten years and three major campaigns. I've run one-offs here and there in the past decade, and it's been fun, but I haven't had the urge to return to Terranova for a long sojourn. If I did, I'd Tinker with the rules to alleviate some of the skill bloat and god-stat-ism. Those mods have worked well in one-offs, but have not seen long-term play.

TL;DR: great game. System works until you get sick of the wrinkles.

When you say "god-stats" do you mean certain attributes/skills are obviously the best for combat while others are unimportant?
I'd love more details on the dice/resolution mechanic. Nothing wrong (necessarily) with a little multiplication. How'd it work?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 03, 2021, 10:11:00 PM
I GM it for a while back in the day.

Loved the art and the stetting, did not like the system. It wasn't granular enough for me.
I would play it again, but not sure if I could stick with it for any kind of campaign. Maybe as a wargame/RPG lite once in a while.
If I were to try and do a serious campaign, I would probably try to use the setting wtih the Mekton rules.

Can you elaborate on what wasn't granular enough in the system for you? Character options etc?

It's been an age, so if I get fuzzy on specifics, bear with me.
As I remember the system, it was a d6 dice pool, roll xd6, take the highest, apply modifiers. This means that every pip or +1 modifier meant 16% of a dice roll. It's really hard to stack mods on such a system without running the number way up.
Again, as I remember the system (I really should get the 1st ed rulebook and brush up on it) damage was determined by margin of success, with about 3 results. attack > defense, you do  minor damage, attack x2 > defense you do a lot of damage, etc. Then roll on a table for specific effects. Not too bad, but still limited by large margins.
It really made me think the system would be fine for miniatures combat, but not so much for RPG combat and skill resolution. So I think the range of numbers in the system was what bothered me.

Quote from: Thondor on July 06, 2021, 10:13:37 AM


When you say "god-stats" do you mean certain attributes/skills are obviously the best for combat while others are unimportant?
I'd love more details on the dice/resolution mechanic. Nothing wrong (necessarily) with a little multiplication. How'd it work?

The way the system worked was that every skill test was rated on two axes: Skill level, which gave you the number of d6 rolled, and Attribute, which added to the total. The dice were rolled, with only the highest number taken. So, 3d6 with 5, 5, 3 would mean a 5. Then add your attribute modifier to that. Other modifiers were also added, like cover, movement modifiers, and wound penalties (which were brutal after the first one!).

Combat involved opposed skill rolls: Small Arms vs. Dodge, Melee vs. Melee, Heavy Gear Gunnery vs. Heavy Gear Piloting. If the attack was higher than the defensive roll, you'd take that Margin of Success and multiply that number by the Damage Multiplier of the weapon. That would be compared against the wound/damage threshold of the character or vehicle. If it was high enough, you could instant-kill a person, or destroy a vehicle in one shot. That was always a possibility, so there were (optional) mechanisms to mitigate instant PC death--which happened to one of my players in their very first roll in Heavy Gear ever. Brutal and deadly. Which was fine, 99% of the time.

Agility was the stat that modified every skill I just listed (and a few more!) except for HG Gunnery (Perception). Agility was very, very important. Too important. If you didn't have +1 Agility, you were boned. If you had +2 Agility, you were set. I didn't allow +3 attributes.

The problem was that after modifiers, it was quite common for a +3 or higher to a die roll, and at +3, the dice system would break down and the tone of the game became decidedly less gritty than it was originally intended.

A lot could be mitigated by changing the attributes so that Agility does not rule over most things. There's also a solid d6 version of Heavy Gear for free floating around. It's a great game, great setting, and unlike a lot of mecha games, it's very, very fast to resolve a fight. I just wish it wasn't so fiddly and non-granular.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 06, 2021, 03:16:47 PM

Quote from: Thondor on July 06, 2021, 10:13:37 AM


When you say "god-stats" do you mean certain attributes/skills are obviously the best for combat while others are unimportant?
I'd love more details on the dice/resolution mechanic. Nothing wrong (necessarily) with a little multiplication. How'd it work?

The way the system worked was that every skill test was rated on two axes: Skill level, which gave you the number of d6 rolled, and Attribute, which added to the total. The dice were rolled, with only the highest number taken. So, 3d6 with 5, 5, 3 would mean a 5. Then add your attribute modifier to that. Other modifiers were also added, like cover, movement modifiers, and wound penalties (which were brutal after the first one!).

Combat involved opposed skill rolls: Small Arms vs. Dodge, Melee vs. Melee, Heavy Gear Gunnery vs. Heavy Gear Piloting. If the attack was higher than the defensive roll, you'd take that Margin of Success and multiply that number by the Damage Multiplier of the weapon. That would be compared against the wound/damage threshold of the character or vehicle. If it was high enough, you could instant-kill a person, or destroy a vehicle in one shot. That was always a possibility, so there were (optional) mechanisms to mitigate instant PC death--which happened to one of my players in their very first roll in Heavy Gear ever. Brutal and deadly. Which was fine, 99% of the time.

In one of my games, a bunch of CNCS pilots (The PCs) got in a bar fight with some AST pilots. One PC hit an AST pilot over the head with a bar stool... and killed him dead. I don't remember if I ruled it as non-lethal damage or just rolled with it. The "point" of the bar fight was to evoke that kind of cold war antagonism without necessarily having to kill the other guy, so the combat system really didn't work for me there.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 06, 2021, 05:52:46 PM
In one of my games, a bunch of CNCS pilots (The PCs) got in a bar fight with some AST pilots. One PC hit an AST pilot over the head with a bar stool... and killed him dead. I don't remember if I ruled it as non-lethal damage or just rolled with it. The "point" of the bar fight was to evoke that kind of cold war antagonism without necessarily having to kill the other guy, so the combat system really didn't work for me there.

I've had that happen. It is both a feature and a bug of the Silhouette system: there is no such thing as "non-lethal" damage. Even tasers and tear gas can (and have!) killed.

I'm ok with that, because it's still really hard to outright kill a guy with a club in a barfight, but it's better and safer to not swing a barstool at a guy.

I'd have ruled that the guy would die from a brain hemorrhage without immediate medical attention... Still, not the sort of light "blow off steam" barfight you intended to have the PCs run through.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 06, 2021, 11:18:19 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 06, 2021, 05:52:46 PM
In one of my games, a bunch of CNCS pilots (The PCs) got in a bar fight with some AST pilots. One PC hit an AST pilot over the head with a bar stool... and killed him dead. I don't remember if I ruled it as non-lethal damage or just rolled with it. The "point" of the bar fight was to evoke that kind of cold war antagonism without necessarily having to kill the other guy, so the combat system really didn't work for me there.

I've had that happen. It is both a feature and a bug of the Silhouette system: there is no such thing as "non-lethal" damage. Even tasers and tear gas can (and have!) killed.

I'm ok with that, because it's still really hard to outright kill a guy with a club in a barfight, but it's better and safer to not swing a barstool at a guy.

I'd have ruled that the guy would die from a brain hemorrhage without immediate medical attention... Still, not the sort of light "blow off steam" barfight you intended to have the PCs run through.

I hope you mean in-game not IRL!

To me this sounds like a feature not a bug. Like you say, hitting somebody over the head with a bar stool is a dangerous thing to do, like smacking them with a club or mace. Contrary to the impression you often get from movies, unconsciousness from a blow to the head is brain damage, not some kind of "phasers to stun" kid-gloves option. Maybe the game would benefit from a "Hollywood violence" switch, but then that doesn't seem to be what it's intended to do.

Quote from: Marchand on July 07, 2021, 02:59:47 AM

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 06, 2021, 11:18:19 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 06, 2021, 05:52:46 PM
In one of my games, a bunch of CNCS pilots (The PCs) got in a bar fight with some AST pilots. One PC hit an AST pilot over the head with a bar stool... and killed him dead. I don't remember if I ruled it as non-lethal damage or just rolled with it. The "point" of the bar fight was to evoke that kind of cold war antagonism without necessarily having to kill the other guy, so the combat system really didn't work for me there.

I've had that happen. It is both a feature and a bug of the Silhouette system: there is no such thing as "non-lethal" damage. Even tasers and tear gas can (and have!) killed.

I'm ok with that, because it's still really hard to outright kill a guy with a club in a barfight, but it's better and safer to not swing a barstool at a guy.

I'd have ruled that the guy would die from a brain hemorrhage without immediate medical attention... Still, not the sort of light "blow off steam" barfight you intended to have the PCs run through.

I hope you mean in-game not IRL!

To me this sounds like a feature not a bug. Like you say, hitting somebody over the head with a bar stool is a dangerous thing to do, like smacking them with a club or mace. Contrary to the impression you often get from movies, unconsciousness from a blow to the head is brain damage, not some kind of "phasers to stun" kid-gloves option. Maybe the game would benefit from a "Hollywood violence" switch, but then that doesn't seem to be what it's intended to do.

That incident did get me thinking about how often it's been portrayed in fiction that a character knocks someone unconsious, when in real life they'd probably just hurt them.

On the other hand, it is a game about giant robots shooting each other. If we want to go for realism, the first thing to go would probably be the Heavy Gears. And then the title wouldn't make much sense...

Hey Gearheads! The price for the 1st edition Rulebook on drivethru came way down! I'm going to order myself a copy out of nostalgia!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1323/Heavy-Gear-Rulebook-1st-Edition&affiliate_id=35526

Quote from: Marchand on July 07, 2021, 02:59:47 AM

To me this sounds like a feature not a bug. Like you say, hitting somebody over the head with a bar stool is a dangerous thing to do, like smacking them with a club or mace. Contrary to the impression you often get from movies, unconsciousness from a blow to the head is brain damage, not some kind of "phasers to stun" kid-gloves option. Maybe the game would benefit from a "Hollywood violence" switch, but then that doesn't seem to be what it's intended to do.

It can work that way, but you have to consciously (hah!) rule that way for non-lethal damage from clubs.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on July 07, 2021, 04:15:41 AM

On the other hand, it is a game about giant robots shooting each other. If we want to go for realism, the first thing to go would probably be the Heavy Gears. And then the title wouldn't make much sense...

Yeah, that's always the caveat: if you're going to include mecha--even mecha that are about as realistic as you can make mecha without them being powered armour--you have to squint at realism a bit. I still prefer Gear-sized mecha to Battletech or Gundam sized, though I seem to be in a minority there. More VOTOMS, please.

Still, the lethality of HG never really bothered me. I think the math break-points and the way attributes work grind my...gears.  

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 07, 2021, 08:18:55 PM

It can work that way, but you have to consciously (hah!) rule that way for non-lethal damage from clubs.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on July 06, 2021, 11:18:19 PM

I've had that happen. It is both a feature and a bug of the Silhouette system: there is no such thing as "non-lethal" damage. Even tasers and tear gas can (and have!) killed.

I'm confused - is there non-lethal dmg or not?

Or does Josh mean there is only one type of damage, and if someone gets hit with a club but not enough to kill them, the GM can rule they're knocked unconscious?