This is gonna be a bit of a rambling post, but bear with me. It does actually touch on a number of topics on tabletop gaming and how the series is very poorly represented by those that have had the licenses.

For those that may not remember, Robotech was an amalgamation of 3 original Japanese animated series consisting of Super Dimension Fortress: Macross (aka The Macross Saga), Super Dimension Cavalry: Southern Cross (aka The Masters War) and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (aka The New Generation). There have been additions over the years such as the Japanese OAV MegaZone23 Part I (aka Robotech: The Untold Story), Robotech II: The Sentinels (an original work attempting to make a sequel that failed due to the Yen vs Dollar in 1986 and was turned into a 'Movie'), the Japanese OAV Genesis Climber MOSPEADA: Love, Live, Alive (aka Robotech: Love, Live, Alive) and Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles (also an original work as a movie that ended up being a standalone project due to the 'Creative Team'). The series spawned a line of novelizations from Del Rey in the late 1980s (after the series aired), a number of different comic book series by a host of different publishers and now 3 different Roleplaying Games (Palladium for 2 editions, Strange Machine Games for 1 edition, and Battlefield Press for a Savage Worlds version).

Robotech is the only franchise I can think of, bar none, where the canon (aka the Tv series as it aired in 1985) is ignored, sometimes whole cloth, by its licensees. This is especially true for every single version of the role-playing game that has been published so far. Part of this is the fault of the rights holder, Harmony Gold, since their current 'Creative Director' (as told by someone that worked with him directly) 'doesn't have ideas, he has whims'. The horror stories that have come out over the years of completed manuscripts, with all the changes requested being implemented, been sent to HG for approval, only to come back with different changes ordered. And this going on for six or more months at a time. Of course, when the RPG first came out in the 1980s, by Palladium, a large part of the problem was Harmony Gold simply didn't share what artwork they had with Palladium. I know this because I helped HG (through Tom Bateman, who worked there at the time) organize a gigantic file of Southern Cross artwork for them in the early 2000s and found a metric assload of wrongly labeled content (which I also helped fix by providing Palladium with my own personal collection for the 2E version of The Masters War book, for which I even got a special thanks). Of course, even then, Palladium (likely because of HG's 'Creative Director") got a crapton of stuff outright wrong, even when I showed them exactly what was wrong.

The ignorance of the Tv series by its licensees has been a stupid one since Palladium first started offering The New Generation and then The Masters War videotapes for VHS starting in the late 80s. And doubly so since the release of the Broadcast version of the DVDs in the early 2000s. These people are literally making money off of a license for the Tv series, attempting to replicate it in game form, and many times don't know their earhole from their arsehole when it comes to said Tv series. And worse, almost without fail, every last one of them refuse to change their minds no matter what direct evidence you provide them (and that's irrespective of whether you're nice to them or, as I have become in recent years, insulting to them). This is especially true of the recent RPG versions. A great example (if you'll forgive me) is their write up on the Chimera Heavy Escort Fighter from The Masters War. They not only have it as 'Clumsy' in aerospace combat (despite the fact its a nuclear-powered monster) but also the slowest (in space) fighter in the game, and thats irrespective of whether they are conventional space fighters (enemy and human) or Veritech fighters. I literally showed them 2 different videos from 2 different episodes showing where they were wrong: the first was from the episode Prelude to Battle (showing Chimera's rolling dodges to avoid being picked off by incoming enemy AAA beam cannon fire) and the second was from The Hunters (showing a group of Chimera's blowing the doors off of a squadron of Ajax Veritechs, coming from well below them, attempting to outrun the engagement zone where a short-lived black hole is about to open and swallow every single thing nearby). In both instances, I was told 'that doesn't really matter' cause of X, Y or Z.

So, okay, what the hell does that have to do with tabletop gaming? This isn't a thread for me to just bitch and moan about moronic licensees.

All 4 versions of the game have done an absolutely piss poor job of replicating even a moment of what we see in the series. I'm not the swiftest of cats on the best of days, but even a dumb redneck like me can grok the basic principles of the Square Cube-Law.

We'll start with both of Palladium's versions. We'll compare 3 mecha from the show and how Palladium wrote them up: Queadlunn-Rau Battlesuit (Macross), Bioroid (Masters), Enforcer (New Gen)

Queadlunn-Rau: 1E - 150 MDC, 2E- 290MDC
Soldier Bioroid: 1E - 90MDC, 2E - 125MDC
Invid Gamo/Enforcer: 1E - 200MDC, 2E - 390MDC

Of these 3, the Bioroid is treated as the worst of the worst.

I find that exceedingly odd because the Queadlunn-Rau not only is made for disposable clone troops (granted, elite ones), but already weighs in at 32.4 metric tons dry, MINUS the pilot. That is minus ordnance, fuel and the pilot alone (take Miriya as an example) is going to add another 6.25 metric tons. All told, you're going to be looking in the range of 40 metric tons, fueled and fully loaded. And the mecha's height is 17.11m at the shoulder. It is shown having negligible armor, being pierced by simple lasers (as well as 55mm slug-thrower ammo), either killing the operator (one is shot through the faceplate, so probably took her head clean off her shoulders) or simply exploding.

The Soldier Bioroid weighs in at 11.3 metric tons dry at 6.7m tall, has a few thrusters built into the feet (flying mostly on the Biover Anti-grav Sled or some sort of inertia-less system in space minus the Biover) and carries a hand-held beam cannon, though a few appear to have light beam cannons mounted in the head. Likely only needs a few liters of something for reactant and to turn into plasma to spit out the beam cannons. Most of the frame under the armor is bundles of 'myomer' fibers. The Bioroid is designed as an elite Air Assault Infantry mecha where the pilot's nervous system basically controls the mecha (the nerve impulses are translated into the mecha's movements) and its the only mecha in the series other than true Power-Amplified Body Armor to have such a setup (the Queadlunn-Rau and Gamo are piloted like almost all other mecha by traditional control methods like joysticks). 

The Invid's Enforcer is probably their heaviest weapons platform in their arsenal with a pair of heavy duty 'heat cannons' mounted on the shoulders and a smaller pair of laser-plasma cannons mounted in the 'chin'. The armor is shown to be sort of effective in spots (withstand multiple his with rocket-propelled grenades) However, it weighs in 28 metric tons dry and is 9.7m tall at the shoulder. Again, this is the dry weight, minus any onboard fuel or consumables for the pilot (Invid pilots literally sit in a puddle of green goop). Like the Zentraedi, the Invid aren't necessarily torn up over losing masses of troops (one of their most effective tactics was to use their Iigaa Fighter Scouts to suicide ram enemy targets, mecha and ships, destroying both in the process.

Now we'll compare Strange Machine Games versions (sadly, we only have The Macross Saga stats so far for the Savage Worlds version). The armor scales thusly: Light, Mecha, Naval. 10 points of Light Damage translates as 1 point of Mecha damage.

Queadlunn-Rau - Armor Mecha: 2, Structure – Mecha: 2
Soldier Bioroid - Armor Light: 8, Structure - Light: 18
Gamo Enforcer - Armor Mecha: 2, Structure - Mecha: 2

Once again, we see comparable (though not the same) stats to those of Palladium, and in contravention of what is established in the show.

Long time Robotech fan contributor (and one of the authors of the unofficial Robotech Reference Guide, which HG used to make much of their baseline stats for) Peter Walker, who is an actual Astrophysicist, posted this about how armor works with relation to Galileo's Square-Cube Law:

Strength generally scales as cross-sectional area, whether muscle, skeleton, strut, or servo; height squared. Mass scales with volume; height cubed. A mecha twice the height (but otherwise identical) will be half as strong, proportionally - because its strength will have only quadrupled, but its scalable mass will have increased by eight.
The total mass of a mecha will be made up of several components:
1) the irreducable components like the cockpit module, computer, sensors, etc. These will be about the same size regardless of the mecha.
2) Some minor components that scale with height. These will be things like control and sensor cables.
3) the skeleton and actuators of the mecha. These will actually scale faster than than the cube of the height, because as it gets bigger, it has to become more robust to drive its self-mass, driving mass higher faster. Powerplants may fall under this category, but with a floor like category 1)
4) the armor, which will scale with the square of height.
Given a minimum strength/mass ratio, the armor thickness is limited by a factor that is linear with the height. The bigger you are, the less mass budget you have left for armor, and then you have to spread that armor over a larger surface (that is growing as height squared).

Got that?

So what IS established in the show. Well, we'll have to look at the Bioroid and the dialogue for it.

Episode #42 Danger Zone
[THE NARRATOR]: Professor Miles Cochrane and his colleague Dr. Sampson Beckett probe the remains of an enemy Bioroid in the Robotech Research Laboratory.

[DR. MILES COCHRANE]: I'm now activating ultraviolet scanner.

[DR SAMPSON BECKETT]: Oh!

[DR. MILES COCHRANE]: Alright, let's see exactly what type of mecha we're dealing with here.

[DR SAMPSON BECKETT]: Data on its way. Bioroid. Hovercraft. Some kind of assault ship.

[DR. MILES COCHRANE]: Okay, how about the damages received. See if you can get me a readout on that.

[DR SAMPSON BECKETT]: Alright. Requested data on its way. I'm punching up a schematic of the infrastructure. Hmmm. As you can see, internal damage is minimal.

The Bioroid is all beat to hell, by the way. Its missing its lower right leg and has cracking all across the surface of the mecha. However, only a few spots are completely exposed, as if they armor either flaked away or was blown off.

The long and the short of it is every version of the Robotech RPG has been built around several faulty assumptions. Part of this is inherent in the game systems chosen, like Palladium. The series shows that avoiding getting shot is the best way to survive. However, Palladium went the Battletech route where you're basically piloting modern day tanks trying to blast away at one another. Problem is, we can pretty well decode the series as showing weapons throwing out Mega-Joule energy hits (for most, not all, weapons) and armor either straining or completely buckling under those hits. And of all the mecha in question, only the Bioroid gets hit in vital areas that SHOULD cripple it and still not going down. A large portion of it is the biases of the licensees overriding not only common sense, but what is shown. Many fans claim to not like The Masters War, presumably because its a complex narrative that doesn't bore you to tears with nonsensical love triangles.

Speaking personally, I use WEG's Star Wars REUPD6 version, as its probably the closest we can get to a system that simulates what we see on screen.

This is literally just the tip of the iceberg on this and how the people producing the RPGs don't understand that 'Bigger doesn't always mean tougher'. As I love to say, there has got to be a better way to skin a cat.

I salute your nerddom. I've done a similar rant about the height and scale of Transformers, specifically the F-15 Jets and how they wouldn't be 60 feet tall despite a lot of fans saying they should be.
So I empathize.

But man. The one commonality in the anime(s) is that your survivability is strongly dependent on whether you're a main character or not, and the needs of the story. Bringing in real world physics just underlines how silly giant humanoid mecha are. The best you can do is either base the stats on what's good for the game, or try to emulate the TV show. Both approaches have their issues.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on February 29, 2024, 05:15:50 AM

Speaking personally, I use WEG's Star Wars REUPD6 version, as its probably the closest we can get to a system that simulates what we see on screen.

Well....here ya go!

http://www.d6holocron.com/wiki/index.php/Robotech_Defence_Force

I didn't if you were aware of it, so here's the link.

Enjoy

Quote from: blackstone on February 29, 2024, 08:32:56 AMWell....here ya go!

I wasn't, though looking at the stats I'm convinced they're the exact opposite of what I'm looking for. Its also a lot of Macross mecha that have absolutely nothing to do with Robotech.

There is no way the HWR-00-Monster (erroneously called the MAC II) tops out a whopping 9D Walker-scale. The thing is a walking battleship turret, not a battleship. Its own weight, at 285.5 metric tons dry, and size, at 22.46m tall, would preclude anything but exceedingly thin armor. Besides, its not designed for frontline combat but to engage targets at dozens(?) of miles distant. That was partly why they designed the Spartan, to give the other Destroids a counterpart to engage in Close Quarters Combat instead. Spartans are there to defend Monsters, Phalanx's and Defenders from fast moving targets that close the distance. The Tomahawk has a few weapons to deal with close-in threats, like the TZ-III Gun Cluster, but those are almost last ditch weapons.

Still, thanks for the thought.

The sad part Palladium Books and by extension Kevin could have at least with the second edition tried to do something that would remotely resemble the anime.

But no he decided to quintuple down on first editions flaws and do nothing to address them. Keeping weapons damage low while adding more MDC makes already long combats longer. Sure one can use missiles it gets boring.

What a wasted opportunity sure to be repeated in a third edition if they get the rights again.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 29, 2024, 07:58:17 AMBut man. The one commonality in the anime(s) is that your survivability is strongly dependent on whether you're a main character or not, and the needs of the story.

Yes and no. The main thing is that you want to avoid getting hit. Rick Hunter, the protagonist of the first chapter, loses 2 VF-1J Veritechs in combat, bailing out in time in each one. One of them is literally thrown against a wall with spikes on it and the spikes punch straight through the armor as if it were nothing.

Skull-1, Roy Fokker's old VF-1S, gets shot full of holes by an enemy Queadlunn-Rau and he ends up succumbing to his wounds. Rick later takes over a repaired Skull-1 only to have the arms blown off in Force of Arms as he managed to block a pair of anti-mecha missiles detonating against them in a one-in-a-million gamble.

There has to be some rationale for mecha resisting damage. At least in The Masters War its shown that some cannon fodder (non-named character piloted) Veritechs have special arm shields that completely ablate away incoming beam cannon attacks. Hit the mecha in a location not protected by that and its still adios muchachos.

Its still mostly 'Don't get hit!'. Marie Crystal's Veritech Logan has a mid-air collision with a Bioroid in Star Dust and it stalls out and she is saved by Sean Phillip's 'catching' her fighter with his Hovertank in Battloid mode. Lancer's Veritech Alpha takes a direct hit in Dark Finale and it takes the Invid Princess Sera using her Commander Battloid mecha to save him from turning into a pancake upon impact with the ground. They're the exceptions to the rule, but getting hit is still bad.

QuoteBringing in real world physics just underlines how silly giant humanoid mecha are. The best you can do is either base the stats on what's good for the game, or try to emulate the TV show. Both approaches have their issues.

Well, there has to be a level verisimilitude or it breaks down. That even applies to mecha anime. Of course, you can't make Hard Sci-Fi Giant Transforming Robots, but at least SOME level of realism to keep from completely breaking your suspension of disbelief.

Honestly you seem very anal retentive about the minutiae of this series (which I salute,) but it also means that no product is ever going to satisfy you, so you'll have to create your own massive and intricate rules.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 29, 2024, 09:24:37 AMHonestly you seem very anal retentive about the minutiae of this series (which I salute,) but it also means that no product is ever going to satisfy you, so you'll have to create your own massive and intricate rules.

I don't think it actually requires intricate rules, per se. The rules can be kept relatively non-crunchy, but the emphasis needs to shift from 'everything is a tank' to 'everything is fragile, don't get hit!' Player characters would have a pool of 'Fate' points to spend to keep from croaking in combat, turning a critical hit that explodes their mecha to 'I punch out in time' or 'No, it wasn't a critical system that was hit, but my Veritech just had its leg lopped off'.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 29, 2024, 09:24:37 AM
Honestly you seem very anal retentive about the minutiae of this series (which I salute,) but it also means that no product is ever going to satisfy you, so you'll have to create your own massive and intricate rules.

Pretty much my response. There's a fine line between being so close to the source material to where it's either playable or unplayable.

Sometimes you have to make compromises.

Good luck to the OP.

Quote from: blackstone on February 29, 2024, 09:41:48 AMSometimes you have to make compromises.

Sure, no game is going to absolutely 100% simulate the combat we see in Robotech, but you could at least get it razor-thin close, I think. Or at least closer than what Palladium and SMG have done.

Palladium turned everything into a tank. Combat was slow and the enemies that used swarm tactics (Zentraedi/Invid) had mecha that were beefed to the gills while the enemies that used sheer technological prowess (The Masters) to make up for low numbers were reduced to absurd levels. It was an upside down system that makes zero sense. 

SMG took a baseball bat to the later generations to make them 'sort of' equal in power to The Macross Saga mecha. This despite 20+ years of technological innovation in the case of The Masters War mecha, and nearly 50 years in the case of The New Generation. Its the equivalent of having a game where a Sopwith Camel is just as fast, maneuverable and capable as an F-4U Corsair or P-51 Mustang, not to mention an F-4 Phantom Fighter Jet.

Quote from: Abraxus on February 29, 2024, 09:06:54 AM
The sad part Palladium Books and by extension Kevin could have at least with the second edition tried to do something that would remotely resemble the anime.

But no he decided to quintuple down on first editions flaws and do nothing to address them. Keeping weapons damage low while adding more MDC makes already long combats longer. Sure one can use missiles it gets boring.

What a wasted opportunity sure to be repeated in a third edition if they get the rights again.

You left out the part where he mislead thousands of his and Robotech's most hardcore fans on his $1.4 mil Tactics game about the status of the project ultimately only delivering around a third of the models promised because he spent the rest of the money on thousands of extra boxes exclusively for retail that should have been paid for with his own money...and then simply washed his hands of the responsibility when he finally had to admit he was losing the Robotech license.

Quote from: Abraxus on February 29, 2024, 09:06:54 AM
The sad part Palladium Books and by extension Kevin could have at least with the second edition tried to do something that would remotely resemble the anime.

But no he decided to quintuple down on first editions flaws and do nothing to address them. Keeping weapons damage low while adding more MDC makes already long combats longer. Sure one can use missiles it gets boring.

What a wasted opportunity sure to be repeated in a third edition if they get the rights again.

You are right.  I bought Palladium's Robotech RPG around when it came out after a friend ran it.   I loved the series back when I was young and I watched it every morning and Palladium's Robotech didn't feel anything close to the show.  I was disappointed.

I haven't tried either Battlefield Presses version or strange machines so I cannot comment on those.

Quote from: Abraxus on February 29, 2024, 09:06:54 AM
The sad part Palladium Books and by extension Kevin could have at least with the second edition tried to do something that would remotely resemble the anime.

But no he decided to quintuple down on first editions flaws and do nothing to address them. Keeping weapons damage low while adding more MDC makes already long combats longer. Sure one can use missiles it gets boring.

Yeah, the MDC escalation started with Palladium Robotech and continued into RIFTS. Moar MDCes! A Cyclone ride armor has 200 MDC! Yay!
(Wow, I pulled up Invid Invasion just to have it on-hand, and Siembieda himself did a lot of the illustrations in there. And they're not too shabby.)

Technical minutia is a tough one.  It's fictional.  We can't relate because what works one time may fail utterly in another episode because the story needs it to. 

Personally, If I'm running a Mecha based game from now on I'm using Tiny-D6 Mecha vs Monsters 2E.  This includes RoboTech/Macross and the rest.

It has both transformers and combiners, but is rules light. 

I will say that I own all 4 versions of RoboTech games, and Palladium 2E is my favorite.  Hell, it even tried to justify why VF-1s were firing lasers out of their nose cone retro-thrust vernier ports (animation error).  The 2E game mentions the SDF-1 squadrons did this as a modification, but normal VF-1s from the factory don't.  And the firepower is crap.  I'm ok with that.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 29, 2024, 12:47:12 PM
Yeah, the MDC escalation started with Palladium Robotech and continued into RIFTS. Moar MDCes! A Cyclone ride armor has 200 MDC! Yay!
(Wow, I pulled up Invid Invasion just to have it on-hand, and Siembieda himself did a lot of the illustrations in there. And they're not too shabby.)

Being familiar with Kevin (we've swapped stories over lunch at Origins and a couple times in his office back in the mid 2000's) I can pretty much tell you exactly where the MDC inflation started and why.

The why is simple; because Kevin stuck with his usual Palladium ruleset as a base and that system utterly lacks any sort of luck/plot armor mechanic, the inherent resilience of the Robotech protagonists had to be accounted for in the MDC values of the mecha as if they were all being operated by the protagonists.

For the 1e Macross era it wasn't too bad; a modern tank had 50 MDC, the Veritech had 250, while a standard Battlepod also had 50. The modern tank gun did 2D6 MD, a long burst with the Veritech's GU-11 gun pod averaged 21 (6D6) damage and a single SRM was 35 (1D6x10) so 2-3 bursts or a couple missiles would easily drop a Battlepod and the Battlepod averaged 44 damage (8D10) with its main guns so about six hits on the receiving end to have you Veritech shot out from under you. Personal human body armor at the time had TWO MDC points (technically it was 200 SDC with a conversion of 100 SDC = 1 MDC).

Where it got stupid was the Southern Cross era, because the protagonists spent a LOT of time exposed to fire from mecha-scaled opponents and, again, Palladium rules lacked any sort of luck/plot armor. So to account for the protagonists' survival... viola; MDC body armor set at 50 MDC so it could take at least one, possibly two of the Bioroid's 1D4x10 MD weapon shots (basically meant to be equivalent to the 4D10 MD of the individual Zentraedi particle weapons). Similarly, since the protagonists were able to damage Bioroids with personal weaponry, those had to be MD too.

So, Invid Invasion rolls around and not only do you need to not backslide on the personal armor values, but you have to account for a man-scaled power armor atop it... which is why the Cyclone has 150-200 MDC.

Basically, all of it spins out of a "it made sense at the time" set of decisions all starting from that first decision to stick with Palladium's default of "no special plot armor for PCs."

The decision to make it even worse in 2e Robotech can similarly be laid at the feet of decade+ of Rifts material that started with being slightly ahead of Robotech (the beat body armor in Rifts had 80 MDC, the Cyclone-equivalent suits had 180-250 MDC), but supplement escalation (particularly CJ Carella's material) pretty quickly escalated the MDC values to where something Cyclone-sized had 450+ MDC and full-sized bots were closing in on a thousand MDC.

And because Kevin always thinks in his Megaversal system terms, that meant his 2e of Robotech needed to not be completely outclassed by the numbers you found in the Rifts books.

It's all a case of "Made Sense at the Time" logic based on the refusal to let anything Palladium produced use anything other than the core Palladium game mechanics.

If I had a time machine that could only be used to fix trivial stuff, I'd have gone back to when Kevin had been first working on Robotech and convinced him the genre required some type of "plot armor/luck points" mechanic instead of trying to build it into hardware.

If that had happened, we may not have even seen MDC except as a mechanical convenience (because things like main battle tanks already had 2000 SDC with main guns doing 2D6x100 SDC, so a convention of "divide by 100 for convenience" isn't unreasonable).

Hell, I suspect you'd have had to actually go back to whichever system resulted in Kevin deciding to add personal SDC (vs. SDC only applying to armor and objects while creatures had hit points); probably either TMNT or 1e Heroes Unlimited; just because the entire point of adding those was to account for the incredible resilience and plot armor of the comic book protagonists and villains. It was only because of THAT decision that doing the same with the MDC values made sense.

I think you COULD actually build a solid Robotech system out of Palladium's rules... but you'd have to go back to basics with 1e Palladium or even Mechanoid Invasion and build the needed luck points/plot armor* mechanics off that to do so.

* Because it would be scalable to both personal and mecha scale combat, I think luck points spendable to increase your defense rolls instead of "armor points" to absorb damage abstractly would make the most sense if basing it off Palladium's base engine.

Then you could do a Veritech or Destroid with 20 MDC (2000 SDC) and personal armor with 100 SDC (relative to a human's 14-ish HP at level 1) and a Cyclone with 150-200 SDC. The Veritech's 55mm gatling rifle would be about 3D6x10 SDC for a single shot or 2D6x100 SDC for a 10-round burst or 4D6x100 SDC for a 20-round burst (which is holding the trigger down for one second... GU-11 supposedly held 200 rounds and could fire at up to 1200 rpm/20 rps ... so basically 10 seconds of sustained fire).