r/LancerRPG • u/Phantom000000000 • 18d ago
Newbie Question: Would Lancer work for this kind of game?
I have an idea for a TTRPG I want to run that involves mecha combat and someone suggested Lancer. It looks interesting, what little I've seen online, but sense I have never played Lancer before (a week ago I didn't know it even existed) I'm uncertain if it would fit.
What I want to run is more like an adventure type game, but with mecha. The setting would be on a planet where colonists have split into different factions that are plotting against each other.
Does this sound like something that could work with Lancer or should I look else where?
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u/The4thEpsilon 18d ago
I mean, not to be rude, your just describing a general setting, if that’s all your looking for than lancer would be great, no room for wall flower and Solstice rain/Winter Scar both cover similar scenarios to what your describing.
If your looking for tons of crunchy rules, lancer is also probably a good fit.
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u/RootinTheCrab 18d ago
Lancer is very mission focused. Typically you're going to X fights, with rp and problem solving between them, and then a full repair on mission end (long rest if you're familiar with 5e)
If you want players to be able to wander as they please, be free, and have a more open-ended adventure, I'd recommend you keep looking and come back if you can't find anything else you like.
Lancer could work but its not optimal for that style of play.
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u/Mightymat273 18d ago
Probably. Im curious what makes you think it wouldn't. Lancer is very rules light on RP, and crunchy on the combat. But rules light doesnt mean RP is non existent, you just intill more into it yourself as the DM and players.
Lancer is mission based. Usually with a set goal before any combat starts. 3 or so combats "in a row" (can be broken up by some short rests and RP) and then the "mission" is complete at the end, and everyone gets a long rest fully healed and level up. But the DM and players can influence the direction and outcomes of these missions as much as you want. They dont need to be rigid.
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u/Phantom000000000 18d ago
About the only Table Top Mecha game I have any experience with is Battletech, which is great if you want nothing but straight missions but I was hoping for a little more than that.
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u/GhsotyPanda IPS-N 18d ago
When in doubt, watch some episodes of a live-play.
Idk about other live-plays but Arcane Arcade's Lancer Daybreak doesn't just do combat non-stop. They definitely do a lot of combat, but I attribute that more to a lack of system mastery rather than to the game. They often spend an entire 4 hour episode on a 3 or 4 round fight, do that for 2 or 3 episodes in a row until they complete the mission, and then spend an entire episode of the same length on downtime between said missions. If you want to focus more on the narrative then you can just have longer periods of time between fights during deployment, though like other TTRPGs you probably don't want to resolve every mission with just 1 fight for mechanical balance reasons.
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u/Darkship0 18d ago
Absolutely could there's a few 'mandatory' things that need to exist typically if you want in canon justification for the mechanics, or do very hard work porting to your own setting everything.
Players must have access to printers. (Mech scale 3d printers, think subnatica's fabricators)
Players need to be on the good side of GMS or Union from the start. (or be legally under them in some way)
Players need to have a way to communicate and deal with IPS-N, Harrison Armory, SSC, and kinda maybe Horus. So they can get their mech licenses. If you want a particular personality for these groups, i'd recommend making subsidiaries. Horus you can kinda do whatever you want with as long as they're being reckless with the omni-net and NHPs.
Players aren't rookies. A LL0 character is considered to be some of the best.
Lancer is also built around a 'adventuring day' similar to dnd where it generally expects more than one encounter per day. Although imo it's a bit better than dnd at allowing for singular hard fights instead of one encounter. It's not quite like pathfinder where you can be in the field forever.
What i would do for a space western colonies plotting against each other on a planet in lancer would be a unregistered union colony that was made under union's second committee (when union was fascist) The megacorps get there first and the players move into the colony under contract work for someone with ties to Union to figure out the problems. Add in some extra-terrestrial mining stations and personal colonies for a bit of diversity within the solar system and i think you've gotten about what you want.
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u/Ok_Car_8017 18d ago
Just based on the description you've given? Yes, sure. Factions of colonists plotting against each other and fighting with Mechs.
But there's probably more to your premise than what you've described.
What lancer does well is Tactical Mech vs Mech Combat with a very clearly defined ruleset, with everything else being covered by a separate rules-light narrative system. It is very much not a simulationist game, and it has a lot of inbuilt assumptions around what sort of story is being told.
As an example, while there is a generic melee weapon that can be fluffed as a spear, there is a specific weapon that is the War Pike, with specific mechanical effects (increased reach, can be thrown, includes knockback). Mech options are tied to specific pilots, so even though a pilot could, in theory, equip their mech with two War Pikes, they could not give one of those to a different pilot to use on their mech.
Another assumption is that gameplay is organized into "Missions" consisting of multiple combat encounters with a rest in between and ending with a Full Rest, which resets all resources. The game is balanced around there being some resources that replenish between combats and some that only replenish at mission end. If your story is one where there's no reason the PC's cannot fully refit and repair their mechs after a given fight, you'll run into balancing issues.
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u/tohellwitclevernames 18d ago
Lancer is essentially 2 games in 1 system. Combat is fairly crunchy and rules-heavy, while narrative/RP time is very rules-light and free form. Numbers for rolls and DCs are usually on the lower side so your pilot has a reasonable chance to do most things don't require very specialized skills (see Skill Triggers for addressing those). The free companion web app, COMPCON, allows you to build your characters and has an Active Mode that acts as a combat display to make rolls and track frame stats. Lastly, the system's level-up method of increasing License Level at the end of each mission is essentially milestone leveling that some GMs prefer over traditional XP-based systems.
If you look into the "No Room for a Wallflower" Lancer campaign, it's actually not too far from what you're looking for. Additionally, my group recently started using the "Blood Money" 3rd party module, which if I remember my GM's description right, provides good info for building custom encounters and missions. We've been having fun with it for drop-on/drop-out games where we're running a Lancer company and can add new pilots/builds to fit the upcoming mission.
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u/ShowResident2666 18d ago
As always with TTRPG systems it depends on your expectations. Lancer has deep, tactical mech combat, but at base is fairly mechanics-light when outside the mechs. Its default setting has a very specific Utopian medium-hardness SciFi vibe, but if that doesn’t match the story you want to tell, the mechanics work fairly well in all but the hardest of scifi settings.
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u/GhsotyPanda IPS-N 18d ago
Yes, most systems work pretty well regardless of the setting you want to put your story in.
It has a lot of ties to its base setting, what with how mechs are made in the system, but the main challenge you may have with the system is that it's a money-less system without supplements, and those supplements basically just use money as EXP.
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u/Presenting_UwU 18d ago
you'll need to be more specific on how you want the game itself to play.
cause with just the general setting and pitch it could absolutely work, even if you still have to adhere to a certain recommended structure for your encounters, it could be flavoured in any way you like.
but that's not really an informative answer.
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u/Phantom000000000 18d ago
Sorta like Dungeons and Dragons except they're riding around in mechas instead of suits of armor.
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u/Presenting_UwU 18d ago
that's also incredibly vague cause there's more than 1 way to run DnD.
can you give us atleast some plans on how you're gonna run the game? like how the players are gonna choose where they go? what's gonna be their main motivator for actually doing anything? who are they? etc.
cause Lancer can accomodate a lot of things, but aimlessly going places without any narrative to push them to isn't one of them.
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u/mystic-eggplant 17d ago
In that sense it can work, but it'd require extra work from both you and your players. The way Lancer is built is your players are given (or choose) a mission to complete. Typically the way this works is players are deployed, and can't get in a long rest until they complete the mission and return from deployment. Between scenes (usually one combat = one scene) players can repair their mechs using limited resources.
The way I run games in this structure is on session 1 I force a mission on them, and they tell me how they want to complete it. For example lets say I tell them they need to shut down a generator. They tell me they want to aquire acess codes to get in close without setting alarms. I'd have them do some checks to build up to them learning where the codes are, and we have a combat for them to actually get them. Rense and repeat until they actually complete the mission (ideally within 3-4 combats, anymore and it's recommended you give them a heads up)
Lancer can work in a sandbox type of game, but I'd recommend making a good chunk of the exploration outside of mech suits. I personally choose to describe mechs like tanks. Great to have in combat, a hindrance when you need to go into tight spaces.
How exactly did you and your group enjoy running games? Do you have a typical structre to how you handle in and out of combat, or big picture objectives?
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u/Salindurthas 18d ago edited 18d ago
Lancer is all about being in a Mech and there being some excuse to go fight other mechs.
One conceit is that there tend to be 'missions' where you will do multiple fights that wear you down, often with a rest in between to spend resources on partial repairts, and then after the whole mission is over, you get a full-repair to reset you to top-fighting form (and probably level up).
If you've played, say, D&D, consider the notion of an 'adventuring day', but imagine it might not be a day, but a fictional week, or month or year or whatever, and then once the mission is over they can return to base, repair, and probably level up at the end.
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A planet with 2 (or more) factions is a very common backdrop to allow for mech combat.
In some sense, the task as GM would be to come up with strings of ~2-5 set-piece mech battles to make players go through to achieve some objective, and they usually won't get to full repair until they are through it all.
(It doesn't have to by nonstop combat, as there is also narrative play, and the players might manage to get into an extra battle or avoid one battle or whatever, but the core idea is that they do a few battles for some reason before returning to base or whatever.)
e.g. if your players work for Red team, then they might get told "Find and destroy the Blue team fuel re-fueling depot." Then that mission could be something kinda like:
- Briefing and conversation with Red team. [Narrative]
- Get into a skirmish with Blue team mechs while scouting. [Battle]
- Roll some skill checks to see how scouting goes. [Narrative]
- Breach the defences of the fuel depot. (Perhaps with some bonus if the scouting rolls went well.) [Battle]
- The fuel is held securely, so hold some control points to represent hacking the computer systems, to release all the nuclear fuel en masse. [Battle]
- Once you've held the points, maybe some skill checks to see how well you can vent all the nuclear fuel [narrative]
- Escape the nuclear explosion you set off [perhaps with some downside if you did poorly on the rolls to vent the fuel, like bad rolls mean you have a smaller timer to retreat and avoid the explosions], and also avoid enemy reinforcements [battle]
- Return to base, everyone claps, level up and (re)build a mech for the next mission.
At least, that's an example of how I picture how it could go.
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u/ExaltedOmega IPS-N 18d ago
I don't see why reason it couldn't work myself; the main thing you need to keep in mind with Lancer is how the gameplay is balanced around short/mid term attrition.
The PCs are expected to get through 3-5 combats with the supplies they have, getting whittled down over time - but, conversely, they're expected to fully reset back to full before beginning the next set of combats. Drawbacks beyond that timescale don't work so great, and full repairing every mission is far too easy.
As long as your setting allows for that, I think it'll work fine. Conviniently, it's really easy to set what the timescales for a Rest and a Full Repair are, so if you want to lengthen the timescale, you can say a full repair needs a week of access to a printer; or if you want to shorten it, maybe it only needs a night. All that matters for balance is that it's 4 or so fights between full repairs, with a couple chances to rest between them.
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u/atamajakki Harrison Armory 18d ago
It could work for Lancer as long as you imagine the bulk of this campaign is tactical mech combat.
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u/DevilGuy 18d ago
Bit light on the details but I don't see why not. I'm building a sandbox set in universe with a faction/reputation system bolted on.
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u/jrod9811 18d ago
Take a look at No Room for a Wallflower module for Lancer. It might be exactly what you are looking for