Mind of tempest
(he/him)advocate for 5e psionics
the mech rpg is it any good?
is lancer any good?
Thomas Shey
Legend
Also, be aware that its a game with a very strong divergence between the in-mech, combat oriented part of the game (which is very detailed and mechanical) and the out of mech stuff (which is very narrative and lightweight). That's not necessarily a critique, but something I'm not sure everyone would expect.
Thomas Shey
Legend
I'll have to give that a look.
Little slow to post, but I had a lot of thoughts. I've got 3 big pros and 3 big cons for you.
Pro #1 - Crunch: Lancer does the crunchiest of crunchy grid combat. Movement matters down to the hex, action usage is tight, heat/stress & HP/structure management are critical, cover is regularly useful. The basics of enemies, terrain, and player actions create rich, engaging gameplay with lots of opportunities for smart play and cool builds.
My players love the mechanical depth of Lancer. Our last scene (a holdout mission) was a total nailbiter where the players started off confident, got scared, thought they were about to lose, and then bodyblocked in a way that left an enemy just one point of movement short of the objective zone. Games don't always end up like that, but the rules reward these kinds of calculated decisions.
Pro #2 - Gameplay Diversity: Lancer has a lot of diverse mech options, both player- and GM-side. Even at LL0 in an Everest / Chomolungma, you have: hacking vs attacking, melee vs ranged, ordnances with range boosts, firing a bunch of aux weapons vs heavy skirmish vs superheavy only, boosting limited-use systems with engineering. The mech systems tie into all these, and the designers aren't afraid to push boundaries even in the core book. Taking 6 actions in a turn, super-hacking mechs, grapple mechs, talents that reward leaving your mech, talents that reward overheating, and on and on. It really feels like a playground.
You do get some build soupiness at Tier 3 when everyone's builds are mostly complete and players are just picking generic goodstuff cores, but at that point the team is enfranchised enough that they start curating their builds for the fun of it.
On the GM-side, you "only" get ~5 sitreps, ~20 enemies, and ~10 templates, which you wouldn't think is very much compared to (for example) the 300-ish monsters in the 4e MM, but everything in Lancer is meant to be mixed & matched which means scenes can feel very different with just a few changes. I think Operation Solstice Rain showcases this pretty well.
Pro #3 - The conceit of the setting explains the asymmetry between Lancers and their enemies. In most tactical combat games, players need to be significantly more durable with more well-rounded strength profiles and no glaring weaknesses (unless a player wants to opt into them). In contrast, enemies are at their most interesting when they have very little durability & sharp strength profiles. This annoys me in games like D&D / PF where there's no in-universe explanation for the difference: PCs just operate by different rules because they're PCs. It's not diegetic, and that especially chafes on me when I use things like minions & unique recharge mechanics.
In contrast, Lancer's central conceit is that the PCs are a rare group of badasses. Their missions are always important, their survival is paramount, and their enemies are regularly under-equipped / low on morale / using unsafe mechs / etc. This explains PCs having uniquely high structure and stress, and their near-infinite flow of resources.
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Con #1 - GM Workload: Lancer is a mech wargame glued to half of an apocalypse game. You traverse between scenes with handwaving or some extremely ruleslite d20 vs TN 10 gameplay, before landing in a combat with a bunch of super crunchy rules, predefined deployment zones, enemy ingress zones, etc. The massive delta in terms of rules support for pilot vs mech gameplay, and Lancer's sales pitch as a crunchy mech combat game, leads to a lot of My Precious Encounter designs. Lancer demands bespoke battle maps designed for certain sitreps, smart terrain placement, enemies with kits that synergize, deployment & reinforcement lists, and the like. At the table, the GM is expected to hand PCs a complete statblock of any given mech at the drop of a hat, so you can't just pull out your monster index card and improvise a conflict.
Massif's COMP/CON tool helps you track things, and the Lancer community has put in a ton of work into making this easier (shoutout to RetroGrade Minis awesome sprites, and Eranziel's Lancer Foundry module). But even with all this, the game still needs maybe double the work of setting up a D&D game.
Lancer tries to reduce the workload by encouraging the GM to just railroad the players, so they only have to plan the combats. You can see this in Solstice Rain, where the players are expected to walk from scene to scene, without any opportunities for clever scouting or interrogation. Or in one of the most popular Lancer open tables environments, Interpoint Station, which eschews worldbuilding almost entirely in favor of playing the game as a pure wargame. That's... fine? But it's the only form of play with any real support in the rules.
If a GM (say, myself) wants a game with a little more agency, it takes so much of work. There aren't good guidelines for travel, exploring territory, obtaining reserves outside of downtime, random encounters for worldbuilding, or managing multiple factions. There also aren't any first-party examples to pull from. In this fan-made remix of Solstice Rain that changes the game into a pointcrawl, you can see the author is just making stuff up whole cloth because there aren't any rules.
The total overhaul of out-of-combat options in Karrakin Trade Baronies, and the fact that clocks were introduced in an Wallflower (an adventure path! why aren't clocks in the main game!??!!) are part of the same problem: the designers did not think enough about GM tools when putting this game together.
Con #2 - It's Verrrry Slow: Lancer is also extremely slow to play. Fights taking 2-4 hours, and it's incredibly rare to run more than 1 combat in a session (even more rare than 4e). This leads to diegetic weirdness where players will only fight 3-4 times between each promotion, because in real life, that's 10~15 hours of play. The game just shrugs this off, but it bugs me.
Lancer also makes choices that bog down game pacing. Popcorn initiative leads to a string of, "who's going next? uhhhhhhh" 20-30 times a session. On the GM side, every enemy has the same number of actions as PCs so they're usually making 2 attacks per turn, and enemies tend to have long "activation tails", where a string of enemies all act in a row at the end of the round. Each player engages mentally for maybe 10% of a combat, and 90% of the time they sit around twiddling their thumbs or playing on their phone. As a GM, it hurts me to see my players trying so hard to stay interested when there's just nothing for them to do most of the time. This gets especially bad at high player counts.
Lancer fans have built new encounter design guidelines that make a lot of this less miserable, and there are suggested houserules (like reworking Stun) that improve some of the worse edge cases, but these solutions are all band-aids for a large, systemic slowness in game resolution.
Con #3 - Not Balanced: Lancer was pitched to me as this perfectly balanced grid combat game, and to this day I have no how anyone could think this. The game is rife with systemic imbalances. 2 mech skills are miles above the others, Everest is so good that it chokes most unique mechs, some mechs are so weak that the designers have made alt-frames to replace them (e.g. Minotaur / Calendula), melee combat is bizarrely unrewarding, NPCs can trivially heatgun most PCs, and several dozen mech systems are crazily under- or over-priced.
For a game that is so obsessed with these highly-precise, well-balanced encounters, Lancer contains a lot of balance mistakes. Having to thread the needle with all these power deltas & unspoken assumptions puts more work on the GM, exacerbating what is already my #1 concern.
----------
I think if I put together my own GM guidelines and my Lancer houserules, that would be ~10 pages total. Which is a lot (at least for me; for comparison, my 5e houserules are 3-ish pages), but the fact that I'm still running Lancer hopefully tells you that the game is worth it. Playing with robots is awesome, and, despite its problems, Lancer is probably the best mech RPG I've seen. If you're willing to put in the effort, it's a lot of fun.
Pro #1 - Crunch: Lancer does the crunchiest of crunchy grid combat. Movement matters down to the hex, action usage is tight, heat/stress & HP/structure management are critical, cover is regularly useful. The basics of enemies, terrain, and player actions create rich, engaging gameplay with lots of opportunities for smart play and cool builds.
My players love the mechanical depth of Lancer. Our last scene (a holdout mission) was a total nailbiter where the players started off confident, got scared, thought they were about to lose, and then bodyblocked in a way that left an enemy just one point of movement short of the objective zone. Games don't always end up like that, but the rules reward these kinds of calculated decisions.
Pro #2 - Gameplay Diversity: Lancer has a lot of diverse mech options, both player- and GM-side. Even at LL0 in an Everest / Chomolungma, you have: hacking vs attacking, melee vs ranged, ordnances with range boosts, firing a bunch of aux weapons vs heavy skirmish vs superheavy only, boosting limited-use systems with engineering. The mech systems tie into all these, and the designers aren't afraid to push boundaries even in the core book. Taking 6 actions in a turn, super-hacking mechs, grapple mechs, talents that reward leaving your mech, talents that reward overheating, and on and on. It really feels like a playground.
You do get some build soupiness at Tier 3 when everyone's builds are mostly complete and players are just picking generic goodstuff cores, but at that point the team is enfranchised enough that they start curating their builds for the fun of it.
On the GM-side, you "only" get ~5 sitreps, ~20 enemies, and ~10 templates, which you wouldn't think is very much compared to (for example) the 300-ish monsters in the 4e MM, but everything in Lancer is meant to be mixed & matched which means scenes can feel very different with just a few changes. I think Operation Solstice Rain showcases this pretty well.
Pro #3 - The conceit of the setting explains the asymmetry between Lancers and their enemies. In most tactical combat games, players need to be significantly more durable with more well-rounded strength profiles and no glaring weaknesses (unless a player wants to opt into them). In contrast, enemies are at their most interesting when they have very little durability & sharp strength profiles. This annoys me in games like D&D / PF where there's no in-universe explanation for the difference: PCs just operate by different rules because they're PCs. It's not diegetic, and that especially chafes on me when I use things like minions & unique recharge mechanics.
In contrast, Lancer's central conceit is that the PCs are a rare group of badasses. Their missions are always important, their survival is paramount, and their enemies are regularly under-equipped / low on morale / using unsafe mechs / etc. This explains PCs having uniquely high structure and stress, and their near-infinite flow of resources.
----------
Con #1 - GM Workload: Lancer is a mech wargame glued to half of an apocalypse game. You traverse between scenes with handwaving or some extremely ruleslite d20 vs TN 10 gameplay, before landing in a combat with a bunch of super crunchy rules, predefined deployment zones, enemy ingress zones, etc. The massive delta in terms of rules support for pilot vs mech gameplay, and Lancer's sales pitch as a crunchy mech combat game, leads to a lot of My Precious Encounter designs. Lancer demands bespoke battle maps designed for certain sitreps, smart terrain placement, enemies with kits that synergize, deployment & reinforcement lists, and the like. At the table, the GM is expected to hand PCs a complete statblock of any given mech at the drop of a hat, so you can't just pull out your monster index card and improvise a conflict.
Massif's COMP/CON tool helps you track things, and the Lancer community has put in a ton of work into making this easier (shoutout to RetroGrade Minis awesome sprites, and Eranziel's Lancer Foundry module). But even with all this, the game still needs maybe double the work of setting up a D&D game.
Lancer tries to reduce the workload by encouraging the GM to just railroad the players, so they only have to plan the combats. You can see this in Solstice Rain, where the players are expected to walk from scene to scene, without any opportunities for clever scouting or interrogation. Or in one of the most popular Lancer open tables environments, Interpoint Station, which eschews worldbuilding almost entirely in favor of playing the game as a pure wargame. That's... fine? But it's the only form of play with any real support in the rules.
If a GM (say, myself) wants a game with a little more agency, it takes so much of work. There aren't good guidelines for travel, exploring territory, obtaining reserves outside of downtime, random encounters for worldbuilding, or managing multiple factions. There also aren't any first-party examples to pull from. In this fan-made remix of Solstice Rain that changes the game into a pointcrawl, you can see the author is just making stuff up whole cloth because there aren't any rules.
The total overhaul of out-of-combat options in Karrakin Trade Baronies, and the fact that clocks were introduced in an Wallflower (an adventure path! why aren't clocks in the main game!??!!) are part of the same problem: the designers did not think enough about GM tools when putting this game together.
Con #2 - It's Verrrry Slow: Lancer is also extremely slow to play. Fights taking 2-4 hours, and it's incredibly rare to run more than 1 combat in a session (even more rare than 4e). This leads to diegetic weirdness where players will only fight 3-4 times between each promotion, because in real life, that's 10~15 hours of play. The game just shrugs this off, but it bugs me.
Lancer also makes choices that bog down game pacing. Popcorn initiative leads to a string of, "who's going next? uhhhhhhh" 20-30 times a session. On the GM side, every enemy has the same number of actions as PCs so they're usually making 2 attacks per turn, and enemies tend to have long "activation tails", where a string of enemies all act in a row at the end of the round. Each player engages mentally for maybe 10% of a combat, and 90% of the time they sit around twiddling their thumbs or playing on their phone. As a GM, it hurts me to see my players trying so hard to stay interested when there's just nothing for them to do most of the time. This gets especially bad at high player counts.
Lancer fans have built new encounter design guidelines that make a lot of this less miserable, and there are suggested houserules (like reworking Stun) that improve some of the worse edge cases, but these solutions are all band-aids for a large, systemic slowness in game resolution.
Con #3 - Not Balanced: Lancer was pitched to me as this perfectly balanced grid combat game, and to this day I have no how anyone could think this. The game is rife with systemic imbalances. 2 mech skills are miles above the others, Everest is so good that it chokes most unique mechs, some mechs are so weak that the designers have made alt-frames to replace them (e.g. Minotaur / Calendula), melee combat is bizarrely unrewarding, NPCs can trivially heatgun most PCs, and several dozen mech systems are crazily under- or over-priced.
For a game that is so obsessed with these highly-precise, well-balanced encounters, Lancer contains a lot of balance mistakes. Having to thread the needle with all these power deltas & unspoken assumptions puts more work on the GM, exacerbating what is already my #1 concern.
----------
I think if I put together my own GM guidelines and my Lancer houserules, that would be ~10 pages total. Which is a lot (at least for me; for comparison, my 5e houserules are 3-ish pages), but the fact that I'm still running Lancer hopefully tells you that the game is worth it. Playing with robots is awesome, and, despite its problems, Lancer is probably the best mech RPG I've seen. If you're willing to put in the effort, it's a lot of fun.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Thanks for the summary, Yalm; some of that is, possibly, a virtually unavoidable consequence of complex-interaction systems (I've rarely seen one that doesn't suffer from some balance issues once people started pressing on it hard), and some are things I don't have issues with (I consider mecha fiction sufficiently stylized in the same way most supers settings are, so some diagetic failures don't concern me at all) but some were things I had some issues with that might have been overcome if I thought I had a group that would want to engage with it properly (one had one player who actively hated anything where characters were operating out of vehicles or mecha, and other probably lacks the patience needed to engage with the game properly).
I don't know any of the authors well enough to be confident in this, but I think that some of the balance / GM support issues are related to growing pains. The designers were pretty fresh when they wrote Lancer for the first time, and with each release they've been finding issues with the system & ironing them out.
Wallflower adds clocks, Solstice Rain was the first (?) product with a map, Karrakin added an attempted pilot overhaul (personally I'm not a fan but to each their own), Dustgrave took a closer look at the squicky ethics of NHPs, one of the expansions reworked the Minotaur into the Calendula, etc. Even now, Winter Scar (currently in playtesting) will be the first to add a GM-only plot overview. 3rd-party content is also getting better, with Interpoint releasing a suite of additional sitreps and side objectives that give players more agency within combat. It's actually quite cool to see the scene mature.
Wallflower adds clocks, Solstice Rain was the first (?) product with a map, Karrakin added an attempted pilot overhaul (personally I'm not a fan but to each their own), Dustgrave took a closer look at the squicky ethics of NHPs, one of the expansions reworked the Minotaur into the Calendula, etc. Even now, Winter Scar (currently in playtesting) will be the first to add a GM-only plot overview. 3rd-party content is also getting better, with Interpoint releasing a suite of additional sitreps and side objectives that give players more agency within combat. It's actually quite cool to see the scene mature.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Hey, @Yalım hat's your objection to Karrikan? One of the issues I had with Lancer was the complete radical separation of in-mech and out-of-mech in play ethic; I can see it to some point, but when mech combat is a hard core heavy-mechanics game and to the degree it comes up, personal combat is done with semi-handwavey pure-narrative resolution, I can't help but find some cognitive dissonance there. I'm not sure I want to invest in something just to find out I have just a different set of problems with it though.
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