d20 Transformers...

[thundershot]

Oh, yes, definitely going to be conversion notes. Sorry, I meant to imply that. The "size alteration chart" will be a sort of "Here's what it looks like in d20, here's what it looks like in Mechamorphosis." So there will be rules for porting your pitiful humans (err . . . sorry, must've been channeling a gigantic megalomaniacal morphing robot for a second there . . . I meant "brave heroes") into Mechamorphosis terms, as well as for porting courageous and insidious mechamorphs into your d20 modern campaign.

THAT is what I wanted to hear. That means the book will be usable, rather than be a good read. I simply don't have time to have multiple styles of games going on at once, and this should be interesting... With Level Adjustments, it wouldn't be out of the question to have, say, a D&D Wizard or Fighter taking on a lower level robot (I always loved "The Decepticon in King Arthur's Court"). Level adjustments and hardness are the keys.. yess....



Thanks
Chris

 

[Green Knight]

This is SUCH a shameless rip-off of Transformers...















...and I LIKE IT!

This is DEFINITELY a must-have, for me. It makes my head hurt to think that WoTC could EASILY publish a Transformers RPG, due to the fact that both it and Transformers are owned by Hasbro, yet they don't do it. So yeah, I'll take some Exile/Tyrant action in lieu of Autobot/Decepticon action. Not like I won't change the names, anyway. Then again, with the way the most recent Transformers series' piss me off, I may very well use the books setting if it's good. Of course, I can always create my own Transformers continuity (And why not? The comics and the cartoons have themselves created somewhere in the area of 532 different continuities ). Or I could create my own world. I've been considering using the D20 Modern rules to create a world similar to Rifts, right after the aftermath of some kind of magical event which brings slews of non-human races to Earth and lets magic loose. Throwing giant robots into the mix would be pretty neat, too. We'll see.

 

[Von Ether]

d20 Mechamorphs: The game for overanxious gamer fathers everywhere.

"Because you know that your son's teacher won't mind that your child bragged about being a 25ft tall robot over the weekend. A spell-casting wizard is a whole different matter."

 

[thundershot]

Oh man... Make a mechamorph, and then give him levels of wizard or sorcerer... yessss....


Chris

 

[Green Knight]

Forget that! I want to play a mechamorph in D20 Star Wars! I actually wanted to do that YEARS ago in a WEG Star Wars campaign. I was playing a droid who was both a small droid as well as the brain for the party's ship. I guess another way of looking at it is that I was the ship, and that small droid was the ship's avatar. Anyway, my goal in the campaign was to turn that ship into a transformer, so the party would have a giant transformable robot on its side. Or at the very least, turn the droid avatar into a transformer, maybe being able to turn into a speeder or some such vehicle.

Think about it. The party, which is composed of 5 PC's including the transforming droid, is advancing into an enemy controlled area and they're spotted by the bad guys, who ASSUME the party only consists of 4 members, and take them by surprise and capture them. They also take the party's equipment for their own use. Unbeknownst to them, one of the speeders they've snatched is a transforming droid. So now your PC has infiltrated the enemy camp and pretty much has free reign, whereas the other PC's are locked up. He can now spy on the enemies, sabotage them, and help the PC's escape. And at the end, when the bad guys confront the now freed PC's, you can let one of the bad guys ride you into battle, and when he's about to attack, THAT'S when you transform and reveal your existence, and trash the rider.

That's just one idea, anyway.

So when does this come out, again? Can't wait to get my hands on it. First thing I'm going to do is write up stats for Optimus Prime. Then I'm gonna come here and post his stats in a Poll asking the universal question, namely "If Optimus Prime and Elminster were to fight, who would win?". Personally my money's on Prime. He's got The Touch, after all.

 

[rvaughn_ffg]

So when does this come out, again? Can't wait to get my hands on it.

Mechamorphosis will be out by Origins (early June).

 

[Green Knight]

This just occured to me, so I thought I'd ask.

Will there be rules for Gestalts/Combiners? Two or more robots which merge together to form a larger robot?

I've always wondered how workable it'd be to have a PC party consist of a team of Combiners. While it'd be awesome, you'd still have to give each player something to do for that to be fun.

How about robots with more then one alternate form? Triple-changes, quadruple changers, etc? You turn from a robot to a car, to a jet, to a tank, and so on? Will there be rules for their kind?

And last but not least, will it be possible to recreate robots similar to Headmasters/Targetmasters? Albeit not like how it was done on American tv. Let me explain. In the Japanese Headmaster series, the heads were robots, NOT fleshies in mechanical suits. Conversely, the bodies were dead things, NOT living robots. So essentially what you had was a human-sized robot who had all the benefits of being human-sized, but when he wanted to, he could merge with his car parked outside and thus become a normal sized robot. Any way to recreate that with the rules in the Mechamorphosis books?

 

[Green Knight]

Mechamorphosis will be out by Origins (early June).

Excellent! Just in time for my birthday.

 

[thundershot]

Heh... GreenKnight, you and I are in the same boat, man. I love all things Transformers. Masterforce and Victory were EXCELLENT (Headmasters would have been better if I had it subbed... I have them in raw Japanese).

I know d20 Mecha can be used for everything you mentioned, because, well.... I had to make them. Using the combining feature with a giant robot and a power suit for a *master worked well, along with the remote feature. I even made a Pretender. (just make a medium sized weaker extra mode called "Human") I've been toying with the idea of making the Pretender's armor a separate "power suit" with the summonable ability, but I don't know what advantages it would have...

I'm hoping Mechamorphasis will have a way to do all of this as well, in maybe a simpler form.


Chris

 

[Green Knight]

I've never seen the Japanese series', unfortunately, though I've heard plenty about them.

As for Transformers, it begins and ends for me with G1, Beast Wars, and the comics. I loathed Beast Machines with a passion, was unimpressed with Robots In Disguise, and was once again repulsed when first Armada and now Energon hit the air (It says quite a bit when you find more consistent writing, better storytelling, better dialogue, and a more coherent continuity in G1, which is 20 years old, then in Armada. For cripes sake, at least G1 episodes maintained continuity within themselves. I've seen Armada episodes in which the events later in the episode contradicted what happened only 10 minutes earlier!). I feel like I've been out in the wilderness for the past 5 years, suffering through never-ending crap, waiting forlornly for SOMEBODY to put a good Transformers series on the air. Fortunately the comics which I've picked up have been really good, but I never have the spare change to go out and buy them, and I'm completely unused to collecting comics after all these years, so I'm always behind. Oh well. Fortunately it appears that they're publishing TPB's, so I'll see about getting those, eventually. Especially The War Within. Can't wait to finish off that series.

But yeah, I've always figured D20 could cover all those situations, though I never really put any effort into doing any converting, myself. Nice to see someone has had some success. As for Mechamorphosis, while I hope that they'll have something similar to the various Masters, I doubt it. The gestalts, though, are what I'm really hoping for. Especially if there're rules which make forming into a gestalt advantages to a group of PC's, rather then leaving all but one of them out in the cold, having nothing to do while the gestalt battles it out with whomever.