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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9610162" data-attributes="member: 7044704">There was a long period of time when I would have lauded Mekton based on nostalgia, but a recent attempt at playing a PbP (which has fallen through completely) got me to actually go through character creation for the first time in over two decades and my opinion has changed.  The game (with the tech book expansion) does offer some of the most versatile and comprehensive mech (and vehicle, starship and even kaiju) building rules while avoiding hopeless overcomplication, and the mecha combat rules work all right even between different scales of combatants.  The problem is the actual roleplaying engine its attached to, which has not aged well.  It's still using a primitive form of the various Cyberpunk systems, which isn't a major problem in and if itself, you could hack in the better parts of CP Red with some work.  But the rulebook inevitably uses a ton of space for mecha rules, which leave the character generation rules feeling cramped.  Some elements feel archaic and/or just plain creepy, in particular the life path system which focuses heavily on romantic entanglements for PCs who are still of high school age.  There are both fixed archetypes (for less experienced PCs - archetypes newbies also get extra XP for advancement during play) and a Traveller-style option to play vets with varying numbers of service terms in a (rather strange) set of careers.  Playing older characters forces you to roll extra lifepath results with non-optional outcomes, which might reward you but are also very likely to cause permanent loss of attributes and other complications.Other issues by modern design standards include way too many skills tied to different attributes in a very uneven way, a pretty limited personal equipment list that also doesn't feel very scifi at all from here in 2025, and as with many R Tal games, Reflex is a God Stat and if you don't take a 10 in it you are probably going to die - especially if playing a vet who lost points from their lifepath.  You can also expect to start with fairly ineffective skills outside of the cockpit unless the GM plays around with suggested task difficulties, which are high enough to make things very hard for starting PCs.  It's not as bad in combat where you're rolling against enemies (who are often even worse than you are to start - assuming you have a good REF) but the static numbers for other things are on the excessive side. So yeah, the mecha stuff is still pretty darn good, but it's got an albatross of a pilot generation system around its neck that badly needs an update at this point and will likely never get one unless some fan puts in the effort.</blockquote>

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