Giant-Robot RPGs

[tecnowraith]

Well with the release Transformers movie on DVD, I am seriously giving thought of running a campaign similar the genre. But which game system would well with the setting and which system could the transfroming and massive, large scale destruction of combat seen with Transformers and other giant-robot genre. I do not want mecha suite but sentient beings as playable characters. Any ideas for a game system?

 

[DMH]

d20 in the form of Mechamorphosis, one of the Horizon line from FFG. It is Transformers, more or less.

 

[tecnowraith]

Anything else besides D20, Gurps and math-lite ?

 

[DMH]

I wonder if Giant Monster Rampage (print from MEG and pdf from Radioactive Press) might be what you are looking for. It shouldn't be difficult to describe the monsters as robots.

 

[Crothian]

Cartoon action hour had a supplement that was basically transformers.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Exalted has a supplement about the Alchemicals that could probably work for giant robots. They're already given a hi-tech spin and basically described as bioroid-cyborgs, would really only take a flavor change to move them entirely over into "transformers." At high essence 6+ they're the size of a warstrider (18-25ft).

Most of the giant robot type games I'm familiar with are either GURPS or d20 systems. Palladium had a couple but then you'd have to deal with the Palladium ruleset. I have a copy of a fan created giant robot system, it's palladium as well.

 

[ephemeron]

I don't know how easy it is to find them now that Guardians of Order is a memory rather than an RPG company, but Big Eyes, Small Mouth and its spawn, Tri-Stat, might be worth a look. They take the Hero/GURPS approach of point-building characters with a bunch of possible power ranges, but in a less math-intensive way. I guess they might count as "math lite".

For that matter, 4e GURPS is probably better suited to a Transformers game than 3e GURPS Robots or Mecha would be; the latter two are built on GURPS Vehicles, which was designed for gearheads who enjoyed design sequences that amount to minigames, but 4e cleans things up a great deal. (Yes, I've been a GURPS fan at various points of my gaming career.)

Another possibility would be to just use something like Mekton Zeta and merge the pilots and mecha; in the least-effort case, that would amount to having two sets of statistics for each character, but then again you could rationalize that in a Transformers game, since each character has two forms anyway.

 

[Aeric]

Mekton Zeta Plus (the Mekton Zeta mecha creation sourcebook) has the most customizable rules for mecha creation I have ever seen. Anything from a Death Star to an iPod could be created with those rules. They have rules for onboard AIs as well as for transforming into other things, including scale changes (which a lot of the original Transformers did; Megatron became a human-scaled gun, Soundwave a radio, etc.).

The only downside about Mekton is the combat system, which is heavily derived from Battletech and therefore slow and wargamey. However, IIRC, there are variant rules in Zeta Plus that allow you to speed things up by taking an average of all your mecha's hit location "kills" (hit points, basically) and turning that into a sort of HP score for the machine as a whole.

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

Speaking of Mekton Transformers, I remember seeing on the 'net years back a fan-made supplement for creating Transformers using the Mekton ruleset.

http://www.meta-earth.com/tf/tf.html

Never got a chance to try it, as none of the gamers in my area in the time gave a flying rat's backside about anything giant robots.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

The Silhouette System by Dream Pod 9 has a very good Mecha Design system. It also has three developed settings which feature mechas.

The first one is Heavy Gear, which tells the story of an interstellar war between Earth and its former colonies. Its mecha are basically large battlesuits.

The second setting is Jovian Chronicles, which takes place in the Solar system and has lots of similarities to the Gundam series - including very large space-capable mechas.

The third setting is Gear Krieg, which is basically a WWII setting - but with mechas and superscience.