I'm mostly intrigued by the combination of the two design philosophies. I'm ambivalent about mecha, and I don't have much experience with 4e beyond a couple aborted tier 1 campaign attempts.
Who are the really interesting modern TTRPG designers?
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
The mix of rules-light out-of-mech play and high-crunch mech combat (and license combination optimization - the "mech build" part of things) is interesting, and takes things to an extreme. I think works well here because at the end of the day all the mech RPGs I've seen draw a pretty sharp line between situations where your pilots are mounted up and not, and Lancer's just a bit more explicit about admitting most combat will be while you've got your mechs and many downtime activities don't need a big raft of hard mechanics.
That said, you can do a little fighting on foot even on a mech battlefield (and there are some builds that even lean into that a bit) but you won't hit hard and you're still likely to die horribly (which may not be terribly relevant, death is pretty temporary with the tech on display in the setting). But it does give you something to do if your ride gets trashed early, and I've even played a couple of missions where at least some of the players were expected to dismount to deal with objectives in people-scale bunkers where even a little size 1/2 suit wouldn't fit.
Grendel_Khan
Hero
An eerily accurate description of how Nobilis went for my group. Though I also think it's one of the most annoyingly written RPG books I've ever read. Just endless amounts of whimsy occasionally drizzled with blood and darkness, because everything must be a pretentious land of contrasts (with no sense for what you actually do).
Joshua Randall
Legend
You definitely cannot please everyone all the time, but I think there is a fundamental difference between admittedly complex, rules-not-explained-real-well games like Amber, Ars Magica, etc. that are clearly intended to be played as actual games (no matter how ham-fisted their design may be) --
-- and something like Nobilis which I am not entirely convinced is intended ever to be played. That said! It is absolutely inspirational reading and Jenna Moran has a new game coming out, The Far Roofs.
Arilyn
Hero
I get that games like Nobilis can be hard to actually play at the table. But Ars Magica? Isn't that more of a taste thing? I would never link ham-fisted with Ars Magica. It's brilliant and entirely playable.
Thanks for heads up on The Far Roofs. I'll definitely check it out. We have the fancy coffee table version of Nobilis, waiting to be played one day... I keep telling myself it can be done!
I agree that Nobilis is . . . challenging, yet beautiful; I've never actually played a game. Chuubo's is great, and was, I believe, the first to capture the sort of comforting, Studio Ghibli-style game. The thread is about influential designers, and I think Moran is definitely that.
Point of order: it's about interesting designers doing interesting things right now.
Yes. Jenna is currently Kickstarting the Far Roofs, as noted above. She is very much a current and active game designer.
Sorry, folks kept talking about Nobilis and I got confused.
gorice
Hero
I've played a fair bit. The combat is good, and I've had fun with the out-of-combat stuff, despite the rules seeming very minimal. The problem lies where the game tries to suture those two parts together. Lancer has its own version of 5e's '6-8' encounters, and it works about as well.
My advice: throw out all that stuff about mission structure and just let things develop organically. Have a few enemy team compositions in your back pocket, and don't expect any mission ('adventure day') to last more than 1-2 fights. Pretty much how I used to run 5e, actually.
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