............................................................ The Saga of Absurdo X
Once upon a time a friend of mine decided to run a Giant Robot campaign using the Hero Games "Robot Hero" Rules. We were all going to be taking the part of various factions that access to different pieces of tech. Mine had transformation technology IIRC. We were going to be conducting military battles against each other's robot forces, so we would need a variety of robots.
Now being someone who loves giant robots, I immediately set to work creating my share of the bots. Since this is also champions based, there was nearly endless room for various bits of munchkinie goodness and I took advantage of them with a will. However, when ever I figured out a particularly nice bit of munchkinie goodness, he'd change the rules to basically outlaw it. I'd come up with another one, rinse wash repeat. I didn't mind too much because I liked making up the bots.
Finally the night came that we were going to be starting things and he annouced that the rules had been changed once again. Only this time the rules change invaladated all of the bots I had designed, wasting all of my time and effort and I'd have to make up new bots on the spot. So I was extremly annoyed and determined to make him pay for ruining all my work. Essentiall the evening was basically only going to be a test run now. So he made a few critical mistakes.
1) Didn't put any point limits on the individual robots.
2) Didn't require a minimum number of robots.
3) Didn't require pilot characters.
The last one was the most important. For while you could make a bot of any stats if you were willing to pay the price, the pilot was the limiting factor for things like dex and reflexes, because they were only human.
I decided to sink nearly all the points my side had into a single Giant Robot, The Legendary Absurdo X . It was as big as you could make a bot 1,000,000 tons and it had batteries of every imaginable type capable of laying waste to a contenent. AND it had a 110 Dex. Now remember this is in a system where Spiderman has about a 35 dex. The absurdly high dex meant that he would go first against any REASONABLE bots that presumably the other players were making up and act probably 2-3 times as often in a round of combat. Not to mention that he could hit anything with ease and was nearly impossible to hit.
Unfortunately I had apparently done a little bit too much cackling with glee at the though of the impending massacre I was going to inflict and hadn't been quite careful enough about keeping my Master plan secret.
So, after several hours worth of work everyone had their bots ready to go and we faced off on the map board. The GM asked for the dex and speeds for the bots and I discovered that one of the other players had a bot with a 120 Dex that he had crafted. Not nearly so large and magnificent a bot as Absurdo X ( I think about a third or quarter the size), but just ever so slightly faster.
Thus, he opened fire with his first battery of weapons and it was at that point that we discovered a major flaw in the system. Rather than damaging the magnificent Absurdo X , his first volley of weapons fire had in fact completely anihilated Absurdo X AND he had 5 or 6 more banks of weapons to go.
What nobody had really realized was that HP and armor did not scale proporionately with size. So even though Absurdo X was several times the size of the enemy bot, it had only a handful more hitpoints and actually a worse armor rating due to it's large size.
We sat around the game board stunned for a moment and realized that the rest of the bots were absolutely no match for the other mega-bot and would in fact be anihilated post haste as he fired his other weapons banks.
That brought a quick end to the evening and pretty much put the kibosh on any more Giant Robot battles, though several years later he tried a different style of campaign with equally disasterous results in a totally different way.
The kicker was that several days later the GM realized a major mistake. The hex size was dictated by the size of the largest bot, ie. Absurdo X , which was several times the size of any other bot in the battle and thus it's weapons vastly outranged those of the other bots since they were so much smaller. So Absurdo X , the mightiest robot ever should actually have won the battle.
