Due to some disputes and altercations, Our group's opinions on BattleTech has kinda soured and is looking for a new giant robot game to play, I have been hearing about Lancer for a very long time and I am curious about what it offers, although I am willing to hear about other games that I can use my BattleTech minis as well.
Lancer offers high customization, extreme tactical focus, and a cool vibe overall imo. Been a GM for several years and several very distinct campaigns, dm me if you have any questions about the system and what you're looking to do in it and I can elaborate
yeah I do have some questions about it, I'll dm ya
I think Salvage Union is pretty cool
Last week I played in a Lancer game run by a Battletech fan, who drew a lot of comparisons between the two games during the session. She also brought her Battletech minis and they worked perfectly well for the game.
how was Lancer as a game? any features?
the thing that I eventually fell out with BattleTech is that it takes many mecha tropes from its inspirations and it kinda bastardized it to hell and back, which kinda leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. BattleTech feels like an odd deconstruction of the genre than anything else.
I want to know if Lancer is up to snuff with the genre as a whole.
As a game I think it's really cool! The tactical elements feel really (for lack of a better term) actionable: you have a toolbox of things that you need to use across a diverse array of situations, it goes beyond just constructing an optimal build and repeating your best combo ad nauseum.
I'm not really the person to ask about the other stuff, though. I know nothing about Battletech so I can't really draw comparisons myself, and I'm not well-versed in mecha media.
I recently took a look at the rulebooks and the art looks interesting.
Lancer has a rather specific setting. If you want something thematically and stylistically closer to BattleTech, you might like Heavy Gear. It's an older game but I think it's spiritually much more closely aligned with BattleTech than most other mecha-themed RPGs, and it might have just the right amount of complexity and customization you're looking for. Lancer errs towards the class-based gameplay of D&D 4e, while Heavy Gear treats its Gears as more modular chassis ad vehicles to customize.
The one strike against it, maybe, is that Heavy Gear assumes the Gears are smaller than the mechs of BattleTech, but I don't know if that's a barrier of entry for you to work around in the narrative.
yeah I know about Heavy Gear. It's Armored Trooper VOTOMS the tabletop game, as admitted by Dream Pod 9 themselves.
The thing is: the handheld rules never existed at start. So they were addrd way later as bad extension instead of the ruleset being designed with them in mind. Thus they dont fit really and they never corrected them.
And yeah they dont fit
Celestial Bodies has some cool mechanics.
There is also mektonz where you can design mechs and vehicles. Rules looked interesting but never played it as i found it too complex for a rpg and too simplistic for a wargame
Mekton Zeta isn't actually complex in play, it just has exhaustive mecha creation rules. Sort of the GURPS effect where character creation seems overwhelming even if the mechanics are otherwise very approachable.
Not the other poster, but I can answer this question! Lancer is very much a love letter to mecha anime/stories, while also having something very specific it wants to say using the tools of the genre.
Lancer is self-described as a "mud and lasers" mecha game, meaning it's both very high tech, but also really concerned with grit and detail. Mecha can get really cool super-science abilities, like in later Gundam shows. But battles in Lancer are absolutely snarls of metal and missiles, like earlier Gundam. Tactical play is very important in a Lancer combat.
Where Lancer is most distinct is in what it's about. Lancer is a setting with expansive space travel, creating settlements all over the galaxy and stuff. Places close to the seat of government are basically utopias with easy access to super science tech that can build anything you might need super fast, and everyone is comfortable and living peacefully under a government I've forgotten the name of 😅.
But when you get outside of the inner worlds and lose access to the plenty provided by that government, things get a lot more precarious. Petty squabbles blow up into interplanetary wars, need turns into piracy, etc. This is where influences like Dune and Warhammer come into play. Lancer is about precarity in a world of abundance. It's interesting stuff!
Lancer basically loves mecha shows, and especially loves tactical mecha combat. But it's also very much trying to be it's own show and not emulate an existing one. Lancer is great if you play it straight on, but it's terrible if you're looking for a game you can do Gundam or Macross or Code Geass in or whatever.