“Mecha have their own set of characteristics…”
When we announced Mechasys: A Mecha Construction and Campaign Supplement back in November, that line got quite a bit of commentary. Some readers were intrigued and excited, others less so. I stated back then that I’d go into further detail about how that works. So, without further ado…
Let’s start with “why.” Why do mecha in Mechasys have characteristics? More than any other genre I can think of, the giant robot vehicles in mecha shows and assorted media are as much characters as the human characters themselves. Look at Gundam (any of the dozens of series out there), Pacific Rim, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mazinger, Voltron, Big O. In each of these cases, the mecha has a personality all their own. Even if they’re not sentient or self-aware, they exude personality, prowess, and power.
Could these characteristics be replicated within the existing rules? Sure, but while designing Mechasys I felt that attributing characteristics to these vehicles gave more flexibility in their construction and design. It leds to interesting choices when it comes to not only building your mecha, but your character as well. In Mechasys, when building your skill pool for certain skills, you use the characteristic of your mecha or your character – whichever is greater.
For example, your mecha pilot character with an Agility of 4 is piloting the Avatos, a mecha with an Agility characteristic of 3. If you want to make a Gunnery (Cannons) skill check against an enemy Jotuun, the check uses the character’s Agility of 4. If the Avatos has a Brawn of 3, but the pilot has a Brawn of 2, and you’re building a Melee skill check pool, you’ll use the mecha’s Brawn of 3 when building the pool.
You may be asking “how is that balanced?” I would counter with: “does it need to be?”
One aspect I love about Genesys is that character choices are balanced to a point. Not everything is in perfect balance like in some other systems--you can have a high-level character still be threatened by adversaries they faced when they were first starting out. Even those low-level threats can be scaled up with little extra effort on the part of the game master.
So what if you end up with a mecha/pilot combination that has characteristics of 4s across the board? That means the GM can throw more and more opponents at you and ramp up the excitement.
Another factor to consider is that mecha have the same number of characteristics as their human counterparts, but they don’t have the same ratio of experience points to buy up characteristics with. On average, your mecha may have half the amount of Build Points to buy up your mecha’s characteristics with.
Take the Gladiator chassis for instance (Chassis are the mecha equivalent of Archetypes or Species).
The Gladiator comes with a solid Brawn and Willpower of 3, two combat-reliant characteristics to help its pilot with Melee, Brawl, and Vigilance skill checks. As a mecha pilot, one might expect the character to have an Agility of 3 or even 4, which would be used in place of the mecha’s for Mecha Operation and Gunnery (Cannons) skill checks. The Gladiator’s intellect and Presence both start at 1; likely the pilot might have higher characteristics, but not always. Do you accept the low characteristic with both character and mecha, or buy it up on one of them?
If you build a character and mecha whose characteristics complement each other, odds are you’ll have built a character who is lacking in areas when they are not in their mecha. There are instances where the protagonists of mecha shows had to act outside of their giant robots, often for an entire episode. If their “characters” were optimized for mecha operation, chances are they underperformed in situations without their mecha.
You have more questions, I’m sure. We’d love to hear them! Please post them to us below, or ask on our Facebook or Twitter pages! We’ll get to a few of them next time, and we’ll introduce you to the Avatos: our signature “hero mech” and one of the two mecha gracing our cover by artist Ardian Hidayat!
Mechasys: A Mecha Construction and Campaign Supplement releases in Q1 2021! Follow us on social media to see our latest news.
And keep an eye out on our Mechasys page for more announcements!
Avatos