As most folks are aware, Carl Macek fused three Japanese television series together to make Robotech, as the Japanese shows were narratives shown once a week until the story was told and the longest of the three, Macross, was only 36 episodes. American syndication required 65 episodes - that is, a new episode every afternoon Mon-Fri for thirteen weeks. Macross was a masterpeice - think Japan's version of Star Trek. Even now, three decades later it's still wildly popular and has spawned games, sequels and feature films. This was NOT a "cartoon" made for "children." I recently had to beat my head against the wall of a very good friend who "just does not like anime." I've got some GREAT plot ideas for a Robotech game, but alas, with my current group of players I'll probably never get to run it.
OK, back to the kitbash. Macek took the three shows and rewrote the dailogue to make three previously unrelated shows a single narrative. It was messy, and sometimes not done as elegantly as it could have been. But there it was. 85 episodes of Robotech. And when I discovered this show in 1985... it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. All the cartoons I watched up until that point were relentlessly episodic save the big 5-parters that were usually stand-alone miniseries or introductions to a longers series - "GI JOE : A Real American Hero" or "More Than Meets the Eye" for Transformers. You could show a lot of the episodes in any order and not really mess much up - until the new wave of action figures hit and new characters popped up.
So Robotech was a kitbash of a television series, for better or worse. The first RPG I ever purchased with my own money was Palladium Books' Robotech RPG. I loved that game. I played the hell out of that game. I noticed the inconsistencies with the series even in my early teens. Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of fun with Palladium's games. I'm not one who will sit here and tell you how truly terrible and unplayable they are - because I don't believe it. A little rusty, maybe. In need of a tweak here and there, sure. But unplayable? No.
So I watched as much of Robotech as I had avaialble. At the time I was really running the game a lot, Robotech did not (and hadn't ever) run in the Austin TV market. There were some episodes out on VHS one could rent, but initially they were one episode per tape. Later, you could get Macross at one Blockbuster 30 minutes from my house on several casettes that each had about six episodes on them. The problem there is they edited the hell out of those tapes to cut out all the superfluous character scenes and stuff. Just get to the fighting already! So those weren't that great from a fan perspective, but it did allow us to check out the mecha battles. And they did NOT play like the RPG.
The main problem was MDC. For those of you who aren't in the know, regular humans and stuff like your car, your PC, your front door- these things have Hit Points or Structural Damage Capacity. SDC. An untrained human punch does 1d4 SDC. Most humans have around 10-15 hit points without special training. A regular gun, say, a 9mm pistol, does 2d6. With me so far? OK. Mega-Damage, or MDC, is what really tough things like tanks and mecha have. 1 MDC = 100 SDC or HP. If your weapon is not rated to do MDC, however, it is explicitly prevented from doing MDC damage even if you can generate over 100 SDC on a damage roll. So, mecha etc. are effectively immune to small arms. Mostly OK. The problem then comes with the way the numbers work.
The "typical tank" in the Robotech RPG has 200 MDC in its main body. The main cannon of the tank does 2D8 MDC per shot. So... The typical tank has to shoot another typical tank an average of 22 times to destroy it? Now, 2D8 MDC is a LOT of damage. A semi truck has 600 SDC, or 6 MDC equivalent. It would be blown to smithereens by such a cannon. As it should be. Thing is... it's impossible to one-shot a tank with a tank's main gun. You can't even mobility kill one if you use the straight up rules for MDC. The maximum damage of 16 points won't destroy a single tread, it would still have 9 MDC left! Later in the book you find out a LAW does 1D6 MDC, and a 90mm recoilless does 1D10. Neither of these weapons could achieve any kind of useful effect against a "typical tank."
This just gets wonkier as the game line goes on. By the time of the Invid Invasion book, a man-sized suit of personal armor has 50 MDC. This means if you discount the impact and shock effects, which aren't part of the core rules (just part of GM common sense) a PC wearing CVR-3 armor could eat an average of 5 shots from a "typical tank" before the sixth shot wasted 'em. Strager still, the Gallant H-90 rifle does more damage with a single shot, 4d6 MDC, than the four head-mounted lasers on Roy Fokker's VF-1S Veritech (4d4 MDC.) We clearly see Fokker's Veritech take out a Zentraedi Battlepod with those lasers, too - and those pods have 50 MDC! Even with rolling a crit for double-damage and rolling max damage on the lasers, that's only 32 MDC, so what we see in the show would be impossible in the game... And wait a minute... an armored human has as much MDC as a Zentraedi Battlepod?
So we've established MDC numbers are broken somewhere. At best, MDC vehicles have too much MDC. At worst, both the armor and weapons values are borked. We went so far as to divide all MDC by 10 for non-PCs or important enemies, and 5 for all PCs and important enemies. It just emulated the show better. In a strange twist, we inadvertently invented the "mook rules" we're all so fond of nowadays from Savage Worlds and other games.
How would I deal with this now? Well, Palladium has revised the Robotech RPG. It's better in a lot of ways, but still has a frustrating MDC imbalance. The numbers just don't make sense in places. I got some inspiration one day a few years back reading the excellent Robotech Reference Guide. This amazing site has a lot of information on mecha presented in a real-world format, much like reading a Jane's briefing on something. I decided that I would use that information to create a combat system. Actually, it's not a full combat system, but rather a patch you can use with any combat system that replaces the damage resolution mechanic for the mecha.
The articles on the RRG refer to armor by how well it does against benchmark weapons. Here's an excerpt from the file on the VF-1 Valkyrie:
VIII. Armor:
The armor of the standard Valkyrie is composed of an advanced titanium-steel alloy. The armor stops all small arms fire, provides good protection against heavier infantry weapons, such as a 12.7mm machinegun round, and fair resistance to light mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Zentraedi 22.3mm HE autocannon round.
The additional armor on the reinforced sections of the Super Valkyrie stops all small arms and heavy infantry weapons fire, provides good resistance to light mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Zentraedi 22.3mm HE autocannon round, and poor resistance to medium mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Valkyrie's 55mm APFSDS round.
The additional armor on the Armored Valkyrie is composed of a standard Chobam laminar developed in the late 20th century and improved with the materials science advances made during the Robotech era. This armor was mainly designed to defeat projectiles and other kinetic weapons. The armor stops all small arms, heavy infantry weapons fire, and light mecha-mounted weaponry, and provides fair to good resistance to medium mecha-mounted weaponry, such as the Valkyrie's 55mm APFSDS round.
The Valkyrie provides full protection from nuclear, biological, and chemical hazards, using an overpressure cockpit environment activated by radiation and hazardous chemical sensors, or manually when biological warfare conditions are anticipated. The internal consumables supplies can provide atmosphere for two days maximum.
So all this "good protection" "fair resistence" and "stops all small arms, heavy infantry weapons fire..." reminds me of something. Oh, yeah, the table on the back of all my Marvel Superheroes books! You know, FASERIP Marvel where your ability scores are rated not in numbers, but in adjectives. Spider-Man didn't have a 22 Agility, he had an Amazing one. So I started thinking... what about a chart like that to determine how much damage mecha might take from a weapon?
Reading through the files, I came up with the following scale:
No Resistance
Poor Resistance
Poor to Fair
Fair Resistance
Fair to Good
Good Resistance
Good to Excellent
Excellent Resistance
Stops
Now, I originally married this scale to the 10-block Shadowrun damage track and a D100 chart. For this article, I believe I am going to keep the Shadowrun-esque damage track and instead go with a 2d6 chart. The reason for this is that I like the way a bell curve concentrates results on the most likely outcome (7 in this case) so as to model what would "normally" happen in the game world.
So let's define each mecha as having ten structure blocks. If you want, you can use Shadowrun's method of -1 after a single block, -2 after three, -3 after six etc. to simulate performance degradation due to damage. The chart will give results in number of damage blocks to mark off.
|
ROLL
|
NONE
|
POOR
|
P2F
|
FAIR
|
F2G
|
GOOD
|
G2E
|
EXC
|
STOPS
|
|
2
|
5
|
5
|
3
|
2
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
|
3
|
6
|
6
|
4
|
2
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
|
4
|
7
|
6
|
5
|
2
|
2
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
|
5
|
8
|
7
|
5
|
3
|
2
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
|
6
|
DEST
|
7
|
6
|
3
|
3
|
2
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
|
7
|
DEST
|
8
|
6
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
1
|
1
|
0
|
|
8
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
7
|
5
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
1
|
0
|
|
9
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
8
|
6
|
5
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
0
|
|
10
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
7
|
6
|
6
|
4
|
2
|
0
|
|
11
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
8
|
8
|
8
|
5
|
3
|
0
|
|
12
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
DEST
|
6
|
3
|
1
|
So basically, I use whatever system I want and roll to resolve a hit. Say I'm a VF-1 Valkyrie firing the GU-11 gunpod at a Zentraedi battlepod. I hit, and roll 2d6. I get an 8. The Battlepod's resistence to medium mecha-mounted weapons is listed as "virtually none" so I'm going to use the "none" column. Hmmm... an 8 on the none column is a big badda boom. Wicked. In the old RPG, I would have done 3d6 damage to a 50 MDC battlepod...
The table above allows for instakills all the way up to "good" if you roll boxcars, but it also allows for total "PING!" armor shots at the higher levels.
So there's the bare bones of my Robotech kitbash to make mecha combat more like the show. It also reduces die rolls and math. What does the Internet think?
Looks good to me! My first Palladium RPG was also Robotech, though I never really got to play it. Rifts, on the other hand, I played a lot, and mecha featured prominently in our campaigns--and the issues that were incipient in Robotech got even worse in Rifts.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, I first really noted the brokenness of the MDC system in a comic published in the back of the Triax and the NGR sourcebook, in which a mecha battle depicted, yup, mechs getting taken out with a single blast. Interesting that even Palladium's own artists couldn't bring themselves to adhere to the "reality" of the system's mechanics. (I'd be morbidly curious to see a comic that depicted a mech battle that stayed true to the MDC mechanics as written; it would go on for pages and pages!)
When I converted Rifts to Basic Roleplaying, I made sure to balance weapon damage versus armor such that a mech's main weapon was capable of one-shotting its own armor, just like tanks in real life. I like your chart approach, too. Reminds me of some WWII miniatures game rules I've read and played.