How to do a Mecha in MRQ

[Michael P Hopcroft]

Say i wanted to do an Escaflowne-style setting in MRQ, where there are great big armored suits that the cream of warriors can use (and the possession of which is, in large respect, a measure of your personal power and strength). They could be magical, or technomancy, or whatever, and are usually used against other people in similar suits using swords of the appropriate size.

Now this raises some interesting design issues. You could, in theory, hack one of these suits to bits in the limbs, or even head, without hraming the user AT ALL. Or you could, with the right shot, drive that fifteen-meter-long greatsword right through the heavily-armored torso and leave only a messy red stain where the user was.

And obviously that extremely heavy piece of steel you're swinging around is far bigger than you could conceivably pick up yourself, so the suit has to have really impressive STR -- impressive enough to do things like punch through stone walls.

How would you work this?

 

[CthulhuFnord]

It wouldn't be that hard to do realy. In many ways the hit location in Runequest would work rather well for Mecha games. Arm and leg hits can potentialy cripple a mech, where a head or torso shot would ruin the CPU or kill the Pilot. Mecha operations would be governed by the Pilots skills, so a fella with a high skill in Broadsword would be awsome with a mech sized one. Your skills would be capped off by your Operate Mecha skill, not unlike the restriction with mounted Combat.

As fars combat goes in regards to the Physical attributes I'd got with the Mecha replacing the users attributes. Smaller and less powerfull Mecha may just give bonuses instead, i.e. suits of Powered Armor.

All in all it's a realy cool idea actually. Sounds like a perfect 3rd party RQ game.

Say i wanted to do an Escaflowne-style setting in MRQ, where there are great big armored suits that the cream of warriors can use (and the possession of which is, in large respect, a measure of your personal power and strength). They could be magical, or technomancy, or whatever, and are usually used against other people in similar suits using swords of the appropriate size.

Now this raises some interesting design issues. You could, in theory, hack one of these suits to bits in the limbs, or even head, without hraming the user AT ALL. Or you could, with the right shot, drive that fifteen-meter-long greatsword right through the heavily-armored torso and leave only a messy red stain where the user was.

And obviously that extremely heavy piece of steel you're swinging around is far bigger than you could conceivably pick up yourself, so the suit has to have really impressive STR -- impressive enough to do things like punch through stone walls.

How would you work this?

 

[Baron Meliadus]

I think MRQ can quite easily scale to this sort of setting. CthulhuFnord basically covered nearly everything I was going to say myself. Mecha having their own stats, Mecha abilities being capped by the pilot's skill, etc.

You could have Resilience and Persistence for Mecha too. Resilience reflecting back-up systems and self repairing circuits, and Persistence reflecting ECM and anti-virus defences.

The combat rules work as normal, with perhaps a serious wound to the chest killing the pilot.

You could also have scientists and mechanics who build/maintain the stuff, perhaps limiting the Mecha's characteristics, resilience and persistence they can design/build to their engineering technology skills.

As for damage and armour you could go in one of two routes. Either give the players huge handfulls of dice to roll (15d10 for a 15m greatsword, or 20d4 for a high explosive missile)... Or use a scaling concept which means that you use the same values for characteristics, armour and weapons that occur in MRQ tables, but scale up by a factor of ten if a Mecha is involved.

E.g. My Nemesis Assault Mecha has a STR of 15, SIZ of 10 and CON of 18. It has 6 Armour Points all over. It has 8 hit points on the chest, and wields a greatsword doing 2d8+1d4 damage. Against other Mecha and vehicles I use the above stats...

When fighting humans however everything is multiplied by ten. So my STR is 150, SIZ 100 and CON 180. It has 60 Armour Points all over (making it invulnerable except against high tech support weapons). It has 80 hit points on the chest, and wields a greatsword doing (2d8+1d4)x10 damage which averages out at 115 points which normally crushes walls, dinosaurs, and squashes piddly little humans flat!

However, when faced with a bombardment from the fleet battleships in low earth orbit my Mecha is deadmeat, since spaceships multiply their stats by a hundred!

A Mecha campaign would indeed be cool. 8)

 

[CthulhuFnord]

While going through some of my old Chaosium stuff I found Martian War Machines in the Creature Compendium.

 

[atgxtg]

I think CthluhuFnord has the right idea. It woundn't be too difficult. A GM might want to swipe a few ideas from some other Mecha based RPGs and adpat them to MRQ. For example, some games put Mecha on a different scale than PCs, and this might be useful for MRQ, just to help with the math. Otherwise you might end up with weapons doing a dozen dice damage-or more! A x10 or x5 scale could make it easier to handle.

For pilot/crew injuries, you could give the pilots some sort of piloting test to ecape a destroyed mecha. TO account for hits in the same location as the pilot, assign the cockpit to one digit on the D20 hit location chart (i.e. 11 in the Torso) and a hit to that speciific number can injure the pilot if it penetrates the armor.