How To RPG: Scramble! How To Be Pilots & Crewmen

I like my giant stompy robots, both the "Real Robot" end and the Super Robot end. They, along with anything else focused upon the doing of deeds in vehicles or on mounts, present a problem when put to tabletop RPGs.

The problem is that the focus of the action is on what the pilots or riders do in or on their things, which is even more friendly to wargaming (tabletop and videogame alike) than the skirmish-scale wargaming from which Dungeons & Dragons derived itself. I learned the hard way, years ago, that most gamers who are into mecha properties (robots, fighters, road warriors, etc.) see the point of the game as being the action in the vehicles and not outside of it.

The complaint is that you might as well play a dedicated wargame because characters don't matter. (You get this a lot from the frustrated writer crowd, and others who should be watching soaps instead of shitting up RPGs.)

If you hear this, then you hear the voice of someone who doesn't get how RPGs are to be played; they talk about characters as if this is a drama exercise (e.g. Fiasco) when it's not. Lots of blather online and (formerly) in print goes on about what to do about this, but we already have the solution.

You handle this by making the campaign structure exactly as if it were a proper D&D or Traveller campaign: put the players in charge of what to do and how it gets down. For some properties, this is easy. BattleTech/Car Wars: You're an independent operator (mercenary, autonomous SpecForce unit, etc.) so you have that capacity from the get-go.

For others, this requires a shift. Your standard Star Trek scenario has you has the bridge crew or senior officers; this would also apply to similar organizations such as armies. In this case, the Troupe Style approach is better: you have your man, but you sometimes play the henchmen because your man wouldn't logically be along (for whatever reason). This is good for playing the crew of a ship, or a sizable military unit, because the players (as the leadership) make the operational calls before sending their men out into the field to get it done (playing the field agents then).

This form of campaign, therefore, is a logical iterative shift from a proper D&D campaign once you get to Name Level and start the stronghold-based endgame. At that point, it's not uncommon for exactly this sort of rotating emphasis to occur; one go has the Fighter lead an expedition against a threat in his domain, and the other players are his henchmen because the Magic-User is deep into spell research, the Thief is busy overseeing construction of his underground lair, and the Cleric is off on a crusade for his god. Same structure; only the trappings differ.

The consequence? You often see whatever the vehicle is become an important character in its own right, so to speak, and progression of this vital asset routinely becomes playable content unto itself. (Think of the Millenium Falcon as a thing you bought stock and then upgraded over time into its famous configuration; same concept, differing in implementation.)

This is a solved problem. You need only make simple adjustments to how you would run D&D or Traveller to do a pilot/crew-based campaign properly and have plenty of fun.