My Life As A Gamer: The Mecha Game You Don't Think About: RIFTS

It's kind of weird for me to say so, but one of the most prominent mecha tabletop RPGs that has never been out of print is Palladium's RIFTS. In the game's lore they were originally meant to be scaled down armored units ala Madox-01 but are now employed as much against giant monsters as against armored units.

Just about every faction in the game, and just about every published location or setting subset, has some form of mecha in it. Pilots are common playable characters, and they get a lot of art assets devoted to their depictions. (Hello, BAR-1!) Many players prefer to play mecha pilots over any other character archetype, and many others often have pilot skills as an option for a secondary competency.

You don't think of it as a mecha game because of all the monsters and magic, but in practice it usually is- albeit very much in the Real Robot mode of Robot-as-War Machine and not at all the mode of a Super Robot and its invocation of (super)hero tropes. To date, there's been no attempt at Super Robots in the game and I don't think that's even on the radar in Palladium's offices.

With this year being a big annivesary, this is a good time to get some stuff and see for yourself if this is for you, especially if you love to tinker.