My Life In Fandom: A Post On The Super Robot RPG That Doesn't Exist (Yet)

As much as I love mecha shows and tabletop RPGs, there's a very good reason for why the merger thereof has rarely had the desired effects: the appeal of a TV series and the appeal of a tabletop RPG are antithetical to one-another.

The former is a medium of narrative communication. You are a passenger on a roller-coaster ride. You passively observe the events depicted, have no presence in the situation, and can do nothing to change the outcome. The only question you have is to accept or reject what is offered; this is why reviews, formally published or informally shared, matter so much in the business of a series.

The latter is a medium of simulated problem solving, usually in the form of an explicit wargame scenario. You active participate in events, have resources to manage, and a series of objectives to achieve as well as constraints to work around and opposition to contend with. Your actions directly and immediately change outcomes, preferably in your favor. This is why reviews matter less than direct handling of the game's procedures and mechanics, and why--for multiplayer--user network size is a serious factor to consider before buying.

The conclusion is that the overlap of Brand X Mecha series fans and tabletop RPG fans is not as large as one might expect. The appeal of series-related merchandise, which a tabletop RPG would fall into, comes from fulfilling the fantasy of pretending to be a part of that series' narrative. Naturally, some series--usuall Real Robot shows--are far easier to make workable as games than others.

The solution is to stop making licensed games. The secondary conclusion is to not make a knockoff game with its own series continuity, which is where Dream Pod 9 screwed up with Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. For all its faults, Palladium's Splicers did this right by giving a base scenario and (with only one supplement) leaving it up to individual campaigns to develop as they see fit.

Let's return to what many think is unviable: a Super Robot RPG.

This is how you do it:

• Hit up TV Tropes (or something like it) and find all the tropes that all the popular Super Robot shows with strong followings worldwide have in common. Build an original setting with just those tropes featured, and don't be Midwit SMRT Bois about it; be sincere and earnest. Recall that Super Robot villains routinely possess technology that renders conventional military forces weak or irrelevant, or your Super Robot has no plausible reason to exist.
• Leave room for every player to get in on the Super Robot action; no one wants to be Useless McDeadweight at the table.
• Ask the players to respond to the enemy threat. Before they roll up their characters, have them decide on what the Super Robot response will be. Do a basic spec in real world terms of what the robot is and how it works; you can mess with the game mechanics later. Some will make a Combiner. Some will let one guy handle the robot while they do support. The players sort out how they'll handle the threat.
• Let them roll up their characters. Use a simple, swift procedure to do this; you want them playing within five minutes, and that's for a total newb to tabletop RPGs.
• Let them move between Super Robot action and more strategic level wargaming, like in XCom you move between Big Picture and Tactical Warband Encounters, so that they are able to direct their Super Robot's development in a believable fashion; this would be the primary for of power progression.
• Do not define anything more than the initial scenario. The campaign has to be determined by the players' actions, not by the GM or the designer. This limits the supplement treadmill severely, which is good as that business model is poison to the long-term health of the hobby.
• Use a proven game engine that uses standard (gaming) dice in standard amounts to faciliate getting non-gamers on board and playing; you'll have to put in some work figuring out which one works best, but the Old School Renaissance still uses D&D as a base for a reason, and both Classic Traveller as well as Basic Role-Playing have similar ease-of-use qualities to them. If you can avoid using anything but the D6, so much the better; it's why Dream Pod 9's games worked as well as they did.
• This design model also allows players that want to put in the effort to recreate their favor shows and replay them, making the appeal even larger than any one licensed game could ever have without the additional costs or legal hassles such deals incur.

Yes, for the record, this is what Mekton Zeta aimed for as a use-case and somehow missed because of the Real Robot fixation. Had the line continued past Starblade Battalion (itself a very good Real Robot distilling of a lot of classic Gundam-style tropes into an original setting), maybe we would have had this as a product entry.

And yes, for the record, I am aware that R. Talsorian still exists; it's just that Maximum Mike hasn't yet figured out that it's a waste of time trying to do new editions of his existing games when MZ (and CP2020) are still fit for purpose to this day. If he wanted to revive the profile of MZ, making this product as a MZ supplement would do it.

Go on, surprise me with "Cosmo Tiger Force". If the Pundit can make his stuff from his flat in Uruguay to an Anglophone global market, so can anyone everywhere with the time and the language skills.