My Life As A Gamer: Why Most Mecha Games Fail (And Why BattleTech Endures)

Regular readers will be familiar with Jeffro Johnson's Trollopoulos campaing, run using Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition. I'll not repeat the entire thing here, so you can read Jeffro's post defining the elements that make a tabletop RPG campaign actually deliever the promised experience for yourself. Below are the key elements.

• 1:1 time aka Jeffrogaxian timekeeping
• Faction play aka Chantsonian patrons
• 1:10 scaling aka Chainmail scale battle
• An “always on” campaign made up of multiple interacting Braunsteins
• Rules-As-Written

Regular readers will also recall that I'd been looking at other tabletop RPGs to see what works and what does not using this as a filter. So far, to date, I conclude that few published games even get close to meeting these standards. Off the top of my head, those few games include Classic Traveller, Classic Call of Cthulhu, and the 1990s version of TORG. The TLDR is that a proper RPG is also a proper wargame, which means that logistics matter and Narrative logic does not. (See below about TORG.)

Over the weekend, while watching Acrobunch, I'd been thinking of what mecha RPGs meet this standard.

Believe it or not, only one does: BattleTech and its RPG tie-in A Time of War (formerly MechWarrior). This is because BTech has something that even the closest compeitors lacks: an answer that a Normie would accept as a valid answer to "What do you do?"

Dream Pod 9's mecha games lacks that answer. Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, and Gear Kreig lack that crystal-clear answer. They are product lines that make for fantastic series bibles to reference when writing as a hired gun for a novel, comic, film, or series. They are not complete RPG products. Hand them to a Normie, ask them "What do you do?" and they have no answer.

(I will note here that this is a problem with tabletop RPGs generally; it's just very noticable here.)

The same problem afflicts every single adaptation of Robotech, and by extension the three properties that comprise it. It's nice to have reference materials for writing your own fanfiction, but these days online wikis can do the same job at a fraction of the time or effort required- especially concerning licensure. It's no surprise that the only playable scenarios are the Invid/Inbit Invasion (as the series only follows one group and not the war as a whole), The Sentinels and The Shadow Chronicles (as those were stillborn and thus open-ended). There is sweet fuck-all playable space for Southern Cross, and any playable Macross campaign is going to feel like fanfiction blending 7, Frontier, and Delta.

R. Talsorian's Mekton Zeta is not even a developed setting. It's a developer's toolkit, and that's not what Normies want when they buy a product. They want to buy a table, put it in the house and use it immediately, not to take a pile of lumber and make a table. Way too much fucking bother, whatever else its merits as a ruleset; in this respect, it's got the same problem as using GURPS or HERO for damn near anything at all. Complete product, ready-to-go, or not at all; don't half-ass it.

So what does BattleTech have that makes it win? The same thing that D&D does: a default campaign model that is easy to comprehend, easy to implement, scales up readily, and lends itself to the very elements of proper play that Jeffro specifies. For BTech, that's The Mercenary Company, which is why you see it used so often in related media like Hairbrained PC adaptation as well as with MechWarrior 5.

No one balks at having repair or recovery times measured in weeks or months. No one balks at interplanetary transit times in days, or interstellar in weeks. Patron-level play and Domain Play is intuitive and even presumed as normal; growing your little lance to a company or battalion sized unit, complete with an aerospace wing and infantry/armor support is just how things are done so lettintg Bob run the Purple People Eaters is just one more email exchange. Establishing your own Domains? As in "Here's your planet in or near the Periphery. Don't fuck it up." sort of thing? Hardly uncommon. Just gives players more to do, both in and out of their 'Mechs.

It's all there, and once you see it you won't ever unsee it- much like that Katrina Steiner or Natasha Kerensky art from the 1980s. The other mecha RPGs are Narrative media badly adapted into a medium by, for, and all about ludology- specifically, about wargaming. BTech is a wargame from its inception and it shows, which is why it alone endures and why it's the only Western mecha RPG that still has any serious presence in the RPG business across all media- and the only one in tabletop.

N.B.: In TORG Possibility Energy is the means for justifying any form of Narrative logic, and only through being Possibility Rated can someone circumvent the boundaries that tightly constrict Ordinaries and their mundane existences. It is a real force; it can be detected, sensed, manipulated, and therefore can be controlled consciously by P-Rated people. The first edition makes this explicit and therefore justifies the usage of Narrative logic as the expenditure of Possibility Energy by the P-Rated. This includes the creation and enforcement of World Laws, Reality Axioms, and so on.

Second: Heavy Gear = Armored Trooper VOTOMS knockoff, and Jovian Chronicles = U.C. Gundam knockoff (and thus a knockoff of anything like it, such as Wing, Seed, AGE, and OO). JC has the full mecha build system, so not only are other Real Robots on the table in a JC-powered game but so are all Super Robots; the setting just ignores that.