Robot Warriors

[Rapier]

While the ideas are still percolating, I am working on the games for next year's GenCon. I am, at least, getting enough of a start to lay down some ideas and get things started while I have time before school starts up again.

 

You know that meme where they talk about how conquistadors were around the same time as samurai, the Aztec Empire, knights with swords, early smoothbore guns, etc? I'm doing that (meme attached). I am tinkering with the idea that I will bring them all together (and work them into the GenCon Universe by having them all abducted by the aliens I have been using for the past few years). Think of the Cowboys vs Aliens vibe.

 

But it is going to be a tough sell for a 150pt samurai to go up against an alien that can give a 350pt super a run for the money. I have been thinking about what if I allowed the heroes to escape into a steampunk garage full of steampunk mechs.

 

This could even be cool to use as one of my "intro to Hero" games by showing what Hero can do, instead of the same old superheroic characters. Some of my concerns are that this is going to add a layer of complexity to a group of players that will likely have little Hero experience. It is also going to require a bit more effort on my part, since i haven't actually run Robot Warriors in like 25 years. I will also have to build all the mechs.

 

I have the Robot Warriors conversion document Christopher Goodwin wrote, and I have the two original 3E books (Robot Warriors and Robot Gladiators), but I was wondering if anyone had any writeups for Mechs (other than the couple in TUV). Also wondering if anyone ran into any problems playing Mechs in Hero. Are there any pitfalls or things that don't work well I can ponder?

 

Thanks!

[Lord Liaden]

Well, as a start, I can offer these 5E game stats for Robotech, including several mech write-ups, from the archive of the grand old Star Hero Fandom website: http://web.archive.org/web/20081210091859/http://www.starherofandom.com/h_robotech/index.php

[Rapier]

10 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

Well, as a start, I can offer these 5E game stats for Robotech, including several mech write-ups, from the archive of the grand old Star Hero Fandom website: http://web.archive.org/web/20081210091859/http://www.starherofandom.com/h_robotech/index.php

This will help. I knew there were a couple of us that had a bunch of this stuff, but I think I purged a bunch of it in a link cleanup a while back. I know that Robot Warriors was...problematic. But I can't remember why so, at this point, I am mostly investigating if this is even something I want to do. I have always used vehicles as a...vehicle for the story (if you will forgive the pun) and never actually used them as VEHICLES. They were a way to get from point A to point B and hardly none of them have ever been shot at...and the couple that were got hand-waived.

[Khymeria]

I had a mech code name Shogun show up in my superhero game, piloted by a samurai with a laser katana. It is written for 6E but is a pretty extensive mech setup. Happy to send you the hdc file if you like, or another format if I can. 

[Rapier]

6 hours ago, Khymeria said:

I had a mech code name Shogun show up in my superhero game, piloted by a samurai with a laser katana. It is written for 6E but is a pretty extensive mech setup. Happy to send you the hdc file if you like, or another format if I can. 

The hdc would be fine. That is where it would end up anyway!

[Khymeria]

17 hours ago, Rapier said:

The hdc would be fine. That is where it would end up anyway!

Shogun.hdc Akiro Takahashi.hdc

[Chris Goodwin]

If you ever played Robot Warriors back in the day, then playing it in 6th edition is almost exactly the same, and in the case of Range Modifiers vs. ground scale is actually easier.

 

There's probably at least as many resources for mecha using standard HERO System vehicle rules as using Robot Warriors.  I prefer RW myself.  Give me a few days and I'll pull up the mech designs I used in the game I ran.

[Khymeria]

You might get some inspiration and a kick out of “Batman Ninja”. Not the best of the DC cartoons, but it’s got a similar vibe for samurai and mech. 

[Gauntlet]

We used to play Battle Tech using Hero Robot Warrior rules. Loved it better as there was much more you could do with your mech in combat. We just stated that END was Heat. One thing though, mechs that can shift from mech to fighter suck in Battle Tech but not in Robot Warriors. If I can find my Battle Tech writeups I will have to put it on this site.

[Gauntlet]

But I guess there is a difference between a war game like Battletech and a Single Combat game like Hero. In Battletech you can have that mech combat with five to 10 units of four per side, but if you tried to do that with Hero, each segment would probably take at least a week. While with Hero each mech during its phase has quite a lot of options as to what it can do, Battletech your mech can move and fire weapons, that's it.

[Lord Liaden]

The Fantasy Hero Companion for Fourth Edition introduced a Mass Combat system, in which groups of similar characters are treated as a single "unit" which attacks, defends, and moves as though it was one character. The number of combatants in a unit, and the map scale used for their interactions, was up to the GM depending on the scenario they were running.

 

Fantasy HERO for 5E carried over essentially the same system. I don't have the 6E version, so can't definitively say whether that was included, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't. (I'm rather disappointed that it wasn't made part of the core rules, as it can obviously apply to other genres than fantasy.)