looking for a good system to have mechs vs giant monsters

[Stormwolf69]

like I am said in the title I am looking for a good system to have mechs vs giant monsters any recomndations ?

[ShadowSandbag]

Have you looked into Lancer at all? They have a whole bunch of stuff for Giant Mechs and I don't know about monsters, but worst comes to worst you could reskin some of the more exotic mech types.

[Stormwolf69]

No will have to look into that one but I am reading the rules for Mekton but it fells like I am missing rules to make the giant monsters.

[Maglubiyet]

There's always Tiny Frontiers: Mecha and Monsters or the Mecha Hack, if you want a minimalist game.

[GrayDeath]

Look no further than Cthulhutech, thats what it was built for.

Bonus: it also offers regular Character Rules that are playable if not excellent.

[Lord Torath]

I've heard good things about Mutants and Masterminds for this sort of thing. I think they have a Mecha suppliment.

My only experience is with Palladium's Robotech, and I've never actually played a campaign with it.

Look no further than Cthulhutech, thats what it was built for.

Bonus: it also offers regular Character Rules that are playable if not excellent.

Just, uh, ignore ALL the fluff. It's a pretty terrible setting.

[DataNinja]

Have you looked into Lancer at all? They have a whole bunch of stuff for Giant Mechs and I don't know about monsters, but worst comes to worst you could reskin some of the more exotic mech types.

Lancer has the Biological tag... but if you slap that onto everything, it basically makes the whole hacking and tech subsystem that things rely on useless. It's much, much better to just re-fluff things so that hacking makes sense in some way, because the system's balanced around it. (Say... it's energy fields that disrupt nervous systems/electrical systems, or something.)

But, yeah, if you do that, and reskin everything... you have tons of options. You've got fast annoying monsters, you've got monsters that can launch missiles spines from their back, ones that release swarms of mini-monsters to plague a zone... it takes a little bit of work, but this is 100% my recommendation. It's a very solid tactical system.

[GrayDeath]

I've heard good things about Mutants and Masterminds for this sort of thing. I think they have a Mecha suppliment.

My only experience is with Palladium's Robotech, and I've never actually played a campaign with it.
Just, uh, ignore ALL the fluff. It's a pretty terrible setting.

Its Lovecraft Mythos in Space turned up to 11.

But thats clear once youve had a look (and I for one love it for Bier and pretzel Games, so beautifully mad^^).

[lightningcat]

Look no further than Cthulhutech, thats what it was built for.

Bonus: it also offers regular Character Rules that are playable if not excellent.

My bigger problem then the fluff is the dice system. Playing Rummy with each roll is not worth the effort. They should have done something like Lot5R roll & keep if they wanted the dice game idea.

[tensai_oni]

Mutants and Masterminds. 2nd edition has the Mecha and Manga book but 3rd ed is better overall.

Chris Perrin's Mecha RPG. A pretty obscure system (and hard to google) but works well.

I didn't play Lancer so no opinion on that, but the book looks solid.

[Hunter Noventa]

There's also Battle Century G which is supposed to be pretty good for mecha, but mediocre for non-mecha stuff.

[MeeposFire]

One could refluff battletech where you run the mechs as is for the mech side and then reflavor other set of mechs as giant monsters. Now this would work best for monsters that have ranged attacks such as godzilla and the like so for instance you could make a large monster using the berserker battlemech and you could say its weapons are its special attacks such as the ppc being a lightning breath, ECM suite is its body generating a field that disrupts your systems, and things like triple strength myomer is the monster getting so angry that it enters a rage that makes it move faster, hit harder in melee and it has a harder time hitting with its ranged attacks.

EDIT: One neat thing about going this way is that it will allow you to show off losing arms or legs or the like in this case for mechs and the giant monster.

[Saintheart]

Over in this thread the case was made that D&D 4e actually functions rather well for doing mechas!

[Drascin]

My friends and I have typically used Mutants&Masterminds for our Getter Robo style giant blobmonster killing needs. In the end, something like Mazinger or Getter is basically a giant mechanical superhero.

That said, OP, there are a LOT of ways to go with mecha, and it's hard to recommend something if we don't know what the tone you're going for is. I'm not going to recommend the same game if you want to play Evangelion than if you want to play scaled up Starship Troopers! So, what are you going for, here?

[Lord Shark]

There's also the Mecha vs. Kaiju RPG, which is available in both Fate Core and True20 versions.

[Telok]

There's also the Mecha vs. Kaiju RPG, which is available in both Fate Core and True20 versions.

I did not know that existed and now I think I want it.

[DrMartin]

Look no further than Cthulhutech, thats what it was built for.

Bonus: it also offers regular Character Rules that are playable if not excellent.

Chtulutech always put me off with the dice rules, and the very restrictive skill system:

- the chance of a critical fail goes up when upgrading a skill from an odd number to an even one (with the corner case of doubling your chances of crit fail when upgrading from 1 to 2 dice, from 10% to an impressive 20% of fail critting a roll)
- the skill system pretty much requires you to spend most of your starting skill points just to cover the bases of your profession, leaving very few points left for customization beyond "i am a soldier who soldiers". That at least for the couple sample characters I created to get a grasp of the system when i first got into it.
- these two points interact nicely, as at character creation one will have most likely several skills at 2, as skills at 3 (max at chargen) are very expensive (6 points out of 30) and the skill system is so granular that you need quite a lot of skills to cover even basic character ideas. So your newly generated character will

I am curious now in your experience playing it, since I never played the game (and those ideas can be nothing more than armchair rumblings): did you encounter these issues? if so, did you fix them at your table, or in the end they were minor bumps or didn´t really color your enjoyment of the game (as in crit fail in a beer and pretzel game is good fun anyway?)

To the OP: where would you place the focus on the game? on the mech or the pilot? (or the Kaiju?) I think that he answer on which system is best depends largely on the answer to this question.

[Chogokin]

Sounds like you're already reading Mekton, which is what I would recommend. Giant monsters would simply be built as Mecha, with the Techno-Organic modifier and Internal Automation. Another option, if you really want to give giant monsters a different feel from the robots, would be use the Fuzion rules, and build the giant monsters as, well, giant monsters, using some of the powers from the HERO system in Fuzion, such as many levels of permanent Growth. That could be complicated, however.

Good luck, whatever path you take!

[GrayDeath]

Chtulutech always put me off with the dice rules, and the very restrictive skill system:

- the chance of a critical fail goes up when upgrading a skill from an odd number to an even one (with the corner case of doubling your chances of crit fail when upgrading from 1 to 2 dice, from 10% to an impressive 20% of fail critting a roll)
- the skill system pretty much requires you to spend most of your starting skill points just to cover the bases of your profession, leaving very few points left for customization beyond "i am a soldier who soldiers". That at least for the couple sample characters I created to get a grasp of the system when i first got into it.
- these two points interact nicely, as at character creation one will have most likely several skills at 2, as skills at 3 (max at chargen) are very expensive (6 points out of 30) and the skill system is so granular that you need quite a lot of skills to cover even basic character ideas. So your newly generated character will

I am curious now in your experience playing it, since I never played the game (and those ideas can be nothing more than armchair rumblings): did you encounter these issues? if so, did you fix them at your table, or in the end they were minor bumps or didn´t really color your enjoyment of the game (as in crit fail in a beer and pretzel game is good fun anyway?)

To the OP: where would you place the focus on the game? on the mech or the pilot? (or the Kaiju?) I think that he answer on which system is best depends largely on the answer to this question.

Sorry for the Delay, didnt think to check the thread.

We did not start with starting CHaracters but with experienced ones, as we did not intend to paly long enough to level up, so we didnt encounter that specific problem.

overall the Dice system is solid, if nothing to write home about, once you are past starting Chars, and the fact it can pretty eeasily cover such wide areas of competence is nice.

Overall we played for I think 6 sessions, enjoyed it, but i didnt leave enough of an impression to get anyone but me to actively like it (and we didnt get a group wanting to paly mecha back together since then ^^).