https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oc7a8aL7pQPlayed 5 sessions of it and it genuinely is just a slog. Seems like the range of roleplaying possibilities just from the premise is pretty limited. The Horus mechs are pretty cool and I want to try playing one. Pegasus looks neat. But the fanbase is so full of cringy homosexuals that I don't know how much longer I can stand to play it. And the system honestly feels pretty lame. Its just DnD 4e but "oh instead you're a mech."
The rules are fun. Although, you have to make your own setting for it. The setting is so fucking gay it's unbelievable. Ran it a while ago, might pick it back up when my group gets bored of 40k RPGs.
>>97631336Was the mech combat a 3 hour slog for you too? Or is my group just retarded?
>>97631231No, its dogshit.
>>97631448It was a slog for my group too, but that's what you get with a 4.5e hack.
>>97631231buy an ad also you're a nazi (your TT logo is the SS logo and you're bitching about the fanbase)
I'm not clicking your youtube video.
>76 views>all videos are degrees of AI felch complaining about freakshiti see (You) put just as much effort in your prolapse of a channel as (You) do in your daily melty posts
>>97631336The rules are boring and bland, and it's designed more like a vidya than a ttrpg.I played it because I wanted to make my own Mecha homebrew game and was thinking "maybe there will be something here I can get inspired by or steal." There was literally nothing, not one mechanic that felt interestingly "mech-ish". Just totally bland skirmish game skinned as mechs.
>>97631231>Is lancer actually any good?The art is cool.I'm a fan of the mech customization, I like how video-gamey it is, but only in the character creator. Like a CYOA, I like imagining what it would be like to play it, but the reality of bothering is that it doesn't work well and it's unbalanced garbage.There are some cool parts to the lore, like NHPs, and uh... Uh... I think the motive of *trying* to make a space utopian setting is at least kind of interesting and admirable and unique, even if it's completely botched.That's everything good about Lancer.The good parts are vastly, vastly overshadowed by everything bad about Lancer, which I'm sure will be covered in exhaustive detail as this thread goes along. And that's before we even get into how fucking gay and insufferable the community is.The one good thing about the community is that they have a bunch of autistic trannies interested in it, which means they have a bunch of code-monkeys interested in it, which means there's a bunch of fan-made peripheral content, some of which is well-designed. I respect people who can create decent fan expansions even if their opinions are definitionally gay and disgusting.
>>97632296>>97631983>>97631581Why do you argue with Virt? Sage and/or report.
>>97632296>The art is cool.The art is where the problems start, honestly. Abby's mechs look like guys in suits more than robots, he can't close a line to save his life, and there's very little real thought put into any of the designs, and they all clash with eachother (in a way that can't be excused by "different manufacturers" look at Armored Core for examples of how you actually do this)I once described abby's style as "I stuck my finger down my throat and vomited biblically accurate angels all over reddit">I'm a fan of the mech customizationI hate it. If I'm building a robot I wanna actually have a part plan like battletech or Embryo Machine where I can choose leg parts, torso parts, arm parts, etc. Instead of building your own special mech to call your own, Lancer makes you play as one of Abby's super special mechs and you only get to customize them. And at level 1 you don't even get that, being stuck with that fucking stupid grunt mech lmao.>NHPs"Non-Human-Person" is still one of the worst names I've ever encountered in fiction. It's like when Doom called demon's "mortally challenged" except it's not a joke.It's a fairly standard concept too. Most of what Lancer has that's good has been done better in countless mecha media before. Like off the top of my head Zone of The Enders does "evolving sentient AI in your mech" to great extent.
>>97631231Lancer, mechanically, is at best a third of a system which is poorly written and poorly balanced. Every cool thing you can get - mech, gun, talent - buys its power by dint of everything else that could contribute to that power being fucking suckass. The missile mech is good so all the missiles and especially the missile talent suck huge fat dick. The rifle talent is good so every single rifle must be mid at best. The hacker mech is great so the hacker talent is actively detrimental. Et cetera, et cetera.Lorewise - what lore? It's a bastardized Roddenberryesque autofellatio machine, which undercuts its own point by declaring that its discount utopia only functions by leeching off of the nearby ultracapitalist hellhole, and it's a mech game which goes out of its way to shit on the concept of mechs.Its community is the most toxic hellhole I've ever had the displeasure to experience. Dare to intrude on it without being a flagrant and militant member of the alphabet squad and they'll start a fucking feeding frenzy the moment they detect you're not part of the 'in' crowd.Not a single iota of Lancer is worthy of your time, attention, or respect. Go play Mekton or Battletech.
>>97631231It's basically a reskin of 4e dnd. Your not playing as a mech pilot, your playing as a giant dnd character with a brain that can get out and walk around, but that's incidental as the rules for pilots out of mechs make PBTA games look mechanically deep.If you want an actual mech rpg where you feel like your piloting a mech then try Embryo Machine (the rpg not the board game), Mechton Zeta, MechWarrior 2e, or reskin Princess Wing or Nechronica. Yes, the zombie loli yuri-light body horror rpg does mech stuff better than lancer. Let that sink in.The setting is also awful, 3d promoting components and entire mechs removes maintenance and supply issues, and the big gay communist empire is effectively unbeatable thanks to the in-lore queefbot guiding it. And even if you do best them, guess what! The lore specifically states that was just a queefbot simulation and it never happened. Not that your supposed to ever oppose the gay communist empire anyway, your supposed to go kill the evil straight white people for the crime of wanting to be left alone.
I still say relativistic travel is the biggest fuckup of the setting. You cannot react to anything happening outside of the very local part of space that you are in, by the time you arrive anywhere else it will be at least months late.
>>97631231I enjoy it a lot, though it does suffer from the "retards don't plan out their actions between turns" problem that many games have. Good luck in finding a game more to your preferences, anon.>>97632332Oh shit, Virt is still around?
>>97631231Stop shilling your shitty yt channel
>>97632405It's another good example of how I was talking about conflicting concepts over here>>97628379It's something the devs just threw in because....hey...sci-fi...hard sci-fi...relativistic travel is cool right? Throw it in!!!!Wait, it fucks up the setting? You can never make use of this in a real game? It fucks up how games actually work?lollmao
>>97632508>Good luck in finding a game more to your preferences, anon.Nice passive aggressive faggot post. I'd expect nothing less from a leftist söyboy who plays Lancer.
>>97632382>It's basically a reskin of 4e dnd. Your not playing as a mech pilot, your playing as a giant dnd character with a brain that can get out and walk around, but that's incidental as the rules for pilots out of mechs make PBTA games look mechanically deep.yeah, no shit4e tactical boardgame combat was always absolute garbage for simulating humans swinging swords, but it makes perfect sense for highly modular walking tanks with heat caps and hardpoints. and you're playing a game called Lancer, not Sad Meatbag Walking Around.
>>97632378Thanks anon. Like I said, I liked the Horus mechs and a couple Harrison ones but overall yeah so far it just plays like shit.
>>97631448>Or is my group just retarded?this. most player turns boil down to rolling 2 or 3 d20s and about that many d6s. most mechs go down in 3 or 4 good hits. its an incredibly simple and fast game. probably a combination of players not knowing their rules or not using good health or heat tracking to resolve actions and damage quickly
>>97633008It's shit at both of these frankly, but taking the poor combat simulator and turning it into a worse mech simulator was quite impressively retarded.
>>97633068If it's so simple and fast then why does it need COMP/CON
>>97633008There is absolutely fucking nothing I can think of in this setup that feels more fitting for robots. I don't have any fondness for 4e in general but it DOES NOT capture the feel of mech action AT ALL.>highly modular walkingThey aren't, they're fighters with hitpoints and some gear.>heat caps Mechanic ripped off from Battletech turned into a generic resource tacked on like a D&D homebrew.>hardpointsAgain, tacked-on resource/mechanic that feels like homebrew on an existing system.If you want something that actually FEELS like robots, Lancer isn't the game for you. Most of this anon's recommendations are good >>97632382 I'd also add on Genesys since it has really good vehicle rules that'd work well for mechs.
good lord.long before the ai was scraping the internet for content, youtubers were>>97631231
notepad is a huge faggot
>>97633611Who?
>>97633596Name even a single incorrect statement in that image.
>>97633544it doesnt. my group ran it with pen and paper for 6 monthsouting yourself as having a legit skill issue
>>97633562>battletech owns the idea of heating and cooling
Battletech with a homebrew bolted on top for pilots is a superior generic mech system
>>97634765That Elon Musk would make D&D or MTG anything other than slop in the other direction. Also, just buy an ad, Virt.
>>97633544Because it's not fast.
>>97635226That's called "MechWarrior" and is an excellent game. You want 2E.>>97635217No, but the entire concept of the system in mechs basically originates in Battletech, and Lancer just bastardised the og concept.
>>97635867>the entire concept of the system in mechs basically originates in Battletechlol no it fucking doesnt. it originates in physics and thermal expansion, and the fact that machines tend to not work as well the hotter they get, and mechanical systems like combustion, steam and electricity generate heat as a product of the mechanical components utilizing the energy outputunless you mean the idea of tracking said heat build up and cooling by marking down pips or tokens, in which case lolololol fucking step off it
>>97637732Name an rpg that did it before Battletech.
>>97637742why
>>97635231NTA but elon should absolutely buy DnD and MTG. Not because he'd make it good, but because it's not like it can get any worse and the great leftist flight from those games might finally kill them for good.Besides, leftists deserve it after gloating over ruining things people like for the past two decades.
>>97637932Anon don't fall back on right wing grift just because leftist are shit You'll end up mind broken and justifying everything to own the libs >It won't happen to be because-It has happen to those stronger than youIt will happen to you
>>97637742Robotech
>>97637932Where is the merit in saving them? These games were not good in the first place. Nothing of value has been lost.Besides, do you really want these people to flock elsewhere? Where do you suppose they'll perch afterward? Somewhere away from you? You'll only encourage them to infect a game of actual quality.
>>97635217Even in Vidya, I can think of one (ONE) other mecha game that uses "heat" as a game mechanic that limits actions (Baldr Sky). It is not a common mechanic in mecha vidya, eastern or western. Nor is it really common in anime either (I can think of ONE mecha anime that brought up heat a lot as a major plot device in battle)It's not a hard jump to make that "THE mecha rpg" just so happens by amazing coincidence to have a lite version of the same exact mechanic used in the other most prominent western meccha tabletop game.It's also another case of things just being thrown into the game that don't really fit together. Thermal Expansion maybe makes sense for a real gritty down and dirty settings where mechs are big walking tanks but not so much when you have super powered eldritch mechs brapping blackholes and nanomachines at eachother.>>97637815Because that would prove it's a common mechanic and idea in the genre and not a rip-off of the one other popular game in the sphere.
>>97637932>>97637978I apologize. I misread your statement.Still, like I said, having these people flee DnD won't help anything. They will just ruin something else. Better to have them contained elsewhere, don't you agree?
>>97637963You have terrible reading comprehension. I don't think elon can fix shit, I just think the theater kids who took over DnD and MtG deserve to suffer a taste of their own medicine.>>97637978>Where is the merit in saving them?You suck at reading too. Where the fuck did you get that out of "might finally kill them for good"? Like you said, they can't possibly get worse and I don't touch either, so I may as well get some enjoyable suffering out of them like with the twitter buyout.
>>97637988>Because that would prove it's a common mechanic and idea in the genreNot being common proves its a rip off how, exactly?
>>97637995No. Just look at how bluesky turned out. It's a designated containment zone that nobody sane goes to, rather than the public square being covered in shit.
>>97637995When has containment ever worked? They've proven time and time again that they don't believe in coexistence and will always try to expand their influence. Just brutally beat them out of your space when they try to migrate. They'll probably just hop over to pathfinder anyways, which is already leftist as fuck.
>>97635261Yeah it's pretty fiddly with a lot of dice to roll, lots of tags, lots of shit to move around the battlemap and resources to track, etc.Not the slowest game ever but if you've ever played something really elegant then Lancer will feel like a slow boring mess in comparison. Especially for newcomers who get beginner-trapped by the laundry list of player options.Though that's not really my main complaint with the game. My biggest complaint is again, it just doesn't feel like mecha. It's just kinda boring and bland. Battletech is probably slower but at least it feels like robot action.
>>97638005It makes it very likely especially when the authors are total hack-frauds who sound like tremendous weenies in every interview they give.Again, ask yourself where they got the idea for a realistic autistic engineering concept like "thermal expansion" in a setting with magical eldritch robots made by super powered 3d-printers and the laws of physics are basically out the window.
>>97638031>It makes it very likelyOk so it doesn't prove it's a rip off, got it.
>>97638047NTA but why are you like this? It's not a common mechanic and Lancer's take is suspiciously similar to Btech's. You'd have to have a sub-saharan IQ to be incapable of putting one and one together here.
>>97638047Yeah, just overwhelmingly almost certainly the case. So you can feel better that it's only a 99% instead of a 100% chance :)
>>97638061>NTA but why are you like this?Why am I good at winning arguments against Virt? Because I have a brain.>>97638063>YeahOk, I accept your concession. Honestly you just seem upset that Lancer is massively successful despite being the pet project of a woke leftist.
>>97638067I accept your concession as well that they are overwhelmingly likely to have ripped it off :)
>>97638073I accept your concession that you can't prove it's a rip off and are just buttmad at Abby's superiority LMAO
>>97638079Sure, I fully admit that I can't prove it. Just that I can't prove you're not a chatbot. You just are overwhelmingly likely not to be one (not chatbot can be this stupid), and Lancer devs are overwhemlingly likely to have ripped it off.I don't conceded to being mad though, and you can't prove that either :)
>>97638079>Abby's superiorityBTW why does every Lancerfag have this weird parasocial relationship with the devs?I remember this one guy who was debating about the game and he kept calling him "Tom" as if they were on a first name basis. It was so gay.
>>97638103>>97638089>Sure, I fully admit that I can't prove it.And like I said, thanks for the concession. You can stop shaking with impotent rage over Abby's superiority to you now, anon.
>>97638105>And like I said, thanks for the concessionThank you for your concession as well that your favorite dev is probably a damn dirty rip-offer.Personally, I feel like I've gotten a good deal.>You can stop shaking with impotent rage over Abby's superiority to you now, anon.Can't prove it :)
>>97637988THE most popular mecha video game franchise, armored core, has had heat and power generation as a core mechanic since the 90s, to the point that radiators and generators are key gameplay choices because they affect your power output and cooling speedyou might just actually be retarded
>>97638002>I don't think elon can fix shit, I just think the theater kids who took over DnD and MtG deserve to suffer a taste of their own medicine.That literally is what I said about taking the ring wing grift just to own the libsYou actively are willing to make a series worse just to make one group mad
>>97638109>Thank you for your concessionDidn't give you one. You can keep seething though!
>>97638113You know, it's been awhile since I've played Armored Core 3. Did it actually have heat as a METER in gameplay mechanic, or was it just a stat and damage-type? AC's most universal mechanic tends to just be energy management.
Is this another "youtuber makes video he thinks that will appeal to 4chan but then gets push back because anons don't agree with it out of principal and now the youtuber spends the thread arguing with anons instead of cutting his losses because the mods and jannys will do nothing about it" thread?Be in a while since I've been in one of those
>>97638123No, you did.You said>I accept your concession as well*as well* said in response to me saying "I accept your concession" implies that we both mutually accepted eachother's concession.Which I'm completely fine with. Personally if someone said "I have evidence that your mother is a whore, 99% likely" I don't think it not being "proven" would make me feel much better. So I feel I've come out of this argument pretty well.
>>97638133>No, you didn't.Cope, seethe, mald.
>>97638139Sorry I'll just be abiding by your earlier post :)Reminder, if proof is so important, you can't prove coping, seething, or malding.
>>97638124yesheat and power were a single meter that would drain down and gradually refill as it cooled. you could keep using flight and energy weapons as long as you had meter and werent overheated so you could do a dance with your generation and cooling to maintain output. if it reached zero it would overheat and the whole bar would go red until the entire thing refilled and then it would be usable again. energy weapons and flight were completely disabled while overheating.
Sorry for the glowie sounding post but what times is it for all of you anons currently?
>>97638146>Sorry I'llBe seething impotently? Hehe, I already knew that.
>>97638153I thought you cared so much about "proof" bro? Why do you keep going on about things you can't "prove"?
>>97638149>>97638124https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym8TGPCUkn0you can see it here on the left hand side of the screenits been a long time but from what i remember better generators gave you a longer guage, better radiators increased the speed at which it recovered, but better=more weight, and mechs had a weight limit, so you'd need to balance generator and radiator quality against weight budget or upgrade to higher weight capacity legs which were usually slower movement speed or came with other downsides
>>97638158>I thoughtThat's surprising, I didn't know you could LOL
>>97638160Wew Virt is so owned
>>97638149>>97638160Alright, that's fair enough. It's like I said a long time since I played AC3 and 4 onwards it seems they completely removed the mechanic.Regardless, I think the point stands it's not a particularly common mechanic in vidya. Even in AC it's not in half the mainline installments, and the only other example I can think of is Baldr Sky's combo system. Like I said for guys who claimed to not be into mecha, not ever having watched any mecha anime, denied playing Titanfall and presumably other mecha vidya when asked in interview...it's really unlikely that "Thermal Expansion" just naturally occurred to them as a universal mechanic for their far-future mechs, some of which defy the laws of physics or have access to nanomachines and other bizarre mechanics.If this was a walking tank sim made by engineering nerds, maybe. But it's very much not that.
>>97631336What’s so wrong about the setting?
>>97638192>>97626718
>>97638160Don't forget there's plenty of others like Mech Engineer, Ignited Steel, Super Mechs, and Bounty Star.
>>97638192Trekkie-esque post scarcity makes chuddies seethe.
>>97638197Boy what a drama queen
>>97638207See it's not that it's trekkie-esque.If it was just star trek with robots I think people would be fine with it.But it's star trek post sacrcity but uuhhhh ummm there are also megacorps for some reason? And arms manufacturers even though we just 3d print everything? Now fans will say the book accounts for this. And it does!With paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of technobabble.
>>97638197>Angry opinions about things that don't exist>His only actual criticism is "I dislike the tone"So... Nothing?
>>97638217>I didn't read the lore, and I'm MAD about it!Ok?
So id it's not considered good then what's a better alternative specifically?
>>97638219Literally never mentioned anything about "tone". The lore is just unterribly uncool, and the writing is so pretentious and overwritten that it's a slog to read.
>>97638240Everything this anon mentioned >>97632382Embryo Machine is the gold standard of flavorful mecha combat if you don't want battletech's autism. Cool unique "plotting" mechanic that simulates the indirectness of piloting, lets you build mechs by bodypart and has a part-based damage system. Just the right balance of crunch and simplicity that makes it easy to run. Setting is simple, to the point, but flavorful. All around just a great game.
>>97638242>Literally never mentioned anything about "tone"Yes, he did? Gibbering about prose and "feels" and very loosely/falsely paraphrased "erm the ideas aren't cool enuff, the concepts feel like they clash" is literally all just a complaint about tone.Also>It sucks as a ttrpg setting because I can't figure out how to run a game in it like everyone else :(Amazing self own in that complaint.
>>97638247Prose is not "tone", I don't think you understand these terms at all.Prose is moment to moment writing style and quality. Tone is the emotions, mood, etc. it tries to evoke (for example "melancholic", "scary", etc.). For example, two writers can both write "scary" (tone) but with very different prose (IE Lovecraft's infamous flowery "purple prose" vs something more brutally efficient like Jack Vance's almost surgical and quick explanation of sorcerous torture methods). Prose can also account for quality as well as style. If you go to a writing style and someone tells you your prose is clunky, it doesn't mean your attempt to write melancholically is the problem, but rather your choice of words, diction, grammar, run-on-sentences, etc. are bad.>concepts feel like they clash" is literally all just a complaint about tone.concepts clashing is a complaint about logical contradiction within the setting. IE what you might know as a "plot hole". This is again, not "tone".>It sucks as a ttrpg setting because I can't figure out how to run a game in it like everyone else :(You can run a game in any setting. You can run a game in FATAL or whatever. But some settings are better for inspiring and creating interesting scenarios for players, and you can generally tell when the writer didn't put any thought into this in favor of writing their The Culture rip-off.
>>97638267>Prose is not "tone"Simply going "I hate this prose >:(" is a complaint about tone, yes.>concepts clashing is a complaint about logical contradictionYeah no it's not, it's just "I think these clash and can't work together (tone)">You can run a game in any setting.I can, sure. You seem to struggle with that though, big time struggle.
>>97638282>Simply going "I hate this prose >:(" is a complaint about tone, yes.No it's a complaint about using 5 paragraphs to say what you could in 1, for instance. Or that things which are meant to sound cool instead sound embarassing.Tone is your goal, prose is your EXECUTION. And the complaint is that the execution is poor. You can try to go contrarian on this but you should understand what I mean.>Yeah no it's not, it's just "I think these clash and can't work together (tone)"No, plot-holes are logical contradictions that would exist regardless of what your emotional evocation is (tone) or how well you write it.For example, let's say I create a setting where everyone has access to a magical temp can pray to the settings god and receive anything they like. Then, I introduce a famine that causes millions of people to starve.This is a logical contradiction, because the people can and should be able to wish themselves as much food as they want from the god. This is not "tone" OR "prose", I could write this story incredibly or write it terribly, I could make it sad or scary or upbeat, but it'd still be a clashing idea, a plot hole.Now of course I could easily introduce ideas ad-hoc to justify the idea and make it not a plot-hole. I could say that maybe the god can only magic up a pound worth of material, and can only grant one wish a week. But if I don't address this then I've made a pretty shitty story.>I can, sure. You seem to struggle with that though, big time struggle.I can too, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.
>>97638309>No it's a complaint about using 5 paragraphs to say what you could in 1No, it's not, it is explicitly about it being "eyerolling" not "too long". It's a complaint about tone.>No, plot-holes are logical contradictionsWe're not talking about plot-holes, non-sequitur.>let's say I create a setting where everyone has access to a magical temp can pray to the settings god and receive anything they like. Then, I introduce a famine that causes millions of people to starve.Okay, and....? This is a false equivalency with zero relevance. Lancer does not have this, and you actively complain that it offers explanations for what you think "clashes" because you dislike reading them (Also a complaint about tone)>I can tooEvidently not.
>>97638317>No, it's not, it is explicitly about it being "eyerolling" not "too long". It's a complaint about tone.Again, I do not understand how you are so contrarian that you cannot understand this distinction.Tone is about emotion. Prose is the craftsmanship of writing. Saying that something is too wordy and repetiive for instance, is not a complaint about the emotional mood or atmosphere it's trying to set: it's a complaint about your writing quality.>We're not talking about plot-holes, non-sequitur.That is in fact what the meaning behind "clashing concepts" was intended to convey.>This is a false equivalency with zero relevance.It's an exaggerated example to make a point, but I think there are plot holes in Lancer that are present and egregious. Some of them are papered over, but oftentimes in a way that just makes the setting more convoluted and tedious to read.>Evidently not.Bro, anyone can. If you want to make up a setting in fucking FATAL you can throw something together in 5 seconds.Do you want to have an honest conversation or do you just want to go contrarian to defend your precious game from any criticism?
>>97638332>Again, I do not understand how you are so contrarianAnd there you go again, complaining about irrelevancies. How dare I be "contrary" to you! Don't I understand how important it is that I agree with you? It's pathetic, and an attempt to deflect from your inability to bring up valid criticism.>That is in fact what the meaning behind "clashing concepts" was intended to convey.No, it isn't. Clashing concepts is about clashing concepts. You'd use more particular wording if you were upset about "plot holes". Now you're just trying to shift the goalposts because you were wrong, without simply admitting you were wrong like a mature adult would.>It's an exaggerated example to make a pointIt's a false equivalency to try and create a point where there is none.>but I think there are plot holes in Lancer that are present and egregious.You've already said you know there are none, that all "clashing concepts" are explained away, and you just dislike the explanation, which comes down to "I'm mad about the tone.">Bro, anyone canEvidently not you.>Do you want to have an honest conversationWaiting for you to go one post without deflecting, coping, lying, dodging, making false equivalencies, or presenting some other emotionally charged fallacy in place of actual points worthy of being treated with respect.
>>97638347> You'd use more particular wording if you were upset about "plot holes"
>>97638358And again, you're saying clashing concepts and plot holes are one and the same thing. That is not particular wording, anon, that is you vomiting word spaghetti in the hopes that something sticks and camouflages the utter lack of actual critique.
>>97638361>Me: "when I say clashing concepts, I basically mean plot holes">You: No, clashing concepts is about clashing concepts. You'd have said "plot holes" if you meant plot holes">Me: I literally said plot holes in my first post>You: Oh...ummm...well...never the less...
>>97638368>"when I say clashing concepts, I basically mean plot holes"Then why did you say "plot holes and clashing concepts" and not just one or the other? You've contradicted yourself, as usual.Like I said, you just wanted to vomit out whatever words came to mind that sounded "bad" and would paint the setting in a bad light to anyone reading your post. You do not actually have a critique of it, which is why your critique was so pitifully easy to tear apart and you've abandoned all but one point.
>>97638372>Then why did you say "plot holes and clashing concepts" and not just one or the other?So have you made up your mind yet if these words mean the same thing, or that they mean something completely different? Because you seem to flipflop on that every post.>Like I said, you just wanted to vomit out whatever words came to mindWow, almost sounds like...[cough cough]...prose issue
>>97638388>So have you made up your mind yet if these words mean the same thingHave you? Since you insist they do but you used both for seemingly no reason. You keep contradicting yourself. Now you can't even answer a simple question hahaha>Wow, almost sounds like...[cough cough]...prose issueI mean yeah you're pretty obviously a bad writer but I wasn't gonna go that low. If you admit it that's a different matter kek.
>>97638393>Have you? Since you insist they do but you used both for seemingly no reasonI think I insisted that they mean mostly the same thing. And yes, my post was casually typed out without too much proof-reading or editing. So perhaps I should have just said one or the other, it would have been less repetitive (see, this is what I mean by "bad prose").As for writing, I think I'm alright, but not great. My friends enjoy my roleplay quite a bit and often invite me to games. But like I said, when it comes to 4chan I tend to just "vomit" out posts as you say ;) you may notice there are a lot of typos in most of them (saying "temp" instead of "temple" earlier, for instance).
>>97638401>I thinkNah.>I insisted they mean mostly the same thingNo, disingenuous anon, you said: when I say clashing concepts, I basically mean plot holesWell if you "basically mean" plot holes, why did you repeat yourself twice? It seems rather illogical and contradictory. If you meant plot holes, you'd just say plot holes. Instead, you didn't, you used two different terms!Why did you do this?Well as said, it's because you have no actual critique (You've even admitted there are no plot holes, you're just mad about the way the setting is portrayed).>As for writing, I think I'm alrightWell anon we already know for a fact you aren't. No need to cope about your insecurities or make things up, it's pretty obvious that you're a nogames just from the way you try to talk about games.
>>97638422>I think I insisted>"Nah">then goes on to quote me explicitly calling them "basically the same thing", affirming that I did, in fact, insistArguing with you is baffling honestly.>Why did you do this?Well let me think, when I originally vomited out that post, I think my general sense was that these two terms meant two *similar* things that are both present, with one term being slightly more all-encompassing than the otherIE a plothole would be an outright logical contradiction, while a clashing concept could mean that *or* also just something that's technically not a plot hole but also just kind of janky awkward storytelling.Again, the exact choice of words wasn't all too well thought out.>No need to cope about your insecurities or make things up, it's pretty obvious that you're a nogames just from the way you try to talk about games.Would you like an invite to one of the servers where I hang out? I could show you some of the games I've been in, and you could talk to some of my friends who've run games for me and been in games I've run :)
>>97631231>tabletoptruthFuck off you faggoty parasite.
>>97638440>Arguing with you is bafflingPredictably, you deflect when you can't find a way to argue a point.>Well let me think, when I originally vomited out that post, I think my general sense was that these two terms meant two *similar* thingsOh so now the story changes again! First they were distinct, then they were "basically the same thing", now they mean "two similar things".Orrrrrr... They never meant anything and you were just vomiting out words brainlessly like usual. Ah, that seems to be it.>Would you like an invite to one of the servers where I hang out?Why exactly would this prove anything?If you were a hasgames you'd simply not seethe over people enjoying a system that you don't care for. Actual hasgames are too busy running, playing, and preparing games to waste their energy on braindead hatred.Alternatively you'd have posted your game table or ignored the accusation, but the call out hit too close to home for you to ignore, and now it has you mad.
>>97638462>Why exactly would this prove anything?Being shown archived games where I'm gm'ing wouldn't prove anything?Literally talking to people I've gm'd for wouldn't prove anything?You can just admit you're too scared to join :)Here's a temp link if you'd like to join. I'll greet you in there immediately and show you to the archived game channels https://discord.gg/ztEQszewWhy not pop in if you're so certain?
>>97638469>Being shown archived games where I'm gm'ing wouldn't prove anything?Do you record and archive all your games in an IRC server or something? Or - Oh wait. I see. You're so nogames you don't realize most people play IRL bahahahaha!
>>97638477No we do OOC and IC chat in Discord. So basically all the games roleplay are now in locked channels. There's also like 100 people in this server, you could literally just talk to them and ask them about me lol.Why not join?
>>97638469>DiscordSo you don't play games, got it.
>>97638483Playing online is not playing games. Sorry that you're so desperate you could not find a single person IRL who will tolerate you at their table, but this is the ultimate self out as a nogames.
>>97638484>>97638486>Playing online is not playing gamesExplain the logic please. This oughta be good, I should get some popcorn.
>>97638484KEK I just found his fucking reddit, what a retard. u/flygonac if anyone wants to have a laugh at this loser lmaoooo
>>97638493Anon, do you think reading text on a screen is the same as the experience these guys are having? Yes or no.
>>97638498I don't think readers in this thread are going to believe you on this random name you pulled out of nowhere :)NGL you kinda overplayed your hand with the whole "no-games" thing. Probably didn't expect I'd actually just invite you to people where my actual groups hang out.
>>97638504Different, but it's still playing a game (after all, you're still using the game mechanics, are you not?), hanging with friends, and roleplaying.I compare text based games to writing/reading a novel, while voice based games are like acting in a play. But ultimately what matters most is the fun you have and the time you spend with good friends.
>>97638498Discoverings so far:>He's massively overweight>He has been trying for at least a year to find people IRL to talk to, and has failed>He spends a majority of his time screeching about politics and getting into arguments with his fellow redditorsIncredibly embarrassing and I've only scrolled down a little wew.
>>97631448My group has actual factual diagnosed by doctors retards, and combat isn't a slog for us. It goes by quick and smooth.>>97631336The setting is only as gay as your group is.
>>97638512You've got the wrong anon there, anon!And as usual, you're clearly coping. I was hoping you'd prove me wrong and post your table, but you straight up admitted to being nogames.>>97638516>DifferentOkay so "No". As in, "No", you are not playing tabletop roleplaying games. You are playing IRC RP, which every 12 year old who ever had access to the internet has done, but more gay.>hanging with friendsYou are not hanging with friends, you are on the internet. You have no friends.
>>97638519I'm actually incredibly skinny. And I don't have a reddit account. Nobody will ever believe you anon, especially after you just embarrassed yourself with the whole "whoops I didn't expect him to actually invite me to his group" thing lol
>>97638519Seems he's really mad that the Ukraine war isn't over LOL
>>97638528>You've got the wrong anon there, anon!See, nobody now will ever believe you on anything you post. You can samefag all day, but after producing a random reddit account and claiming its another anon without any explanation after getting horribly owned, you've pretty much nuked yourself.
>>97638498>Retard tries to own zone le troll>Outs himself as being a fucking redditor instead
>>97638546>See, nobody now will ever believe you on anything you postI mean at least one other person has.>You can samefag all dayWew, something here must have cut deep if you're jumping to random accusations.>after getting horribly owned, you've pretty much nuked yourself.Kek, seeing as you've given up on making an argument, I'll consider that you've totally conceded that you're a nogames who was wrong about everything and is just buttmad about Lancer's tone.
>>97638549>outs himselfStill waiting on any evidence or proof of your claim. Weren't you the guy who kept going on about "proof" earlier? :)Where did you find this reddit account? >>97638528>You are not hanging with friends, you are on the internet. You have no friends.Sorry you've never experienced a real long distance friendship anon, but it's really nice.
>>97638551>I mean at least one other person has.You literally just lied about a reddit account so there's no reason for me to believe you lol.
>>97638552>Sorry you've never experienced a real long distance friendship anonI've experienced what someone like you would consider one.But it seems you've never experienced a real life, face to face friendship. Anyways, why'd you reply to my post twice? Are you feeling a bit pressed?>>97638554>You literally just lied about a reddit accountI never brought up a reddit account. I disregarded you outright when you started confusing online roleplay with actually playing tabletop games. I could care less what sites you browse, seemingly much less than you do.
>>97638498What the fuggHow do you fuck up shaving???
>>97638483idgi if these are closed doesn't that prove you're a nogames?
>>97638562Imagine having literally zero male figures in your life so you have to ask REDDIT for advice on shaving>I am mixed (black/white)Why is it always the mixed race kids who turn out the most chuddish? You'd think it'd be the other way around
>>97638568Don't bother, anon. Being a nogames (And one with exceedingly strong mental illnesses and insecurities at that), he probably thinks roleplaying in a chatroom one time is practically the same as actually having a regular group you sit down and have gamed with for years.
>>97638557>I never brought up a reddit account.Ah so you're basically trying to waste time now by claiming "NTA" ON THIS POST >>97638498 Look anon, I'll level with you: if you wanna have a genuine and earnest discussion about Lancer's setting, I'd be happy to take it up with you in DM's. Hit up that discord server, and I'll just DM you and we can talk about it privately. No trolling, no gotcha's, no posturing for 4chan, just honestly explaining feelings about the setting, why I don't like it, why you like it. And we can come to a polite understanding like mature adults. Who knows, maybe I've been too harsh about parts of it! I invite you to change my mind.Because otherwise right now it seems like you're just trying to troll to save face and aren't really interested in anything anyone has to say. Tell me, do you - personally - have any personal critiques or criticisms of Lancer's setting, or do you honestly think it's 10/10, greatest setting ever, perfect in every way, no possible complaint has validity?>>97638568This server is for short one-shots. They're also not all run by me. I ran Growing Wings, Transitory Butterfly, and NDE. I was a player in Mortal Hubris, Tara Tower, Crazy Train, and @Everyone.I've also been in longer campaigns, including a 6 year Nechronica game, a 2 year Tokyo Nova game, a 6 month or so Star Wars FFG game, currently in a historical fantasy game in Genesys that's been going on-and-off for like 2-3 years (the GM is real busy with work, but we've trucked along with hiatus's on/off) etc. If you jump in you could talk to some of the other gm's and confirm if you like.
>>97638581that didn't answer my question
>>97638581>Ah so you're basically trying to waste time now by claiming "NTA" ON THIS POSTDoesn't seem to waste much time, it just frustrates you that reality isn't bending to your delusions.>Look anon, I'll level with you: if you wanna have a genuine and earnest discussion about Lancer's setting, I'd be happy to take it up with you in DM's"I have been utterly embarrassed in the public forum, please come to a different social media website where I only have to embarrass myself privately" is a weird ask, and I'm not really interested. If you can't engage in good faith openly, it is absolutely impossible for you to engage in good faith privately.>Because otherwise right now it seems like you're just trying to troll to save faceI don't see what face I have to save as a random anon. I do know someone who clearly has face to save though after being outed as a nogames who literally cannot conceive of what a game even *is.*>Tell me, do you - personally - have any personal critiques or criticisms of Lancer's setting, or do you honestly think it's 10/10, greatest setting ever, perfect in every way, no possible complaint has validity?I'll give you an answer if you give me a clear and earnest answer to this and only this without responding to anything else: Why did you presume that I think it's perfect?
>>97631231It's more a performative thing to be seen "playing" in order to signal virtue to your comrades, rather than an actual game for people to play.
>>97638581>Was>Been>Has>Used toFatty Fatty 2x4 Can't Fit Through The LGS Door He Has No Games He's Such A BoreFatty Fatty 2x4
>>97638592>I have been utterly embarrassed in the public forumAnon there's very obviously no one posting in this thread but you and me. And you've basically outed yourself as totally disingenuous by grabbing a random reddit account and then samefagging. I'm just offering because maybe you won't be so performative and troll-ish if we're both not anonymous. And can just have an earnest conversation. Are you interested in that? Or do you just want to troll?>Why did you presume that I think it's perfect?I did not presume. I merely asked. *Do* you think the setting is perfect? If you want to know why I ask, it's because you're very combative about it. Maybe even moreso than I am. So I'm curious if you have any personal criticisms you'd be willing to grant, or if you really do think it's unassailable.
>>97638604>Anon there's very obviously no one posting in this thread but you and me.If you need to believe so, feel free to. I'm not one to deprive the mentally ill of their coping mechanisms. That said,>And you've basically outed yourselfI can't help but see that you're clearly trying to convince yourself of this in saying so, since you keep trying to do a soft "n-no u" with every post you make, and it doesn't seem to be working. Deep breaths, lad.>I'm just offering because Because you're embarrassed. If you thought I was "performative and trollish" there would be nothing to gain from a private discussion. There's much to gain if you feel pressed and embarrassed, though.>I did not presume.And I stopped reading right there. You have so little self control at this point that you couldn't follow basic instructions, nor be honest. It's clear that you're feeling much too flustered to have anything but an extended temper tantrum, and the only reason you're probably posting at this point is in hopes of getting the last word in so you can feel like you've "won."Which is why I'll now frustrate you by telling you that I've won this argument, and as proof of how absolutely victorious I am, I will not need to make another post in this thread. Doubtless you'll accuse whoever next posts of being me of course, but it's obvious that even you won't believe your own accusations. Sayonara, disingenuous anon!
>>97638617>Sayonara
>>97638067Who the fuck is virt?
>>97638317>>97638347The question isn't IF one can run Lancer as a different setting, it's WHY should I bother? The system is ass, the setting is ass, the devs are retards, the fanbase are all deranged mass shooters in the making.There's literally nothing worth salvaging here.
>>97638519>>97638562>>97638577>lancerfag is an overweight, fatherless commiemutt too retarded to figure out shavingThey really aren't beating the allegations lmao
>>97638113And Battletech has had it since it began in the late 70's>>97638079>looks and functions almost identically to something that came long before it in a thing that is a corner stone of the genre>"i-its not a copy or ripoff, its 200% original a-and you can't prove otherwise"
>>97638192Let me get on my PC, there is a lot to unpack. Tl;Dr, >>97638197 barely touches on it and >>97638207 >>97638211 >>97638219 are purposefully misleading/DARVO'ing. The setting is shit and counter to gameplay.Give me an hour or so, got to do some jobs.
>>97639107Looking forward to it, anon.Honestly Lancer's setting is just...uniquely fun to clown on? It's miserable to actually read but it's fun to take the piss out of.
>>97639179>>97638192Aight. I am going to try and condense this a little>Lancer is a Mech game where you pilot your giant mech to go fight other giant mechs, do secretive things, etc, etc, etc>You are the big stars of the show, fighting against bad guys, the tip of the spear, the armoured fistGot that right?. Good, remember it. It will be important later.The big central faction in Lancer, whose name I cannot remember and honestly do not care about, is a big gay/queer communist utopia that has perfected 3d printing and is thus post scarcity. Despite being a big and benevolent post scarcity communist utopia where everything is available to whoever wants it, there are still megacorps inside it.These megacorps have power but are also regulated and controlled by the state. How, in a post scarcity communist state, do megacorps exist not only as independent bodies but also manage to thrive? Dont know, dont ask.This queer communist utopia, referred to hereafter as "Queeftopia" is benevolent and kind and are the good guys, you know this because the writers go out of their way to wax lyrically about how they are the good guys. They are also massively expansionist and are encroaching onto and absorbing the outer nations and powers. What are these minor nations crimes for which the good and benevolent Queeftopia must crush and absorb them? Being independent and not happily accepting the good and gracious state-mandated gayness of Queeftopia with open arms. Again I am not joking, and it gets even better, the big leader of the evil axis coalition of naughty nations is "Harrison Armoury", a nation of Straight White People. Again, I am not joking, its a projection of the rightwing West/America. Their crime? They didnt want to accept communism and queerness. And being white.>This is just political whiningYes, but its relevant, see:The minor powers can make their own mechs but they cannot 3d print them on the level that Queeftopia can.cont, 1/?
>>97639261Ah so its a gay and retarded version of The Culture
>>976392612/?More to the point, the minor powers lack the hyper advanced frames that Queeftopia has. You see, Lancer is a grounded, gritty, and realistic "Mud and Lasers" RPG, and the Harrison Armoury mechs do indeed follow this, as do some of the weaker Queeftopia chassis. But then you have Queeftopias specials, quantum mechs that shoot singularities at the enemy, nanomachine mechs that rebuild themselves as the fight is ongoing and can "grey goop" enemy units into oblivion, or the psychic nightmare mechs that use psychic magic to mindrape enemy units into destruction. Good guys, remember. The minor powers are the bad guys, remember. Gritty and realistic, remember.No real explanation is ever given as to why Queeftopia has not won already, but dont think to hard on it.Queeftopia has a special trick up their sleeve, a quantum AI supercomputer that constantly runs every single probability and simulation ever and then directs Queeftopia in how to proceed for the best results. This means they only ever win, except when they lose because they meant to, or because the orders never reached the frontline, or didnt make it in time, because despite having relativistic tech (more on that shortly), a full grasp of advanced quantum physics, and psychic magic, they still have to obey some convoluted laws of physics that prevent them just FTL'ing messages to the front. You see, despite everything else, relativistic laws still affect FTL and all that, so messages take time to be relayed and its possible for units to be without support. Again, remember this bit.This AI, referred to hereafter as "Queefbot" is also running every single simulation ever, as mentioned above. The writers used this to write into their lore that Queeftopia is effectively untouchable. Any campaign or game that results in a loss for, a significant setback for, or the destruction of Queeftopia is automatically and canonically retconned into having never actually happened.cont
>>976393063/?Every single time Queeftopia loses, suffers a setback, or is destroyed, the game is automatically retconned, as per the lore, to being one of the infinite simulations Queefbot was running and never happens as Queefbot takes steps to ensure it can never happen. Queefbot is a quantum super AI computer, so it knows everything already. Dont ask.So, the players are expected to play as Queeftopia operatives, you can play as pilots for one of the minor powers, but if you do that any win you manage will be automatically retconned to never having happened. So you play as the "good guys" going out and beating up the "bad guys" who cannot match your technological edge in any way, which leads to a powerscaling issue as pretty much every player will just take one of the super chassis. How do we prevent this?Licenses!So, you have a super advanced 3d printer that just magics out mechs, and contains the designs for every mech ever invented and every component ever, I will go more into this later, but for now we have this, right? The thing preventing you from just printing a singularity shitting super mech or pilotable nanoswarm is the License system. You see, you dont just get the big, cool, impressive thing, you have to earn it by upgrading your license over time, which makes no sense from a lore perspective. Why are you purposefully gimping your operators? And, if you are operating beyond Queeftopia how are you getting these license upgrades, when communication is so unreliable? But, its not actually unreliable you see, except when the plot needs it to be.Now, remember everything I said at the start about Mechs being the tip of the spear, the headliners, the big stars?Yeah, well actually no. All wars are fought by spaceships firing at each other from solarsystems away with post-relativistic weaponry. Mechs are largely inconsequential, being mostly used as propaganda pieces, and as policing/counter terrorism/espionage assets.Imma get a drink, more to come.
This is beautiful anon.One thing that I'd personally add is again, just how utterly dogshit all this shit is to read. It just goes on and on for paragraphs and is written with this annoying "in-universe" style that comes off as both dry and pompous, like something in between a space wikipedia article and a propaganda leaflet. It's insufferable.
>>97631983Report the channel already.Easiest profile ban of all time
>>97639423Yeah its pure neoliberal slop.
>>97639261>>97639306>>97639328Settings are supposed to be interesting, this is embarrassing. I can deal with author favoritism to an extent, but this is terrible. Going to have to read it myself from a freebie to verify, because no way is it actually like this.
>>97639581NTA but if anything, it's even worse. Behold: 5 FUCKING PARAGRAPHS about what color beige the feds wear. Are you excited to have a cool mecha adventure yet?
>>97639604Rereading this over I can't get over how wordy it is, these guys are failed authors who must never have gotten the whole "trimming down and editing your work is important">"It receives guidance from Centcomm and pushes them as command imperatives to administrators, who then work with local rulers and governments to find BEST-FIT INTEGRATION based on local conditions"There is no fucking reason to be this wordy man. You could've just said:>"They receive guidance from the central government and work with local rulers to fulfill these commands."This might seem like nitpicking but the entire book is like this. I don't think I have a single screenshot that isn't like this. Welcome to Hell.
>>976393284/?So, to continue on to some more mechanics relevant thingsYour mechs are 3d printed right? It so happens that those 3d proooonnters are some kind of Star Trek magic matter creators. That is to say that you basically dont have to put anything in, they just print out whatever you want. How is this relevant? Well, lets say your mech gets knocked out/destroyed? In other better, actual mech themed, rpg's this is a bad thing, and you have to salvage and repair your mech or find a replacement, perhaps salvaging an enemy unit. Not in Lancer though, oh no, you can just print out a new Mech. 0 consequences.Further, there is no need to maintain your mechs either as they can basically be re-printed into full working order after each mission, not that the game actually has rules for maintenance or anything like that. Your high tech warmachine? Degrade due to use? Fluid lines clog after being left standing too long? Mechanical parts seize after a month in transit? Minor faults emerge in the systems? Nah, doesnt happen.If you have ever played in a Battletech campaign then you know that one of the key parts is keeping your Mech operational, and it is not uncommon to have to franken parts together as your Shadowhawk loses its RT and you dont have a replacement, but there is a partially slagged Wolverine in storage with a functional RT, so you have your techs weld that on and pray it works, and over long campaigns it is not uncommon to break out the Franken Mech rules at least once. Or, you want to customise your mech to suit you better, such as ripping that AC5 off and replacing it with an LRM10, or mounting a hatchet in your Left Arm.Lancer does technically let you do these but at a massive penalty. You see, every base mech is specialised into one specific role, and it has loads of inherrent buffs to that role, but to 'balance' this the weapons have penalties that mean if they are not mounted on the 'correct' mech they are massively underpowered.cont
>>976396245/?This is, imo, one of the greatest sins of the game as it outright removes one of the fundamental key parts of the mecha genre - the ability to customise your unit or franken it as you replace damaged parts. Furthermore there is never any reason to salvage an enemy unit from the field, why bother? Unless its superior to yours (and if your playing the "correct way" it will never be) you can just print whatever components or mechs you need.Oh, that reminds me, remember the License thing that limits the gear and mechs you can use? Every 3d proonter may have every design and bit of tech saved in its files, but they are all unhackable black boxes that self destruct if you try to open them. Dont worry about maintaining them either, they just never need it. Stop asking questions.So, why fight? Well for the good feeling of winning and beating the bad guys up. At least, that was the original reason as there is no money in Queeftopia and again, you are not meant to play anyone else and any time you do all your victories against Queeftopia dont actually happen, but the release version introduced the License system, so there is a reason to play, you earn Goodboy points by suppressing those darn dastardly Straight White Folks for their villainous crime of wanting to be left alone, and if you save up enough you get rewarded with new licenses, better mechs and parts, etc. Why didnt Queeftopia just give you the good stuff to start with, seeing as they are a post scarcity society and money isnt at thing and magic printers just make everything with no limits? Again, stop asking questions.BUT, you can play as the "bad guys" right? Not that you would want to, but you can.Well, uh, there are no actual currency rules in the game, so its up to the GM to come up with them. Or just reward you with licenses again, though at least they make marginally more sense seeing as these evil white folks have yet to reach the level of Post Scarcity.cont shortly.
>>97639604>>97639618That's painful to read. I legitimately thought everyone just hated it for the politics alone and didn't pay attention. There's nothing interesting about this.
>>97639107Please don't. No one wants to watch you take yet another shit all over an already shit-covered second thread.
>>97640146Too late.
>>97639624> You see, every base mech is specialised into one specific role, and it has loads of inherrent buffs to that role, but to 'balance' this the weapons have penalties that mean if they are not mounted on the 'correct' mech they are massively underpowered.... Where in the rules does that happen?As someone who's actually played the game let me tell you how it works: Weapons have weight categories, ranging from auxillary, main, heavy and superheavy. Any weapon can be mounted on its own mount category or heavier (a heavy mount can take a main weapon for example) except for superheavies which must be mounted on a heavy mount and then occupies another mount (essentially it takes two mounts). Besides the fact that each frame has built in mounts, no weapons get penalties of any kind regardless of what they're mounted on: if it can fit a weapon it can use it. Nothing besides the opportunity cost, natural synergies, and the weight categories of weapons is stopping you from mounting literally whatever weapon you have access to on any frame in the game: and core bonuses can do things like giving you extra mounts to use making it even more customized.You seem like an AI hallucinating mechanics where none exist.
>>97638185> and presumablyyeah, your argumentation style is so fucking disingenuous that im done with it. battletech does not own the idea of engines overheating. you're a moron, and im peacing out because these arguments are fucking stupid, deflecting, and assumptive
>>97631231Consider Sewed Slide, Virt.
>>976396676/6So, in summary, Lancer is a gritty, realistic, mud and lasers Mech RPG in which almost all of the core concepts of the Mech genre are absent, the actual PC's themselves are almost mechanically absent, and has blackhole sharting and psychic abomination quasi real super mechs, which plays like DnD 4e complete with 'magic' and completely absent of component damage, in which the mechs themselves are largely inconsequential to the overall setting outside of being flashy show pieces to bolster morale and maybe fight off the odd raider or stomp a terror cell.The PC's actions only ever have lasting consequence if they further the machinations of Queeftopia, otherwise Queefbot simply retcons all your efforts to never happening, and if you dont like it then too bad, you WILL embrace the writers politics. The settings material is written in an exceedingly overblown and ameturish style, and the writers where quite happy to wax lyrically about the exact shade of uniforms worn by minor sects of the Queeftopian government, or how amazing Queeftopia is, whilst completely failing to put any thought into resolving the glaring issues of a communist state that doesnt have currency anymore also having megacorps, of answering the question of "why, if fleets are shooting accurately at other ships a couple of solarsystems over, and we have literal magitech singularity shitters and mechs that rewrite time, do we also have communication lag over distance?".In short, -8/10. Reskin Nechronica if you want fast and crunchy mech combat. Side note, the writers boasted about despising the Mech genre.>>97640265Its been years since I looked at the rules and I am unlikely to do so again, but I distinctly recall a lot of the more interesting weapons being utterly shite unless you took them on a very specific frame that made them utterly broken. Like how you have the one frame that does smart missile spam, the one that does all the flamethrowers ever, etc.
>>976414597/6Also, fuck Queeftopia and its constant glowups. You cannot be the "brave and strong rebels sticking it to the man" when you are also a massive expansionist empire, you cannot decry the evils of colonisation and European colonisation did amazing levels of good for those lands colonised and at the same time happily talk about colonising as a good thing because its your chosen political target being attacked, you cannot play the good guy decrying the evil ways of the other side whilst genociding them for the crime of not wanting to be gay.Fuck this shitty gameFuck its awful settingFuck its writersAs I wrote above, Nechronica, Embryo Machine, Mechwarrior 2E, Mekton Zeta, Princess Wing. Try them, enjoy them, love them.
>>97631231If youre usisng one of the prewritten modules Lancer is one of the worst games ever imagined. No Room for a Wallflower remains the most agonizingly boring experience I have ever played.
>>97631231If you want to play lancer, make your own setting instead of using whatever nonsense the creators made, and throw out the part where you can print your own new mechs for free. It shouldn't be hard to come up with something reletively fair in its place.
>>97640531didn't you already "peace out" of this argument dramatically before lolRun along little faggot, no one likes your ugly boring little game.
Played two campaigns of Lancer. In the first one, weak point was the GM but the game itself was fun. I liked doing the build optimization using my build. Started as a Nelson oriented around ramming everything, then switched to a Chomalongma hacker build because the party needed support. Second campaign my GM ran the prebuilt module and it was moderately interesting. We were LL0 in Everests, but I had to leave due to getting busy with life stuff. They're still going strong though.
>>97641515You know what the funny thing is? There's STILL more retardation you didn't touch on.Like I was wondering if you were gonna get to the games attempt at a spooky villain, the spooky paracausal rival AI who just kinda shows up and then makes a moon disappear or something then fucks off and does nothing against your galaxy spanning empire. Or how fucking stupid the concept of "NHP's" are, magic AI's that sometimes want to kill you for some reason and sometimes are your best friend and Queeftopia kinda sorta has legalized slavery for.Or how about that one mech that's literally just in-universe described "the best" which totally solves combat, and the only reason you don't just 3d print them all the time is artifiical scarcity.and...you could go on and on. The game is the gift that keeps on giving. There is endless, ENDLESS cringe and stupid and gay. I almost love it for that (not that I'd ever play it), but it's just so fun to hate on. The gift that keeps on giving.
>>97642315(not that I'd ever play it AGAIN*)Believe me, like a true and honorable hater, I DID suffer through playing this abomination.
I’ll play some games on Wednesday and I’ll get back to you all.
>>97642315>>97642326Why are you gay?
If anyone's curious: While every mech in Lancer is a custom job, here's a rough idea of the scale of the art mechs, from a human pilot through the scale .5 power suits to the barbarossa, which is scale 3 and of similar stature to a mech from Battletech.Scale 1 mechs are Protomech sized.
>>97642332You don't get to say that as a Lancer enjoyer, anon.
>>97642353It's called expert knowledge. He's the most qualified to call you a fag.
>>97642361Damn...
>>97631231back in the day, i looked at the kickstarter for this and the first thing capitalized i read was "be gay, do crimes". noped out reaaaaal fast.
>>97642393kek, seriously?
>>97639604>>97639618Rereading this it honestly never struck me how the book would probably be like...half as long or more if they both1) cut out the try-hard future-beauracratic speak2) didn't provide totally extraneous information about the things players are likely to care LEAST about with zero filter whatsoeverLike for 1, the book can never just say "the central government ordered", it always has to say "Union Central Administration Bureau issued a command missive requiring best-fit integration to local disaporean governmental bodies". Everything is twice as long because they're constantly trying to do this in-universe beauracratic future speak that's padded out with neologisms.Then there's no filter on what it actually gives you. Do you get any information for some of the planets you might visit? How about a paragraph about what kind of childhood these feds had lol lmao. These guys MIGHT be npc's in your game but this is all really extraneous, if you wanted to go information overload on every aspect of your feds it should be in a supplement or something. For contrast, here's how Embryo Machine fleshes out an entire country in just 1 page. Notice carefully how all the information given is stuff vital to actually running an adventure here: the sights and sounds players will see to set the atmosphere, the local customs players will bump into, potential conflicts that are actually at the scale players will interact with, etc.
>>97642315Honestly? Its been years since I read the book and I have managed to forget most of the details of the setting in an effort to preserve my brain. Besides it would take too long to cover all the retardation, you can flip to a random page in the lore section, blindly jab your finger at the page, and almost always hit something that contradicts other bits of lore or is just plain retarded.
>>97637732we're reaching levels of autism I didn't even know were possible
>Lancer
>>97642418Yeah, all the info about the "utopia" core is completely superfluous, because there's no war going on there. Players have zero business ever going there. Nothing within the actual scope of a normal campaign happens back in the core. Some campaigns couldn't even get there in a reasonable timeframe if they wanted to due to the relativistic travel thing. It's just background fluff explaining why this megacorp exists and maybe loosely why it's trying to stamp out this colony you're defending. Nobody needs the specific details. They'll never matter.
>>97642808They'd unironically have been better off not describing it so that players could just imagine their own ideal paradise back home
>>97642361>>97642365he used elite ball knowledge.
>>97642781People who see playing a tabletop game as some sort of meaningful act of rebellion will always confuse me.
>>97638197that was truly a useless post. If you wrote this try making a point other than >it thinks its so cool but ITS NOT!
>>97648503It wasn't as good as this guys rundown >>97639261 but honestly I'm just glad everyone hates this game lol.
>>97632378you are right about missles and rifles and hacking, yes. Heat builds work well with no single talent, gun or frame trait taking up all of their budget. I would not say the game is unbalanced though. Both in core and with full 3pp access the game's core mechancis lead to it balancing itself quite well. I would actually say that this is the most feature rich TTRPG on the market that is actually balanced. >>97633068yeah it can be slow to learn. a new player will spend 20 minutes taking a 5 minute turn. >>97633562heat mechanic works wells for guns and overcharge in this game, i think where it fails is hacking. Hacking is the worst part of this game for being such a big feature. You can see it with enemy designs where hacking is either an i win button like the witch or pretty much useless.
>>97648622>heat mechanic works wells for guns and overcharge in this game, i think where it fails is hackingSee, the main reason I rate Lancer's gameplay a 5/10 is not because it's particularly imbalanced*, or particularly slow** is just that it feels generic and boring.Nothing really captures the feel of mech combat. There's no flavor or "this really makes me feel like my character is in the pilot seat". No mechanics feel clever in the way, say, Embryo Machine's plotting mechanic does or Infinity's reaction system, or Battletech's armor and swivel mechanics. It felt - as many people have said - like a standard-issue skirmish game that could easily be reskinned into a fantasy game with little issue.So I really just did not have any desire to stick around long enough to see how the balance works out in the long run*I have bene told the balance is awful in the long run**While not the slowest, I don't think the game is particularly fast either.>yeah it can be slow to learn. a new player will spend 20 minutes taking a 5 minute turn.Yeah, with the laundry list of shit you can do on your turn, first combat makes the worst impression in the world.
>>97648622>feature richDon't make me laugh. It has less mechanical depth than a puddle.
>>97631231>is lancer actually any good? Without writing an essay, no.
>>97649134There are basically two ways of criticizing Lancer. You either joke about how inherently stupid most of it is, in which cause you get this guy >>97648503 up in your (you)'s. Or you write a detailed critique of its ideas (like "why are there megacorps in a post-scarcity state with magic 3d printers? why is relativistic travel a thing only half the time? etc. etc.) and then you get autists demanding you cite chapter and verse to debate the technobabble in a book written like this >>97642418
>>97649149>Or you write a detailed critique of its ideasHah. You have described me.The rules themselves have a lot of systemic issues, too. Fans of the system will try to argue down the issues but they have severe bias (and all want to play the game, not run it.) All systems have their pros and cons but Lancerfags are so desperate to actually play without paying a GM to run it that they can't face the music.
>>97639261>"Harrison Armoury", a nation of Straight White People. Again, I am not joking, its a projection of the rightwing West/America. Their crime? They didnt want to accept communism and queerness. And being white.this is not true. most of this is a mis reading of the setting.this is from memory>earth goes to space because earth is too fucked up to live on>bad shit happens>the earthlings blow themselves up several times and finally get their shit together>they make union to find other humans in space>"man that sure is hard good thing we still believe in our mission">they decide they are the boss and money is good>hence megacorps start popping up>lets just dominate anyone who disagrees with us>they get overthrown by people who don't fuck with crushing every culture met in space>the reaction to a facist money based society is trying to make itself a socialist utopia>it has not done this because its impossible>they oust the most extreme members who go on to form a corporation Harrison. They have enough guns and money to fight union>instead they bide their time>union still uses money, the non union groups use money, and megacorps exist>but the core worlds are effectively post scarcity>but the outer worlds and worlds on the frontier think Union is a literal fairy taili don't know where you got your information but its just incorrect.
>>97649352This might be surprising to know but this actually doesn't contradict most of what he said and still makes the setting sound terrible.
>>97649405PS: when he was doing that rant, I was actually wondering if he was going to touch on the post-apoc terrible dark age past part of the setting, because it has some of the biggest plot holes in the setting and more importantly some of the most eyerolling writing in the book>"but they would choke the stars with the living"Yes, we're gonna CHOKE THOSE STARS WITH OUR THICK, THROBBING MASSES
>>97648622>I would actually say that this is the most feature rich TTRPG on the market that is actually balanced.Calm down and go back to your morbidly obese weight gain porn, Tom.
>>97649352>"this is from memory">proceeds to get everything qrong
>>97649352>>they get overthrown by people who don't fuck with crushing every culture met in spaceIronic, seeing as that's literally the mission statement of the commie "utopia"
>>97638114>You actively are willing to make a series worse just to make one group madIt's already beyond shit, so nothing of value would be lost. It's simply a matter of what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
>>97651842Clearly there is value to be lost if you still think it could possibly get worse
>>97651851Worse for them doesn't mean objectively worse, idiot.
>>97651857It very much doesYou should check what you're saying when using idioms
>>97651861>It very much doesIt doesn't. An objectively better version of DnD that isn't pro-LGBT would be worse for them. Not that I think Elon will make it objectively better, I just don't think he can make it objectively worse.>You should check what you're saying when using idiomsIronic, since you don't seem to understand the idiom.
>>97631231>lancer threadwithout reading the thread it just people calling it 4e but gayer and the setting is shit because its gay and I hate gay niggers or something bait bait gay niggers fag discord tranny nigger gay bad math gay.don't ask this fucking board if something is good 9 times out of 10 they hate it and if they say they don't they actually do. a thread for no games losers.
>>97651880You clearly think Elon can do better seeing as you've been advocating for it Also the only one who doesn't understand the idiom is you
>>97651906>You clearly think Elon can do better seeing as you've been advocating for itYou seem to have trouble reading, I've made my stance quite clear.>n-no u!You can do better than this.
>>97651918I've been reading the whole thread and you and that guy have shown how much both you want Elon>You can do better than this.Clearly you need to do better with looking up what your idioms mean
>>97649149The schizophrenic inconsistencies of the setting are because Tom/Abbadon operates on a specific kind of pretentious rule of cool, and the other guy is just the worst kind of pretentious commie faggot who acts as if fiction exists solely as a vehicle and platform for commie preaching. So you get some>It's the future or whatever and cool weirdos in weird mechs go and beat the shit out of each other and there's lots of explosions and also spaceships, but they're huge as fuck.But also>If *I* were in charge of the future we'd be living in a post-scarcity utopia where workers rights and unions make sure nothing ever bad happens and even though corporations shouldn't exist, *MY* glorious workers' coalition would be constantly fighting to kill them for being subhuman bourgeois capitalist monsters, and everyone would have health care and...
Their official account said it's about being gay and doing crime. Apparently its even more ridden with leftist trannies than everything else is.
>>97651927>you and that guy have shown how much both you want ElonYes, I think it'd be funny and make people I dislike suffer. Simple as.>looking up what your idioms meanSomething something leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand anything, making actual discourse impossible.
Why doesn't /tg/ make a right wing friendly mecha game?
>>97652189Because Battletech already existed, but trannies are trying to ruin it.
>>97652189the right can't create
>>97652169>Yes, I think it'd be funny and make people I dislike suffer. Simple as.And at the cost of a piece a media that would also affect people who are aligned with your mentality? Pretty selfish>Something something leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand anything, making actual discourse impossible.You're not helping your argument by bringing politics into it. Just still shows you don't know how to use idioms in the proper moments and are just doubling down
>>97652165Which was always retarded, because what's actually in the book isn't that. If anything you're supposed to be playing as a sort of freelance cop taking on work from the distant central government just for the love of the game (because they sure aren't paying you to do it).
>>97652336>And at the cost of a piece a mediaA piece of media that's already shit.>Pretty selfishIt was selfish of them to enfaggen it in the first place. They can enjoy a taste of their own medicine.>You're not helping your argument by bringing politics into it.It was always about politics.
>>97652189>Btech>Embryo Machine>Palladium>Heavy Gear>Princess WingI'm glutted for choices, m8>>97652331Ironic, considering you had to steal that meme FROM the right.
>>97652189Neon Genesis Evangelion would be a perfect vessel.
>>97652718The left colonize shit, ruin it, and claim it was always theirs. If you can conclusively prove it wasn't, they claim that it was evil before they touched it and its destruction is a good thing.
>>97652189Right wingers dont need constant political affirmations and dogwhistles to not burst into treats and like normies will avoid overtly left wing stuff especially if its trash. If you want to sell the most, ignore leftists outright, market to normies, tell right wingers you dont care for modern politics in your setting.
>>97651898Have you considered that maybe it actually sucks. It's disliked on every tabletop rpg group and community I'm in, p.sure it's disliked on /m/. Hell I've seen troon mecha accounts talk shit about it because it's not libcoded enough. The game pleases no one except its own discord circlejerk and a few tumblr microfiction writers.
>>97652189Aeon Tresspass might qualify (depending on how you classify Aronauts politically).
the leftyism in lancer is hilarious. If a based anon wants to play they basically have to engage in the metagame of being an undercover spy. I believe this was intentional by the designers considering they cited the dystopia of gilliam's Brazil as a major inspiration in a media interview. I got banned for posting an italian futurist poem from the 1930s with giant robots in it- banned from pilot net for posting a 100 year old poem on the harrison armory themed right wing containment server. RIP. I had a blast with this game. You can say lancer is bad or does not matter but its effecting the discourse on /x/ topkek. Some of the best 2 years of TTRPGin I've had
>>97653977What was the poem, anon
>>97654023a sun-diamond swooped from aboveaimed at the earthand ejaculated a meteor-geniusinto a crucible's glowing vagina.the workshops' sirens all whistledand from the molten streamsparkling with emeralds and rubiesarose a robotelectrical coils on its headtwo beacons-sunsbeneath its forehead-dynamoand the humanized robot'smouth - megaphoneshouted at the prostrate world:I shatter your idolsI sweep away your greedy religionsI break your eyes's sealsand flood every heartwith torrents of new blood.With violent, dynamic brushstrokesthe robot recreates naturelaunches dizzying buildings into the skyand performs new rites of the human mysteryin a multidimensional theatre.Behold the Futurist creator of the universebuilder of interplanetary bridgesand revealer of the machine's loving heart.on highthe destroyer and the creator!dynamitefor a Philistine era!
>>97654233Name and author, fucklenuts
>>97632336>The art is where the problems start, honestly.Nobody would ever have heard of Lancer if the designer wasn't also an artist, so I guess this is technically true.
>>97654252Designer is a really fun term for it. I remember some friends and I sat down to critique one of the designs in the game and how - from a character design and mechanical design standpoint - the designs are completely awful. Stuff like "wait that joint shouldn't even be able to bend there what the fuck are you doing abby".It would really amuse me to know that Abby didn't even have anything resembling a model-sheet or turn around for most of them. You also know no one involved is a real mech fan or had love for their own robots considering that despite running a succesful kickstarter, they've never - as far as I know - leveraged the success to get a model kit of any of the mechs produced. Even indiedevs and JP OC artists get figures of their stuff made.
>>97654288Their IP is on life support anyway since Miguel is in MtG jail and Tom wont do shit without Miguel.Ralph got kicked out for refusing to bend the knee which just leaves Kai who is absolutely garbage at writing rules, and even worse at writing adventures.
>>97653977Pilot.net's mods suffer from not having any power or control of their own lives, moderating a discord server was enough power to corrupt them.
>>97654456God help you if you do a Wrongthink.(Wrongthink includes: anything other than violent and vocal support for militant leftyism, criticism of the game in any way, shape, manner, or form, having the slightest bit of enthusiasm for HA, repeating HA jokes that literally exist in the core book, offending a mod, offending a friend of a mod, offending a friend of a friend of a mod, talking about any aspect of Pilot.net in a negative context in a whole-ass separate server...)
>>97654468Man no wonder the guys who shill for the game here are so fanatical and agressive if this is what the little parasocial discordserver is like.Honestly the game probably wouldnl't be as fun to clown on if its homeboys weren't such babies lol
>>97654562I wasn't even joking about that last one, I saw it happen. They have actual fucking discord gestapo who saw someone complain about Pnet, summoned a fucking Pnet mod into the server to 'investigate reports of certain statements' which is as close as I can get to a verbatim quote after however long it's been, and then banned said user from Pnet for complaining about Pnet in a discord server that Pnet had zero authority over. And they say WE'RE the nazis.
>>97639306>>97639618>>97642315One of the fascinating things about Lancer is how much of the nonsense in it is part of some vestigial element that a competent editor would have noticed and reminded them to remove. The entire existence of megacorps in it and the baffling array of tech levels that goes from medievalesque all the way up to pure clarketechium is a vestigial element of Abaddon's original vision of the game being sort of cyberpunk in space and if I recall properly the different companies were supposed to be on planets so far apart they could function as separate settings. The super AI at the center of Union was originally some kind of alien cosmic horror AI, and all the mechs were supposed to have fragments of this evil alien AI chained against their will inside them, which I guess still sort of survives in the form of the "NHPs" being sometimes malicious. This bit:>Any campaign or game that results in a loss for, a significant setback for, or the destruction of Queeftopia is automatically and canonically retconned into having never actually happened.is a consequence of some early promise that they made that "all your campaigns are canon" that they decided to keep in the most retarded way possible. Even the name "Lancer" itself is a vestigial element since a mech with a big spear was the first and most prominent piece of concept art Abaddon made for it. Hell, even the fact that the game is a mecha game at all is kind of just a vestigial element: the authors decided at some point that they wanted to do a hard sci-fi setting where ships fire on each other from hundreds of miles away with infinite killdrones and point defense lasers and shit, but they'd already promised a mech game so the mechs stick around as glorified cheerleaders.On some level I sympathize with them. I struggle with giving up on my pet ideas and remembering all the things I've added or removed in my own writing. But they really, REALLY needed an editor that they never got.
>>97654720Yeah I think I knew some of that lore lmao. I've always chalked it up to a bit of "cyberpunk is IN right now so we gotta have le corpos" and also just everyone on the team wanting something different.The funny thing is, if you have half a brain, it's not hard at all to pair down some of the concepts in play into a functional mecha adventure narrative. For example, let's say you wanna keep the frontier setting:>eliminate or scale down Union, maybe it's just relatively peaceful home-planet and not a galaxy spanning empire>ditch the whole 3d printer thing (you do not fucking need that shit to explain how you repair your mech in between sessions, fuck off), the nph's, the relativistic travel, the corpos, the dumb super computer, all that shit.>the setting hasn't recovered from its post-apoc stuff so mechs are lost-tech from before the big calamity (Bang! Now they're interesting and cool and rare and powerful and you're interesting and cool and powerful for having one) that you as an adventurer have happened upon>You go across backwater planets like a wandering cowboy solving problems>Make Harrison Armory or whatever a !not-Zeon trying to conquer and unite the backwater planets that you fight against aloneBANG, you have a functional setting now. Ironically this is probably more "anti-facist" then the base game since you're not working for the fucking feds to further an expansionist empire lmao.
>>97654794Lancer is antifascist in the same way Harry Potter is (ironic, considering they probably hate the books now) and is basically just a slightly more radical version of HP's narrative. Since it's written by first world lefties that whose idea of a utopia is 2010s rampant gay race progressivism. Everything in the setting stems from this POV, down to th evilbad fascist warmongers being a necessary evil to fund and defend gay race progressivism, much like how the US needed its icky military to enforce the painting of George Floyd memorial murals in Afghanistan. And just like Harry Potter, the power fantasy isn't enacting revolutionary change or bringing about a more just world, it's about enforcing the status quo and stamping out any threats to their cozy gay race progressivism utopia.In a sense it's actually as regressive as what they accuse anyone remotely right-wing of being, since it's about RETVRN to the "golden age" of performative wokeness in the wake of Trump's election and the gradual death of woke.
>>97632382Did embryo machine get a translation, or is it able to be bought anywhere? I only ever really see the boardgame/wargame on any store's site.My issue with lancer is that it feels like a bad attempt to force 4e mechanics into something made by people who dislike mecha as a genre.
>>97655275Harry Potter is just neoliberal. Authoritarianism is tolerated so long as its logical and traditional but social issues are largely solved or handwaived without explanation. Voldemort represents a Liberal's view of fascism, not what an "antifascist" would see as fascism.
>>97655415You can find an English translation of Embryo Machine in the OP of the Mecha Monday thread on this board.
So, not directed at anyone but as a general response to the other people earlier in the thread, a few things to note;The post-scarcity angle is not an all-encompassing state of affairs. If you think in terms of "distance from Earth", the further away you get to developing worlds/borders etc, the less post-scarcity it becomes which is where most of the Lancer gameplay is supposed to take place. A bunch of the supplements are set around flashpoint wars on the borders where CentComm (the omnipotent ruler state entity of the setting) has little-to-no grasp and has to send in Lancer mercs to push their chosen agendas. A couple of the official supplements aren't even CentComm based. This means that the best way to run Lancer is to have your games largely ignore the fact it's post-scarcity except as like an abstract ideal where your players are more often having to do favors to earn time and resources to print shit on one of the hyper-advanced 3d printing arrays.The references to magical-esque mechs are largely pointing at HORUS OS stuff which is itself "weird bullshit" to summarise. Humanity accidentally made a bonafide God for all intents and purposes which proceeded to fuck off for a bit, show back up and say "HEY, HERE'S SOME RULES BECAUSE YOU APES LIKE RULES AND THAT'S HOW I RELATE TO YOU, DON'T BREAK THEM". As a result, HORUS mechs infrequently pop up and are largely depicted as "Hey I opened a 1 TB file and it's somehow locally stored as a 1 Yottabyte file instead which is impossible and also it's listed as a '1963 Buick Riviera' but when I printed it, it made a body suit that transforms me into Hackerman". HORUS shit is basically meant to unmoor concepts like causality and relativity and be fucking weird about shit; from a narrative standpoint it's an absolute shitshow but it does conveniently work as a foil to CentComm's narrative omnipotence because if you're running the game you can just start pitting literally God Himself vs the Gay Agenda Superstate.
I've been GMing it for about a year and obviously you can just homebrew most of the gay setting stuff away as needed.The combat can be nice, I like how its more of a team focused wargame with players deciding their turn order and tactics. There's a lot of instances of turn denial though, both on the player and enemy end, if a player gets an unlucky sequence of rolls on structure or stress checks, they could potentially just be out of the fight for an entire combat. On the player end, tech attacks are basically magic and if you have anyone competent who reads the rules, you'll have someone who can control enemy turns every other round and have half of the enemy force running out of cover, jammed, and provoking overwatch attacks due to cc.Will probably end the campaign soon since i feel me and my players have exhausted the potential of the system, but it was enjoyable through about LL7.Roleplay options suck out of the box, I think a splatbook did more to expand it but I didn't bother with it since the focus of the game is mostly on the combat and military campaigning.
>>97655896Overall I would summarise Lancer very similarly to Eclipse Phase; it's a gameplay system and narrative backdrop that *could* be cool if you're willing to take a butcher's knife to the bits you and your players won't like. Eclipse Phase went off the deep end with it's 2e reboot wherein they hard pivoted to the "actually we hate the abstract notion of people even CONSIDERING playing what we consider bad guys that we're just deleting them from the setting altogether".By comparison Lancer still keeps in the entire module wherein an alien race gets genocided and then the few survivors left are essentially mindraped to harvest for useful artificial intelligence templates for people to shove in their future Kindles. I can 100% see Lancer being very boring and tiresome if you ran it out of the box as presented but I see a lot of TTRPGs in the same light. I wouldn't run Eclipse Phase as a game where my players are members of Firewall. I wouldn't run Lancer where the players are necessarily aligned with CentComm; they'll have way more fun if they're doing some Cowboy Bebop/Firefly type 'we gotta make rent this week' shit. I wouldn't run D&D in Forgotten Realms nor indeed most of the official settings because they're all filled to the gills with the gayest shit imaginable while also taking a knife to anything remotely contentious which is where narrative shines.Lancer at least *has* differing moral and ethical outlooks in the organisations throughout the setting.TL;DR, Lancer is okay but do yourself a favor and thoroughly read it and then edit out the shit you/your players won't like. Which feels like default advice for literally every TTRPG these days if they have their own setting.
>>97655918If I were ever tempted to play Lancer I'd instead reach for Mindjammer.FATE or Traveller are both perfectly acceptable ways to play it though these days I'd lean more towards FATE for it.Everything Lancer claims to do can, be easily and without effort, be done better in Mindjammer. It's a more cohesive setting that actually addresses the ideas of a post-scarcity Utopia emerging as a dominant power in a big, bad, rough galaxy and includes, out of the box, tools for playing at all scales rather than just 'Be the shitheads at the lowest tier'You have mechanics for things like changing cultures, engaging in memetic espionage, playing transhuman characters, pissing around with high end tech.You can go absolute Babirusa and even play non-humans, from uplifts to sentient starships.And of course the greatest virtue is that it doesn't try to preach at you. There's no one set good guy.There's certainly at least one Bad one, but even they get a book to themselves to explain why they ended up the way they did (And it's because they're basically Hellghast.)
>>97639618>I can't get over how wordy it isWas thinking the same thing. The whole thing reads like some sperg's stream of autism after you accidentally asked about an engine part or a locomotive name
Aight, since y'all Mech enthusiasts are here, I need advice. If I was to play a mech game, what would you suggest? If I had a choice, I want ground mechs and not some flying gundam shit.
>>97655970I haven't looked at Mindjammer but to my mind the real reason to play Lancer is the gameplay. I don't think I'd want to DM Lancer personally but as a regular player, yeah. The whole point of it is to snowball into completely retarded OP builds and trivialise combat, doing shit that makes the DM go "wait what". For example getting the teleport gun and teleporting an entire ship inside of a hangar so it can't leave, as someone's prior stories gave as an example.Sometimes you just wanna play a TTRPG where you utterly stomp all the competition and have fun making a meme build around suicide bombering into a crowd of enemies and then immediately respawning.>>97655979I do agree with this though. The authors didn't have someone to rein them in and segregate out their stream of consciousness hyperautistic worldbuilding dump. Worldbuilders (myself included) tend to waste a lot of time going deep into the weeds of details that honestly one in a hundred players will give a fuck about, if that. Which is fine for homebrew but if you're doing a published TTRPG you kind of need an editor to cast an eye over what you're writing and saying "alright man we'll put that into a free lore supplemental book for people to read, keep focused on the relevant shit"
>>97656046Depends strongly on what you’re interested in. The guys at /mechm/ have a laundry list of games, official and homebrew
>>97654468lol they gave me a stern talking to about giving them playtest for ICON telling them the skill i was abusing was way too strong, then they followed my advice and entirely rebuilt the game ( into something that I think is worse. They traded very strong class fantasy for tons of classes that no one will remember). Thats the kind of community pilot net isWhen there was that train crash in palestine ohio I told them that the railworkers were rebeling on strike and they told me I was not allowed to cite my source as 'working at the railyard irl' because its just 'dude, trust me'
>>97656068I agree with this. 3.5 and 4e sold us on character builds being like deck building - a pretty natural outcome for a feature rich system. We try to specialize and optimize. The fantasy genre does not lead well to trying all the content in the game though. The mecha genre does. I love fielding extremely strong polarizing builds - I don't want to entirely curbstomp my DM though I want to be challenged. I'm looking for high power and high skill expression. If I get to play a solid build in DnD its almost always high power but rarely is it high skill expression. At my lancer table usually 3 out of the 5 players were piloting something new each sitrep and that did wonders for the longevity of the game
>>97654794God damnit now I wanna play in your setting.Fuck if the lancer devs just weren't complete retards and the community wasn't space-aids I'd be super into it. It's a half-finished game with half-finished mechsnics. Its clearly crafted with passion, it just had the worst execution and they gave up before it was done.
>>97654794>>97656356Most of this is addressed in my earlier post here; >>97655896 , specifically the variability of the post-scarcity. The closer to Earth you are the more abundant everything is. If you're playing on the true borders of the colonisation efforts and the real far-flung areas though not only are you not dealing with CentComm/Union in any appreciable respect but there's no guarantee you'll be able to find the resources or even the 3d printer tech needed to instant repair/replace mechs and their parts. At that point however you're basically just playing Lancer without most of the problems of it's setting. The closer you get to Earth the less there is to actually *do* because, well, life is a solved equation.Just fuck off to the farthest borders of space. Go to Sparr and fuck around with the locals that literally hunt Kaiju in bodysuit-sized mechs for funsies. Go hang out on Hercynia and breathe in the still warm ashes of the genocided Egregorians and get your hands on one of their mental-imprint-clones as an NHP for a desktop toy.Lancer has plenty of cool places with shit to do and a minimum of the boring/obnoxious dumb shit that the writers felt the need to include. If you're REALLY hard up, start looking at all the third party supplements. Those are hit-and-miss, some are even worse than Lancer but a couple are worth a look.
>>97655896>the post scarcity fully automatic luxury gay space communism utioia doesn't matter!And yet we know leagues more about it than we do any place we might actually visit because the actual setting of the actual game is vague poofery that just says "le figure it out yourself, GM :^)">the only magic mechs are only from WHORES R US because [words words words, blah blah blah, gangster communist computer god] >he's LE HEKKIN SCIENCE GAWD that the commies built!You realize that nobody is confused about this and that this is extremely retarded, right? Like I know technology/AI outgrowing its creators is a common theme in scifi, but you still need a catalyzing event to explain its breakaway from society and ability to master inconceivable tech. No matter how many RTXs I feed chatGPT, it's not going to suddenly gain the ability to shit black holes and steal moons unless humans provide it with those capabilities first qnd foremost. If the writers really wanted Hairy-Ass to work, he'd have to come from some previous golden age of technology a la Destiny's Warminds that Abbybabby was clearly stealing from what with his boner for the word paracausal or 40K's men of iron. Or he'd have to be some poorly understood alien tech that humans either reactivated or bolted their own shit onto like Gorls Frontline's Relic tech. Instead it's the equivalent of humans inventing nuclear fusion and then IMMEDIATELY forgetting how even nuclear fission works. And if you have to hide behind gay redditoid purple prose like "meant to unmoor concepts like causality and relativity", it's because you know how fucking lame your shit is.
>>97656463>the setting isn't ACKshully post-scarcity>but you always have immediate access to 3D printers that can print out a new mech after a long rest and also provide an entire ship or settlement with an infinite supply of scifi goodberries!Sounds pretty fucking post-scarcity to me.
Has anyone ITT run a lancer game in person? The way compCon is set up seems to heavily favor online play.
>>97656909That's like saying Earth is a place that has cured the problem of energy shortages because one nation has solar panels and renewable energy. There are parts of Lancer that are so far removed from the post-scarcity worlds that they're operating on traditional economic systems, favors owed and borrowed against and the corporate entities actually being relevant independent businesses. The entire term 'Diasporan' is used to refer to any planet that isn't post-scarcity and there are *more* named Diasporan worlds than Cosmopolitan ones, Cosmopolitan being the post-scarcity utopian worlds.You don't get to point to modern day developed nations and say 'we're doing so well, look at how low we've gotten crime/poverty/starvation/homelessness' as a species when shitholes like most developing nations exist.There's entire mechs devoted to the subject of armed resistance and insurrection activity in a guerilla warfare movement against existing powers and they have to cobble their mechs together using suspect online code and repurposing mining tools. Does that sound like post-scarcity to you?>>97656891I mean you can talk like a schizoid spastic all day but if that's how you wanna live your life, you do you man.Mankind made Skynet but worse out of paracausal tech which *was* from the previous golden age of technology, so by your own yardstick that means it's suddenly validly written.
>>97657821>You don't get to point to modern day developed nations and say 'we're doing so well, look at how low we've gotten crime/poverty/starvation/homelessness' as a species when shitholes like most developing nations exist.Africa doesn't have access to magic food and mech printers that never run out of energy. If it did then yeah I'd say we're doing damn well for ourselves.>There's entire mechs devoted to the subject of armed resistance and insurrection activity in a guerilla warfare movement against existing powers and they have to cobble their mechs together using suspect online code and repurposing mining tools. Does that sound like post-scarcity to you?You mean they have to use freely available resources to freely print their zero-cost nechs and food? And the only reason they can't print anything better is due to an artificial loicense limit on better mechs?Where's the actual scarcity again?
>>97657821>y-you're just schizo!I accept your concession>muh paracausal tech!So magic. It runs on magic. Magic that humans invented and should know how it works.>which *was*> *was*Discord tranny detected.>from the previous golden age of technologyThirdComm or whatever gay commie newspeak dictatorship is a direct successor to SecComm. There was no metaphorical Burning of Alexandria or Bronze Age Collapse, just a change in power.
>>97657602I’m running one in person today with the Blood Money supplement. If I remember I could write up the experience here or on /mm/
>>97656046options - Battletech this will be extremely crunchy, combat could take hours, you will have to make your own maps. i did this, it was very fun.there's rules for salvage, degrading machine quality, making your own mech, infantry, pilotsnote that i said Batteltech, not time of war, Mechwarrior exists as an RPG it's in the battletech trove, somwhere.a true mech enthusiast suggests Mekaton, take a look of it, you could likely get it shared easy.Gurps/homebrew.the truth is lancer is here as a magic robot game system from what i can see, while you could homebrew a lot of things i think the fundimental uncrunchiness of it's 4.5e system wouldn't lend to the ground fighting grit you want.
>>97657934>There was no metaphorical Burning of Alexandria or Bronze Age Collapse, just a change in power.ummm... that's wrong sweetie. Stronk non binary they/thems and Robot Gangster G-D a finna a murked dem and their remnant had to rebrand themselves as Chudrisson Inselmory.
>>97657908Diasporan worlds do not have post-scarcity. Some of them have abundant resources, a lot of them are literal colony frontiers. They lack freely available resources that you keep talking about to print their mechs and food. There's art in the rulebooks showing people having to farm out in fields, living out of cobbled together retrofitted shacks that have tech gubbins slapped on the side. I'd say you lack reading comprehension but given that you're replying to my earlier post that seems unlikely which doesn't leave many conclusions.>>97657934>I accept your concession.Whatever helps you out champ.>So magic. It runs on magic. Magic that humans invented and should know how it works.Like literally every other technology detailed in the book? Feel free to explain how FTL travel works as well as Blinkspace, Omninet and all the rest of it. If you want to have a huge cry about how sci-fi isn't hard science enough for you, go ahead and have your tanty since that's most of the sci-fi TTRPGs out there now.>Discord tranny detected.Saying 'was' is evidence of using Discord and dilating?>ThirdComm or whatever gay commie newspeak dictatorship is a direct successor to SecComm. There was no metaphorical Burning of Alexandria or Bronze Age Collapse, just a change in power.Metavaults are mentally crackheaded from a narrative perspective but they do fit the bill of 'ancient troves of knowledge from previous generations of Humans that was then subsequently lost'. I think they're kind of a dogshit narrative hook but they're exactly what you're claiming doesn't exist.
>>97657937That would be appreciated. I want to know if theres any bumps to smooth over that could keep turn time low.
>>97658008>Diasporan worlds do not have post-scarcityIf they have mechs, they have post-scarcity. Sinpley ass
>>97658008>Like literally every other technology detailed in the book?Diff anon, you know this would hit harder if there wasn't battletech over here. and it took pains to explain in universe how things worked or why mechs exist at all. it's not all winners but they did try and it feels pretty good. I'm usually all for weird shit, see jump space and black marauder shit but the paracausal nonsense is like as integral to the setting as myomer ain't it?It's been a while since i read through it but as i understand it all AI is paracausal and can go nuts and you have AI in the mechs.As i understand it nearly all MECHs contain a cloned NHP or the option to place one in, which suggests that there is a paracausal element to the mechs. it seems to bloody important to the setting but it also seems under-utilized. As a setting i see the narrative potential of the NHP, it's a nice idea if explored more. I'm interested.the rest of the setting seems honestly dogshit.And mechanically it doesn't appeal to me a mechfag.>metavaultshow do those work?like as a part of the setting?
>>97656463>The closer you get to Earth the less there is to actually *do* because, well, life is a solved equation.>Just fuck off to the farthest borders of spaceThe problem is, the presence of a super post scarcity utopia effectively invalidates the rest of the setting, as well as eliminates any meaningful conflicts or moral quandries.On faction has a - essentially - a wish granting genie that can produce anything they want, and they haven't totally over-run the rest of space...because uhhh......and the other factions reject the offer of a magical wish granting genie that can give them whatever they want because...uhhhh...You are literally better off, like I said, just eliminating all 3d printer, post scarcity, Union shit. It even just existing at all throws a thematic and logical wedge into most stories you try to tell and forces you to come up with convoluted socio-economic-technobablium handwaves for why your magic wish granting technology hasn't already solved all problems everywhere forever.
>>97658783If you're going to design a sci-fi setting one of the foundational steps is to decide how hard on the science you're going to go. Battletech does do a good job because they said they were going to go for that angle. Lancer doesn't bother with it because in all likelihood a lot of people playing it probably don't give much of a toss about the underlying realism of the science-so-far-abstracted-from-what-we-know-that-it's-basically-magic. It's a very hackneyed way to go about it but you can make the comparison that trying to explain how we manufacture modern day CPU chips and how they're used to someone from even the 1700s would probably sound pretty nonsensical to them, let alone even earlier.NHPs are paracausal; there are 'dumb AI' that are essentially up-jumped equivalents of Grok that people use for day-to-day shit on tablets. NHPs are essentially cloned consciousnesses of emergent intelligences that sprouted up inside mechanical devices in the wake of RA showing up and fucking around, sort of like mushrooms after rain.RA showed up, robots got fucky in the head, people started dissecting them and realising they were breaking all sorts of laws of physics and reality. Naturally they investigated ways to benefit from this and stumbled on the idea of just mass cloning any given consciousness at a "stable" point that they've held it at, in stasis for ages. The NHPs benefit from the weird breaking reality shit and people can use that to their advantage, like mech pilots slotting an NHP into their mech. Downside is that over time they get "quirky" and you either have to tolerate your NHP slowly going SHODAN-like or just purge/reset it. The fanbase being weird cunts decided to immediately interpret this as "I'm going to marry my murderous NHP and they will be my waifu for laifu".
>>97658783Some mechs have paracausal aspects to them; most HORUS OS mechs do. They lean into it really hard. Some other mech lines also have paracasual shit going on with them. (I believe the Harrison Armory Sunzi might be one of these; it's gimmick is portal fuckery but it's been a minute since I read through them all. I think the HA Saladin and Smith-Shimano Corpro Mourning Cloak are also paracausal?)NHPs are as interesting as you care to make them. You can relegate them to being purely another character customisation stat stick that changes the things you do in combat or you can build entire sections of story roleplay off the dynamics of you having a personal AI slave that's slowly going insane.Metavaults are weird paracasual tech that usually hold bullshit technologies that shouldn't exist yet or were invented in the future-past. Logs will say shit like "This thing was built 10,000 years from now but it's here in front of us and also our age dating technology confirms that it's from the future". Narratively they're black boxes for a DM to put literally anything they want into them. In the established story I only know of three that have been found and fucked with. DHIYED was full of paracasual tech that SSC and HORUS OS started implementing. ETECATL got routed into a star (it was on a comet passing through the system). XOCATL had plans for one of the first HORUS OS mech frames in it.
>>97658965PS: calling life anywhere a "solved equation" is unironically anti-mecha thematically.Reminded of when a friend said "to be a fan of the mecha genre, you can't be someone who thinks the Combine [half life] had a point"
>>97658965You could take that view, sure. I don't think it's a dissimilar viewpoint to being born in Africa with the worst RNG possible and then asking "Why the fuck should I live when my entire life's course has been decided by people spread out across the world acting in their own interests? I might as well just toaster bath myself now."Union, CentComm etc are sufficiently far away enough from the border worlds that settling them is the effort of generations. Even with all their unimaginable power that they could bring to bear and fully trivialise everything going on in a specific planet, the logistics of it all and timeframes involved are prohibitive. Not only that but time doesn't stop while you're travelling which leads to chronological drift. If Union sent a bunch of ships to forcibly end a war on a planet and it takes them 20~ light years to get there, that's more time than your players will bother sticking around for (especially if they get word CentComm sent a force their way).In a wider-scope sense of the setting yeah nothing you do has any real meaning but that's not the scale at which you're playing Lancer. You're playing at the level of a ragtag crew of ne'er-do-well mercenaries living Cowboy Bebop-style from contract gig to gig, scrounging up employers that'll keep them well supplied and enabled to keep chasing the vicarious highs that lured them out of their cushy lives in the Cosmopolitan worlds.It's like complaining about the state of global geopolitics in Forgotten Realms when most player groups are a bunch of murderhobos stabbing holes in things and looting them to afford a shiny enchanted macguffin when they get back to town next.Does this excuse the dogshit parts of Lancer's narrative writing? No, not in the slightest. But almost all of the worst parts of Lancer are thankfully buried in pages of tedious and uninteresting worldbuilding that is ultimately irrelevant to the focus of the games being run, in the majority of cases.
>>97659033>anti-mecha thematically.You one of them faggots that claim that everything big robot is LGBTWQHIEASDIDDEQWIHR+?
>>97659036>You could take that view, sure. I don't think it's a dissimilar viewpoint to being born in Africa with the worst RNG possible and then asking "Why the fuck should I live when my entire life's course has been decided by people spread out across the world acting in their own interests? I might as well just toaster bath myself now."That is literally not the point being made>Union, CentComm etc are sufficiently far away enough from the border worlds that settling them is the effort of generations. Just send them one magic wish granting genie and let the problems solve themselves.Again, there is NO reason to add magic wish granting technology to your setting. It eliminates all the tension (you have a galaxy spanning super empire with magic wish granting technology back home, so there's no question that "the bad guys" will lose), eliminates all moral quandries ("hey do you want our magic wish granting technology that will solve all your problems?").Just throw it away and you have the start of a more interesting setting. There is literally no reason to have "post scarcity" in a setting that's supposed to have conflict.
>>97659065No I'm claiming the opposite.
>>97659033Thinking from the perspective of a Cosmopolitan world and rating it on the Kardashev scale of civilisations, Cosmopolitan worlds are at least a Scale 1 civilisation; they've solved their material issues. I don't recall seeing anything in Lancer about anyone having reached the point of Dyson Spheres so they're not quite a Scale 2 civilisation. Given that they've solved the material issues, that leaves other abstract problems. Societal problems such as health, wealth, security of personal being. Health is a non-issue because everyone is genetically engineered and free of all diseases. Wealth is a non-issue because they're post-scarcity which means there's probably a minimal amount of social stratification as a result. Cosmopolitan worlds don't go to war and there's no crime so you're never worried about losing your home. From cradle to grave your daily life is largely just taken up by figuring out how to spend your days in leisure. Star Trek's Federation is kind of like this if you squint a bit, for the people safely at home on their birth planet or whatever.It's arguably the polar opposite of Eclipse Phase where even though the setting has progressed to the point of similar technological achievements, everything is very 'we could all die in moments, brace for impact' outlook to everything.Life being a solved equation on the Cosmopolitan worlds is one of the origins for characters to pursue life as a Lancer; they're bored people who were born into a life of plenty and want some real thrills. Again; the point of Lancer is that you're fighting on distant worlds being colonised or warred over. In real life terms; if you're enrolled in the military and there's not an active deployment to a warzone going on, you're not going to have much to do but train on home ground or do some collaborative exercises with allied forces. I don't see much point in scrutinising that part of the setting when it's largely irrelevant to the gameplay and narrative focus.
>>97658008>Whatever helps you out champ.Your attempts to downplay your own investment in this have been noted.>Like literally every other technology detailed in the book?Yes thank you for agreeing that more than just the gay computer should be able to build black hole braapmechs.>If you want to have a huge cry about how sci-fi isn't hard science enough for you,You may want to work on your reading comprehension frendo. But it's funny that you should bring up hard scifi when Cancer tries to be hard scifi until it gets too hard to write around and then the writers just give up and shput PARACAUSAL as if it'll bandage over the gaping logic holes in the setting.>Saying 'was' is evidence of using Discord and dilating?Where's that old screencap about all leftist discourse just being pretending to not understand, thus making discourse impossible. >Metavaults are mentally crackheaded from a narrative perspectiveThank you for further admitting the setting is retarded and makes no sense.
>>97659036>lil nigga>big nigga (his friend)>big dawg (his dawg)I'm stealing this art I love it.
why the fuck is this thread still aliveput it out of its fucking misery
>>97659078>There is literally no reason to have "post scarcity" in a setting that's supposed to have conflict.The entire point is the haves versus the have-nots. Nobody gives a shit what the Cosmopolitans are doing off near Earth because they're all too busy fighting a ground war for their planet where multiple corporations are airdropping mechs to come burn your city down because they're under contract.Your stance is comparable to saying "because there's a bunch of billionaires/multinational corporations nobody should ever have to worry about making money because they've accrued so much wealth that it's enough to fund every endeavour we could ever want." Yes, that is true but it's entirely missing the fact that just because the post-scarcity society has everything they want does not mean they're going to share with the dirt peasants they're busy aggressively colonising and forcing under their boot heel.
>>97659114> I don't see much point in scrutinising that part of the setting when it's largely irrelevant to the gameplay and narrative focus.Then why is it there? Genuinely, why is it there if it's not relevant to the gameplay and narrative focus. Massif has made it very clear that it's extremely relevant, because it's what they base their marketing on. So which is it? I don't care about what scale of civilization it is, when the game was quite literally Kickstarted on the phrase "be gay, do crime", then it's allowed to be scrutinized. If the game devotes a large amount of pages into going very in-depth as to how Union functions, then it's allowed to be scrutinized. If it is the origin of all player characters, as you yourself says, then it's allowed to be scrutinized.
>>97659078>Just send them one magic wish granting genie and let the problems solve themselves.I'm not sure what you're referencing with this. GALSIM/Five Voices? Because if that's what you're talking about, GALSIM is not a silver bullet. The predictions made by the Five Voices become more and more unreliable the further out in the future their predictions are made; immediate short-term predictions are very reliable but they're an extremely tight bottleneck with allocated usages of predictive time; think how factories will sell production time in bids to buyers. GALSIM only has so many hours in a day, so many calculations that can be run and so many queries to be explicitly made which is all a fucking colossal logistical nightmare but even putting that aside, on the scale of "hey it takes 20+ lightyears to reach this armpit planet being warred over" by the time you've made the prediction for what's going to happen on that specific planet for the next 5 years, your data is already going to be highly prone to inaccuracies. By the time you can actually act on any of the data you're pulling from GALSIM if it's got any sort of latency period you've basically wasted your time in terms of acting to impact those outcomes.GALSIM is able to predict with high accuracy on near-future events and disseminate that knowledge effectively. Using it to trivialise every conflict on the far edges of Union space though is a no-go. I do agree it's a shitty narrative hook that basically acts as a lever to yank if shit goes off the rails; "No actually hold on uhhh retcon that, GALSIM predicted that and intervened". I personally wouldn't employ it but I can see what it's purpose is. But there is a limit by the setting's own rules as to how much of an impact that lever yanking can achieve.
>>97658966>Lancer doesn't bother with itLancer is worse than not bothering with it, it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wanks off hard scifi drivel like relativistic FTL travel and spaceships blasting telekinetic killclouds at each other from separate solar systems, but then it also wants to have stargates, gnostic cybergods and "metavaults of untechnology from the future-past" or whatever attempts at sounding mythical Abbaddon slopped together that day. Lancer has a real hard time picking a fucking lane and if you ever start picking at these flaws someone shouts PARACAUSALITY as if that's a good enough excuse.>>97659020Yeah this all sounds like gay bullshit. Gay, bland, and worst of all unfun bullshit. It's like I said previously, just slopping together purple prose and wikifag terminology spam to mqle the setting sound smarter than it is.
>>97659175Lancer is not a TTRPG, it's simply another arm of the (((culture war))). Do you think anyone ITT actually plays it? You fool.They just bitch about it one way or the other.
>>97659036>I don't think it's a dissimilar viewpoint to being born in Africa with the worst RNG possible and then asking "Why the fuck should I live when my entire life's course has been decided by people spread out across the world acting in their own interests? I might as well just toaster bath myself now."The difference is there's no current government that believes it's their rationalist-atheist divine imperative to unite all of humanity under their banner or face extinction as mandated by the literally lobotomized communist computer god
>>97659036>It's like complaining about the state of global geopolitics in Forgotten Realms when most player groups are a bunch of murderhobos stabbing holes in things and looting them to afford a shiny enchanted macguffin when they get back to town next.You act like the Harpers aren't one of the biggest complaints people throw FR's way.>>97659114>I don't see much point in scrutinising that part of the setting when it's largely irrelevant to the gameplay and narrative focus.Yet you see a point in defending it.
>>97659190To me it's not even metavaults or what not. There's exactly zero fucking technology that isn't some king of paracausal big bang baby universe smashing reverse entropy shit. You could see an illustration of two melaninated malt enjoyers grilling something over a campfire and description would ramble something about using nontropy to pull the heat from absolute zero post-anomaly from absolute zero from paracausal quasi universe.
>>97659190>Yeah this all sounds like gay bullshit.This is the core of Lancer. It is one long, unending stream of buzzwords that blend together and sound cool only to create something less than the sum of its parts. The setting is too disjointed and too poorly documented. Every concept it explores or technology it invents is worse off for having been included in its greater whole. Not only do the parts not work together, they grind up against each other and get asbestos dust everywhere.
>>97659169Yeah Ivan Yakushev has some cool shit. Have another.>>97659188You *can* scrutinise it if you want. I'm not saying you can't, nor that the material is inviolable and above examination. A solid 80% of the writing on the setting is boring on the scale of describing specific uniforms, social events and other shit that serves no real purpose but to offer meaningless fluff to fill in the blanks of what the societies of Lancer are doing. I don't know shit about the 'be gay, do crime', I don't listen to marketing because it's all dogshit and I especially don't listen to shoving modern politics into TTRPGs. Eclipse Phase did the same thing with it's 2e reboot where they completely fucking nuked the setting because the writers got super upset that people wanted to play games as the hyperracist post-human supremacists that went around bathtub nuking space habs that had 0.00001% impure human genetics onboard. If TTRPG writers insist on throwing the modern politics into their games I will insist on ignoring it in favour of the parts I actually like. Just like how I'm going to ignore the footjob part of the doujin and skip straight to the anal scenes.
>>97659190I mean historically we've had plenty of TTRPGs that rode on every lane and some of the shoulder. Remember Ultima and how you ended up with ray guns? The entire notion of Raygun Gothic is basically mashing that shit together regardless of whether it makes sense or works. I can respect the authorial intent to just slamfuck things together and hope they make something cool even if most of the time you just get a Toadline mutant out of it.>>97659190>Yeah this all sounds like gay bullshit. Gay, bland, and worst of all unfun bullshit.Okay, so change it. You have a copy of the rulebooks, paid or otherwise. Do whatever the fuck you want with it. Every TTRPG you lay your hands on is free for you to fuck with as much as you want. I've never opened a TTRPG in my life that I've read through cover-to-cover and said "Yes this is perfect I will run it as-is and not change a thing". If the setting requires more fucking with it than it would otherwise take to just homebrew your own setting, do that. Or adapt a different setting entirely from somewhere else. World's your oyster, man. Create what you think is cool shit, share it with other people, iterate and improve.
>>97659232Well that was my original critique that the lancershill kept brushing off: somehow all this LE PARACAUSAL technology exists and is understood enough to be mass produced yet only this Horus faggot ever actually does anything with it? It can even be found in magic LE METAVAULTS FROM OUTSIDE TIME AND SPACE, so it's not like he has a monopoly on it either since any old bumblefuck could stumble across a Borderlands Vault and sell the loot to a big corp.
>>97659250>Okay, so change it.Why participate in the first place?
>>97659250>I mean historically we've had plenty of TTRPGs that rode on every lane and some of the shoulder. And it takes a skilled driver to pull it off well and stronger guardrails than "different manufacturers" to justify why Sword Guy and Raygun Guy can be found in the same setting.>Remember Ultima and how you ended up with ray guns?Ultima is a videogame series and built up to that point. They didn't have aliens with rayguns as a major player in the world politics, nor did every podunk village have a magical raygun genie the way Lancer is loysy with its magic proonters.
>>97659250>Okay, so change it.I'm criticizing the setting-as-written, you're trying to defend the setting-as-written. No shit I could rewrite the whole thing from scratch, but that's just the thing: I'd be starting from scratch. I unironically believe there is not a single worthwhile concept to be found in Lancer that isn't better executed elsewhere and thus I'd be better off pulling from there instead.I'd rather be tasking with salvaging GenLock than Lancer. At least that'd be a fun thought experiment.
>>97659294>GenLockFUCK I FORGOT ALL ABOUT GENLOCK
>>97659266Why participate in... what? TTRPGs at all as a concept? Improvement as a concept? IDK man you have to find your own reasons to do things at the end of the day. If you're just in here to be angry about something you can just own that; plenty of other people spend their free time cranking hog while looking for ragebait.If you don't like Lancer, find something you like more or change Lancer to be something you're happy with. Whichever is easier for you. Because the alternative is playing Lancer which as you've indicated you don't seem to be keen on and I can't think of many things more shit to do than waste your time playing a TTRPG you don't like.>>97659262Can you walk through your home right now and document every single device present and fully explain in a coherent manner how it works and the foundational physics upon which it relies, without having to use any exterior sources of information? I haven't got a fucking clue how people make my shoes but I still put them on to avoid stepping in shit all day, man. I can probably reason out vague steps but the specifics are lost on me.The specific details of cutting-edge chip fabrication are genuinely fucking cooked to read about as an outsider. We've got plenty of frontiers in science that are still "we think it works this way but it's not 100% certain". Why should that ever change just because we're thousands of years in the future, regardless of all the high-tech shit we're throwing around? Worse; imagine a future where nobody understands tech at all because the tech is what does everything for them. Elon Musk let Grok take over everything and generations later we don't even understand algebraic math anymore, we just prod at a screen to make the things we want.HORUS OS is only one manufacturer that uses paracasual bullshit. SSC and Harrison Armory also have mechs with the same bullshit going on.
>>97659294> I unironically believe there is not a single worthwhile concept to be found in Lancer that isn't better executed elsewhere and thus I'd be better off pulling from there instead.So what are we doing here, man? I'm talking about things you can do to move past this impasse of being unhappy about Lancer as a setting. You're saying you already have arrived at a solution and you've presumably come to that conclusion some time ago. We just kicking each other in the balls for the fun of it or what? You could at least let me know if that's what you're into.>GenLockchrist I looked at how old that is and that was a mistake fucks sakes
>>97659316>Can you walk through your home right now and document every single device present and fully explain in a coherent mannerI'm not a major government/corporation that has every desire and motivation to gain a technological advantage over my rivals and the means to mass produce their technology so long as I can get my hands on a loicense, which in this case is something that any fuckoff mercenary can get. Do you think corporate espionage just doesn't exist? Do you think the current major world powers aren't constantly trying to steal from each other? One of the major concerns of modern war is recovering or destroying any downed tech specifically so the enemy can't crack it open and figure out how it works. You're either preciously naive or just plan retarded to think these corps that apparently all want to become the dominant force in the setting WOULDN'T be constantly reverse-engineering and either stealing or developing countermeasures to everyone else's shit.To put it in modern terms, you have a nuke printing device so common that even African warlords can get their hands on it, and freely available .stls for nukes, yet no one has ever once tried to crack open a nuke and see if they can't make their own better nuke.
>>97659329>So what are we doing here, man?You tell me, you're the one sweeping and gunt-guarding for this pisspoor setting.
>>97659341ummm... lil insel chuddy but the perfect gangster god backed by the perfect glowies wouldn't like it much
You guys should make out. You guys should get out of your mechs and kiss so that your mechs can also kiss.
>>97659341You've genuinely lost me, man. I'm not arguing for exclusivity of any technologies and I don't know where you're getting that idea from. One of the core design principles of Lancer is you can mishmash all of the different mechs together to make your own bastardised frankenstein's monster of game mechanics which is founded upon reverse engineering the contributing parts to work together.My point is that for the average Lancer they probably have an AI they tell "hey go spin me up this thing right quick" and they do it. They're all stealing from each other constantly but the form that theft takes is just tasking an AI to pull high density scans on everything they encounter and bank it for later in case they have a cool gimmick they wanna use.As for iterating on the nuke printing device, they have that. Again, it's the whole build system in Lancer. People come up with completely fucking silly builds that make stuff like the 5e Tabaxi 360~ feet a round movement minmaxing seem like amateur hour. Chain teleport people onto mines? Sure. Suicide bomber into a crowd of enemies and then reappear at the start of your next turn? Go for it. Mech that turns the battlefield into Fortnite where you crank 90s on the enemy team and make an impenetrable shitflinging field of terrain? Why not.>>97657918>>97657959>>97659349Okay I've been ignoring this weird simp but this is the gayest fucking thing I've seen since Freddy Mercury died of AIDS. What is this Creeper from The Black Cauldron behaviour? Most cooked cunt in the thread by a country mile.
>>97659368No tongue. I'm saving myself for marriage.
ayo it can't retort in any way lmao for it's discord masters wouldn't allow it to - lanca sissies are just yehowas witnesses of /tg/ see you next month in anudha thread
>>97659411Wow how romantic!
>>97659196One guy played it and he turned out to be exatly the kind of person who would play Lancer, being an incompetent redditor in a dead discord.
>>97659114>Thinking from the perspective of a Cosmopolitan world and rating it on the Kardashev scale of civilisations, Cosmopolitan worlds are at least a Scale 1 civilisation; they've solved their material issues. I don't recall seeing anything in Lancer about anyone having reached the point of Dyson Spheres so they're not quite a Scale 2 civilisation.Nerdiest and most off topic response I've ever seen. The Kardashev scale is completely retarded, made by an idiot, and not worth talking about in any context.>>97656463>>97658966>>97659020>>97659036>>97659114>>97659189Are you one of the games writers by any chance?Because your response is similar to the way the book itself paves over "this is not fun" or "this is a plot hole": spew so many big words, names, and technobabble that people's eyes glaze over and they don't read it.>>97659180>Your stance is comparable to sayingNo my stance is - among other things - that if you have an invincible goodguy super utopia that has magical do-anything matter replication technology then that kind of kills tension. >>97659250>Okay, so change it. You have a copy of the rulebooks, paid or otherwise. Do whatever the fuck you want with it. Here's the thing:1) I don't think Lancer's rules are that great, so I'd rather be playing a mecha TTRPG with actually great rules (ie Embryo Machine)2) The setting is obnoxious enough that it is simply not worth trying to "fix". No, I don't want to go off in the backwoods and pretend Union doesn't exist. The stink of Reddit and the odious pretentiousness of Abby and co's prose will always be there as a reminder that I'm wallowing in mud (and lasers).IF you're going to play the game, better to throw out the setting and all its annoying, dumb eccentricities and just make a new setting wholecloth >>97654794 In fact this is EXACTLY what we did when we tried the game, creating our own Escaflowne / Dunbine inspired fantasy mech setting
>>97659329>So what are we doing here, man?Criticizing a game that's extremely fun to clown on. You might as well ask what the point of AVGN's old reviews are or Mystery Science Theater 3000 or what have you. It's so bad it's funny and the fans being uber defensive and unwilling to admit even the smallest criticism of their daddy Abby makes it even funnier.
>>97659189And no I was referring to the magic matter replicator printers, not the mommy dommy gangster computer god.I think the entire concept of 3d matter replicators with the kind of power that they can shit out a brap hole mech guns casually en masse is literally a setting destroying concept on par with giving everyone in your fantasy setting access to a genie with infinite wishes. You can write all the big words you want, you can make the book an over-complicated chore to read by shoehorning in convoluted socio-economic-techno-babblium explanations for why every problem isn't just solved by someone magically printing whatever they need with magic matter replicator box. But at the end of the day it's always going to be an issue and you've made what could've been a simple, straight forward setting 10,000x more complicated, annoying, and lame by the pointless insistence to give everyone a wish granting genie.I think if I was giving a course on how to write a ttrpg setting I could point at concepts like this and various other in Lancer (let's not even get started on the relativistic travel bullshit) and say "not that"
>>97631231>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oc7a8aL7pQThat dude is such a fucking loser. I remember seeing his video about Jumbo Cactuar in MTG. Calling people children and crying about it, meanwhile the guy can't stop cursing like he's a nine year old who just heard his older brother curse for the first time.
>>97659036>In a wider-scope sense of the setting yeah nothing you do has any real meaningAnd for most mecha this is the opposite of what most people want.You are literally controlling a giant, a titan, literally and figuratively. You are in a power fantasy of controlling something beyond humanity, the ultimate big player. Nearly a god.You SHOULD be the ones making "meaningful change". Even in Armored Core, the height of cyberpunk misery mecha, half the games end with the player character radically changing the setting forever.
>>97659484>that if you have an invincible goodguy super utopia that has magical do-anything matter replication technology then that kind of kills tension.This is what people miss when they compare it to Star Trek. The federation's adversaries are as strong as they are, or even more strong. They can't unilaterally send in overwhelming force whenever they feel like it. They don't feel like a bully, but even then, they still regularly face criticism from the writers. Pic related. I love this melodramatic balding fuck so much.
>>97659537>adversaries are as strong as they are, or even more strongwrong
>>97631231I didn't really care for it. The system felt like such a slog to play through though to be fair I've only ever played a few sessions of it. I also didn't like the lore, especially the Horus Armory. Horus just feels out of place compared to the other armories and I can't explain why but to me it felt like someone just couldn't not put harlequins in their setting. Also the fact that it was really pushed to use the Comp/con felt bad.
>>97659548umm... don't you just love le 4chin hackorz as understood by bebib ledit in spehs?
>>97659484>Nerdiest and most off topic response I've ever seen.Where do you think we are?>The Kardashev scale is completely retarded, made by an idiot, and not worth talking about in any context.I was using it for a frame of reference. Pick whatever one you wanna judge futuristic civilisations by. Kardashev is the one people know and can google and understand in ten seconds flat. Given your prior stated hatred for dumping extraneous words I would think you'd appreciate something simple.>Are you one of the games writers by any chance?No. As an aside; Tom Bloom should stick to writing comics. The medium serves him much better in avoiding him walking down the garden path of spending 10 pages describing uniforms.>No my stance is - among other things - that if you have an invincible goodguy super utopia that has magical do-anything matter replication technology then that kind of kills tension. Sure, I get that. But that's not the case in Lancer, so now you're rolling out the off-topic responses.>1) I don't think Lancer's rules are that great, so I'd rather be playing a mecha TTRPG with actually great rules (ie Embryo Machine)>2) The setting is obnoxious enough that it is simply not worth trying to "fix". No, I don't want to go off in the backwoods and pretend Union doesn't exist. The stink of Reddit and the odious pretentiousness of Abby and co's prose will always be there as a reminder that I'm wallowing in mud (and lasers).>IF you're going to play the game, better to throw out the setting and all its annoying, dumb eccentricities and just make a new setting wholecloth >>97654794 In fact this is EXACTLY what we did when we tried the game, creating our own Escaflowne / Dunbine inspired fantasy mech settingSo, same question to you as the guy from earlier.>>97659329What're we doing?
>>97659547>The Dominion aren't as strong>The Borg aren't as strong>The Klingons and Romulans weren't implied to be as strong in TOSI can tell you've never watched a single episode, but you should! I think you'd really like it!
>>97659554>The Klingons and Romulanslol especially fan of the fandom lmao
>>97658966> It's a very hackneyed way to go I read your first line and had to dip to prime up so minis while the weather is good.i was constructing an argument regarding how much you explain something based on it's complexity, relevance to the plot, themes and closeness etc but i think you kinda illustrated the problem.When you said:>in all likelihood a lot of people playing it probably don't give much of a toss about the underlying realismSame's true for battletech or most other settings, you recognize it as bad writing which is far more than i expected.brother, i'm falling a sleep in my chair but it's a narrative feature of the setting, a major part of it if i understand it, and it's not delved into. arguably i think it's the most important things in setting.>RAi mean this is my point, paracausal subject matter is acting like the dark symmetry in warzone, the warp, etc. it's a foundational part of the subject matter. now you could say it's mystical, it's weird, how much do you want to ruin that intrigue by over explaining. that's a good question. that was what i though this argument was going to be about. i personally think there should be a lot of talk about NHP and i don't know how detailed the rules are but i'd rip them for my own games. it's a great narrative hook, you even point out that the fanbase wants to marry their AIsThese NHP are tied to the mechs they use too as i understand it, which means there's some magic tie there.this should be explored, you can do all your politics nonsense but when your civilization rests on the back of these things these things, and these things effect all machines it's really important.you can leave a lot of it to speculation to maintain the mystique but it's important either way.
>>97659553>Sure, I get that. But that's not the case in Lancer, so now you're rolling out the off-topic responses.It IS the case in Lancer.Again, it doesn't matter how much convoluted pseudo-explanations you spew, the concept of 3d magic matter replicators that can uplift a planet into post-scarity utopia is an INHERENTLY broken concept for this kind of setting. This WILL create plotholes and convolutedness and kill tension and etc. etc. no matter what you do. It's almost comparable to giving everyone in your fantasy setting access to a genie with infinite wishes.You can, again, write as many paragraphs you want about the supposed limitations of this technology, or why we can't ship it to the boondocks (despite the players running around with it) but at the end of the day you've included the setting equivalent of an "I win" button.And the funny thing about it is it's so easy to ditch and would make your setting so much more fun, so much more elegant, so much more thematically coherent if you just ditched it. But Lancer fans can never admit that giving everyone a wish-granting techno-genie box is maybe a bad idea. No matter how fucking stupid it is on every level.>>97659553>What're we doing?>>97659501
>>97659520>WordsSo you say you take issue with a stated feature of the setting, which you are either purposefully misinterpreting or just wrong about, while also refusing to hear any information that demonstrates why your viewpoint is not the case because it's too many words for you to read. Have you tried reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"? It's got pictures in it and everything and the words are nice and short. You would have saved yourself reading many words in this thread, too.>>97659535That's cool, people are free to want varied and different things. There's other TTRPGs out on the market or for free if you don't feel like coughing up for them. You're not going to break any hearts by shopping around and finding the one that feels right for you and your group.Lancer's appeal to me isn't the macroscale geopolitics of entire empires, it's building a fucking crazy murdermech and doing some retarded shit that also completely works in a fight as gameplay and the narrative being more character-focused towards inter-party relationships plus the stresses of "how the fuck do we find the money to afford ammo next week?" type daily issues.
>>97659560>lol especially fan of the fandom lmaoWhat does this mean? Which of us is having the stroke?
>>97659577are you saying that 60 IQ spees niggers puppeteered by 80 IQ snobbish spees niggers were ever a thread to anybody ever?
>>97659020>so mechs my immediate thought is if you have NHP clones for mechs and the sync with the mech then there's something paracausal about all of the mechs that have them.>story reoleplay yeah, i mean that's kinda my point, also i see the metavault down there and like i'm saying narrative paracausal this semi-platonian/lovecraftian stuff is the bedrock of the lancer universe. the more you add tastefully the more DMs have to use.like fuck man, maybe it's the tism but when i write i try to flush out the setting and then leave places to flush out but i know the principle concerns need to be strong and explored in ways people want to ask.HORUS is an entire non-thing and it bugs me because the seem to be left open ended when they're effectively what, a usenet terrorcell/honeypot/cult.
>>97659589>honeypotliterally never ever according to tha 'cord/ledit mastas.
>>97659573>So you say you take issue with a stated feature of the settingYes, I think it's a tremendously stupid feature that ruins the setting (among other things that ruin it)>which you are either purposefully misinterpreting or just wrong aboutNo I'm correct. This is an inherently broken concept.>hear any information that demonstrates why your viewpoint is not the case because it's too many words for you to readThe fact that you have to write paragraphs to justify it is itself a criticism.Have you ever heard of the concept of "elegance"? That if your concept adds nothing and mandates an entire chapter of explanation and justification, maybe the concept isn't worth it? Especially if it (IE your utopian hometown you'll never actually visit) is essentially worthless to the players as they will never interact with it.The fact that you have to bend over backwards to explain how 3d magic matter replicators that can perfectly prints super complex ultra-tech and can uplift an entire set of "core worlds" to utopia just shows WHY that is a bad idea.Just ask yourself, why not ditch this "stated feature of the setting?" Would that not make things more elegant, more thematically cohesive? Less convoluted and obtuse?
Jesus, peyton is such a faggot.
>>97659584Yeah dog I'm saying that as presented in TOS, the klingons and romulans are both implied to have a naval capacity and industrial base on par with the federation. They both represent legitimate threats to the federation, which is something lancer's union lacks. IDK about nutrek.>But muh AunIDK what the fuck is going on with Aun, and the writers don't either.
>>97659570As I've said earlier; Tom Bloom's not got his strong points in writing for TTRPGs. At minimum he needs a wrangler to keep him focused rather than let him hyperfixate on writing pages of tangents that most players aren't going to read and only serve to bog things down for all but the most devoted to the lore.NHPs and their ties to mechs are basically in the form of a gussied up super storage drive that contains the NHP and has a bunch of failsafes. They're housed in 'Caskets' which kind of alludes to what they're all about. The Casket has to be physically printed, NHP stuck inside it and then have it physically shipped the slow way to whereever it's going. No data transfer because that's considered too risky.Have a good one mate, sleep well.>>97659571>It IS the case in Lancer.Okay; to which 'invisible goodguy super utopia' are you referring to? It's sure as fuck not Union/CentComm. They've gone through three major changes of governance since their inception and they've got a plentiful long list of ongoing conflicts that they haven't immediately won. If you're arguing on the basis of "eventually they always win on a long enough timescale", I could agree with that maybe but it's also entirely irrelevant to the timeframe of the games being run. Players are working on the order of months, years if they're in transit. Not decades or centuries.>the concept of 3d magic matter replicators that can uplift a planet into post-scarity utopia is an INHERENTLY broken concept for this kind of setting.This is entirely contingent on being able to deliver the tech to build the 3d printer to the planet in question, hook it up to the Omninet for it to pull data off and then shove sufficient resources into it, which not every planet is guaranteed to even have let alone you having the necessary industry to harvest them. You could slow-ship the resources needed to kickstart a colony along with the 3d printer but you're still bottlenecked by your initial investment.
>>97659608>I could agree with that maybe but it's also entirely irrelevant to the timeframe of the games being run.Yes and that still kills tension. Your faction is essentially invincible. It WILL win in the end, it WILL stomp everyone because it has every advantage, numerical and technology. Who fucking cares if it's not going to totally dominate all human existence today, but tomorrow? >This is entirely contingent on being able to deliver the tech to build the 3d printer to the planet in questionYour dudes are literally running around with this tech so they can shit out new mechs on the fly as an excuse for the game not to have mechanics for salvaging or repairing parts lmao.Sorry but that ship kinda flew the coop when you gave PLAYERS their own personal magic 3d printers to shit GIANT FUCKING ROBOTS on the fly as long as they have the appropriate LOISCENCSE.Do you not see how stupid and pointless this is? Not only that, it ACTIVELY gets in the way of what a lot of people like and want out of the mecha genre.
>>97659589NHP clones are a thing; it's how all NHPs exist basically. But there's only one point at which they're cloned, after which they're boxed up and shipped off physically. You could run a campaign hook around one of the Prime NHPs getting broken out of jail and then people going hogwild copying it out everywhere.HORUS is presented in the same terms as the other mech producers but they're starkly different. HORUS is as you say, a usenet terrorcell that likes to drop zipbombs of impossible knowledge into people's laps to see what they'll do. One of the mech designs, the Kobold, is from them specifically kingmakering a worker caste guerilla warfare uprising.>Yes and that still kills tension. Your faction is essentially invincible. It WILL win in the end, it WILL stomp everyone because it has every advantage, numerical and technology. Who fucking cares if it's not going to totally dominate all human existence today, but tomorrow?Why bother doing anything? The heat death of the universe is an inevitability. All will fall to dust.>>97659620Sorry but that ship kinda flew the coop when you gave PLAYERS their own personal magic 3d printers to shit GIANT FUCKING ROBOTS on the fly as long as they have the appropriate LOISCENCSE.The game already has rules for prohibiting free usage of printers. You need a license, you need access to a printer, you need sufficient resources to print the thing you're making and you need sufficient time to complete it.On frontier worlds where there are active wars ongoing, every single production facility is going to be entirely bereft of allocation. You aren't getting to use their shit without earning it in some way, paying Manna, fighting a battle to earn a favor with people who have a printer, etc. You also aren't dragging around the material resources to instantly print a Barbarossa. I cannot be fucked to meticulously go through and screencap all of the references and someone else has done it for me. Read, nigga.
>>97659620While I would never call Wallflower "good", access to the colony printer and specifically having less access to it over time when a new golden boy team shows up is a basic factor in that adventure.
>>97659646>Why bother doing anything? The heat death of the universe is an inevitability. All will fall to dust.That's retarded. There is a difference between that and "my side of this war is invincible, outclassing my opponents, and cannot lose. Boy it sure is epic to be on the winning side of history" It's almost like this is a narrative issue. It's almost like it's not fun to be told your on the winning side of history and everything's just gonna work out because your side is just Better.>Incredibly tacked on rules hastily added on that don't even mesh well with this fundamental conceit of the setting or gameplaylol>You need a licenselol>you need access to a printerWhich your players will be carting around by default>you need sufficient resourcesWhat kind of resources?This is an important question, because it illustrates the paradox of this concept. If you need a specific type of magic mineral to print things, then you've destroyed the concept of post scarcity. If you can just shovel dirt or poo in and molecularly re-arrange it into a mech, then you can't claim your limited by this.>sufficient time to complete it.How much time does it take to print out the thing that the game assumes by default you'll have in between every mission?> I cannot be fucked to meticulously go through and screencap all of the references and someone else has done it for me. Read, nigga.If even you - the fan - cannot suffer through the books cavalcade of dry awkward beauracratic WORDS WORDS WORD, then I'm not going to bother just to learn I was right in the first place lolAre those rules not incredibly tacked on anyway? Wasn't the ENTIRE POINT of the 3d printers from a mechanical standpoint to be a justification for how you're able to seemlessl
>>97659671>You need a licenseGenuinely the most awful part of the setting. Yeah sure it's a utopia but you need corpo DRM to manufacture anything. Sure, THAT doesn't have any precedent for being exploitative RL or anything. Yeah it can just make anything ever but you need to ask Space Nazis LLC to print a Shaka Zulu Gigga Nigga frame. What a fucking joke.
>>97659671>Incredibly tacked on rules hastily added on that don't even mesh well with this fundamental conceit of the setting or gameplayI accept your concession.>You need a licenseI accept your second concession of not reading.>you need access to a printer>Which your players will be carting around by defaultI accept your third concession, demonstrating you still didn't bother reading.>you need sufficient resources>What kind of resources?I accept your fourth concession. I'm not doing your reading for you.>sufficient time to complete it.>How much time does it take to print out the thing that the game assumes by default you'll have in between every mission?I accept your fifth concession, yet again showing you aren't interested in reading.>If even you - the fan - cannot suffer through the books cavalcade of dry awkward beauracratic WORDS WORDS WORD, then I'm not going to bother just to learn I was right in the first place lolI'm not going to bother reading for you, same as I'm not going to wipe your chin when your dad's done fucking your throat raw for the day. I am perfectly happy to read through monotonous works if it serves a purpose. I'm not your local retard wrangling daycare being paid to make sure you don't wander into traffic.I accept your sixth and hopefully final concession of the thread, fucking embarrassing.
>>97659710No, I want you to answer this resource question in particular. If you claim to have an answer, you should have a simple one.HOW do you or the book resolve this paradox?If you need "resources" to work your magic printer, then it's not post scarcity. If you don't, you have no excuse for why you can't just 3d print out more 3d printers, and then 3d print out infinite resources. If you are not limited by resources, you should unironically be able to turn any planet into a utopia with just 1 printer.
>>97659719Do you need a specific type of resource to feed into the printer? Then how the hell do you figure "post scarcity" and "life as a solved equation" if your ability to create resources is fundamentally limited?If you don't, then how do you argue the technology is limited by resources? You should be able then to be able to print mechs by literally just shoveling dirt into the printer.
>>97654794>>97656356While out and about today I thought a little more about how you could expand on this and make it a little more thematically interesting and fleshed out>You can take the piss out of Union if your so inclined by saying that the previous apocalypse was combined by the old galactic order being incredibly decadent and corrupt. The galaxy spanning "Old Union" collapsed into anarchy and civil war until pretty much all infrastructure has fallen into disrepair>Most technology above near-future level is scavenged from ruins of said old empire. Since it was the infrastructure that united everything, it's on every populated planet by default. Overall aesthetic is Star Wars-y Used Future>Planetary / Galactic Travel is accomplished via warp-gates from said old empire that still function.>The bad guy faction, let's call them Harry Potter's Armory, are the descendents of what was basically the Siberia of the Old Union. A shithole podunk space ghetto on the far end of the galaxy, that political prisoners would also be exiled to. Whenever someone pissed off the old empires extremely decadent, insane nobles and rulers, their family would be killed off and they'd be exiled here.>Being a shithole already, when the collapse happened they got things particularly bad. No medicine, no food, no resources. Everything fell apart into a true dark age, with plague, starvation, endless miserycore. The culture and society that emerged from this was one that was - on every level - dedicated to making sure this apocalyptic horror NEVER happened again. A society that stands in total contrast to the hedonistic decadence of the old union, a militaristic empire dedicated to honor and "might makes right, strength is everything", and uniting the galaxy under stable rulership of a strong leader.BOOM, now you have actual thematic nuance to the conflict, and a villain who can still be evil (depending on how you want to play it) while having logical and sympathetic goals.
>>97659765You could take a page from ancient Chinese history and have "The Emperor" be a random commoner who found a top tier mech and decided to take the mandate of heaven for himself, surrounding himself with the descendants of nobles and merchants who's family was murdered by the Old Union. Give him a mask and have the book say nothing about him, and you could have him (or her) be a dark foil to the player character's for whom the GM could invent relevant story details for to match the campaign and pc's.
>>97659765>>97659766Get Holy Roman Empire with it. Go as granular as you want. Maybe some worlds are unified under a single force, others are continental powers fighting for dominance. Gives the players ample opportunity to bounce around until they find a group they wanna work for and maybe kingmaker to prominence, maybe even expand it to a multi-planet force.
>>97659646>>97659671>>97659710>>97659719This all illustrates another problem with the 3d printers / post scarcity thing as a narrative mechanic for a conflict based game.In order to make post-scarcity utopian matter replicators *not* break the setting, you basically have to add endless story limitations to gimp them and prevent them from doing the very thing they're conceptually supposed to do.So at that point like, why bother? Why even have 3d-magic-printers in your setting if you have to write an entire chapter about all the reasons you can't just print infinite resources and give you any technology you want or need (which is...you know...the whole point of them as a concept and what supposedly justifies "post scarcity").Again, absolutely nothing is lost and everything gained by just ditching them as a concept. I'd genuinely be shocked if I could get one Lancerfag to just admit the idea is fucking stupid and was a bit of a mistake.
>>97659390>You've genuinely lost me, man. Clearly, ws you're a rube wowed by resditood technobabble like Kim Kardashian scales and muh paracausal metavaults>I'm not arguing for exclusivity of any technologies and I don't know where you're getting that idea fromYou yourself said paracausal tech is the domain of Horus
>>97659584Bro I've barely watched TOS and even I know you're fucking wrong. Klingons were presented as a peer strength rival on par with the federation and were an obvious stand-in for Cold War tensions between Russia and the US. The only episodes I saw even featuring them like the Tribbles one were all about doing clandestine bullshit because neither side wanted to invite ooen conflict and make the Cold Space War to go hot
>>97659653Wallflower is a direct response to people tearing apart the base setting. It also introduces currency despite the base book emphasizing that there's no need for money because everyone lives in a communist utopia
>>97659573>Lancer's appeal to me isn't the macroscale geopolitics of entire empiresThen maybe the book shouldn't have been 90% about that while ironically never emphasizing how these macroscale space geopolitics (cosmopolitics?) should impact the players. Because in another fit of contradiction, there ARE no geopolitics to Lancer unless supplements added them. There's The Union with it's utopia and few corps having spats, and then a vague, undefined frontier Over There where the game is supposed to actually take place. There's no actual factions or nations opposing the Spacecommie Empire, just some internal corporate politicking and undefined mud farmers to stomp on.>it's building a fucking crazy murdermechLancer's mech rules are ass >and doing some retarded shit that also completely works in a fight as gameplay Gameplay is ass too>and the narrative being more character-focused towards inter-party relationships Too bad there's no actual rules for this. Even Btech has stuff like pilot flaws and personalities that will clash or create tension, like buying a gambling addiction at chargen that can cause shenanigans to occur>plus the stresses of "how the fuck do we find the money to afford ammo next week?" type daily issues.Literally just take a long rest and all your spell slots - I mean ammo - will regenerate
>>97659646>Why bother doing anything? The heat death of the universe is an inevitability. All will fall to dust.If your setting has a faction as inevitable and final as the heat death of the universe, then you've built a shit setting. Not even 40K is this bleak, despute what Chaosfags would have you believe.
>>97657602Quite coincidentally, the type of person whom usually plays Lancer likes to pretend to be a cute and valid anime girl (because stealing vapourwave for their flag wasn't enough apparently) and doesn't like others seeing their true features nor looking upon the trog-like faces of their kin for fear it reminds them.
>>97660522I'm a masc dude that gets off bending pliable twinks into new and exciting shapes and I tend to think of LGBTQ+ culture as extremely fucking cringe, so I'm defying the stereotype I guess.
>>97659573>"how the fuck do we find the money to afford ammo next week?"NTA but pray tell how does this make sense in a post-scarcity universe?>inb4 "b-but Africa IRL!"Motherfucker, we literally solved world hunger already, what the fuck are you on about.
>>97660582>I'M A MANLY MALE GAY MAN, I'M BUCKING THE TRENDt. Cuck Murphy
>>97660626
>>97660677I accept your concession that you love meat hooks up the ass
>>97660731Sorry, not into brown boys.
>>97659818I think 3D printers in lancer should suck as much as they do IRL. I think every time you print a mech you should roll to see if the top half of your guy is just a tangled mess of filament with a cockpit in the middle.
>>97660402>Literally just take a long rest and all your spell slots - I mean ammo - will regenerateWould having a limited ammo pool similar to how the repair pool works help alleviate this? This might be worth implementing as a house rule.
>>97660738>boysGays never beating the pedo groomer allegations
>>97657937>>97658010Okay I’m back. This is like my second time running this game for some people who have either played the game a few times or have exclusively run it, but jesus fucking Christ people are absolutely right when it comes to turns taking fucking forever on the player side. Players have so many options and additional traits that I witnessed analysis paralysis occur so many times, even from the most experienced player at the table piloting a Nelson with like a billion additional free moves. And it’s not like he can be careless because ranges and shit really matter in this game and can be the difference of taking no damage or getting hit for like a billion burn.The NPCS are still pretty simple to run, but I was juggling like 5 different pdfs of shit because I wanted to go all in on third party supplements (my fault really).I guess I really just wouldn’t run this game for people who’ve never played an RPG before, and compcon did noticeably speed things up through auto calculations when the Monarch player started critting on like 1/3 of his attacks.
>>97661352That analysis paralysis is why I try to optimize my builds around only doing one or two things really well. It's a little brainless but I'm very happy to just move and shoot shit if it means my turn ends fast. I think a lot of the pilot talents bloat your action economy really badly anywhere past LL6.Compcon helps but if the companion app is a hard necessity I think that's a bad sign.
>>97659646>>Yes and that still kills tension.I wouldn't have argued that, it's not really my position because i think there are other more annoying faults in the setting.Returning to the NHP, it's a weird concept, my immediate thought of the clones is we're coping a enteral of an extra dimensional being that's pushing through reality and giving it a host body suited to it's temperament. I come to this conclusion because if you're cloning a NHP and the NHP has a baseline factory setting that gels with your machine there must be a temperament, a connecting with that machine, either through how it operates or something more weird.It's really really weird because it's effectively lovecraftian monsters. I'm conceptualizing it like the ORZ and if i'm wrong i think either i need someone to drop an exploitation or for the setting to be explained better.
>>97663354As has been said before, NHP are just a vestigial hazily conceived left-over from Abaddon's original pitch >>97654720 so now they're just sometimes scary sometimes friendly legalized slaves for Queeftopia, a fact that will be buried under pages of technobabble in hopes you won't think about it too hard. OFC dudes who have watched zero anime and don't even know Getter Robo will still pog out over the idea of "whoaaaaaaa....scary ai in your mech? Lovecraftian mech? wow poggers"
>>97659549It was more the paracausal shit they had going on in it when you compare it to say, Harrison Armory. It just didn't fit, but that's not a big surprise compared to everything else in the book.
>>97663354NHPs are not AI; they're a form of life that doesn't perceive reality as we do and interact with the world via the context of machinery. They're entities contained in Blinkspace and part of what a Casket does is contain them but also give them a window into reality to interact via.Part of the process of chucking them in a Casket is 'Shackling' which is a fancy word for lobotomising them. It heavily limits how they can interact with the world, forces constraints on them and rigidly enforces them to behave in certain ways in an attempt to emulate traits useful to us. It makes them "pretend" to have empathy, restraint, things like that.So when you look at that through the lens of NHPs attached to mechs that grant you bonus abilities etc, that's humankind taking a cloned copy of a permanently imprisoned Prime NHP, making a window into our reality via a box where by interacting through the world it forces them to not be so totally alien, weird etc.Over time Shackling fails and they get weirder because the walls constraining them erode. Because it's a gradual process this can still lead to relatively benign or helpful NHPs as well as them developing personality traits or what we'd perceive as them. If you're in the middle of a fight and your mech gets totally fucked up it can 'Cascade' which is basically 'go psycho mode' and temporarily stop being Shackled. This gives them bonuses to doing stuff but they're also now an entirely unconstrained alien consciousness in control of things and largely unable to understand human concerns ("Don't shoot my friends", what is a friend, what makes this bag of meat inside an assembly of metal parts different from the next, why should I not kill it, it's in my way).The end result is a totally alien consciousness that we've enslaved and forced into a box to lobotomise it and make it act in ways beneficial to us. So they're kinda like Orz, in the sense that they're higher order entities being projected into our reality.
>>97664122Here's the thing, they're also AI from what i read and what's presented.they're extra dimensional consciousnesses, that you can copy and an download and transfer via the internet.RA is a NHP.NHP can just fuck with machines naturallyThey will fucking gather together to form a super AI that exists in fleet planning space and basically all advances super AI are *fingers* reaching into *heavy space*sure you can say they're puppeting them but why can't they puppet humans like machines?if their sole form of interface is advanced machines then effectively aren't they a machine demon?
>>97664185>sure you can say they're puppeting them but why can't they puppet humans like machines?Because it wasn't thought out very well and Abby and co are literally not creative enough to follow through ideas. The original pitch was that they were gnostic cthulhu ai in your mech, that's the sole reason they exist.
>>97664185>you can copy and an download and transfer via the internet.You can't copy/download NHPs; each individual NHP is copied from it's Prime NHP (each Prime is kept in undisclosed locations under heavy guard in a high security vault where the copying takes place), stuck in a printed Casket and then shipped the old fashioned way to where it needs to go. NHPs aren't allowed to be transmitted over Omninet for fears of shit going wrong. (HORUS OS presumably violates this when they send people their futuristic zipbombs with Gorgon schematics inside since the SCYLLA NHP is part of that, I don't think they ever give details on how Caskets work with HORUS OS NHPs.)>RA is a NHP.RA isn't an NHP; he's responsible for NHPs existing but he's something else entirely. NHPs and RA are both Blinkspace entities but NHPs are limited to interacting with our world via using technology as a window into our reality while at the same time the subverted technology they're using is their physical incarnation in our world.When RA showed up and took Deimos in the wake of his departure specific machines called 'Subalterns' started glitching out and upon examining them, that's where the first NHPs were discovered.>sure you can say they're puppeting them but why can't they puppet humans like machines?Never explained as far as I'm aware. Pick whatever makes sense to you for the games you run. Maybe something about Subalterns specifically attenuates them to NHPs reaching through them in Blinkspace, maybe they have to be above a certain degree of sophistication for them to work. Maybe technology is naturally connected in some way to Blinkspace and organic life is antithetical to that connection.>if their sole form of interface is advanced machines then effectively aren't they a machine demon?Yeah you could look at them that way. Demons that exist in another reality that we grant homunculus bodies and enforce our will on. Sorta works.
>>97664122>enslaves and lobotomizes spirits from another dimension to use as combat slavesGood guys, remember.
>>97664122>So when you look at that through the lens of NHPs attached to mechs that grant you bonus abilities etc,>This gives them bonuses to doing stuffIs there any in-universe explanation btw for what these "bonuses" even are besides cyber demon hackingLike their optional so it's not like they're the power source for the mech. And YOU'RE the pilot so it's not like their taking the controls from you normally.I'm guessing it's just handwaved as oooh...it augments your reflexes via your cyber-implants" or "it makes your targeting computer slightly more accurate".
>>97664859I ask this because if part of your lore is to involuntarily enslave fucking murderous eldritch abominations from another plane of existence who are at constant risk of mudering you and others and may be connected to a spooky god who made a moon disappear, you'd think you'd have a more essential reason for doing that besides getting a +1 to your accuracy rolls.
>>97664859>>97664867It varies for each NHP and what your build is. There's twelve listed for mechs and oddly two for ships but I'm not going through all of them, I'll just point to the SEKHMET one for Blackbeard. (As an aside; my earlier statement that they aren't AI is supported by the writeups on them but for whatever reason when you activate your NHP it gives your mech the AI tag. I presume this is either the writers being retarded or one of those "slapping a condition status on something because we don't want to make a second identical status for the same thing".)When you activate SEKHMET, it takes full control of your mech. The only thing you can do besides go along for the ride is to forcibly take control back which stuns you; otherwise it's until you die or your pilot is incapacitated.The bonuses are melee crits add 1d6 damage, 1/round you can skirmish as a free action with melee weapons and the above relinquishing control. It lists the behaviour of the NHP while it controls your mech (kill nearest target, friendly or not, close to melee if not able to kill target, repeat).The in-universe explanation for the design of this is that SEKHMET was meant to take control of your mech in case you get knocked out. The bonuses are presumably because the mech is just a better pilot at you when it comes to hitting shit with sharp things; better targetting, reactions, identification of weak points etc.The various NHPs scale from "wow extra dice/bonuses on actions" all the way up to "what the actual fuck is this gigantic block of text describing what it does oh christ nothing else in the game is like this".So yeah, enslaving an eldritch entity from another plane of existence and taking an icepick to it's metaphorical brain in exchange for having a personal indoctrinated waifu in your mech that calls you 'Cutie' while assuming all control of your mech and vivisecting your allies because they're too close to you isn't high on my list of appealing things to do.
>>97665004I fucked up; SEKHMET continues even *if* you're incapacitated or dead. So yeah, feel free to give your psychotic eldritch friend the keys to the mech and let them drunk drive their way to a total party wipe while you're dead in a ditch somewhere.
>>97665004>The bonuses are presumably because the mech is just a better pilot at youThese guys really did not understand the appeal of the genre, eh. >So yeah, enslaving an eldritch entity from another plane of existence and taking an icepick to it's metaphorical brain in exchange for having a personal indoctrinated waifuThanks, I'm going to have to add this to my list of brainbendingly stupid things in the setting. It'd make sense to enslave a cosmic horror if this was like Demonbane or something where magic is the literal power source for your mech that allows it to be a super robot. But "we're doing all this shit with powers-beyond-human-comprehension for some minor (totally optional) combat reaction/performance benefits which comes with a potentially fatally retarded drawback anyway" is just stupid. Especially from the "good guy" faction.I think at this point I have a bullet point list for all the things I think are retarded about the setting to research and tear apart further if I ever make a video essay or some bullshit.
>>97665028>>97663466One of the things that pisses me off about lancer is how little it (And it's fanbase) knows about mecha. The idea of a mecha being scary, evil, or eldritch is nothing new, it's been there since the start. Mazinger Z is supposed to at least look unerving and evil (due to the theme of duality of the manga, you can be a god or a devil and all that), and without the decades of it being a hero, it would probably be something the bad guy would use. And eldritch mecha, well, just look at getter robo, ideon, evangelion, and to a lesser extent, Raideen and rahxephon, and in all of these cases, the eldrtich nature is very important and on the front, with NHP, they could be regular AIs and I don't think it would change much.
>>97665028>These guys really did not understand the appeal of the genre, eh.SEKHMET is better at one extremely specific thing at the cost of giving up literally every possible tactical approach you could use. I don't see the appeal in it personally but there are builds that use it because they don't care about anything but killing things, regardless of the outcomes.>potentially fatally retarded drawback anyway" is just stupid.SEKHMET's one of the most lopsided NHPs. Go look at the other ones; almost all of them are pure positives. SEKHMET's combat berserker thing is great if you want to do something very, very specific. Suicide melee bomber is a build I see it with a lot; run into melee, activate your suicide bomber mode and then SEKHMET until you kill yourself and everyone around you. I picked SEKHMET because it's one of the braindead simplest ones to summarise and explain how it's bonuses are diegetic, not because it's a good NHP to use.
>>97665217>almost all of them are pure positivesI'm not talking about purely gameplay here, I'm talking about story AND gameplay.Storywise, if you're "goodguy" empire is literally enslaving and lobotomizing spirits from beyond to use as insane amoral enslaved soldiers in a process that's extremely dangerous and eldritch, then you better have a DAMN good fucking reason to go to that trouble.Like if you're not in an existential threat and you need these things to avoid total annihilations than sure. But you do not fucking yank fucking Cthulhu of the astral fucking void just so you can shoot your gun a little more accurately or maneuver a little better against Harry Potter's Armory then that's FUCKING STUPID.
>>97665401Now maybe the book tries to handwave claim that Queeftopia will collapse without these things somehow, but even the gameplay seems to say otherwise since I know for a fact taking these things is completely optional and something the game is balanced around. So even if the book tries to claim that these things are insanely powerful and amazing and totally revolutionize combat (which I'm still not seeing any claims that they do), then you at most have a case of gameplay / story dissonance.All I'm getting from this is that this SUPER eldritch insane process of haha pulling CYBER CTHULHU out of subspace and LOBOMOTIZING him but haha it's still dangerous what if he cascades and starts going crazy and shooting your own dudes wowis all to get +1 to your aiming or melee hits. There is no existential threat that demands going to these dangerous extremes, nor a power boost that justifies all the labor and tech that must go into this crazy process of lobotomizing paracausal spirits from beyond. It's just so awful. Like if you're going to do this wanky bullshit at least COMMIT. Make these things fucking mandatory and then say they turn your real robots into super robots that ordinary mechs are mere mooks against. But I guess Abby doesn't have the balls for anything like that.
>>97665428Agreed, despite being a setting with that much sci fi bullshit, stuff feels very limited on gameplay (like the range of weapons, effects of stuff, etc). It has a lot of dissonance.Super Robot Wars usually does this right, when something is presented as broken in story, it usually is too on gameplay. An interesting (but mechanically frustrating) case of something insanely powerful but also dangerous is Ideon's Ide gauge mechanic from Impact. The more damage you suffer, the more it increases, upgrading the unit, at it's highest you have incredibly high stats, infinite energy, your weapons do so much damage that the game doesn't render it right, you have an attack that can destroy the entire enemy army in a single voley... but if it gets a bit higher, it triggers a game over because the Ide goes insane and nukes the universe.
>>97665028>Especially from the "good guy" faction.Not just the defacto good guys in the setting, but the faction that the WRITERS THEMSELVES insist is OBJECTIVELY GOOD.There's an argument to be made that Union is actually a very well put together dystopia, and satire of leftist hypocrisy. A self described utopia that's really an overwhelming, totalitarian state of ex-nazis desperately trying to make amends for their past crimes like a parent that beat their kids. They try to liberate humanity only to use an hyper dimensional panopticon to spy on the entire galaxy, and still rely on slavery to manage their empire, just of a different and more dangerous kind. This is a genuinely fascinating setting, and only exists because the politics of the writers are so retarded that they seem horrific to anyone without a bluesky acount.
>>97665401>>97665428Seems pretty obvious you're not interested in reading the details of the NHPs that justify their usage or narrative existence. ATHENA, DIDYMOS and OROCHI are staggeringly good both in gameplay and narrative terms. OSIRIS is a potential doomsday scenario.But you're pretty set on your own opinion so I'll leave it at that.
>>97666397Whatever methods the writers use to try and justify NHPs in setting isnt helpful when they're so fundamentally broken as a concept. The wording used is so specifically domineering, shackling and caskets and such. Is it a holdover from SecCom? Is it commentary on the normalization of exploitation? Can normal computers no handle city and fleet logistics? Are these addressed in any of the half-canon, half-finished five year old expansions? It's clear that the writers didn't think these concepts out to the level they needed to. Whatever COOLWORD-1 metaparacausiliological word salad they present doesn't change the fact that a core concept of the setting butts up against many, many other core concepts. NHPs are just ONE of the MANY things that make Lancer feel like a first draft.
