Wise Turtle Publishing

Curious about how to handle pilot/mecha interaction... I get how to make a character and how to make a mecha/vehicle, but not sure how to represent the way different pilots would affect the performance of the same mecha.

First idea that comes to mind is to figure the relevant abilities/weaknesses of each, then average them. It seems like this might have a few side-effects (not necessarily bad ones), like you might want to define two flavors of Combat Expert (for personal and mecha combat). Also might mean that a lot of mecha abilities might be tied to the Pilot ability of the, uh, pilot.

I’d like to arrive at a relatively simple way of handling this, with as few house rules as possible. I’ve read on here that Clay was working on a mecha supplement at one point, and see that a few of you have been planning or playing mecha-inspired games. Anybody have solutions you’d like to share? Do you you just add all the relevant stats together? Does this mean you have to pump up the Difficulty of non-combat tasks to compensate for the bigger dice pools?

Also, i haven’t actually played a damn rpg in ages and am still looking for a gaming group (or the time to even participate in one), so this isn’t an urgent question. I just know that OVA would be/will be my first choice for running a game and would love to try a Macross-esque mecha campaign.

I think I know what you're asking about and Sniffycrab informed me that only the Pilot Ability transfers from pilot character to mecha vehicle.

Unless Clay states otherwise, it's best to assume that it rings true.

I guess it would really depend on the type of action you want.

Getter Robo and Mazinkaiser SKL, two super robots that rely on multiple pilots, tend to go for a swap on who's in charge. For the SKL, Ryo was in charge of melee combat and Ken in charge of ranged.

The recent Starfinder game suggests a sort of D&D party system for ships. You could have the pilot who handled movement, the Gunner who handled combat, the captain that handled social roles, and the engineer who handled repairs.

Agile stacks with Piloting. Combat Expert would work with Gunner roles, as would Attack. Quick and Evasive would make sense for defense. And Knowledge would let you do pretty much any other task. Other than those, the other Abilities probably won't be much help.

The easiest method is to just stack rolls. As long as contests are mecha vs. mecha, then no real adjustment needs to be made. If you plan to use a lot of Difficulty Numbers, there may be some merit to buffing those numbers higher—but I think people expect mecha to be awesome. If they just posessed human levels of ability—that would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?

I have beat around the idea that a mecha's attributes serve as a cap for the Pilot's abilities. That is, a mecha with +1 Quick limits the pilot from using anything more than +1 Quick of his or her own. Pilot is always used at full "power," since it encompasses the knowledge to make the most of a Vehicle's shortcomings.

This was too fiddly to include in OVA proper, but if you have a problem with buckets of dice being rolled, you may find it useful.

Clay wrote:I have beat around the idea that a mecha's attributes serve as a cap for the Pilot's abilities. That is, a mecha with +1 Quick limits the pilot from using anything more than +1 Quick of his or her own. Pilot is always used at full "power," since it encompasses the knowledge to make the most of a Vehicle's shortcomings.

This was too fiddly to include in OVA proper, but if you have a problem with buckets of dice being rolled, you may find it useful.

While I don't have an issue with having to roll that many dice for a single check (Been mostly online on that front and using dice rollers. Not up to Hero System levels, but still...), it does bring up a few interesting ideas, such as a need for one to either "tinker" with their chosen mecha not unlike how some would tinker with their automobiles, or give a plausible reason why one would want to upgrade to a different model of mobile suit.