stepnix | Saturday, November 22nd, 2025

Now and then I run into the take in ttrpg spaces that giant robot tactical combat rpg Lancer is particularly difficult to reflavor, which is interesting to me because that has not been my experience. My feeling is generally that as long as you're in giant robots, you can port the system pretty easily into other settings or write your own, and even if you're doing like, werewolves in grid combat, you're basically fine. But I don't want to just dismiss this other tendency, I want to understand what in particular poses an obstacle.

"Flavor is free" is a popular piece of TTRPG advice bordering on a truisim: if a bit of fictional description is inconsequential, you can replace it with something else (with "inconsequential" typically defined as "easy to replace," so you see how this gets circular). Its popularity can obscure that this is actually a pretty distinct reading strategy: a player who goes into a game assuming that not everything locked into the overall network of mechanics can be homebrewed into something else is going to have a very different experience than one who takes every description as part of the presented scenario.

Back to Lancer. There are a few elements of the setting very closely associated with the mechanics: The mech manufacturer factions, the licenses they provide, and the "printers" that let players repair or recreate their mechs. Major parts of the progression and resource economies have specific in-universe justifications. I think this is where my reading starts to differ: I feel like the in-universe elements exist to enable the desired gameplay, so changing the setting doesn't "matter" as long as you keep the progression and resource economy working like normal. The manufacturers can be rethemed or be completely reduced to upgrade trees without affecting "this changes my mech's numbers."

But if you're seeing the primary goal of the mechanics as expressing a specific setting's assumptions, then that just won't follow. You can't change the manufacturers without coming up with a new set of mechanics to reflect those assumptions, you can't change what the license rules represent without drastically changing the resource economy, etc. This is a much more restrictive reading, which might be part of why I disprefer it.

I have reason to believe Lancer was written with "flavor is free" and the capability to change the setting for your own table as a base assumption of the writers, closer to my own reading. But it turns out that doesn't come through to every reader. funky.