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In a strange and hypothetical turn of events, you've found yourself running two mid-level Lancer campaigns. You're an experienced GM, you have plenty of time on your hands, you figure you're up to the challenge. You've recruited friends and familiar faces from your favorite TTRPG spaces, especially those that you know are really into the character-building side of the game. Build freaks! We know 'em and love 'em. But you're a little surprised when both groups end up with the exact set of character builds. It wasn't planned or anything, everyone just picked all the same character options as someone in the other group. Weird, but there is a silver lining: since it's the same party at both tables you figure every combat you prep can be used for both groups. What could go wrong?

First session of the campaign(s), you run a combat for Mobile Task Force Zeta-Zero-Two "Radiation Ronin," and they love every minute of it. It's a long hard fight with tough decisions to make, but they emerge victorious, and everyone talks about how much they're looking forward to the next sitrep. Feeling very pleased with yourself indeed, you put that same combat in front of the time-hopping band of rebels, Carrion Cavalcade. They hate it! By the end of the session, everyone is clearly frustrated, they're too tired to keep playing, and you're left wondering what went wrong.

Within a couple days, you've gathered something of a postmortem from the Cavalcade's players. They tell you that even though they won the fight, none of them feel like they really fulfilled the fantasy they built their characters for. The Really Big Sword player felt stuck making hacking rolls, the sniper had to ram and grapple to shut down the enemy. They weren't making any tactical errors, it was a difficult fight and they made the choices they needed to in order to win the sitrep. But they weren't playing the way they really hoped to.

Okay, that's good information, and you know enough to prepare differently for the next session. Radiation Ronin need to push their session back (someone has a cat wedding), so you even have some extra time. You set to work crafting a combat that will let every character show off their strengths and fulfill the role their players envisioned. It's not going to be an easy fight, just one where everyone can be where they want to be.

Showtime. The difference is palpable. Carrion Cavalcade pounces on every opportunity for a clever combo and fills the chat logs with their favorite moments. Everyone gets to see their mechs at their best, everyone leaves happy, you're feeling so much better about the campaign from here on out. You can't wait to run this same combat for Radiation Ronin and-

hm. that didn't go as well.

They're a quieter group, even at the best of times, but you can tell they didn't share the Cavalcade's enthusiasm. They won the fight with flying colors, triggered the same hype moment combos, but, they just weren't feeling it. They tell you the combat was fine, they enjoyed it, it just didn't have the same thrill as the first one. One of them says that things went a little "too smoothly," and things start falling into place for you.

Radiation Ronin enjoyed the first combat because they were forced to make new plans in the moment, Carrion Cavalcade didn't because they felt like they weren't getting the gameplay they had planned for.

Carrion Cavalcade enjoyed the second combat because they were able to fulfill their gameplay fantasies without a hitch, Radiation Ronin hated it because executing their ideal turn repeatedly felt boring to them.

Both groups genuinely enjoy the mech combat gameplay of Lancer, both groups genuinely enjoy building a character out of a smorgasbord of rules-chunks, but the things they enjoy about those things are different. Do you want to explore the whole space of possibility, and it's disappointing if you can get away with doing the same thing over and over? Or are you here to experience one particular slice of play, and it's frustrating if you feel like that's being denied?

To invoke some truly incomprehensible jargon, Radiaton Ronin enjoy their frotz in a nitfol sort of way, and Carrion Cavalcade have more of a gnusto approach to their frotz. I'm not suggesting either approach is inherently superior, or "more true" to Lancer or any other combat game, but I do hope I've been able to outline the different needs of different players, and potential opportunities for expectations to become misaligned at the table.

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.

Chapter two: Protagonist Creation!

Intro material has some advice before the rules themselves show up: Don't powergame, don't make a character that's too annoying (i'm under attack), be okay with bad things happening to them eventually, and also you can ignore the character creation rules completely if you really want. I expect I'm going to get pretty tired of "you can ignore this if you really want" by the end of the book.

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papercult has had two different threads on generic systems. which is fine. which is cool. both have come to the conclusion of "it's better when a game has specific goals rather than trying to be the One Game For Everything." which is fine! which is cool!

...but. i do not think that so-called generic systems should be reduced to trying to be the One Game For Everything. i think "this game doesn't work for every campaign concept" is always going to be true! which makes it a boring observation to me. It's much more interesting to me to drill down into the specifics of what they do work for and why. In this sense, "generic" can still be a meaningful (if not perfectly accurate) label for gesturing at some setting flexibility, but it's not like, the main appeal. I don't think the genericism is ever the main appeal, really.

idk i have a vague dissatisfaction with Generic Systems Discourse because it takes a foundational bit of design theory (different mechanics produce different outcomes, so should be used intentionally) and then stops. once you start talking about several generic systems at once, they aren't mechanically unified, so you're no longer talking systems! you're just saying "games should have goals" without trying to analyze the goals of the games you're discussing!

i think this means i don't have any beef with any individual generic system i just think people talk about them weirdly

how does Exalted have "girl who is sword" and she's not immediately the most popular character in the game. I've played Xenoblade 2. I've played Lancer. I know there is a ready audience for this. and yet I have only found ONE (1) piece of fanart of her.

"maybe they realize this archetype is necessarily objectifying" i did not think that would stop Exalted fans

The Dungeons and Dragons community forums were shut down in late 2015, shortly after the release of D&D 5e. The forums hosted tens of thousands of discussion threads across several editions of D&D.

The G+ Archives is a set of exports from now-defunct Google Plus TTRPG communities. A full directory can be found here.

The Story Games Index preserves threads from the Story Games community forums. The design-focused subforum, Praxis was more poorly preserved.

The Gauntlet forums inherited many users from Google Plus, especially the Gauntlet community that inspired it.

Fictioneers is, unfortunately, a community I know very little about. It seems to have focused on the "storygames" lineage of TTRPGs.

Wynwerod was relatively short-lived, but while it was active it seems to have hosted some of the Gauntlet survivors, and may have shared users with Fictioneers.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine isn't as tightly structured as Princess Wing, but it does provide some guardrails:

1) The game is divided into chapters, that typically cover a length of time determined by the campaign genre

2) Each player can (and usually will) perform two XP Actions per chapter, with available XP action typically determined by campaign genre. These are usually specific emotional beats, or actions that become significant by having attention drawn to them, rather then their outcome.

3) After performing an XP action, your character "fades," or loses narrative focus.

All of this combines to form a revolving spotlight effect. If the spotlight falls on you, it helps to have a scene prompt ready!

Your scene prompts are bundled into quests. A full quest write-up contains:

1) A situation your character is presently involved in, or a situation they keep coming back to. This is the Quest itself.

2) Major goals, significant narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest a limited number of times. The GM determines when they've been fulfilled.

3) Quest flavor, minor narrative beats that you can expect to happen during the Quest 1/chapter. The player can declare that quest flavor is happening without waiting for the GM's suggestion.

So! Of these, the quest flavor is the scene prompt tech closest to what I discussed with Princess Wing. The player decides that the scene will be about something in particular from their character material, and the scene will be about that. A quest's major goals work a little differently. I'd suggest they're prompts for the GM instead, scenes that the GM should be on the lookout to set up and create the opportunity for. I've heard the phrase "character flags" used for this kind of thing before.

[In practice, a Chuubo's game will probably see players saying "hey GM I have an idea for how to fulfill my major goal," and that's totally fine. It's a game that wants everyone to spend a little time in the director's chair, even if the GM has the most explicit power there.]

Much of this structure and prompt tech returns in The Far Roofs. This time, the quest flavor summons not just a narrative beat, but a specific emotional reaction to it from the player character, as determined by a Mood Roll. That's a lot to work with from just a couple lines!

Lastly, Far Roofs has a few prompts associated with its Mysteries and the neighborhoods of the Roofs.

The other prompts I've discussed here are linked to their games' progression systems. You get XP or other benefits from invoking them, which drives your character's story forward. The Errantry prompts, by contrast, are only there to spark ideas, characterize the element of the setting they're associated with, and invite players into the director's seat.

I picked up Emergent from an ongoing trans fundraising bundle. I struggle to read through all the character options and monsters right away, but...

This game is something special.

It has style, it has neat dice tech, it has fascinating ideas for scripting structure a campaign, it reminds me, in very good ways, of Monsters and Other Childish Things. I'm keeping an eye on this one.

The main thing I hear about Exalted is its maximalism. Your characters are the strongest and the coolest, there's mountains of lore, and there's rules for everything. I check the rulebook (3e) and it's almost seven hundred pages. That's a lot to read, but that's what I'm there for, right?

sorry there's how many expansion books?

hm

They do have an alternative, Exalted Essence. It's basically a parallel edition that covers all the types of Exalted at once, but it sells itself on being simpler... will that still give me the maximalism I'm looking for? It should, yeah, there's still multiple pretty large books.

...the current Essence crowdfunding campaign has some really nice deals on 3e material

...3e won't be so bad if I limit myself to just one type of Exalted, right?

and that's why i'm currently on course to get into Most Of Essence and 3e, But Specifically Dragon-Blooded Exalted

surely only good can come from this