Roleplaying Games

Battletech + Magic: The Gathering = Lancer

Mecha, Clarke’s Third Law, and Big Government

In Lancer, you play a lancer. There are other mech pilots in the galaxy, but lancers are the best of the best at piloting weapons of last resort. If lancers are deployed, shit is about to hit the fan or it already has.

The Good

Mechs Are Magic

Mechs in Lancer are less like walking tanks and more like wearable spell books in a Clarke’s Third Law kind of way. Except for the starter model, the mechs lancers use vary dramatically. Between 29 Frames with 30 Core Bonuses, 77 Weapons, and 126 Systems, the number of possible configurations is staggering. This is a mech game for Magic: The Gathering players.

Frames are mech chassis, all of which have their own unique Traits and Core Systems. Core Bonuses give you options and benefits when driving Frames from specific manufacturers, like increasing the range of all your installed weapons. Weapons hurt other mechs, sometimes in unconventional ways. Systems do everything from deploying portable bunkers to making your mech physically intangible.

Lancer’s 29 Talents give your pilot even more options, like automatically knocking a target Prone. But the word “Talent” is a misnomer. A lot of them combine stuff you DO and stuff you HAVE. For example, Jackhammer lets you fire a special round from a underslung launcher attached to your Cannon (IF you have a Cannon). I interpret this as your character applying these mods themselves.

In a lot of ways, the Weapons, Systems, and whatnot in Lancer are akin to powers in superhero RPGs. Conventional cannons and missiles are boring. If you’re not phasing through stuff Vision-style or throwing enemies around like Magneto, what are you even doing with your life?

Downtime Play is Powered by the Apocalypse

Lancer has two distinct modes of play: Downtime and Missions, similar to Chris Perrin’s Mecha. Downtime Actions are exactly like Moves from Apocalypse World. Get a Damn Drink can net you “A useful item or piece of information”. It can also cost you your dignity. Get Creative lets you fabricate personal gear, but probably not in one Downtime session. Plus, you’ll need specific tools, materials, or a workspace.

These are a godsend because opened-ended roleplaying can be awkward. Even experienced gamers are sometimes not sure what they’re supposed to do unless there’s an obvious enemy to shoot at. The menu of Downtime Actions prompts the players to do something interesting, if not useful.

Leveling Up Doesn’t Rely on Prodding or Impressing the GM

Licenses make a lancer’s life easy. They represent your paygrade, your experience, and even your reputation. When you increase your License Level you can boost your Mech Skills (general piloting ability), improve your Talents, and get access to new frames, systems, etc. There are only 12 LLs, so maxing out your pilot doesn’t require a five year campaign. Nobody has time for that shit anymore.

Here’s the best part. In Lancer, players get an additional License Level at the end of every mission. It doesn’t matter how long the mission took to complete. It doesn’t even matter if they failed the mission. If they survive, they get an extra LL. Take that, D&D, with your old-ass super-granular Experience Points.

I Am In Love with a Manticore and a Minotaur

There are five mech licensors in Lancer. One makes the generic model all newbs start with. One makes sports-car-mechs. One makes walking bunkers. One is owned by the descendants of Dick Cheney.

Horus is a cross between a cult and a hacker community.

Horus makes the Manticore and the Minotaur. The Manticore can teleport-swap places with a target and shoot lightning three different ways. The Minotaur can temporarily teleport a target to NOWHERE and make enemy mechs shoot each other. Both are walking crimes against nature and government regulation, and I love them.

Government May or May Not Be the Answer to Humanity’s Problems

Like all good sci-fi, politics and government is a big part of Lancer’s lore. Union, the central government, was founded to implement The Utopia Pillars. They are…

I. All Shall Have Their Material Needs Fulfilled

II. No Walls Shall Stand Between Worlds

III. No Human Shall Be Held in Bondage Through Force, Labor, or Debt

The Utopia Pillars were drawn up at the founding of Union by The First Committee, or FirstComm. The Pillars were then discarded centuries later by the right-wing SecComm as they took Union in an exceedingly imperialist direction. SecComm was eventually overthrown after they did a genocide on the very first alien species they discovered. The Pillars were then readopted by ThirdComm, who is currently in power.

Lancer has some convoluted but fascinating lore, mainly because humanity’s future history is a giant clusterfuck. Humanity nearly drove itself extinct thanks to war, climate disaster, and more war. In an effort to stave off extinction, they sent out 10 giant colony ships. Generations would live and die on these ships, and some of them would never actually make planetfall.

Humanity would collapse, rebuild, AND THEN ALMOST COLLAPSE AGAIN before discovering that they had already been here before and tried to contact those colony ships. When they heard distant cries for help that were centuries or millennia old, they finally got serious and founded Union. After thousands of years and three committees, Union is still contacting human worlds that barely remember Earth and never even heard of Union.

Seriously, fuck the Prime Directive. Union intends to bring stability, freedom, and dignity to all of humanity. Unfortunately this is all slowed down by hardline holdovers from SecComm because conservatives will always kneecap progress.

Then again, maybe that’s not so bad. It’s debatable if Union is a good thing in the long run, even with its new-found use of soft power. Like Cap said, “…it’s run by people with agendas and agendas change”. FirstComm was a fairly liberal administration, but SecComm was a bunch of right-wing “Anthrochauvinists”. What if the inevitable ForthComm corrupts everything ThirdComm is building? What if the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions?

Questions like this make Lancer fascinating.

The Bad

NPCs are Tedious

I almost didn’t count this one. It’s common in RPGs, but that doesn’t make it good. Most RPGs still treat NPCs like GM-controlled PCs, and Lancer does the same during combat. I’m sick of this.

A lot of modern games make all actions from the players’ point of view. Most PbtA games don’t even let the GM roll anything. NPCs are just expressions of the setting, story, or environment. Mörk Borg does something similar. Lancer only does this during Downtime play.

Lancer’s NPCs are just different enough from PCs to make things worse. They die/blow up as soon as they reach 0 HP. Also, the GM doesn’t roll for damage or initiative. NPC weapons do a set amount of damage and the players almost always go first. But their mech Classes (basically NPC Frames) and Systems are different from the Frames and Systems lancers use. It shows that lancers are “special”, but it also means the GM has to learn a whole different set of everything.

The Ugly

Combat Plays Like a God Damn Wargame

Unlike Downtime, combat is like a wargame in which all the players have one unit. It uses grid maps, and each space represents 10 feet. To-hit and damage require two separate die rolls. There are two different types of Actions: Full and Quick. There are detailed Line of Sight and Cover rules. There are four types of Area Attack Patterns: Line, Cone, Blast, and Burst. Kill me now.

What really burns me up is that the publisher thinks its companion app, COMP/CON, makes this nonsense palatable. For fuck’s sake, I play tabletop games to get away from screens! If a tabletop game needs a companion app, that game usually has problems. D&D Beyond does not make Dungeons & Dragons better. It makes it vaguely playable. At best.

Lancer was made for wargamers with a narrativist bent. The narrative bits are like cut-scenes in a video game. They’re there to dump exposition and give context to the REAL game, which is a tactical wargame featuring super-mecha. Playing out mech battles in Lancer is far from cinematic. Lancer’s combat system is a fuck without a kiss.

Lancer could have been a masterpiece, but the wargame-like mechanics ruin the experience. Keep in mind that the rules allow for combat in narrative mode. In fact, it recommends using narrative combat for purely personal/no-mech fights. But if you only did narrative mech combat, a third of the character sheet would be pointless. Then again, using all those “paracausal” weapons in narrative mode would make combat feel like “Jojo’s Bizarre Mecha”. That might be fun.

My personal nuclear option is to reskin Chris Perrin’s Mecha with Lancer’s fluff. They’re both mecha games that divide combat and non-combat play between two distinct game modes, so it’s not a big stretch. But I haven’t done that myself, so I don’t know if you’d lose something in translation.

All that said, I still want a Lancer series on Netflix.