Robot Face

GLOG: The Giantrobot Laws of Gaming

Overview

The rules are just like your favorite GLOG except before you do combat everyone gets into their mechs and fights that way. So the Str/Dex/Con scores you roll up are the scores of your mech, not of your meat character, whose physical scores are all 8, or 12 for the Soldier class. A mech's ascending armor class is just the higher of its Dex or Con.

Mech combat is just like normal combat except all damage is mech damage. If a non-mech takes mech damage, multiply it by 10. If a mech takes non-mech damage, divide it by 10, rounding down (so if it takes less than 10 damage at once it's negated).
Mech damage converts with siege damage, giant damage, spaceship damage, warband damage, etc. all at a 1:1 ratio, if those systems are interacting in your game for whatever reason.

Mechs are probably only good for 1 fight, maybe 2 before they need maintenance. Even if they don't sustain any damage, you can't just carry around extra ammo. Repairs are lengthy and costly, you have to go back to base for about a week in the engineering bay before you're combat-ready again.

Weapons rules

Melee range: Your mech has to be able to touch them.
Close range: Your mech could reach them with its movement. Can also attack in Melee range.
Long range: Up to thrice Close range. Attacks in Melee range at disadvantage.
Extremely long range: Can attack anything within line of sight. Attacks in Close or Melee range at disadvantage.

After a fight, every full-ammo weapon you attacked with now has 1d4 shots left.

Unarmed attacks are d4 damage, Melee range.
Thrown objects are d4 damage, Close range.

Standard-issue weapons:
Autocannon - d6 damage, but roll 3 times and take the highest. Long range.
Rail gun - d10 damage, extremely long range. Costs an attack or all your movement to reload.
Missile launcher - d6 damage to target, d4 damage to each adjacent mech. Long range.
Flamethrower - d8 damage, close range. Still deals 1 damage if the attack misses.
Sword - d6 damage, melee. As long as you haven't attacked this turn, you're in a Parry stance: +1 AC, and if a Melee attack misses you, you may immediately make an attack with the sword. Doesn't use ammo.

Special weapons: anything custom, experimental, alien, whatever. Use magic weapons from other games but reskin them to be weird tech.

The number of weapon slots a mech has is the number of weapons the your class starts with.
Each mech also has three module slots, which provide various effects (I'll list some with certain classes, but you can also use magic items from other games reskinned as tech).
To swap out a weapon or module, it takes a week of downtime at an engineering bay; this can coincide with repair time.

Class List (posts coming very soon)

Superhero - The first mechs that ever appeared after the invasion. Still the world's most effective defense against aliens, and it bothers the military a lot that they they tend to be civilian "chosen ones" instead of actual trained fighters that they can control.
Soldier - Military trained mech pilot, realest of the real robots. This is the fighter class.
Lab Rat - Government project, kept drugged up and heavily modified to enhance mech interfacing. Closest to matching Superheroes in terms of defense against aliens, but the pilots are traumatized freaks instead of plucky shonen protagonists.
Psion - Have you heard? There's a new type of human being now. Their brains are adapted for the new world. They can step into a huge war machine and effortlessly control it, better even than their own body.
Inventor - Being a hobbyist mech fighter is the sort of thing that gets you on every government watchlist. But if you're good enough at it and only go after aliens and factions they don't like they'll mostly let you do your thing.
Gamer - This class brought to you by me seeing the trailer for the Gran Turismo movie years ago and thinking it would be a really fun concept if it was about mecha instead of racecar. Basically, this is a highly skilled VR gamer, among the best in the world, recruited by a mech faction to see if their skills transfer. And boy do they transfer.

Mech Faction Generator

This mech faction is...

  1. Military.
  2. Government, but not military.
  3. A private weapons corporation.
  4. A private corporation of some other type.
  5. A trillionaire's personal project.
  6. A citizens' militia.
  7. A sports league.
  8. Mercenaries.
  9. A doomsday cult.
  10. A criminal cartel.
  11. A terrorist organization.
  12. An activist group dedicated to destroying all mechs, who realizes mechs are the best way to do that.

They believe that the most important thing for success in mech fighting is ...

  1. To have the best tech.
  2. To have the best weapons.
  3. To have the best trained pilots.
  4. To have the greatest numbers.
  5. To go beyond what any other faction is willing to do.
  6. To pick your fights carefully.

Their secret or not-so-secret agenda is...

  1. World domination.
  2. Ecological preservation.
  3. To make humanity an interstellar society.
  4. Communism.
  5. They're secretly run by aliens who want to invade the Earth.
  6. They're secretly run by aliens who want to protect the Earth.

d6 relationships between two factions...

  1. Alliance against a common enemy. (Probably aliens.)
  2. Friendly rivalry.
  3. Bitter rivalry.
  4. Will work together to fight aliens but orders are to kill each other after the fight. (Do the pilots actually obey those orders? Probably not.)
  5. Kill on sight.
  6. Can't acknowledge eachother's existence for political reasons.

Aliens

Use monsters from OSR bestiaries, dealing and receiving mech damage, reskinned to be weird alien robots.

Appendix N (inspirations)

#generators #mech #rules #setting