Brain Fizz Episode 4: On Giant Stompy Robots

Hello! It's been a while since I did one of these. Imagine my brain is a dog, and ideas are... I dunno. Passing cars. Most of the time a car goes past, I have a good old bark about it, but let it go. But sometimes I try to chase that bastard down good and proper, and I throw myself after it in a mad dash to stop it. At the moment, that idea is mecha - big humanoid warmachines. I am running down the street barking at it. There are already a lot of games about mecha on the market, and a lot of them are pretty good. But, as with many tech-heavy games, I find that the drama takes a backseat to the maths; that it's more of a Mech Simulator 2014 than a fun experience. I'm not an expert on mecha; not by a long shot. But I'm interested in them, and the stories we can tell about a small team piloting an unreliable walking tank. So I've started chasing down some ideas about it. SETTING-wise, I want to tell stories about Nordic forge-houses in a Fimbulwinter apocalypse; where legacy technology is rare and unstable, so the only way the humans can fight the conquering giant robots known as JOTUN is to strap tank-cannons onto enormous rigs and storm out across the wilderness in search of a fight. SYSTEM-wise, I want to focus on the experience of a team being in control of a single battlefield output - the mech. Attack and Defence are handled by a pool of dice - D6's, mainly, but specialised equipment can give you D8's or D10's. You can devote your turn to a given task in the mech - say, pulling defensive maneuvers, spotting enemy mecha, or aiming the cannon - which boosts the relevant dice pool. That way, it's not just the Gunner who's firing the gun when the dice are rolled; they aim it, for sure, but the pilot steers the warmachine into position, and the scout spies the weak points on the enemy, and the loader slams in a high-ex shell, too. It's a team effort, a constant stream of decisions that make the difference between fighting your way through to the besieged hold or ending up as frozen slag. I've only thought about this for a full morning so far, and I'm already scrapping earlier ideas and remaking them into something better, so it's a long road yet. But stay tuned for more, eh? - G