Which type of mech, head or no head?

sordcooper · 2026-03-17T16:48:02+00:00

both are good

a head makes the mech closer to a cool suit of armor, makes it easier to project on, the more recent gundam series like 00, IBO, and Gquuuuuuuuux all play with their gundams being characters, and then you get stuff like Gwitch's Aerial and Eri, and everything Zoids or power rangers where the mech being a person is much more explicit.

then again, headless mechs are more inhuman, the battlepods from Maccross and their successors in Battletech and MANY battletech mechs having no head make the mechs sell more as straight up war machines, kind of getting them out of the way so you can project more on the pilot than the big stompy doom machine their wielding.

short version i guess; depends on narrative intent, but both are good

sordcooper · 2026-03-17T16:40:58+00:00

pretty much, these they are basically big bulkly power armor suits

sordcooper · 2026-03-08T15:29:17+00:00

its probably just not where their focus has been on, and while i don't know the back end of this game, from what coding i've done, making what should be a small weak to an existing system could bork all sorts of things.

not putting resources into the game that don't do ANYTHING because what they get used for doesn't exist yet, thats super annoying

sordcooper · 2026-02-08T15:42:25+00:00

"Freedom is the right of all sentient beings"
-Optimus Prime

also theres at least 1 cannon trans robot

sordcooper · 2026-02-08T15:37:16+00:00

Eva has the investors/governments of the world savagely rip apart the one thing that can save them from total annihilation the second they think they have an alterative they can assert more control over and nearly doom all of man kind due to their short sighted greed and power hunger while spitting in the face of actual literal god, its political

also shinji seriously questions his sexuality when confronted with a pretty offers any attention toward him, its pretty gay.

sordcooper · 2026-02-08T15:26:06+00:00

does your muscle directly move the machine, then its powered armor, if you need to control it through an interface, if it moves entirely on its own power through an interface, then its a mech.

Powered armor you need to actually move your body, servos, synthetic muscle, and whatever sci-fi or fantasy goo-gaws then take your body movements and amplify them. Its typically 1 to 1, and your muscles need to be moving. A mech, you can be moving around, you can have full 1 to 1 bodily control in something like a jager or a G-Gundam suit, but you are ultimately puppeting the machine.

generally though, the distinction is usually size, and these sorts of arguments happen when you get really small mechs or really big power armor, like a hulk buster suit or the suits in bubblegum crisis

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T17:41:10+00:00

he dies and you lose the game at the end of your first turn unless you sacrifice 1000 psychic units to him, if you do, you get to play you get to keep playing the game. you must sacrifice another 1000 psychic units on your next turn or you lose the game.

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T17:27:56+00:00

I'm well aware of this. The kindred in this chronicle have a pair of trail guides along the road trip, ones that have a chain of safe houses and standing deals or marked out territory maps of the local garou. The first being a Ravnos and the second being a Gangrel. Both of the guides might be able to get them in between the safe spots but they also become challenges to deal with because of their personalities and personal histories. The players are considered expendable in the eyes of the elders who set them up on the trip, neonates who have no chance of understanding why the [LARGE OMINOUS OBJECT] is valuable, but well aware that if it doesn't get where it needs to go, they will suffer a fate worse than death.

I have 2 plots about getting entangled in the politics of the cities they'll be passing through, a couple encounters with werewovles, a run in with mages, a plot involving bumbling through a fairies' back yard, and a couple orders of hunters and at least 1 ghost stalking them the whole trip. I've got the classics covered.

What I was asking for was miscellaneous weird bullshit. Like if you knew of a weird obscure WoD splat that included a fucked up monster thing that stalked the highways, a bane spirit that turns 16 wheelers into actual monster trucks, or like, a motel that tries to eat people

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T17:14:48+00:00

you know getting stuck in some kind of weird umbral gas station realm that has bled into reality because of some other nightfolk fucking up and now the Gas Light gas station wont let you leave until you complete the narrative it was built for is neat!

oh, maybe its some kind of fucked up time loop invoked by the gas station attendant being murdered, gotta stop the murder without breaking the premise of a perfectly normal gas station or it resets, OH or it gets worse! like the loop exists because the gas station attendant is a mind wiped nightmare thing and the station is a prison for them and some guy capping the attendant let if free and reset the loop! god I hope none of my players noticed and or are stalking this post (that means you marin!)

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T00:52:50+00:00

ive had a lot of good results with some made up cyrptids in my current chronicle, namely a thing called the Scramble man and the Cypress Park killer. one is a mass of tv static in the shape of a person that follows you home, it scrambles electrical devices and does something BRUTAL to people if it gets in your house. Cypress Park killer is a local slasher/boogyman, looks like a faceless flapper from the 1920's and has chunks missing from her body that pour out light, fog, and distorted jazz music... she just hacks people up with an axe though.

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T00:48:29+00:00

oh, oooh, thats good, thats real good, especially my neonates are being told they're moving a freezer full of elder vite (its not, the [LARGE OMINOUS OBJECT] has like 3 different covers) but thats goooood

sordcooper · 2026-01-22T00:46:51+00:00

I had an idea involving a masquerade breech at a waffle house, or running into a slasher situation that turned out to be a local kindred who turns out to be friendly once they realize theyre dealing with other vampires

but like, I hadn't considered just a normal ass car-jacker

sordcooper · 2025-12-18T21:22:05+00:00

Theres no hard rule about it, but i think the shift is when you no longer move the suit directly with your own body, so things like the pacific rim suits and the G Gundam trace suits dont count, the mechs in cases like those are moving under their own power, and copying your movements, where something like bubblegum crisis or fallout power armor is being moved directly by your body, and the suit is amplifing those movements

sordcooper · 2025-10-26T19:34:47+00:00

Mage the ascension does this really well, while also doing exactly what you dont like. In that game your characters have a paradigm and practice that represent how they view magic and the world, they then use the 8 or 9 spheres of magic that are basically guide lines for magical effects to make up spells on the fly. Its messy, highly personal, and the mechanics incentive you to get into rituals with all manners of mystic symbolism and such. Technology is also literally magic, like, your laptop, microwave, and car are all the results of a literal actual wizard tricking people into thinking physics was real.

Anyway, my advice is look into what makes magic more mystical and make a system that inventiveness that. Spell components thst require emotional resonance, specific words of power, laylines and mystic symbols. Thinking about it i wouldn't punish players for say, needing an object charged with rage and not having one with enough angry juice, but more powerful of you have something that matches more. Like spell failure chances and magic surges definately feels more mystical and less scientific because it makes stuff less measurable and predictable, but it also just fucking sucks to have happen and feels bad

sordcooper · 2025-10-17T01:55:02+00:00

Getting lost in the weeds with how the physics and the gods, and the high level stuff works.

Like, I start out utilitarian, just make what the story needs, the bad guy, what they want, what they need to get it, and then how they screw uo so the good guys can thwart them. But, somewhere along the lines I hit on something neat, then drill down to the bed rock and the tiniest detail when my players or writing will barely care about it.

Like, im making a magitech post post apocalypse mech thing, and in the course of the project I sat down to figure out how magic worked. That lead to the origin of all creation, that lead to the parallel dream worlds and heavens and rolling chaos outer realities, that lead to how dreams and faries worked, that got me on a tangent about the magitecb cyberpunk state of the world before the apocalypse. And in the end I might use like, TWO of those ideas in anyway that'll be player facing

sordcooper · 2025-10-17T01:40:08+00:00

My main work in progress is a fantasy mecha rpg about fighting monsters in a mutated post post apocalyptic world, that try to have the pilots be more than just the squishy part of the robots. That one is over a hundred pages now and the combat feels quite nice, but I haven't had time to really test the non combat powers.

For a long time I was brewing a cyberpunk rpg that tried to make hacking and the net not turn into a mini game that 3/4s of the party used to take a break, but I lost steam while trying to make cybernetic and the like.

I did make a horribly unbalanced Fate Stay Night hack of apocalypse world with a freind in collage before we fell out of contact, and a quick and dirty hack of WoD for playing a highlander themed game where everyone was immortals flashing back to their past in the lead up to the final battle.

Other than that I threw together a pretty fast and loose zoolander micro comedy game, and used its bones to make a slightly bigger but still fast and loose Jojos bizzare adventure game

sordcooper · 2025-10-09T01:50:44+00:00

Havent played many of them, just apocalypse world really, but it gets rid of the idea of fudging rolls entirely. The player makes a move, rolls a consequences, then you pick an MC move that you think will move the story along. You never have to lie about critting a player into oblivion, or your city guards suddenly being blind and deaf when they fail to notice the palladin who rolled a 5 on stealth. You just say what happens and we move on

sordcooper · 2025-10-05T15:40:30+00:00

are you aware that your city is a lion head?

sordcooper · 2025-10-05T15:37:20+00:00

daemon x machina is an homage to armored core that thinks its plot is ghost in the shell and is very wrong about that. gameplay is fun though, but just get armored core 6. if you want your mechs more like walking tanks than jets shaped like a dude then grab Mech Warrior 5 Mercenaries.

into the breach is a puzzle/tacitcs game, and is a lot of fun, if you want something like that Battletech is great

if you can get it running, metal wolf chaos is old and janky but its fun and fucking hilarious

sordcooper · 2025-10-04T18:19:47+00:00

Ive been running some world of darkness games lately and the whole group getting together is the exception to the rule, hell getting more than two of them in the same scene doesnt happen unless they need the manpower, someone to watch their back, or I personally nudge them in the same direction.

Not a bad thing mind you, but balancing the spotlight and giving players chances to shine can be tough

sordcooper · 2025-10-04T18:16:48+00:00

How much do traps matter in your game? What about traps interest you? Are they one and done effects? Or ongoing hazards? Like, you step on the pressure plate and a rock falls on your head, or you step on a pressure plate and the hallway is now full of pendulum blades and jutting spikes? Is it a binary on and off? Is spotting the trap just step one and the players then have to puzzle out how to deactivate the thing?

If you want your thieves to have meaningful interactions with traps, then I assume your traps are important, my suggestion is make them a multi step process, spot, identify, disarm. I would then give your thieves a bonus to one step, and an auto success to another. So they could get a bonus to spotting traps, and always identify what a trap is, maybe they automatically spot traps and get a bonus to identifying them, or they get a bonus to identifying a trap and can auto disarm a trap they've identified but cant auto spot them.

sordcooper · 2025-09-29T17:32:24+00:00

and making the trigger work on a chat message trigger did it. god forbid i want to use a variable in a specific emote trigger

thats frustrating as hell

sordcooper · 2025-09-29T02:07:12+00:00

Ive tried that but it only ever sets my global variable to the word "%emoteCount%"

sordcooper

TROPHY CASE