It would be interesting to see more additions to pilot gameplay, Especially with things such as turrets. Although ideally, Considering almost all robotic enemies in titanfall have the data knife port, And were all at some point in development goimg to br hackable. It'd be nice to see a piece of extra pilot utility and be able to hack mechanical squads or drone swarms, Since TF Hacking is squad-wide too, With potentially even a Icepick styled upgrade kit. Pilots are half of titanfall so seeing them get even more love would be great. Additionally, Considering Light, Anti Infantry and Anti Titan turrets exist in deployable form, In addition to the medium ones we see in TF2s campaign, And the heavy types seen in TF1, might turrets make a appearance?
calling the game legaly distinct titanfall is a little reductive tbh. also, your a little reductive towards the game in general, or at least thats how it sounds-not that your "wrong", you just sound a bit jugemeantal. otherwise this is really good work.
I respect the balancing style I call “diegetic” I use it for a grafted of shadowrun and cyberpunk with the main sentiment to understand being “a mob hit isn’t a ‘fun and balanced’ encounter’, it’s a genuine attempt on someone’s life”
I definitely like how this makes NPCs more "Titanfally", swapping out "simple NPCs based on group tactics" for "individually strong NPCs with more management". I'm not so hot on the changes to core mechanics, but if the playtests succeeded in conveying the Titanfall feel overall, then I guess they're working as intended. Without the Titanfall context, the core Lancer changes are definitely iffy; several of the things you mentioned are only issues if you ignore their place in the Licence/build system. There are items that allow quicker Reloads, some frames already have massive HP/defences and really don't need more, many frames shouldn't be relying on Repair Cap or even high HP, and Heat/Tech actions have wildly varied uses based on which actions you have access to. Really, Lancer's in-depth customisation is its greatest strength. To be honest I don't think Lancer should be advertised as "Like Titanfall", because it's really quite different outside of having mechs in it. It's cool that you've managed to do enough homebrew that the two properties are actually similar, but generally speaking people getting into Lancer expecting to play Titanfall are gonna be disappointed every time.
The problem is just that there really aren’t a lot of other mainstream mech games in the west, or rather there weren’t for a long time until AC6 came out out.
First, the point of Structure Damage is to simulate battle damage, which can be catastrophic but only like 4% of the time, which is done to counter the RPG trope of "only the last hp matters". Second if you didn't double the HP you wouldn't need to nerf and over complicate healing. Third the reason the healing was full, besides simplicity, was to counter the RPG trope of "healing being less effective than damage". Lastly as a full action you can fire two Mounts at a time, making it quite routine to be throwing 3d6+ Damage at a target a turn, average 10.5 not 4.
And this is before systems, protocols, talents... You can fire an Auxilliary Weapon for up to 5D6+6 AP (Maybe higher, but I haven't encountered it.) As a Quick action. Enough to instagib anything that doesn't have two or more structure.
(For context for anyone reading: I was in the third act of the Lancerfall campaign.) I think it's worth noting that the default Lancer npcs combo off of each other well. I have limited Lancer experience, but from what I have seen the npc mechs can be interesting to fight against when they play off of each other. This is a very overused phrase, but they are genuinely more than the sum of their parts from what I have seen. That said, as you said, they are pretty simple. I can't say if this is intended to promote custom gm enemy design, but what I can say is that your custom mechs were a very welcome change. You struck a tight balance where fights felt strategic, and like death was an actual risk, but not to the point where anything felt unfair. The only exception I can think of is Scorch, but even then having the equivalent of Jack Baker from RE7 appearing every so often was exciting and memorable in its own right. If you did want to change the Scorch, the only thing I can think of is giving some of its attacks self-burn, similar to how you can damage yourself with the Scorch if you're not careful--but I digress. It's also worth noting that I thought Legion was interesting to fight against. Fighting against long-range pointmen/area denial mechs as a close-range burst dps who wanted to take damage from other close-range burst dpses did genuinely give me a lot to play around. All in all, I enjoyed the campaign. When it ended, all I could really think is "I wish we had more sessions of this", which is a sign you're doing something very right as a gm.
My personal opinion is that the Lancer basic NPCs are very bare-bones and *need* the optional systems to add variety and complexity. Suddenly you don’t know which systems an enemy might have installed and this can keep the players guessing. This also gives some use to the “scan” quick action from players.
i like how it takes less than one minute for you to admit that you didn't realize the npc mechs are standins for rank-and-file mechs like reapers that are just big chaff for lancers to fight
Hmm. I respect the effort that went into making this, as it is effectively an entirely different ttrpg that is just based on lancer, but the way you talk about a lot of lancer mechanics makes it clear that you do not understand why those rules are the way that they are, or what they are supposed to do. And it's not fun hearing someone say "these rules each make the game suck and they are bad" knowing that you are not using or thinking about them correctly. I am interested to check this out tho
"The NPCs exist to let the GM set up faux fights for the players to crush right through in order to feel powerful." Ha. No. The NPC *Templates* are a modular baseline and are not meant to function on their own, but interconnected with one another and the environment. That's like... RPG DMing 101 dude. "It did not provide me with the intense, tactical Player Vs. DM gameplay I was expecting." A.) You're a lousy GM if you *expect* player vs. GM gameplay. And B.) Just play a war game. Battletech, Heavy Gear, Warcaster... those are 2-8 player crunchy tactical games that do the exact thing you're describing.
I know lancerfall will be primarily mech focused, but my suggestion would be a bit more abilities for pilots outside of their mechs. I haven't seen the whole system, though, so they might already have plenty aside from what was mentioned in the video. They could get a "pilot token" system, similar to the titans, that lets them use pilot abilities or boosts like map hack, which would give a bonus to hit enemy units. Also, I'm not sure how it would be implemented, but calling down your own titan to crush an enemy player's titan is incredibly fun. I see a lot of players bait with a rodeo so the opponent pops smoke and sits in it, to then call the titan on that spot and annihilate them. Just an idea!
I'm fascinated by your take on the lancer npcs; in my year of playing, they've been some of the BEST tactical units to use against my players to cause some extremely nail-biting fights, and as a GM the fact they have such tight roles with a lot of cool optionals is a lot of fun to use.
all in all from the entire video i can say that you've had such a wildly difference experience with Lancer than me and my groups, but I fully respect the hustle and I hope all your playtesting goes well since you've practically built your own game instead of a lancer variant!
Speaking as someone who played in the campaign, Cass's titans played like an enemy another gm might make for a boss encounter. They still had tight roles, but they had a lot more tools to reinforce those roles.
@@goldra8409oh for sure, theres a lot of fun to be had here, i just found it fascinating that everything i love about lancer is what they bounced off of and rebuilt haha!
I ran a death-heavy western marches game before, and we made death more accessible by letting every player created their own band that operated within the larger guild that drove the campaign. These bands not only give the players a small pool of related characters to choose from, but effectively create a persistent character from the band itself with its relationships and origin helping define how it operates. It also means on a character death the new character will have access to the old one's resources, so long as the other players recover and return their things (or don't get wiped out too). Experience sharing was done by all characters leaving behind journals, letting players give a little epitaph from any entries they wanted to share, and as the GM you can rule how much XP the new character gets. Adapted to Titanfall this could effectively be sub-factions like we see in the game with Marvin's Finest Hour or the ACEs. It also still leave the door open to players who want to be persistent as a simulacrum, with their sub-faction having to spend money and resources recovering and reconstructing them upon death rather than on recruiting someone new.
Also, while this works less well for western marches-styled campaigns body recovery is legitimately a lot of fun. In the case of a party-wipe or just leaving some people behind I've had players face their foes again under different circumstances to recover their things and get lots of XP. Sometimes the enemies are scaled-down from the damage they've taken or just fatigue to make beating them easier as early-game characters, or I'll buff them with even more abilities and make the fight less about recovery and more about just revenge, and all the challenges that comes with. But the most important thing is to switch it up; it gets old quickly if an enemy becomes a bad Dark Souls boss that your players keep dying to and never changes.
While the redesign of LANCER towards titanfall is really cool and sounds super fun to play; combat in roleplaying games shouldnt be GM vs. players, unless you just want to do a wargame spat (which this redesign seems it would be very good for), there's nothing wrong with giving the players an immense challenge; but your stance as a Game Master should be that you want the players to see the rest of your story. A realistic, challenging story is not the problem in my eyes, the problem is the GM vs. Players philosophy. That being said im massively looking forward to seeing what else LANCERFALL has in store for us!
Me and my friend group use to play titanfall 2 all the time together but as the game got quiet we moved into lancer and we've all been enjoying it together
You’re the first channel I’ve subscribed to after watching a single video in a long time. I also kinda hoped this video was coming when you mentioned Lancer in the other Titanfall video and as someone who loves both Titanfall and Lancer, I am here for it!
This is really neat, and super impressive! I'm excited to see what further changes you make and try it out myself! Interestingly I can't say I agree with most of the complaints about Lancers core mechanics (except for the structure and stress table swinginess!), even though they are very close to my thoughts when I first started playing. For me lancer is an rpg with a hell of a learning curve, but once I botched a few initial campaigns and actually got some good advice (the encounter balance guidelines in the core rulebook very easily lead you astray 😢) it's become my favorite tactical game by far. But all that being said I think the changes you pose here forge it into a very different but also extremely fun looking experience, though good luck with balance, LANCER already hits a razors edge and changes as simple as letting everyone quick action reload could have insane consequences esp at low levels (looking at you, cyclone pulse rifle - you are not balanced with the intent of being able to fire every round GodDAMN 😅) but i don't doubt your ability to keep it fun to play! Im especially intrigued by the pilot and infantry changes, as while I think infantry squads in lancer are the way they are to keep them simple enough to deploy alongside 6 other unique npc classes and not require the GM to overclock their brain just to keep from forgetting hundreds of little mechanics in the heat of battle, they definitely lose a lot of that combined arms fantasy that Titanfall captures so incredibly, and I know that Massif press originally wanted to make pilots more of a thing in combat but weren't able to get the balance right in time for the games release so seeing a potential of what they could look like as a "complete" part of the package is very exciting! 😊
Oh side note, I'm reminded of something: I found a Homebrew stress/structure table as part of this free module called "GMS Crisis Core Catalogue" that could be worth checking out! I haven't extensively tested it myself yet but it looks to solve a lot of the issues of "ah it seems one unlucky structure check has ended my whole career" which I've run into as well 😂
As someone who's done very similar adjustments/overhauls to my favorite TTRPG systems, I want to give a word of warning constructed of my own experiences: Be very careful with handling what is supposed to be a large group of units as many separate individuals, even if you highly incentivize sticking together. Even giving the option to split up can be a bad idea, because action economy and the time it takes to play each turn of combat can absolutely destroy balance/fun on accident. It's not the end of the world, but it can absolutely turn into a road to hell paved in good intentions. Good luck on your overhaul though, the general changes you've made overall seem like great additions. Also P.S. as an idea for Northstar: Perhaps an ability to shoot through cover? Perhaps with a significant range/damage debuff when doing so. Making the nimble-sniper into a more "get into weird places and abuse positioning" could be an interesting route, as being able to fly could potentially mean shooting from a position that isn't far away, but still safe.
I love that you made this video. Me and my friends came up with this exact idea a few weeks ago, and I heard you bring it up in one of your videos. Ive been DYING to know how you run it! Thank you so much!
While I’ve never played lancer before, I have some experience with other tabletop rpgs and I think I’ve always wanted to have something like the discounted titanfall mobile game in that format. I loved playing titanfall assault back in the day when it was available and I think it’d transfer great into a tabletop format. The map design was really good with all the high/low ground areas and rooftops restricted from titans really allowed all characters to shine. The way how all the spectres, drones and grunts in addition to titans and pilots with special abilities flowed really nice together. It might be a nice place to look at to get some ideas from.
Thats great, welcome to lancer! Just know that theirs a lot of arguments made in this video that disregard or downright misrepresent mechanics. I sugest running it rules as written and trying it out for yourself first.
As a long time lancer fan I gotta say I disagree with nearly all these changes. Lancer is a ttrpg, not a wargame. The players are meant to have an advantage in any given fight because they're meant to do 2-4 fights a day and it's about telling a narrative. NPC mechs are templates because the player mechs are meant to be more powerful. You're meant to include 1-3 optional systems for NPC mechs. Most NPC mechs are meant to be chaff because the players in lancer are elite soldiers and most NPCs are rank and file. I think calling it unworkable is a bit of a stretch unless you specifically are looking for a wargame not a ttrpg
If you want another way to play table top Titanfall you can play it as a war game in One page rules There is a fan made listing on the one page rule army builder called the Interstellar Corpo-State (IMC) it has all the titans and infantry units but there are no drop ships. If you are confused on what one pager rules is it’s basically warhammer 40k but easier to play and the core rules are only one page It’s also free btw
I haven't had much experience with Lancer, but I think NPC's being that simple is kind of the point. Each one is very focused on one specific thing. If each of them is just doing their thing separately, they're not going to put up much of a fight. The real challenge comes from all the ways the GM can make the various NPCs' abilities combo together to fuck over the players
Wow! This is just wonderfully made, my respects. Talking about "all players are simulacrums" -- this could be a narrative problem. But hear me out. I understand this is not a "big narrative ttrpg", rather a semi-wargame, and still it could be better for players' feel of progression to make smth like skirmish-wargame campaigns do. Character dies? Roll on a table and get a "scar". One could be an eye out and getting a shoot debuff, or "Hatred" towards something in particular which forces you to attack certain type of targets until they are dead (by buffing your attacks against those and debuffing against any other, until hated targets are dead). They could be even strait buffs, for example "what doesn't kill us", which gives your Pilot some extra HP. And one of those "scars" could be Death, which results in a transferring of this character into simulacrum body. This could have it's own down and upsides. Like, "you don't get scars" but also... well, you don't get scars, so you can't become a cool war-torn old man. OR, simulacrums could have their own "scars table", and those are not physical, but purely mental. Flashbacks of your repeating death could stun you suddenly mid-fight. This one table also has it's "death". This time, your war-torn mind becomes totally unreliable, so you are turned off. This is the end of this character's story. Start a new one. I think, this could add a ton of flavor, even if players would be able to negate their physical scars by buying some kind of bionics, or mental by paying for a therapy session (no simulacrum therapy exists). "Death" could be not that sudden also. Like, "roll 1d12 + number of scars you already have on a table" and "death" being a result on a position 14. So, 2 chances, before you could really die for sure. Hope, this helps or at least inspires.
i remember someone in my dnd server used to talk about how he loved Lancer and how good it is even though he hasn't run any games of it yet, when he did he hated it and ended up leaving the server, i hope it is far better
I don't think this would work for lancerfall but I have an idea for a fun summoner class that wouldn't bog down turns. Its basically two bodies. The main body thats a factory on legs that exists to sit in one spot and not die. Then you have one controllable drone at a time who is basically disposable. The funny little guy could do stuff like grab enemies limbs to slow them or throw off their aim, self destruct or take an otherwise devastating blow for an ally. If the drone dies then it gets respawned at the main body. Keep all the abilities on the drone so that they're basically playing a small mech, instead of like 5.
One thing I want to say about Stress and Structure. Heat is generally half the amount or significantly less than the amount of Health they have. So a target with 15 HP has like 5 Heat. So you could have a bunch of Physicala hitters while having only 1 Hacker keeping thebhacker relevent.
You mentioned lancer ONCE on one of your Titanfall videos and now THIS, really thank you, the first time i saw lancers i wanted to play some Titanfall shenanigans with it and i was quite disappointed with the pilot mechanics too (I WANT TO RODEO A TITAN LET ME BE HAPPY) so really thanks for this! I'm not so experienced with ttrpgs (especially lancer) so my feedback won't be that good but i really want to accompany the development of this
Honestly i'd just play another system. I love Lancer by pilots are bugs outside their mechs, so you're better off finding something that fills that niche.
A recommendation for handling death in the frontier defense style missions, you could rule that those missions are training simulations like some of the PvP maps. When players die they have to wait for a set round to respawn, and if there are temporary unlocks similar to frontier defense they lose them when they come back. Making respawning make sense in the context of the mission and also making it very punishing.
i do quite like this idea but I think it being a simulation is a bit of a copout answer. it gets rid of any real stakes or character drama, and that's the kind of thing you want to really embrace in a ttrpg.
@@cassius_scrungoman Fair point, then I’d recommend the good old dnd approach. When a character dies they create a new character at the license level that the players earlier character was at and they loose all the extra gear that didn’t come with their mech, pretty much starting at square one loot wise and player character relationships would need to be reformed. My other suggestion was the scar system that Wasteland 3 uses (I don’t know if that’s what it’s actually called that’s just my personal name for it), but it doesn’t really give a good answer how death is handled. But it instead gives a player character a scar when they drop to zero hp. It’s pretty much a debuff that represents a grievous injury. But they all can be treated with Injury kits in game, so I’d recommend dividing the injuries into two categories. Ones that aren’t as severe and can be treated with an injury kit (like broken bones or severe wounds) and those that are to serious and need to be treated with special equipment or bionics (like lost limbs or damaged organs). Sorry for the wall of text, I like making ttrpgs as a bit of a side hobby. PS I feel like the simulation frontier defense mission type could still be a fun idea for your system, but it would probably work best as an alternative fast pace rule set for the game.
Our fucking lancer group is something else. 4 game developers, 2 Xcom impossible vets, and a rookie GM that is honestly INCREDIBLE in their ability to actually challenge us in any meaningful way at all while writing a pretty damn good story. I really encourage more people to give Lancer a go. While its base system does need work, especially with position and line of sight, it's overall great. I like your BOSS ideas though and am gonna throw this at our GM for more ideas, as we keep rolling the fuck out of their ultras >_>
Cool to see this fork of Lancer! Some of these mechanics reminded me of Mainframe Defenders, a game rhat I think does fundamental mechanics a tad more reasonably
I agree with a lot of what you said but I think tat reloading taking a Full Acton is somewhat balanced by the fact that Stabilize reloads ALL your loading weapons, so you can shoot all of them over the course of two turns and spend a third to reload them all at the same time. The cumbersome reload mechanics are also circumvented by some mechs' traits (Raleigh and Stortebecker), certain systems, like Barbarossa's Autoloader Drone and Internal Ammo Feed, and some abilities that grant more actions. I recall having a lot of fun with a Sniper Raleigh which relied Heavy Gunner to shoot their Antimateriel Rifle between rounds, so that they wouldn't need to make attacks on their actual turn and their Full Metal Jacket trait would reload the rifle in time to be used again for the next use of Heavy Gunner.
Because I loved your idea, here are some good considerations about the HP. At TitanFall, every titan has a shield bar (Ex:from stolen batteries), the main health bar and the critical stage bar. But when you look closer at the game, you can notice that the main health bar is a energy shield protecting the hull, shown as blue effects when hit, which means that the white bars are your main shield health, the blue bar is a extra shield and the critical stage is indeed your hull integrity health. Well, the way which Lancer done sounds like the "shield"(HP) only recharges after a hull damage (* what is pretty dumb *) and with a more realistic approach were each hull hit can be lethal, while you went to a more arcade style as in TitanFall, by removing the weight of specific part damages and increasing the "shield" strength. Both have some perspectives, but you could keep the part damage as a critical hit consequence and also making the shield actually a shield by making it more rechargeable, because would give more immersion and also making the players act more carefully. Those things would make a sort of middle ground between World of Tanks and WarThunder.
Personally I would take some of the pilot mechanics from After//Burner and apply that to LANCER but heavily mod the mechs to get the Titan customization from Titanfall 1 - the best game ever made.
i would recommend allowing titan fall regen for the players, possibly through a core system but only when the player is doing pilot stuff, similar to how TF|(2) does it
While I think its neat to see people take inspiration from what they don't like about lancer and try and work it into something new, I really don't like the insistence on the fact that its mechanics are just inherently bad, because for the most part I see you misunderstanding the point of how they work in the game itself. Ordinance weapons are slow to use because they are ether meant to be used sparsely or built around with systems such as auto-loader drone or the Raleigh mech. Find it a bit strange how you find stabilize to be boring but yet repair cap to be OP, ya repair cap massively increases their hit-points but its balanced by the fact stabilize is a full action, if your using your Repairs your not doing anything else unless you overcharge. You now have a choice to ether go for the kill and risk structure or play it safe and boring. Structure feels very punishing when you see the "two 1s is a dead mech" but in over the year of playing and GM'ing ive done, Ive only seen that come up twice both near the end of a mission and in service to cool moments we reminisce about lots. Your views on the destroyed weapon mount entry on the structure chart shows me you undervalue systems, as mechs with one weapon mount can often times pull their own weight in a battle without firing a single shot through systems alone. This becomes more obvious when I hear your thoughts on hacking. Speaking of witch heat is probably the most misunderstood thing here. Heat should not be viewed as a damage type, it should be viewed as a player limiter. Overcharging is a very powerful tool in a lancers arsenal and is one of the many things that puts their mechs head and shoulders above NPC's, giving them more actions in combat on a whim and is balanced by heat capacity. On top of that many other powerful weapons and systems build up heat when used, limiting them further. Now, after the players have built up heat on their own from systems, overcharge and weapons, now the 2 heat from invade starts to become more interesting as it can be used to punish players with poor heat management, causing them to most likely become exposed, setting them up for lethal health damage. And hacking isn't just for heat damage or a small de-buff, its meant for controlling the battlefield. Sure the basic invade options and tech actions may seem boring at first, but this is an RPG at the end of the day, the cool stuff is always level gated. Moving enemies against their will to throw them off a cliff, into mines or just to set up another player to opportunity attack them, Turning off gravity to send an ally flying at the enemy or to disorient an opponent, literally hacking into a different timeline! Hacking is an incredible asset to have on the battlefield, It may not kill things outright, but it makes them die faster. While it may not seem attractive to you if you ever play with a Minotaur, Goblin or Lich you will learn fast how cool hacking can be. Anyway, hope I could clear some things up and maybe try and get you to look at the game I love from a different light, and I hope this project gets attention, does well and becomes its own cool thing.
To make it a bit more Classic TTRPG, you could run the game starting from training/grunt. That way you could climb up slowly the number of mechs in games you run.
Honestly, with the amount of work youve already put in, the idea of making a Titanfall TTRPG yourself isnt a bad idea. You could call it something like 'Frontier's Fall' or something like that.
Hard disagree with the hp in lancer, you say you dont want to drag the gameplay but then you increase the hp and make it far easier to replenish? When a lancer mech goes down for repairs its important that the dm wrenches up the tension for them, and make sure that their team defends their fallen comrade! I love the idea but i feel its too wargamey for a system thats combat *and* roleplay focused
Apologies if you mention this, saving this to watch at work tomorrow lol! Highly recommend you give Battletech a try at some point if you want some good mech Tabletop gaming. Theres two versions, Classic is crunchy and detailed, Alpha Strike is quick and fun! Plus RPG and Campaigns, there's a ton to do in the game.
This reminds me of my shitty attempt of making a titanfall ttrpg back in high school, right around when apex was dropped on us, so I had to, midway through making all the different stuff, try to find a way to incorporate all the new apex stuff into the titanfall ttrpg I was making (mainly just the guns bc I thought the peacekeeper was badass)
You could appropriate some of the tech from altered carbon to explain death. Basically all that is you is stored on a chip and your body can be replaced, could even use apex's respawn banners as the chip
Maybe a good way to go for northstar would be to turn them into a debuff/ support? This way the class would still have impact, stay unique and would result in more interesting gameplay as it would incentivise teamplay and coordination to take out priority targets. I can see this as potentially being quite annoying though, especially if players or the gm doesnt know any effective counterplay so if you did choose to do this the range mechanic you had for it would suit it well as it would also add an extra layer of risk/reward since players and the gm could choose to get closer to do more, but also run the risk of being caught out and put into a blender. Anyways feel free to use or completely ignore my suggestion, either way have a good day and lancerfall looks p sick
If you're not happy with Northstar, have you tried just turning Northstar into Viper? Viper is cool, I'm sure it would be easier to make him cool than default Northstar.
What is the balance like if you give pilots the ability to call down titans like a core ability? You could even make a mode that has players start as pilots and gain titans as the fight progresses, allowing for ejects and such with an invisible eject being akin to tones core ability?
I have yet to play Lancer myself (campaign is still in a planning state) and I am excited to play my Gorgon though I would be lying if I hadn't thought about all the things related to Titanfall (and Armored Core) that I would want to have in the game as well. I am amazed on how much work you put in and while I probably won't get around to look into it any deeper, I have a question regarding your baseline npc classes, how powerful would you see them compared to a completely RAW Lancer player character and would they be suitable to be "boss fights" at certain LLs?
on their own they would probably chew through vanilla players, but honestly I don't know. most of my campaign with these guys was played with the only major change being 2x player hp, so as a boss on their own I think they'd work fine.
Have you tried the tabletop systems GURPS by Steve Jackson Games or Heavy Gear by Dream Pod 9? The former is a universal simulationist tabletop game which makes tactical combat far more interesting than D&D-likes, The latter is a straight up tactical wargame with mechs. I think you might enjoy one or both of these.
So you stripped out everything that made Lancer *Lancer* and then declared it better Lancer. Just go make your own TTRPG and quit messing with a perfectly functional game you clearly didn't play.
Ok first, cool Project, of course we want to play Titanfall in Lancer❤ But after 2 Minutes of watching the Vid, I disagree strongly with the Statement of unbalanced Combat and to small a Tactical Challenge for the GM or Players😅 I had a Player who left my Group, because he felt like the NPCs are too strong and it was to challenging for him... If you stick to the suggestions how to set up a Battle, given by the Rulebook however, then it is pretty Easy for Players. Still you get all the tools from the Rules to actualy make engaging difficult Fights, should you desire them. I feel like "fixing" is to strong a claim for this particular Situation, while doing it differently is not wrong😉 If you prefere it this way, its perfectly fine with me, but you didnt fix a already very very very well balanced game, where only youre own creativity can stop you from doing whatever you want😉 P.s.: I watched until 8 Minutes now, because I was curious about youre Ideas and I dont realy get what youre saying, when claiming that Enemys do like 8 damage most of the time. Wich Mech has 33 HP?😅 Thats like at License Level 3-6 earliest, when you skilled nothing else, wich can be a good tactic, but has its own weakneses. There are Enemys who structure you with one Attack. You get double Damage, when you are exposed, enemys could decide to simply hack you and explode youre Reactor, because shooting him is not worth it...😅 At least the thing with Enemy Mechs should at least have 2 Structure we agree on👌 But nobody said the Enemy should have just 1 Structure right?
it sounds genuinely mechanically worse. like, i know that lancer looks like titanfall if you squint real hard, but it is absolutely not "titanfall with the serial numbers filed off" its a different thing made to do different things. Of course theres no pilot mechanics, of course npcs are simple. Theyre meant to do that because of the way it is. There are systems way better suited to running titanfall, because theyre actually meant for that. This is somewhat painfull to watch, like listening to someone try to run a social intrigue campaign localized entierely to one big castle in dnd or something,
when I was introduced to lancer, it was brought up in reference to Titanfall several times. if you look online for discussions about the system, references to Titanfall are ubiquitous. they are definitely going for different things, but they definitely have a close relation.
I tried playing this with a group and we've run into every single issue stated in the video that LANCER has. It genuinely is that bad and makes for pretty terrible game play, to the point that in a fight against a boss enemy and its goons, I managed to crit it and it lost its *only* weapon that it had. In a fight where it was dealing massive damage to our party, effectively forcing the person targeted to stabilize and heal or leave its attack range, a single crit with a homebrewed glorified butter knife that dealt 1d4 damage that I had fitted to my mech simply because I had the space to do so and couldn't fit anything else on, suddenly the fight became rolling dice to kill it because it couldn't do anything else. Genuinely, the base LANCER system is too volatile and sways too heavily from one extreme to the other, either the GM does way too much damage, or the players do, and there is no in-between. And what is described in the video is always going to be INFINITELY more fun simply because its easier to play and keep track of. A player in our group tried out a Hacker mech only to find that he had quite literally no options, and like the video states: "If I used Lock-On on a target without moving, and its Tuesday and it has half health and blah blah blah". It is quite literally no fun to have a 4th party member that is near entirely useless most of the time for the rest of the party cause they can't reliably help in a fight, and it's not fun for said 4th party member to NOT BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING EVER because the system is so far up its own ass trying to get you to play Bingo with its many asinine conditions to even attempt to hack something in the first place. I'd rather play whatever the newest iteration of Lancerfall is right now than go through that shit again.
@@Average_GDI_Disk_Thrower there are systems out there for people like you! You might enjoy the slower pace in combat, with resistances, armor and dodging that shadowrun has, offering little randomness and npcs with full player capabilities. Or the fast paced fps nature of a lumen based system. Try some stuff out! Just don’t complain because this system isn’t something it’s not trying to be
people can enjoy lancer for what it is and I'm happy they like it. i didn't like it and so I changed it into something I did. i don't see what's wrong with that. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all ttrpgs in existence, I'm going to work with what I know.
@@cassius_scrungoman absolutely. It’s fine that you play it like that, honestly, the original comment was maybe a bit too heated, but I wrote it while watching the video and especially compared to some of your other content you seemed very disparaging and almost mean throughout, calling almost every mechanic silly, unrealistic, arbitrary etc, which doesn’t feel good too watch if I like it for those very reasons you know? Still gonna keep watching your stuff, even if I think you’re a mildy mediocre game designer that made one video i didn’t like one time
Not to yuck your yum, but trying to make Lancer into Titanfall sounds a lot like "how to make D&D a low magic dark fantasy?" It feels like trying to make the system something it's not. Also the statement "I was lured in by a genuine tactical challenge of GM vs players." There is no such thing as GMs vs players. Every fight is a "faux fight" because the GM can make the players face 30 enemies at once. What you seem to be wanting is more difficult combats that require tactics and careful decision making which is something Lancer already does as a thousand second hand accounts prove. Homebrews great, and if it works for your group good for you. But the way you talk about it sounds like you think you're version of Lancer is "better". Just as a basic example the reason lancer NPCs are so simple is because you're meant to have multiple different NPCs on the field at once so they can play off each other, and if they each had the complexity of a PC most GMs would forget half the things their baddies can do and the combat would grind to a slog as the GM pours over mountains of text just to take 1 optimal turn. If you're having fun then you do you, but you're coming off really dismissive. Don't kick down other artists man, it's not a good look.
Cassius and I have used foundry (virtual tabletop) in the past, if the initial buy in of that is a bit much for you, there is roll 20 support as well, although it comes with some issues and jank (mostly tokens of above size 1). If you mean where to find a group and not where to play, lancer community discord or other lfg forums are viable options. Or just asking friends / people at your local games store.
I have to say your choices for the pronouns of the Mechs are interesting, although given my rather shallow knowledge of the lore I have no idea if theyre based on anything but vibes
If you want a tractor challenge, i can also reccommend turning up the rank of NPCs, and remember that balance is based around multiple foghts occurring between rests
![Is Helldivers Finally Good Now? | Cassius' Compendium™ [cc]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vdS4kzZJMpg/mqdefault.jpg)
![Is Helldivers Finally Good Now? | Cassius' Compendium™ [cc]](/img/tr.png)
here is a link to my discord incase you have interest in playing this yourself: discord.gg/5cJ7b4mYXj
Now put in monarch
Can Titanfall work in alpha strike?
It would be interesting to see more additions to pilot gameplay, Especially with things such as turrets.
Although ideally, Considering almost all robotic enemies in titanfall have the data knife port, And were all at some point in development goimg to br hackable.
It'd be nice to see a piece of extra pilot utility and be able to hack mechanical squads or drone swarms, Since TF Hacking is squad-wide too, With potentially even a Icepick styled upgrade kit.
Pilots are half of titanfall so seeing them get even more love would be great.
Additionally, Considering Light, Anti Infantry and Anti Titan turrets exist in deployable form, In addition to the medium ones we see in TF2s campaign, And the heavy types seen in TF1, might turrets make a appearance?
calling the game legaly distinct titanfall is a little reductive tbh. also, your a little reductive towards the game in general, or at least thats how it sounds-not that your "wrong", you just sound a bit jugemeantal. otherwise this is really good work.
I respect the balancing style I call “diegetic” I use it for a grafted of shadowrun and cyberpunk with the main sentiment to understand being “a mob hit isn’t a ‘fun and balanced’ encounter’, it’s a genuine attempt on someone’s life”
I definitely like how this makes NPCs more "Titanfally", swapping out "simple NPCs based on group tactics" for "individually strong NPCs with more management". I'm not so hot on the changes to core mechanics, but if the playtests succeeded in conveying the Titanfall feel overall, then I guess they're working as intended.
Without the Titanfall context, the core Lancer changes are definitely iffy; several of the things you mentioned are only issues if you ignore their place in the Licence/build system. There are items that allow quicker Reloads, some frames already have massive HP/defences and really don't need more, many frames shouldn't be relying on Repair Cap or even high HP, and Heat/Tech actions have wildly varied uses based on which actions you have access to. Really, Lancer's in-depth customisation is its greatest strength.
To be honest I don't think Lancer should be advertised as "Like Titanfall", because it's really quite different outside of having mechs in it. It's cool that you've managed to do enough homebrew that the two properties are actually similar, but generally speaking people getting into Lancer expecting to play Titanfall are gonna be disappointed every time.
The problem is just that there really aren’t a lot of other mainstream mech games in the west, or rather there weren’t for a long time until AC6 came out out.
First, the point of Structure Damage is to simulate battle damage, which can be catastrophic but only like 4% of the time, which is done to counter the RPG trope of "only the last hp matters".
Second if you didn't double the HP you wouldn't need to nerf and over complicate healing.
Third the reason the healing was full, besides simplicity, was to counter the RPG trope of "healing being less effective than damage".
Lastly as a full action you can fire two Mounts at a time, making it quite routine to be throwing 3d6+ Damage at a target a turn, average 10.5 not 4.
All true.
And this is before systems, protocols, talents... You can fire an Auxilliary Weapon for up to 5D6+6 AP (Maybe higher, but I haven't encountered it.) As a Quick action. Enough to instagib anything that doesn't have two or more structure.
(For context for anyone reading: I was in the third act of the Lancerfall campaign.)
I think it's worth noting that the default Lancer npcs combo off of each other well. I have limited Lancer experience, but from what I have seen the npc mechs can be interesting to fight against when they play off of each other. This is a very overused phrase, but they are genuinely more than the sum of their parts from what I have seen.
That said, as you said, they are pretty simple. I can't say if this is intended to promote custom gm enemy design, but what I can say is that your custom mechs were a very welcome change. You struck a tight balance where fights felt strategic, and like death was an actual risk, but not to the point where anything felt unfair. The only exception I can think of is Scorch, but even then having the equivalent of Jack Baker from RE7 appearing every so often was exciting and memorable in its own right. If you did want to change the Scorch, the only thing I can think of is giving some of its attacks self-burn, similar to how you can damage yourself with the Scorch if you're not careful--but I digress.
It's also worth noting that I thought Legion was interesting to fight against. Fighting against long-range pointmen/area denial mechs as a close-range burst dps who wanted to take damage from other close-range burst dpses did genuinely give me a lot to play around.
All in all, I enjoyed the campaign. When it ended, all I could really think is "I wish we had more sessions of this", which is a sign you're doing something very right as a gm.
My personal opinion is that the Lancer basic NPCs are very bare-bones and *need* the optional systems to add variety and complexity. Suddenly you don’t know which systems an enemy might have installed and this can keep the players guessing. This also gives some use to the “scan” quick action from players.
i like how it takes less than one minute for you to admit that you didn't realize the npc mechs are standins for rank-and-file mechs like reapers that are just big chaff for lancers to fight
Hmm. I respect the effort that went into making this, as it is effectively an entirely different ttrpg that is just based on lancer, but the way you talk about a lot of lancer mechanics makes it clear that you do not understand why those rules are the way that they are, or what they are supposed to do. And it's not fun hearing someone say "these rules each make the game suck and they are bad" knowing that you are not using or thinking about them correctly.
I am interested to check this out tho
Yep, skill issues galore on his part.
"The NPCs exist to let the GM set up faux fights for the players to crush right through in order to feel powerful."
Ha. No. The NPC *Templates* are a modular baseline and are not meant to function on their own, but interconnected with one another and the environment. That's like... RPG DMing 101 dude.
"It did not provide me with the intense, tactical Player Vs. DM gameplay I was expecting."
A.) You're a lousy GM if you *expect* player vs. GM gameplay. And B.) Just play a war game. Battletech, Heavy Gear, Warcaster... those are 2-8 player crunchy tactical games that do the exact thing you're describing.
@@TheSimpleMan454 I don't think this was meant to be a reply to me but I 100% agree
I know lancerfall will be primarily mech focused, but my suggestion would be a bit more abilities for pilots outside of their mechs. I haven't seen the whole system, though, so they might already have plenty aside from what was mentioned in the video. They could get a "pilot token" system, similar to the titans, that lets them use pilot abilities or boosts like map hack, which would give a bonus to hit enemy units.
Also, I'm not sure how it would be implemented, but calling down your own titan to crush an enemy player's titan is incredibly fun. I see a lot of players bait with a rodeo so the opponent pops smoke and sits in it, to then call the titan on that spot and annihilate them. Just an idea!
I'm fascinated by your take on the lancer npcs; in my year of playing, they've been some of the BEST tactical units to use against my players to cause some extremely nail-biting fights, and as a GM the fact they have such tight roles with a lot of cool optionals is a lot of fun to use.
all in all from the entire video i can say that you've had such a wildly difference experience with Lancer than me and my groups, but I fully respect the hustle and I hope all your playtesting goes well since you've practically built your own game instead of a lancer variant!
Speaking as someone who played in the campaign, Cass's titans played like an enemy another gm might make for a boss encounter. They still had tight roles, but they had a lot more tools to reinforce those roles.
@@goldra8409oh for sure, theres a lot of fun to be had here, i just found it fascinating that everything i love about lancer is what they bounced off of and rebuilt haha!
@@goldra8409it would be an improvement over the ultra’s
Those things have TOO many traits! So hard to keep track of it all.
I ran a death-heavy western marches game before, and we made death more accessible by letting every player created their own band that operated within the larger guild that drove the campaign. These bands not only give the players a small pool of related characters to choose from, but effectively create a persistent character from the band itself with its relationships and origin helping define how it operates. It also means on a character death the new character will have access to the old one's resources, so long as the other players recover and return their things (or don't get wiped out too). Experience sharing was done by all characters leaving behind journals, letting players give a little epitaph from any entries they wanted to share, and as the GM you can rule how much XP the new character gets.
Adapted to Titanfall this could effectively be sub-factions like we see in the game with Marvin's Finest Hour or the ACEs. It also still leave the door open to players who want to be persistent as a simulacrum, with their sub-faction having to spend money and resources recovering and reconstructing them upon death rather than on recruiting someone new.
Also, while this works less well for western marches-styled campaigns body recovery is legitimately a lot of fun. In the case of a party-wipe or just leaving some people behind I've had players face their foes again under different circumstances to recover their things and get lots of XP. Sometimes the enemies are scaled-down from the damage they've taken or just fatigue to make beating them easier as early-game characters, or I'll buff them with even more abilities and make the fight less about recovery and more about just revenge, and all the challenges that comes with. But the most important thing is to switch it up; it gets old quickly if an enemy becomes a bad Dark Souls boss that your players keep dying to and never changes.
While the redesign of LANCER towards titanfall is really cool and sounds super fun to play; combat in roleplaying games shouldnt be GM vs. players, unless you just want to do a wargame spat (which this redesign seems it would be very good for), there's nothing wrong with giving the players an immense challenge; but your stance as a Game Master should be that you want the players to see the rest of your story. A realistic, challenging story is not the problem in my eyes, the problem is the GM vs. Players philosophy. That being said im massively looking forward to seeing what else LANCERFALL has in store for us!
Me and my friend group use to play titanfall 2 all the time together but as the game got quiet we moved into lancer and we've all been enjoying it together
Ok I'm not even halfway throught the video and I'm already sold on it
Always love to see more people getting into Lancer. I've been playing for about 2 years and its definitely one of my favorite TTRPG's.
You’re the first channel I’ve subscribed to after watching a single video in a long time.
I also kinda hoped this video was coming when you mentioned Lancer in the other Titanfall video and as someone who loves both Titanfall and Lancer, I am here for it!
This is really neat, and super impressive! I'm excited to see what further changes you make and try it out myself!
Interestingly I can't say I agree with most of the complaints about Lancers core mechanics (except for the structure and stress table swinginess!), even though they are very close to my thoughts when I first started playing. For me lancer is an rpg with a hell of a learning curve, but once I botched a few initial campaigns and actually got some good advice (the encounter balance guidelines in the core rulebook very easily lead you astray 😢) it's become my favorite tactical game by far. But all that being said I think the changes you pose here forge it into a very different but also extremely fun looking experience, though good luck with balance, LANCER already hits a razors edge and changes as simple as letting everyone quick action reload could have insane consequences esp at low levels (looking at you, cyclone pulse rifle - you are not balanced with the intent of being able to fire every round GodDAMN 😅) but i don't doubt your ability to keep it fun to play! Im especially intrigued by the pilot and infantry changes, as while I think infantry squads in lancer are the way they are to keep them simple enough to deploy alongside 6 other unique npc classes and not require the GM to overclock their brain just to keep from forgetting hundreds of little mechanics in the heat of battle, they definitely lose a lot of that combined arms fantasy that Titanfall captures so incredibly, and I know that Massif press originally wanted to make pilots more of a thing in combat but weren't able to get the balance right in time for the games release so seeing a potential of what they could look like as a "complete" part of the package is very exciting! 😊
Oh side note, I'm reminded of something: I found a Homebrew stress/structure table as part of this free module called "GMS Crisis Core Catalogue" that could be worth checking out! I haven't extensively tested it myself yet but it looks to solve a lot of the issues of "ah it seems one unlucky structure check has ended my whole career" which I've run into as well 😂
As someone who's done very similar adjustments/overhauls to my favorite TTRPG systems, I want to give a word of warning constructed of my own experiences: Be very careful with handling what is supposed to be a large group of units as many separate individuals, even if you highly incentivize sticking together. Even giving the option to split up can be a bad idea, because action economy and the time it takes to play each turn of combat can absolutely destroy balance/fun on accident. It's not the end of the world, but it can absolutely turn into a road to hell paved in good intentions.
Good luck on your overhaul though, the general changes you've made overall seem like great additions.
Also P.S. as an idea for Northstar: Perhaps an ability to shoot through cover? Perhaps with a significant range/damage debuff when doing so. Making the nimble-sniper into a more "get into weird places and abuse positioning" could be an interesting route, as being able to fly could potentially mean shooting from a position that isn't far away, but still safe.
I love that you made this video. Me and my friends came up with this exact idea a few weeks ago, and I heard you bring it up in one of your videos. Ive been DYING to know how you run it! Thank you so much!
While I’ve never played lancer before, I have some experience with other tabletop rpgs and I think I’ve always wanted to have something like the discounted titanfall mobile game in that format. I loved playing titanfall assault back in the day when it was available and I think it’d transfer great into a tabletop format. The map design was really good with all the high/low ground areas and rooftops restricted from titans really allowed all characters to shine. The way how all the spectres, drones and grunts in addition to titans and pilots with special abilities flowed really nice together. It might be a nice place to look at to get some ideas from.
I literally just started getting interested in lancer like last week
Thats great, welcome to lancer! Just know that theirs a lot of arguments made in this video that disregard or downright misrepresent mechanics. I sugest running it rules as written and trying it out for yourself first.
As a long time lancer fan I gotta say I disagree with nearly all these changes. Lancer is a ttrpg, not a wargame. The players are meant to have an advantage in any given fight because they're meant to do 2-4 fights a day and it's about telling a narrative.
NPC mechs are templates because the player mechs are meant to be more powerful. You're meant to include 1-3 optional systems for NPC mechs. Most NPC mechs are meant to be chaff because the players in lancer are elite soldiers and most NPCs are rank and file.
I think calling it unworkable is a bit of a stretch unless you specifically are looking for a wargame not a ttrpg
If you want another way to play table top Titanfall you can play it as a war game in One page rules
There is a fan made listing on the one page rule army builder called the Interstellar Corpo-State (IMC) it has all the titans and infantry units but there are no drop ships.
If you are confused on what one pager rules is it’s basically warhammer 40k but easier to play and the core rules are only one page
It’s also free btw
I haven't had much experience with Lancer, but I think NPC's being that simple is kind of the point. Each one is very focused on one specific thing. If each of them is just doing their thing separately, they're not going to put up much of a fight. The real challenge comes from all the ways the GM can make the various NPCs' abilities combo together to fuck over the players
Wow! This is just wonderfully made, my respects. Talking about "all players are simulacrums" -- this could be a narrative problem. But hear me out.
I understand this is not a "big narrative ttrpg", rather a semi-wargame, and still it could be better for players' feel of progression to make smth like skirmish-wargame campaigns do.
Character dies? Roll on a table and get a "scar". One could be an eye out and getting a shoot debuff, or "Hatred" towards something in particular which forces you to attack certain type of targets until they are dead (by buffing your attacks against those and debuffing against any other, until hated targets are dead). They could be even strait buffs, for example "what doesn't kill us", which gives your Pilot some extra HP.
And one of those "scars" could be Death, which results in a transferring of this character into simulacrum body. This could have it's own down and upsides. Like, "you don't get scars" but also... well, you don't get scars, so you can't become a cool war-torn old man.
OR, simulacrums could have their own "scars table", and those are not physical, but purely mental. Flashbacks of your repeating death could stun you suddenly mid-fight. This one table also has it's "death". This time, your war-torn mind becomes totally unreliable, so you are turned off. This is the end of this character's story. Start a new one.
I think, this could add a ton of flavor, even if players would be able to negate their physical scars by buying some kind of bionics, or mental by paying for a therapy session (no simulacrum therapy exists). "Death" could be not that sudden also. Like, "roll 1d12 + number of scars you already have on a table" and "death" being a result on a position 14. So, 2 chances, before you could really die for sure.
Hope, this helps or at least inspires.
i remember someone in my dnd server used to talk about how he loved Lancer and how good it is even though he hasn't run any games of it yet, when he did he hated it and ended up leaving the server, i hope it is far better
WHY DID IT TAKE ME SO LONG TO FIND THIS I HAD NO IDEA YOU TALKED ABOUT LANCER
I don't think this would work for lancerfall but I have an idea for a fun summoner class that wouldn't bog down turns. Its basically two bodies. The main body thats a factory on legs that exists to sit in one spot and not die. Then you have one controllable drone at a time who is basically disposable. The funny little guy could do stuff like grab enemies limbs to slow them or throw off their aim, self destruct or take an otherwise devastating blow for an ally. If the drone dies then it gets respawned at the main body. Keep all the abilities on the drone so that they're basically playing a small mech, instead of like 5.
One thing I want to say about Stress and Structure.
Heat is generally half the amount or significantly less than the amount of Health they have. So a target with 15 HP has like 5 Heat.
So you could have a bunch of Physicala hitters while having only 1 Hacker keeping thebhacker relevent.
The timing on this is fucking perfect because I was gonna run something like this soon thank you so much
I never knew I needed this. Please don't let this die
You mentioned lancer ONCE on one of your Titanfall videos and now THIS, really thank you, the first time i saw lancers i wanted to play some Titanfall shenanigans with it and i was quite disappointed with the pilot mechanics too (I WANT TO RODEO A TITAN LET ME BE HAPPY) so really thanks for this! I'm not so experienced with ttrpgs (especially lancer) so my feedback won't be that good but i really want to accompany the development of this
Honestly i'd just play another system. I love Lancer by pilots are bugs outside their mechs, so you're better off finding something that fills that niche.
A recommendation for handling death in the frontier defense style missions, you could rule that those missions are training simulations like some of the PvP maps. When players die they have to wait for a set round to respawn, and if there are temporary unlocks similar to frontier defense they lose them when they come back. Making respawning make sense in the context of the mission and also making it very punishing.
i do quite like this idea but I think it being a simulation is a bit of a copout answer. it gets rid of any real stakes or character drama, and that's the kind of thing you want to really embrace in a ttrpg.
@@cassius_scrungoman Fair point, then I’d recommend the good old dnd approach. When a character dies they create a new character at the license level that the players earlier character was at and they loose all the extra gear that didn’t come with their mech, pretty much starting at square one loot wise and player character relationships would need to be reformed.
My other suggestion was the scar system that Wasteland 3 uses (I don’t know if that’s what it’s actually called that’s just my personal name for it), but it doesn’t really give a good answer how death is handled. But it instead gives a player character a scar when they drop to zero hp. It’s pretty much a debuff that represents a grievous injury. But they all can be treated with Injury kits in game, so I’d recommend dividing the injuries into two categories. Ones that aren’t as severe and can be treated with an injury kit (like broken bones or severe wounds) and those that are to serious and need to be treated with special equipment or bionics (like lost limbs or damaged organs).
Sorry for the wall of text, I like making ttrpgs as a bit of a side hobby. PS I feel like the simulation frontier defense mission type could still be a fun idea for your system, but it would probably work best as an alternative fast pace rule set for the game.
Our fucking lancer group is something else. 4 game developers, 2 Xcom impossible vets, and a rookie GM that is honestly INCREDIBLE in their ability to actually challenge us in any meaningful way at all while writing a pretty damn good story.
I really encourage more people to give Lancer a go. While its base system does need work, especially with position and line of sight, it's overall great. I like your BOSS ideas though and am gonna throw this at our GM for more ideas, as we keep rolling the fuck out of their ultras >_>
Cool to see this fork of Lancer! Some of these mechanics reminded me of Mainframe Defenders, a game rhat I think does fundamental mechanics a tad more reasonably
I love you and everything you do lancerfall was a dream of mine for a long time and this is a dream come true
I agree with a lot of what you said but I think tat reloading taking a Full Acton is somewhat balanced by the fact that Stabilize reloads ALL your loading weapons, so you can shoot all of them over the course of two turns and spend a third to reload them all at the same time.
The cumbersome reload mechanics are also circumvented by some mechs' traits (Raleigh and Stortebecker), certain systems, like Barbarossa's Autoloader Drone and Internal Ammo Feed, and some abilities that grant more actions.
I recall having a lot of fun with a Sniper Raleigh which relied Heavy Gunner to shoot their Antimateriel Rifle between rounds, so that they wouldn't need to make attacks on their actual turn and their Full Metal Jacket trait would reload the rifle in time to be used again for the next use of Heavy Gunner.
Because I loved your idea, here are some good considerations about the HP.
At TitanFall, every titan has a shield bar (Ex:from stolen batteries), the main health bar and the critical stage bar. But when you look closer at the game, you can notice that the main health bar is a energy shield protecting the hull, shown as blue effects when hit, which means that the white bars are your main shield health, the blue bar is a extra shield and the critical stage is indeed your hull integrity health.
Well, the way which Lancer done sounds like the "shield"(HP) only recharges after a hull damage (* what is pretty dumb *) and with a more realistic approach were each hull hit can be lethal, while you went to a more arcade style as in TitanFall, by removing the weight of specific part damages and increasing the "shield" strength. Both have some perspectives, but you could keep the part damage as a critical hit consequence and also making the shield actually a shield by making it more rechargeable, because would give more immersion and also making the players act more carefully. Those things would make a sort of middle ground between World of Tanks and WarThunder.
Personally I would take some of the pilot mechanics from After//Burner and apply that to LANCER but heavily mod the mechs to get the Titan customization from Titanfall 1 - the best game ever made.
Came for the titanfall stayed for your profile pic
Noticed the starsector(?) sound effects, nice. Just started to GM lancer recently, which is a funny coincidence.
I hope lancer gets really really really popular
i would recommend allowing titan fall regen for the players, possibly through a core system but only when the player is doing pilot stuff, similar to how TF|(2) does it
I feel like you would really like Battletech.
Im not sure if you've already thought of this but Northstars VTOL Hover should give her a minor damage bonus.
This was a brilliant video! Hopefully I can cobble together a group to try this. Cheers! :)
While I think its neat to see people take inspiration from what they don't like about lancer and try and work it into something new, I really don't like the insistence on the fact that its mechanics are just inherently bad, because for the most part I see you misunderstanding the point of how they work in the game itself.
Ordinance weapons are slow to use because they are ether meant to be used sparsely or built around with systems such as auto-loader drone or the Raleigh mech.
Find it a bit strange how you find stabilize to be boring but yet repair cap to be OP, ya repair cap massively increases their hit-points but its balanced by the fact stabilize is a full action, if your using your Repairs your not doing anything else unless you overcharge. You now have a choice to ether go for the kill and risk structure or play it safe and boring.
Structure feels very punishing when you see the "two 1s is a dead mech" but in over the year of playing and GM'ing ive done, Ive only seen that come up twice both near the end of a mission and in service to cool moments we reminisce about lots.
Your views on the destroyed weapon mount entry on the structure chart shows me you undervalue systems, as mechs with one weapon mount can often times pull their own weight in a battle without firing a single shot through systems alone. This becomes more obvious when I hear your thoughts on hacking.
Speaking of witch heat is probably the most misunderstood thing here. Heat should not be viewed as a damage type, it should be viewed as a player limiter. Overcharging is a very powerful tool in a lancers arsenal and is one of the many things that puts their mechs head and shoulders above NPC's, giving them more actions in combat on a whim and is balanced by heat capacity. On top of that many other powerful weapons and systems build up heat when used, limiting them further. Now, after the players have built up heat on their own from systems, overcharge and weapons, now the 2 heat from invade starts to become more interesting as it can be used to punish players with poor heat management, causing them to most likely become exposed, setting them up for lethal health damage.
And hacking isn't just for heat damage or a small de-buff, its meant for controlling the battlefield. Sure the basic invade options and tech actions may seem boring at first, but this is an RPG at the end of the day, the cool stuff is always level gated. Moving enemies against their will to throw them off a cliff, into mines or just to set up another player to opportunity attack them, Turning off gravity to send an ally flying at the enemy or to disorient an opponent, literally hacking into a different timeline! Hacking is an incredible asset to have on the battlefield, It may not kill things outright, but it makes them die faster. While it may not seem attractive to you if you ever play with a Minotaur, Goblin or Lich you will learn fast how cool hacking can be.
Anyway, hope I could clear some things up and maybe try and get you to look at the game I love from a different light, and I hope this project gets attention, does well and becomes its own cool thing.
To make it a bit more Classic TTRPG, you could run the game starting from training/grunt. That way you could climb up slowly the number of mechs in games you run.
Honestly, with the amount of work youve already put in, the idea of making a Titanfall TTRPG yourself isnt a bad idea. You could call it something like 'Frontier's Fall' or something like that.
Funny, I was recently thinking how cool it would be if titanfall had a ttrpg.
Hard disagree with the hp in lancer, you say you dont want to drag the gameplay but then you increase the hp and make it far easier to replenish? When a lancer mech goes down for repairs its important that the dm wrenches up the tension for them, and make sure that their team defends their fallen comrade! I love the idea but i feel its too wargamey for a system thats combat *and* roleplay focused
Apologies if you mention this, saving this to watch at work tomorrow lol! Highly recommend you give Battletech a try at some point if you want some good mech Tabletop gaming. Theres two versions, Classic is crunchy and detailed, Alpha Strike is quick and fun! Plus RPG and Campaigns, there's a ton to do in the game.
This reminds me of my shitty attempt of making a titanfall ttrpg back in high school, right around when apex was dropped on us, so I had to, midway through making all the different stuff, try to find a way to incorporate all the new apex stuff into the titanfall ttrpg I was making (mainly just the guns bc I thought the peacekeeper was badass)
14:10 I have a suggestion for Ronins melee. Allow Ronins to duel with their swords. With chances for blocking, parrying, hitting, etc
That's just the Duelist Talent/trait.
You could appropriate some of the tech from altered carbon to explain death. Basically all that is you is stored on a chip and your body can be replaced, could even use apex's respawn banners as the chip
Maybe a good way to go for northstar would be to turn them into a debuff/ support? This way the class would still have impact, stay unique and would result in more interesting gameplay as it would incentivise teamplay and coordination to take out priority targets. I can see this as potentially being quite annoying though, especially if players or the gm doesnt know any effective counterplay so if you did choose to do this the range mechanic you had for it would suit it well as it would also add an extra layer of risk/reward since players and the gm could choose to get closer to do more, but also run the risk of being caught out and put into a blender.
Anyways feel free to use or completely ignore my suggestion, either way have a good day and lancerfall looks p sick
AH IT'S HERE
Lancer on its own sounds somewhat like BattleTech at this point.
It shares a lot more DNA with Heavy Gear and Beam Saber. The grids are about the only real concrete commonality.
If you're not happy with Northstar, have you tried just turning Northstar into Viper? Viper is cool, I'm sure it would be easier to make him cool than default Northstar.
i already did add viper as a boss fight and that's what Northstar's current mechanics are mostly based off of, hence the indefinite flight
LANCER WOOOO
What is the balance like if you give pilots the ability to call down titans like a core ability?
You could even make a mode that has players start as pilots and gain titans as the fight progresses, allowing for ejects and such with an invisible eject being akin to tones core ability?
Today I learnt:
-lancer is a thing
-this style of game is a thing
-I’m stupid for not subscribing
I have yet to play Lancer myself (campaign is still in a planning state) and I am excited to play my Gorgon though I would be lying if I hadn't thought about all the things related to Titanfall (and Armored Core) that I would want to have in the game as well. I am amazed on how much work you put in and while I probably won't get around to look into it any deeper, I have a question regarding your baseline npc classes, how powerful would you see them compared to a completely RAW Lancer player character and would they be suitable to be "boss fights" at certain LLs?
on their own they would probably chew through vanilla players, but honestly I don't know. most of my campaign with these guys was played with the only major change being 2x player hp, so as a boss on their own I think they'd work fine.
This addresses a lot of the issues I have with lancer and I think it's a pretty rad idea!
Have you tried the tabletop systems GURPS by Steve Jackson Games or Heavy Gear by Dream Pod 9?
The former is a universal simulationist tabletop game which makes tactical combat far more interesting than D&D-likes,
The latter is a straight up tactical wargame with mechs. I think you might enjoy one or both of these.
I dont play ttrpg but this seems cool. Why are Viper quotes seemingly some of the only quotes for the abilities? Smh.
So you stripped out everything that made Lancer *Lancer* and then declared it better Lancer. Just go make your own TTRPG and quit messing with a perfectly functional game you clearly didn't play.
i literally did make my own ttrpg system that's the point of the video
Ok first, cool Project, of course we want to play Titanfall in Lancer❤
But after 2 Minutes of watching the Vid, I disagree strongly with the Statement of unbalanced Combat and to small a Tactical Challenge for the GM or Players😅 I had a Player who left my Group, because he felt like the NPCs are too strong and it was to challenging for him... If you stick to the suggestions how to set up a Battle, given by the Rulebook however, then it is pretty Easy for Players. Still you get all the tools from the Rules to actualy make engaging difficult Fights, should you desire them.
I feel like "fixing" is to strong a claim for this particular Situation, while doing it differently is not wrong😉 If you prefere it this way, its perfectly fine with me, but you didnt fix a already very very very well balanced game, where only youre own creativity can stop you from doing whatever you want😉
P.s.: I watched until 8 Minutes now, because I was curious about youre Ideas and I dont realy get what youre saying, when claiming that Enemys do like 8 damage most of the time. Wich Mech has 33 HP?😅 Thats like at License Level 3-6 earliest, when you skilled nothing else, wich can be a good tactic, but has its own weakneses. There are Enemys who structure you with one Attack. You get double Damage, when you are exposed, enemys could decide to simply hack you and explode youre Reactor, because shooting him is not worth it...😅
At least the thing with Enemy Mechs should at least have 2 Structure we agree on👌 But nobody said the Enemy should have just 1 Structure right?
Repectfully, don't try and label this as a "better lancer". Lancer is balanced as is, maybe not how you may like it, but it is balanced.
Oh my god i finally get the bitcoin mining joke from last night...
does anbody now what program or game is he using to play lancer im new and want to try it
They're using Foundry VTT
@@user-xsn5ozskwg thanks dude appreciate it
it sounds genuinely mechanically worse. like, i know that lancer looks like titanfall if you squint real hard, but it is absolutely not "titanfall with the serial numbers filed off" its a different thing made to do different things. Of course theres no pilot mechanics, of course npcs are simple. Theyre meant to do that because of the way it is. There are systems way better suited to running titanfall, because theyre actually meant for that.
This is somewhat painfull to watch, like listening to someone try to run a social intrigue campaign localized entierely to one big castle in dnd or something,
when I was introduced to lancer, it was brought up in reference to Titanfall several times. if you look online for discussions about the system, references to Titanfall are ubiquitous. they are definitely going for different things, but they definitely have a close relation.
I tried playing this with a group and we've run into every single issue stated in the video that LANCER has. It genuinely is that bad and makes for pretty terrible game play, to the point that in a fight against a boss enemy and its goons, I managed to crit it and it lost its *only* weapon that it had. In a fight where it was dealing massive damage to our party, effectively forcing the person targeted to stabilize and heal or leave its attack range, a single crit with a homebrewed glorified butter knife that dealt 1d4 damage that I had fitted to my mech simply because I had the space to do so and couldn't fit anything else on, suddenly the fight became rolling dice to kill it because it couldn't do anything else.
Genuinely, the base LANCER system is too volatile and sways too heavily from one extreme to the other, either the GM does way too much damage, or the players do, and there is no in-between. And what is described in the video is always going to be INFINITELY more fun simply because its easier to play and keep track of. A player in our group tried out a Hacker mech only to find that he had quite literally no options, and like the video states: "If I used Lock-On on a target without moving, and its Tuesday and it has half health and blah blah blah". It is quite literally no fun to have a 4th party member that is near entirely useless most of the time for the rest of the party cause they can't reliably help in a fight, and it's not fun for said 4th party member to NOT BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING EVER because the system is so far up its own ass trying to get you to play Bingo with its many asinine conditions to even attempt to hack something in the first place.
I'd rather play whatever the newest iteration of Lancerfall is right now than go through that shit again.
@@Average_GDI_Disk_Thrower there are systems out there for people like you! You might enjoy the slower pace in combat, with resistances, armor and dodging that shadowrun has, offering little randomness and npcs with full player capabilities. Or the fast paced fps nature of a lumen based system. Try some stuff out! Just don’t complain because this system isn’t something it’s not trying to be
people can enjoy lancer for what it is and I'm happy they like it. i didn't like it and so I changed it into something I did. i don't see what's wrong with that. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all ttrpgs in existence, I'm going to work with what I know.
@@cassius_scrungoman absolutely. It’s fine that you play it like that, honestly, the original comment was maybe a bit too heated, but I wrote it while watching the video and especially compared to some of your other content you seemed very disparaging and almost mean throughout, calling almost every mechanic silly, unrealistic, arbitrary etc, which doesn’t feel good too watch if I like it for those very reasons you know?
Still gonna keep watching your stuff, even if I think you’re a mildy mediocre game designer that made one video i didn’t like one time
Comment for the algorytm!
Not to yuck your yum, but trying to make Lancer into Titanfall sounds a lot like "how to make D&D a low magic dark fantasy?" It feels like trying to make the system something it's not.
Also the statement "I was lured in by a genuine tactical challenge of GM vs players." There is no such thing as GMs vs players. Every fight is a "faux fight" because the GM can make the players face 30 enemies at once. What you seem to be wanting is more difficult combats that require tactics and careful decision making which is something Lancer already does as a thousand second hand accounts prove.
Homebrews great, and if it works for your group good for you. But the way you talk about it sounds like you think you're version of Lancer is "better". Just as a basic example the reason lancer NPCs are so simple is because you're meant to have multiple different NPCs on the field at once so they can play off each other, and if they each had the complexity of a PC most GMs would forget half the things their baddies can do and the combat would grind to a slog as the GM pours over mountains of text just to take 1 optimal turn.
If you're having fun then you do you, but you're coming off really dismissive. Don't kick down other artists man, it's not a good look.
i wonder why you called tone's lock-on missles fox 2s
Are titans THAT hot, so even fox 2s can track them?
Yeah... I was gonna say.
3:38 77mm? Pretty sure it’s a 40mm
Bruh where can I even play this? It never appears on roll20
Cassius and I have used foundry (virtual tabletop) in the past, if the initial buy in of that is a bit much for you, there is roll 20 support as well, although it comes with some issues and jank (mostly tokens of above size 1). If you mean where to find a group and not where to play, lancer community discord or other lfg forums are viable options. Or just asking friends / people at your local games store.
Let players hack mech squads from range as tech media or manual in person
I have to say your choices for the pronouns of the Mechs are interesting, although given my rather shallow knowledge of the lore I have no idea if theyre based on anything but vibes
they're canon, based off the titan AI voices
Comment for engagement
If you want a tractor challenge, i can also reccommend turning up the rank of NPCs, and remember that balance is based around multiple foghts occurring between rests