Lancer rambling //
got the Lancer rulebook & stayed up until ~2am reading it yesterday (after doing my best to sleep in till like 5pm b/c vaccine hangover)
mechs are cool! licensed-based equipment progression is neat! talents look like about the right amount of "flex"/"power" for character builds, although I'm less sure about the talents that map to specific weapon types as opposed to styles or situations. love the HORUS stuff.
re: lancer rambling //
the "triggers" (~skills, as in "+2 to Get Somewhere Fast" or "+4 to Apply Fist to Face") seem like a nice level of detail/abstraction
but the skill system in general seems… flat. "everything is DC 10" doesn't seem like a great place to start from, and "risky" rolls (where you always incur the penalty of failing, even if you succeed) just doesn't seem… meaningful? why tie "something bad always happens" to a die roll if something bad is always going to happens?
re: rpg skill check rambling //
I dunno if it was Dungeon World or Powered by the Apocalypse that had a system of rolling 2d6+mod, with a table mapping results to "success with no complications" "success and choose 1 of 3 complications" "success and choose 2 of 3 complications" "failure and…" type outcomes
with every "move" coming with a list of generalized complications ("burn a resource") that the GM would fill in according to the situation.
that's the kind of thing I want to see in a system
re: rpg skill check rambling //
@lioness my strong impression from playing it briefly is that Lancer is a great system if you enjoy making weird combat builds and using them in a Battletech-lite kinda hex-based mech combat system
also there are skill rolls outside of combat sometimes, but that's not really the focus
Definitely a combat-first RPG
re: rpg skill check rambling //
@lioness none of this being necessarily bad things. But it's a system that focuses on one type of play experience, and if you're looking for other things, it can disappoint.