The goal was to just have a four-session (or five, if you count a session 0) something-or-other to learn about how the system works, what I like, what I don't like, etc. And, well, I learned a lot about Lancer! But I also thoroughly broke things in the process. >.> Fortunately I had some help figuring out what was an expected vs an unexpected break thanks to a number of veteran players in the 4 parties I ran through the mini-campaign. For folks wanting a bit more about how Lancer works, this post is (hopefully) for you! I'm gonna go over how this mini-campaign was structured, a brief summary of how it went, the things I was warned about (but ignored & faced the consequences), the things I wasn't warned about and learned anyway, my opinions on the system, and what I'd do differently if I were to try something like this again. This post assumes you're at least passingly familiar with Lancer's terminology & mechanics. Let's get to it. (Opening this post in a new tab is recommended.)
Overview
Let's start simple: what the heck did I do, anyways? Narratively, the story was fairly straightforward: the players are hired by Union to go to a planet, destroy a prototype before it gets prepped for mass-production, and get out. When they try to destroy said prototype, surprise! The BBEG of the campaign, Harland Montgomery, is already piloting it, and "forces" (we'll get to that; see "Opinions on the System") the players to retreat. Enemy forces then besiege the players' base camp as Harland upgrades the prototype; the players survive the onslaught, and then go take out Harland Montgomery once and for all.
Mechanically, it gets more complicated. Y'see, I wanted to do 4 one-session missions so that I could see how leveling up works, get a taste of Downtime actions, & toy with how the power curve develops over License Level (LL) 0-3. Thing is, Lancer is really not intended for this pace of gameplay, both in its balance and its method of leveling up. Namely, it's built for parceling out resources over an extended period of time & assumes every level comes with a Full Repair (FR), and this is... not that. To try and reintegrate some of that aspect, I had a hack system of "pre-printed parts;" while players wouldn't heal between missions & as they level up, they could spend their Repair Cap alongside these pre-prints to swap out systems, add weapons, and generally just make their mech feel like they were at-level while still having to spend resources. If this sounds like a recipe for disaster: there's more. I also allowed players to do a Downtime action in between each combat; if enough players bought time using their Downtime action (either with Power At A Cost or the more straightforward Buy Some Time actions), everyone had the option of getting a FR. To counterbalance the allure of constant FRs, I also had a "reinforce base camp" action that would let players build more cover on their relatively-weakly-defended base camp. Also, as the narrative pressure ramped up, more players had to buy time to get people FRs, though I had a guaranteed FR for LL3 so players could enter the final combat all kitted out.
How It Went
In short: the mechanics were functional, in the same way that a watch with a too-tight cannon pinion is functional. Players were able to follow the rules & hacks, but to use the MDA framework of game design I screwed up a lot of the aesthetic of play with all these hacks. I didn't offer enough cover to make skipping a FR worthwhile (see "Forewarned Lessons" and "Unexpected Lessons"), and players were so hesitant to spend pre-prints that they usually just didn't, especially when a FR was usually less of a decision-making burden. Like, why use Downtime on ???an action??? when you could just buy time & make use of all those upgrades, right? So, all my tweaks to try & keep the aesthetic of play close-to-normal didn't work as intended and made a bit of a mess, though at least the final session was fun for folks. Always nice to go out with a positive bang.
Forewarned Lessons
Pretty quickly, the handful of veteran players warned me of a few problems I was going to face:
- Full Repairs are extremely powerful, because it means players can burn Limited systems & core power willy-nilly and those things are jacked.
- This means FRs are generally better than any resource a Downtime action could produce; see "Unexpected Lessons" for why my hack-in reinforcement Downtime wasn't sufficient.
- Players will want a FR at LL2, when they (typically) unlock a new frame.
- Mechanics that reward extended play were less incentivized, because players could count on a repair coming up.
Each of these warnings reared their respective heads over the course of the game. The first came up most often in encounter design; I often had to escalate an encounter's difficulty because the players were rolling through enemies faster than expected, because unsurprisingly the Lancer core book's GM advice (such as it is; see "Unexpected Lessons") assumes you're trying to balance encounters around maybe 1 player using their core power at a time. The second and third were the main drivers of the high number of FRs mentioned above; of the 26 Downtime actions that could have happened during the between-combat breaks before the guaranteed FR, only 10 were actually used for something that wasn't a FR either now or later. This includes the 2 double-counted Downtimes, where a player rolled so well on buying time that they allowed someone else to hare off and do a different Downtime action while still getting the FR. Put another way, that's 69% (nice) of Downtime getting voluntarily spent on FRs, while 38% of Downtime was spent on other stuff. Finally, point 4 came up with some leveling choices, especially among the veteran players. Like, there was basically no reason to take a Lancaster for this mini-campaign, and Hull was generally less favored as a stat because there wasn't much reason to build for durability; FRs were easy enough to access that you could get away w/ a team of glass cannons. End result: despite my best efforts, the long-game of Lancer's resource management didn't really come through.
Unexpected Lessons
Some of these lessons are things that I think the experienced players coulda predicted if they'd been asked, but y'know, there's only so much that comes up when you're looking at a design. Case in point: encounter design knowledge is uh, really vague in the core book. There are some back-of-the-envelope numbers in the book but, as a friend-of-a-friend put it, they "make encounters winnable, not fun." My first session was mostly built around narrative, and that meant I had like, a few normal enemies and an ungodly number of Grunts, and all but one of those units fell under the Striker banner. This resulted in a bunch of units that fell apart before they could do anything, a swamped turn order, and just a generally dull encounter with far too much random damage for how rote it was. Fortunately, debriefing with the veteran of that party helped me get a much better grasp on what I should be doing, so I could improve the first encounter for the ensuing 3 parties (along with the rest of the mini-campaign). First lesson: Grunts are for turn order tweaking & to give players some feel-good fodder. They absolutely should be threats if left unaddressed, but they shouldn't dominate the combat. Second lesson: try to use every category of NPC units (except maybe Artillery) in every combat. It's a quick way to get an encounter that's relatively interesting, especially if you take the time to think about how the NPCs might synergize. Arguably the core of both of these lessons is this underlying fundamental: combat encounters are for combat design, not narrative design. I don't necessarily like that this is how Lancer functions, but having tried to break from that lesson (and watched as the game fell apart) it's clearly necessary to understand.
On a similar note: Lancer borrows a lot of aesthetics from wargames, but it is not a wargame. This was something that I personally struggled with a lot, in 2 major ways: "what does the Size of a piece of cover mean," and "how do you determine if something gets cover." The writers very explicitly don't put a flat metric on one unit of Size, and that made it difficult for me to understand like, "How hard is it to climb over this piece of cover? Can you shoot over it?" There's an explicit piece of rules text to handle the latter point, but for the former, it's just kinda ~eh~ in the rules. I ended up deciding that one "Size unit" was equivalent to one hex, i.e. climbing on top of Size 1 cover means climbing up 1 hex height, but that's not formally defined anywhere; it seems like that's just a common convention. What does it mean that a unit can shoot over a piece of cover the same size as it, but also a unit on top of the cover is standing completely above any units below it? Don't worry about it; it's a combat mechanic, not a representation of reality.
As for the "what gets cover" issue, this boils down to one question: when is a line "completely unobstructed" by cover? It turns out, this is a point of contention! Skipping past the various justifications & ways of reading the rules, the end result is deciding whether a single hex of cover should protect 3 spaces or just 1. Most folks apparently read the rules to permit the former; I read the rules and interpreted it as the latter. This small change caused a lot of headaches with some of the experienced players, especially in the "defend the base camp" mission. I had doled out very few hexes of cover during Downtimes, and the players had distributed them rather sparsely as a result. Between the attacks that ignored cover & a hefty amount of enemy mobility, though, the cover rarely got used as desired. Because I interpreted cover as protecting just 1 space, it meant that players really needed to have minimum 2 hexes of cover to have it be worthwhile; I accounted for that for the final encounter, but it still was rough getting there.
Side note, another aspect of GM advice that was sorely lacking: what the heck should a map look like? I initially assumed that, considering at early levels 1 Difficulty is enough to really put a damper on your chance to hit, let alone 2, you'd want cover to be pretty sparse; everybody should be hitting each other fairly consistently. Based on some sneak peeks of an upcoming GM advice guide a friend dug up (read: asked for on Twitter), though, maps should actually be pretty dense with cover; whereas I started designing maps assuming cover should be a significant investment to enter/retain, it seems the assumption is that cover should be pretty much always available. Personally, I'm not sure I like this design decision, but it does help explain why so many mechanics are built around interacting with cover.
One mechanic that I think sees less use than it really should is line of sight. The book is vague about how often you should be obstructing LoS, but from what I've picked up the "Lancer culture" assumption is that cover obstructing LoS is the exception, not the rule. There definitely is something strange about Hidden and Invisible units still being perfectly visible on the map, and certainly Arcing weapons feel like they're far too common for how rarely that tag comes into play, but the general convention seems to be "most hard cover is permeable to LoS, that's why you can shoot people on the other side of it." Very strange, if you ask me.
The final unexpected lesson: sitreps, the missions that have specialty clear conditions, actually take consistently longer to finish than straightforward combat missions. The mini-campaign was structured as 3 sitreps w/ a capstone plain combat, and I was often struggling to get the sitreps to finish in time to do some roleplaying, help people through leveling up, etc before the session ended. The final combat, however, ended fairly quickly for all but one team (that team had a minion fighter going all-out, so it's not that surprising), leaving plenty of time to chat & debrief about the game. It made for a bit of weird whiplash for some folks, where suddenly they only had the leisure time to talk about their characters & how they behaved in the ending credits sequence.
Opinions on the System
All right, enough talk about how the game is supposed to be played, let's talk about what I think about the game itself.
The Bad News
I'm gonna start with my gripes, and we'll start with the one I've kind of implied up 'til now: there is a "right" way to play Lancer. I don't mean this in the sense that "the only way to have fun with Lancer is to play it the way the devs do." Rather, I think this is a strange interaction between being a fairly crunchy game w/ a lot of ambiguities and the fact that it's an indie game in the modern TTRPG renaissance. The former means that there are a lot of gaps in the official material that a GM needs to fill; I'll get back to this in a moment. The latter means that there is a culture (or at least, a stronger culture, even if it's not an overbearing quality) of saying "if you don't like what Lancer is doing, just play something else." I'm sure some of this impression is just a byproduct of interacting w/ some more rules-as-written-oriented players in this mini-campaign, but I also know some friends who struggled with the slow pace of Lancer & were told on the ~official Lancer Discord~ (whatever that culturally means) that spending as much as 12 hours in combat—not playing sessions, but in combat—before hitting LL1 was normal. Personally, that's not the pace of game I want to run or play in, and it frustrated me a bit that, when I tried to hack around that pace, I was told "this won't work" rather than "okay here's how we can try to make it work."
Going back to the gaps in the official material, when there's a "right" way to play but a lot of ambiguities to resolve, there's only really one way for a GM to learn how to resolve them: playing with people who have already played Lancer extensively. This is... not a great solution, IMO. Hopefully the aforementioned GM advice book that Massif Press is putting together will help disseminate all the random FAQs, cultural knowledge, etc more effectively, but I won't deny being frustrated that I had to use trial and error (or tap the experience that I know not everyone can access) to figure out how to rule on a number of edge cases.
Other than that, there are a number of things that I just don't really like about Lancer. It's really hard to have an enemy act like a threat when random dice can suddenly say, "hey, your centerpiece enemy missed" (the BBEG missed 75% of his first shots, undercutting his scariness and causing most of the teams to go "well damn, let's just kill this guy now"). There is a lot of NPC bookkeeping on the GM's side, to the point that COMP/CON is basically a necessity to run the game even if it's not strictly required as a player. Narrative skill checks work largely on a strict pass-fail system, and it's really hard to mesh narrative actions into combat play without throwing an encounter completely out of whack. Enemies run on a completely different build system from players, so it's hard for any enemy to feel like they can actually hold their own against the players. The fact that there is a long-term resource game means that combat encounters have to be balanced around consistent resource expenditure rather than close calls, but also combat being so randomized means that you have to be very reactive in order to not overexert player resources. Knowing what enemies are capable of is vital to survival, let alone avoiding having your moves get stuffed, but optional systems are rarely so game-changing that there's a reason to use the Scan move. Similarly, Brace is pretty much uniformly a terrible decision, because resistance now is basically never worth losing your movement & all but one quick action (including reactions & free actions) until after your next turn; by the time you know you should've Braced, you're three hits too late.
That said, I think it's worth recognizing: as I understand it, Lancer began as a D&D 4e hack, and that explains a lot of my issues. 4e is kind of the indie gamer's darling version of D&D because it focused on delivering one thing and one thing only: a combat MMORPG in tabletop form. Scarce pass-fail narrative checks? D&D 4e. Randomized combat? D&D. Combat design built around draining resources? D&D. "You gotta pick up the nuances by playing with experienced players?" D&D (though granted, Wizards of the Coast has put more effort into closing the nuance gap; it's far from shut, but at least you can buy encounter design experience more easily). It's almost easier to say what struggles are Lancer-unique; from what I've listed, I'd say the cover & LoS ambiguities, the inherently underpowered but equally complex NPCs, the importance of knowing what NPC templates mean, the uselessness of Brace, and the cultural friction are prolly all Lancer-specific.
The Good News
That all said, it'd be remiss of me if I didn't talk about the stuff I liked! First and foremost, I think the license & frame-building systems are probably the best version of mix-and-match character building that I've seen so far. There are a lot of cool synergies, and it feels way more accessible to assemble a frame out of multiple licenses compared to e.g. D&D's multiclassing. Seriously, one of the big reasons I got interested in Lancer was because it scratched all my D&D-like "look at all the shit I can do when I hit high levels" itches while still letting me feel like I had some serious ownership of my character's design & progression. This might be a Pathfinder-specific thing, but it always felt like unless I strictly leveled one class I was just making sub-optimal decisions since all the cool/useful features of a class were buried late into the class levels, and it was hard to get excited about a build that someone else had largely pre-developed for me. With Lancer though, each "class" being only 3 levels deep means even the deepest abilities are pretty accessible, and you can't fit all the stuff you unlock onto one mech anyways so it doesn't feel as much like a "wasted level" if you only use one or two bits out of each license in your final build.
Additionally, for all that I bemoaned the complexity & weakness of NPCs, the Template system is a really convenient way to make building NPCs easy once you get the hang of the different Templates' power levels (and it's not too hard to get a hang of said power levels). The mix-and-match quality of NPC templates also means you can "create" your own enemies much more easily and have them be functional opponents compared to the difficulty of making your own D&D enemies. Also, the clear categories of player & NPC classes (Striker, Controller, etc) made it very easy to get a sense of how a party or encounter was balanced, even if I often had to dig into the nuances to refine my encounters. Plus, since I don't know where else to put this thought, for all that I hated how vital COMP/CON was for keeping all an NPC's numbers handy, I appreciate that I actually used all those numbers regularly, unlike my experiences of D&D/Pathfinder where it so often boils down to just needing 3 or 4 numbers per enemy out of a lengthy Monster Manual statblock.
Considering I wrote a shorter list of positives than negatives, I feel obliged to ensure folks: I generally enjoyed my time with Lancer. While it struggles to straddle the line between Battletech and a roleplaying game, it at least manages to be approachable and do some novel things with character building. There's a lot that I'm going to change for Sealed Pacts, but it feels like an exciting starting point instead of something so intractable or misery-inducing that I'd be better off starting from scratch. The reason I'm writing so little is just, y'know, happiness writes white and all that.
If I Were To Do This Again...
Unsurprisingly, as I was going through the mini-campaign, I was already thinking a lot about how I'd want to do it differently if I were to do it again. I think the most important lesson I took away from the whole experience is this: I have to focus the experience more. I was trying to tell a story, introduce players to Lancer, and run through a wide range of game mechanics all at once, and it showed. That said, I also think any Lancer four-session schtick is better served with only 3 combat encounters in it, so you can guarantee some time to RP. With all this in mind, in no particular order, here are a few ways I'd revamp the game, based on what aspect I'd want to focus on for that game.
An Introduction to Lancer
Probably the most straightforward option, if I'm trying to give new players a taste of Lancer then I'd plan on playing 2 sessions at LL0 and 2 at LL2, set up as 2 missions (so there's some Downtime & a FR between LL0 and LL2). I'd probably distribute the combat encounters at 0, 2, and 2, so players are spending more time with more of their personal tools. This also gives me space at LL0, the most boring level, to introduce the BBEG & maybe a key secondary NPC or two before the combats actually start getting serious. Note that, while I think a 3-encounter mini-campaign is better, this would probably be the place to have a back-pocket short encounter just in case you need to inflict some Consequences™.
Telling the Same Story, but Better
If I wanted to keep the story the same, the solution is straightforward: it's all one mission. The first session, where the players are getting planetside, probably would just be 100% narrative; that way they have time to explore the nearby town, talk about what it's like to settle in, get some hints as to what kind of person the BBEG is, etc. As for what level to run it at, I'd probably say LL2 or 3; LL2 is when players start to get shiny tools thanks to their new frames, but LL3 is when they can really refine their builds into something personal. Also, I'd definitely rework the final encounter to have the BBEG more specifically rebuild his prototype to respond to the players' builds.
One Level Per Session and the Pre-Prints Hack
Honestly I think this is a really neat potential system, so I want to try and salvage it, but I think it has to be the centerpiece of a mini-campaign instead of a secondary hack. First priority, though, is definitely to have veteran players. This would be a mini-campaign about making the most of your resources, so you'd probably also want to have some more transparency about what's gonna be in each encounter too; probably have session 1 be a bunch of narrative play around figuring out what they'll be doing w/ undetermined HASE, and then drop them into the game proper at LL1. No FRs; instead you have a narrative beat about players having to scrape together their LL2 mechs, meaning they also have to port their core batteries over from their Everests (i.e. if they used their core power at LL1, they won't have it for LL2/3). I think one of the experienced players I played with also had the idea of having the pre-prints just be additional Repair Cap that can be spent on upgrade swaps, rather than it being a completely separate resource w/ additional Repair Cap costs? That way players have more flexibility to do "oh shit" repairs if something goes wrong. Also, extremely important: play on paper, or at least have players use paper character sheets. It's way easier to track resource expenditure across levels when COMP/CON isn't forcing you to FR every time.
Final Thoughts
... I'm honestly surprised at how much I wrote, tbh. I didn't think I'd have much to say, but here we are. Bright side: this way when I finally do my @enthusiastic-rest episode (stealth page launch~) on TTRPGs I can just say "look there's a big post I wrote about Lancer that has most of my feelings, here are the highlights." Speaking of, might be worth restating those highlights here.
- Lancer is, on the whole, a pretty decent game. Like, I'd rather play Lancer than D&D, I think.
- Lancer also has plenty of issues, especially related to getting a hold of Lancer's target vibe. Many of the issues are inherited from being a D&D 4e hack, but there are a fair number of Lancer-specific problems.
- The mini-campaign was functional, but not fun in the way I wanted it to be.
- If someone else wants to steal this idea but do it better, make sure you refine the purpose of the mini-campaign & cut the encounter count down.
Hope this all was interesting to read!
