Not all Mecha are created equal!

This site has seen a few recent walks down memory lane. Some comments on a previous entry brought up some old memories of a group I hadn't thought of in years. That group, more than anything, taught me many lessons on what NOT to do as a GM.

I ran Rifts for this group. I was a big fan of Palladium after having played Heroes Unlimited. I became more excited about Palladium because they were attempting to build a universal system; a system where one could play any genre without having to change rule sets. Later I would discover a product that did this much better: GURPS.

Rifts, for those that don't know, took the next step. Rifts brought all genres into one game. Sci-Fi Aliens and Demons existed next to Mutants with super powers, medieval warriors and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. I was impressed with the concept. I bought all the books as I could afford them; I bought many of them for the art alone. It was impressive stuff.

What wasn't impressive was the game system. For all intents and purposes, Palladium was the first D20 game; it was a reworking of the AD&D game rules and, frankly, not a very good one. But, I didn't know it at the time. At the time the only other game I had played was D&D. So, Palladium seemed normal, simple, easy to understand.

I got a group together and I began a game. I won't go into details of the game I put together, even though I am still impressed with myself for bits of it to this day. However, I would like to share some of the things I did wrong centered around one player.

I don't remember the guy's name. He was, as the rest of us were, a geek. Today, I would describe him as an "otaku" - he was very into anything Japanese. The guy was rail thin and tall, kept his hair long and bone straight. He wore only black. And, frequently, he walked around with a katana in his belt. He was quite a piece of work.

A member of the Rifts group was a friend of this Otaku and asked me if he could join. Sure, I said, no prob. The Otaku was of course interested in playing a Mecha Pilot from the Robotech game produced by Palladium. This was Rifts. A Mecha Pilot would fit right in, right? Wrong. My first mistake was not thinking "This character will have a huge war robot. No one else in the group is armed with a large war robot."

So, the Otaku rolled up his character and picked out a Mecha. His character arrived via one of the rifts local to the players. All was good.

I decided to make a challenge for the group. I sent in a mecha and two war robots. I honestly thought the group would take this threat without much trouble. My second mistake was not verifying this as fact. Had I bothered to read the Robotech book instead of just buying it and staring at the art, I would have seen that the best weapons in that game did half to a third of the damage done by Weapons in Rifts. And as to armor, well, there wasn't much!

So, most of the group went after the two war robots. The Otaku took the bait and went Mecha to Mecha. The shooting started, the Otaku got an early shot and hurt the mecha he was battling. A bit later, the bad mecha took his shot. I rolled for damage and gave the number to the Otaku. He looked at me in horror. I didn't understand what was wrong. He explained to me that the damage I just gave him was about double what was needed to destroy his mecha. Oops!

(Later, I bought the Rifts Conversion book. They state plainly that the mecha in Rifts were much tougher than the Robotech mecha. They recommended beefing up the numbers for the Robotech mecha to allow them to compete in Rifts. Wish I had this information sooner!!)

The Otaku made his roll and punched out of the mecha to relative safety. The rest of the party did its job and killed the other two war robots and I had the bad mecha retreat. However, when the dust settled, I had a mecha pilot without a mecha and all the replacement mecha were in another dimension!

So, the Mecha Pilot was running around without a mecha, which was frankly a bad deal for that character. The player, the Otaku, was a loud ass about the deal. He didn't take it in stride at all. I discovered as we went along that this was the core of this person: bitter, annoying, difficult to please. My third mistake was that I should have had some type of mecha fall into this character's hands. However, the guy was such a jerk, I remember thinking that maybe I didn't want him to have so much fire power. This was about the moment I looked at the rest of the group and realized my first mistake: no one else had a mecha.

Later, this and other issues brought this particular group to a screeching halt. But, the lessons I learned were: A) verify, don't assume, B) read the books, C) new players should come in at the same power as the current players, D) work around previously made mistakes.

There was some fun had in that group, but not as much as there could have been. There were a lot of battling egos and mine was not innocent. However, the lessons learned were valuable and I like to think I'm a better GM for having had that experience.