RPG Critique: Lancer

Lancer is a tabletop RPG written by Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan and published by Massif Press in 2019, following a meteorically successful Kickstarter campaign. Players take on the roles of the titular lancers, elite mecha pilots in a largely post-scarcity future where humankind has spread itself thin across the galaxy. Notably, Lancer's player-facing rulebook is free; only the GM needs the paid version, which is a pretty reasonable $25 and comes with extra setting material and NPC stats. This piece covers the paid version of the game.

I want to love Lancer, but there are a few issues with it that I just can't quite shake, and I think they deserve to be discussed. This piece is going to be more critical than positive, because the bulk of Lancer is solid and functional in a way that doesn't feel especially productive to discuss. I do want to stress, though, that I think this is a good roleplaying game that's absolutely worth your time, especially given the price point. I'd highly recommend picking up the free version and taking a look for yourself if the aesthetic and general premise appeals to you. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. We'll start with the good stuff that I think is worth commenting on, the stuff that sets Lancer apart from other games.

This game looks and feels fantastic. It's well-written and generally well-edited: the prose is extremely clear and readable, and I only spotted a couple of typos, which didn't detract from the overall experience. The layout is similarly excellent, aside from the index, which is comprehensive but oddly arranged. The real star of the show, for me and for many others, is the art. Many of the illustrations, including that magnificent cover, are by co-author Tom Parkinson Morgan, and he brings his A-game. I knew TPM for his webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons years before Lancer, and the mech portraits in particular (I believe they're all him) bear his signature detail-rich, slightly sketchy "indie comic" style. They hit just the right balance between fancy and legible, and I'm in love with them.

These mechs don't just look fantastic, they're a joy to create. Character and mech creation in Lancer might risk being a little complex and confusing if not for COMP/CON, a free companion web app which I'd absolutely recommend to anyone playing or GMing this game. The process of building even a level 0 mech with only base equipment is genuinely fun. The basic Everest frame can mount three primary weapons and a healthy selection of support systems, from powered flight to deployable cover, and your options only widen from there.

There's no currency system, since all your mechs are assumed to be 3D-printed from easily available raw materials, so the only thing that limits your choices in licensing. Each level up gives you a rank in a license, one of 28 parallel advancement tracks that each grant a selection of advanced weapons and gear and, at rank two, a new basic frame for your mech. Licenses can be mixed and matched freely, though committing to a particular one of the "Big Four" manufacturers gives you access to some special perks. I built a few pilots and mechs at level 3, to see what your options might look like at any given level, and each one felt like there was room for variance even within the licenses I'd selected.

The core mechanics of Lancer are openly inspired by Shadow of the Demon Lord. Most rolls you make will be a d20 plus or minus the highest result among some number of d6s, sometimes with a static modifier as well. Target numbers don't vary very much from the baseline of 10 except in combat, and even there you're more likely to be applying bonuses or penalties to your roll than adjusting the target. It's not an especially innovative system, but it doesn't need to be; d20 rolls have survived the last forty years for a reason.

Combat is the clear centrepiece of Lancer, and it's refreshing to see a game that's not shy about saying as much. The action economy is generous: a mech can move, attack with a weapon, and do something else in one turn without breaking a sweat, and can take some heat to accomplish even more. (Heat is a little like a mana gauge - using some weapons and systems causes you to accrue heat, and taking too much can cause reactor damage if you don't take a turn off to cool down.) There are rules for ramming, grappling, hacking, and various other stunts, but most of it isn't too heavy on complexity.

Positioning and cover are important enough that you really do need a battle grid, which contributes to a tight, wargamey feel that I very much enjoy. A player with basic system knowledge will understand exactly what their mech is capable of doing at any given time, and can focus on how best to apply that toolbox to the current fight. This is Lancer at its very finest, presenting players with tense tactical puzzles they can approach from multiple angles.

But, when you dismount your mech and start doing things on foot, we come to my first major issue with Lancer.

A lot of things feed into your mech's combat abilities: your choice of frame, the systems you bolt on, your personal mech skills, your unique pilot talents, and so on. On foot, everything changes. You have a series of skill triggers, general fields of competence that grant you bonuses in increments of +2, from "read a situation" to "blow something up". You can also write your own with GM approval. When you do something covered by one of your triggers, you apply the highest bonus from among them to your roll. You also have a background that can give you a plus or minus d6 to some associated tasks. That's it. That's the full extent of the rules. You get some personal equipment, but, aside from weapons and armour, most equipment gives you narrative rather than mechanical benefits.

The problem here isn't that pilot-level gameplay is less complex than mech-level gameplay - that in itself is fine, and in fact expected in a game that puts mechs front and centre. But this skill trigger system is so loose, freeform, and, for want of a better word, "storygamey", that it feels like it comes from an entirely different game system - especially since skill triggers explicitly never apply to mech combat, and likewise pilot talents never function outside your mech. Fighting on foot isn't even turn-based, but wholly narrative, though characters on foot in mech-scale combat do still conform to the turn structure. It's a little too light. In battle, you're playing fourth edition D&D; on foot, it's more like Risus, or a very stripped-down variant of FATE.

Then, when you get some downtime in between missions, you start playing Apocalypse World. I should note at this point that the authors have been very open about the game systems that have influenced this one, and they specifically call out Powered by the Apocalypse as the main inspiration for this downtime system. But seeing these downtime actions laid out exactly like Apocalypse World moves, complete with menus of complications you and the GM can choose from, is incongruous with both the tactical rigidity of mech combat and the loose, fiat-heavy style of narrative play. (I should note that the usual limitation of one downtime action per downtime period avoids the cascade complication issue that plagues many PbtA games, but that's a whole different article.)

And this is not the only area in which the component parts of Lancer don't quite connect.

Remember those Big Four manufacturers that give you the licenses you need to build your mech? Let's go through them.

• Harrison Armory is the closest to a modern arms company, with chunky, vaguely brutalist mechs that specialize in advanced weaponry and battlefield gear.
• Smith-Shimano Corpro has the sleekest, most anime frames, stressing speed, stealth, and finesse.
• IPS-Northstar is a former shipping conglomerate whose rugged, no-nonsense mechs excel in close combat and sheer durability.
• HORUS is a decentralized hacktivist collective that possibly grants licenses at the whims of an all-powerful runaway AI, with lumpy, biological-looking frames and a strong techno-religious flavour to much of its hardware. HORUS mechs are the best at hacking, and can also bend space, command swarms of nanomachines, and wield weapons that ignore most of the game's rules because they technically don't exist.

One of these things is not like the others.

The player section gives HORUS a substantially longer writeup than any of the other three manufacturers, but that's not the crux of my issue with it. See, while Miguel Lopez was credited in the game's Kickstarter as the main narrative writer, with Tom Parkinson Morgan focusing on system work, HORUS has TPM's fingerprints all over it. Some of the flavour blurbs on HORUS systems are styled as sermons or religious scripture, wire-and-brimstone catechisms that read like William Blake trying to teach you C++. It's stylistically so similar to and evocative of K6BD that I have to believe HORUS is Parkinson Morgan's baby. And I can't help but feel that this baby doesn't play well with the others.

I'm not opposed to this sort of quasi-supernatural weirdness in sci-fi, but Lancer focuses it all so heavily in this one place that it feels completely out of step with the rest of the setting. Sure, SSC can turn its mechs invisible and HA mechs can project forcefields and manipulate gravity, but HORUS' tech feels like outright magic, especially since so much of it is described as black-box science that eludes understanding even by those using it. The disconnect bleeds over into mechanics, too: HORUS is clearly meant to evoke anarchist movements, hackerspaces, and the like, so why, from a story perspective, does it follow the exact same licensing rules as the three corporate states it exists alongside?

Imagine dropping four-colour superheroes into a gritty, gory fighting game... wait, bad example. Okay, imagine Game of Thrones, but one of the great houses is controlled by alien parasites with powerful psionic abilities, and also they're objectivists. That's kind of what HORUS feels like in Lancer.

My last major critique of Lancer is a smaller one than the previous two: it's about how the game handles NPCs. Lancer makes the very wise decision that NPCs don't need to follow the same internal logic as PCs. NPC mechs are substantially less durable than players, they don't have access to all the basic actions players do, and their weapons deal fixed amounts of damage rather than rolling it. All this serves to make handling large numbers of NPCs easier for the GM and more empowering for the players, since they have advantages to offset being outnumbered.

NPCs aren't built out of frames and systems like PCs are. An NPC starts with an archetype that defines its battlefield role, like Bombard, Assassin, or Witch (specialist in inflicting harmful conditions and heat), and a tier between one and three that defines its general power level. It then chooses up to two extra traits from an archetype-specific menu to flesh it out and add power or interest. Optionally, it can have one or more templates that add more traits - some of these make a mech more or less powerful than normal, while others are more for colour and style.

Mechanically, this is a great system, and an easy way for a GM to build encounters quickly, perhaps even on the fly. However, it has some odd side effects. The writeups of the archetypes sometimes mention specific example models of mech, but they're all from smaller manufacturers outside the Big Four. It would certainly be possible to reskin and tweak some of the archetypes to mimic a player mech, but the default idea that your enemies are pulling from a different, largely inferior selection of hardware creates a strange situation where the bad guys feel like the underdogs. The players have the backing of four of the most powerful corporate states in the galaxy, while their enemies buy from a mess of lesser corporations and also-rans. Is it a stretch to say that this makes players seem less heroic? Perhaps, but I do feel it.

These are the three main things about Lancer that hinder my enjoyment of it: systems feeling disconnected, HORUS being too weird compared to the rest of the Big Four, and the aforementioned issues with how NPCs are defined. Do they ruin the game? Absolutely not. I still think Lancer is good, and I like it a lot, and I'll probably be playing (more likely GMing) quite a bit of it if I can. But I think it's still worth talking about what holds back good media from being even better, as well as what makes it good. I'm sure that I could find just as many faults in any of my favourite games - Godbound, Troika!, and, for my sins, Pathfinder. And perhaps I should.

If you play Lancer, my advice to you is to approach it less as a conventional RPG about pilots and more as a skirmish wargame with strong story elements, a sort of halfway house like the largely forgotten Inquisitor. Focus on the best, most developed elements, the combat and the mech-building, and pit your homemade war machines against as great a variety of foes as you can. That's how I plan to run this game, and that's how I think it works best. Or maybe you've got a different approach in mind. Maybe you don't find HORUS as incongruous as I do. Maybe you don't mind the narrative gameplay being such a light touch. That's why I've gone into so much detail on what I consider problems - so you can decide for yourselves whether you consider them problems too.