Thread by @Mike_Prinke

Went on a #Pathfinder2e and #StarfinderRPG book binge. It turns out Paizo has been very busy since I initially got these. Sooooo much new stuff to see!

So they have mechs now

The mech rules are pretty clever, managing to take into account even the possibility of playing a Power Rangers Megazord.

For reference, that'd be a Colossal frame with five operators, which means it gets like five actions every turn.

At least I'm pretty sure the Megazord would be colossal. The sense of scale in Power Rangers is hard to pin down.

Gypsy Danger is definitely Colossal though. With two operators. And a Gundam is probably Gargantuan.

The rules for how these operate basically translate each character's full turn into a mech action, which condenses the mech neatly compared with ship combat. Ships have a different job for each station like it's Star Trek, but with mechs you all contribute turns to the same gear.

The result is that it's somewhere between vehicle combat and ship combat -- detailed enough to have power management, shields, etc., but snappier, with the group operating as a "brain" for one entity.

Or several if everybody has mechs.

If you wanted to Macross it you'd need to do some homebrew. Basically you'd have a mech with an alternate starfighter form and switch between them as-needed. It seems like with the things mechs share in common with ships, the translation isn't too bad?

It feels like the sweet spot here is to have at least two operators and make each mech a team coordination thing. But I think for my setting, where there's a lot of solo mechs, I'd give them a computer assistant that contributes an extra action.

Like in a lot of Gundam series, there's an OS (operating system) that's actually a bigass suite of predictive software that interprets the pilot's actions, making it easier to do complex things.

So, I think an aux module for the OS, and that gives the mech 1 extra action in addition to the ones provided by the pilots, as long as at least one uses a full action to operate the mech.

High level OSes could divert power to overclock the mech and add more. But at great risk.

You might overclock and get 3 actions, even as many as 4 -- but you might burn the CPU out and get stuck with 1 action after your burst of activity.

Lots of fascinating opportunities to play with this and bring different aspects of the game into the mech. These don't really cover magic, for instance -- but the Operations Handbook (IE PHB2) has a Magic Officer for starships that you can probably crib ideas from.

I'm feelin' fresh inspiration from this'n. This was a good idea to salvage my mood tonight.

Also what the goddamn fuck there's like 50 pages of weapons in the arms and equipment book

Do you know how many weapons fit on a page? All of them -- so how many weapons do you think there are on 50 pages!?

Okay this is an ABSURD amount of traffic for a post like this what the heck happened