#Scrap Metal - Lancer as a Roguelite

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

celest panther
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Is this a good idea? Not clear to me, but here we go. I'm going to be attempting to hash out some ideas on this oft-churned concept. Any and all feedback, playtesting, or rocks thrown at my head will be useful. As I go I intend to build this out with:

  • Additional roll tables for things like easy elite battle construction.
  • More refined guidance on how the overmap will be structured.
  • Guidance on making Boss Encounters - both 1vParty and small squads that all require voiding warranties on a variety of things.
  • A fair few player options to freshen things up for people who have been through the core book 500 times (I have a lot of alt frames with no home).

This is poised to be the actual framework I fit a lot of loose things that I've been disparately working on into, so lets see where this goes. I'll be unleashing this on my players in the relatively near future, and will also be using this as a sort of dumping ground for thoughts on the matter.
Current draft of the text
Spreadsheet for alt frames

mild spire
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woah

celest panther
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Since posting earlier I've done a bit of cleanup and done a very coarse sketch of a shop system that will probably need some heavy testing. Food for thought: are superheavies buffed in this mode because you only need to find one good item? Or worse because executioner is hard to come by.

manic lark
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depends on the Sheavy

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ranged ones are straight buffs imo

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melee ones like the drill are just fine without Exe, but TCB will feel worse

celest panther
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possibly, but you wind up in weird spots because you dont have the heat/loading management you'd usually spec for. Curious!

manic lark
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i think that's kind of the beauty of a format like this

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sometimes you will find a DSAS without Vanguard

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just like sometimes in Slay the Spire you'll find a Catalyst without any Poison cards

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yes i must constantly compare to this game bc its my baseline

night bloom
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My potentially a hot take: Sheavy melees are already strong and executioner just leans them towards ridiculous

celest panther
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quite possibly true

celest panther
manic lark
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hmmm, looks familiar but i cant put my finger on why

image.png 2026012.JPG
night bloom
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It is a good format

rocky fjord
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following

simple folio
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Ooh, also following

vagrant bridge
idle abyss
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Cool business

calm isle
livid helm
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Liked and subscribed

celest panther
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One thing im trying to unsnare today: shop generation thats reliable enough to be useful but tricky enough to not override the randomness

  • highly random, but rerollable for chits? Worried this winds up with players pressuring each other to reroll, but maybe its a way for the angel summoner to bring bmx trickster up to par
  • pre-labled shops? (E.g.: the IPS-N shop, the Tech Actions shop) maybe makes it too close to the normal salvage mechanics.
  • wider range of offered goods (e.g. doubling the number of weapons offered in a given shop) but make them very expensive?
livid helm
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I probably like the first one the most.
And yeah, the person with really good kit can blow cash on rerolls

celest panther
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Graphic design is my passion

SPOILER_The_Over-Map.png
celest panther
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tentative first whack at filling this out (eagle-eyed viewers will notice I also added an extra line because I thought you were a bit limited on options in the prior incarnation). Will probably reconsider some parts of this, I think heavy weapons are too populous for the moment. Interesting balance thing I'm thinking through: if you take a frame in the starter kit, and roll a frame with a heavy slot, you're pretty gimped until you find one. logically that means you need some heavies early in the tree as at least options, or frame re-rolls. Perhaps both? to allow people to get out of the bad everests they'll be in?

SPOILER_The_Over-Map.png
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All just sort of musings for playtests, but I want to avoid a situation where everyone feels like they have to take the SAME choice between heavy or frame.

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Further note: thinking about allowing a single reroll post-combat for a chit. As is, once you pass your last shop chits are worth much less, which puts pressure on the map to have at least one shop in the last couple of spaces.

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it is insane how fast the questions are exploding out of this I should not have decided to do this

celest panther
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Curious if there would be interest in a condensed playtest. Very rough approximation of attrition and testing progression while only running a couple of the short combats

mild spire
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i'd give it a shot

manic lark
celest panther
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The nightmare of a flat earth. Surely a round earth wouldn't have time zones.

mild spire
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surely we have the technology to transform the earth from its current flat state into a beautiful sphere

vagrant bridge
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Also might just be a problem on my end, but the example map image doesn't show up for me on the Google doc

celest panther
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uh weird not sure about the image thing

celest panther
# celest panther tentative first whack at filling this out (eagle-eyed viewers will notice I also...

I think the easiest fix is as follows:

Put nodes that can but dont necessarily contain heavy weapons fairly early in the tree. Im pretty happy handing out a lot of frames in a run as theres some fun tech you can do by hopping around a bit, and extra frames will always have value as a health top up in a desperate spot so not as worried about that.

And then just hope that rng, donations, and shops cover the gap

vagrant bridge
warm lodge
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i got an idea for an setup for this:The players are SecCom era flash clones and have to escape their prison/base with the limited help of union against the bases automated defenses

celest panther
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Theres lots of good structures for it

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Also more coming soon on this! Full scale playtest begins Tuesday and im going to start sketching out boss theories soon

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Life occasionally kicks my ass and yhis is pretty low on my priority list - thankfully its about to become my weekly game for a month or two so ill have lots of thoughts.

warm lodge
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will pigsriots roll tables be public?

celest panther
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Theres a link to them at the end of the document but honestly im genuinely just rotating whether "just filter it in comp con" is the easiest answer haha

mild spire
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people can't access the link

warm lodge
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yea

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pls make it public

celest panther
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Ouurgh

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My old nemisis

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Fixed

warm lodge
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Thanks!

celest panther
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Rotating "boss design" in my head because thats quickly becoming an essential leg of this project I think.

For 1 (or 2) v X fights in lancer i think you need to dodge two bullets

  1. how do you make conditions/control effects appropriately impactful;
  2. how do you reach an appropriate level of complexity to replace an entire opfor (and often the sitrep too)

Ultimately I think the things you can generalize about bosses is how their defensive mechanics work, more than their offensive ones

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So, in that vein, I want a pillar here to be 3-4 defensive "templates" for a boss that can be applied, and a few samples of each. Lowercase t templates, not proper lancer ones.

I think ive got a few ideas here which ill hopefully have time to hash out over the next few weeks.

vagrant bridge
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Stage hazards are super useful for Lancer bossfights I've found. Stuff like pits of lava or turrets that automatically shoot at people not in cover (with the map designed around lines of fire/cover for them) and so on

celest panther
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first launch of scrap metal to players today - doled out the initial selections and not much else. Interesting note that 4/5 people took a chassis over a heavy weapon but my players are self-described degenerate gamblers. Same split on talents vs CB - I personally would value a full talent about the same as a core bonus, with roughly as many possible stinkers?

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Not 100% sure thats correct though.

celest panther
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Free floating note to self: roll tables take a while. Yeesh

celest panther
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Rotating a three part of default defensive kits for boss archetypes

  1. Bruiser - something akin to AC6 stagger solution - bosses have a set of tokens that refresh on $timing or $trigger that allow them to reduce damage, or clear a status/condition. Exact timing of when/how they can use this is a big lever for feel and potency. HP should be calculated with the assumption that theyll be resisting most/all damage as if they have tokens, and a harsh Blowback when they run out (brace downsides, exposed, etc)
  2. buddy system - two, linked entities that share an action pool and a health pool. Their offensive abilities should be on cool downs or require some action from that particular entity to refresh, so players can clock/punish timings.
  3. Bastion - the npc has physical objects that either abstractly represent or provide in an aoe Resistances/status condition deflection for them. Once destroyed, they can be affected as normal. These objects should be destroy able with a barrage, ish, and need conditions on which they refresh.
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Ive thoroughly tested the first one, am pretty convinced the third will work, and the second will need some thorough testing

night bloom
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So would these archetypes be alongside other NPC classes and templates?

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Like, a "Bruiser Commander Assault"

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Or would it be "Boss Commmander Assault" with an optional trait of "Bruiser, Buddy or Bastion"

celest panther
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Theyre not really intended to be stapled onto existing npcs - template isnt a good word for it i guess.

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(Just as that word is already a Term in lancer). Theyre just supposed to be formats for which ill provide a couple of examples

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The fundamental issue with attaching these to normal npcs is they just simply dont have enough complexity to replace a sitrep

celest panther
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Going to need to develop more thorough guidelines for scaling down encounters. I'm drafting out my first one and feeling on somewhat uncertain ground for it because I do think you need to shorten combats for breathing room, but its a razors edge between "shorter, smaller combat" and "obliterated opfor"

chrome egret
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im thinking

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could I integrate this into an otherwise normal campaign as a "dungeon"

celest panther
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Yes! This is actually exactly how im playtesting it right now

chrome egret
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Ah I see

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hell yeah

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now if you dont mind I see the rules at the top so im just gonna

celest panther
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Not sure what text youre referring to but yeah wouldn't be public if it wasn't for grabbin

chrome egret
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I meant the rules

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words have not been on my side today

celest panther
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Ah I c

celest panther
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Meditations:
Theres actually not THAT many peices of gear in lancer once you start carving things down. A total of 26 melee weapons across all expansions, and across a party of 5 thats 15 draws. Youre almost guaranteed to pull duplicates.

Is this good? Bad?

somber lintel
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Though tbf if you’re doing carving first then yeah…

celest panther
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Yeah the idea here is people can shape their builds a bit by picking the pools their draw 3 is from

somber lintel
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Tbf I don’t know what’s in the pool at the moment

celest panther
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Basically the nodes are specifics like "melee weapons" or "frames" but they could get more specific

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I dont think duplicates are necessary a bad thing but my party of 5 pulled 2 D/D 288s last night so

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Thats funny at least

somber lintel
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Could lump melee and cqb together maybe

celest panther
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The question in my mind is more "do you want to hard block duplicates or not"

night bloom
manic lark
celest panther
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The fabled hechaton, black ice module, dd288 build

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Very normal video games experience

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....my fucking lycan got opcal and super thermal blade though so ill set myself on fire.

celest panther
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Also news from the front: holy shit kinhammer is good what the hell

somber lintel
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Without a license requirement, it’s strictly better than GMS Heavy Melee yeah

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Adding +1 threat to GMS HM could make it a lil more competitive

celest panther
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+threat on heavies is a huge buff because of executioner - not remotely an untenable one though (as GMS Heavy is pretty limp).

somber lintel
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Yeah precisely, little QOL bump if you’re looking for one

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Otherwise yeah it’s the unlucky roll on the melee table lol

celest panther
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Thoughts from the front:

current repair rules in the shop are too stingy. Doubling repairs for the value is a good idea

Actually, I was musing on this earlier but I think that making everything have a flat # of repairs (I.e. players start with 5 repairs, no matter the chassis) is a useful implementation here

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Attrition is the main pain point here, as expected. Players are having a BLAST, and predictably we’re getting some discrepancies between power level ( my lycan got a super thermal blade and executioner…. And lycan as a frame is really over performing) but that’s X Com babyyyyy

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Donation rules feel really good. Limited numbers are making people stretch their brain cases but 2 plus some break glass options feels like it’s just about right

celest panther
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Super heavies feel just about right here because while they do solve a lot of builds offensively, but you’re often lacking the tools to really support it so it evens out

celest panther
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Also my players seem to prize mech skill points extremely highly - risking a very tough route to get a couple of 4x packets of them. Would people consider those to be roughly equivalent to talent sets?

celest panther
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Shops are extremely big opportunities for players to consolidate/organize their builds. They feel extremely good in their current incarnation, though I did cheapen/expand availability of repairs (2 per chit, 6 total available). Ultimately players don’t get a huge amount of additional stuff but the minor breadth of options really let people nail things down.