RPG Mini-Review: The Mecha Hack

Like a lot of people, because of you-know-bloody-what, I've been trying webcams lately. No, not the kind you pay for. Nor the ones you charge for. In your dreams, BTW. No, the ones where you play a game. A Role Playing Game. No, not that kind of roleplay. Let's start again.

So, in my latest attempt to stay sane, I've been running online RPG games. And because its me, it involves giant robots. Its a little side interest of mine that's been bubbling away in the background for decades. I've wanted to play a giant robot RPG for years, but never found someone to run one, other than me, so I've ended up collecting a few rulebooks. The most recent thing to catch my eye was today's review subject, The Mecha Hack. This, as I understand it, is a modified version of “The Black Hack”, a bare-bones take on ^5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. That sounds like the Kevin Bacon game, but what The Mecha Hack does is take possibly the most fundamental RPG mechanics, I.e. going into a dungeon and wrecking face, and apply them the matter of piloting a robot and wrecking face. You can build a character in 5 minutes, a party in 30, have the outline of a scenario in 10, and have couple of fights in 1 hour. Baddies are boiled down to an attack and a life bar, for example, and you get a huge great list of them. And there's a great many charts to help. You can have a campaign up and running in an afternoon. Its pretty elegant stuff, although I did run into a few oddities and “oh, they mean that” moments as I adjusted to things. The most obvious is that you “roll under”, but the most significant of these is that games treats man and machine as the same thing mechanically. Well, you do get a pilot type and a chassis, for 16 combinations, but the former is mainly a special rule for the latter. The word I want to stress here is “minimalist”, you don't get a lot, but you get what matters. And possibly the greatest name generator chart in human history.

Now, this means The Mecha Hack is not a deep experience. Not only are most things abstracted to an extreme, so replicating some styles of robot is hard, the rules do not cover events outside of combat. Well, there's half a page or so on that last point, but its not the kind of game that walks you through a character's history as you create one, or deals with social matters. That's gonna be a deal-breaker for some, although I suppose you could hybridise this with Fate/Fudge and come out OK. My personal opinion though is that the best bits of any RPG session is when players improvise something, and the absolute worst is when you have to spend a long time working out if something out is rules legal. This lack of depth is not a bug, its a feature. The thing about keeping things this simple is that it doesn't take much to make it interesting with a few tweaks. This has freed me up to concentrate on the stuff that's fun about planning/running a game; world building, endless references, stupid jokes that only amuse me, and developing scenarios for people to play. This simplicity has also proved a boon for online play, as there's no infrastructure needed beyond the video call. Using tactical maps would require something like Roll20, of course, but otherwise its gonna stuff you have as a gamer. And once players get into it, there's plenty of meaningful decisions to make in combat. That said, my only problem with system is that the abstract movement can be hard to visualise in my head, so maybe maps are a good idea?

So, to wrap up this mini-review, The Mecha Hack is a good bit of inexpensive fun. If you want to get gaming in a hurry with minimal fuss, I can recommend it. Especially if you decide to take “inspiration” from things like Pacific Rim and Gundam.