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Okay, so it more or less matches with intuition. I did forget to mention one Part, though.

The Knight Core provides +2 Armor : +1 DUR on top of any Stat Boosts the Options might have, and the Asura Core provides two Arm Slots that can have their own Stat Boosts as well. But the Dual-Core… doesn’t seem to do much?

It takes up a Core Slot and your Fabled Part allowance to give you +1 Core Slot and +1 Fabled Part allowance. That’s just back to square one, to my eye. The only use I can see is that it has a chance of taking the Break for the Core attached to it, which doesn’t inspire confidence. Is it meant to do anything else?

(4) “Additional” Equipped Parts

Currently there are two Parts that break the usual six-Part limitation: The Knight Core, which allows a second Option, and the Asura Core, which grants two more Arm slots. Since the latter is a Fabled Part, access to it is not guaranteed at any table, but the Knight Core is available to anyone so long as the Knight MEC isn’t specifically disallowed.

Point is, a MEC with one of these Cores can have 7 or 8 Parts equipped, so how are Part Breaks resolved for them?

The Knight Core is easy enough to adjudicate; the second Option Part becomes unavailable when the Core Breaks. No change to the Part Break roll is necessary in this case, though the second Option Part probably shouldn’t also be considered Broken. That is, that second Option remains functional and in inventory for the next open Option slot.

The same approach could be used for the Asura Core, with the second pair of Arms becoming unavailable (but not Broken) when the Core Breaks. This might be a bit punishing, though, so maybe only one of the extra Arms becomes unavailable if the Asura Core would Break? Then if the Asura Core is rolled again for a Part Break, the remaining extra Arm gets an actual Break.

If more of these “additional slot” Parts become available in the future, it might be worth adding a paragraph on how to handle these kinds of Break cases.

(1.1) No, I understand the purpose and function of improvised attacks (and improvised actions broadly). I just don’t think that improvised attacks should be at the same starting line as Basic ATKs when it comes to DMG. Sure, there can be exceptions, and there can be Effect application, but improvised attacks shouldn’t be stepping on the toes of Parts that players paid for.

(1.2) A Stratagem might say, “Increase your current Shields by your COM”, for instance. There’s shades of this already with Stratagems that grant Shields based on Hits for some Stat Roll or other; that’s indirect scaling. The same could be done for Parts and Perks if direct scaling benefits were desired, which it seems like they’re not, but hey, house rules.

(3) We’ll just have to agree to disagree here. We draw the line of “acceptable mechanical outlier” in different places, which is fine.

(1.1) Improvised attacks

Yep, I nearly missed improvised attacks myself. That was almost going to be one of the feedback points until I saw the mention snuck in at the end of the Improvise description, lol.

I will say, it should probably not do DMG equal to Hits, since that’s the going rate (i.e. the standard) for Basic ATKs and Stratagems. Basic ATKs generate +2 SYN to self and Stratagems usually have more going on, so there is still a distinction, but to me it wouldn’t quite feel like an improvised attack unless the DMG was lower.

Off the top of my head, I would consider [Each Double] = +1 DMG, to a minimum of 1 DMG, or else a base of 1 DMG with +1 per double. There’s higher DMG potential than the Summons who simply get 1 Action = 1 DMG, while not stepping on the toes of other ATKs. But maybe the +2 SYN of proper Basic ATKs is already value enough.

(1.2) MEC Stat Involvement

Alright, that’s understandable. Maybe in the future, Stat contributions can be the effect of specific Parts, Stratagems, or Perks. In the meantime, probably better to remove MOB from the Speed calculation, in the interests of leveling the playing field.

(2) Integrity and Armor

Maybe consider dropping both Integrity and Armor in favor of a new term, like Hull? There’s a certain elegance to having the three survivability stats being one syllable each: Shields, Hull, and Soak. Then you could have the parallelism between Max Shields and Max Hull.

(3) Chances

Some Chances are gambles, while others are totally within the players’ control. A Pilot can actively pursue e.g. the added Dice after Boosting for Blaze Rush → Diving In on the Heat Hatchet (Squire), or position themselves to include an Ally in the Blinding Flash AoE to trigger Beacon of Hope (Knight).

This is in direct contrast compared to the likes of True Slash and Charged Shot, which was the thrust of the original point. The player only has so much control over those, and while that does provide variety, I’d argue that it’s not necessarily the good kind of variety. At that point, I would almost rather see a different kind of keyword, if they’re going to be so completely different.

I can give a pass to the ones that require a Target not have an Effect or not have taken DMG because that’s something that can be controlled as a team simply by deciding Action order; the gameplay demands are fairly low. The Gambler High Roller gets a pass, too, since that’s the entire gimmick. Double Tap → Third Time’s the Charm (Ranger) leaves a bitter taste in the mouth to be “punished” for killing one Target with a good Roll.

For the ones that check for a mechanical Target (Shaman’s Ghost in the Shell and Warlock’s Built to Fail), I have mixed feelings. It’s thematic, but again, not really in the player’s control. The ones based on downing Targets, mhmm, I guess they’re fine since learning a given opponent’s approximate DMG tolerance is something the player can do.

But all the rest of the Stratagems I checked don’t demand opponent cooperation the way that True Slash and Charged Shot do. Again, it’s rougher for the former due to the short Range. And I acknowledged the opponent control tools and multiplayer cooperation in my original post. However, most everything else is something the player can choose to do self-sufficiently. For the ones that require a particular Effect on the Target, the player can include a way to apply the Effect on another Part of their MEC if needed and use their first Action in a phase for setup.

That’s why I wanted to try floating the idea of Stratagems with Action Point costs greater than 1. Even if using those Stratagems locks the Pilot out of other Actions for that Turn, that’s still a choice they make on their own.

Just gonna drop a bunch of points here in no particular order.

(1) More MEC Stat Involvement

Base Mobility contributes to Speed Sum, but no other Stats are involved on the MEC sheet. I’d like to see each Stat involved in MEC calculations. For instance:

• DUR is given as the Stat for an improvised attack, but that should probably go to TOR.
• Instead of Armor being base 12, maybe 10 + DUR?
• Not sure about FIN.
• The thing that stands out to me for ATU is max SYN, but you seem to have that specifically calibrated for “max SYN = Flash Action”, assuming no Unshackled perk.
• Max Shields could be 3 + COM instead of 4 by default.

This would probably involve an audit of the existing Part Bonuses, to verify that numbers remain within the intended ranges. As with MOB and Speed, only the base amount of a Stat would count for these calculations, not Part Bonuses. Still drawing a blank with FIN, though.

(2) Why Integrity and not Max Armor?

The lack of symmetry between Shields/Max Shields and Integrity/Armor is a bit strange to me. It’s not a problem, per se, just a headscratcher.

(3) ATKs that cost multiple Actions

True Charge via the Hunter’s Great Sword and Giga-Blast via the Pirate’s Cannon-Arm have incentives for using them in the next Phase, assuming the Target is still in Range. I don’t like these because it removes agency from the player; certainly the game is meant to be played with teammates, and there are tools to restrain or manipulate enemy movement, but an individual player doesn’t have absolute control over when they’re allowed to use the Chance effects. It’s particularly bad for the Great Sword since it only has a Range of 2 and explicitly forbids Movement. The Cannon-Arm at least has a Range of 4-12.

What if these ATKs instead had Cost : 2 Action Points? This is a different kind of restriction that, to my mind, seems to be less dependent on the opponent’s cooperation while still having a significant opportunity cost. Could sprinkle in other clauses like it having to be your first Action in a Phase or that you haven’t Shifted or Moved via Stratagem. (Boosting might be fine, since it has a cost?)

This would open the door for other Stratagems down the road that can’t be used in one Allied Phase. 3-4 Action Points means it would only be usable in the second Allied Phase. Probably wouldn’t want to go higher than that, though. Either way, Boosting and free Shifts are probably a wrench in the works here, if the goal is to make MECs feel slow while they’re charging up, but that could perhaps be addressed with a (scaling?) Speed and Boost distance penalty if a Stratagem has non-zero charge? Requires more thought.

That’s all for this round. I’ll be back with more later. o7

Yeah, making Stats uniform would make things easier. From an outsider’s perspective, I couldn’t always tell whether the mismatches were intentional. I erred on the side of sticking with the book where it wasn’t an obvious error.

• Stat Boost I think the fact that the MEC Stats are in all caps makes them distinct enough from the likes of Armor, Shield, Soak, and Speed, and the X : Y format does a lot for readability on its own.

• Feedback I’m probably going to split it off into a separate, dedicated topic, but to respond to your points here, I think there aren’t any “instant picks” for all scenarios, so good job with that. Though, you might want to put a DMG cap on the Martial Artist’s Roundhouse Kick, from the Cyber-Thighs Part. Direct DMG is already powerful, and Speed can get quite high if you build around it (>30). That it gives SYN on top of that is icing on the cake. It’s stopped from being an instant pick by the need to build around Speed, but the ceiling on the payoff is quite high.

I did see your posts about v0.14, and (silently) updated the Perks on my sheet to match. It was Kinetic Regen and Overclock specifically that merited new text.

There’s also an edge case with the Knight Core, which allows two Option Parts to be equipped. Is the second Option Part tied to the Knight Core specifically, so that if the Knight Core suffers a Part Break, that Option Part is lost? This might be one to use an in-line Stat Boost to expand the effect description.

More will come in a future post. Still doing a bit of recovery from the data entry, haha. This game has been a brainworm for me for the past few days, so I’m taking time to catch up with other things I let slack during my fixation period.

I’m glad that you find my feedback valuable! And all that better that it’s helping to encourage you, too. It’s plain to see that a lot of time and effort went into the rules here, and as a fledgling/aspirant game designer myself, I wanted to do my part.

I think the new layout works great. De-emphasizing the Part type and cost shouldn’t be a problem, because the page setup follows a standardized Helmet : Core : Maneuver : Option : Arm : Arm scheme, so players can already intuit the type of Part by its position on the page, and have a place to sanity check without it taking up too much space. And the costs are already mostly standardized as discussed.

The main thing that stands out to me is those Parts whose Basic ATKs and Stratagems are mismatched. I don’t think the mismatch itself is a problem. The big ones are the Banshee’s two weapons and the Beast Tamer’s Guided Spear. If those mismatches aren’t in error, then they paint a picture of, “Attacking with the weapon requires X stat, but unlocking their full potential requires Y stat.” This is particularly fitting for the Guided Spear, since MOB/DUR lines up with physically manipulating the spear, while COM/TOR represents the guidance tech.

I would want those kinds of mismatches to be made clear on the Part sheet of a MEC, so I’m not “surprised” when I scroll to the Stratagem sheet. On that note, I would appreciate a “Source” field on the Stratagem sheet so I don’t need scroll back and forth checking what Stratagems come from which part. I did a lot of that while verifying the data entries, lol.

But yeah, going back to a previous reply, I think that if Focuses and other keywords are to be used, they need to be called out somewhere in the text. I got partway through the starter frames before I decided, “Yeah, no, this ambiguity is going to trip people up” and made a glossary.

I do have some more feedback to share that I might collect in a separate post, though part of me might want to wait until v0.14 since I expect some of the changes might already be addressed in some form. Either way, the sheet is mostly feature-complete now; I don’t intend to pre-populate the Stratagems sheet because a) The Horrors of Data Entry 2: Electric Boogaloo and b) players are only going to have a handful of Stratagems available in practice, so they’d either need to hide or delete a lot of “irrelevant” rows for their specific builds. At least with the Parts sheet, players only need to look at it as long as it takes them to adjust their equipped Parts.

Until next time, signing off. Keep up the good work!

EDIT: Ah, I did have one quibble that I wanted to put out there. I think having “Stat Boost” as a keyword has some unnecessary overlap with the Boosting mechanic. I think something like “Stat Tuning” or something would improve clarity. I also notice that some specific Parts have Stat Boosts that are in-line while others are separated into their own lines. The Necromancer’s Death Scythe actually has both:

[Stat Boost] : +1 FIN : +1 COM

[Stat Boost] : +5 Max Shields

[Stat Boost] : +1 Soak

Instead of, for example:

[Stat Boost] : +1 FIN : +1 COM : +5 Max Shields : +1 Soak

Though the latter would be subject to word wrap, of course. I guess that’s two quibbles, lol.

Ah, data entry for the 180+ Parts was a nightmare, but it’s finally done, lol. Normally I would’ve just made an edit to the changelog post and called it a day, but I ended up going way off the rails and making a lot of executive decisions that I wanted to explain and justify in a separate post.

Setting aside typos, errors, and straight-up missing Focuses, the big thing for me is that having only two Focuses really limits the ability to search/filter for parts, especially when Stat Boosts and Rolled Stats (i.e. Stats used for ATKs and Stratagems) compete for that space. There are also some rare cases where the Stats for a Part’s Basic ATK and Stratagems are mismatched, which makes choosing the appropriate Focuses difficult. I ended up carving out Stats and such into their own columns, and reprioritizing certain Focuses.

• MEC Stat Focuses were mostly deprecated, since the spreadsheet can already be sorted by one of the Stat Boost columns. Only one that stuck around was Stat Boost in the case of multiple Stat increases since I thought that might be valuable information.
• Element Focuses were entirely deprecated for the same reason. There’s just columns with checkboxes to show what Elements each Part is capable of using.
• Most Status Effect Focuses were deprecated, with the exception of Versatile (can apply 3+ different Effects) and new Free [Effect] Focuses for the handful of Parts that have “Once per Allied Phase, apply [Effect].
• There are also a handful of Basic ATKs that automatically apply Effects; these were termed “Basic [Effect]”.

I could go on, but my core philosophy after stripping out the Focuses with low information content was to determine which effects I would be most disappointed in missing after a search. Movement, Negate, and SYN effects stood out to me as being particularly valuable.

To help make my thought process a little bit more transparent, I added a Focus glossary with this sort of information. Together with the added instruction sheet/cells, I hope to make the sheet a bit easier to handle. That’s also the reason I chose to hide the detailed columns (Basic ATK/Stratagem Stats, Focuses, Elements/Effects), so that the Parts sheet doesn’t look too intimidating. The most important cells for number of parts bought/equipped and the Stat Boosts thereof remain exposed.

Ultimately, it’ll probably be difficult for me personally to “earn back” the time spent on the data entry, but I still think it’s worth it. Hopefully my deviations from the text aren’t received too harshly, haha.

EDIT: Part of it is the divide between the needs of a PDF and the strengths of a spreadsheet. Real estate in a page layout is very valuable. The Part listings could probably be rearranged to have ATK/Stratagem Stats separate. Each MEC does have its potential Elements listed beneath their Stat Focus and Team Focus, but that assumes all of its Parts are taken. So, Elements would probably be better off including in the Part listings themselves. Further, since the costs of most Parts are standardized (10,000c for Squire Parts; 15,000c for the vast majority of Parts, and 20,000c for two-handed Parts and the Gaccha Core), the Part cost could probably be a fair bit smaller if necessary to fit other information.

I took advantage of having a spreadsheet to pack information in a relatively dense space, with some concessions to readability. It was the sort of thing like, “I can, so I ought to”. While it ventures firmly into homebrew territory, I think that having more information empowers the user to make better decisions. The spreadsheet isn’t a replacement for the rulebook, but it provides a good starting point; some Focuses already invite further investigation with their vagueness, e.g. Utility.

I’ll stop rambling now, lol. Turns out I have a lot to say about the game. Hopefully that comes across as enthusiasm and constructive criticism.

I’m glad you like it! There’s still more features to be added; today I’ll be tackling the massive task of data entry because I’ve spent so long skimming the Parts list for Stat Boosts that I might as well(TM) put them into a sortable list. More than 175 MEC Parts is one of your selling points, so I have some work ahead of me, lol.

I haven’t actually run the game yet. Making this sheet was my second step into campaign prep (the first being reading, of course). It’ll be much easier for me to run and players to get into if they have an automated tool like this. I’ve made a few spreadsheets like this now, so I’m getting the hang of it.

Keep up the good work! I’ll be looking forward to future releases, and I’ll try to keep the sheet up to date. (On that note, I need to include the version supported by the sheet somewhere…)

I’ve added a changelog to the sheet, but I’ll also maintain one here:

• v1.0: Release
• v1.1: Fixed Soak formula; added Cargo tracking; added Enhancement tracking
• v1.2: Added Introduction sheet; enabled viewer comments; populated Parts sheet; added Focus glossary
• v1.21: Fixed an error with the Psychotech perk detection.
• v1.22: Fixed other perk errors; fixed part bonus calculations.

This game crossed my desk recently and piqued my interest. In the interests of facilitating experimentation, I created a version of the MEC sheet as a Google spreadsheet with lots of automation.

Stats, upgrades, costs, and even perks are all tracked by the sheet, though I haven’t yet populated a database for e.g. dropdown lists. It would require a lot of data entry, but it’d be pretty convenient.

Anyway, here’s the sheet link. Let me know if you use the sheet, and please share any feedback you might have. Thanks.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16ZbiPMeLnERHt2knWZ5wxXMSv5-nQYD0u8Y8jrG6eCQ/edit?usp=sharing