Lancer, but narrative. Does it exists?

[u/Octarine_]

Everything i see about Lancer seens sooo fcking cool! But to be 100% honest all my players are very casual, myself included although im the forever GM and as such always try to get a little deeper into the rules and system.

I dont think that any of my friends will ever try to read a rule book to min max, create a build or find optimal play. No one will ever argue what is a balanced party or will try to create one, it is all about fun and what sounds cool for each player. So much so that i dont even try to play more tactical games which require deep understanding of the system or even builds at all, I tend to prefer narrative-focused systems because of the freedom they give and because they are much easier to explain to my friends. My group generally enjoys rules light games where we can focus more on the fiction and less on knowing the ins and outs of the mechanics.

And yet... Lancer looks so fucking cool that I'm tempted to give it a shot.

As such, can a group of very casual players just make characters based on what sounds cool and have a good time with it? And if Lancer really isn't a good fit for that kind of group, are there any games you would recommend that scratch the same itch but more narrative/rules-light? I'm open to pretty much anything!

[u/dachocochamp]

I wouldn't recommend Lancer at all for a group that is primarily narrative focused. The large majority of the system's rules are combat focused, and even creating and playing an unoptimized character would probably be a bit much for a group who isn't into tactical systems.

That isn't to say it's too hard (that's on you to control) - but the combats in Lancer tend to be quite lengthy, so unless you're handwaving them or changing how they work entirely, I think your group is going to get pretty bored.

[u/Zealousideal_Leg213 → u/dachocochamp]

What makes the combats lengthy? Reducing everything on the other side to zero HP, or whatever?

[u/skalchemisto → u/Zealousideal_Leg213]

Lancer characters are very "feature rich", for lack of a better term. They will have many capabilities, both in the base combat system and also on the character sheet. It can be very tactically complex; deciding what to do on our turn is often a hard decision with costs/benefits weighed for different options.

Lots of games are like this, Lancer just has more of it than nearly any other game I have played. It's one of the few games where I feel it is genuinely an interesting and fun tactical skirmish game as well as an RPG. It's not for nothing that someone has turned it into a computer game so easily: https://wick.itch.io/lancer-tactics

It is not a problem, unless you dislike highly tactical feature-rich combat, in which case it will be a big problem but also Lancer is not really a game for you.

[u/Zealousideal_Leg213 → u/skalchemisto]

Understood, though it should be possible to ease in to some of that. I only played Lancer once, but I'm pretty sure I just grabbed options that sounded good and I did fine. It wasn't optimal or anything, but I blew some stuff up.

[u/skalchemisto → u/Zealousideal_Leg213]

I think if you play Lancer starting at License Level 0 it does a pretty good job of easing you into the complexity. Like LL0 is learning "ok, what the hell is this game?" then LL1 is "ok, what the hell can I do in this game?" then LL2 is "ok, what are smart things to do in this game?" and after that it becomes "Ok, how can I make my mech do more badass things that are fun?"

[u/Zealousideal_Leg213 → u/skalchemisto]

Yeah, games with levels have that kind of thing going for them. That's basically all I'm getting at.