Character Sheets for Big Stompy Robots
Continuing to noodle on materials for Hexenritter and thinking about what I want the stompy robots to be like, both within the fiction, in mechanical expression, and in at-the-table tactility. Here's where we are at the moment:
What's in a Name?
My initial plan was to call the hexenritter's giant stompy robot a "kesselgang" which my poor Google Translate German translates to "cauldron gear." I wanted a name that evoked both magic and witchcraft, and a giant walking armor. Cohost1 user PunchGirlFists pointed out that the "-gang" in "kesselgang" actually means gear in terms of, like, gearshift. Not a piece of equipment. After some generous back-and-forth she suggested "marschierpanzer" which translates to something like "marching tank" or "marching shell." I think that's pretty evocative of a giant suit of armor that moves under its own power?
Hit Location
For me, a fundamental part of the fantasy of giant fighting robots is the destructiveness. Not just of the violence the machine inflicts, but on the violence that can be inflicted on the machine without (necessarily) killing the rider. The fight towards the end of Mobile Suit Gundam 08th M.S. Team when the Ez-8 tears off its own arm to use as a bludgeon? That's the juice.
This also blends nicely with one of the whole points of heavy medieval armor: mediating the lethality of hand-to-hand combat for those who can afford it. If you have heavy armor, you're more likely to survive being subdued.
Part of this fantasy is facilitated by hit location. The random chance of an arm or a leg being torn off or disabled. Having rules for hit location and damage to discrete parts of the giant fighting robot also gives room for called shots to be a thing, which gives tactility to the fantasy of the robot as a thing with parts.
Another fun thing: using different die sizes for rolling hit location gives room to simulate the parts of the marschierpanzer different kinds of enemy can reach. A guy on foot with a spear probably can't hit anything but a robot's legs. On a tall warhorse? Maybe you can land a torso hit too. But only another giant robot or kaiju can truly threaten all of a marschierpanzer's bits.
Lil Man to Scale
I'm unreasonably proud of the robot silhouette and little man. I made both by doing origami with the polygon tool in Affinity Designer, grouping them together, and hitting "rasterize." I made the thing to a 15 pica height and made the little dude 3 picas tall. So, a six-foot dude with a 30-foot-tall robot.
Things to Keep an Eye On
Big questions mostly unanswered are:
- How many hits should the limb of a marschierpanzer be able to take before being destroyed or disabled? Right now I'm starting at "1" with room to upgrade limbs to up to "6" and the ensign/crest/flag to up to "3." But I could change it to a threshold of damage taken instead.
- How do I make sure fights are quick and snappy? If marschierpanzer can take a lot of punishment, it means fights between them are unlikely to resolve quickly. This runs counter to some of the design philosophy of the underlying system I'm using. And, I want to avoid producing something where combat is just robots mashing into each other with no interesting decisions to make in the meantime. Maybe tune it so it's pretty easy for a marschierpanzer to make a decisive hit on another?
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RIP Cohost.↩