System Rebuilding - Mekton Zeta Part I

Today I'm starting a new series of articles on game design, focusing on older systems and how to improve them. To start with I'll be taking a look at one of my groups favorite systems, Mekton Zeta. I chose this system because we have been using it fairly often and many of its flaws have become quite apparent.

To start with here are what the system does well:
- Fast paced combat, I have never played another system where we could play out a fight with seven or more combatants on a side and have it take less then an hour.
- I have never encountered a better system for constructing vehicles and weapons.
- The life path system makes character creation a game in itself
- It captures the feel of Mecha anime

Now to list its flaws:
- Character attributes are extremely unbalanced, Reflexes and Luck and extremely useful while Attractiveness and Education are almost completely useless.
- There are a lot of skills that never come up and many of the careers give you ranks in them.
- There is a major disparity between Career characters and Rookie characters, Career characters start out stronger while rookie characters gain experience faster. This makes it a horrible decision to play a Career character unless they take a ridiculous number of careers. There is also the problem of characters having no set limit to the number of starting careers they can have, just their age.
- Equipment on Mechs usually takes up space equal to its cost, this means that you will have to spend a ridiculous number of points when building your mech just to fit interesting weapons on board, often more then the cost of the rest of the mech.
- Weapon's weight is a function of how much damage it does, which means more complex weapons weigh the same a smaller, simpler weapons that deal the same damage.
- Character's attributes cannot be increased after character creation.
- Practice IP is either useless, or takes forever to assign.
- Training IP rarely comes up.
- There are two separate mechanics for luck.

Those are good enough lists to start from, I'm sure I'll remember other flaws and strengths as I work on the system.

The core system is roll a d10 add your Attribute and your Skill that applies to the roll and compare to the target number or opposed roll. This is a simple and elegant system but on its own it would have a problem of after a certain point it becomes impossible for a character with a low attack value to hit an enemy with a high defense skill. To avoid this it has critical success and critical fumbles, on a roll of 10 you roll another die and add it to your total, if that die comes up a 10 you get to add another die, and so on until you stop rolling 10's, meanwhile if you roll a 1 you roll another d10 and subtract that from your total.

I cannot see a reason to change this system on its own, though I might make small changes to the system if I feel another mechanic needs it altered.

Looking at my list of flaws I'm going to start going over the experience figure first, then cover Attributes and end with skills.

Mekton Zeta uses three types of experience, Direct IP, Practice IP, and Training IP. Direct IP is earned in play and by defaults to having no restrictions. Practice IP is gained by spending 2 hours alone working on the skill per IP, and cannot be gained on a skill you have 2 or more ranks in. Finally Training IP is gained by practicing with a teacher, and you can use it to gain IP in the skill until your rank would equal the limitation of your teacher.

Direct IP has no problems, being nice and simple. Practice IP is a great idea but it has the problem of being useless if you have 2 or more ranks in the skill, and Training IP is intended to work as a mentor teaching a younger character and it works, but it is campaign specific. I think I'd change the restrictions on Practice IP to be 5 ranks in the skill, and have Training IP have a maximum of 7, or the teachers rank in that skill whichever is higher.

Characters spend IP to increase skills in Mekton, and you could expand this to affect attributes as well. To increase a skill you spend 10 IP times the current rank in the skill, for an Attribute I think it needs to be at least 50 IP times the rank, but it needs to be play tested. This solves the lack of advancement to attributes as well as give players an additional use for IP.

Moving on to Attributes there are 10 in the game, Attractiveness, Body Type, Cool, Empathy, Intelligence, Education, Luck, Movement Allowance, Reflexes, and Technical Ability.

Attractiveness covers two skills, Personal Grooming and Wardrobe, it is pretty much useless as the two skills it covers pretty much never come up.
Body Type determines your health, carrying capacity, melee damage, and a few other things.
Cool is your willpower and charisma, it covers the Interrogation, Intimidate, Leadership, Persuasion, Fast Talk, Resist Torture, and Streetwise skills, with the exception of Streetwise these are all skills that often come up in the genre.
Empathy covers Acting, Human Perception, Interview, Leadership, Seduction, and Social skills, these vary in usefulness.
Intelligence covers Awareness, Write, Disguise, Electronic Warfare, Expert, Gamble, Languages, Programming, Shadowing, Survival, and Teaching, this is a larger list than it looks like as Expert and Languages are taken once for each area they apply to. It also determines starting skill points.
Education once again covers your starting skill points.
Luck determines your starting luck points and can be applied to your ejection rolls.
Movement Allowance determines how far your character can move, run, or jump in a turn.
Reflexes covers all combat skills, Athletics, Dance, Driving, Stealth, Swimming, Zero Gee, and Aircraft/Shuttle Pilot. This makes it the most valuable stat as combat is the focus of the game.
Technical Ability covers Basic Repair, First Aid, Jury Rig, Mecha Design, Mecha Tech, Medical, Play Instrument, Paint or Draw, Photography & Film, Pick Lock, and Pickpocket. Once again this is a good list but some only exist to add flavor.

Looking over this list I think you can merge Attractiveness, Empathy, and Cool into a single Attribute, call it Charisma. Then merge Body Type and Movement Allowance together and call it Physical Ability. Education can be dropped all together, I'll just change skill points to be 10+2 times your intelligence score. That leaves us with Charisma, Physical Ability, Intelligence, Luck, Reflexes, and Technical Ability.

While this leaves Luck and Reflexes as the most valuable attributes, I think the skills need to be gone over and possibly reassigned. Rather then cover them as they are there are enough that I will go over the refined versions.
- As Attractiveness is now part of Charisma I'm merging Personal Grooming and Wardrobe into a single skill called Appearance. While it won't come up often in combat it can provide advantages in social situations and on disguise checks.
- I'm going to merge Interrogation and Intimidate into a single skill, called Intimidate. It is rolled against the targets Stability or an opposed Resist Torture roll depending on the situation.
- Persuasion and Fast Talk will be merged into a single skill called Persuasion, as the book seemed to treat them as two uses of the same skill but list them separately.
- Resist Torture, Acting, Human Perception, Interview, Leadership, Seduction, and Social are staying the same, just being governed by Charisma instead of their original attributes.
- Streetwise will be removed.
- The Intelligence and Technical Ability skills will not be changed.
- Automatic Weapons, Rifle, and Handguns will be merged into a single skill called Firearms, out of mech combat is to rare for three separate weapon skills to make sense.
- Dodge, Blade, and Hand to Hand are going to remain unchanged.
- Aircraft/Shuttle Pilot, Dance, Driving, and Stealth, will remain unchanged.
- For the Mecha combat skills I am changing it to be the lowest of your Reflexes and Intelligence attributes. The main reason for this is that it takes both knowledge and reflexes to operate complex deices like mechs.
- I'm changing Athletics, Swimming, and Zero Gee to be tied to Physical Ability instead of Reflexes.
- I'm going to give Luck a skill, called Fortune, taken from the Cyberpunk 2020 game from the same creators. I will give details of how fortune works when I get to revising the Luck systems next week.

I think I have worked out the changes to the skill system that needed to be made. The lifepath system needs a major change now as the skills have changed, meaning that the careers will have to change to reflect this.

I'm going to end Part I here as this has been a long post, Part II will be posted next Monday.