Faced with a few hours of downtime yesterday that I didn’t want to spend looking into a screen, I decided to do a little solo RPG session, and being inspired by a colleague running a Lancer campaign, I settled on The Mecha Hack as a soloable version of such.

What is ‘The Mecha Hack’?

The game is a very simple OSR style game – you have four statistics (Power, Mobility, System, Presence) set by rolling 3D6, and any action you wish to take which is not a guaranteed success is achieved by rolling under those stats on D20.

All rolls are player facing, which means that a player rolls to attack by getting under their Power stat, and rolls to dodge an enemy’s attack by rolling under their own Mobility stat. This drives the narrative through the players, with descriptions of their successes and failures.

All damage is achieved through dice rolling, with armour being a ablative protection which only resets after a ‘long rest’ (i.e. repair), and in some cases an action may cause a mech to have to ‘test’ their reactor for overheating/power consumption and shut down.

Statistics rolled for Mechs ultimately translate to human-scale too for person-scale roleplaying, with the proviso that humans can’t damage mechs, and mechs instakill humans.

A Quick actual Play

A rolled up a Maverick archetype with a Striker mech, and used the mission tables in the book to determine this was going to be a scrambled defense of a base in a jungle world. from kaiju monsters. The complication: the green recruits at the base were on the verge of fleeing instead of attacking.

With scant opportunity, Maverick rolls PRES to corral the troops over the comlink in his mech – while most flee, a couple stick around. Maverick directs them into the old training mechs sitting abandoned in the launch bay, while strapping in to Striker.

Before long, the crashing through the undergrowth heralds the arrival of the first wave of monsters, all claws and teeth.

1D6 Kaiju Spawnlings (2) with acid blood (do 1 damage to everyone close when damaged), and 1D6 close (claws) and 1D4 ranged (spines) damage.

Next wave appears in 1d6 ‘moment’ rounds = 2

I can’t find any specific rulings on who goes first in combat, so I assumed the player probably should

Striker fires at near range >17 Mobility (success)
Roll for Kaiju HP at 1HD = 2
Roll for light weapon damage 1D6 = 4
Spawnling1 is killed
Striker fires again at Spawnling2 and misses. Rolls vs reactor for overheating (since same action twice) and is OK.

Striker fires two shots from his super-sized revolver, blasting one of the spawnlings away. The recruit and their training mechs are ready, but can’t activate until next turn. The remaining Spawnling closes in for the attack

Spawnling2 attacks Recruit1 who fails a dodge (1d20 < MOB = fail), for 1d6 damage = 3 damage (5/8hp remaining)
1 Kaiju Drone appears at ‘distant’ and runs into close.

In the next moment of combat, Striker ignites a beam sword and goes to work, but the acid blood is spattering over both it and the Recruit mechs, corroding what little armour they have.

Striker attacks Spawnling2 with beam sword (1d20 < POW = success) and does 1d6 damage = 2 damage (3/6 remaining)

Combat continues in this vein, until Striker triggers his ‘Static Cloud’ module – the equivalent of a magic item – which does 1d4 damage to all enemies in close combat and makes the mech ‘hidden’, and then performs an advantageous (roll 2 die and pick highest) attack from that position.

By the end, the kaiju are slain, one of the Recruits is bleeding out and both mechs are down to no armour. I roll for a complication, and ‘fog fills the area’ – meaning that enemy detection has to now be via SYS rolls.

How did it play?

There’s a risk when playing solo that you end up going through a very mechanistic, simulationist set of combat roles – and to a degree that happened here – but with a relatively simple system it didn’t get in the way and yet really emphasised the mecha aspect of the system. Acid blood (Guyver), Training Mechs (Patlabor), Kaiju (Pacific Rim), Beam Swords (Gundam) and Static Clouds, to say nothing of the steaming jungle (008th MS Team) all came from the game system.

I can’t wait to give this another shot, and have already looped my local Dad’s “D&D” group into playing a one-shot – the mission? To heist some mechs from an orbiting cruiser and stealthily planetfall.