This was a mess, plain and simple. The speech-to-text did mostly alright, the real issue is I may have understood the assignment a little too well and really did just rant for the entire car ride home. I think it shows in terms of length, incoherence, and diction. Who knew I said "you know" so much.
The concept of the "road rant" is fun and I'll probably do it again sometime, but will confine myself to a shorter timeframe so it's not such a bitch to edit. I will probably also come back to the Halo RPG idea at some point because I think it would be fun and deserves a much better-written outline than what you'll find below. Read at your own peril.
(TL;DR -- The Lancer RPG mechanics are an interesting and workable system for a Halo hack, replacing manufacturers with specializations, mechs with armor sets, and tying unlocked abilities to armor pieces that a PC could mix and match.)
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| Tell me you don't already hear the theme song. |
How I'd Make Halo
I am writing this via Siri on my phone on my way home from work because people in the OSR discord server thought that this would be a fun thing to do. I agree. So far, and I think the thing that’s gonna be the most different about it, is writing without pause – just kind of continuously in some sort of crazy fucked up automatic writing like Salvador Dali would’ve done talking about RPGs. Today specifically I want to talk about halo as an RPG. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart because I’ve been a big halo fan boy since about, well as long as I’ve had console video games. Halo 3, being my first halo title that I myself owned, is of course my favorite. So one thing that jumps to mind when talking about Halo, one thing that I think it’s important to know when it comes to the (shit I’ve lost the plot).
Like if you’re a squad of soldiers – and here I’m talking about like say, Only War for example – you’re a squad of imperial guardsmen. You’re cannon fodder, you’re given a flashlight and cardboard armor to fight the enemies of the Imperium yada yada yada. OK well you basically have fuck all choice in the matter of where you go or what you do.
So you (as the GM) have to kind of create these increasingly more unrealistic situations in which the squad of guardsmen or squad of soldiers is cut off from their support structure, from their command structure, from the hierarchy that would constrain their choices and their freedom and all the stuff that we, you know, we like in an RPG. You have to come up with a reason why none of that applies.
That may work for a one-shot right, but it doesn’t work for a campaign because if every single arc of your campaign is all “boy, look you know our commanding officer’s dead, our support structures are gone, there’s nobody else around, and we need to achieve the goals that we’ve been given,” then it’s kind of ridiculous right? if you’re just a line trooper, you know, there’s only so much that you can do with a sort of military science fiction campaign – at least in my mind – in a way that preserves the, you know, all of the details of it being a military setting right?
If you are just soldiers with guns running around doing things then you’re not really in the military. Maybe, you know, you’re elite-level soldiers and you are doing some high-level shit where you’re giving kind of carte blanche to achieve these goals in whichever, you know, way you find best.
Which is kind of how it works out in Mass Effect. But they had some really, you know, contrived situation where you were playing a soldier with military orders, that’s part of the military organization, and yet you were given this, like, incredible freedom and agency to accomplish your goals in whatever way, you know, you see fit. Which I don’t think is very realistic for the military, but whatever.
OK so the problem with being guardsmen, or marines, or like low-level soldiers like I said, you don’t have much choice. However, if you’re playing an elite soldier like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect it’s a different story. I think that Halo falls more on the Mass Effect side of the spectrum. In my mind, the player characters are all Spartans because the most interesting part of Halo, right, from the players perspective, is going to be a spartan. Do you wanna be Master Chief? Do you wanna kick Covenant ass and finish the fight?
The problem is Master Chief – and I'm talking Master Chief in halo one through five – is kind of a reactionary. He’s given these missions (that's the way that a Halo campaign is set up, as missions) and you go on these missions, you know, fight these enemies (incomprehensible dictation). And it’s not like a linear corridor shooter, right, like they’re big maps, oftentimes they are (incomprehensible dictation). You have some choice in how you get around some (incomprehensible dictation).
I guess in Halo Infinite, the Halo six, the one that's out right now, the campaign is now something of an open world map. Again, you are constrained by the fact that, you know, like there's no dialogue, there's no really any sort of like, I don't know, any sort of action or any sort of like, input that isn't just fighting.
And from what I can tell from the campaign (I haven’t played it because I'm waiting for the co-op campaign) for Infinite, the issue with the Halo Infinite campaign is it's just like, you go from one base to the next. You fight the Covenant at the base to take over the base, so it can be garrisoned by your own troops, and then you kind of work to take down some bosses on this big giant map.
And you can do it in any order that you wish, but fundamentally – and I think maybe this is, you know, the fault of it being just purely FPS – all you can do is, you know, go to, you know, the space, kill people in it, take it over, move onto the next base, wash rinse repeat. (Incomprehensible dictation for the next several sentences).
So that's kind of the tough thing about, I think, a Halo RPG. You as the GM have to do a lot of work to set up discrete missions where, you know, you start the game or you start the session in the commanding officer’s tent, right. The commanding officer says, “Look we need to do X, Y, and Z; our secondary concerns are A, B, and C; and here are optional objectives 1, 2, and 3. Have at it!” And then the players, you know, go and they do that and it’s all well and good. But the issue I ran into is it gets repetitive, right? I think that Only War and a Halo RPG's main focus is, of course, combat. If all you're doing is combat, it gets old very quickly.
So the problem is we don't have a whole lot of instances in Halo of stuff that isn't combat because it's primarily, you know, it's an FPS game. You bought the game, you play the game, because you're there to shoot things and so that's what the game is about. And so they cut the extraneous stuff, more or less, where you're talking to, you know, the people you're saving. You know, there's not a lot of downtime in Halo is I guess what I'm getting at.
Halo Five experimented with it a little bit but they tried to, like, jam it into the engine within the mechanics of Halo without really adapting a whole lot. So it's just, there's points in the game where you just wander around a level and there's NPCs that will just say, like, voice lines to you as you walk past. I guess it gets to be a little bit better than just, you know, “go there, kill this, move on” but there's not a lot of interaction between Master Chief and the general population and you don't even get a whole lot of that in the books, either.
The books are primarily from the standpoint of Master Chief going about badass shit and, you know, a lot of the interactions that he has in the books give us more dialogue, and more kind of person-to-person interaction between him and other Spartans, or him and military personnel. There's not a lot of, like you know, “John Spartan 117 gets dropped into the middle of town and he has to talk to people and figure things out here.”
So I guess what I'm getting at here is that military campaigns have a whole different set of constraints and things that a GM has to work around. Which makes it difficult, or maybe it's not difficult but different, because a lot of things that, you know, a lot of the prevailing wisdom for doing like, sandbox OSR D&D games isn’t going to apply. Even some sci-fi right, is like that, playing Traveler or the way you play Star Wars is gonna be different than the way you're going to play Halo if all the characters are Spartans.
That being said, I think that's why Lancer is such a good fit. Because Lancer is a game where the players are mech pilots and (incomprehensible dictation) really crunchy kind of, you know, almost like, I don't even know, just like very crunchy RPG's. Combat is where you are in your mech, you know, you have like a mech build more or less which defines like the weapons you have, your abilities, and all the different mechs do different things. And so then you kind of, like, have to synergize your build with the other PCs’ builds for your party so then you have like a good kind of like party comp. When you're doing this mech combat it’s crunchy and there’s a lot of rules but from what I can tell from reading it is that it works very well.
But then the other half of Lancer is when you're out of your mech and you're just, like, the pilot, and you're just running around doing pilot things. (Incomprehensible dictation) you know, you have, like, the actual role-playing part of the game happens when you are a pilot and you're out of your mech and the rules for the game for the pilot side of things is a lot lighter; it's more story game mechanics. Things are more kind of descriptive rather than prescriptive, and, you know, it's kind of like a lighter, more almost like Dungeon World kinda game.
Now where I see Halo and Lancer kind of coming together is Lancer is about you as pilots are doing missions, and you're getting dropped into these combat zones, and you have to fight your way through them and, you know, kinda sounds a lot like Halo. (Incomprehensible dictation) I think to me, the story beats to a Lancer campaign are probably gonna be pretty similar to the story beats of a Spartan campaign, right? You have like, elite, top-tier soldiers with crazy cool technology dropped in to fight these combats, you know. You're part of the military, but you're really (incomprehensible dictation).
So the the way mechanically I think Lancer works for Halo is in that you have the mechs classified as makes and so there's I think like, five or six different manufacturers and they all have manufacturer-specific like, design philosophies which affects their mechs aesthetically how they look, they play, what are known for, that sort of thing. So there's one where it's like crazy hackers, kind of like pseudo-esoteric, you know, really high concept technology manufacturer and then you've got the kind of more Gundam-inspired, I want to say like, you know, Japanese anime-looking mechs so these are manufacture is kind of a different design philosophies and there's different mechs with different purposes within the manufacturers, so it’s not like each manufacturer has the “melee bruiser” mech but one manufacturer’s is blue and cyperpunk looking or whatever, but then the other manufacturer’s is like, utilitarian. I guess what I’m saying is each manufacturer is different and the mechs a manufacturer produces are different from each others’ as well as different from the other mechs made by that manufacturer. It adds a lot of variety.
OK so there is a fan made RPG for Halo but I haven’t played it so I can’t really talk about it. But the thing that jumps to mind when I do talk about Halo is this lucid dream kind of concept for a Halo RPG that I had one night when I was stoned. I was asleep and I woke up and it was this really great idea (at least I thought at the time I don’t know how workable it is) but here it goes: the idea is to use Lancer, which is an RPG about big giant mechs and pilots and it’s kind of a crunchy RPG – think like Gundam kind of mechs – and anyway so the concept was to use that as the base for the Halo RPG and I think that’s workable for a number of reasons.
Armygame Agency
Before I really get into that, I think it’s worth talking about whether or not, you know, whether it’s Halo or Starship Troopers or Only War (which I’m going to to talk about here in a minute because it was my first RPG that I got into) with any sort of military and I think especially military science fiction RPG you run into, like, a number of issues running it and coming up with campaigns.
Because fundamentally, the life of a soldier, when you talk about an RPG soldier, is a reactive one right? You don’t have a lot of agency because you have a military sort of hierarchy, and structure, and you have orders dammit! Things you have to do are gonna limit your freedom and your freedom to make choices. In kind of like a sandbox environment from the OSR perspective – you know this kind of sandbox, do choices matter, yada yada yada kind of thing – problem being you are fairly limited in the military context, right?
Because fundamentally, the life of a soldier, when you talk about an RPG soldier, is a reactive one right? You don’t have a lot of agency because you have a military sort of hierarchy, and structure, and you have orders dammit! Things you have to do are gonna limit your freedom and your freedom to make choices. In kind of like a sandbox environment from the OSR perspective – you know this kind of sandbox, do choices matter, yada yada yada kind of thing – problem being you are fairly limited in the military context, right?
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| Not pictured: player agency |
Like if you’re a squad of soldiers – and here I’m talking about like say, Only War for example – you’re a squad of imperial guardsmen. You’re cannon fodder, you’re given a flashlight and cardboard armor to fight the enemies of the Imperium yada yada yada. OK well you basically have fuck all choice in the matter of where you go or what you do.
So you (as the GM) have to kind of create these increasingly more unrealistic situations in which the squad of guardsmen or squad of soldiers is cut off from their support structure, from their command structure, from the hierarchy that would constrain their choices and their freedom and all the stuff that we, you know, we like in an RPG. You have to come up with a reason why none of that applies.
That may work for a one-shot right, but it doesn’t work for a campaign because if every single arc of your campaign is all “boy, look you know our commanding officer’s dead, our support structures are gone, there’s nobody else around, and we need to achieve the goals that we’ve been given,” then it’s kind of ridiculous right? if you’re just a line trooper, you know, there’s only so much that you can do with a sort of military science fiction campaign – at least in my mind – in a way that preserves the, you know, all of the details of it being a military setting right?
If you are just soldiers with guns running around doing things then you’re not really in the military. Maybe, you know, you’re elite-level soldiers and you are doing some high-level shit where you’re giving kind of carte blanche to achieve these goals in whichever, you know, way you find best.
Which is kind of how it works out in Mass Effect. But they had some really, you know, contrived situation where you were playing a soldier with military orders, that’s part of the military organization, and yet you were given this, like, incredible freedom and agency to accomplish your goals in whatever way, you know, you see fit. Which I don’t think is very realistic for the military, but whatever.
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| Mass Effect is interesting because it takes the standard Bioware formula but adapts it to a protagonist who is explicitly part of the military -- the Bioware RPG formula and this rigid, military command structure normally would be incompatible. Bioware contrived the role of a Spectre to allow the player freedom to explore, while maintaining a connection to the military background. |
OK so the problem with being guardsmen, or marines, or like low-level soldiers like I said, you don’t have much choice. However, if you’re playing an elite soldier like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect it’s a different story. I think that Halo falls more on the Mass Effect side of the spectrum. In my mind, the player characters are all Spartans because the most interesting part of Halo, right, from the players perspective, is going to be a spartan. Do you wanna be Master Chief? Do you wanna kick Covenant ass and finish the fight?
Places to Go, People to Kill
I guess in Halo Infinite, the Halo six, the one that's out right now, the campaign is now something of an open world map. Again, you are constrained by the fact that, you know, like there's no dialogue, there's no really any sort of like, I don't know, any sort of action or any sort of like, input that isn't just fighting.
And from what I can tell from the campaign (I haven’t played it because I'm waiting for the co-op campaign) for Infinite, the issue with the Halo Infinite campaign is it's just like, you go from one base to the next. You fight the Covenant at the base to take over the base, so it can be garrisoned by your own troops, and then you kind of work to take down some bosses on this big giant map.
And you can do it in any order that you wish, but fundamentally – and I think maybe this is, you know, the fault of it being just purely FPS – all you can do is, you know, go to, you know, the space, kill people in it, take it over, move onto the next base, wash rinse repeat. (Incomprehensible dictation for the next several sentences).
So that's kind of the tough thing about, I think, a Halo RPG. You as the GM have to do a lot of work to set up discrete missions where, you know, you start the game or you start the session in the commanding officer’s tent, right. The commanding officer says, “Look we need to do X, Y, and Z; our secondary concerns are A, B, and C; and here are optional objectives 1, 2, and 3. Have at it!” And then the players, you know, go and they do that and it’s all well and good. But the issue I ran into is it gets repetitive, right? I think that Only War and a Halo RPG's main focus is, of course, combat. If all you're doing is combat, it gets old very quickly.
So the problem is we don't have a whole lot of instances in Halo of stuff that isn't combat because it's primarily, you know, it's an FPS game. You bought the game, you play the game, because you're there to shoot things and so that's what the game is about. And so they cut the extraneous stuff, more or less, where you're talking to, you know, the people you're saving. You know, there's not a lot of downtime in Halo is I guess what I'm getting at.
Halo Five experimented with it a little bit but they tried to, like, jam it into the engine within the mechanics of Halo without really adapting a whole lot. So it's just, there's points in the game where you just wander around a level and there's NPCs that will just say, like, voice lines to you as you walk past. I guess it gets to be a little bit better than just, you know, “go there, kill this, move on” but there's not a lot of interaction between Master Chief and the general population and you don't even get a whole lot of that in the books, either.
The books are primarily from the standpoint of Master Chief going about badass shit and, you know, a lot of the interactions that he has in the books give us more dialogue, and more kind of person-to-person interaction between him and other Spartans, or him and military personnel. There's not a lot of, like you know, “John Spartan 117 gets dropped into the middle of town and he has to talk to people and figure things out here.”
So I guess what I'm getting at here is that military campaigns have a whole different set of constraints and things that a GM has to work around. Which makes it difficult, or maybe it's not difficult but different, because a lot of things that, you know, a lot of the prevailing wisdom for doing like, sandbox OSR D&D games isn’t going to apply. Even some sci-fi right, is like that, playing Traveler or the way you play Star Wars is gonna be different than the way you're going to play Halo if all the characters are Spartans.
What is a Mech but Really Big Armor?
But then the other half of Lancer is when you're out of your mech and you're just, like, the pilot, and you're just running around doing pilot things. (Incomprehensible dictation) you know, you have, like, the actual role-playing part of the game happens when you are a pilot and you're out of your mech and the rules for the game for the pilot side of things is a lot lighter; it's more story game mechanics. Things are more kind of descriptive rather than prescriptive, and, you know, it's kind of like a lighter, more almost like Dungeon World kinda game.
Now where I see Halo and Lancer kind of coming together is Lancer is about you as pilots are doing missions, and you're getting dropped into these combat zones, and you have to fight your way through them and, you know, kinda sounds a lot like Halo. (Incomprehensible dictation) I think to me, the story beats to a Lancer campaign are probably gonna be pretty similar to the story beats of a Spartan campaign, right? You have like, elite, top-tier soldiers with crazy cool technology dropped in to fight these combats, you know. You're part of the military, but you're really (incomprehensible dictation).
So the the way mechanically I think Lancer works for Halo is in that you have the mechs classified as makes and so there's I think like, five or six different manufacturers and they all have manufacturer-specific like, design philosophies which affects their mechs aesthetically how they look, they play, what are known for, that sort of thing. So there's one where it's like crazy hackers, kind of like pseudo-esoteric, you know, really high concept technology manufacturer and then you've got the kind of more Gundam-inspired, I want to say like, you know, Japanese anime-looking mechs so these are manufacture is kind of a different design philosophies and there's different mechs with different purposes within the manufacturers, so it’s not like each manufacturer has the “melee bruiser” mech but one manufacturer’s is blue and cyperpunk looking or whatever, but then the other manufacturer’s is like, utilitarian. I guess what I’m saying is each manufacturer is different and the mechs a manufacturer produces are different from each others’ as well as different from the other mechs made by that manufacturer. It adds a lot of variety.
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| Swapping out (purely cosmetic) armor pieces, visors, color patterns, etc. is one of my favorite parts of Halo games, from Halo 3 onwards. If there's a Halo RPG to be made, this has to be included. |
Actual Idea Discussed Below
So I think the way you work this for Halo is that you do it based on armor customization. A big part of, I think, what drives the fan base for Halo Infinite (even though Infinite kind of has a shitty customization) is the armor customization for you to make your guy your guy. It is a huge part in Halo, right? Like there's a lot of fanart for people’s Spartans they've made, and fanfiction, and then all these different armor marks. and one of the things that Bungie does (and 343 Industries does but I don't think they do as well) is for each piece of armor they suggest a sentence or two about it of flavor text and it it does such a great job of establishing the setting of the Halo universe outside of like, you know, moment to moment (incomprehensible dictation).
But the main thing is that in every Halo game after Halo 2 there's this massive, like, expansion of what armor looks like and you know, you have like Halo 3 where you can change the shoulder pad, chest piece, and helmet and then the color of your Spartan’s armor. Infinite does it like, worse, but the idea being you have all these different pieces where that in-universe serve different purposes and kind of, you know, demonstrate different specialties.
So maybe you have armor that looks like something out of ghost recon and that's what, you know, the recon or scout/sniper-focused Spartans wear. And there’s like different variations on that of course, but you know, you can tell a lot about what a character’s role is based on the armor that their suit is comprised of. That's a big part of what I think makes Halo very popular is, you know, making these choices for your character and then kind of customizing your Spartan. I will confess I spent a shit load of time doing that myself when Halo 3 first came out and every Halo game since right, everyone agonizing over the way the Spartan looks because it's a reflection of you. And I think that that's a huge draw for something like an RPG.
So rather than different mechs in different manufacturers you have different focuses, like different – I don't even want to say like, career paths – but different like, specialties. So to say, you know, you have like close quarters battle as a specialty and then you have like, the recon specialty, and then you have like, the breacher specialty. So these are the “manufacturers” in that those are different kinds of broad classes of armor and then within those classes there's different armor sets, and then you can mix-and-match different armor sets. Maybe the different armor pieces give you different abilities and, you know, maybe have different stats associated with them to kind of give you this variety in characters. Because I think another issue with Halo is the way the Spartans are made, as in the training, in the augmentations, they are kind of different but broadly speaking the idea of the Spartans is that they’re all these giant like, 7-foot tall, you know, supersoldiers and they're all fucking incredible, right?
But the main thing is that in every Halo game after Halo 2 there's this massive, like, expansion of what armor looks like and you know, you have like Halo 3 where you can change the shoulder pad, chest piece, and helmet and then the color of your Spartan’s armor. Infinite does it like, worse, but the idea being you have all these different pieces where that in-universe serve different purposes and kind of, you know, demonstrate different specialties.
So maybe you have armor that looks like something out of ghost recon and that's what, you know, the recon or scout/sniper-focused Spartans wear. And there’s like different variations on that of course, but you know, you can tell a lot about what a character’s role is based on the armor that their suit is comprised of. That's a big part of what I think makes Halo very popular is, you know, making these choices for your character and then kind of customizing your Spartan. I will confess I spent a shit load of time doing that myself when Halo 3 first came out and every Halo game since right, everyone agonizing over the way the Spartan looks because it's a reflection of you. And I think that that's a huge draw for something like an RPG.
So rather than different mechs in different manufacturers you have different focuses, like different – I don't even want to say like, career paths – but different like, specialties. So to say, you know, you have like close quarters battle as a specialty and then you have like, the recon specialty, and then you have like, the breacher specialty. So these are the “manufacturers” in that those are different kinds of broad classes of armor and then within those classes there's different armor sets, and then you can mix-and-match different armor sets. Maybe the different armor pieces give you different abilities and, you know, maybe have different stats associated with them to kind of give you this variety in characters. Because I think another issue with Halo is the way the Spartans are made, as in the training, in the augmentations, they are kind of different but broadly speaking the idea of the Spartans is that they’re all these giant like, 7-foot tall, you know, supersoldiers and they're all fucking incredible, right?
Cletus the Spartan
You don't have it where you know, you have Cletus the Spartan and he's like a really bad shot, right, but he's really strong and he's really smart but just can't fucking aim to save his life. That's just not gonna happen, because it doesn't fit the lore and it doesn't fit how Spartans play in the videogames or how they're treated by other people or I think would work in our context, right? You're not starting as Joe Schmoe mopping up rats in the tavern basement. So the issue that I think will pop up in character creation is that probably every single player character is going to be broadly similar in abilities, right? Like the range of strength, and agility, and perception for Spartans is going to be pretty narrow. Now there's some Spartans that are like, known or being better at some things like Spartan Kelly, who is one of Master Chief’s friends from you know, his training days, is like known for being like, really fast right? And there is Linda who is a very, very good sniper, that's her specialty, and then Master Chief’s thing is that he's lucky. But broadly speaking, right, like Linda is as strong as Kelly is as strong as Master Chief and they're all very similar in terms of their abilities.
So that, you know, the thing to make your character stand out isn't going to be your stats. Because what I see is that everybody’s stats are more or less gonna be the same or very similar. So the way you stand out is your armor, right, and what your character’s or your Spartan’s specialty is. So maybe your Spartan is known for or their specialty is, you know, they're a pilot and they just happen to be really fucking good at flying Hornets or Longswords and yada yada yada all the Halo aircraft and spacecraft. OK well if that's what, you know, your character is gonna be good at that then maybe you're going to pick armor pieces that enhance that in some way. Then maybe you say “well outside of the spacecraft I would like my Spartan to also be good at, I don't know, being stealthy,” so you pick maybe a couple recon pieces. So you unlock armor pieces the same way you unlock mechs and equipment in Lancer.
Now the way that works is when you level up, you go up what’s called a license level. That lets you pick a new mech or reach the next level of abilities for that manufacturer. The idea being, if you are license level 3 for a manufacturer you can pick anything, such as a mech or equipment or ability from level 3 downward, but if you wanted to do something from another manufacturer you have to level up your license level for that manufacturer separately.
So I kind of envision it being the same for Halo where you have like, a baseline armor that everybody gets which, you know, is kind of how it works in multiplayer with the default skin as the kids say these days. You would unlock different armor pieces or pay money but they have no effect whatsoever, all the armor is cosmetic. But I think that the best way to do it in a Halo RPG standpoint is making armor matter by tying into abilities. Tying them to abilities differentiates different characters and that’s the way that I think Halo would work well as an RPG.
I don't know that I would ever write something up, maybe if there's interest I would. I mean, fundamentally, Lancer is a crunchy game about military science fiction and Halo as a FPS is about science fiction military combat and I think the best way to represent that is through the crunchy Lancer combat but then, you know, and in your downtime kind of in between, missions, you know, you have this greater focus on the role-playing aspect of the game. And that's where I think Lancer makes a really good fit for Halo, right? You have high-level elite soldiers given a wide latitude to accomplish their objectives, and the characters have quite a bit of variety because of the gear that they have and the mech that they're using. So aesthetically they're different, mechanically they're different, they fill different niches.
So you know, I'm almost home now, this has been a very long drive and voice to text rant that I've gone on. I'm gonna have a lot of editing to do (editing note: this was an understatement) but I'm glad we've done and I hope I get some comments and would love to hear some feedback in the end.
So that, you know, the thing to make your character stand out isn't going to be your stats. Because what I see is that everybody’s stats are more or less gonna be the same or very similar. So the way you stand out is your armor, right, and what your character’s or your Spartan’s specialty is. So maybe your Spartan is known for or their specialty is, you know, they're a pilot and they just happen to be really fucking good at flying Hornets or Longswords and yada yada yada all the Halo aircraft and spacecraft. OK well if that's what, you know, your character is gonna be good at that then maybe you're going to pick armor pieces that enhance that in some way. Then maybe you say “well outside of the spacecraft I would like my Spartan to also be good at, I don't know, being stealthy,” so you pick maybe a couple recon pieces. So you unlock armor pieces the same way you unlock mechs and equipment in Lancer.
Now the way that works is when you level up, you go up what’s called a license level. That lets you pick a new mech or reach the next level of abilities for that manufacturer. The idea being, if you are license level 3 for a manufacturer you can pick anything, such as a mech or equipment or ability from level 3 downward, but if you wanted to do something from another manufacturer you have to level up your license level for that manufacturer separately.
So I kind of envision it being the same for Halo where you have like, a baseline armor that everybody gets which, you know, is kind of how it works in multiplayer with the default skin as the kids say these days. You would unlock different armor pieces or pay money but they have no effect whatsoever, all the armor is cosmetic. But I think that the best way to do it in a Halo RPG standpoint is making armor matter by tying into abilities. Tying them to abilities differentiates different characters and that’s the way that I think Halo would work well as an RPG.
I don't know that I would ever write something up, maybe if there's interest I would. I mean, fundamentally, Lancer is a crunchy game about military science fiction and Halo as a FPS is about science fiction military combat and I think the best way to represent that is through the crunchy Lancer combat but then, you know, and in your downtime kind of in between, missions, you know, you have this greater focus on the role-playing aspect of the game. And that's where I think Lancer makes a really good fit for Halo, right? You have high-level elite soldiers given a wide latitude to accomplish their objectives, and the characters have quite a bit of variety because of the gear that they have and the mech that they're using. So aesthetically they're different, mechanically they're different, they fill different niches.
So you know, I'm almost home now, this has been a very long drive and voice to text rant that I've gone on. I'm gonna have a lot of editing to do (editing note: this was an understatement) but I'm glad we've done and I hope I get some comments and would love to hear some feedback in the end.
As another Halo fan, I agree that Lancer is a surprisingly good fit for Spartan RPG’s. I often think about the other parts of the Haloverse, though - the covert cloak and dagger missions between the Insurrection and the UNSC. The Spartans were created to subdue colonies, after all - not to kill aliens. The Rubble - a bunch of asteroids held together by an increasingly rampant AI and populated with a terse “alliance” of insurgents and Jackals seems to be a perfect spot for RPG stuff.
ReplyDeleteI think the biggest problem is the potential repetitive and cyclical nature of combat, as you’ve noted, because Halo always only had a handful of Named Enemy Types.
So - is this a crunchy RPG for telling Spartan heroic-battle stories or an RPG which can accommodate the little guys? I’ve seen the fan-made version (very dense) which tries to have it both ways. Is that a successful take? Maybe, but, again, as you’re saying - it needs a very concrete campaign structure, like Halo Wars 1 or the story of the Spartans on Onyx. Happy to chat about this more on the OSR Discord.
Lancer does seem to be a good fit mechanically, but I think the more interesting question is how to make the game structure work, allowing both player freedom and the narrative of being part of a military organization. I think this could be solved pretty straightforwardly by letting go of the assumption that players need to have one, or one kind of, character. Like, the players could spend most of their time as Spartans, but in between the action, they could take on the role of the Spartans' handlers or the brass, using the information they have at that high level to decide where to send the Spartans and what to do next. This might lead into a mechanic where the players decide the objectives. The players as the brass have a whole bunch of things they need done, lots of places needing intervention, and lots of ways to get it done that involve sending in Spartans (need to pacify a colony? You could send in a team of Spartans to just terrorize the people, or you could send them to kidnap a prominent figure and pressure them to get the colony back under control, or to covertly destroy a supply chain so the colony is forced to welcome back the UNSC to survive). I might write more of this up on my own blog.
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