How Do You: Robotech's Wonderful World of What the Crap?

[Alrik Vas]

Okay, so a lot of discussion lately has been on the source material and how it interacts (or clearly doesn't) with Robotech itself.

My question to you all is, do you just make a million changes that make sense to you, do you try to stay true to the original material and convert it your own way, or do you run it strictly by book print?

Personally, when I played Robotech back when, we went by the book (or at least our understanding of it, we were pretty young and new to RPG's at the time). Now I'm not so sure what I would do, and oddly enough I'm considering a Robotech game for the first time in years.

[mech798]

What our group did, (wow, talk about long ago), was just assume that the OSM was really and truly a movie-- a historical docudrama put out long after teh events, and of varying degrees of realiability-- Macross was "the history channel" take really trying to focus on what happened, and the later two were done with less attention to detail. That allowed us to handwave some of the odder parts away as director fiat (IE: The SC had a lot of problems including an over aggressive leadership, but to keep the series on its time frame they simplified all that and made certain that the actor playing Leonard had the idiot ball at all times).

[Seto Kaiba]

My question to you all is, do you just make a million changes that make sense to you, do you try to stay true to the original material and convert it your own way, or do you run it strictly by book print?

My habit, and indeed what got me into translating Japanese publications in the first place, is to correct the RPG's contents such that they're as true to the original source material as is possible with the Palladium system. I first did this for the old Macross II RPG which Palladium did back in the mid-90s, and have since been collaborating with jaymz to make Macross stats and Robotech errata for 2E.

To me, it was always pretty obvious that both Macross II's RPG and 1st Ed. Robotech were more a shot in the dark than an accurate reflection of the show's contents, and 2nd Ed. Robotech ain't much better, so when I start a review of a book, I tend to wade in with a copious supply of red ink pens and correct the hell out of them. In the end, I typically end up with something that accurately reflects the original show AND makes a decent amount of in-game sense. My changes usually end up increasing the utility and endurance of the mecha when applied to RT, which has a lot of pants-on-head stupidity and mistakes in its official specs as well.

Some of my edits have provoked some interesting discussion on their own...

[taalismn]

Considering the source material was not written with an eye towards decades of fan nitpicking and ironclad posterity, and is thus more full of holes than a block of Swiss Cheese, smoothing over the inconsistencies with a bit of commonsense to patch up the small ones and homebrewed fan-material to plug the larger becomes a necessity.
For the most part, though, players in my experience have wanted to focus on the here-and-now, and cinematic mecha combat, rather than long expository monologue about the respective military organization rank TOEs, policies, or whatever. Their attention was mainly on "Can we have that?" or "Can we blow that up?"

[Alrik Vas]

kaiba, I'm interested in the work you and Jaymz have been doing, if you're willing to discuss/share.

As far as adjustments to the RPG material, I've always been a fan of things blowing up easier than harder. I'll think about how i want to do it, i guess.

[jedi078]

My question to you all is, do you just make a million changes that make sense to you, do you try to stay true to the original material and convert it your own way, or do you run it strictly by book print?

I've added a realistic spin to my Robotech universe and toss out all the immature anime crap. With such a realistic appoach there have been a lot of changes.

This has apparently worked because my play by post robotech game has been running strong for over seven years now and despite some individuals claims (i.e I haven't seen any cold hard proof that someone else has ran a longer game) it is probably the longest running PBP Robotech game.

[MilkManX]

I don't worry about the technical details. I worry about making the game fun and interesting for the players and myself. Heck half of my players only watched the show sporadically. They just like RPG's and mecha is a bonus.

[Seto Kaiba]

kaiba, I'm interested in the work you and Jaymz have been doing, if you're willing to discuss/share.

As far as adjustments to the RPG material, I've always been a fan of things blowing up easier than harder. I'll think about how i want to do it, i guess.

I'll have to go digging for a link, since that's obviously not the sort of thing I can post here due to rules and all. I tend to go whole hog for accuracy to canon and anime, since my players are mostly die-hard fans and all.