The White Elephant: A Post-Mortem
Hi. This is the post-mortem post about my two-year Lancer campaign, fully chronicled over on my Tumblr. But Tumblr unbalances my humors and I don't like its text post editor so big campaign update posts are going to be on ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear now.
After two years of a regular campaign, I would still be down for running a Lancer game in the future (just not right now), which is a solid compliment to give a system.1
I really am going to miss being able to spend 30-90 minutes coming up with a sitrep, opfor, and map and then calling my prep for the week done, but that's a double-edged sword (I like getting deep into prep!). And Lancer's balanced enough that I could be confident that the players would have a decent chance of coming through (too high a chance of coming through, as it constantly turned out) but would still have to work for it (the Tempest Drone cheese-grater trick I think was the most broken thing to fall out of the campaign and that only showed up at the end. No shade to Magpie's player - can't blame them for playing the game).
Even in the non-combat sessions, when I remembered to include the full spectrum of Difficult/Risky/Heroic rolls I found that Lancer had enough meat to its system to keep the energy up. I still look very fondly on the between-combat session of getting from a Guardian Fleet battleship down to Angelus Landing. The downside - and this is a problem I had with Blades in the Dark2 - is that because this system is so loose, it left me floundering a little on what to prep for non-combat sessions. When it's intended that player rolls can have such big outcomes - when a success allows them to just do the thing or a fail means that a new complication gets introduced - I get very cautious about what I should write down beforehand and so I don't end up writing down enough and then those sessions end up feeling anemic.
White Elephant started when I took half a campaign idea I had initially planned for a Stars Without Number sandbox and brought it into Lancer without much adaptation. What I should have done was plan out how the plot threads were going to progress and maybe cut most of the sandbox content. Something like introduce the Guardian Fleet immediately after that first mission to give something to work against and tie in the mystery of the HARLEQUIN more. Maybe have the Guardian Fleet also actively investigating the HARLEQUIN. Making it so that the lancers were going up against the Fleet in every mission would have made the campaign feel a lot more cohesive, I think.
Having the Guardian Fleet show up more often would have allowed for actual rivals (vital to a mecha story) and more personality for the enemies. I was planning to have this thing where Guardian Fleet regular units had fewer mechs because chassis warfare was still relatively new for them. I really am going to miss Lancer's system of being able to slap templates on generic NPC statblocks, it worked very well to set up combats.
I do wish I'd been able to use more combined arms sitreps. But I had to end the campiagn, because two years is too long for a Lancer game. Two years is especially too long for this Lancer game. That's twice as long as I intended this campaign to go! Again, I think trying to start it out as a sandbox ended up being a bit of self-sabotage on my part. My gut feeling is that with Lancer's level-after-mission structure, a sandbox has to be more intentionally designed34
But actually the biggest rake I stepped on is that I intended to do better NPC work in this campaign by having the whole bridge crew named and hanging around, and then just didn't use them. I think I got distracted by the promise of flashy mecha action and forgot to actually make characters for the players to interact with on the Eye of the Tiger itself. Same with half the party taking Technophile - I just did not take advantage of the fact that there were all these NHPs hanging around to bounce things off of. NPCs solidly in the win column were Arjhet and Tehjra, an idea that came to me as a visual gag who then became a little bit of a mouthpiece for me the GM to prod the players. I should've been using the Tiger's bridge crew for that but A&T had the advantage of being native to the sector in this time period and enmeshed in its factions. A couple of fun lessons for future campaigns there.
Another issue is that what drew me to Lancer to begin with was the military sci-fi aspect - it was actually reading Battlegroup, the spinoff game about controlling whole fleets, that got me excited to run a Lancer campaign. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, popping up a few times during the campaign but not enough to satisfy my Battletech-loving heart. To be fair, most of my players wouldn't have been into a more military-focused campaign anyway so I really ought to have recalibrated my own expectations from the beginning but I didn't catch on to that until it was too late and it still feels that I lost sight of why I was excited about Lancer in the first place.
Then there's the practical issue that my group can only meet every other week, and with Lancer's combats effectively taking a whole session that meant it could take a long time for in-world events to actually move along. Some players brough up that the cognitive load for 3-hour Lancer combats got to be a bit much (and this would probably also explain why very few Reserves got used in combats), and I've got to agree - I think I forgot an enemy system or to call out something or have battle chatter in every single combat I ran for this game.
Ultimately I still like Lancer. I'd run it again, and I have more ideas about what I'd do. But I don't think it's the right fit for my group, at least not right now. And so we move on. I was starting to miss being able to get really deep into session prep, so I'll be turning my attention to something that lets me do that. Though a little like taking a sledgehammer to Lancer's assumption that FTL travel Does Not exist5, this next campaign will be a little unorthodox for the game we'll be using.
In the meantime, as always: play us out, Jack.
Edit: A player said something that reminded me of the difficulty I had planning too far ahead for Lancer because while combats are relatively straightforward to prep, I was reluctant to really prepare any ahead of time because I never wanted to feel like I was railroading the PCs into a specific combat. That led to janky pacing where we would have a noncombat session until we hit a point where it felt right to throw in a mech combat but then had to wait to next session so I could actually plan out the fight. Then of course the combat took the whole session on its own so we'd have to wait to the session after that one to keep going with things.
The only system I can think of that I was willing to jump back into immediately after finishing a campaign was Godbound.↩
I will forever complain about how Blades in the Dark doesn't provide enough guidance on how it should be run and how I ran it badly for a year, but one of my big pieces of GM advice is still to just run Blades in the Dark. It absolutely made me a better GM.↩
I'm aware of the manna system in Long Rim which I think would definitely work better in a sandbox, but for my first Lancer campaign I wanted it to be corebook-only (I did add the GM-facing Enhanced Combat and NPCs Rebaked, because I cheat like that).↩
For more on sandboxes intentionally designed to interact with this kind of strict milestone leveling... watch this space.↩
And I must say that deliberately twisting one of a setting's big assumptions to make the PCs unique was also one of my favorite parts of White Elephant. Big recommend to try doing that in the future.↩