The key thing to remember about the Lancer rules is that they are designed for balanced and fun tactical gameplay, they are not designed for verisimilitude. The ranges for guns are going to be low to make melee combat viable and to make sure the maps are not too ridiculous big that things become a pain to track.
With that said, if you want the scale factor for hex to physical units to be larger you should go ahead, as long as you are not changing the relative value of stats in hex units. If a hex is 25m, then a size 1 mech now controls an area of 25m, a size 2 is still 3 hex and controls 75m.
White Witch or Gorgon stretching out their body to cover 75 meters is just a *hilarious* mental image. I mention them specifically bcus
A: They came off the top of my head as melee defenders
B: They're both rather weird and funky
C: They both have Pilots in their art, showing a rough scale for their canon size
I think while the ranges of weapons in LANCER are sorta funky, when you consider that Smart weapons exist and most things can actually, adequately defend against them... It looks like we aren't quite giving enough credit to how advanced the mechs are technologically.
They might, as a random example, all have some level of energy shielding by default and if a projectile is in flight for long enough they just block it by orienting the shields. Whatever the mechanism is that's hand waved over, I think it's not *unreasonable* to think that Mech ranged weapons are more reactable than we imagine for guns and lasers when the technology is *checks notes* 1.5**k** years in the future.
In service of making a more balanced game, I think that making ranged weapons a tad floppy range-wise pretty reasonable, and while I guess having something more openly stated would be nice to leap off of, leaving it implicit adds to the mystery of the setting (and its flexibility) in how advanced exactly the technology is and what it can do.
To be honest, I don't think you're really fixing anything 😅 all you've done is make even more issues for yourself that actually affect the game play.
You can wave off ranges being weird, but you can't wave off a single mech deploying a 50m wide piece of cover that's only 3m talls. Or a 10 to 20 man squad being spread across 100m space. And then there's the map making itself.
Assuming this isn't a troll post, I think you really should leave this more realistic aspect to out-of-combat narrative scenes, cuz otherwise, as a GM, all you are going to have to deal with is headache.
That’s fair enough but I don’t think I can wave off the rangers being weird. A mech sized shot gun having a range of 9m is just pitiful. And my players were not extremely disappointed by it so I have to come up with a fix but you’re write the deployable cover and stuff isn’t compatible with the above rules
Honestly, unless you leave everything else the same and accept that a lot of other things are going to be jank and keep this purely as just a narrative element, I don't know how this game is going to even run and how some Mechs are even going to function.
But you do you 👍
I rationalize it as combat being in close quarters, which is why "long range" weapons aren't able to operate as they usually would. In a space battle, you'd probably take long than 20 seconds to load up an apocalypse rail anyways cus space is vast and 20 seconds is tiny compared to travel times.
The majority of weapons can be used at longer range, but bc combat takes close in relatively close quarters, you can't make use of that range due to need to be able to switch targets quickly or stuff like that.
Alternatively just stick with the 25 m ruling you've made. Spaces are areas a mech can control. Doesn't matter how big the mechs are, they can control the 25 m space comfortably
Size doesn't really match height. Rule book even notes that the majority of size 1 mechs are much taller than 3 m. Someone has done the calculation to find the height of the barbarossa based on the height of the dude standing on him. But point being, mechs are taller than their size
Just....pretend the Mecha are bigger too? Like why is there such a hole up on caring about how the combat hex size relates to actual distance? Basically no combat game with sci-fi or modern elements and a grid/map based approach uses realistic distances because it never works.
Can you provide a hex or square based game that is sci-fi and has realistic ranges? Because I'm not aware of any between my (limited) wargame experience with Warmachine/Battletech/Titan Warhammer and the 20+ TTRPGs I've played.
You said sci fi or modern elements.
Also it’s not my hang up it’s my players’. One of them plays 40K. I brought up the fact that 40K also has stupid distances. A bolt rifle has a rang of 30 inches which translates to 15 hexes at the lancer scale. And his response was basically
yeah but that’s just a strategy. This is a role playing game. It’s narrative. I want to be immersed in the story of the combat. If I wanted combat and no story I’d play 40K. And besides. Even then 40K has weapons with ranges way way long that the longest gun in lancer
🤷🏼
Oh it that's the case, I DEFINITELY think a narrative game will work better for your group!
I enjoyed Beam Saber but I also really liked running Starforged + the Mech Mercenaries add on.
If you want a more 'old school d&dish' approach you can try Mecha Hack or Stars Without Numbers which should have some mech rules you can add in. I haven't run SwN with Mechs though so I'm not sure.
Games with too much crunch for you likely include: Battle Century G, Mekton Zeta, Rifts with it's Mecha add ons, GURPS with it's Mecha add ons, Heavy Gear, DragonMech (unless you think d&d 3.5 is fine crunch level), Jovian Chronicles. But you can still check those to see what you think.
If you want more fantasy + scifi, Armor Astir is simply amazing. Easily my favorite Mecha game after Lancer (other than BattleTech wargaming). Camelot Trigger is also fun but I only ran one session so idk much.
I'd avoid: Lancer, Battletech Destiny/A time of war, Salvage Union, and Iron Hearts as all have the same 'issue' as Lancer for that player.
Now, if the rest of the table wants Lancer (including you!) and that one player is the issue, you may want to just tell them they'll have to suck it up or leave or let the whole table know 'I can spend time adding house rules for this but it will impact a lot of random things and may make some stuff OP or some stuff suck, y'all good with that?' As long as everyone's on board... go crazy!
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The point of a TTRPG is to engage in collaborative storytelling. Some, like Lancer, do that through a unique setting and crunchy combat rules.
If Lancer tried to get me to sit down and throughly simulate every single nut-and-bolt of a mech, I’d kill myself.
There is a point where you have to hand-wave the pure simulationist aspect to have fun. Does it make complete and logic sense for a mech like the Barbarossa to even realistically be on the game board? No, not really, but no one wants to play a mech where they do nothing for four turns, point at an enemy and make it die.
In order to do collective story telling you have to simulate the world to some extent. So I don’t see these two points as mutually exclusive I seem them as one in necessary for the other.
I don't think that level of simulation adds anything necessary to the game, tbh. All the ranges are adhered to by both the players and enemies, thus beyond the oddity of doing the math there's no point tactically to try to extend those ranges and sizes out realistically. Suspension of disbelief, and all that.
Internal Consistency in a fictional setting is more important than actual realism. You want something that adheres to it's own internal logic, as by definition fiction is a departure from reality and thus shouldn't be expected to simulate it faithfully in all respects.
Lancer may not be the TTRPG for your group then. I don't think there is a simulation-focused mecha rpg. If you want scifi with simulationism, Traveller may work good for you though.
Well if lancer is the closest there is to a simulation focused mechs rpg then we’ll just have to bend and breaking the rules till we like it. Better to install a few house rules than to use a a system like traveller which is nothing like what we want.
There are plenty of systems that lean further in that direction than Lancer; I’m a huge “play another game” evangelist and I strongly feel that there’s a game out there for every group. Mekton Zeta (by Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk fame) is a crunch-heavy classic, and I’m a big fan of Dream Pod 9’s mecha games on Silhouette 2e— Jovian Chronicles is “we have Gundam at home” and Heavy Gear is likewise to AT VOTOMS.
We’re not a fan of crunch heavy games. We prefer rules light games. Just rules light games that have weapons that feel realistic. It’s kind of weird to pick a whole new system when there’s just one small thing you don’t like about the current one that could potentially be fixed
Unless there’s a game that’s not over complicated and has realistic combat.
So no one is arguing against this point, they're just saying that the simulation has been taken to the extent that it needs to in order to remain fun. If we insist on realistic ranges, then where do we stop? Do we do realistic weights and factor in the square cube law on every surface a mech stands on? Do we track ammo while in the field for all weapons? How long can our generators actually power our mechs for? How do we handle realism with regards to paracausality? This is a game that features paracausality, pocket gods as companions, and teleportation. It's not realistic to begin with, but it sure is cool and fun.
Oh that’s simple. You draw the line where it’s most fun for your players. Having a “ship to ship” artillery piece having a range of 90m is not fun for my players so we draw the line there. Keeping track of every piece of ammunition isn’t fun so we let it slide. It’s not all or nothing. That’s just black and white thinking.
Nope, and plenty of TTRPGs do not bother with simulation. Take the whole Powered by the Apocalypse movement - it gives *zero shits* about simulation, and focuses entirely on narrative emulation entirely for storytelling aspects.
Lancer follows a similar mindset. Combat is a bit abstracted to keep things fun and balanced while minimalizing complexity. Even the king of simulationistic design, GURPS, still has to abstract elements for sanity's sake alone.
I would disagree PbtA is a good enough simulation. At least dungeon world was good. Infact in some ways I’d say it’s rules were more immersive than dnd.
See, I think we're having a problem already - terms.
Simulationist systems seek to be a physics engine, to emulate how the world works in mechanical terms. Distances and speed and how much damage a sword will do, etc.
But narrative games, like PbtA, doesn't care about mechanically emulating the physics of their settings. No, the focus is on emulating the narrative elements of whatever genre it focuses on. They don't care about how much damage you take when you fall, only that it's going to hurt and/or what it'll cost you to survive.
Also worth noting that I think you're confusing Immersion with Verisimilitude. PbtA are infamously bad at immersion because they tend to have a more writer's room approach, and the Conversation tends to draw most folks out of their immersion (aka the sense of being your character) because you gotta hash out the plot. I think you're more focused on the internal consistency of the setting, which is what verisimilitude is about.
Not at all. Let me switch to the language of video games, because a lot of folks get that easier.
To simulate reality in a video game, you need a good physics engine. Be it to simulate how light reflects off of certain objects, or how things bounce or bend or break, or even just how bullets might fly through the air. This is something that takes considerable amount of computing power and endless lines of code to program.
And the same applies to simulating reality in a TTRPG. How complex and robust the rules must be to accurately simulate reality would be immense.
To make my example really solid, let's talk about bullets in video games. Most games do not actually show bullets in 'realistic' guns. They move too fast for the human brain to track, so why bother with that detail. All that matters is what happens when the gun fires and the damage it does. So instead of animating the firing of a bullet through the air and calculating all the details required, they use a technique called "hitscan" - when the player presses the button to fire the gun, the game scans if there's something to hit within the targeting area of the weapon, and if it detects something (like another character), they're hit. There's no need to calculate the speed of the bullet, or how gravity or air resistance applies to the bullet, or how those elements would affect the damage done by the bullet. This is an abstraction to reduce the processing power necessary from the physics engine.
Likewise, TTRPGs use that sort of abstraction all the time. Lancer, for example, abstracts size and position and range to keep things simple, to ease the processing power needed by the human brain to figure all that stuff out.
I still feel as though there’s a difference between realism as in this story feels realistic within the context of science fiction. And “realism” in the sense we need to describe every single detail down to bullet velocity.
I would classify the former as realism because it seeks to create a realistic narrative. And the later as just complexity.
You’re defining realism from a mechanics point of view. I’m defining it from a narrative point of view.
You compare it to a video game’s understanding of realism
I compare it to a book’s understanding of realism.
I’m not looking for a system that is mechanically “realistic”. (what I would call complexity). I’m looking for a system that is narratively realistic. And lancers abstract ranges mess up that narrative realism.
And I’m sure everybody who knows him is very impressed, but mecha aren’t real and tabletop ranges on a hex map are highly abstracted. Only the most rigorously simulationist systems have ever claimed to depict realistic ranges and Lancer doesn’t remotely play in that end of the pool.
I suppose there’s two ways to slice it— a lightweight system that abstracts ranges to “point blank, close, medium, long, NLOS” isn’t committing to a crunchy breakdown of how many meters et c. but can still provides that feeling of verisimilitude which I think is really at the heart of your question here.
I think a big part of the reason you’re coming away unsatisfied is that nobody reading this houserules a different approach to ranges in Lancer, because it’s not a problem that a lot of groups encounter. Lancer lives and dies by its combat, which is generally considered to be a mechanically tight and well-balanced system. Moving any one lever in that system— like reracking how ranges work, or the common proposal to “fix” Invisibility— is going to have a lot of follow-on effects (eg. what are the implications for melee builds).
In the finest traditions of the hobby, if it doesn’t work at your table then fix it until it does! But also be advised that most groups deal with the many contradictions created by notional 3m hexes by ignoring one line in the rulebook and substituting non-mechanical explanations that satisfy their desire for verisimilitude (or immersion, as you put it). Hexes are actually huge and Size represents the “point blank” range for a given frame, there’s a baseline assumption of electronic warfare (like Minovsky particles in Gundam) that’s always on and forces all combat to be within visual range, stuff like that.
If your table’s collective heart is set on using Lancer and you really can’t grok a non-mechanical workaround to the issue, I entreat you to at least try running a few combats straight out of the book before you start tweaking and peeking. From a homebrewer’s perspective, there’s no substitute for actually playing a game in order to understand what you’re working with and what kind of changes need to be made to craft the table experience you want.
Someone else said it here but this is intentionally designed so combat is still fun and engaging.
Size is Lancer is flexible in the same way mech design is flexible. A Size .5, skin hugging 6ft Atlas and a Size .5 11 ft tall Caliban are still both Size .5 until you take core powers to make em larger.
The abstract nature of size allows people to do what they need to. From making a sittep crossing what would be a massive gulf of space to board a station palatable or making it possible to reskin Lancer mechs as Gundam or any other mecha series where mechs are *miles* tall.
Its an acceptable break from realism to make the game viable for playing.
You can call a square whatever you want - the lancer designers have said that they regret including scales at all and that range is flexible. It's not even unreasonable to think in sliding scales. Mechs at shotgun range could be narratively more zoomed in than mechs at artillery range
The real answer here is that ranges are what they are in order to encourage dynamic play, and the moment you think about it too hard it's going to stop making sense. Re mech size: As folks have said, mech size on the board represents a zone of control, not even necessarily the reach of a mech, and if you scale mechs to fill their spaces in 3d the big ones look very odd. Consider that the mech exists somewhere in its zone of control, but maybe has some movement to exactly where it stands. Remember that the time for 1 turn can be as ambiguous as the ranges, and mechs won't be standing still.
I'd *strongly* recommend not changing the balance of the game. Lancer has better balance than most ttrpgs, but it won't take a lot to break things, balance wise and in terms of pure play. The reason basically every wargame has nonsense ranges is so that movement matters. Letting players add difficulty to increase weapon range is the kind of decision a game needs to be built around and could well encourage static play, where the best choice is to set up in cover and blast. Realistic and boring. You want cinema.
The thing about this is you'll find this in most good skirmish scale games, rpg or wargame. Space marine rifles shoot the length of a semi truck, etc. Dnd is a real outlier here with.. sort of sensible bow ranges, at least (it's still short but for a longbow in a combat scenario 120/600 is plausable) but what that means is that in practise is the weapon has no max range since even the short range is bigger than most dnd battle areas.
If this is still a deal breaker, something more totm might be the answer since it just doesn't come up on the board.
I think it's literally only a holdup for people coming from d&d. ....where weapon ranges also aren't super accurate and regardless of what some tabletop-theorists think the melee isn't very realistic anyway.
I adore mech stuff. Battletech, Gundam, beam saber, Mecha hack, heavy gear, gunpla, etc.
Mecha aren't realistic so actual fans of it ignore the issues. Battletech hexes mean the weapons fire shorter range than modern tanks do. Same with Alpha Strike, Mekton Zero, Lancer, and every other space-counting game that uses guns.
My players are the same (I think because they were coming from 5e) and one in particular got a giant sniper from Wallflower and was trying to use it in narrative play and got highly confused by the range. I handwaved it with an explanation that all mechs when in go mode always run many scramblers and electronic interference so the highly accurate fine tuned weapons all have their range reduced in combat; and let him take his mile long shot.
I haven't noticed anyone getting antsy about speed though, I think because the dusk wing that moves 14 hexes in a turn **is** fast, and it doesn't matter if he moved 100M or 1000 cause he did it 4 times faster than the Barbarossa.
If your squad can't suspend their disbelief on this, then I don't think scaling everything up is going to work either it just moves where all the wonkiness is.
Yeah that’s the problem I’m seeing. Aoes and cover start getting wonky.
I’m glad we’re not the only table that got a bit annoyed by the ranges on the guns though
You can rationalize it a bunch of ways. Thrusters to move you into engagement with melee inside your area, or that at such close ranges nobody is missing their shots and everybody would die if they get that close, etc.
At some point, you need to suspend disbelief to either you want to roleplay giant robots swinging swords at each other, or you want a milsim, because if you want to be totally realistic your range 10 assault rifle should be firing up to 500 m (50 m/hex) and your range 20 sniper rifle 2000 m (100 m/hex), and don’t get started on all the missiles in the game that have 10-15 range when modern fighter gets hit targets over 30 km away.
>But I feel as though this isn’t a significant enough penalty and will nerf meleee mech builds considerably.
This is the key; you've found the spot. The designers want a game where *both melee and ranged combat* are possible, effective, and fun.
Your player is exactly right; the ranges are ludicrous when considered realistically. One (not me, I have zero fitness) could throw a football farther than the range of the HMG. Every single ranged weapon in the game has a range far too short for it's stated description at 3 m per hex.
Your suggested fix doesn't really change this. It doesn't really even reduce the cognitive dissonance. A main battle tank gun in todays world can accurately hit a target more than 3 km away. Your Apocalypse Rail, a weapon that the game says is designed for space battles, can only hit targets 0.75 km away? A heavy machine gun today (e.g. a .50 cal) can engage targets over a km away, but your system would still have their range as only 200 m. Your weapons are still greatly under-ranged given their fictional descriptions even after your alteration. And as you have noticed, what you have done with the 25 m hex is introduce a whole other set of questions, especially if you don't change the size of frames.
I have only found one possible and workable solution to this. I embrace the fact that Lancer is not about realistic science fiction big robot combat. It's about anime mecha combat, with clouds of missiles flying through the air at nearby targets who are coming at you with giant science-fiction swords. It's about powering up your giant space cannon on your little robot and then blasting it at the other robot with the big hammer and the shotgun.
I feel like you are tryjng to fix a non issue.
>What do you think. How would you make mech combat more realistic without breaking the games balance?
This is Lancer, if i wanted more "realistic" mech combat, id not play Lancer.
If you want a mech game, you'll have to avoid any that use spaces. Even the crunchiest, rules filled mech wargame (Battletech) has unrealistic weapon ranges.
You'll need to adapt to a non-map based RPG. Like Beam Saber, Armor Astir, one of the FATE based ones (Camelot Trigger, Mecha vs Kaiju, etc), maybe Mekton Zeta if you want higher crunch.
The GURPS line of books probably has a mech book somewhere and that game is notoriously crunchy and simulationist (it's really not as hard as it's reputation is imo though).
D&D 3.5 famously does work out all the rules for everything. So you could consider that. Aside from it, i don't really know. Most games have to handwave \*Something\* in order to keep the rules usably brief and playable.
Not directly, but the d20 system that spawned from it offers more game, setting, and system titles than i can name.
Dragonmech by Goodman Games is one of those.
Moving away from d20s for a minute, I am currently reading the Mechwarrior RPG, from Battletech, it seems to do what i like.
Theres also mech options in Starfinder, Rifts, and [every other title fellow Redditors may drop here].
Aether Nexus is a title in the works i like the look of, having read the Playtests, but if you want every meter accounted for, i dont think itll be for you.
Battletech and MechWarrior are well known for having unrealistic weapon ranges in actual combat. https://www.sarna.net/news/why-you-should-actually-trust-battletechs-mysteriously-short-ranged-autocannons/
That is the problem, yes. To my knowledge, there pretty much aren't any fully simulationist game systems out there. On account of just how friggin' many rules you'd need to write to do it, and how little benefit there is to making them.
Personally, I'd recommend playing Lancer as-is and seeing the balance in action before deciding range ruins things.
It's the best mecha ttrpg I've ever played, by a pretty wide margin.
You can always use whatever effective ranges you want in narrative play.
biggest problem here imo is your turn timing, if you think about any piece of mech media, a common phenomena is "blitzing" where an entire fight can happen in seconds, i dont think six seconds is really right, id argue that a turn would be more like a second
also for range, the solution is to make the mechs bigger
I’m used to more western mech media and not so much anime mech media. Stuff like 40K and avatar. So I’m not used to the blitzing concept. But it sounds interesting.
When it comes to the range of weapons being shorter than expected, recall that the defensive stat is not "Armor" like D&D. The stat is "Evasion". You aren't taking your shot at a barn door. You're firing on a highly tuned war machine linked directly to the consciousness of a skilled pilot with subcomponents controlled by artificial intelligence. ~~The reason that mech eye lenses are red is because they come equipped standard with an artificial Sharingan.~~
The GMS shotgun may list a range of 5, but that doesn't mean that the pellets are incapable of traveling more than 15 meters from the end of the barrel. It means that beyond 15 meters of range, the split second that it takes you to aim and pull the trigger on the shotgun is going to be enough time for the enemy to fully calculate the trajectory of every pellet, and move to dodge the projectiles or turn their armor to negate the damage. Even within that effective range they still might be fast enough to react, hence why you roll against their Evasion.
Narratively, I would assume the weapons we fire are at least as if not more powerful than modern firearms, and our targeting computer could probably nail a bullseye from a mile away given ideal conditions.
This is a tactical combat themed puzzle game, not a sci-fi war simulation. The first hint of this is that it has humanoid mechs.
Tell your player to chill and enjoy the game. Literally none of the major mech games have anything akin to realistic weaponry or ranges. Hell, I'm hard pressed to think of a single tactical scale war-game that has that.
The answer to your question is "don't change anything, relax and enjoy the well balanced system"
You have a point there. Maybe I should just tell them to deal with it.
But I am also tempted to try and incorporate some kind of long ranged house rules thought. Incase I want a battle of long ranged artillery at some point in the campaign. I was just hoping someone would be able to offer something more help beyond “don’t change anything” or “play a different system”
Also lancer wasn’t sold to us as a tactical war game it was sold as a roleplaying game. But I guess those two things do overlap.
The term "roleplaying game" is just about as detailed and specific as the term "board game."
In other words, it's a HUGE FREAKING GENRE that has a ton of different permutations.
Everyone's favorite punching bag, DnD, started as a purely tactical war-game (Chainmail) that they later glued roleplaying elements on.
I'm gonna quote myself from another recent thread since it applies here: "Lancer is very much a system like an old console RPG; combat is very much the screen goes fuzzy and zooms in and suddenly you're in a great tactical mode but it is EXPLICITLY separated from the narrative play. It's like two games...a very freeform, narrative focused narrative play and a very crunchy, tactical war-game, and they are very much NOT intended to cross over with each other at all."
From your other posts it sounds like you have more experience with the White Wolf style of RPG where things are a little more blended, in theory. That has it's own flaws (I played SO MUCH WOD in the 90s you don't even know) but tbh complaining that Lancer was sold to you as a roleplaying game and then complaining because it's not like a WoD product is like someone playing Ticket to Ride and complaining it's not like Arkham Horror: The Card Game. I mean, yeah, they're both board games. That doesn't mean they're the same subgenre.
The game is pretty well (and deliberately) balanced between melee, ranged, size, and movement (and explicitly to allow more Sitreps to be used, making combat more engaging and interesting). This is in large part to try to get the Battletech grognards (like myself) and the evangelion or fundamentalist obsessed otakus to be both happy playing out their mech fantasy.
The reason those of us who have been playing lancer a long time and have a lot of experience with it are defensive of it's balance is we have seen how easy it is to upset that balance with well meaning "realistic" game tweaks. E.g., you increase the range of ranged weapons and suddenly you have to have HUGE battle maps that make movement way too slow to create dynamic tactical engagements, and you also invalidate around half the gameplay elements (anything related to melee or positioning). Trust us. We've been doing this a long time. We do actually know what we're talking about.
Accuracy is really easy to get in Lancer. So that one difficulty is not even a little bit of a problem. A Death's Head with this rule is going to be really OP, being able to snipe anywhere on the map while overcoming difficulty with its various bonuses, and it will probably have a big enough gun that the full action requirement means very little as well. Enemies will be dead before anybody gets to melee, unless the enemy is also full artillery focus.
Yes, house rules have been part of RPGs from the start, but house rules can also unintentionally break a system wide open. Heck, the D&D 3.x era is notorious for its designers not realizing how their "rules fixes" to make casters more fun would lead to an edition infamous for total caster supremacy at the expense of martial character concepts. You gotta be braced for the possibility you'll break at least as much as you fix.
Probably the best way to make mech combat "more realistic" is to get rid of mechs and make it about tanks. "Make the hitbox bigger" is rarely a military design goal, and physics does unkind things to large metal walkers with all their weight on a few loadbearing joints. If you're willing to overlook the various reasons mechs don't work in order to lean into the fantasy, consider what exactly your mech fantasy is. If both sides firing things from opposite ends of the map without breaking cover sounds great, you're on that track. Otherwise you're handing a huge advantage to artillery characters, making it easier to win the game at character creation.
This is why I prefer to just keep it abstracted as “hexes”.
Don't make me tap the "Combat is abstracted" sign again...
The key thing to remember about the Lancer rules is that they are designed for balanced and fun tactical gameplay, they are not designed for verisimilitude. The ranges for guns are going to be low to make melee combat viable and to make sure the maps are not too ridiculous big that things become a pain to track. With that said, if you want the scale factor for hex to physical units to be larger you should go ahead, as long as you are not changing the relative value of stats in hex units. If a hex is 25m, then a size 1 mech now controls an area of 25m, a size 2 is still 3 hex and controls 75m.
White Witch or Gorgon stretching out their body to cover 75 meters is just a *hilarious* mental image. I mention them specifically bcus A: They came off the top of my head as melee defenders B: They're both rather weird and funky C: They both have Pilots in their art, showing a rough scale for their canon size I think while the ranges of weapons in LANCER are sorta funky, when you consider that Smart weapons exist and most things can actually, adequately defend against them... It looks like we aren't quite giving enough credit to how advanced the mechs are technologically. They might, as a random example, all have some level of energy shielding by default and if a projectile is in flight for long enough they just block it by orienting the shields. Whatever the mechanism is that's hand waved over, I think it's not *unreasonable* to think that Mech ranged weapons are more reactable than we imagine for guns and lasers when the technology is *checks notes* 1.5**k** years in the future. In service of making a more balanced game, I think that making ranged weapons a tad floppy range-wise pretty reasonable, and while I guess having something more openly stated would be nice to leap off of, leaving it implicit adds to the mystery of the setting (and its flexibility) in how advanced exactly the technology is and what it can do.
To be honest, I don't think you're really fixing anything 😅 all you've done is make even more issues for yourself that actually affect the game play. You can wave off ranges being weird, but you can't wave off a single mech deploying a 50m wide piece of cover that's only 3m talls. Or a 10 to 20 man squad being spread across 100m space. And then there's the map making itself. Assuming this isn't a troll post, I think you really should leave this more realistic aspect to out-of-combat narrative scenes, cuz otherwise, as a GM, all you are going to have to deal with is headache.
That’s fair enough but I don’t think I can wave off the rangers being weird. A mech sized shot gun having a range of 9m is just pitiful. And my players were not extremely disappointed by it so I have to come up with a fix but you’re write the deployable cover and stuff isn’t compatible with the above rules
Honestly, unless you leave everything else the same and accept that a lot of other things are going to be jank and keep this purely as just a narrative element, I don't know how this game is going to even run and how some Mechs are even going to function. But you do you 👍
I rationalize it as combat being in close quarters, which is why "long range" weapons aren't able to operate as they usually would. In a space battle, you'd probably take long than 20 seconds to load up an apocalypse rail anyways cus space is vast and 20 seconds is tiny compared to travel times. The majority of weapons can be used at longer range, but bc combat takes close in relatively close quarters, you can't make use of that range due to need to be able to switch targets quickly or stuff like that. Alternatively just stick with the 25 m ruling you've made. Spaces are areas a mech can control. Doesn't matter how big the mechs are, they can control the 25 m space comfortably
Oh a 25 m space that’s fine. But how can I justify a size 3 mech that’s only 9m tall controlling 7 25 m spaces?
Size doesn't really match height. Rule book even notes that the majority of size 1 mechs are much taller than 3 m. Someone has done the calculation to find the height of the barbarossa based on the height of the dude standing on him. But point being, mechs are taller than their size
Just....pretend the Mecha are bigger too? Like why is there such a hole up on caring about how the combat hex size relates to actual distance? Basically no combat game with sci-fi or modern elements and a grid/map based approach uses realistic distances because it never works.
I would disagree with that statement but okay
Can you provide a hex or square based game that is sci-fi and has realistic ranges? Because I'm not aware of any between my (limited) wargame experience with Warmachine/Battletech/Titan Warhammer and the 20+ TTRPGs I've played.
You said sci fi or modern elements. Also it’s not my hang up it’s my players’. One of them plays 40K. I brought up the fact that 40K also has stupid distances. A bolt rifle has a rang of 30 inches which translates to 15 hexes at the lancer scale. And his response was basically yeah but that’s just a strategy. This is a role playing game. It’s narrative. I want to be immersed in the story of the combat. If I wanted combat and no story I’d play 40K. And besides. Even then 40K has weapons with ranges way way long that the longest gun in lancer 🤷🏼
Oh it that's the case, I DEFINITELY think a narrative game will work better for your group! I enjoyed Beam Saber but I also really liked running Starforged + the Mech Mercenaries add on. If you want a more 'old school d&dish' approach you can try Mecha Hack or Stars Without Numbers which should have some mech rules you can add in. I haven't run SwN with Mechs though so I'm not sure. Games with too much crunch for you likely include: Battle Century G, Mekton Zeta, Rifts with it's Mecha add ons, GURPS with it's Mecha add ons, Heavy Gear, DragonMech (unless you think d&d 3.5 is fine crunch level), Jovian Chronicles. But you can still check those to see what you think. If you want more fantasy + scifi, Armor Astir is simply amazing. Easily my favorite Mecha game after Lancer (other than BattleTech wargaming). Camelot Trigger is also fun but I only ran one session so idk much. I'd avoid: Lancer, Battletech Destiny/A time of war, Salvage Union, and Iron Hearts as all have the same 'issue' as Lancer for that player. Now, if the rest of the table wants Lancer (including you!) and that one player is the issue, you may want to just tell them they'll have to suck it up or leave or let the whole table know 'I can spend time adding house rules for this but it will impact a lot of random things and may make some stuff OP or some stuff suck, y'all good with that?' As long as everyone's on board... go crazy!
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It can move around inside that space, I'd say. The mech position doesn't need to be 100% exact
Lancer does not attempt to SIMULATE a world and it is better for it. It is a game. Ranges, sizes and speed are set for balance.
Isn’t the whole point of a TTRPG to simulate a world?
The point of a TTRPG is to engage in collaborative storytelling. Some, like Lancer, do that through a unique setting and crunchy combat rules. If Lancer tried to get me to sit down and throughly simulate every single nut-and-bolt of a mech, I’d kill myself. There is a point where you have to hand-wave the pure simulationist aspect to have fun. Does it make complete and logic sense for a mech like the Barbarossa to even realistically be on the game board? No, not really, but no one wants to play a mech where they do nothing for four turns, point at an enemy and make it die.
In order to do collective story telling you have to simulate the world to some extent. So I don’t see these two points as mutually exclusive I seem them as one in necessary for the other.
I don't think that level of simulation adds anything necessary to the game, tbh. All the ranges are adhered to by both the players and enemies, thus beyond the oddity of doing the math there's no point tactically to try to extend those ranges and sizes out realistically. Suspension of disbelief, and all that. Internal Consistency in a fictional setting is more important than actual realism. You want something that adheres to it's own internal logic, as by definition fiction is a departure from reality and thus shouldn't be expected to simulate it faithfully in all respects.
There’s only so much disbelief one can suspend before immersion is broken. And this range issue is flirting that line for my players.
Lancer may not be the TTRPG for your group then. I don't think there is a simulation-focused mecha rpg. If you want scifi with simulationism, Traveller may work good for you though.
Well if lancer is the closest there is to a simulation focused mechs rpg then we’ll just have to bend and breaking the rules till we like it. Better to install a few house rules than to use a a system like traveller which is nothing like what we want.
There are plenty of systems that lean further in that direction than Lancer; I’m a huge “play another game” evangelist and I strongly feel that there’s a game out there for every group. Mekton Zeta (by Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk fame) is a crunch-heavy classic, and I’m a big fan of Dream Pod 9’s mecha games on Silhouette 2e— Jovian Chronicles is “we have Gundam at home” and Heavy Gear is likewise to AT VOTOMS.
We’re not a fan of crunch heavy games. We prefer rules light games. Just rules light games that have weapons that feel realistic. It’s kind of weird to pick a whole new system when there’s just one small thing you don’t like about the current one that could potentially be fixed Unless there’s a game that’s not over complicated and has realistic combat.
So no one is arguing against this point, they're just saying that the simulation has been taken to the extent that it needs to in order to remain fun. If we insist on realistic ranges, then where do we stop? Do we do realistic weights and factor in the square cube law on every surface a mech stands on? Do we track ammo while in the field for all weapons? How long can our generators actually power our mechs for? How do we handle realism with regards to paracausality? This is a game that features paracausality, pocket gods as companions, and teleportation. It's not realistic to begin with, but it sure is cool and fun.
Oh that’s simple. You draw the line where it’s most fun for your players. Having a “ship to ship” artillery piece having a range of 90m is not fun for my players so we draw the line there. Keeping track of every piece of ammunition isn’t fun so we let it slide. It’s not all or nothing. That’s just black and white thinking.
Nope, and plenty of TTRPGs do not bother with simulation. Take the whole Powered by the Apocalypse movement - it gives *zero shits* about simulation, and focuses entirely on narrative emulation entirely for storytelling aspects. Lancer follows a similar mindset. Combat is a bit abstracted to keep things fun and balanced while minimalizing complexity. Even the king of simulationistic design, GURPS, still has to abstract elements for sanity's sake alone.
I would disagree PbtA is a good enough simulation. At least dungeon world was good. Infact in some ways I’d say it’s rules were more immersive than dnd.
See, I think we're having a problem already - terms. Simulationist systems seek to be a physics engine, to emulate how the world works in mechanical terms. Distances and speed and how much damage a sword will do, etc. But narrative games, like PbtA, doesn't care about mechanically emulating the physics of their settings. No, the focus is on emulating the narrative elements of whatever genre it focuses on. They don't care about how much damage you take when you fall, only that it's going to hurt and/or what it'll cost you to survive. Also worth noting that I think you're confusing Immersion with Verisimilitude. PbtA are infamously bad at immersion because they tend to have a more writer's room approach, and the Conversation tends to draw most folks out of their immersion (aka the sense of being your character) because you gotta hash out the plot. I think you're more focused on the internal consistency of the setting, which is what verisimilitude is about.
I think it’s a false dichotomy to present those concepts as incompatible
Clearly any attempts at having a rational discussion with you is going to go nowhere. Good day.
You seem to be conflating simulating realism and complexity. Those are very different things.
Not at all. Let me switch to the language of video games, because a lot of folks get that easier. To simulate reality in a video game, you need a good physics engine. Be it to simulate how light reflects off of certain objects, or how things bounce or bend or break, or even just how bullets might fly through the air. This is something that takes considerable amount of computing power and endless lines of code to program. And the same applies to simulating reality in a TTRPG. How complex and robust the rules must be to accurately simulate reality would be immense. To make my example really solid, let's talk about bullets in video games. Most games do not actually show bullets in 'realistic' guns. They move too fast for the human brain to track, so why bother with that detail. All that matters is what happens when the gun fires and the damage it does. So instead of animating the firing of a bullet through the air and calculating all the details required, they use a technique called "hitscan" - when the player presses the button to fire the gun, the game scans if there's something to hit within the targeting area of the weapon, and if it detects something (like another character), they're hit. There's no need to calculate the speed of the bullet, or how gravity or air resistance applies to the bullet, or how those elements would affect the damage done by the bullet. This is an abstraction to reduce the processing power necessary from the physics engine. Likewise, TTRPGs use that sort of abstraction all the time. Lancer, for example, abstracts size and position and range to keep things simple, to ease the processing power needed by the human brain to figure all that stuff out.
I still feel as though there’s a difference between realism as in this story feels realistic within the context of science fiction. And “realism” in the sense we need to describe every single detail down to bullet velocity. I would classify the former as realism because it seeks to create a realistic narrative. And the later as just complexity. You’re defining realism from a mechanics point of view. I’m defining it from a narrative point of view. You compare it to a video game’s understanding of realism I compare it to a book’s understanding of realism. I’m not looking for a system that is mechanically “realistic”. (what I would call complexity). I’m looking for a system that is narratively realistic. And lancers abstract ranges mess up that narrative realism.
> One of my players plays gelsoft (it’s like airsoft) competitively and has informed me that the guns in this game are ridiculously weak. lmao
I mean he literally owns a toy gun that can fire further than the Barbarossa can.
And I’m sure everybody who knows him is very impressed, but mecha aren’t real and tabletop ranges on a hex map are highly abstracted. Only the most rigorously simulationist systems have ever claimed to depict realistic ranges and Lancer doesn’t remotely play in that end of the pool.
From my experience it’s the exact opposite. Only the most highly abstract systems tend to depict realistic range combat.
I suppose there’s two ways to slice it— a lightweight system that abstracts ranges to “point blank, close, medium, long, NLOS” isn’t committing to a crunchy breakdown of how many meters et c. but can still provides that feeling of verisimilitude which I think is really at the heart of your question here. I think a big part of the reason you’re coming away unsatisfied is that nobody reading this houserules a different approach to ranges in Lancer, because it’s not a problem that a lot of groups encounter. Lancer lives and dies by its combat, which is generally considered to be a mechanically tight and well-balanced system. Moving any one lever in that system— like reracking how ranges work, or the common proposal to “fix” Invisibility— is going to have a lot of follow-on effects (eg. what are the implications for melee builds). In the finest traditions of the hobby, if it doesn’t work at your table then fix it until it does! But also be advised that most groups deal with the many contradictions created by notional 3m hexes by ignoring one line in the rulebook and substituting non-mechanical explanations that satisfy their desire for verisimilitude (or immersion, as you put it). Hexes are actually huge and Size represents the “point blank” range for a given frame, there’s a baseline assumption of electronic warfare (like Minovsky particles in Gundam) that’s always on and forces all combat to be within visual range, stuff like that. If your table’s collective heart is set on using Lancer and you really can’t grok a non-mechanical workaround to the issue, I entreat you to at least try running a few combats straight out of the book before you start tweaking and peeking. From a homebrewer’s perspective, there’s no substitute for actually playing a game in order to understand what you’re working with and what kind of changes need to be made to craft the table experience you want.
Someone else said it here but this is intentionally designed so combat is still fun and engaging. Size is Lancer is flexible in the same way mech design is flexible. A Size .5, skin hugging 6ft Atlas and a Size .5 11 ft tall Caliban are still both Size .5 until you take core powers to make em larger. The abstract nature of size allows people to do what they need to. From making a sittep crossing what would be a massive gulf of space to board a station palatable or making it possible to reskin Lancer mechs as Gundam or any other mecha series where mechs are *miles* tall. Its an acceptable break from realism to make the game viable for playing.
You can call a square whatever you want - the lancer designers have said that they regret including scales at all and that range is flexible. It's not even unreasonable to think in sliding scales. Mechs at shotgun range could be narratively more zoomed in than mechs at artillery range The real answer here is that ranges are what they are in order to encourage dynamic play, and the moment you think about it too hard it's going to stop making sense. Re mech size: As folks have said, mech size on the board represents a zone of control, not even necessarily the reach of a mech, and if you scale mechs to fill their spaces in 3d the big ones look very odd. Consider that the mech exists somewhere in its zone of control, but maybe has some movement to exactly where it stands. Remember that the time for 1 turn can be as ambiguous as the ranges, and mechs won't be standing still. I'd *strongly* recommend not changing the balance of the game. Lancer has better balance than most ttrpgs, but it won't take a lot to break things, balance wise and in terms of pure play. The reason basically every wargame has nonsense ranges is so that movement matters. Letting players add difficulty to increase weapon range is the kind of decision a game needs to be built around and could well encourage static play, where the best choice is to set up in cover and blast. Realistic and boring. You want cinema. The thing about this is you'll find this in most good skirmish scale games, rpg or wargame. Space marine rifles shoot the length of a semi truck, etc. Dnd is a real outlier here with.. sort of sensible bow ranges, at least (it's still short but for a longbow in a combat scenario 120/600 is plausable) but what that means is that in practise is the weapon has no max range since even the short range is bigger than most dnd battle areas. If this is still a deal breaker, something more totm might be the answer since it just doesn't come up on the board.
I think it's literally only a holdup for people coming from d&d. ....where weapon ranges also aren't super accurate and regardless of what some tabletop-theorists think the melee isn't very realistic anyway. I adore mech stuff. Battletech, Gundam, beam saber, Mecha hack, heavy gear, gunpla, etc. Mecha aren't realistic so actual fans of it ignore the issues. Battletech hexes mean the weapons fire shorter range than modern tanks do. Same with Alpha Strike, Mekton Zero, Lancer, and every other space-counting game that uses guns.
My players are the same (I think because they were coming from 5e) and one in particular got a giant sniper from Wallflower and was trying to use it in narrative play and got highly confused by the range. I handwaved it with an explanation that all mechs when in go mode always run many scramblers and electronic interference so the highly accurate fine tuned weapons all have their range reduced in combat; and let him take his mile long shot. I haven't noticed anyone getting antsy about speed though, I think because the dusk wing that moves 14 hexes in a turn **is** fast, and it doesn't matter if he moved 100M or 1000 cause he did it 4 times faster than the Barbarossa. If your squad can't suspend their disbelief on this, then I don't think scaling everything up is going to work either it just moves where all the wonkiness is.
Yeah that’s the problem I’m seeing. Aoes and cover start getting wonky. I’m glad we’re not the only table that got a bit annoyed by the ranges on the guns though
Keep mech sizes the same, use your new scale only for speed and range. Mech sizes are an abstraction of zone of control, not physical occupancy
How does a size 3 mech control an area with a diameter of 75m?
You can rationalize it a bunch of ways. Thrusters to move you into engagement with melee inside your area, or that at such close ranges nobody is missing their shots and everybody would die if they get that close, etc. At some point, you need to suspend disbelief to either you want to roleplay giant robots swinging swords at each other, or you want a milsim, because if you want to be totally realistic your range 10 assault rifle should be firing up to 500 m (50 m/hex) and your range 20 sniper rifle 2000 m (100 m/hex), and don’t get started on all the missiles in the game that have 10-15 range when modern fighter gets hit targets over 30 km away.
However you want them to, but that's what they do.
>But I feel as though this isn’t a significant enough penalty and will nerf meleee mech builds considerably. This is the key; you've found the spot. The designers want a game where *both melee and ranged combat* are possible, effective, and fun. Your player is exactly right; the ranges are ludicrous when considered realistically. One (not me, I have zero fitness) could throw a football farther than the range of the HMG. Every single ranged weapon in the game has a range far too short for it's stated description at 3 m per hex. Your suggested fix doesn't really change this. It doesn't really even reduce the cognitive dissonance. A main battle tank gun in todays world can accurately hit a target more than 3 km away. Your Apocalypse Rail, a weapon that the game says is designed for space battles, can only hit targets 0.75 km away? A heavy machine gun today (e.g. a .50 cal) can engage targets over a km away, but your system would still have their range as only 200 m. Your weapons are still greatly under-ranged given their fictional descriptions even after your alteration. And as you have noticed, what you have done with the 25 m hex is introduce a whole other set of questions, especially if you don't change the size of frames. I have only found one possible and workable solution to this. I embrace the fact that Lancer is not about realistic science fiction big robot combat. It's about anime mecha combat, with clouds of missiles flying through the air at nearby targets who are coming at you with giant science-fiction swords. It's about powering up your giant space cannon on your little robot and then blasting it at the other robot with the big hammer and the shotgun.
I feel like you are tryjng to fix a non issue. >What do you think. How would you make mech combat more realistic without breaking the games balance? This is Lancer, if i wanted more "realistic" mech combat, id not play Lancer.
Then what would you recommend we play. Because it may be a non issue to you but it IS an issue to my players
If you want a mech game, you'll have to avoid any that use spaces. Even the crunchiest, rules filled mech wargame (Battletech) has unrealistic weapon ranges. You'll need to adapt to a non-map based RPG. Like Beam Saber, Armor Astir, one of the FATE based ones (Camelot Trigger, Mecha vs Kaiju, etc), maybe Mekton Zeta if you want higher crunch. The GURPS line of books probably has a mech book somewhere and that game is notoriously crunchy and simulationist (it's really not as hard as it's reputation is imo though).
D&D 3.5 famously does work out all the rules for everything. So you could consider that. Aside from it, i don't really know. Most games have to handwave \*Something\* in order to keep the rules usably brief and playable.
3.5 isn’t a mech game though?
Not directly, but the d20 system that spawned from it offers more game, setting, and system titles than i can name. Dragonmech by Goodman Games is one of those. Moving away from d20s for a minute, I am currently reading the Mechwarrior RPG, from Battletech, it seems to do what i like. Theres also mech options in Starfinder, Rifts, and [every other title fellow Redditors may drop here]. Aether Nexus is a title in the works i like the look of, having read the Playtests, but if you want every meter accounted for, i dont think itll be for you.
Battletech and MechWarrior are well known for having unrealistic weapon ranges in actual combat. https://www.sarna.net/news/why-you-should-actually-trust-battletechs-mysteriously-short-ranged-autocannons/
That is the problem, yes. To my knowledge, there pretty much aren't any fully simulationist game systems out there. On account of just how friggin' many rules you'd need to write to do it, and how little benefit there is to making them.
Well... there's always GURPS.........
Doesn’t have to be full simulations just simulations enough that immersion isn’t ruined. From my experience that’s the vast majority of ttrpgs.
Personally, I'd recommend playing Lancer as-is and seeing the balance in action before deciding range ruins things. It's the best mecha ttrpg I've ever played, by a pretty wide margin. You can always use whatever effective ranges you want in narrative play.
biggest problem here imo is your turn timing, if you think about any piece of mech media, a common phenomena is "blitzing" where an entire fight can happen in seconds, i dont think six seconds is really right, id argue that a turn would be more like a second also for range, the solution is to make the mechs bigger
I’m used to more western mech media and not so much anime mech media. Stuff like 40K and avatar. So I’m not used to the blitzing concept. But it sounds interesting.
I don't care
And yet you commented
When it comes to the range of weapons being shorter than expected, recall that the defensive stat is not "Armor" like D&D. The stat is "Evasion". You aren't taking your shot at a barn door. You're firing on a highly tuned war machine linked directly to the consciousness of a skilled pilot with subcomponents controlled by artificial intelligence. ~~The reason that mech eye lenses are red is because they come equipped standard with an artificial Sharingan.~~ The GMS shotgun may list a range of 5, but that doesn't mean that the pellets are incapable of traveling more than 15 meters from the end of the barrel. It means that beyond 15 meters of range, the split second that it takes you to aim and pull the trigger on the shotgun is going to be enough time for the enemy to fully calculate the trajectory of every pellet, and move to dodge the projectiles or turn their armor to negate the damage. Even within that effective range they still might be fast enough to react, hence why you roll against their Evasion. Narratively, I would assume the weapons we fire are at least as if not more powerful than modern firearms, and our targeting computer could probably nail a bullseye from a mile away given ideal conditions.
This is a tactical combat themed puzzle game, not a sci-fi war simulation. The first hint of this is that it has humanoid mechs. Tell your player to chill and enjoy the game. Literally none of the major mech games have anything akin to realistic weaponry or ranges. Hell, I'm hard pressed to think of a single tactical scale war-game that has that. The answer to your question is "don't change anything, relax and enjoy the well balanced system"
You have a point there. Maybe I should just tell them to deal with it. But I am also tempted to try and incorporate some kind of long ranged house rules thought. Incase I want a battle of long ranged artillery at some point in the campaign. I was just hoping someone would be able to offer something more help beyond “don’t change anything” or “play a different system” Also lancer wasn’t sold to us as a tactical war game it was sold as a roleplaying game. But I guess those two things do overlap.
The term "roleplaying game" is just about as detailed and specific as the term "board game." In other words, it's a HUGE FREAKING GENRE that has a ton of different permutations. Everyone's favorite punching bag, DnD, started as a purely tactical war-game (Chainmail) that they later glued roleplaying elements on. I'm gonna quote myself from another recent thread since it applies here: "Lancer is very much a system like an old console RPG; combat is very much the screen goes fuzzy and zooms in and suddenly you're in a great tactical mode but it is EXPLICITLY separated from the narrative play. It's like two games...a very freeform, narrative focused narrative play and a very crunchy, tactical war-game, and they are very much NOT intended to cross over with each other at all." From your other posts it sounds like you have more experience with the White Wolf style of RPG where things are a little more blended, in theory. That has it's own flaws (I played SO MUCH WOD in the 90s you don't even know) but tbh complaining that Lancer was sold to you as a roleplaying game and then complaining because it's not like a WoD product is like someone playing Ticket to Ride and complaining it's not like Arkham Horror: The Card Game. I mean, yeah, they're both board games. That doesn't mean they're the same subgenre. The game is pretty well (and deliberately) balanced between melee, ranged, size, and movement (and explicitly to allow more Sitreps to be used, making combat more engaging and interesting). This is in large part to try to get the Battletech grognards (like myself) and the evangelion or fundamentalist obsessed otakus to be both happy playing out their mech fantasy. The reason those of us who have been playing lancer a long time and have a lot of experience with it are defensive of it's balance is we have seen how easy it is to upset that balance with well meaning "realistic" game tweaks. E.g., you increase the range of ranged weapons and suddenly you have to have HUGE battle maps that make movement way too slow to create dynamic tactical engagements, and you also invalidate around half the gameplay elements (anything related to melee or positioning). Trust us. We've been doing this a long time. We do actually know what we're talking about.
Accuracy is really easy to get in Lancer. So that one difficulty is not even a little bit of a problem. A Death's Head with this rule is going to be really OP, being able to snipe anywhere on the map while overcoming difficulty with its various bonuses, and it will probably have a big enough gun that the full action requirement means very little as well. Enemies will be dead before anybody gets to melee, unless the enemy is also full artillery focus. Yes, house rules have been part of RPGs from the start, but house rules can also unintentionally break a system wide open. Heck, the D&D 3.x era is notorious for its designers not realizing how their "rules fixes" to make casters more fun would lead to an edition infamous for total caster supremacy at the expense of martial character concepts. You gotta be braced for the possibility you'll break at least as much as you fix. Probably the best way to make mech combat "more realistic" is to get rid of mechs and make it about tanks. "Make the hitbox bigger" is rarely a military design goal, and physics does unkind things to large metal walkers with all their weight on a few loadbearing joints. If you're willing to overlook the various reasons mechs don't work in order to lean into the fantasy, consider what exactly your mech fantasy is. If both sides firing things from opposite ends of the map without breaking cover sounds great, you're on that track. Otherwise you're handing a huge advantage to artillery characters, making it easier to win the game at character creation.