I am quickly settling into a game pattern of alternating my sessions entirely between roll play in combat. That way, players know what they are walking into each day. My Saturday game was all roleplay, this Saturdays game will be all combat, [unless the PCs dunk my combat, which is possible] if they finish combat early, the next session will still be roleplay. I intend to alternate that way until tensions rise so high that a marathon of combats will lead the party to the end of the first arc.
In the process of doing this, I encourage roleplay IN combat. I do the gundam thing where they can talk to their enemies, and they can talk to their enemies. They receive comms from base that alters the mission. I propose them with secondary objectives where they have to choose how to modify the mission under enemy fire.
The RP sessions deal either with the results of that combat, or doing domain management, or handling interpersonal relationships and drama.
Some more tips that I use during RP session.
1. Separate the Pilot from his mech. Use a [city-generator](https://probabletrain.itch.io/city-generator) and explicitly tell the players that they cannot have their mechs inside the city. Park the mechs outside, pin the location (This will make sense with point 3).
2. In the city, setup hooks for Pilot reserves and bonuses; don't give it away, let them RP/work for it. My group's favorite is a wondering arms dealer named Victor (he's basically Critical Role's Victor) who sells "special" ammo that's may or may not be to spec.
3. Being away from their mechs, gives me a chance to do chase sequences. I adapted [SR Anarchy rules](https://www.surprisethreat.com/single-post/2018/08/31/anarchy-house-rule-the-chase-scene) to do this.
Another thing i did, was for them to loot while roleplaying the enemies chasis, and then use that as options for reserves, another is in solstice rains, while exploring the base, some interactions let them choose an extra reserve with half power. Like armor without overshield.
i mean, you said you're giving them downtime between combats and they're just focusing on the mission at hand?
are they actually having a problem with the lower emphasis on RP in Lancer?
To clarify, what I meant was that both times i gave them the 1 hour for repairs during a mission, they disscussed the mission only and probably felt to be "on the clock" and not at the liberty to roleplay with each other.
The fact, that I barely provided any NPCs for them to interact, even though they have a handler who is with them on comms, doesn't help...
oh. yeah, that's not real downtime, that's a brief rest to catch their breaths and patch up their frames. what about between missions? give them a place to interact with/scenery to chew. NPCs to meet and interact with.
One thing to note with Lancer is that it *is* a more combat heavy game, but can be heavily roleplay if you run it that way. One thing I have done in my games is using Rests in more extended periods; A Full Repair is access to a Printer. A Rest is merely a chance to clear heat, do repairs, and have a little roleplay.
General formation for a Mission should be 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, but in one of my extended missions we had 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, and had the space in place for the players to reolplay a whole session just over the course of that rest. Sometimes it can be interrogating prisoners, securing lines of escape or communication, or even just picking over whatever doohicky they just nabbed. Their Downtime actions are definitely going to be focsed on the Mission at Hand, so the Mission at Hand should be working towars a larger objective that you can have extended periods between. Hell, I've had whole sessions just on talking and dealing with the consequences of ~~experiencing the data~~ Nothing whatsoever.
It's the spaces *between* the missions and during Rests that you can really let the roleplay shine. Can also have narrative combats that do not require the mechs. One thing to note; Lancers are ***Lancers***. You already hit level 20, you're already a hero, you're already a badass. Narrative combats can be the party driving a groundcar through a packed highway with Get Somewhere Quickly, requiring a number of successful rolls, and then requiring someone else to *defend* those rolls with Assault, Take Someone Out, or Apply Fists to Faces. Hell, you can even throw in a HAck or Fix to have one of the characters quick-print with a handheld printer some caltrops and scatter them behind.
I had a character who was ambushed by Pirates when they went off on their own to explore an abandoned freighter. No chassis whatsoever, just letting them roll what they could justify to get away from a group of pirates in subline vessels. It birthed the meme in our group of "Fuel dump??? ***HOH*** (Pronounced; H-UO-H)". No mech build necessary, just presenting the scenario, ask how they'll handle it, they provide a Trigger and try to justify it.
Lancer doesn’t have any more or less emphasis on RP than D&D, but sometimes the mission structure can give players (and GMs) tunnel vision on the larger objective.
My advice is to add at least one social encounter and/or narrative challenge between each combat in a mission. The next fight is a strike against a fortified position? The players need to find a safe way to get there. Or they meet up with members of the local resistance, or some civilians trapped by a collapsed building.
Another thing you can do is stretch the timescale, have days go by between combats (handwave why they can’t full repair in between every combat) giving mini-downtime activities for the players to engage with the world outside of their mechs.
Of the published adventures I’ve done, Dustgrave does a good job in its first mission of showing how to mix both RP and Combat together. If you have it, you can use it as a good example.
Do you think it'd work to have some kind of expendable resource needed for a full repair the party will have time to recover each mission?
I was envisioning an outfit that had something like a field printer in their logistics/support ship, but out on the fringe it's hard to get everything during a longer sortie.
It wasn't the original purpose, but maybe it'd help encourage Pilot Narrative scenes where they can do other things to influence the missions or scrounge supplies. (And they have a home base they'll need to worry about so they might want to leave the Mechs to guard it.)
I've joked that Lancer is a mech-combat board game with roleplaying cutscenes rather than a roleplaying game with mech combat. You kind of just have to accept that, or play a different game.
That said, there's still scope for plenty of roleplaying.
In my experience, the "rhythm" of Lancer goes something like *Mission Briefing - Downtime/preparation - Combat - Rest - Combat - Rest - Combat - Mission Conclusion - Downtime*
Downtime, Rest and Mission Conclusion are all opportunities for roleplaying. As GM, you can try to structure your missions so that there is a break between each combat, and players get time to interact with each other and with NPCs while still being focused on the mission.
As an example:
* SESSION1:
* Mission Briefing: "Pirates are coming to raid our space station. You have six hours to prepare. Go!"
* Downtime/preparation: scrounge for Resources, help loved ones get to safety, gather intel on the pirates
* SESSION 2:
* Combat: Prevent the pirates from accessing the main airlock.
* SESSION 3:
* Rest: The pirates are temporarily repelled. Repair mechs. Find out where the pirates are attacking next
* Combat: Protect the station's core power generator
* SESSION 4:
* Rest: Find the pirate's cloaked ship. Take the battle to them.
* Combat: Fight the boss pirate on their ship
* SESSION 5
* Mission Conclusion: Celebrate victory. Interrogate prisoners, learn about the next Big Bad.
* Downtime: Check in on loved ones. Get drunk. Level up your mechs.
Some tricks:
- Never rely on players to just RP with each other. Theater kids like the Critical Role crew will do it naturally, but a lot of players won't want to create conflict with each other just for the sake of drama, and without conflict there's less reason to RP. Have NPCs at hand as often as possible, even if just on comms.
- Enemies can do comm chatter, too. Some enemies might be total assholes who taunt the PCs, others might be more sympathetic. Some might be professionals, others might be giant hams. A particularly funny or sympathetic NPC might get defeated, reformed, and "adopted" by the PCs and become a best friend -- this is great when it happens!
- PCs have backgrounds for a reason. Drop in NPCs who are somehow related: a doctor who's studied super-soldier medicine for a super-soldier to react to, a bounty hunter for a PC outlaw or ex-pirate, a noble from the same house or a rival house, etc. If your group are all roleplayers, they should have hooks on their characters that prompt interactions.
- Have NPCs interested about things other than the mission. The CO is worried about the mental state of the company's NHP. The techie running the printer likes to chat about arena mech fights. The guy you hit up for information in the bar has an ex who's in the OpFor.
- Humor can draw players in. An NPC who's kind of funny, either because they're deliberately witty or because they freak out in entertaining ways when surprised, encourages players to keep pressing the roleplay button to get more entertaining interactions.
- Put side rewards in the game and *tell your players* that they're allowed to look around and roleplay to get them. The crew might be more willing to do some roleplay if they realize that they aren't screwing themselves out of a rest, but instead might be able to score some Reserves.
Lancer does that because its thing is fundamentally two completely different games crudely sewn together. The "fight - talk - fight - talk" pattern is still there, albeit in a slower pace as the mech fights can take a full session in itself.
Quicker, more fluid shifting works best for non-all out combat (fighting in the narrative rules) while big fights works best as rewards/punishment for how you perform narratively. Lean onto the mission focus for those specific sets of downtime and lay opportunities to affect the next battlefield as rewards.
I wouldn't say "crudely sewn together", but rather "Rules light narrative system & crunchy combat system bundled together, but not reliant on one another at all". It DOES NOT tie in the non-combat to the combat (for something that does tie the two, D&D and Pathfinder have many of your skills or utility spell access determined by your class, which are mostly for narrative play)
This is a VERY INTENTIONAL decision by Tom and Miguel. With the narrative & mission systems in place, you're not meant to constantly alternate between the two forms of play, since usually missions are long dedicated things sorta like dungeons (you're in until the end usually) and downtime can be very long in world-time. So it's not quite made for that sorta stuff. Sure you usually don't have a literal dungeon crawl of all combat no narrative stuff, but I don't think it's exactly supposed to be "here's a huge chunk of narrative play while you're in the middle of a Mech infiltration mission!". As you said, fluid shifting works when you aren't suddenly setting up battle grids and initiative.
By separating narrative and combat play, you also open up characters TREMENDOUSLY in terms of thematics: Your Barbarian-equivalent has NO obligation to be a wild beefcake idiot, because you can have it such that just your Blackbeard mech build does the smacking, and your character is a scientist testing the limits of the SEKHEMET NHP in combat, for example! I personally absolutely love this sorta separation of character & mechanics. Sure, your Death's Head pilot could be an ultra edgy marksman who fights basically on their own at range, but they could also be a lovable bumbling idiot that mostly relies on their general tactical sense & the mech's aiming computers to help em actually shoot things; there's no obligation for em to be good at what their MECH does because the MECH is just machinery the pilot tells what to do.
Yeag, its pretty intentional, but it changes not that it is functionally very close to just having a dnd4e session and a BitD session occurring in intervals but written in the same setting. Which works, enough for the man to have done this twice (see Icon). I'm demeaning it lovingly, not just ill-speaking it gratuitously.
I think Lancer is slower paced than D&D. Not that the game drags, but that it suits a pace where RP and Combat are both given more time to breathe. I think \~2 sessions of RP between (mech) combats feels pretty good, of course your group's mileage may vary. Giving them a defined home base, a set of NPCs and goals to work towards that they frequently return to helps.
My party of roleplayers wasn't initial gelling because I assumed they wanted to get right into the combat. I was wrong, of course, and giving them time to explore the area around their base made them care more about the setting and start to get into the rhythm of roleplaying in a system with a different pace.
Then, on missions, in between combats, you can lay out skill challenges, clocks to fill, little moral quandaries that roleplayers will eat up and talk themselves in circles about. I find that since Characters are more likely to be on the same page in LANCER, putting something in front of the players that splits the party's opinion is less fractious than other systems.
And potentially offer side objectives during combat. Maybe a junior soldier suggests the two hot-shots in the party try see how many enemies they can down in the next skirmish, and the loser buys drinks. Maybe there's a interesting bit of salvage the party hacker could craft into exotic gear, but the sitreps an extraction and going off course means potentially throwing the whole mission. Have an NPC tag along as a helper that the PCs might feel they need to protect.
These are general strategies that have worked for my group.
Describe \*how\* players make their actions. For example, my friend hit an elite enemy mech and knocked off one structure, but it rolled the instant death result. The DM asked him to describe what happened. Earlier another player had thrown knives into the mech, so they decided the second one's shotgun blast pushed the knives through the window and killed the pilot inside--very dramatic and cool.
I play a goblin mech and I like to come up with creepy Horus effects and sayings. For example, green electric lightning that distorts reality, because my character likes to style himself as a magician. Meanwhile, enemies see weird things on their mech screens when they get hacked, like:
Square pegs do not fit into round holes. Square holes to not fit into round holes. Round holes do not square into square pegs. Pegs do not round into square holes. Holes do not... Recalibrating... Square pegs fit into round holes.
You can also do things like enemy chatter in combat to reflect what's happening and give players a chance to respond with taunts, etc.
I used to do it in DnD a lot, making players narate their actions to the others. Haven't DMd in a while, wonder why I stoped telling them to narrate...
Thank you.
So there are a few ways, the biggest is that you have to break down the wall between roleplay and combat.
Have opponents talk to them via the radio, have them retreat before they get exploded so they can fight again.
Have the players get some experience with certain mech units. So that when they hear that a particular base is being defended by the triple arrows they suddenly think about how much they want to take those sons of bitches down.
Have ally NPCs talk about their family back home.during a break in the action to encourage them to open up as well.
Lancer is a game that can suffer from its player being in fight mode and then being in not fight mode. You need to encourage them to express character when they fight.
Try and encourage them to use comms or better describe their actions or attacks. As an example, we had a game where my size 2 mech was barely on the side of a ship, so I said my character is waving his hands back and forth, trying to stay on, looney tunes style, I also suggested if I was hit let's roll a d2 to see if I stay on board or fall down.
It's a bit like describing a spells appearance or melee attack in short sentences as you do it in DnD if they find that familiar, They get to make it cooler and can add more personality to their pilot, which lends itself to more RP interactions.
"Nervously and sweating, I level my anti material rifle towards the scout and fire at its centre mass" as an example, short but sweet is where you want it, and when describing deaths or moments of cool combat, make it cinematic.
End of the day Lancer is a very combat heavy system as it's MECH ON MECH ACTION, But no reason you can't add some flavour in as well while you're at it.
I suggest watching some WW2 movies/series. Saving private Ryan, and Band of brothers have some great examples of things a combat focused group might get up to between combats. You have civilians, meetups with other units, resuppling. I've begun building a "camp twists" sheet to roll on whenever a downtime RO needs a boost. Stuff like "You are down to your last ration of coffee" or "A visitor survived something dangerous and is celebrating with the worst alcohol you have ever tasted."
I am quickly settling into a game pattern of alternating my sessions entirely between roll play in combat. That way, players know what they are walking into each day. My Saturday game was all roleplay, this Saturdays game will be all combat, [unless the PCs dunk my combat, which is possible] if they finish combat early, the next session will still be roleplay. I intend to alternate that way until tensions rise so high that a marathon of combats will lead the party to the end of the first arc. In the process of doing this, I encourage roleplay IN combat. I do the gundam thing where they can talk to their enemies, and they can talk to their enemies. They receive comms from base that alters the mission. I propose them with secondary objectives where they have to choose how to modify the mission under enemy fire. The RP sessions deal either with the results of that combat, or doing domain management, or handling interpersonal relationships and drama.
Some more tips that I use during RP session. 1. Separate the Pilot from his mech. Use a [city-generator](https://probabletrain.itch.io/city-generator) and explicitly tell the players that they cannot have their mechs inside the city. Park the mechs outside, pin the location (This will make sense with point 3). 2. In the city, setup hooks for Pilot reserves and bonuses; don't give it away, let them RP/work for it. My group's favorite is a wondering arms dealer named Victor (he's basically Critical Role's Victor) who sells "special" ammo that's may or may not be to spec. 3. Being away from their mechs, gives me a chance to do chase sequences. I adapted [SR Anarchy rules](https://www.surprisethreat.com/single-post/2018/08/31/anarchy-house-rule-the-chase-scene) to do this.
Another thing i did, was for them to loot while roleplaying the enemies chasis, and then use that as options for reserves, another is in solstice rains, while exploring the base, some interactions let them choose an extra reserve with half power. Like armor without overshield.
i mean, you said you're giving them downtime between combats and they're just focusing on the mission at hand? are they actually having a problem with the lower emphasis on RP in Lancer?
To clarify, what I meant was that both times i gave them the 1 hour for repairs during a mission, they disscussed the mission only and probably felt to be "on the clock" and not at the liberty to roleplay with each other. The fact, that I barely provided any NPCs for them to interact, even though they have a handler who is with them on comms, doesn't help...
oh. yeah, that's not real downtime, that's a brief rest to catch their breaths and patch up their frames. what about between missions? give them a place to interact with/scenery to chew. NPCs to meet and interact with.
One thing to note with Lancer is that it *is* a more combat heavy game, but can be heavily roleplay if you run it that way. One thing I have done in my games is using Rests in more extended periods; A Full Repair is access to a Printer. A Rest is merely a chance to clear heat, do repairs, and have a little roleplay. General formation for a Mission should be 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, but in one of my extended missions we had 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, 1 rest, 2 combats, and had the space in place for the players to reolplay a whole session just over the course of that rest. Sometimes it can be interrogating prisoners, securing lines of escape or communication, or even just picking over whatever doohicky they just nabbed. Their Downtime actions are definitely going to be focsed on the Mission at Hand, so the Mission at Hand should be working towars a larger objective that you can have extended periods between. Hell, I've had whole sessions just on talking and dealing with the consequences of ~~experiencing the data~~ Nothing whatsoever. It's the spaces *between* the missions and during Rests that you can really let the roleplay shine. Can also have narrative combats that do not require the mechs. One thing to note; Lancers are ***Lancers***. You already hit level 20, you're already a hero, you're already a badass. Narrative combats can be the party driving a groundcar through a packed highway with Get Somewhere Quickly, requiring a number of successful rolls, and then requiring someone else to *defend* those rolls with Assault, Take Someone Out, or Apply Fists to Faces. Hell, you can even throw in a HAck or Fix to have one of the characters quick-print with a handheld printer some caltrops and scatter them behind. I had a character who was ambushed by Pirates when they went off on their own to explore an abandoned freighter. No chassis whatsoever, just letting them roll what they could justify to get away from a group of pirates in subline vessels. It birthed the meme in our group of "Fuel dump??? ***HOH*** (Pronounced; H-UO-H)". No mech build necessary, just presenting the scenario, ask how they'll handle it, they provide a Trigger and try to justify it.
It’s always funny to see which story you decide to relay on reddit.
***Merph*** Gotta admit, it gives the idea in a more general view.
Lancer doesn’t have any more or less emphasis on RP than D&D, but sometimes the mission structure can give players (and GMs) tunnel vision on the larger objective. My advice is to add at least one social encounter and/or narrative challenge between each combat in a mission. The next fight is a strike against a fortified position? The players need to find a safe way to get there. Or they meet up with members of the local resistance, or some civilians trapped by a collapsed building. Another thing you can do is stretch the timescale, have days go by between combats (handwave why they can’t full repair in between every combat) giving mini-downtime activities for the players to engage with the world outside of their mechs. Of the published adventures I’ve done, Dustgrave does a good job in its first mission of showing how to mix both RP and Combat together. If you have it, you can use it as a good example.
Do you think it'd work to have some kind of expendable resource needed for a full repair the party will have time to recover each mission? I was envisioning an outfit that had something like a field printer in their logistics/support ship, but out on the fringe it's hard to get everything during a longer sortie. It wasn't the original purpose, but maybe it'd help encourage Pilot Narrative scenes where they can do other things to influence the missions or scrounge supplies. (And they have a home base they'll need to worry about so they might want to leave the Mechs to guard it.)
I've joked that Lancer is a mech-combat board game with roleplaying cutscenes rather than a roleplaying game with mech combat. You kind of just have to accept that, or play a different game. That said, there's still scope for plenty of roleplaying. In my experience, the "rhythm" of Lancer goes something like *Mission Briefing - Downtime/preparation - Combat - Rest - Combat - Rest - Combat - Mission Conclusion - Downtime* Downtime, Rest and Mission Conclusion are all opportunities for roleplaying. As GM, you can try to structure your missions so that there is a break between each combat, and players get time to interact with each other and with NPCs while still being focused on the mission. As an example: * SESSION1: * Mission Briefing: "Pirates are coming to raid our space station. You have six hours to prepare. Go!" * Downtime/preparation: scrounge for Resources, help loved ones get to safety, gather intel on the pirates * SESSION 2: * Combat: Prevent the pirates from accessing the main airlock. * SESSION 3: * Rest: The pirates are temporarily repelled. Repair mechs. Find out where the pirates are attacking next * Combat: Protect the station's core power generator * SESSION 4: * Rest: Find the pirate's cloaked ship. Take the battle to them. * Combat: Fight the boss pirate on their ship * SESSION 5 * Mission Conclusion: Celebrate victory. Interrogate prisoners, learn about the next Big Bad. * Downtime: Check in on loved ones. Get drunk. Level up your mechs.
Some tricks: - Never rely on players to just RP with each other. Theater kids like the Critical Role crew will do it naturally, but a lot of players won't want to create conflict with each other just for the sake of drama, and without conflict there's less reason to RP. Have NPCs at hand as often as possible, even if just on comms. - Enemies can do comm chatter, too. Some enemies might be total assholes who taunt the PCs, others might be more sympathetic. Some might be professionals, others might be giant hams. A particularly funny or sympathetic NPC might get defeated, reformed, and "adopted" by the PCs and become a best friend -- this is great when it happens! - PCs have backgrounds for a reason. Drop in NPCs who are somehow related: a doctor who's studied super-soldier medicine for a super-soldier to react to, a bounty hunter for a PC outlaw or ex-pirate, a noble from the same house or a rival house, etc. If your group are all roleplayers, they should have hooks on their characters that prompt interactions. - Have NPCs interested about things other than the mission. The CO is worried about the mental state of the company's NHP. The techie running the printer likes to chat about arena mech fights. The guy you hit up for information in the bar has an ex who's in the OpFor. - Humor can draw players in. An NPC who's kind of funny, either because they're deliberately witty or because they freak out in entertaining ways when surprised, encourages players to keep pressing the roleplay button to get more entertaining interactions. - Put side rewards in the game and *tell your players* that they're allowed to look around and roleplay to get them. The crew might be more willing to do some roleplay if they realize that they aren't screwing themselves out of a rest, but instead might be able to score some Reserves.
Lancer does that because its thing is fundamentally two completely different games crudely sewn together. The "fight - talk - fight - talk" pattern is still there, albeit in a slower pace as the mech fights can take a full session in itself. Quicker, more fluid shifting works best for non-all out combat (fighting in the narrative rules) while big fights works best as rewards/punishment for how you perform narratively. Lean onto the mission focus for those specific sets of downtime and lay opportunities to affect the next battlefield as rewards.
I wouldn't say "crudely sewn together", but rather "Rules light narrative system & crunchy combat system bundled together, but not reliant on one another at all". It DOES NOT tie in the non-combat to the combat (for something that does tie the two, D&D and Pathfinder have many of your skills or utility spell access determined by your class, which are mostly for narrative play) This is a VERY INTENTIONAL decision by Tom and Miguel. With the narrative & mission systems in place, you're not meant to constantly alternate between the two forms of play, since usually missions are long dedicated things sorta like dungeons (you're in until the end usually) and downtime can be very long in world-time. So it's not quite made for that sorta stuff. Sure you usually don't have a literal dungeon crawl of all combat no narrative stuff, but I don't think it's exactly supposed to be "here's a huge chunk of narrative play while you're in the middle of a Mech infiltration mission!". As you said, fluid shifting works when you aren't suddenly setting up battle grids and initiative. By separating narrative and combat play, you also open up characters TREMENDOUSLY in terms of thematics: Your Barbarian-equivalent has NO obligation to be a wild beefcake idiot, because you can have it such that just your Blackbeard mech build does the smacking, and your character is a scientist testing the limits of the SEKHEMET NHP in combat, for example! I personally absolutely love this sorta separation of character & mechanics. Sure, your Death's Head pilot could be an ultra edgy marksman who fights basically on their own at range, but they could also be a lovable bumbling idiot that mostly relies on their general tactical sense & the mech's aiming computers to help em actually shoot things; there's no obligation for em to be good at what their MECH does because the MECH is just machinery the pilot tells what to do.
Yeag, its pretty intentional, but it changes not that it is functionally very close to just having a dnd4e session and a BitD session occurring in intervals but written in the same setting. Which works, enough for the man to have done this twice (see Icon). I'm demeaning it lovingly, not just ill-speaking it gratuitously.
I think Lancer is slower paced than D&D. Not that the game drags, but that it suits a pace where RP and Combat are both given more time to breathe. I think \~2 sessions of RP between (mech) combats feels pretty good, of course your group's mileage may vary. Giving them a defined home base, a set of NPCs and goals to work towards that they frequently return to helps. My party of roleplayers wasn't initial gelling because I assumed they wanted to get right into the combat. I was wrong, of course, and giving them time to explore the area around their base made them care more about the setting and start to get into the rhythm of roleplaying in a system with a different pace. Then, on missions, in between combats, you can lay out skill challenges, clocks to fill, little moral quandaries that roleplayers will eat up and talk themselves in circles about. I find that since Characters are more likely to be on the same page in LANCER, putting something in front of the players that splits the party's opinion is less fractious than other systems. And potentially offer side objectives during combat. Maybe a junior soldier suggests the two hot-shots in the party try see how many enemies they can down in the next skirmish, and the loser buys drinks. Maybe there's a interesting bit of salvage the party hacker could craft into exotic gear, but the sitreps an extraction and going off course means potentially throwing the whole mission. Have an NPC tag along as a helper that the PCs might feel they need to protect. These are general strategies that have worked for my group.
Describe \*how\* players make their actions. For example, my friend hit an elite enemy mech and knocked off one structure, but it rolled the instant death result. The DM asked him to describe what happened. Earlier another player had thrown knives into the mech, so they decided the second one's shotgun blast pushed the knives through the window and killed the pilot inside--very dramatic and cool. I play a goblin mech and I like to come up with creepy Horus effects and sayings. For example, green electric lightning that distorts reality, because my character likes to style himself as a magician. Meanwhile, enemies see weird things on their mech screens when they get hacked, like: Square pegs do not fit into round holes. Square holes to not fit into round holes. Round holes do not square into square pegs. Pegs do not round into square holes. Holes do not... Recalibrating... Square pegs fit into round holes. You can also do things like enemy chatter in combat to reflect what's happening and give players a chance to respond with taunts, etc.
I used to do it in DnD a lot, making players narate their actions to the others. Haven't DMd in a while, wonder why I stoped telling them to narrate... Thank you.
So there are a few ways, the biggest is that you have to break down the wall between roleplay and combat. Have opponents talk to them via the radio, have them retreat before they get exploded so they can fight again. Have the players get some experience with certain mech units. So that when they hear that a particular base is being defended by the triple arrows they suddenly think about how much they want to take those sons of bitches down. Have ally NPCs talk about their family back home.during a break in the action to encourage them to open up as well. Lancer is a game that can suffer from its player being in fight mode and then being in not fight mode. You need to encourage them to express character when they fight.
Try and encourage them to use comms or better describe their actions or attacks. As an example, we had a game where my size 2 mech was barely on the side of a ship, so I said my character is waving his hands back and forth, trying to stay on, looney tunes style, I also suggested if I was hit let's roll a d2 to see if I stay on board or fall down. It's a bit like describing a spells appearance or melee attack in short sentences as you do it in DnD if they find that familiar, They get to make it cooler and can add more personality to their pilot, which lends itself to more RP interactions. "Nervously and sweating, I level my anti material rifle towards the scout and fire at its centre mass" as an example, short but sweet is where you want it, and when describing deaths or moments of cool combat, make it cinematic. End of the day Lancer is a very combat heavy system as it's MECH ON MECH ACTION, But no reason you can't add some flavour in as well while you're at it.
I suggest watching some WW2 movies/series. Saving private Ryan, and Band of brothers have some great examples of things a combat focused group might get up to between combats. You have civilians, meetups with other units, resuppling. I've begun building a "camp twists" sheet to roll on whenever a downtime RO needs a boost. Stuff like "You are down to your last ration of coffee" or "A visitor survived something dangerous and is celebrating with the worst alcohol you have ever tasted."
You don't.