LANCER: I Literally Cannot Go Back To D&D 5e (Part 1: Finding Lancer)
It's like switching from a Premium version of a service back to the Freemium version. Not great.
>//COMMUNICATIONS ESTABLISHED
>//OPEN PROTOCOL
I don’t know if it’s me being (undiagnosed, unconfirmed) ADHD, the fact that That One Arcane Shoreline Company has made so many critical blunders of both PR and economics, or the fact that I just don’t enjoy the system anymore. One thing remains true: I tried to go back to D&D 5e after spending a little over a year in the Lancer system, and I lasted maybe two combat encounters.
Two.
Granted, the people I was playing with were wonderful, and while new, the DM did a great job in the narrative sections in what I understood to be a narrative campaign. I thoroughly enjoyed laughing with my friends and weaving the beginnings of what might have been a great story! I made a character with more support spells that could help the party in non-combative ways. I didn’t expect there to be a lot of combat, and granted, there wasn’t. But what combat there was, I wasn’t excited for. I didn’t have a big list of damaging spells, or even combat-useful effects. It got to the point where I was quickly checking out in between my turns, and just waiting for combat to end.
Let’s break down what happened, and first give a bit of context. If you want to skip through and go straight to the breakdown of D&D vs Lancer, you can go to the Part 2 of this post.
Background
I used to be a D&D nut. As in, it got to the point where I had a whole YouTube series on making character builds from various pop culture (read: Overwatch and DOOM). While it didn’t last long, it represented something I loved about D&D: Making character builds. I enjoyed making combinations that had either cool mechanics and combinations or crazy damage numbers. I wound up one-shotting a boss with an assassin build that I had been workshopping for months before that point.
Does that mean that my low-combat support build was the literal opposite of what I found fun? Yes, but that would have been going against the spirit of the game my most recent DM wanted to run, or at least the game I thought he wanted to run. Plus, there were plenty of opportunities to use support spells in cool ways, which I am forever grateful for.
I took a break from 5e for a while around 2020, and during the pandemic I hopped around systems like Cyberpunk, Pathfinder, and Zweihander. Each of them had their draws and flaws, but nothing really stuck with me. Either the games were too crunchy, too inaccessible (PF2e was still in playtest or early release), or just not really something I wanted to play often.
Hey! Thanks for reading this far. Want to get Lancer content, GM advice, player advice, stories, and insights into the journey and wisdom of a professional GM? You can get these articles straight to your inbox for free!
You can also share this post with your friends, real, parasocial, and paracausal!
Patching an RPG-Sized Hole
I found Lancer when I was digging into a game called Remnants. I figured I might be able to try and run something new for my friends. One friend group had recently come out of an absolutely terrible gaming experience with a homebrew system that I might go into in another post. I thought I would try and remedy that. I flipped through Remnants, but at one point or another I realized that it had far too casual of an approach to slavery for my liking, and an emphasis on East Asian culture by someone who was evidently of Western descent, or at least that was how it looked from my reading. (Author’s Note: I checked. Everyone at Outrider Studios, the studio behind Remnants, is definitely not Asian.) Either way, with both of those things, I dropped the game and looked for a new mecha RPG to play.
Lancer was the first entry in one of the articles I read. The premise was cool, but what drew me was the companion app that supposedly made things a lot easier. I read through some reviews and watched videos on it to make sure it didn’t have the same problems as Remnants.
Reader, I have to say Lancer is probably the most progressive system and community I have ever come across, and I mean that as a compliment. The Discord banner is a dabbing hacker frame in front of a trans flag, if you were skeptical. The universe looked really interesting to get into, and the companion app looked promising, so I looked for the core book and bought it (even with there being a free version), knowing full well there was a chance I would never actually play this game, similar to Remnants. That said, I still wanted to give playing it a shot.
I told some friends about it. I wasn’t gung ho on GMing it, though. I had tried in the past with D&D 5e and Cyberpunk 2020, but neither of those games were really fun to GM for me, so I wasn’t chomping at the bit to run Lancer.
No real bites, which was expected. That said, I was hoping someone would at least run a one-shot, something to assess the game in the field. From flipping through the book, I adored the modularity of the system, and how build-focused the tactical combat was, which I had loved from the beginning of playing RPGs.
In May, I got a ping on Discord. One of my buddies had looked through Lancer, wanted to run a game, and offered me the chance to bring my girlfriend along. 6 days later, we had characters and mechs drafted, a Roll20 game loaded up, and we began our journey in what I would come to understand as Lancer’s first official campaign module, No Room For a Wallflower.
D&D had already fallen by the wayside for me by this point. I had been in enough RPGs that the idea of porting sci-fi stuff into 5e was just silly. I can’t tell you what exactly was going through my mind, but I felt D&D had already lost its favour with me.
Fast forward to the end of May of 2023.
Back in the Game
I got invited to this 5e game by a friend I had (and still have) known for a long time, ever since the beginning of high school. We found out that we were at the same job through a group chat, and he told me about a campaign he wanted to run as a new DM. I figured I’d jump in and be supportive, even if the system gave me an ick. By this point, I had become so thoroughly engrossed in Lancer, to the point of running games and making homebrew and drafting a whole campaign supplement. The recent horrors of Hasbro’s subsidiary lurked in my mind, so I asked if it were feasible to switch to a system like Pathfinder, but quickly realized that wasn’t happening with this group. They were starting at a higher level, and wanted to finish the adventures by summer’s end when we would all go back to our studies.
So I soldiered on. I made a character, not even bothering to really fill out spell details because oh dear god had running Lancer in Foundry and COMP/CON spoiled me with the ability to quickly draft up characters. Yes, D&D Beyond exists, but I wasn’t paying for that. I refused to support WotC at this point.
I got to my first session of D&D 5e in what was probably over 2 years and sat down, opening my laptop to Roll20.
Time to see if D&D still held up.
>//COMMUNICATIONS DISCONNECTED
>//CONTINUE IN PART 2 UPON RELEASE