Post originally by Kobold Lord at 2004-06-25 06:26:29
Converted from Phorums BB System

The reviewer stated:
"My biggest fear is that the high fantasy elements---those elements that make D&D what it is---would be watered down by Sci-Fi until it was a painfully diluted shadow of itself...Clearly, when dealing with a subject so far removed from traditional high-fantasy conventions, a D&D sourcebook must make its case immediately that it doesn’t upset the delicate balance inherent to the system and its game worlds."

Why do so many people believe that mecha violate the high fantasy conventions? Not just this review, of course; there's been several fantasy mecha reviews popping up recently, what with the near-simultaneous releases of Striders, Stryders, and Eberron, and most of those reviewers have cited similar sentiments.

Yet... Every Final Fantasy at least since FFIV has featured mecha. Plenty of fantasy-themed animation, from Escaflowne to Scrapped Princess and whathaveyou, have featured mecha. And it isn't just Japan, either; let's not forget that mecha were written into D&D Greyhawk canon way back in first edition. Check the Artifact section of the DMG. Then in second edition, one of the most important planes in the Planescape setting was appropriately called "Mechanus."

There are more examples, if anyone cares to remember them. While mecha aren't appropriate to every world, it seems odd that so many of us forget that there's plenty of people out there using this very source material. I'm rather surprised we didn't get mecha rules sooner, considering all the people that must have had to homebrew them.

In most campaign worlds, mecha actually make logical sense. Humans in the real world are very inventive. It doesn't seem logical to donate such an easily accessible power source as magic (and if you've got a single spellcasting PC, magic is probably easily accessible) to a society of humans and not have them develop technology with it. Several official campaign worlds have recent cataclysmic events that wiped out all magitech (the Cataclysm of DL, the fall of Netheril in FR, etc.), but it's nice to see some support for those GMs that don't want to have the same cliched disaster immediately preceding PC activity in their own campaigns.