Mechatron: Role-Playing Robots

The world...ended. Nobody knows how. The final war? A plague? Weather? All of the above? You are robots, left behind by the humans, desperately trying to follow your more and more error-filled programming, and keeping your robot-city from shutting down completely.

The learners will get to experience the award winning table-top roleplaying game Mutant: Year Zero, produced by the Free League game company, introducing the revolutionary Year Zero Engine game system. No experience of table-top role-playing games is required. Beginners might even find this system easier to learn than DnD.

I started playing in this setting when I was 12. The game is set in a dystopian future, after the apocalypse, much like Mad Max, or other similar movies/shows. Players will manage their homebase and explore the world, possibly discovering secrets about their origins as they go.

Week of September 18th: We make characters for everyone.

Week of September 25th: The characters choose their first assignment.

Week of October 2nd: The characters choose their second assignment.

Week of October 9th: The characters choose their third assignment.

Mechatron is excellent for an Ongoing class. The world is open for the players to explore, so the adventure for each session will be decided by the players, not the GM, primarily. Thus, players during session 5 are not tied down by the decisions made by the players of session 4, but are free to explore some completely different part of the world, and make other decisions for the home base. That makes this game more suitable for an Ongoing class than DnD. Further, since the players start with a home base, it is easy to come and go. If a player attends the first session, and then misses the second session, their character is simply assumed to do things in the home base, etc. If a learner enrolls on class 5, they can easily join as new recruits to the troubleshooting group. Also, character creation is much faster than in DnD. In DnD, it takes a new player about an hour, if not more, to create a new character. In Mutant: Year Zero, it takes closer to 15-20 minutes, because the rule-system is fast and easy to learn. Thus, if a learner joins after week 4 or even later, we can build a character together quickly and then jump straight in, as the game system is easy to learn.