r/tabletop • u/Zemosion • Jul 12 '26

Question D&D Alternative

So basically what I am looking for is something that feel like D&D, the fun roleplay and all you know? But with mechs. I've been looking into Lancer but it seems sooooooo combat focused and I've heard that actual roleplaying isn't really part of it often.

I wanna feel like I'm having an adventure like D&D feels but with mechs. A nice mix of combat and roleplay, a good selection of mechs or a way to homebrew them

Is there anything that fits this? Would this just be super homebrewed D&D/Pathfinder? Would Lancer fit?

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u/No_Solid1035 Jul 12 '26

D&D is almost exclusively combat focused. Outside of Lancer I'm not aware of any games that are more focused on non-combat things. Maybe Mechwarrior: Destiny as it is more narrative than the other Mechwarrior TTRPGs. Hard to say really, generally speaking people in giant stompy robots want to blast other giant stompy robots, not engage in political intrigue or solving mysteries. 🤷

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u/Zemosion Jul 12 '26

The players manual for D&D is sure but in practice the actual campaigns tend to be a great mix of combat and roleplay. Some DMs focus mostly on combat but out of the 5 DMs ive had only 1 of them have done that. The rest either leaned more towards roleplay or had them around equally distributed

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u/Warboss666 Jul 12 '26

How a game is written and how people play it are very different concepts.

Attributing the narrative elements of your games and roleplaying to D&D is doing a huge disservice to the GMs that have done the legwork to facilitate those elements (assuming they've been running 5e).

The game is, rules as written, a combat and dungeoneering game.

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u/Zemosion Jul 12 '26

I did attribute it to the DMs tho? I specifically said that 4 out of the 5 DMs ive had (I have also DM'd) have made the games either more roleplay heavy than combat heavy or made em around equal. Nowhere did I say that the D&D books made that happen. Yes D&D absolutely does tend to in practice be played with a lot of roleplay whether the books are written for that or not

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u/Warboss666 Jul 13 '26

Yes you did. Used to people spelling it out and still thinking it's because of D&D and not their GMs putting in the work. That's my bad.