Theme

Super Robot Taisen MOO is a roleplaying game based loosely on the Super Robot Taisen/Super Robot Wars series of games. This brings with it several specific things, and a handful of general guiding principles. Some of these things are covered in other files, such as Tone, Rating, and Plot; others, however, will be covered here.

Genre Conventions

The game titled, essentially, "Super Robots Having A War," is about -- and stay with me:

• a war
• of significant scale
• being carried out in robots
• that are also of significant scale (both the war and the robots are super).

While you are bound to see some variance in a subgenre that's lasted some fifty years, of course, the genre that spawned the series that spawned the MOO has some common threads to it. Below are some of the genre's most common ideas; while these aren't meant to be taken as dictating people's RP, they should be seen as an example of what play might typically include.

• A large number of problems -- personal, political, emotional, social, existential -- can be solved or at least engaged with by hitting something with the weapons on a giant robot... just... a bunch of times. Conversely, however, there are problems that can't be solved this way, and some of them present themselves as problems that can. This is a tension that generates conflict and is part of the point.
• The vibe can range from tragic to light-hearted; there will be a certain amount of anime-typical comedy. (We ask that players observe Rating in this regard, especially in public spaces; however, a little bit of shounen-anime-typical sex or violence comedy isn't going to be out of place. Kotetsushin Jeeg sees a character reach an epiphany about how to dock with drill parts by thinking of them as breasts. Conversely, however, please do not make lascivious or prurient posting the entirety of your contribution to the game; it really isn't that kind of game, either.)
• Science factors into the world in a major way but is not an absolute. There has been an effort made to establish the general, testable rules of the universe; there is also some stuff that operates on a completely different paradigm. (Some of this stuff even dresses up as science.) We have put some effort into massaging more egregious cases of something obviously intending to be science but not making any sense into feasibility, and dropped a few cases where one theme's pseudo-science would damage everything else. Do not be surprised if a superweapon that seemed scientifically feasible in the '90s and now is proven not shows up in its unedited state, however, or something violates even the in-character understanding of causality. Knowing the rules of reality, in a mecha theme, is often something that equips you to recognize something is breaking them and then consider whether to shoot the thing breaking them with a rocket punch.
• Ultimately, feelings are just as important as raw numbers in shaping the world. Bad things happen; dreams go unfulfilled; people die deaths that remind you of the cruelty of humanity. Despite this, the world is ultimately built out of the right dreams and feelings finding the right circumstances.

Theme Integration

Our setting incorporates setting data from at least a couple dozen pieces of content. When you attempt to jab that many things together, no matter how similar in structure and tone they are, a few things are bound to break. If you're coming here from a place of primarily being familiar with only one piece of integrated content, the world may look different from what you expect. Here, we'll lay out a few of the baseline assumptions that were used in integrating themes on SRTMOO, which can in turn inform Post-Hoc Integration of others.

Recognizability at Game Start

For the most part, themes have been integrated to be as recognizable as possible at game start from the lens we see them through, rather than in the full sweep of their history or in their next steps. Where this rule has been broken has usually been for one of the following reasons:

• The SRW games themselves created an interesting integration point themselves, which we are now using;
• The change makes the characters easier to play in the integrated world;
• Those next steps are actually more of interest to us than the starting state, and the starting state has been adjusted to make the later state more possible;
• The change is to something comparatively minor for that theme and the thing it's changing around is more major to another theme;
• Another large SRW RP has already done something like that in relatively recent memory, and we'd rather angle toward a different story.

For franchises with long timelines, such as Universal Century Gundam, Future Century Gundam, or Front Mission, this has often meant shaking up bits of the history in the interest of letting the theme (or another theme) feel more like itself in the present.

No Theme is an Island

The corollary to the previous point is that themes have usually been integrated with an eye toward how they would factor into each other's stories. The relative dormancy of the Macross Series's Variable Fighter between the Zentradi War and the present comes from the rise of Universal Century Gundam's Minovsky warfare; the Huffman Island Conflict of Front Mission and the destruction of New Yark at the hands of Getter Robo are part of a long-running tension between Code Geass's Britannia (which also incorporates Anno Domini Gundam's Union and Cosmic Era Gundam's Atlantic Federation) and the OCU, especially Japan. To the greatest extent possible, we've avoided having totally unattached themes, organizations, and characters; most decisions have been made to create the feeling of a shared world, rather than a multiverse of differing assumptions.

We Actually Need a Playspace

If the Macross Series's Zentradi, Universal Century Gundam's Principality of Zeon (and After War Gundam's Space Revolutionary Army), Evangelion Series's Second Impact, and Martian Successor Nadesico's Jovian Lizards all had their canon kill counts... everyone would be dead! In fact, so many people would be dead that people would have to start dying in a second Earth Sphere, all of those people would be dead, people would have to start dying in a third Earth Sphere, and it's possible all of those people would also, in fact, be dead, and this obviously says nothing of shows integrated post-hoc. Each individual theme's horrible nightmare past tragedy has been somewhat scaled back in the history and integration of the game to get to a place that's roughly compatible with all of them. (This applies to elements besides simple death count, such as the potential destruction of certain types of weapons.)