YMMV / Mekton

• Game-Breaker: Quite a few (for both players and Referees), though some are less obvious than others. Luck, an otherwise useless attribute (despite the official suggestion of how to determine psi abilities), is the source of one of these, as it's possible to get a result of 40~45 on any given skill roll with the proper setup, almost guaranteeing a critical (and possibly even an instant kill) in combat.
  • A handful of the game breakers can be negated by a watchful referee, especially if they require the players to run all designs by them. The easiest of these to spot are the scaling exploits, in which a munchkin tries to design a game-breaking mekton abusing the scaling rules.
  • Burst (especially Burst Infinite) can easily become this, if used right. It is quite possible, in Mekton Zeta, to create an energy chainsaw that can quite literally saw a battleship in half, every other turn (using the 'cooldown' turns to close in on a new target) for about a hundred points.
    • A hundred points being the entire points allocation for a production line "grunt" military mecha. Not to say that the weapon isn't exploitative as hell, just that 100CP is a *lot*.
  • To get an idea of just how damn many exist, take a gander at The Mekton Technical System Abuse Catalog.
    • Some of the most amusing such exploits include the zero-weight (giving infinite speed) spaceship, a.k.a. "The Death Beachball"; the negative-cost mecha ("GM, you owe me 5.000CP"); or ammunition combining both Nuclear (infinite damage) and Paintball (no damage, but damage-based bonus to spot checks; a.k.a. "Most visible fleet in the Universe. And most pink").
• Harsher in Hindsight: Starblade Battallion mentions terrorists nuking the World Trade Centre in 1997.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Operation Rimfire, one of the characters had a girlfriend called Maria who was brainwashed and given an alternate personality. Nearly two decades later, Mobile Suit Gundam 00 was made...
  • The fan-made Virtual Mekton setting writ-large is this with the release of Gundam Build Fighters and Gundam Build Fighters Try. The game setting ended up predicting quite a few of the underlying elements in the two animes.
• Narm: Dremmond's death scene in the Rimfire adventure, largely owing to his Final Speech being an Infodump.
• Spiritual Licensee: Creator Mike Pondsmith has stated the game was inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam. (In a case of Hilarious in Hindsight, the Mekton rules would be licensed for a Gundam game, but only in Japan.) He also admits that the original version of what became Mekton Empire was a shameless ripoff of Star Wars.

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