Eclipse Phase vs Lancer
Compare Eclipse Phase and Lancer side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Eclipse Phase | Lancer | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Scifi, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic | Scifi |
| Play Style | Crunchy, Open Source, Horror, Weird, Investigation, Espionage, Faction Play, Atmospheric, Lore-Heavy, Skill-Based, Mission-Based, Tactical | Tactical, Mecha, Grid-Based, Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Heroic, Crunchy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d100 and try to land equal to or under your skill — or aptitude × 3 for unskilled checks — adjusted by difficulty modifiers in ±10 increments. The 33/66 rule grades each roll on a single throw: a success of 33 or higher is a superior success, a failure of 66 or lower is a superior failure, and doubles (00, 11, 22, …) are criticals. Four pools — Insight (mental), Moxie (social), Vigor (physical), and Flex (wild card) — spend to add +20 to target numbers, flip-flop a roll's digits, upgrade a success, ignore wounds or trauma, or introduce narrative elements like NPCs and environmental details. | Narrative scenes use d20 roll-over (10+ succeeds), with backgrounds granting advantage and triggers adding flat bonuses. Mech combat is grid-based and tactical — no initiative, players and NPCs alternate turns. Pilots progress through License Levels (LL0–LL12), unlocking new chassis, weapons, and systems across five manufacturers with 30+ mech frames. |
| Dice | d100 | d20 + d6 |
| Complexity | High | High |
| Accessibility | Very High | High |
| Runnability | High | High |
| License | Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Lancer Third Party License |
| Cost | Free | Free (PDF) / $$ |
| Publisher | Posthuman Studios | Massif Press |
| Year | 2019 | 2019 |
| Best For | Groups who want hard transhumanist sci-fi with cosmic horror undertones, dense subsystems for hacking and body-swapping, and the Firewall conspiracy framework where cortical-stack backups turn death into a setback rather than the end of a character. | Groups who want deep tactical mech combat with meaningful customization layered on top of accessible narrative play — giant robot enthusiasts seeking a modern alternative to BattleTech. |
| Highlights | The ego/morph split separates mind from body — characters back up their cortical stacks and can resleeve into biological morphs, robotic synthmorphs, or digital infomorphs between sessions, making body choice a tactical decision and death a recoverable setback. The 33/66 rule grades each percentile roll on a continuous scale of superior success or superior failure without rerolls, so a single throw produces a degree of outcome rather than just pass/fail. Seven distinct reputation networks (@-rep, c-rep, f-rep, g-rep, i-rep, r-rep, x-rep) replace cash for many transactions in post-scarcity territory, modeling factional standing as a parallel economy with its own favor limits and weekly refresh caps. | Free core PDF, extensive mech customization with 30+ frames, clean split between rules-light narrative and crunchy tactical combat, Comp/Con companion app is well-integrated |
| Considerations | Bookkeeping splits across an ego sheet (mind, skills, traits, pools, rep) and a separate morph sheet (body, ware, Durability, derived combat stats), and resleeving mid-campaign swaps out the morph half including pool maximums. The book takes an overtly political stance — the introduction states it is "not the game for you" if you support authoritarianism, and faction writeups present anarchist and autonomist values as the authorial baseline rather than one option among many. Routine cortical-stack backups make character death recoverable by design, so traditional life-or-death stakes need to be reframed around backup destruction, exsurgent infection, or memory lack to carry weight. | Mech combat dominates — narrative half feels thin by comparison, steep learning curve from sheer volume of mech options, genre-locked to sci-fi mech fiction, requires grid/VTT for combat |