bsky post complaining about a TTRPG (lancer, if it matters) uses the phrase "mechanical support for storytelling" and the only thing I could think to do is ask you if that seems like a cromulent complaint to have about a TTRPG because based on everything I've read on your treatises on the subject it doesn't seem like one but I am willing to live in the timeline where I pissed on my reading comprehension
See, the context actually does matter there; while "lack of mechanical support for storytelling" is a meaningless criticism in the abstract because nobody can agree what we actually mean when we say "story", let alone what it entails for a game to support having one, with respect to Lancer I strongly suspect that they're saying "story" in the way that folks who've mainly experienced tabletop roleplaying via Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators say "story" – which is to say, as a shorthand for "literally everything other than combat"; and by "combat" in this context we mean "things that happen when you're inside a giant robot".
(The problems with treating "story" and "combat" as disjoint sets are, of course, beyond the scope of this post!)
It's a frequent complaint regarding Lancer that the framework of play doesn't give a shit about anything that happens when you're not actively stomping around inside a giant robot, and it's not an unfounded one. Heck, one earlier first-party supplements straight up yanks out all of the non-giant-robot mechanics and replaces them wholesale with something more suited to that supplement's particular milieu and it basically doesn't affect the gameplay loop at all; that's how severe the disconnect between giant-robot play and non-giant-robot play is.
Now, given the kind of game that Lancer is, we can quibble about whether "the non-giant-robot play is almost entirely unconnected with the giant-robot play" is a reasonable criticism, but at the very least it's an intelligible criticism.
Yeah lancer might be the one game (that I know of) that has worse non-combat rules than dnd5e

















