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"I was told this was a mature roleplaying group!" :indignantly replaces ball gag in own mouth, leaves::
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Mar 6, 2019 21:17
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Adeptus Evangelion Mustn't run away You know, it's a good point. There's a bunch of randomization so we have no idea how accurate he is, but yeah, let's make Shinji Ikari himself. He's got an 11, a 9, an 11, an 8, a 15, a 10, an 11, a 10, a 7, a 15, and a 13, so he drops the 7. Shinji's mostly average with a couple good stats. He puts one 15 into Synch Ratio, which goes up to 60 from Prodigy. The other goes into Agility because he would like to run away, for 35. His 8 goes in WP because it's Shinji, and his 9 in Fellowship, I think. The rest get slung around randomly and they're mostly average. By the end, Shinji is WS 31, BS 30, S 30, T 31, Agi 35, Int 31, WP 28, Per 31, Fel 29, Synch 60. He's good at synching, pretty nimble, mostly average. Our little everyman. Being a robot pilot that fell into the cockpit, he takes Beginner's Luck. Whenever he spends Fate, he gets +10 on the reroll. Shinji is definitely not a Natural Talent (+5 to any stat besides the useful ones, WS, BS, Agi, or SR), he's DEFINITELY not Stable (Your worst Drawback is negated until you're out of Fate), Synch Flux would fit (Whenever your Synch varies, more likely to go up), but for Shinji it's got to be Expert Coward. He automatically succeeds at breaking grapples and can withdraw from a fight as a half rather than full action. If you must run away, it pays to be good at it. Shinji is definitely Unprepared (Take +1 Insanity every time you take critical damage that causes Insanity) and has an Open Mind (His Feedback Threshold is lower. This makes him more likely to take feedback Fatigue and pass out. Which will make Eva-01 wake up. Score for the Berserker!). He gets an average roll for HP, so 3+6 (Prodigy)+3 (Toughness Bonus) for 12. Average for a human DH character. He's luckier on Fate, rolling a 10, and so he starts with 3 instead of 2 Fate. Lucky Shinji. Weirdly, I don't think Coward actually does that great at fitting him here on the Drawbacks table. Instead, he's a Civilian (Flips out when he accidentally kills dozens of people) for 10, Depressive for 10 (It's loving Shinji, man, this is even more defining than his worries), and Dependent for 5 (He craves positive reinforcement). That makes him sufficiently deep to have maximum points! And this hits the problem that none of the Assets really fit him much. I guess he's Unremarkable (Everyman) for 5, Uncanny Luck for 5, Fast for 5 (No Shinji! No running!), has Mad Skill for 5, and was Made for his Eva for 5 so that he can assure it's got a Savage Berserk, because Unit 1 is crazy. Shinji is obviously a Berserker since the entire class is based on him. His starting skills don't really matter, but I guess he'll take Concealment and Athletics for running. Then he's got Japanese, Common Lore (Japan), and literacy. He buys Awareness for 100 EXP because you need it, he buys Bestial for 100 because '+1 Pen with natural weapons, +d10 damage while Berserk' is catnip for a Berserker, he buys Ghost in the Machine for 100 because 'Remove the -30 penalty for Berserk Rolls' is, again, Berserker catnip, and he picks up an extra Bio Upgrade for 100. Berserker gives him 1 free, and one Weapon Upgrade, so he's got 2 Bio, 1 Weapon in his pool. In earlier editions, I might note, your Eva gave you like +15 to hit. Designed to negate early game whiffing. Shinji does not have this bonus, since he is made in 2.5, so he's going to be on a 30% to hit (60 if he goes All Out, at least?) for awhile. His Eva gets a 7, 8, and 5 for results. He picks his Soul from Made for Each Other, and takes a Mighty Soul; Eva 01 is confident and dangerous. He uses the 5 on Construction to have a Hulking Giant with -5 Agility but +5 S and T. He uses the 8 on History for Mismanaged because the 7 result would have been disastrous (Your Eva always goes after other Evas when Berserk via Nemesis, which is, uh, BAD for a Berserker) so his Eva is a clunker that takes worse crits because the Marine Corps demanded it have VTOL. The Mutation becomes 7, which is Small Scale Model, -2 to AP on all locations but -10 to enemy to-hit against him. His robot is somehow, at the same time, a massive boondoggle screwed up by its designers, extremely strong but slow, tiny, and pugnacious. He spends his Bio points on +5 S and T so he at least has TB 4, SB 4. His Weapon Points will only matter when combat comes up and there's not much worth spending them on yet anyway. Shinji is not at all ready. His robot is tough enough, and armor isn't that useful anyway, but he's not a great fighter and doesn't want to be here anyway. The Savage Berserk means that when he's knocked out or his Eva takes damage while unpowered, he tests SR+0. If he succeeds, his robit gets back up without power requirements, attacks the nearest enemy, gets +30 Str and +10 WS, and then takes a WP or Fel -10 test to shut itself back down after the battle, or else it goes on a brief rampage against allies/structures. So there's Shinji Ikari. Completely unready for this poo poo, not a great warrior, and reliant on his robot. For the second, probably more effective PC, we have Nise Asuka, Her player thought this was going to be a game about being genetically engineered badasses, and so took Manufactured. She then notices the little thing saying 'Manufactured should be autistic or sociopathic' on their blurb and ignores it, thinking that's silly. Seriously, who suggests this. I know Rei was weird, but 'hey how deep all the artificial humans are on the SPECTRUM' is insulting and weird. There's a lot of romanticization of mental illness in this game's writing. I digress. Nise rolls a 15, 20, 12, 15, 17, 12, 15, 13, 11, 9, and 12. This means dropping the 9 she'll be below average in 0 stats. This also reveals something else: The differences from rolled stats matter a fuckton more in a DH system than WHFRP2e. Stats are harder to raise, go up less, and have a hard cap of +20 rather than the +40 max in WHFRP2e. So Nise's insanely lucky rolls (Seriously, Faker here is amazing) will forever put her much higher than Shinji. She wants to be a Skirmisher because she wants kickass giant chainguns and loves Real Robot shows. Thus, she takes a stat spread of 35 WS, 40 BS, 32 Str, 35 Tough, 37 Agi, 37 Int, 28 Per, 37 WP, 31 Fel, 58 Synch. She continues rolling great and gets 14 Wounds and 3 Fate. Nise is sure she's going to kick the asses of whatever weird aliens this show is about. For her Traits, she takes Superior Specimen for +3 to her physical stats, raising her to 35 Str, 38 Tough, and 40 Agi base. She hasn't yet realized S and T don't help her robot. She also takes Distinguished Donor because it's a flat +5 Depth and more Advantage points are cool, right? For drawbacks, she takes Guillible because hey, +20 to peoples' social skills against her won't matter, right? Not like those are going to be used for anything weird. And Mental Conditioning, so she has to make WP tests to disobey orders from NERV. She thinks this will be used for the cool betrayal scene or something where her robot heroine fights through it and breaks free to join the rebels or someshit. This campaign is going to rule. For Drawbacks, she wants to get this poo poo over with as soon as possible and takes Ineptitude (Singing), Short Fuse (Hell yeah, hot blood), Impetuous (Hotter blood!), and Lonely. She wants to kick rear end and hang out with her buds, and thinks being unable to sing at all will make for a good running joke. For Assets, she takes Soldier because hell yeah she's a supersoldier born and bred. Then Athlete because she's also going to be buff as hell. She'll then grab Resilient Metabolism because the test tube didn't make no quitters. As an added bit of hilarity, since Athlete and Soldier stack their +2 SB for purposes of lifting, she can easily lift 135 kg above her head with no test, going up to 180 if she spends a little on S and T later. Nise is going to be the baddest. For her two random skill picks, she takes Command and Intimidate so she can be an officer. She takes the Commission (General) Talent for 200 for +2 damage with basic slug weapons, especially as it says it makes her shells HE which sounds awesome. She buys 2 Weapon Slots so she can bring the Gatling Gun you can start with. She grabs 1 Bio Upgrade so she can buy Bulging Biceps and make her mech as buff as her. She's excited to make the robit. She gets 3, 6, 9, and 10 for her Robot rolls. She spends the 10 on Destined to Meet for History, which gets her an additional Feature of her choice from this table. She spends 6 on Mutation for Steel Giant: +2 Armor and +10 to enemy to-hit for her robit. She spend 3 on Soul, for a Twin Soul robit that seems to respond as an extension of herself and gets an awesome run fast/snipe Berserk, the Hunter style. That sounds awesome and she wants to fluff that as a hyper mode where she and the robot are super in synch. She spends the 9 on Reinforced, giving her +1 Armor but -1 Rounds of Power. She's a sniper, what does she need power for? She grabs Redacted for her History choice and so gets another Construction or Mutation, getting an 8. She takes Multieyes, for +5 BS but a chance she's blinded if she takes Fatigue. She thinks this robot looks awesome and names it Unit X-13 Valkyrie. She's going to come up with cool attack names for it, a speech for going into super mode, and she definitely buys the Gatling Gun. She has no idea that spending Commission on General weapons was a mistake or that this gun is terrible. It's a loving giant robot chaingun, how can it suck? And there are our two examples. Shinji Ikari and someone who just wanted to meld Real Robot Aesthetics with Super Robot Hotblooded. Hopefully, there will be another robot game out there for Nise Asuka. Basically what I imagine happened with Nise Asuka's player is that she looked at what's actually in the book (200+ pages of Fighting Robots) and concluded, reasonably, this was meant to be a game solely about Fighting Robots and kickass explosive chainguns since they got so much attention. It's an easy mistake to make. This is because that IS what the vast majority of the rules are about, after all. So reasonably, one could say AdEva is primarily about giant fighting robots after all. Just with all that weird slime they dumped on it too in the quest for Depth. Next Time: Synch Ratio and You Night10194 fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 21:59
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I, too, love the idea of a Berserker class built around freaking out, fainting, and letting your robot go apeshit.
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Mar 6, 2019 22:19
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Halloween Jack posted:I, too, love the idea of a Berserker class built around freaking out, fainting, and letting your robot go apeshit. The funniest part is, I used to hang around this game's community back in the day (it was many years ago) and like, every Berserker PC was built and written as 'Raaarrr I'm the big tough hotblooded badass! I'm so tough and scary and wild!' when the class mechanically wants you to hyperventilate, fall over, and let the robot take over. E: They do get other ways to go Berserk later, but that's RAW the easiest one, especially once they get 'spend Fate to become Berserk without testing when you'd test' later on. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 22:21
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The main thought I have about the Berserker is that while it's a hilarious concept, it'd probably be more fun if the player actually got to play it.
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Mar 6, 2019 22:49
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Mors Rattus posted:The main thought I have about the Berserker is that while it's a hilarious concept, it'd probably be more fun if the player actually got to play it. You do get some control of the character, you're just effectively under Old Frenzy the whole time. You have to move towards an enemy and attack if able. Note this is a game where you usually have only one enemy boss on the field. As a result, you, uh, don't actually get a lot of options. When we get to combat, that will be a consistent theme: There's a ton of stuff, and subsystems, and rules. There's a ton of Stuff You Do every fight. But you do it every fight. Fights are full of ritual and action and rules but they're actually pretty boring. Also, the idea with Not-Asuka there (She's Manufactured because she's Fake) is that she's a character built on good faith engaging with the rules that exist, because a player who just reads the rulebook and maybe misses some of the Implication of stuff like Unshippable (and who doesn't read the GM's guide, which the GM's guide tells you not to let players do anyway. It's one of those kinds of things where they think it's important to keep their lovely GM advice secret from players not to 'spoil' the game) is going to get the impression this is just a clunky robot fighting game. And thus not realize what they open themselves up to by taking stuff like 'social skills are easier to use on me'. Though if you're in a group where you have to take those kinds of precautions you should just not be in that group, I will reiterate. Also, just don't play this game.
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Mar 6, 2019 22:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm always a fan of the classic combo of "break the system over your knee" and "make something that should be thematic and cool but is mechanically garbage" as a way to show off the system's foibles. Hmm, should of thought of that. *starts rolling on the Lifepath chart again*
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Mar 7, 2019 01:02
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yeah, honestly I think that's a good approach to system reviews. Libertarian Furry game had the 'this is why money breaks the game', that Hell Space prison ship got the 'Yeah playing a psychic is a terrible idea, and the whole thing would be unbeatable if they hadn't forgotten to give enemies health' I think with that kind of game and Cthulhutech it's also good to show what happens to a player who goes in on good faith and either misses or was misled about the red flags.
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Mar 7, 2019 01:20
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Robindaybird posted:I think with that kind of game and Cthulhutech it's also good to show what happens to a player who goes in on good faith and either misses or was misled about the red flags. When I was writing her up based on the suggestions of 'Nise Asuka+Person Who Made A PC For A Different Game' it hit me that actually, Asuka is a character made in perfectly good faith for what is in the core book of AdEva. It's all about guns and robots and fighting; a player unfamiliar with the source material just looking at what's given rules would be reasonable to expect to make a PC who will fight horrible aliens and then maybe break free from the evil conspiracy and work to save the world later. Especially if they're working in good faith and not looking for the 'traps'. Like, someone making a Manufactured and taking the 'Can't disobey orders without a WP check' might be thinking 'Oh cool, that sets up the scene where the Evil Conspiracy orders me to do something awful and I try to break free and escape' if they don't pick up on the danger from stuff like Unshippable and the general milieu. So she'll be sticking around some in the review as 'Asuka's Expectations' and why they're justifiable from the core book alone, because when I think about it, they totally are. The entire core book is about military stuff, customizing robots, buying fighting styles, and having big battles. And to be honest, compared to how AdEva is usually used? A simple stylized action melodrama where a bunch of special pilots fight horrible aliens, experience a shocking twist, turn on their conspiracy, and save the world is hardly the worst thing you can do with the system. E: Like gently caress, not only are there no additional social or mental or interpersonal rules over DH's mostly very simple ones, there's no rules for stress, mental health (outside of the ridiculous DH Insanity system), etc. All the rules are about shooting aliens with a chaingun for 200+ pages. A reasonable person could thus conclude the game is about shooting aliens with a chaingun. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 01:27
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Night10194 posted:The funniest part is, I used to hang around this game's community back in the day (it was many years ago) and like, every Berserker PC was built and written as 'Raaarrr I'm the big tough hotblooded badass! I'm so tough and scary and wild!' when the class mechanically wants you to hyperventilate, fall over, and let the robot take over. There are other options. "Enemy sighted. Commencing engagement protocol." (Pilot takes ten shots of gin in rapid succession, passes out, throws up into the Tang)
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Mar 7, 2019 01:49
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Robindaybird posted:Libertarian Furry game had the 'this is why money breaks the game', To be fair in Hc Svnt Dracones it's hard not to break the game. Robindaybird posted:I think with that kind of game and Cthulhutech it's also good to show what happens to a player who goes in on good faith and either misses or was misled about the red flags. In HSD that's called the saga of "player who missed that using their weird Space Magic(tm) means you instantly die half the time, especially if you're not pretty enough when you learn it." Though I have a hard time imagining the poor person who goes into HSD in good faith.
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Mar 7, 2019 02:30
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Night10194 posted:Adeptus Evangelion EDIT: Oh, and what would a character who lied about their dice rolls and gamed the system super hard look like, anyway? Zereth fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 05:18
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Zereth posted:Okay but can you play the penguin? You cannot play PenPen. They'd honestly look about like Nise Asuka. I am astonished at how goddamn lucky her rolling was. She'd probably be built better (though starting EXP is so little it barely matters), but base stats wise she's the upper level of what you could get away with while looking plausible. If she was being built to 'win' so to speak, she'd probably be built towards melee. As it is, she'd still be very effective eventually with Ranged since some of the later Ranged weapons are good, it's just the early basic guns that really loving suck. Even as it is, she'd do pretty solid damage with the chaingun; it's just melee does more. Her Prog Knife is base d5+3+SB (So +3) Pen4 and rerolls damage, taking best. Meaning two chances to score Fury. Her gun, as built right now, would be d10+4 Pen0 (And most Angels have 4 or more armor, so *effectively* the Prog Knife is doing more than the cannon), and its main advantages are this is DH1e so Full Auto is +20 to hit, and she can hit multiple times. Multiple hits do give her more chances to get around defenses or score Fury. She's definitely a hell of a lot better than Shinji; Shinji really sucks at level 1. The other thing is if I was building her seriously instead of off a joke about making a genetic supersoldier because the player thinks it sounds kickass (And because her name is Fake Asuka), she'd be a Neospartan. And would have already taken Weapon Expert (She'd take it with her first EXP as it is). There's a whole mechanic for shooting through AT Fields that we'll have to get to, an Neospartans get a massive potential bonus: +2 to Breach, the value for determining if you get through the field. That ability is ridiculously good for a ranged character. Weapon Expert similarly makes getting through fields easier and you get it at Rank 1 as a Skirmisher. It's one of their claims to fame, so to speak. Effectively that +2 Breach is +20% chance you burst through a field. You want that. Manufactured actually loving suck and are the mechanically weakest pilot type. None of their advantages actually do much, and mental stats aren't very useful for piloting an Eva. The Prodigy has a bunch of good Synch stuff (Again, I'll get to these mechanics in time, there's a loving lot of them. This game hates concise or organized or generalized design; every situation gets its own rules and I hate it), the Neospartan's breach boost and +WS and BS are worth playing one for alone, but the Manu doesn't really get anything good and mostly exists to have creepy traits and be Rei, normally. E: The main actually useful thing a Manu can do is take d5+3 clones that can let them survive dying without burning Fate, but that's sort of planning for failure. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 05:44
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Night10194 posted:You cannot play PenPen. 
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Mar 7, 2019 07:25
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I remember the broken strategy, at the time I looked at AdEva, was Push/Pull shenanigans with melee weapons. Not necessarily the most broken strategy, but it was pretty good.
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Mar 7, 2019 09:00
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Night10194 posted:E: The main actually useful thing a Manu can do is take d5+3 clones that can let them survive dying without burning Fate, but that's sort of planning for failure. Which in an Evangelion RPG should be a no-brainer, but this isn't actually that kind of game.
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Mar 7, 2019 14:08
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Night10194 posted:E: The main actually useful thing a Manu can do is take d5+3 clones that can let them survive dying without burning Fate, but that's sort of planning for failure. Considering the type of show Eva is, this is a very appropriate choice. Also as a general point for all the flaws of the system I do enjoy the process of rolling up a new Evangellion as with the way the system works you should be able to create a unique feeling holy monster that feels right for you.
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Mar 7, 2019 14:28
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Hunt11 posted:Considering the type of show Eva is, this is a very appropriate choice. The actual Eva construction system, and even the Eva upgrading system? Both of those are actually pretty good. I'll give this game the credit it deserves when it does something worth crediting and making your robot is one of the really fun parts. In every game I've run, players were really attached to their Evas and enjoyed building them into their characters. EVA-10 Eisenhower was a critical part of his story (and also always called Ike, because he was a good robot). That's a hallmark of a good subsystem, because it actually succeeded at the intent of making the Evas feel like an important and unique part of your PC. The mechanical issue with AdEva (putting aside any creep factor) is how many subsystems it has, and how few of them do that. Every new concept or whatever needs a whole new subsystem, not just ones where they actually needed one like constructing your ride. And most of them aren't very good.
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Mar 7, 2019 14:42
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Adeptus Evangelion In Synch A slight note on the Evas chapter: I made an error in listing their Armor values. An Eva actually has AV 7 on their central Body, AV 4 everywhere else. So Asuka's Valkyrie has AV 7/10 instead of just AV 7, which is actually a bit more survivable. Still only has 5 HP on its Head, less armor, and it'll die if it takes enough Head damage, though. If the mountain-shooting singing screaming blue diamond aims for your head specifically, you know your GM is being a dick. That correction out of the way, let's talk about Synch Ratio, one of the more important new subsystems because of its interactions with the AT Field, which, uh, we'll get to in a minute because it's yet another goddamn subsystem (and the worst one in the game). Your Synch Ratio is almost certainly your highest base stat, and you generate a Synch Bonus as per normal; every 10 points of Synch Ratio=1 point of SRB. This is important, because your Synch Bonus is your AT Field Strength. Again, this chapter won't get into why that's important, but I can: It both determines how hard it is for an attack to break through your field and how many points you get per round to try to use AT Powers. As one of the most important AT Powers (and the one everyone has) is spending points 1-1 to reduce an enemy's field, you can see why this matters; you'll almost always need to cut an angel's powerful AT Field down to size before your buddies can shoot it. For that alone, every pilot wants a good Synch Ratio. But Synch doesn't just do that. It also represents how 'in tune' you are with your Eva. They're driven by the linkage of minds/souls, after all. Thus, at certain thresholds, your Synch starts to do odd things. At 20 or less Synch, you can't pilot an Eva. Your Eva just shuts down if your Synch gets wrecked down to that level. At 21-35, you can only take half actions and it's difficult to move the Eva, but you get +1 Feedback Threshold. At 36-80, your Eva operates completely normally. At 81-100, you get an awesome ability: Any time you spend Fate to reroll a test, you can use your current Synch as the TN on the reroll. Also reduce Feedback Threshold by 1. That sounds awesome, right? It is. But then things start to go wrong as you get dangerously in synch with your killer robot angel. At 101-150, you start to take d10 Ego damage a round (We'll get to Ego) and your Feedback Threshold becomes 0; any Critical damage to your Eva fatigues you as you feel everything. If you pass out now, your Eva auto-Berserks. At 151-200, any event that changes your Synch Ratio makes it go up and can no longer make it go down. You also take d10+5 Ego a turn. You ALSO suffer any Critical damage the Eva does as direct Wounds on your pilot; say my Eva takes Crit 5, I take 5 Wounds and can't reduce them. You also get a free Fate Point per round to spend on anything besides Burning it. If you hit 0 Ego in the Eva, your Synch Ratio will keep climbing every turn until the battle is over, and your Eva will keep Berserking. At 201+, you gain two angel traits described in another book: Heavenly and Superior Action, while taking d10+10 Ego a turn. Superior Action reduces the cost of your actions; Full Actions are Half, Half can be done as Half or a Reaction, and you can use the Attack action twice in one turn now. Heavenly means when you spend AT on powers, neutralizing, etc, it will no longer reduce the points available for your shielding. An Eva pilot at 201+ is basically a demigod even if they're dying in the cockpit the whole time. They have an entry for 400+ but it's 'Who knows what happens here? SEELE wants to find out.' How can your Synch get so drat high? Synch Disruption happens whenever you suffer Ego damage or gain Insanity Points while in the cockpit. Roll 2d10 exploding dice, add up the total. If it's odd, drop your SR by that much. If it's even, raise it. You can only suffer one Synch Disruption a round no matter how many times it should be triggered. As you can see, this can slam you into the dirt or rocket you towards demigodhood really fast during a fight if it comes up. Finally, FEEDBACK THRESHOLD is explained. It's equal to your TB. It's how much Critical Damage you can suffer in the Eva before you start taking feedback Fatigue from the pain. If your Threshold is 3, for instance, as soon as your Eva has more than 3 Critical Damage (negative HP) on a body part, you take 1 Fatigue every time it takes more Crit to that part. Remember, Fatigue is a flat -10 to everything if you have even 1 point, but if your Fatigue exceeds your TB, you get knocked out. And then it's Berserk time. There's also a long section about Fate Points and how they usually can't be spent to heal your Eva or unstun your Eva as opposed to your pilot. There's also some advice not to take pilots' limbs and stuff if they have to Burn Fate to survive (They say it's because you're less disposable than in DH, but I say it's because there are less cybernetics!), unless, of course, they're a very good roleplayer who is eager to embrace more depth for their PC! Of loving course. It's very passive aggressive about 'don't hurt the player more, they already failed your scenario, unless they're a real roleplayer who can TAKE IT' Ego Barrier is something I remember genuinely fondly from the edition I played. The Ego Barrier/personal AT Field is your ability to remain distinct as a person and an individual. Without it, you just collapse into a gestalt of LCL (Also known as tang), the stuff filling your cockpit. In the version I played in 2.0, Ego replaced the normal Corruption system from DH. It was a much slower process of chipping away at a character's ability to be an individual person as they started to suffer weird empathic events and altered perception, and the slow process was absolutely the centerpiece of one of the two campaigns I ran. When you turn into tang at 0, your PC isn't gone; you can Burn Fate to come back 3d10 days later. Since the campaign it was big in was one-on-one (the other one I ran was a group game) I added in a big, weird mystical experience where the PC experienced her life through the eyes of others because heck yeah, that was the fun part. The Tang Episode was one of the climactic moments of that game, and the slow degradation had built towards it for a long time. In 2.5, they completely removed the slow degradation/alteration system and turned Ego into a stock of Soul HP. You get 20+5xWPB. It goes back up 10 per game month. You suffer no effects as it ticks down, only a sudden dissolution into tang at 0. It's solely a secondary HP system. You can still Burn Fate to come back, and they do introduce one interesting element to that: When you do, you come back physically changed based on your perspective on yourself. They don't do much with it; it's just Test WP-10 to get back into a better body (Large chance of minor cosmetic change you want, small chance of +2 to a stat, 10% chance of erasing some permanent injury), Test WP+0 to come back normal, and if both fail, come back with a flaw like a cosmetic change you don't like, -5 to a stat, or permanently halved Ego. That's sort of a waste of a potentially interesting part. One of the reasons I'm talking about how it was when I played vs. how it is now is because AdEva wants to be taken seriously as a game about deep character interaction and roleplaying and mystical experiences, right? It wants the social aspects of the game and the out of the cockpit character drama to be a big deal. It doesn't have any mechanics for it. Nothing to guide those experiences. Not even any play advice beyond the Implications you see in some of the slimier bits. The old Ego Barrier system, as much as it had some mechanical flaws, actually DID provide a slow, weird degradation of the self in contact with alien forces that built up to and culminated in a climactic 'you have lost yourself, how do you find your way back and what do you learn' incident. That kind of weird experience and its focus on the character's interaction with the world and their sense of self and ability to relate to others despite being separate beings? That's the stuff Eva is about, goddamnit. And here it's just turned back into a simple Soul HP system. One of the reasons I made Nise Asuka as an example PC is because her assumption about the game is legitimately reasonable from just looking at the rules. Of the 250+ pages in this Core Book, the vast majority are about shooting aliens with a chaingun. From this, you could reasonably assume the game is about shooting aliens with a chaingun. There's very little actual support and few mechanics for the things the game wants to be about, because it's too busy adding another subsystem for loading specialized ammo into your alien shooting chaingun. And the rules for the chaingun shooting aren't even that good! There are just a lot of them! If this game was better written towards what it wanted to be, it would be spending much more time on how to handle stress, interpersonal conflict, and mental health. Given the grace with which it handles anything to do with storytelling or interpersonal issues at present, though, perhaps it is a mercy they focused on the alien shooting in their mechanical design. There's also a Time Management system, where every month your PC chooses an activity to minorly buff themselves. Physical Training raises a physical stat (Str, Tough, Agi) by 1 per month (2 if you have Athlete and succeed a test with that stat), up to +3 over a PC's lifespan. Combat Training does the same for BS/WS. Education does it for Int or lets you gain a single Basic Skill (Or an Int based Advanced Skill if you use 2 months). Spending time on your hobbies relaxes you and makes you recover 20 Ego instead of 10 that month. The Operations Director (Oh, we'll loving GET to the pile of Bad Ideas that is the OD) can spend time doing paperwork to get the team extra resources. Therapy can lower IP but never actually cure Insanities. General Rest gets you nothing but heals all Critical Damage and you have to do it if you suffered any Crits; you're in the hospital. Social Interaction gives +1 to Fel, up to +3 during your lifetime. It's a simple, unobjectionable little 'what did you spend time on between fights' system. It's inoffensive, but also mostly irrelevant. Like most of the rules in this book. This book could easily be 1/2 or even 1/3 the length it is and very little would be lost, but amateur project, no editor, and no sense that they should be trying to be concise. Everything needs rules! Everything needs its own rules! No need to generalize! Next Time: AT Fields and You
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Mar 7, 2019 16:46
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It... Sort of seems like if you're willing to dump a lot of time into rewriting the horrible parts and taking a rake to the dead wood that there might be a decent homebrew under AdEva.
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Mar 7, 2019 17:57
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wiegieman posted:It... Sort of seems like if you're willing to dump a lot of time into rewriting the horrible parts and taking a rake to the dead wood that there might be a decent homebrew under AdEva. Not really, no. Speaking as someone who ran a game of it, you'd really be better off completely scrapping the base system. There's no reason to use Dark Heresy rules, and they don't work well for Evangelion. There is a definite possibility of making a good homebrew based on Evangelion, but the path there isn't by reworking AdEva. Incidentally, the campaign I ran was pretty much entirely the Nise Asuka "approach the game as a cool giant robot battle simulator" that focused almost entirely on setpiece bossfights and explosions rather than personal drama and philosophy
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Mar 7, 2019 18:08
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I think some of this comes down to: some parts of the RPG experience shouldn't be boiled down to stats and mechanics. A while back, some friends and I were knocking around the idea of a Pacific Rim RPG, and one of the things we talked to death about was how to represent the Drift in tabletop terms - how well the two pilots are bonding and connecting, with each other and with the jaeger. What we ended up concluding was that not only could we not come up with a numbers-and-dice representation of that kind of stuff, to distill that down to just rolling the dice and numerical values was completely missing the point. Assign point values and effects to "Hey you're working together amazingly well!" and "Oh poo poo there's a problem!" sure, but the nuts and bolts of that should be personal role-playing between the players and their characters.
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Mar 7, 2019 18:09
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adeva feels like the sort of game that suffers very much from the "fluff/crunch" division where "crunch" slowly mutates from "rules" to "rules for killing people"
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Mar 7, 2019 18:10
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Adeptus Evangelion AT FIELD AT MAX POWER! Oh, AT Fields. The AT Field (the book is very adamant that it is an ABSOLUTE TERRITORY field, NOT and Absolute Terror field) is a very important metaphysical concept within Eva. It is the barrier between an individual mind and the world, the space within which the you that is you can exist. Angels have such powerful AT Fields that they create an altered, sacred space of reality around them that can render them immune to conventional attack, among other things. Part of the reason Evas are necessary is that they, too, can generate an AT Field and pierce an angel's. Naturally, for the game's purposes, the main focus on the AT Field is its use as a shield, a weapon, and a way to cast spells. AT Fields are absolutely the worst subsystem in the game, and it's really amusing to see how they've tried to change them to be better without actually grasping why they were such dogshit. An AT Field generates AT Points equal to its AT Strength, with AT Strength equal to your Synch Bonus (or, if you're an angel, the 10s digit of your Light of the Soul, which is really just Synch but for angels). That same Strength becomes your Deflection (or 1/2 that Strength in the case of a lot of the field types). When you get shot at, an attack has a Breach value. If the Breach doesn't equal or beat your Deflection, the attack just bounces off your field. Breach is equal to a weapon's Breach Value, +The ATS of the attacker IF it's a Melee Attack OR a Ranged Attack within 20 dam. So only close range shooting actually lets you add your own field strength to breaking through. You also add +1 Breach per 2 DoS on an attack, or +1 Breach per 1 DoS if you have the Skirmisher's Weapon Expert. This biases the game strongly towards melee and close range. Note most weapons have base Breaches of like +1-+2. Only Positron weapons really go through AT Fields on their own. Also, the book is really, really unclear on if your ATS for purposes of breaching fields goes down if you've spent ATP on spells this turn. It does, by the way, as far as I can figure out from the wording of some of the stuff. There's really no clear reason for there to even be a distinction between ATP and ATS except for the fact that angels don't lose ATS for spending ATP, since they have Heavenly. As it is, it's just an unnecessary complication. You also regenerate your full ATP/ATS every round, minus any you're maintaining on spent powers. So say I have 5 ATS, I use 5 to Neutralize an angel, and then next round I walk it back to 3, I now have 2 ATS/ATP left to spend on other things or use for Deflection. Now, Breach is itself a big improvement over the original system; when I played, Deflection was a flat '10% per point of Deflection you negate an incoming attack unless it pierces AT Fields somehow' and most angels have a Deflect over 10. As a result, step one of every fight was for someone melee focused to move up and work on turning off the angel's field to let the ranged characters play at all. But it all gets into a general preference in the game rules for melee over ranged; even with the Breach system, Asuka is going to be doing jack poo poo if she's at her full 50dam (or more) range with her chaingun, and all the 'super longshot' sniper heavies are worthless except the Positron Gun unless Shinji's up there turning off the enemy AT Field. But at least there's a mechanic for your Eva to bull through the field without putting everyone on Neutralization duty. Note that any points you're spending on Neutralizing or using powers or whatever cost you Deflection. Even at 0 ATS left, you still count as having an AT Field up if you only have 0 because you spent all of them. ATS/ATP also gets at one of the weaknesses in design for the AT Tactician. They have a couple very clunky ways to get more ATP (They can bank some one round and spend it plus their generated ATP for the round with a Talent, or they can willingly take Ego damage to generate more ATP with a talent, or they can link fields with allies and spend their allies' fields, too, with a Talent.) but they have no way to just generally get and use more. And some spells cost more than 10 ATP to use. Also note: If you use ATP for an attack spell, your ATS for Breaching is equal to the Breach value of the spell, but also the ATP spent on the spell. Regardless of range. So soul laser some motherfuckers. The AT Tact isn't actually weak, just awkward. AT Powers are quite useful. One thing, though: Deflection is functionally useless against angels. They try to have this tradeoff with the Field Patterns you can spread, where a bunch of them give passive benefits but halve your Deflection; why would you care? You're never going to stop a high Breach angel unless disruption has made you run hot as hell, in which case just turn off your current field and switch to a new one. Also, you have to declare an action to spread your field, but it's a free action now. In the original, it used to take you your full first turn of a fight to spread your AT field. I don't know why they even have it as an action unless you really don't want your field on at the moment for collateral damage reasons or something (Turning on your field does not actually cause Collateral Damage. That's a mechanic). The real issue with the whole AT system is that measuring the fields precisely and blah blah is totally unnecessary. It seems to have started as a way of modeling mechanically why conventional forces can't hurt an angel, when all you have to do is write down 'Only a being with a strong AT Field can fight and defeat a being with a strong AT Field'. Instead it became this big, complex subsystem that's really annoying to use and slows down combat, plus punishes players who try to actually use long range options. Yes, yes, in the show their guns never work outside of the Great Positron Cannon they kill the loving blue diamond with. So? You're already messing around with the format of the show a lot; fights in the show are very monster-of-the-week-how-do-we-kill-it rather than extended punchups where just being strong enough and having combat talents eventually defeats the monster. You could even still keep AT Powers around; the gameplay role for the AT Tactician is fun and definitely open for a cooperative battle game. Just the whole system they interact with is annoying and very difficult to balance. Also, hilariously, most AT powers do not use the stats AT Tacts are good at beyond Synch. Many even rely on WS, the one stat they're terrible at. Next Time: Actual AT Powers
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Mar 7, 2019 18:49
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Honestly they should have just called the class Absolute Tactician as a nod to the fact that the T always had multiple definitions.
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Mar 7, 2019 18:55
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Kaza42 posted:Not really, no. Speaking as someone who ran a game of it, you'd really be better off completely scrapping the base system. There's no reason to use Dark Heresy rules, and they don't work well for Evangelion. There is a definite possibility of making a good homebrew based on Evangelion, but the path there isn't by reworking AdEva. The thing is, I made a mecha game with DH that actually does work pretty well. The reason it works is because I specifically made it to try to see if DH's base combat engine would work once I changed the entire equipment balance of the game through the medium of writing new gear for mecha (and adding in HP pools for Arm, Arm, Legs, and Body, because it's Front Mission). Changing how Damage and Pen are treated (High Pen weapons are universally lower damage, so they waste damage on light targets), heavily limiting multi-die and Tearing weapons, making it so getting an arm blown off doesn't actually affect your wanzer (I love that dumb name. Good old Wanderung Panzers) besides removing the arm? All those things made a playable game. As did converting all ranges to abstracted Strategy RPG Squares for movement and shooting and putting actual caps on ranges instead of DH's 'you can shoot out to 4xlisted range and with one talent, do it at no penalty' to try to adjust movement against weapon range. It's a work in progress, but it's been fun in testing. But all of that was done specifically to gently caress around with the issues in 40kRP combat. E: Also, I originally started doing that back when I was still actively running 40kRP because it was a vehicle for testing changes I intended to backport to potato men running around with boltguns. I just ended up dropping 40k hard and keeping the Front Mission hack in the background as something I tinker with and run occasionally because gently caress yeah, I love mecha. AdEva, uh, does not do those things. Especially with the critical values. So anything that domes Asuka is going to be bad. Doubly so for Shinji, who both takes extra critical damage every time he takes any due to Mismanaged. AdEva's design goal is less to bring damage/HP scaling into line or whatever and more to make sure Critical Damage happens often so they can have gory descriptions of how much it hurts your teenager and their bleeding robot. And since critical effects often stun or disable you, getting that arm blown off can be a death sentence. They do cut back on multi-dies, but really only for ranged weapons; melee is just as powerful, rife with rerolled damage, and very high base modifiers and pen. You can also add way more upgrades and bonuses to melee weapons, of course. They really hate guns outside of huge super cannons, and even those need a buddy using Neutralize or casting buffs on your shot. And range/movement is still out of whack because of the requirement to get close. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 19:05
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Is there a story behind the "Absolute Territory, not Absolute Terror"? My gut tells me it's some dumb translation or subs vs dubs nonsense, but I want to hear the details.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:33
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SirPhoebos posted:Is there a story behind the "Absolute Territory, not Absolute Terror"? My gut tells me it's some dumb translation or subs vs dubs nonsense, but I want to hear the details. I think it gets displayed both ways in the show or something. It's almost certainly something dumb and the fact that they devote an entire page to whining about how it's TOTALLY ABSOLUTE TERRITORY GUYS only strengthens my certainty of this.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:36
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It's probably because it's 4Chan and they're making a dumb reference to the equally dumb tvtrope thing about stockings.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:46
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They should compromise, have a guy name Whitby wander in and describe it as Absolute Terroir.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:55
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unseenlibrarian posted:It's probably because it's 4Chan and they're making a dumb reference to the equally dumb tvtrope thing about stockings. Stockings? Excuse me? Big Mad Drongo posted:They should compromise, have a guy name Whitby wander in and describe it as Absolute Terroir. That is an A+ reference to a book I thought only I read. Thank you.
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Mar 7, 2019 20:18
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Adeptus Evangelion Space Wizard You know, of all the things to annoy me in the edition transfer, it annoys me most they took away the AT Tact's ability to use their own Cross Blast. I want to kill people with a combination of my brain and unnecessary exotic symbolism, game! The AT Fields you can use are Deflect, Accelerate, Bunker, and Layer. Every character starts with Deflect. It's easy to get one or more of the others on any PC, too, which you'll want to do because Deflect isn't very useful. Also, I notice they left the ATT's Quickspread power in (they used to get a Talent to spread their field as 1/2 action instead of a full action) despite the fact that spreading your field is a free action now. Editing! Deflect just gives you your full remaining ATS after any points you spend on powers in Deflection. It doesn't do anything else. Everyone can do this automatically. Accelerate halves your Deflect (though not your ATS; you just get 1 Deflect per 2 ATS) but also effectively counts your Agi Bonus 1 higher per point of Deflect it's giving you. Note this movement bonus goes down as you spend points. But if you just planned to throw up your field and leave it on, this is loving golden. Bunker also halves your Deflect, but as long as you have 2 or more Deflect from it, you become completely immune to AoE attacks. Anything inflicting an AoE hit just bounces off, no questions asked. Potentially awesome. Layered Field is kind of meh, giving 1/2 Deflect and then 1 AV per 2 points of Deflect. So effectively +1/4 ATS to AV. Maybe if you have nothing else to do. Still, they're all better Deflect Field, because angels are going to punch right through that poo poo. Offensive powers are a little limited, but very powerful, potentially. Friction Flood, for instance, can only be used at 20 dam but it hits an enemy with a freeze field that halves their movement. What's more, if they move, for every 2 dam they move, they take 1 unstoppable wound to every body location. That includes their Core, the part you have to break to kill an angel. You need a full action to cast and a half action to maintain this, but still. 'Stop moving or you die' with no check to cast, no save, etc is pretty loving crazy! Repulsion throws people around and potentially does a ton of falling damage. Rutherford Chain has you rip off part of your body, give it an AT field, and use it as a living bomb. The other spells are basic medium attack spells, but you can supercharge their damage and pen by spending more ATP, which still helps them burst enemy fields. Teleforce Blast is good for that, Kinetic Wave is an AoE which has its own problems (especially as you're often fighting only one enemy) with collateral damage, but both are acceptable basic magic attacks. Weirdly, Teleforce Blast requires Manipulation 3, which you don't get for several ranks, while the AoE version requires 2, which a Tactician can get at Rank 2. Chaos Punch lets you punch an enemy with WS (That thing the ATT isn't good at. Other classes can use AT powers, though) to lower their available ATP by 4 while also hitting them with a melee weapon. Entropy Flux lets you change the damage type of a melee weapon and buff its damage and pen. The first ability is mostly meh (only really effects Critical Effects) but the second part can be helpful. Especially as the points spent on enhancement still help you breach. Restrict Shot lowers the collateral damage an attack does. Meh. Spatial Funnel reduces the accuracy of full auto, but makes an entire burst land on one point on the enemy, and increases range. If they dodge one shot, they dodge them all, though! Very useful, potentially. Also lets you add the ATP/ATS spent on it to the weapon's Breach. An ATT can make Asuka's chaingun useful! Wrap Beam lets you try to deflect beam weapons that don't have more Breach than you do ATP spent on the power, and even Ganon Tennis them right back at their shooter. Neat. Dirac Sea powers are all about space-time warping. Krashnikov Tube is a hugely expensive (10 ATP) power that lets you wormhole punch people or redirect attacks coming at you with wormholes (though it's quite difficult to do so). Dirac Cache lets you make extradimensional spaces to store extra guns or ammo. Dirac Jaunt used to be so much cooler; I remember an ATT using it to take his friend to the moon to demonstrate he'd discovered FTL in one of my games. It's your usual extremely expensive, extremely restricted, 'can potentially hurt you and everyone you bring with you' teleport spell that can take you up to 10km, now. You used to be able to get to the moon! Inverted Field lets you drag people into altered spacetime with you and stick them there. Phase trap lets you grab an enemy and drag them into a personal altered space together with you that outsiders can't effect. Anti-AT Field is in the Utility powers for some reason. It costs *21* ATP to turn on and is 'rewrite reality'/'wish' level magic. You take ego damage every round you're playing magic tea party and you can choose to have a huge explosion go off or just do 2d10 irreducable damage or whatever. It's effects are nebulous! AT Flare is a basic 'draw agro' power, which is good to have in a game; it gets angels' attention. AT Ping scans for active AT Fields in case you're fighting something invisible. Barrier lets you throw down a much stronger Deflection barrier for people to hide behind. Float gives you wizard jumpjets. Inertia lets you telekinesis objects around a little. Kinetic Manipulation lets you manipulate things as if with your robits' hands at a distance. And good old Neutralize is the workhorse of AT, which lets you just throw points at turning down an enemy's field. If you keep using half actions to maintain it, you can even keep your own ATS for purposes of Breaching their field even as you spend your ATP on doing so. Otherwise, you can just maintain it as a free action after turning it on with a half action. So that's AT. There's some cool stuff you can do with it, but there's no real coherency and the subsystem itself is overcomplicated trash that didn't need to exist at all, made to fulfill a purely narrative role. Hooray! Also, demerits for having a 'Well, uh, REWRITE ALL REALITY!!!!' spell. Next Time: Use Gun On Alien.
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Mar 7, 2019 20:19
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unseenlibrarian posted:It's probably because it's 4Chan and they're making a dumb reference to the equally dumb tvtrope thing about stockings. Xiahou Dun posted:Stockings? Excuse me?
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Mar 7, 2019 20:27
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SirPhoebos posted:Is there a story behind the "Absolute Territory, not Absolute Terror"? My gut tells me it's some dumb translation or subs vs dubs nonsense, but I want to hear the details. Short version: it's never called either in the show proper, but a display reads "Absolute Terror" during the opening credits. The original japanese term for it is Zettai Kyōfu Ryōiki, which means Absolute Terror Field (Field could also be read as territory). In the manga, there's the words "Zettai Ryōiki" next next to the words "AT Field". Zettai Ryōiki means Absolute Territory. Now, it's pretty obvious that the Ryōiki bit refers to the Field, not to the T in AT Field, so of course a bunch of nerds decided AT Field means Absolute Territory and created a creepy rating system about stockings based on it.
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Mar 7, 2019 21:32
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Adeptus Evangelion Stat goddamn everything So, now that I've talked about AT and you know that unless you're in close most weapons aren't great at breaking an AT Field, it's time to talk about the shitload of guns (most of which suck) and melee weapons (which are quite powerful). To start with, one of important mechanical bits of the game is that they really want to do military wank/X-COM stuff as well as making Eva. So as you fight, you unlock Research Points based on how well you do at limiting collateral damage and killing angels. You get 10 Research base, 20 if you do extremely well in a battle, 15 if you do great, and 11-15 if you do good. We'll get into how you define all of those later. You spend research on unlocking new technologies. Research didn't used to be its own separate thing, but rather something you spent your general 'Surplus' reward for winning battles well on. Now you get Research and Surplus both. Surplus is meh, since you use it to build base structures and stuff and can't upgrade your mechs with it and very little of that stuff is particularly important. Research is where it's at. Once you spend 60 research on weapons and armor techs (spending enough research to unlock a tech is usually 30-50) you move your tech level to Tier 2, as you just generally get better at science. This immediately unlocks the Tier 2 versions of everything you've already unlocked, and means future weapon categories will be unlocked at Tier 2, too. You can still buy the Tier 1 versions if you want. I'm not sure why you would outside a few edge cases, but you can. Once you've spent 180 research, you unlock Tier 3. Note that spending 50 to unlock, say, Positron Weapons (DO THIS THEY ARE THE BEST GUN IN THE GAME) and then 10 towards unlocking Heavy Progressive Weapons (out of 30) will cause you to become T2. You don't need to do any actual research to unlock Ballistic and Progressive weapons as categories. Heavy Progressive Weapons just lets you take other general weapons and make the Progressive, essentially making them vibroblades. Most of the melee research trees don't unlock specific weapons so much as they unlock new upgrades to put on the general melee weapon chassis you already had from the start. A good way to look at some of the issues with weapons is to compare the two weapons every Eva gets. The Progressive Knife and the Pallet Gun. A Pallet Gun is a terrible, terrible gun designed as the first proof of concept for Eva scale automatic weapons. It does d10+2 Pen0 with 0 Breach, fires at S/2/3 (So Single, 2 shot Semi, 3 shot Full), has only 6 rounds a magazine (and carrying more ammo is difficult; Evas don't have backpacks, just their weird shoulder pods) at 50 dam base range. It's going to bounce off most angels, especially as it's Breach 0. Meanwhile, the Prog Knife is d5+3+SB, Pen 4, rerolls damage once and takes best, and is Proven (3) so no damage die can roll lower than 3, on d5s. So 9-11 damage a swing in the hands of a basic Eva with basic strength, with Pen 4. Two chances to Fury due to the Progressive reroll. It's a great melee workhorse. Plus, as a melee weapon, you'll always be throwing your ATS into breaching their field at close range. This is because of a dumb bit of 'realism'. They want to hammer home that the initial guns were 'difficult to make' since they're the first generation of giant robot guns. So the initial rifle, pistol, and chaingun all suck. Leaving you with 0 good physical ranged options without research, while everyone gets a free, excellent melee weapon. If you somehow don't gain any other weapons techs, either, ballistics don't get much better: You get a +2 Pen, higher clip assault railgun (compared to the Pallet Rifle), a pistol with full auto but only d10+2 Pen2 like the rifle, a powerful rocket sniper that does lots of collateral damage, and a railcannon that USED to be a 3d10+3 Pen4 monster and is now d10+5 Pen4 with +3 Breach and infinite range. Also, all Heavy Weapons across all trees besides the Chainguns (there's another, better chaingun in another tech tree) and a T3 Eva rocket launcher require T2 tech and a structural support upgrade to mount on an Eva at all, and get blown off if it takes any Body Crits. Now note that that d10+2 on the Chaingun (it fires Pallet Rifle rounds, just at a higher rate) is not going to do poo poo to most serious enemies. Asuka has picked the trap option of being a ranged character in AdEva before you get any of the good guns. A melee character is fine right out of the gate, but ranged takes investment. On average it's going to be 2-3 battles before she gets any better weapons. But maybe it's just the Ballistics that suck. That's how it is in X-COM, right? This is trying to be X-COM. You can unlock Masers easily, and they must be good, right? Upgrading to Lasers rocked in X-COM. Haha, they're terrible. Masers are better than ballistics, and they do pierce armor okay and have a ton of ammo. Their Commission upgrade is +2 Breach, which is pretty useful. But they actually do less general damage as you level them, instead increasing in fire rate. They do reliable but low damage, all having Proven (4) so every damage die does at least Damage 4. Most have Pen 3-4. Most do d10+2 or d10+1. There are also overheating high-powered HELIOS guns that actually do enough damage to hurt things and set targets on fire, but they can also explode. The only real winner in the Maser category is its big T3 heavy weapon, but it's a doozy: The Siege Maser has unlimited range, 2d10+3 Pen5 Breach 2, and a special rule called Beam. If you hit with the first shot, you can just keep spending a half action every round to keep hitting with the same DoS and the same (failed) enemy Dodge until they're dead, you're forced off target, or you run out of ammo. Okay, so Masers were mostly a waste of time. What about this N2 Shell gun? This fires bullets with a tiny antimatter warhead and they're mecha-scale 40k Boltguns because lol Shinji+40k. They're also terrible, for the same reason 40k Boltguns were often considered 'low tier' in later 40kRP. They don't have full auto until you get to the chaingun at Tier 3, and they don't do enough damage to make up for their low rate of fire, at d10+6 Pen 1. They all have Tearing at least, so 2 chances to Fury? The thing is, d10+6 Pen 1 looks decent, until you compare it to melee. At T2 (You will almost certainly be T2 if you have N2 guns, they cost 50 to unlock), even with no other melee upgrades, let's look at our new friend the Prog Knife MK 2. d5+4+SB, Pen 5, still Proven 3. Let's put it in the hands of an average pilot who isn't even a melee specialist, with average strength on their Eva. d5+7 Pen 5 is, effectively, up to d5+12 if they had the armor to blow through. And the pilot has the same two chances to Fury, can store it in a wing dock, has the whole ATS thing, etc. They're not only probably outdoing your N2 Gun, they can multiattack if they have the Talents, which the N2 Rifle and Pistol can't. The chaingun would probably be better if it had more range, but it's the same damage as the others, just automatic and locked up at T3. So N2 was probably a waste of research. Is there no hope for shooting motherfuckers? What's that on the horizon, is it the best guns in the game? It is! Positron Weapons are what you want. Like N2, you're probably going to be T2 when you get these. Unlike N2, both T2 Positron Weapons are amazing. The rifle is the only good rifle in the game, and the cannon is probably the best heavy weapon. Positron weapons use their Pen as their Breach value. That's their thing; they're anti-AT weapons. They also count any increases to Pen as increases to Breach. The basic rifle has solid single, semi, and auto fire, a decent magazine cap, great range, better damage than ballistics or masers, and better pen, too. d10+3 Pen4 with good range, good breach, and good ammo means it's the first and only rifle worth a drat. The Positron Cannon is a portable cannon that does Pen 8 (And Breach 8) and 3d10 damage, and while it only has 3 shots it's easy to reload. And that's at T2! At T3, if you can find the time to set it up and sit still firing it, the Great Positron Cannon can't be moved around the field but does 4d10 Pen (Breach) 12. With a range of 'gently caress you.' These weapons are the salvation of Asuka's build. You also can't really add many cool upgrades to guns, so they're mostly useful as bought. Melee weapons, on the other hand, consist of a bunch of basic Progressive weapons and then a bunch of unpowered weapons and ways to power them. You can make Polythermic weapons that cut through enemy weapons (but not natural ones), set enemies on fire, and do significant bonus damage to enemies on fire. You can make any of the basic melee weapons Progressive (A Progressive Great Weapon is 2d10+2+SB Pen 3 Breach 1, and rerolls its lowest die. Great Weapons: Not just for Acolytes!). Pneumatic Weapons auto-confirm Fury, add +1 to damage, and kill any enemy Reactions for the rest of the turn on Fury as you leave them gasping. Tesla weapons straight do +1d10 damage, +2 Pen, but can only inflict 1 Critical damage a hit and become E, the shittiest damage type. Chain Weapons replace your SB with a d10 and can't parry, but also still hit the enemy if they're parried, just on the arm instead. Melee weapons! Significantly more damage, easier to break AT Fields with since you want to be close anyway, use your SB, possibly multi-attack, and generally kick rear end, compared to all the work you have to do to make guns work. Hurrah for game balance! Sure, sure, you have to get close to use a melee weapon, but come on, you have to have SOMEONE get close to use a gun anyway. What's funny is how much they toned down and worked on guns between editions, and then spent it all giving melee weapons more and better powers, instead. Similarly, Positron Weapons are actually more powerful than they were last edition, and they were already really worthwhile. One player used to say 'For every problem there's a solution, and that solution is a Great Positron Cannon.', and that was before they handed it another d10 of damage; the old GPC is the normal, portable Positron Cannon, now. Which also reflects another weirdness of this whole mess. The GPC comes from the show, right? They use it to kill Remiel, the giant mountain-exploding screaming laser diamond. It basically never comes up again until they try and fail to use it on an orbital target later. The whole 'constant march of X-COM tech' isn't really a thing in Eva. For the most part they just spray their useless rifle at something, then get to the punching. But here it's this whole attempted strategy layer subsystem and it's just weird. If it was better done, it'd be a fun sop to gameplay. As it is, get Positron Guns as fast as possible so your Ranged characters stop screaming, then grab whatever melee tech seems coolest. Then maybe Ablatives so the Pointman stops being such a sad, sad class. Much of the complexity of this game just results in 'solved' systems because the designers don't actually understand Dark Heresy and its failings very well; they try to disguise how shallow the gameplay actually is by having tons and tons of rules instead. Next Time: Actually use gun on angel
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Mar 7, 2019 22:28
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if there's one thing evangelion needed, it was a fiddly research and base building minigame
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Mar 7, 2019 22:53
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Mors Rattus posted:if there's one thing evangelion needed, it was a fiddly research and base building minigame YOU'LL LOVE THE PLAYABLE MISATO. (Every single thing about the Ops Director is a terrible idea, as born out by all my experience with the Ops Director). This is also why I say this isn't something 'fixable'. Because while DH can work for Mecha, potentially, it cannot really work for Evangelion. I should also add there is no reason to use WH40KRP as a chassis for basically anything because it is in and of itself not a very good system. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 23:06
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I think I’ve mentioned this in the thread before, but I’ve run AdEva twice, both with IRL groups while the rest of the community seemed to be running games online*. The first game only went one session before devolving into a literal fistfight that ended friendships, but in the meantime we learned how trap-option crippling a flaw “Depression” was. The second game was some sort of 1.0/2.0/test rules kludge that went for a bunch of sessions before again dying to out-of-game drama, which was most notable for one character’s Eva starting with a Prog axe instead of knife (and tearing through everything it encountered) as well as having a speaker that constantly played PRC propaganda**, another player rolling every “your Eva is just the worst” option on the tables (including the one where it’s made from two units that half-worked, duct-taped together) along with the randomly-rolled colors of the Mexican flag, and the Berserker trying and somehow failing to ever go Berserk across the multiple angels and several sessions we played. His character’s entire mechanical contribution to the game was punching a kid at school I think *which made way more sense after every session started with “okay pull out your laptops and cross-reference three chapters in two different PDFs to update your characters” **those Eva tables used to be godamn wild, IIRC one of them was “your unit was painted by an elementary school” [Edit:] I remember someone pitching a version of the Playable Misato that tooled around in the “spider tank with a Positron Cannon” robots from one of the video games, but it got rejected for making adults fun to play AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 8, 2019 |
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Mar 8, 2019 00:09
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AmiYumi posted:**those Eva tables used to be godamn wild, IIRC one of them was “your unit was painted by an elementary school” I unironically miss the wild stuff like 'Your robot was built by popular subscription and we get a huge surge of funding if you win without losing the plaque that represents the dreams of children'. Or when the Soul table wasn't just your hyper-mode. I got so much mileage out of Ike being Bonded to his pilot.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:19
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Night10194 posted:
So you're saying GURPS? Realtalk, you'd probably get a surprising amount of mileage out of Monsterhearts.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:21
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