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The Lone Badger posted:Realtalk, you'd probably get a surprising amount of mileage out of Monsterhearts. I ran a game of Monsterhearts once. There was a substantial body count.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:36
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AmiYumi posted:[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 Honestly, if you were making a game based off Eva, why wouldn't you include all the Eva apocrypha? Like make an alternative to NERV fielding Jet Alones and T-RIDEN-T Land Cruisers or a knockoff Eva like those dish-faced mass-production Evas from the concept art.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:37
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Young Freud posted:Honestly, if you were making a game based off Eva, why wouldn't you include all the Eva apocrypha? Like make an alternative to NERV fielding Jet Alones and T-RIDEN-T Land Cruisers or a knockoff Eva like those dish-faced mass-production Evas from the concept art. It sort of depends. I liked to emphasize that the Evas were a piece of poo poo as a weapon and being used because they had 0 viable alternatives. The GM's guide does have stats for the T-RIDEN-Ts and Jet Alones and all, though.
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Mar 8, 2019 00:51
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Young Freud posted:Honestly, if you were making a game based off Eva, why wouldn't you include all the Eva apocrypha? Like make an alternative to NERV fielding Jet Alones and T-RIDEN-T Land Cruisers or a knockoff Eva like those dish-faced mass-production Evas from the concept art.
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Mar 8, 2019 02:16
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So the weird thing that it feels like I'm reading out of this AdEva statting... is that it feels like AdEva, the game about fighting Angels, is crying out for things that are not Angels to fight. Because otherwise your Breach value is going to determine the actual usability of a lot of weapons. If there were non-Angel enemies, Angels not requiring Breach to hit or a mix of enemies/enemy types in a battle, it would perhaps add a bit of tactical consideration to your weapon choice?
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Mar 8, 2019 02:24
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PurpleXVI posted:So the weird thing that it feels like I'm reading out of this AdEva statting... is that it feels like AdEva, the game about fighting Angels, is crying out for things that are not Angels to fight. Because otherwise your Breach value is going to determine the actual usability of a lot of weapons. If there were non-Angel enemies, Angels not requiring Breach to hit or a mix of enemies/enemy types in a battle, it would perhaps add a bit of tactical consideration to your weapon choice? Basically, but it's also just a function of the weapon balance being extremely bad. They put the weapons in to put them in, rather than thinking about how they'd work in game. Similarly, most fights are party on one enemy, so Blast, AoE, etc all don't usually matter. Which is especially annoying because every AoE causes Collateral, which hurts your fight rating, despite not actually helping you any. If I was designing it, I'd drop the entire Breach and Deflect mechanic because they're trash that just make a bunch of stuff useless and at best don't get in the way. This game's actual mechanics are really, really bad. E: The big thing is they never really seem to have asked themselves 'what is this weapon's job' when designing the weapons, but rather 'what's it's fluff'/'how tacticool does it seem'? Night10194 fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Mar 8, 2019 |
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Mar 8, 2019 02:26
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I'm kind of down with a game where your giant robot may have been designed by committee, built from spare parts, rebuilt by a lunatic who made an incomprehensible cockpit with controls that probably change when you're not looking, and/or is the mecha equivalent of the F-35. (at least presuming you have the opportunity to eject from your exploding mech and wait for another one)
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Mar 8, 2019 10:21
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Night10194 posted:If I was designing it, I'd drop the entire Breach and Deflect mechanic because they're trash that just make a bunch of stuff useless and at best don't get in the way. This game's actual mechanics are really, really bad. Whenever you're designing a RPG, always listen to Marie Kondo's advice. Ask yourself: Does this mechanic spark joy? If not, toss it.
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Mar 8, 2019 11:06
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Cythereal posted:The Beast Arises. My man. gently caress the Beast Series. I had what I considered good reasons before (BUT WHAT IF ORKS WERE SOPHISTICATED INTELIGENTS LOOKING DOWN ON IMPERIUM, Wall Names, Ulanor/Armageddon connection), but this can work too.
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Mar 8, 2019 11:23
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 Interlude 2: Miami Connection 2000 Before we get to combat, it occured to me while reading the AdEva review (shout out to Night10194) that to really demonstrate how much Jamie breaks the game over her knees, she needs a couterpart, someone whose hypothetical player takes the game’s fluff and advice at face value without examining how the rules fit together. Specifically, I want to explore this idea that the Rockerboy is supposed to be a combat character. So let’s introduce player 2, Jessie. Jessie latches onto the description of the Rockerboy, loving the idea of trying to save the dark future with Rock-n-Roll. But she then sees in the stat descriptions that they’re also a combat character according to the stat section. Jessie instantly thinks of her favorite B-move, Miami Connection and decides to make Y.K. Kim’s character in Cyberpunk 2020. Jessie goes with the name “Kimmy Chi”, since that sounded rock-star ish. Jessie has to backtrack a bit on stats when she notices that playing the guitar is governed by Tech, but she eventually settles on this spread (60 points, same as Jamie):
TECH 7 ATTR 5 LK 4 MA 5 (RUN 15 LEAP 3) EMP 9/ BOD 8 (BTM -3) Jessie then rolls on the life path, and comes up with a good set of numbers that matches up with the story she has in mind.
8-Neat, short hair 0-Fingerless Gloves 6-Chinese/SE Asian (Taiwanese) 6-Gang Family 8-5 Never met parents 1-2 Lost everything through bad management 0-grew up on Corporate Farm/Research Facility 0-No siblings 3-Arrogant 3-Lover 7-Love 3-Like almost everyone 2-A tool 19 years old 7-5-5-3 Lover Kidnapped, still love each other 3-6-4-2 Financial Windfall 9 Nothing A poor ganger whose leader apparently signed the wrong sponsorship deal, with most of his childhood being nothing more than a controlled experiment. Kim eventually escapes, but his first love (maybe one of the research team?) is left behind. Despite the harsh upbringing, Kim has a heart of gold, and believes with the right message he can save his lost love. Jessie uses the example Career Skill list in section four (as it's also a Rockerboy) for her own character-what’s good enough for one of the game’s iconic characters will work for Kim, right?. While she wants to follow the advice against just maxing out her special ability, she does see that even a slight increase makes a huge increase in starting funds. Eventually she compromises, and makes adjustments to the skill package. It’s also at this point that she realizes that for being advertised as a combat class, Rockerboy only has one combat skill! She’s also disappointed that it’s not in martial arts, and wonders why even have Brawling when any MA seems better. However, she assumes there must be something she missed and leaves a single point in it (as the game recommends with career skills).
Notice 3 Perform 6 Style 3 Composition 4 Brawling 1 Play Instrument 6 Streetwise 3 Persuasion 5 Seduction 1 While flipping through the book, Jessie notices the large amount of space given to guns. As much as she wants to stay true to her character concept, she realizes she doesn’t have enough Pick Up Skill points to invest in both some form of ranged weapon and a martial art. She does leave two points in, figuring she can increase it later. This is just how Kim starts out, after all, no need for anything to be that high.
Education 1 Thai Kick-Boxing 2 Drive 1 Submachinegun 6 With a CL of 8, Kim starts with 5000 eb. Jessie is unsure what to get for Kim’s weapon, but eventually takes her cue from the stat block for Johnny Silverhand in the adventure, after the Ref says that he doesn’t plan on running it. Jessie can’t find anything called an “Arasaka Rapid Assault” but does find the H&K MP-11 (0 accuracy mod, 4d6+1, 30 rounds and 20 ROF, 200m). She buys that and some ammo. She buys a light armored jacket, but spends a little extra to make it an urban fashion jacket. Got to look good, after all! Kim also gets a guitar, a cell phone. Jessie is unable to find any info on the “portable sound studio” mentioned in the role’s description, but the referee tells her not to worry about it. At this point, Jessie has 3,174 eb left for Kim. She wants to get the smartlink bonus for Kim’s SMG. So that will be 1000 for the neural processor, 200 for the interface plugs, 100 for the smart gun link...and then Jessie sees that in order for Kim to use the smartgun link, she has to get a smartgun mod for the H&K MP-11, which costs another 1400. That puts Kim’s expenses related to cybernetics at 2700, more than half his starting budget, just to get a +1 to hit. Kim can barely afford a chip socket at this point. Even the Smartgoggles with just the Targeting Scope is out of reach. At this point, Jessie says “gently caress it, let’s just go for defense”. She trades the urban fashion light armor jacket for an urban fashion suit of Metalgear. Jessie figures that if Kim can’t do awesome martial arts tricks in his acts, he can go dressed as a neo-urban samurai. Besides, the 25 SP looks pretty impressive. Kim also eschews cybernetics altogether. The only thing that Kim could get after the Neural Processor/Interface Plug tax is a chipware socket, and the game’s flavor text talks down to chip skills so much it doesn’t seem worth it (especially when you factor in the Humanity Cost). Instead, Jessie uses the money to buy a city car. Need some way of getting around right? And that’s Kimmy Chi. I did my best to make this guy seem reasonable, but starting from a premise of “Rockerboys are combatants!” was going to produce a pretty  result. It also shows how much you get punished for not min-maxxing before you even start play. Had Kim started with a CL of 10, he’d have as much starting money as Jamie. On the other hand, if Jessie had stuck to the example build in section 4, Kim’s starting funds would be 1500 eb - enough for a decent weapon, light armor, and that's it. But also, I figured Kimmy would be a good opportunity to test some of the presumptions the flavor text makes. I have no idea how this is going to turn out.Next time: Hawaiian Shirt Day on the urban battlefield! SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Mar 8, 2019 |
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Mar 8, 2019 19:30
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Adeptus Evangelion Premise Breaker So, before I can talk about combat, if I'm going to go into exactly why Combat is such a loving mess, I need to tell you about one of the worst decisions in all of AdEva, the Operations Director. So, if you know the show, there was a NERV officer who served as Shinji's chaperone and direct commanding officer. Misato Katsuragi was a pretty popular character. So of course her archetype gets turned into a PC class. The problem is, the Ops Director is not a kid, and does not pilot a giant robot, in this, the game about a group of kids who pilot giant robots. The other problem is the OD adds a bunch more unnecessary, time-wasting subsystems to the game, and is intentionally created to cause the Decker Problem as if this was somehow a good thing. For those not familiar, the Decker Problem refers to the problem in early Shadowrun where the Decker plugs into the matrix to perform a complex subsystem, while everyone else gets some pizza and talks about the game last night or something. There are a ton of things that only the OD interacts with. On purpose. There's also some really weird changes to the design of the OD in 2.5 compared to V2 to try to also make them a badass superspy on the ground, at the same time as the game as switched from encouraging pilots to investigate the plots and conspiracies to declaring '14 year olds can't be batman!' and saying they should never do so. That is, as an aside, a really weird change between the edition I ran and this one. In V2, you were actively encouraged to have investigation sections and the players trying to unravel what the hell was going on if they wanted to get into that. There were also actual plot hooks and suggestions for out of combat adventures, like the PCs being invited to meet important politicians and funding being on the line based on how well a bunch of traumatized teens comport themselves at a state dinner. Those were actually kind of fun. I miss that kind of thing. In 2.5, that's all out of both the core and GM book. Pilots also used to be reasonably dangerous (as per DH Acolytes, so not worldbeaters, but on par with a normal soldier) outside their entry plug because many of their skills translated over. That's explicitly gone with lots of admonition that pilots should be helpless outside their Evas. This creates a situation where, if you want to do Conspiracy Stuff by the book as written, the OD plays Dark Heresy (normal) as a Super Acolyte while everyone else does, um, something. Then the OD exposits at them later. This is done to avoid actual exposition, which the book says is boring. The OD also has a ton of stuff only they interact with, to make up for the fact that they do not get to actually play the main mechanical point of complexity in the game (shooting a giant alien with an explosive chaingun). Some of what they can do is useful; they're good at shouting encouragement to panicking PCs or sometimes pulling out bonuses to hand out at a critical moment. Some of it is useless; they command all conventional forces on the field in a game where most of the time conventional forces are, by design, a total waste of time. The biggest point of design in the OD is their stat growths: They're good at every single stat in the game except SR, because theirs is 0. They're Excellent at Strength, Toughness, Perception, Intelligence, and Fellowship. They're meant to be much more competent (in general) than the pilots. They also get all kinds of normal Dark Heresy stuff because they're essentially playing Dark Heresy while occasionally yelling at some kids in a robot and commanding some doomed tanks. The game even acknowledges the OD is basically playing a parallel, different game than the pilots. It's also very eager to point out the OD is in command and can order the pilots around. It gives a little bit about how you should be careful with who you make OD but given the earlier stuff in Assets and Drawbacks, and later stuff coming in the GM's guide, this is actually a warning flag for me in this game. The OD gets their own entire tree of talents to interact with their subsystems, because of loving course they do and this is why this book is 260 pages long without a core resolution mechanic, bestiary, or anything else. It needs an equal length GM's guide to run the game! I'm just going to keep harping on that because it's awful. They can do stuff like call for more useless mooks, buff the useless mooks (they remain useless unless a PC is neutralizing the enemy, and even then they're not very), call in an N2 Strike at the cost of a Fate Point (Antimatter bomb), hand out actual buffs to the PCs which is the main useful thing they do, and do superspy stuff. They get abilities like 'Burn Fate to say that NPC works for me and has been doing so the whole game secretly' or 'Spend Fate to arrive through the window as the pilots are in danger, with a gun'. Which are kind of fun, but the problem is it's still a different game. If the pilots are in danger, given how pilots on the ground play now, that's just Ops Director o'Clock and they don't really have much of a role in the scene. Similar, all the spying and investigating stuff is the OD doing it on their own, while the pilots do something else. The OD also does ALL of the basebuilding and picks the Research for the team; they have sole control of all resource management in those subsystems. There's also a phase of combat where you command Conventional Forces trying to slow down the angel for some reason (It's a waste of time). The OD does that alone. The OD somehow plays too much and not enough at the same time. Plus, they're often not with the pilots because they're off doing their spying or paperwork or adult things, to the extent that the game suggests giving the OD's player a second PC who is just a schoolmate or peer of the pilots to play with them so they don't get left out in pilot centric episodes. Think about this. All of this is stupid. All of this is going to split a group's attention, and is an excuse to introduce a shitton of subsystems that only exist because the OD exists as a PC. Also, let's take something like our buddy Asuka: The OD counts for purposes of her Mental Conditioning and her Guillible, so the OD's player could effectively control her PC by giving her orders, RAW. Also, with the creepy poo poo from earlier, I'd be really wary of introducing an adult PC with actual authority over the other PCs in a game with Unshippable. That's how you get Bliss Stage, AdEva. Do you want Bliss Stage? Please don't loving answer that, I know the answer. There's also just the fact that the ODs in the games I've played in basically all ended up mostly irrelevant and useless. In play, the class just doesn't contribute that much that's necessary. The book also suggests basically punishing your group if you don't have one by having the GM take control of all resource distribution instead of the players, and by generally feeding them information via NPCs rather than actually having them involved investigation of the conspiracy or whatever. I got some better advice for you, AdEva: If the players aren't going to be involved in a portion of the game, don't loving bother. Also, without an OD, you remove the Conventional Forces. Oh no, whatever will we do without descriptions of hundreds of UN soldiers being murdered by kaiju without being able to hurt them? That's a really critical part of the game that requires extra hours of playtime. Similar, the OD just breaks the game's premise. The premise of the game is Giant Robits and Teenagers. A character who operates wholly outside of it, and has to play a totally different game, requires splitting off a ton of time, effort, and energy to run two campaigns at once, and while the GM is attending to one, the other has nothing to do. The Conventional Forces are similarly a narrative issue: If they CAN kill an angel, you're in a position where the Evas aren't really necessary and a lot of the stuff about them ends up looking silly (since part of the premise is it takes an AT Field equipped Eva to kill an angel). But similarly, if they can't hurt one, why bother playing them out on the field and wasting time? You're really just rolling to kill 3d100 UN troopers and create d1000 orphans at that point. If I was to redo the OD, I'd make them an NPC the players design from a pool of points and bonuses and buffs, creating a sympathetic adult who hands out cheerleading bonuses as a resource the whole group spends together in combat. A shared 'this is the guy or gal we can depend on at work, and here's what they do for us' NPC would do more for the game while keeping the focus on the whole group of players, and on hitting a giant flaming wheel of eyes with a right cross before getting turned down for the prom. Which is what it's really all about. Next Time: Okay, FINALLY, Asuka Uses Gun On Angel
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Mar 8, 2019 21:20
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Night10194 posted:
honestly this is a fantastic ideal to use for games with a squad/militaristic type vibe. Not only it lets players get more hands on and invested, the kind of OC they'll create will tell you a lot about what kind of game they wanna run.
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Mar 8, 2019 21:43
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Robindaybird posted:honestly this is a fantastic ideal to use for games with a squad/militaristic type vibe. Not only it lets players get more hands on and invested, the kind of OC they'll create will tell you a lot about what kind of game they wanna run. totally an idea worth stealing.
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Mar 8, 2019 21:55
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Only War has a sort of prototype of that sort of thing with the commanding officer you pick that gives various bonuses or penalties based on their temperament.
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Mar 8, 2019 22:10
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EthanSteele posted:Only War has a sort of prototype of that sort of thing with the commanding officer you pick that gives various bonuses or penalties based on their temperament. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of, just much more developed. Because the bonuses the OD hands out are actually quite important (partly because of how every pilot besides the ATT has terrible WP and the game wants to gently caress you with Fear since it uses DH's lovely Fear rules) but having one player stand around and hand out cheerleading bonuses while not participating would suck. In general the OD is the solution to problems the game created so it could solve them with the OD, but I definitely see a place for making your Misato and what they do for you in a game rather than demanding they be a PC.
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Mar 8, 2019 22:21
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm kind of down with a game where your giant robot may have been designed by committee, built from spare parts, rebuilt by a lunatic who made an incomprehensible cockpit with controls that probably change when you're not looking, and/or is the mecha equivalent of the F-35. I seem to recall Erika (Open_Sketchbook) working on something in this vein?
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Mar 8, 2019 22:47
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I mean I feel like you could make being the ops director fun if there was some way to force the Angel to concentrate its AT field in one direction to withstand the berserker or as a taunt mechanic, allowing conventional forces to suddenly be capable of contributing damage as part of an overall strategy with the EVAs. I'm not sure if that's entirely in-theme, but it's theoretically workable. The "create your own NPC" is probably more on-theme though.
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Mar 8, 2019 22:50
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wdarkk posted:I mean I feel like you could make being the ops director fun if there was some way to force the Angel to concentrate its AT field in one direction to withstand the berserker or as a taunt mechanic, allowing conventional forces to suddenly be capable of contributing damage as part of an overall strategy with the EVAs. I'm not sure if that's entirely in-theme, but it's theoretically workable. Oh, you can definitely do this and it's what you're meant to do with the Conventionals past the phase where they just die to hold off the monsters while the Evas launch; the Conventionals listed just don't actually do enough damage to matter. The best they can usually do is about equivalent to one round from Asuka's chaingun, and her chaingun is a fairly weak weapon.
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Mar 8, 2019 22:52
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wdarkk posted:I mean I feel like you could make being the ops director fun if there was some way to force the Angel to concentrate its AT field in one direction to withstand the berserker or as a taunt mechanic, allowing conventional forces to suddenly be capable of contributing damage as part of an overall strategy with the EVAs. I'm not sure if that's entirely in-theme, but it's theoretically workable. One thing I am unclear on: Is AdEva supposed to be using the Warhams rules as a convenience, but it's ultimately "Remix your own Evangelion", or is it set in 40k?
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Mar 8, 2019 22:56
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Nessus posted:I think the thematic thing with the AT Fields is to justify the entire operation rather than just handling the problem by jacking off the conventional military-industrial complex. It's just using them as a base rules system for remix your Evangelion. They just decided DH was the right backing for their game, solely because there was a dumb fanfiction about Shinji being a 40k player and that making him somehow a better person. This is not a good reason to select a mechanical framework.
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Mar 8, 2019 23:02
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Nessus posted:I think the thematic thing with the AT Fields is to justify the entire operation rather than just handling the problem by jacking off the conventional military-industrial complex. The former. It's just a matter of "We know these rules and they have a fear subsystem, totally right, yes?"
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Mar 8, 2019 23:20
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Do AT Fields even come up in the anime? From everything I heard it sounds less like something mentioned in the show and more like a fan trying to justify genre conventions when presumably everyone is already on board with fighting monsters with giant robots.
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Mar 8, 2019 23:56
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Yeah, it's mentioned (and shown) frequently in the show. Mostly it's a big glowy hexagon barrier thing used to explain why nothing can hurt angels except teenage angst.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:01
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SirPhoebos posted:Do AT Fields even come up in the anime? From everything I heard it sounds less like something mentioned in the show and more like a fan trying to justify genre conventions when presumably everyone is already on board with fighting monsters with giant robots. The AT Field is actually a genuinely important metaphysical concept for the show in that it represents the space and separation the defines you as an individual. Everything has one. The angels just have ones that create a crazy space of altered reality around them that stops tank shells as well as prevents them from collapsing from a total lack of individuation. E: What the AT Tactician does with them is mostly made up for the game so they can have a wizard class, but if it was better done I'd be fine with it solely because adding in a support caster with fun abilities is neat for a group combat game.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:04
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megane posted:Yeah, it's mentioned (and shown) frequently in the show. Mostly it's a big glowy hexagon barrier thing used to explain why nothing can hurt angels except teenage angst. Night10194 posted:The AT Field is actually a genuinely important metaphysical concept for the show in that it represents the space and separation the defines you as an individual. Everything has one. The angels just have ones that create a crazy space of altered reality around them that stops tank shells as well as prevents them from collapsing from a total lack of individuation. So then...you know what, never mind. I think I already know the answer to my question and it hurts my head dwelling on it further.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:06
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Yeah I guess it would work better for the game Nise-Asuka thinks she's playing.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:14
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This is probably a question I shouldn't ask, but... why even bother having conventional forces in that case? It's just getting people killed for an extremely slim chance of maybe doing a tiny bit of good. If Evas are the only effective weapon, just use them. Don't throw away lives needlessly sending tanks against the monsters.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:21
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Cythereal posted:This is probably a question I shouldn't ask, but... why even bother having conventional forces in that case? It's just getting people killed for an extremely slim chance of maybe doing a tiny bit of good. If Evas are the only effective weapon, just use them. Don't throw away lives needlessly sending tanks against the monsters. If the Angels manage to achieve their objective then humanity as species will go extinct so there really isn't any other option.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:24
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Cythereal posted:This is probably a question I shouldn't ask, but... why even bother having conventional forces in that case? It's just getting people killed for an extremely slim chance of maybe doing a tiny bit of good. If Evas are the only effective weapon, just use them. Don't throw away lives needlessly sending tanks against the monsters. Good question! There is no reason. It's because it happens in the show because the show is A: Showing off normal kaiju tropes with angels at first and B: There's some stuff about the UN not trusting that the Eva is actually going to work and you know, standard 'oh these gruff military guys don't trust the magic weapon with a 14 year old boy in it'. Standard mecha stuff. They're in the game because A: They're in the show and B: They want the Ops Director to get to feel like a cool military wank badass so they get to push tanks around and get hundreds of people killed for no mechanical reason while wasting everyone's time. The conventional phase and conventional allies are extremely badly done, pointless, and another of the dozen or so subsystems this game needed carved out of it. E: Basically, the idea is that the conventional forces can't really threaten the monster, but they do annoy it and get it to stop to deal with them, giving them time to launch the Eva and intercept. But actually playing that out relies entirely on GM May I, takes 3-7 rounds of pointless combat during which only one player is playing, and is generally a mechanical waste of time. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 00:24
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Hunt11 posted:If the Angels manage to achieve their objective then humanity as species will go extinct so there really isn't any other option. There are more productive things to do with lives than throw them away in doomed battles. Night10194 posted:Good question! Ah, because anime. Gotcha, that's all that really needed to be said.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:28
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Cythereal posted:There are more productive things to do with lives than throw them away in doomed battles. The thing about the Evas in the show is they're a piece of poo poo as a weapon. They barely work, the people who designed them are so secretive about what they are that they're hard to fix, they're expensive, they run on a short battery and a loving extension cord, and it's nearly impossible to find people who can drive them. The game book instead insists they're the most powerful weapon humanity's ever built and could wipe out armies casually and blah blah. When in the source material they're a terrible weapon, but if all you've got is a pointed stick you go with the pointed stick since as you said, it's a waste to throw other weapons that literally can't hurt them at the angels. The only time an Eva is really powerful is when it's Berserk, which means it's breaking its bindings, because an Eva is essentially an angel bound by cybernetics with a human soul shoved into it (If I remember properly, it's been years since I saw it). This is not a good thing. Berserk actually doesn't happen much in the show, certainly not enough to build a PC class around, and whenever it does it's treated as a horrifying near-catastrophe instead of a power up. But that's just how the game rolls.
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Mar 9, 2019 00:47
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Night10194 posted:The thing about the Evas in the show is they're a piece of poo poo as a weapon. They barely work, the people who designed them are so secretive about what they are that they're hard to fix, they're expensive, they run on a short battery and a loving extension cord, and it's nearly impossible to find people who can drive them. Eva’s can’t actually run out of power and really could causally destroy armies... when they are acting as free angels. But an Eva that isn’t controlled isn’t actually a weapon, it’s a kaiju. So yeah I think I agree that Eva’s are pretty lovely weapons.
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Mar 9, 2019 01:29
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Night10194 posted:The thing about the Evas in the show is they're a piece of poo poo as a weapon. They barely work, the people who designed them are so secretive about what they are that they're hard to fix, they're expensive, they run on a short battery and a loving extension cord, and it's nearly impossible to find people who can drive them. If I was given a large sum of money and asked to create The Eva RPG, it would, for once, be unambiguously best to do with PBTA.
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Mar 9, 2019 01:38
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NGE appears to be a mecha show, but it's actually pretty much entirely about emotional distance and mental trauma (which goes a long way to explain why Bliss Stage is like that). The Evangelion v Angel fights serve the same purpose as a monster-of-the-week fight in Sailor Moon; they're vehicles for learning about the characters, not worthwhile fights in their own right. Accordingly, you would need some kind of system that would let you do mecha v kaiju (or senshi v youma) fights with that understanding baked into the mechanics. Otherwise you're just going to end up with the same flaws AdEva has, because you can't get at what the show is actually about if you engage directly with the symbols instead of with their meanings.
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Mar 9, 2019 01:56
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Cythereal posted:Ah, because Ultraman. Gotcha, that's all that really needed to be said. Fixed that for you. Evangelions are very notably inspired by Ultraman/Godzilla
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Mar 9, 2019 01:59
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As with a lot of TRPG adaptations, it seems like it would work much better to make an Evangelion pastiche instead of trying to map the show one-to-one to a game. Most narratives just doesn't follow all of the constraints that RPGs necessarily have.LatwPIAT posted:You don't need to be inside a psych ward to be depressed though. Things can get better and you can still be depressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean that Anno must have been depressed when he wrote it, but that he wasn't presently institutionalized is not evidence to the contrary. Oh, for sure, you're absolutely right. I was being hyperbolic, but "Evangelion got hosed up because Anno was incredibly depressed when he made it" gets repeated a lot despite not being something anyone at Gainax ever said.
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Mar 9, 2019 02:03
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inklesspen posted:NGE appears to be a mecha show, but it's actually pretty much entirely about emotional distance and mental trauma (which goes a long way to explain why Bliss Stage is like that). The Evangelion v Angel fights serve the same purpose as a monster-of-the-week fight in Sailor Moon; they're vehicles for learning about the characters, not worthwhile fights in their own right. I am really excited to get to the GM's book because the complete lack of understanding of even basic storytelling, let along ability to grasp this, that's put on display there really explains everything about AdEva. It's going to be amazing. This is why I don't remember a goddamn thing about any of the angel fights from the games I ran but I remember The Tang Episode or how they dealt with their Manufactured finding out she was artificial and stuff like that. That was the good part! That was what we were there for. I absolutely agree that a properly made Evangelion game would focus on this. Examining why this one doesn't, how it doesn't, and its failures on a thematic, storytellling, and mechanical level is really interesting to me and why I'm writing all this.
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Mar 9, 2019 02:04
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please tell me the conventional forces part of the game is a fully detailed lovely mass combat system that angels ignore entirely
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Mar 9, 2019 02:11
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Mors Rattus posted:please tell me the conventional forces part of the game is a fully detailed lovely mass combat system that angels ignore entirely Extremely. And again, it takes multiple turns to resolve. With only one player playing. The reason they tell you to drop it if you don't have an OD is because they think the GM playing by themself would be too much work, not because they see a problem with it, too.
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Mar 9, 2019 02:12
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I mean, are you really surprised they don’t have any inherent disdain for playing with yourself at the table
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Mar 9, 2019 02:14
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