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Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Night10194 posted:

There's no a single ounce of creativity to his visual design, no matter how much they throw around 'non-euclidean' or 'extra dimensional'.

is he weak to getting stabbed with a boat

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Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



The idea of a sequence of Sephirotic angels in an Evangelion pastiche, leading up to Keter, should be really cool.
Like, a Keter angel could be something incredibly simple and that doesn't do the mechanics at all. It's just a light that remakes the world, and possibly the players need to put together a reason why their world should or should not be transformed. And they get to choose because they're inside their Evas, which have strong enough AT fields to keep existing. Maybe Keter is remaking the world into an actual paradise, but everyone's being tang'd as it does so.

You could even just have the core be sitting out where you can stab it, once you trek across the world that is being made, or something.

I just, this is spitballing, but it's how I channel my rage at this total insult of an angel. Ugh. It's so bad.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I like the idea that killing the Angel is inevitable, but the question is how much trauma you endure and how much damage is done to the world.

Where's the link to that game where you're playing Mission Control and not the traumatized EVA pilots?

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Adeptus Evangelion

Komm Susser Tod

Well, here we go. Here's the last part of the book. After this is just final thoughts and then we're done at last. Just gotta get through Giant Naked Rei and the Tree Of Life and oceans of tang. The game assumes your campaign is going to end on Third Impact. That thing you spend the whole game trying to prevent is going to happen and maybe you're going to get a shot at ending it, or maybe this is going to end in tang, crosses, and sadness. Because that's how End of Eva went so of course your RPG is going to go the same place. Given End of Eva was basically a giant indictment of the kinds of fans who wrote this game, I suppose that's fair enough, right?

Our first scenario is Succession, where an angel gets to Adam and decides to absorb him and become New Adam, now with New Adam Flavor. The Angel immediately gains LS 400, doubles all its stat bonuses, becomes immune to crits that don't outright remove the limb or kill it, starts regenerating, and gains Heavenly. It then tries to get the Oyster Fork of Destiny (Sorry, the Lance of Longinous) and kill Lillith, then kill everyone and make a world for angels. Your goal is to kill the new angel god with either the lance, or by waking up Lillith and going 'loving hell, it's Adam! I know we're an accident, and also that we kept you locked in the basement for eons, please save us mom!' and hoping that somehow works. She might cause a different Third Impact after killing the rookie Adam imposter, though. Or maybe you can talk Lil out of it. And if the Lance doesn't work (and the Lance's abilities are GM fiat anyway) Adam (or the victorious Lillith) just ends the world anyway. If the Lance does work, uh...the last time the Lance worked we had an Antarctica. Just saying. We don't have one anymore. So there might be consequences.

The second scenario is where the angel gives Adam a kick and wakes him up. Adam then awakens as the Giant Of Light (Big 'ole superEva) and his numbers are going to slam the poo poo out of you, because they're even slammier and more numbery than Keter. Otherwise, things go exactly like the last one. It's barely a separate scenario.

Ascension, the third scenario, happens if you're a guy with a head full of evil plans, a chin full of beard, and a hand full of Adam. This is what would happen if Gendo was trying to take over the world rather than being desperate to see his wife again so he could be close to the only person he felt comfortable with or cared about. An individual has Adam grafted to them and has gained Adam Powers. This basically turns the initiator into someone with ATS 40, but a very squishy human body, since a Lillim can't have the full power of Adam. They also get power over angels as minions, and might even be able to create more, but if you neutralize that AT field and slam any numbers into this guy they are loving dead. This means they're actually pretty easy for an endgame party to kill as long as they can get over the ATS hump. The book goes on about how anyone who achieves this is a master planner who will never just have a direct confrontation with you because they're super smart, blah blah. Get through whatever contrived minions and machinations this person has (probably some MPEvas) and then smash them like a bug and make a quip about a puny God and you've won. Kind of a disappointing Third Impact after the alien God and maybe having to wake up Lillith, no?

The Singularity Egg brings in the writers' favorite one-time thing that was barely in the show, the Sea of Dirac. An angel tries to technobabble and universe create itself into a new Adam. You want to stop it while it tries to turn the whole world into another world and then makes itself World God. Kill World God before it is World God. Save Current World. Lame climax.

Corrupted Source has an angel reach Lillith and, being a dumbass, try to wake her up and fuse with her instead of realizing that's not Adam like Kaworu did. This makes a flawed God-Machine that can't create new life, but otherwise you just need to kill it or something before it ruins everything and kills all humans. Also kind of lame. Also, they pull the Geofront up into orbit and if you aren't in your Evas the entire party dies and you play as another random NERV branch party trying to stop the apocalypse, which is beyond lame.

The Original Plan has Lillith woken up by humans, but she doesn't do what they want. She's Lillith. She does what she wants, instead. And that's looking out at all this weird gunk growing on the planet and pondering if she's going to turn it all to tang and start over. They give no stats for fighting her with your Evas, though it's given as a possibility, but I'd assume she's about on par with Adam if it comes to numberslam. The more likely option is that, with your AT Fields, you're able to be recognized and manage to talk to your creator. PCs might convince her the world she accidentally made is a good world, anyway and let her just leave to do her job on another barren rock ball. That could actually be a fun ending, trying to figure out how to talk to a completely alien mother of your species and get her to recognize you have value and shouldn't just be tang. Reaching out to and communicating with a totally alien and frightening existence successfully would be a fitting climax.

A Human Work is just Ascension, but with a human taking control of Lillith instead. They also might be in an entry plug inside her. Otherwise, it barely differs besides being harder since a human can use more of Lillith's abilities, apparently.

Human Instrumentality is the attempt to convince/trick Lillith into remaking mankind into a gestalt consciousness made of tang and crosses, as per End of Evangelion. If you want this to not happen, you have to take a ton of Ego Damage while joining the Tree of Life formed by the MPEvas (assuming you didn't beat them; you probably won't, but you might) and yelling 'HEY LIL! THEY'RE loving WITH YOU! YOU'RE GETTING PLAYED, MOM!' until she listens. Then you gotta deal with Lillith, probably as per The Original Plan. I like to imagine the 'saved the world as it existed' ending version of this being a very embarrassed Lillith/Giant Naked Rei carefully stuffing each cross back into the tang, making a rebuilt human out of it, patting them on the head, and sending them on their way, primarily because it's funny.

In Doomsday, someone gets the idea of shoving Adam and Lillith together and everyone dies. This is the Rocks Fall Everyone Dies ending, explicitly. You do this to your players and they probably don't come back for the next campaign, and justifiably so.

The endings are okay. I think bringing in End of Evangelion, for which I take the reading 'This is revenge for the death threats for the original ending and an indictment of the fans who would make AdEva', is probably a mistake. There are better endings you could do for an Evangelion oriented story, but for the kind of game AdEva is, which is a combat game about Giant Robot X-COM, a final big battle with a creator and macguffins and saving the world and poo poo is probably fine. God knows that's how I ran it 9 years ago, so my hands are not clean of tang in this situation.

Anyway, that's the end of the books, but not the end of the review. No, no, we've got a final analysis of AdEva and all of this coming up. I ain't run outta ink yet, goddamnit.

Next Time: Night Runs Out of Ink

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 15, 2019

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

marshmallow creep posted:

This AdEva thing just keeps on going, huh?

I want to be clear that I'm not knocking the review, but with this last update I'm just kind of struck by "they don't know when to stop, do they? Like, at all!"
Homebrew adaptations tend to go one of two ways: bare-bones rules for statting up things in the setting, or a sprawling mess that goes on for hundreds of pages, trying to quantify every single thing with overly detailed rules.

The first type is pointless because anyone can do that in the universal system of their choosing. The second seems to be more about expiating some sort of complex about quantifying everything in RPG rules than actually designing a functional game.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Mar 14, 2019

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Night10194 posted:

Adeptus Evangelion
undodgeable 100% (I forgot, he counts as Short Range at all times when firing) Damage 50 Pen 50 shots.
How badly will this gently caress up a fully optimized maximum upgrades EVA/Pilot? Because I mean unless they can, somehow, get more than 50 armor it might as well be "completely ignores armor"

Zereth fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Mar 14, 2019

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Adeptus Evangelion

I want to GM in this world, but like, not the AdEva one. Other ones.

So, this has been my first review of something I loving hated. This game is so much worse than I thought it was from memory. When I was running it in college, I missed the creepy poo poo (though in my defense, stuff like Unshippable is new in 2.5) almost entirely, despite having direct experience with it through the community of the game whenever I played outside of my normal play group. I loved running this game the two times I did. I had a great, great time writing both a one on one game and a group game with this system. At the time, a player told me 'You can really only play this game once before you know what's coming since it only really has one campaign structure, but it's a fun one' and I agreed whole heartedly.

I watched Eva because I was enjoying running AdEva off of what I knew from cultural osmosis and the V2 rulebook. It took until near the end of both campaigns before I started to realize the rules weren't adding anything to the game. The fun part was all the stuff we were doing, the stuff we were bringing to the table; AdEva wasn't doing any of it. Fights were something that became a foregone conclusion of high damage and Great Positron Cannons so we could get back to the character drama. That, combined with the experiences I had with the game's direct community and that sense of 'you can only run this once' made me shelve AdEva and my plans for sequels or additional campaigns, happy I'd played it and remembering it fondly.

I think it took getting knocked out of caring about 40kRP to make me want to take another look back at AdEva and see what it really was, rather than what I remembered it being like. It has all the flaws of 40kRP, but while I knew there was creepy poo poo in the game's community from my experiences with them, the degree to which it is hidden in the actual rules themselves makes my skin crawl. This game isn't just a massive, clunky mess of subsystems and bad design: It's a creepy as gently caress game that has a lot of design that can specifically be used as a coercive in very unacceptable ways if the GM wants to do that. And I have every reason to believe there are GMs and players who want to do that.

I write a lot about the quest for 'maturity' in nerd culture and how toxic it can be because it tends to think that maturity is found in an ocean of blood, Hard Men Making Hard Choices, 'A certain degree of sexual imagery', and abuse. This game's authors think that what's coercive and toxic is dramatic. They think that having traits like Sadistic (where your PC MUST be abusive towards others, it's mechanically enforced) and doing so with no safety rails or mechanics makes for deep roleplaying. We know it doesn't, but it's telling that they think that. The people making this game think it's a deep and impressive story worth telling; look at all that horseshit about how you can't let players bully you out of telling your great story. The fact is, you don't write a deep story by sitting down and saying 'I'm going to write a deep story'. Stories acquire their depth through writing characters who feel like people, who people can connect with. You don't write a good world by writing out tons of details about it, you write a good story by having things actually fit together, and often by having something you're really excited to convey. It isn't a matter of how much you put in, it's what you put in, and how you do it. Your story can only be mature when it has confidence in itself; you can't force it by throwing in extra tragedy or exploitative sexual relationships or whatever. There are great, deep stories that touch on dark material. But they're great because of what they say and the way they say it, with genuine empathy for their characters and an understanding of their material rather than an arbitrary attempt to reach greatness through an ocean of blood and tears. More importantly, it is possible to write something optimistic, hopeful, touching or even joyful and have it be every bit as deep as tragedy. Darkness is not the essence of all artistic value. For gently caress's sake, listen to Handel's Messiah or the Ode to Joy and they'll single-handedly disabuse you of the notion that joy can't be beautiful.

You don't find any of that here, in this game. You just find more toxic melodrama and wallowing in 'grimdark'. Grimdark is an absolute poison on genre fiction. Grimdark is the poo poo I'm talking about up there. The wallowing. The reflexive, constant cynicism without any real thought as to why one is being cynical. Evangelion, the source material, is a pretty dark show. Terrible things happen to the characters, most of their relationships are unhealthy, adults treat these important children who they're relying on like poo poo. An insane doomsday cult is plotting to essentially kill humanity as it is now so they won't be lonely or scared anymore. Because that's the thing, everyone in Eva is lonely and scared. Even the mighty conspirators with the world in the palm of their hands are doing what they're doing to stop being lonely and afraid and to try to find validation.

And that's why it mattered so much to me that it ended how it did originally, with Shinji rejecting that. A story about how all these epic forces can be traced back to fear, loneliness, and the desire to connect with others ending with the main character embracing emotional vulnerability and declaring that he wants to learn to love himself so he can exist and exist with love for others meant a lot to me. 'It's okay that things hurt sometimes and I can love myself despite it, enough to care about others and connect with them while accepting and recognizing their separate personhood' is a conclusion, flawed as Eva can be, that I find really beautiful. Evangelion is a flawed, weird work that is very much a product of the time, place, and people who worked on it, and I've only seen it once a long time ago. But I'm glad it exists.

AdEva captures absolutely none of that. Its mechanics are all about shooting an alien with a chaingun, and at the same time, that's okay. It's okay to write a simple story! Or a tactical roleplaying game. It would be 100% fine to put down Giant Robot X-COM. Hell, after doing this review I want the game Nise Asuka thinks she's playing and hope it gets made some day (or that I have time to homebrew something that's an approximation). But that's the thing: So much of the trouble of AdEva comes from trying to be an important work, because it's based on an important work (Eva is really influential on its genre, after all) without understanding anything about that work. They think the big guns and oceans of blood matter. They think the darkness is what makes the work. And yes, the darkness is important, but not the way they think it is. It isn't because it's dark. It's because of how the characters react to it and live with it. And for me, it's especially because of how the protagonist eventually breaks through that darkness and embraces something of light in the end.

Look at the endings this game gave, and the super angel final bosses. They're all about numberslam and kaiju fights. Only the endings with Lillith have a hint of maybe getting at the sort of stuff I'd want to see in an Evangelion game, where someone has to deal with the fear of talking to an entity they don't fully understand to find a way forward.

AdEva is a useful game to examine, in the end, because of its lack of value. It says so much about the consumption of and play of RPGs that a game this bad sustained its development as long as it did; the play group can make any game fun if you have sufficiently engaging characters to move forward with, after all. And its grasping, weird quest for dark meaning and how that feeds into creating a toxic atmosphere, or the way it engages whole-heartedly with surface level elements of the story without actually looking any deeper? It's a wonderful illustration of a lot of trends in the consumption of media and fandom. This is a Fan Game to end all Fan Games, because it has every single pitfall of fan games. It is a game created with absolutely 0 critical analysis of mechanics, implications, or themes.

And so in the end, I hope this deep examination of this deeply flawed, worthless game can, itself, have some value in helping us do better. Negative examples are valuable, and this is an excellent negative example. I also know I got little personal in this final bit with what all this means to me, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? You can see a lot of what I believe through how I critique these things, both in what I enjoy as a designer/GM and what I like to write about when I write elfgame campaigns.

So that's it for this, a weird, terrible game about a weird, flawed, and fascinating work. Thank you all!

Next Time: Hats Now

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Zereth posted:

How badly will this gently caress a a fully optimized maximum upgrades EVA/Pilot? Because I mean unless they can, somehow, get more than 50 armor it might as well be "completely ignores armor"

The best armor possible is like 13 or so.

All of 40kRP had problems with armor values and penetration, AdEva is no different. Let's say Nise Asuka (whose mech is actually particularly tough) had maxed upgrades, she'd have 18 Wounds on the torso with 13 AV and 5 Toughness Bonus. That shot absolutely annihilates her torso in one shot, no roll.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



So that boss has an attack which will instantly kill anybody it hits, it never misses, and you don't have a method of defnding against it.

That boss has never been playtested.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Zereth posted:

So that boss has an attack which will instantly kill anybody it hits, it never misses, and you don't have a method of defnding against it.

That boss has never been playtested.

Welcome to most of 40kRP, honestly. AdEva isn't any different in that regard. But yes, nothing in this game gives the sense of ever having been properly, systematically playtested.

It could hit your limbs instead and just cripple you.

kommy5
Dec 6, 2016
Congratulations!

megane
Jun 20, 2008



Night10194 posted:

It could hit your limbs instead and just cripple you.

Does AdEva use different crit charts? Because unless I'm misremembering, in DH if you get crit hard enough in the arm you still die, and this guy's going to give you the nastiest crit effect possible every single time.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

megane posted:

Does AdEva use different crit charts? Because unless I'm misremembering, in DH if you get crit hard enough in the arm you still die, and this guy's going to give you the nastiest crit effect possible every single time.

Yes, it does. Hardest possible crit to an arm severs the arm (and fucks you up, so you're probably not in great shape to keep fighting) but the Eva only drops on head crits or body crits.

You are definitely correct about DH in that the heaviest arm and leg crits just kill you same as anything else. They take slightly more damage to kill you, but they do.

Merilan
Mar 7, 2019

There's so much to unpack there, but your note on what nerd culture views as dramatic is particularly meaningful.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Night10194 posted:

Yes, it does. Hardest possible crit to an arm severs the arm (and fucks you up, so you're probably not in great shape to keep fighting) but the Eva only drops on head crits or body crits.
I really need to boot up that SNES emulator and play Front Mission again

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Halloween Jack posted:

I really need to boot up that SNES emulator and play Front Mission again

I played FM4 first (I rented it on a whim because I liked Earthsiege II, many years ago). I was really surprised at everything about it when I went back and played 1. FM1 is absolutely not the story I'd expect from an SNES Mecha RPG and I goddamn love it.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Night10194 posted:

So that's it for this, a weird, terrible game about a weird, flawed, and fascinating work. Thank you all!

Next Time: Hats Now
Congratulations!

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

Night10194 posted:

So that's it for this, a weird, terrible game about a weird, flawed, and fascinating work. Thank you all!

Next Time: Hats Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NuFVQk_CCs

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Merilan posted:

There's so much to unpack there, but your note on what nerd culture views as dramatic is particularly meaningful.

I think a lot of the trend towards darkness also comes out of a weird desire not to change things. A Grimdark setting doesn't change, after all. It's always the same. No-one makes progress, things keep slowly getting slightly worse, etc. There's a fear of being labeled 'fanfic' if you try to make big changes to a setting or work you engage with. If the world is an endless shitpile, nothing has to actually change; it just muddles on and on.

This is also why I write up the more hopeful interpretation of WHFRP2e's setting that comes out of my critique for this thread. That, and that interpretation has gotten me some of the best gaming I've ever had as a player rather than a GM and I want to share it. Also, it IS textually supported; 2e's sourcebooks are considerably more optimistic than you'd expect from something with 'Warhammer' in it. Which is part of why I love writing about them and have come to love GMing them as well as playing.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

that, and nihilism is a crutch for pathetic manchildren who don't want to examine why they're stuck in a rut, why they can't get laid, why their jobs suck - it's easier to throw your hands up and say 'the world sucks, that's just how it is' instead of taking an introspective look. They don't want to think anything is their fault, that they need to actually do something.

This is also why they tend to miss the fact that Tyler Durden is a critique on toxic masculinity and those destructive, nihilistic impulses only makes things worse. Or why those chucklefucks thing Rick is a character to be emulated, instead of a toxic mess who largely creates his own problems.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Give a character the trappings of intelligence and a portion of the audience will think they're cool, no matter what. See, Ikari, Gendo. He's actually (to me) a vision of what happens if Shinji fails the conflict he faces. He's a man who pushes everything else away out of fear and spends his entire life in pursuit of being validated by someone he feels he needs, even at the cost of becoming incredibly destructive and doing a great deal of harm to his son (and the world). I also feel he doesn't really do or accomplish very much in Eva besides sit there with his hands steepled, seeming to be deep in thought.

But to others he's the cool supervillain who always has a plan and is a super badass even if he's a bad guy. Because he's got the shining glasses and he stays calm and quiet all the time.

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

Night10194 posted:

Adeptus Evangelion

I want to GM in this world, but like, not the AdEva one. Other ones.
I write a lot about the quest for 'maturity' in nerd culture and how toxic it can be because it tends to think that maturity is found in an ocean of blood, Hard Men Making Hard Choices, 'A certain degree of sexual imagery', and abuse. This game's authors think that what's coercive and toxic is dramatic. They think that having traits like Sadistic (where your PC MUST be abusive towards others, it's mechanically enforced) and doing so with no safety rails or mechanics makes for deep roleplaying. We know it doesn't, but it's telling that they think that. The people making this game think it's a deep and impressive story worth telling; look at all that horseshit about how you can't let players bully you out of telling your great story. The fact is, you don't write a deep story by sitting down and saying 'I'm going to write a deep story'. Stories acquire their depth through writing characters who feel like people, who people can connect with. You don't write a good world by writing out tons of details about it, you write a good story by having things actually fit together, and often by having something you're really excited to convey. It isn't a matter of how much you put in, it's what you put in, and how you do it. Your story can only be mature when it has confidence in itself; you can't force it by throwing in extra tragedy or exploitative sexual relationships or whatever. There are great, deep stories that touch on dark material. But they're great because of what they say and the way they say it, with genuine empathy for their characters and an understanding of their material rather than an arbitrary attempt to reach greatness through an ocean of blood and tears. More importantly, it is possible to write something optimistic, hopeful, touching or even joyful and have it be every bit as deep as tragedy. Darkness is not the essence of all artistic value. For gently caress's sake, listen to Handel's Messiah or the Ode to Joy and they'll single-handedly disabuse you of the notion that joy can't be beautiful.

You don't find any of that here, in this game. You just find more toxic melodrama and wallowing in 'grimdark'. Grimdark is an absolute poison on genre fiction. Grimdark is the poo poo I'm talking about up there. The wallowing. The reflexive, constant cynicism without any real thought as to why one is being cynical. Evangelion, the source material, is a pretty dark show. Terrible things happen to the characters, most of their relationships are unhealthy, adults treat these important children who they're relying on like poo poo. An insane doomsday cult is plotting to essentially kill humanity as it is now so they won't be lonely or scared anymore. Because that's the thing, everyone in Eva is lonely and scared. Even the mighty conspirators with the world in the palm of their hands are doing what they're doing to stop being lonely and afraid and to try to find validation.


I actually want to talk about this passage because it relates to both AdEva and Warhammer Fantasy in the approach to Chaos, and the line(s) in general. GW and fan games are by it's nature the lunatics who were allowed to run the asylum, so to degree they are all seeped in this mentality. They all want to create Berserk or A Song of Ice and Fire without knowing how to or that they do, with the possible exception of AdEva people.

I'm not going to get into A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones because there has been so much written about it already and why it works on the internet, it doesn't matter, but Berserk is a little more niche and even bigger of a General Nerd Hardon series, regardless of if someone has a positive or negative perspective on anime or manga. It has all the hallmarks: Seas of blood and gore; Oh boy Terrible Moral Dilemmas and Bad Choices The BADASS Makes, lots of sexual imagery, and the series is founded on physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Nerds say, for understandable reasons: 'Guts has been poo poo on more than pretty much any other character in fiction'. It's just weird and dumb when it gets to: 'Johnny from Johnny Got His Gun? Pussy! Shinji? Man the gently caress up, we love your abuse, but not your response, why not be like Guts over her, gently caress head! He had it worse!' Not realizing how Guts reacted it, does and would make him as miserable as the cast of Evangelion and just as much of a social pariah who fails interacting with others (until he develops as a character) and someone who trade for their failson and daughter lives in a minute. They don't even understand how that subject is used so successfully.

The action and fighting is obviously exciting, but also doubles as a way for the audience not functionally realize at the top of their brains that Guts is pretty much going to win any fight he's thrown in despite being completely outclassed or having 'done this poo poo before'. It cunningly creates tension and peril where in traditional fantasy series it wouldn't exist by being less bloody. People are more than willing to accept that the one armed and eyed Guts not getting a serious wound in ten years, not only because he lost their limbs in the first place, but because every loving blow he or someone else takes looks like the apocalypse. It also ties into themes, but that's for another day and maybe thread.

I can go on how sexual imagery isn't done in the Nerd Media way (no boob armor) and has definite appeal to women and gay men, but it's pretty apparent the author does most of it in a way that he personally enjoys and is sometimes creepy, so I won't bother with that. But how it handles abuse and 'Hard Choices' is actually important. Guts, Griffith, Casca, and Guts new companions are informed by their trauma. Guts is the Black Swordsman; the Hundred Man Slayer and a bunch of other titles because he had no other choice than to do that and die. His 'father' Gambino blamed for his wife's death, and took him surviving from being from a woman who hanged and the elements as a new born as a curse even before that. 'There are no Baby Swords here," was him at his nicest to Guts, and when Guts got the most support as a child from whatever mercenary band he was in. Gambino selling Guts as child to be...well, there is a reason immediately seeks comfort in a sword like a security blanket and as an adult he hates physical intimacy, let alone has so much baggage with sex. That's not even getting how that how it further affected Griffith's world view and even his tragic inability to view as sex as anything other than a tool and how it denies him an actual chance to articulte his feelings about Guts. Trauma is important and creates Drama and characterization that can't be separated from what started it.

Also I can do a 'The Virgin Runious Powers vs the Chad Godhand' here but I'll save it for another WHRPG write up.

NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Mar 14, 2019

Prism
Dec 22, 2007

yospos

Halloween Jack posted:

I really need to boot up that SNES emulator and play Front Mission again

Night10194 posted:

I played FM4 first (I rented it on a whim because I liked Earthsiege II, many years ago). I was really surprised at everything about it when I went back and played 1. FM1 is absolutely not the story I'd expect from an SNES Mecha RPG and I goddamn love it.

If you can get ahold of it, the fan translation for FM5 is pretty good. The game is longer than it probably should be but it was a decent send-off to the series (though I still wish they'd make another tactical RPG in the line).

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

To me, the issue with Chaos vs. the Godhand (I am going right back into Hams Fantasy after this) is that Chaos has all these dozens of ways to just say 'we have you now'. The Godhand have to ask. You have to make that choice. Yes, Griffith was always going to make the choice he made because Guts fundamentally misunderstood and thought Griffith wanted an equal to respect and treat as a friend rather than possessions and subordinates. But Griffith still had to make the choice. Nothing magically forced him to make the sacrifice and he could have said no. But he wouldn't because he's Griffith.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




The issue I have with that comparison is that Warhammer Fantasy is far older than both Berserk and ASoIaF with the first edition of WHFB coming out in 83 while the others came out in 88 and 96 respectively which means I have a hard time seeing any direct comparisons or influences. At least to Warhammer.

But as for general geek/nerd culture both have made kaiju sized footprints.

Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 14, 2019

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Oh, I just compare them as two works that have superficially similar powerful rear end in a top hat demons and the fact that the Godhand make for more interesting character interactions than the Chaos Gods. Not as direct influences.

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Night10194 posted:

Adeptus Evangelion

I want to GM in this world, but like, not the AdEva one. Other ones.

So, this has been my first review of something I loving hated. This game is so much worse than I thought it was from memory. When I was running it in college, I missed the creepy poo poo (though in my defense, stuff like Unshippable is new in 2.5) almost entirely, despite having direct experience with it through the community of the game whenever I played outside of my normal play group. I loved running this game the two times I did. I had a great, great time writing both a one on one game and a group game with this system. At the time, a player told me 'You can really only play this game once before you know what's coming since it only really has one campaign structure, but it's a fun one' and I agreed whole heartedly.

unshippable is so revealing of the problems with this adeva. not just the creepy overtones, but that at some point the creators realized that the creepy overtones might be offputting for some players, and decided to accommodate those players not by talking about how to set boundaries for a healthy table, but rather by charging players to opt out of the creep factor for their characters only. there's so much of this sort of fix, where players are charged character resources to patch systemic issues, in very popular games - including every WOTC edition of D&D, Pathfinder, and every variation on 40kRP - that it's trickled down to fangames drawing on those games.

it's weapon mastery but for pedophilia

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

Cooked Auto posted:

The issue I have with that comparison is that Warhammer Fantasy is far older than both Berserk and ASoIaF with the first edition of WHFB coming out in 83 while the others came out in 88 and 96 respectively which means I have a hard time seeing any direct comparisons or influences. At least to Warhammer.

I think I stated I don't see it as intentional (and the Chaos Gods current interpretation came WAY after the Godhand made a proper appearance), but as it comes from the same nerd DNA and desire for Grimdark storytelling. Berserk and, to a lesser degree in my opinion, ASOIF know how to handle their dark subject matter and even reveal in it, without it just becoming dull nihilism. Nothing Warhammer has done has ever had an iota of what the Red Wedding and Eclipse did to their audiences, and the Red Wedding was followed by one of the greatest moments of hope and redemption in the series (Stannis literally riding in like a white knight to save everyone's asses and admitting he had become too vainglorious and realize his duty to the people he wanted to rule) and even Guts was able to move on and make a new group of friends he could trust and put his faith in.

Likewise, it's clear the reasons people state why Berserk is so cool, is written all over ADEVA even if there are obviously zero direct influences. Geeks and I'd say the average reader understands that Berserk, ASOIF, Lovecraft, and Conan are cool, but can only tell you the surface elements of the work as to why.

Night10194 posted:

To me, the issue with Chaos vs. the Godhand (I am going right back into Hams Fantasy after this) is that Chaos has all these dozens of ways to just say 'we have you now'. The Godhand have to ask. You have to make that choice. Yes, Griffith was always going to make the choice he made because Guts fundamentally misunderstood and thought Griffith wanted an equal to respect and treat as a friend rather than possessions and subordinates. But Griffith still had to make the choice. Nothing magically forced him to make the sacrifice and he could have said no. But he wouldn't because he's Griffith.

Griffith did, the Godhand had to show to that to him before he cut the deal, but they also reminded him "Hey kid, you really wanted this sweet proverbial castle, that's symbolic of entitlement and a sense of perfect control that's actually impossible to feel, right?". Like they even had to say, "The Idea of Evil normally just likes making these deals as a gag to blow up in your face, and laugh at you for being a dumb poo poo head," in the pitch too. The Godhand is very fair in their deals and from their own members to the Apostles, all have to live with that fact and don't end up as brain washed extensions of their masters will to ensure anything. They willingly threw out some of their humanity and retain enough that they are their former selves and capable of change, regret, and possible redemption. You don't have to be a total sucker to take their take their deal, you can realize you were screwed, and there is a reason Griffith got his Demon Army outside of just going 'I'm in charge, actually' unlike say Abaddon or Archaeon.

They're better in pretty much every way that matters by a mile.

NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Mar 14, 2019

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




I would argue that WH40k as a setting far more GW's desire to for grimdark storytelling than Warhammer Fantasy is. WHF, through both the WHFRPG write ups and my own reading of setting material, gives off far more tones of dark fantasy with a mix of high fantasy magic elements to it rather than everything being utterly grimdark like it is in 40k.

Especially 40k during the 6th and 7th edition era where the writing went so grimdark it wasn't even comical as much as aggravating or out of place and a perfect display of writers kinda falling in the same trap as the AdEva writers did in my meaning.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

I think another part of this is something that's bothered me for a long time about some video games and shows and movies and books: the use of tragedy in an attempt to eliminate any sense of responsibility on the part of a villain. It's a common idea that a villain is shaped by an unhappy past, but either it's become more common lately or I've just been noticing it more, I keep noticing more and more often how many stories go "Look at how tragic this villain's backstory is! They never had any choice but to be a villain! Don't you feel so sorry for this deep, tragic, complicated character?"

People seem to love driving that idea which is not bad into isolation so hard that you come away with people who the story and writers assure you aren't consciously evil. They do all these evil things but don't you see they're the real victim? And I get looked at like I just sprouted a second head when I say I don't pity them, or weep over them, and in fact I believe they need to be punished for what they've done. Yes I have sympathy for them, but a tragic backstory can only justify so much in my eyes. I keep getting told to root for these horrible people who have done various and sundry terrible things, but it's okay it's not really their fault they're a victim forced into this.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I think that sort of thing reached its apex in the Marvel movies (specifically Civil War), where the stakes of the story are global and political, but they hinge on relationships and personal issues.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Also, 'If you think about it, really I am the victim in all this!' by an aggressor is an abuser's tactic.

potatocubed
Jul 26, 2012

*rathian noises*
I think at least part of the tragic backstory angle comes from villains in media tending to be cool and charismatic instead of e.g. Republicans. So your fanbase immediately falls in love with the villain and now you need to soften them or risk alienating the people who are paying your bills.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Night10194 posted:

Also, 'If you think about it, really I am the victim in all this!' by an aggressor is an abuser's tactic.
Like, what if the people who protest Nazis are the real Nazis?

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

Cythereal posted:

I think another part of this is something that's bothered me for a long time about some video games and shows and movies and books: the use of tragedy in an attempt to eliminate any sense of responsibility on the part of a villain. It's a common idea that a villain is shaped by an unhappy past, but either it's become more common lately or I've just been noticing it more, I keep noticing more and more often how many stories go "Look at how tragic this villain's backstory is! They never had any choice but to be a villain! Don't you feel so sorry for this deep, tragic, complicated character?"

People seem to love driving that idea which is not bad into isolation so hard that you come away with people who the story and writers assure you aren't consciously evil. They do all these evil things but don't you see they're the real victim? And I get looked at like I just sprouted a second head when I say I don't pity them, or weep over them, and in fact I believe they need to be punished for what they've done. Yes I have sympathy for them, but a tragic backstory can only justify so much in my eyes. I keep getting told to root for these horrible people who have done various and sundry terrible things, but it's okay it's not really their fault they're a victim forced into this.

Yeah! Miura gives you lots of sympathy for Griffith (and obviously Guts, but he changes after he does horrendous poo poo), but obviously doesn't want you to empathize with him or forgive him just because he had a hard turn. Griffith was tortured, raped, and sexually used, but he purposefully and in cold murdered his friends to fufill his dreams and then raped Casca, a woman who was in love with him and would have done anything for him, to spite Guts and tell him 'I don't love you.' There is no walking back from, or maybe there is (Miura is low key big on redemption, an aspect of the series overlooked), but not to someone like Griffith and how he's chosen to live his life. You watch want Griffith and succeed in the Golden Age Arc, but you also keep wanting him to say 'No' to the Godhand. The series openly mocks the concept of heroic journey later in the series...

Even the 'Griffith Did Nothing Wrong' video isn't an actual defense of him on youtube, but an argument as to why people can still sympathize with a poo poo head like him. Readers still want to like Griffith, but the author doesn't let you (while also not throwing out that sympathy necessarily)! Anyone could become Griffith, everyone feels those temptation or urges of entitlement and willingness to gently caress over others for our own successes. That's the tragedy in the character, but in real life we loving despise these people when we suss them out.

Night10194 posted:

Also, 'If you think about it, really I am the victim in all this!' by an aggressor is an abuser's tactic.

I think this was the joke with the The Egg of the Perfect World and Emperor Ganishka in Berserk too.

NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Mar 15, 2019

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



potatocubed posted:

I think at least part of the tragic backstory angle comes from villains in media tending to be cool and charismatic instead of e.g. Republicans. So your fanbase immediately falls in love with the villain and now you need to soften them or risk alienating the people who are paying your bills.
There is kind of a universal problem with how an interesting and dramatic literary villain (which here includes anime vampires, etc.) tends to get people to fall in love with them and immediately start redeeming the appealing person.

Merilan
Mar 7, 2019

The topic of forgiveness is an interesting one to me when writing characters (in say, the context of introducing antagonists in tabletop games) when it gets me to explore the reasons why we are willing or not willing to let go and how we (often subconsciously, shaped by the media we consume) often have double standards on whether we forgive one person or not. And that's not even getting to the space of how rehabilitative or redemptive processes are often just as harming, if not more harmful because of the attitudes that some people have where once you commit a wrong, you just stop being a person to them, period.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Merilan posted:

The topic of forgiveness is an interesting one to me when writing characters (in say, the context of introducing antagonists in tabletop games) when it gets me to explore the reasons why we are willing or not willing to let go and how we (often subconsciously, shaped by the media we consume) often have double standards on whether we forgive one person or not. And that's not even getting to the space of how rehabilitative or redemptive processes are often just as harming, if not more harmful because of the attitudes that some people have where once you commit a wrong, you just stop being a person to them, period.

Yeah, what irks me isn't villains being given redemption stories. I love a good redemption story, but they're hard to do well.

But far more often is characters - especially a character generally held in-story to be a supreme judge of character and arbiter of right and wrong - pronouncing a character redeemed on the spot despite having done little to nothing to deserve it. Or a villain who dies and all the heroes weep over them because they were such a victim and it was never their fault (I'm not going to name names, but in my opinion there's a character who represents a case study in this in a game I've been playing lately). I'm not familiar with anime so I can't speak to that body of knowledge, but I'd say characters along the lines of, oh, Kylo Ren.

Redemption, to me, is not an event that happens. It's a change in the state and nature of a person, a permanent shift in the direction of their life.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

Im just going to mention this because its Eva related and its about Villains and their design but Gendo is a chump in Evangelion. He looks super menacing, he talks to the council that rules the world, he has secret plans, but at the end he really doesnt do much beyond his actual job. His only major accomplishment is moving adam from wherever it was to his base which, uh, the angels already thought it was in his base so good going making that actually true and then in the ending betraying people who cared about him to get rejected by his dead wife/creator.

Gendo's entire arc is "maintain distance from everyone at all times and exploit their emotional vulnerability" and then be stunned that in the singular moment where he needs to be vulnerable he is rejected. Its a 26 episode parable.

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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Barudak posted:

Im just going to mention this because its Eva related and its about Villains and their design but Gendo is a chump in Evangelion. He looks super menacing, he talks to the council that rules the world, he has secret plans, but at the end he really doesnt do much beyond his actual job. His only major accomplishment is moving adam from wherever it was to his base which, uh, the angels already thought it was in his base so good going making that actually true and then in the ending betraying people who cared about him to get rejected by his dead wife/creator.

Gendo's entire arc is "maintain distance from everyone at all times and exploit their emotional vulnerability" and then be stunned that in the singular moment where he needs to be vulnerable he is rejected. Its a 26 episode parable.

I am real glad someone else gets that Gendo is a loser.

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