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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. Ding ding ding, we've got a winner. Every mecha game falls down because the people are trying to make a thing about the mecha and managing the minutiae of that, which no mecha thing has ever been about and then they wonder why its unsatisfying and doesn't evoke the show and its themes properly. I think an Eva game would be like Monsterhearts or Hillfolk for out of mech stuff. Misato only ever Turns Someone On or Shuts Someone Down. The Eva fights only matter as an extension of themes and doing it as a tactical game is already bad because a tactical game you can't ever "lose" because the entire game ends is not a good one. Of course you can play Hardcore Ironman on it and waive the Berserk mode safety net, but that is a very different game trying to tell a different sort of story than Evangelion is. It's tough to come up with a thing that works at both levels, but the main cost of the Angel fights would be how hosed up you get before it goes down, with Berserk Bailout being 100% hosed up and having to refit the Eva and petition for more spare parts from the UN is 10% hosed up. High collateral damage would also be important. The point wouldn't be to defeat the angel, because you always will, but to make it as painless as possible, which is way harder. Being the jerk whose Eva is in mint condition because you used the school building for cover so now NERV got a bill for that and everyone hates you because you blew up the final bastion of normalcy in their lives is the sort of stuff that should happen. An Eva combat Move PbtA would be: When you attack an angel deal 1 harm and roll 2d6: On a 10+ deal +1 harm and nothing goes wrong, on a 7-9 deal +1 harm and choose 1 of the folliowing: No Collateral Damage, you take 0 harm, you don't leave your partner in a bind. That means you always deal damage to the Angel when you attack, but getting a good result speeds up taking it down leaving less time for stuff to go wrong. The options would always basically be you suffer, another player suffers and the city at large/someone else suffers. Cutting the power cable would be a Soft move. Running out of Power is the Hard move. It's basically Foreshadowing Future badness??
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Mar 9, 2019 03:07
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Adeptus Evangelion Roll for goddamn everything. So, combat. At a certain level, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't actually mind AdEva missing the point of Evangelion entirely to be a combat game. I love mech fighting, I love tinkering with mechs, a game where Asuka pulls a chaingun and blows away some imaginative cosmic horror with HE shells while Shinji passes out in the cockpit and lets the mech do all the fighting and there's also a wizard and a tank around too would be fun. It wouldn't really be Eva, but it would be fun. The problem is the entire combat engine is dogshit. We won't be getting to the bestiary and how to design angels for some time, but suffice to say DH is NOT made for 3-5 on 1 boss fights. Every single angel they built for the system is a lovely gimmick boss (which, to be fair, show accurate) because in a straight fight they'd get action economied into the ground. Everything about the combat system is designed to conceal the lack of actual tactical depth behind a lot of random rolling and...you guessed it! SUBSYSTEMS! That's like, the Dev Team's one move. Let's start off with our next unnecessary subsystem! When you detect the angel, roll to see where you intercept! 10% chance you intercept them in the ocean, 25% on land, 25% 'near your base', 30% chance they make it right outside the base before you know they're there, 9% chance they somehow GOT INSIDE YOUR BASE (a giant loving kaiju, mind you. Some of them have wizard powers but STILL) and 1% chance they're not detected until they're in the base's 'geofront' and near their goal, which will kill everyone. You roll to see if they go through a city. You pick your battleground. You do all kinds of poo poo and the region you fight in will determine if you have turrets, conventional forces, where you'll have traps, power sources, how much collateral you'll do and gently caress I just want to punch a wheel made of eyes goddamnit. Now let's think of why this is total horseshit. One element of an engaging serious encounter in a tactical RPG is planning the loving map. Plotting out where there'll be cover, what areas the enemy(ies) will try to go, where objectives are, what needs protecting. Randomly rolling to see where you fight the loving thing is the opposite of that! You want to carefully plan these encounters because every single one is supposed to be a significant setpiece. But here's the game, expecting you to randomly roll and then what, to have prepared six loving battlemaps? Have the people who designed this game ever GMed? Do they have any idea what they're actually asking the GM to do? We get a totally unnecessary section on what we already know: You kill an angel by breaking its AT field (or using weapons that can Breach it), damaging its body until it's critted into being open, and then destroying the Core. If you're a really good shot/fighter, you can go right for the Core and skip step 2. The Core is the only actually vital organ an angel has; if you don't destroy the big red ball somewhere on the thing's anatomy, it will regenerate its body eventually no matter what you do to it. In practice, if you disable an angel with crits and it's down for a couple rounds, the Eva kick circle will have no trouble blasting the Core. No-one involved in designing this game understood that '2-3 rounds where I can't move or dodge' means 'dead as gently caress' in Dark Heresy, especially when you're the only foe on the field. So in practice do Step 2 and Step 3 is a formality. Next we get another dumb, boring add on. You run a Defensive Line of conventional units, with no Eva support and no way to hurt the angel, while it tries to advance forward. If you can stop it for 6 turns (I'm not sure how, the thing is immune to all your fire and under no obligation to shoot your units) the Evas will get deployed with some minor bonuses and you'll get more conventional backup in the actual fight. The faster it bypasses you or kills all conventional units on the Defense Line (which, again, why would it? They're 0 threat. All it has to do is move forward) the less ready the Evas are. Winning the Defense Line will give all your units +1 Power (there's a Power System for units) in the upcoming battle, and give pilots a bonus on Fear tests because if the angel is that much of a stupid dipshit it can't be a big deal. Again, you have nothing that can actually stop the angel. The most you can hope for is a few trick units and traps that can slow its advance. The only way this phase matters at all is if the GM decides it does, in which case why are we playing it out? Almost none of the bonuses for winning matter. Also, only the OD plays the game at this point. The OD gets all kinds of abilities to add to Defense Lines, but...again, all the angel has to do is just keep motoring and it wins. There's no rules for drawing its aggression or how it behaves. You have no mechanical levers to actually interact with beyond the fact that a few of the extra tricks you can pull in may slow the angel's movement. Nothing you fire can hope to do damage. And you know, let's back up and talk about what it would mean if you could. When I ran back in V2, Deflection was a 10% chance per point of deflecting attacks. I used the Defense Line rules once or twice before realizing this was time-wasting horseshit, but even worse? Once, the conventionals won. Yeah, that's right. A low Deflection angel got unlucky and got its head blown off by rail-tanks that then cored it before they could deploy the Evas early in the campaign. It was kind of cool as a one time thing, but it undermines the premise a bit and more importantly, it's kind of a huge anticlimax. But if that can't happen and the conventionals can't even injure the angel, why even play out the section? Why push tanks around and fire guns and poo poo when they just bounce? It's because this section is meant to be misery porn and something for the OD to do. It's there for military wank and their dumb side fiction about hard military men yelling about how their boys are dying while those DUMB KIDS throw fits about having to fight. That's right there in the chapter fiction. It's a dumb waste of time that thinks it's adding complexity and raising stakes. Next, the Evas finally loving launch and mostly fight like normal DH. You also scan the angel with the MAGI supercomputers at base and maybe get some information on it. Fighting in a developed are causes collateral. Fighting in an undeveloped area causes less. You win by more if you cause less. Undeveloped areas have less turrets, generators, etc to back Evas up, but the turrets and conventionals are still mostly useless even if you open the angel up for them. The actual rules for conventionals are all in the OD section, but each unit has a Power to show how many of them there are and get little special attacks and minor support moves to back up the Evas at higher powers. They're mostly loving useless. There's an entire mass combat system that doesn't matter just so the OD can push units around the map while the Eva units, who actually matter, win the battle. Each wound dealt kills 1 power of units, etc, and so an angel will just loving murder every individual unit with each attack. The most useful units are the VTOLs that come out to drop gear and ammo and batteries for Evas, really. They give a big spiel about how you're in a giant robot, ready for combat, and confident going in, so you don't make Fear tests like normal DH. Until you get within 20dam (you know, the range to Neutralize, or actually breach the field), the monster causes you any Insanity or Ego damage, or it beats an Eva. Any time it does this, you roll Fear with its normal Fear rating (so -0 to -30. Remember: All pilots besides the ATT have poor Willpower advances and few anti-fear Talents until very late. They're going to get hosed). There's an even worse than normal Shock table you roll on, at d100+10 per DoF on the Fear test. If you get over 130 on that table that pilot is insta-defeated by Fear and cannot participate in the battle. That kind of poo poo. Once you've failed a Fear test during a fight, you stop testing, but if you succeed you keep testing every time the conditions happen, which puts you at even more jeopardy than the lovely DH Fear rules normally do. Hurray! When it's over, you check Collateral Damage. You inflict Collateral by using any AoE attacks (more the larger they are), firing on full auto (unless all rounds land), being deployed at all (1 per Eva just for playing, thanks!), losing limbs, going Berserk, or being defeated. Also, the angel probably causes a bunch when it explodes into a cross on being killed. After the fight, you get Surplus (used to build more conventionals and turrets, so useless) and if you got 10 or less Collateral (very hard to do), you get 20 Research. 15 if you got 11-15. 10+d5 if 16-25. Just 10 if more than that, and less and less Surplus and poo poo. Also, the book tells you millions of people suffer worldwide for the cost to repair and maintain your Evas if you take too much. Yay. Evas also have their own crit tables! I'm not going to produce these in detail, but let's just say losing limbs sucks (you often get stuns, insanity, etc). Losing your head kills your Eva. Losing your Body kills your Eva and might kill your pilot, usually having 20-30% odds of crushing the cockpit for d100 damage or merely doing d10+10 vs. your TB and couple Plugsuit AV. Also, if your Eva is defeated, you try to eject. You also suffer Ego damage based on the number of Wounds and Critical Wound you took (1 per Wound, 2 per Crit). Ejecting is insanely dangerous. You only have a 10% chance of everything working and getting you safely out of combat. You have better odds of the ejector trapping you in your dead Eva and causing it more damage (or boiling you in the LCL for d10 more damage from a thruster misfire) than of everything properly working to get you to safety. Also good chances of wounds from a hard landing or your cockpit landing where someone can step on it. Who the gently caress designed these ejection seats!? If you're really losing, they can deploy an antimatter mine against the enemy to try to slow it. Somehow this won't kill it, or you (AT Fields!) but will do massive collateral damage and kill everyone else within 10km. This is obviously bad. The OD can get the ability to call in these N2 strikes, for whatever reason. They do hurt the angel, a little, and might give you time to repair and re-engage, but eh. If you've lost so badly that they're using the N2 mines, you've probably lost your campaign. So that's combat. Look at how unnecessary almost every part of that was. Oh, also, no angel stats or rules until the GM's book, so Asuka still can't shoot a loving angel with her chaingun. She's getting impatient as hell! Look at what a mess all of that information was. None of it is fun to play. It's just a bunch of ritual steps before you get to a pretty basic boss fight at the end, usually with a dumb gimmick. Also, Collateral makes AoE weapons a huge drawback and often not worth using, and only Research really matters among your spoils at the end of battles. AdEva is a game that ignores basically everything about its source material's actual themes or structure in favor of being a combat game. It is a really lovely combat game. Not a single fight in this game was actually memorable enough that I remember it 8-9 years later. The fights are the boring part. The fun part was playing characters and dealing with insane situations. And yet this book is 200+ pages of rules for those boring fights, with no actual material on anything else! loving hell this game is a trainwreck! Next Time: Pointless Base Building Minigame. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 05:21
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I feel like if the 'Defensive Line' were just one roll, maybe up to three in quick succession, where you chose how much of the conventional forces to gamble in a wasted effort to slow the angel down by pissing it off... that could be a decent mechanic? The bonuses you get would have to be valuable, though. That way you can have a dramatic moment where, after scanning the esoteric kaiju and thinking about how the last fight went, the players (maybe all together, with the Ops person as an NPC) have to decide how many brave other people are going to die to make their fight a little easier and less likely to get them killed. But this is throwing pearls before swine, and is only useful to any other mecha-vs-kaiju games people might want to create.
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Mar 9, 2019 05:55
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EthanSteele posted:Ding ding ding, we've got a winner. Every mecha game falls down because the people are trying to make a thing about the mecha and managing the minutiae of that, which no mecha thing has ever been about and then they wonder why its unsatisfying and doesn't evoke the show and its themes properly. LANCER does not fall down, but that's because it literally uses a separate tactical combat ruleset when mechs are involved.
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Mar 9, 2019 05:55
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I do feel like some Gundam shows absolutely have a space for tactical mech combat - mostly for the purpose of a (dramatic and interesting) Fantasy loving Vietnam vibe: Some characters die because war is hell and they were on the wrong side of tactical events, and Gundam fights sometimes happen because there's a tactical need for violence. You can have tactical combat in a game with character development and emotions, you just need some preventative measures (narrative tools) to prevent horrible anticlimax and a decent system for playing out fights. ...but then, my ideal mecha game is designed to emphasize the gap between pilot intention and mecha capabilities, with character development/practice slowly allowing the player to really use their mech as an extension of themselves. Like how Amuro starts out literally relying on the written manual for the Gundam, and while it's still super powerful and he doesn't die, he absolutely fucks up a number of missions.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:02
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From what I've read, it's a big theme in Gundam that mobile suits are pieces of millitary hardware, usually being produced in a WW2-esque competitive arms race, and much like in real life can be easy to use, an incredible pain in the rear end or even downright dangerous to their user depending on how they're designed. It's a big theme in Zeon or equivalents that competing military firms keep trying to make the next big wunderwaften with wildly varying results, and sometimes characters have to bust out an old prototype that can be incredibly powerful when used right but has a good chance of driving you insane or killing you, or some other major flaw. So yeah, character advancement being getting used to your machine and tuning it to your preferred specs seems like a great thing to work with.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:11
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The key to why all this combat stuff is so terrible is there are no meaningful decisions. Also, this game does not respect your time, at all. If Defensive Line was 'how many people and how much damage do we sacrifice to know things about and injure the angel going into the fight', those would be meaningful decisions to make. Even if it was solely a fiction consequence, 'how many people die before we get the Evas up in order to make this easier' would be a meaningful consequence. It would resolve quickly, and it would also give the NPCs fighting and dying up there some dignity because what they achieve could actually matter. Which is one of the general problems with this game. Evangelion is a story about suffering, loneliness, and depression. It's about a bunch of flawed people in an insane situation that reveals their relationships and their characters. But it's a story that has empathy for its characters,. At least in the main show. They don't suffer to show off how deep their suffering is, they suffer because that's the story, and the suffering is consequential, even ending in catharsis at the final point of things. Here, all these 'drawbacks' and all the 'drama' and shipping and death is all there to show that stuff off and revel in it without empathy or dignity, because that's what the authors think gives a character 'depth'. I mean that's the loving game mechanic, you get Depth for having distinct character flaws, and can use it to purchase minor strengths like you were a loving TVTropes entry. The combat is the same: All those guys up there die to show off that they die in a clumsy attempt to add stakes. There's no bravery or dignity in it, they just get murdered by rote so you can do the ritual 'oh look the tanks get killed to show off how much cooler the Eva is' and poo poo to give the OD something to do. A simple decision of 'how much do we ask of the men and women up top, to make it so we have a better chance to win' would mean more to the story than any of this crap, because the authors not only don't understand game design, they REALLY don't understand a goddamn thing about storytelling. And I mean it when I say they don't respect your time: GMing takes time to prepare. Asking you to be ready with multiple battle maps, for instance, just so they can use their table is horseshit. But similarly, think about how long fully played out tactical combats take. 7 rounds of DH combat with a bunch of units moved around the map for Defense Line can take awhile. For something that's a meaningless rote part of combat that's in just to be in. All of the combat is that way. This also ignores the fact that when A: Someone needs to get within 20dam to really hurt a monster anyway and B: You usually only have one monster on the field the actual effects of a map and the objectives you can add become very limited. So you probably won't even get much out of having a battlemap at all. There isn't space for much in the way of tactics in the tactical combat. Plus the system isn't especially great at it anyway. There are very few levers to pull or things to manipulate in a fight, even less than there are in, say, Deathwatch.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:15
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Ghost Leviathan posted:From what I've read, it's a big theme in Gundam that mobile suits are pieces of millitary hardware, usually being produced in a WW2-esque competitive arms race, and much like in real life can be easy to use, an incredible pain in the rear end or even downright dangerous to their user depending on how they're designed. It's a big theme in Zeon or equivalents that competing military firms keep trying to make the next big wunderwaften with wildly varying results, and sometimes characters have to bust out an old prototype that can be incredibly powerful when used right but has a good chance of driving you insane or killing you, or some other major flaw. I think in a proper mech RPG you would be creating your personal unit at the same time as your character if with the understanding that sometimes they may change, discover secret powers, be totaled and replaced with the next one, and so forth.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:22
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Nessus posted:While this is not false I think it is overstated. Probably the actual difference is that in Gundam and other "real robot" shows, the machines are primarily treated as advanced military hardware, with any unique dramatic "special sauce" rooted in some soft sci-fi explanation rather than your father's ultimate creation that Big Fire wants to seize/your burning masculine spirit/a relic from the stars and/or gods and/or ancient history.. Yeah, Gundam subverts that by reintroducing Tem Ray and he's mentally unstable from brain damage, trying to get Amuro to install a piece of junk into the Gundam to supposedly make it fight better (and dies misinterpreting Amuro's Newtype abilities killing 12 Rick Doms in a minute as his junk module).
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Mar 9, 2019 06:35
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My current mecha game concept (a significant improvement and iteration on the playable but deeply flawed mecha game I made the summer after college) is going to probably allow for 'getting your entire mecha blown up and rebuilt from scratch' as a possibility. Also, I will probably steal 'roll on a trait table for manufacturing quirks for your mecha' from AdEva, but more for fluff than stats, because that seems like a quick route to intense player emotional attachment to the mechs, a combination of customization and randomization. That's an attachment engine if any system is.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:43
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Young Freud posted:Yeah, Gundam subverts that by reintroducing Tem Ray and he's mentally unstable from brain damage, trying to get Amuro to install a piece of junk into the Gundam to supposedly make it fight better (and dies misinterpreting Amuro's Newtype abilities killing 12 Rick Doms in a minute as his junk module). Picturing the Peter Brock of Gundam.
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Mar 9, 2019 07:06
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Nessus posted:While this is not false I think it is overstated. It's big in the subtext and as the series goes on; in fact it's actually a big thing Gundam the Origin retelling (by one of the og creators of 76!). Zeon is NotJapanNazis obsessed with their superior fighting force, indoctrinated in extreme philosophies (Japan) and Zeon Technology and Wunderwaffe (Nazis). I can't stress enough how big it is in the new Manga/movies. Every scene not about Kid Char or Char raising the ranks is about the Mobile Suit arms race or space politics, and the series is mildly sympathetic to Tem Ray sees just how loving blind his superiors and coworkers thoughts are to this new war philosophy that every expert (outside of the military or arms manufactures) is outright telling the Federation how much of a game changer this new form of warfare will be. NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 07:53
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There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with having a nice crunchy combat system for mech stuff. Super Robot Wars exists, and while a console SRPG is a different beast, it's works. The thing is that you absolutely need to have an equal emphasis on what happens outside of combat, and possibly even more combat if you're doing a tabletop, since the players are going to be the ones driving the story. You also need a combat system that is functional and understands the thematics and concepts involved, however, and AdEva is 100% not that system, nor do I think that you could derive such a system from Dark Heresy, period.
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Mar 9, 2019 07:54
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wiegieman posted:LANCER does not fall down, but that's because it literally uses a separate tactical combat ruleset when mechs are involved. Lancer pulls much more from successful mech games than from mech anime. Anime mecha stories work by having the narrative dictate how fights play out, while drawing inspiration directly from games allows more freedom to let the fights push the narrative. I get a strong Armored Core vibe from Lancer's treatment of mecha, and that was a game series where I really got the visceral feel of controlling a giant robot. It also has the advantage of designers who don't feel the need to use a single system for everything. Out-of-mech pilot content is mechanically simple and more narrative, while the robot punching is unabashedly tactical and boardgamey.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:01
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I honestly just retooled and reskinned D&D 4e to run Super Robot Wars for years, of all things, because the at-will/encounter/daily chassis translated really well to the whole paradigm of techniques and finishers (whether they be secret moves or one-shot superweapons) that tend to feature in those games. But I think one trap that some mecha systems do fall into is falling too much in love with the idea of 'war is hell, anyone can die at any time!' which... isn't that core to existing real robot shows, honestly? Gundam gets a lot of rep for it but even something like Votoms coasts on its main character being hyper-skilled that there's not that much ambiguity about his survival until the end because shows with that actual kind of idea, regardless of genre, aren't that rewarding or enjoyable to stay with until the end. It's extremely difficult to maintain a narrative if you sell your audience's emotional engagement too cheaply, too often.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:07
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OvermanXAN posted:You also need a combat system that is functional and understands the thematics and concepts involved, however, and AdEva is 100% not that system, nor do I think that you could derive such a system from Dark Heresy, period. I have a working mech combat system built on that chassis but it changed an enormous amount about the system, including all range and movement rules, the action economy, and a lot about damage and penetration. But it's also specifically a mech system for 'these are just big power armor/AFVs' and Front Mission's wanzers are only 3-5 meters tall, being way more like super-heavy infantry. I would never try to build a Super Robot system or even a giant robot system in it. Also, it uses what it uses partly because when on the ground, players act a lot like Dark Heresy characters, given they exist in a world of robot mercenary techno-thrillers. The chances you have to do some black ops or spy poo poo or investigate things outside of your mech are very high. Plus, it's based on an SRPG setting anyway, rather than a mecha anime. So its setting was already set up for a much crunchier kind of mech combat. Also I made it back when I was testing out if the changes I made in it would work as backports to 40kRP to fix its lovely rocket tag combat, just some stuff happened around the same time that made me stop running 40kRP so I never bothered working on that backport. It was a silly experiment in fixing DH's combat and gear balance that I just keep and mess around with sometimes because it's functional enough to be fun and I love Front Mission. E: But that's also partly why I wanted to do AdEva for the thread: I've made the hack AdEva is trying to be, in a setting it fit an awful lot better. I did it for pretty dumb reasons, but I've done this kind of work. I think it makes it a lot easier to comment on why AdEva fails at it. And why what it's trying to do is a very stupid idea in the first place. Also, like, my rules for FM (despite having totally different mechanics in a lot of places) are like 30-40 pages. Not 250. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 08:08
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Joe Slowboat posted:That way you can have a dramatic moment where, after scanning the esoteric kaiju and thinking about how the last fight went, the players (maybe all together, with the Ops person as an NPC) have to decide how many brave other people are going to die to make their fight a little easier and less likely to get them killed. Another possibility is an AW-like game where players are mechanically incentivized to argue while the conventional forces die. For example, a system where unspoken resentment debuffs everyone, but winning an argument at least exorcises that resentment and maybe even benefits the argument winner. In such a system, you have to debate, "Are we really going to let them die because of our petty bullshit?" versus "Are we going to let the bad feelings from not dealing with this get us all killed?"
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Mar 9, 2019 08:11
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Sure, Gundam (especially the original) is basically a big War Story, but it's pretty much translating the toyetic fun aspect of robots into war movie tropes, not making the actual core drama of the series involve who has the most wargritty sociopath PTSD foot-pounds behind his Super Thrust Death Cannon (NOT a LASER or any PSYCHIC CRAP).Merilan posted:I honestly just retooled and reskinned D&D 4e to run Super Robot Wars for years, of all things, because the at-will/encounter/daily chassis translated really well to the whole paradigm of techniques and finishers (whether they be secret moves or one-shot superweapons) that tend to feature in those games. Using 4E does sound clever although it seems like it would get kind of too complicated by relatively high levels. But having some degree of gamified tactics does make a lot of sense if it isn't pure Super Robot Action like Eva would be, god dammit fangame
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Mar 9, 2019 08:20
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Nessus posted:Sure, Gundam (especially the original) is basically a big War Story, but it's pretty much translating the toyetic fun aspect of robots into war movie tropes, not making the actual core drama of the series involve who has the most wargritty sociopath PTSD foot-pounds behind his Super Thrust Death Cannon (NOT a LASER or any PSYCHIC CRAP). Our game went from like level 6 to about level 14 which was about the perfect arc for it because Paragon Paths were the perfect time to go "you got a mid-season upgrade!" whether it's the inner goddess in the robot awakening or getting a Custom Ver. Ka (Endless Cucco) or whatever else my players wanted.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:24
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Fundamentally, mecha elements aside, AdEva doesn't do anything to actually address the issues of DH's combat engine. Namely that you have a combination of very low stats (A medium-high level DH PC generally has raw stats on par with a 'just finished 1st tier'/'a little ways into 2nd tier' Fantasy one) that require tons of situational modifiers to get anything done, which then break the system down if you get higher stats somehow. At the same time, no-one is especially durable and damage reduction is extremely variable and unreliable. Add to that that the monsters were generally designed around 'high numbers' and dumb poo poo like multiplicative unnaturals (which they eventually dropped, but dropped by still giving people like Unnatural 4) and you just end up with a system where people eat poo poo all the time if the slightest thing goes wrong. AdEva tries to 'fix' this by adding separate pools for each wound location but you have so few wounds on each that you end up in Critical if you're taking any damage at all, very quickly. And then Criticals disable you or strongly debuff you. And then you're hosed. It doesn't matter that having your arm blown off didn't kill you; it stunned you, and now Deadhorsiel, 69th Angel of Anger At The Protagonist For Not Performing Masculinity, is going to kill you (Thanks to whoever came up with that name, I love it). Similar for how taking off an angel's head is supposed to give you a split second window to get the core, but since it puts it down for d5 rounds you just form the kick circle and turbofuck it.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:30
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 Introduction This is going to be my first non-adventure review for Deadlands. After four of the major Plot Point Campaigns and the stellar Coffin Rock adventure, this is my first location/setting guide for the Weird West proper. Back East is a two-part line covering the Union and Confederacy east of the Mississippi. As most of the cool action is in the frontier, there has been precious few material on said regions besides these two books from 1999. There were plans to do updates for Reloaded for the Trail Guides series, but said project was scrapped due to publishing constraints. As such both Back East books still serve as the best insight into said regions. But before we dive into the review proper, there is one big grey elephant in the room I must address. Deadlands is an alternate history of the late 1800s, where unleashed supernatural evils brought magic and monsters back into the world during the Battle of Gettysburg. Due to the fallen rising as undead, this setback turned history around in the Confederacy’s favor and they’re still an independent country with lots of territory as far west as Arizona. The most controversial decision among the gaming public is not just the writers keeping the Confederacy alive, but having said country voluntarily free all of their slaves without any hint of internal dissension. The setting ends up playing into the Lost Cause mythos by downplaying the real reason said nation seceded from the Union, and in some cases prettied up the legacies of said figureheads. One example is Robert E. Lee being portrayed as an heroic general, whose spirit comes to the aid of the PCs in a climactic battle during the Last Sons Plot Point Campaign. Or having the bloodthirsty first leader of the Ku Klux Klan, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, actually be a swell guy who happened to become possessed by an evil spirit in a saber which made him commit lots of atrocities. As for why a whitewashed Confederacy, one of Deadlands’ main writers during the Reloaded era posted this explanation on the Pinnacle forums back in 2013: Matthew Cutter posted:The point is that players at the game table shouldn't have to play a game where sexism and racism are constant hurdles for their characters to jump. Matthew Cutter posted:Because we decided it would be that way to make the game playable. Period. It has nothing to do with historical facts or anything else. It's to make the game enjoyable to the widest possible range of people. A lot can change in 5 years. While the Neo-Confederate movement always had that spark of racism in its devotees and the flag has been flown by bigoted groups for over a century, in 2017 the deadly Charlottesville Rally exposed to the general public far and wide just what kinds of people honor the Confederacy’s legacy. I’m hoping that when the SWADE version of Deadlands is made, the writers will be willing to either retcon or change this aspect of the setting so that this great game can be enjoyed by the widest possible range of people. There might be hope for change. Back East: the South was written by three writers who live in various states in the region: Kenneth Hite, Steven Long, and Christopher McGlothlin. McGhlothlin was known as being a huge Neo-Confederate writer who inserted his love of the country into other RPGs, notably the Mutants & Masterminds book Worlds of Freedom. He doesn’t write anymore for Pinnacle Entertainment (Deadlands’ publisher) in recent years but Kenneth Hite does. And during the writing of the Deadlands Noir Companion, Hite actually retconned the Confederacy to be more explicitly anti-black. He wrote the Chicago chapter, and in taking a page from the Last Sons’ handling of the American Indian Wars he dispensed with the default "post-racial" setting assumption and deconstructed the South. Although Noir still has a standing Confederacy, there was still a Great Migration north of black sharecroppers. In the Chicago chapter, a huge segment of the black population hate said country, and a popular black-run newspaper in Chicago was banned in publication down South. The CSA Embassy in Chicago is also very unpopular in the city by said residents. Great Migration, Chicago Chapter posted:That growth did not come without pangs. Urban poverty exploded, infant mortality skyrocketed. Offal and chemicals turned the river into a fizzy murk; coal smoke filled the air. Labor unions marched for the eight-hour day, fiery preachers called for reform and socialism, gangs warred over turf and protection, anarchists set off bombs and assassinated Pinkertons, and the big bosses cracked everyone’s heads in riot after riot. Despite all this, however, Chicago’s booming prosperity became a magnet for the black population in the Confederacy. Black sharecroppers poured North during Confederate President Wilson’s brief “New Opening” policy, seeking better jobs in Northern factories, which were plentiful during the war, and better race relations—which proved more elusive. White fear of the “Great Migration” triggered the worst riot of them all in 1919, which nearly burned the whole South Side to the ground, led to Federal intervention, and killed dozens of people. Nobody knows how many; the white administration didn’t want to find out, and bulldozed burned-out buildings over bodies without excavation. Chicago Entries posted:Chicago Defender: An entirely black-run and written weekly tabloid, the Defender covers Bronzeville and the other black neighborhoods of the city, exposing corruption and racism wherever it finds them. Staunchly reform Republican and hardline anti-Confederacy, the Defender never shies away from a fight. The KKK was also a thing in the Confederacy during the late 20s to early 30s. The CSA President at the time tried to reign them in, but this caused him to hurt in the polls: CSA Presidents 1913-1956 posted:1929-1932 — Oscar Underwood: A prominent anti-KKK campaigner, Underwood has the misfortune of holding office at the onset of the Great Depression in the CSA. In an attempt to combat the effects of the Depression on the South, Underwood makes several attempts to expand the power of the central Confederate government. Some were successful, most were not. Regardless, a combination of radical, often racist, opposition and the effects of the Depression limits him to a single term. Part of me wonders how much of this is Pinnacle trying to go "yeah, a modern Confederacy still wouldn't be great for African-Americans" without out and out saying "sorry we f'ed up on this," versus Hite doing some subtle opposition. Either way, it shows that the Pinnacle writers are willing to retcon settings elements, and did as much in 2015 regarding decisions that caused fan backlash during the writing of Stone and a Hard Place. When juxtaposed with what Back East: the South attempts as a post-racial Confederacy, it’s quite striking to see one of its authors practically double back on this later on down the line. Here’s hoping they stay the course!  Tombstone Epitaph’s Guide to the Confederacy A large portion of this book is written in an in-character period piece between three in-game authors (I wonder how they translate to the real authors’ regional experience). Writing for the Tombstone Epitaph, said paper is based on a real-world news publication and is clued in on many of the conspiratorial and supernatural events of the setting. They’re dismissed as a yellow journalism rag by many, but those in the know find it a reliable resource. For the purposes of this Let’s Read, I’m going to denote special icons. Marshal’s Territory denotes the GM’s Eyes Only story behind a certain location or event; although in its own section later in the book, this can cause a bit of virtual page-flipping so I’m going to consolidate both into one section. Secondly, in the interests of acting as a counter to the Tombstone Epitaph’s Rebel Bias, I’ll be publishing  Libertad’s Red, Dead Guide to the True South, marked with the aforementioned teacher icon. It will showcase relevant elements from actual history, culture, and folklore of the South along with relevant sources I could find on the subject. It will also serve to point out some of the more unfortunate whitewashing elements.quote:In the Deadlands world, slavery (at least as an organized and accepted practice) is a thing of the past, and racism is not far behind it. Both the Confederacy and the Union have realized the errors of their past choices and abolished this foul practice. Looks like they can already sense the readers’ impending judgment.  To Live and Die in Dixie Our first section proper covers the Confederacy’s society and culture in general terms. It is a large diverse region ranging from the temperate hills of Appalachia all the way down to the subtropical marshlands of New Orleans. The South is a class-based society, with distinct social groups whose birth determined not just their economic means but also unwritten codes of proper behavior and expectations. The first up are the Aristocracy, or Planter class. They’re less than 10% of the population and are the dominant political and economic force in the Confederacy. Although the USA and CSA both ban titles of nobility from being issued by the government, their name comes from the closed circuit of inherited wealth typically passed down the family tree, and also having an otaku level of obsession with aping the culture of British nobility.* Their wealth was gained via sprawling slave estates, and although they lost this purchasing power during Confederate emancipation they still have lots of pull and sway. *Yes I know Calvin Candie was a Francophile, but I feel his character best exemplifies his brethren’s misplaced sense of European admiration. Below the Planters are the Yeoman, landowning farmers who owned few or no slaves and often maintained small plots of land or lived on subsistence farming. Their lives are ones of constant work, and the life expectancies of women are short due to the high birth rate of families. Finally there are African-Americans, (the book refers to them as “Negroes”) who at first were slaves and treated with all the cruelties of the real-world institution, but gained a great deal of upward mobility when the Confederacy emancipated them. The dragging on of the Civil War created a void in the labor markets and armed forces which freedmen quickly met. Although whites and blacks still live separately,* African-Americans are well respected for their contributions by whites and racist attitudes have been purged on a systemic level.** *the book says part of this is by choice, but also mentions social pressure which indicates that the Deadlands’ Confederacy isn’t as progressive as the book otherwise claims to be. **unless we count the mega-powerful and wealthy Knights of the Golden Circle, causing the book to contradict itself here. Poor Whites Social Class So Back East forgot to include one very large and very iconic social group of the South. Poor Whites were the lowest social class of Caucasian Americans in the region. They owned no slaves and no land of their own, working as subsistence farmers or in manual labor occupations on land they rented from Yeomen and Planters. The Planters looked down upon the Poor Whites as uncultured, simple people, and the Poor Whites resented the elitism and wealth while someday hoping one day to make it big themselves.The Antebellum Aristocracy realized the dangers a large group of poor people with no social mobility possessed, so they exploited racial tensions as a means of pacifying the Poor Whites and Yeomen. Even the most impoverished white family had more legal rights and protections than even well-to-do freed people of color, and the former could take solace in the fact that at least they weren’t slaves. Additionally, the siren song of the American Dream was promoted in the owning of slaves, even a single one, as a status symbol. If you saved up enough funds to buy a slave you could be “somebody,” and maybe one day own a plantation of your own! This was of course a fantasy, and as the years went by more wealth and thus more slaves were concentrated into an ever-tightening circle of Planters.  Birth of a Nation This section covers the founding of...ow! Wait, hold on a second! This really shrill dogwhistle was going off in my ear just now. This next section I’m going to quote heavily from, as it’s performing the RPG sourcebook equivalent of a Gish Gallop. Keep in mind that the default statement of Deadlands is that history as we know it proceeded normally up to 1863. Keep that in mind as we read on. That means that the Confederate states’ Articles of Secession, Vice President Alexander Hamilton Davis’s 1861 speech, and the Southern Aristocracy’s modus operandi were the preservation of slavery. So you’re thinking that Deadlands is going to pull a “State’s Rights” justification on you, eh? Well, I did a CTRL F search for those two words or some variation of in the PDF, and I couldn’t even find a mention of the phrase anywhere! In fact, slavery’s Constitutional enshrinment and importance as an economic power makes more reference in this chapter. quote:In hindsight, the most reckless choice ever made by the American people came in the 1860 Presidential election, as the victorious Republican Party at best alienated and at worst infuriated each of the South’s social classes. The Republicans’ avowed opposition to slavery threatened the aristocracy’s wealth, while their various plans to repatriate slaves to Africa forcibly and subsidize Northern industry with taxes on the yeomen caused anxiety amongst Negroes and endangered the livelihood of most Southerners. Abolitionists and the Back to Africa Movement The question of the expansion of the slave trade and how to prevent it was a hot-button issue in the early to mid 19th century, as well as theoretical end-games once it’s been dealt with. The Back to Africa Movement was a proposal by various groups for the return of African-Americans to their ancestral homelands. Said movement has been championed by all sorts of people for different reasons, such as white supremacists who wanted to rid the US of an unwanted minority group; or civil rights advocates who believed that black people would more easily find freedom and self-determination in Africa than in the West.Regarding a proposed forced migration by Republicans engendering widespread mistrust among African-Americans, I could find no reference of this. I checked the 1860 and 1864 GOP Platforms and found mention of ending slavery but no specific plans on what to do with said slaves or where they ought to live. Although racist sentiment existed even among radical abolitionists, many black slaves viewed the Union and Republican Party at the time positively in comparison to the Confederate states for the former granted them a better chance at freedom. It was not unknown for newly-freed slaves to join the Union army with intent to liberate their brothers and sisters from bondage. quote:Events following the election now seem inevitable. Led by South Carolina, the seven southernmost states seceded from the Federal Union, and formed the Confederate States of America. A peaceful separation was sought, but the Union chose to settle the political dispute with force, attempting first to close the vital Southern port of Charleston and then calling for 75,000 armed volunteers to coerce the Confederacy back into the Federal Union. So this section is lying by omission, although given that the section is written in-character I suppose this makes a teensy bit of sense. While it is true that the Union Navy put a blockade around Confederate ports on April 1861, earlier that very same month a Confederate military regiment fired the first shots at the Battle of Fort Sumter and thus officially started the American Civil War.  Several years into the war the Confederacy’s not looking good. Jefferson Davis was feuding with governors and military officers over controversial decisions such as conscription and suspension of habeas corpus. Their pockets filled with Planter money, the Confederate Congress issued a draft exemption for the owners of 20 or more slaves, spawning the phrase “A Rich Man’s War, a Poor Man’s Fight.” With the dead rising in Gettysburg the Rebels indirectly got a tactical advantage, but in doing so prolonged the war. As the industrialized, populous Union continued to batter the South, General Patrick Cleburne raised the proposal of freeing and arming slaves to fight, thereby gaining the moral high ground against the Union who in this reality hasn’t yet written the Emancipation Proclamation (they’d do so in 1865 in response to Confederate manumission). Cleburne had many critics, pointing out the Peculiar Institution’s economic reliance as well as being a Constitutional right. But President Davis supported the idea, in that no price was too great to secure independence. Even though the nation was explicitly founded upon protecting slavery, so ummm... why are they fighting again? Eventually most of the Southern plantation owners came around to his line of thinking after Sherman’s March to the Sea resulted in countless towns and cities being razed to the ground. Cleburne’s proposal went through, and huge amounts of slaves volunteered for duty at the chance of freedom. quote:Negro hopes for emancipation by Union troops dimmed after the South’s 1864 victories, so Confederate military service seemed their best chance for freedom. Confederate Negroes volunteered in increasing numbers, eager to improve their standing in society by valor on the field of battle. From their first opportunity at the Battle of Fort Stedman, the freedmen have done just that, and now the only color most Confederates perceive in their Army is gray. Unless they’re Indians of the Coyote Confederation who they’re at war with, or Apaches menacing Southern railroads, or Seminole fighters in the Everglades. Notice how the text subtly robs the Union of an otherwise progressive moral high ground by giving it to the Confederacy. This is not the only time this book, or Deadlands in general, will do this. In recognition for this limited manumission, the British Empire and France recognized the Confederacy’s independence, broke the Union blockade with their own military forces, and supplied food, firearms, and other vital supplies to the Southern war effort. The British demanded universal manumission in exchange for continued support. The Davis Administration tried to do this, but once again he was faced with heavy opposition even from his own Vice President and Planters who hoped to pass laws to reinstitute slavery. Realizing the power they now had, an all-black regiment of South Carolinian soldiers sent a message to Cleburne that they’ll lay down their arms and refuse to fight as long as all of their brethren are still in bonds and denied suffrage. Cleburne took their side, threatening to surrender to the Union too unless the black soldiers’ demands were met. There were no court-martials for anyone, or assassination attempts, or infighting against this act of treason, as all the Confederate officers magnanimously saw reason. Legions of black voters heading to the polls beat out the Planters’ pro-slavery bills, and somehow without any racist groups taking up arms or setting off dynamite at voting booths like what happened in the real Reconstruction and Jim Crow South. This universal manumission would become known as Jubilee in the Confederacy, signalling the death knell of the Plantation owner’s traditional hold on politics. They retreated from public life back into their stately manors and would never (officially) influence public affairs again.* The next big issue is women’s suffrage, which is looking more and more of a reality as the distaff gender fills in for the traditionally-male labor force fighting and dying in the prolonged war. *the text contradicts itself in several areas later on this.  So, in the world of Deadlands, not only was slavery a huge economic and social force on Southern society, was backed by the richest and most influential members of the Confederacy, and a Constitutional right. Additionally, the President’s personality and policies made him clash heads with aristocrats and military officers alike. This leaves me with one burning question: whose dicks did Jefferson Davis have to suck in order to avoid assassination and impeachment? Jubilee Day Jubilee is a holiday which originated among the African-American community, marking the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st. It is regarded as a “Black Independence Day,” marking the first significant gain in rights for them in American history. The holiday is celebrated in a variety of ways, but typically showcases art, history and culture. There’s also a subgenre of music known as Jubilee derived from slave songs containing themes of perseverance, freedom, and sorrow in a hostile world.We get some brief info on Jefferson Davis himself, who is still sitting President after winning re-election and is a controversial figure even among Southerners. He’s viewed by fans as a principled hardworking man who won’t budge from what he knows is right, and his haters view him as a stubborn snob and bully. The man was blamed for all manner of ills during the first four years of the Civil War, but his popularity soared after earning British and French support along with capturing Washington DC during 1871 (they lost it later). Things took a dark turn in 1872 when he became more tyrannical. President Davis put Richmond and sections of the country under martial law, and those running against him in the 1873 elections met with mysterious deaths. He narrowly defeated Robert E. Lee after a suspended election in 1876, leading to many charges of voter fraud. Marshal’s Territory: The real Jefferson Davis was killed in 1872 by a shapeshifting doppelganger, tasked by the Reckoners with making the war more desperate and bloody while also making the Confederacy a worse place to live. Members of his family, who long suspected the change in his disposition, were placed under house arrest in Mississippi, kept under close watch by Harrowed agents known as the Nightwatchers.  Richmond, City of Graves Technically a chapter of its own, Richmond’s entry is short enough that I’m covering it as part of the original post. The capital of the Confederacy is located in Virginia and is just a hop, skip, and a jump from the US capital of Washington DC. Naturally the border’s securely guarded by a long Demilitarized Zone of no man’s land with barbed wire walls, cannon emplacements, and troops on the respective edges. Richmond’s population exploded from war refugees in 1863, and since the Southern Bread Riots the city still has a gloomy demeanor. This time it’s being on the front lines, and the large amounts of coffin-bound soldiers returning home has dubbed the capital the City of Graves. In fact, the graveyard’s grown so large that professional mourners make a living escorting families to their loved ones’ remains. The Davis Administration rules directly in lieu of local governors, using the thuggish provost guard nicknamed “Pug-Uglies” to make arrests of even minor offenses. The Nightwatchers are the rumored secret police of Richmond, and they’ve been known to disappear people from their very homes in the middle of night. Sometimes the law doesn’t even have to get involved, as it’s quite common for aristocratic men to settle personal disputes via duels even though this is technically illegal. Capital Hill has a Whig majority in the House, who remain Davis’ greatest opponents, while the Democrats are the opposition party. Political Parties of the Confederacy, or Lack Thereof Although southern Democrats were the backbone of the pro-slavery sentiment, the Confederacy itself banned all political parties during its founding. Their rationale was that such organizations were dangerous to a democracy and would inevitably be bought out by moneyed interests. This did not prevent ideological blocs from forming within their Congress however, namely over the role of the central government during war-time.Richmond has some interesting locations, too. Belle Isle houses the Confederate Flying Corps of ornithopter pilots, while Castle Thunder Prison holds spies, deserters, enemy combatants, and other POWs. The Church Hill Mansion is home to Elizabeth Pew, who is universally hated in town for being a supporter of the Union cause but somehow has not been arrested from martial law. Marshal’s Territory: Castle Thunder is a realm of misery and torture, and the Nightwatcher’s leader is known to carry out interrogations here. One of the local newspaper journalists is held here, mistakenly believed to have ties to pro-Union elements. The Nightwatchers also have a doomsday scenario to blow up huge reverses of gunpowder beneath the city’s key points in the event of Doppelganger-Davis’ assassination or a Union takeover of Richmond. There’s an undead serial killer known as the Exsanguinator whose wife turned to prostitution after becoming a widower; he kills her clients for “defiling” her, causing the poor woman no end of fear and heartache. Finally, the famed priest Moses Drury Hoge prayed at the bedside of Robert E. Lee, using Blessed* powers to save the general from death. He is also a member of the Chaplain Corps, a group of Christian Confederate Blessed who were formed in 1863, and the Union has no equivalent organization besides the non-governmental Order of St. George who reports to the Vatican. For those not in the know, a Blessed is one of Deadlands’ “spellcaster classes,” holy men and women empowered by the Almighty to deliver miracles. They are non-denominational and can appear among various religions, but given Deadlands’ Christian symbolism it’s pretty much presumed that the Abrahamic God is giving them their powers.  This sidebar is in Fire & Brimstone, but is relevant to bring up here. Meaning that the Almighty gave Confederate, not Union, soldiers said powers. In 1863, which in Deadlands’ timeline was before even black soldiers were employed for manumission. Meaning that the major force for good in the setting was okay with supporting a government upholding race-based chattel slavery at the time.  DEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAADLAAAAAAAAAANDSThoughts So Far: This opening chapter is a mess. Even in the context of its whitewashed alt-history there are some huge holes in logic. Not only was the Confederacy founded upon protecting slavery without mention of State’s Rights, it later gave up its raison d'être surprisingly easily. The aristocracy and plantation owners seem all too willing to give up the ghost, not resorting to every dirty trick in the book like they did in real life to hold onto their economic dominance. Deadlands is no stranger to rich assholes lining their pockets off of human misery; it’d seem ludicrous if any of the Great Rail Wars barons had a crisis of conscience and tossed in the towel due to moral reasons alone, or for Dr. Hellstromme to shut down his company when he realized that his products are hurting people. And this isn’t a paltry sum of money, either: slaves represented 16% of the pre-Civil War United States’ assets, worth more than all the banks, factories, and railroads put together. We’re talking what would in modern times be equivalent to trillions of dollars. Forget the Reckoner doppelganger! Every Planter would’ve wanted Jefferson Davis’ head on a silver plate, and no price would’ve been too high to pay for any group of assassins or terrorists to do the deed. In the half-assed attempt at sanitizing the Confederacy while keeping in its real-world reasons for secession, Back East creates a country that went from fighting for an evil cause to fighting for nothing at all. The villains of the Antebellum South are all too easily forgiven, strangely eager retreat from public life in spite of their vast social power, the black freedmen and women either silent or blind to the discussion for redress of the evils inflicted upon them. In spite of using the Black Confederate soldiers meme as an in-universe explanation for gradual elimination of racism, we only get the name of the one South Carolinian who threatened surrender (Captain John Buckner), with much of the praise and glory in-character heaped upon the white officers General Cleburne and Lee in most of the sourcebooks. Join us next time as we cover the Front Line States, the troubled border regions facing the brunt of Union firepower! Libertad! fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 08:40
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Cleburne is a dude who often gets mentioned by Lost Causers, but he was completely ostracized during the war and after his suggestions, he stopped getting promoted.
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Mar 9, 2019 09:02
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Night10194 posted: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).
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Mar 9, 2019 09:16
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Kemper Boyd posted:Cleburne is a dude who often gets mentioned by Lost Causers, but he was completely ostracized during the war and after his suggestions, he stopped getting promoted.
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Mar 9, 2019 09:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The ironic thing in that in most actual anime of this genre nobody's actually loving, because everyone has the emotional maturity of a six year old. Hostile V posted:Unironically congrats on getting it because when I saw it, it was a drip feed of four episodes a week once a week at anime club, talking to friends and being snarky. We thought the ending was boring and weird and that the show was overhyped. I really have to imagine most people saw it in that way as well and took the ending as an insult. Tulul posted:Just FYI, A and B are completely false but super-persistent myths. The show never suffered budget cuts. They had some serious problems with deadlines and plans for the story changed throughout production, but that was all down to Gainax/Anno, not money. Anno had serious depression a few years before the show was made, which was a huge influence, but he wasn't in a psych ward when he wrote the show. 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 9, 2019 10:20
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Terrible Opinions posted:In anime unless it's explicitly pornography. I don't expect anyone to have sex ever. There will be an uncomfortable amount of discussion of sex at a middle school boy's level of understanding, but nobody fucks. I exaggerate a bit, depending on the genre and era a gratuitous sex scene is almost guaranteed in certain kinds of anime, but generally anything of a remotely comedic bent will sometimes have lots of sex jokes and fake outs but never anyone actually successfully getting their rocks off. Usually the more a character wants to gently caress the less likely they are to actually do so. Kids may be conceived well offscreen. The thing where people obsess over the trappings of the metaphor without realising the extremely unsubtle themes is way too common.
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Mar 9, 2019 10:48
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Nessus posted:They could just talk up Longstreet instead. Yet mysteriously enough he sort of gets forgotten and all his military successes seem to just kind of float into Marse Robert's pocket. it's because Longstreet got on the side of the angels up to and including riding out against racists in New Orleans. He lived til 1904 and got radiation therapy for eye cancer! Longstreet got damnatio memoriae'd by the father of the Lost Cause, Jubal Early. Apparently Early absolutely hated Longstreet post-war and went on to blame Longstreet for every failure that was actually Traitor Lee's. What grinds my gears about Lost Causers (this is a minor nitpick but anyway): there's often poo poo like "Bad Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest. Good And Honorable Confederate Bobbie Lee." Of these two dudes ( they were both assholes, mind you), only Forrest realized later on he had been wrong. Lee never saw anything wrong with the cause he fought for, or the slaughter he had created.
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Mar 9, 2019 11:18
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Kemper Boyd posted:Longstreet got damnatio memoriae'd by the father of the Lost Cause, Jubal Early. Apparently Early absolutely hated Longstreet post-war and went on to blame Longstreet for every failure that was actually Traitor Lee's.
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Mar 9, 2019 11:34
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All the AdEva and Gundam. talk suddenly reminded me of [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cz3xzkG0O9WkubsBJHUNM_bBBksVUn95FL8uWNgpOFM/preview]Trigger Discipline], which was another mecha themed /tg/ homebrew much like AdEva but much lighter on the rules and the main twist is that its also simulating a mecha anime show with all that comes with it.
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Mar 9, 2019 12:04
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Hahahah, so wait, wait, wait a moment. "Hey, guys, you know how we enslaved you and then started a war to keep enslaving you, you wanna fight for us now if we promise to stop enslaving you?" You'd figure the more believable response would be "uhhhhh, yeaaaaaah, suuuuuure, just hand us those guns and uniforms." [promptly burns the uniforms, turns the guns on the former slave-owners] Like, or just loving refuse to fight even if allowed to, so the Union could burn these slave-owning dickheads to the ground and everyone can take turns pissing on the ashes. RE: Trigger Discipline. My main issue with that was that its original incarnation was... very undifferentiated. No matter what you were doing, everything functioned exactly the same and had the exact same effect. You might as well have been flipping a coin to determine who got to narrate the next scene.
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Mar 9, 2019 12:13
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gently caress Deadlands Forever
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Mar 9, 2019 12:35
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Were the Deadland's writers unaware that the CSA constitution limited presidents to a single term, or is there some mention of amendments to allow Davis to remain in power? (I mean, there'd have to be amendments to overturn everything their constitution said about slavery...)
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Mar 9, 2019 12:39
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For another take on the conventional forces thing, I've mentioned that a while back some friends and I kludged together a Pacific Rim RPG, and we included rules for conventional forces supporting the jaegers. What we ended up doing was treating Conventionals as basically support powers you can call in whenever a jaeger can't engage a kaiju right this second. Jets and tanks and artillery won't do a lot of damage, but they will do some, more if you're willing to risk their lives (our system gave airstrikes two separate modes - a safe attack at altitude for a little bit of damage, or a risky attack for a decent bit of damage that has a 50% chance of getting the plane killed). They could and would wear down and kill a kaiju, but only at the cost of either massive collateral damage to the city, or just taking a very long time... again, probably getting the city leveled [by the kaiju] in the process. Not the stars of the show by any means, but they would contribute and keep the tempo of the game up on turns when the jaegers couldn't do anything, and a couple of times that chip damage made the difference.
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Mar 9, 2019 14:35
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Angry Salami posted:Were the Deadland's writers unaware that the CSA constitution limited presidents to a single term, or is there some mention of amendments to allow Davis to remain in power? What I gather is that the Deadlands writers were products of the American public school system. As I am also the same, I can promise that sort of thing wasn't touched on. Slavery is brought up as a cause of the war but not the main reason (certainly we never read the CSA Declaration of Independence which is all IT'S ABOUT SLAVERY, STUPID), folding it into the air-quotes states rights. Keeping the CSA even when Deadlands Reloaded dropped is just not wanting to put the work in to bring your setting to something barely approaching modern sensibilities ("this game does not have slavery but has people who supported slavery but don't now because of zombies") and perhaps foolishly thinking you need to keep the people as fans who want a vibrant Confederacy. It's not even that hard to tweak the setting to 'the North still won,* and now there are zombies.' It's really not. *By Gettysburg the South is already losing and I can't imagine the Reckoners' goons do much but hasten it since they'd also go after Confederate troops.
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Mar 9, 2019 15:40
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Deadlands is a completely worthless setting.
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Mar 9, 2019 15:53
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I think even the hate of the CSA being around wouldn't be so bad if the setting treated them as actual bad guys and not just another faction showing how divided America is. Honestly, I'd ditch it so we could shoot Klansmen and but keep the British invasion in. CSA gets knocked out, but does more harm and manages to rope in their English allies to start swarming some northern cities. NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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Mar 9, 2019 16:22
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Zereth posted:I'm hardly an EVA expert, but I thought one of the twists with EVAs was that if you got into the meatbits and took a sample and sequenced the DNA, it was human DNA? That's ANY Angel, not just Evangelions, all but Shinji's are made from Adam anyway.
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Mar 9, 2019 16:33
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You know, it's funny. As your describing The South, I keep inagining... Haiti. You've got the exact same situations, with the majority black population in many areas, and an rear end in a top hat aristocrat class that has exploited racial tension that they've become complacent with class issues, and lots of guns. If I was writing Deadlands, I'd have the CSA 'win' the war and receive recognition from Europe/the North, but have things become... increasingly tense, as revolutions, insurrections, and state rivalries threaten to tear the young Confederacy apart. It survives, still, but the world is slavering in anticipation, confident that they'll be able to handle the chaos to come. Like Haiti, the black population in the South slowly gains freedom and rights in return for conscription on both sides. Add a thick smear of supernatural voodoo and European style occultism and secret society, and you've got an exciting place to have Deadland style adventures, just more urban than frontier style. Imagine having a ghost haunted spy game in New Orleans. I'd replace the Agency/Ranger rivalry by expanding the influence of European powers and the Agency trying enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The Agency would be a more 'gray' organization that balances their war on the supernatural with their spy games with England/France/etc. While the Rangers would be more straightforward monster hunters and law bringers. Plus it gives you a reason for all those ex-Confederates to go West, something I feel is important to the Western genre but Deadlands kind of ignores. They just lost a different war.
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Mar 9, 2019 16:55
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Dawgstar posted:What I gather is that the Deadlands writers were products of the American public school system. As I am also the same, I can promise that sort of thing wasn't touched on. Slavery is brought up as a cause of the war but not the main reason (certainly we never read the CSA Declaration of Independence which is all IT'S ABOUT SLAVERY, STUPID), folding it into the air-quotes states rights. Southern Public School Education especially. It's really loving vile, saying as someone who got exposed to it early. There's full on Lost Cause revisionism and while my particular school didn't go into it, a neighbor's did pull the full on 'the quality of life for blacks was much better when they were slaves'. Not to mention all the Plantation tourist sites that I know of in the Mississippi/Louisiana border area, only one mentioned it was built on slave labor and that is the one that tries to claim it's the origin of the br'er rabbit stories and again tries to claim the owners as 'good people who treat their slaves well'.
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Mar 9, 2019 16:56
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Terrible Opinions posted:I assume Jet Alones wouldn't be playable because they are objectively better than Evas if you assume the lance that punches through AT fields is mass producable like it is in the movie. IT's the same reason you don't include tanks in a mech game and GEVs were nerfed in later versions of OGRE. It also goes directly against the goals of the death cult the PCs are working for to have a weapon that works. Though it uses small robots, Front Mission has tanks! They can't jump or climb, so they're a lot worse at moving around in urban combat when you don't want to take down all the buildings (or want to go inside something like a warehouse), and you also can't air-drop them with back-mounted jetpacks to slow their fall like you can a wanzer. Wanzers on treads or wheels (a valid design choice in at least one FM game) have the same issues. In areas where tanks can maneuver okay, they're fine. Tank cannons are often superior to wanzer arm-equipped weaponry. But the real advantage wanzers have is that their limbs and loadout are modular so you can pop an arm off and put a new one on, weight limits permitting. Helicopters also exist and are also pretty scary, though they tend to be vulnerable to mech snipers or missileers.
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Mar 9, 2019 18:10
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