Neon Genesis Evangelion General Thread /ngeg/

>tfw you will never be a high altitude bomber dropping ordnance that makes MOABs look like firecrackers

>tfw you will never be one of the many mechanical and structural engineers who made Tokyo-3 possible and cry every time an Eva has to be deployed and fight on your modern marvel

>tfw the Jet Alone project was sabotaged and you will never pilot the living embodiment of millions of tons of steel and nuclear powered HFY, strong enough to push an EVA back, and built to wield massive useless cannons and guns to fire at angels
>Also vidya game giant power hammer

Goddamn, I LOVE the static defenses in Eva.

As for the OP, I've never actually got to play AdEva, and have accepted the fact that I probably never will, since games seem to be so hard to find. I'm only a casual fan too; couldn't tell you more than what you probably already know if you've just watched the series.

>tfw you aren't the bartender or convenience store clerk who keeps Misato fully stocked despite their being world ending monstrosities attacking your home on a daily basis

in some ways being a casual fan is better because if you did run, you could fill in the blanks yourself.

Goddamn the fucking Geofront is such a fucking waste of money Goddamn. There are like 40 people working there and its a damned fucking city sized underground base. The city sinking into it doesn't even make seeeeense.

Watching episode one [two in the time it took me to write this] with a friend. The gist of it is that I went with Titans. The children piloted "Prometheans" that were not surprisingly created from the body of the Titan Prometheus. The creatures attacking NERV Olympus were Titans. The Rei style clones were Vestal Virgins. I honestly didn't really have much more than that.

I don't understand that. Is this an alternate universe manga or something? Wouldn't Yui be much older than Mari?

AdEva is best when you use Eva as inspiration but not a guideline. Like I said above, with the Titanomachy plot. I mean, it's also a clusterfuck of a series. If you want to "understand" it, you need to read EvaGeeks or some other wiki.

I forgot to link this NERV Olympus logo.

I don't remember what it actually was, but whatever's in Terminal Dogma would be "Elpis".
If I do run it, I've definitely got to flesh shit out more.

It's the manga that started running concurrently with the series and covered the same things, but took forever to finish.
And it's not supposed to be an AU type deal. Mari is quite a bit older than the pilots.
And since the Rebuilds were out/coming out at the same time, that may well be the case for her there, too. The only possible interesting thing that might come out of the Curse of Eva bullshit.

god, i love the different nerv logos that have spawned around adeva

Wasn't most of the plot, on going grand schemes and intrigues scrapped, so at least Shinji's mental problems would be resolved?

I did not know there was a manga. I also didn't know Mari was in it. I thought she was made for Rebuild. Or do you mean concurrently with the Rebuilds?

Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not good at art, so I've got to rely on things like gelbooru fan art of D.Va and other characters wearing plugsuits.

More for budget. But yeah.

>I like the Rebuilds more
The original series and End of Evangelion are literal masterpieces.

Of the Rebuilds, only 2.0 is really good. 1.0 is an inferior retread and 3.0 is a complete mess.

Dub is best desu

The original series has a lot of holes.

>Literal masterpieces
>Has a fucking mascot character
I don't care if it was mandatory in the 90s, but damn I hate cute animals.

>single woman has a pet
>reeeeeeee
user you dingus

>The original series has a lot of holes.
It actually doesn't, though.

But it does. I mean, even the animation is incredibly dated and has that jittery early 90s effect. A lot of plots and aspects get discarded. Honestly in general I think that calling something perfect is rarely true, no matter what the work is. Everything can be improved.

>the animation is incredibly dated
Not enough bargain bin CG for you, huh?

>A lot of plots and aspects get discarded.
That doesn't mean there are holes.

That is literally what a hole is. I mean, I'm watching it right now. So much of the setting is unexplained, and a lot of the characterization is inconsistent. I mean, in just one episode Shinji goes from "I don't care :^)" to running away and being depressed. Either of those would be perfectly valid responses to Shamshel, but he just flipflops. Rei and Gendou in Rei "Rei I" are also so weird. In one scene she's able to hold a human conversation with Gendou complete with smiles and giggles, the next time we see her she's a robot again.

Hell, Gendou's motivations are sketchy and make no sense. His plan or intentions aren't really clear, just his goal of reuniting with Yui, but even that is strange considering how he treats her.

As for the animation, I don't know much about modern anime, but come on, you honestly can't tell me that it isn't dated. There are jitters from when cells aren't aligned, characters are off model every so often, there's reused animation, and in one episode Asuka has Ritsuko's shadow.

>"I don't care :^)"
It's called a defense mechanism, user. Shinji's smug apathy is a front.

Rei is never robotic, just weird. Despite her inhuman qualities, she's a fucked up person just like the rest of the cast.

>His plan or intentions aren't really clear, just his goal of reuniting with Yui, but even that is strange considering how he treats her.
???

The subpar CG in Rebuild is so, so much worse than any off-model frames in the series, and some of the animation in the series is god-tier, like the fight with Zeruel. The original series McGuyver'd its shoe string budget to create something beautiful.

All reasonable points, but consider as well that Studio Gainax was poor as shit back then and was forced to have 5 minutes of a single frame in the last episode because they couldn't afford to pay their animators any more.

For what went into making it, Eva was fantastic. It may not have aged as well as nostalgia would have you believe, but it's still one of the classics of anime. I consider it to hold a similar position that Blade Runner does for western film.

The manga started running concurrently with the series, and finished...sometime around 2.22. Mari was only in a bonus chapter at the very end, apparently.
And yes, it took THAT FUCKING LONG to finish and I have no idea why

I did Greece too, but I went with it being the Gigantomachy and had them battle Gigantes, piloting Gigantes Obliteration Devices (The G.O.D. Units) and a bunch of other really goofy shit.
The whole thing was a semi-bait-and-switch for Cthulhu mythos though. The sunken city of Atlantis was actually R'lyeh (the hint being that Atlantis was somehow in the Pacific and not the Atlantic, for one, and the blown-up Americas were called the Hyades with UN HQ there being CARCOSA) and the G.O.Ds were dredged up from Atlantis by people who wanted to reinstate ownership of the Earth by The Alabaster Dead Ouranos so that he would protect his fiefdom from the horrible infinity of Chaos, with a bunch of other conspiracies vying for their own goals

Never really got past the point of silly slice of life (though Greek homoeroticism did manage to pop up early, to my players' credit), that I prioritized entirely wrong and GMed horribly because I couldn't get my shit together to prep properly

If any of my players are here: sorry for flaking before we got to do anything actually fun for you, my mental health issues basically tore down my entire life at that time. I apologize for the campaign being shit

>Rei is never robotic
She's very robotic.

>???
I'm saying that I don't get the impression that he loved Yui.
I also feel that way too much credit is given to how the series handled the budge problems. It's the best they could do, but it's far from an unassailable masterpiece.

I'm aware. I'm just saying that both due to budget and other things, it was not the perfect masterwork that it often gets called. I wouldn't really put it on par with Blade Runner. I'm not saying Eva is *bad*, either. I'm just saying that what Eva wanted to be is better than what Eva ended up being.

Ah, I see. How is the manga, then?

>Gigantes Obliteration Devices
Hue. I forgot to mention the Prometheans were named after Gods.

I also flaked, though at least the catalyst was that a) I hated half my players, and b) one of them that I did like cracked her head open slipping on the stairs.

Anyone got the Mobile Suit Mechanicus pdf version?

Wuzzat?

>1d4chan.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Mechanicus
A hack of Adeptus Evangelion that is used to play Mobile Suit Gundam. AdEva was itself a hack of Dark Heresy.

Whoo. I wasn't sure bumping from page 11 would work.

That sounds horrible. There are much better systems for a Gundam style game. I don't even know if Dark Heresy is right for Eva in the first place.

I use a nice user's Jovian Chronicles module for OpenD6. It's good and quick-rolling, and lets us put emphasis on what Gundam's there for: character drama in war with some giant robots in there sometimes.

I thought this thread would have a lot more content than it does.

Has anyone played AdEva v3? I want to know how it went, and how it plays. My main dislike of what I heard the developers talking about when it was being made was that they feel pilots should be weak or useless outside of the Evas, while I feel that the fact that Eva pilots physically experience what their Evas do is something I'd want to explore in a game.

Like, it boggles me that people believe this.

Like, Eva's a big deal, I get that, and I understand that it's had a huge influence on anime, and still does.

But holy shit, it's not a masterpiece in any sense. The whole thing is a mess past the halfway point or so, and End of Eva is just insanity born of a "I'll show them" attitude.

As the person who was first saying Eva's not a masterpiece, I actually prefer the later stuff (up until the budget goes straight to shit and they're doing crayon drawings). I also don't feel that End is the hateful fuck you to fans that people treat it as. I feel like it's disingenuous to treat Anno as a troll or anything like that. After all, some of the "death threats" shown during End of Evangelion are also actually positive feedback. He doesn't hate his fans by any stretch of the imagination.

He's not Miyazaki.

I wouldn't define it purely as trolling, yea.

But I do think there was some concept of showing people off over their reaction to the initial ending, not in a trollish sense, but certainly in a misunderstood creator backlash sense. Not so much hating people for not getting it, but certainly some anger over fan reaction.

I don't have any clue what you're talking about.

How well would Mutants & Masterminds work for an Eva game? Doesn't it have a Mecha book?

>Adeva
Not even once. I've played two games, and the system is designed to bring out the worst shitter in the GM. While you may think that's in line with the series' tone, it's not very fun to actually play.

I think Eva is also one of those works that resonates with you depending on where you are the first time you see it, kind of like Catcher in the Rye except for mental issues instead of adoloscence.

I can't imagine running an AdEva game for people you hate. There's way too much opportunity to punish them.

In what way? My problems were mostly mechanical, I don't really see how it was bringing out "the worst shitter in the GM".

I think you quoted the wrong person. I didn't hate them when I started, but this was sort of a pick up game on F-list and it turned out that only X people wanted to join and at least one of them was a fucking idiot who was off in his own little world.

Ah, I did. Thank you based phone browser

Is who I meant to quote.

The game has very little mechanics wherein Ego or Stress are given out in large amounts. As a result getting a break is actually very hard, and getting eliminated from the game this way is nigh impossible. Therefore the game encourages arbitrary granting of Ego/Stress points by the GM to compensate, which pretty much translates to punishing players for playing the game, however you look at it.

Another contributing factor are the powers available in angelgen, with gems such as the ability to drain a PC's Luck, or making a PC fall "madly in love" with someone (taking away player agency), among others.

I disagree with that notion. I don't see any of what you listed as being 'bad' or really even out of the ordinary.

I definitely don't like the notion that you're somehow "taking away player agency". For one, that's sort of the point of mind control and whatnot, but beyond that, situations will always force players to act within certain parameters. How they act within those parameters is what agency is all about.

Maybe you've just had bad GMs? I've never looked at games with those kind of mechanics and thought "how do I fuck over my players now?"

I love the series and the idea of it being an rpg setting, but the fans kind of kill it for me.

>who are you?
>i'm user from the eva irc
>yeah but who ARE you?

Think the lack of games comes from the fact that people who are really into evangelion often aren't the types of people to devote a lot of time into planning something (unless it's their own suicide), or to think and act strategically as part of a group.

It's better to just take motives and ideas from evangelion and apply them to another game, without the players expecting them.

I don't entirely agree with you? I mean, you don't even have to be "really into Evangelion" to play. I didn't get into Eva big until after I'd read AdEva.

I'm also not sure what you're getting at here
>>who are you?
>>i'm user from the eva irc
>>yeah but who ARE you?
or how the fans kill it for you. Unless you just mean the fandom in general, in which case I can't really sympathize; I've never been one to let fandumb ruin anything for me.

I think the lack of AdEva games--and there have been quite a few, a lot with some good fan art--is more to do with the inability to get games together in general, and the fact that AdEva isn't something with a real physical book that can easily be played with friends at the dining room table. Internet games are harder than regular games to get together, from what I can tell and have experienced. Then again, I've actually HAD internet games, but been unable to convince my non-Veeky Forums friends to play dicegames that don't come in a boardgame box.

I was referring to a random query from an eva fan, and probably should have explained it better. Seriously, the stupidest shit I've seen in liff has all come from eva fans. I can't storytime the best bits because the words literally escape me.

Also, how have the games turned out? Did you manage to play a voice game, and have you played a game to its conclusion? I've only played 2-3 sessions before flaking out due to different time zones, and I'm interested to hear how an adeva campaign plays out. Especially if it's a good one with memorable sessions.

>forcing a player character to fall in love with somebody
>directly attacking a metagame concept

These are things that would fit if you were running a parody, not a serious game. As it is, why even bring your players to the session if you, the GM, are just going to assume direct control whenever you feel like it because they're not on your rails.

These are literally mechanics that enable That GM.

Honestly, I'd turn, walk away, and try to run it out of something like Gurps, Savage, Open d5, D20, Palladium, or literally anything else.

This is a game that has too many rules, a level of crunch that makes people who jack off to tables and statistics bust in their pants, and was, and still us, over-engineered to the level that Autists would look at it and say "Okay this is a bit much even for me"

V3 isn't much better, it replaces the Dark heresy system of advancement with.... a Very close to the dark Heresy system of advancement, only it's arranged like a tree because of Metaphor alone, it's inspired, but it's also rather badly designed.

Angels in 2.5 and 3 will either absolutely manhandle the party or die in a couple rounds with little to know pomp at all, that is unless your the type of GM to spend 3 weeks play testing your own boss encounters to actually find the sweet spot.

Even now, the game breaks apart because of their only being a handfull of viable builds. if your not making your character in one of a handful of ways, your on a one way trip to either crushed plug station, or Tang town.

But that's just my experiences with the system.

This right here. I'd love to run AdEva for my group but a single combat round has about 6-10 steps.

Now think of the fights of the series. Was the gist of it all carefully planned moves and solid execution? No, it was throw an Eva against an angel, learn how the angel fights on the spot, get brutalized, hope you can make a comeback.

For all the simulation value of AdEva, which I think is genuine because I can clearly identify all the crunch from the series, I believe it lost a lot of basic fun value. If AdEva gets properly streamlined, I think it has the potential to be a totally fantastic game. Right now it's a well researched clusterfuck of rules that change every 4 months.

Also, if you cringe about the players of AdEva, seriously what the fuck were you expecting. The show is edgy teen emo rebelliousness and the pain of growing up. Don't look for these players online, they only bring sorrow.

>edgy teen emo rebelliousness
Through the lens of players you don't want at your table. Given the internet, though, there's a lot of chaff to separate from the grain.

Honestly, Eva always seemed like it would be better suited to a more narrative, character based system like FATE anyway.

> Was the gist of it all carefully planned moves and solid execution? No, it was throw an Eva against an angel, learn how the angel fights on the spot, get brutalized, hope you can make a comeback.

That's the sort of thing that seems really easy to do in a video game, but in a tabletop RPG how do you make that work?

Unless there is a limit to the amount of time, OOC, that players get to take their turns, the players are going to stop and think about what they are going to do on their turn. In a game with a premise like NGE where losing even a single fight is assumed to have devastating, possibly even world ending, consequences? That encourages careful planning too instead of just swinging and hoping for the best.

The only way I can think of that would cut down on that would be to just not give the players very many options at all. They can't make careful plans because they only can do 2-3 things total anyway, so just pick one and hope it works. Which seems like it wouldn't be especially fun to play for multiple fights anyway, and on top of that you can't give the players the tools to handle anything outside of a narrow range of Angel concepts that way.

Eva fights in the show kind of force you into a position where to make it a game you either need to have a lot of rules to handle weird edge cases or basically no rules at all and you just freeform it.

It's not just the loons themselves, it's situations they will get you into.
Some of their bitter, pathetic lives will always spill into every activity you do with them.

>I can't storytime the best bits because the words literally escape me.
I feel like you probably could, if you tried.

"You can't help but feel a strong attraction to [player]" is far from "direct control". I'm also not sure what you mean by "attacking a metagame concept". Almost every game has mind control powers. The larger a game is, the more likely it is to have several. That's not necessarily enabling That GM.

I feel like you've had a bad experience and are now overreacting to the presence of pretty typical things. Your version of things that removes agency seems to be very limited in scope, and would include a lot of mundane things.

>if your not making your character in one of a handful of ways, your on a one way trip to either crushed plug station, or Tang town.
>But that's just my experiences with the system.
I feel like because of the way that it's made, this really only happens if the GM ignores the players and makes the angels whatever.
Dark Heresy seems like a system that could be a lot easier than it is, but my main problem was always that the system itself doesn't support the kind of game Ad Eva is. It's a game for the players to get attacked by smaller enemies and swarmed. But AdEva is a game where you gang up on enemies that don't have human anatomy and are puzzle fights.

>I'm also not sure what you mean by "attacking a metagame concept".

The attack that directly targets the luck pool. That's an enemy attacking a metagame mechanic.

And I would argue telling a player that they have to feel a strong attraction to another character borders on direct control and is the kind of thing a That GM would just love to use. It's on par with rolling to seduce another player character.

Why should the goal be eliminating the player from the game?

Well in the show, at least early episodes, NERV does have time to plan against the 'trickier' angels. Either an initial sorty goes poorly or the Angel makes their trick apparent on the approach, but there is prep time which allows for things like setting up the positron rifle, working together to protect the shooter from acid, preparing to catch the angel, and most importantly, DDR training montages. The tension comes from having limited planning time and only one shot to pull of the plan. Also one of the reasons why I like the idea of a PC Ops Director.

The one game of AdEva I've played in, the GM just threw the pilots at the Angels without taking that into consideration, which led to needing those long, carefully planned turns as we figured out on the ground how we were supposed to fight the thing.

The dodge mechanic from DH more or less invalidates the whole group of pcs v. one enemy dynamic.

I just started running a game of Ad3va, but we just started so I don't have much to say. The pilots are fairly weak outside of the robots, but not terribly so. Guns hurt everyone, not just pilots. My main gripe with it is that there are no rules for operations director, so I had to use a homebrewed WordDoc I found on the subreddit, which I had to further modify, so my player could be one.

It's going quite well though. We're using Norse/northern european Mythology as the backdrop. The OD is basically Beowulf which is neato

PC ops director is fantastic to have. Not only will they be there to direct the pilots, they give the pilots a window into the stuff happening behind the scenes at Nerv. The problem is that unless you do some homebrew stuff, they don't get to actually join in on the fight, which might make them feel left out during certain points. They also will not always be with the pilots, so the GM has to work hard to work with them and the pilots at the same time

Again, I have zero problem with any of this and I feel like you're making a big deal out of nothing, probably based on a bad experience.

I'll be honest, I actually don't mind that the PC OpDir is gone in v3. I know v2.5 had a lot of cool ideas for them, but ultimately it's bad to have two types of players playing two types of games.

>but ultimately it's bad to have two types of players playing two types of games.

That's typically where I fall on the issue. I've mused over running two parties with the same players, one of pilots and one of NERV staff, but think it might be too disjointed for at least my group.

I agree with both of you, that's why I feel that there should exist a "Light" version of AdEva. Right now AdEva is a strong simulationist, and that's alright. Like I said, I think it's very well researched. But if it drives players away for being too cumbersome, there should be a rules-lite version.

Again, I also agree that the fights of the series don't translate well to a game.

How can you even play an rpg based on Eva?
Seems like a weird idea.

There are rpgs about far weirder things, user.

>tfw there will never be a Xcom style NGE vidya game, where you take the role of the director of Nerv.
>research creepy angels, new eva tech, build more evas, train more emotionally unstable teenage pilots, fortify your fortress city further, and in general, prepare for angel attacks in the strategic view.
>maybe even have some sort of dating sim esque elements, where you do your best to manipulate the emotional development of the pilots from the shadows, to keep them from going completely nuts.

>when angels attack, you do your best to direct the pilots in their evas to defeat the friggin eldrich monster, in tactical, turn based combat, where the risk of your pilots going nuts gets higher the longer the combat takes, and losing the fight will have catastrophic, perhaps even game ending consequences.
>Angels would be somewhat randomized, and their attack patters would as well, making it so that no game is ever quite the same.
>Their attacks would have some forewarning, and you could even send military forces to scout out their abilities/stall them, while you do your best to prepare your defenses.
>End game is Seele activating their plans, and you basically having to go trough End of Evangelion, and hopefully fare better.
>hard mode, no safe scumming allowed.

10/10 game, right there.
Too bad it will never be real.
Oh well, a man can dream.
youtube.com/watch?v=rf5SFn2gPjY

there, there, user. Bridge Simulator is still a thing.

That doesn't sound too hard to make, to be honest. It's on the same level as xenonauts or chapter master. Only hard part would be writing all the random tables.

I find that people playing two characters only really works in certain games, and AdEva isn't one of them, especially since Bridge Bunnies and Pilots are going to be doing their mechanical thing at the same time.

I do have a suggestion, though. It's a bit of an OOC thing, but you know how the OpDir can spend points to requisition support and all that? Let the players do that. Let them use those points, but have it represent the Operations Director helping them out. Sort of like Fate points already are.

Why so? It's not like the individual elements don't already exist in other games. Hell, a lot of giant robot games at least ostensibly want you to focus on the out of mech experience, though most fall into that old trap of "only have rules for combat, everything else is a simple roll".

Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 actually is part "Raising Sim" and part dating sim.

>Honestly, Eva always seemed like it would be better suited to a more narrative, character based system like FATE anyway.
You should check out Bliss Stage. People get put off by it because of the sex stuff but it's not that much weirder than canon Evangelion with Shinji jerking off on people. You can run a pretty good Eva inspired game in this system.

>You can run
No you can't. The game literally doesn't function. It's also not really a good game even if you ignore the fact that it technically never starts. Also it's less the sex stuff and more the way it's implemented.

>No you can't. The game literally doesn't function
Then how did I play it several times? You must be misunderstanding the rules or something.

>It's also not really a good game
Fair enough. It's definitely not for everyone, it's a really weird game.

It also enables people who aren't That GM.

You're just too used to seeing things used only for their worst rather than what they open up for in terms of good. You're too used to minimax and never seen maximin