It seems I've reached this point in my life where it's unavoidable for me to GM Evangelion...

It seems I've reached this point in my life where it's unavoidable for me to GM Evangelion. I've got two dedicated players that'd be up for it and I suppose I'd have choose very carefully two more.

With that being said, anyone had experience with AdEva? Should I use 2.5 or 3.0? 3 seems more streamlined but with less content and shittier page layout.

Also, I had the vague idea of rebranding some aspects of the mythology for novelty's sake, for example replacing the christian """symbolism"""" with a different one, like Arthurian legends and knightly shit. Anyone ever successfully pulled that off?

pls respond, also Evangelion in Veeky Forums general

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=yzvIn0mdXtY
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Never even read AdEva, but today I had the silly idea of Wheel of time Eva.

How would that even work, user

Im curious too. Would magic wielders be the equivilant of pilots with males being hunted down because they take on more of the Eva aggression, forcing them to be put down?

I'm not shure.
Time is in a not specified previous or later cycle (which is really the same).
I'd say the plot device to pilot the Eva is that you need Ta'veren, possibly Ta'veren channelers, which is a good headstart into psychosis for the kids.
It would maybe end up as a more magitech Eva, something like escaflowne perhaps.
White tower scouts the pilots and there is plenty intrigue and self sabotage between Ajah.
Angels are more personal and piloted by the Forsaken.

There could be ways...

AdEva looks like the coolest fucking thing in the world with the only downside being they call AT Fields Absolute Territory.

From what I gathered there are time skips built in to the system which is pretty fine desu and grants some awesome moments for non-combat encounters like Angel attacks

It's essentially a mystery game with giant monster fights and a bunch of customization.

Oh, you might want to put in some lore stuff about how going Berserk is an uncomfortable process or something because apparently you can break that (although if you guys want to go full sentai and dgaf that's fine too)

Yeah there is, it even grants some bonuses and gives fun opportunity to RP I suppose. Also yes iirc there is a whole "class" around Berserking, though i suppose its more or less canon one can do that more or less at will since Rebuild 3.0

Now I'm making myself giddy.

>Stone of Tear geofront with Calladhor in the final dogma
>Pilot into Stedding, robot shuts down
>Gholam making it's way into HQ.
>Human instrumentality project utilizing the Horn of Valere
>"Get into the chest Shinji!"

If they go completely berserk certainly. And red the Ajah is always advocating preemptive severing.

Good fucking luck. I've been a part of one game. Best GM of our group was in charge. Basically the backstory was a collaborative effort between him and us - if he thought we weren't a pack of emotional cripples, he added in some stuff, and so on and so forth. This led to an.. interesting campaign.

Leave the mythology. It only even makes a tiny amount of sense because it's really hebrew rather than actual christian. Bring in one of the GM book factions, like the Eigenart initiative or the Charon group if you want to shake up the mythology. The sharp change will alert the players that Something Is Up.

Can't speak for system version. We played 2, but there were so many fucking house rules it was barely even AdEva.

...

...

Goddamn did everyone want to fuck Rei?

I don't think so.

I heard AdEva had a random angel generator but I can't find it in my books.
can some one post a pic oof it? I need it for my next seasson.

There's a creator in the back of the oeprations manual. V3 beta 5 definitely. Random, well, just throw some dice at your choices after assigning numbers to them. Easy.

Thanks for the advice. But I find it hard to reuse the same things as the original anime - Angels, Lilith and shit - since well, the anime is enough closure and there is no reason for anything to happen after that.
Or should one basically keep the same premise and remove the existing characters for the show, dealing with the same situation with a whole new cast?

Nope. But I'm pretty sure everyone wanted to choke Asuka at some point. The difference is that some people just before they knew she's into it, some just after and some all the way through.

Well, there are some ideas for reworking it in the ops-director book.

Lilith and the Angels and Adam are kind of the base of Evangelion. Otherwise you're telling a weird war story between countries with giant robots that defy reality for funsies for no reason at all. Aside from Adam and Lilith - or at least beings like them, godlike progenitors, one or two, you don't need to have the same, or even similar ones. But Human Instrumentality is the birth of a new universe from the Kabbalah, for example, while the Eigenart Initiative's plan is stepping back up the tree. Seele's symbol, if you'd like, is symbolic of the Womb of God and his forgiveness. That sort of crap.

>into it
Doesn't the find that "Disgusting." ?

Nah I always wanted to fuck Asuka.

I had in mind to more or less retell the story with a slighhtly different mythology - for example, using the holy grail instead of Lilith, Adam by thr first Snake or shit like that - wasn't yet very clear but I figured it'd be a be a decent idea to bring novelty without having to figure out a whole new cohesive plot starting from the end of the series.

Both options seem pretty hard to pull off desu. But I'll manage, thanks for the advice. You mentioned the OD book, know where to find? It's not on 1d4chan it seems

That comment was more about Shinji's pillow-fisted limp grip really.

Damn, that makes a lot of sense

I always like the concept of having the themes erode over time. Start with it being like "oh no ragnorok is upon us but weird and scary" and end with just nightmare images slapped onto nightmare images. The red king opens his million eyes and judges you for the sins you committed, you see your friends face melt off as his brilliant eyes gaze at you.

It's the GM guide. Themes and myth. Very first bookmark.

A cohesive plot from the end of the series wouldn't work - the start? Maybe. As long as you've got the major building blocks - evas, godlike beings, an annihilated world - there's no problems, but it's just more work. Adam and Lilith aren't the snakes and grails. They don't have a proper analogue. They're more competing gods at much lower power scales than anything else.

>Also, I had the vague idea of rebranding some aspects of the mythology for novelty's sake, for example replacing the christian """symbolism"""" with a different one, like Arthurian legends and knightly shit. Anyone ever successfully pulled that off?

I had an idea for a mix of Jewish and Norse once: you're playing tower defense around (the last known site of) the World Tree, Yggdrasil, which is also the Tree of Knowledge that Adam ate of. Instead of angels the attackers are the Jotuns (giants) of Outer-Earth; if they destroy the tree, mankind will be reduced to mindless savagery. The Watchers are hanging around and have their own plans for mankind through various shadowy organizations.

How could anyone after his "fuck everything with a hole in it" phase want to fuck any of the Evangelion characters is still beyond me.

>implying Kaworu is not love

Zizek said it's imperfection that creates attraction. Prefection is boring, fake and lacks character.

that can't be a real zizek quote, there's not even a single sniff

I want to fug a MP Eva scaled down to my size, macro is a shit fetish

You sound like someone who hasn't interacted with 14-year olds for a good while, user.
She's a brat and really fucked up in the head to boot.
Being German is just icing on the cake... she'd grow up to be pretty ugly.

And that quote of Žižek could be easily interpreted here as Asuka is pretty much perfectly repulsive.
She's the exact opposite of perfect and it comes off just as fake as a perfect character like Little Jesus from Gundam.

You want fucked up, check out Tiffany Grant's (her VA in English) obsession with Asuka.

That said, Asuka is actually pretty genuine. She's not 100% fake - while her dominant persona is, she's reaching out for help as much as she can - to Shinji primarily toward the end of the series. She just involuntarily sabotages herself, and Shinji, the only person who could help, is too weak to get past the pushing away.

youtube.com/watch?v=yzvIn0mdXtY
SEriously. It's freaky.

Fucking hell lol
Well in her defense, some otakus have worse collections and arent even related to the character in any way

Oh yeah. It's just ever so slightly unsettling. Woman could make a mint doing porn voice overs.

>tfw you will never get to be your own waifu

besides the voice she's far from it

My ex gf was suicidal and attention-seeking.
Also I worked in a high school teaching metalworking to kids when I couldn't find any other job.

The thread always begins and evolves in the same way. There is never an ending.

Well, that is to be expected when discussi g something that is more watched than its played.

Anyway, to get back on tracks, has anyone ver been/played with an Operation Director? How did it go?

>4 pilots, 12 angels, one campaign.
>Pilots: a nicer version of asuka who manages to be even more arrogant
>A habitual drunk 14 year old computer whiz
>Class dunce piloting in exchange for a's on tests
>Random scared teenager who it turned out wasn't a pilot at all, the Evangelion was remotely controlled at all times.
>2nd fight of campaign is vs angel mother with spawn who have an anti-at field, scared teenager gets killed. Dunce has to eject, is found by derelict and escorted to safety, pair p-scale kill an angelspawn with power of dance and kalishnakovs. Adult derelict becomes new pilot.
>Campaign continues, lots of oddness. Eventually final fight happens, we win, final impact shortly after that.
>Final impact immediately becomes gambit pileup
>Science team, who we'd missed the entire campaign, were part of societas eruditorium and launch their bid for world domination, kill commander who was going to turn himself into a distributed soul in control of all evangelions at once
>Seele deploys the MPvangelions to try and initiate a two-stage instrumentality and decapitate the SE leadership, with their souls in the MPvangelions.
>Class dunce was convinced by Charon to be the lead soul for their human heaven project and uses the fight with the MPvangelions to harvest souls
>Derelict stops bothering with his Eva, turns out to have been angel hybrid since the encounter with the spawn and becomes not-Kaworu, but with beam spam instead of homolust and working for the Eigenart Initiative.
>Nice version of asuka gets turned into the kingmaker - her help could tip the 4 way shitfight going on in the Geofront between the SE, Seele, not-Kaworu and the Dunce.
>Nice asuka eventually sides with dunce and convinces not-kaworu to join in on their side
>Habitual drunk figured out what was going on and convinced the local Magi to self destruct nerv-HQ,
>everyone dies
>No third impact, all conspirators for world domination dead.

Everything ended pretty well for the planet, I'd guess.

Steal about half of the lore from cthulhutech. I won't swear on it, but there may be a mod for adeva.

I've been in 3 AdEva games so far. There are a lack of good mecha systems, but by god would I avoid that one. Though I run GURPS (so it's my favorite system), the modular mecha stuff ain't easy.

I think you'd have best results with Mutants and Masterminds 3e, and the mecha supplement for it. AdEva does have a book with some fun scenario/monster ideas to lift from ([REDACTED] is what it's called), so check that out even if you're not up for grappling with its awful rules. The Borderline version seemed neat, though I've been out of touch with AdEva's weird development for some time.

To put my dislike for the AdEva rules into perspective, I have an easier time running RIFTS.

That sounds awful, user. Care to be any more specific as to why I shouldn't play it?
I've been into DH games and the rules weren't that bad.

>AdEva
Don't use AdEva. It's shit in any edition, unless you think Dark Heresy is a good game.

If you don't like Dark Heresy, good luck finding a system or game to run it in, though. I think freeform's the only thing Eva can be run in.

>Tangent
IMO the mythology is just window dressing for pretty scenes. The core of Evangelion is interaction, how different people interact, and what that interaction does to people. The Angel fights are just as much about the pilots interacting with Nerv, the Evas, and the Angels themselves as they are about fighting the Angel, maybe even moreso. How a character handles an Angel fight, and how each fight changes them, is a critical detail I've often seen missing from Eva games. I've been in a few, and every Angel fight has failed because of how the GM and the players approached it. Angel fights are just something you win. The story stops if you don't win, so winning is a foregone conclusion (unless the players have agreed that death of the party is an acceptable conclusion).

This makes fights boring and irritating for a few reasons. None of the GMs I've played under had the creative juices or mindset to change the win conditions of an Angel fight. It's rare that an Angel does anything outside of just attacking the Evas as soon as possible. None of the GMs I've played under managed to make Angels interesting to fight in their own right, mechanically. This, I feel, is due to Dark Heresy not being a game conducive to making interesting fights. The players rarely focused on, or could focus on, their characters during fights. They were too busy with the mechanics, figuring out their next move so that they didn't hold the already slow fights up. I also didn't find that AdEva was conducive to rewarding teamwork, or making it necessary for Angel fights.

You need to figure out ways to do all of that, because the game doesn't. Everything about AngelGen is about combat capabilities, and combat is the least interesting part of Eva.

So the first problem I ran into is the dice core - if you like DH this won't be a huge problem, but 1d100 with crits on either 10% end is a random distribution with too many crits for my liking.

The main issue that I remember is that the game just wasn't put together to well-in the 2.5 and + editions I tried, the main ability of the "uses guns" class, Precision, requires single shots. This doesn't sound like a huge deal, but it means forfeiting the +30 to-hit bonus from burst fire, and your to-hit roll needed to be good to get through AT fields, or you did nothing. Similarly the "probability shell" angel ability (all attacks on angel roll twice, take lowest result) meant the guns person got to just do absolutely nothing the whole fight.

There was a berserker class, which was built around regularly doing stuff that makes the entire team worse off/lose post battle benefits (it's out now). That also made a thing where angels got a number of actions commensurate to the number of PCs, so if any PC was pulling less than max optimization in a fight they were actively hurting the team (by giving bad guys more actions).

In general, I felt like the game very much wanted to be played A Certain Way, and if you deviated from that at all you had a bad time. A lot of "trap" options too, things that sound cool but are actually not that great (see: precision)

I do like RIFTS a lot more than most people-it's very explicit about its lack of balance, and it has a fun setting - but it is accommodating of groups that want to run heroic games, and more gritty hard-fought ones. AdEva wasn't.

ooh, good analysis on the story problems with angel fights here.

>Angel fights are just something you win. The story stops if you don't win, so winning is a foregone conclusion (unless the players have agreed that death of the party is an acceptable conclusion).

Finally, someone who understands why AdEva campaigns feel so terrible.

How is it a problem inherent to AdEva though? It's indeed worrying that every single fight in Evangelion is a matter of life and death, but that's not really a matter of rules. It has to do with the subject material.

If you want a different mecha series that might make it easier for you to figure out how to do an Evangelion game, you could always do it more "Fafner" Style.

You have base of operations. A large battleship with Island Habitation on the surface and cloaking/shielding devices to hide it.

Your goal is to protect your "island" and your residents. Children are shoved into the giant robots because that was what they were bred to do and are not only actively better than it than the older generation but will last longer because piloting the giant robots is lethal over time. The older generation can still fight using less advanced means and by operating the island/ships weapons and such but they're far more likely to die and you lose valuable staff for training/island management/resource gathering by doing so.

Fafner's style of Alien invasion leads itself far more to a tabletop setting since it basically functions that the Alien Hivemind sends out "feelers" to find targets and once it has, it slowly escalates sending in more and more troops to try and get the kill, which is why you're on a battleship with camouflage because once you're discovered you want to try and escape or in a worst case scenario, detach a chunk of the island and use it as decoy to draw the enemy while you escape.

I mean, if you're doing an Eva game I say the smartest thing you can do is open with an Angel that doesn't act you in full force at first.

Some type of Angel that can split itself off into very separate, very distinct pieces that you don't realize are all one big Angel at first and only realize it is when suddenly two Angels you've defeated are now both showing up together and then midway into the fight they combine and that's when your party is faced with the realization that you haven't been fighting the main body.

Then it becomes a game of let it's attacks escalate or go and try and find the head yourself and kill the source

>How is it a problem inherent to AdEva though? It's indeed worrying that every single fight in Evangelion is a matter of life and death, but that's not really a matter of rules. It has to do with the subject material.

>How is a problem inherent to the subject material related to a game that seeks to emulate that material

The cold hard truth is that Evangelion actually makes for an utterly terrible p&p game.

He's saying that it's not a problem unique to AdEva. You lose a fight badly enough in any tabletop game and the campaign ends.

>We estimate the probability of an Evangelion campaign ever succeeding is of 0.000001% !

...

I've always wanted to play AdEva, but I've never been confident I could life up to the standards of a roleplay-heavy game (the only other games I've been able to play have been run by GMs who encouraged murderhoboing).
I'd love a chance to play, but finding a game is hard.

"He's" missing the fact that in a usual campaign, big climatic fights like that tend to be the end result of a series of choices that led up to that point, rather than "You were defending the McGuffin and dis nigga showed up wutchu gun do bout it wite boi"

Yeah, intermediary villains might not immediately kill the party.

Fair enough, but they're not really cinematic. Once you've got them neutralised, chances are a player has corrode or rend field and is busy stomping on their AD. Unless it's AOE specced the evangelions are going to win pretty hard. It's like playing nobilis.

>"He's"
No need to be coy user it really was another person. However this one user misinterpreted my post too, what I meant was in it was a problem unique to Evangelion itself (series/movie/and by extension) game.

The series works because yeah the heroes never suffer a traditional defeat, as the consequences for doing so would be catastrophic.

Then it's true having the same kind of consequences in a PnP campaign, which unlike a series is partially bound to luck and many other factors, is really a risky gamble. I think that instead of blaming the system, one should try to accomodate less drastic consequences for failing to defeat an angel.

Sorry, maybe my post wasn't clear ( here). I really hate the 2000 character limit, and I find myself often butting heads with it.

It is a matter of rules. The stats for an Angel (and the players) are about fights to the death. The rules represent, broadly, how close one is to death. This is why I said that I believe freeform is the only good way to handle Evangelion (echoing insofar as P&P). In the show, rarely is it about how close someone is to death. It's about the trauma of these fights, and the lengths humanity will go to to continue living as a species. The first time a pilot dies, they come right back the next fucking episode.

>Tangent
If I had to whip a system out of my ass, it'd be some sort of stakes-betting system where everyone gambles with narrative currency ("points") that takes effect either in the short-term or long term. If you have enough points, you can go into a fight and come out with few consequences. Go in without enough points, which will be the standard, you start taking consequences. Short-term and long-term would probably be equivalent, but the impact would play out different.

Example: The Angel is heading for the seaside desalination farm that provides the island the majority of their fresh water. It's also a giant sea turtle, so it'll take heavy firepower to get to the core. Players are short on points, so they take a long-term consequence of rigging a desalination system to explode, depriving people of clean water and likely causing people to move away/PR fiasco, but also concentrating enough firepower for the Evas to go in for the kill.

Then again, it's easy to just ignore the points and freeform that.

I agree that these consequences don't work in P&P due to the emergent nature of dice. Either change the stakes/consequences, or change the way you play. Both work.

OP here, add me on Skype we'll talk!
oreal.platine

Sent you a message, OP.

I only have the 2.5 version

3.0 is free as always on 1d4chan, dude

V3 kinda solved the problem. Berserk stopped being a class ability, and became the consequence of losing the fight.
Eva goes ripshit and causes tons of collateral damage while the pilot gets a consequence he'll probably have to deal with for the rest of the campaign.

One way to do this is to add some sort of countdown or attrition meter. Each defeat brings the meter closer to 00:00 and changes the game world for the worse.