Adeptus Evangelion Borderline

It's taken...longer than we'd hoped, but the 1.3 edition of Adeptus Evangelion Borderline has finally been released.
It's got a whole shitload of changes we've been making over this time, most importantly having angelgen in the pdf instead of in a googledoc on the channel on irc.
The new version can be found at mediafire.com/file/42qb8e35jiea0o8/vBorderline_13.pdf

Also, AdEva thread

Other urls found in this thread:

docs.google.com/document/d/1wX11RS2zRxTKV6lm16MBMOT6_0nSHcKUCFg7eSHQWRE/edit?usp=sharing
mediafire.com/file/o69miv64p6ifc0i/Adeptus Evangelion Beta Draft 005.rar
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Actually, I'm wondering if I can upload it here directly...
We've also got a bunch of resources here docs.google.com/document/d/1wX11RS2zRxTKV6lm16MBMOT6_0nSHcKUCFg7eSHQWRE/edit?usp=sharing

Yay for an AdEva project that's still alive.

Shame about the ill-conceived v3.

First for best girl.

bumping for interest

kinda lost here

In what way are you lost?

not him, but I'm lost in that I've seen people talk about this game but have faced the barrier of entry that is watching the anime.

what are the strengths of this system?
does it only really work with the setting?

what, as people are fond of asking, is the point?

"Fucked up teenagers use giant cyborgs to stop horrible monsters from destroying the world, all while everything goes to shit around them." is the basic scenario.
The system itself really is made for doing Evangelion-deriviative things (though the specifics are almost always changed, the base scenario above is usually followed).

I see.

so it doesn't lend itself to adaptation to other settings...damn.

does it handle sanity loss and lots of robot upgrades well?

Loss of upgrades not so much due to any such things being temporary - your eva's arm gets blown off alongside the wing loadouts in the pylon, and while it'll take a bit to repair they're going to staple a new damn arm onto the thing (with those upgrades, because we don't think permanently losing your stuff is a good idea honestly for gameplay reasons)
That said, losing said arm is going to make the pilot a bit more unhinged, what with feeling it as if it were their own arm, and they're just going to have to do it again NEXT time against the NEXT angel...

so it penalizes damage to the hull only temporarily, but it has a permanent penalty to the operator unless the operator has a way to re-hinge themselves...

it actually sounds like it COULD work with Lost Source. LS was supposed to be a Sci-Fi Souls game, so a slow spiral into insanity with successive "deaths"(in the games case, this means being re-built from a backup at the nearest workshop) might be what it needs(assuming AdEva uses a simple enough system for it.)

Also has a possibility of outright death for the pilot if the torso takes too much damage (though it's rare - it's the kind of game where actual PC death doesn't happen that often because you want to weave them into the background plots going on,)
That said, Borderline specifically uses Dark Heresy v1 as a base due to how it started out, so 'simple enough system' isn't exactly the best way to put it. Though at this point it's 'skills and the combat chapter and a few minor other things' that we actually use from DH

>same engine as Dark Heresy
well SHIT.
same here
I guess I'll just go back to figuring out new mods to add to the Lost Source setting

does this game have any interesting or note-worthy weapons/equipment/mods/etc.? that I could miniaturize and slap firmly into Lost Source?

Just download the book and read through it. It's got all kinds of shit.

gonna do that in a bit, was hoping for the cliffs notes cause I'm lazy tonight...

With great respect for the Borderline team, I feel you should know there is ANOTHER Adeptus Evangelion game out there, which has deviated far enough from Dark Heresy that it may be more to your tastes.

I would suggest looking up BlackMesaJanitor's work, and comparing it to this newest version of Borderline, and using whichever you prefer.

In that spirit, I'm downloading this update to see if it will suit my group better than BMJ's AdEva 3.5 Beta

ah I see
this is an offshoot of the AdEva I have seen others talk about.

do you have an official link to the BMJ official website?

While I'm not sure it's what you're looking for either (it's still entirely based on doing Eva, and while it doesn't use DH's rules it's somewhat close to it still), here's current v3 mediafire.com/file/o69miv64p6ifc0i/Adeptus Evangelion Beta Draft 005.rar
BMJ doesn't have an 'official website' and in fact stopped working on it due to various reasons.

From what the Reddit tells me, 3.0 v5 is the last thing BMJ did before he quit AdEva for good. Borderline was created due to his, uh, decision to rewrite all of 2.5 himself, and the version of 2.5 that came before is Borderline. Anyways...

There were differences and quite some drama in the dev circles while producing the next version after v2 (which is bad, don't even go look for it). It eventually led to a split, which created vBorderline and v2.5 simultaneously - they are structurally very similar, but while v2.5 was really something of a half-baked stopgap so that the team (such as it was) could next focus on a brand new system divorced from DH, vBorderline was a more serious attempt at developing the DH-based skeleton.

The end result was that vBorderline got further developed and refined on-and-off by its devs over the years (a lot of emphasis on player options and numerical balance), while BMJ moved on to produce v3. Or the v3 alpha, rather.

I would not recommend anyone use v3. Besides all the problems inherent in being an alpha with only cursory attention paid to balance, it's a large and complicated system that just doesn't seem like it ever knew where it wanted to go, which combined with the self-admitted stress of being almost sole developer for it, I presume is why BMJ decided to drop it.

I think v2.5 is okay if you want a "simpler" system than Borderline, but it also has quite a number of balance issues (mostly in regards to trap options).

So uhhh... anyone got any more artwork of Eva in a fantasy/medieval setting?

...

I'd suggest things the other way around honestly - you want either Borderline or v3 (and not 2.5 at all).
v3 DOES have the benefit of being an entirely self-contained system and, while it does have problems, there are some things it went with that ARE just outright better. And while I'm personally not a fan of the direction it went overall fuck weapon breaking FUCK WEAPON BREAKING fuck so many things in the system holy fuck, I'm fully aware that my personal biases are not how everyone else feels.

On the other hand, fuck 2.5 and fuck Elpizo and his ideas that infested it even long after it was gone. Fuck what happened to Skirm, fuck ATT having ridiculous ATS just from using its abilities in a completely straightforward manner, fuck 420zerkerryday, FUCK randomgen, fuck wargauntlet, there is too much WRONG with 2.5 to even list

Why is it that everything an OpsDir does cost some kind of resource?

Pilots only have to worry about ammo (which dont cost surplus) and their non-expendable AT scores.

Also guys, remember that Borderline has an IRC channel over at irc.rizon.net #adevaborderline
We're moderately chill and don't ban people, so don't hesitate to drop by.

>I think v2.5 is okay if you want a "simpler" system than Borderline, but it also has quite a number of balance issues (mostly in regards to trap options).
Don't people generally agree that v3 has its own fair share of trap options? Haven't read the thing since the first public draft, so I can't personally comment. I'm really not a fan of the system and would not use it myself, but it does at least have the advantage of being self contained.

Probably because managing Nerv's assets in combat is a lot more like resource management than piloting an Eva is? Not sure comparing them helps. OD was supposed to get more attention this edition (too much shit requiring resources or being one use is a known problem), but it got held off so we could finally get this release and everything else in it out. OD is a bit lower priority to fix up, since many (or even most) games forgo one.

one way to look at it is that vB was developed by people who could do math with their autistic wizardry

v2.5 and v3 were developed by people who thought you were meant to play the game a certain way and only gave tertiary attention to balance

Neo-Asuka is shit. SSSHHHIIITTT!!!
RRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>one way to look at it is that vB was developed by people who could do math with their autistic wizardry
You're not wrong. Dial runs damage calculations on all the weapons to make sure they're in shape. I don't think mainline dev has ever done similar.

2.5 had the idea that you should be taxed for using a sword because it was a 'hero weapon'
v3 didn't try to do that...but did anyways for a while when they dropped giving swords blocking abilities for a bit and didn't add anything to them at all and didn't change anything to them to make up the difference, which made them 'axes, but worse'

From the changelog:
-A quick fix. It is not the best, but we thought it better to not take even longer. Please understand.

I'm a little disappointed to hear that neither latest Borderline or latest BMJ has Operations Director rules. OD was the main thing that my players felt was lacking from BMJ's work, and the biggest draw towards Borderline.

That said, I never felt OD was necessary, so I see this as just making a straight comparison of the piloting game easier.

(Pic related: the first "Theoi" my players engaged in our campaign.)

uh, what? Borderline has OpsDir and has had it for years. It's just not perfect

Borderline DOES have OD rules.
We just didn't give them as thorough a fix as we did the other careers this time around.

She peaked with the EoE fight to be honest. She could never match up to that now.

She's got a cute hat at least. That's...one point for her!
And now she's been supplanted by New Best Girl!
Totally an AdEva character. Hyped up to be supercompetent, rolls nothing but 90+s all the damn time.

Ah, my misunderstanding, then. I'm very glad to hear it!

>Besides all the problems inherent in being an alpha with only cursory attention paid to balance, it's a large and complicated system that just doesn't seem like it ever knew where it wanted to go, which combined with the self-admitted stress of being almost sole developer for it, I presume is why BMJ decided to drop it.

IMO, BMJ's problem was he went into a death spiral. His dev team dried up, so he took on more responsibility himself, which meant he was on the only one working on drafts, which made his dev team dry up even more until he was the only one left who could work on anything, and he didn't even have a sounding board anymore.

His old team basically stopped playing the game because they lost interest but he didn't have anyone else to listen to. So he kept changing the system chasing after the approval of people who didn't even play the game anymore. And the feedback he did get from other sources wasn't enough.

It got to the point where BMJ would show up and ask for feedback or try to brainstorm stuff and he would get no replies, because no one but him knew the stuff he was talking about.

Its no wonder he burned out. I'm just surprised it took so long.

Doesn't help that BMJ never listened to any of his alpha testers that were selected with the intention of finding GMs who had never run 2.5 to test run v3.

Wait, really?
He didn't listen to them at all?
I hadn't heard that one (or at least, don't recall hearing that one), what was said there?
>captcha

He'd listen but he wouldn't always do what they said.

BMJ was very much a 'I'm the captain, you're the crew' sort of dev guy. He picked a direction, and what he wanted was help making that vision a reality.

He was pretty open to suggestions on how to improve what he submitted, so long as he liked the suggestion. But getting him to change direction or accept alternatives was like pulling teeth. You could get him to do it, but you probably needed 3 or 4 people to convince him it needed to happen and it wasn't going to be painless.

Sometimes this would mean ignoring solitary dudes that had ideas that didn't mesh with the system. Sometimes that meant him being stubbornly attached to his ideas, good or bad.

I remember a bunch of us had the same experience. We'd report problems to him, usually the same glaring ones. Then he'd see it as a non-issue because said glaring issues were intentional. Or he'd say it was noted and just ignore it.

It got to the point where a player of mine was the one reporting to him, because I couldn't be fucked.

Trust me when I say that was an improvement.

2nd edition turned out like dogshit because he listened to too many people and would let whoever was talking at the time sway his opinions and steer the game. BMJ was stubborn as a mule, but making system changes require multiple yes votes was a good thing.

I think I was about the only person keenly interested in giving feedback for the system, and was working with another guy on coming up with new elements or overhauling existing mechanics.

But then I got banned because Blast didn't want me in *his* community.

what is that gun? It looks like it uses 3-phase power to launch projectiles.

Fuck if I know, it's some Anima shit. And I doubt it has anything involving '3-phase power', it's a gun with a triple helix wrapped around it

Sorry to hear that, man. We needed more people like you, not less. Bad feedback is what eventually killed BMJ's spirit.

The straw that broke the camels back was something to do with the AT system for v3. I can't remember the specific rule, but something was written in such a way that RAW the mechanic didn't work at all. BMJ asked how this had gone unnoticed for so long, since it was something big and essential to v3's rules, and was told that it was because people simply didn't use that part of the system.

BMJ had a huge meltdown about not being able to trust feedback if people are just ignoring whole mechanics without telling him, and vanished for like a month. I think that's when he realized that v3 was doomed, because he never released another draft and he stopped talking about the OpDir book he was working on.

Eventually he just admitted that he couldn't work on AdEva anymore.

Which is a damn shame, because I was actually looking forward to that OpDir book.

>I'd suggest things the other way around honestly - you want either Borderline or v3 (and not 2.5 at all).
>v3 DOES have the benefit of being an entirely self-contained system and, while it does have problems, there are some things it went with that ARE just outright better. And while I'm personally not a fan of the direction it went overall, I'm fully aware that my personal biases are not how everyone else feels.

No, v3 is trash.

- There is no balance. BMJ never had a head for numbers; there was no crunching done on any values in the drafts, only eyeballing to what felt right with less and less playtesting as things went along.
- Character building is aimless. Because of the sheer number of options available (which are, as mentioned above, unbalanced), a player who doesn't know what they're doing will end up useless. 2.5 has trap options, abilities or equipment that just aren't good, but v3 is on another level of letting you spend your XP on useless crap. And both share crippling character trait options, as many were imported from 2.5, so that's not a distinguishing factor.
- The bookkeeping required to run combat is atrocious, and increases exponentially with how many players you've got. The interval system was just a plainly ill-conceived solution to the "reaction" problem, which is stupid considering there was an already built-in mechanism for handling automatic reactions to player actions, and efforts to go mapless comically still forced some kind of map or tracker or people would get lost.

There were some improvements on the way the pilots themselves are handled off evas, but the system has so many holes that GMs have to houserule half of it to make that part of the game functional anyway, so there's zero net gain over DH-based implementations.

What was it, just when the hell you're supposed to regain ATP, at the start of turns or rounds? (plus there was other shit about at which step of intervals regaining and maintaining and spending ATP happens)

I wasn't around, but if it's that, I had pointed it out ages before.

I though Intervals were a cool idea, but they came in too late to the party. Intervals were a solution that he came up with after most of the system had already been built, so it just exploded all of the already clunky decisions present. If Intervals had been in from the start, maybe it could have been done more seamlessly.

He did have a couple good ideas, though. I actually really like the whole damage pool/critical moment/soft damage thing. It let you design angels that could no-sell attacks in the short term without completely wasting the players time because they were still contributing to its eventual downfall.

Biggest problem with intervals was that they were tested with the Angels targetting different things each round...but in practice an Angel stuck in melee was going to murderrape whoever it was next to, repeatedly. And the thought that people would DO that didn't come up beforehand. Which lead to melee stuff getting buffed up more, which lead to gunstuff being too weak in comparison, which lead to a whole mess of other shit going on, and then more sweeping changes.
I'm not sure if the death spiral effect of one eva going down but the angel keeping the interval it got from that eva was ever fixed, either. It was still there last I checked, but it might've changed past that.

Yeah, damage pool was a good concept. If intervals came late in development I can see why it was such a mess of a mechanic. Again, I find it strange because the AoO mechanic is right there in the book, which is supposed to be how you deal with the big time lapse of players all taking their respective turns, but instead went underutilized - just a way to punish the party in very narrow circumstances.

It got changed so angels lost their intervals as evas went down. Kept the wonkiness that a well-built PC was probably a better match against a given angel than deploying a whole party.

So did anyone actually play either this edition or the 3.0 for any extended period of time?

I've been playing Borderline for a long, long time.

AoOs were easy for GMs to forget since they were conditional, and a lot of the time the just never came up or came up too often. It didn't appreciably impact combat as a balancing mechanic unless you chose something that would trigger constantly.

And the AoO triggers that's came up frequently were pretty few, and picking them every time felt samey and cheap.

Could've been fixed by giving every angel one AoO from a list of decently common things, then they can take ones from the more conditional stuff - that way it's a given that SOMETHING is going to be giving them an extra thing to do from a small variety of things. Less samey if it's a default thing Angels have.

3.05 Angel-gen gives every Angel some points to spend on Opportunity Attacks from a list, and there are ways to get more points.

...

Yes, but that's on top of intervals, isn't it?
I was talking about a way to help with the action economy problem WITHOUT just outright giving the angel a number of actions equal to the PCs.

I meant that the mechanic was there and could be fleshed out - make angels operate more out of following the rules of their AoOs than from what actions they took on their turns.

But as with many things, while the concept was there the implementation was halfassed so there was little reason to use it off-the-shelf.

Even fits something like Ramiel perfectly. 'AoO for being within X distance'. Could make things for the others as well, probably.

Though I'm curious - have you (or anyone else for that matter) taken a look at Borderline's angelgen yet? Any thoughts on that?

But you forgot REAL best girl

two can play this game

Let's be honest for a moment here - can I just run an Eva-style game in a different, less crunchy system? Is there anything that'd really be wrong with that?

If you can figure out something that works for you, yes, of course.
Thing is, Eva wants to have brutal, gorey combats that nevertheless leave the players alive (but not necessarily well) afterwards, while ALSO having a whole bunch of stuff that is completely unrelated to giant fightan robutts, ranging from 'general slice of life' to 'trying to actually do stuff about the conspiracy', so trying to do all of that gets....weird.
Being stuck with DH in Borderline's case doesn't help worth a damn, but that's what we have, and it would be easier to start from scratch than to try swapping to anything else.

>Thing is, Eva wants to have brutal, gorey combats that nevertheless leave the players alive (but not necessarily well) afterwards,
Yeah, but in practice Evas become unkillable god-machines and you end up relying on pure fiatium to maintain the illusion of threats.

Obviously when I say that I refer to situations wherein their stats mean they barely so much as get a scratch on a high-power high-level angel ability before they even use their AT field to mitigate that damage.

Thus why Borderline Angelgen states gives notes on how everything works together and is intended to make Angels nasty as well.
Also, giving things NOTHING but single-target, single attacks when it's 1v4 is a recipe for disaster no matter how strong that one attack is - when I ran my game I tended to give every enemy some form of AoE or multiattack, even if it wasn't their primary attack form. They wouldn't necessarily solotarget someone, but I'd do things like give something Swift Attack and have them use it to swing at two different players, or ranged attacks that struck everything in a line.

Oh no, that's basically what I did. Nothing but line attacks. Barely did anything at all to 'em. Though this was with V3

With what I did, I killed the manu twice (they got better), defeated a few of the others, tanged the prodigy and an npc skirm, and never fucking touched the goddamn berserker because the dicebot was in love with her.

...

...

Run bliss stage.

Obviously they should run Fate or Gurps because everyone wants to use those for everything. Or D&D.

What changes have actually happened to AngelGen over the past like, year?
What's actually changed, broad strokes

Looking through the changelog tells me little, because it's all written in a way so as to be relative to the old version, and it's been two years since I played 1.2

To Angelgen specifically since it was put up in the IRC channel?
I will be completely honest, I have not kept track of any changes there myself. It's now actually in the PDF instead of on a slow-loading googledoc, and bookmarked, but I have literally no idea about the changes it's gone through because I wasn't the one doing those.

To the rest of the stuff, we added a shitload of talents to all pilot careers, rejiggered weapons and traits, made the patch talents that are only there to correct some annoying things from DH free at chargen, and completely redid how Berserking works, plus added an entirely new angel crit chart. OD is only minorly changed because we wanted to get something out instead of taking even longer, especially with the dread Eye Arr Ell looming over us ready to strike at any moment.

>Redid Berserking
I always did find Berserking to not have much of an impact in vB, that was one thing I liked in v3. It felt like it mattered when the EVA went Berserk.

Also one of you guys should really start using LaTeX or something for this, who writes the actual document? Not having hyperlinks for the Talents always bugged me enough that I added them manually for 1.2, but that's really ugly, bad and time-consuming compared to just compiling it properly in LaTeX.

I also added all the Dark Heresy references, which is why I never shared the PDF. Didn't want to draw the ire of the GW autists

>I always did find Berserking to not have much of an impact in vB, that was one thing I liked in v3. It felt like it mattered when the EVA went Berserk.
Isn't that the system where you choose to berserk (at a price), and then you more or less just kill the angel?

Making it something you can use reliably for a guaranteed win (at a price, yes).

Yeah basically.

You barter with your GM and plead for him to let you survive the encounter, at the cost of that survival (and to survive, you must be victorious) coming through the form of a Berserking EVA

I don't remember how it worked in practice, but I liked the idea of being able to cry uncle and let all Ragnarok loose through that act of submission

Yeah, you admit that you failed, but you still get to feel like you're a fucking monster kicking names and taking ass

Again, I don't remember if it actually worked that way, but I liked the principle

Don't like that idea personally, because it DOESN'T feel like you're kicking ass. It feels more like 'the GM took pity on you and made the enemy fall over dead, but you get to describe it as part of the pity package' and all YOU are really doing is saying 'I would rather pay X penalty than have the game end'

Even putting ass kicking aside, 'guaranteed win' is extremely anticlimactic. Never mind there being a 100% chance you can berserk whenever you want to. Berserk, by its very nature, shouldn't be something you can completely rely upon. Granted, Please Moves exist, but they're a lot more limited in nature and are largely a compromise not to make the thing 100% RNG.

> 'I would rather pay X penalty than have the game end'
And there are a whole lot of other ways that a losing Angel fight can play out, too. Making 'you berserk and win' the standard really takes away from situations like
>we have to pull back and repair the evas to try for round 2
>pull out, N2 spam and devise a new strategy while it regenerates
>you're fighting in some location that isn't it knocking on the Geofront, and it wins, making things worse for you but not losing the game instantly
>fuckit use the Lance

So it doesn't sound like v3 style Berserking is something we'd ever want in Borderline.

Its not quite that simple. I never played the most recent draft of V3, but from what I remember, anyone at the table can veto a berserk. Any player, or the GM. So you can't do it if the GM isn't on board, or if anyone at the table still thinks they have a shot of winning this themselves or isn't down with ending the fight that way.

On top of that, I remember there being a severity mechanic that was used to figure out how much of a price you would pay, but also served as a goalpost for if you could berserk at all. So if you lost the fight too early or if you had too many Evas left standing, berserking was still off the table.

None of my players ever saw V3 berserk as a reliable option. Just as a safety net they hoped never to have to use. Mechanically, its exactly like using the lance or dropping so many N2 mines the angel dies from it: you win the fight but at a terrible cost you should have avoided. The only difference is calling it berserking and fluffing it in a cool way.

I don't see why you can't use the mechanical side of berserking but fluff it the way you just did. Sounds like a basic house rule fix to me.

Downloaded the most recent pdf just to check:
>For an Evangelion to Berserk, two things have to be true: both the GM and the players have to agree that the battle has reached a point where victory for the players is unlikely, and the GM and a single specific player must agree to bring Berserk into play. If a GM refuses to allow a Berserk to happen for whatever reason, it cannot be forced by the players. Likewise, a single player cannot conspire to Berserk with the GM if the rest of the pilots consider the battle to still be winnable.
So the only thing that can stop it is another player or the GM going 'nuh uh'. It might be less guaranteed if people can veto it, but it's still a meta 'okay we win now' agreement. Doesn't change that much.

>Mechanically, its exactly like using the lance or dropping so many N2 mines the angel dies from it
It's not at all like the examples I listed. Out of those, the only one that outright kills the Angel is 'fuck it use the Lance'. The others are different, and set up different things in the future. A lot of the point beyond me listing these examples is that they play out differently than 'pay a price, angel dies'.

It's more like, if everyone dies in the battle, you roll on a couple of charts, take the worst possible ending to the fight, but the Angel is killed.

Depending on how bad you do, the pilot in the Berserking Eva can be killed - Like, if the Angel's near full health and everyone's been aced, the Berserk will probably kill the pilot and/or someone's loved one, you'll get a catastrophic damage which will probably blow up parts of your city and reduce your points for the next fight, and hopefully there'll be a half-dozen sessions of how badly you fucked up.

It's a little bit closer to how it worked in the show, but it's also a bit more un-fun. Berserk, basically, is a lose condition, rather than a gameplay feature to be messed with. That's because the actual lose condition ends the world, and therefore the campaign, which isn't fun for anyone unless you really like blowing up planets.

I'm having a hard time imagining anyone playing a straight NGE campaign with vB when the system lends itself to tacticool fightan and there's so many creative ways of killing Angels, but little to enforce the feeling of being way in over your head, and being, at heart, an incompetent little child who's gotten too big for his breeches

Because, in all honesty, berserking is COOL. And it (shouldn't) happen very often in any system. So if you replace Cutscene Victory Berserk with Cutscene Victory Lance or Cutscene Victory Giganuking you end up losing what may be one of your few chances to HAVE that cool fluff.
And the ones that are 'retreat for Round 2' also require you pull it off early enough and the GM is willing to actually DO that while also having the fight be in a position for that to be possible

> which isn't fun for anyone unless you really like blowing up planets.

Like most of BMJs ideas V3 berserk is sorta cool but ultimately unrefined.

Moving berserking out of the players control as a combat option and character archetype was a great move. Making it a risky fallback option for emergencies was a good idea. Making it a narrative fight-ender, however, is sort of lame.

It should have been a running tab. So once you start the berserk, you start accruing debt. You can gain more and more bullshit effects on a dime mid-berserk, but every time you do you rank up more debt. And at the end, all the debt comes due and bad shit happens.

So if all you do with a berserk is wake up and ignore power requirements and then you finish off the angel with normal attacks, its much different from using berserk to regrow an arm and punch the angel so hard the One Punch Man opening starts playing. Berserking is still a bad thing, but the player never actually gives up control of the fight and if they try to waffle in the middle they leave themselves open to berserking but still losing the fight because they didn't go double or nothing.

That DOES sound like a more interesting way of doing it, honestly. Keeps player agency (and leaves the possibility for berserking in and of itself NOT being enough, such as what happened during End)
Speaking of which, something using that style would probably have a hefty penalty for dying AGAIN when berserking, I'm guessing.

I don think it even needs that. Just say that if you die, you still have to pay off the debt, but the prices have to have legal targets.

So if you died mid berserk, you can't blow all your prices on give yourself insanity and drawbacks. You have to pick the stuff like an NPC dying, or your team mates getting insanity, or an Eva going into the next fight damaged.

I would even be tempted to say that if you die, your debt gets halved but you have to pay off the rest. A PC is dead-dead. Thats usually about as bad as you want things to get in a single fight unless you are in the final session. No need to punish them twice for one failure.

I meant more as in 'you still rack up the consequences you earned and your eva's out of the next fight' which...is a damn big penalty, even if the GM builds the next angel with the lesser number of players in mind because it means the zerking player can't do something that fight.

What would Veeky Forums summarize as the greatest problems in v3, I sort of like it, but it's sadly unrefined and unfinished with too many flaws.

Do you wanna kill a planet?

"Several good ideas, horrible horrible implementations of those ideas"

That application of Berserk is better because it's much more in-line with how the TV series approaches Berserk.

>Because, in all honesty, berserking is COOL
Hell no.

From an out of game perspective it is.
Ingame, yeah, it's fucked up and horrible, but we are not the characters, now are we?
Hell, think about the series proper. The scenes where 01 berserks are cool in that wonderfully messed up way.

I never intended to imply it was supposed to be cool in character or anything. Or something that should happen frequently, ever.

Its too cumbersome. There are just too many mechanics to keep track of. It could do with a simplification, cutting out what doesn't work so what does has a chance to shine.

It needs actual balancing by someone who has a head for numbers.

And it needs much, much more playtesting.

I did a bit of that here - Vague and poorly implemented skill resolution rules.
- Schizophrenic skill advancement.
- Rules that force roleplaying in specific ways to get mechanical bonuses.
- Lack of balance.
- Overly complex character advancement track.
- Complex enemy design rules with no guidance.
- Dozens of talents or abilities that are never used or simply don't work RAW.
- Cumbersome combat engine with many fiddly pieces:
- Turn tracking that's a bookkeeping nightmare.
- Presenting itself as requiring no map for combat, while requiring a map for combat.
- Unreasonably limiting movement/action/power rules.

No, it was pretty fucking scary. I remember being horrified of it when I was a youngling. After a long, long while of it, yeah, I think things like it bursting out of Leliel's shadow and breaking physics over its knee are cool as fuck, but this stupid asinine philosophy where you're at odds OOC vs IC is -exactly- the kind of thing BMJ described back when he talked about changing Berserk, and frankly, I agree with him 100% there and Berserk should be firmly out of the player's control and has absolutely no business whatsoever being something purposefully accessible to them.