Adeptus Evangelion

I know v3 died, but how is the last version of it? To what degree is it playable?

v3 is a tangled mass of slow, clunky, unintuitive mechanics and a lot of rolling on tables and rolling for effects and very poor balance between options and no real system to support interactions on the pilot scale and

Just don't play it.

Damn. How much do you have to use the Dark Heresy books in order to play v2/borderline? The main reason I wanted v3 was so that I didn't have to worry about consulting multiple source books for basic things

v3 is just reskinned dark heresy but with a lot of bad design decisions added onto the already bad design decisions of dark heresy

vBorderline can't be played without consulting the dh(1e might I add, the worse version of dh) book a lot.

So if i wanted to try and run this, what version should I use? And any advice?

The best of the worst here is vBorderline. If you can stomach playing Dark Heresy 1e Giant Robot Battles and trying to put Evangelion in it, then that's what you want. v3 requires way too much houseruling to be viable. I don't know anything about v2.5 but it's probably about as good as vB.

The ones from the Borderline Angel Repository?
Unfortunately, they were - all of them - made before Angelgen was a thing, so they're all handcrafted rather than using what's in the book.
EVENTUALLY I'm going to redo mine to be closer to Angelgen's standards.
The reason that Sachiel is marked as being HARD is because it has 40 Int and should be run as such, it is NOT a standard Sachiel because it was designed to fit the oddities of my game's setting
The skills chapter, the talents chapter (for specific talents only), the weapon traits from the weapons chapter, the Playing The Game chapter, and the rules on Insanity and Fear are what's used from DH.

Waaaay back when, before any work on 2.5 was going on (and thus before The Split), we asked BMJ about updating to another ruleset, because he was the guy In Charge.
He said no, because people already had DHv1, we didn't want to make them get and become familiar with ANOTHER system for this. So guns were stuck with.
So work was done with DH. And at this point, everything is balanced around DH's wonky rules such that updating them to a different system would take as much work as making another system wholesale that's BETTER at being Eva than something based on anything else, and considering how often life intrudes on development as it is that would take...quite a damn while.
Just working on this we can at least try to get something out of it

Speaking as one of the players in this campaign, I've had no criticisms about the Angels thus far.

Only thing that worries me is the talk of end of campaign!

What kind of setting are you running?

I'm not saying you don't have your reasons for using it, I'm just saying that it's a very bad system for NGE, and it's a goddamn shame that piece of shit's the most complete NGE system out there.

There's a 4E in the works, currently stalled out due to dev arguments
I have one of them on discord if you guys want me to bring him in here

Nah. No sense in getting into a hundred post argument exchange with devs. I'll be interested in seeing the results, though.

It's...a very chopped-and-screwed AU of Eva. One with a differently-dead Yui and and giant skyships. Also the main kids of the anime are not pilots, but senior personnel.

There's a lot more to this, but considering that I know that some of my players are watching, I'd rather let them explain this fanfic-based...mass.

Why would there be arguments?

You do know where you are, right?

I've never gotten along with adeva devs because my ideas for what an NGE system should do is different from theirs.

For starters, I don't want the focus of the game to be on the Angel battles, like all the other systems. It should focus more on the relationships characters have. I don't think character death is a valid consequence in an NGE game, outside of special circumstances. Really, something like Fate would be much better, or maybe even an Apocalypse World hack.

Pointman from this game here. It is indeed very different, and iirc, it kinda started that way because I expressed my opinion that a lot of things that happen in canon make no goddamn sense without the assumption that the angels were attacking terminal dogma intentionally. So the group that was getting together for the game started building a world in which the angel threat is responded to with an expeditionary force, to seek out the angels wherever they strike. And thus was Gendo Ikari's New Apocrypha Air Fleet conceived.

How well does this handle mecha combat that's not group of PCs fight single boss monster. How would you retool it for mech vs mech combat?

>>For starters, I don't want the focus of the game to be on the Angel battles, like all the other systems. It should focus more on the relationships characters have
In my mind, these two things should be heavily interconnected. Eva has a lot to do with the horribly fucked up mental state of all of its characters, not just the pilots and these giants are hooked up to their screwed up little heads. Angel battles should have social consequences and social problems should cause combat problems.

of course, positive social interactions would have positive effects on piloting, but who would want Hope and Good Things Happening in my giant meat robot simulator

Five supermassive flying carriers, each carrying a division of conventional forces and a Lance (blame the battletech fan Berserker) of 3-4 Evangelion units. Admiral Gendo Ikari commands from the Naraka, his flagship. His two children, Rei and Shinji, lead the Pilot Acclimation Program, a fleet service designed to make things easier on the child soldiers they have piloting the massive war machines.

For V2, 2.5 and VB? Not very well but there are ways to mitigate this. It works both for mech-based enemies as well as angel-like beings which fight in packs. Returning to a singular pool of wounds for lesser enemies come to mind.

That said, in general, combat in AE is assumed to be asymmetrical.

>character death
You know, I agree with you. This is not a game about the PCs dying. Even the series proper, nobody important died until the finale. They FAILED, yes, on multiple occasions. Failure should be possible.
Making the game 'more lethal' is a pointless exercise and I still don't know why it was done in v3.
Also, it's just kinda that combat rules are easier to write for - you know what people are looking for there in general, out of combat is a lot more...vague.
No idea about v3, but for Borderline you make absolutely sure that you're using Variable Called Shots, and then you watch as everyone goes down quick as fuck. If you want mooks, you give them a single hit location and they die when they hit crit anything, save stating things normal for the Good Things, and Enemy Aces get full PC stats. And you make sure as hell that you rework plug breach unless you WANT your players burning fate a whole lot. Shotguns kill.

I think relationships can have a broad reach, up to and including the personal relationships pilots and Evas have with each other. I'd like for there to be some sort of bidding system, or Create an Advantage spam like there is in Fate where the characters build up to defeating the Angel with a flashy move or several smaller flashy ones. The issue is that it's really hard to do game design for non-combat (as put) because we're just not used to it in systems.

I have no idea why it was done either. I chalk it up to losing focus, or wanting something different from Evangelion.

That said, there are several versions of Evangelion one can simulate. I want to simulate the TV show, warts and all, but I think that Rebuilds are much better source material for an RPG because they're just easier to adapt.

The player party is the Lance of the newly completed Nerv-5: The Sky Ship Naraka, commanded by CAPT Lorena Yosano, our OD, the ex-Shining Path guerilla with guilt over atrocities committed in the name of the cause. The Lance itself is commanded by Ensign Tadodaho "Todd" Hill, my successful attempt at creating a friend-shaped Eva Pilot. Survivor Pointman from a former hippy commune in upstate new york, a commissioned officer under the UN's Youth Officer program, trained as an emotional counselor. He hallucinates his mother's voice under stress and has a compulsive behavior to seek physical contact (specifically to check people's pulses) to make her go away. He's a hugmonster.
>who would want Hope and Good Things Happening in my giant meat robot simulator
Me.

Anyway, Todd and our Rei-equivalent, Rin, are very close friends, due to being each other's first real friend.
Like, absurdly close.
They share a bed.
Neither of them have a good concept of how close friends are supposed to be. Rin grew up in the laboratory of the Haniel Project, and Todd grew up in a town of maybe 200 people that never really gave up on the age of Aquarius and free love. They're touchy-feely.

Which makes the Asuka-equivalent, Artemis Pierce (Neo-Spartan Berserker), VERY CONFUSED.

He's kind of Asuka's training with Rei's personality. Child soldier with a side order of Sacrificed Basic Functions For Extreme Training.

Some of the situations he's gotten the team in have been...err...

How would you describe them, Todd?

THey're not in a romantic relationship, no. In Todd's own words, "If we were like that, we'd kiss. We don't, so we're not in a relationship and it's not fraternization."
"Absurd." and "Easily cleared up if he would just talk before doing things."
Also, he's worshiped by a cult because he looks like Kaworu.

But talking before doing things would result in communication.

This is Evangelion. Communication is HERESY.

Don't cry because it's over
Smile because it happened

If communicating is heresy, then Heresy is what Todd trained to do.
Anyway, away from the characters and how all 3 of the other pilots are in love with Rin for a moment.
Yui Ikari was assassinated the old-fashioned way by SEELE, which turned Gendo away from 'Get my wife back' to 'Get my wife's revenge and stop Third Impact,' and he is currently engaged in a shadow war with SEELE over personnel and supplies, if i read things correctly. He blackmails, extorts and manipulates people into his service as usual, but this time it's to get them fighting SEELE on his behalf. His second in command, Rear Admiral Fuyutsuki, is also in charge of covert ops, and his actions are what allowed Rin and her mother to escape SEELE.

I'm tired. if this thread is still here in the morning i'll tell more. If people are interested, anyway

Has anyone run an Eva game on a different system? If so, how'd it go and what system?

I ran something very similar with a modified version of meatbot massacre at a friends request. It went badly. I wouldn't recommend a system designed for fun when you are trying to do Evangelion.

I lost interest after they made it clear that the goal was "no fun allowed, no apostles, fuck the operations director, only a boring wasteland of chipping away at health."

There is not one ounce of surprise in my mind that the game collapsed and died immediately after this mentality became enshrined.

Well it wasn't quite Eva but it used the Eva setting.

I ran a Delta Green game set in a world where Kaji exposed SEELE and their plan to the world at large, forcing them underground. The last angel was destroyed as he was in the show as part of a last ditch effort to initiate third impact, but NERV disbanded and was reformed into WILLE, and Gendo and Fuyutsuki went missing.

I did the whole 15 year time skip like 3.0, but instead of inexplicably turning the rest of the world to shit, I had it in a slightly less craptastic world with doomsday cults running around. SEELE was still hellbent on starting instrumentality, and were kickstarting crazy cults all across the world to do it. The PCs were WILLE special investigative operatives under Kaji (Now bearded, separated from Misato, and rather bitter) and went around busting up doomsday cults attempting to manipulate ADAM material to recreate angels (Yeah I had to bend the rules of canon a bit but we were short on monsters that utilized SAN mechanics and I didn't want to throw poorly armed fanatics at them the whole campaign) before everything came TUMBLING DOWN.

>There is not one ounce of surprise in my mind that the game collapsed and died immediately after this mentality became enshrined.
AE certainly has a problem of bad habits being enshrined as core game/campaign design, I'll concede that, but that much is true of any RPG.

The thing about apostle is that it isn't the kind of thing that should be a career/class/mechanical option.
It's a plot thing entirely. It's a neat plot thing, but it's a plot thing. You don't need to have a prebuilt career saying you become contaminated and have a bond with your eva in order to work with your GM to become contaminated and have a strong bond with your eva.

Sounds cool. I guess things went really south at the end, didn't they?

That sounds fun.
And hey, Armisael was trying to recreate the Angels, not like there wasn't SOME precedence there.

Which ones in particular?

If you ask my very biased personal opinion, AE suffered from two extremes of 'badwrongfun':

>No fun allowed and it's opposite, only 'fun' allowed
Without summoning the 'I hate fun, you primitives untermensch' brigade, AE seemed to suffer from two opposite extremes based on all those games I've played. The first one is that which says no character or player should ever enjoy himself or have some lighthearted moments because 'this is serious roleplay' and 'NGE was depressing', ignoring the fact that the source material was very goofy and comedic (with a serious undertone of everyone being insane) until the last third. These games are usually dry, not very enjoyable and with a tyrannical GM out there to punish anyone trying to even inject a bit of amusement into it.

The opposite, however, is the game where the GM is a big sissy who hate having any harm inflicted upon the characters and the game end up looking more like fucking K-On than NGE.

>The utter fucking railroad of depression vs the bad super robot anime
Extrapolating and continuing from the above, another problem was that in the former category the GM was utterly intent on making things as depressing and meaningless as possible, resulting in a game where nothing really matters because eventually it will all TUMBLE DOWN even if you went and made some effort. Not only that but anyone trying to do something the GM didn't account for would get slapped back into place. This mentality is particularly enshrined in the GM advice for V2.5 and V3. The opposite, of course, is the game which is the AE equivalent of a monty haul where nothing bad ever happens and a spineless GM allow some blatantly dumb and out-of-genre ideas solely because it's cool.

>The 'you're doing it wrong' brigade
At least during the V2 days there was a LOT of shit and vitriol coming from the IRC community over what was 'good/right' and 'bad/wrong' with someone else's game and while I'll admit there were plenty of games where people got the core concepts wrong I can't help but think it helped enshrine the idea that there is only one mold for how an AE game should go or what it should contain.

I hated that.
The real measure of what's good/bad/right/wrong is if the players (including the GM) are enjoying themselves. Maybe not the PCs, but the players. If they're having fun, then who gives a shit?

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That sounds like a community problem rather than a system one, per say.

Thats a nice goal and all, but the question then becomes "literally how?"

Because you are talking about making the interaction between player chatacters the mechanical focus of the system. How do you do that in such a way that doesnt either tell players how to RP their own character, or mechanically reward them for doing X and thus making it inevitable that players have conversations the same way robots do their taxes for the most mechanically optimal rp conversation about breakfast.

It's a problem when there are so few people playing that the communiy might as well be 75%+ of the playerbase, not to mention said playerbase also has a hand in working on later versions.

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>There's a 4E in the works, currently stalled out due to dev arguments

Let me guess, they can't decide what the core concept of the system is?

>How do you do that in such a way that doesnt either tell players how to RP their own character
Same way some systems do it. The character picks the personality traits for the character they want, and those traits have mechanical effects. For example, in Fate, if your Trouble Aspect is "Stubborn as a Mule," the GM can compell you or you can self-compel for a Fate Point. You took the trait, that's how you want to roleplay.

>mechanically reward them for doing X and thus making it inevitable that players have conversations the same way robots do their taxes for the most mechanically optimal rp conversation about breakfast.
Dunno. Fate gets around that by having the Trouble cause problems for the character in the present for future weight in the story, and it's up to the GM to make those compels meaningful. I've yet to trudge through Apocalypse World hacks or Bliss Stage for more mechanical ideas. Might even use the idea of Fetters from Nechronica, who knows.

All of those questions are good, and it is difficult to answer them, because RPGs typically haven't invested time in non-combat mechanics. There isn't a large body of work to look at and steal from.

B L I S S S T A G E

How did your NGE game go in Bliss Stage?

I meant to actually reply to the guy who asked about NGE games using other systems. It actually went really well, was one of the more memorable campaigns.

How was it mechanically? Did you run into any issues, such as having to houserule things?

Not really, some refluffing in terms of how the mechanics worked had to be reworked, that's about it. A player suggested a bunch of hourserules, none of them made it through because they were dumb.

What was the game like?

Wish I could run AE again but I'm really out of an interesting game concept.

What did you run before?

Fairly Vanilla AE, heavy mythological stuff once or twice and stuff which was basically Rebuild 3.0 a good 3-4 years before the damn thing was out.

You could try running Literally Vanilla Eva, with the same bridge crew (but with different shit going on in the background.)
Alternately, do something where the Angel equivalents have individual goals of their own. Intelligence, sapience, and all that, even if distinctly nonhuman, can make for an interesting twist, after all.

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