Adeptus Evangelion

>Rahxephon, Gasaraki, Argento Soma, Bokurano, Space Runaway Ideon
These anime are sometimes (favorably or unfavorably) called 'evangelion clones' for a variety of reasons with the exception of Ideon, which is the predecessor (and one of the inspirations) to Evangelion and made by Tomino of Gundam fame. If you need more of that eva flavor (in varying degrees) but you have already seen the anime, the movies and read the manga.

>King of Braves Gao Gai Gar
Thematically and tonally the utter and absolute opposite of Evangelion. So why is it added to the list, then? Because, in my very biased opinion, this is one of the best 'monster of the week' mecha show. It's a very episodic children-aimed toy commercial anime, but one with very solid and competent writing, namely in it's creativity for all the 50+ monsters who appear. An absolute must if you want your game to not get stale with the angel fights.

>Getter Robo
A sprawling sage composed of several manga as well as anime spinoffs. While a bit more on the hotblooded and badass end of the 'super robot' genre, Getter Robo delves later in it's serie in themes of cosmic forces, the nature of humanity, life, evolution and all sort of trippy themes with equally trippy visuals with god-like mechas who transcend mankind. It also has robot dinosaurs, which is awesome.

>Godzilla series
Giant fucking monsters. That said, the Godzilla serie is THE kaiju movie serie and you are bound to find one or two ideas for a monster or plot element you could use. It's also good to help portray humanity's smallness compared to giant beasts and machines. The most recent japanese film, Shin Godzilla, was directed by Hideaki Anno himself.

>Lost
J.J. Abrams is a fucking hack. There, I said it. But that said, this is a show which dick around the audience pretending to lead to something while introducing countless pointless plot points. A good lesson in how to learn to bullshit your players into thinking you know what you are doing, which is a key skill for running Adeptus Evangelion.

>X-COM serie
Aliens invade earth and you are put in charge of earth's first and last line of defense, an international taskforce which is often undermanned and unprepared against the escalating threat. You must constantly research new technologies or be left in the dust with humanity destroyed. Sounds familliar, theme-wise? Both the original and the reboots are great material to mine.

Appreciated, user. If you're the one that said previously you've GMed, what about some storytime? Even a few brief summaries or perhaps a tldr of the campaign(s)?

For further inspiration, if your group has a recovering evangelical christian in it, get him drunk and ask him about the rapture.

I suppose. It's late, at least in my timezone, so apologies if the posting gets all messed up or incoherent. Truth be told, however, I'm a little shy about story time-ing my games.

Don't be shy. No matter what, there's always worse games that've happened.

We had a small game planned once. NERV 5th branch, was supposed to be a weapons testing range in the US for EVA-scale weapons, which meant there were a few EVAs on hand. Reject models, with reject pilot candidates. The base itself was all aboveground, on worthless land in the southern US. The way the DM had it planned, we expected a few "comfy" sessions and then shit to hit the fan, but we never could get our shit together and play.

Personally I prefer AdEva Borderline, but I've never managed to get into a game of AdEva that lasted more than 5 sessions, to my eternal sadness

Didn't they stop development?

Oh look at that another team have taken it up and putting their own spin on it. Maybe we'll see something of that one day.

I've got a blank sheet and a Combat Status Screen that work through GDocs for v3.5. Additionally, I hashed out some OpDir rules using what AdEva dev originally dropped a while ago. They're not perfect, and I fully endorse considering the OpDir to count as a fourth player in combat for the purpose of Angel Difficulty if you care about that.

Don't be afraid of throwing horrifying shit the players can't handle in AdEva, the Berserk feature and the possibility of a plot-powered N2 Mine exist solely to let you go all out. That said, it's best to always at least give the players a chance at victory; they'll likely fuck it up, but you can at least confidently say they could have won if they weren't awful.

Blank Sheet
docs.google.com/document/d/1lqGN1dr7kst3H9ICR7JDIi5QqT8Bsbe-lg6G1VC-NoY/edit

Combat Status
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9sDNdup8sb0u_a7ZA_ozLvTI9uz5oL5b99xI7F6YiU/edit#gid=266936950

OpDir Rules for 3.5
docs.google.com/document/d/1CgCGEIxYp47DEgMMondf-yKW9pGzoXlZJK3E5fBTKo0/edit

Moblie Suit mechanicus is better BTW

though someone needs to make that one for Deathwatch

All of the systems have their flaws. The early stuff and borderline are all dependent on DH as a base system, which means extra rules to learn and frankly beyond a couple of ideas DH isn't actually a good foundation for an Evangelion game.

DH is based around fights being bloody gorefests where you blow away groups of mooks, and the moment you run into something your guns don't immediately turn into salsa you better be running the fuck away. The brutality of the combat is good, but that's pretty far from the 'boss fights forever' standard AdEva campaign.

V3 was all in one book, so thats a plus, and it also had some new ideas. Some of these new ideas turned out to be cool. Some of them... not so cool. Its not well balanced, but no version of AdEva really is. Id say that V3 is probably the best version of the game anyway, because when the new mechanics click they really work. The few fights I've played of V3's combat were the sort of thing where in the heat of the moment I was totally convinced we were getting our ass handed to us until we pulled victory from the jaws of defeat, but after the fact looking back on it we were actually doing fine. It just felt like we were doing badly.

Oh. A while V3 powerlevels get wonky, you are allowed to make more than one type of Angel. DH based angel design is fucked, because the action economy means that any angel you make that only has one turn a round and doesn't shit out 5+ attacks that turn? Might as well forfeit the game before init is rolled, because you will never land more than one or two hits on an Eva the entire fight, because dodges. Every angel has to be a superspeedy multiattack spammer just to have a hope of being relevant, or its attacks need to be one-hit-kill tier power where you can blow an Eva the fuck away from full health if you ever do anything. Classic angels like Ramiel simply don't work in early AdEva systems.

>its attacks need to be one-hit-kill tier power where you can blow an Eva the fuck away from full health if you ever do anything
>Classic angels like Ramiel simply don't work in early AdEva systems
So...which is it?
Also, you're forgetting things like penalties from terrain/circumstance/the Angel itself, multiple reactions on the Angel's side, defensive properties, Full Auto, blast, just hitting multiple targets at once, happy funtime mindfuck, various player talents, or as much as I dislike just throwing it about, Fear.

I like the battle screen but can we get a version that doesn't have the cast of cute anime girls already filled in?

Ramiel doesn't work because while its attack is very powerful, its still only one attack a round. With the various defensive options the Eva's have, most of those rounds even if Ramiel hits 100% accuracy, the Eva's can negate the hit entirely with active defenses like dodges.

Even then, based on how DH hit locations work, even if the attack does infinity damage? Its still unlikely to actually take the Eva out of the fight. Because you can vaporize a leg or an arm from full health, but the Eva can fight through that loss. Unless it vaporizes the body or the head, the Eva is still in the game.

And thats assuming a 100% hit, infinity damage attack. Which turns into more like a 'maybe 50% chance it does any damage at all, 40% chance it hits someplace that actually takes out the eva'.

Single, powerful attacks suck in early AdEva.

There, removed the party I had on it. Feel free to copy it and make any changes you want.

Hi, AE GM who posted this. Just woke up and I need to address some of the issues with AE that people have brought up as those issues are very legitimate ones and it is impossible to have ran this game and played it so much without being fully aware of them. Again, this is all keeping in mind that I've never played V3 and thus am utterly unable to address any of it's criticism, flaws or strengths whatsoever as my only experience with it is just lightly skimming the book.

Since all my experience is heavily V2 (which I know is, in retrospect, a pretty terrible version but its all we had in the early 2010) and VB this is all I can offer input with. I'm not excusing the design flaws here, more explaining how to counter or mitigate them.

>DH is based around fights being bloody gorefests where you blow away groups of mooks, and the moment you run into something your guns don't immediately turn into salsa you better be running the fuck away. The brutality of the combat is good, but that's pretty far from the 'boss fights forever' standard AdEva campaign.
The bloodyness of combat CAN be used to your advantage but this requires taking the V2 angel design, tossing it into a trashcan and setting it on fire. Having ran and played V2 several times back in the day what I came to realize is that you are much better off making 'glass cannon' angels in order to speed up combat and it's lethality. Angels which can lop off an arm or a leg in one blow but, once they are actually neutralized and submitted to a hail of sustained gunfire die out fairly quick. This avoid turning combat into a protracted encounter.

You see, the longer the battle goes on the more the angel has a chance to win. Angels only really need wounds, which in some cases they can regen. An eva has limited power, limited ammo and it's pilot can get fatigued, incur IP gain or lose ego. In other words, the longer the battle the more fucked you are.

Continued in other posts because brb

Did not help that they had average TB be 8 in 2/2.5 and go up from there.
That was not a good decision.

I made those mistakes, which is why I say it
>requires taking the V2 angel design, tossing it into a trashcan and setting it on fire

Just add more wounds or ablative layers if you want a tanky angel, DON'T give it TB 12+

Continuing my rambles, let's expand upon angel design:

Now so far I've posted under the assumption that a game would work similar enough to the NGE canon that not much need to be discussed in angel design beyond balancing and tweaking the crunch to account for the pitfalls of the DH core system used for V1 to 2.5. However...

>Tweaking your angels
Now this would probably first require a post about 'constructing your game mythology' but since we're still talking angel design and crunch, might as well talk about it real quick: canon angels are, barring some exceptions, generally very tough and strong but dim-witted, if not oblivious kaiju with a single-minded goal to reach what's beneath the base and initiating the end of the world. It does not need to be so, however, depending on your game 'mythology' and the nature of your angels.

>Tweaking intelligence
More intelligent angels are exponentially more deadly because of one simple thing they'd do, which most normal angels don't: called shot. The moment angels (or whatever you call them) become smart and perceptive enough to aim for the head first, this make combat over pretty damn quick. The said, there is a middle-ground between dumb-and-oblivious. Perhaps the 'angels' of your game have more of an intelligence on par with a cunning predatory beast: tiger, crocodiles and the extinct dinosaurs are all big killing machines but we wouldn't really call them dumb, right?

>Angel number
One thing which can seriously change a game is if multiple angels can attack at once. Canon angels are generally solitary creatures. Perhaps the 'angels' of your game are, again, more like pack predators and capable of rudimentary socialization. I'd recommend dropping their overall power level if that's your plan, but keep in mind this will SEVERELY change the dyanmic and style of your game.

Multi-angel encounters REALLY makes the whole action economy thing mentioned above change dramatically. Two half-strength Angel-equivalents vs 4 pilots runs far differently than one regular Angel vs those same 4 pilots
Also, an Angel doesn't need to make called shots to be run intelligently! It just needs to make efficient use of its abilities, to be able to tell what's actually a threat, and - if need be - know when to call it quits.
And this power is fun for splitting people up.

>Also, an Angel doesn't need to make called shots to be run intelligently!
That is also true but the called shot example is the most basic thing a non-retarded angel will figure out, that if it tear off the head of those annoying Giant-Lilim-in-Angel-meat they will stop trying to prod him with those chunks of metal.

Is OP still around?

Why? Explain your preference

Its a joke. MSM, to my knowledge, never remotely got past planning stage.

Does anyone actually run AdEva games? How do you get groups together for this kind of thing? I've wanted to play for so long but I know I'll never get into a group because none exist and my real friends just aren't autistic enough for something like AdEva

...

>Does anyone actually run AdEva games?
Most were ran on IRC, usually between 2010-ish to 2014-ish, which was generally the 'golden age' of Adeptus Evangelion, spanning between the development of V2 to V3.

This was also, I think, what largely lead to the downfall of the game.

V1 came out in 2009. By 2015, the people who were originally invested in the game and development were older and had real life jobs and shit. Most of adevadev wasn't actually in any adeva campaigns anymore, both due to IRL time constraints and simply having played it for years and gotten burnt out on the genre.

BMJ was the guy carrying that project. Once he burned out, it was over. They community wasn't big enough to replace other members of the dev team, and it certainly wasn't big enough to replace him.

The dev team was also full of autistic and/or egotistical shitstains who could never agree on what was the 'proper' vision of the game, resulting in the 2.5/VB split.

But you are right that most people interested in AE got to play it. In my case A LOT. Probably way too fucking much to be frank. Hell I've ended up playing AE more than fucking D&D, the most common and widely available (and played) tabletop RPG.

Without any new blood to enter the community and the same people playing with the same people, the game got really stable. It became an insular community ran by dickheads who pushed out anyone who was trying to do things differently or simply refused to join in on their circlejerk.

I'd be down to play a game, desu. I never got to play with my original group, and we all moved away from each other.

One thing which I think made AE 'crappier' was that after 2.5/VB came out, there was a MASSIVE DIP in the amount of homebrew people were doing. I remember that the V2 day was full of game with houserules, new content and ideas....sure, a lot of it was crap, but people were attempting to try new things to keep it fresh.

The rise of new editions didn't help people waning interest. If anything, it made it far worse.

I wanted to play it, but the group that almost played it kinda petered out. We played something else and then just sort of drifted apart.

I ran two games, one in V2-early v2.5, and another one that just finished a few months ago in v3.

The first one I ran IRL, the second one we did voice over the Internet because getting everyone in the same room was difficult for logistics reasons.

They were OK.

V2 had the problem of children becoming hyper-capable super-soldiers that could rival space marines outside of their evas, and V3 has some good ideas but the system is very clunky in that it takes so many table lookups in order to resolve an attack. You want to know what an attack in V3 looks like? Here's how it looks like:

1. Roll to hit. Don't forget your bonuses and any effects on you or the target.
2. Does the target respond to the attack with an interrupt or AT field? Resolve, if applicable.
3. Note the hit location. Add in any location-specific hit effects on target (such as Smolder)
4. Roll damage.
5. Calculate effective damage after armor and modifiers.
6. Increment damage counter, and re-calculate Critical Momentum. Compare effective damage to toughness of target (don't forget modifiers) to determine if the attack was critical or glancing.
7. Roll 1d6 for glancing or 1d10 for critical attacks and add the target's Critical Momentum.
8. Any response from the target for this roll, before hit effects are applied? Apply any modifiers.
9. Find the correct table based off damage type (Energy/Kinetic), target type (Angel/Eva), and body location hit. Look up the hit effect for the number from the last step.
10. Apply hit effect to body part, and global modifiers, etc.
11. If the target was an Eva, re-calculate AT field strength based off any synch disruption from the last step.

Yeah, I understand that this was done to create a combat system where you can take hits and lose limbs and not die, and on paper it seems simple enough, but it is so clunky in practice.

It's probably one of the few tabletop systems that would work much much better with a computer doing the math and tracking.

There's two maybe three places where the target gets to do anything in response to the attack, the rest is just book-keeping.

I participated in one game and thought it was a lot of fun, but then I tried to run one and was surprised by how unfinished it actually was. Still a lot of fun, though.

I joined a 2.5 game in progress once that had gone like 15 sessions with only one angel fight and a couple more after I joined before another. Somebody got one shotted and mission aborted and then the game died off. So other than a bit of teenage anime shenanigans on base I dont know if I can really say if I've really played it before.

I think the Dark Heresy base really isn't that bad though. The pilots can't be space marines if you don't give them a gun and somebody to shoot at.

I think 3 got it right with the whole "Pilots outside their evas are early teenagers who probably can't even shoulder a rifle correctly, never mind use it. If they get in a straight fight against an adult, the adult wins outside of extreme circumstances" thing.

There are always plenty of players, the problem is always finding a GM

Committing to running AE is, from experience, pretty taxing. I can see why the player/GM ratio is even more imbalanced in this case.

All of the editions are bad. The older stuff is based more on Dark Heresy, so it's more bad.

Use Fate instead.

>Call crunch-based games bad
>Use Fate instead.
Spotted the hipster numale

That's because Evangelion isn't the type of setting or theme that respects the more granular, crunch-based stuff. You need something a lot more flexible.

Plus, stress tracks work really well for the city/geofront, for the evas, for the pilots, and aspects work well on everything.

Whereas Dark Heresy was never a good system anyway, for any purpose you might have. It'd almost be better to use D&D3.5 instead, if you want crunch.

But FATE is narrativist garbage. It's not even an RPG.

Nope. You're wrong.

I know you're mad because you didn't know about the aim half action and your gm only threw +0 and under modifiers on all tests but Dark Heresy is a fine and crunchy system on its own.

I'm sure Fate's "Rolling +4 Fight Session 1 to 100" and finding exciting new ways to twist your aspects to apply is really good for something though, maybe even an Evangelion game.

... As someone who loves FATE ad Evangelion, I literally spent a week trying to craft a FATE-based eva system. Shit's hard.

Mind you, ad-eva is shit, but yeah.

Man, I almost took over dev for MSM but the guy who was working on it never got around to sending over his notes. Though to be fair, I never would have had the time for it either.

Yeah, I've been working on a hack for a while. A few ideas I have is that the city itself has three stress tracks- Resources, Collateral, and Geofront. All of which is restored over weeks instead of the normal scale. Resource stress is taken whenever the OD or whatever is spending a lot of shit in a hurry. Throwing out hundreds of N2 bombs, rushing repairs on an eva, that kind of thing. Collateral is a peculiar fusion of both the damage done to the city as well as how NERV is seen by the outside world. A pilot says something ridiculous or stupid on a public scale? Collateral stress. Someone smashes straight through a hospital to get to a weapon? Collateral stress. The NPC Commander of NERV tells SEELE to go fuck itself? A heaping pile of collateral stress.

Finally, geofront stress is taken whenever an Angel gets past the evas and starts trying to smash down into terminal dogma.

One thing I'm not sure how to do is how to handle piloting the Evangelions- it's the main wall I've been knocking myself into.

>One thing I'm not sure how to do is how to handle piloting the Evangelions
Just get in and think about how much you hate your father.

>Whereas Dark Heresy was never a good system anyway, for any purpose you might have. It'd almost be better to use D&D3.5 instead, if you want crunch.
If someone takes this obvious bait they should kill themselves

He says, taking the obvious bait.

Pointing out that something is obvious bait isn't taking the bait

I know that this is also bait and I took the bait this time, but I do so knowingly.

To be honest I'd only really use Ad Eva for the random tables. FATE is actually very well suited for running an Eva game for numerous reasons.

Checking in - I'm a dev working after the BMJ generation left. While the main book is still dead, project EYES just got announced and I'm working on some stuff. It's not gonna be anytime soon, mind, but it's something.

For the record, 3va had some good ideas, but it got bogged down by sticking with 1d100 mechanics and rigid character options. And blatant imbalance, but that comes with the territory.

Wait, there are devs working on AdEva?
What are you guys working on now? What are your plans?

Can you autists just accept the facts? AdEva was built to fail. It was a bad idea, V3 had literally zero merit. V1 & 2 were hastily constructed meme fests.

Let it die.

Uhhhhhh.

EYES is reformatting 3va to address its structural issues.

I'm adapting it closer to DH's future. It's complicated. The best way I can put it is smashing together They Live, XCOM 2 and Dark City. It's a personal project more than an actual development fork, but I hope people like the eventual result.

Fucking stop.

Oh no, I was called a name over the internet aaaaaaaaaaaa

You're really fun at parties, aren't you?

No. :3

>EYES is reformatting 3va to address its structural issues.
Which means what, exactly? Could you name any specific mechanics you're replacing, and with what you're replacing them?

Borderline's still being worked on as well

I just don't get why devs are trying to work with the shitstain known as Ad3va, when borderline has issues which can be worked around.

Not a dev, but give me like 5 hours to read all of their discord stuff and i'll get an answer.

Also, here's a post they made on reddit recently compared to 'development' which from the discord, started in January.
reddit.com/r/AdeptusEvangelion/comments/6rchen/project_eyes_update_1/

I'm not a part of the dev team so I can't say what's exactly being changed or what's not. Just that I talk to them on occasion.

Wait what? What's being worked on?

But it's fun

Things like OD and a bunch of tweaks to make things smoother and more interesting if we can ever get our third to show up

Is there any room for a compsci nerd who might be able to program something or is the EYES system going to be better than the massive matrix-lookup system from before?

You mean DH or 3va? Either way, EYES is looking to simplify lookup, as am I.

>More intelligent angels are exponentially more deadly because of one simple thing they'd do, which most normal angels don't: called shot.

Zeruel in v3 can automatically call shots at point blank and hit, so you can literally just float him around decapitating players one by one starting with the damage dealers. Almost guaranteed TPK.

It's dumb.

>Gets torn the fuck apart by shinji getting into close combat instead of trying to shoot it or nuke it, using only 01's hands. Not even the knife.
>Almost died just from that if not for the timer running out
>This BEFORE berserking
The official AdEva Zeruel has never made sense. It's the complete opposite of how it should work.
It isn't the BIGGEST BADDEST BADASS EVER, it's a puzzle boss where everyone but Shinji failed the puzzle (get up close and be willing to lose an arm and now the fuck can't touch you)

Keter was designed to be the "biggest badass ever" in the rules as basically a proof of concept about how you could make a really powerful angel. He's basically 2nd-impact era Adam.

Zeruel was just thrown a bunch of asspull rules "lol just remove those limbs" "okay I automatically hit unless you have a dodge ready"