Adeptus Evangelion

I'll be DMing a game of Adeptus Evangelion tomorrow, though I have played Dark Heresy, I've never ran a game in it.
Though I do have experience DMing DnD 3.5.
Any last minute tips you fa/tg/uys can offer?

Don't just beeline straight to the objective even though you can. Try to keep combat every 2-3 sessions because it will eat up the WHOLE session. Schoolgirl drama?

It is a good idea that went horribly wrong, because Dark Heresy's rule-set isn't suited for it at all.
Not that I have a better recommendation, but you will have to hack another system or to make your own if you want this to work.

school ork drama?

The nonfight sessions have always been more enjoyable than the fights, in my opinion. Hopefully your players made characters that will interact interestingly together (and won't just ignore each other). Interesting doesn't necessarily mean positively.
OD is a pain in the ass to manage. It's like running two games at once that happen to meet up every so often. If you have an OD, it might be best to do their solo stuff at a different time entirely. Don't leave them out. Don't autoveto any crazy plans they have, either. They don't get to do that much.
Don't throw angels with TB 8 at early groups. I don't care what anything says, it's just not fun when the only things that work are furyfishing or dogpiling with knives. Use more wounds instead, also helps against crit. This is assuming 2.5 of course.

What's wrong with it?

Dark Heresy went wrong with it.
It was used because it had messy crit tables and insanity rules, but the rest of the rules are horribly ill-suited for anything Eva-related. And even those two things...
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I know this all to well. Far too well. I've been trying to work around DH for so long. So very long.

Hm, ok. I've only played with DH-rules once and that was in some Space marine version. The combat rules seemed ok.

Since you're running a DH version of AdEva, the dreaded words 'P-scale combat' might eventually come up. There's always complaints about that.
If you want it to happen, that's what you want for your game and you shouldn't have to worry about any of the below.
If you don't, there's ways around it, to various degrees depending on just HOW much you don't want it.
For one, don't let kids have guns. And kitchen knives aren't real weapons.
Trained professionals aren't going to be people with 30s and 35s in all stats and a few combat talents - if the children have high stats and a bunch of stuff, so will the adults. And, usually, backup.
If that's not enough for the feel you're going for, have the weapon proficiencies only apply to E-scale weaponry. Taking a hugeass penalty while the people you're trying to fight aren't makes things much harder.
Unfortunately, some people just can't stop being murderhobos. One and two are usually sufficient, use three only to say 'you will never win combat outside of your Eva and I don't want you even trying'

Ok since DH is clearly a poor choice for Eva, what would those here recommend?

>Trained professionals aren't going to be people with 30s and 35s in all stats and a few combat talents

Why not?

Battle Century G can work well. Some of the mech building options are features ripped straight out of Eva (namely The Beast, a hand to hand melee upgrade that gets stronger the more damage you take), so all you need to do is have a few upgrades be free/required and you can easily build the base of an Eva unit. There are specific rules for gimmicky boss enemies too, so you sort of already have a system for Angel generation too. There's also the fact that pilot stats don't affect mech combat, so your players can freely build unoptimized school children without gimping themselves in combat. And if you like insanity rules for some reason, the Battle Century Z expansion has an entire section for that.

DH is fine. The only problem you will face are a few nit-picky issues. Don't sweat the details.

Because those are the numbers teenage kids have in AdEva - average of 32, before purchase or backgrounds are looked at. It's quite possible to have some kid that has a Ballistic Skill (or most any other stat) over 40 right out of chargen. And in general, an adult is going to be better at pretty much anything than a kid is - what makes the kids special is that they're the ones who can pilot the Evangelions. Unless, of course, you want to do it differently for your own game. That's perfectly fine, and I've done it that way myself - but not everyone enjoys that.
The thing is that people use NPCs with stats in the 30-35 range with like maybe 1 or 2 talents (if anything)...and then wonder why the kids are beating them up effortlessly. Those are the stats for things in DH after all! Except, because the stat range for 'teenager' in AdEva is the stat range for 'adult' in DH, adult needs to be bumped up some if you want that to be a meaningful distinction.

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AdEva GM here:

Number one tip: when GM'ing AdEva, you take an active role in character development, as opposed to a passive one where you only reward players for good roleplay. In AdEva, you need to be talking about players about what their characters feel, and work out with their characters what sources of either good morale or despair accrue over the course of the story. You will also need to be the voice in the character's head, the inescapable thoughts as they contemplate their wishes and beliefs, unless the players really step up to doing that right away. Evangelion isn't just about giant robots, its about character development and philosophy through internal monologues. You will need to KNOW the player characters to be a good AdEva GM.

Have the rules ready and on hand. Combat is incredibly convoluted.

Make sure players have ways to advance the plot and discover secrets while not piloting. Unless you want to keep them completely in the dark to go along with the mysterious sense of the original show.

P-scale combat is extremely, extremely lethal, and also very barebones. You have to make sure the narrative controlling the combat doesn't too easy or too hard, because there is very little in the way of actual rules for human vs human combat and unarmored characters will die in 1 or 2 hits from any kind of weapon. If you want to implement it, you will want to add skill trees for it, to make it more interesting.

Whatever happened with V3?

Skip tips 2 and 4 if you aren't doing v3

Pretty sure 4 is specifically about v3. Where attempting Pscale combat gets you killed and skill trees exist. Especially since one of the more common complaints about the DH based AdEvas is that the pilots can murder shit too easily.
BMJ burned out a while back and stopped. A bunch of different people picked it up afterwards but I haven't really seen anything from any of them since then.

Has anyone tried this with the Lancer rules?

lancer?

Wouldn't work

I'd suggest adapting something else to the setting. Tenra Bansho Zero looks awright.

I've never had problems having fun using AdEva.
While the combat rules are a little bit clunky, the noncombat stuff has been a problem ever, and that's a majority of the game.
Could it be better? Of course it could, everything could. I'm not sure why everyone keeps saying 'Don't use it at all, do a bunch of work and make your own thing instead' though

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If I was absolutely adamant on running AdEva, should I use Borderline or V3?

I think V3, while still not perfect, probably has learned more lessons from the failures of earlier editions. The combat might not be as meticulously balanced in numbers as Borderline claims, but it tries some neat design choices like making going crazy beneficial to a point because it gives you more roleplay coupons you can trigger for what are effectively fate points... but if you go too deep down that well your character does eventually become near-worthless as a pilot.

Likewise it makes Ego loss slightly more interesting, because Tang isn't the only possible end result of that going badly but just one extreme example of it.

V3's approach to AT Fields is miles better than earlier editions.

Its worth reading through at any rate, if only because BMJ really tried to make it as pick-and-choose as he could, so you might be able to cut out anything you especially hate about it and still run it fine.

It does lack OD, though, because BMJ's stated goals for that book were sort of ambitious even if he wasn't going hollow at the time.

>do a bunch of work and make your own thing instead
Eh. TBZ already has the whole piloting thing down, as well as synch ratio and potentially being turned into tang inside your eva.

For aspiring GMs who want to run Adeva in the variant where Angels move after every player movement, let me tell you that more than 3 players starts to break that system really hard.

v3 always felt like a bunch of neat ideas that weren't implemented very well, nor were necessarily good ideas TOGETHER. Especially with how many times some big thing got overhauled but the things related to it weren't changed at all.
But that might just have been me.
And I seriously, seriously hate the fact that so many weapon traits are 'no you can't' or 'weapon breaks when...', unless that got changed in one of the last versions, though I doubt it

Monsters and Other Childish Things

Don't think those got changed, no. But hey, V3's word docs are up for grabs now and there is no one to tell you no!

Eh, I already helped out with it some, with some minor stuff when BMJ was working on it.
Helped with 2.5 as well.
Besides, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to pick it up.