Where can I find a good actual play of this? Alternatively, just tell me how it plays

> There are a few ways to approach this problem, but all of them start with this: communicate clearly that this is something that’s not working out. The first step is always communication- no one can necessarily read you mind and know that you’re not enjoying it when the cool young adult Staff is more requested than anything else.

The balance in AE may have been fucked, but god damn if BMJ and friends didn't try their hardest to tell people how to be better GMs. I can't think of any other system that devoted pages to help the GM as much as AE did.

The stats say different. This was clearly designed for V3, but it also looks like an early draft that never got completed. The OD's tree of life only has a couple branches, and the staff list is clearly just a rough sketch.

Honestly, what AdEva needed a simple app of some kind. Something that you could plug a couple values into and hit 'Execute' on to spit out the results of your attack and the rolls that made it happen in case you did fate fuckery to change the outcome.

It wouldn't be hard to program, and it would cut an hour off every fight easily.

It feels like it really wants to be a video game system. If there was a computer looking up the four table lookups I need to resolve one attack, it would be great! Like I said, I appreciate it, but it's SO difficult to book-keep for combats. The status effect chart I posted? Remember that some of them can be applied individually to limbs, so you can end up with something stupid like:

Pilot (Oversynch, Fear result 2 (2 intervals remaining))
Eva (Prone, 3 rounds of battery remaining)
Right Arm (On Fire, holding progressive sword)
Left Arm (Broken)
Left Leg (Smolder (4 intervals remaining))

...And this for each participant in the combat. The other thing with combat is that exposed cores mean that the pilots will tend to just focus the core and nothing else. The best combats I've had with the system were against angels that had no cores. On the flip side, Evas will get disabled by headshots or a big hit to the body, so there's the chance that someone gets unlucky, gets their head melted off, and can't participate in the session.

As far as out-of-combat goes, AdEva is a system that lives or dies based on your group and your GM's ability to roleplay and to set up situations where roleplaying can happen. Since the pilots are almost always assumed to be in one place, there's a limit on what you can do regarding exploration.

> making a catch-all action for stuff so basic they are not going to bother specifying you can do it, but don't want you to not be able to do it at all
> this necessitates making another action for 0 Stamina so you don't have to waste part of your turn dropping shit.

The autism here runs DEEP

Also, for each pilot:
Stamina: 2/3
Sync Ratio: 54 (base) + 13 (temporary modifier) = 67 effective
ATS: 3 (based off effective SR)
ATP: 3/6 (based off effective SR)
Strain Threshold: 3 (base) -1 (strain modifier based off SR)
Current Strain: 1
Fatigue: 1
Injury: 0
Stress: 12/30
Ego: 3/20
Luck: 3/4

And better write down your base and starting values for stress and ego because those matter for breakdowns and disruptions.

Look man, letting go is a free action. I created the table mostly for myself to be able to look things up quickly instead of thumbing through a PDF, because I already had five windows open across two monitors, my tablet open with another chart, and these things printed out for quick reference.

Also it's important to specify that removing something from a Wing costs an action because there are abilities that let you do it for free, which you can take advantage of to make a character that stabs an enemy twice, leaves the knife there, and takes out a new knife in one round.

...

I would like to know more about how the social side of the game tends to work out. Somehow, I doubt all games end up as masterpieces of psychological fiction.

Why not just play Bliss Stage?

It's not dissimilar to other games that have stress tracks and a general assumption that PCs are socially or mentally damaged.
Basically depends on how you run it more than anything inherent in the system.
There's a stereotype "Russian Spartan" character, raised by NERV to be a perfect soldier, with the demeanor of a grizzly military veteran who isn't shaken or upset by anything. For a while, every game seemed to have one, and they generally brought the tone down by being too stoic and unflappable.

The Russian child soldier also brings the game down by trying to be adult competent (Especially at infantry scale combat) for everything relevant.

Why do they even? Where is the fun? Who chooses to be dull instead of playing, like, an unwitting double agent of a national government flipping out on people for pointing out their implanted memories don't add up?

I think it's less about being dull and more about not wanting to participate in the drama inducing flaws. Basically, the kind of player who makes a stoic, "mature" Spartan is the same kind of player who zones out on the non-combat parts of other games.

Nah, see, its like this. Russian stoic Neospartan is just the first rung on the 'my first AdEva character' flowchart after you pick a Neospartan.

The picture for the NS in the book was Asuka. So you have that as your immediate basis for comparison. Obviously, since you don't want to be ripping off Asuka, you play a dude.

Asuka was German. You should pick a different nationality. If you are an american, your next immediate thought was Russia, because for Americans Russia and Germany fill the same headspace as 'countries that used to be our Big Bads'. Japan might be on that list for them too, but they will skip that for fear for being seen as a weeaboo in their giant robot anime RPG.

That gets you to Russian Neospartan (male). From there, you have two options. You either watched Full Metal Panic, and immediately dive into playing Sagara Souske but without the comedic timing, or you latch onto 'In soviet Russia, [noun] [verb]'s you!' memes. Both options roughly lead you into the same place as a stoic fearless guy who gives no fucks, just with varying levels of professionalism and chugging vodka.

Its a goddamn Stand Alone Complex-tier 'multiple people having the same output for a given input' result of handing the Neospartan to a new player. It doesn't happen to everyone, but the hit rate is way higher than you would guess, each of them thinking its a new idea.

I say this, BTW, because I was exactly that guy back during V2. I played a Russian NS, and I had a blast doing it. I didn't pick it because I didn't want to roleplay, I picked it because it sounded like fun to roleplay. And it was, although granted I went less '14 year old batman' and more 'I'm not allowed to form relationships with people because I was taught depending on another person was a weakness that would kill us both, BUT I was also taught teamwork was important, and I have no idea how to reconcile these because I'm a goddamn kid'.

Okay, that's real. Almost the same thought process turned my Prodigy into the stealth scion of Angel-worshiping Branch Davidians.

Going to have to explain that one.

The example character but different. Set up to become important, but a little aware of it and the parties setting it up weren't insiders.

Game plays like complete horseshit, take it from a ~3.5 year straight GM of the system. Take another system, crowbar Evas in and you'll have something much better. I've heard Battle Century G is good, use that or another generic system. Otherwise you'll have to deal with BMJ's godawful editing and the system's horrible unbalanced fuckery.

When my game ends in 1 or 2 years, I'm going to come here and dump a massive storytime on y'all, but here's a small preview. My players are actually playing cosmic abominations with memory loss who are playing their characters. Their character-characters have Stands and we haven't gotten in an Eva in 15+ sessions. Last campaign, one of my players used poorly-balanced custom content to deal 200+ damage to a Adam-tier god in a single turn and kill it after all their previous characters from previous campaigns showed up to kill said god and all died.

I feel like such a divergent concept doesn't reflect accurately on the quality of the game itself.

I don't get it, you're bitching out the system using your own cringeworthy fanfiction-tier story and evidently poor balancing as justification? I'll be the first to admit the game is bloated but try not using Sonic the Edgehog and his merry band of godslayers as your mouthpiece if you want Veeky Forums to listen.

Not trying to defend the heinous stuff going on in that guy's game, but any game will be fanfiction because it's a fanfiction system.

How can you be such a shitty GM that your game lasts for over 2 years? That bothers me even more than how dumb the game itself sounds.

Yeah, but most hedge closer to the canon than not. A few damaged kids piloting lobotomized god-beasts up against 7 or 8 enemy god-beasts that are trying to spank the booty that NERV keeps in the basement. Also, there's a shady conspiracy trying to manipulate everything into an alternate endgame.

Has BMJ done anything since AdEva? His stuff is poorly balanced, but honestly that parts fixable and he was coming up with some cool ideas as time went on.

Bah, that reminds me, I need, to take care of the logs for the game I was in for...a long time.
Shit was fun, even with all the breaks, but said breaks meant I just kinda stopped keeping up with logkeeping. Lots of stupid bullshit going on.
No rules content though, just the RPing.

...holy shit, I didn't realize what'd been going on with v3. That seems like a bit much. The DH-based AdEvas don't seem to require that much lookup to resolve shit unless you actually hit crits though in all fairness, that may be due to simple familiarity on my part

So, is the AdEva reboot project as dead as I think it is?

I know they were going off in their own direction, and even changed the name, but I feel like they didnt have somebody to chain themselves to the anvil and hammer out drafts.

So while this has probably been suggested before, I figure what the hell, might as well toss the idea out anyway.

Seeing as how AdEva is mostly dead in the water and was of dubious functionality anyway, has anyone attempted to hack Nechronica into a Eva game?
It already has the building blocks in place, mentally fucked up kids in a post apocalyptic world losing the bits of sanity they have, the combat is relatively fast paced, brutal and dismemberment heavy. Seems like a perfect fit.

7th Sea spends chapters describing nonmechanical tips and tools available to a GM as both a storyteller and arbiter. The back of the GM Guide for it is well worth a read, especially for people dipping their toes into running games.

Here, have a modified Combat Screen for use in AdEva.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9sDNdup8sb0u_a7ZA_ozLvTI9uz5oL5b99xI7F6YiU/edit#gid=266936950

You can also easily use a modified ServitorBot like this one mediafire.com/file/nt6vx34r8cw6gfn/AdEva Servitor Bot.rar for both rolling everything as well as using it as a quick call-up for all Hit Location Effects and Status Effects.

Both are the results of me running a game of AdEva where my players unwittingly fought their way through the Voluspo with the aid of Hel and her stolen corpses of not-quite-dead-gods. Same game I did some small work for the modified Operations Director Handbook.

Neat!

But I play Borderline

>Left a hidden waifu on the sheet
Neat

Oh, I didn't actually notice that. Waifu eliminated.

What is the difference?

Preeetty much everything. Think of it like different editions of DnD. Technically the same game, rules and playstyle are very different.

You monster

V2 is 3.5 DnD; a mess based on old rules from a different system bloated down by not knowing what it wants to do.
V2.5 is PF; it tries to fix the previous edition with what mostly amounts to not really changing the system, just making a few glaring mistakes of clutter more streamlined.
V3 is 5e; it tries to distance itself from its roots mechanically without scaring people away, and so has reassembled itself into... pretty much the same thing, in a different way.

>games lasting makes you a shitty GM, instead of one your players actually enjoy playing with
I kek'd

Also he's right, BCG is great for Eva shit, especially with the expansion's rules for mental disorders and collateral damage.

Borderline is a version of the DH based AdEvas. Tries to work with that system as best as possible, but DH is DH.

play vBorderline, v3 is hot garbage

Different people like different things, and edition wars are retarded.
Please don't stir shit up again. Even though I prefer Borderline but I'm biased and don't like where v3 ended up myself, I don't go around telling people their shit sucks play my stuff.
To each their own.

This stuff is basically like playing Dante's Inferno

I demand to know more about your games, user.

I hadn't thought of this, despite Nechronica rules coming up before in ideas for mecha games.

It might be good time to explore this now that there's a new translation out for the Nechronica book so the rules will be easier to follow, and the combat is actually pretty fucking fun once you figure out it's endless combos and tricks.

I actually did a bit similar, except my Neospartan ended up being a nerdy Russian girl who probably had autism, and attempts to make her into a badass Solid Snake Child just kind of made an emotionally crippled, needy, dangerous idiot who acted closer to pre-timeloop Homura than post-timeloop Homura. Later I heard basically everyone did Russian Neospartans, but I guess I accidentally dodged the other parts of the stereotype.

I'll admit I ended up sticking with 2.5 mostly because I liked the Berserker class, the Ops Director role, and the tree system ended up feeling a little limiting in some ways.

I can get this is more of a 'by taste' thing, though, and I can get that the entire Ops Director notion might be either the best thing ever or a huge dud and pain in the ass depending specifically on your particular group and game plot/flow.

Operations Director is honestly one of those things thats probably the most fascinating bit of AdEva, because its really a kind of character setup that doesn't exist in other games. But at the same time, whether the GM can figure out how to work with it is the defining feature between them being painfully useless or a real asset to the game.

AdEva in a nutshell: thats a cool idea they came up with, shame it didn't get the polish it needed.

Honestly, I feel like there would be potential if someone got a more organized group together and made a sort of remake/continuation that distanced itself from the source material to some degree, basically pull a Xenonauts with it.

>Alternatively, just tell me how it plays.
Poorly. Find a better system.

Those BCG rules are straight out of AdEva and utter fucking trash.

BCG is a great system and could easily run evas, but I just wanted to tell you that you're wrong. Also games lasting for two fucking years are going to utterly lose all steam.

Weird as it is, I've found the best way to actually incorporate ODs is to have them...be children themselves, so that it isn't two games running at once, that meet up during combat.
Though that basically limits it to clones and MAYBE neospartans.

I had a lot of fun in the time I played this game. It's a system that when ran right, runs really well. But it's incredibly easy to tip over one way or the other into shit that's either too easy or too hard.
As a system goes, I really like the combat, clunky as it is. Once you're used to it and you have the tables open, it can go pretty fast. The process for damage is the same every time, so you get into a rhythm and get going. It works even better if the player does the latter half of the rolling for things like glancing/critical hit and so on so the dm can move on to the next thing. That said, if you CAN'T get down with that, like some of the other players in my group, then it can really grind.

Like the other poster said, it's super easy to over power or under power your angel based on your party makeup and what the angel can do. It's a lot harder to score the right balance of damage, other effects, and soak, and it's a lot harder to fudge for the dm due to the glancing/critical rolls. If you take the right amount of time for considering the strengths and weaknesses of the party and playing with those, as well as watching what you do with the action economy that favors the angel at more players, then it'll be pretty solid.

I've seen stuff about Operations Directors and while we didn't play with one, I've done some reading about them. Honestly, it seems like the game would be better off if the OD was never a player at all. If you can get everyone on the same footing, then you can play a lot more in the background with the shadowy organization manipulating things. The OD is kind of important, so you either make them shit at their jobs, or play two different games. Besides, it's better when everyone's a hopeless child, right?

But that's a thing I really didn't like about the system: Everyone's a fucking child. At the end of the day, fight's over, we win, but we can't uncover the big mystery because a child is too easy to spot, too easy to overpower, too easy to foil. You're never on the same level as anyone else, even the people in the same shadowy organization as them. Want to get a car? Nope. How about a gun? Haha, no way. You gotta have some forgiving gms and then you're trading in that sweet sweet immersion. You gotta give the players some power to play with if you can, and finding what that is important.

My gm(s) did that by basically making us slowly turn into angels (really slowly learn we were angels the whole time) and so we started to manifest powers we could use. Ultimately, we couldn't be killed, but we were such weenies, we never really abused it, save for the time we did some ritualistic suicide to bring the AI running the city back to life. It sorta worked.

And that's the other problem: Out of combat, it's not that it sucks, it's that there's literally nothing there. There's too many skills for the spread of points you get, some are overbroad and too narrow, some useless altogether, and then that's it. There's nothing else. There's so little out of combat content that it almost seems like an afterthought. Which is a shame, because the combat (in my opinion) was really well balanced for the pilots. I tried hard as hell to break the system and I couldn't do it (as a melee character anyway). But then we're back in the halls and we're basically freeform roleplaying and faffing about.

Still though, even if you don't like the show (I can't say I'm a huge fan) it's a fun system that you should try once and probably only once. I give it high marks, for the most part.

Hell I will recommend 7th Sea 2e for anyone looking for solid advice for how to make characters that actually fit into the world.

v3 doubled down on that, yeah. There were a lot of complaints about pilots being TOO good at pscale stuff in prior editions, especially combat (since it was all based on DH), so they took that to heart when making v3.

Cold blooded killer Spartan 8 year olds who can handle a gun better than the spetznaz were a real problem.

If the NS has high combat stats and a bunch of combat talents, the spetznaz should've had at least the same, if not better. And backup.

I've always wanted to play AdEva, but never got the chance. Anyone starting a game in the near future?

sounds like kind of an inherent issue with trying to adapt the source material to a structure it wasn't created for.

i might if theres demand for it

Well, I'll play! Anyone else up for giant robots and adolescent angst?

Fuck off LCD.

I don't even know who you are referring to

>when you've burned through so many alternate accounts that you can't even remember who you are anymore

I'll play.

Liquid Crystal Display?

Madness represents pilot psyche. Fetters are unchanged. Memory Fragments can still be memories or backstory, but should be more relevant. They're supposed to be justification for knowledge and skills, so they need to be more broad as-is, like Fate Aspect-tier broad. Premonition is whatever your overarching trauma is.

Combat is unchanged, except it isn't you with all of the parts, but the Eva. Pilots are not vulnerable to damage on the field of battle unless the enemy chooses to target the Torso after all parts there have been destroyed, maybe with some sort of auto defend 1 to reduce damage to pilots (who have a basic HP of, say, 2, or a wound threshold of two before being crippled). Angel design would be the fun part, since you can split up one Angel across several monsters. You could have the main Angel being represented as a Savant, with their core as a Horror, their limbs Legions, etc., since single enemies don't work too well unless you give them a very complicated amount of AP, parts, skills, and reactions.

It would work very well, all-in-all, if you don't mind the lack of ability to bet parts outside of the Eva (although you could bet a wound, perhaps?). I also recommend using the rebuild of Nechronica's rules by this bloke, makes combat more manageable as a GM: . Of course, it would work just as well in base Nechronica, but beware of chain attacks being overpowered as fuck due to how they keep damage adds from stuff like Super Strength.