Bliss Stage Thread

Its about child sex, user. It's the major point of the game

That doesn't really explain the comparison to AdEva. Besides the meme Eva comparison that falls apart when you actually play the system, I don't see how an accomplished game designer would take inspiration from some thrice failed project from Veeky Forums

>the combat is still confusing to me
It isn't the traditional kind of "combat" you see in other games where you're rolling to attack and using abilities. It's actually a really unique system, I don't think there's anything to compare it to.

Basically every mission has a number of objectives to it. Once you attempt an objective, you pick the character relationships you want to use and roll their intimacy dice (it's fudge dice, so results are +, 0, -, in order of best to worst result). Then you have a bunch of categories to place those dice into to determine how the objective goes. All you need to do to succeed an objective is just put a + into the Mission Success category, but you also have Pilot Safety (basically your pilot's health, gets worse if you place a 0 or -) and then you need to put dice into the relationships you activated in order to maintain them (works similar to pilot safety). So the crunch comes down to figuring out how best to divide up your dice results for the best outcome. Relationships with high trust can tank a lot of damage, so you usually want to dump zeroes into them in order to protect lower trust relationships that you need to put pluses into. Then there's the madman route of just tanking the poorer dice to your pilot safety in order to put more pluses into relationships. Sometimes it's best to straight up fail an objective just to put the pluses into a relationship that's about to break, though failing an objective usually has some bad consequence to it (like an NPC getting injured, or more objectives being added to the mission to complicate it, etc). There's a bit more to it than that but that's the gist of it. It's such a simple system yet at the same time it can feel pretty intense when you're actually playing it.

Okay, so combat difficulty is entirely based around how many objectives you set for the mission. So a really hard mission might have 9 objectives total and an easy one could have 2 objectives.

Objectives can vary wildly, but you want them to be broad in scope unless you wanna portray a certain bliss monster as particularly dangerous, at which point you may wanna add extra objectives to purely destroying it.

Each objective should have some sort of consequence to its failure summed it up nicely.

The game has a very nice difficulty system that entirely depends on a pilot's trauma. Where the more trauma you have, the more complications a GM can choose to add to the roll. (By making players put more dice into the various mission variables.) Which necessitates more dice, which results in more bliss and trauma.

You can also have interceptions. They're as simple as extra objectives you keep in hiding and reveal at a certain point. Which can add tension to what was previously seen as an easy mission.

One of the game's strengths too is that often you don't need to set a 'game failed' state from objectives being failed. Instead, you should strive to ensure that a mission can be failed entirely, but if that happens a whole slew of bad events that can lead to a death spiral are going to happen.

I'll give you a storytime of just that happening in a sec.

He specifically mentions it on his website, man. He says he basically wanted an Eva game that focused more on intimacy and character relationships rather than the mechs and the monsters, and mentions AdEva by name as a game that he didn't like because of that.
I personally think he's a degenerate because it is very very much a game about child sex. It is a game where nearly every character is under the age of eighteen and most of them probably have some sort of sexual relationship. The pseudo-GM is expected to play a character who most likely is a pedophile. If he didn't focus so much on sex then it wouldn't be as weird but it is very much about sex. Not explicit in any way but it is still a very central part of the game, and I don't like that. I don't want to spend my time ERPing damaged children fucking and I don't want to spend time with people who do. I kicked someone from my group for suggesting this tripe, because its some fetish shit. The dude was a pretentious asshole who was into loli/shota hentai, which basically makes him the target audience for this game.

I like how you spend your entire thing ranting about how you hate the premise and how no one should like it because you don't like it. Why are you here again?

>The pseudo-GM is expected to play a character who most likely is a pedophile.
In all of my time playing this system over multiple games, I have never seen anyone get a five with the authority figure. (Wait, no. There was once, said authority figure developed a reputation as a crackhead and nobody ever trusted or listened to them again.)

Like it has some cool ideas but it's not worth playing for them alone. I like the idea of relationships literally being your weapons and while improving your relationship makes the weapon stronger damaging the weapon has feedback and harms the relationship. That's cool, and I'd like to steal that and use it for a SMT/Persona sort of thing. I just don't want to use the child sexual relationship sim framework it comes from

Then leave the thread, my dude. We're discussing bliss stage here. Not your failed homebrew.

Because it's pretentious pedophilia by proxy: the RPG. It's basically FATAL tier shit and should be mocked and derided for the retarded magical realm shit it is

It's a bad game and you should feel bad for playing it.

Monsterhearts did it better

Why can't you just homebrew it so you don't have the kids fuck at Intimacy 5? Have the players decide to bond in a different way, making each other true brothers or some shit.

If it did, tell me how, I'd love to know.

Bliss stage is also from an older era of storygames, so it's clearly experimental and less refined.

>who have never fought and made up (to the point where you're both bruised and bleeding) and thus don't really get it.
...user most people haven't done that. Because that's an extremely unhealthy way to live and deal with interpersonal issues.

Monsterhearts is even more of a magical realm game than Bliss Stage. The creator is an obvious militant homosexual and the game is basically just propaganda to enforce xir agenda. The game is literally built around mechanics that strip you of any agency of a player. Thought you were playing a straight character? Too bad, I rolled a 12 on my seduction check, you have to suck my cock now. And don't even get me started on the all the retarded sex powers.

At least Bliss Stage literally specifies that people can't force you to behave in a certain way just because of numbers on a sheet, you're free to actually roleplay a character instead of getting rollplayed into getting the blood sucked out of your cock by a gay transexual vampire.

Cont.

Okay, so I mentioned how objectives should have a consequence and how difficulty is determined by pilot trauma and the number of objectives

The best example of a mission where all of those variables happened was Seven.

On the narrative side, the game was hitting its final stage. And there was the mother of all bliss entities, just sitting at the edge of the city leeching people's lives away by just existing. They discovered it almost too late too.

Enter the Seasoned Veteran. This guy wasn't a particularly good pilot. He just somehow managed to clutch everything and stumble his way to hard-fought victories. He was sitting on five trauma and all of his friends from before were suddenly starting to bliss out.

No one else is available, so he deploys and pretty much immediately starts feeling the pressure. Initially, he's doing well, but he has to practically burn through every 'disposable' relationship to stay afloat and save the people being threatened by this thing.

In fact, looking back at it. It was kind of a symbolic take on this guy sacrificing half of the resistance movement for two people. (When a relationship is broken for the first time, a character is harmed. A couple of previously harmed characters from other circumstances even died.)

So after getting the shit kicked out of him and barely surviving for six objectives. He comes to the seventh objective. And the roll come up so badly that it's about to break the anchor relationship and finally cycle out every relationship in use if he wants to succeed it.

The objective's failure cost? Waifu Blissed.

The next two objectives? Character harmed, Anchor Blissed.

He fought. Came up short and now he's got to make the decision. Kill this thing once and for all at the cost of his waifu's life and his own? Or cut his losses, rescue the girl and hope he can maybe win the rematch without an anchor.

He rescued the girl. No waifu no laifu.

I'm not really doing it justice.

This brings up another question. So what's the difference between gaining trauma and gaining bliss?

That's a gross misinterpretation of the rules of a game that is explicitly about teenagers exploring relationships.
Why would you do th... Ah, right.

Trauma kills you in a way you feel appropriate at 7, bliss ends with your character either falling asleep forever, becoming the new authority figure or leave the resistance to move on with their life in some way.

Regardless of whether or not you bliss or trauma out. You're entirely free to narrate it how you see fit. And your character usually accomplishes some sort of major objective along with their demise or disillusionment unless you feel it massively innapropriate.

It's important to specify the character was at 6 trauma and 6 terror. (When your terror exceeds trauma, you gain an extra point.) The guy was one botched roll away from dying and 94 bliss, so if a relationship if 5 broke he'd actually bliss out.

It was an insane clutch.

Err, I should specify that 108 points of bliss puts your character into epilogue or authority figure status.