My group recently started an Evangelian-esq game with modified DH rules (because we playtested C-tech and none of us especially liked anything other than the assets/drawbacks) where battles have multiple phases.
First, you are the front line of defense. Turrets and tanks and shit. You get 3 rounds, and any damage you actually manage to inflict on the enemy before those 3 rounds are up stays, but its really hard to do. Also, its your job to try and draw the enemy away from the fortress city you are defending before the giant robots get fielded and all hell breaks lose.
Then you fight as the giant robots. These are your 'real' characters.
Then you play as the poor mooks on the ground who have to run around evacuating people, shutting off busted gas mains, providing emergency care and putting out fires. This all happens DURING the battle, and events that you just caused during the 'robot' phase have a very real chance of causing something you now need to fix, or even killing your mooks if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Depending on how efficiently the enemy is dispatched, how much collateral damage is caused, and how much the mooks are able to minimize the damage, the giants robot brigade can end up with its funding cut/boosted or find that they now can't get that armor upgrade they wanted because the funding for that got redirected to getting the powerplant that was blown up back online before the next battle.
So yes, in a fashion our group does play as folks outside the cockpit in a mecha campaign.
The basics are thus:
Take Dark Heresy. Cut out the psyker stuff (obviously) and re fluff everything. Actual classes are pretty open, as you choose 2 DH classes and effectively get to choose between what you buy as if you had access to both lists, although many skills and talents may not be buyable (I'm looking at you, techpriest).
Assets and drawbacks can only be bought at character creation. Take the ones from Cthulutech, and every 'point' = 100 experience. Drawbacks buy more experience for you to use, assets are like normal talents. Obviously you need to restat the mechanics of most effects to apply to DH rules, but its usually not hard. Also: the ones that give you 'drama points' instead give you 1 fate point that you can only use in that specific situation and can't be burned.
To make the fights more interesting, your Mecha has different wound pools per body part (body = full, arms/legs = half body, head = 1/4 body). However, your mecha has a good armor but no toughness, and compared to a standard DH character even the body has few wounds. This gives you a very small buffer of damage before that limb gets crippled, but unlike DH you can lose your arm and not die.
AT fields are tricky. We introduced a new characteristic (Synch Ratio) that is normally your willpower + 40, but certain talents or status ailments might raise or low it accordingly. Your SR mod is is your AT field strength, and all attacks have to bypass that before hitting your armor or your wounds. You can also burn points off your AT field for one round to negate a like number of AT field points of a target, as well as spend AT field points to throw out low level telekenetic powers (blast, pull/push) if you succeed on a SR check.
As the idea was inspired not by Evangelian directly, but Shinji @ 40k, most of the weapons are mecha sized equivilants of the Dark Heresy gear.
Also, if its every comes up 1 mecha wound = 10 person wounds. So if their armor is 4, you need to hit them with 50 wounds from a normal weapon just to get a single wound in. 49 or lower gets ignored. What do you expect? It's a giant fucking robot.
Prog = mono. The Prog knife is both Mono and Tearing due to a high frequency vibration technology that they have trouble applying to larger weapons.
Positron Cannons are made to breach AT fields, so roll 1d10 when you shoot them. If the d10 is equal or greater to the AT field strength of the target, it ignores the AT field altogether. Otherwise resolve damage as normal.
Most tactics require some poor bastard to get in into close range and neutralize the enemy AT field, which puts them in striking distance and leaves their own AT field down.
There is no corruption score, but everything that might normally contribute to Corruption instead stacks with insanity. Insanity is a real problem, but its Eva, what do you expect?
That's about all I can think of thus far as differences. Anyone who wants to can pretty much pick up from there.
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It IS hard to do as a campaign, especially since weeks to months usually go by between battles, which makes giving the players oppertunities to roleplay their characters outside of combat rather difficult to pull off effectively. Thus far, its mainly been select scenes of them being trust into the public spotlight as the people responsible (responsible for saving the day or killing thousands depends on how well their battle went) and being chased by all of the publicity, fans, weeping mothers and simple lunatics that come naturally from this situation.
Just to throw them, there will soon be a special event in which terrorists try to take them (and by extension, the world) hostage and they have to find a way to escape or fight their way out as their characters, not their mecha, for once.
But it always eventually comes down to: So, you should have at least a few weeks before the next battle, what do you do?
I've thus far gotten such interesting responses as "I take up sculpting" and "I marry one of my groupies. Preferably one of the pretty ones."
First, you are the front line of defense. Turrets and tanks and shit. You get 3 rounds, and any damage you actually manage to inflict on the enemy before those 3 rounds are up stays, but its really hard to do. Also, its your job to try and draw the enemy away from the fortress city you are defending before the giant robots get fielded and all hell breaks lose.
Then you fight as the giant robots. These are your 'real' characters.
Then you play as the poor mooks on the ground who have to run around evacuating people, shutting off busted gas mains, providing emergency care and putting out fires. This all happens DURING the battle, and events that you just caused during the 'robot' phase have a very real chance of causing something you now need to fix, or even killing your mooks if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Depending on how efficiently the enemy is dispatched, how much collateral damage is caused, and how much the mooks are able to minimize the damage, the giants robot brigade can end up with its funding cut/boosted or find that they now can't get that armor upgrade they wanted because the funding for that got redirected to getting the powerplant that was blown up back online before the next battle.
So yes, in a fashion our group does play as folks outside the cockpit in a mecha campaign.
The basics are thus:
Take Dark Heresy. Cut out the psyker stuff (obviously) and re fluff everything. Actual classes are pretty open, as you choose 2 DH classes and effectively get to choose between what you buy as if you had access to both lists, although many skills and talents may not be buyable (I'm looking at you, techpriest).
Assets and drawbacks can only be bought at character creation. Take the ones from Cthulutech, and every 'point' = 100 experience. Drawbacks buy more experience for you to use, assets are like normal talents. Obviously you need to restat the mechanics of most effects to apply to DH rules, but its usually not hard. Also: the ones that give you 'drama points' instead give you 1 fate point that you can only use in that specific situation and can't be burned.
To make the fights more interesting, your Mecha has different wound pools per body part (body = full, arms/legs = half body, head = 1/4 body). However, your mecha has a good armor but no toughness, and compared to a standard DH character even the body has few wounds. This gives you a very small buffer of damage before that limb gets crippled, but unlike DH you can lose your arm and not die.
AT fields are tricky. We introduced a new characteristic (Synch Ratio) that is normally your willpower + 40, but certain talents or status ailments might raise or low it accordingly. Your SR mod is is your AT field strength, and all attacks have to bypass that before hitting your armor or your wounds. You can also burn points off your AT field for one round to negate a like number of AT field points of a target, as well as spend AT field points to throw out low level telekenetic powers (blast, pull/push) if you succeed on a SR check.
As the idea was inspired not by Evangelian directly, but Shinji @ 40k, most of the weapons are mecha sized equivilants of the Dark Heresy gear.
Also, if its every comes up 1 mecha wound = 10 person wounds. So if their armor is 4, you need to hit them with 50 wounds from a normal weapon just to get a single wound in. 49 or lower gets ignored. What do you expect? It's a giant fucking robot.
Prog = mono. The Prog knife is both Mono and Tearing due to a high frequency vibration technology that they have trouble applying to larger weapons.
Positron Cannons are made to breach AT fields, so roll 1d10 when you shoot them. If the d10 is equal or greater to the AT field strength of the target, it ignores the AT field altogether. Otherwise resolve damage as normal.
Most tactics require some poor bastard to get in into close range and neutralize the enemy AT field, which puts them in striking distance and leaves their own AT field down.
There is no corruption score, but everything that might normally contribute to Corruption instead stacks with insanity. Insanity is a real problem, but its Eva, what do you expect?
That's about all I can think of thus far as differences. Anyone who wants to can pretty much pick up from there.
-------------------------------------------------
It IS hard to do as a campaign, especially since weeks to months usually go by between battles, which makes giving the players oppertunities to roleplay their characters outside of combat rather difficult to pull off effectively. Thus far, its mainly been select scenes of them being trust into the public spotlight as the people responsible (responsible for saving the day or killing thousands depends on how well their battle went) and being chased by all of the publicity, fans, weeping mothers and simple lunatics that come naturally from this situation.
Just to throw them, there will soon be a special event in which terrorists try to take them (and by extension, the world) hostage and they have to find a way to escape or fight their way out as their characters, not their mecha, for once.
But it always eventually comes down to: So, you should have at least a few weeks before the next battle, what do you do?
I've thus far gotten such interesting responses as "I take up sculpting" and "I marry one of my groupies. Preferably one of the pretty ones."
>>? Anonymous 08/03/09(Mon)11:59 No.5325356
? ? >>5325335
? ? You are a cool GM and you should feel cool.
? ? Gonna use any specific terrorists or just people in it for the money? A christian group holding them for trying to circumvent God's ineffable plan could be fun.
? ? >>5325335
? ? You are a cool GM and you should feel cool.
? ? Gonna use any specific terrorists or just people in it for the money? A christian group holding them for trying to circumvent God's ineffable plan could be fun.
>> Anonymous 08/03/09(Mon)12:06 No.5325400
? ? >>5325356
? ? I hadn't thought of that. that could be fun.
? ? I was thinking that the outrageous claims and demands made by the Terrorists would actually be the party's first indication that there is something going on behind the scenes. After all, why do these terrorists seem to blame your organization for the existence of the very monsters your are trained to fight? What do they know that you don't?
? ? >>5325356
? ? I hadn't thought of that. that could be fun.
? ? I was thinking that the outrageous claims and demands made by the Terrorists would actually be the party's first indication that there is something going on behind the scenes. After all, why do these terrorists seem to blame your organization for the existence of the very monsters your are trained to fight? What do they know that you don't?