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JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I just don't much like "and now I, a player, spend a worldbuild point to worldbuild," but I know that not everyone is like that.

Besides, there are many other things to bitch about, like useless morphs.

And I guess the spider bot's sheet implies the devs have gone over their antireligious streak?

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PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

JcDent posted:

And I guess the spider bot's sheet implies the devs have gone over their antireligious streak?

The entire intro fiction's presence of religion is basically how it holds back the protagonist and gives her pointless anxiety over things she has to do to survive.

So ha ha, no, it definitely doesn't feel that way.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


the boob windows are corny, but on the other hand it's a future where people can pick their bodies, and if you've seen how people dress their avatars in MMOs and second life, the boob window is pretty tame.

that said, if i was gonna be facing off against crazy godlike AIs and nanoviruses and god knows what else I would download my mind into a loving gundam with no meat to infect at all.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

They will absolutely infect your metal.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


The Lone Badger posted:

They will absolutely infect your metal.

then i will download my brain into a virus body and infect THEM!

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



The Lone Badger posted:

They will absolutely infect your metal.
Then I'll engage them with the funnels, which I will control remotely with my psychic brainwaves that I invented because I am a computer and thus the best at science points.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
yea tbh Eclipse Phase at least has more plausibility for Dumb Future Fashion just because not like your worst dangers can't just infect your fancy mecho body, might as well Jojo style on them.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you
Flex points seem perfectly fine if you're not completely averse to that sort of thing as a concept. The NPC thing is in other games and it's good. The clue thing is weird because it feels like a safety net for bad GMs who make you roll to progress cos the player can just spend a point and go "i get an email from a mysterious benefactor with a hint on where to go next" or something?

Morph bloat is real, but also part of the deal of the game is that a lot of the time you don't get to choose your morph so there being 5 super best ones doesn't matter because you get dumped in something random for a mission anyway. Having a bunch of morphs is necessary for that feeling, but I'll definitely agree that maybe 50 distinct morphs with 3 types of ape isn't the way to do it.

What I really hated about EP1 was that willpower was the god stat in that if you don't have a decent amount of you can just get knocked out for 48 hours of intensive psychotherapy every time you resleeve (ie: every time you do literally anything not in your immediate location). I hate random chargen on principle personally, but the random chargen was neat enough in EP1 except that you could end up with 10 willpower and you're completely useless at doing anything the game wants you to do and are completely locked out of the unique and interesting things the game offers in resleeving and forking. I'm hoping EP2 has changed that because willpower being so important was such an obvious and glaring thing that it annoyed me.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


it seems like people suffering shock from resleeving should be a background mechanic that happens to npcs and 'civilians', with the PCs all just being acknowledged as people who can handle it fine. otherwise they probably wouldn't be adventurers in the first place.

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007

IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!


Boob window aside the problem with the art is that much of it looks like generic washed out cyberpunk, considering the strong core concept of transhumanism this is unacceptable.

I honestly saw some 40K art that seemed more nuanced and unique in that way of moving beyond the limits of humanity.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

sexpig by night posted:

yea tbh Eclipse Phase at least has more plausibility for Dumb Future Fashion just because not like your worst dangers can't just infect your fancy mecho body, might as well Jojo style on them.

Problem is right next to the "IT'S THE FUTURE, WHY NOT SHOW OFF MY TITS WHILE FIGHTING"-women, you have men in mostly bulky, functional body armor. Like if the dudes were also dressed flamboyantly in outfits that had arrows pointing right at their dicks(or whatever the male boob window equivalent would be), I'd buy it.

EthanSteele posted:

Morph bloat is real, but also part of the deal of the game is that a lot of the time you don't get to choose your morph so there being 5 super best ones doesn't matter because you get dumped in something random for a mission anyway. Having a bunch of morphs is necessary for that feeling, but I'll definitely agree that maybe 50 distinct morphs with 3 types of ape isn't the way to do it.

You could still have the "resleeve into whatever's available" while simplifying the morphs and morph selection. I mean, have a couple of pre-mades, sure, for the most common kinds, but aside from that just give me a table of applicable tags and I'll make my own goddamn morphs.

I also still, by the way, hate the "resleeving is constant" rather than "resleeving is something rare for infiltration or when you die"-thing. I always intentionally structured my games with as little forced resleeving as possible because A) every player is going to make their ideal morph right off the bat as far as they're able, and then just yanking it right out under them is being a dick and B) in EP 1.0 it required, as mentioned, a ton of recalculating every time and gently caress that mess.

PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Jul 29, 2019

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Yeah. I've no problem with resleeving on occasion, I'm not down with doing it frequently. Its one of the reasons I prefer the gatecrashing aspect to any of the firewall/etc concepts. I view morphs as modern americans view cars; if you don't own property, its probably the most expensive thing you have, changing it is a big deal, unless you have have a specific job involving the use of a bunch of different vehicles, and not having one means your life is miserable outside of like two or three places.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Eclipse Phase: Second Edition



Back to Chargen

Okay, with that out of my system it'll be at least two paragraphs before I start melting down again, promise.



Anyway, Chargen. EP 1.0 basic Chargen was kind of a Lifepath Lite where you started out picking certain skill "packages" based on background, education and ideology, and then in a later supplement they added a proper Lifepath option that tended strongly towards generating extremely OP or extremely garbage characters, since EP 1.0 was a well-designed system where a narrow selection of skills and gear were vastly more useful than the rest of the broad catalogue. EP2 sticks to the original somewhat, you pick a Background, Career and Interest and they constitute your starting skill package. But they don't feel like equal choices, because rather than surrendering a bit of verisimillitude to make them all broadly capable, only, say, two of the Careers actually contain combat skills. And if there's anything I've learned from GM'ing and playing in games for 20+ years, it's that every character needs some access to all three points of the Know-Talk-Kill triangle, otherwise it complicates combat balancing and leaves half the party twiddling their thumbs in the other scenarios, unable to really participate.

(Fake Edit: About 20 pages later it also tells us that point buy exists in a sidebar)

Of interest are also the Lost among the Backgrounds. The Lost were, in-fluff, an attempt at fast-growing a bunch of kids in vats and rapidly accelerating their mental growth as well to quickly supply new citizens. Of course, they all went insane and developed psionic powers that a magic space disease gives you(Watts-McLeod, being infected with it makes you an "async" and it's a disease that moves with your ego, not your morph). Now, conceptually? Fine, fine. Main problem is that psionics in EP1 were more or less universally dogshit garbage. 90% of Asyncs' usefulness was down to the GM, because a bunch of Spooky Space Bullshit was fluffed as having vague-but-often-positive reactions to Asyncs that they wouldn't have to normies. The other 10% were their psi powers which had abilities like Math Good or Stab A Guy For A Lot Less Damage Than Just Shooting Him IF He Has A Biological Brain Otherwise Lol.

There were actually cool and universally useful psi powers, but they were all omega-level, i.e. restricted to NPC Exsurgents infected by the Evil Space Flu.

Anyway, back to the book. If you really hate yourself and want to guarantee that you're useless, the book also supplies a small chart for randomly rolling your Career/Background/Interest.



At chargen it's entirely possible to bump starting skills up to 90, at the very least, even before spending free points, just by picking two synergizing skillsets. This kind of repeats one of the EP1 problems which is that once you get a skill to 90 or so, which you can easily do at chargen, you're... capped there. There's nothing to improve or change about it. John Shootman maxes out his gun skill at chargen and then... his entire character growth is learning anthropology or how to assemble pewter figurines. He cannot further invest in his core character concept. At most you can have 100 in a skill and 30 in its related aptitude, for a roll-under TN of 130, and generally all that can do is reduce difficulty or let you Do Thing Faster without risking instant failure. Maybe they'll elaborate much later, well past the game mechanics chapter(a bold move, let's see if it pays off!), but there's really no way in which a TN of 130 is functionally that much of a boon over a TN of, say, 90.

In part this is because of how the game measures Margin of Success, it's just the number you roll, rather than the difference between TN and roll. If it was the difference, then a TN 130 would be an effective +40 boost on all opposed rolls(which will crop up during combat, at the very least, and many social situations), compared to a 90. EP1 had the Margin of Success thing, actually, which would make the optimums of ability more relevant. Of course it still had the issue that you were likely to reach your maximum right at chargen, but still.



Then you can join a faction, which has zero impact on you, skills-wise. Ultimates are, by the way, gone from this list.

Anyway, we've now generated some skills, and then we generate some stats, or rather, "Aptitudes." Except we don't generate them, we just pick them from one of seven pre-made arrays. Exciting. I have no idea why they did it this way, since it actively prevents certain high-Aptitude combinations unless you spend some of your sparse CP's to boost them.

Speaking of Aptitudes. If you want to fight, you need to go high Reflexes/Dexterity, because of course shooting people, sneaking around people and dodging are all governed by this skill. Meanwhile, poor Somatics/Strength gets dunked as usual. It lets us hit people, move well in micro-gravity and run fast. I know that in EP1, melee combat was a stupid boondoggle to invest in, and I'd be surprised if that has changed.

The game next asks us to calculate how many languages we know, to choose them and then points out that computers handle real-time translation anyway so lol language doesn't matter in 99% of all cases.

Step 10(spending our free extra character points, and it feels like we get a lot less after following the Lifepath-lite than we did in EP1) indicates that "No Skill May Be Raised Above 80," by any combination of skill points and aptitude points. Does this only take effect in step 10 while spending CP's? Or does it also means that if I get a +40 and a +50 from a career and background, then the aptitude boost, it still caps my skill at 80? Could use a bit of clarity in writing. Because a few steps later it says "no skill may be raised above 80 during character creation."



So the game never actually spells out whether there are any diminishing returns from getting the same skill from a background, career and/or interest. Now, earlier it says that the max skill rating is 100, and the max aptitude is 30. It also says that skills and aptitudes add together to give the final rating, which implied to me a total maximum of 130. But during step 10, it describes the aptitude as adding to the skill for the purpose of calculating the skill ceiling of 80, so I guess the ultimate ceiling really is just 100 for both Aptitude+Skill. Maybe this loving limit would have been great to tell people about during step loving 1, rather than forcing them to loop back and redo their Background/Career/Interest just because they wanted to be really good at something, you fucks.

Anyway. Aside from some bad writing, and some stuff inherited from the actual mechanics and EP1, the chargen is pretty straightforward. Except for all the things, like loving Psi, that it tells us we need to browse a couple dozen pages forward to actually know what our choices mean.


also not all the morph art is good


the neotenic on the left looks more like a... honestly I have no idea what the appropriate term is, person who's born half-scale, than a kid's body. not that I'm complaining, gently caress neotenics, except please don't, you loving criminal

So morphs, I think I bitched about morphs before. But here's the skinny on them from EP1. In EP1 they were split into four types: Biomorphs, Synthmorphs, Pod Morphs and Infomorphs. Biomorphs were 100% organic(augments aside), Synths 100% robotic, Podmorphs were organic shell with a crispy robotic interior and tended to include most of the ones based on alien DNA(like giant squirrels, pitcher plants, nova crabs, etc.) and had most of the ones that were not just "man with extra arm" or "metal man with armor." Infomorphs were if you existed entirely as data.

Now, there were good Biomorphs, though some were clearly better than others. There were good Synthmorphs, though again some were very clearly better than others. There were no good Pod morphs. And Infomorphs you only picked if you wanted your GM to hate you and to have no actual ability to play the game, because even in the most tech-heavy regions you eventually needed someone to go lift or pull a thing.

We've got the same four categories here, though, now with the aptitude boosts removed, they're a lot more equal, though most of the cool pods are not yet in the game again(only nova crabs, hell yeah nova crab) and the remainder are basically Half-Metal Man w/ Gun and gently caress Robot, The Robot That Fucks. Infomorphs still suck poo poo conceptually, however, thank you.


okay, so "pleasure pod," it's still a hookerbot with a steak rubbed all over it


meanwhile, coolest core game morph in the bidness

They really could not resist wasting our loving time, though. So. Basically every morph has some pre-fitted modifications. Like a Cortical Stack, basically your brain backup. Which every morph bar one has. And which is listed on every morph bar that one. Rather than just giving that one Morph a "HAS NO STACK"-disadvantage. That one morph is the Flat, btw.

quote:

Flats are baseline unmodified humans, born with all of the natural defects, hereditary diseases, and other genetic mutations that evolution so lovingly applies. Flats are increasingly rare outside bioconservative enclaves — most died off with the rest of humanity during the Fall.

Part of the problem here is that a good few of the morphs have as their main reason for being more expensive than the rest, a high Flex pool, which means that if you have a cooperative GM or a GM that peppers their area descriptions with lot of terrain for you to interact with(clearly, for instance, the point of the Bouncer morph having high Flex is so the player can fiat in some terrain for them to do stunts off) that Flex is either no longer necessary, or you won't need to use it for its intended goal and you suddenly have a lot more to do other stuff with.

Balancing-wise, compare the Bouncer and the Olympian which cost the same. The Olympian is more durable and, while the distribution is slightly different, the Olympian has 6 base points in their pools while the Bouncer has 4. What makes up the difference is basically cold resistance, prehensible feet and a built-in oxygen reserve, stuff that it's extremely setting/GM dependent whether comes up at all, while the Olympian is all-round capable.


love the loving neo-orangutan art, by the way, that's some loving Chaos Marine poo poo right there

Same cost you've got the Nova Crab, which has a lower point pool(3, and only in one category) than either the Bouncer or the Olympian, making up for it with a shitload of pre-set mods that are primarily only relevant if you're in space and likely to be depressurized. Which is kind of like being resistant to save-or-dies, in that no GM who knows a loving thing about his job would pop them on you without you being resistant to it, because no one likes to TPK the party anticlimactically. So your resistance is kind of built into being a player at all, so these are wasted points. Occasionally it could be relevant for taking a shortcut or ambushing someone or whatever, but again, an Olympian can just put on a spacesuit or pay some space dollars to get the same mods.

However, the Nova Crab has giant claws! They do a staggering 2d10 damage! And, oh, wait, the Olympian can just buy a loving axe(or start with the Scavenger gear pack that has one) that does more damage than that and the Nova Crab doesn't even have anything *coughaSOMbonuscoughlikeinEP1cough* that would let it still have a leg up in case it went to buy a couple of axes for itself.

Now, while looking up these stats, I found the melee weapon stats on page 204, in the melee combat chapter.

I've still yet to figure out how to actually buy gear outside of chargen, though, what the gently caress, game. This was much better organized in EP1, I'll note.

Anyway, like in any game with badly mangled chargen, there are Traits. For instance, Acumen, adds +5 to our COG checks, for the cost of 1CP(or 1 MP if we want to waste points having it apply to only one body which the game expects us to lose or drop shortly anyway), while actually buffing our COG by +5 costs 5CP. I assume it's meant so that it only applies to checks that are "pure" COG, i.e. no skill involved, but it could use a bit of clarity-in-wording, by which I mean spelling it out. Alternately the devs are just idiots who didn't notice this broken option. The traits, BTW, also indicate that in a game clearly intended to have regular resleeving, there are still a bunch of dumb checks involved to make sure that you don't become a sobbing wreck whenever you're resleeved.

A large part of the negative traits, because of course there are negative traits, are of the "lol hope the GM forgets I've got this squad of bad guys after me"-kind. Haha, or you could have a morph that's bad at it's save-or-dies vs the TITAN flu! You should pick that one, because any GM that pops those dumb save or dies on you, you should just go ahead and quit the loving game right there. Also remember how they took out Aptitude modifiers from morphs? They actually didn't, now they're just traits instead! Hope you remember that -5 SOM penalty from Feebleness on your morph! Of course there are like ten different variations on this for each aptitude and both positive and negative and some more specialized than others, like only applying to maths stuff.

Glad to see they recognized and fixed zero of their issues.

Swear to God, even loving HSD2.0 made more of a positive improvement in places than EP2 so far.

A break from mechanics, time to read some DEEPEST LORE.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


^^^ the neotenic looks like someone with primordial dwarfism, the kind where you have standard proportions but are scaled down. ^^^

Ronwayne posted:

Yeah. I've no problem with resleeving on occasion, I'm not down with doing it frequently. Its one of the reasons I prefer the gatecrashing aspect to any of the firewall/etc concepts. I view morphs as modern americans view cars; if you don't own property, its probably the most expensive thing you have, changing it is a big deal, unless you have have a specific job involving the use of a bunch of different vehicles, and not having one means your life is miserable outside of like two or three places.

this is a good way of looking at it. If you have a tricked out racecar (ie your personal morph) then why the hell are you gonna leave it at home when you go racing and just use whatever car the venue has on offer?

i understand it more if they're maintaining some kind of quarantine on earth, by having people sleeve into fancy combat bodies that permanently stay earthside so they don't trek back a bunch of viruses, but presumably whatever agency you're working for will provide BETTER bodies for the purpose than you already have. Like weird combat bodies that won't fit in normal spacecraft or habitats.

i also have issues with resleeving being such a psychological drama. I get it if you've died or you're forced to take on something really different as your 'main' body, but if you're just resleeving for a job how is it different to basically operating a remote drone? It's like switching characters in an MMO. You might find it jarring at first to have switched to like a fully robotic body from being a classic human, but that's more of an adjustment period than a psychological trauma. people adapt to change and altered mobility much better than sci fi writers seem to think. if we didn't it'd be a trauma for us to rollerskate, or drive a car, because that uses vastly different inputs to make us move than walking does, but kids manage it.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

juggalo baby coffin posted:

i also have issues with resleeving being such a psychological drama. I get it if you've died or you're forced to take on something really different as your 'main' body, but if you're just resleeving for a job how is it different to basically operating a remote drone? It's like switching characters in an MMO. You might find it jarring at first to have switched to like a fully robotic body from being a classic human, but that's more of an adjustment period than a psychological trauma. people adapt to change and altered mobility much better than sci fi writers seem to think. if we didn't it'd be a trauma for us to rollerskate, or drive a car, because that uses vastly different inputs to make us move than walking does, but kids manage it.

Children during growth spurts can take months to acclimatize to their new body shape, losing a limb or having your face disfigured can cause major psychological trauma, and there's a certain group of people who have a very intimate experience of what it's like to be in a body that feels wrong and for some of them that feeling never goes away.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


LatwPIAT posted:

Children during growth spurts can take months to acclimatize to their new body shape, losing a limb or having your face disfigured can cause major psychological trauma, and there's a certain group of people who have a very intimate experience of what it's like to be in a body that feels wrong and for some of them that feeling never goes away.

yeah, but the thing is in the eclipse phase universe you know that it's temporary. you're gonna find it awkward to move around if the new body is proportioned differently, sure, but you can adjust to that. I had my growth spurt all at once one summer, I grew 10 inches taller in the span of a couple of months. I know what it's like, but it's a far cry from needing intensive psychotherapy. I also wound up covered in heinous stretch marks, which i still have and find kind of embarrassing.

Losing a limb, being disfigured, and having dysphoria are all much different to swapping bodies in the sci-fi future. For one, it's extremely rare that any of them are voluntary, but beyond that they're permanent and carry social consequences. We're talking about a universe where swapping bodies is common, and resleeving to travel is painless and reversible.

It's more likely that there would be consequences to spending a long time in a body that isn't yours than there would be short term acute psychological issues.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

juggalo baby coffin posted:

yeah, but the thing is in the eclipse phase universe you know that it's temporary. you're gonna find it awkward to move around if the new body is proportioned differently, sure, but you can adjust to that. I had my growth spurt all at once one summer, I grew 10 inches taller in the span of a couple of months. I know what it's like, but it's a far cry from needing intensive psychotherapy. I also wound up covered in heinous stretch marks, which i still have and find kind of embarrassing.

It didn't really require intensive psychotherapy in EP 1e either. The primary effect was being unaccustomed to the new body, which was permanent on a critical failure or lasted at most Margin of Failure/5 days. You'd also get MoF/10 Stress, and maybe 1d5 Stress on top of that if it wasn't an ideal situation (1d10 for an extreme situation).

The result is, on average, going to be a few days of acclimatization and a few points of Stress at most. This isn't in the realm of requiring psychotherapy unless you're already extremely stressed out. Unless you're one of the rich weirdos who resleeve frequently, you can probably just shed that Stress naturally.

And most people can't afford to resleeve often, so is it really temporary in that sense?

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Losing a limb, being disfigured, and having dysphoria are all much different to swapping bodies in the sci-fi future. For one, it's extremely rare that any of them are voluntary, but beyond that they're permanent and carry social consequences. We're talking about a universe where swapping bodies is common, and resleeving to travel is painless and reversible.

Just because they're different in a way we can rationalize doesn't necessarily mean our monkey brains aren't similarly affected by both. And whether it's actually painless when it demonstrably causes people stress and in extreme cases trauma is questionable.

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


LatwPIAT posted:

It didn't really require intensive psychotherapy in EP 1e either. The primary effect was being unaccustomed to the new body, which was permanent on a critical failure or lasted at most Margin of Failure/5 days. You'd also get MoF/10 Stress, and maybe 1d5 Stress on top of that if it wasn't an ideal situation (1d10 for an extreme situation).

The result is, on average, going to be a few days of acclimatization and a few points of Stress at most. This isn't in the realm of requiring psychotherapy unless you're already extremely stressed out. Unless you're one of the rich weirdos who resleeve frequently, you can probably just shed that Stress naturally.

And most people can't afford to resleeve often, so is it really temporary in that sense?

well that's my point, i think the resleeving stress mechanics should be for NPCs, rather than player adventurer types who resleeve for jobs. For a normal person changing bodies then being like 'oh poo poo this is my body for the forseeable future' would be stressful. For a PC who is resleeving to do a job on mars or whatever, it's using the company car for a few weeks.

LatwPIAT posted:

Just because they're different in a way we can rationalize doesn't necessarily mean our monkey brains aren't similarly affected by both. And whether it's actually painless when it demonstrably causes people stress and in extreme cases trauma is questionable.

I agree that people would be affected by it, but I think if they were to be affected it would develop over time rather than immediately. It should be painless in the setting, their understanding of the brain is advanced enough that they can digitize brains and map them into new, radically different bodies, bodies that they build. Pain is a function of the nervous system, if they can edit a nervous system they can just turn pain off.

but i'm sure to keep some grimdarkness it probably is painful somehow, despite the absence of nerves in a digitised mind.

MollyMetroid
Jan 20, 2004

Trout Clan Daimyo

juggalo baby coffin posted:

well that's my point, i think the resleeving stress mechanics should be for NPCs, rather than player adventurer types who resleeve for jobs. For a normal person changing bodies then being like 'oh poo poo this is my body for the forseeable future' would be stressful. For a PC who is resleeving to do a job on mars or whatever, it's using the company car for a few weeks.


I agree that people would be affected by it, but I think if they were to be affected it would develop over time rather than immediately. It should be painless in the setting, their understanding of the brain is advanced enough that they can digitize brains and map them into new, radically different bodies, bodies that they build. Pain is a function of the nervous system, if they can edit a nervous system they can just turn pain off.

but i'm sure to keep some grimdarkness it probably is painful somehow, despite the absence of nerves in a digitised mind.

she is talking about trans people
and others who suffer from body dysphoria
and emotional and mental trauma related to that across years

juggalo baby coffin
Dec 2, 2007

How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?


MollyMetroid posted:

she is talking about trans people
and others who suffer from body dysphoria
and emotional and mental trauma related to that across years

I know, I uh dunno if you actually read either of my replies.

MollyMetroid
Jan 20, 2004

Trout Clan Daimyo
I did. They did not give me the impression of someone who knows how dysphoria feels. IDK. "driving the company car" it ain't.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you

PurpleXVI posted:

You could still have the "resleeve into whatever's available" while simplifying the morphs and morph selection. I mean, have a couple of pre-mades, sure, for the most common kinds, but aside from that just give me a table of applicable tags and I'll make my own goddamn morphs.

I also still, by the way, hate the "resleeving is constant" rather than "resleeving is something rare for infiltration or when you die"-thing. I always intentionally structured my games with as little forced resleeving as possible because A) every player is going to make their ideal morph right off the bat as far as they're able, and then just yanking it right out under them is being a dick and B) in EP 1.0 it required, as mentioned, a ton of recalculating every time and gently caress that mess.

Resleeving being constant is for Firewall games, don't do a Firewall game if you hate that. If your players are making their ideal morph off the bat and you're doing a Firewall game then you need to have a talk about expectations because that's kind of... the entire thing that you don't do and if you're playing a Firewall game then I wouldn't even class it as forced resleeving because by doing a Firewall game you're buying in to doing lots of resleeving because that's the deal. Gatecrashing? Sure, go wild, that's when you get to have all the cool toys and play the game like a more traditional one and go over the shopping lists and get stuff and build your character around having certain tiems. Firewall games you should be doing blueprints instead of items so you can print your chosen tools anywhere you go and be more about skills than stuff. It's not an easy thing to grok for sure, the first thing me and the other 2 players in the group did when we made characters just for giggles was to buy loads of stuff and customized our morphs because we were still in that mode, then we got what the deal was for Firewall games and realized that was the opposite of what you should be doing, which luckily the book does tell you if you're not blind and dumb like we were.

I will say that when we played it was with the really good roll20 sheet which made resleeving a complete breeze calculation-wise because you just selected the different bodies as you wanted and it modified everything for you so that part of it wasn't an issue which obviously makes me a bit biased.

I think if you're doing a Firewall game then there being a trait that represents being an agent and being good at the thing that it wants you to do so you're basically the guy from Altered Carbon as far as being really good no matter what the sleeve is would help.

LatwPIAT posted:

Sleeve stuff

Yeah, resleeving is exploring that entire deal and that swapping bodies is not like swapping cars and thats the point. Most people never get to resleeve in their entire life and the body they've been dumped in may be a completely different ethnicity, expressing a completely different gender, be a completely different species or even be a clunky robot that looks like the Iron Giant. Multiply that by the number of loved ones you have you that will also all look completely different from how you feel they should and it's pretty obvious why the deal is going to have an effect that's interesting to explore and is definitely going to have a profound impact (in the scale way, not the philosophical way) that you don't just get over by being in the body for a couple of weeks.

For everyone else my complaint about needing psychotherapy was only for low willpower characters, anyone with even close to average stuff is going to be fine most of the time like LatwPAIT says.


juggalo baby coffin posted:

I agree that people would be affected by it, but I think if they were to be affected it would develop over time rather than immediately.

Immediately is when it should happen, the first time you see literally any part of your body and it not being the way it "should " be, and "probably decades" is how long it would last. You're underestimating the level of change going on here. In real life when I have my hair cut I'll sometimes go "woah!" after a couple of hours when I see myself in a mirror and a friend shaved for the first time in years a little while ago and felt really weird and these are very small basic changes and nothing compared to full on dysphoria. Now imagine looking down and seeing your hands are completely different in every possible way bar number of digits. When you walk you get knee pain because the way your consciousness makes you walk isn't right for the body you're now in and none of your movements work quite right. I've got a bunch of musculoskeletal problems in real life that mean I have to put conscious effort into keeping my pelvis in a good position and to keep my knees over my ankles and my ankles towards the midline of my foot rather than 4 cm to the side because it turns out that's really bad for movement and suddenly having to do that (or not having to do that in my case) would probably mess someone up big time. There's so much automatic stuff going on that people don't even realize until it gets changed in some way. The movement stuff is what you get over in a couple of weeks of breaking it in like new shoes, the existential dread not so much.

You can have a game where resleeving is totally fine and painless, but Eclipse Phase isn't trying to be that game and it isn't bad or grimdark forced horror to not be that.

EthanSteele fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jul 29, 2019

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

juggalo baby coffin posted:

. It should be painless in the setting, their understanding of the brain is advanced enough that they can digitize brains and map them into new, radically different bodies, bodies that they build. Pain is a function of the nervous system, if they can edit a nervous system they can just turn pain off.

I seem to recall in Eclipse Phase 1, the teletransportation paradox - ie, the new sleeve might have the same thoughts and memories and personality as you, but how do we know it isn't your clone and the original you is dead? - was left as an elephant in the room, and I presume it is in 2 as well.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
The real deal is hosed up reinstation policies, one of my pcs got "lucky" and managed to farcast AND physically evac'd from earth...and the copy got reinstated and stole their legal id. Then they got lost on a gate crashing trip, enough time went by to reinstate the backup, but uh, then the original person came back. These were three separate people across the entire solar system who had been apart for years, so remerging like an alpha fork wasn't possible (and none of them wanted to either). The eventual solution was to treat the others as siblings you don't really like but feel compelled to send a christmas card to or whatever, especially since they all ended up embodying aspects of the original person's personality the other ones hated.

Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 29, 2019

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


the only thing i don't get is why so much of the art seems to show more-or-less human / humanoid bodies as the default or normal baseline. it just feels like "human but with a minor sci-fi detail like robot arm or blue skin" is the predominant template used (across the art that has been posted) and the more interesting forms are only shown when they're specifically mentioned (a la octobot or mecha-gorilla)

if i could digitize my brain and insert my digital consciousness into an infinite variety of forms, "basic human" would be like the last thing i would ever pick. indestructible T-800 skeletal death robot is probably as close to humanoid as i would ever care to be again

ZeroCount
Aug 12, 2013


what if I *don't want* my PC to get dysphoria every time they body-hop though?

OvermanXAN
Nov 14, 2014
Starting with something resembling human makes a lot of sense, though. it's a lot easier for a human to comprehend something with the same general body type and body systems. Especially if you're only ever going to have the one sleeve, it's logical to go with what's easiest to acclimatize to.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

hyphz posted:

I seem to recall in Eclipse Phase 1, the teletransportation paradox - ie, the new sleeve might have the same thoughts and memories and personality as you, but how do we know it isn't your clone and the original you is dead? - was left as an elephant in the room, and I presume it is in 2 as well.

It's really more of a premise than an elephant in the room. It's a setting where most people believe a perfect copy of you is 'you', and the players are allowed to resume play as their perfect copies of themselves. There are people in the setting who don't believe this, and they are largely regarded as backwards and narrow-minded. Sometimes players disagree with this premise, but that's them not buying into the setting, not the writers accidentally leaving gaping unanswered questions in the game

Freaking Crumbum posted:

the only thing i don't get is why so much of the art seems to show more-or-less human / humanoid bodies as the default or normal baseline. it just feels like "human but with a minor sci-fi detail like robot arm or blue skin" is the predominant template used (across the art that has been posted) and the more interesting forms are only shown when they're specifically mentioned (a la octobot or mecha-gorilla)

if i could digitize my brain and insert my digital consciousness into an infinite variety of forms, "basic human" would be like the last thing i would ever pick. indestructible T-800 skeletal death robot is probably as close to humanoid as i would ever care to be again

This is down to three things:
1) A significant portion of the world population can't choose their bodies. To put your consciousness into a T-800 skeletal death robot, either you have to be rich enough to afford a new body and hope that skeletal death robots are in vogue this year (and also street-legal), or be a part of the 1%, the only people who can get custom-built bodies.
2) The less human (or pig/squid/ape/etc.) a body is, the higher the chance that it's going to be unpleasant to transfer your consciousness to. For this reason, most people avoid non-humanlike bodies if they can.
3) People who go all-in on transferring their consciousnesses into radical non-human bodies are considered kind of weird and possibly a bit dangerous by the dominant social norms, so people are heavily discouraged from doing so.

If you take the imperfect metaphor of your body as your car, what you're proposing is equivalent of riding around in a tank. You can do it, but most people don't because they can't afford to, because they're kind of weird to drive, and because driving around in a 60-ton vehicle armed with a cannon and several machine guns with tracks that can crush smaller cars makes people somewhat wary around them.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

LatwPIAT posted:

It's really more of a premise than an elephant in the room. It's a setting where most people believe a perfect copy of you is 'you', and the players are allowed to resume play as their perfect copies of themselves. There are people in the setting who don't believe this, and they are largely regarded as backwards and narrow-minded. Sometimes players disagree with this premise, but that's them not buying into the setting, not the writers accidentally leaving gaping unanswered questions in the game.

I can see the argument, but
a) if they wanted to make it part of the setting that it was in fact definitely safe, then they could have said that in the book, it'd be like one sentence come on;
b) forking is a thing.

The fact that most people believe it doesn't mean that it's true - in fact I previously considered that it was part of the horror of the setting that people had to believe resleeving/egocasting was safe because most of the ones who survived the TITANs remember doing it, even if that wasn't really their memories. The idea that continuity of the OOC player represents its resolution is very appealing but its mapping to the setting isn't clear.

PoontifexMacksimus
Feb 14, 2012

By popular demand posted:

I honestly saw some 40K art that seemed more nuanced and unique in that way of moving beyond the limits of humanity.

Which is strange considering how chauvinistic the Empire is about the perfection of the human form. None of the day 40K games ever had any humanity loss or cyber-psychosis rules, right? Did any of the fluff ever talk about humans being uneasy with extensive cybernetics, or was it just Burn The Mutant 24/7?

Were there rules about fixing your mutations with equally inhuman but apparently accepted cybernetic implants?

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


Augmetics are considered part of the idealized human form as an aspect of the Emperor in his form of the Omnissiah, the Machine God. Mutants are considered unclean because they deviate from that assumed perfection in uncontrollable (and worse, inheritable) ways. They're not an exercise of humanity's power over their own flesh, they're a defeat by nature or the Warp.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

hyphz posted:

I can see the argument, but
a) if they wanted to make it part of the setting that it was in fact definitely safe, then they could have said that in the book, it'd be like one sentence come on;

What do you mean by 'safe'? Safety doesn't really enter into it: you can make copies of people, most people in the setting and the authorial text consider these copies a continuation of the original and considers death essentially cured through this method.

PoontifexMacksimus
Feb 14, 2012

wiegieman posted:

Augmetics are considered part of the idealized human form as an aspect of the Emperor in his form of the Omnissiah, the Machine God. Mutants are considered unclean because they deviate from that assumed perfection in uncontrollable (and worse, inheritable) ways. They're not an exercise of humanity's power over their own flesh, they're a defeat by nature or the Warp.

Have to say I find it hard to see the human aspect of an ambulant pile of cogs and cables. ;) Sure, it's a setting element, obviously, but I always thought it was one of those internal contradictions in the setting which would be interesting to see more explored, and the RPGs would obviously be the place to do it.

Edit: After all, there are still strong taboos about human technological hubris even without the warp re: AI

PoontifexMacksimus fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jul 29, 2019

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

PurpleXVI posted:

Ultimates are, by the way, gone from this list
Good

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

LatwPIAT posted:

What do you mean by 'safe'? Safety doesn't really enter into it: you can make copies of people, most people in the setting and the authorial text consider these copies a continuation of the original and considers death essentially cured through this method.

Ok, EP 1 mentions that resleeving characters are struck by "loss of continuity of self", and there is some explanation of the process, but (as I remember) at no point does it say "the person resleeving experiences severe disorientation and loses consciousness then wakes up in their new body". Which means that the possibility that their experience is "the person resleeving dies forever and a clone of them wakes up" is not eliminated, and I always figured this was deliberate.

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

hyphz posted:

Ok, EP 1 mentions that resleeving characters are struck by "loss of continuity of self", and there is some explanation of the process, but (as I remember) at no point does it say "the person resleeving experiences severe disorientation and loses consciousness then wakes up in their new body". Which means that the possibility that their experience is "the person resleeving dies forever and a clone of them wakes up" is not eliminated, and I always figured this was deliberate.

There are rules for resleeving "with continuity" where you lie down in an ego bridge and gently move from one body to the next, maintaining continuity of experience the whole time. Obviously this is off the table for egocasting or violent death (the two most likely cases for player characters) but the possibility exists in the setting.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Have to say I find it hard to see the human aspect of an ambulant pile of cogs and cables. ;) Sure, it's a setting element, obviously, but I always thought it was one of those internal contradictions in the setting which would be interesting to see more explored, and the RPGs would obviously be the place to do it.

Edit: After all, there are still strong taboos about human technological hubris even without the warp re: AI

I see it mostly because the mechanicus has a huge amount of political power and gets to decide what's normal. You can have a face full of bug eyes as long as they're metal. Power in the Imperium, once you're past a certain social rank, is mostly about who you can convince to follow what you do. The mechanicus can do bioware and meat replacement organs in some of the rpg books, its just that they're lower quality and nowhere near as popular because the meat-borg faction in the mechanicus is nowhere near the top, and magos biologis with freaky stuff tend to get shuffled to Rogue Trader ships and other "plz get the hell out of here" places.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Have to say I find it hard to see the human aspect of an ambulant pile of cogs and cables. ;) Sure, it's a setting element, obviously, but I always thought it was one of those internal contradictions in the setting which would be interesting to see more explored, and the RPGs would obviously be the place to do it.

Edit: After all, there are still strong taboos about human technological hubris even without the warp re: AI

It kinda does in the Horus Heresy series. The whole "Emperor as Omnissah" thing was pretty blatantly political, an agreement that papered over an arrangement where the Mechanicus was given autonomy and resources to reunite their forgeworlds, and in return they'd manufacture tech for the Emperor's war machine. The revolt of Mars and throwing in their lot with Horus was mainly due to the dissidents who opposed the treaty. The Fabricator-General, Kelbor Hal, was promised greater independence if Horus won, but was opposed to the Treaty even before then, seeing the idea of the Emperor being the living embodiment of the Omnissah as...well, as what it was, basically. An easy story to smooth over the divisions between two empires that had been welded together 200 years previous.

EthanSteele
Nov 18, 2007

I can hear you

ZeroCount posted:

what if I *don't want* my PC to get dysphoria every time they body-hop though?

Mechanically you can be better at it by having high willpower. Mostly its talk about it with your GM and ask if the reason you're not at full capacity for a bit can be getting used to things in terms of a new fit more than all the other stuff. If you're still not happy with that having a psychological effect on your character then you should probably just not play Eclipse Phase because the game has the psychological effects of body-hopping as a central conceit.

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Wapole Languray
Jul 4, 2012

Mechanically you can just not use the morph-swapping tables and poo poo if you don't want to. It's not like it breaks the game in half, it's just a process you can choose to not use, or choose to use only in cases of violent/traumatic swapping instead of routine.

I like EP, and I will gladly run it, especially once 2e gets some decent online tools and character sheets.

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