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LatwPIAT posted: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. i mean, guilty as charged i like your explanation though. in that case i still don't know why the art would be so human centric - it sounds like the default human body is the cheap-o thing everyone is forced to use out of necessity, while the more exotic stuff is the fun aspirational treasure you'd be adventuring to discover and use. it'd be like if a D&D book was full of level 0 commoner art because they were the most common class in setting, instead of pictures of a badass barbarian leaping into a dragon's fanged maw, or a mighty wizard summoning a meteor to crush a pit fiend.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:22
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i mean, guilty as charged Part of it is also that mechanically, both in 1 and 2, the basic human bodies are the superior option. There's never any reason to be a Nova Crab, the big ol' pitcher plant beasties or a Reaper unless you want to make a statement. Effecitvely, just being a human or uplift is always superior. It's more like if all the art in D&D 3.x was of wizards because only wizards were mechanically a worthwhile choice.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:35
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i mean, guilty as charged
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Jul 29, 2019 21:46
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It seems possible to strip the mechanics outta this and run an Altered Carbon rpg. I want... I want to see RPGs books based on properties that are 70% plot synopses again.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:58
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Upthread, people were talking about how Vampire had a real disconnect between the way the devs wanted you to play (a moody personal horror game about mental illness and inner demons) and the way people actually played it (superheroes and murderhobos with light gothic teeming and aesthetics) Eclipse Phase always felt the same way to me - the fluff and presentation try to sell it as Delta Green in space, but the end result is usually a gonzo cyberpunk adventure where you occasionally shoot a scary monster. Lots of fun, but a far cry from "horror and conspiracy" Part of it is the wide array of tools the player has to negate any inconvenience caused by mental stress. Buying up Willpower at character creation lets you pass the majority of sanity rolls, and buying other traits cuts out the bad parts of resleeving. What stress you do accumulate can be trivially disposed of if you have access to time accelerated simspace and a good psychosurgeon. And you should, because psychosurgery is awesome (and probably the closest Eclipse Phase ever gets to an effective horror setting) I can definitely see what they were going for with things like the exsurgent virus. In a world where death is a temporary inconvenience, they wanted to come up with a fate worse than death, something people were really scared of. However the end result was just a gently caress you save or die roll to see if your character got trashed for being in the same room as the bad guy. They also oversalted the dish by expanding the power, reach and prevalence of the virus until it was everywhere, all the time, and everyone knew about it. To the point that the Argonauts developed open source tools to detect it in software and widely distributed them, turning a former GM only secret into widespread common knowledge.
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Jul 29, 2019 22:18
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Nessus posted:I imagine the vast majority of people would want to be in a human or human-plus body, while folks who would (for serious, not for play-play) want to be a death skull spider of misanthropy +4 are relatively rare, just very well represented online. i assume there's no prestige class equivalent for a player that wants to become a titan? because if i'm playing a game of transhuman sci-fi space opera, of course my eventual goal is to turn myself into an immortal machine god
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Jul 29, 2019 22:23
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Freaking Crumbum posted:i assume there's no prestige class equivalent for a player that wants to become a titan? because if i'm playing a game of transhuman sci-fi space opera, of course my eventual goal is to turn myself into an immortal machine god 1e had Singularity Seekers and Exhumans. They were obnoxious, stupid assholes, but they were also the only factions really exploring the possibilities offered by the setting. Every other faction is based around a political position - anarchism vs statism, nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, capitalism vs communism. The same debates we've been listening to for two hundred years, with a science fiction patina overtop. The Exhumans are the guys who say "gently caress all that, I'm going to be a sentient bacteria that forms supercomputing clonal colonies and reproduces by disassembling other matter for feedstock
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Jul 29, 2019 22:29
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mellonbread posted:1e had Singularity Seekers and Exhumans. They were obnoxious, stupid assholes, but they were also the only factions really exploring the possibilities offered by the setting. Every other faction is based around a political position - anarchism vs statism, nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, capitalism vs communism. The same debates we've been listening to for two hundred years, with a science fiction patina overtop. The Exhumans are the guys who say "gently caress all that, I'm going to be a sentient bacteria that forms supercomputing clonal colonies and reproduces by disassembling other matter for feedstock I mean, I do think this is an intentional thematic point; the characters who say 'gently caress it' to human cultural and ethical ideas tend to be... people who say 'gently caress it' to human cultural and ethical ideas. It's not exactly uncommon in science fiction. And it's not like you can't be a real weird posthuman who is also part of society and therefore exists within those questions; from what I remember there's a TV chef who's a clone hive of forks designed to be effective cooks.
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Jul 29, 2019 22:34
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LatwPIAT posted: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.
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Jul 29, 2019 22:39
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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. It doesn't say that because that's not a definition of 'person' that EP shares. EP is deliberately a setting where there's no practical difference between a thinking brain and a perfect copy of that thinking brain, and these are considered to be the same person. This is the premise: that whether 'you' wake up in a new body or die and a clone wakes up is making a distinction without a difference. Freaking Crumbum posted:in that case i still don't know why the art would be so human centric - it sounds like the default human body is the cheap-o thing everyone is forced to use out of necessity, while the more exotic stuff is the fun aspirational treasure you'd be adventuring to discover and use. The bodies you're going to have available are going to be ones that look mostly human, and most of the NPCs you're going to meet are going to use them, so using human-like figures is both indicative of the standard adventure situation and of typical scenes from the setting.
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Jul 29, 2019 22:41
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The Exhumans were kind of the zombie-enthusiasts of Eclipse Phase, i.e. they were convinced that when all the barriers and rules of the world came down they, when it was all savagery, with their enlightened worldview and superior abilities, would be left standing on top of the pile. Instead they tended to lobotomize themselves out of a bunch of human abilities, becoming vent-dwelling predators or big sacks of super-thinking goop mostly enthused about calculating their own coolness. This made them very satisfying to shoot. Freaking Crumbum posted:i assume there's no prestige class equivalent for a player that wants to become a titan? because if i'm playing a game of transhuman sci-fi space opera, of course my eventual goal is to turn myself into an immortal machine god Thing is that for all its claims of being VERY FUTURE SCI-FI, Eclipse Phase just generally doesn't do that much with many parts of the premise. For instance, most of your supertech is gonna be "see in new wavelengths" and "shoot with new forms of horrible radiation." All of the cool "looks-like-magic-because-advanced"-stuff is entirely the purview of the exsurgents. About the only truly not-just-old-stuff-but-better options are nano-fabrication, resleeving and the pandora gates. So no, there's no way to really break the mold as a "prestige class" or something else once you're sufficiently far advanced. It's, to me, a bit similar to 2E Exalted Lunars. "Look! The Chimeras get to do all these super-cool The Thing-esque tricks! But no, you can't, it means you turn into an NPC." Similarly, the Exsurgents get to have all the magic-science abilities but no, if you want them, you turn into an NPC.
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Jul 29, 2019 23:03
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean, I do think this is an intentional thematic point; the characters who say 'gently caress it' to human cultural and ethical ideas tend to be... people who say 'gently caress it' to human cultural and ethical ideas. It's not exactly uncommon in science fiction. The fork guy, presumably, realized that he felt profound passion about cooking and is no doubt deeply satisfied by being able to be a cloud of forks that operates the entire kitchen. He had a goal and he fulfilled it. A lot of transhumanism seems to be along the idea of "if only I wasn't a human being, then I wouldn't suffer."
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Jul 29, 2019 23:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Eclipse Phase: Second Edition So if they removed Ultimate as a playable option due to having fascist tendencies, did they do the same for the Jovians?
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Jul 29, 2019 23:22
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Libertad! posted:So if they removed Ultimate as a playable option due to having fascist tendencies, did they do the same for the Jovians? I would assume so, but it is also true that they could also have rewritten the Jovians to be more specifically 'the bioconservative faction' rather than the Starship Trooper Fash faction? Most of my Eclipse Phase understanding is secondhand (a buddy of mine is constantly trying to get a game started and not having time) but I get the sense that Jovians are more effective as the opposite of Exhumans, rather than fascists. Still not a good guy faction any more than the hypercapitalist secret service assassins are... ...honestly it's just very weird to me that the Ultimates, aka the very self-important nerd fascists as opposed to the more organized fascists, are the ones who got relegated to NPC. Maybe too many fans were siding with them, while Jovians etc don't really have the same seductive cool factor as 'shaolin death monk from space?' E: To be clear, when I said 'forks' I meant 'forked minds' - the actual kitchen crew IIRC run the gamut from 'standard human type sleeve' to 'cooking robots of various stripes' - some of which may be literal forks, idk.
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Jul 29, 2019 23:43
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LatwPIAT posted:It doesn't say that because that's not a definition of 'person' that EP shares. EP is deliberately a setting where there's no practical difference between a thinking brain and a perfect copy of that thinking brain, and these are considered to be the same person. This is the premise: that whether 'you' wake up in a new body or die and a clone wakes up is making a distinction without a difference. Well, I, at least, am 100% on board with that. All those questions about whether, for example, a Star Trek transporter really kills you and creates a copy so the new copy isn't really you always struck me as nonsensical, trying to draw a completely meaningless distinction. I am my mind, memories, and personality. If the copy has my mind, memories, and personality, of course it's me. Why wouldn't it be? Because it's not made of the same atoms as the previous version? So what? Those aren't what define me, and my body cycles through different atoms over time anyway. Because of continuity of experience? I don't have that anyway; I lose consciousness (almost) every night. I just have yet to hear a coherent argument for why, if I'm "replaced" by a copy with my exact same memories and thought processes, that copy shouldn't be considered to still be me. I don't even see the possibility of two copies existing at once as posing a problem (which I gather is what's meant by "forking"). Okay, planarians are famous for regenerating if you cut them in two; both halves regenerate into a new planarian. Which one is the original, and which one is the copy? Okay, now suppose humans could regenerate like planarians, with each half retaining the mind and memories of the original, and you cut a human in two to get two copies. Which one is the original and which one is the copy? They both have just as much claim to be the same individual as the original. Obviously, that's not how "forking" is supposed to take place here; it's by direct copying of the mind into a new body; but I don't see that the means by which it's done are important to the result. If both copies have the mind and memories of the original, which one is the same person as the original? Both. Of course, their memories and personalities will diverge over time, and they'll no longer match each other, or the original. So what? My memories and personality today aren't the same as my memories and personality five years ago, but I still consider myself the same person; those forked copies have just as much reason to consider themselves to be both the same person as the original as well. ...Anyway, getting off of the philosophical digression and back to the subject of RPGs, I hadn't been previously familiar with Eclipse Phase, but these posts have piqued my interest. Sure, it seems it has some problematic elements and some wonky rules, but, well, I have yet to encounter an RPG that doesn't; if a perfect RPG has been created I have yet to find it. I sort of want to give Eclipse Phase a try now, though I don't know when I'm going to be able to... my current unpredictable work schedule makes it impractical to commit to a regular gaming group at the moment, unfortunately.
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Jul 30, 2019 00:10
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Nessus posted:Why do you want to become a sentient nanomachine colony? Joe Slowboat posted:...honestly it's just very weird to me that the Ultimates, aka the very self-important nerd fascists as opposed to the more organized fascists, are the ones who got relegated to NPC. Maybe too many fans were siding with them, while Jovians etc don't really have the same seductive cool factor as 'shaolin death monk from space?'
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Jul 30, 2019 00:15
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I don't even understand what was so drat fascist about the Ultimates to begin with but okay I guess.
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Jul 30, 2019 00:43
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Jovians are, in fact, a listed player faction choice during chargen. Doing a quick read ahead they have, if anything, turned the Ultimates less detailed and... honestly a bit less awful-sounding than in EP1? mellonbread posted:I've run into more people who like the Jovians. I think it's partly the appeal of surviving by your wits alone in a hostile universe full of super powered technology, and partly because there's no greater appeal to RPG players than liking things the devs tell them not to like. The Jovians do in fact have some point in that the stuff they're deciding not to mess with is literally the cool toys that humanity almost killed themselves with once, and which are used for some horrific poo poo by, say, some Hypercorps(anything nasty you can think of to do with ego editing and forks? Some hypercorps will have done that for the perfect deniable slave labour) and the Exhumans(war crimes don't even start to describe what they do in some of the fluff). Refusing to engage with the toys that might give them a chance of fighting back against future TITAN or Exhuman attacks, is no less insane than the Anarchists who refuse to put any brakes on said toys aside from popularity contests, or the Hypercorps whose only brakes are liquidity and stock value. Of course then the Jovians collectively get saddled with a fascists system for ???? reason. If they were conservative without consequently always being fascist, the Jovian part of the system would suddenly be a lot more usable to play in and their fundamental ideology might actually be something more players would want to engage with. But the devs are so hamhanded when making points in EP1 and EP2 that they might as well be made of pork.
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Jul 30, 2019 00:44
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PurpleXVI posted:Thing is that for all its claims of being VERY FUTURE SCI-FI, Eclipse Phase just generally doesn't do that much with many parts of the premise. For instance, most of your supertech is gonna be "see in new wavelengths" and "shoot with new forms of horrible radiation." All of the cool "looks-like-magic-because-advanced"-stuff is entirely the purview of the exsurgents. About the only truly not-just-old-stuff-but-better options are nano-fabrication, resleeving and the pandora gates. So no, there's no way to really break the mold as a "prestige class" or something else once you're sufficiently far advanced. Watts Macleod is a strain of the exsurgent virus Asyncs have the Watts Macleod virus Therefore Asyncs are Exsurgents Therefore by rules as written, Asyncs can use all the cool "Exsurgent only" powers 
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Jul 30, 2019 00:45
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Nessus posted:Mostly I would say the question is: Why do you want to become a sentient nanomachine colony? Like, one that is meaningfully different than a human being, as opposed to just a human being capable of surviving hilarious amounts of random harm and possibly doing some neat stunts like popping a Damascus knife out of your thumb to open a wrapper. Based on what was said I don't think he is literal forks. A fork is apparently (someone who knows EP better than me can correct me) when you copy yourself into another body and don't turn off the one you left. Now there's two of you; you've forked your consciousness into two streams. He's just a chef working with a team that all happen to be... himself. Himselves? Prism fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 00:47
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PurpleXVI posted:Of course then the Jovians collectively get saddled with a fascists system for ???? reason. If they were conservative without consequently always being fascist, the Jovian part of the system would suddenly be a lot more usable to play in and their fundamental ideology might actually be something more players would want to engage with. People often slammed EP for its political leanings, but if you go back and look the slanted worldview is painted from the perspective of in-universe characters who themselves have biases. In the red-border chapters where it actually talks about the game like it's a game, Eclipse Phase 1E was a lot more even-handed than people gave it credit for.  Seems like the devs have backslid though. And as others have said, it does seem a little odd that they decided to keep the Jovians and axe the Ultimates because "muh fash" given that they wrote this in Rimward: 
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Jul 30, 2019 01:05
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Will the Great posted:People often slammed EP for its political leanings, but if you go back and look the slanted worldview is painted from the perspective of in-universe characters who themselves have biases. In the red-border chapters where it actually talks about the game like it's a game, Eclipse Phase 1E was a lot more even-handed than people gave it credit for. The problem was that while problems were occasionally mentioned, 99% of the fiction still kept insisting and being written like the problems didn't exist. It simply wasn't even-handed!
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Jul 30, 2019 01:11
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LatwPIAT posted:The problem was that while problems were occasionally mentioned, 99% of the fiction still kept insisting and being written like the problems didn't exist. It simply wasn't even-handed! Yeah, going "BUT UNRELIABLE AUTHORS" doesn't really work when 99% of the unreliable authors present the same viewpoint(and frankly the non-narrated parts weren't much different). I don't think I recall more than, like, two narrators across the entire span of books presenting pro-PC/LLG/Jovian viewpoints and at least one was written to sound as villainous as possible.
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Jul 30, 2019 01:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, going "BUT UNRELIABLE AUTHORS" doesn't really work when 99% of the unreliable authors present the same viewpoint(and frankly the non-narrated parts weren't much different). I don't think I recall more than, like, two narrators across the entire span of books presenting pro-PC/LLG/Jovian viewpoints and at least one was written to sound as villainous as possible. Unreliable narration is an extremely difficult technique to use to begin with, and not good for a reference work for an RPG setting. If you can't tell what the truth is, you have to make it up yourself, and then what's the point of having the book?
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Jul 30, 2019 01:29
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MollyMetroid posted:I did. They did not give me the impression of someone who knows how dysphoria feels. IDK. "driving the company car" it ain't. The company car part was referring to someone who is changing to another sleeve for a short period of time to commute or do a job, not someone who is stuck long term in a different body. It's also voluntary for those people, which makes a big difference, and doesn't carry the same cultural and social consequences that suffering from dysphoria does in real life. EthanSteele posted: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. Again, I don't have a problem with that as part of the setting, but if the PCs are elite agents or whatever then they are going to be resleeving much more than the average person. I understand that it would be traumatic for a guy to go from one body they've had all their life to being stuck in a different one long term, but that's not the situation the PCs wind up in. People are consistently not taking into account the fact that this is a setting where they have control over both the brain and the body. They can download skills into you. They could download the cerebellar memory of how to operate a new body into you so it feels as natural to move in it as in your original body. It's also canon that you can change your new body's gender/appearance through healing vats, or even change your own gender identity through psychosurgery.
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Jul 30, 2019 01:36
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Part of the main issue with the Jovians in 1e isn't their political position and the fact that "they have a point, but their point has been hijacked by authoritarians and fascists who are gleefully controlling their society and government". It's the fact that in order to survive on Jupiter and its moons they're more or less living in bunkers inside giant asteroids and moons and are just an intrastellar tollbooth lane that gets cranky when people don't pay to go through their space...and it's really easy to just transport your consciousness remotely to bypass them entirely. "The Jovians are complicated" would be fine if they had more means by which to actively interact with the world as compared to the other factions that Are Complicated and Make Some Good Points But Then Kinda gently caress Up. Planetary Consortium: runs Luna, fighting over control of Mars, run the banks, run the trades. Very visible. Very easy to interact with outside of their own territory. Extropians: hyper libertarian capitalists follow the money and the cheapest working conditions possible and are generally traveling wherever for the purposes of business. Ultimates: generally found out in the Brink, Ultimates nevertheless gently caress around the solar system looking for new skills to master and new people to impose their fashy ideology on. Exhumans: either Brinkers or found anywhere. You generally can't expect where to find them. Scum: The Swarms travel all over for trade and cultural purposes and they're a pretty reliable way to get a ride if you can live anarchic for a while. But, in general: Anarchists: everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Jovians: unless they're special agents slipped loose from the home state for purposes of espionage/PCs, generally just found in the bunker cities of Jupiter.
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Jul 30, 2019 02:26
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mellonbread posted:Because I can Also between hearing about yet another god drat society of Batmans and finding out that dude isn't a cloud of literal forks, I gotta say Eclipse Phase is definitely falling short here.
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Jul 30, 2019 02:38
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juggalo baby coffin posted:The company car part was referring to someone who is changing to another sleeve for a short period of time to commute or do a job, not someone who is stuck long term in a different body. It's also voluntary for those people, which makes a big difference, and doesn't carry the same cultural and social consequences that suffering from dysphoria does in real life. ok so like, the thing is that you're talking like a person who's never actually experience dysphoria. It isn't "cultural and social consequences" you twerp it's "I am in a body that is fundamentally wrong" and the thing about psychosurgery you just said is mega-yikes holy poo poo
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Jul 30, 2019 02:46
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I'm pretty sure some of that chef dude's forks are more or less appliances, but I could be wrong. You're completely correct that the statement on exhumans is 'it's fine to turn into a nanoslime with eye stalks, as long as that's aimed at some kind of human purpose.'
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Jul 30, 2019 02:46
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MollyMetroid posted:ok so like, the thing is that you're talking like a person who's never actually experience dysphoria. It isn't "cultural and social consequences" you twerp it's "I am in a body that is fundamentally wrong" yeah you don't seem to have great reading comprehension, I said there are ALSO cultural and social consequences. I know what dysphoria is, and I'm not going to ever understate how hard it is to live with in real life. I'm not advocating psychosurgery for real trans people, it's part of the loving setting! like I keep saying, this is a setting where both body and mind are mutable. This is the slogan of the game: quote:Your mind is software. Program it. The psychotherapy people use to help people come to terms with their new body involves brain editing. New bodies come standard (in 1st edition) with mental patches to help the persons mind integrate with their new body. I don't know how to articulate any more clearly that the experiences of a transhuman intelligence with the ability to edit their own minds and bodies are not 1:1 with the experiences of real life, present day people with dysphoria
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Jul 30, 2019 03:04
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MollyMetroid posted:ok so like, the thing is that you're talking like a person who's never actually experience dysphoria. It isn't "cultural and social consequences" you twerp it's "I am in a body that is fundamentally wrong" But that's where Eclipse Phase is. You can just decide, "I want to be this orientation this week", and get a procedure done. The whole goddam point is that even core personal identity issues are fungible here
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Jul 30, 2019 03:06
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Nessus posted:Also between hearing about yet another god drat society of Batmans and finding out that dude isn't a cloud of literal forks, I gotta say Eclipse Phase is definitely falling short here. Forks vary wildly in legality and ethicality depending on where you are but generally speaking you wouldn't want to have a whole mess of forks working in unison for two reasons. 1: there already exists a Morph that's a decentralized cloud of nanomachines linking one mind together called a Swarmoid. 2: it's hard to herd a bunch of forks because generally speaking they're all people and the people who do have a whole mess of forks working in unison are a breed of Exhumans who inhabit gigantic war machines and have pruned all the forks back so they stop being so drat difficult and non-compliant. It's hard to manage people and it's even harder when they're all crewing the same body. So they just alter their forks to be specialized and not complain about working the guns or the treads or monitoring coolant all day every day forever indefinitely. The more sustainable way to be a whole mess of forks working together is, as previously established, instance everyone in some means. This can be turning yourself into a family of six You-s Paranoia 1e-style with a bunch of identical bodies, being a chef and letting all of yourselves live in the instruments, run a bunch of servers that you let each version of you live on as an infomorph, etc. To say nothing about the problems with ego-merging a bunch of yourselves who've lived separately enough to diverge. Anything longer than separation for a few hours gets psychologically taxing should you integrate them all and become one entity again.
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Jul 30, 2019 03:07
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But there are exceptions, there is literally an entire big name criminal organization that is staffed solely by forks of the 'founder'. Also in one of the splat books iirc they introduced essentially a bunch of humans who managed to link their consciousness together and not become a hive mind OR lose their individuality, also the group isnt intending to be(come) exhumans or weird post-human off shots, apparently they did it to survive when their colony failed. For reasons. 
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Jul 30, 2019 05:59
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LatwPIAT posted:Unreliable narration is an extremely difficult technique to use to begin with, and not good for a reference work for an RPG setting. If you can't tell what the truth is, you have to make it up yourself, and then what's the point of having the book?
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Jul 30, 2019 06:13
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Hostile V posted:bunker cities of Jupiter. Keep going, I'm nearly there. e: seriously, how is that not a game title already
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Jul 30, 2019 07:06
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I'm still somewhat baffled when you read about something being deeply flawed, mechanically, on FnF, and then someone comes in and goes "yeah, I love playing it." Why?
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Jul 30, 2019 07:12
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JcDent posted:I'm still somewhat baffled when you read about something being deeply flawed, mechanically, on FnF, and then someone comes in and goes "yeah, I love playing it." Why? Because a lot of people can still enjoy a game despite the mechanics? Also because a lot of what goes on here is opinion and not straight up fact and some posters just have terrible opinions (not about this specifically, EP sure does have its mechanical issues no doubt). edit: You know, on further reflection, it's even more hosed up that someone can ask how people enjoy games with bad mechanics in the FnF thread then the people in the FnF thread enjoying said games. We don't post here because playing this poo poo is below our dignity. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Jul 30, 2019 |
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Jul 30, 2019 07:48
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LatwPIAT posted:Unreliable narration is an extremely difficult technique to use to begin with, and not good for a reference work for an RPG setting. If you can't tell what the truth is, you have to make it up yourself, and then what's the point of having the book? For an RPG setting book if I had to use an unreliable narrator I'd have it annotated by a reliable narrator pointing out "Whoa this this is a complete lie" "Technically accurate but misleading" etc
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Jul 30, 2019 09:34
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juggalo baby coffin posted:People are consistently not taking into account the fact that this is a setting where they have control over both the brain and the body. They can download skills into you. They could download the cerebellar memory of how to operate a new body into you so it feels as natural to move in it as in your original body. Can they actually? I don't think they can. I think there's a mention of software being used to ease the integration of an ego into a new sleeve, but there's no indication I can remember that this makes the the new body feel as natural to operate as the old body. In part because the rules give mechanical consequences indicating this is not the case. Hostile V posted:Part of the main issue with the Jovians in 1e isn't their political position and the fact that "they have a point, but their point has been hijacked by authoritarians and fascists who are gleefully controlling their society and government". It's the fact that in order to survive on Jupiter and its moons they're more or less living in bunkers inside giant asteroids and moons and are just an intrastellar tollbooth lane that gets cranky when people don't pay to go through their space...and it's really easy to just transport your consciousness remotely to bypass them entirely. "The Jovians are complicated" would be fine if they had more means by which to actively interact with the world as compared to the other factions that Are Complicated and Make Some Good Points But Then Kinda gently caress Up. It often felt like the writers could never quite decide whether the Jovians were a scary threatening space-Soviet Union, or just pathetic Luddite North Korea. They had to be pathetic to reflect/be evidence that their ideology was bad, but also frightening to show that their ideology was an existential threat. Like a bad Baen villain.
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Jul 30, 2019 09:35
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JcDent posted:I'm still somewhat baffled when you read about something being deeply flawed, mechanically, on FnF, and then someone comes in and goes "yeah, I love playing it." Why? Most games fall into the loose, incredibly arguable broad category of "just fine, or at least mediocre." A lot of FnF is catastrophizing. And even for games that are legitimately, horrendously hosed, if anyone cares enough to be its audience then it typically has something in it that affords it forgiveness, even if a lot of other people don't think that something is worth the rest of it. And, finally, the top priority for most people who play RPGs is probably the social and collaborative nature of it. Even for whiny system nerds it tends to overrule "do I think this game isn't very good, or is even sort of bad." I certainly play a ton of games that I'm not hype about, or that even feature parts that I actively dislike. I'd love to have the time and group(s) to play even more of these lovely games! Sure, if literally the whole package of some game makes you miserable, "no gaming is better than bad gaming" (probably) is true, but depending on yourself and your group and your table, plenty of theoretical "bad gaming" isn't actually bad enough to justify blowing it off. You don't have to secretly want to marry a football in order to enjoy hanging out with your friends eating nacho-covered pizzas on game day.
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Jul 30, 2019 09:49
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