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They also openly booted all the MRAs off their official forum, which got them some goodwill as well.
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Aug 3, 2022 19:24
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Kavak posted:I should've known. Why was Eclipse Phase so popular anyway? Cyberpunk game that actively encouraged (... in 1e at least) working for your community and making the world a better place instead of just chasing sick profits. That was all it needed to get me to try both editions. It fell flat imo, but it was at least willing to engage with the purpose of its nominal genre unlike most of the other cyberpunk games that were on market at the same time. Now we have other modern games to fill that gap (of varying quality).
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Aug 3, 2022 19:30
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Also timing. Transhumanism itself was cresting a nerd peak around the time it came out, in the wake of stuff like Altered Carbon and Accelerando, futurists like Kurzweil and Yudkowsky were going strong. Transhumanism was really hot and sexy among nerds at the time, not that it's really subsided that much in the past decade. I also had a bunch of transgender acquaintances and some friends at the time who were into it for reasons I absolutely cannot disagree with. Plus I recall a lot of people really into it - and honestly what I read of the text itself - pretty happily elided the "horror" part of "transhuman horror" that the game claimed to be about, and solely engaged with being a robo-crab in a hollowed-out spinning rock. Pretending the "rep economy" wasn't itself a terrifying idea and instead would naturally reward people who did the boring necessary stuff because of course you'd talk up the person who's making sure the sewer lines aren't flooding the habitable areas of your rock.
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Aug 3, 2022 19:43
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I'm also getting an impression that while the devs probably lean anarchist (And if I was in their setting, I would too), the communities they were interacting with at the time leaned libertarian and saw the horror bugs as capitalist features.
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Aug 3, 2022 19:53
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potatocubed posted:They also openly booted all the MRAs off their official forum, which got them some goodwill as well. That happened long after its initial popularity, though. Being a radically different game drawing on a specific niche of 00s pop culture with high production values that you could get for free probably helped more.
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Aug 4, 2022 00:42
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Has there been another system that's actually covered the idea of resleeving and the like besides Eclipse Phase? I always kinda considered the setting and mechanics a little flawed but there were elements there that with a bit of GM work could be made functional.
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Aug 4, 2022 05:04
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Gearhead posted:Has there been another system that's actually covered the idea of resleeving and the like besides Eclipse Phase? I always kinda considered the setting and mechanics a little flawed but there were elements there that with a bit of GM work could be made functional. Well...https://renegadegamestudios.com/altered-carbon-rpg/ Anyone here tried it?
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Aug 4, 2022 07:04
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Pakxos posted:Well...https://renegadegamestudios.com/altered-carbon-rpg/ I remember seeing videos plugging this. There was a LOT of paid shilling for it so I kinda tuned it out.
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Aug 4, 2022 07:18
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Didn't Eclipse Phase have some pretty cringey nu-atheist stuff regarding every religion BUT Judaism and Buddhism?
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Aug 4, 2022 08:45
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Fivemarks posted:Didn't Eclipse Phase have some pretty cringey nu-atheist stuff regarding every religion BUT Judaism and Buddhism? Religions completely vanish as far as Eclipse Phase is concerned. The only society that still has a meaningful amount of people who identify as religious is the Jovians. One pointless extrasolar location is a Buddhist monastery and Mars has a Muslim minority that's really only brought up in reference to their having been mostly all killed by exsurgents and living in the wastelands on the edge of society. Oh and then there are the "voodoo" worshippers that are brought back as sinister savage badguys every so often for a module. On the one hand it's distinctly weird, when you think about it, that they write up everything else about space society(to greater or lesser quality) and then miss this particular thing, on the other hand it does feel very much like it was written by a white person in an air-conditioned US or EU office somewhere, who didn't think to explore the subject beyond their own immediate experiences. Like it tracks relatively well with what they'd have been exposed to in their own direct experiences and pop culture.
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Aug 4, 2022 09:12
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Fivemarks posted:Didn't Eclipse Phase have some pretty cringey nu-atheist stuff regarding every religion BUT Judaism and Buddhism? Buddhism and Islam are the two major religions that are still widespread in the setting. Buddhism apparently managed to adapt to the idea of digital immortality and resleeving much better than cranky old Christianity (and totally not just because white tech nerds often have a soft spot for westernised Buddhism), Islam for... reasons (probably a conscious desire to show it as a more progressive religion than Christianity, as a kind of positive discrimination, given how Islam was typically treated in the west circa 2008). Catholicism is also around, as part of an extended Altered Carbon reference that has it be an especially conservative, hateful, regressive, populist religion for fascists. Well, part Altered Carbon and part criticism of the Bush administration. And there's a couple of new ones popping up, like alien worship. All in all, Eclipse Phase does not particularly care for religion except as a thing for fascists and/or weird people.
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Aug 4, 2022 12:35
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Gearhead posted:Has there been another system that's actually covered the idea of resleeving and the like besides Eclipse Phase? I always kinda considered the setting and mechanics a little flawed but there were elements there that with a bit of GM work could be made functional. Infinity, but generally much less casually.
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Aug 4, 2022 12:43
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LatwPIAT posted:Buddhism and Islam are the two major religions that are still widespread in the setting. Buddhism apparently managed to adapt to the idea of digital immortality and resleeving much better than cranky old Christianity (and totally not just because white tech nerds often have a soft spot for westernised Buddhism), Islam for... reasons (probably a conscious desire to show it as a more progressive religion than Christianity, as a kind of positive discrimination, given how Islam was typically treated in the west circa 2008). Aw, it sounds like they don't think Buddhism is a supernatural religion which is also common among white tech nerds.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:14
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Gearhead posted:Has there been another system that's actually covered the idea of resleeving and the like besides Eclipse Phase? I always kinda considered the setting and mechanics a little flawed but there were elements there that with a bit of GM work could be made functional. Lesser Shades of Evil is science-fantasy, but includes within it resleeving and a system for designing new bodies and moving between them, and generally kinda interesting setting that could be reworked to be really good if you inject a bit of Horizon: Zero Dawn (I mean, Ambrose Kingsway is pretty much already Ted Faro gently caress Ted Faro). But a) it's not currently available in PDF, and b) it's an EOS press thing and gently caress EOS.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:14
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Dawgstar posted:Aw, it sounds like they don't think Buddhism is a supernatural religion which is also common among white tech nerds. No no, man, don't you know? Buddhism's more of a philosophy than a religion.
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Aug 4, 2022 14:05
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PurpleXVI posted:No no, man, don't you know? Buddhism's more of a philosophy than a religion. 
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Aug 4, 2022 14:12
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I don't remember how transhuman space handles religion besides the cthulhu jokes.
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Aug 4, 2022 14:13
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Going through PurpleXVI's review I remember there was a smug comment about how Christianity (and Judaism, strangely enough) lost all popularity after the Fall because "well their messiah didn't show up, so checkmate theists ". Because it's not like there weren't other huge disasters in the past that Christianity survived through like the Black Death and the fall of the Roman Empire.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:00
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SirPhoebos posted:Going through PurpleXVI's review I remember there was a smug comment about how Christianity (and Judaism, strangely enough) lost all popularity after the Fall because "well their messiah didn't show up, so checkmate theists And people say Comstar is a graceless lambasting of Catholics.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:09
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When Eclipse Phase came out, cyberpunk and space opera RPGs were really showing their age. Based on what I remember from forums back then, there was a real hunger for stuff that would pull cyberpunk out of the 80s, and for sci-fi games that would address ideas like AI, cloning, cybernetics, etc. as something other than curiosities used by criminals, weirdoes, and aliens that would appear in one episode of Star Trek and never be seen again. EP wasn't the only transhuman sci-fi game of the 00s, but there wasn't a lot of competition. Corporation is frankly just not very imaginative. Ex Machina was a "guide to running cyberpunk" for Tri-Stat, packed with four campaign settings that don't get fully fleshed out. The consensus on GURPS Transhuman Space seems to be that it had the opposite problem: it's one of those very dense settings that's so well thought out that the author forgot that instability and crises and contradictions are what gives the PCs stuff to do. a|state was downright aggressive in denying the PCs the ability to be interesting or do anything. Fates Worse Than Death is about playing one of the countless poor people from Soylent Green, instead of a cyborg assassin rockstar. EP also has higher production values than any of these. Edit: And Cyberpunk 3.0 had come out a few years before. Yeowch. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 15:09
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Halloween Jack posted:EP also has higher production values than any of these. Eclipse Phase 1.0 had high production values. Eclipse Phase 2.0 had worse art and editing on pretty much every level. 1.0's art communicated "space mystery" reasonably well while 2.0 was mostly "SPACE EXPLOSIONS YEEAAAH SHOOT A GUN NEXT TO A LADY WEARING SKIN-TIGHT LATEX AND NO BODY ARMOR AND SHE ALSO HAS A GUN AND THERE'S A SQUID YEEEAAAH"
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Aug 4, 2022 15:13
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I feel like there’s a space for Buddhism doing well in Eclipse Phase on the grounds that certain schools of Buddhist thought deny the existence of a persistent self/mind, and everyone in Eclipse Phase except some of the Jovians is a brain scan copy of someone whose original self got messily killed in the apocalypse. So there’s a form of Buddhism that has an answer ready to “who am I and do I have a soul, did I die” and that seems likely to do pretty well in the basic scenario of mass traumatic upload to space stations. That being said, I don’t think EP handled any of this well.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:25
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The purpose of all science fiction RPGs is to showcase art of naked women floating in fluid tanks. Trinity proves this.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:25
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Coincidentally, I'm reading the newest Why Your Team Sucks articles on defector.com, and one of the reader submissions was a story about a sibling that had to have brain surgery and lost most of her memories (she's since recovered). But even though she couldn't recognize her family, she still knew deep down that the Detroit Lions sucked. That story reminded me of the fiction from EP and got me wondering about an RPG where the set up is "you play as people recently awoken from a coma and you only remember trivial bullshit".
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Aug 4, 2022 15:58
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LatwPIAT posted:Buddhism and Islam are the two major religions that are still widespread in the setting. Buddhism apparently managed to adapt to the idea of digital immortality and resleeving much better than cranky old Christianity (and totally not just because white tech nerds often have a soft spot for westernised Buddhism), Islam for... reasons (probably a conscious desire to show it as a more progressive religion than Christianity, as a kind of positive discrimination, given how Islam was typically treated in the west circa 2008). But, okay, I'm not going to defend Organized Religion, but I also believe that there's a sort of inherent elitism in believing that the religion is only a thing for fascists and/or weird people. My personal experience, with religious driven organization and protest being one of the reasons that I'm nominally not a second class citizen, probably has something to do with it.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:14
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Fivemarks posted:But, okay, I'm not going to defend Organized Religion, but I also believe that there's a sort of inherent elitism in believing that the religion is only a thing for fascists and/or weird people. My personal experience, with religious driven organization and protest being one of the reasons that I'm nominally not a second class citizen, probably has something to do with it. I feel like one of the weird ways in which EP succeeds in spite of failing is that it treats every faction and every belief system and every X-Risk in such a way that there is something a GM is probably not going to like about how each and every one of them was handled and is encouraged to homebrew.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:18
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SirPhoebos posted:Coincidentally, I'm reading the newest Why Your Team Sucks articles on defector.com, and one of the reader submissions was a story about a sibling that had to have brain surgery and lost most of her memories (she's since recovered). But even though she couldn't recognize her family, she still knew deep down that the Detroit Lions sucked. I too am waiting for the Disco Elysium TTRPG to be released.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:49
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Fivemarks posted:But, okay, I'm not going to defend Organized Religion, but I also believe that there's a sort of inherent elitism in believing that the religion is only a thing for fascists and/or weird people. My personal experience, with religious driven organization and protest being one of the reasons that I'm nominally not a second class citizen, probably has something to do with it. Yeah, it's definitely elitism in this case. I remember it distinctly in EP because it was alongside CthulhuTech which was probably a bit worse than EP only because the writing was so ham-handed. Christianity crumbles immediately because tiny superstitious brains can't with aliens and is relegated to weird reclusive freaks and do I have to tell you Islam is mostly terrorist fanatics because it's CthulhuTech? I do not.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:56
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Huszsersvn posted:Bluebeard was never a pirate, you're thinking of Blackbeard. I think I'd like to see a game about Blackbeard's wife, however. Your husband sails out, leaving with keys to the mansion. Half of the rooms are age of sail trivia about boats and stuff, half the other rooms have stuff to do with drunk sailors. After the bride has done her tour, she has to find a way to spend the half of the year before her husband returns. You can choose to blame the Dutch.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:59
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Nick Buntline posted:I too am waiting for the Disco Elysium TTRPG to be released. I’m being the change I want to see in the world and designing a game that isn’t strictly Disco Elysium, but is about being an amnesiac attempting to solve a mystery. In a moment of things coming full circle, the mechanical chassis is in large part ripping off Bluebeard’s Bride.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:08
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That reminds me, anyone ever play The Demolished Ones? It came out not long after I read The Demolished Man, and I liked the aesthetic of the art.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:10
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Bluebeard's Bride has been on my radar for awhile as one of those celebrated indie games that I'm too much of a trashy bitch to enjoy. I mean, it must be celebrated since they kept publishing supplements and the art looks expensive. Now I feel vindicated in sticking to games where a vampire with a raygun kills orcs in a basement. I just don't feel the need to set aside a few hours to imagine a woman being tormented, to remind myself that patriarchy is bad.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:21
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Bluebeard's Bride is, to me, a great example of a game not actually meant to be played, but where you read it and imagine playing it. The fact that you *can* play it isn't important. It's a work where you read it and imagine how interesting and unique an experience it is and then it goes back on your as shelf as you pull down Masks or D&D or Fiasco for your weekend game night. Then it catches your eye in a month and the cycle starts over. Invisible Sun falls into that category as well.
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Aug 4, 2022 17:42
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Dawgstar posted:Aw, it sounds like they don't think Buddhism is a supernatural religion which is also common among white tech nerds.  That said, yes, non-self would probably make it a lot easier to handle a lot of the stuff in Eclipse Phase, conceptually.
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Aug 4, 2022 18:55
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Capfalcon posted:Bluebeard's Bride is, to me, a great example of a game not actually meant to be played, but where you read it and imagine playing it. The fact that you *can* play it isn't important. It's a work where you read it and imagine how interesting and unique an experience it is and then it goes back on your as shelf as you pull down Masks or D&D or Fiasco for your weekend game night. Then it catches your eye in a month and the cycle starts over. What bothers me about BB, as opposed to other games about oppressed people in miserable situations, is that the outcomes are uniformly awful and the narrative responsibility given to the players. I really don't want to sit around a table conjuring up misogynistic fantasies and worrying if they're too tame or too extreme. Watching a Lars Von Trier movie is punishment enough, don't make me cowrite one. (Is there a jargon term for games that are rules-light, narrative, built for one-shots, and more focused on the scenario than the broader setting? There are a lot of them.) Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 19:47
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Halloween Jack posted:(Is there a jargon term for games that are rules-light, narrative, built for one-shots, and more focused on the scenario than the broader setting? There are a lot of them.)
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Aug 5, 2022 00:11
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Capfalcon posted:Bluebeard's Bride is, to me, a great example of a game not actually meant to be played, but where you read it and imagine playing it. The fact that you *can* play it isn't important. I've made this joke a bit too often lately, but— so that explains CoNTINUUM!
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Aug 5, 2022 02:30
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t3isukone posted:This we've gone over in quite a bit of detail in the Book of Rooms review-there's an ambiguous story in each room, the Sister with the ring decides what the token she takes is and whether it supports Bluebeard as a killer or not. Ah, yes, the moral ambiguity of "man stabs kid dead for beating him at fencing" I know I have two pages of discussion still to read but laffo at the idea of someone seriously going through the horror rooms and saying "no, it was an accident, Bluebeard isn't at fault" as an organic interpretation of the evidence and without the explicit intent to be the faithful wife.
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Aug 5, 2022 05:40
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Ettin posted:Efreet I think the Efreet is actually a lot more viable than its description implies for the default in-cities game because a lot of Eldritch Society operations are assaults, not heists. Your job is often going to be to infiltrate a facility/base/project and kill important people there then burn everything that looks valuable, and that in and of itself is going to get pretty loud, so being constantly on fire is an issue that can be worked around pretty easily because during the times where you're constantly on fire, you'll be getting attention due to all the people you're killing and the poo poo you're loving up. The Efreet's disadvantage is real, but it's a moment by moment tactical issue rather than a strategic "you don't fit with the default tager game" issue because you are still just as good at infiltration for strategic purposes - the infiltration is probably going to be done while in human form for a lot of Tagers because very few of them have actual stealth/infiltration bonuses when transformed and being in human form is less noticeable - and your firepower (which is quite significant) ideally will let you set everything on fire and bug out faster, so your moment to moment stealth problems are a nonissue - by the time the quick reaction forces have tooled up and gotten to the scene of your crime, you've already disappeared and transformed to exfiltrate out. On the flipside, I actually think ironically the Efreet is most disadvantaged when running around in environments where other Tagers can stay transformed more freely (because there aren't that many eyes around to observe them) but the Efreet, being constantly on fire, will have to stay human-form for longer.
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Aug 5, 2022 12:43
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JcDent posted:Ah, yes, the moral ambiguity of "man stabs kid dead for beating him at fencing" I mean, the players all know Bluebeard is a killer. Specifically of wives who look in his secret room. The game is not about unmediated reactions.
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Aug 5, 2022 14:03
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