/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Or, if you're using either of the variant character creation paths from Transhuman, use fewer package points. 1PP is about 100 CP, so go with about 8PP.

If you're doing something like this, consider raising the amount of Rez gained per session, I've run some short campaigns and the main complaint is that the characters didn't change a lot, which will only be more noticeable if they start off weak.

What would you say is a good amount to bump up Rez gain by?

Not sure how it compares but there actually is already a Blame! homebrew game called Blam!

1d4chan.org/wiki/Blam!

I don't know, I haven't haven't had a chance to test it. My first guess is to just give out rez every session, instead of each story arc like the core book says. This is going to at least triple the advancement rate, depending on how long your story arcs are.

Say the merging theory about sybils is true.

Could you take a 'baby' seed AI, one right at the beginning of development, pre-personality, pre-sapient, just with the right 'code' and merge a transhuman ego with it, so that the transhuman would be uplifted to seed AI status? At least, a very weak one to begin with.

Sounds like an x-threat.

Has anyone run Continuity? Did you have the players roll for alienation and integration right at the start, or would that handicap them too much?

Probably, if done by someone nasty enough. Just wondering if it'd give the ego the mental architecture to begin the self upgrade process.

Has anyone made a terror bird morph? I remember a couple threads ago people were sharing images of birds/feathered dinosaurs using tools or with opposable thumbs. It might not have been /epg/.

What isn't an x-threat?

Not a morph-morph, but one of the Yearblogs did stat "Terror Birds of Mars" as a smart animal. I think it was Seedware?

Post it! I did something similar.

The system is pretty good IMO (I like it anyway), but may not be optimal for near future cyberpunk. It's made with heavy transhumanism in mind, so most stats are mental to facilitate transfer between bodies and similar. You could use it for cyberpunk, but its not the best fit for anything not GitS-esque (There is a GitS hack if you want to do that.

700-800 is pretty good imo. You can go lower but then you have few enough points that minmaxing is pretty necessary. There's less "fluff" choices like interesting interest skills or similar.

Rez is slow as fuck. Standard gainsx5 should be fine, but beyond that might be different.

Supposedly a lot of AGIs were (and maybe still are) made by pasting AI skills templates onto a generic human brain framework. I can't imagine it'd be easy to do that with a nascent seed-AI framework, but its probably possible. Singularity Seekers want to do that, but either splicing the mind in, or creation genuine seed-AI architecture is generally stopping them at least long enough for someone to stop them.

I didn't. It's short enough that I didn't want people getting fucked over by a random roll for a whole one-shot.

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The only reason to ever use the Eclipse Phase rules is to run the Eclipse Phase setting

Anything else isn't worth the headache

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/epg/, I just want to remind you all, any transhuman born on Earth, Luna or Mars should have the skill requisite for a Driver's License.

That is all.

>Not getting everywhere via public transport and freerunning
>Not bumming a ride for every mission and sitting back and huffing cancersticks while cooking up this month's gag reel from your porn video as some other sucker drives

>Not flying

They don't have the skill level for their pilot's license.

Conversely, any Transhuman who now lives on Venus most of the time, regardless of where they were born, should have the requisite skill for a pilot's license

>Not buying an indenture literally just to chaffeur you everywhere
>Not getting a team of them and having them cart you around in a robot-powered palanquin
How does it feel being a peasant?

You don't need a pilots license to fly a morph.

The Call of Duty looks weirdly EP

True, but if you don't want to break your face, you better have those points in Flight.

I've never said they all HAVE licenses, but rather they all easily have the skill level to easily get one. Which is more important.

The last Black Ops also had some kinda interesting transhumanist themes.

Too bad it's bad

The sheer amount of talent that goes into the individual elements of the CoD games are something to behold, but when put together it's just bleh

>There is a GitS hack if you want to do that.

Oh Lord, could someone provide me with a link, please?

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Late night dead thread.

So let's ask a late night question. What kind of stuff do you hear on the radio deep in your local night time? Do people still to "late night" talk shows and easy listening music?

I'd be greatly upset if radio talk shows and stuff like that were yet another thing that vanished because of the transhuman snobbishness of "mmmmm yes we have evolved past such barbaric traditions".

I mean I guess they'd exist in a form different than what we're used to today, but I'd hope the general idea would be the same. But then again, I had great Call of Cthluhu experiences with NPC radio personalities so this is likely just my personal bias talking.

Well, in literal terms, we still use radio to do a lot of that fancy pants "mesh networking", and there are a couple examples of talk shows in the books.

I suspect Transhumans will be fiends for multitasking and constant media consumption, so basically non-stop podcast listening could easily be a thing. And any asshole with a mesh insert can make a show, so it's not exactly a huge barrier to entry.

Of course, I basically do that all the time myself (listen to things, I mean), so now that could just be MY bias talking.

Yes. This is called "making a seed AI".

forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675751-Ghost-In-The-Shell-Conversion-for-Eclipse-Phase

Ghost stations.

Seriously. I'll find stuff broadcasting from god knows where on one frequency, some ungodly ethnic music, or random political speech that seems reasonable and then veers off into "And that's why Hitler was secretly a gnostic archon and we must submit our delicious boyholes to aryans!", all said in an arabic accent, etc. And then I'll never hear it again.

I'm still searching for 'curry radio'. The most cheerful announcer I've ever heard. Shit was infectious. There you go. Basilisk hack radio.

Oh, and since I work nights and I'm driving around, you can only ever hear them in certain spots. You know, 5 minutes down a highway, then they fade out. And sometimes you'll hear something that shows you've got no business hearing them - like they're being broadcast from towns thousands of kilometres away.

Actually, Free Pirate radio on Mars has to be pretty nuts. With radio boosters (which come standard on most vehicles) you can push radio range to like, 250 km in the open, if not farther. There have to be all kinds of assholes just cruising the red in their space-campers, blasting out whatever the fuck they want.

Urban areas probably have that effect to describe, since mesh range is much shorter in confined spaces. Some guy runs a radio broadcast for his neighborhood out of his apartment, but you skip a couple steps over, now there's some anarchist cell with a backdoor into the city infrastructure running radio out of a sewer tunnel.

God. Mars' escape velocity is like 5km/s. I can see some arsehole with a love of memetics boosting shit into orbit out in the boonies that just blares random radio until destroyed.

At least the Consortium is probably willing to expend a decent effort to get that cleaned up pretty quick. Mars is such a major hub, and with the space elevator and many space ports and orbitals - letting just random trash cans float around is probably a pain in the ass to let keep.

The other option would be gliders. Something tossed off Olympus with solar panels could probably stay in the air a while. Hitler radio, on the air, literally.

Now that would be a real bitch. Slap on some chameleon coating and radar/thermal damped pretty cheap, thing would be a huge pain in the ass to find as it soars across the sky, randomly pissing people off as it swings into their neighborhood.

I imagine barsoomians and nomads building some pretty sweet bounty rewards for any red son of a gun with enough skill to take his rifle and pick it out of the sky.

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>hitler radio
>claims to play "the fuhrer's greatest hits"
>mostly long rambling one-man conversations composed of very brief snippets from historical recodings
>occasionally music, again either remixed speeches or sung by various Scum made neo-Hitlers in choral arrangements
>these broadcasts cover an incredibly wide and rarefied range of subjects, rarely relevant to the dictator's historic context
>the broadcasting beacons are usually carried by large balloon, launched by drone rovers

That's exactly the kind of weird shit I expect to encounter when traveling around the Outer System.

And then someone spoils it all by raiding that Jewish station, killing everyone, putting every ego into a hitler morph and claiming the radio station did it.

I can see this being a thing for Das Frettchen. It's only him, as a hobby thing.

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Building a robot to carry a child instead of just an artificial womb machine bolted to the ground in a hospital is a waste of resources

You do that to show poorfags how much better than them you are.

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This is the sort of thing that needs to go into some sort of random encounter table, like docaquatic. Anyone got further ideas?

From a system standpoint the game is godawful, it is made by a bunch of "big idea" guys who have very little idea what balance or usability mean. Their system doesn't mesh well with their intended idea of modular bodies and their entire combat system is seven flavors of ass.

That being said it is one of the best setttings I have ever played in and I loved it enough to do a full conversion to a better system. I chose ORE from Wild Talents/Godlike/Reign.

Who would drive with all the overcrowding and traffic? Besides I'm sure most cars were self-driving anyway.

It's a status symbol. Hey indentures, wanna see the kid I had?

Focus on melee weapons. :^)

Which book do Shapers come from?

Panopticon, IIRC.

I don't think anybody who commented got it. Fall Evacuee, Lunar Colonist, Martian and Re-Instantiated backgrounds get you +10 Pilot: Groundcraft, and the transhuman average is 11-15. So assuming an average transhuman with that background, you get 20+ points in Pilot: Ground for free, which is enough to qualify for a driver's license.

I really like the idea of a mesh random encounter table too, intending to work on some short prompts.

Random adds for sexy neo-avian swimsuit and lotion play porn pop up and cloud you're encropics in the middle of trying to access the area's blueprints on the fly.

Plot twist, it's a red-six heuristics lab basilisk hack to make you immediately purchase some.

Lol.

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What's the point of having a hammock next to a bed?

Two people live there?

Also, clearly using the bed for storage.

Would you allow players to sleeve into Vehicle/Macromorphs?

I mean, you basically can already, just most vehicles aren't designed to host infomorphs easily. You can use a frickin' hab as your morph if you want.

Jamming them is the closest I'd allow. If anyone objects, they go in my fetishfag book.

Yeah I know that, but it seems to me the chance to utilize it is limited to a degree aside from having the rare occasion where you have a reaper morph on hand or something.

As if you couldn't do that with any other morph options.

>As if you couldn't do that with any other morph options.

I do, with all of them. That's why all of the characters' morph listings are blank.

You sound like a fun guy to be around

>Everyone is neuter
>Being neuter is my fetish
>Everyone is an infomorph
>Being disembodied is my fetish
>Fuck it!

On second thought, you're right. Banning stuff just because it could be someone's fetish just leads to no one having fun. I guess that's why my players beat me up and sent me to the hospital.

GM/player relations have nothing to do with the game itself

Why though? I've never had any problems with the system, and I actually like the combat in it.
What problems did you have with it?

>corporate-sponsored kaiju battle tournament
>players are a team of amateur genehackers taking their homemade morph out to fight the corporate teams and circuit regulars

It's like Battlebots, but with giant monsters.

>The PC's highjack them

>No cute gf sleeved in this

>The PCs get disqualified
>The PCs lose rep for fucking up the show

Which planet has the best gravity for kaiju creation? X-Risks notes that with Jehovah's Corpse there's no way for creatures over a certain height to work in Earth-like gravity.

obviously low G. Go with moon gravity, that's the second most popular gravity next to earth.

Wait, I'm confused. I haven't read the whole book, but does it ever tell you which are applied first in character creation, the CP you use for skills or the morph bonus?

Because the way the sheet is built it would seem that the morph bonus is applied on top of the base+CP, instead of the CP being applied on top of base+morph. But doing base+morph first then CP is better for balance, I think, not allowing players to max out so many skills.

Does anyone know, do people have opinions about this?

The official character creator seems to have it so that the morph bonus comes later... I'm confused.

Morph bonus comes last. It doesn't count toward the 60 point limit after which you start paying double. It also makes sense because Eclipse Phase is a game where you have to switch bodies, so the bonus that changes the most should be layered on top after everything else to make it easy to remove and replace.

>Because the way the sheet is built it would seem that the morph bonus is applied on top of the base+CP, instead of the CP being applied on top of base+morph. But doing base+morph first then CP is better for balance, I think, not allowing players to max out so many skills.

Maxing out skills is an important part of character generation. In a percentile system there's no reason to have a skill at less than 60 if you intend to ever roll against it. The only reason to have anything lower than that is to act as a complimentary skill to provide bonuses for something actually important.

It explicitly says that morph bonus apply AFTER you've spent all your CP.

Well shiiitt. Our whole group has done their characters way wrong (I guess?). This is juuuust fucking dandy.

Jehovah's Corpse was 2000 meters tall. Up to 150 meters would be difficult but probably not impossible.

Go the Book of the New Sun route and create it underwater. Jehova's Corpse is included as a pretty obvious reference and nothing more, so I doubt the author really thought about it that hard, but something like that could feasibly move around beneath the ocean