/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

I'm interested in EP, as it seems to be good to convey Sci-Fi operatives, intrigues and horror.
Should I just read 1st Ed and wait for 2nd to play ?
Also, how much sjw bullshit is in there ? I'm used to White Wolf/Onyx Path books, so I can tolerate a few hamfisted sentences, provided they don't ruin the whole book with it.

A lot of the fluff, especially in the core 1e, is very AnCom-leaning. Fortunately, this is mostly from in-character fluff pieces and you can adjust it pretty heavily. 2e's shaping up to be more in-your-face about it, going by the comments about the Ultimates, but it looks like the actual fluff isn't going to change a huge amount.

For rules, I'd recommend checking out 1e, core and Transhuman specifically. If you like the level of complexity, then you can stick with it. Otherwise, 2e's doing a fair bit of streamlining, so you may be more interested in it when it's done.

Okay, thanks for the info. I'm gonna read core and Transhuman while following the news about 2e.

>Morphs, morph traits, and extra gear no longer purchased with CP.
This is the only objectively good part of this.

The rest is questionable and
>Every character now starts with 2 languages instead of 1.
is cancer.

>Should I just read 1st Ed and wait for 2nd to play ?
2nd Ed. looks like it's going to be pretty much shit, so I'd say just start playing 1st Ed. There's no reason to wait for 2nd Ed.,

>streamlining
Streamlining is just code for dumbing down. Diversity is just code for white genocide.

Jovians, please leave.

I don't know if I like the dumbing down of the system. I contacted the devs and asked if they would still be offering 1st edition books and pdfs. They said yes.

It also bothers me. It makes the linked aptitudes more balanced, but I'm gonna personally hope it goes back to REF.

There's just Economic Justice Warrior stuff, which at least is kind of novel for an RPG.

Personally I like the 2e changes but ymmv so checking out the 1e stuff wouldn't be a bad idea.

>Every character now starts with 2 languages instead of 1 is cancer

Why? More people are multilingual than monolingual. It's only in majorly english speaking countries where people keep just english - and they aren't necessarily the population powerhouses of the future (or right now). If an average transhumans are smarter, it makes sense for them to know more than one language.

I kind of wished they'd phrased it a little differently. Like if you took COG and INT reductions you'd start with only 1.

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>Also, how much sjw bullshit is in there?
In the first edition there was a bunch of social Darwinists called the Ultimates who were a pretty popular faction among players. The devs are removing them as a PC choice in the 2nd edition because they "don't want to encourage fascism".

While I'm sure they also don't want to encourage fascism, that's also not why Ultimates aren't on the short list anymore - they're pulling them because they consider it to be a more complex and advanced option not something to offer players right out of the gate, presumably because the Ultimates may be written as more actively hostile or threatening in the setting and raise complications or questions while playable - probably similar to playing a Singularity Seeker or Exhuman would.

An analogy to D&D was used - while you can technically play a hobgoblin in many versions of D&D, this is generally not a default assumption by the game and is not presented as a core feature.

Or similar to the sidebar Drow get in the PHB.

I don't buy that explanation while Jovians are a default faction. It's far more complicated to fit a strict bioconservative PC into your campaign than an Ultimate.

Except, you don't have to be a strict bioconservative necessarily to be a Jovian PC - and the jovians do allow use of higher technology for the greater good.

Meanwhile, it's even in the 1E fluff that Firewall has terrible penetration the the Ultimate hierarchy and very heavily compartmentalizes around ultimate sentinels for security reasons. And while the Jovians might have ideas or movements which could be threatening to greater transhumanity, as of yet the game is not implying they are acting on any of those ideas directly where as the game strongly tries to convince you ultimates are up to no good in your neighborhood.

Also Jovians are in to balance out the factions. Even if they don't agree with the ideology, the developers accept bioconservatism is a thing that could be seen as a legit response to the Fall

>Except, you don't have to be a strict bioconservative necessarily to be a Jovian PC
You don't have to be a "1488 gas the genetrash race war now" memer to be an Ultimate.

>Meanwhile, it's even in the 1E fluff that Firewall has terrible penetration the the Ultimate hierarchy and very heavily compartmentalizes around ultimate sentinels for security reasons.
Isn't it stated that Firewall has nobody in any position of import within the Republican government?

>And while the Jovians might have ideas or movements which could be threatening to greater transhumanity, as of yet the game is not implying they are acting on any of those ideas directly
The Ultimates value individualism extremely highly and there's tons of differing views within the faction. Just because a subset of them are doing shady shit doesn't mean every Ultimate would support it. Different Ultimate ideologies probably despise each other as much as anybody hates anybody.

I kind of like what they'd done with the weapons. Some people are not sold on the reload mechancis, so no idea if that'll stay, but definitely some interesting and good clarifications there.

Also, now a mechanical reason to crouch or go prone besides maybe just a smaller profile.

The polygun concept is also pretty neat.

Also holy shit hollowpoints are way less broken. +1d6 against soft targets only.

They're an element of smart ammo now, so they're more flexible if you're willing to pay extra, which is neat.

It also looks like grenades got across the board buffs, which is a little scary considering how dangerous they could be in 1e.

You don't have to, but it helps.

Grenades had worse damage output than guns in 1e, thanks to the way the action economy worked. Firing two bursts from a pistol did more damage than a frag grenade.

The balance is probably that now all the good stuff is (R) - and not allowed most places explicitly and thus takes more time to get and people ask awkward questions if they find you with a pocket full of TMP.

That, and they are also very explicitly not for close range any more, with all weapons being No Point-Blank or No Close. No Close especially can be rough, 10 meters is a pretty decent space.

For grenades you have the opposite problem, your normal range is your SOM in meters.

>and not allowed most places
Most lame places maybe.

>The FUCKING FASCISTS won't let me carry my bandoleer of recreational high explosives!

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Any news about changes to bots?

Nah, Mesh actions are next up in the playtest cycle, and Bots will presumably be in gear. I haven't directly compared the two rules but I think collisions aren't quite so holy shit now - but that will depend on the max speed and DUR of bots. You only get stupid multipliers when you're rushing or sprinting or something though.

Jamming is a lot simpler. You treat it like sleeving into the drone, you operate the drone as if it was you - but are limited by the Drone's Vigor pool. Otherwise you are the drone. Other option is just autonomous operation where the onboard AI executes your commands, which are still quick mental actions.

The holy shit modifiers are with size categories now, so you'll need something bigger than a saucer to properly fuck people up with ramming now.

Which really, is fine. The saucer shit was an exploit, while hitting a person with a future car going balls out should fuck your shit up.

I completely agree, and I'm also looking forward to splattering an exsurgent or something with a security aircar.

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Stop it.

Nope.

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What's eclipse phase? I saw the cover online once and it looked cool but I never followed up on it. I've seen it mentioned negatively in passing on here as well, but I don't trust the general opinion of any Veeky Forums board. Anyone willing to fill me in?

A dead game with a dead thread.
1d4chan.org/wiki/Eclipse_Phase

>I've seen it mentioned negatively in passing on here as well, but I don't trust the general opinion of any Veeky Forums board.
>Anyone willing to fill me in?

Which is it, faggot? Do you want our opinions or not?

This is a general for Eclipse Phase, not Veeky Forums at large. Are you stupid?

I mean, it's hardly right to call a game which just funded a KS at 5x their goal to start a second edition "dead" is it?

Alright, I'll tell you my opinion. You're cancer, and if you killed yourself right now, the world would be a better place.

Ah, realizing your inability to read you resort to wishing death upon someone who noticed that you're a retard. I would advise against wishing death upon every person who notices that about you, or we'll run short on people quickly.

I see it as people throwing money at a corpse.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion, man.

>y-you're a retard!

You're the one who can't form your own opinions about things that are literally free to read on the internet yourself. I'm sorry your feelings are so easily hurt, but if you're going to get this upset about every post, Veeky Forums isn't the site for you. Perhaps >>>r/eclipsephase will be able to fill you in.

>I mean, it's hardly right to call a game which just funded a KS at 5x their goal to start a second edition "dead" is it?

Considering how 2e is shaping up, I'd say it's spot on

So tell it to me straight. I'm a dude who likes to take underperforming morphs and trick them out. I really, really struggled with this in 1e. Is it easier or harder now to overcome the difference in baseline morphs with aftermarket mods now?

What aren't you liking about 2e senpai?

>projecting your feelings onto others

Lel

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>damage control

It's a total frankenstein. They simplified parts of the game without simplifying others, and it's shaping up to be an uneven mess. Look at the skill list. Beam Weapons, Kinetic Weapons, Spray Weapons and Seeker Weapons have all been combined into Guns. Meanwhile, Hardware and Medicine are still field skills, meaning you need to buy each one multiple times to actually be useful in the same variety of situations. The result is that the point costs for making a combat character versus a tech based character are completely lopsided. This is visible in many other places throughout the material we've seen so far.

It's still salvageable, but I seriously doubt Posthuman will actually fix it all and get the game into a cohesive state. They're releasing the game piece by piece and changing the pieces based on the feedback they get, despite the fact that there isn't enough there to actually play the full game. What they should have done is waited until they had enough together that you could play a sample adventure or two, and gotten feedback based on that.

Since we're talking about the Kickstarter, I'll point out that they were literal years late delivering on their promises from the previous one, including at least one book that they have yet to deliver. Just because people rushed to donate when Posthuman came with a hand out doesn't mean they're going to get what they paid for.

>>Free Fall now based on SOM
>This bothers me far more than it has any reason to.
I, too, liked having only two relevant aptitudes for linked skills.

I mean, I can understand the concern about field skills - though I would argue that since there's multiple "combat" skills, multiple "tech" skills is also fine. Sure, Guns lets you shoot everyone forever - that helps you real good when some guy tries to knock your brains out with a wrench in a dark alley.

The problem I think is that especially with the smaller skill list and the package system - and how buying skills is way easier now, if Hardware was just one skill it'd be too easy and also make characters behave strangely. You could not be say, just have spent some time as a car mechanic - you would also be a rocket scientist, a phone repairman and have your plumbing and electrician's license. Oh, and be an armorer and demolitionist. But if somebody shows you how to fire a gun the same basic principles (besides the special traits on the guns themselves) apply to all of those weapons. Point n' shoot.

Also, now that MP is a thing you really are not hurting for skill points in this game. I don't know what the ratio is for the 3 packages, but I know it gives you pretty good spread on it's own, then you have a maximum of 100 skill points you can add on. EP never really hurt for giving you skills, and 2E is no different. If you want to build a mr fixit who can fix literally anything (without just throwing repair spray at it) that probably SHOULD take a lot of your build up that's a freakishly diverse skill set.

Additionally, Combat should be easy to get into - it's a real pain in the ass to not have combat skills of some sort when the shooting starts. That's still true, even if you can use

Somehow must have undid my work there - meant to end with "even if you can use social skills in combat or action scenes".

Not the guy you're replying to, but there's a big difference between having 3 combat skills and having 6+ different medicine skills. Same with having both interface/infosec. In a game where you have one skill for guns, I have a hard time justifying effectively having different skills for surgery, pharmacology, genetherapy, general practice, etc. Medicine should honestly just be a medicine skill.

Hardware is a little dicier, but given that you're usually playing elite agents, having one guy both be able to fix car and fix space ship isn't that far fetched.

One alternative is to do what my table house rules, that for active field skills if you have the skill at 30+ for one particular field, you can use that skill for all fields at a flat rating of 30. So for example if you have COG of 15 and Hardware: Mechanics 60 you would be able to have an effective Hardware: Mechanics of 75 and for Hardware: _____ you would have 45

Am I the only one who freaks out when games have some skills named in verb form while others in noun form?

No.

Deceive vs athletics doesn't really bother me, but Know is horrible.

Not especially, 'though it really should be called Deception. It just rolls off the tongue better and more accurately represents its breadth of actions.

I don't think anybody likes Know.

Like, they say that the three Knowledge skills were all the same except for the slight difference anyway - but I don't think kludging them into a single skill which then goes on to describe the three areas it could cover anyway helps.

You'll just have a giant block of "Knows" in the middle of your sheet now - and god help you if you get an ambiguous "Know" skill.

Yeah, having one knowledge skill with a ton of fields seems better than a single skill with three fields, each with subfields in terms presentation.

Know (ugh) skills are tucked in their own section though, so at least they aren't breaking up the skill list.

>>Every character now starts with 2 languages instead of 1.
>is cancer.
How?

Not so much SJW stuff, it's just that the authors have incredibly obvious opinions on who the Good Guys and Bad Guys of the setting are. Anarchists and communists Good, capitalists and conservatives and Christians eeeeeeevul. And the good guys have plot armour.
If you're okay with OWOD, though, you'll be fine.

X-Risks revealed that the Ultimate leaders are planning a takeover of the Gate network, isolating the rest of transhumanity around Sol. Is that still canon?

In defense of these fags, it seems that at certain points of the story they put a libertarian guy talking about anarchocapitalism since they seem to actually know something about it(and very little about anarcho-syndicalism aka the nearest thing to anarchism that anarcho-communists will not acknowledge happened).

Of course, since it has money involved they are egocentrical assholes with recreational nukes that are about to become a X-risk anytime soon.

>Except, you don't have to be a strict bioconservative necessarily to be a Jovian P
Case in point; a new player may not realize this on first reading.

>ne alternative is to do what my table house rules, that for active field skills if you have the skill at 30+ for one particular field, you can use that skill for all fields at a flat rating of 30. So for example if you have COG of 15 and Hardware: Mechanics 60 you would be able to have an effective Hardware: Mechanics of 75 and for Hardware: _____ you would have 45
This house rule is worse than the actual field skill rule, which is that you can default to another field skill at -30.

You know, that rule everyone forgets so they can bitch about how field skills are too thinly sliced.

>Of course, since it has money involved they are egocentrical assholes with recreational nukes

So proper ancaps with personal defence naval cannons to use against people violating the NAP?

>GRAVITY TRANSITION ZONES
>The widespread use of simulated gravity in space habitats means
>that you will often encounter places where the direction of down
>suddenly changes.

No, no you wouldn't. The most you'd encounter is a region in which gravity changes along a gradient as you move closer to or further from the edge of a rotating reference-

>If you are cast adrift in the microgravity zone at the axis of a
>rotating space habitat, you will slowly drift outward until you
>begin to encounter simulated gravity, at which point you will fall.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

ECLIPSE PHASE 2: THE DEVS STILL CANNOT INTO HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE

Yeah, people keep pointing this out. Cold damage is no longer mentioned by Vacuum - so maybe they'll stop trying to make this a thing, finally?

fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2017/6/9/defenders-of-kashyyyk/

Auzituck preview up

Just get the core pdf from OP 's post. It's all creative commons so you don't even have to feel bad about piracy

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Only a rumor of it was ever canon

Where's that one guy who's always butthurt about Shredders? We should tell him they don't have the AP quality anymore.

I'm still confused why shotguns don't exist. Shredders are highly specialized weapons, the opposite of an unchoked shotgun

For those wondering, in an airless spin gravity hab you would drift normally until you hit an object. In a large one with air things are considerably more complicated, but ultimately air movement will push you in the spin direction and you will end up 'falling' largely sideways. To end up 'falling' 'down' at the end of your trajectory it would need to be truly huge.

Regarding an air-filled hab, it would have to be exceptionally large for air resistance to accelerate you to the velocity of the rim before the ground does.

>Sure, Guns lets you shoot everyone forever - that helps you real good when some guy tries to knock your brains out with a wrench in a dark alley.

Is this supposed to be sarcasm? Guns still have better damage output and are easier to stack modifiers on than melee weapons.

>Guns still have better damage output and are easier to stack modifiers on than melee weapons.

ish. No more free Smartlink bonuses, and several guns can't be fired in close range or point blank. The bonus for point-blank is only +10, and you take a -30 for firing while being engaged in a melee and a -20 for attacking while running.

Melee weapons now have some more ways to add DV now and quite a few of them come with bonuses like AP or Reach by default. Hitting people with a bad still doesn't outpace a bullet, but if a guy jumps you in an alley with a baseball bat you still gonna have a bad time.

>you take a -30 for firing while being engaged in a melee

Do you no longer get free movement as part of your turn? If you don't want to be engaged in melee, just take a step back from the guy on your turn. They didn't add AOOs for that, did they? I hope not, this isn't Pathfinder.

The reason it was called X-Risks was because it was Firewall giving examples of possible risks to the species.

IIRC, that Ultimate plan was merely something that was conceivably possible for them to pull off, since they already guarded several gates and were well-armed enough to take the rest.

It was never confirmed beyond that though. Firewall has never been able to get anyone into the higher echelons of the Ultimates (which gets them all pissy because they're the only ones allowed to do ridiculously unethical things in secret because they're the only ones acting for 'the greater good' unlike all those other people).

Yeah, you get your free base movement, but this is why I mention a dark alley. It's entirely possible for there to be nowhere for you do go. Or what if you get the classic move where one guy grapples you from behind while the other guy works you over?

Also, you can delay actions to act before someone - and I see no rule saying you can't delay automatic actions necessarily, if you don't need to move, you might be able to just hold your movement and then when that guy steps back you step forward.

And what if your gun has No Point Blank, or No Close? Then just a base movement back might not work. This means you'd have to take the Full Move (which is automatic) but then applies the -20.

Firewall is an x-risk.

So all mental skills are automatically +10 from Muse teamwork right? There's nothing specifying the helper has to be trained in the skill.

The setting will never acknowledge this, but they are. Firewall operatives and Gatecrashers are significant threats to transhumanity.

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