Anyone ever play Eclipse Phase? The setting looks kind of cool but I haven't delved into the rule book yet...

Anyone ever play Eclipse Phase? The setting looks kind of cool but I haven't delved into the rule book yet. Players want something a little different from Call of Cthulhu but they don't want something like dungeons and dragons. Just wondering how it is compared to other sci fi games.

Wait for edition dos.
the setting and the rules are getting a facelift.

The books read like a sci-fi novel, which can be polarizing. I personally like it. My friend and I like the setting, though we've never actually played it. I also love how the player options book reads like an internet forum lol

Supposedly combat is a mix of deadly and the players being able to bump up their shooting skills to the point they're basically John Wick.

Lots of existential threats too. Someone is good with a gun? Vent him into space. Or bomb him. Or upload a fork mind into a virtuality with him sleeved in a pleasure pod, run five thousand years worth of trains on him, then upload that to his while he's sleeping so he can only remember how to handle cock, not guns.

RPPR did a game with the 2nd edition rules.

From what I heard of them there, they offer precious little benefit and feel a bit too easy and janky.
Sort of like they acknowledged that there were systems that needed fixing, but not enough to really justify a whole new edition, so they just put some other shit in there too so ti would be enough.

...

One of the main problems is how connected everything is. From a player perspective, that means you constantly have to be thinking about ever present surveillance, political repercussions, and intrigue fucking everywhere. As a GM, it means you have to plan and account for all of that in relation to what your players do.

It's stressful, tiring, and not particularly fun most of the time. It really limits you to either houseruling that takes you away from the written setting or running very specific types of games.

Players could just approach everything like black trenchcoat shadowrunners. Not sure the setting is even really supposed to let you go pink mohawk with a reaper morph anyway.

Honestly, for our games we mostly either stick to the boonies or go black trenchcoat and work to make the info gathered useless. Six unknown guys with burner IDs in illegal combat morphs came in and blew up an allegedly exsurgent infected hab. Six different extremist groups claim responsibility. Welcome to Tuesday, what's this on the news about Martian Prime Minister John Zhao fucking a dead neopig?

>like black trenchcoat shadowrunners
And they’ll fail because security is unfathomably advanced in the Eclipse Phase universe.

More interesting to read about than play.

>One of the main problems is how connected everything is.
I've been trying to write a quick scenario for a couple of friends for ages that's running into that.

It's basically a micro-dungeon crawl on a ship ending with 9Lives shenanigans, but the part I can't crack is the whole 'intro scene' on the little mining asteroid they'll have to cast to - how do I build it so that you can't just crush a couple of hack checks and learn everything you need to know, but it doesn't require fifty individual hoop-jumps if they don't.
And how is it believable that the panopticon doesnt just follow their every move as a matter of course, rendering the whole attempt to .quietly. get passage on a mining ship to the general vicinity of aforementioned secret micro-dungeon ship moot.

Currently it's a corp hab with a scum hab bolted onto the side, but I'm still not really sure if it will work.

Yeah, that was a key setting misstep.
>"This is a black trenchcoat game of stealth, conspiracy and horror. You are a secret Illuminati agent who protects the world from the shadows."
>"Also there is an omipresent panopticon watching everyone's every move, with task hedonist AIs who work 24/7 just crunching camera feeds and tags and social media."
The setting and intended style cannot coexist easily, and you have to either be very careful and act suspicious as fuck, run games that aren't superspies save the world, or tone down the panopticon and turn the noise to signal rating way the fuck up.

EP also tried to create this post sacristy game where death wasn't that big of a deal but often uses it as a major crux for ideas.

It's a intriguing idea but the developers wanted to have this horror in space game but then wanted to go for this fun and fluffy game. Which the two aspects constantly trip over this theme issue over and over.

I remember reading somewhere that the authors are either anarcho-communists or anarcho-capitalists, and it seeps pretty badly into some parts of the setting. I understand that the environment of Eclipse Phase gives space to a lot of extreme ideologies, but it sort looses its 'oomph' if you portray one of them as factually correct.

They're Anarchocommunists. AKA "The ideology so shitty it actively contradicts itself". They tolerate ancaps for the most part. They fucking loathe Objectivists.

It really does show. Factions like the Consortium or the Constellation have everything about how hypercapitalism can put EP technology into use to abuse the lower class while a literally immortal elite rule everything. Meanwhile, descriptions of the more non-capitalist factions like the Titanian Commonwealth often leave out most of the bad parts. Ancap factions like the Extropians are a weird middle ground, and the ubermensch faction has been transformed into space Nazis.

Works for me.

Rip /epg/

F

They try to paint the bioconservatives as nutjobs but they are basically right. Keep in mind even the aliens basically said to cut it out with the AI shit.

What happened to it?

Neotenics a best

And you trust the Factors? The fact they have the most positive interactions with the Jovians is really just proof that they're doing something wrong.

That said, Jovians do more to limit exsurgent infection than anyone else and that's what's most important. Mega-AIs and transhuman technology didn't cause the collapse, they merely allowed the actual cause to take effect more quickly.

There's nothing to talk about except in universe political shit flinging and complaining about dev decisions. Games are so few and far between that no one really has anything to say that hasn't already been said.

Ultimates > whatever faction you think is best

Ah ye that makes sense.

Exhumans, so you are objectively wrong because you settled for the pussies who don't dare to take the plunge.

It's pretty sad, but inevitable given how the devs have been treating the game.

Exhumans just cut corners and don't want to put the real mental/philosophical work into perfection. Plus, I'd like to see exhumans go up against TITANS with swords and win.

And how /epg/ couldnt get over themselves and just reinterpretation the setting to suite them.

I'm guessing people did that when (if) they played but goddamn just cause an author is going on about one thing doesn't mean you have to.

Efficiency above all, ultimates are just closeted exhumans hiding behind weak moralizing and arbitrary self limitations. On the point of the sword, they (or well, some, because exhumans as a group are incredibly diverse and full of idiots too) could, but would never be so dumb as to cripple themselves when fighting a serious threat.

You swing for the king you best bring your A game

Nothing to hack with a sword, except your enemies. I don't see the exhumans with any actual strategic victories during the Fall.

My current work-around ofr the mining base asteroid is that the main industrial bit is run by Business Corporation Limited, who sell oxygen, fabber mass and power at a knock-down rate to the scum that live in the hab structures just next door.
The BCL sector is standard panopticon shit, while surveillance coverage in the scum parts is patchy at best, and systems are mostly horribly balkanised and individually owned. The scum are just paranoid and collective-minded enough to have a half-arsed policy of scrubbing corp motes and spybugs from their zone, so as long as you aren't publicly flagrantly dodgy you might go unnoticed.
Essentially it's a slave village, as the scum aren't given enough spare to do anything that would really give them independence from BCL.
The spy shit can happen in the scum parts, but venturing into the BCL zones is going to involve a good cover story, straightforward plan, and not much criminality.

YFW Nine Lives have done more for the survival of humanity than any other entity in the solar system post-Fall

YFW you have no F because it was cut out of your ego because someone wanted a copy.

>bioconservatives
>doing anything but dying at 70 of cancer
precautionists are not retarded versions of the jovians

I liked it quite a bit but the GM ran it like shadowrun instead of a Firewall campaign so my opinion is colored by not playing as designer intended.

If you are doing a combat focused game tell your players to focus on one combat skill and get a ton of moxy. Research is important to get blueprints for anything you want. A lot of things will kill you no matter how well armed you are so don't be afraid to give players the big guns. A shiny giant mecha and plasma rifles wont protect you from a basilisk hack.

Hacking is god awful and slows the game to a standstill and is also extremely important. Not a good point in the game's favor. Maybe this was fixed in the new edition?

Wish I could play again but nobody else but my old GM allows exhuman characters.

I wanted to run it for a while, but my group told me it was too political and too weird.

>liking Ultimates
Confirmed a fascist. I’m so glad that they’re removing such a problematic faction in 2nd edition.

This guy gets it. A mechanical rewrite of the game can't solve the fundamental issues with the setting. Even if 2E is any good (and from what I've seen so far, it won't be) there's just no getting around the stuff that makes the game a pain in the ass to run and play.

Hacking is god awful and slows the game to a standstill and is also extremely important. Not a good point in the game's favor.
Agreed 100 percent

>Maybe this was fixed in the new edition?
The quick start rules present a simplified version, but the full hacking mechanics are just as bad

>Ultimates

Pic very related

Nine Lives' business model is pretty dumb. They sell a good that is already massively oversupplied and can be infinitely copied.

>too political
Diverse and extreme political ideologies are a big theme of the setting but the whole point of the PC organization Firewall is to give everyone a reason to work together. Your job isn’t to debate social issues and economic models it’s to combat threats to humanity.

>and too weird
The setting isn’t really that weird.
>minds can be digitized, stored, copied, and uploaded into bodies
>Star Trek style replicators are fairly common so material goods don’t have a lot of value
>Earth got SKYNETed killing 95% of humanity before it got quarantined
>the solar system Balkanized and the major powers are in Cold War mode
>PCs are part of a secret organization that recruits agents from everywhere
>also scientists gave some apes, dolphins, pigs, octopuses, and crows human level intelligence because why not

Why are you trying to convince him? He's not the one who refused to play it

>
>Or upload a fork mind into a virtuality with him sleeved in a pleasure pod, run five thousand years worth of trains on him, then upload that to his while he's sleeping so he can only remember how to handle cock, not guns.
You sick fuck

I've decided that the work-around for the panopticon shit is that many of the space stations, brinker habs and the like that we visit have Alien-style neo-80s type tech, as a precaution against insta-rape by TITANs.

Since things like hab-wide wifi and free-flowing networks are less common, the constantly-accessible nature of it all is less of an impediment to playing with only normal levels of spy paranoia.

In those cases where that's not necessary, it's because various private groups are intentionally keeping their systems separate - with hacking so potentially good, the only way to maintain a secure network of any kind is to airgap EVERYTHING.

This is another of the things that doesn't sit all that well with me - hacking should be basically impossible, because surely half a dozen groups have buily ridiculously capable network-protection AGI by now, meaning everyone will have them. No PC should be able to outclass a built-for-purpose NetSecAI unless that character concept is "I am a rogue NetSecAI".

Otherwise you have to give the PCs an AI tasked solely with dominating the network and scrubbing traces behind them, lest that either becomes one player's whole job, or you have them completely evacuuate the hab inside the response time of the cops-equivalent every time.
Heist games are cool and all, but if you have to play every single environment like a bank job because surveillance is too omniscient then it gets repetitive.

Except no one particularly wants to build AIs that can hack things really well because that went pretty badly last time.

Maybe I'm using my in-game terminology wrong.
Obviously I don't mean full seed AI, just the constrained type commonly usedin all sorts of systems.

In a setting where you can plug skills into egos, why isn't every network watched by the equivalent of an infomorph with InfoSec 250 running at 10,000,000x real time speed?

Oh, sure, i know you didnt mean plugging seed AIs into every system.

But at the same time, it's pretty easy to justify some general unease about plugging a hyper-speed highly proficient infolife, even if its a capped AGI, into your security systems.

Some people will do it, for sure, but the general population of transhumanity could pretty justifiably be terrified by the idea.