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This reminds me, I wanted to do a sci-fi game with a lot of transhuman stuff. I've already given thought to real world AI rights, seeing as how computing and robotics are advancing so fast that I could reasonably expect to see something of at least animal intelligence in my lifetime and potentially something similar to a mentally disabled human. I was thinking about a universe that not only has human-intelligence AI, but also things like brain uploading. You get into some interesting legal territory regarding whether an artificial intelligence gains legal rights, or whether a brain transfer into a computer or robot body counts as legal "death" and the moral quandary about it. I think a big question would be "Is transferring my mind killing me?" It's like the old Star Trek transporter question: if you get vaporized and then reconstructed, are you really being teleported or is it killing you and then reassembling your body with a brain that thinks it just teleported? Would being teleported just resemble eternal oblivion to you and you have no way of knowing until it actually happens? Can an uploaded brain truly know if it's the actual person's mind if it thinks that it was uploaded, rather than created wholesale with false memories?
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Nov 11, 2015 23:31
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That's stuff I think about too, if I was DM the centerpiece trial would be a case where a brain transferral happened against the written wishes of the deceased.
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Nov 11, 2015 23:41
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That's a big part of Eclipse Phase.
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Nov 11, 2015 23:42
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Triskelli posted:That's stuff I think about too, if I was DM the centerpiece trial would be a case where a brain transferral happened against the written wishes of the deceased. Can you imagine the shock of introducing deadly teleporters into a sci-fi setting without warning the players? They're testing out brand new, experimental teleportation tech. It seems like it works...until eventually they meet their own ghost. Surprise, the PC was actually a clone all along! Now mix that with common teleportation, to the point where the PC may have dozens of teleports and each one is killing them. I wonder if the clones count as having souls, or if they're just empty shells? Now I've got myself thinking about the downsides to not having a soul in a universe where they exist, and what that means for PCs who use teleporters....
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Nov 11, 2015 23:48
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some loving LIAR posted:Six months is awfully soon. Modern probate proceedings (at least, where I am) take longer than six months.
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Nov 12, 2015 00:05
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darthbob88 posted:And on the other side, raise dead can't work on corpses older than a couple weeks at most, nor reincarnate, so it's going to be all undead. How about a universe with proper reincarnation? Like, it's proven that reincarnation exists but most people don't actually know about their past lives. Do property rights extend to future lives if the person has no memory of it and is technically a different person, or are laws applied to the soul inhabiting? Likewise, is murder as severe a crime if the person is just going to come back in another body?
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Nov 12, 2015 00:08
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chitoryu12 posted:Now mix that with common teleportation, to the point where the PC may have dozens of teleports and each one is killing them. I wonder if the clones count as having souls, or if they're just empty shells? Now I've got myself thinking about the downsides to not having a soul in a universe where they exist, and what that means for PCs who use teleporters.... So, a universe where "The Prestige" is a historical documentary?
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Nov 12, 2015 00:11
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I saw a cool thread about this, actually. Had a funny Fiasco game a few years ago. We had a drug dealer who worked out of a fast food window and his idiotic henchman. The customer couldn't get the instructions down, so in response to honking, he went around the drivethru several times to get the plan explained.
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Nov 12, 2015 00:32
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chitoryu12 posted:This reminds me, I wanted to do a sci-fi game with a lot of transhuman stuff. I've already given thought to real world AI rights, seeing as how computing and robotics are advancing so fast that I could reasonably expect to see something of at least animal intelligence in my lifetime and potentially something similar to a mentally disabled human. I was thinking about a universe that not only has human-intelligence AI, but also things like brain uploading. You get into some interesting legal territory regarding whether an artificial intelligence gains legal rights, or whether a brain transfer into a computer or robot body counts as legal "death" and the moral quandary about it. As previously mentioned, Eclipse Phase has a lot of this. One of my favourite pieces of legalism that comes up in Eclipse Phase's transhuman setting is that the idea of a democracy is widely acknowledged to be laughably untenable. Why? Because if loving everyone in the democracy can fork and clone their minds as much as they want with full resolution, making new complete people at will, then the idea of people voting for stuff is unthinkable. How could you possibly hold an election for, say, a government position when everyone in your constituency can clone themselves as many times as they want? I believe in EP, most places consider Alpha forks (perfect clones) to be real people, legally, whereas Beta forks and down (imperfect clones - Betas can still pass the Turing test, mind, and have thoughts and opinions and sapience and stuff) are property of their originator rather than people. On an "unusual legal issues in RPG settings" note, Progenitor by Greg Stolze has a few good ones. Progenitor's a setting where superpowers are contagious and the world rapidly becomes a strange and different place. The two big legal issues that are mentioned are "how does evidence in court work when people can read minds and have clairvoyance and poo poo?" and "what happens if you try and murder someone and they turn out to be invulnerable or something?" The first is resolved in the States with the ruling that you cannot use mind reading to prove somebody guilty in a court of law because the 5th Amendment prohibits someone from incriminating themselves. However, any physical evidence you find based solely on information you found from mind reading them is perfectly admissable. If you mind-read the murderer, find out he's guilty and where he buried the murder weapon, then go find the murder weapon, he goes to jail. The States, notably, has a piece of legislation called the Federal Cognitive Sovereignty Act which makes the contents of somebody's mind their personal property and therefore protected against theft, trespass, alteration without permission and so on under the law. Not everywhere has this kind of legislation. I believe it was introduced because a court case happened where both the defense and prosecution lawyers had Hypercharm and half the jurors committed suicide. Doing stuff like that was made illegal. The second is resolved simply in most places: if you tried to kill someone and couldn't because woops turns out they're superman, that's just attempted murder. Easy. France goes a slightly different route and invents a new crime called something like 'interrupted murder' for circumstances where it would have been murder if it wasn't for superpowers, like they were invincible or could regenerate or a passerby happened to be able to heal wounds instantly, or (as happened a couple of times) somebody turned out to have the power that they can come back from the dead as a ghost. One final, particularly thorny, legal issue surrounding superpowers in Progenitor is that, in the States at least, everyone who is confirmed as having superpowers is considered to be armed with a lethal weapon for the purposes of all other crimes they commit - whether those powers are actually dangerous or not. You have the ability to generate holograms and you get arrested for being in a bar brawl? You don't get charged with battery, you get charged for assault with a deadly weapon. Doesn't matter that you didn't use your powers - doesn't even matter that you couldn't use your powers to hurt others, legally you were carrying a loaded firearm. This obviously gets a load of protest but is never overturned because largely the Justice Department's position is that, poo poo, you had superpowers, we had no way of knowing your powers weren't nuclear explosions.
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Nov 12, 2015 00:52
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chitoryu12 posted:How about a universe with proper reincarnation? Like, it's proven that reincarnation exists but most people don't actually know about their past lives. Do property rights extend to future lives if the person has no memory of it and is technically a different person, or are laws applied to the soul inhabiting? This is actually a plot device in Exalted and it's really cool hth
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Nov 12, 2015 01:21
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Doodmons posted:On an "unusual legal issues in RPG settings" note, Progenitor by Greg Stolze has a few good ones. Progenitor's a setting where superpowers are contagious and the world rapidly becomes a strange and different place. The two big legal issues that are mentioned are "how does evidence in court work when people can read minds and have clairvoyance and poo poo?" and "what happens if you try and murder someone and they turn out to be invulnerable or something?" Goddamn it, my group will never play a superhero game and yet I'm still probably going to buy this book.
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Nov 12, 2015 01:39
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chitoryu12 posted:How about a universe with proper reincarnation? Like, it's proven that reincarnation exists but most people don't actually know about their past lives. Do property rights extend to future lives if the person has no memory of it and is technically a different person, or are laws applied to the soul inhabiting? In Altered Carbon and the rest of the Takeshi Kovacs series the main premise is just this: people have removed their consciousness into cortical stacks that exist in the base of the brain near the spinal cord and if you can afford to "re-sleeve" which is get your cortical stack moved into a new body, you are effectively immortal. Murder and assault have been reduced to "property damage" crimes whose penalty is getting your digital consciousness placed into suspended animation for a few years, with your sleeve either put up for sale or (if you can afford it) put into storage until you are released. Real Death occurs when your stack is damaged to the point where your consciousness is lost (unless you have a backup copy of your identity stored on disk somewhere), and the punishment for that is 200 years in storage or Erasure. The books do a great job of exploring the impact that this type of digital immortality has on society and even on your own morality. There's some hardcore poo poo where people get tortured by having their digital self uploaded into torture programs run at fast forward: ninety seconds in these torture programs can equate to months of torture. If your digital self dies under torture? Welp, you get rebooted and the torture continues. Really, really good series if you are into hard sci-fi in a dystopian future. My favorite character is the Hendrix Hotel set in San Francisco. It's a hotel run by an Artificial Intelligence who is programmed in such a way that when a guest checks in the hotel effectively has an orgasm. It becomes very loyal to Kovacs and fishts off some bad guys with a couple of strategically placed miniguns in the lobby.  Kenlon posted:Goddamn it, my group will never play a superhero game and yet I'm still probably going to buy this book. Hah hah. I thought I was the only one who bought rulebooks for games I will never play.
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Nov 12, 2015 02:02
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I stopped watching True Blood two seasons in but the most interesting bit of the show I thought was how Bill the Vampire was currently engaged in a legal battle with the state over ownership of his house/estate, which had been made into an Civil War era historic landmark/state park/museum (IIRC)
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Nov 12, 2015 02:27
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Playing a game of Traveller with a group of people, some I've played RPG's with and some I haven't. The party split to look for some work, and two of them went to get drunk and find entertainment. Characters are a male human enforcer and female Makattan ex-pirate ship pilot (custom species, very anthro-feline like) GM human Makattan So is there any place to watch people fight? Oh yeah, there is! Let me get you the name. *checks notes* Alright, we're going there and we're gonna get rich! Mmm, probably not. What're you talking about? I'm gonna give you my money, and you're gonna bet on me!Considering the guy is very used to combat, this is a better idea than I was expecting. Then I found out that he has no melee skill (which given the whole thing is pit fighting, is pretty paramount) and the Makattan has a point in large blades. So it's exactly as terrible an idea as it sounds. Naturally, he's going for it. Edit: Turns out? Amazing loving idea. He took a combat stim before jumping in (free dodge per turn + -2 damage taken) and after 14 rounds of nothing happening because neither fighter could land a hit, the opponent ended up getting a few weak/zero hits in, but Mr. nailed 5 damage after 5 damage hit, and capped it off at the end with a 6 damage hit that knocked the opponent clean out and nearly killed the guy. The table was laughing after each and every hit, just how ridiculous it is. Got 600 credits on a bet for it too.
Rorac fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 06:19
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Skellybones posted:That's a big part of Eclipse Phase. Wow. I was just recently thinking about this myself: the idea that in EP, either there has been some way found to prove that resleeving doesn't kill you and make a clone, or people are aware that nobody knows for sure and yet they do it anyway. Either way puts a really odd spin on the setting, especially if you think of what the proof would need to be. I'd like EP much more if the system weren't "kinda messed up Shadowrun" though. Also, so buying Progenitor now.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:31
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hyphz posted:Wow. I was just recently thinking about this myself: the idea that in EP, either there has been some way found to prove that resleeving doesn't kill you and make a clone, or people are aware that nobody knows for sure and yet they do it anyway. Either way puts a really odd spin on the setting, especially if you think of what the proof would need to be. In EP, the only easy way to get off earth was to get your brain scanned and your identity dumped in to a body offworld. People who looked at that and said, "That's bullshit, this is just a really elaborate form of suicide," stayed on earth. Because of that, they all died. Now the survivors are overwhelmingly people who were okay with resleeving. It's not necessarily that they're correct, it's just that there was an overwhelming selective pressure to be one of those people.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:36
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:In EP, the only easy way to get off earth was to get your brain scanned and your identity dumped in to a body offworld. People who looked at that and said, "That's bullshit, this is just a really elaborate form of suicide," stayed on earth. Whoa. That's.... pretty drat terrifying.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:48
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hyphz posted:Whoa. That's.... pretty drat terrifying. Man up and embrace death, you big baby.
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Nov 12, 2015 16:55
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chitoryu12 posted:How about a universe with proper reincarnation? Like, it's proven that reincarnation exists but most people don't actually know about their past lives. Do property rights extend to future lives if the person has no memory of it and is technically a different person, or are laws applied to the soul inhabiting?
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Nov 12, 2015 17:21
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:Man up and embrace death, you big baby. It's that every individual is likely to eventually reach a point where they have a choice to teleport/resleeve or die for sure. Like, you have terminal cancer, we can transfer you to a body that doesn't have cancer but it might kill you, but you are going to die anyway; want to try it? Of course you would. And then afterwards, you do die, but now the person left to live is a clone of you WHO BELIEVES THEY SURVIVED THE RESLEEVING. And will be happy to do it again. Let that happen over a period of a generation or five and suddenly you have an entire population who will send themselves to death without a thought, believing it will just save them walking down the road.
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Nov 12, 2015 18:37
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Just like in EVE. "Podjumping" was a quick way to get back home after a fight far away. Self destruct your escape pod and you'd wake up in your fresh clone at your home station. Just remember to buy a new clone
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Nov 12, 2015 19:50
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Counterargument to all this: If you were spontaneously created by magic/sufficiently advanced technology when you woke up, and everything before that was just an elaborately planned memory, how would you know? What would make your clone any less "real" than you? Sanctity of self is a weird argument because by a certain logic, getting drunk violates your sanctity of self more than clone-rebirth does, since you act noticeably different when drunk.
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Nov 12, 2015 21:51
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Poison Mushroom posted:Counterargument to all this: 
Agrikk fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Nov 12, 2015 |
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Nov 12, 2015 22:08
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Poison Mushroom posted:Counterargument to all this: Then going from the other direction, how smart will your dildo have to be before you have to ask for its consent?
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Nov 12, 2015 22:35
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:In EP, the only easy way to get off earth was to get your brain scanned and your identity dumped in to a body offworld. People who looked at that and said, "That's bullshit, this is just a really elaborate form of suicide," stayed on earth. I don't think most of them even resleeved, just because there's a finite supply of bodies available. So there are millions, or hundreds of millions of digital people still stuck inert on unpowered hard drives, living in virtual reality simulations, or trapped as indentured servants doing menial tasks for corporations in the hopes of one day being emailed to a less lovely owner.
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Nov 12, 2015 22:47
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Skellybones posted:I don't think most of them even resleeved, just because there's a finite supply of bodies available. So there are millions, or hundreds of millions of digital people still stuck inert on unpowered hard drives, living in virtual reality simulations, or trapped as indentured servants doing menial tasks for corporations in the hopes of one day being emailed to a less lovely owner. Or they could be stuck in a ghost rider module on a private citizen, acting as a personal secretary doing such thrilling tasks as researching things on the mesh, closing pop-up ads, and managing your host's personal area network. Two more years until you make enough to buy a real morph and not have to sit in this dude's head all day. The real beauty of Eclipse Phase is that you can stick your consciousness into a Hypergibbon.
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Nov 13, 2015 14:47
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The only time I ever played EP, one of the PCs was a giant arachnoid war-droid with four plasma cannons and three AI copies of himself riding shotgun in his brain. All they did was teamwork action hacking rolls to do ECM and interdiction on other people's electronics while the main personality stomped around as a giant unhackable, plasma-making GBS threads terminator. It was very Eclipse Phase, that's for sure.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:05
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Doodmons posted:The only time I ever played EP, one of the PCs was a giant arachnoid war-droid with four plasma cannons and three AI copies of himself riding shotgun in his brain. All they did was teamwork action hacking rolls to do ECM and interdiction on other people's electronics while the main personality stomped around as a giant unhackable, plasma-making GBS threads terminator. It was very Eclipse Phase, that's for sure. Well that sounds like a ton of fun for everyone else.
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Nov 13, 2015 20:05
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The Grammar Aryan posted:you can stick your consciousness into a Hypergibbon. i would like to know more
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Nov 13, 2015 21:23
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Is that as the Hypergibbon's PA?
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Nov 13, 2015 23:08
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Agrikk posted:Well that sounds like a ton of fun for everyone else. They were pregens. Everybody was that 
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Nov 13, 2015 23:25
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Doodmons posted:The only time I ever played EP, one of the PCs was a giant arachnoid war-droid with four plasma cannons and three AI copies of himself riding shotgun in his brain. All they did was teamwork action hacking rolls to do ECM and interdiction on other people's electronics while the main personality stomped around as a giant unhackable, plasma-making GBS threads terminator. It was very Eclipse Phase, that's for sure. at that point, are you even human? and then the horror part of EP enters.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:07
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Kommando posted:at that point, are you even human?
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Nov 14, 2015 00:13
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Humans are supremely loving weird as-is, instantiating yourself in a giant spidermech is really more of a sidegrade in that regard than anything else.
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Nov 14, 2015 00:25
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Yawgmoth posted:My response would be "who cares?" in 50 foot plasma letters. My psychic space-octopus agrees.
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Nov 14, 2015 06:50
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:i would like to know more As with almost every tabletop game, EP has a series of expansion books that include things like new Morphs. A ton of them. Hypergibbons are vat-grown little gibbons with cyberbrains jammed into them. They're ostensibly for running around habs or space vessels and doing maintenance work, since they're small, but the picture shows it swinging from a wire while wielding a machete. Hypergibbon got a knife. Hypergibbon gonna gently caress you up.
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Nov 14, 2015 13:07
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There's also baboons used for police/security. A pack of genetically enhanced baboons given body armour and night sticks, corralled by a human handler. Then they are released on a target which they then beat/eat.
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Nov 14, 2015 13:39
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oh so it's like "uplifted gibbon" rather than "gigantic gibbon" that's a bit less fun. alistair reynolds has kinda sated me on uplifted primates, to be honest
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Nov 14, 2015 16:03
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:oh so it's like "uplifted gibbon" rather than "gigantic gibbon"
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Nov 14, 2015 22:37
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:oh so it's like "uplifted gibbon" rather than "gigantic gibbon" Didn't they only get a few chapters of screen time in Xavier's workshop? Most of the uplift I remember were pigs. loving Run Seven.
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Nov 14, 2015 23:46
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