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So in D&D someone started a Transhumanism and Posthumanism thread. Already off to a great start with the OP deciding not to post any links to articles or even write a thought provoking post and before the end of the first page was stuck in a stupid fight over whether resleeving is death and how the entire thing is ridiculous. Linking it incase anyone here wants to try to save it or even make a good thread for it. Edit: for real content on a new page, whats everyones thoughts on the playtest now that its been out for a few weeks? Communist Zombie fucked around with this message at 10:52 on May 29, 2017 |
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May 29, 2017 10:49
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moxie was the one ep mechanic we used in our game, it translates to rolemaster very well. Glad they are making more of it.
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May 29, 2017 21:57
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Communist Zombie posted:So in D&D someone started a Transhumanism and Posthumanism thread. Already off to a great start with the OP deciding not to post any links to articles or even write a thought provoking post and before the end of the first page was stuck in a stupid fight over whether resleeving is death and how the entire thing is ridiculous. Linking it incase anyone here wants to try to save it or even make a good thread for it. it's kinda hard to debate the real merits of transhumanism when so much of it is bogged down in libertarian bullshit that revolves around 'I can't wait to be a computer and never deal with the filthy underclass again'. I mean, even in EP that's kinda a major point of the setting.
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May 29, 2017 22:08
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Private Speech posted:It doesn't really follow the system much outside of the setting. I think they tried initially but couldn't make it work and/or be fun, so they made it into pseudo-gamebook form. So they dealt with the bad mechanics by making the game even more rules light? I can go with that. Just like how no gaming is better than bad gaming, no rules is better than bad rules. How large are the gear lists in the new edition?
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May 29, 2017 22:36
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sexpig by night posted:it's kinda hard to debate the real merits of transhumanism when so much of it is bogged down in libertarian bullshit that revolves around 'I can't wait to be a computer and never deal with the filthy underclass again'. I mean, even in EP that's kinda a major point of the setting. Extropia: Maximum freedom. Maximum slavery.
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May 31, 2017 16:13
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Eclipse Phase Second Edition open playtest is up.
neaden fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jun 30, 2017 |
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Jun 30, 2017 01:29
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I ran some friends through a second edition playtest game this weekend. Some thoughts: - The expansion of the Moxie mechanics into Vigor, Insight, Moxie, and Flex is interesting, but it was a little tricky to remember what affects which aptitudes at first. I am sure that it would become easy after a couple games, though. - Character creation is so much easier. I made the pregens for my players, and first ed characters took 45+ minutes each while using one of the excellent spreadsheets that people have put together. With the second edition packages, it took me about half an hour to make the first character, and maybe 15-20 minutes for each one after that. Picking the three different aspects of the character (background, career, interest) retains a fair bit of customization, as does the open-ended skills like Knowledge, Profession, and so on. - Gear packages are great. Having the info right there for the common character types saved me a ton of flipping through the book and the short descriptions are enough for players to get the idea of what their weird future-tech does. - My game involved the Lost project, so I ended up making some Lost Asyncs. They ended up being fairly terrifying - deceptive, perceptive characters with extremely low Lucidity. I enjoyed how well the stats reflected the game's backstory in that respect. - We didn't get too far into it, but the new Psi system seems neat. It reminds me a little of Double Cross' virus counter and I wonder if that was an influence. The players really got into the more unusual Strain effects like imprinting on other characters/objects as parent or child, or seeking out cold. I like the new Sleights, though we didn't get too far into them in a one-shot. Overall? I really like the changes on the whole. Morphs don't feel quite as important since they no longer affect aptitudes, but if that's the price to pay for much more streamlined character generation, I can deal with it. It also makes it so much easier to handle resleeving, exactly because not everything has to be recalculated. Most of the group had been playing Transhumanity's Fate, which started strong, but I don't feel entirely matches the tone that Eclipse Phase is going for. Transhumanity's Fate is pretty handwavey when it comes to gear and even morph traits, which is weird to me, because EP is really a gear porny type of game. (I know that's how Fate Core does things, but it ends up feeling a bit weird in play - at least with my group.) I'm curious if anyone else has played much with Transhumanity's Fate? And to be clear, I like Fate as a system, it just doesn't seem to fit super well with EP. As it is, we'll be wrapping up the Transhumanity's Fate game soon and (if/when we play more EP) playing with the Second Edition rules in the future.
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Jul 3, 2017 16:00
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My general impressions of the EP2E Open Playtest is that they've applied some simple fixes to major problems (like 1000-point character generation) which are simple and useful but unimpressive, but also tossed on a bunch of really uninspired abstract systems on top. So the dice-rolling system from Unknown Armies is joined by a "on a good success pick an option on a superb success pick two"-kind of thing from ApocalypseWorld, while at the same time they're trying to put narrative-modifying points akin to FATE points on top of a Shadowrun-like system that spends two pages explaining how characters move. It's just... EP1E was a bad system made by the unholy union of Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu, and EP2E seems to try to fix everything by gluing on even more systems.
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Jul 3, 2017 18:19
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I really want to start running Eclipse Phase for some friends online, and while I am pretty familiar with 1st edition from reading the books is 2nd better enough to switch over to that? I am already having everyone make their characters with the packages from the Players Guide (Transhuman?) so moving to a different package based isn't really meaningful. It seems to me like your Morph not changing your stats misses a lot of the flavor of shifting bodies radically being something different to experience. I get the reason for the decision, but if I want to play a really streamlined trpg Eclipse Phase seems like an odd choice in the first place.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:12
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LatwPIAT posted:My general impressions of the EP2E Open Playtest is that they've applied some simple fixes to major problems (like 1000-point character generation) which are simple and useful but unimpressive, but also tossed on a bunch of really uninspired abstract systems on top. So the dice-rolling system from Unknown Armies is joined by a "on a good success pick an option on a superb success pick two"-kind of thing from ApocalypseWorld, while at the same time they're trying to put narrative-modifying points akin to FATE points on top of a Shadowrun-like system that spends two pages explaining how characters move. I mean, I'm pretty okay with that unholy union. I wouldn't call it elegant by any means, but there's just so much in it. Sometimes that's fun. That's part of the reason that I mentioned Transhumanity's Fate; when I tried running it with a sleeker system, it really didn't feel the same. It's definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it's adapting mechanics I like into a thing I already like. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I did find most of the changes exciting. Lord_Hambrose posted:I really want to start running Eclipse Phase for some friends online, and while I am pretty familiar with 1st edition from reading the books is 2nd better enough to switch over to that? That's kind of up to you? If you're running first edition and everything is clipping along, I wouldn't say it's a huge priority. I'm in the boat where I really like EP, including first edition rules, but my players just do not engage with extremely crunchy character generation. They like the characters that come out of it, but I can only imagine the looks I'd get if I sent them the 1e spreadsheets for character generation. So for me, second edition - which does streamline that set-up/GM side of things - is appealing. I imagine that you could read through and simply graft in some of the 2e-isms (diversified Moxie, reworked Psi sleights) to your 1e game without much effort at all.
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Jul 3, 2017 21:23
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Sionak posted:I mean, I'm pretty okay with that unholy union. I wouldn't call it elegant by any means, but there's just so much in it. Sometimes that's fun. That's part of the reason that I mentioned Transhumanity's Fate; when I tried running it with a sleeker system, it really didn't feel the same.
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Jul 4, 2017 15:07
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In advance of Eclipse Phase’s Second Edition I’ve been thinking about the game and the setting. I think one of my problems with the game, both in terms of backstory and system, is that it tries to do too much. For me things like the spacewhales living in the sun, Meathab, all the different uplifts, ubiquitous forking/backups all detract from the horror elements of the setting. If everyone can backup/resleeve you don’t have to worry as much about collateral damage or stopping something before it is too late. I want something less gonzo and more horror focused. At the same time I do really like how the transhuman elements work with the PCs, meeting a fork of yourself that you’re not sure you can trust, having TPKs, waking up in a body you don’t recognize all work really well for the cosmic horror EP is going for. This made me think about trying to tone down/prune the setting in general, and I’m curious at what people would think about these changes and what they imply for the setting. I still want something Eclipse Phase, but lower key with just a bit more Nova Praxis and Dead Space mixed in. The first and possibly biggest change is that most people can’t backup/resleeve. Instead this would be limited to Asyncs (which would be much more common, about 1% of the population) and AGIs, and all player characters would be one of those. I like this idea for a couple reasons. First off it reduces the ubiquity of backups and helps up the stakes when you have to worry about people dying. Secondly I think it strengthens the paranoia of the Eclipse Phase of the setting, are you the guardians of humanity, the next stage of transhuman evolution? Or are you a weapon, a vector that wipe out life in our solar system once the stars are right and the ETI wills it. This would of course have a big change in the background, especially with the evacuation of Earth but I think having more people live off world before the Fall or evacuate off ships. Resleeving technology, along with some other elements of the setting like Corcacopia machines would be legacies of the Titans, something they left behind as a weapon, as litter, or perhaps as a gift to their creators. The ability to resleeve, and perhaps heightened access to this Titan technology would have let a lot of the infected to become very wealthy becoming the core of the hyperelite along with some AGIs. The next thing I would want to change would be to up the post-apocalyptic nature of the setting. 90% of people are dead and gone and things haven’t settled down yet. Communities are a lot more focused on survival and having the necessities of life and much less organized. The Consortium would be more of a rough alliance than a quasi-government and each space station and hab on Luna, Mars, and Venus would be mostly independent. Everyone would be more paranoid of each other and Exsurgents and Titan Cults would be more common. Pods and the Lost would both be projects to try to repopulate in a hurry, with most Pods having a vat-grown brain and serving as a dedicated lower caste like Replicants in Blade Runner. Tl;dr thinking of making some fluff changes to up the horror and run CoC in space where the PCs can die a lot.
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Jul 12, 2017 16:58
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I was able to GM a game where we literally ignored 90% of the horror bits and went off gatecrashing in strange cool places all day. The horror in this game is surprisingly ignorable
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Jul 12, 2017 17:03
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curufinor posted:I was able to GM a game where we literally ignored 90% of the horror bits and went off gatecrashing in strange cool places all day. The horror in this game is surprisingly ignorable Agreed, you can play s good game gate-crashing, or being Martian freedom fighters/terrorists, or leaning into the Gonzo and having your character be the self proclaimed republic of Dave. I just don't think those elements mesh well if you are after more horror.
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Jul 12, 2017 17:17
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You don't see the horror in a setting where you can be consumed bit by bit by a nanite swarm gone bad, then reupload yourself, go back into the threat zone, and have it happen again and again? Voluntarily? I mean, for a game that tips its fedora so much at religion, this game is awfully focused on ignoring the strife your meat body faces and confronting the stress the immaterial, immortal part of you endures.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:02
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grassy gnoll posted:You don't see the horror in a setting where you can be consumed bit by bit by a nanite swarm gone bad, then reupload yourself, go back into the threat zone, and have it happen again and again? Voluntarily? That's not what I'm saying. I think a lot of the setting works well for horror. I also think parts of the setting work poorly for horror and am interested in tightening the focus thematically.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:05
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grassy gnoll posted:You don't see the horror in a setting where you can be consumed bit by bit by a nanite swarm gone bad, then reupload yourself, go back into the threat zone, and have it happen again and again? Voluntarily? There's a game being reviewed in the FATAL & Friends thread, Oubliette, where it's the fantasy equivalent of EP: you play immortals in an afterlife city. You can be "killed", but the worst thing is going insane.
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Jul 12, 2017 19:59
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neaden posted:That's not what I'm saying. I think a lot of the setting works well for horror. I also think parts of the setting work poorly for horror and am interested in tightening the focus thematically. Lemme preface all this by saying that I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts on the matter, and the Internet can really easily make something come across as hostile or combative when it's not intended. I'm mentioning this because I've typed out various forms of the following post and deleted them because I sounded like a jackass and, for once in my life, didn't mean to do so. I think one of the big obstacles you're going to run into is the nature of the players. "Look at this fantastic technology, and see the damage it does to the human mind" doesn't work if everyone stops at the comma. Like, I think singulitarianism is stupid as hell, and even I get caught up in the gear and toys when I play EP. You could work really hard to have fluff and tone at your table pushing the horror angle, but I think you're going to find the game returning to Goofus and Gallant's Raygun Adventure. Have you considered approaching the problem from a mechanical angle? It's kinda cliche, but compare EP to Unknown Armies. Being a wizard in D&D is cool. Being a wizard in UA is an awful, awful thing. A large part of what drives UA is the mechanics reinforcing the idea that magic is bad for you and warps you irrevocably. Casting a spell requires in-fiction and mechanical damage to you in one way or another, and that sets up persistent conditions and statuses. I'd think deeper sanity rules would go a long way to reminding everyone what a horror show they're in, when even traveling to a new hab via resleeving has the potential to jack you up in a small but internalized, significant way. Maybe not full-on penalizing rolls or Moxie gain or whatever, but pushing you along a track that may as well be marked "Are you a monster yet?" If you're good at game design, you could frame it in a way where you start out using one set of rules as a "normal" person, and by the time you're a terrifying post-human entity, you're operating on a completely different system. 'course, then you run into the problem of having to act out behaviors that are by definition outside your comprehension AND potentially crippling your players to the stage where the game isn't fun anymore. I'm bad at game design, and that's why I wanna talk about it.
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Jul 12, 2017 21:08
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All I have to contribute to the discussion of mixing horror and gonzo settings is to mention Transmetropolitan.
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Jul 13, 2017 02:19
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I would have never really thought of Transmet as horror, but now that you mention that I can totally see it. As to EC, when I tried to get a couple friends to play who weren't huge sifi fans, the mental thing was the hardest. They got caught up in the gear, and talked about killing themselves over and over just because they could. They had a hard time grasping how truly hosed up it could get. Imagine a serial killer in that setting. He could kill you, take your stack, and keep on killing you forever. Imagine if your mind gets corrupted, and every time you resleeve you lose more and more of yourself. Hell, imagine being a literal wageslave and being stuck as a disembodied mind working for some Corp. The horror can be from the Titans and alien poo poo, but it can be entirely human too, and that's the kind I prefer.
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Jul 13, 2017 02:49
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sleepy.eyes posted:The horror can be from the Titans and alien poo poo, but it can be entirely human too, and that's the kind I prefer. I feel like that's the hidden blade of the setting. Like, we know there are literal monsters out there in the dark and they mean to do us wrong, we have amazing technology and knowledge at our disposal, but in the end we're still incredibly monstrous to each other and more active in destroying each other than the monsters are.
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Jul 13, 2017 03:19
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Rename Eclipse Phase to "The Scary Door RPG" please and thank you.
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Jul 13, 2017 07:33
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I agree that there's a ton of elements in EP that don't directly contribute to the horror, but I don't really see that as a problem. The players can have a great time with the awesome future for a while, but the space horror is always waiting. A lot of the episodes of the really excellent Actual Play "Know Evil" on Role Playing Public Radio were described as "kind of Futurama right until they became Dead Space" and that's been my experience as well. I do think the sanity system is a big part of that - that's your real health track, and there's only so many times you can go back to an older back-up. In the 2e playtest, they added three small sanity tracks, sort of like Delta Green did. I believe both took at least some inspiration from Unknown Armies, though they are not as in depth. The options are: Alienation, Helplessness, and the Unknown. You can become adapted to them, but at a permanent cost to your attributes, if I'm remembering right. So that's expanding on the nature of the threats as Grassy Knoll mentioned. Eclipse Phase is such a large and complicated setting that I think this speaks to an underlying issue. You really can't throw in everything from Gatecrashing to Factors to TITANs and expect the game to have much of a narrative flow. It is necessary to figure out what this particular game is about and zoom in accordingly. Know Evil, as mentioned above, dwells a lot on how awful people can be to one another and uses TITAN threats more sparingly. It also really focuses on a theme for each tier of the game, from hypochondria/distrust to sacrifice.
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Jul 13, 2017 14:36
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Yeah it's a massive, diverse sandbox. You just need to zoom in on only a couple of elements at a time.
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Jul 13, 2017 16:58
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Also: quick aside, but horror is most effective when it's not just tension and darkness all the time. You have to have moments of absurdity or levity in there to really ratchet up that horror factor, so as to keep your audience from ever getting used to it. Plus, the fun, absurdist elements of EP can be used to become horror very easily! MeatHab is a very silly thing, obviously, where it's a space hab mostly made out of meat with bacon floors and a weird cult involved who worship the hab ego, who is mostly just a hands-off cool dude with a strange sense of humor. Thing is that you could very, very turn that into something terrifying by just introducing the words "exsurgent virus". MeatHab begins to grow to absurd, exponentially increasing sizes as it consumes everyone and everything inside it for biomass, sending incredibly thin tendrils of mucus-y flesh out into space, turning the zone around it into a titanic meat-web that makes it impossible to approach. Add in some human stupidity with a large ship passing by for whatever reason and getting spiderwebbed, and bam, there's your conflict.
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Jul 13, 2017 17:38
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Send the PC's into Penrose Station and right before they cross the gate let them know this is their second time in and they will be stretched out infinitely but never dying for all eternity in the event horizon. Who needs to be scared of dying when surviving is so much worse?
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Jul 13, 2017 18:17
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This is a good game. I ran a short campaign where the party is sent to a scum ship to imvestigate some suspicious terror activity only to realize the extent of the infection and eventually claim a pyrric victory by exploding the entire vessel, obliterating an enormous amount of souls. The horror aspects of the game really kicked in about three sessions in, when the ship's primary morph bank and the majority of the ego bridges were destroyed in a series of coordinated explosions. The players, were they to lose their body, had to make do with whatever morphs they could forcibly reappropriate. The threat of permanent, irreversible insanity lurked around every corner, and despite all their efforts, and even their success, the entire party chose to be vaporized and return to an earlier version of themselves with no memory of their endeavors. I do like this setting and system, because of things like this
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Jul 13, 2017 19:06
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EP provide a whole bunch of different kinds of horror that work much better than standard RPG oh no bad things are gonna happen as far as I'm concerned. We never bothered that much with the longterm sanity rules but the game was still full of creeping dread and bleak as gently caress implications. We also didn't bother that much with psi and its implications. * continuity of consciousness - is a backup you? what if you restore a backup early, or someone steals your backup? What about when you go incommunicado for 3 months and your insurance company restores your backup and it takes over your life? What happens when you resort to the broken farcaster that transmits you successfully but then you wake up sitting in the couch afterwards still in the disaster? Which character do you play? * forking in general - what's it like to be a beta or delta fork, what does merging actually mean and what are the implications, isn't neural pruning actually horrific, is keeping forks around and deleting them okay, etc * VR and reality - VR and neurosurgery are good enough that you can never really trust that you're in base reality. Did your ego get stolen? Is someone repeatedly running you through the same situation to observe your behaviour? It's super efficient to torture people for information when you can iterate various approaches and script it to run it in parallel! Apply fuzzing techniques to people, why not. * Visual hacks and the exsurgent virus are scary in a way that goes behind just 'i will get infected and grow tentacles' - okay, you kill all the exsurgents, are you safe now? what if there's a second layer of subtle control? what do they want you to do? Anders Sandberg's EP stuff is great for this kind of game and I also lifted a lot from Greg Egan's SF - he basically has a whole pile of short stories that provide useful philosophical anxieties or horror options for this kind of setting.
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Jul 13, 2017 22:49
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Mighty Dicktron posted:Also: quick aside, but horror is most effective when it's not just tension and darkness all the time. You have to have moments of absurdity or levity in there to really ratchet up that horror factor, so as to keep your audience from ever getting used to it. To paraphrase someone from RPPR, 'It's like Futurama meets Dead Space' Eclipse Phase needs to get weird at times. Both in the alien horror sense, and in the 'This is society now I guess' sense. In between serious arcs, I had my players compete in the Space Olympics aboard the swarm 'Get your rear end to Mars', which honestly was one of the best sessions of the campaign, with the Drugathon being the main event. One party member won by barely being able to sing a song in front of a crowd while all other participants were passed out/too hosed up to function, where another person ran off on a petal trip and eventually came to in a unique morph and no idea where their original body went.
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Jul 13, 2017 22:59
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My headcanon on EP's society is that it's super broken. The various cultures are packed full of trauma from the Fall and are telling themselves they're way more recovered than they actually are - this leads to lots of pathological and strange behaviour which is on a surface level treated as hey check out our weirdness and diversity, but actually is quite likely to lead to massive failure in the future. The problem is that organisations like Firewall are focused on the existential threats like 'what if we grow tentacles' as opposed to the wider 'transhumanity's on the edge of an emotional collapse and really needs a hug before that happens'
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Jul 13, 2017 23:09
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I appreciate all the thoughts about the setting. My thoughts on what exactly don't work with the setting aren't fully formed so hearing others take on it it's helpful. I especially like the comparison to horror Futurama. But at the same time Futurama is comedy so I don't need it to be as self consistent as horror. And the consistency is a big part of my issue with Eclipse Phase where you have fairly functional Utopias rimward and massive poverty on the inner planets. It's also an issue to me that the hardness of the science. setting seems to vary a lot. Sun whales and cornacopia machines point to having massive resources and super advanced science yet millions of people are still lacking a body. Part of why I've been thinking about this has been from reading the fiction anthology they put out, After The Fall. I liked most of the stories, but they don't always really seem to fit together. In terms of what works as a game I think Nostrums works the best, where you have a rag tag group of investigators gradually uncovering a larger conspiracy. There's a moral choice at the end about collateral damage though that I think loses some of it's oomph since everyone can presumably back up. It also involves multiple fire fights with hand guns and police baboons which I like, but at the same time it doesn't make sense that no one ever has a swarm of fun drones or a nanobot plague as a defense system. Edit: in terms of mechanics I don't really like stick based approaches and I don't want to discourage resleeving or forking for players, I just am wary of those being common society wide. neaden fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jul 14, 2017 |
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Jul 14, 2017 16:49
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neaden posted:It's also an issue to me that the hardness of the science. setting seems to vary a lot. Sun whales and cornacopia machines point to having massive resources and super advanced science yet millions of people are still lacking a body. For this one in particular, it comes down to societal issues. The people lacking bodies are those in the inner system societies, which are still on a very capitalist system. They've been told they need to earn a body by working in the cyber-cubicle farm, and since they needed to earn money for their food, clothing, and housing on Earth, they believe it. You tell them you could print a thousand bodies a day, and their main response will be "I can't afford that" or "Who's going to pay for this?" And since those in charge of the polities are the same oligarchic people who like your money, that's not going to change (Barring player intervention. I'd be kind of keen on a social/political game where the PCs were trying to drag Luna kicking and screaming into post-scarcity). Plus there's the issue that you can print synth bodies out of lunar regolith and a handful of space junk, sure, but meat bodies take longer to grow, and who wants to be a filthy console peasant when you could be the glorious bleeding master race? It's mostly societal, and one of the interesting parts of the system for me is how the different societies interact.
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Jul 14, 2017 17:09
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Dareon posted:For this one in particular, it comes down to societal issues. The people lacking bodies are those in the inner system societies, which are still on a very capitalist system. They've been told they need to earn a body by working in the cyber-cubicle farm, and since they needed to earn money for their food, clothing, and housing on Earth, they believe it. You tell them you could print a thousand bodies a day, and their main response will be "I can't afford that" or "Who's going to pay for this?" And since those in charge of the polities are the same oligarchic people who like your money, that's not going to change (Barring player intervention. I'd be kind of keen on a social/political game where the PCs were trying to drag Luna kicking and screaming into post-scarcity). See that kind of makes sense but then at the same time you have Rusters on Mars also fulfilling that same role in biomorphs. It also means that people have switched from a debt based approach like we use in houses and education today to an indenture system that doesn't really fit. It means everyone in a paid off biomorph has an asset equivalent to a paid off house which means that you shouldn't really have super poor biomorphs in the inner systems, yet you do. I think the Ruster approach of embodied people in debt with purposefully built flaws is stronger thermically. Finally as social critique I don't really buy today people in capitalist systems don't demand free stuff. They do all the time. Generally they don't want to feel like their hard work is going to a lazy mooching other which doesn't really fit here for me. neaden fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jul 14, 2017 |
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Jul 14, 2017 17:20
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In EP 2nd Edition the Ultimates are no longer a faction because Rob Boyle does not want to encourage PC concepts with fascist tendencies. Oddly enough, the Jovians are still on the table. The official forums had some detractors, but not necessarily what I'd call bitter. Reddit, on the other hand, had a less forgiving view. On the one hand, it feels kinda hypocritical to ban the faction for that reason but not the Jovians. But from what I heard in the playtest, faction choice matters a whole lot less. Granted, I can understand the authors' reservations. Fascism and alt-right political views are gaining more mainstream attention and in some cases approval. Even if one takes the "few bad apples" folks like Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. Which in tabletop gaming terms would be absolutely massive. I wonder if Eclipse Phase, much like it's MRA problem on the forums, ended up attracting some non-ironic fascists masturbating over their chrome-skinned roided-up morphs. Then again, I did reread some of the Ultimate entry, and the Overhumanists totally have fashy vibes and the other sub-factions more or less tolerate them. It would make sense metaplot-wise if the Overhumanists gradually became more radical and took over the Ultimate communities much like in real life (see moderate conservatives trying to de-radicalize the Nazis, or the Night of Long Knives). There is a demand for that on the forums, in making the Iconics their own faction if this is done. Still, I understand the reasoning given the political climate, but it's still totes weird to leave Jovians as an option. Is our favorite biocon junta undergoing some liberal reforms now? Libertad! fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 02:49
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Libertad! posted:Still, I understand the reasoning given the political climate, but it's still totes weird to leave Jovians as an option. Is our favorite biocon junta undergoing some liberal reforms now? I have said, often in this thread, that the Jovians' bioconservativism has been misunderstood by the authors associating the concept with neoconservatism and religious dogmatics and could totally be written as both a defensive stance in relation to the Fall and an extreme defense of democracy from the threats of out-of-control invasive and dehumanizing technology.
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Aug 10, 2017 03:21
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I'm actually a little mixed on the idea despite how anti-Trump and anti-alt-right I am. I mean, I don't really remember the ultimates too much, but playing a villain faction is a thing in many games. Often, it's done under the understanding that the audience is intelligent enough to not allow fiction depiction to influence their world view. But, then again, I guess the recent years have shown that such trust is misplaced and one cannot trust the audience in such a fashion. Also, I do like the idea that it pisses off unironic fascists and the alt-right, two groups that are truly the same. It's just unfortunate that it has to come at the cost of those who just thought it might be fun to play the villain and either don't support fascism or won't allow themselves to be influenced by a fictional depiction of fascism.
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Aug 10, 2017 03:40
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Covok posted:I'm actually a little mixed on the idea despite how anti-Trump and anti-alt-right I am. The major issue I see, not just for the whole fascist stuff, is that why have the Ultimates when you have the Exhumans? It seems like they cover the same ground, really. I mean, I could totally see an Ultimate ending up in a Predator biomorph with their whole superiority complex.
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Aug 10, 2017 03:50
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The problem with the Ultimates is that on the face of it their contention was correct - they were a biologically superior form of human. A bad guy faction like the Jovians is okay because either you're with grappling with complex value problems, or you can demonstrate their lovely fascist behavior is only justified if you pretend untrue things are true. But a faction like the Ultimates, their justification for their terrible actions is at least arguably correct. That is a much more problematic thing.
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Aug 10, 2017 05:06
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The concept of ultimates hasnt gone away, you can still populate your campaign universe with EP1 ultimates, theyve just gone from the core book v2. I'm getting a little nervous that EP2 is stripping back the rules too far similar to how D&D4 did after the crunchtastic glut of 3.5 rules. Also removing money removes a key definition between the inner system and outer.
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Aug 10, 2017 15:44
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 05:34 |
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Kommando posted:I'm getting a little nervous that EP2 is stripping back the rules too far similar to how D&D4 did after the crunchtastic glut of 3.5 rules.
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Aug 10, 2017 16:03
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