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PurpleXVI posted:
There's a couple of things that stand out to me about the Inner System on compared to the Outer System one. Firstly, it feels like it's obviously being deceptive about the detail of the Inner System inhabitant's life. The anarchist puts on today's playlist and checks Spacebook - but surely the Inner System person, living under modern capitalism, could also put on a playlist and check social media when they wake up, if they wanted to. It feels like this is supposed to portray the Outer System anarchists as having richer lives, but you we know what modern living under late-stage capitalism is like and social media and music playlists is like... not exactly reserved for the truly rich. I'm also not entirely sure what kind of social class we're supposed to figure the Inner System worker is. It's so weird that they're working one-day gigs and getting penalized for lengthy lunch breaks (also not working from home despite doing a programming job they have to rent their own space to work with, despite their commute being virtual but also they have to deal with beggars look this makes little sense) but also have friends who can just... resleeve into Sylphs (expensive!), spend the night buying drugs and partying, having dinners at fancy restaurants... Maybe my impression of economic class is all off but this person seems to be awfully well off despite working in a breakneck gig economy. (Hypercapitalism... actually causing prosperity? That doesn't seem right...) PurpleXVI posted:I do feel like the Scum in EP1 felt more like Mad Max Warboys with spaceships than fishmalks like they're presented here at times, though. Maybe that was just me. They were a bit fishmalky, combined with an attitude of "we're better than everyone else because we're anarchists and we give no fucks and we gently caress" and a tendency to attract exactly the kind of player who'd want to play a fishmalk in the first place. I found the way the 1e authors constantly gave the Scum handjobs for being too cool for school pretty eyeroll-worthy myself. PurpleXVI posted:By the book, most travel in the "Inner" system, i.e. farther Sunwards than Jupiter, is listed as taking a maximum of "weeks," rather than "months" in EP2. So how long's the Mercury/Mars run gonna take you? 54 days with a full load of cargo, around 6 days with passengers only. That's with full propellant tanks at launch and empty propellant tanks at arrival, so it might be a tad bit expensive to go that fast with only a handful of passengers.
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Aug 4, 2019 01:11
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Ronwayne posted:Another thing I realized, we got our ancoms, ancaps, and right-authoritarians. They probably weren't all that relevant when the setting was conceived in 2009. The overarching theme is a conflict between the forces of hierachal capitalism and liberal anarchism, (with anarcho-capitalism as a weird outlier), and authoritarian state socialism doesn't really fit into that conflict.
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Aug 4, 2019 10:51
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juggalo baby coffin posted:its because eclipse phase sucks rear end Can't we just leave authoritarian state socialism in the 20th Century, where it belongs?
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Aug 4, 2019 12:24
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Halloween Jack posted:There is power in the factory, power in the land. I'm not sure if space habitats have either of those Space habitats can provide access to mineable resources and hold the solar panels/nuclear reactors for the factories.
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Aug 4, 2019 23:12
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PurpleXVI posted:Part of the problem here is how badly psychosurgery is handled, in terms of setting, in both EP1 and EP2. It's literally just taken as "okay we delete autism.ini and then he's a normal person" or "we find the .cfg file and swap 'disloyal=1' for 'disloyal=0'" and that's that. Like it's described as though we have perfect understanding of every part of the human mind and how to edit it. In 1e Psychosurgery tended to cause a whole lot of mental stress, so part of the horror of corporate-mandated psychosurgery of their slaves was that it was that it was stealing the mental health of the workers. There's also a passage in Sunward (I think, or maybe it was Rimward about the AnCaps) talking about how, oh, sure, (EP 1e psychosurgery rules also didn't really support the idea that you could just fix things easily. The most you could do was to give someone a ±30 bonus/penalty towards wanting to perform some action - which was pretty meaningless in game terms since there weren't really any rules for wanting/not wanting to do things - but clearly indicated that you couldn't just change 'disloyal=1' to 'disloyal=0'. You were limited to changing 'disobedienceFactor=0.45' to 'disobedienceFactor=0.15'.) PurpleXVI posted:Some of the hypercorps also rely on business models that didn't even exist before the Fall(infugee exploitation, basically any sort of society beyond Jupiter, Pandora gate exploration), so they couldn't really have been founded with solid corporate architecture pre-Fall, meaning they had all of ten years to get all of this poo poo stacked up and functional. Infugee exploitation, or at least the system of indentured servitude that exploits the infugees, existed pre-Fall. When the corporations set up shop in space they decided to and were allowed to re-institute indentured servitude as a practice. This is one of the early sources of the burgeoning anarchist movement in space: former slaves suddenly super into an ideology that is very anti-slavery.
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Aug 5, 2019 12:29
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PurpleXVI posted:LLA(Lunar-Lagrange Alliance): Luna and near-Earth environs. They're capitalists and, for some reason, primarily Indian in culture. PurpleXVI posted:Islam: For some reason, Mars is the primary home of Islam now. They've moved with the times in ways that the setting's Catholics have apparently been unable to. PurpleXVI posted:Tharsis League: I don't know if these guys ever existed in the original, I don't recall them and honestly they don't really have a reason to exist. They're Mars' theoretical-but-toothless non-corporate government. Theoretically they might be roused into something approaching an actual Martian state, but the writing makes this feel extremely unlikely. PurpleXVI posted:Titanian Commonwealth: Scandinavian Democratic Socialists in Space. They're so perfect that it's a bit offensive. Like they literally have no flaws. Everyone has everything they need, they've got super high tech, they've got no regressive social policies, they're living on one of the better pieces of real estate in our Solar system and they've even got a powerful military. Titan is, as a result, probably the most meaningless location in the game as no one would ever need to go there for any reason except a relaxing holiday. The TC are the creation of one of the authors' PCs - the one who's a smug rear end in a top hat, founder of the TC, majority shareholder in a major TC state corporation, professor of post-capitalist economics at the most prestigious university in the Solar System, expert hacker, and Firewall proxy.
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Aug 6, 2019 01:24
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PurpleXVI posted:As for EP being a hard sci-fi setting. Allow me to loving cackle my rear end off. They've got magic nanoconstruction, magic brain editing, magic FTL gates, utterly effortless genetic engineering, etc. If anything it's where EP tries its damndest to be "hard" to limit your fun(like physical travel speeds to ensure people have to deal with enforced egocasting and resleeving stuff) that stands out the most, rather than the "soft" parts. Now, EP would definitely benefit from being a "harder" setting, where all of these things come with some sort of limits and dangers, like nanofabricators can be hacked to suddenly become gray goo hazards, etc. and thus aren't on every street corner Grey Goo isn't hard science, because nanoscale dismantling is incredibly difficult, and not terribly threatening because nanoscale objects are very vulnerable to things like fire and bright sunlight.  PurpleXVI posted:So the first change they made is that now, if you have Psi, you also need to have a mental illness, because it was clearly overpowered in EP1 and needed some limitations. PurpleXVI posted:Likewise, Grok, Xeno-Empathy and Eco-Empathy could all be useful on Gatecrashing-focused campaigns. PurpleXVI posted:or give you niche bonuses that you'll be arguing with the GM about forever(like what exactly defines something that gets a bonus from superior calculation or "creative thinking."). I also like Enhanced Memory, the power easily simulated in any online game by just scrolling up in the chat log. Truly impressive.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:19
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Joe Slowboat posted:The 'nice anarcho-socialist habs' aren't the scum barges, those are medium-bad at best, I don't think the authors were ever particularly enthused about '4chan but it's a pseudo-nation-state.' I was thinking about Titan, and the implied habs that have their poo poo together but aren't really the narrative focus precisely for that reason? The Scum are definitely written in a way that makes it seem like the authors want you to know they're too cool for school. They party all the time, they have kinkier sex than you squares, they're totally radical, they don't obey the Man's law, man, and they have Molotov Cocktails on the drink menu because no rules woooooooooooooooh!
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Aug 13, 2019 17:28
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They changed the tag line from "game of transhuman conspiracy and horror" to "game of transhuman conspiracy and survival", so in on regard they clearly wanted to get away from the horror but also they decided to copy the sanity system from Delta Green RPG, maintain the Exsurgents as an existential threat hanging over everything, and have characters being taken over by alien otherness as an inherent playable archetype so clearly they didn't want to get away from the horror.
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Aug 13, 2019 20:22
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I mean, on one hand a not entirely accurate treatment of biology and not making sense within the setting, but on the other hand, best soldiers in the setting are mostly female-bodied and also it grates the gently caress out of hardcore misogynists. Also I get maximum blessing from the setting for playing a rad soldier lady! 
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Aug 15, 2019 00:35
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I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
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Aug 19, 2019 21:25
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Night10194 posted:What boggles me is why even give a Scum Barge HP and Armor value? Any sane GM is going to nix the '4 guys empty bullets at this in EVA suits until it explodes or whatever' plan because it's a city-barge and its survival or not is likely to be an adventure objective. So why even give it HP or combat stats? The armour can be useful for things like "I want to hit something on the far side of this wall", determine when your firefight starts tearing holes in the spacecraft, and determine how many explosives you're going to need to breach a Scum Barge outer wall. The decision to not give spacecraft any combat-relevant attributes in 1e was also, while sensible, somewhat controversial because a lot of fans really wanted to have spacecraft they could play with. There was enough demand for letting you player characters have spacecraft in 1e that a Merit for owning a spacecraft was added to the Player's Handbook, and once you have a spacecraft in your hands, the lack of any rules beyond "GM's decision" became sorely apparent. Me, I just converted the entire game to GURPS and used GURPS: Spaceships. 
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Aug 20, 2019 20:29
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Gun Jam posted:??? It represents the additional damage from more than one bullet hitting the target, and/or the effects of multiple hits weakening the armour so the last bullet penetrates deeper and therefore has the potential to do damage.
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Aug 20, 2019 22:15
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juggalo baby coffin posted:you can literally dismiss hume and buddhism out of hand in this context because both are totally unverifiable. it's the equivalent of jumping off a cliff on the chance that god will save you. continuity of consciousness in this case is the only real way you can be sure you aren't just elaborately dying. whether there is a moment-to-moment true self doesn't really matter, what matters is ensuring, for you, you continue to experience life. You seem really unreasonably angry that EP has taken a stance on an open philosophical debate that isn't your stance on the open philosophical debate. (Even moreso, it's particularly perplexing that you thought Altered Carbon did it better, because it rushes just as quickly through the debate and presents a setting where, basically, either you believe that resleeving and backups are a continuation of the same life, or you're a Catholic bioconservative who doesn't. I wouldn't even call this a neutral presentation, since the novel and series both present decisions made on the assumption that resleeved backups are the same person as their origin as meaningful.)
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Aug 26, 2019 02:00
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Libertad! posted:I concur; instead of ego-souls we should be debating the realism of the Reputation Economy or how Extropia hasn't yet become a Neo-Feudal Asteroid Hellscape. A friend of mine described the ideal Extropia being perpetually stuck as Bioshock's Rapture circa January 1958 until the players start interacting with it.
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Aug 26, 2019 04:11
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AmiYumi posted:I still don’t know why we had this debate at all regarding a setting that makes it very clear its inhabitants have no choice in the matter. When over 80% of all people alive were uploaded at least once, saying they're not actually meaningful continuations of the people they remember being must be an incredibly lovely thing to say, in setting.
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Aug 26, 2019 05:37
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Ithle01 posted:These entries are just so ... boring? The writers create a setting with so much potential and then they just go and write a crappier version of the monstrous manual. The 'Monster Manual' part of X-Risks was pretty dull, in part because it was 90% just reprinted info from other books. In the core book the various 'monsters' are compact entries often no more than a column long under the appropriate heading to suggest what you can have the players run into in the game. The entire list of Exsurents fits on slightly more than a page, as do the TITAN machines.
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Sep 3, 2019 12:37
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JcDent posted:Leftovers' special implies that exhumans cut up off the shelf morphs instead of growing them custom. You'd think dickheads rich enough to do it would be able to skip that step and just engineer the MK III Edgelord. It takes something like 18 months to grow a new biomorph. I guess the resourceful exhumans are impatient.
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Sep 3, 2019 18:53
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One thing that's very easy to miss is that (almost) all Exsurgents have Psi-Gamma and Psi-Epsilon level abilities. This makes them frustrating to play against because the most useful of those are save-or-mindfuck abilities, but it does make the Exsurgents formidable enemies. Each hit from one of those whipping tentacles can be 1d10+4 Stress and Trauma or -30 to all your actions, strip the character of the ability to use a combat skill, or mind-control them to shoot their friends. In addition to the GM-fiat "turn off all electronics in the area" Psi-Epsilon ability. In addition to the touch effect of trying to infect you with an Exsurgent virus. And if you have Watts-MacLeod yourself, the range increases from Touch to Close so you're definitely being reprogrammed to shoot your friends first.
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Sep 9, 2019 14:13
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wdarkk posted:So what you're saying is that Eclipse Phase is the no fun zone. Well no, but actually yes. As a Call of Cthulhu-style climatic eldritch abomination that you're genuinely not supposed to have a decent chance against (which is the inspiration for these: the Whipper is an ill-tempered Elder Thing and the Creeper is a Shoggoth) they're decent. Short-ranged so you might have a chance to run away, but likely to kill you with no recourse very, very fast if you get close. Outside of that specific role, they're not going to be very fun.
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Sep 9, 2019 16:20
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juggalo baby coffin posted:yeah I kind of missed a fair amount of stuff in the finer details, especially in the last couple of batches. I was getting really tired of the book and wanted to get it finished, so my apologies for that. Thanks for filling in the stuff I missed though, the actual lore stuff makes no mention of whippers using guns or anything, which seems like an oversight. The Whipper is potentially capable of holding a firearm, but by default it doesn't have the skill to fire it. The GM could always just give it the skill to do so, but unlike Psi powers, it's not really suggested you do so. Exsurgents tend towards melee attacks, while TITAN creations often have firearms.
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Sep 9, 2019 23:59
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