Eclipse Phase Review.

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silva
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Post by silva »

FrankTrollman wrote:Uh... you sir, are still a fucking idiot. 2d10 produces 19 possibly results. Nineteen is very visibly less than one hundred. For fuck's sake, 19 is less than 20.

-Username17
Nope, a roll-under percentile 2D10 where you add the dice (having previously designated one for tens and other for digits) produces 100 results. AND it produces a bell curve as shown in the graph I showed above, instead of a straight line as a single d20.

This is common knowledge, and is the whole base for the Gurps "realism" - guaranteeing most outcomes will fall under a middle range thus avoiding extraordinary feats. If you swap you percentile 2D10 for a single D20, you lose this quality.


Edit: here, lemme link the graph again..


Image
Last edited by silva on Thu Oct 24, 2013 2:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by virgil »

silva wrote:Nope, a roll-under percentile 2D10 where you add the dice (having previously designated one for tens and other for digits) produces 100 results. AND it produces a bell curve as shown in the graph I showed above, instead of a straight line as a single d20.
How the fvck does it produce 100 results? Your own damn chart shows it ranging from 2 to 20, which is a smaller range than a d20. Are you just fapping to the versatility of 2d10, where it can be used either as a cheaper zocchihedrons OR as a bell-curved approximation to the d20?
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Post by silva »

Virgil, the graph shows only 20 results for sake of comparison with a single D20. If you designate the 2 dice in 2D10 as a tens and a digits one, you get 100 results AND the bell curve.

Ie: rolling a 3 in tens die + 7 in digits die = 37.
Last edited by silva on Thu Oct 24, 2013 2:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by virgil »

Those are two separate functions, one is a bell-curved 2-20 while the other is a linear d%. Or are you saying that it produces 100 results on a bell curve, therefore having a higher probability of getting near 50 than 15?
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Post by RadiantPhoenix »

silva wrote:Nope, a roll-under percentile 2D10 where you add the dice (having previously designated one for tens and other for digits) produces 100 results. AND it produces a bell curve as shown in the graph I showed above, instead of a straight line as a single d20.
Silva you are a deranged moron.

Is this a 54 XOR a 9?

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If it's a 54, you're talking about a d100, which has no bell curve.

If it's a 9, you're talking about 2d10, which has a first-order approximation of a bell curve.
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Post by silva »

Fuck, you guys are right. If you count tens and digits separately its also flat / no curve. My bad. :mrgreen:
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Post by virgil »

I keep trying to give silva the benefit of the doubt. I think he's saying there's a hidden advantage in EP using d% over the d20 (when everything's in 5% increments) in that you can simultaneously use your die roll to get a separate number that falls on a bell-curve; so with a single roll, you get a 54 & 9 to use in whatever resolution is being called out. Where this is pants-on-head retarded is that such a feature doesn't exist in any capacity in Eclipse Phase, therefore making the 'advantage' not even exist.
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Post by silva »

Forget what I said, Virgil. I was mistaken.

Frank is right - you can totally swap the d100 for the d20. (you would only lose the granularity)
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Post by virgil »

So back to the original point; which is that Eclipse Phase has changed its resolution mechanic notably since this review was made.
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Post by silva »

is the change from "roll as lower as possible" to "roll as hier as possible while below your skill" really that significant ? I mean, form-wise it is (I prefer to roll high than low), but math-wise dont know..
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Post by Username17 »

silva wrote:is the change from "roll as lower as possible" to "roll as hier as possible while below your skill" really that significant ? I mean, form-wise it is (I prefer to roll high than low), but math-wise dont know..
Well, it means that you don't have to do subtraction in order to output success or failure results. That's a plus.

You still have to report two numbers (your modified skill and your literal result), so it's still demonstrably worse than rolling over TN 100. And a forgotten modifier will change things directly from "best" result to "worst" result (or vice versa), and that's kind of weird and stupid. And it means your entire RNG can't "escape" and thus it is literally impossible to get good or powerful enough at any task that a random hobo can't beat you if you both roll kind of low, and that's a strange limitation to embrace for a game system that nominally is supposed to have crawling cities, living dolls, and death stars in it.

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Post by virgil »

FrankTrollman wrote:Well, it means that you don't have to do subtraction in order to output success or failure results. That's a plus.

You still have to report two numbers (your modified skill and your literal result), so it's still demonstrably worse than rolling over TN 100.
On the other hand, some people have significant concerns with having players do double digit addition. Modifiers to a skill are very heavily in 10pt increments, and it encourages characters to be built in 5pt increments.

It makes me wonder...
Divide skills/modifiers by 10
Whole numbers are bonuses to your die roll
Fractional remainder is your threat range

Resolution is 1d10+bonus
  • TN 10 for basic success
    TN 13 for excellent success
    TN 16 for exceptional success
Natural 0 is a critical threat
  • Roll a second d10 and confirm if <= threat
Natural 1 is a critical fumble
  • Roll a second d10 to confirm if >= threat
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Post by silva »

Frank wrote:I mean fuck, “ten years” really makes my blood boil.

Math Fail, p. 38 wrote: wrote: Before the Fall, the solar system had a population of approximately eight billion, with all but five million of these people living on Earth. The Fall wiped out almost ninety- five percent of transhumanity, and today the population of the solar system is slightly less than half a billion, with almost all of these transhumans living off the Earth.

Ugh. For those keeping track at home, that means that at least 400 million people survived from Earth, and only 5 million actual spacers exist – meaning that the cultures, clades, memes, and divisions of the spacers should be totally fucking irrelevant. This is like the entire population of the United States moving to Iceland. Your chances of even seeing someone who speaks Icelandic or has an Icelandic culture is almost nonexistent.

The population numbers and the timeline are full of fail. It essentially just turns the entire game into Battlestar Galactica by the back end. The fact of the huge first generation Earth-refugee bias in the populations of well everything drives the apathy level towards the Sol factions way too high. I mean shit, you're Vetnamese, right? Only 10 million of your people escaped the Fall, making it by far the worst and most iconic tragedy in Vietnamese history. And the New Vietnamese outnumber all the spacer civilizations together by two to one. Your culture isn't Titanian, Martian, or Jovian – it's fucking Vietnamese. New Vietnam matters more than all these hypercorps and exocolonies and brinkers and autonomists combined. And New Vietnam isn't even the tenth largest refugee civilization. And that's just a damn shame, because the habitat civs are by far the coolest part about the book.
Frank, what adjustments would you do about these things to give the setting more plausibility ?

Would halving the declared refugees population and doubling the timeline do it ?
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Post by silva »

By the way, Ive just used this Frank paragraph here..
The primary thing that got missed [in Eclipse Phase] is that people still have “knowledge” and “language” skills and such. That's throwback thinking. Consider: you walk into a new region that is completely cut off from the outside worlds. Maybe your new region is a slowship to Pluto or is an isolation chamber that a fringe group is using to store their apocalyptic plot. Whatever. The point is, that you personally carry IMDB, all of Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, TV Tropes, PubMed, IUPAC, and a realtime translation service to every known language in the solar system with you. Even without the ability to harvest any meaningful data from the region around you, you still just ambiently have more information at your fingertips than you could actually think about in a thousand years. People shouldn't be “knowing” facts, they should be “finding” and “contextualizing” facts. The very way these people interact with the idea of knowledge is completely alien to modern human thought – and it's really exciting. But the skills just don't match up with that reality. The sample characters “know” things like Academics: Economics and Laguage: Mandarin, and that's just completely fucking irrelevant to people who carry the entire internet in an effectively instantaneously searchable format in their belt buckle or even their actual bones.

..to prop an attempt at an EP Apocalypse World hack, both here and here. Feel free to contribute, folks. And thanks again to Frank for such a nice and evocative review. When you let your extreme pessimism and math anal-obsession aside, you are a genius. :thumb:

(Im still waiting for a more appropriate time stamp and demographics, btw)
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Post by silva »

Any tips for making Eclipse Phase more sandboxy and less "uncover GM plot of the week' ? :confused:
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Post by Fucks »

Yes. Just play a bunch of PCs who want to establish a new colony or build a new habitat or such shit.
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Post by silva »

Fucks wrote:Yes. Just play a bunch of PCs who want to establish a new colony or build a new habitat or such shit.
And how to tie that with Firewall and exsuegent threats ?
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Post by Fucks »

You don't have to.
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Post by silva »

Anyone getting Morph Recognition Guide ? I heard its neat.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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