Eclipse Phase newbie help?

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Silent Wayfarer
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Eclipse Phase newbie help?

Post by Silent Wayfarer »

I downloaded the Eclipse Phase book and was impressed by it, so I ordered the hardcover to support the company. Can anyone here give me advice about building a character, or point me to somewhere I can learn?
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Vnonymous
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Post by Vnonymous »

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50259& ... sc&start=0 There's already an Eclipse Phase thread
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erik
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Post by erik »

Though that was more of a review than character building advice, eh?
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Mandella
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Post by Mandella »

I'm sure there can be good advice over here, but the forums at the official Eclipse Phase site are fairly active, and several of the folks there are happy to help out newbies.
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Post by Koumei »

The stat that determines your Trauma threshold/sanity/whatever you want to call it? You will make it the maximum possible. The other stats don't even fucking matter, they're small skill bonuses that still count against the skill cost multiplier. But trauma takes you out like a bitch and crops up all the time.

Also, be proficient with one ranged weapon class and zero melee weapon classes. Note also the skills it suggests you take - the noncombat ones are highly relevant here so take them at a lot.
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Post by Username17 »

As a newb, you will want to steer away from "subsystems" as much as possible. So don't be Psychic or use Hacking or any of that. Fortunately, those subsystems are actually kind of garbage. Hacking really doesn't do anything that interesting, which is surprising in a setting where totally random strangers can put visual objects in your field of view without consultation and entire consciousnesses are loaded and unloaded into bodies time and time again without fail. And the Psionics are rather pointless over an above being kind of confusing.

Basically you grab a range weapon of some kind and a bunch of social skills and then you're in a percentile roll-under system. Think of it like Call of Cthulhu. In space.

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Post by virgil »

I'm wondering about the ability of the setting/system to make this one character concept I thought of: a single android with an entire community of consciousnesses uploaded in a virtual town (living faster than the outside world), where the primary source of employment is playing a cRPG. That game is the sensory input of the android, and uses some kind of sorting algorithm from the consensus to act as decided by the 'players'.

Conceptually, the character would do pretty well at analysis, observation (all input is subject to wiki-approval), and internal brain hacking. It would be vulnerable to memetic attacks and quick response activities.
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Post by virgil »

Discovery of doing math on the Fray skill: it's terrible. If you have Fray at 60, you're spending in the range of 40 CP for a 4% chance of actually saving you from a ranged attack. Like Shadowrun, the real benefit is putting points into the more utilitarian Gymnastics/Free-running; because you can use that in place of Fray when using Total Defense for a +30 to your skill, which raises your dodge to a reasonable 16% success rate.
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Post by Desdan_Mervolam »

On a mostly unrelated note, call your bank. When I ordered the EP rulebook, my credit card information got stolen shortly afterwards and I am pretty sure that was what caused it.
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Post by silva »

The best advice I would give you is: wait for the Fate conversion thats on the horizon. The default system is from the same pedigree as Shadowrun, aka a slow and unecessarily complex mess that dont communicate any clear design goal.
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Post by virgil »

I have an idea for an adventure, but it involves deleting an entire community of infomorphs to stop an ex-threat. Is the moral grey-ness like this a bad idea?
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Post by Lokathor »

virgil wrote:I'm wondering about the ability of the setting/system to make this one character concept I thought of: a single android with an entire community of consciousnesses uploaded in a virtual town (living faster than the outside world), where the primary source of employment is playing a cRPG.
So, you're basically Legion from Mass Effect then. Sweet.
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Post by Username17 »

I made the mistake of clicking on a silva post. Don't do that. The reason that Eclipse Phase has a bad system is that it is a BRP hack, and those are bad. Not because some people who worked on Shadowrun were among the people who worked on Eclipse Phase.

silva is, as usual, so fucking stupid about absolutely everything that it hurts my brain. Note that his actual stance is that BRP hacks are awesome, but now that we're talking about a real one, he admits that it's bad. The cognitive dissonance should make his head explode, and maybe already has.

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Post by Fucks »

Wait for Eclipse FATE then. ;)
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virgil
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Post by virgil »

Time to see if I understand Eclipse Phase's current rules for hacking. From what I can tell, if you don't know their mesh ID, you can't hack them. If they stealth their signal, it's a Complex action & opposed Interfacing (-30) test to find their mesh ID. If they have wireless turned off, you can't hack them or even know their mesh ID. If they're undercover where being in stealth or wireless mode would be conspicuous, they can buy a stack of ectos hooked up in a chain between them and the rest of the Mesh, so there's half a dozen failure points before you can reach the ego inside.
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Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
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Post by Username17 »

virgil wrote:Time to see if I understand Eclipse Phase's current rules for hacking. From what I can tell, if you don't know their mesh ID, you can't hack them. If they stealth their signal, it's a Complex action & opposed Interfacing (-30) test to find their mesh ID. If they have wireless turned off, you can't hack them or even know their mesh ID. If they're undercover where being in stealth or wireless mode would be conspicuous, they can buy a stack of ectos hooked up in a chain between them and the rest of the Mesh, so there's half a dozen failure points before you can reach the ego inside.
Yes. There are a half dozen failure points between you and any successful hacking attempt. Also, they can and therefore will make you hack through each intermediate piece of hardware in turn before they get to anything they care about and therefore it takes several sequential successful actions before you can touch them. Hacking cannot be performed in combat time, even setting aside the fact that the hacking effects you are allowed to inflict are pretty lame.

On the flip side, you're allowed to hackastack your offense by having an arbitrarily large number of ectos running hacking programs try to bust through each level. So anything your hacking programs can succeed at, they do succeed at every round.

So hacking is a shit tonne of die rolls that ends up being totally deterministic and the end result is that if they are connected to the net at all you win and if they have a hard cutoff you lose. Actual personal computer skills are only useful for tuning up your own hardware and software to get bonuses on what your hackastack can theoretically succeed at. But it's all kind of pointless, because it takes slightly longer to do than can possibly matter in a combat situation and also the effects allowed to you are shocking lame. I mean, people are allowed to set their own ectos to transform their personal experience of the world around them into a disney forest and everyone's entire self is digitally recorded and transferred from body to body, but for some reason you can't meaningfully hack peoples' sense data, personality, or memories.

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Post by virgil »

If you give them AR illusions, it's a roll to disbelieve to even know it's an illusion. If they do know it's an illusion, then it does essentially grant a -30 debuff to their actions. Depending on account access once you do get it, you don't even need to roll to throw the illusions at them successfully.

If they've got greater security than some schmuck, then you're probably going to take the -30 to get admin access; which is a straight roll if you've got +30 from gear/software (which you do), before you account for things like teamwork bonuses or taking extra time. And if they have a cyberbrain, then you can turn them off, edit their memories, take control of their body, or blast their Sanity, none of which are lame hacking effects. If they have biobrains, you can still illusion them up, control their drones/checkbook/weapons and possibly even their cyberware. Not as impressive as those with a cyberbrain, admittedly, but serviceable.

Of course, this all requires not thinking about the failure points to even be allowed to hack. And the rolling does seem kind of excessive.
Last edited by virgil on Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
EXPLOSIVE RUNES!
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