Eclipse Phase Review.

[iambane]

If guns are "legally restricted" then the void is filled with hackers who will just hack stuff and ram it into you.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Pretty much. When it comes to fighting society, terrorism is just one of many tactics and guns are just one of many tactics of terrorism, especially in a futuristic society.

Even if your goal is 'be a terrorist', you still wouldn't engage in melee combat because melee combat in modern societies is ass unless you have some kind of mitigating factor like superpowers.

[Ice9]

I was thinking about opposed rolls, and remembered the awkward comparison method used here. Then a much simpler way occurred to me - gives you opposed MoS is one easy operation:
Roll d100, add your skill, and compare to the foe's d100+skill. If a minimum success is required, then your total must be 100 or higher to hit.

I don't think I've seen a d% game using this, but there's probably one out there.

[Starmaker]

gives you opposed MoS is one easy operation:
Roll d100, add your skill, and compare to the foe's d100+skill. If a minimum success is required, then your total must be 100 or higher to hit.

As Frank explained, the problem is not that the comparison itself is ass (it makes sense and binary opposed roll comparison doesn't require any math at all) but that the game requires you to calculate the exact difference to determine effect. Thus, no time is actually saved.

[Ice9]

Yes, and since you do have to calculate the difference in MoS, this method does it a lot faster - instead of each player determining how much MoS they got and then comparing them, you just subtract the higher total from the lower total - that's the difference in MoS.

[iambane]

I'd love to see a list of fixes you guys (and frank) would make. I mean, the game is CC after all.

[Username17]

Ice9's system would be a good replacement for the roll low system across the board. Since the target number is invariant - it's always 100 - the math gets really easy. And since the degree of success is just "the last two digits" - players are giving both the absolute value and the degree of success with the same number.

As for the skill list, there are too many skills. Especially in Combat, but also in other areas.

• Beam Weapons
• Blades
• Clubs
• Exotic Melee*
• Exotic Ranged*
• Fray
• Gunnery
• Kinetic Weapons
• Seeker Weapons
• Spray Weapons
• Throwing Weapons
• Unarmed Combat
  *: This skill is like fifty million skills

Seriously, what the fuck? This is a game with brain hacking and nuclear weapons, you don't need to have any combat ability at all to be a contributing member of the team. Having 14 spaces on the character sheet to keep track of the niggling details of what your bonus is one one weapon or another is completely pointless.

What they should have done is a bit more skill abstraction (save with Combat Skills, where there should just be a "Combat" skill and be done with it). Everything people do, everything people know is some form of operation or protocol. That could, and should have been run with. When you're piloting a ship, you're operating it. When you're hacking into the ship's controls you're networking with it. Performing first aid is operating a body, diagnosing a toxin is networking with the toxin database. Because everyone has these databases to potentially network with, the only important thing is your actual familiarity with the interface and technical terms so that you can get the right answer in a timely fashion. Fuck, you got seventy two skill slots on the character sheet - the game does not benefit from having even half that many.

Next up: drop attributes full stop. You can be a pile of nanobots or a giant fucking crab. All the attributes are just kind of stupid - and they are a senselessly difficult way to do things. Morphs should just give skill bonuses rather than worrying about them changing aptitudes that change starting values for skills but in this case modify skills anyway, at least seemingly, it's not super clear. If you're in a fish or octo-morph you get a bonus to your Operate: Liquid Environment skill, and then you move on with your life and scrub all 21 Aptitude boxes off the character sheet.

Next stop: scrap the Psi and hacking minigames and replace them with a new minigame called hacking that does every single thing that those subsystems do and does it in a hardware independent fashion. As long as you can put a new Muse in every credit card sized microcomputer and each Muse is allowed its own hacking rolls, the game is just going to slow to a crawl the moment someone really pulls out their wallet. That can't be allowed to continue. Networking: Brains opposed by Operate: Perception. Done.

-Username17

[iambane]

Ugh, sorry, skill abstraction and Sci-Fi seriously bug the hell out of me. Fantasy? Pulp Fiction? Sure. Once you start talking about one combat skill in a Sci-Fi game I start walking.

[Username17]

Ugh, sorry, skill abstraction and Sci-Fi seriously bug the hell out of me. Fantasy? Pulp Fiction? Sure. Once you start talking about one combat skill in a Sci-Fi game I start walking.

Skill Abstraction is absolutely necessary in sci-fi. Much more so than in Fantasy or modern genres. Because while you basically know how a cart or a camel works and you can plan ahead with it. Even fantasy skills can be incredibly specific, because the things you can do without falling back on fantasy are so limited. People in the world are spending their time mastering the literally ancient and secret art of barrel making, so if a single skill is a single spell, that's really not that out of place. And indeed, since everything is a boringly predictable use of one of the simple machines, any special abilities you have can be incredibly simple. They are, after all, going to be subjected to distressingly Newtonian physics the moment they are accomplished.

But the future does not work like that at all. You have stuff that you are working with that is total handwavium. When you have a plasma conduit or a crystal matrix or a multiphasic converter that's just a black box. It's just part of the stuff that makes your future society go, and no one knows how it works or what it can do. So having a skill that lets you toggle multiphasic converters has no meaning, which means that it doesn't resolve any dispute at the table. And since the entire point of having a skill system at all is to resolve disputes between players about what is supposed to happen in the story, that level of detail actually causes the rules to essentially cease to exist. The skills have to be more general like "Engineering" because recalibrating plasma conduits doesn't actually mean the same thing to any two players at the table.

---

But the argument for chopping down weapon skills is even more compelling. Weapon skills in a futuristic setting aren't very good. Over and above the fact that it is insulting for driving a sedan, a minivan, or a hover car to all be one skill while pointing and shooting a pistol is three different skills depending on whether the thing traveling to your target from your point-and-shoot handheld weapon is a solid slug, a beam of light, or a spray of ions - it's also incredibly unbalanced for the diversity of handheld weaponry to "cost" anything. The future generally speaking has virus bombs, nuclear missiles, and most importantly of all: mercenaries. Maintaining a purpose for player characters to actually pick up weapons at any point in their careers is frankly difficult. And telling people that being an arms master costs as much as being able to play in three or four other subsystems is not the way to get that shit done.

The basic setup of most "fantasy" naturally lends itself to being an armsmaster actually being a big deal. Being the best warrior in the kingdom makes you rule the kingdom in Iron Age accounting. So however much you want to charge for sword and spear mastery is defensible. But in modern and future worlds, there's actually no amount of personal badassery that you could have that would allow you to seriously threaten society as a whole. They can keep hiring sheriffs and giving them shotguns faster than you can kill them, even with super speed and accuracy. Knowing how to shoot both a radium pistol and a handlaser isn't important or impressive. And it can't be, because people in the setting have literally millions of people who can do those things. And most telling of all: the most powerful dudes in the setting don't bother with personal weapons at all because they can't be fucked.

The true and consistent fact is that people demand there to be a lot of weapon skills because they are trying to pretend that Jane isn't the least useful character on Frefly. Or they just really hate jocks and don't want fighters to have nice things. There's no justifiable setting reason, game balance reason, or story coherence reason for a guy to be able to pull the trigger on a crossbow but not be able to pull the trigger on a pulse rifle or gauss rifle. Splitting weapon skills up is just hands down, provably a shitty idea.

-Username17

[Murtak]

To expand on Frank's point, consider Shadowrun. This is a world where you seriously do have sword adepts, monowhip-wielding cybered combat monsters, magical staffs, earth spirits attempting to engulf you and remote controlled gunships. One would think that weapon skills would be useful in a world like that. And indeed Shadowrun does have about a dozen weapon skills.

But when you actually think about it, what is the point of having both pistols and automatics, let alone rifles and automatics? You can get fully automatic pistols and you can get concealable submachine guns. Basically getting pistols an top of automatics gives you access to hold-outs and getting automatics on top of pistols gives you underbarrel grenade launchers. That is awfully narrow. The other skills are even worse. The difference between cyber-enhanced unarmed attacks and swords is next to nil for example, yet they require different skills. So mechanically you either end up with a street samurai who only shoots submachine guns, because they let him do next to everything and actually sucks at firing, say, a shotgun - or you end up kicking said samurai in the nuts because he adheres to his flavor text and takes all the combat skills. Both options suck.

What you actually want to do is to only have players take a new skill when they actually gain a new capability. Shadowrun is a game about breaking and entering, so having a nearly undetectable weapon is useful - so a separate skill for monowhips is justifiable. Actual range on a weapon and decent concealability for a ranged weapon are both useful, so pistols and longarms might be different skills. Automatics on the other hand should be dropped. The three close combat skills should just be unified - silently killing someone is valuable, but there is no meaningful difference between a knife and a club.

Remember, this is a setting where you are actually expected to fight a lot and in wildly differing ways. Yet at least half of the given combat skills are functionally useless. When you switch to a setting with less combat or a setting where you can more easily choose how to defeat your opponent you are down to a quarter of less of the combat skill list. I can easily imagine settings where a skill like "Personal Combat" which covers everything from Kung Fu to sword-fighting to machine guns to phasers are entirely reasonable. Heck, looking at Star Trek I can justify folding ship-to-ship combat into it too.

By the way, why does a short combat skill list bother you? Does it seem "cheap"? Unrealistic?

[iambane]

I've always viewed future, and science fiction, are super specific detail driven genres. It reflects in my gaming choices for the genre. Just like I expect Swords and Hammers to be a better mechanical choice than Bows and Crossbows in a Fantasy RPG. The genre reflects on the game.

For note, Eve Online totally makes me wet.

[erik]

Battle Stations isn't a roleplaying game, but there's no reason it cannot be adapted to such purposes.

The characters in that game are usually aboard a spaceship and half their actions deal with operating the ships and their other half deal with interacting with other creatures (usually fighting them).

There are seriously only 5 skills.
Athletics
Combat
Science
Piloting
Engineering

If you want to make it into a full blooded RPG then really you could just add "Diplomacy" and be done with it.

Generalizing skills is totally awesome in sci-fi since having to break stuff down is a waste of time.

[Murtak]

I've always viewed future, and science fiction, are super specific detail driven genres. It reflects in my gaming choices for the genre. Just like I expect Swords and Hammers to be a better mechanical choice than Bows and Crossbows in a Fantasy RPG. The genre reflects on the game.

1. Specializations handle this fine, if you really need to have some mechanical way to represent someone being better at shooting with a hand phaser than with a phaser rifle.

2. You did read what I wrote, right? And what Frank wrote? Multiple similar skills are provably bad for the game.

3. Why the heck do you expect melee combat to be mechanically better than ranged combat in fantasy games? And how does it relate to SciFi games, or to combat skill bloat?

[Mask_De_H]

I've always viewed future, and science fiction, are super specific detail driven genres. It reflects in my gaming choices for the genre. Just like I expect Swords and Hammers to be a better mechanical choice than Bows and Crossbows in a Fantasy RPG. The genre reflects on the game.


For note, Eve Online totally makes me wet.

Disregarding the Cleric Archer example, why would you think that? Seriously, what would make you think that when there's representation for bows being as awesome as swords in fantasy literature. I agree that the setting reflects on the system, but that seems like a weird vector to base that reflection on.

[Surgo]

Sure, science fiction is all about super specialization. But that's perfectly coverable by a fetishizing over your equipment down to the finest detail. There's no reason to turn "super detail" into "skill bloat".

[iambane]

Unlike you guys I'm not going to demand that one way is right or wrong. I only said what I enjoy.

[RandomCasualty2]

But the argument for chopping down weapon skills is even more compelling. Weapon skills in a futuristic setting aren't very good.

While I agree that splitting weapon skills is generally a bad idea, I have to say I disagree with the base premise that weapon skills aren't very good.

So long as you're dealing with an RPG with a combat premise, something like Shadowrun for instance, weapon skills are always going to have a special valuable place in the RPG. While it's fundamentally true that you may not be able to kill everyone, being able to kill people is quite valuable. Often times you're just not going to be able to become the guy who just calls down wave after wave of mercenaries, because the game typically is not about that.

Generally, the PCs are the mercenaries, not the rich guy just hiring people to do jobs for them. And for a mercenary, having a weapon skill is really important, because killing them before they kill you is pretty mcuh what you're all about. The rest of the game world may not consider that a particularly valuable skill, but from the PoV of the PCs, that's damn invaluable.

The problem isn't that weapon skills are useless. It's that multiple weapon skills tend to be useless. And that's generally true of fantasy as much as it is sci-fi, if not more so. Being able to use a mace just isn't a very useful added ability if you can already use a sword. While there may be a few mace weak monsters, you're getting significantly less of an advantage out of your mace training than you are out fo your sword training, because the instances you use your mace are pretty much going to be the instances where your sword is ineffective.

Now unless you've got an RPG system where swapping between plasma pistols and shotguns is a routine thing to best penetrate armor or take advantage of combat at close/long range, you're basically just going to worry about secondary weapon skills in capture scenarios. So a secondary weapon skill being used is something you almost never see.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Unlike you guys I'm not going to demand that one way is right or wrong.

I've always viewed future, and science fiction, are super specific detail driven genres. It reflects in my gaming choices for the genre. Just like I expect Swords and Hammers to be a better mechanical choice than Bows and Crossbows in a Fantasy RPG.

While I'm sympathetic to your idea on melee combat being just as good or better than ranged combat in heroic fantasy, you can't claim open-mindedness after someone calls you out on why you expect a specific genre element.

[koz]

I smell a broken quote tag.

[cthulhu]

LLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[koz]

LLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

JEEEEEEEENKIIIIIIINS?

[iambane]

While I'm sympathetic to your idea on melee combat being just as good or better than ranged combat in heroic fantasy, you can't claim open-mindedness after someone calls you out on why you expect a specific genre element.

An expectation is not the same thing as a demand. You might want to pick up a dictionary and figure out the difference.

[Username17]

The big point here is that when you make a preference argument, especially here, that is in no way privileged. The fact that you enjoy a particular game that happens to split up its weapon skills a lot does not mean that splitting up weapon skills is a good idea. It doesn't even mean that it increases your enjoyment, because you could just as plausibly be enjoying the game in spite of the effects of multiple weapon skills rather than because of them.

The fact that skills are divided up into six, twenty six, or seventy six different numbers has no flavor. The word on your character sheet next to the number does not impact the play of the game in any way. Indeed, the names don't even have to be descriptive. Your skills could be called "skill A, skill B, skill C..." and so on. That wouldn't impact the story in any positive or negative fashion. It's a bad idea, but it's a bad idea because it makes the game harder to learn. But WH40K doesn't suffer as a game because your units have skills called "BS, T, Ld, or I." The fact that skills are divided up into more categories has real effects, but those effects are not flavor effects. They are numeric effects. And as such, we can quantify those effects and judge them good or bad.

When you increase the number of weapon skills, you are punishing people who use weapons. You are forcing them to either:

• Accept a huge penalty (equal to their entire skill) when using a weapon other than their signature weapon.
  or
• Pay more for their weapon use than they pay for other capabilities.

Seriously, that's the only effect. And it's bad. First of all, there are basically no fictional characters who appear to opt for the first option, which makes that restriction on warrior characters incredibly out of genre for all genres. And secondly, weapon use is not the best skill in like any game (except Feng Shui, where it also sets your awesomeness for lots of other stuff completely unrelated to shooting people in the face). Even in Shadowrun, which is admittedly quite combat-centric in places. Summoning, Sorcery, Compiling, and Gunnery are all individual skills that are seriously and specifically superior to Pistols, Longarms, Automatics, Heavy Weapons, Throwing, and Archery combined. If any skill were to have a cost multiplier attached to it for game balance reasons, it would be Summoning, not Firearms.

So no, people do not have to take the "argument" that you play games with a lot of weapon skills in them and enjoy those sessions seriously. That's a fallacious argument on many grounds.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

Unlike you guys I'm not going to demand that one way is right or wrong. I only said what I enjoy.

And we (exasperatedly) asked why you enjoyed it in that way. Don't make this into a you vs. the world thing.

[RandomCasualty2]

Seriously, that's the only effect. And it's bad.

Well, it's not all bad, it's just that you have to accept that you're going with the signature weapon route.

If you've got games with lots of classes, where you've got warriors, monks, mages and clerics, then signature weapons are kind of pointless. If you're playing a low magic combat game with all warriors, then you may well want to set up your game such that you've got a mace guy, a sword guy, an axe guy and so on, because those could amount to your basic classes.

And in that case, making sure axe guy is the best with an axe is a goal you care about, because that may well be his main niche. He's the dude with the axe.