Eclipse Phase Review.

[Username17]

Part 1: First Impressions and Chargen.

The first thing you will notice when cracking open Eclipse Phase is that there are a lot of things in it that are wicked awesome. This is at its core because the game world is incredibly overcrowded. You've seen kitchen sink settings before, and Eclipse Phase is one of them. We're talking RIFTS levels of overcrowding. But we'll get to that in a minute. Let's talk about some of the awesome.

The License: Holy shit, Creative Commons License. I think everyone should buy a copy of the game just for this. This is the license that everyone knows RPGs should have. It's totally legal to post your characters and your game aids to the internet. It's not a legal gray area or anything, non-profit game additions are explicitly allowed. Finally, an end to legal harassment of fans is in sight.

The Save Points: I don't blame you if you find the entire idea of character save-points in a pen and paper RPG to be insulting. But it really works, and it's a great implementation.

The Transhumanism: You can just be an octopus uplift or a digital intelligence or have your mind distributed between a swarm of microdrones. This forward looking futurism is actually quite refreshing. Handled at least as well as Transhuman Space, and in a much more playable game.

The Hook: The entire “Extinction Looms: Fight It” thing is exactly the thing missing from Transhuman Space: a reason to care, a motivation to interact with the setting and “do stuff.” Extinction level threats are exactly the thing needed to make the PCs band together despite and even becauseof having wildly different ideologies. Combined with the body swapping you can seriously have libertarian egoist cowards fighting alongside communist party members without that being weird or contrived. Brilliant.

---

But seriously, setting bloat. The book is 400 pages, and 230 of them could charitably be called game mechanics in any meaningful sense of the term. Even then, a fair number of those pages are given over to bonus rules for bonus tacked on systems. 20 pages are given over to a completely superfluous set of Shadowrun-style magic powers you can get from having been infected with an extraterrestrial space virus. I am not making that up.

The game would be severely improved by getting rid of all the ET bullshit. It adds nothing to the setting except confusion. Also, the Factors are pointless. And the fact that there is Titan (the utopian sweidish space commies) and TITANs (the super intelligent AI network quasi-gods partially from space, I wish I was making that up) is way too confusing. Any one planet and its colonies would supply more than enough adventuring fodder for a long campaign – most of the moon colonies of outer planets represent more territory than the entirety of the Forgotten Realms and have more detailed maps available.

The Stargates, exo worlds, ETIs, space viruses, and such cause substantial harm to setting. They reduce comprehensibility, they make it harder to give a shit about the Sol system and everything in it. It's a very obviously bad plan. You can play Stargate or you can play Solar Empire, you can't play both.

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Chargen is like three or four steps too long. I'll get into that in a bit, but the key thing to contemplate is the fact that you seriously are supposed to spend one thousand customization points, and there is seriously a step of chargen where you get 30 extra customization points pre-spent. Also, Combat is a joke. Like literally at the high end players are dropping their weapons 9% of their attacks and attacking 8 times in a combat turn.

Let's start with Chargen. You have these things called “aptitudes” that are rated on a scale of 1-30 and what they actually do is set the starting value of your skills and then you buy them up from there. As such, the only thing that makes sense is to decide your skills first and then set your aptitudes to 30 on whichever ones cover the most skills and set your aptitudes to minimum values on everything else. This means, for example, that even if you want to be an accomplished swimmer, your aptitude in “Somatics” will tend to be extremely low – there just aren't that many Somatics skills and most of them are melee combat related (and if you are attempting to engage in melee combat, I am actually embarrassed for you). This is really irritating, because technically you assign the aptitudes first, and those set how many points you actually have, which means that you pretty much have to make your whole character through twice before you even find out how many points you have left over.

But that's not even the first step. There are actually several steps before you set your aptitudes where you grab backgrounds that give you access to various skill bonuses that are in fact very small. Some of these also have small bonuses and penalties attached. Some of them give you restrictions on what you are allowed to play. This of course is a complete non-disadvantage, because you would only take those backgrounds if you happened to be that kind of character. Some of them give you nothing in exchange for these limitations, some of them give you bonus points (seriously). Points are totally fungible, so if you take one that gives you 10 points worth of zero g operations and 20 points worth of Networking: Autonomists this is completely identical with one that gives you 30 points of zero G ops or 30 points of Networking Autonomists if you intended to ultimately buy 30 points of both anyway. There is some shenanigans here, a few of them are worth more points than others, and if you get enough bonus points in one category to push yourself past the 60 point total you're getting double skill value. But you're still talking about 10-20 bonus points when you are about to spend one thousand points. The big one to think about is being an Infolife. Being an AI makes you spend half points on four skills and double price on 8 different skills (one of which is super important). If you are a character who was going to spend more than twice as many points on the first pile than on the second, you can save a lot of points by being a computer program. Otherwise, you can seriously rape yourself. It only affects starting character points, so it's seriously just an algebra problem where your total points go up or down based on your expenditures in step 5 that you are supposed to answer in step 1. Aaargh.

This is not helped in the slightest by the fact that clearly some of the authors thought that your skill totals were a constantly recalculated value (Learned + Aptitude) – indeed you can seriously change your aptitudes after you've spent all your Customization points based on your morph (that is, your starting body). This is totally incomprehensible, as your Aptitudes merely set your skill starting values and have no real intrinsic worth of their own in almost all cases. So once you've bought and set your skills, changing your aptitude is kind of pointless.

All of this is basically a waste of time, because pretty much the only thing about your character that matters in any real way is your skill totals. Everything you do in chargen is just algebra similar to the old Decipher Star Trek game chargen where you procedurally generate those skill totals. But goodness gracious, you're spending one thousand points, all those steps are almost completely irrelevant. If you have a COG of 30 and all 10 COG skills, this only saves you 250 points vs. having a COG of 5. It's literally impossible for any of this shit to matter to the tune of more than a quarter of your character. The game could be severely improved by removing all of the attributes and most of the chargen steps and just being a purely skill based game. The aptitudes are such an afterthought as to be kind of insulting.

And while we're on the subject: there are way too many combat skills. The combat system is that you miss half the time and drop your weapon like one time in twenty or more. Also, the weapons available include ones so big that essentially anything you care about using is going to one-hit anyone you're liable to meet into ineffectiveness and then you can drop it on them again and end the fight – the game severely suffers from the “two shot syndrome” that plagues Shadowrun. One explosive shot will do your opponent like 2 wounds, and a plasma burst is going to do like 3. It's not even really that important, considering that two wounds is such a big shift on your attacks and defenses that you might as well not even be playing the same game. There's no reason for there to be 12 Combat skills, because they are basically all interchangeable and combat isn't that interesting.

-Username17

[Username17]

Now on to part 2.

Part 2: A whole lot of subsystems.

Eclipse Phase is dominated by a large number of subsystems that are at best semi-transparent. Most of these fall back to the core system of rolling percentile dice and trying to get under your skill, but each of them decides to wander off into crazy town in one way or another in order to make the system as a whole unnecessarily difficult to learn.

Combat: Too Many Steps

Combat is clunky and uninteresting. Basically people die very quickly and you don't really mind because backups are available. However, the game throws a wrench at you by having things take more time than they should, and to behave in ways that are severely counterintuitive.

For starters, you attack someone and they roll a defense roll. Natural enough, right? Also, if your margin of success is high, you'll do extra damage. Again, to be expected. And you might think that having a higher margin of success on your attack roll than the defender's margin of success that you hit – and you'd be totally wrong. Actually you compare the literal value of your attack roll and their defense roll and whoever got a worse roll and still succeeded wins. Seriously, there's an entirely superfluous game of blackjack layered onto checking your margin of success to determine whether you hit or not. No one knows why this is.

On top of that, there's the incredibly weird thing where you get critical fumbles when the defender rolls doubles on their percentile dice and rolls under their defense score. Which I guess is supposed to produce a “Storm Trooper Effect” or something in that people (regardless of skill) drop their weapons continuously when fighting against skilled opposition. But the effect, while frequent enough to be humorous and bizarre, is not actually enough to save your ass, especially because your Defense score is halved when your opponents use ranged weapons, which they will be doing because this is the god damned future and they sure as fuck aren't going to be trying to cut you up with a guisarme. As such it works out to: every time an opponent attacks you, they have a 1% chance of losing their weapon plus an additional 1% for every 22 points of “Fray” skill you have – the game straight up tells you that Fray is a “necessary” skill for almost all characters, but that is clearly a god damn lie.

Every character needs exactly one weapon skill and the biggest weapon related to that skill they can get. Characters are thus like Warhammer 40k units. Josh users a Bolter because he took “Kinetic Weapons” and Greg users a Melta Gun because he took “Beam Weapons.” Did I mention that there are too many weapon skills? Oh yes, yes I did. I totally stand by that assessment.

And finally, actually inflicting damage is a strange foray into another game system entirely, because now you're rolling d10s and adding them together and subtracting them from your opponent's hit points. Also, you are dividing that damage by a completely arbitrary number to see how many wound levels you hand out. You'll probably hand out 2 or 3, which translates to -20 or -30 respectively to all skills. So pretty much anyone you wound is completely fucked no matter what you hit them with. And they probably have enough hit points to stay up (nominally) after getting hit one, but not if hit twice. People also die for good if you hit them 3 times. It's... a lot of dice rolling and math for what is essentially a foregone conclusion.

Hacking: OMGWTF?!

The first thing you notice when you start reading the hacking section (“The Mesh”) is that it appears to be written by the same team of fuckups that fucked up the Shadowrun Matrix. That's because it is. I propose a new international treaty where Lars and Rob are not allowed to write hacking rules anymore. I figure I will be able to get a fair number of countries to sign onto it.

The biggest hold-your-head-WTF moments actually come in the rambling and self contradicting tirades describing the Mesh itself. And no, I'm not talking about the grammatical errors that lead me to believe that Lars still hasn't mastered writing in English. I'm talking about stuff like it giving you a rant about how Synth-morph cyberbrains are “vulnerable to hacking” when fucking everyone in the entire game is a digital persona copied into their body. And the incredibly poorly thought out crap about the TITANs. It starts out with the problem that “Titans” are one of the standard character types, and “TITANs” (note: pronounced exactly the same) are the evil machine gods from singularity fiction, and then it goes on to the fact that absolutely everything about the TITANs makes no damn sense. The people in the solar system went from a system of limited, definable bandwidth to a system of limitless untrackable bandwidth in order to keep artificial intelligences from growing too large. Seriously. That's on page 237.

Also, we're not supposed to worry about transfer speeds despite the fact that we are specifically using light waves (radio and microwave) and civilization is distributed amongst multiple planets. Apparently someone forgot that you can crank band width up as much as you fucking want and speed is still going to be a problem if things are many light minutes apart. It's science fiction, they could have produced some sort of black box (quantum entanglement relays or something) to cover that. But they didn't. And now it's a serious hole in the entire setup. They do mention Distance Lag, but not in the context of describing the availability of information and downloading speeds. So they talk about a universal mesh, but actually it's several dozen universal meshes, and the sync with the description is... poor. I mean, the universe is split up into these domains or planes of digital existence or whatever you want to call them, instantly accessible internally yet separated from each other by impenetrable Faraday Cages or the vastness of space or simply existing one on top of another slightly out of sync, hidden away by the vagueries of unbreakable digital encryption. And you can indeed call them whatever, because the authors don't even engage with this exciting concept enough to bother naming the phenomenon.

A special note: someday I am going to personally hunt down all the fucking Germans who use the words “virii” and “nexi” as if they were words. Then the world will be a better place where people use the proper plurals of proper words.

Anyway, every Hacker has top quality gear. The superfluous aliens and secret AI gods have better stuff than you, but transforming the wrist PDA you get for free into military hardware is a programming test at -30, and you get to add bonuses to that. So... whatever. Of course, this hardly matters because hacking takes forever (both in and out of game), and despite the fact that everyone and everything is a digital image printed from outside the game seriously allows you to block all hacking possibilities by setting “Hacking = No” on your PDA. That's not an exaggeration, that's a condensation of the 10 page long description of how you go about hacking and counter-hacking. There are a lot of dice rolls and shit, but basically you aren't actually obligated to accept any of these high density signals.

Again and again while reading through this I am stunned by the lack of respect hacking gets in the chapter about computing. Holy shit, every single person's memories and personality are digitally printed into their brains. They are walking around able to replace their own sense data with external devices. And not just crap like having the inside of their goggles display whatever they want – I'm talking they can have their “ecto” wrist computer generate sounds and even smells inside their brain to change the mood of their surroundings. People can even send these mentally generated images directly to others, intruding onto their sense space. So um... why can't seriously any hacker lock absolutely anyone in a nightmare world at any time? Why can't they just “terminate your fork” whenever they want? Fuck cyberbrains, Hackers should be able to digitally overwrite anyone. And turning off your damn PDA should be no defense at all considering that they didn't need you to turn your fucking PDA on to put you into the body in the first place.

But no, despite the fact that “you” can broadcast AR into “your” head and send AR data to “your friends” a Hacker needs to infiltrate “your” ecto and subvert it to run “his” illusions as if they were “yours.” Why can't he skip all that bullshit, and just use his own computer to directly display AR on you? Fuck, there is no explanation at all. The sample “scorcher” programs (the things that you can do to cyberbrains – and for no reason only “cyber” brains – that you have infiltrated) are severely underwhelming. Like, giving someone a -30 to their visual perceptions for 3 turns kind of meaningless. What the fuck? People can voluntarily and instantaneously replace their perceived surroundings with a forest full of happy deer and lovely butterflies, but a malicious hacker who has an account inside your brain can't even turn your eyes off?

While we're on the subject, AIs can take digital actions and they can be run on your “limitless” processing power and act through your “limitless” bandwidth. Their skills are severely underwhelming, but each and every single player comes equipped with Agent Smith for free. Any digital action that carries no meaningful repercussions for failure may as well automatically succeed. A thousand times if that would be helpful.

Psi: A Wasted Opportunity

So first of all, I got no problem with people hamhandedly forcing psionics into science fiction. It was done well in the original Star Wars trilogy and even the Vorkosagen books. Star Trek, Traveler, and pretty much every other space opera sci-fi setting whether “hard” or “soft” has sooner or later decided to pony up and put in psychics. It's a convenient black box to pull special effects out of with minimal explanation.

And yet, I can't help feel that the psionics in Eclipse Phase are a complete waste of space. The stuff they do isn't really that interesting. We're talking stuff like getting a +10 or +20 bonus to a skill – which is fine and all, but it's just more chargen algebra which increases the learning curve of the game at no meaningful benefit to anything. Really, there's not a single Psi-Chi sleight that benefits the game for existing. The few non-standard senses could and should have just been implants. Almost all of them actually are available as Implants, making the whole category frustratingly pointless. Many of them don't even have rules (ex.: “Filter” allows you to “ignore distractions” but only “up to the gamemaster's discretion” – it doesn't even bother to specify whether wound penalties count!) but the real damning thing is that none of these do anything actually meaningful. There's no retrocognition or mind reading or telekinesis or distant viewing – it's just a set of rules to learn for an alternate set of functionally identical surveillance gear. Congratulations, you get +10 to your investigation test because you are psychically intuitive or some shit instead of because you have some tweaked the sensory feeds up on your senselink. Whatever.

But that's just the Chi-crap. The Gamma things are... pretty much just as insulting. Albeit in a slightly different way. Most of them indeed are meaningless skill buffs. Great, you get a bonus to your networking because you subtly influence the minds of others, couldn't you just have had a bigger social skill instead? Why yes, yes you could. But even the ones that actually do things are just stuff that should have been in the hacking section. You can read biological minds, or erase memories of biological minds, and stuff like that. But those are all digital information stored, copied, and altered on a biological media on a regular basis in this setting. So the only reason that people aren't allowed to just take the same equipment they use to create and alter their memories into biological shells and do those things to their enemies on the fly is apparently just to give the “psychics” some kind of role protection. But it feels incredibly arbitrary, and it's still not enough role protection to make you feel like you didn't just flush a bunch of points down the toilet to be not that cool and not that unique.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

Just through I'd pop in and say that I've been enjoying this review.

Also, since the system is crap and a good portion of the setting is crap, is there anything which makes the book useful? If the setting material is compelling enough, it should be possible to run it with basic Shadowrun (plus EotM) rules. I mean, the fact that everyone's from Tiphares (or like Takeshi Kovacs, if you will) and has backups requires no game rules at all. Then you either make everyone a technomancer or say everyone has a comlink and you're good. If you want to keep psionics, you already have adepts and mystic adepts.

[shau]

So if you max out your Fray skill everyone just accidentally disarms themselves whenever they try to kill you?

[Koumei]

From the sound of it, it caps at 100 or something, as it's percentile, so the best you can manage is adding +4% for a total of 5%

Unless it's one of those wacky systems where you can roll percentiles and need to roll under 247 on 1d100 for some skills?

[Username17]

It maxes at 98, so you never get better than a 9% chance of your enemy dropping their weapon. Then it's just a question of who rolled higher (in a roll low system) to determine whether you hit or miss. Maxed attack and defense checks are not hard to get, so at the high end you just hit half the time and critical fumble 9% of the time.

-Username17

[souran]

Frank--

I don't know how much time you have on your hands but please write one of these reviews for "Anima" if you get the chance. 5 minutes of looking at that game caused me to wonder if there is anybody who can write a game that actually plays.

Oh, and if you want a game you can totally shred for hours try "crossroads of eternity." Think of a moderately complicated japenese console rpg. The sort where you have no real idea how the game determines damage, but it doesn't matter because its easy to figure out how to make your damage out put go up. You know the sort where your characters have multipel hundreds and then thousands of hps. Now try and play a game with that kind of math at the table. Hint bring a calculator because armor absorbs a percentage of each attack.

[Starmaker]

Actually you compare the literal value of your attack roll and their defense roll and whoever got a worse roll and still succeeded wins. (...) No one knows why this is.

...I do?
Skills (S) are rated from 1* to 100+ and d100 is used as a RNG (X). There's also difficulty (D).
*or 0, it's not really relevant.
So we have two ways to determine success when checking a skill:
1. (X+S)>D (difficulty as target number)
and
2. X<S-D (difficulty as a skill penalty).
Obviously, the second way is easier when you deal with 2-digit numbers because when the basic difficulty is 0 the check does not involve any addition or subtraction. These checks give binary success/fail results, and by using one +/- operation we can tie margins to degrees of success.

Now, with opposed rolls there's a stupid way to resolve stuff without involving +/-, which is have opponents roll checks as above until one fails - it takes too damn long. Any method with only two rolls has to employ margins, whether actually calculating them (2 subtractions) or ditching the "lower is better" and comparing raw rolls. These two methods seriously produce the same results in terms of probability (not in the same instances obviously), and I can clearly see why EF went with #2: it doesn't require any subtractions. AD&D's THAC0/AC is hard to stomach for some, and it rarely goes above +-20. A 1-100 scale can involve calculations like 72-48 vs 57-32, and believe it or not, there are people for whom the result is not immediately obvious.
So I don't see why Frank is unhappy with the "roll higher" opposed roll system.

[Username17]

Actually you compare the literal value of your attack roll and their defense roll and whoever got a worse roll and still succeeded wins. (...) No one knows why this is.

...I do?

Now, with opposed rolls there's a stupid way to resolve stuff without involving +/-, which is have opponents roll checks as above until one fails - it takes too damn long. Any method with only two rolls has to employ margins, whether actually calculating them (2 subtractions) or ditching the "lower is better" and comparing raw rolls. These two methods seriously produce the same results in terms of probability (not in the same instances obviously), and I can clearly see why EF went with #2: it doesn't require any subtractions. AD&D's THAC0/AC is hard to stomach for some, and it rarely goes above +-20. A 1-100 scale can involve calculations like 72-48 vs 57-32, and believe it or not, there are people for whom the result is not immediately obvious.
So I don't see why Frank is unhappy with the "roll higher" opposed roll system.

You're not getting it: you have to take the margin of success anyway. Rolling lower is still good, because the more you succeed by, the better your attack. But if you rolled a lower literal value and the other guy made his roll and rolled higher, you miss.

So you have to do the subtraction, then you also have to report the raw score and compare that. Ad as you note, it's the same probability as just comparing the margins of success from having done the subtractions in the first place. I understand that there are advantages to comparing for higher numbers under a TN - just that none of those advantages exist when you're already forced to calculate how far under the TN you got for other reasons inherent in the system.

-Username17

[Ice9]

I see why the game does it, but it's still a bit awkward. For one thing, it subverts the "lower is better" rule that every other skill check uses. Secondly, it means there's effectively no limit to how poorly you can roll - even a TITAN playing chess against an 8-year old who's played one game could still lose. And between opponents with similar skill levels, the higher skill person doesn't have as much of an edge as they would in most systems.

Edit: Huh, you still have to check for margin of success, eh? Well that's just stupid then. It makes it unlikely that a strong attack will hit - generally only low MoS attacks will hit. But I don't know if this was intentional or just failure to think through the implications.

[Roog]

Edit: Huh, you still have to check for margin of success, eh? Well that's just stupid then. It makes it unlikely that a strong attack will hit - generally only low MoS attacks will hit. But I don't know if this was intentional or just failure to think through the implications.

You get the same distribution of sucess and MoS as you would if the victor was determined by having the higher MoS on the roll, and their final MoS = Victor's MoS - Loser's MoS

[Taleran]

I'm sorry but that review is a piece of crap, you can't make any decent stance on a review if its full of bias and nothing but powergaming (OHOHO don't use melee weapons you must play this way)

it really tells something about how you play RPG's by this review

and it sounds like you just don't like science fiction in general from your distaste in some concepts oh well

[Kaelik]

I'm sorry but that review is a piece of crap, you can't make any decent stance on a review if its full of bias and nothing but powergaming (OHOHO don't use melee weapons you must play this way)

it really tells something about how you play RPG's by this review

and it sounds like you just don't like science fiction in general from your distaste in some concepts oh well

Yay! A fanboy!

[Taleran]

Yay! A fanboy!

obviously anyone with a different opinion must be a fanboy.....

[TavishArtair]

I'm sorry but that review is a piece of crap, you can't make any decent stance on a review if its full of bias and nothing but powergaming (OHOHO don't use melee weapons you must play this way)

For one, everyone has a bias, so just get over that.

For two, you will note that most soldiers nowadays specialize largely in ranged combat training with only the basics of hand to hand combat, and no one wastes their breath calling them powergamers when they kill a hundred times as many opponents as people with sharp sticks (or sharp metal sticks, whichever).

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, a fanboy is someone who dismisses someone's point of view because they're biased against something said fanboy likes.

Here are non-fanboy ways to disagree with what Frank said:

1) Your analysis is incomplete in certain areas, because rule XXX clears up the theme contradictions between the Sol Empire and StarFargate.
2) Your analysis is misleading; the combat resolution system is easier to understand than it looks on paper.
3) Your analysis is true but it doesn't matter because of personal tastes--people who play the game want combat to be decided in two rounds.
4) Your analysis is blatantly untrue because you claim XXX while page 94 refutes that claim; that part of the review collapses because of that.
5) I disagree with your stylistic analysis of the book's grammar; while not factually correct it really isn't all that jarring because it resembles informal spoken English.
6) What you said is true but I think that the good things outweigh the bad.



Those are all okay. The following are fanboy arguments:

1) You have a personal grudge against Lars, therefore what you say is incorrect!
2) You have written typos in your Shadowrun work, too, Frank, therefore you shouldn't be talking about Eclipse's errors!
3) You don't like the system because it doesn't resemble Shadowrn enough, therefore your analysis is incorrect!
4) Your review is wrong because you like to powergame so your statements are incorrect! A non-fanboy (if still stupid) way of putting this: The game tries to cater to 'casual' and 'first time' gamers so I think your poking apart at the rules issues won't really matter to the audience who plays these games.


Why are the statements in column B fanboy arguments while the stuff in column A legitimate? Because column A addresses the content of the review, not the speaker.

Fanboys are notorious for hysterically responding to critique of their fandom with ad hominem, which is why you got called that. If you don't want to be a fanboy, you can criticize Frank's posts on his assertions, not the speaker.

[Apalala]

I'm sorry but that review is a piece of crap, you can't make any decent stance on a review if its full of bias and nothing but powergaming (OHOHO don't use melee weapons you must play this way)

For one, everyone has a bias, so just get over that.

For two, you will note that most soldiers nowadays specialize largely in ranged combat training with only the basics of hand to hand combat, and no one wastes their breath calling them powergamers when they kill a hundred times as many opponents as people with sharp sticks (or sharp metal sticks, whichever).

Yeah, and no matter how you look at it, ranged weapons aren't powergaming. They're just about the only viability.

Ranged attacks get bonus to the attack roll for aiming and being in pointblank range,should you fight someone silly enough to use a melee weapon. You also get a reach bonus if you're fighting someone who is unarmed or using a knife, and you can add a laser sight for another bonus. Sure, ranged attacks take a -30 penalty if you're in melee range with someone, but you can take a move action at the start of each turn to totally negate that, and there is nothing the melee person can do to stop you.

That means that in close quarters combat, someone with a huge sniper rifle versus someone with a hi-tech knife is going to have an inherent +30 advantage. And that's before you consider that defense is half vs ranged attacks.

[Taleran]

For one, everyone has a bias, so just get over that.

For two, you will note that most soldiers nowadays specialize largely in ranged combat training with only the basics of hand to hand combat, and no one wastes their breath calling them powergamers when they kill a hundred times as many opponents as people with sharp sticks (or sharp metal sticks, whichever).

ITS A ROLE PLAYING GAME, since when does what people do all the time come into play, besides I can think of countless legitimate concerns as to why you would want to use melee weapons, beside the point I know

No, a fanboy is someone who dismisses someone's point of view because they're biased against something said fanboy likes.

Here are non-fanboy ways to disagree with what Frank said:

1) Your analysis is incomplete in certain areas, because rule XXX clears up the theme contradictions between the Sol Empire and StarFargate.
2) Your analysis is misleading; the combat resolution system is easier to understand than it looks on paper.
3) Your analysis is true but it doesn't matter because of personal tastes--people who play the game want combat to be decided in two rounds.
4) Your analysis is blatantly untrue because you claim XXX while page 94 refutes that claim; that part of the review collapses because of that.
5) I disagree with your stylistic analysis of the book's grammar; while not factually correct it really isn't all that jarring because it resembles informal spoken English.
6) What you said is true but I think that the good things outweigh the bad.



Those are all okay. The following are fanboy arguments:

1) You have a personal grudge against Lars, therefore what you say is incorrect!
2) You have written typos in your Shadowrun work, too, Frank, therefore you shouldn't be talking about Eclipse's errors!
3) You don't like the system because it doesn't resemble Shadowrn enough, therefore your analysis is incorrect!
4) Your review is wrong because you like to powergame so your statements are incorrect! A non-fanboy (if still stupid) way of putting this: The game tries to cater to 'casual' and 'first time' gamers so I think your poking apart at the rules issues won't really matter to the audience who plays these games.


Why are the statements in column B fanboy arguments while the stuff in column A legitimate? Because column A addresses the content of the review, not the speaker.

Fanboys are notorious for hysterically responding to critique of their fandom with ad hominem, which is why you got called that. If you don't want to be a fanboy, you can criticize Frank's posts on his assertions, not the speaker.

your points all make sense but the only one I even talked about was the bottom one and that point makes sense, there isn't a RPG that exists that you can't poke at the rules and make munchkin overpowered characters with because the people writing them can't predict everything the players will think of to do with the rules. So reviewing the game in a way that likes to pick apart all the minute ways that the average player won't even care about is in a word retarded

if you want me to pick out specific pieces of it then fine

The game would be severely improved by getting rid of all the ET bullshit. It adds nothing to the setting except confusion. Also, the Factors are pointless. And the fact that there is Titan (the utopian sweidish space commies) and TITANs (the super intelligent AI network quasi-gods partially from space, I wish I was making that up) is way too confusing. Any one planet and its colonies would supply more than enough adventuring fodder for a long campaign – most of the moon colonies of outer planets represent more territory than the entirety of the Forgotten Realms and have more detailed maps available.

The Stargates, exo worlds, ETIs, space viruses, and such cause substantial harm to setting. They reduce comprehensibility, they make it harder to give a shit about the Sol system and everything in it. It's a very obviously bad plan. You can play Stargate or you can play Solar Empire, you can't play both.

okay this is irrelevent because 1. nothing in the rules states you have to use all the concepts, hell they point this out all over the place

2. Science Fiction isn't limited by what you can and can't do Yes you can play Stargate and Solar Empire because SPACE IS PRETTY DAMN BIG

3. adding in more options can't possibly add harm to a game

Chargen is like three or four steps too long. I'll get into that in a bit, but the key thing to contemplate is the fact that you seriously are supposed to spend one thousand customization points, and there is seriously a step of chargen where you get 30 extra customization points pre-spent. Also, Combat is a joke. Like literally at the high end players are dropping their weapons 9% of their attacks and attacking 8 times in a combat turn.

this is implying that everyone that ever does combat in the game will do it EXACTALLY THE SAME, which is impossible.

Let's start with Chargen. You have these things called “aptitudes” that are rated on a scale of 1-30 and what they actually do is set the starting value of your skills and then you buy them up from there. As such, the only thing that makes sense is to decide your skills first and then set your aptitudes to 30 on whichever ones cover the most skills and set your aptitudes to minimum values on everything else. This means, for example, that even if you want to be an accomplished swimmer, your aptitude in “Somatics” will tend to be extremely low – there just aren't that many Somatics skills and most of them are melee combat related (and if you are attempting to engage in melee combat, I am actually embarrassed for you). This is really irritating, because technically you assign the aptitudes first, and those set how many points you actually have, which means that you pretty much have to make your whole character through twice before you even find out how many points you have left over.

this isn't how role playing works you are given descriptions of the atributes(you know those things that DEFINE your character) and told what they are for you then pick them to what you want

But that's not even the first step. There are actually several steps before you set your aptitudes where you grab backgrounds that give you access to various skill bonuses that are in fact very small. Some of these also have small bonuses and penalties attached. Some of them give you restrictions on what you are allowed to play. This of course is a complete non-disadvantage, because you would only take those backgrounds if you happened to be that kind of character. Some of them give you nothing in exchange for these limitations, some of them give you bonus points (seriously). Points are totally fungible, so if you take one that gives you 10 points worth of zero g operations and 20 points worth of Networking: Autonomists this is completely identical with one that gives you 30 points of zero G ops or 30 points of Networking Autonomists if you intended to ultimately buy 30 points of both anyway. There is some shenanigans here, a few of them are worth more points than others, and if you get enough bonus points in one category to push yourself past the 60 point total you're getting double skill value. But you're still talking about 10-20 bonus points when you are about to spend one thousand points. The big one to think about is being an Infolife. Being an AI makes you spend half points on four skills and double price on 8 different skills (one of which is super important). If you are a character who was going to spend more than twice as many points on the first pile than on the second, you can save a lot of points by being a computer program. Otherwise, you can seriously rape yourself. It only affects starting character points, so it's seriously just an algebra problem where your total points go up or down based on your expenditures in step 5 that you are supposed to answer in step 1. Aaargh.

PEOPLE WHO GROW UP DIFFERENTLY HAVE DIFFERENT SKILLS

why is this not obvious?

This is not helped in the slightest by the fact that clearly some of the authors thought that your skill totals were a constantly recalculated value (Learned + Aptitude) – indeed you can seriously change your aptitudes after you've spent all your Customization points based on your morph (that is, your starting body). This is totally incomprehensible, as your Aptitudes merely set your skill starting values and have no real intrinsic worth of their own in almost all cases. So once you've bought and set your skills, changing your aptitude is kind of pointless.

again think about it attributes represent your characteristics skills represent skills what do you think you would get better at faster over time?

All of this is basically a waste of time, because pretty much the only thing about your character that matters in any real way is your skill totals. Everything you do in chargen is just algebra similar to the old Decipher Star Trek game chargen where you procedurally generate those skill totals. But goodness gracious, you're spending one thousand points, all those steps are almost completely irrelevant. If you have a COG of 30 and all 10 COG skills, this only saves you 250 points vs. having a COG of 5. It's literally impossible for any of this shit to matter to the tune of more than a quarter of your character. The game could be severely improved by removing all of the attributes and most of the chargen steps and just being a purely skill based game. The aptitudes are such an afterthought as to be kind of insulting.

250 points 250 is a pretty large amount considering they limit you as to how many you can put into groups of skills and the point totals double when you go over 60, again meaningless because its ONE way of assigning the points

And while we're on the subject: there are way too many combat skills. The combat system is that you miss half the time and drop your weapon like one time in twenty or more. Also, the weapons available include ones so big that essentially anything you care about using is going to one-hit anyone you're liable to meet into ineffectiveness and then you can drop it on them again and end the fight – the game severely suffers from the “two shot syndrome” that plagues Shadowrun. One explosive shot will do your opponent like 2 wounds, and a plasma burst is going to do like 3. It's not even really that important, considering that two wounds is such a big shift on your attacks and defenses that you might as well not even be playing the same game. There's no reason for there to be 12 Combat skills, because they are basically all interchangeable and combat isn't that interesting.

there are different skills because there are different weapon groups.....


I mean I can't even take any more of this crap because you have such a WHAT WILL HELP ME KILL THINGS FASTER attitude that it completely destroys all the arguments you make

Every character needs exactly one weapon skill and the biggest weapon related to that skill they can get. Characters are thus like Warhammer 40k units. Josh users a Bolter because he took “Kinetic Weapons” and Greg users a Melta Gun because he took “Beam Weapons.” Did I mention that there are too many weapon skills? Oh yes, yes I did. I totally stand by that assessment.

I mean do you even know what the word roleplaying means?

[Mask_De_H]

Yay! A fanboy!

obviously anyone with a different opinion must be a fanboy.....

Bro, you have three posts, your first one is talking shit about a review using standard fanboy logic and your most recent is the classic "Break up posts and fail to make points rebuttal-fu" technique.

You're not going to win this. You're not going to change our minds unless you respond in a detached, rational manner and not go for knee-jerk responses and ad hominems. A word of advice before Roy sniffs out the fresh meat: cut your losses here and lurk more.

[Taleran]

Bro, you have three posts, your first one is talking shit about a review using standard fanboy logic and your most recent is the classic "Break up posts and fail to make points rebuttal-fu" technique.

You're not going to win this. You're not going to change our minds unless you respond in a detached, rational manner and not go for knee-jerk responses and ad hominems. A word of advice before Roy sniffs out the fresh meat: cut your losses here and lurk more.

good one there HE HAS LESS POSTS ATTACK what a facinating and new concept that is

my hat is off to you good sir

[Maxus]

I think you're being overly defensive.

Mask's point was we know absolutely nothing about you as yet beyond your literal handful of posts, and two of those three weren't that impressive or did much to ensure our goodwill. Therefore, what we know about you isn't that impressive and doesn't make us want to like you much.

But I can dig how the Den's blunt discussions can rub people the wrong way.

So, look, here's breaking down some of what I got from Frank's analysis:

1) Character creation is a overcomplicated and seems to place a great deal of stress over things that don't actually matter much in the field, when you're playing the game.

2) Despite many options in the same areas (backgrounds and combat), many of those options are straight-up inferior or, in other cases, superior to most other options, despite those options having the same metaphorical cost. This is bad design. If you're going to have melee weapons next to rocket launcher or plasma streamers, the melee weapons should be equally viable. It's cool if you want to roleplay a space swordmaster; it genuinely is. But if you're playing a space swordmaster, you shouldn't get killed on day three of your journey to protect people and slay evil with your awesome composite polymer ever-sharpening space sword, by some mook with a big gun.

3) The hacking/computer section needs to be completely re-written to iron out the inconsistencies and gaps in it, especially when it comes to how hacking interacts with things stated to be in the game (like electronic brains).

There, I gave you what I picked up from Frank's analysis so you don't have to look at snark and vitriol. So if you want to respond the design criticisms, start there.

[TarkisFlux]

Bro, you have three posts, your first one is talking shit about a review using standard fanboy logic and your most recent is the classic "Break up posts and fail to make points rebuttal-fu" technique.

You're not going to win this. You're not going to change our minds unless you respond in a detached, rational manner and not go for knee-jerk responses and ad hominems. A word of advice before Roy sniffs out the fresh meat: cut your losses here and lurk more.

good one there HE HAS LESS POSTS ATTACK what a facinating and new concept that is

my hat is off to you good sir

While he did begin the post with that, he only used it to set the stage. Your posts thus far have generally embraced some form of "It's ROLEplay, not ROLLplay" vibe, and that shit doesn't fly in design discussions here. It will get you flamed and laughed at and generally run out of the virtual town tied to a horse upside down because it has nothing to do with actual optimal design decisions for your source material, to say nothing of using those design decisions to play the game optimally.

That you focussed on the first part of his post instead of the latter suggests your skin isn't thick enough for this board, and you are likely to be unable to engage in debate with us assholes. I don't say that in an attempt to insult you (as I have been accused of in the past), but because I honestly think you don't understand where this board comes from and your continued posting in this fashion will only serve to frustrate all sides before everyone decides that you don't know what you're talking about and ignores you.

Or, as Mask_De_H wisely put it, "lurk more", at least until you're able to retort with something more substantial than play style differences.

Edit: properly credited quote

[Taleran]

While he did begin the post with that, he only used it to set the stage. Your posts thus far have generally embraced some form of "It's ROLEplay, not ROLLplay" vibe, and that shit doesn't fly in design discussions here. It will get you flamed and laughed at and generally run out of the virtual town tied to a horse upside down because it has nothing to do with actual optimal design decisions for your source material, to say nothing of using those design decisions to play the game optimally.

That you focussed on the first part of his post instead of the latter suggests your skin isn't thick enough for this board, and you are likely to be unable to engage in debate with us assholes. I don't say that in an attempt to insult you (as I have been accused of in the past), but because I honestly think you don't understand where this board comes from and your continued posting in this fashion will only serve to frustrate all sides before everyone decides that you don't know what you're talking about and ignores you.

Or, as MGuy wisely put it (god, did I really just type that? you've come a long way MGuy), "lurk more", at least until you're able to retort with something more substantial than play style differences.

'lurk more' what do you think this is 4chan?

The only reason I focused on the first part of his post is because the second half is quite honestly bullshit

first try to scare him with his measly post count, second repeat everything everyone else who responded to my first post said, 3rd threaten with mods 4th LURK MOAR

and secondly anyone who tries to use post count as a legitimate reason for anything on the internet is a tool

would you take a post like that serious?

you're able to retort with something more substantial than play style differences.

okay when people put at the top of their reviews I AM A POWERGAMER AND MY REVIEW IS GOING TO PICK APART EVERY LITTLE THING THAT MIGHT BE ABUSABLE

its called a RPG for a reason you are playing a role not a stat block just there to murder people its not my fault if people are too narrowminded to make a character that doesn't focus entirly on MURDER MURDER MURDER (yes I realize this will get attacked because role playing a murder is also possible but a well developed murder and not a cardboard cut out)

and I didn't just pick it apart because of play style but because most of it is ridiculous

While he did begin the post with that, he only used it to set the stage. Your posts thus far have generally embraced some form of "It's ROLEplay, not ROLLplay" vibe, and that shit doesn't fly in design discussions here. It will get you flamed and laughed at and generally run out of the virtual town tied to a horse upside down because it has nothing to do with actual optimal design decisions for your source material, to say nothing of using those design decisions to play the game optimally.

oooo how scary I think I might have to run away from your threat of insults throug the internet I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I WILL EVER TAKE IT

[Leress]

Taleran, why is Frank's review bullshit. Please elaborate.

[DragonChild]

Taleran, do you realize that right now, you're probably convincing more people NOT to play the game than Frank is?