Eclipse Phase Review.

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Red Archon
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Post by Red Archon »

Just pitching in to ask, what kind of design goals do you have? If you're talking about the difference between weapons being +1 to hit, +1d6 damage, it's a futile fucking argument. But if you want sword fightan majik, what's particularly wrong with ToB?

In all eventuality, weapons are not spells and if they are made such, what's the massive, meaningful difference between a faitan man and a wizard man? In my personal opinion, both weapon specialisation and arsenal attitude should apply. If someone wants to play Siangham Man and the other guy wants to play Faitan Man Who Uses Any Weapon and the third wants to play Pocket-Dimension-Utility Belt Super Arsenal Man, then fuck it, let's make all of them options, and different but equal options at that. Hell, specialisation within one of these branches would be cool and doable. Sure, a shitload of work, but what the hell, in Majik there's Arcane and Divine, within which are different base classes and casting mechanics within which there are specialisations and degrees thereof. Why not give such options to Faitan Man? Not forgetting the option of playing Mr. Vanilla, if someone so chooses.

edited for spelling and shit
Last edited by Red Archon on Fri Dec 25, 2009 5:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Murtak »

Using broad weapon groups, coupled with specializations (Shadowrun style, not D&D style) should pretty much solve your problems RC. For a setting like D&D your skill groups might be melee weapons, reach weapons and ranged weapons. Melee weapon specializations might be swords, axes, clubs and daggers. Anyone wishing to play a general badass can just raise melee weapons, anyone who wants to be an axe-wielding dwarf can get a specialization.

It doesn't integrate well with 3E though. :sad:
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Post by Orion »

Shadowrun Specializations are mandatory if you don't want to suck.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Orion wrote:Shadowrun Specializations are mandatory if you don't want to suck.
Yeah, SR specializations have the big problem of being must takes, There's honestly no reason you wouldn't want to specialize in a specific pistol, because hell, you get to choose what weapon you're gonna bring, and there's no point in game where you're going to say "Gee I really wish I had a Super warhawk instead of this Ares Predator."

SR really did a bad job of handling specializations, because they're must takes. You're pretty much an idiot if you don't take them.
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Post by A Man In Black »

RandomCasualty2 wrote:But some people want their characters to use a specific weapon. A dwarf player probably doesn't want to use a rapier, and an elf may not want to use a maul.
If someone wants to play a dwarf who turns his nose up on rapiers, that's just fine by me. I just don't want the system to force that upon people, or make people feel like it's forced upon them. One of the game elements that creates that feeling of being locked into one weapon or one fighting style is giving people +1 to stuff for choosing to only wield a greataxe.

Right now, 4e makes every axe-wielding dwarf fighter not want to use a rapier, regardless of the player's wishes. 3e doesn't do a very good job of letting him switch from his old greataxe, either. I want "prefers a maul to fruity rapiers" to be a character choice more in line with "has red hair" and less like "has levels in fighter."
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Post by CatharzGodfoot »

A Man In Black wrote:
RandomCasualty2 wrote:But some people want their characters to use a specific weapon. A dwarf player probably doesn't want to use a rapier, and an elf may not want to use a maul.
If someone wants to play a dwarf who turns his nose up on rapiers, that's just fine by me. I just don't want the system to force that upon people, or make people feel like it's forced upon them. One of the game elements that creates that feeling of being locked into one weapon or one fighting style is giving people +1 to stuff for choosing to only wield a greataxe.

Right now, 4e makes every axe-wielding dwarf fighter not want to use a rapier, regardless of the player's wishes. 3e doesn't do a very good job of letting him switch from his old greataxe, either. I want "prefers a maul to fruity rapiers" to be a character choice more in line with "has red hair" and less like "has levels in fighter."
Yeah. Refusing to use a certain weapon isn't interesting or even a character trait unless you had the choice to use other weapons in the first place. And it doesn't even come up unless the DM throws you weapons that you don't want to use.
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Post by Murtak »

Edit: doublepost
Last edited by Murtak on Sat Dec 26, 2009 10:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Murtak »

Orion wrote:Shadowrun Specializations are mandatory if you don't want to suck.
How so? How is skill a 8, skill b 6, skill c 6 better than skill a 7, skill b 7, skill c 7?
RandomCasualty2 wrote:"Gee I really wish I had a Super warhawk instead of this Ares Predator."

SR really did a bad job of handling specializations, because they're must takes. You're pretty much an idiot if you don't take them.
Did you even bother to read the rest of my post?
Murtak wrote:Melee weapon specializations might be swords, axes, clubs and daggers.
Assuming there is some meaningful mechanical difference between a dagger and a club I don't see why someone wanting to have the option of using a concealable weapon, an armor penetrating weapon and something to use on skeletons and oozes would ever want to specialize.
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Post by Red Archon »

When it comes to skills or abilities or feats or whatever you want to call the capabilities of the characters, the amount of them is often directly related to the difficulty of the system. 3.x did a good job in offering both simplicity and mastery, so you really can just call "I hit with my sword," after which you roll, add the simple figure on your char sheet and compare it to the AC of the opponent. But as we all know, there's a lot of system mastery to be done. I think all skill systems should aim for that exactly, which, were I to make an uneducated guess, is also the general opinion of the gamer community. Therefore if we don't add a shitload of skills and find the balance between them somewhere, we have to make the fewer options (read: Combat, Social, Mobility) into skills that have a lot of expansion materials and depth. The less we make rules - and I admit, less is indeed more a lot of times - the more we walk away from Game towards Magic Tea Party Land. This is obvious.

I think I had a point in there somewhere, which would be that the system should be easy to learn and difficult to master. There should be a lot of options to any system, preferrably an immeasurable amount, and an inborn balance. It's hard to set hard-and-fast amounts of skills and abilities that is exactly optimal. I think Eclipse Phase sounds like it took the alot-of-skills route to the common misadventure - the fact that there are two useful skills and everything else is shooting yourself in the foot.
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Post by Crissa »

Frank has shown the math in another post why 8 6 6 is better than 7 7 7.

-Crissa
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Post by Username17 »

Crissa wrote:Frank has shown the math in another post why 8 6 6 is better than 7 7 7.

-Crissa
That's assuming "attacker chooses" models. If your opponents get to choose what version you have to use, 8 8 6 is worse than 7 7 7.

So Shadowrun Specializations are totally fine for stuff like infiltration where it is a property of your enemy's installation whether you use the good number or the bad one. They don't work well for weapons for the same reason that SR has too many weapon skills. There just aren't that many cases where you can shoot someone with a rifle but you can't shoot them with an SMG and vice versa.

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Post by A Man In Black »

Murtak wrote:Assuming there is some meaningful mechanical difference between a dagger and a club I don't see why someone wanting to have the option of using a concealable weapon, an armor penetrating weapon and something to use on skeletons and oozes would ever want to specialize.
They would specialize if the specialization benefit overwhelmed the disadvantage of not having the right weapon for the job.
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Post by Murtak »

A Man In Black wrote:
Murtak wrote:Assuming there is some meaningful mechanical difference between a dagger and a club I don't see why someone wanting to have the option of using a concealable weapon, an armor penetrating weapon and something to use on skeletons and oozes would ever want to specialize.
They would specialize if the specialization benefit overwhelmed the disadvantage of not having the right weapon for the job.
Obviously, yes.

So if you go with three possible specializations and you only have three monsters (skeletons, goblins and worgs) you need to make sure that the +1 a specialization gets you over a balanced spread only applies as often as you gain a penalty because your chosen weapon sucks against a given monster. You can do this by having the monsters hand out penalties or bonuses (clubs are at +2 vs skeletons, polearms +2 vs worgs, swords +2 vs goblins) - now the specialized character is at 10/8/8 and the balanced character is at 9/9/9. With a larger monster spread you can balance this perfectly, or favor the balanced or specialized character a little.

Alternatively you can hand out non-numerical benefits or penalties, such as reach weapons being really really desirable the common suicidal imp, which only has 3 hit points but explodes for a ton of damage if it gets to hug you. Or daggers being easily concealable. Of course this sort of thing is harder to balance than numerical modifiers, but with a little eyeballing and playtesting this sounds doable.
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Post by The Vigilante »

FrankTrollman wrote: They don't work well for weapons for the same reason that SR has too many weapon skills. There just aren't that many cases where you can shoot someone with a rifle but you can't shoot them with an SMG and vice versa.

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How would you reduce the number of skills ? Something like this perhaps :

Small Arms - Hold Outs, Light Pistols, Heavy Pistols, Tasers
Long Arms - SMG, Carbines, Rifles
Heavy Arms - Machine guns, bazookas etc...

This is just what went through my mind at the moment. How would you choose to do it ?
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Post by Murtak »

The problem is not the number of weapon skills as such, but rather that weapons are too similar in function (as Frank put, if you can shoot them with a rifle you can shoot them with a SMG and vice-versa). So you need to figure out what functions your weapons provide and then group them by those functions. You also need to assure that weapon skills are as valuable as nonweapon skills, but that does not affect the actual grouping.

Shadowrun sort of does this. Pistols are easily concealed and silenced, rifles give you range, heavy weapons give you enormous firepower that is in no way concealable or silenceable. But the differences are way too small to matter, especially given that most weapons will drop an opponent in two shots, many runs will require silenced weapons and that most combats will take take place in cramped conditions. So basically a pistol or SMG is already the best choice for most runs. An assault rifle or machine is not noticeably more deadly, the reach of a good sniper rifle is most often wasted and grenades work fine with next to no skill.

If you want to work within the system - that is, keep weapon stat blocks and only redesign weapon skills - you might want tot try this:
- Use Frank's recoil rules
- Combine all close-combat skills into a single skill (optionally keep the monowhip as a separate skill, possibly at half cost)
- Anything small and concealable gets folded into Sidearms.
- Anything that requires two hands to fire gets folded into Longarms.
- Anything that is currently a heavy weapon gets folded into Gunnery.

You will end up with people able to shoot SMGs just fine and helpless in the face of an assault rifle, but I don't think you can help getting issues like that without changing weapon stat blocks.
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

Murtak wrote: - Use Frank's recoil rules
Never heard these. What are they?
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Post by Korwin »

RandomCasualty2 wrote:
Murtak wrote: - Use Frank's recoil rules
Never heard these. What are they?
Dito. And where are they.
Its not in his Unreleated Houserules.
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Post by Murtak »

[url=http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=48581#48581 wrote:Frank's recoil rules[/url]]Rather than equating number of bullets to recoil directly (which oddly punishes machine pistols and boosts assault cannons), a weapon has a minimum strength. The base Strength Minimum of a weapon is the base DV-2. Most recoil modifiers in the book don't apply. The following do, however:
A Shape which exacerbates recoil increases Strength Minimum by 1 (example: Holdout pistols).
A Shape which mitigates recoil decreases Strength Minimum by 1 (example: Rifle)
A Short Burst increases Strength Minimum by 1.
A Long Burst increases Strength Minimum by 2. (not inclusive)
Full Auto increases Strength Minimum by 3. (not inclusive)
Firing from Prone or otherwise braced decreases Strength Minimum by 1.
Using a Bipod or Tripod decreases Strength Minimum by 2.
A Gyromount or Gun Emplacement decreases Strength Minimum by 3. (not inclusive)
A Gas Vent System is incompatible with a sound suppressor and reduces Strength Minimum by 1 (there are no long multiple levels of those things).
Every point that the weapon exceeds your Strength Minimum gives a -1 penalty to firing the weapon and a -2 penalty to all other dice pools you have for the rest of the turn (not just the action). Drones and such use their Body as their Strength, and fall over if their Strength Minimum is exceeded.
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Post by Wesley Street »

FrankTrollman wrote: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.
*golf clap*

While most gamers debate mechanics, I'm more interested in the actual art of writing and setting development. Improper plural usage from otherwise intelligent human beings has become a HUGE PET PEEVE for me. Followed by the recent break out of run-on-sentence-itis and eleventy-million-writers-on-a-40-page-book-emia.

If you're writing a game for an anglophone audience use proper English or pay for a good translator.
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Post by brendGol »

so - what would be the best hand to hand combat weapon to choose sense they are training for it?.. it must be something like non lethal things like brass knuckles or sap gloves or metal sticks, etc.)

“Take things as they are. Punch with x large sap glove when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.”
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Post by UmaroVI »

I have now played Eclipse Phase, and the system is SO SHITTY. I do disagree with Frank about the details of how the skill and attribute system is shitty (although not the magnitude of the shittiness).

So, attributes give you "free" points in skills. You do it like this:

Figure out your brain's attribute. This is the base for the skill.

Pay points to bump the skill up. You pay double past 60.

To USE the skill, though, you then add on modifiers. Such as the modifier to the attribute you get from being in your body, or the bullshit you get for being infected with a space virus. These add on last, and do NOT affect the doubling of cost past 60.

Oh, and your maximum, final attribute is capped by your body - usually at 30, but at 20 or 25 for shitty bodies.

Finally, some things check JUST attribute. This is important. In particular, a whole lot of OMG SPACE HORROR checks just Willpower, and when you take wounds, you pass out unless you make a just-Somatics based roll.

This has some shitty implications. Say you want to be Captain Social Skills. You probably think you want a high Charisma attribute, right? Nope, you want a medium Charisma attribute. Say you have a 30. Then you pay 30 points to bump skills to 60, and double past that. Now, since you already have a 30, if you get in a shitty body that caps you at 20 or 25 - and you might have to sometimes - you get fucked. Also, if you get into a body that gives you a bonus to Charisma, you can't USE that bonus, so you also get fucked.

Instead, you want a 20 Charisma. Now you pay 40 points per skill to get 60 - but now you don't get fucked for having a shitty body, and you ALSO don't get fucked out of getting bonuses for having a nice body. Say you hop into a +10 charisma morph, of which there are several - you now have effective 70s.

Also, there are some things that are very important that are not skill-based, just attribute based... but only for some attributes. If you give half a shit about fighting, you want a high Somatics score, because otherwise you collapse after one wound most of the time (and it's trivial to get "ignore wound penalties" out the ass). Everyone needs a high willpower or you go cry in a corner the first time you see something scary. There's some other bullshit too but those come up the most. So, like, if you want to use guns, you want a low score in whatever the fuck they called Agility, and a high Somatics. Because you probably only have 1-2 agility skills cause you just use 1 type of gun like everyone who isn't a retard, but you need a high Somatics (even though you probably only know Frey, and no other Somatics skills) because you care a whole lot about making those straight Somatics-based checks.

Now, let me describe some ways the combat system is shitty. Frank is on the money with everything he said, but there's other aspects to the clusterfuckery as well.

Okay, so first, anyone who gives even the tiniest of shits can get like 30 armor. Armor subtracts directly from damage. A fucking plasma cannon does like 3d10+12 with -8 armor piercing, which will do on average 6 fucking damage, whee. Most weapons will just ping. And you can do better than 30 armor with a combat morph.

But, on a critical hit (doubles), you ignore armor. Also, you can take a whole -10 penalty to ignore armor if you still hit and roll 30+ (hitting on 1-29 is a regular hit). See where this is going? Everyone wears armor, and then just shoots around it. You either don't call shots and then spend Moxy (which is Edge, and coincidentally a stat everyone wants maxed) to upgrade to crits and ignore armor, or you call shots to ignore armor. Or, if you are already taking big penalties, you call to ignore armor then spend Moxy to ignore penalties. There's no real gap between "hit that ignores armor" and "ping" so armor is silly and pointless and the entire system is a clusterfuck of stupid and trap options.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I have no idea how anyone is going to be able to get 20 to 21st-century gamers to accept the idea of brain hacking. It's so arbitrary, too.

Like, people will accept the idea of giving mental commands to machines. People will also accept being able to accept and interpret stimuli through robotic appendages like eyes and fingers. People will also accept Matrix-style brain rewriting. People will also accept the idea of people sending their thoughts to a machine that will broadcast wireless signals. People will also totally accept whack things like psi-telepaths bending the minds of people and machines several km apart.

Yet for some reason people derp the fuck out when you make the entirely logical suggestion that a hacker should be able to hack other peoples' minds. I mean it's just like... what the hell?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Archmage »

People have trouble accepting the idea that human brains are just meat computers processing data via electrochemical impulses.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Archmage wrote:People have trouble accepting the idea that human brains are just meat computers processing data via electrochemical impulses.
Hell what do you think propaganda is? It's brain hacking using social exploits.

Brain hacking in it's most fundamental sense has been around for as long as there has been leadership.

The question about matrix-style brain hacking is different though. Inception had a decent idea: the brain is super-sensitive to ideas and sensory input that either didn't come from it or isn't what it's use to, and brain hacking then becomes a question not just of feeding in sensory input or ideas, but matching that "data fingerprint" to what the brain will accept. The better the hack, the less likely your brain will know the difference. In a cyberware setting this causes issues, but basically kludging and saying that in a clinical environment with kickass equipment and a few hours it's easy to, say, tune cybereyes to something your brain doesn't conceptually reject.

In an Eclipse Phase swap-your-body-out world this kind of goes out the window but in a shadowrun style setting it would hold up reasonably well as a paradigm.

In reality this isn't the case. It's stupid fucking easy to trick your brain because it relies on assumptions and guesses and shit. But for a cyberpunk RPG with brain hacking, the Inception concept works well enough in theory that it can explain why there's difficulty in on the fly brain hacking, and how more skilled hackers can make longer, more effective hacks.

From a narrative consideration though, you get into some wicked Phillip K Dick shit. You literally have no way of knowing if you are who you *think* you are, since not only your brain can be hacked, but data systems can be hacked, altering history to reflect the brain hack. Depending on how prevalent brain hacking is, you don't know if anyone else is truly who you think they are. A society that knew that brain hacking existed probably couldn't exist. It could only exist if the hackers erased knowledge of brain hacking from anyone they encountered, at which point you have Dark City: The RPG.

From a TTRPG standpoint, the danger of brain hacking is that it can easily take control of a PC away from the player.
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Post by Username17 »

I blame Descartes. The idea of Cartesian Duality is completely bullshit, but it is entrenched in Western Philosophy so deeply that many people do not even question it. So even after agreeing that computers can feed any information they feel like sending to your brain, people still rebel at the thought of their mind being hackable because they believe their brain and mind are different things. The fact that this is objectively not true, and in fact that you can get them to admit that it is in fact not true is no impediment to them believing it.

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