You think that it's a case of 'players are special', then? Can an NPC 'real person'—as opposed to a mere AI—not do Teamwork (with a PC or another NPC)? In most RPGs, I feel like it's a very strange thing when PCs can do something that NPCs can't, purely by virtue of not having a human player behind them. That's what I meant by 'metagaming weirdness', or whatever I said. :)

While technically Muses and AI are not characters, it is up to the GM to judge just how far away from character-dom they are. For instance, it makes no sense for a surgeon to operate without the assistance of, say, a DoctorBot (which for the sake of simplicity probably isn't being jammed). However, while I love smart clothing, I don't want it telling me that my clothing is a fashion disaster. I -like- my clothes. And don't get me started on AI in personal computers ("Don't you think a terabyte of porn is enough?"). Personally, I believe that Muses have basic character functionality. They can assist in some situations, however outside of doing things _for_ the player (research, hacking, etc while the player is working on something else) the muse should have reduced capabilities. It is, of course, just an intangible piece of software attached to your ecto/mesh inserts. A DoctorBot can assist because it is physically there, a muse with medicine skill is mostly limited to assisting in diagnosis or jamming you to do it in your stead (again, doing things for the player instead of with the player). You see the point I'm bringing here. If it is in a morph, or is capable of assisting in a very real sense, let it assist. That's what robots do in this day and age, its not like we suddenly snapped post-Fall and started screaming "NO WE CAN DO IT OURSELVES LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

Those arguments aside, it still sounds like Treebore is saying that a PC splicer dude can engage in Teamwork, while an NPC splicer dude *can't*… he's not a 'character' because he's not played by a player. I think if you *disagree* with that, it logically follows that you have to let AIs into the club as well.

Not allowing AIs to provide the teamwork bonus also creates some issues, though, at least in my mind. It just doesn't make sense to me that if someone's trying to hack my PAN, I can defend myself or I can leave my muse to do it for me, but there's no advantage to both of us working together on defense. Or a worse situation -- my infomorph buddy with minimal infosec who's in my ghostrider module and I can defend my PAN together, but if I happen to have a security AI in the module instead, I'm out of luck and it's back to one of us or the other. As for the abuse potential, that's something I'd just talk to my players about if I saw it becoming a problem, personally.

Just a couple points: Assisting can mean many things, even for 'purely physical' actions. I agree that there need to be limits, which the GM can adjudicate: Teamwork pushing a boulder, probably not; Teamwork doing auto repair, almost certainly. There's much precedent for this, such as the smartlink system (and the augmented reality assistance for my ancient auto repair example exists today, IIRC). AIs aren't hilariously weak. They're limited and a fair bit inflexible, but their skills go up to 40; that's pretty decent. They're not superlative, but they're not trivial. -- I certainly agree that balance is critical. The GM should always decide if a given use is reasonable. One issue that I see often is that helpers don't require any relevant skill to get that +10. There are cases when this is reasonable, but it's probably a solid house rule to require a certain level (low, but fair) of a relevant skill, or at least the ability to usefully default. (IIRC, AIs can't default, so that's handy.)

Treebore wrote:

With regards to the rules I think the definition of "character" is important. I think that, for example, in Teamwork, they say characters for a very specific reason.

Instead of getting into a debate centred around mercurial ideas (Does an AI have sufficient personality to warrant civil rights -is it a character?- or are they, as a group, simply intangible products and goods -or are they equipment?-) lets attack the rules logic itself. You say the writers used 'character' to specifically mean players. I say it is more encompassing, the writers use character as a generic term for both npc and pc. "Success tests are called for whenever a character is acting without direct opposition." (p 117) As well as every other use of the word 'character' in that chapter point to this. If the people at Posthuman wanted it to mean non-AIs they would have said, if they wanted to to be PCs only the same thing applies. This being said there is an issue of abuse here but really you can't let the players win simply by doing something clever, most non-newb infosec people would know the 3 muses trick too and almost certainly use them. If skill checks are becoming too easy for the group you could also house rule that the second character that is a copy of another only provides half the normal bonus (+5) but still counts as providing +10 for the purposes of the maximum. The third copy provides no bonus but still counts as the third +10 for purposes of gaining a bonus from further help. Flavour justification is that because the copies think similar to the 'original' helping you they aren't nearly as much help, and in ways they are even less than helpful. This solves a few possible abuses; creating forks of yourself to aid you, using all the same (unmodified) ai and the possibility of another player and their forks helping you. At the same time I don't really think its in the spirit of the rules as creating three alpha or beta forks and having them help you just seems like a transhuman thing to do if you can hold them all.

That could be a unique case, but still a good catch. :)

Those of you who are worried about player characters having three muses to assist them in all actions are perhaps missing one of the built-in limitations in the system that makes this kind of thing at least marginally inconvenient. Personal computers in Eclipse Phase (e.g. cranial computers and ectos) are only capable of running a single ego at a time. That ego can be an AI, an AGI or a digitised human ego. In order to gain the maximum 30% bonus for teamwork using muses, therefore, a player must have at least three computing devices on his person and all of them would need to be linked together. While this is eminently possibly given the small size of personal computers, multiple computers all networked together provides multiple points of vulnerability. That aside, a +30 bonus isn't a big deal in the kind of tasks where AI assistance is useful; These tend to be mental or mesh actions that help to progress the story. In hacking attempts it can allow players to take a penalty to their action in order to speed up a careful hack attempt. And of course NPC hackers are likely to use similar strategies anyway, both defensively and offensively. I do think it's not a bad idea to require the supporting characters to be useful with the skill at hand in order to be able to assist. If you wanted to do this mechanically you could borrow a trick from the new World of Darkness. You would have the supporting characters roll as well and they would provide a teamwork bonus if they succeeded on their roll. Exceptional success might give a small bonus, exceptional failure might actually hamper the work of the primary actor. The disadvantage of this, of course, would be the additional rolling required. Another option would be to treat the skills of supporting characters as limited support skills, providing half the bonus usually allowed by support skills to the primary actor's rolls. By the way, in my experience, players tend to use forks rather than muses for teamwork purposes anyway.

Yerameyahu wrote:

Some people think it's not just research and hacking. :) Like, every roll to shoot, run, dodge, etc. :(

He means me. Hello *waves* :D

Treebore wrote:

So how many of you think AI's and Muses, etc... are "Characters" as defined in Eclipse Phase?

We play them as such. In my gaming group, each of us plays another character's muse to keep their interactions interesting. Muses are supposed to be unique.

Quote:

However we are having some disagreement on this definition, so I was wondering how many others think AI's and Muses, which are not played by a player as their "Character" but as part of their characters gear/resources, qualifies as a "character" within the context of the rules?

The argument could be made that, due to the fact that muses can be given orders and can carry out tasks largely independent of their owner they could be played as characters. Also, full AGIs and ego images can be used by characters as muses.

Treebore wrote:

I think that is a bad call on the game designers part, but if they want Teamwork to be so easy, then so be it.

This would be consistent with how modifiers work in other parts of the system, and with the game world as a whole. IIRC, the total modifiers applied to any roll range from -60 to +60. And in general, under moderately favorable conditions and with a little bit of preparation and investment, that +60 is within reach to most player characters. Just add in some special equipment, some complementary skills (that's what Skillsofts and those 300 points of mandatory Knowledge skills are for), an Augmentation or two, get your friend Vinny to help you, and you're all set. A teamworking AI is just one more way to do that (and kind of expensive, at that), and as such is not really a game breaker.