Watch out for your players abusing the Action Economy. Due to the nature of the Ego/Forking and the like it is very easy for a player to simply stack up on Ghostrider Modules and Guardian Angels and essentially have a small army behind them all the time. Try to keep them limited to only managing their own self, I do so by having any Forks of the characters be controlled in combat by me, and having the players issue commands to them in the same way they would a remote controlled AI. It is also very, very easy to get modifiers for many mental actions that essentially make them living gods of their field. Drill into your players that a Skill Rating of 50 is about that someone with professional experience would have in a field. If a player wants to have an Infosec of 80 make them explain how exactly they came to be one of the leading experts in their field (And issue consequences because of it. You do not get to be the best of the best without a lot of people taking note.)

IMO, EP is not made with preventing twinking in mind. A quick read of the rules gives you at least three major loopholes you can abuse to make yourself a combat monster. I think the rules were written like this intentionally though, since the focus of the system is on the characters and the setting, but not so much on combat. I would approach this in two ways. 1) Talk with your player like an adult. Explain that this system is easy to abuse. Just ask him to make a character he will enjoy playing, and not to go out of his way to take advantage of the system. In the end, the advantages he squeezes out of the numbers will not make a major change to how effective his character is overall. 2) As a GM, remember that EP is not designed to run like Shadowrun or other games. The focus is on CONSPIRACY and HORROR. Conspiracy means A is blackmailing B into leaving false evidence about C and you've just fallen into the middle of it. Being a giant, unstoppable killing machine doesn't help very much when the Planetary Consortium decides you're a race traitor and vaporizes your ship from .2 AU. Most of the 'horror' aspects don't care all that much about armor and such. The nice thing about EP is there are so many paths for the PCs to follow to their untimely deaths. Your job as GM is to explore all of them. This really is a game designed to let you kill your PCs with extreme prejudice.

I would take a different route. If the player wants to play an extremely capable character, hey, what's wrong with that? Eclipse Phase does allow you to create extremely capable characters, particularly if they specialize in one relatively narrow field - e.g. combat, hacking, socialization etc. Just talk with your gaming group and discuss the types of characters/roles they want to make (and the type of stories they are interested in!), trying to make sure that everyone gets a niche. Does the twinky player want to create the best non-Titan hacker in the system? Great, indulge him - do not try to "punish" him. If his character's Infosec score is 90, well, do emphasize in your stories how easy it is to break through the most "secure" systems of the Hypercorps; make sure his handle is whispered in awe across the social networks. Do not artificially inflate the Infosec challenges he's facing. Let the player gloat! There's still plenty of space for diplomats, scientists, military/special ops etc. to shine. And it's not as if you cannot create challenging situations: as it was rightly noted, this is a game of conspiracy and horror - and it's actually much more terrifying to be outclassed by some alien intelligence in the one field where you easily outclass every transhuman in the Solar system! That said, I think there's two main mechanical issues one has to be careful about when dealing with Eclipse Phase from the GameMaster point of view. The first is dealing with bonuses from extra time. It's true that you cannot boost your basic ability by more than +60 through any combination of modifiers, but remember that even if you have a ridiculous -100 from various adverse conditions, by taking 9 times longer than the basic timeframe (i.e. adding 16 times 50% of the basic timeframe), you can still turn that -100 into a +60. EDIT: This is really something more general. It's often quite simple to get negate extremely large penalties in Eclipse Phase, either by careful preparation, or by spending a point of moxie. I think this is a great cinematic feature of the game, allowing the heroes to overcome great odds ("Use the Force, Luke!"). The second issue is forking. Forking is cheap (a ghostrider module or an ecto has a cost of low), and extremely effective in many, but not all, circumstances. Even if you are a mediocre shooter, by jamming a small army of 30 small, cheaply armed robots you can be more effective in combat than a single, extremely experienced sharpshooter in a Reaper morph. To a lesser extent, the same goes for hacking, and research. Not so much for most social abilities. Again, this is ok! It's part of what it means being transhuman - one can be legion. Just make sure you plan accordingly.

Rhyx wrote:

I understand what you mean Babayaga and I agree with the essence of it. The problem comes with what happens when the challenge you mean for the super specialist meets with anyone else in the party. Sometimes you get a great surprise and the non specialist rises to the challenge and those moments are great, but other times the techie with a neotenic body goes splat when it was a challenge meant for the ultimate swordmaster in a remade body that rounds the corner... Then again EP is the kind of game that although classless lends itself to super specialization (reminds me of Shadowrun in that way, the character creation is very open but the PCs end up with a very tight skillset.) And I have to agree with you again about preparation overcoming obstacles that is very much a strenght and in many ways reminds me of taking 20 in D&D 3.0, With enough time you can pretty much overcome most hurdles.

If I'm playing in that party I'm blaming the death of the techie on the ultimate swordmaster for not doing his job, protecting the party, and I'm blaming the face for not doing the leg work and allowing us to be surprised by the opposition. :[ What's the point of having an ultimate swordmaster he can't protect the people who actually get stuff done?

Quote:

Even if you are a mediocre shooter, by jamming a small army of 30 small, cheaply armed robots you can be more effective in combat than a single, extremely experienced sharpshooter in a Reaper morph.

30 armed robots is a shitload of luggage.

OneTrikPony wrote:

30 armed robots is a shitload of luggage.

"Welcome to our habitat, sir. We sincerely hope your stay here will be pleasant and profitable. Before you enter the habitat proper, could you please install these security patches on your autonomous equipment? It is for ensuring compliance with local law enforcement, I am sure you understand." There is nothing that destroys the twink more than paranoia. Sure, you have the best equipment possible, but what if it gets hacked and turns against you? What if your meshID is trackable? What if people notice you have turned off your meshID? What if there are surveillance specks riding on your bots? Why are those children sousveilling you as you meticulously try to remove bugs? Meanwhile the local pickpocket steals their wallet.

root@Beware of Twinking [hr] Oh, yay, my specialty. There are two things I've seen that are what I would consider to be problems if they were in a different game. First is forking, as people have mentioned, which puts your players at three mental actions, and a +30 to every skill they have through fork teamwork. They are also fantastic for getting lots of remote work done, and for managing the inanely complex plans I like to come up with. The second is the protean[protean[protean[...]]] nanite hive and the medical vat. These allow the players to build anything they have the plans and resources for, and spit out new morphs whenever they need one. There is also the usual issues of dump stats, recockulous skills, big social stats, and orbital rail guns. Here is why I don't see this as a problem. Firstly, unlike in Shadowrun, you can keep secrets from your players. Eclipse Phase makes use of hard crypto, so you can just tell them that, no, they can't break this encryption, even if their Infosec is +90 (+30 teamwork, +15 dreckcetera, +1x10[sup]7[/sup]). This is useful as a game master. Second, there is no reason why any transhuman with basic mesh inserts and a few creds shouldn't be running the fork tree to get the +30 to skills from teamwork. Technology is supposed to make us better, its supposed to help us with teamwork, its supposed to help us learn differential equations in an afternoon. Short and skinny, forks will replicate until they fill all of the available space, and they are all going to be fighting it out at all frequencies. This turns out to be more a matter of the setting than an advantage. Third, the protean nanite hive loop is cheap, but that doesn't help much. Cheap feedstock will be mostly carbon and nickle, with other metals sprinkled in. This limits what can be built with the cheap feedstock, and give authorities a choke-point for nanite enforcement by keeping track of any raw materials that can be used for really large nastiness. Also, every other group of any wealth has the same capabilities and better production facilities. None of this is to say that players shouldn't get advantage from these things, but they are more of a way to distinguish mooks from baddies and bosses. If they still manage to break the game: nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

An alternative way of dealing with forks (although probably not with twinking players) is to emphasise exactly what's involved in creating forks - alpha forks are essentially you, and you're essentially murdering them every few hours - Beta and Delta forks are limited versions of you that you murder every few hours. Those Beta and Delta forks also know that they are horribly limited pruned versions. And all of those forks remember what you did a few hours ago when you made some forks, you know when you murdered them for living too long and made more? Obviously whether you think of it as murder or not is one of the features of a character in this game and gets to the core of one of the philosophical elements of Eclipse Phase, however you should remind any judicious Forkers about the potential moral implications and challenge there characters with it. Another thing to do with Forks of course, especially alpha forks is, "would this character (as it's been played so far) really get on with the idea of being the clone?" Most Twink characters end up being incredibly good in a field (say combat). Would your master swordsmen clone just lie down and accept being re-merged? I doubt mine would, all that skill and martial pride, surely they'd fight to see who gets to live, or just go off and put there new skills to use and Woe-betide the master hacker that choose to alpha fork - you'll never know which of them out hacked the other to live. I do feel that the time rules might actually need looking at in EP - given enough time you can essentially suceed at anything, as a result challenges only really occur when time is an issue (like socialising or combat, which have no tack backs). This is unlike other rpg's where it can just be the case you can't do something because you're not good enough yet. (Go level up!), this is confounded by the cornucopia machines. - On the other hand most of these issues are actually balancing - if you're all in the Jovian Republic, no one has cornucopia access. If you're all in the far reaches, everyone does so the value of having them is levelled off.