New here, so hello. Eclipse Phase has been my favorite tabletop game for some time, due in no small part to its setting. Horror, sure, but more hope than you're like to find elsewhere. I digress. Despite my high opinion of the system and the years for which I've known it, I have little in the way of practical experience. As I don't find that satisfactory, I've decided to once more don gamemaster attire, see whether I can't make the shoes fit. Alas and alack, previous experience brings to light a number of issues with which I am unsure how to proceed. Below, a summary:
1: One of the players at my disposal is utterly new to tabletop games. I am trying to think what might be the best way to introduce Eclipse Phase in a way that makes it seem less intimidating. So far my thoughts are "read Lack, then we'll make you a simple character and you'll pick more up as we go." Works for D&D, but here I worry it might not provide sufficient depth.
2: I am simply dreadful when it comes to over-arching stories. My current base model is thus: "Barsoomian/Martian odd-jobbers with an eye toward activity of questionable legality. Red dust Shadowrun-esque for a bit v. hypercorps, trickle in Firewall via Breakout." - Question is whether that comes anywhere near a complete enough concept. Thoughts?
3: Any tips for combating player munchkinry? (Edit: The primary reason for my asking has actually resolved itself.)
I believe these issues to be among those with the most weight. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
(Note: No idea if this is in the right place. Believe it to be, but my experience, belief's never done much for making a thing so.)
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Campaign Quandries
Sun, 2015-09-13 00:15
#1
Wikrin
Campaign Quandries
Sun, 2015-09-13 02:06
#2
Trappedinwikipedia
1: Premade characters are
1: Premade characters are your friend here. The hardest part of EP is character creation. Making a character which is fun to play, decently strong, and fits into the universe is one of the harder parts of EP. I'd let them use one of the simpler premade characters (I really like the Triad Soldier for this kind of thing, simple gear, practical broad-base skills, fairly human in outlook). Something like the Firewall scanner is a bad idea here, as they're really strange. Even with Transhuman helping along I think it's a good idea to ease people in with premades, and switch them out for another character if they want later.
2: It's a start, but needs a lot of fleshing out. What jobs are the rednecks doing? What kind of illegal stuff? What hypercorps would they be up against? Where does the friction come from? Why is Firewall getting involved. Answering those questions will probably get a decent web of intrigue started.
For example: The players are Zone Stalkers/Arsia Mons smugglers, mostly moving weapons and red market CMs from Qing Long. Running the zone from time to time when they have the resources, desperation, or sheer balls. They run into Omnicor scouts looking for *something* deep in the zone. They don't know exactly what, but it looks like it might involve Qurain? Omnicor wants their memories gone, and moves to remove them, either through invasion psychosurgery, or simple stack destruction. They need to get out of the TQZ, alive and intact. Firewall becomes involved due to a parallel investigation into Omnicor's suspected search into TITAN-designed defensive systems. The PCs are swept up into a firewall op as Firewall learns of what they (hopefully) still know. That's a good amount to start from, bringing out time lines, NPC casts, and potential encounters could expand that into a campaign pretty easily.
3: I don't usually see a lot of muchkinism in EP. The rules don't allow for a lot of it, and the rest is generally dealt with using potential in-universe consequences.
Sun, 2015-09-13 02:48
#3
Redroverone
As far as campaigns go
I made a simple one based off of a few ideas from the Seedware blog, The Devotees as a jumping point, and a conspiracy website I found, and cobbled together a third rate campaign. Now that Firewall is out and I'm finishing up the grand finale, I realized I could have made a much stronger campaign out of the various Firewall factions and their reactions to what the players found in the first couple of missions.
And, yeah, seconded on the pregens. There's also a great variety in all the sourcebooks, so they won't feel limited.
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The dog ate my signature
Sun, 2015-09-13 16:55
#4
Wikrin
Fair
1: I suppose that could work. Even when I was new to tabletop games, I always very much disliked premades, so I'm biased. Figured the Transhuman character packages would probably be sufficiently simple, but I'll be sure to bring up the variety of premades, see which she'd prefer.
2: Yeah, was just trying to give the elevator pitch, or what have you. Important questions, which are helpful to consider. I figured they would be primarily scavengers and gamers that, as the campaign progresses, get pulled deeper into hypercorp politics and, hopefully, in over their heads. My plan was to start with a job in Olympus. When things go sideways, the group winds up in direct competition/confrontation with some ostensibly OIA agents. They won't be as well trained, and, provided the players know what strings to pull, some things won't add up. Experia is going to play in heavily. The campaign will feature occasional simulspace runs, which will tie in to both Experia and Breakout, leading to contact with Firewall. I don't want to go too into specifics, because one of my players is the sort to look at forums when prepping for a game, and I don't want to give it all away. :( After a successful Breakout run or two, drop in a hook for TQZ mission. Amp up the threat there.
3: By "munchkinry," I mean the sort of "I'll build to be really good at one thing and if it isn't sufficient, I'll probably quit"-mentality. Driving home the need for multi-dimensional character builds and the like. Was worried primarily about one of my players, who has done this sort of thing in the past, but I suspect he's matured a bit since then.
Sun, 2015-09-13 17:54
#5
Jim_Callahan
Be careful with pregens
1. For the guy that's completely new, "Here's your character, have fun" is maybe all right if he's willing, but the better course of action is just to ask him more general questions and build the character in front of him; takes maybe half an hour to an hour, and as a bonus it sort of gives him a feel for how the basic statistics and such works. And never, _ever_ push a pregen on someone who isn't explicitly asking for it, and _always_ give players the opportunity to rebuild/modify the character at will after the first session.
Pregens are great for one-session games, dodgy for two-session games, and miserable for everyone in anything longer than that.
As far as keeping people on track, it's better to use the carrot than the stick and dictate character aspects that work out more or less in the players' favor, e.g. they're all rusters, so no matter what their background says their networking bonus is, it's now @-rep instead. Anything that can be legitimately phrased as you doing them a favor instead of taking something away is preferable.
Also remember that, new or not, he's probably going to read the book to some degree at some point. So you need to make sure he knows about all the various Cool Shit that's possible (uplifts, AGIs, asynchs, being a giant death-robot) and either tell him why you're not doing that or offer him the chance to be an awesome Space-whale hacker etc. If you don't, and then he runs into something in your setting that's orders of magnitude cooler than he is, he's probably going to feel slightly betrayed.
2. Kinda depends how fast you can think on your feet. The fact that antagonist builds don't change player advancement tends to make the technical part of DMing pretty easy to do off-the-cuff in my experience, because "he's a guard, he's probably well-trained at shooting but not to the point of famous, his kinetics is now 60" means NPC design takes about 10 seconds when they wander off the rails. I'd track your organizations' basic relationships (e.g. Firewall is suspicious of project A, which is being managed by Doctor B, who wants to shoot compound C with a giant moon-laser for killing his dog) and just let it roll from there, but that's me.
EP is designed such that you don't really have to write plot so much as just write some politics and then give the players a general boot to the arse in the direction of something interesting (usually by someone hiring them to go after someone else, which doesn't have to be at all subtle).
If you want to build a conspiracy plot, though, be aware that the question of "why didn't we figure this out earlier, we have Kinesics / hacked the traitor's computer two weeks ago / are psykers / etc" will come up. Easiest way to dodge this is to have the people the players interact with directly (their handlers, support staff, etc) just genuinely not be in on it, and switch to the players' side when All Is Revealed.
3. Aren't you explicitly asking your players to be a team of professional criminals? Specializing so that the other team members have to cover their arse when they're outside their wheelhouse is something you probably want to _encourage_, you're in a heist movie and those are boring if one character can hog the spotlight for 60 of your 90 minutes. This is also another reason you should actually build the characters during a session (in addition to the new guy), so everyone can look at the stats of the team and decide that they only need one guy to be the hacker and another to be the less-focused backup hacker, one physical intrusion guy is enough, and somebody should really take some drive for the getaway driver role.
If you insist on dictating backstories and builds to people, your best tool is to do something like set twenty points of their disadvantages aside for you to write backstory for them. Then you can use those for story-based disadvantages: Bill is on the run from the law, Jim got too ballsy with the forks and one escaped and is making his life hell, Slim owes some Bad People more credits than he's seen in his lifetime, etc.
If you really, _really_ insist on dictating actual skill distributions, I would phrase it, again, in terms of giving the players a hand. "You're in the wild west, and everyone's armed, you might wanna put something in Fray, and at least look like you know your way around a knife or something" is a lot better than "You can't have a non-combat hacker character, do it again."
Also, establishing how long it takes to swap out the load in skillware may make more experienced players think about their skills more carefully. Long-term, EP players tend to have a skillsoft for every active skill they don't actually have (sometimes the ones they do have, even), so there's a world of difference between ten seconds to swap in something you'll need and, say, an hour. Setting it toward the high end will make initial build much, much more important.
—
Sounds legit.
Sun, 2015-09-13 18:54
#6
Wikrin
Jim_Callahan wrote:1. For the
This is why I was looking at the character packages in Transhuman. Way less intimidating, but still allows someone to build something to their liking.
I'm never the sort to say "you can't do that," especially when it comes to all the cool shit that doesn't actually disrupt the game at all. I plan on talking to her about the options before we start, but I'm not sure how much she'll want to throw her head in. Her motivations thus far have been... difficult to discern.
This! I'm good at thinking on my feet when it comes to how individuals respond, what sort of resistance one runs into, that sort of thing. I've just never been good with the over-arching stories, at which my usual GM excels. Couple that with a general lack of drive among the players, most of whom are used to being provided with direction, and it can lead to stagnation. When I'm a player, I'm usually the one keeping folks on task, making sure we actually get things done. As a GM, I don't want it to feel like I'm leading folks around by the nose. :/
I would never dictate backstories, builds, or skills. Ugh. Hate it when a GM thinks that kind of shit flies. No, I was talking about things like someone not taking any combat skills, then complaining there isn't enough for them to do in combat. Or building only for combat, and turning completely out when no shots are being fired.
Again, I would never say "you can't do that, do it again." I just want to avoid setting up situations where half the party is tuned out at any given point, and the other half isn't capable of getting anything done.
Sun, 2015-09-13 21:02
#7
Jim_Callahan
Wikrin wrote:I was talking
That's actually probably a legitimate thing to just give them the fair-warning about.
Or just make it part of the character-building questions at the start:
Question 1: "Bullets are flying everywhere, the tank is bleeding out and your getaway car just exploded. What is your character doing to get the group out of this with their morphs intact?"
Question 2: "The team's in place and none of the guards or security devices have noticed you so far. What is your character doing to keep it that way?"
Question 3: "The law just walked into the tavern with your contraband Earth data-storage devices right there in the middle of the poker table, and your weapons and armor are half a moon away. It's only a matter of seconds before the sheriff realizes what she's looking at unless someone says something. How do you cover your arse?"
There you go, players thinking about their characters in combat, stealth, and social scenes. If they have at least a vague plan for those three they can probably find something to do in any other situation, since most action and horror scenes are some combination of those three. You don't even have to be sneaky about it, if you tell your players that it annoys you to have too many scenes where someone's not doing anything they'll probably agree that makes sense.
I think some of the specialization behavior you're seeing is also just a result of a first reading not entirely making it clear what you can do with a skill without the half-dozen support skills every skill needs to really function. Disguise seems fairly useless unless you also have impersonation, Infosec seems basically a complete waste of time without all three of programming, interfacing, and research, and so on. You may need to go over what players can actually do with an "isolated" skill for them to want to actually take it. Things like using fray to move around safely under fire even if you have no other combat skills, using infosec to deliver someone else's program to a system, and using disguise to ... well, actually disguise IS pretty much useless without impersonation, unless you're in the Junta where no one has the mesh.
(I have a gunslinger character that can barely use a word processor otherwise, but has infosec 60. He's gotten a lot of mileage out of turning all the cameras away from an obvious escape path, intentionally tripping the countermeasures, and then walking away in the opposite direction whistling innocently while the guards sprint for the blind spot.)
—
Sounds legit.
Mon, 2015-09-14 02:30
#8
DivineWrath
Wikrin wrote:1: One of the
I'm not sure how to help. Eclipse Phase can be complex. D&D has an advantage in that character classes are nearly complete characters. It is hard to make a broken fighter accidentally. Things like high attack bonuses, high hit points, high fort save, proficiency with a lot of weapons and armor, and many feats per level (many limited to a list of feats useful to fighters) is what a fighter needs, and it is what they get. Even having low strength is something quickly overcome in a few levels (getting there might be hard though). You might lose a bit in terms of flexibility, but you can expect to be able to play the game without needing to know the game mechanics inside and out.
On the other hand, Eclipse Phase a is a character point buy system. While your character might get some freebie stuff, the bulk of your character is what you buy for them using points. The problem with point buy is that you need a good understanding of how the game works to make good choices, and you need some experience with point buy systems to understand things like trade offs, such as choosing whether to max out a skill or spread skill ranks around so you are not useless in a gun fight.
In addition, the setting is complex. Most characters have an AI in their head to help them (their muse), are permanently connected to internet (the mesh), can change physical bodies (resleeving), can choose to have no physical body (can be a difficult thing to grasp), are more or less immortal, etc. For this part, you might want to limit their options at first. Introduce more options later.
Have a number of number of unrelated adventures? Or seemly unrelated at first glance? Basically a new monster every week or episode. Do this until you have some idea of tying them together, or you decide to expand a story. You could even have the players do some homework of trying to figure out a connection.
Maybe their Firewall server is more overworked than most, so they have to ask the sentinels to help out more. Have the players ask questions and do investigations in their down time. Give them answers in a later session. In time, maybe they will write the story for you as they try to look for connections or motives. Maybe they decide that a NPC knows more than they should, or is up to no good. Don't worry too much about dead ends and red herrings. This is a game where memories can be altered or deleted, and where disinformation is a shield of choice for many. Or maybe the big villain had multiple plans, so many of the "dead ends" were options in case plan A doesn't work out.
Or maybe make them part of a gatecrashing team. Surviving against the elements might require much less of a plot than other stories you could make for Eclipse Phase. Plan out some hazards. If the characters are to survive, they either have to plan ahead and/or react quickly.
Hard to say. Any single method to solve a problem might in fact cause another problem. If you have a problem with a combat munchkin, you could throw a stronger combatant as an opponent (there is always someone stronger). However, the munchkin will probably have a problem with anything that can mow it down like it can mow down your average NPC. You could have places where no war machines are allowed, such as most habitats, or rooms where you have a private meeting with a crime bosses (they tend to be less than thrilled when someone comes in with a weapon, let alone with a war machine). If you force the war machine to wait outside, the player will be bored. He could force his way in and therefore the crime boss runs, thus ruining all the effort the team put in just to meet the guy. Or you could opt to have the crime boss let the war machine in, but then he'll look like a fool if the player threatens the crime boss... unless he has some counter to the war machine like a bigger war machine, but that creates the same problem mentioned above.
Really, when it comes to it, playing a RPG involves telling a story together. Not *my* story or *your*, but rather *our* story. The story of the whole gaming group. In order for a story to be told by a group, you need the whole group to be on the same page. If most of the group wants to tell one story, but one player wants to tell another, its hard to stay on track. If one player doesn't want to or can't help tell the group story, then maybe you (as the GM) will have to have a talk with the said player to determine what the problem is and how to fix it. It is possible that the best solution is part ways (at least for the campaign).
Mon, 2015-09-14 15:30
#9
Wikrin
Great responses!
Some really helpful advice so far! Thank you all for taking the time. :)
Thu, 2015-09-17 23:19
#10
thepedant
My (late) answers
1. Newbie
If you're willing to put in the work, I'd do sort of a cross between a pregen character and Transhuman's package system.
So, draw up three character concepts and give them 500 points of basic skills, orientations and flaws, but not morphs or gear. The first three off the top of my head are:
1. Belter Original Space Colonist Miner
2. AGI hedonist hacker/techie
3. Barsoomian itinerant repairman
Then fill out the rest of the 500 points with two sets of three choices each for skills, morphs, extra traits, and gear. So, using the miner, your player would decide:
A. If the miner is a rugged tradesman, a 150-year-old with immortality blues who's seen it all, or someone better at judging the quality of a mining play than wielding a drill, and the appropriate morphs; and
B. 3 choices for starting language, weapon of choice, and other colorful skills.
As I said, this is a LOT of work. But it might be useful.
2. Mars Campaign
I'm a ridiculous planner for campaigns. But, at the basics, you should make a timeline of what you want to happen. For a more freeform campaign, make it loose, and jam in meta-plot only every other adventure at most. If you're clever, you can fold it into the background, but that might be more preparation than you want.
As for what your players' legit jobs are, I've gotten a lot of success from having them as "freelance backup insurance investigators." If you aren't familiar with the old radio serial Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, the anime Master Keaton, or Renee Russo's character in The Thomas Crowne Affair, insurance investigators are basically private eyes hired to confirm the facts of a claim.
For backup insurance, this could mean making sure that people are actually dead, that there aren't extra forks running around, and/or the person didn't die in a way that voids the insurance or a guarantee of backup from the most recent fork.
The jobs that the investigators do can easily embroil them in hypercorporate controversy (no one expected the insurer would be so thorough about the whistleblower they assassinated) to exsurgent threat (confirm that the stack was lost in the TQZ and is unrecoverable) plus anything in between (illegal forks, stack theft by 9 Lives or ID Crew, etc.).
3. Hyperspecialization
I'm known in my group as the GM who, "if you ignore a class of skill, one of those skills will be super-helpful next adventure." I've managed to do it in a way that keeps friends, though.
The way you do it is to challenge the players without punishing them. For example, set up a situation where the combat hyperspecialist ends up briefly having to talk his way out of something (e.g. split from the party, only one who speaks the language, wearing the stolen uniform that identifies him/her as the leader of the group...). Let the bad end be like Han Solo in the Death Star detention center ("we're all fine here...boring conversation anyway"), where the result isn't fatal, just adding more challenges before the players get to where they wanted to be.
Fri, 2015-09-18 17:13
#11
consumerdestroyer
Wikrin wrote:1: One of the
1: As a GM who has done it, I think "read Lack" is actually a really good intro to the setting, even if it doesn't spark character ideas (and everyone I've had read Lack who has played RPGs before comes up with multiple ideas). That said, I think the suggestion earlier to build a character in front of them is probably good, asking questions/offering options and then figuring out the mechanics yourself...at least if you wanna jump right in.
If I was gonna make one suggestion though, and it doesn't work for everyone's style, but I'd suggest doing a one-shot with premades like Million Year Echo's convention play version or Mind the WMD where people can learn the rules and a bit about the game setting, and where they can ask you questions about what their characters might know from their background/faction/home habitat which everyone around the table will be mentally filing away for making their own characters afterwards. It's a really good way of getting everyone used to everything BEFORE they start playing with a character they custom built and are all excited about, and for people new to RP altogether the pre-mades have little personality details and stuff for the people to try and inhabit/project that gets them into the groove of it before making their first ever rpg character.
This is more for the newbie than anyone else, but at the same time if the other players haven't played in the setting yet, it's a good idea just for easing into the mechanics (and it might change some minds about what they wanna play if they see something a pre-made does in action and go, "Ooooh that's what I wanna be able to do.", and that's always a good thing compared to seeing someone else's custom character do it and go, "...damn wish I read that bit I'd have made a different character.")
But if you're gonna dive right in, I'd just suggest letting the newbie shuffle skillpoints around a bit with your help if they get the impression as they play that their character might have had less emphasis on some things and more on others. I always do it with people new to pen and paper no matter what system, it helps to give new people a bit more control since they don't understand it as well.
2: I think it's hard to do a "complete" concept bc of the stuff that various hyperintelligent forces and predictive systems can calculate that no hairless ape of a GM can hope to, but which are available in some for or another to pretty much every antagonistic force in (and out) of the solar system. I'm more of a freeform GM, I answer setting questions/secrets left open for GMs to decide (differently for different campaigns, generally), and then see where the characters are guiding things.
I think if you want engaged players, you play to the story hooks swarming around the various characters' backgrounds, interests, personalities, desires, goals, etc. that become apparent as the game progresses. A good early measure of direction is shared Motivations if there are any, with some other Motivations sprinkled in until everyone is covered, i.e. "ok most of them have -X-Risks, but all of these missions are X-Risks you metagamey shits so let's drill down...all but one of them have -Slavery of some kind, whether Uplift or AGI or indenture, and since the Ultimate who doesn't (and thinks everyone else is genetrash) has +Independence and +Self Reliance, I'm thinking anti-ego trafficking stuff with a late-arc revelation that Nine Lives has a copy of the Ultimate's fork on Legba so his bored amoral super-soldier facade either cracks in rage or hardens in determination for the last leg." that kinda thing, just freestylin' with character motivations can generate more hooks than you have line and sinker for!
Just some ideas from my own experience with this stuff anyway! As to the specifics of your idea, it sounds good to me! I've run games (not of EP, I prepare too much for EP lol) where I've started with less of a concept than that!
3: I don't combat it. I welcome it, because I engage in GM munchkinry with this game sometimes. I throw a lot of minor threats at them to make them feel like big-shot, elite, clandestine agents but the Moxie levels drop dangerously low when they have to go up against x-risk endgames or the entities between them and the x-risk endgame. I'm a big fan of scenarios where a TPK is the most Firewall-approved way of doing things (i.e. detonating the abandoned hab with them inside so what lurks within doesn't escape), and the reason I'm a big fan of those is because players [b]always[/b] surprise me with creative solutions that would totally work that I didn't think of...and I can play it off like that was the only solution all along when they pull it off by the skin of their teeth! ^_^
That aside though, it also means that munchkins actually face [i]challenges[/i] to go with the stuff they mop the floor with, and in the situations where Plans A-D fail, they can just nuke themselves and feel humble that their munchkin characters died alongside those weak characters built with "personality" and "concepts" and other inefficient things in mind...turns out they all die the same when you're trying to prevent a TITAN nanodissassembly spaceship from turning on and blasting in-system from the Oort Cloud to leave a trail of xenocidal destruction in its wake and everything's fucked up except the munchkin hacker's access to the self-destruct timer override. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯