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The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

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Sun, 2010-11-28 09:27

Thomas McDermott Thomas McDermott's picture

The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

Hi all, I am new to Eclipse Phase - currently going through the rules and story, but so far I love the game. I began building upon an idea for a game to introduce my gaming group to EP, tell me what you think. I would like to run the first game of EP where the players in my game are themselves, resleeved long after their demise (in our current time, aka not too long after right now). The premise being that I (me, Thomas) was luckily preserved after death (I was in the Bodies Exhibition!). Someone from my bloodline (a future relative of mine) did some genealogical research and eventually discovered that one of the guys in the Bodies Exhibition who had been preserved (ME!) was his long lost relative. Having strings to pull, he took my CNS and restored me to a new sleeve. I, after coping with my new existence in the future, wanted to look for my own relatives to try to bring them back. In my search I find out most of everyone I knew is now gone. However, I find out that my old friends (the gaming group), were all on a road trip together, where they died after they veered off the road and into a deep swamp where their dead bodies were thus preserved (no one was able to find them until I tracked them down - yes, on Earth). CNSs in tact, I restore them - with the catch that they have to be Firewall agents (part of my deal for tracking them down on Earth). From there I get into the actual adventure and role playing stuff. .... well that is the set up so far, what do you think? I am currently trying to work out the details a bit, but I thought it would be a really cool way to introduce the group to the game world (since it'll be unfamiliar anyway). I also think it is interesting to make their first characters their own sleeves... kind of a creepy idea now that I think about it more.

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cosmic microwave background radiation is awesome!

Sun, 2010-11-28 12:28

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

Fun idea. Might be easier in a gaming group big on cryonics - there is plenty of handwaving needed to get CNSes to survive well enough in a swamp. However, since the point of deanimation is assumed to be in the future various brain-protective nanomachines might be handwaved ("Congrats! Your car's emergency biostasis system worked... now you are stranded in The Future, and there is a hungry bushrobot that want to assimilate you.") Generally, playing oneself is not always easy. It might be slightly easier if you ask players to make people *like them* - they would be everyman characters that are a bit like a slightly more polished version of themselves. That way you could still do the basic setup, get around too extreme handwaving about how they were preserved ("Oh, you were in the cryofreezer of the university hospital after the nasty car accident. They were about to save you Real Soon Now when the disaster struck - you know how projects tend to drag out when there is no firm deadline.")

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Sun, 2010-11-28 12:39

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

Also remember that the people of Eclipse Phase are generally genetically superior to us. Somewhere along the way, separate from which morph they are occupying, they got more intelligent, stronger, quicker, and more willful than the average person today is. Probably has something to do with what body you grow up in. So unless you are willing to hand wave their aptitudes up to an average of 15 somehow (Perhaps instead of actual brain scans they were all used in an experiment to create an AGI based on the personality of someone from the 21st century, one that went particularly well just before the Fall) they would probably start with an average aptitude of 10. And then you have to deal with them almost certainly being entirely useless skill wise. Some of them might have a reasonable skill set in the basic things (perception, freerunning, maybe kinetic weapons) but a lot of the things that someone in EP takes for granted would be entirely foreign to them. Any computer knowledge they had before being killed would probably be useless, so interfacing/infosec would be difficult to explain. They probably never experienced microgravity, at least not long enough to get used to it, so they would not have any free fall skill. Networking and reputation is probably completely out of the question. Its an interesting concept, and it would probably work great for a one off game, or a short campaign, but there are a lot of things you might want to consider if you run it for a longer period of time.

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Sun, 2010-11-28 17:30

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

Of course, one approach would be to have the PCs live ordinary lives as themselves... and then the simspace illusion is suddenly cracked. Turns out they were actually trapped in a TITAN resimulation and Firewall agents just saved them. Yes, they have few skills and might even be suspected of having TITAN code running somewhere in their minds. But when the Firewall lab examining them and the artefact suddenly gets attacked by [Fill in suitable fraction] they have to flee together with everybody else... and might actually carry a secret worth killing for.

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Sun, 2010-11-28 18:56

Thomas McDermott Thomas McDermott's picture

Re: The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

I would have the guys play 'themselves' loosely. Meaning, I am not going to be a stickler if I think they are deviating from their "true" behavior. (What's 'true' after you're copied anyway?) Besides, what would your true behavior be when you are in a new body and in a new world? The self, taken out of a typical context can change a person drastically (especially if the setting is EP). Regardless, taking the whole idea of playing yourself too seriously would kill the fun of the game. It has to be played loosely. As for skills and such, I think I can solve that. In the beginning, the PCs wake up and find out what happens, they ask how it all happened and then they see me (in a new body). From there I can enter a game phase where I gloss over several months where the PCs train to specialize in whatever skills they want, while being able to explore the game world, role-playing a few key scenes to get the gist of their environment before adventuring. We're all newbies here, so I think this will be helpful. Once the PCs are done training (and have a good reason for the skills they own), they'll be ready for their first adventure. During the training/exploration phase of the game, I can begin emphasizing what the world is like now. And the way I find their dead, idealistically preserved bodies... yeah its going to be a bit of a pie-in-the-sky, but you gotta make it work some how in these games. I can change the way they die too. Maybe they were all on their way to Gen-Con and crashed. After they all died, they could have been put in the morgue and then stolen by people looking to sell their parts on the black market. Something happened and the operation was abandoned, but their bodies were still left preserved in the hidden facility. Later in the future, perhaps they were discovered and were grouped with some other dead people who were going to be part of a post human research project. Then the TITANS came and ruined everything, but their bodies were still left in stasis. etc, etc, i find them. Maybe I don't know how they died and they can't remember.

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cosmic microwave background radiation is awesome!

Mon, 2010-12-27 10:12

urdith

Re: The Players as the Players - EP Game 1

Arenamontanus wrote:
Of course, one approach would be to have the PCs live ordinary lives as themselves... and then the simspace illusion is suddenly cracked. Turns out they were actually trapped in a TITAN resimulation and Firewall agents just saved them. Yes, they have few skills and might even be suspected of having TITAN code running somewhere in their minds. But when the Firewall lab examining them and the artefact suddenly gets attacked by [Fill in suitable fraction] they have to flee together with everybody else... and might actually carry a secret worth killing for.

This would be a lovely expansion of the inherent "Oh, X author stole my best idea!" paranoia which runs rampant in certain gamer groups. "Actually, yes, your ideas were being stolen. But not by an author, but an artificial intelligence system looking to map human behavior responses and create a lateral-thinking engine to fill in their own cognitive gaps. Now, let's see who's got a logic bomb in their ego code!"

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"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier."
— Bruce Sterling