Yerameyahu wrote:

My only worry is that this is cliché movie crap, and the captured ego should be the one victim of *your* 'nightmarish' simulspace mastery. :D Hehe, though of course I get the Inception idea of being very subtle, so that the target doesn't even know. I guess I'm just tired of the whole 'enter their mind, where they have the scary power!' idea. For once, I want the 'good guys' to be on home turf!

You could always invert it; perhaps someone chooses to undergo some sort of limited merging with the captured ego (perhaps a pruned beta or delta fork of the original ego) in the hopes of getting the pertinent data, only things don't go quite as foreseen, and someone ends up with a rogue element running around their subconscious. Or something like that. I'm just musing...

Nah, I get what you mean entirely. I suppose at some point you just have to call GM fiat for the sake of an interesting concept. Suspension of disbelief and all that. :)

Indeed, 'protagonist having nightmarish power' doesn't make for a very compelling conflict. During normal psychosurgery, absolutely, that's how I run it. But if you'r trying to make an adventure based around it, something MUST go wrong.

Of course, a dedicated assassin might have subconscious defences beyond a merely militarized subconscious. Think of King Mob in The Invisibles - several layers of false identities and pasts, some honey-pots to lure investigators to false conclusions... and then a freaking attack loa hiding behind a closed door! Technically, this is how I would do it: Model 1: Simspace run by external control. The subject is simply loaded into a simspace on an isolated system and the PCs also join. They interact, and depending on the simspace this can be an interview, interrogation or torture. Model 2: Simspace generated by subject's subconscious. This could be done by having a fork of him sedated and dreaming, and then using specialized software (likely some standard suite like Oneiroi Animator 4.0) control the simspace. The software takes the sleeping fork's dream and uses it to construct a corresponding simspace; events in the simspace are fed back to the sleeping fork to make it interactive. The PCs may still have the ability to give commands to the software and simspace, but given typical dream world logic they might be ignored or cause odd conflicts. If the assassin is a lucid dreamer he will be in control over the simspace to some extent. The subject may or may not be personally present in the dream. Model 3: Simspace with dreaming subject. A simspace is plugged into a dreaming fork, essentially forcing them to dream the simspace. This is tricky psychosurgery hacking, since it needs to maintain the fork in a dream state but prevent PGO-waves and other dream generation while inputing the simspace. In this model the subject will be experiencing the simspace as a dream, with lowered psychological defenses. If he is a lucid dreamer it will be like model 1. In short, all three methods shade into each other. If this is done on the fly, expect weird artefacts and problems for all involved. And if the assassin is really nasty, he might have encoded a khaos AI in his neural network so that incautious interfacing with his stack might allow it to hack the simspace or linked systems...

New Ego Trait: Lucid Dreaming (5cp) Not that expensive because it would have very little impact in most games, though I imagine if the tech existed there would be a large number of people interested in "being" in other peoples dreams. For work and play. Arenamontanus : I like model 2 the best. My only problem with the whole idea is the Muse. Does the Muse interact in it's owners dreams on a normal basis? would it attempt to wake the target in the event of odd biorhythms? If the OP wanted a more Inception like experience, I imagine the party would need one or two guys in control of doping the target as well as the team inside. On the other hand, a smart group would have Alpha or Beta forks working the victim in simspace while the originals would be working outside.

InsidiousAlgorythm wrote:

New Ego Trait: Lucid Dreaming (5cp) Not that expensive because it would have very little impact in most games, though I imagine if the tech existed there would be a large number of people interested in "being" in other peoples dreams. For work and play.

Sounds good. And celebrity dreams might be very desireable - so if you have enough rep, make sure your dream firewalls are good! (Or, subscribe to a dream experience company that ensures that you sleep only in the nicest, safest simspaces possible, complete with proper software security and guaranteed privacy).

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Arenamontanus : I like model 2 the best. My only problem with the whole idea is the Muse. Does the Muse interact in it's owners dreams on a normal basis? would it attempt to wake the target in the event of odd biorhythms?

I suspect people dream about their muse quite a lot, but it is a stupid idea to let it take commands while you are dreaming ("Yes sir, I sold all your stock as you instructed me at 04.22 AM.") Most muses do not have that deep access either, so it just keeps watch during sleep and waits for the owner to wake up. Or wakes him up if something important happens. Normally muses ought to be easy to disconnect if you have stack access. Especially since a serious assassin might have given the muse access to activate virtual suicide pills.

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If the OP wanted a more Inception like experience, I imagine the party would need one or two guys in control of doping the target as well as the team inside. On the other hand, a smart group would have Alpha or Beta forks working the victim in simspace while the originals would be working outside.

Sounds smart. That way they could also run the dream at faster speed... making it even more Inception! ("What is that?" "My totem. I use it to see whether I am the alpha or beta.")

Yerameyahu wrote:

:) I wasn't saying 'new rules are impossible'. I was saying that you're just making stuff up, *and* contradicting existing rules (game reality), and IMO *not* 'just letting the setting science proceed logically'.

I am GM. And I have a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience. I even *work* on issues of uploading. If I want to change details of game reality, I will do it.

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My point is that new elements should be very careful to integrate into the established 'communal' setting, or be very clearly labeled as incompatible house rules. Consistency is the key unless you're deliberately trying to mess with the players (and in the 'whoops, guns now shoot bananas' way).

Sure. I hereby declare that nothing I have ever written or will write for Eclipse Phase or publish on my site will be guaranteed to fit the 'consensus' Eclipse Phase. It will be my fork of it. :-) Seriously, there are aspects of Eclipse Phase that matters and one can't really touch - the system for uploading, egobridges, biobrains vs cyberbrains etc. is so integral to the assumptions of the setting that it doesn't matter that there are some serious problems in the assumptions. There are other aspects that are debatable, like the accidental introduction of backwards-in-time communications due to QE comms, psi and the not-quite right physics of the gates, that can be dealt with by ignoring them (completely or partially). And then there are small things that can be completely changed without upsetting the setting or most people's thinking about it. Like synthmorphs needing sleep. The main goal of the game is to have fun. Shared rules and understanding of the setting are needed to do that well. But if one can make the setting as hard science fiction as possible one gains the benefit that now the science itself can contribute interesting details, setting and rules for the game. Sometimes we ignore the science in the name of fun. Sometimes we ignore the rules in the name of fun. Sure, one can take the view that since synthmorphs and infomorphs don't sleep according to the core book then this whole Inception scenario is against the rules. But that seems to put a minor setting point against both the goal of having fun and against the logic of what uploading in EP seems to be.

Yerameyahu wrote:

I hope you didn't think I was saying 'don't change the game/rules'. Especially because I explicitly said I wasn't saying that. Twice, I think. :D

Sorry. Tired - I have to finish a government report tonight, and I might be taking out my annoyance at rules on the wrong people :-)

red_eric wrote:

A related question is – how difficult is it to modify the ego of an unwilling subject directly? On most computer systems, a certain level of access privileges are required to install software or make fundamental changes to the system. Does any of this apply to ego files in EP?

It better. I would certainly not want to run on a system that didn't protect my mindstate. I think infomorphs probably run as encrypted code inside virtual machines that have cryptographic certificates of their integrity: https for the soul. During egocasts the only point where your unencrypted ego is present should be in the egobridges, all the rest should be heavily protected. (But bad security does happen!) My guess is that stacks are unprotected in the sense that they can be read by suitable equipment, simply because they are an emergency tool: normally nobody can get at your stack because it is in you. So if you get the stack (or for that matter the cyber/biobrain and scan it) you can extract an unprotected ego and do whatever you want with it. Once you have an unprotected ego file you can put it into your psychosurgery software toolkit and run it, edit it and generally mess with the mind. And since this software is not chosen by the ego it has no control over what it does. Everyday "mental tuning" software people use does respect privileges and cannot do anything without permission from the ego or maybe the muse.

I personally tend to adopt a variation of the ol' Myster Science Theater 3000 motto: "Just repeat to yourself, 'It's just a game, I should really just relax'."

Arenamontanus wrote:

Seriously, do you believe in gravity? There is something called Newton's law of gravity, but it is really a scientific theory. A theory we *know* is wrong. The Einsteinian gravity theory works much better. But we have good reasons to think it might not be the ultimate truth. Yet you do not float away from your chair! Gravity is an observable phenomenon, and not something you can claim doesn't exist. Our explanations of the whys and wherefores are limited, but they do describe what we see to a high degree.

I'm an atheist, I don't believe in anything. Hell I'm not even sure I believe in me. =) Gravity, sure I know it's there, but as you said yourself, we don't understand fully *why* it's there or what causes it. Could it be a clever trick imposed on us by a clever AI in a vast artificial reality? Probably not, but do you KNOW for sure? No, you don't, even if you say you do. Kinda like "god". Is he there? Billions say without a doubt god exists, yet there is no proof. Is there a way around gravity? There might be, we just haven't found it yet. Light Speed? Same tricks apply. Einstein was a brilliant man and I am personally inclined to go with his theories, but in the end, until someone smarter comes around to fix all the HUGE holes in his science we won't know for sure how right he was.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Same thing with relativity. We do observe time dilation due to speed and gravity, length contraction, mass and energy equivalence, gravitational lensing and things that look like black holes should. Maybe relativity is wrong, but these effects are real and will not go away. Scientific theories are usually more well tested than the 'facts' people believe they know.

And yet it still doesn't fit with how the universe works, sure it explains quite a bit, but it's inherently flawed and thus wrong. As smart as all these guys are (Personally I love Garrett Lisi and his e8 theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi ) they still can't unify anything, but who's to say that a vastly superior intelligence (ETI/AI/something else) hasn't?

Arenamontanus wrote:

Now, SF that claims there is some subtle loophole to get around light-speed is fine. But SF that chooses to ignore facts about the world that we know is in trouble. Some might be grandfathered - Olaf Stapledon and Jules Verne did not know the things we know about the universe, so the stories still kind of work.

I really like Reynolds and his Lighthuggers personally. If EP were a game that used FTL/Interstellar travel without a sufficient (even if flawed) explanation I probably wouldn't like it as much. Here is my thoughts. The gates use [unknown weird advanced tech] to make travel between long distances instantaneous. The gates of course are made of [unknown weird exotic matter] and are hardcoded with [unknown weird alien programming] so somewhere in all that weirdness they also get rid of that messy time dilation business by using [unknown weird advanced tech] to make both points in space line up in time as well, Yes we call it spacetime, but who's to say the [unknown weird advanced intelligence] hasn't figured out a way to break spacetime into two states by hacking branes or sub Plank scale matter or whatever. Who's to say that even though us mere humans can't figure out how to use qbits for superluminal communications that our offspring transhumans didn't figure out a way. Basically all I'm saying is that in a fictional universe sometimes belief must be suspended in order to evolve the story as a whole.