The other side is equally well equipped with this ability, too though.

If they've got something worth hacking (and not blowing the hell up, remember there aren't any police floating around in space), then they're probably equipped at the very least to hire 1 Ego that can beta fork himself into oblivion.

You can do it three times, his three times multiplied in to a 100.

Usefulness aside, as the player with the hacker character in his group, I find the idea deeply disturbing. The "Just let me shoot myself." kind of disturbing.

Perhaps it is, but by the GM and the setting. Firewall might not appreciate someone doing such things.

No computer have infinite processing power, so you can quite readily rule as a GM that no, you can't run that many forks on this server.

HappyDaze wrote:

Which part do you find disturbing?

The one where there are half a dozen copies of myself running around for the entire campaign. Take a look at the fork merging table. Consider that a campaign may very well last longer than a week of IC time. Unless forks are regularly merged with the primary ego, you're risking a ton of mental stress when you're finally done. Even with regular merging, you'll have psychosurgery roll failures.

HappyDaze wrote:

Matrix wrote:

Usefulness aside, as the player with the hacker character in his group

I just reread this part. For clairity, are you saying that you're in my gaming group playing the hacker?

Okay, that was apparently very bad grammar. What I meant to say was that I play the hacker in my group, not yours.

What about this as an idea? If you make a fresh fork of yourself, that's great for going off and doing some other task at the same time. But when a fresh copy of you is trying to help with a completely mental action, how much are they really bringing to the party? They don't know anything that you don't, they don't have any different perspective, or tactics. They're completely redundant. Yes, having two of you could hammer on a keyboard twice as fast and try twice as many attacks at once, but maybe that's not actually the limiting factor of hacking in EP. If the limiting factor is based more on creativity or something then having an exact duplicate really isn't going to help, your forks are all going to come up with the same ideas that you do, in pretty much the same order.
A GM faced with this problem might rule that fresh forks don't provide teamwork bonuses to purely mental (such as mesh) actions. (Note: This has no effect on the multitasking implant, since those forks aren't helping with one task, they're doing other tasks.) By the time a fork has diverged enough from the original to have a unique perspective and provide a teamwork bonus, it's really starting to diverge enough from the original that the GM should be considering it an NPC, and it needs to be merged, destroyed, or you have a new NPC with independent desires to deal with.
I'm not saying this is how it has to be, but if a GM were having problems with fork armies, this might be a reasonable way to get the game back on track.

[quote=HappyDaze]EP doesn't even require the helpers to be trained in the skill used for the test - they just need to be following the directions of the lead character to give a Teamwork bonus. This would tend to break an argument that creativity and independent though are important to the Teamwork bonus.[/quote]

Agreed. Perhaps I was unclear in my motivations. I wasn't trying to find a by-the-book solution, or even a 100% iron-clad logical one. I was trying to find a solution that would let the game continue to work.

Remember, even an "untrained" character in EP is familiar with computers. If you were trying to get a teamwork test from an incompetent character then I'd probably say no (even though I know of no rule to that specific effect) An "untrained" character is simply an average computer user, but hardly a brain damaged chimpanzee. (non-uplifted, of course. They may actually be a brain damaged uplifted chimpanzee) So they still have something to contribute. I maintain that the creativity-for-purely-mental-actions approach is less than complete nonsense, and might help kill an undesired issue.

I'm certainly not claiming that the way I'm suggesting is the way it SHOULD be done, but if armies of hacker forks are breaking your game, it's the best solution to getting the game back on track that I've seen so far. (IMO and YMMV and all that)

OK there is a simple solution for all of this.

There is a finite amount of infomorphs that a server can run at one time. And it's not memory but processing power that's the limiting power.

The amount of processing power required to run a sentient being, or even a good AI (good enough to help PCs with stuff), is pretty huge even by futuristic standards.

So now we say that there are two types of servers out there.

1. The El Cheapo servers that player characters can get their hands on.

OK so the party buys a ship or whatever and it has a server in it. This server can run a decent sized Sim Space and it has enough processing power to run say 5 infomorphs. Any number of physical world people can log in whenever they want because their egos are running on their brains and not the server. And we can fit a party member or two who is an infomorph on the ship's server comfortably. And the player characters aren't going to be copy pasting themselves all over the place.

2. Large habitat servers meant for colonies of infomorphs.

These servers are probably server clusters that take up cubic kilometers of space on the inside of hollowed out asteroids or floating round on giant barge ships. They are bought by hypercorps with trillions of credits, or pieced together by cities worth of infugees pooling their bank accounts.

These servers have a finite amount of infomorphs that they can hold in the same way that Denver has a finite amount of apartments in it. The number is fixed but still large enough that it probably won't effect the players' lives much.

So in these areas you could probably start forking yourself millions of times over. For at least 5 minutes anyway until local law enforcement gets wind of what you are doing. At best they'll fine you for being a public nuisance. And at worst flashing red lights and Seed AI warnings will start going off and they will format C: the section of the station you happened to be in at the time.

I could really see infomorph colonies displaying giant "NO FORKING" signs as you log into the colony.

Yeah I guess it just cracks down on infinite forking. And forking is a part of the game, it gets a nice chunk of the mechanics section of the book. I guess as a GM I am ok with a player having 2-3 forks rather than a trillion.

[quote=HappyDaze]Since the materials for making computers are not exotic[/quote]

Well yes and no.

Increased demand can make scarcity.

OK so lets look at the kind of super computers you use to run infomorphs on. These computers probably require advanced superconductors or semiconductors, which themselves are probably made out of some material that 50 years ago was a bit rare but not too terribly hard to find. Like gold for example which is actually in most electronics nowadays.

Now skip ahead to the Eclipse Phase present day where everyone and their dog wants supercomputers. There might actually be a lot of this semiconducting material (gold whatever) present in the solar system right now. But most of it is probably tied up in Habitats, ships, hypercorp projects, or just in some rich guy's warehouse somewhere as a rainy day fund.

So while the materials for making computers might not have originally been exotic they might be now due to people's over-consumption.

Our solution to these problems, or a similar problem we had with forking was this, dont let forking be a quick process, make it take some time so you cant do it on the fly, rather it takes some planning if you want multiple forks of yourself for some reason. Secondly we have removed beta and delta forks wholesale from the game, only alphas and gammas, so, sure you can get your one man army on but those other souls of your might not be as obiedient as you had hoped to say nothing of the security risk if one of your alphas gets compromised in some way.

As a GM, I would handle this by saying that the interest of teamwork on a problem solving task is to have different insights on the same problem. And you won't have that by forking yourself on the fly.

There was a TV series called "red dwarf" years ago that was a good SF comedy, but it had some trasnhuman elements in it bevore the term transhuman caught on. One of the characters was an AL copy of a dead crewman named Arnold Rimmer, and in one ep he managed to create a duplicate of himself (The ep was called "ME2) and in it even his duplicate ended up hating him and the two became bitter enemies. That might be a funny solution to the problem. Another solution I'd go for is to simply limit the number of copies that can help in a mental task, as they really don't bring much to the table. Yes I know that in the RAW helpers can aid in a task even without knowing the skills, but in the example given, fixing an object, they were mostly holding tools or holding the light, I'd imagine. In physical terms I can see unskilled helpers aiding, if by nothing else than in a kind of "Hold that wire there while I solder it..." fashion. But in a mental task they might not be as useful, ans I don't see how unskilled helpers aid in a mental task all that much. Since forks are just lesser versions of yourself, they may be of some but limited use. Also, trying to hack a system might entail problems in that it might be defended by a multiple AI that was actually composed of more than one system but integrated together to work together. Does the name "Cerberus" give you any idea of what I'm talking about? Something like that might get a bonus of it's own and be harder to hack. At any rate, limiting even an infinite number of forks to a +30 bonus should work. I'd say that forking should be divided between mental and physical tasks and have slightly different rules for both. An example would be a great soldier. OK, we make a bazillion forks of this guy and give each one a combat morph, and he's now an army that can fight because each physical morph has full combat ability and the skill to use it. Likewise forking an engineer a few times and having each fork help repair a damaged ship could work great because each one works on a separate area and gets more physical labor done faster. But a mental task is a little different, adding more copies of a mind trying to hack something won't be as helpful as adding more skilled bodies and guns to a battle. Also, there are cases where you end up in a "I can go this way or that way.." type of situation. What happens if one fork decided to go left and the other goes right? Would they end up fighting each other? That could get messy. As a final example, think of an army. The more soldiers an army has the better, usually, but does an army get better if we add more and more generals to it? Taking a great soldier and making forks of him may be great, but if we fork a general does it add as much? Sure, we could make the forks into lower officers, but do they add as much as having other, still competent and skilled people, fill those roles? I'd say that the forked general as all the commanding officers would maybe have some advantages but also tend to make the overall army more predictable and susceptible to the original general's flaws, biases, etc.