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EP Lessons: What do you wish you had known the first time you played EP?

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Tue, 2013-02-19 13:28
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Cthuluzord Cthuluzord's picture
EP Lessons: What do you wish you had known the first time you played EP?
Alright, so imagine you can go back in time to the first night you played EP? If you couldn't share any stock tips or dire warnings about the future and had to keep the conversation restricted only to the game (this is a very oddly constructed time machine), what would you tell yourself? It could be mechanical tips for optimizing characters, advice for understanding the setting, methods for better roleplaying, or concerns for a first time GM. What would advice will you give yourself? Speaking personally, after having run an Eclipse Phase campaign for over a year, I certainly kept learning as I went. The setting is amazingly rich and detailed, involving ideas uncommon to nearly every other roleplaying game. As a GM, the interaction of gear, implants, and morphs also brought an endless array of rules variations to keep track of. There are a number of things I would instruct myself in if I had things to do over again. So what's the most important thing you feel is necessary for new players to understand in EP?
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Tue, 2013-02-19 19:07
lets adapt lets adapt's picture
The Resources page. Being
The [url=http://eclipsephase.com/resources]Resources[/url] page. Being able to look at a cheat sheet to figure out the process for hacking or the modifiers for alienation would have made gameplay more organic. After discovering resources available I have been using them with the group I am GMing for now and things have been much, much smoother. I have also become partial to the [url=http://eclipsephase.com/downloads/Eclipse_Phase_Character_Sheet_v.95.xls... character sheet[/url] that everyone's using now. Initially I thought it was going to be a pain to use but after making NPCs with it over the course of a few days I've come to enjoy it. It is a solid solution for character creation, advancement, and inventory management all in one package. I'd love to see (and pay for!) an official app that offers the same or increased functionality; getting a player with an Excel allergy to use the spreadsheet can take some prodding. Also, when most of your players have very minimal or no tabletop RPG experience (like my 60 year old father who is playing in my current Eclipse Phase campaign), being able to keep everything neat and concise makes a world of difference!
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Tue, 2013-02-19 19:10
CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture
Just because you can kill
Just because you can kill without 'killing' someone doesn't mean that life is cheap. When my group first started playing EP (close to three and a half years ago. Dear God) we were very liberal with our gunfire. Security guards were target practice. Collateral damage against civilians was fair play, after all, they can just resleeve off screen. But EP isn't really a post scarcity setting. Particular goods that are currently scarce are less so, but the majority of the systems population still have very real material wants. (Bio)Morphs are expensive, and do not grow on trees. People subject themselves to decade long servitude to get their hands on one. So when our group started to get a little bit loose with how fast we went to our guns, the GM threw in a couple of well realised sob stories about the after effects of some of our actions.  A security guard who now suffered from severe PTSD after we ambushed him just to get him out the way.  A family man whose indentured contract was extended by another 5 years because he was indirectly (brainhacked) involved in the destruction of one of the labs we trashed.  The collapse of an upcoming Uplift Rights charity after we unwittingly falsely connected their name to an equally upcoming Mercurial terrorist organisation. Firewall sometimes needs to go in all guns blazing, but subtlety is still important when it can be applied. Just because people are immortal doesn't mean your actions cannot have unforeseen consequences. Also, the "Three F's". Fray, Freerunning and Freefall. Shits important. Stack those skills.
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Thu, 2013-02-21 09:32
Decimator Decimator's picture
I'm just starting to GM a
I'm just starting to GM a game(two sessions so far), and I, coming from a DND background, didn't think about how the OIA probably wouldn't be keen on having people armed with fully automatic weapons roaming around Olympus City. What makes this even less forgivable is that I have a player character who's built to be a smuggler, and he hasn't gotten to do much! Most everything else, I learned from listening to Know Evil. You said Anders Sandberg is your GMing spirit guide. Well, you're mine.
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Fri, 2013-02-22 16:40
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
I was surprised by how
I was surprised by how powerful rep and Networking was - I had expected the combat monster or the smart guy to be unbalanced, not the social guy. This was before the limitations on initial rep, but still, played right a high rep character can get twist things around in interesting and problematic ways. WoooOOoooOOo... I am a spirit guide! :-)
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Extropian
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Fri, 2013-02-22 17:33
Cthuluzord Cthuluzord's picture
Replies
@lets adapt: Yeah, the day I gave out cheat sheets for combat modifiers to my group was the day I had to relearn how to balance encounters. They started absolutely destroying. And until alternate character generation rules come out, I'm not sure the Excel character generator is even optional. We have a purist in our group (Preston Crowley in the Know Evil game) that absolutely refused to use a computer for a "Pen-and-Paper" RPG. At first. Two and a half hours later, we were all watching a movie while he was still slaving over a hot character sheet. By the end of the campaign, he'd started using the Excel sheet for everything and was a firm supporter. @Codebreaker: I agree with the "killing still being serious" tip in general. I think GMing Eclipse Phase is less about understanding the technology and more about understanding the social, political, and economic situations created by the technology. Its the first RPG in my experience that really rewards an understanding of how materialism and other macro- socio- economic systems can inform and shape the lives of characters. But even then, the SOP of most players seems to be "kill it with (plasma) fire." I like the "three F's." I hadn't thought of that before, and I might "Medichines" to it (FFFM or MFFF?). Of course, my luck I'd dump 60 CP into Freefall and the whole campaign would end up on Mars. @Decimator: First off, you totally made my day! Thanks man! And yeah, it can be hard to remember to include the different laws and norms of each new polity the group travels to when juggling all the other rules and NPC's, yet that is in many ways the most interesting part of the game. By the end of Know Evil, I started thinking of culture shock as the first encounter of every new tier. I'd "stat" it out on paper just like it was a Exsurgent they were going to fight. I thought it helped me from falling into the dungeon-crawl-in-space trap. @Arenamontanus: He replied to my thread! (Swoon...) (...recovers, fanning away a case of the vapors before typing) You know, for being a game focused on an illegal military intelligence organization, you'd think there would be more in the books about actually acting like a spy. I mean, Paniopticon covers electronic surveillance and the mesh in exhausting detail, but there is a lot more to playing a spook than technical stuff. I have also found that a player with some actual knowledge of tradecraft and the social skills/currency to back it up can all but break the game using nothing but social networks. P.S. If I've become a GM spirit guide as well, I think that promotes you to some sort of RPG deity. I should invoke your name whenever I need a critical success or something.
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Fri, 2013-02-22 19:19
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
That Rob runs it totally
That Rob runs it totally differently from the way I do. He's much... TPK-ier. :)
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J A C K   G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!   http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
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Wed, 2013-03-06 11:23
bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture
*takes notes* I've just
*takes notes* I've just started running Think Before Asking as an introductory adventure/mini-campaign for my usual crew of D&Ders and they love it. As a result, I'm probably going to end up running an EP campaign during the next school year. I'm going to have to introduce them to this thread when I get the chance. (I think the point where I knew I had them truly interested was when they first egocast: one of them rolled 00 for their Networking to find a sleeve. I decided that he found a novacrab with all of the trimmings, which he thought was cool, and sleeved in it... which was promptly followed by a critical failure on the Integration test... and a 99 on the Alienation test. Hilarity ensued.)
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"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

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Wed, 2013-03-06 13:10
Undocking Undocking's picture
Spend less on gear, spend
Spend less on gear, spend more on skills and attributes. A tricked out morph with tonnes of augs that give bushels of bonuses is only good to you if you have it. I was forced to switch bodies and realized how naked my character was. It became a thing to role-play out and grow throughout the campaign. I should have killed my team-mates more often. They were X-threats for most of the game, especially the one who constantly wanted to contact xenos. Eventually he entered an ETI Jupiter Brain and I told Firewall destroy his backups. Usually I play more leaned back characters that don't get involved that much in other PC's home lives, but when the transhuman race is in the balance it dawned on me that this character would have been more concerned. More of a roleplaying thing than explicitly TPKing the party. It is a matter of stakes.
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Wed, 2013-03-06 14:14
GreyBrother GreyBrother's picture
Seriously, establish a place
Seriously, establish a place where you want to play. Nothing is more frustrating to create an anarchist psychosurgeon, when your GM wants to play a Game of Thrones with Suryas.
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Wed, 2013-03-06 14:49
Solar Solar's picture
I wish I had know that
I wish I had know that infomorphs are actually run on a specific piece of hardware, as opposed to mobile pieces of software that can just jump through the mesh from hardware system to hardware system as they see fit. It was a shock when I came across the truth, I can tell you!
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Wed, 2013-03-06 15:22
Undocking Undocking's picture
GreyBrother wrote:Seriously,
GreyBrother wrote:
Seriously, establish a place where you want to play. Nothing is more frustrating to create an anarchist psychosurgeon, when your GM wants to play a Game of Thrones with Suryas.
For the record, I'd play that in that. This is really the only game I'd play as a Surya.
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Thu, 2013-03-07 22:22
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
Undocking wrote:Spend less on
Undocking wrote:
Spend less on gear, spend more on skills and attributes. A tricked out morph with tonnes of augs that give bushels of bonuses is only good to you if you have it. I was forced to switch bodies and realized how naked my character was. It became a thing to role-play out and grow throughout the campaign. I should have killed my team-mates more often. They were X-threats for most of the game, especially the one who constantly wanted to contact xenos. Eventually he entered an ETI Jupiter Brain and I told Firewall destroy his backups. Usually I play more leaned back characters that don't get involved that much in other PC's home lives, but when the transhuman race is in the balance it dawned on me that this character would have been more concerned. More of a roleplaying thing than explicitly TPKing the party. It is a matter of stakes.
Wait a second, your campaign moved towards anything resembling the ETI? Now I'm interested. I have literally never heard of an Eclipse Phase directly involving the ETI or their influence other than the exsurgent virus.
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"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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