Do characters take Continuity Stress for resleeving, even if they haven't died? Our characters are egocasting between Jupiter's Lagrange points. On the Continuity Stress Table, it mentions "Uploading-to-resleeve without continuity" inflicts 1d10 / 2 stress. However, we were not certain if that meant "resleeving after you have died".
My intuition says "Yes they do, even if they haven't died". Namely because there are a lot of thorny philosophical/existential issues ("Am I really me, or just a copy?") that pop up with uploading.
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Does egocasting inflict "continuity stress"?
Wed, 2013-05-08 16:07
#1
boomzilla
Does egocasting inflict "continuity stress"?
Wed, 2013-05-08 16:39
#2
Decivre
Continuity is the act of
Continuity is the act of staying conscious throughout the process. Death causes continuity stress because the person wakes up, having remembered death, followed by a potentially unknowable period of time which they lost. Continuity stress is all about the horror of losing time.
Retained consciousness does not cause continuity issues. Resleeving can be done without the ego losing consciousness, transferring from brain to active ego instance, back into another brain. But farcasting (the act of transmitting your ego elsewhere to be resleeved) has a limited range to maintain consciousness. Beyond that, and the ego has to be shut down in order to be transmitted (don't ask me why, I have threads where I talk about why that shouldn't be the case).
You'll be able to read about it on page 269, under the header "Uploading-Resleeving Continuity". Any farcast beyond 10,000 km will require a continuity check on resleeve.
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Wed, 2013-05-08 17:52
#3
asura8
Resleeving is Hard
So: I'm the GM here. So I'll give in my two bits after some deep thought on the matter.
The main threat with an intentional egocast with regards to continuity comes in two points. The first is that you have a certain amount of time depending on the distance where you do not exist. This can be terrifying to many people. However, the distance suggested in the book (10,000 km), seems awfully small, since my internet connection gets more lag than a farcaster would at that distance. So that brings us to the second consideration.
Assume that since there is a time lag that is perceivable, you are not able to keep the two minds in sync properly, since you need a two way link, and thus you can't steadily bring somebody into the new morph. This means you experience a continuity stress as a result of the fact that one second you were in body A, and then in the next second you were in body B, as far as your perception is concerned.
However, personally, I feel a lot of this is covered in alienation/integration. So I feel that the continuity penalty should be less rough for when we are egocasting. As such, I've chosen to apply the players a +20 bonus to their continuity checks. This was primarily decided as the average transhuman should have a 10 WIL, which would normally lead to a Continuity check of 30. This +20 brings it up to the point where they should have a normal distribution around the average stress, or near it.
I'm not sure if this is my final solution, but I think it should be adequate and eliminate the chance (on average), of hitting a trauma from simply egocasting. If I find that this does not keep that from happening too much, I will need to look into increasing the bonuses to these continuity checks, or perhaps reducing the stress done.
Thu, 2013-05-09 08:14
#4
jackgraham
Continuity is meant to
Continuity is meant to represent sort of a combined existential/identity crisis resulting from interruption of consciousness and the associated disorientation experienced when it abruptly resumes in a jarringly different physical environment.
GMs should of course feel free to ignore the 10k km rule if they want. If I remember, the rationale was that latency in the mesh over any hop greater than 10k km requires stopping consciousness, meaning that egocasting is similar to being restored from a backup. (As opposed to intentional resleeving via an ego bridge, where consciousness never stops).
Really, the whole notion of continuity tests hangs around a certain philosophical approach to consciousness that has produced quite a bit of argument, both on these forums and elsewhere.
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Thu, 2013-05-09 10:20
#5
asura8
Stress Problem
That's exactly the sort of conclusion I came to as why there would be a continuity test. The 10,000 km limit roughly associates itself with a one second time lag for two-way communication. I suspect since that lag is greater than the processing rate of information for the human brain, that's why it was set.
Now, there is a problem that I find with the current handling of continuity with egocasts, and that is the stress that is associated with it. Let us make a few assumptions and calculate out the math. In hindsight, I probably made an overestimate in my GM fiat ruling in my game, but let's see how well it holds.
Let's assume that the average person does not receive a trauma from egocasting. To me, it seems that if the average person would sustain a trauma Egocasting, we would have a problem with the system due to the fact that it means that travel would come with some inherent going nutso that would probably make it disfavored.
The average stat for a player character is straight 15s. This means that the average WILx3 will be 45 and a TT of 6. Barring any changes, the standard is 1d10/2 SV (rounded down), reduced by 1 for each 10 points of MoS and increased by 1 for each 10 points of MoF. So let's see what our variance looks like.
Our 1d10 roll will give us, on average 5.5 +/- 2.9. Let's assume we just want the one sigma limit to be safe for people, thus our limit will be 4 SV. So now, we just need to see how likely it is to have 20 points of MoF.
Our average 1d100 roll will give us, on average, 51 +/- 28.9. We can see that our one sigma limit puts us at a MoF of ~35. This means, within the one-sigma limit (68% of all cases), we are having people who will take 7 SV and thus have a single Trauma from egocasting.
So it turns out that my naive estimate seems fine. If we assume that the stress is reduced due to knowledge that you are making such a jump in continuity and the circumstances are at least made a little less stressful (say, following the basic methods of Atsuko Van Vogt, or at least not having them wake up alone on a metal slab), then it seems reasonable to give a +20 to the Continuity test. This will bring the high end of the 68% limit to 5 SV, which will avoid the Trauma.
I can see being stressed out as a result of Egocasting being reasonable. But I do not think going into full fledged panic attacks or taking traumas that take months to go away on their own seem to be our ideal norm.