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Smart Rope

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Thu, 2013-07-04 09:22

hhexo

Smart Rope

This recently came up in my game... One of the player characters had a Smart Rope, which is basically an animated metal rope with a minimal intelligence unit that can carry out orders. It's in the core rulebook. So the player commanded the rope to grapple a bad guy who was trying to run away. Now, the rules don't provide any stat for the Smart Rope, so I assumed it had a basic, Muse-level AI and gave it an Unarmed Combat skill of 30. But then I thought: how does it actually move? Does the player character throw it and it makes a lasso while in the air? Does the rope slither like a snake on its own? At what speed? Can it actually chase a running humanoid? I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have allowed that use of a Smart Rope... but then again, that's what you would think a Smart Rope would be able to do (like an animated rope in d&d or similar). What do people think?

Thu, 2013-07-04 10:30

nick012000 nick012000's picture

I'd say it's more like a

I'd say it's more like a weapon than a morph, and require an Exotic Weapon skill on the part of the user.

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+1 r-Rep , +1 @-rep

Fri, 2013-07-05 06:23

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Read Alastair Reynolds' "The

Read Alastair Reynolds' "The Prefect" - the police baton/whips in that novel are a great inspiration for this. Some of those uses are *nasty*...

hhexo wrote:
This recently came up in my game... Now, the rules don't provide any stat for the Smart Rope, so I assumed it had a basic, Muse-level AI and gave it an Unarmed Combat skill of 30. But then I thought: how does it actually move? Does the player character throw it and it makes a lasso while in the air? Does the rope slither like a snake on its own? At what speed? Can it actually chase a running humanoid? I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have allowed that use of a Smart Rope... but then again, that's what you would think a Smart Rope would be able to do (like an animated rope in d&d or similar). What do people think?

I think it makes sense. The problem is likely that the rope will not have great COO or SOM (default 10), so it is not a super fighter. I would rule that if you just take an off-the-shelf rope and off-the-shelf software you get something that is fairly clumsy. But if you buy a dedicated Autonomous Defence Inc. Personal Protection Rope(tm) it might be faster and fiercer - think of it more as a bot.

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Mon, 2013-07-15 22:51

jackgraham jackgraham's picture

What Aremontanus said r/e

What Aremontanus said r/e Aptitudes; they wouldn't be very good. And we don't spell it out, but a smart rope would come with a default Device AI. Its few skills would be oriented toward climbing stuff, but there's nothing stopping an enterprising PC from loading up a different AI with more combat-oriented skills or even a higher SOM Apt (most AIs have 10's across the board but can have a 15 or 20 in whatever they're specialized toward). Agreed on treating it like a bot/shell, meaning you could remotely operate or even jam it. We don't explicitly cover this in the jamming/remote op rules, but it's a logical consequence of the rules as written. (We've put some jamming/remote rules clarifications in TH. I considered including stuff like smart rope in these rules, but we were running short on space, so I left it out).

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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

Wed, 2013-07-17 10:52

hhexo

Thanks!

Thanks, this seems very reasonable to me. I will have another look at the remote op rules, but I think I got the answer I needed. In the specific situation in my campaign, the PC had an off-the-shelf rope, and it had a basic Device AI since she hadn't upgraded it. Assuming the basic AI did not include a command for "grapple that person", the PC could still have tried to grapple the fleeing opponent with the rope, but she would have had to remote-operate the rope herself (which would have taken one of her actions).

Sun, 2013-07-21 20:44

fellowhoodlum fellowhoodlum's picture

Aaaaand we went ahead and

Aaaaand we went ahead and sleeved a player character in Smart Rope. My players bought upgrade for the Smart Rope, including a Cyberbrain and a pair of Spider Hands. I limited the number of other upgrades to ten (one per finger, haha) Other than that we adopted the stats of a Creepy for the new morph. And said player character only has a SOM of 5. Skillware will overcome the worst weaknesses but we expect much hilarity to ensue. One of my players drew up a picture of it on the G+ : https://plus.google.com/u/0/109748841977583943933/posts/C1ZVhWGY8ue