Yes, I like morphs being distinctive. However, the current distinctions ... really aren't, and aren't significant enough to really address what we read in the text. Biomorphs are written as being all that and a bag of chips, but mechanically, synthmorphs beat biomorphs by most metrics.

Even talking in-universe, there are many groups that specifically work to make new morphs that can cross any limits that might exist. Someone wants a combat-oriented bio-morph or an attribute-focused synth, then they'll do that. It gets even worse when you throw cyber-brains into biomorphs or biological "brain-boxes" into synths. There are still many social and personal reasons to not go with a synth (async morph fever, clanking masses, fear of brain hacking, ease of integration, better sex lives, etc.). I think part of the lack of morph differentiation does help make characters still feel like themselves when forced into a different, non-ideal morph. I still want to see the ego behind the morph stay important.

CodeBreaker wrote:

Unfortunately I think that this is something we are stuck with. Short of a second edition, I don't really see much in the way the developers can do to fix the issue.

Yup. So let's talk hacks, because although it's way early to be talking in any concrete way about 2e, the problem identified in this thread relates to a design problem I've been giving some thought to -- namely, the way having a unitary sanity stat a la CoC limits us. Our design philosophy when we started work on EP was to keep the mechs familiar, because the setting was so weird. I think our experiences in the first 6 years of the game have borne out this strategy, given that we still get questions along the lines of, "Your setting is so weird; how do I deal with it?" So making CoC in Spaaaaaace made sense. But by the time we release 2e, we're going to have a well-developed body of scenarios (no, really) and a matching body of fan knowledge that alleviate this to a large extent, leaving us more free to innovate mechanically. What follows must be said with the disclaimer that I'm in early days in my thinking on this, and that PH is far from a consensus on what we even want 2e to be, let alone mechanical details. Thus I'm trusting you guys to take this in the spirit of this being just me shooting around ideas. So: one thing that I've been kicking around in my head lately is making Alienation, Continuity, and Integration stats in and of themselves, interdependent with but considerably less tightly coupled to Lucidity. They might be derived from core Aptitudes, but have current & max values like Lucidity. Rather than being a test that's made using WIL or SOM whose consequences are mostly to Lucidity, each becomes a resource the player must manage, with direct mechanical and RP consequences built into the system. What this does is to allow more granularity in modeling the effects of reinstancing and resleeving on the ego and the morph it's suddenly part of. They'd definitely be part of psychosurgery, and I could see them being used to chart the effects of drugs, long term simulspace/XP immersion, some of the more extreme augmentations, and sleeving in morphs that are non-standard for a particular ego. (Side note: biomorphs are now the default, but down the road, I could see each ego choosing biomorph, infomorph, or synth as a "ground state" at chargen and then applying game effects from changes in body based on that; this is implied but not mechanically explicit in the game now). My thinking on this has some antecedents in other games. For example, Unknown Armies 1e (never read the somewhat-maligned 2e) has a trinity of sanity stats, each with its own inputs and outputs. And although I only admitted it to myself just now, I might have had 1e Vampire's Humanity/Path + Virtues trinity in the back of my head, although it's got to be said that that was a seminal but weakly implemented system. (I'm trying not to scare the shit out of the anti-"Story Games" faction on these forums; sorry if I've already failed). At any rate, what I find interesting about these systems is that they build out from CoC's unitary Sanity stat, and more importantly, do so in a way that models the aspects of it that are most important to a PC in their respective settings. When I put Alienation, Continuity, and Integration into the resleeving rules, I was modeling what I felt were the most important effects of bodyhopping on the mind and body of a PC in our setting. I was strongly influenced by our literary source material -- in particular Morgan's imagination of resleeving's effects on mind and body in Altered Carbon. I mention this because the A/C/I trinity is meant to blend realism with imparting a particular theme/mood/feel to the setting. The particulars of the stats could change in 2e (as I talk about this, I begin to see a lot of overlap between Integration and SOM), but I think we will want to stick with the themes and moods we started out with. So how could this translate into some interim hacks? Here is where I get super-speculative and directional rather than specific, but encourage y'all to experiment and report back if any of it works out in awesome ways. (I will be experimenting, too!). Try eliminating Lucidity as a unitary stat in your game. Instead, Lucidity, Alienation, and Continuity are the three axises of sanity. Each does different things. Lucidity is still derived straight off WIL and represents the response to cosmic horror a la HPL/CoC Sanity, but it's also used for responses to personal horror (e.g. violence, torture, etc.). Alienation is derived from WIL and SAV and represents both your ability to be yourself in another body, and your response to experiences that challenge your sense of self and how well integrated your personality is (e.g., being sleeved in a morph not of your "ground state" type, having your behavior forcibly modified). Continuity is derived from WIL and INT and represents your resilience in the face of events like death & being restored from backup. In this schema, resleeving/reinstancing checks might be rolled off of the appropriate stat, with failure decreasing the current value of that stat (just like blowing a san check in CoC damages that same stat). Integration and SOM become closely linked, if not the same thing, while some of the functions of SOM (e.g., unarmed/melee DV) become part of morph-based Strength or Constitution stats. Moreover, resleeving/reinstancing are no longer the only situations in which Alienation and Continuity are used in tests. These stats can be put in jeopardy in a wide variety of other situations (which I've mentioned earlier in this post). I will repeat one more time my disclaimer: this is not a blueprint for 2e. These are my own very preliminary thoughts on one direction we might take things, absent any discussion with my colleagues, and this post is actually the first time I've put them down in written form. But you guys are pretty cool, so I trust you take them in the spirit in which they're offered. :)

I recognize that "CoC in space" is supposedly a part of Eclipse Phase, but sanity and the loss thereof has never played a part in the games I've played, something I'm very happy about. I really love Eclipse Phase, but I really dislike rules for sanity loss. They just have no interest for me. I'm perfectly capable of roleplaying my PCs reactions to events, and if I wanted to roleplay someone who was weak in the face of horror I would. In most cases, I don't. I get my fun from seeing a mission as a puzzle to be solved, and solving it. RPing horror, fear, or insanity has no interest to me, unless I had deliberately chosen to roleplay someone who would be fearful. I'm the one who gets to roleplay my PC, not the system. If rules for insanity are given much greater emphasis in a further edition, then I will regretfully part ways with Eclipse Phase. As for the lack of distinctiveness of morphs, I agree with CodeBreaker that the system isn't robust enough to support distinct morphs. I wish it were. The system particularly needs morphs to have stats distinct from the ego, like strength, size, etc. I love that Eclipse Phase lets me play a humanoid robot, though. That's fun. However, I find the idea that my PC would feel somehow "less than human" for riding a robot silly. Even an infomorph can feel as human as desired by using simulspace.

Anarchitect wrote:

One idea I'd like to play with along these lines is having the values be double edged swords. A character with a highly adaptable sense of self might have an easier time sleeving exotic morphs, for example, but they'd also be more vulnerable to mind-altering hacks. Being highly alienated makes it easier to engage violence and horror directly, but harder to interact with transhumans socially. People with the psychological chops to take full advantage of the transhuman possibilities should be more vulnerable to the downsides of it, and more likely to go fully exhuman. This could make playing a bioconservative a valid powergamey choice, because while you'd have a harder time resleeving or egocasting, you'd be more resistant to brainhacks or the exsurgent virus.

I don't like this idea. Its like saying to make a more powerful computer, you have to make it bigger. The last many decades goes against that trend where more powerful computers are overall better than previous generations. While supercomputers are powerful, old ones can be eclipsed in power by what you can put into a modern pocket calculator. Overall new computers are more powerful, smaller, work better, have better programs, etc. Technologies might have a rough starts, where you have to play games of trade off to get anything useful, but once they are on the road of constant development, they get better and better. I think that the sleeving and uploading technology in Eclipse Phase is past that rough start stage, so I think it would only be something like a 1% that can't both resleeve well and resist mental hacking well. I think there will be a time where transhuman minds (or posthuman) will be both be able to sleeve into anything with ease and will be immune to mind hacks (even from TITANs).

I think the sanity-stat trinity has potential, especially if there will be traits that make a character resistant to damage to a certain stat. I could see an AGI (or somewhat odd transhuman) that sees his/her body more as replaceable hardware than a real component of the self, making replacing, augmenting, or damaging the morph meaningless as long as the ego is the same at its core (I know that morphs do effect the mind too). As for "ground state" morph rules, I think that this will need some development. Can you change your "ground state" over time, such as an infugee learning to live as an infomorph after many years in simulspace? If so, how long does it take and can one either resist the change or help it along? Is there any accounting for the shape of the morph over the type (i.e. if an octopus uplift is used to octomorphs, is a human splicer biomorph or takko synth weirder)? There is the possibility for some weird mental attachments, too. I know some guys who would probably feel more like themselves in a male-pattern synthmorph or worker-pod than a very-much human female morph. What makes you, you? Morph-specific stats are a must! Even if you have no idea what you're doing, a fully grown male gorilla has a great deal of strength. This isn't even mentioning the power a military synth might have. @Anarchitect: I dislike having too many trade-offs for sanity-stats, especially anything that makes augmentation and resleeving inherently unhealthy. Unlike certain other systems, like Shadowrun, EP specifically lacks "humanity" mechanics signifying a loss of "humanity" caused by augmentation. Body-modification shouldn't doesn't make you into a monster. Technophobia shouldn't be a defense from mind-hacking either. Heck, someone who has had their mind modified before might be better able to tell when it has been tampered with than one who has no experience would lead him to doubt that the voice in his head is his.

@ Anarchitect I don't agree with your gaming philosophy. I'm not sure if I quite get what you are saying about needing stats that are sometimes good, sometimes bad. My best guess is what you are asking for is what happens in games like D&D for classes (I'm thinking 3.x editions). Classes such as Wizard or Fighter is very optimized for specific tasks, but are poor in others. You can't change the fact that a Wizard is a very poor fighter, and that a Fighter can't cast spells. Multi-classing does not make you good in both fields, only average in both fields. A Wizard caught in melee and a Fighter subject to a charm spell will not function well. I don't like such systems as they tend to be inflexible in terms of how you are shown to be good at some things and bad at others. I came to like point buy systems as they gave you greater to potential to customize characters. You can create characters that are not stereotypes (or at least try to avoid dumb fighters, frail wizards tropes). You can better define how characters work and how they don't. What sort of perks you get of point buy systems are usually dependent on the system itself. An example is BESM. It was one of those systems that tried to make it possible to make any anime an RPG, or make an original anime themed RPG by picking what ever themes you wanted. Unfortunately, because it tried to do everything, it was too easy to spread yourself thin as there were a great many temptations to spend points on. This made it possible to make builds worse than Fighter will low strength, dexterity, and constitution. I nowadays tend to think of games like D&D as RPGs with training wheels, as they make it difficult to make crippling builds. A Fighter class has HP, attack bonuses, fort save bonuses, bonus feats, and proficiency with a lot of weapons, armors, and shields. By picking a Fighter class, you are guaranteed to be good at fighting. Despite the risks of fumbling a character with a point buy system, I still prefer them. I would hate to lose flexibility in trying to make something else work. I also like being able to say how my characters are bad instead of automatically saying that you are good something so you are therefore are bad at something else. It takes some practice to avoid making bad builds, but it is something that can be mastered. ---- Also, I like the Jovians because they show that characters and factions can exist that might not do well in the long run. I don't want to change the rules to make them balanced with everyone else when their decisions might actually be terrible. I don't think they'll last if they stick to their principles and try to compete with the rest of transhumanity on their terms. I think they will have to change their principles, become hypocrites (doing what they say other shouldn't do and make such acts deniable able or blamable on others), or try to exterminate everyone else before they become too powerful. I think if they fail to do any of these, they will in time become overwhelmed by those who have advanced much further than they have.

Why i think it's interesting to have sometimes good, sometimes bad stats. 1. I think certain traits are not universally good or bad, but depend on the circumstances. Let's take size as an example. Being large is an advantage when you want to toss around some NPCs, but it's a disadvantage when you need to crawl through an air duct. One way to handle this is to have a "large" trait that gives you appropriate bonus or penalties. Another way to handle that would be a size stat, that is added when advantageous, and subtracted when it's hindering. 2. You can't always reasonably separate the benefits from the drawbacks. You couldn't make a character who got the large size bonus when grappling, but the small size bonus when crawling, no matter how many character points you have to spend. This makes setting the value on a mixed stat meaningfully different than allocating limited points, even if you wound up with the same set of bonuses and penalties. 2a: Allowing players greater freedom to "choose what they're bad at" tends to result in them players choosing to be good at something that comes up a lot, and bad at something that doesn't. When the game designer links your bonuses and penalties to the same trait, it's easier to make sure that what's lost is actually equivalent to what's gained. It also means that since a player can't just be good at everything they want, and bad at stuff they don't care about, they have to make meaningful decisions instead of no-brainers. 3. Set up properly, a mixed stat creates roles for differing values along it's slider. Either extreme is specialized, and the middle ground is a jack of all trades. The large character is probably specialized in grappling, the small character in infiltration, and the medium character can meaningfully participate in both. Why I think it's interesting to model sanity and it's application to morphology this way: 1. As the setting stands right now, there is very little reason NOT to get as weird as possible. The advantages offered by extreme transhumanism are too great. The only thing keeping people in flats or splicers competitive in this environment is that the X-threats are typically several orders of magnitude more powerful than any transhuman. 2. By the setting information, the majority of people have reservations about extreme transhumanism. People are uneasy about forking, sleeving synthmorphs, and a variety of other things. The setting gains more verisimillitude if there's a valid reason for those concerns, instead of just being a form of fantastic racism. 3. There is already support for the concept of dehumanization in setting: There are posthumans, exhumans, and singularity seekers. These are people who have either modified themselves so much that they no longer self-identify as humans, or seek to do so. However, in many cases the things they've done to change themselves are no more extreme than what some of the players will do with their characters. How is a Neurode fundamentally less transhuman than a swarmanoid? If we're going to overhaul the rules on sanity and self-image, this is the question that I feel needs to be answered by the new mechanics. How far can you push the transhuman envelope before you no longer consider yourself human? 4. I think having your "integration stat" be a slider is more interesting than having it be a resource that gets depleted. Let's make our comparison to an "essence" stat that's depleteable. In this case, every mod you get makes you less human, and it's right there on your sheet. You're penalized and judged for getting heavy modification, which isn't very fun in a system where pretty much everyone is augmented. It's fundamentally anti-transhumanist. On the other hand, my idea for an integration stat is a slider. Having different values on this slider doesn't make you less transhuman. Instead, it changes what kinds of mental trauma you are more vulnerable to. At one end of the scale, your self image is fixed and inflexible. You'll be more vulnerable to trauma from body horror, and you'll find it harder to sleeve anything but your birth morph. But you'll also have an easier time resisting mental hacks intended to change your personality, because you're so damn inflexible. On the other end of the scale, your self image is malleable. You'll find it really easy to take advantage of weirder augmentations and morphs, because you can readily adapt to the changes in your self. On the other hand, you're more vulnerable to trauma and disorders that make you feel detached or less human, for precisely the same reason. Note that mental trauma can still lead to insanity and dehumanization for both characters, it just takes different stimuli to do so. Most transhumans will set their slider somewhere in the middle, because they want to take some advantage of transhuman tech without stress, but also don't want to go nuts the first time they encounter a Basilisk hack. In this system, setting your value anywhere along that slider is a valid character choice. Thus we don't mechanically stigmatize any character archetype, instead giving each a niche. This leads to more variety in character types, which allows greater exploration of the setting through different viewpoints. It would be boring if you could be good at resisting all trauma across the board. Because then you'd just do that, and all the variety would leak out of character design.

Not just a roleplaying difference. In a setting with a sanity stat, That difference is expressible as a mechanic. If sleeving in a synthmorph is something that baseline transhumans suffer doing, it will inflict stress and lower lucidity. Long term it will cause trauma. AGI's might have the reverse problem sleeving a biomorph. Neo-dolphins would suffer if sleeving a humanoid shape instead of a cetacean shape. And making it have mechanical effect instead of just a roleplaying concern is a better solution, because it makes players deal with that difference instead of being able to blow it off when it might hinder them. Frankly, I think every character should have the "right at home" trait for a specific type of morph, based on their background. Everyone was born and raised as something.

@Anarchitect: I think one of the weird things about your proposed system is the example of the "inflexible self-image"/bioconservative and the "flexible self-image"/body-hopper. The this is, fanatics can be surprisingly easy to manipulate; all the levers are clearly marked and static. A more flexible mind is a moving target. I might just be against making every bio-conservative bigot, who fears so much as a blood transfusion "changing" them, automatically more resilient to mental manipulation than someone who embraces life-saving technology. As for the question of when someone stops self-identifying as "human" (a statement that ignores other sapients like uplifts and AGIs), I don't think that any physical form is going to throw a well-adjusted person over the edge. One who already has self-image issues or has some desire or belief that would redefine there humanity might do it. Additionally, extreme mental augmentations (like experimental, crazy crap) might also push someone past that threshold.

Personally, I would tie the continuity tests to time and small penalties to skill tests. And when you are in an "alien" morph, it is already being taken into account by the difficulty modifiers, so... Anyway, the point is that synthmorphs are either used for cheap & fast bodies, or for combat ones. While biomorphs are for living or (more subtle) combat situations. So, are biomorphs inferior to synthmorphs? It depends. Different situations call for different tools, and a morph is a glorified tool. In a battlefield, a sytnhmorph is vastly superior in physical terms... unless hacked. In a city, a biomorph is more discreet than any synthmorph... but for cases (or synthmorphs disguised as cases!), at least in the slums. etc... In general, physical threats gives the edge to synthmorphs (as it should be, The Flesh is Weak), but anything social is more partial to biomorphs for a lot of reasons, the most relevant being that every human-based conscience is wired for body language, specially the one coming from facial expresions (something synthmorphs don't seem very adept at). Considering there is a complete economy centered around social standing, and a group skillset and several important values, I'd say Biomorphs are the Social option. And yes, there is always the oddity. And for soldiers using biomophs in combat, well, sometimes people is better using the subpar tools they used their whole life than trying to do stuff with a new set of tools they are not familiar with.