Over in another thread, Jack Graham made [url=http://eclipsephase.com/comment/38185#comment-38185] This Post [/url], and I have been unable to get the idea out of my head since. I've decided to start a different thread so that I'm not (further) derailing the theme of the initial thread.
It seems to me that with things like integration, alienation and continuity, what we're really talking about is identity. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be ME? These are the existential questions characters deal with when interacting with the more transhuman elements of the setting. So my idea at the moment is to replace Lucidity as mental HP with a different stat, Identity.
Instead of being bought with character points or based on other aptitudes, Everyone starts out with the same number of identity points. However, you don't just have an Identity stat and you're done. You have to place your identity points into 3 containers: Body, Mind, and Social. You split your ID points any way you want to in those 3 pools, with the caveat that you must put at 1 point in each.
Basically what we're asking here, is in a world where you can swap bodies, edit memories, and make copies of yourself, what does your character consider to be their "Self?" How many points you put in each container shows how attached your character is to that thing as their concept of self. Lets say you get 100 ID points to start with, and you have allocate them in lots of 5. I like this, because there's no way to put and even number in each pool: you have to have strengths and weaknesses.
Body-Identity is pretty obvious: It's how much you think of your body as your self. This doesn't necessarily mean your current body, though. It does mean you find value and self-worth in your physicality.
Mental-Identity is similarly obvious: It's how much you think of your mind as being your self. Having a high Mind-identity means you find self-worth in your ideas and remembered experiences.
Social-Identity probably needs a bit more explanation: It's how much self-identity comes from your social relationships. In other words, from your community and your place within it. High Social-Identity means finding value and self-worth in being part of a group, and being valued and appreciated by others.
So you take your initial amount of ID points, and put them in these three containers. What does it mean?
Where you place your identity is both your strength and your weakness. Each type of identity has certain types of metal stress associated with it. When you take stress from one of these sources, you lose ID points from the appropriate pool. In this way, having more ID points in a pool makes you more resiliant. However, your strength is also your weakness: Because that area contains a certain amount of your sense of self, it is vulnerable. The more of your self is in that pool, the more vulnerable it is. Your current rating in a pool is applied as a penalty to stress checks from trauma targeting that pool. Thus as you take damage to your identity, you come closer to madness but also become less vulnerable to further stress. If any of your Identity pools reach zero, you've gone of the deep end, with each pool having unique ways of going mad. Lose your ID bad enough, and you stop being the person you thought you were. You may stop being a person at all.
Body-identity Trauma is caused by failed integration tests, extreme pain or injury, and other types of body horror.
Mind-identity Trauma is caused by continuity failures, death, mental control, forking, and possibly by having a closely held belief convincingly challenged.
Social-identity Trauma is caused by betrayal, large Rep-loss, abandonment, ostracization, or watching people you care about or identify with suffer.
Healing Identity loss still done with psychotherapy. However, when you regain lost identity, you do not have to put in back in the same pool you lost it from. Maybe your sense of body-as-self suffers a mortal blow when your favorite morph gets destroyed, so you rebuild a new sense of self around your friends. Or maybe having someone fork your ego causes you to put more self-identity into being in your original morph as proof you're the "real" you. In any case, you can't shift ID points between pools, but when you suffer identity loss, it's an opportunity to redefine yourself as well.
What do people think?
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Multi-stat sanity system hack.
Tue, 2013-08-13 23:27
#1
Anarchitect
Multi-stat sanity system hack.
Wed, 2013-08-14 02:32
#2
DivineWrath
Hold on! Explain this to me.
Hold on! Explain this to me. How does a person stop being a person? How can this be done with identity loss? What does it mean for you to be a person, and how can you lose it? This is not a simple topic. There have many different attempts to answer this philosophical question. Some modern day movements try to define something as a person the moment an egg is fertilized within a woman, while a philosopher (whose name eludes me at the moment) had defined it as a quality that one has when it is able to determine between the aught (a simpler explanation being able to determine between right and wrong).
I happen to ask this question because it appears that you would not consider a TITAN a person, while I would. I think how you define person hood and similar qualities might lead to significant differences in the rules made regarding identity and sanity.
Wed, 2013-08-14 09:58
#3
Anarchitect
Great Question!
Great Question!
In philisophical terms, I think a person in eclipse phase would be defined as a sapient Ego capable of understanding and being understood by transhumans. This is a bit circular, because of course presumes that transhumans are people, but I think it's as best as we get. Now I want to emphasize that this isn't a judgement. it doesn't inherently presume that things that aren't people are worth less than things that are, though obviously some characters would take that stance. It's just a categorization.
In game terms, It's the point at which you are no longer a playable character.
I see three ways this could go down. The first is "Down and Out." Humans might go non-responsive. Uplifts might go atavistic. AGI's might edit out their higher brain functions and become a non-sapient expert system. In other words, become less than a person. The second is "Up and out." Through whatever means, you've outgrown the human perspective. Perhaps you've become a self-improving seed AI, or maybe a giant habitat made of meat. You're more than a person now. The last is "Over and out." You're identity has been too compromised, and you commit suicide. In all 3 cases, it's restore from backup time. I've racked my brain about what a lateral shift would look like, but I can't come up with anything that would be on the same level as a person, and yet not be one.
Does that answer your question satisfactorily? More importantly, what would you change?
Wed, 2013-08-14 18:20
#4
Madwand
Hmm. I don't like it. Both
Hmm. I don't like it. Both ends of the pool have different mechanics that both mean "you are harder to damage in this way", so I don't really know what an extreme value really means in either direction.
If someone doesn't care much about the kind of body they are using (have a low body-identity) why would they care about body-identity trauma? If the system does support that mechanically, why would I ever have a high stat? I don't get how this system is supposed to work.
Wed, 2013-08-14 19:58
#5
Anarchitect
Well, my idea is that
Well, my idea is that identity gets gradually worn away, and when it's gone your ego is trashed. On the other hand, the more of your self identity you have invested in a particular thing, the more vulnerable you are there. That's the design goal. Do you think that's an interesting concept?
I agree that the mechanic is a bit wonky though. Now having a low value in a particular ID pool doesn't make you immune to that kind of trauma. You can still fail stress checks and lose ID even if you aren't taking a huge penalty, and since you have such a low value that one failed stress check may be what puts you over the deep end. So how it's supposed to work is you take trauma, and while you become more desensitized to it, you also become more unstable. You're basically trading health for resistance, "HP" for "Armor."
I think that works, but I need to set my difficulties so that the resistance effect isn't overwhelming or irrelevant. I'll need to playtest to really know. I'll also be thinking of other mechanics that support the design goal, and if anyone else has an idea for mechanics that do that, I'd love to hear them.
Thu, 2013-08-15 04:13
#6
Xagroth
Mmmm... Frankly, I don't
Mmmm... Frankly, I don't really understand all this. Let's make it simple: isn't this hack a way to force players to loss their egos faster?
Right now, per RAW, there are a few ways to lose the ego:
- No backup / cortical stack (usually limited to Jovians)
- Corrupted backup, dead ego (egonapping might go around this...)
- Loss of Lucidity, without the possibility of a rollback
- Titan infection that corrupts the ego and the backups
So, with this system of three different "SANity" meters, we have to add
- Being in a morph different from your "birth suit". The more different, the faster.
- Running an alter ego or different persona (with a different set of social contacts).
So you limit and discourage bodysurfing and false identities...
Frankly, I believe the best way to "track" the differences is the single Lucidity score and the penalties for using a body when you fail the integration test. Essentially, there is a point where the game stops being funny, and I think adding too much "madness threat" does exactly that... or worse, some players will go wild, rebelling against this by embracing a crazy character.
The game is pretty clear: "your mind is software". This makes the morph just like an armor in the old D&D, so giving penalties for switching the gear, or changing the group of people you talk to... well...
Thu, 2013-08-15 04:36
#7
Smokeskin
DivineWrath wrote:Hold on!
I think you're confusing the issue by talking about philosophical ideas of personhood rather than the psychological issues, which are much more straightforward and tangible.
Take for example you lose your forearm in an accident and gets an arm transplant. Philosophically and rationally, everyone would agree with that. However, actual arm transplant patients often get huge psychological issues with feelings of the arm "not being their own" to the point where they stop taking the anti-rejection drugs and lose the transplant.
Thu, 2013-08-15 04:45
#8
Smokeskin
I haven't really delved into
I haven't really delved into the mechanics of it, but it seems a good thing to do - provided that this is something you really want to explore as a major theme in the campaign AND that the campaign is geared towards it.
I'm reminded of undercover cop movies with a theme of the protagonist having to deal with a changing personality, alienation from his real family and such.
So what do you want? Firewall agents egocasting around the system, new bodies, fake identities, strange social circles to infiltrate, and they're cool cats taking using all the tools they have to get a win for the good guys. Use the standard system. If you want to do the same, but it is a horrible and stressful and times are desperate so it has to be done, then such a system could be good.
Thu, 2013-08-15 09:41
#9
Anarchitect
Now we're getting somewhere.
Xagroth: As a hack, it does add a new way to lose your ego. Whether it's faster or not, I'm not sure. On the one hand, you have 3 versions of lucidity. If any of them go down, you go down, but you also spread trauma out among them so it would actually be more resilient unless the traumas were very targeted to your weakness.
Smokeskin: You get it. I do want to have the characters egocast around, use new bodies, fake ID, infiltrate weird societies, and face terrifying exsurgents, but I don't want them to be cool cats about it. Eclipse phase has technologies that fundamentally challenge every concept of the self humans have, and yet the self is all anyone really HAS. Thus the main threat every character faces isn't losing a morph or a fork, but losing themselves.
The reason I'm making this hack has nothing to do with character resilience. What I'm trying to accomplish is making the rules for mental stress more mechanically interesting. This is because I believe that a game telegraphs it's intentions about what's important by the amount of attention the rules require on any topic. If a game has 10 pages on hacking and 34 pages on combat, then it's a game about combat and not hacking, no matter how the setting is presented. In Eclipse phase's case, I feel like the setting theme is Existential risk and Existential angst. However, the greatest mechanical weight in the game, based on page count, seems to be "check out all these cool future gadgets, and all the different bodies you can sleeve!" Character creation advice in transhuman says "firewall wants you for your skills," but picking your skills is way less interesting than adding augmentations to a morph. That's a problem, and I'd like designing your ego to be as complicated, interesting, and fun as designing your morph.
So: Specific mechanics. I want the different self-identity tracks to be conflicted stats. I want having a high ID in an area to be benificial, but also make your vulnerable. What's weird right now is that the only benefit of having high ID is that you have more buffer between you and insanity, which goes directly against the vulnerability thing.
What occurs to me is that someone with a high ID in one area is more likely to be skilled in that area, because it matters to them. Someone with high Body-ID is very likely to be very physically skilled. Someone with a high Mental-ID is more likely to be highly educated. Someone with high Social-ID is more likely to be at the center of social circles.
Maybe your ID scores set your attribute maximums? REF, COO, and SOM would be limited by your Body-ID. INT and COG would be limited by Mental-ID. SAV is limited by Social-ID, and your rep score is limited to 3x your social ID. And if ID loss to trauma drops your cap below your current score, you're limited to the lower bound until you get some therapy.
Thu, 2013-08-15 13:11
#10
Xagroth
Anarchitect, my main point is
Anarchitect, my main point is that this hack might become an obstacle for the game, in terms of fluidity and player's involvement. One of the main selling points EP has for a player is that it is really hard for your toon to die, regadless of how the situation develops. Add more and more ways to loose the toon, and you will see this safety net disspear.
Also, checking three different SAN values can be confusing, because first you have to know which one to look at, and then go with it. Players can do this faster than the GM (they only have one character to worry about), but the GM might find himself in a situation where he has just said a player he lost his toon, since you miscalculated the damage or got confused because instead of tracking two values (physical health and mental health) you had to track four for each player character.
As for the "rulebook emphasis" observation you make, I'd like to disagree. Following that reasoning, EP would be about gear (specially morphs), since character creation gets the lion's share when you look at all the rulebooks published. Not to mention, Call of Cthulhu (at least my 5.5 edition) has the biggest part devoted to magic and NPC cast (from humans... to Azatoth), yet it's not a game about magic and a bestiary. Oh, and D&D (3.5 at least) had a whole book only for creatures, while the player's book covered a lot of situations and the GM's one was also varied.
Yes, it can give you a hint about what the game wants to focus itself, but I'd say that comes more from the GM.
Thu, 2013-08-15 16:26
#11
DivineWrath
@ Smokeskin
@ Smokeskin
Maybe you're right. I might be distracting things. I haven't been able to figure out how to continue my point, or figure out which philosopher I was talking about. I'll try to finish my point quickly, and worry about the deep philosophical details of person hood to another thread.
My big concern was, that Anarchitect and I seem to have different opinions on sanity, person hood, and other stuff. Let me skip what him or I, may or may not think (and avoid possible arguments of each other possibly miss representing each other). I'll use example people instead.
----
Lets assume that 2 people were identical except for 1 detail. One person (lets call him person A) thinks that you could only change so much, in regards to alterations to mind and body, before you went insane or otherwise stopped being nice to human society. The other person (lets call him person B) thinks that you could change a great deal and yet remain a helpful member of society. Any sanity rule system that is made by person A will probably rule in an upper limit to how much one can be changed before that person is damaged for good. Person B however, might make rules that enable someone to make it all the way to seed AI status without going bonkers.
Thu, 2013-08-15 17:10
#12
Anarchitect
Rule emphasis-wise, I would
Rule emphasis-wise, I would argue that to some degree, that is what those games wind up being about. Though in practice- if only the GM has to worry about, then it tends to have less impact. In any case, I'd agree that the GM has more influence than the rules, but that still means the rules are the game designer's best tool for directing focus.
Losing your Toon: It's still nearly impossible to lose your toon. Did you go crazy? Revert to backup. Still, you aren't wrong about my intention to give a little more threat of being ended. I think that easy backups and resleeves can be boring, feeling more like Paranoia than CoC.
But focusing too much on the point of losing and rebooting your toon is missing the best part. The best games are fun even when you're losing. If you can make failure as entertaining as success, then players are free to take risks instead of being cautious, and GMs are free to let the players fail instead of fudging roles or railroading. So how can we make Losing My Mind more interesting and fun?
Point taken on the multi-resource critique. I'll think very hard about whether what I feel I'm getting out of this is worth the added complexity. I'll also try to think of simpler ways to meet the goals. If ID ratings were just conflicted sliders setting your attribute maximums and resistance to traumas, all actual damage could still go to one Lucidity rating. But then I lose the effect of having your maximums decrease as you withdraw due to trauma, which I kinda like. I want the ID stats to shift around during play in response to trauma and changing self-identity.
Divine Wrath: I think the two people in your post actually agree even more than you think. Both would agree that there is a line between things that are people, and things that aren't. And they'd almost certainly agree it's possible for a thing which is a person to stop being a person (Because corpses). I think the only difference they have is where they draw that line.
So where would you draw the line? That's not a facetious question, I'm interested and open to changing my mind, if I think it results in cool gameplay.
My stance is: I think the setting fluff has set some precedence for what's a transhuman and what's not, and how a transhuman mind might stop being transhuman. AGI are transhumans, for example, but Titans and Prometheans are not. Exhumans have modified themselves so much they aren't transhumans anymore. Firewall worries that the solarians are slowly becoming exhumans, albeit peaceful ones. Exsurgents are definitely no longer transhuman. On the flip side, regular octopi are not transhuman, but uplifted ones are. These are the guidelines I'm using to determine where the line lays for rules purposes.
And while the lines may be terribly muddied in setting, being the center of a lot of philisophical debate, thankfully from a rules perspective we can be remarkably clear. The line is when something is no longer a playable character. You cannot play an Exhuman, an exsurgent, a seed AI, an alien, or a non-uplifted animal. You can play characters on the path to becoming those things, but if/when you cross the line, you stop being a player character.
Fri, 2013-08-16 09:55
#13
Smokeskin
DivineWrath wrote:
But those are just opinions.
When they started doing limb transplants, my thought on that was "great for them, that must be such a gift to get functional hands back". It is hard to imagine otherwise. The reality however has been that a large percentage get major psychological issues from it and end up losing their new limbs because of it. That is a factual finding about the human psyche rather than just an opinion, and I don't think there was any way to know that before the actual experiment was done.
With all the stuff in EP, and what psychosurgery can and can't do, I don't think there's any way to know beforehand how people will react to it. And that gives developers and house ruling GMs the freedom to pick something that is both realistic and interesting for their campaign.
Fri, 2013-08-16 10:07
#14
Smokeskin
Anarchitect wrote:
I wouldn't worry about it. Imo you should only use such a system if the players agree on that this is something they want to be a major theme in the campaign. And if they want it to be a major part of the campaign, they'll want the resolution to model it in interesting ways and they'll want to take the time to learn it.
So I'd worry more about clunkiness than complexity. For example, if your stats change a lot and you use them as aptitude maximums, that could be a lot of extra checking and recalculating skills - that takes time and is annoying. Some modifier to checks, or a chance for free Moxie or regaining Moxie for certain relevant actions, that could be more fluid in play.
Fri, 2013-08-16 13:40
#15
Anarchitect
I swear I made a post here.
But it's been 30 minutes so...
Clunkiness: Yes. The easiest way to handle this during play would be that if ID drops below a linked Aptitude, then you apply the difference as a penalty to all checks using that aptitude. To make this easier I'd put a little "Current penalty" box next to each aptitude on the character sheet. This would bring home that you don't lose the points you put in that aptitude, either. It's a temporary effect.
The easiest option during play would be for the ID score to be a bonus on some checks, a Penalty on others. But this would change the core mechanic to (Aptitude + skill) + morph bonus + ID score, and every difficulty would have to be adjusted to match. It's clean in play, dirty in implimentation.
(Personally, I have a house rule that adds aptitude on the back end instead of the front end: Skills are rated between 0 and 60, soft cap at 40, and in play you roll skill + aptitude. I do this to remove the weird mechanical difference between ego aptitudes and morph aptitude bonuses. with this house rule, adjusting aptitude on the fly is much easier too.)
I think if I was building a system from the ground up instead of modding, I'd probably just have your ID points BE your aptitudes.
Fri, 2013-08-16 21:56
#16
King Shere
Sorry to nitpick
Regarding "loosing your toon"There some additional things that would cause it. They can be bottle up to: The ingame-character is changed in a way that its player no longer desire to play it (or causes that effect to other players or Gamemaster) or play the game with the rest of the players. Sometimes killing the campaign.
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Plutarch
Sat, 2013-08-17 11:06
#17
Anarchitect
That's a fundamental issue in
That's a fundamental issue in any sanity system, including the one that's in the game now. So you do the same thing you'd do any other time you "lose your toon:" Revert to backup.