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Sane lost generation.

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Mon, 2013-12-09 00:48

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

Sane lost generation.

Sane lost generation. One of my players is playing a member of the lost with level 2 psi. That is 3 disorders. 2 from exposure to exurgant, one from the fallout of the future program, I ruled out that character taking any more. Another character in the group is an A grade psychosurgeon and psychologist. By the rules for treating insanity he could get the first character fixed up to having no disorders with 120 hours of successful work. He will be successful in the vast majority of cases. Has access to maximum time reduction due to speed and mental speed (it is a medical procedure so half effect for this) and being an AGI (turns out this is no rules impediment to being a psychologist) is not shy about using accelerated simulspace. Theoretically he could have all 3 conditions in full submission with no detectable signs or symptoms within an hour real time. Knowing the players in question it won’t play out like that. It takes a lot of trust to let somebody poke around in your brain, and who wants to experience 60 straight hours of therapy (would that even work as well as 60 days with a 1 hour session each day, I am guessing not) but I would be surprised if no attempt was made to treat the character. Are there any restrictions in the rules that I missed applying to this situation? What restrictions would you put on beyond those in the rules? My initial inclination is to declare the 2 disorders from taking the psi trait untreatable. The basis for the condition is unlike naturally occurring disorders, little work has been done on it and what work there is not publicly available, they do still impose penalties on attempts to treat other mental conditions. The disorder originating from the lost background is treatable normally. How reasonable dose that policy sound to others?

Mon, 2013-12-09 01:01

bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture

Good policy, and I'd add that

Good policy, and I'd add that it only works if the Lost PC pays the Rez Points necessary buy off the negative trait. And, on top of that, the disorders from async abilities are essentially untreatable--they stem from the async abilities, and, so long as the character is an async, they will have those disorders. You could treat the symptom (the disorders), but not the cause (the virus), and so long as the cause exists, the symptoms will always return.

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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

Wed, 2013-12-11 11:00

King Shere King Shere's picture

I can see the devil walking next to me.

Let me get this straight. Players put a AGI inside a accelerated simulspace - where it is then exposed to a carrier of a "benign" virus strain... Doesn't this look like excellent recipe for disaster? Even if it would work, outsiders wouldn't be certain. And now view both as infected. In some settings I would expect that facility and its surrounding area being nuked from orbit (just to make sure) -and the "deceased" reverted to backups (if they had any). . If only due to pragmatic fall paranoia, by organizations (like Firewall) concerned with potential repeats of the fall.

Quote:
Red Queen: This long after infection, there was no guarantee it would work. Rain: But there's a chance... right? Red Queen: I don't deal in chance. Resident Evil (2002)

—

[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i] Plutarch

Wed, 2013-12-11 11:41

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

you do realize that AGIs and

you do realize that AGIs and asinks share time in accelerated simulspace just about every day right. there are some fairly large accelerated simulspaces around and nether type are rare enough that they wont interact. and Wats-MacLoud isn't just benign, it has also been determined to be unable to infect inorganic systems, and not be infectious from an established asink. if they where going to be that paranoid AGIs would be unplayable. "you successfully fought of a titan robot, restore from backup", "faced a exurgent threat, restore from backup", each of these is far more likely to result in difficult to detect infection, weather the PC is an AGI or not. in any case, it hast harpooned yet. the asink hasn't even joined the party yet i just noticed there was no rules reason why it wouldn't work and wanted to work out how to deal with it. the fact that he is an AGI and thus suspect in many circles will frequently reduce the chance people let him play with there brains but in the outer system (except Jupiter) AGIs are usually accepted as people, even firewall usually accepts them if they stay within reasonable cognitive limits (speed 4, mental speed 2 and *60 simulspace apparently counts as transhuman infomorfs push those limits often enough themselves)

Thu, 2013-12-12 00:14

jackgraham jackgraham's picture

Yup, disorders come from

Yup, disorders come from being an async. That said, nothing's to stop you making it a major plot point in your campaign. If your async & psychosurgeon go on a quest to figure out how to treat asyncs and really have to work for it, why not? Psi is not so powerful that an async who overcame some or even all of their disorders over time would break the game. Also, don't forget that time spent as an infomorph during treatment could cause the async to suffer morph fever until they're back in a bio body. If time acceleration was being used, I'd count subjective time, not real time, before the infomorph async feels the effects.

—

J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth! http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham

Thu, 2013-12-12 03:03

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

i was under the impression

i was under the impression that you could enter simulspace without resorting to an info morph. your ego continues to run on your meat brain but the inputs you experience are mapped from the simulspace. like in the matrix when you jack in your meat body is still vitally important and if somebody kills it you just fall over. EP241 under accessing simulspaces appears to confirm my interpretation specifically mentioning time dilation and completely failing to address how your pore meat brain manages to follow what is going on in a 60x simulspace.

Sat, 2013-12-14 09:20

Smokeskin

The ease of treating

The ease of treating disorders in EP has always struck me as unrealistic, and imbalanced where players have gained CPs from taking them.

Sun, 2013-12-15 20:49

easl

bibliophile20 wrote:Good

bibliophile20 wrote:
Good policy, and I'd add that it only works if the Lost PC pays the Rez Points necessary buy off the negative trait.

I agree with the other posters below that, according to setting, these traits are unfixable. However, I err more on the side of player fun than truth to setting. If someone wanted to play a psych in my game with no derangement, I'd let them buy it off and that'd be it. As with fixing them in game, I find that kind of cheating unless points are payed. Like bibiophile, I'd make them pay for it and use the psychosurgery as the reason why it works.

Mon, 2013-12-16 07:55

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

i am hesitant about the price

i am hesitant about the price to fix floors. i have seen players choose serious floors in other games. have an in character goal of fixing them expecting it to be a major undertaking that may not even happen withing the campaign time frame. and then in the first couple of sessions the solution becomes available. you cant pass up the opportunity in character but your next several sessions worth of XP now go to buying of the floor you had been using to make the character interesting. my read on the player of the asinc is that he is in no hurry to become even a little bit more sane. in character he probably wouldn't mind the flashbacks going away (PTSD) so if he comes to trust the other character not to fuck up his brain why would he not get rid of it. the exurgent induced schizophrenia is less likely to receive treatment. however he may recommend others seek treatment for the delusion that there is not in fact a giant talking hamster following him around.

Tue, 2013-12-17 19:56

#10

jackgraham jackgraham's picture

See p. 229 of Core.

See p. 229 of Core. Psychosurgery normally requires that the psychosurgeon work on an uploaded consciousness. So no, normally simulspace doesn't require uploading. If you're playing a game, you experience things through a simulmorph, but you're not truly sleeved in it. It's more like experiencing an XP recording. But to have psychosurgery done on you, you _do_ need to be an uploaded mind, which means an async is potentially vulnerable to morph fever. Anyway, that's a tangent. Back to the more interesting question, how you run this is going to be subject to how much people in your group enjoy role-playing a disadvantage. One possibility for GMs who want some middle ground is to impose consequences on getting rid of a disorder with psychosurgery. Sure, you no longer have PTSD, but getting rid of your triggers involved erasing so many memories that chunks of your past, or of your current life as a Firewall agent, are just not there anymore. That kind of thing.

—

J A C K G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth! http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham