One of my players came to me with a weird request, he wants to program himself a muse.
I only have the corebook and found no guidelines for it, and am a bit lost on how to regulate it.
I ask the more experienced members, are there official mechanics/limitations for the programming of a MUSE or similar? if not, what do you guys think the limitations should be, that is to say how many muse skills, (I am thinking of limit the programmable skills of the muse to things he knows very well, 60 and up, at least and probably will take a lot of time)
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Programing a Muse
Fri, 2014-01-17 13:27
#1
Chaos Blade
Programing a Muse
Fri, 2014-01-17 14:21
#2
Quincey Forder
"Use the Fork, Homer!"
Aside from that bad pun straight out of a Simpson episode, why wouldn't he just make a fork of himself, and prune it to his heart content with psychosurgery?
Or take a KAOS AI and use profession: programmer and Psychosurgery skills to make it into a muse
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Fri, 2014-01-17 17:14
#3
Chaos Blade
profit?
Mayhaps he wants to sell the result? mind you we are all new to EP, so we are a bit in the dark regarding options and limits, then again this player has a talent for finding the exploits in the systems, so there is also that.
But I wouldn't rule out lucre, he needs to pay a hefty amount due to his character back-story to a third party, or maybe he wants something comparable to a KAOS AI and doesn't want to pay for it.
Still, it is in my nature of allowing the players to do foolhardy things, Schadenfreude is tastier that way
Fri, 2014-01-17 19:40
#4
Smokeskin
I'd say that programming a
I'd say that programming a muse is in no way a one man job. He needs to hire a huge team to develop one from scratch.
Also, ask him what it is about. Don't let players lead you into trouble.
Fri, 2014-01-17 22:46
#5
thezombiekat
i would expect programing a
i would expect programing a muse from scratch to be a task on the scale of writing a new operating system from scratch. your talking millions of man hours.
on the other hand he may not need to write it from scratch. if you create the muse by combining the appropriate skill softs with an open source generic AI shell and your choice of interface personality modules you could have the job done in hundreds of man hours, with a 60 times simulspace and a modest amount of speed/mental speed you could be done in hours real time. this gives you complete customizability provided you can get the skillsofts you need and you can work with existing personality modules. (there are so many you probably cant think of a personality trait that is missing)
at the least extreme you could start with a standard of the shelf muse and tweak its customization settings, and possibly adding additional skill softs. probably within 1 man hour. even this allows a very wide set of possibilities.
what option is used depends on resources and the reason for the project. talk to the player about what he wants to achieve my writing there own muse.
if he is doing it to gain money or rep download trans-human. it has rules for working a job to earn money or donating time and skill to earn rep during down time. tell him he can join a programing group working on writing a muse as a description of his actions that are mechanically represented by those rules. after a suitable time in game give him a free copy of the muse he helped write.
if he is doing it for the bragging rights "i am so leet i programed my on muse" then he should use the second method i mentioned. that is comparable to building your own Linux system including a custom kernel assembled mostly from code already in use within the community with minor tweaks. more time could be committed to increase the amount of custom code and if this code is made public it could also be rewarded with rep according to the rules in trans human.
if he is paranoid about the security of his muse (the manufacturer might have it secretly sening them information) then he should also use the second method. being shore to take extra time to examine the components used for security vulnerabilities, sourcing the components from different small time producers in different regions and integrating them with an elite custom firewall of his own design using the rules on the side bar on p247 of the main book.