The potential for min-maxing is built into the system. You can't remove it without rewriting everything from the ground up, so don't bother. Instead, I'd try this: 1) Explain to your players that they can make uber-powered characters, but in this setting they will never be too weak, so take the opportunity to play CHARACTERS. 2) Your job is to make sure every character is useful somehow. It's easy to make a super character, and also a useless character, so take a hand in chargen and give out some extra points if you need to flesh someone out. 3) Recognize that this isn't D&D. Combat is only as a narrative break from the real plot. I know that's awful; I'm coming from Shadowrun. But this isn't a tactical game. My paradigm for it is it's a game of challenges. With that said ... 4) Combat needs to be a (thinking) challenge. Not difficult, just something they have to think about. Your enemies need to be diverse and smart. Running Continuity, the 'enemy' who has the highest kill count is the friendly ship AI, because he invites everyone to the medical bay for a briefing, then disconnects the bay and launches it into space. There are soooo many ways to kill people in Eclipse Phase, and bullets are so passe. 5) Police/militia does need to play a big role, but not how you're thinking. Your party is looking for an x-threat; something that threatens the survival of transhumanity. If that x-threat gets out, the team failed. If the police seize the x-threat as evidence, the team failed. If the team kills a ton of cops leaving a massive footprint which requires a containment team and a nuke detonation to clean up the evidence, the team failed. Now, is your ultimate trolling around in a reaper morph really going to be able to complete the job without the police dogging his every step? Will he be able to act with discretion, knowing that HIS messing up will result in all of these innocent people getting nuked by an erasure squad? With all that said, the character you need to be afraid of isn't the ultimate; it's the hacker. Keep an eye on that one.

Seconded on everyone who mentioned limits on morph/gear provisioning. For a single PC to solo the entire station, they'd have to be using a heavily customized morph and sick amounts of gear. So how did they get all that stuff out to middle of nowhere Trojans? Unless I accidentally wrote something about Casa Arturo being stocked with combat modified Remade morphs, which I'm pretty sure I didn't. ;) Be careful how you deal with this with this player, though. Sounds like they're really into the gear porn, and players who min/max a really sick combat gear/morph combo and then get shunted into a ruster with a medium pistol can get pretty damned sullen about it. It's often a good idea to warn players in advance that they should invest heavily in their egos, not in their bodies and gear. Letting them shuffle some of their gear points into ego-based but still combat-useful stuff like the Pain Tolerance trait might be diplomatic. Also: The builds on monsters, NPCs, and sample characters in the older books aren't as good as they could be from a power standpoint. We were still learning the system back then, too! If you compare the sample character in Core to those in TH, for example, the TH ones are waaaay tougher on average. If I were writing Glory now, I'd probably stat the mobs much more aggressively in the direction of upping sentinel body count. :)

I'm confused... Adaptive, you threw a PC into a situation where he had to be a one-man cleaner crew, because the rest of his team wasn't present or wasn't instantiated and basically got brain-fried. He [i]succeeded[/i], and you're... What? Upset that the party combat monster did exactly what he was built to do: that being to go nuts and kill shit? You would have preferred that he be mercilessly slaughtered because you threw him into an impossible situation and his backup evaporated like smoke for mostly OOC reasons? Even though part of his victory can only be attributed to the random number gods going down on him and giving you the finger simultaneously? Being upset that the combat monster can murder hella mooks is like being upset that the AGI hacker can breeze through most infosec setups like they aren't there, or like being upset that the social monkey can get a Jovian, a Scum, and an Ultimate to the negotiating table and convince them to join forces. There's a time for subtlety and stealth: that's when you're operating somewhere the authorities or what passes for them have basically limitless backup and the level of violence they can escalate to is grossly disproportionate to that the players are capable of fielding. Then there's the time to kick the door in and go Rambo, and the Song Cai Flower is the time to kick the door in and go Rambo. It sounds like he had one monster of a fight on his hands, too, but pulled it off because, well, he didn't really have much alternative.

easy there shadow. I am sure he is happy they were able to complete the adventure. he is just concerned that his difficulty curve is a flat plain rather than hill. he thinks a single gunman should have had a tougher time of things and that this one scenario is a foreshadow of things to come especially once the other combat monkey arrives

Min/maxing is a viable strategy, however in EP many first time players spend waaaaaaaay too much on their morphs+gear. I know in my first few character sketches I was thinking about going all out and cramming as much gear as possible until I realized that Firewall does not hire you for your hardware. The body is a shell. They can get better shells if that is why they wanted. They want PCs for their knowledge, talents, ideals and skill sets. Generally, 50 CP tops for blueprints and a morph (a bit more for a hacker due to the programs and AI). When someone hands you a sheet with a 100 CP morph+implants with wings, neurochem and all the whistles you respond: "So, what happens when you don't have your morph?" (you are a waste of flesh, that's what). Tell your players to focus on the soft side: skill numbers, specializations, skill softs, base attributes, blue prints, and programs/AI. You can take all of that with you wherever you go.

Adaptive Radiation wrote:

1. Biter ammo is going from low to moderate cost (1000 credits). 2. They're going to be going all over the system, so I'm hoping that will dissuade them from spending a lot on their morphs. I'm saying that Firewall will cover their morphs as long as the morph cost is under 50 CP, otherwise the PCs will be paying for the extra CP. They will also have to pay for extra implants. 3. Using police/anarchist militia more. 4. They're in the outer rim so Rep is going to speak a lot more than cash. I'm also going to have them do favors to maintain their rep. 5. Combat encounters are going to be a lot harder. 6. Look over their gear more carefully.

1. Why? To punish your player? Make him count his ammo. When he needs more, it takes time to fab. Have opponents that don't care about biter rounds (exsurgents made of a jelly that heal quickly from ballistics, armour that the biter rounds cannot read for their fragment algorithms). Don't do it all the time, but enough to get remind your PCs that their hammer won't work with every problem. 2. That is fair. I would decrease that to 40 CP including Low and Moderate implants, but I'm a meanie. 3. Why? 4. That's how it is out on the fringe. 5. Difficult and hard are different beasts (semantics, but indulge me). Run that same PC through the same Song Cai Flower with all the skills knocked up 10 points and the attributes up 10 points and it becomes an unpassable killing field. That is definitely harder, but requires no skill to overcome. Like amping a shooter from Normal to Hard to Legendary. Nothing changes but their stats. It isn't challenging—it is arduous. Running the Song Cai Flower with predatory Drones and omnipresent Breeders. It becomes much more difficult, more challenging. Instead of working at tasks, they are laying in wait, maybe using Ji in the striking ghost morph running an altered beta fork of Tara Yu to bait the PCs in with pleas for help. The Breeders test the waters as the PCs make their way onto the ship with Ego Sense, and once the combat starts they leap out and Sense Block the sight and touch of the combat machines while delivering psychic stabs. You could trade out psi shield or deep scan for omni awareness or empatic scan to increase the creepy level of the skuttling in the shadows. Perhaps the ten robot drones outside, if disturbed, start spamming baslisik hacks, and the flexbots contain malicious muses that start attacking any Ego's muse that sleeves into them. I hid a breeder and two drones in the recycling vats. When a PC looked into it, the drones grabbed her and the breeder Deep Scanned to find out more about the group before letting her go. Sure the drones died, but the breeder escaped to spread word and it was worth every bit. Remember: Eclipse Phase offers more vectors for conflict than physical, especially in a station. Your badass is a sitting duck without decent infosec or an AI assistant backing him up. A trojan YGBM or Basilisk, which sneaks in when they access some seemingly innocent piece of tech over the mesh or hardline, activiates when a character's heartrate increases to a certain threshold spreading confusion when he/she sprays into the back of her comrade. Spimes in the air intercept their radio transmissions and an antagonist real-time spoofs the information and hacks their brains in the midst of combat or before it. Horrible AR XP clips are replayed over and over whenever the local mesh is viewed or accessed causing trauma. The antagonists have combat morphs as well, and they are using a tacnet with unmanned smartlinked homing seekers firing EMP, smoke, and overload rounds popping out from behind corners to aid in their gurrilla tactics. A nanoswarm running Khaos AI(/beta forks) seeks out mesh inserts and uploads them right into a morph for a deadly conflict within their own head while bullets fly around it. Antagonists with access to the hab shut pressure doors on a PC's limbs, vent atmosphere in compartments, jam utility drones, and turn harmless cleaners into deadly dissassemblers. Your PCs had a cakewalk. It happens. They don't know what real fear is yet. Introduce it slowly. 6. Yes. Ask 'why do you have this?' for every Expensive item on the PC's sheet. That is 20 CP right there.

fellow that is a bit of a dick move. undocking i may be giving lack a bit to much credence but firewall is willing to put you back in a fury morph which is 60 cp iirc? of course the one lack had a slight addiction defect but was otherwise unhindered.

Oh, and don't forget to call for Stress checks when things get awful. Combat monsters tend to be very vulnerable to SV, especially if they made WIL their dump stat.

jackgraham wrote:

Oh, and don't forget to call for Stress checks when things get awful. Combat monsters tend to be very vulnerable to SV, especially if they made WIL their dump stat.

I always thought it was quite devious to make WIL almost useless as far as skills go. It means people unused to the setting often go "oh, this aptitude doesn't seem useful at all!" and then ends up paying for it in play. In the new campaign we just started, 3 of the players were more or less completely new to EP, but I managed to convince them of the importance of WIL so now we all have at least 25 as an EGO trait. Despite that, we have already taken some stress a few game sessions in. Luckily though noone has had any trauma.

jackgraham wrote:

Oh, and don't forget to call for Stress checks when things get awful. Combat monsters tend to be very vulnerable to SV, especially if they made WIL their dump stat.

It's hilarious because I've had someone call [i]me[/i] a powergamer because I won't make an EP character with less than 20 WIL. Of course, said person was playing an async with like 10 WIL, so ... yeah.

indeed i will optimize a character for a role but i try not to break them in half

On some level, there is a need to maximize the utility of a character. The number of actions you can do at a given point in time is finite. Maybe you only have an x amount of time to hack a security door before a security guard comes by to take a look. There will be consequences if you can't finish hacking the door fast enough. Likewise, there are times when you are competing against someone else. If you are in a fight against someone, you need to go beat them before they beat you. You are more likely to win if you are good at fighting, than if you are bad at fighting. Maybe you have finite resources. If you only have 5 bullets for your sniper rifle, you can only make 5 shots. Also, if you miss the first shot, your target might start running for cover, making further attempts to shot the target more difficult. The situation favors optimization further if you have team mates to cover the gaps in your skills. With team mates, a hacker doesn't need to be a well trained sniper as someone else could be that. You could push your specializations further because someone else will have you covered. Just don't forget to get some general skills, because there are situations where everyone gets to do something (like in big fights) and team mates who can't do something essentially waste their turns.

DivineWrath wrote:

The situation favors optimization further if you have team mates to cover the gaps in your skills. With team mates, a hacker doesn't need to be a well trained sniper as someone else could be that. You could push your specializations further because someone else will have you covered. Just don't forget to get some general skills, because there are situations where everyone gets to do something (like in big fights) and team mates who can't do something essentially waste their turns.

this is more of a player composition issue i find rather than a character one. my player groups are generally very combat class oriented so the people who branch out into areas besides combat generally do not get to do much

I was just reviewing a different RPG, Traveller by Mongoose, and they have something called skill packages (different from the stuff you can find in the Transhuman book). It is basically a group of skills, useful for a type of campaign, that a players can pick skills from and apply to their characters. It exists to ensure that certain party skills are covered. As mentioned above, party skills are skills needed by at least 1 person for a group to be able to do a task well. So if you are really worried about min-maxing to the point where the can't function outside their specialty, perhaps you should offer a party skill package set, and let players take turns picking skills. This would of course require that some packages to be made since none exist yet (or not, depending on how well skill packages from the Transhuman book can be adapted). Either offer them the skills for free, or reduce starting CP and then offer the skill packages to compensate.

@ Urthdigger Well, the stuff from Mongoose Traveller didn't cover all possible bases. Most of these packages had a theme to them, like a starship package which covered many important skills needed by those spent a lot of time on and dealing with starships, or a criminal package to cover skills needed by those up to no good. There is no need to force a team to have all important skills in the game (though making a general party skill package and making it available wouldn't be a bad thing). Creating a team that is defective or highly specialized isn't always a bad thing.

EP can get *so* much more silly than this, though. 20 alpha copies of a character running in 20 [Low] cost bots (creepies, servitors, robomules), all with narcoalgorithmed MRDR and Kick (plus other narcoalgorithm drugs), quad (ambidextrous x3) wielding your favorite [Low] cost weapon Quantity > Quality And it only costs like 25,000 credits+narcoalgorithms, and nothing they bought is hard to get. Since each of the alpha forks have full moxie, they use moxie when rolling psychosurgery to re-merge all the forks to avoid stress. Of course they're on narcoalgorithmed cumfurt, so I guess it doesn't matter.

I heart that game so much. That, and Unknown Armies. '90s nostalgia. :)

Lilith wrote:

jackgraham wrote:

Oh, and don't forget to call for Stress checks when things get awful. Combat monsters tend to be very vulnerable to SV, especially if they made WIL their dump stat.

It's hilarious because I've had someone call [i]me[/i] a powergamer because I won't make an EP character with less than 20 WIL. Of course, said person was playing an async with like 10 WIL, so ... yeah.

You're in good company. My dear compadre & fellow EP writer, Than, does this in every EP game we play. And now we're 75% of the way through Masks of Nyarlathotep, and I still haven't driven his damned investigator insane. His psychotherapeutic/psychosurgical dialogs with other PCs who have lost parts of their marbles make up for it, though.

jackgraham wrote:

Because you're trying to make the EP version of this character? :)

I have not seen that picture in ages.

nick012000 wrote:

Heh. This thread reminds me of the the time I made Jetstream Sam as a Lost Generation Extropian mercenary. SOM 20 (40), REF 20 (40), WIL 15 (25), Fray (Wielding Blades) 100, Blades (Swords) 100, Infiltration 60, a Battlesuit Exoskeleton, and a pair of Monofilament Vibrokatanas. In melee he does 4d10+6 damage at turn, and he's got a Fray/Blade parry of 120; at range, he's got an effecting Fray of 70 and a Chameleonic Coating on his suit, so good luck spotting him to begin with.