I like my Eclipse Phase with both Black and Chrome. As has been pointed out, the setting is bleak. most of the human race is dead, and the rest are constantly being threatened with extinction whether they're aware of it or not. Some very despicable people---notably the Nine Lives Cartel---use empowering technology for their own cruel ends. But it's also a setting where playing as an uplifted anarchist gunslinger octopus with an authentic afro teams up with a human who has hands for feet, gills, and also a prehensile tail for no reason other than he likes tails. And the Uplifted pig chemist pregen character in the Transhuman book exists. The Know Evil podcast is basically this: a mix of genuine horror and conspiracy mixed with humor and craziness. Just my two...whatever is less than a credit.

Noble Pigeon wrote:

Just my two...whatever is less than a credit.

Decicred, a unit of currency measure which finds use in the Planetary Consortium the way thousandths of a dollar are used today. IE: Largely by people in a position of irreplacable financial power over you, who use it to bilk you out of more than they're claiming to charge by charging you a non-whole division of the currency and rounding up to the nearest. IE, if they say something is 5.01 credits, well, you round up to 6. Anyway, it is not the "horror" parts of Eclipse Phase that attracted [i]me[/i], it's the "Transhuman technology post-scarcity spacefuture" bits. Rather like Shadowrun. In Shadowrun, you can play the game on a spectrum between "Mirrorshades" and "Pink Mohawk." Mirrorshades is that part of the game where everybody is acting logically, where everyplace worth securing in the slightest has a full suite of wards and milimeter wave radars and non-invasive DNA sampling systems to sample flakes of skin dust blown off everybody who walks through the door. Full Mirrorshades assumes that the companies are fully competent - that they will be using every means at their disposal to find you. This means that [i]you[/i] have to be fully competent and account for every possible shred of forensic evidence, anyone who can finger you, etcetera. If you pull a job on a Renraku Zero-Zone, it's basically the end of your campaign - even if you succeed and get paid, you have to murder all your contacts, get a full gene-wipe treatment to change pretty much everything about you, get your voice permanently changed, etcetera, and then wipe out all the doctors, nurses, etcetera, who worked on you to tie up the loose ends. Basically, it becomes a game of "Gotcha." If the GM can think of a type of forensic evidence you failed to account for, a loose end you didn't tie up quickly enough, whatever, the first time you hear about it is when the GM says "Okay, you're at your doss?" *roll roll roll.* "What are you rolling for?" "Your security versus hostile stealth. Your security failed. The walls disintegrate under APDS machine gun fire, and a Great Form Force 8 Spirit of Fire materializes in your bedroom. You need to resist {more dakka than God}, and roll for initiative." If that sounds like not a lot of fun, it isn't. But it's a realistic interpretation of what happens to Shadowrunners who slip up and leave even the tiniest scrap of evidence or the tightest-seeming loose end and cost a megacorp millions or billions of nuyen. Because that megacorp has more resources than God, and they do, in fact, care enough to track you down and put an end to you costing them money. Almost nobody plays [i]Full[/i] Mirrorshades for just that reason. Now, Pink Mohawk is exactly the opposite. Pink Mohawk is playing the spirit of the game to the hilt - not only does Big Brother have ADHD and information overload, he just doesn't give a damn, and the megacorps have moved on from whatever happened last tuesday, writing it off in their unimaginable ledgers as the cost of doing business, stating that the crooks who did it got away and are not worth pursuing, etcetera. In Full Pink Mohawk, you play like you're playing a combination of Payday and Red Faction Guerilla: drive an armored monster truck through the front doors, shoot everything that moves, detonate all the doors between you and your target except the last because explosives are faster than hacking, smash, grab, and run like hell, because they'll stop chasing you completely the moment they skirt across so much as a corner of an opposing megacorp's property lest they trigger the Great Corp Wars. Very [i]few[/i] people play Full Pink Mohawk, but it is more enjoyable than Full Mirrorshades, if you're looking for "Kick in the door, kill them and loot their stuff" gameplay. Most people play somewhere on the continuum between Full Mirrorshades and Full Mohawk, and it usually tends to lean towards Mohawk, in my experience. How is that applicable to Eclipse Phase? Well, if you play EP perfectly straight, the Shadowrun problem is magnified tenfold, because it's not just the corporate retribution squads looking for you, it's Project Ozma and Oversight, or maybe the Jovians, who have even less restraints than the megacorps in Shadowrun, and even more resources and technology, and the panopticon future makes it essentially utterly impossible to do anything yourself without getting them all over you like white on nanofabricated rice; oh, and they don't have to worry about extraterritoriality, either. In Full Mirrorshades Eclipse Phase, you're basically playing Burn Notice, only with an even more oppressive atmosphere than Micheal Weston faced. Bureaucratic and personal manipulative skills are the only important skills, because the only way you can do anything at all and not get it tracked back to you is to trick some other schlub into doing it and then burn anything that could connect you to him, so that when he gets caught and his stack interrogated, which will happen approximately two hours after he did it, all he's left doing is ranting about people who didn't exist, leaving the opposition to conclude he's a nutter. That's a fun scheme to pull off once in a while, but when it's super-high-stakes, any failure-or-slip means you wind up being tortured for eternity in a Project Ozma information extraction simulspace environment, and it's literally the only way you can operate... It's not fun any more. Frankly, Eclipse Phase has all the ingredients of a high-action thriller. I look at it the way I looked at the Iron Kingdoms RPG. In the IKRPG, they put a Warjack on the front cover of the core rulebook. They put rules for Warjacks in the core rulebook. The game is called "Full Metal Fantasy." I was told, on the IKRPG forums many, many, many winters ago, that such things were too "high powered" for players, and that he tried to go out of his way to prevent them from even having guns. I asked him, what's the bloody point in playing in a setting where all this cool stuff is - and is even [i]on the cover[/i] no less - if they don't get to use it? That's not [i]playing[/i] the setting, that's cohabitating in a setting where cool stuff is exists and cool stuff gets to be done, [i]but not by you[/i]. Eclipse Phase is a game where the core frigging rulebook has stats for plasma cannons and [i]Reapers.[/i] What's the bloody point in playing Eclipse Phase if so much as inquiring as to how to get a plasma cannon or a reaper results in Project Ozma proctologically owning your ass? It's not fun at all. Eclipse Phase can be, but to my way of mind, should not be a game of oppressive horror where you can't even keep your head above water and it's the best you can do to reduce your rate of descent. It should not be a game where making any move at all results in a Project Ozma hit team grabbing you up. Eclipse Phase is a game where sometimes, you should just be able to sleeve a Reaper, sprout some plasma cannons, and soften some goddamn deck plates in peace. So find a nice cozy place on the continuum between "Mirrorshades" and "Mohawk" where your players are having fun but don't feel like they're cakewalking over TITAN warmachines or Project Ozma to the point where they have to ask "why doesn't everybody who isn't us do this?" and roll with it.

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I get the feeling most here want to play Eclipse Phase blacker than the space it moves through. Which is fine, of course, play the game how you want. My question is merely why?

Because it's pitched as realistic rather than cinematic. It's hard SF. The only aliens we've met are bafflingly incomprehensible trade envoys offering us bargains we don't understand the value of rather than bug-eyed monsters brandishing kill-o-zap guns. Gangsters (even the heavily armed and dangerous ones) are more likely to be dealing in pirated data than guns or narcotics. Overpaid IT specialists are now a more important part of any assassination attempt than coldblooded killers with sniper rifles. And above all, the PCs [i]aren't[/i] special. They're probably good at what they do (otherwise they wouldn't be gatecrashing or working as Firewall agents or whatever), but they're not the best, and they're working in a field where everyone else is pretty good too. They're talented but totally ordinary people called upon to do extraordinary things, and the strain is gradually going to wear them down. It's not too hard to retool the game and make it cinematic, but the default setting is more like an Alastair Reynolds space opera (right down to the pigs) than a Peter F. Hamilton space opera (well except for the sex). So when people start giving feedback and ideas about how such and such an idea would play out in the setting, they're doing it based on the assumption that this idea is playing out the way it would in a drama, not the way it would play out in a blockbuster.

and hear i thought this was going to be about players getting away with inane shit because its more fun :P

Impressive feats indeed! Whatever did he want with the egos though? Considering there are any number of easier ways he could have accomplished the same thing, I don't see any reason not to allow it either.

Lorsa wrote:

Impressive feats indeed! Whatever did he want with the egos though?

Sent them off to live free with the Scum.

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Considering there are any number of easier ways he could have accomplished the same thing, I don't see any reason not to allow it either.

He's getting a Reputation for that sort of thing. On the circle-@ list. He's also going to have inspired "The Tingler," a bioware implant which functions for normal transhumanity the way his malfunctioning eelware has side effects for him.

Urthdigger wrote:

Well, I should probably explain a few things. First, in order to get into position to reach the black kettle on the top floor when the rest of the team makes a distraction and takes over security on the ground level, I used some credits and my criminal contacts to rent a room on an upper floor of the brothel. Even if I wasn't +Hedonism, it would have been suspicious for me to rent a room and not sample their wares. That I used my medical talents to help other customers (I have a reputation as a discreet physician for those who'd rather not deal with hospital security. Is how I got my g-rep) and had the hotel pay me in booze, blow, and babes was just icing on the cake. As for the egos, we had a side mission of our own to rescue the indentures. Moving the ego was easier than playing escort mission with the morphs. Oh, and when I described that morning, I assumed pleasure pods slept, and used passed out to mean they were still asleep. I was then informed these pods should be capable of running for days on no rest, so we went for another explanation. I'm an alien squirrel with a fast metabolism, go figure I have some feats of stamina.

"Passed out from being sexually exhausted" is a far funnier excuse, too.

I've been fascinated by Eclipse Phase for a while, but beyond the fact I can only very rarely assemble a group to play tabletop with, I would like to play a black-type game, which seems even harder. The game's mechanics are quite simple, but playing a campaign properly and in a blacker tone requires not only the GM but also the players to know the lore almost inside out. Even more so than you'd need to play a rich Shadowrun game. My impression is that there's a million avenues to do anything, to accomplish a mission, to deal with problems and to escape from retribution. And there's just as many ways your opponents can be prepared for intrusion and/or fuck you over afterwards. And everyone needs to be familiar with all of that if they are to approach tasks creatively against a GM who knows his stuff. Lack of familiarity by the GM results in generic adventures, and lack of familiarity by the players means plain actions and simple, boring problem-solving, forcing even a knowledgeable GM to dumb things down so that unenlightened players can manage. In none of those situations does EP shine. It's easy to default to Rule of Cool when you don't know what you're doing or, really, when you don't know about all the awesome stuff you [i]can[/i] do. So it's a bit overwhelming for me, since if I were to play a tabletop RPG, I'd have to GM for my friends. And in Eclipse Phase's case, they would have to be savvy with the game as well. Sounds like a very improbable proposition for me. :( I apologize if this is only tangentially related to the main topic. I suppose I'm fishing for tips to approach EP and still manage to pull off an enjoyable black campaign without everyone necessarily being wildly experienced with the setting.

Probably the best way is to take the approach Morrowind did, and give the players a scenario where they learn as they go. Tell them the basics to start: The Fall happened due to TITANS, humanity lives in space now, the government of where the campaign takes place, and the social statuses attached to infomorphs, synthmorphs, pods, and biomorphs. Past that, they can learn about the exsurgent virus, factors, politics of other habitats, and Firewall when they run into them. This can also likely result in a campaign that starts off Chrome, but gets darker and darker as the veil is pulled away, revealing the future utopia that mankind enjoys to be merely a think veneer over the oily pulsating black heartof the universe. Space does indeed have a terrible secret.

...that a good EP campaign tends to oscillate between [i]Futurama[/i] and [i]Event Horizon[/i] in terms of tone. Often multiple times in a single session.

I like the feeling of the Die Hard movies. The bad guys are smart and competent. A lot of the time, it looks seriously bleak - the protagonist is isolated, outgunned, badly hurt, and they're holding his loved ones hostage. But the protagonist also gets to pull of some seriously cool and devious stuff to overcome the challenges, and there's some humor too.