I am getting ready to set up a campaign to run on Mars. I am not intending on jumping around much in that the game is going to persist on Mars rather than ego casting to other out posts of Transhumanity.
The game has a good system in place to represent goods and services acquisition in the rep based settlements. This being through rolls to find it and a roll to acquire it, burning of rep, refresh rates etc.
For the case of money grubbing places like Mars, there are words to the effect of "if you have cash, you buy it." That is fine in that we all understand the quid pro quo of financial transactions. What the rules are silent on is how to manage this in a game.
What do jobs pay, what does lifestyle cost, and what is the "free" cash-flow as a result. What I am trying to avoid is have the game be distracted by accounting. Accounting both in the form of money restriction and accounting for drinks nor do I want people to be simply buying what ever they want. Tightness of money and the need for it are one of the things that makes living on Mars a grind and less than paradise. I do not want to loose this.
I can not find a mechanism for handling this in the rules. Maybe I missed it.
I am thinking of simply hijacking the rep based system and using c-rep instead of @-rep. This being an analogue. The better your c-rep the more acquisitive power you have. Money maketh the man, so to speak.
Have I missed a bit from the rule book? Is my work around workable?
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Money on Mars
Sun, 2015-04-19 22:35
#1
Justin In Oz
Money on Mars
Sun, 2015-04-19 23:20
#2
jKaiser
Transhuman has a rundown of
Transhuman has a rundown of lifestyle costs and overviews, starting on pg. 104. It breaks it down by how much a monthly expenditure of each cost category (trivial, low, etc.) gets you in various broad concerns. As for making money, it has this to say:
"To gather income, a character must devote one week to work. This is best handled as downtime in between scenarios.
The amount gained from a week of work is based on the character’s rep score in a network appropriate to their situation. This will be c-rep for most, but characters involved in artistic or media work can use f-rep, scientists and technologists can use r-rep, Extropians can use @-rep, and criminals can, of course, rely on g-rep. Their Reputation Level in this network (see the Reputation Levels table, p. 287, EP) determines their income for each week devoted to work, as noted on the Income table."
That's understandably pretty broad. For Mars specific, a lot will depend on what your players are in that environment. Maker and Sufi nomads probably rely more on reputation and barter, so earning an income is less a matter of trading service for currency and more direct favor or goods trading. City-dwellers would use currency or hypercorp rep (maybe as a stand in for requisitions, augmented by social skills as appropriate), and have a means of employment as a matter of course, whether it be a top level terraforming advisor/supervisor or a simple souk goods hawker.
Just making this up as I go, I think you could use the rep system more or less as-is for the countryside sorts, with some fiat to determine availability of goods and services, since most of Mars is still sparsely populated desert and badlands. For actual currency, I think that could be handled by some combination of profession, c-rep, and social/knowledge skills. Or you could approach it a bit differently, and this is especially true if you have NPCs or intrigue you want to get into the story, and have it based more on Networking. The PCs would use it to find job opportunities through getting to know the right people.
Sun, 2015-04-19 23:46
#3
jasonbrisbane
In the same way our great
In the same way our great grandfathers made money(got food) (ie crica 1890?), they would not be able to fathom the types of work we do to make money... most would have grown food, worked on farms or the like.
IN the same way we wouldnt be able to comprehend EXACTLY what transhumanity does to "earn"money.
if you want flavortext then I use the following:
- reviewing restaurants/movies/etc
- laboratory work for testing base samples of ore/blood/nanotech/biological samples/etc
- paperwork for accountancy/business practices/business law/etc
I imagine most/a lot of people would be contracted and work remotely - this is certainly the case for venusian surface miners, so I dont see why others wouldnt do this too. It is certainly cheaper to get people to teleremote into cases mining in remote martian basins and finish after 8 hours and let the next contractor teleremote to the case for the next 8 hour shift, etc..
The possibilities are quite endless.... but you can still find people working in coffee shops, bakeries, etc to produce the "traditional" food their ancestors enjoyed...
Getting it from a fabber just isnt the same....
—
Regards,
Jason Brisbane
Mon, 2015-04-20 07:38
#4
ThatWhichNeverWas
I Has Advice! Behold!
I find it helps to think of Credits as cross-faction Rep, which only be burnt.
If you want to buy something, use the appropriate faction Rep score to find and arrange purchase, but allow the subject to burn credits instead of Rep to acquire the item. Then simply apply modifiers to the rolls as necessary to represent the faction's economy.
As a corollary, it also helps to think of the amount of credits as how much the character can put together at one time, rather than their bank balance: any credit loss/gain within a scenario should be a temporary buff/debuff, rather than a permanent change.
This is a bit different than the RAW, but it helps balance out character creation costs and blueprint demand.
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
Mon, 2015-04-20 11:45
#5
Noble Pigeon
jasonbrisbane wrote:In the
This still bugs me, a lot. I honestly couldn't say what parts of the service industry, if any, are still manned by actual people (or at least infomorphs) instead of AIs. You'd think jobs like waiters or such would be a bit more prestigious than today with the possibility of getting rep for good service along with credits, even in transitional economies. Farming would still be a thing and also be quite prestigious I imagine, although the work would be highly (but not entirely) automated.
an idea I had from your fabber comment:
"I don't care how good a fabber is, I will never be able to say 'I had a grilled cheese printed from the maker' with a straight face. Give me my real bread and my real cheese damnit. I will cook my sandwich on an actual skillet and if you say to me how primitive that is and how you transhumans have evolved beyond such trivial things as skillets, then you can eat somewhere else, you tasteless prick!"
-Aldo Rivoli, ex-Jovian soldier, owner of "Whichita Grill" in Valles-New Shanghai
I have now, in the writing of this post, accidentally come up with an idea for an Italian ex-Jovian soldier who owns a grill on Mars who has joined Firewall to fight "the good fight" and berates people for eating "nano-slob you call food from fabbers". You can't stop me.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Mon, 2015-04-20 12:07
#6
jKaiser
I recall reading a thread
I recall reading a thread about 3D printed food, and the general consensus among the chefs present was tat they liked the idea because it meant consistent ingredients, but they still intended to put it together and cook it themselves. I imagine that's a fairly common arrangement where budgets allow for actual cooks.
I'm also reminded of what a boss of mine told me about working as a barista: "Any idiot can make a cup of coffee. I want people who will bring customers back and be personable." So I imagine where service-industry jobs exist, the you'll still have people walking around and ensuring people have a good time. Bartenders, waitstaff, all that aren't likely to go away, though the exact form will vary. I assume a lot of places will have digital/AI substitutes, seen as less prestigeous (look at how pods are generally viewed) except for the outliers with top-of-the-line or gimmick presentations that survive off the novelty. It's like candles today, once ubiquitous, now an anachronism associated with class and taste.
Bottom line is, it's probably cheaper and easier even in the future to get drinks or food for home, but you go out to socialize. Or have some longsuffering bartender listen to you bemoan how your partner left you because someone else in a shiny new sylph came along.
Mon, 2015-04-20 13:30
#7
Trappedinwikipedia
My guess would actually be
My guess would actually be that most food is still prepared the old fashioned way. Nanofabrication is slow, and no one really wants to wait 4+ hours for their grilled cheese, which will have gotten cold and soggy by the time its finished. In terms of energy use it probably makes sense to avoid as much nanofab as possible, as that's pretty energetically heavy on a hab. Locus has a ton of aquaponic farms for example. My guess is a lot of food is made through AI or indenture (there's actually a food preparing robot in testing right now), while almost all of the frontend is transhuman, with lower class being indentured, and fancy places having employed waiters and such.
Nanofabbed ingredients are probably really common, especially for things like flour or other fairly homogenous ingredients, while more complex structures are probably grown in other fashions. Most things humans eat are self-assembling organic nanofactories after all.
Jobs always confuse me in EP, because outside of work for well educated people (hab repairs, agriculture, engineering, fashion, etc) I'm not really sure what people do. Most busywork can just be handled by the muse of the person doing the more complicated stuff (so no secretaries or anything) Transport probably became mostly AI work decades ago. So that leaves service industry stuff, which is frequently indenture, and the kind of freelance work that doesn't require a lot of knowledge. (XP casting, entertainment work, etc)
I'm not really sure what happens between indenture work, and skilled technical work though, its possible there's kind of a gap there in universe which would make for some interesting social dynamics.
Mon, 2015-04-20 14:35
#8
UnitOmega
There's discussion of food
There's discussion of food out of makers a few times in the books. As best as I recall it tends really on the quality of the unit. Most of the stuff people (especially public access and on space habs) produces simple ration or nutrient bricks with flavoring. More advanced models can assemble something which resembles real food internally, but the best quality food has ingredients or elements compiled via makers and is then prepped by an actual transhuman. You could probably use an AI, since cooking is a Knowledge skill, though that would require physical interactivity. If you have a big enough hab, you can produce plant matter via hydroponics or other methods or even use some of that big space in Cylinders for rolling fields of grain. Mars also has more than a few agridome colonies. This is probably staple crop type stuff though, lots of rice and wheat, etc. Now, farming for animals is more rare. Cylinders, major Martian or Lunar habs probably manage some poultry (Rust Chickens and Rust Duck!) but anything much bigger than that will probably be a vat clone meat. And depending on where you live, the average joe might not get to order cuts of omaha vat-steak, and might have to do with good old protein brick. Most restaurants probably either pride themselves on fresh ingredients handled by actual cooks (and thus, better than the food-paste your maker craps out) or on the intangible "scene" quality.
The idea of Infomorphs or AIs as AR or holographic avatars handling customer service is something I hadn't considered before. That'd actually be a good way to employ indentures without complications of pods. Or let people work from home, which is probably super common with arbitrary mesh bandwidth. Instead of going down to Rocket Burger diner after school, you crash on the simulspace couch and do some virtual shifts.
In general, what humans do, well, look at the examples of Professional skills for one. A 40 rating in a profession is enough on-the-job knowledge to get some kind of official certification. Looking at my own sample list, I can see lots of tasks you'd want that intangible "human" quality on, something AI basically don't do well. To pick a few to think of; Administration, Prospecting, Communications, Cool Hunting, Distribution, Escorting, Heavy Industry, Horticulture, Info Brokerage, IT, Lab Tech, Minifacturing, Surveying, Tech Trading, Usability Specialist, XP Production just to name a few. All stuff you could probably pick up at a basic level pretty easy, but you'd want or require a level of human interaction with.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Mon, 2015-04-20 16:19
#9
jKaiser
Makes me think that in more
Makes me think that in more AGI-friendly habs, there'd be some stiff competition for face service jobs amongst AGIs in the Sapient faction to get real world practice at interacting with humans. A good narrative to justify buying of the Real-World Naivete trait.
I recall Panopticon mentioning that alpaca are common on a lot of habitats because they're compact, easy to care for, taste decent, and provide wool for ever-popular handcrafts. If they have caribou on Titan, there's probably a few thousand transgenic livestock species around the system on habitats. This may not be true on habitats that are still reeling from overpopulation, but a standard O'Neill cylinder devotes between a third and a quarter of its land to parks and agriculture, and if a torus is based on the original Stanford designs, it has an agricultural level below the main "floor" which would actually be bigger than the habitation space, so livestock are probably not that rare. Just don't expect too many spacecows without them being massively altered to be more efficient.
Going back to Mars, the biggest employer of transhumans of all stripes is terraforming/areoforming, which covers an insanely broad range of tasks. Ignoring the orbital and comet-wrangling work, you've got work seeding adapted microorganisms, work blackening the polar caps and land (think crop dusting), any number of installation jobs (every bit of heat adds to the process, after all), construction, landscaping, mining, prospecting for metals and aquifers, transport jobs, bot operation/maintenance, infrastructure installation for things like roads, windmills, power lines, and so on. And that's just the physical, ground-level stuff. If you want to keep your players in civilization, you're still going to see a lot of work as accountants, managers, recruiters, consultants, advertisers, facilitators of all stripes, buyers and sellers, import/export, and more. Near the space elevator you've got plenty of opportunities for tourist traps, and everyone needs security, sysops, programmers...
Mon, 2015-04-20 16:45
#10
UnitOmega
Hrm, the alpaca thing is
Hrm, the alpaca thing is interesting, I'll have to make note of that. It works even better because I recently wrote some notes about current trending fashion types in Elysium involved at least one movement of flashy Central/South American and Caribbean clothing, which includes cloaks, tunics or sashes, and also the estimable sweater for 1980s retro trends (Though I'm also floating with a concept that because Elysium has a big passion for skin and a lot of upper class people, it's considered a sign of being lower class to need to bundle up, you obviously can't afford a rusterized morph which can take the cold).
The big players in meat consumption currently is Beef and Pork, but I reckon those are probably grown mostly in cloning vats which have a much higher efficiency to mass ratio. And if we can bulk clone meat we can probably synthesize the important constituents of dairy. I'd say for sheep or goats, but if the alpaca is more efficient, they could easily be more common.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Mon, 2015-04-20 17:33
#11
Noble Pigeon
jKaiser wrote:Makes me think
Doesn't the existence of muses and AIs make those two roles irrelevant in Eclipse Phase? And, as someone pointed out above, secretaries as well? If you'd absolutely need a physical secretary or assistant, why not just use biomorphs with cyberbrains with your muse sleeved in it?
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.”
-Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
Mon, 2015-04-20 17:47
#12
UnitOmega
While, indeed, Accounting is
While, indeed, Accounting is a knowledge skill and Muses are equipped to act as your personal accountant, your Muse has many other duties which is must be prepared to attend to at any given time. they're also mostly limited to handling personal funds. There are some people, or more likely organizations, which need to employ Accountants full time to manage and track all their assets. There's plenty of mentions of banking or accounting AGI who serve this purpose.
Also, while a Muse can do research for you, it's not great at this. And it has limited space for additional skill programming. You could make a muse to consult for you on a specific subject (such as an artist who has a muse with Profession: Critic), but if you're doing anything bigger than the personal scale you might easily hire someone with more diverse or specific knowledge to consult on a subject, especially if they have complementary skills. We are talking about major employment here, and majority of transhumanity isn't Self-Employed or a business owner, they're contractors.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Mon, 2015-04-20 17:55
#13
jKaiser
Muses and AI can also be
Muses and AI can also be hacked and subverted. Especially in a mostly-hypercorp arena like Mars, with the Movement and other autonomists serving as constant tech-savvy boogymen, having actual people in these roles is another security check when lots of money and materiel are hinging on the fine print.
Mon, 2015-04-20 18:07
#14
Pyrite
Noble Pigeon wrote:
The rush of power from having an actual person at your beck and call?
—
'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
Mon, 2015-04-20 22:38
#15
Justin In Oz
Thanks
Thanks heaps guys for the input and responses. I had not read Transhuman. The reference you gave is exactly what I was looking for.
The idea that 100 years on we would have very little grasp of what out ancestors and postcestors (is that a word?) do is quite evocative. We don't have any contact with most of the professions that make up family names familiar to us today.
This reminds me of a friend who was recounting a dream he had years ago. He said that the dream took place in a post apocalyptic world (the event did happen n the 90s). The thing which he brought out of the dream was that the people had family names that were occupations of the day. He met someone in the dream named "Joe Cardetailer".
Also in terms of who does what Anders wrote a good piece found at http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/Transhuman%20capital.pdf on who does what and why. Inparticular he goes into what work is suited to AIs and what is suited to egos incarnate.
Mon, 2015-04-20 22:52
#16
SquireNed
Posterity is the word that
Posterity is the word that you're thinking of.
Anders has made some very good things that are fun to read about, but I think that he seriously overstates the price for at least basic lifestyles. I'd suggest starting at trivial or low for monthly lifestyle costs (depends on whether you live in a pricey area or a more open area; and that's not strictly political speaking—an anarcho-communist hab may actually wind up having higher costs to stick around than a PC place with all the resources in the world), with moderate costs only if you're including minor purchases like ectos or maintaining a vehicle (if characters have been where they currently are for a long time). High costs and expensive monthly costs are for luxury lifestyles, which naturally would have more purchasing power.
Mon, 2015-04-20 23:17
#17
Justin In Oz
Opposite of Ancestor
Descendants is the word.
You are right that the cost Anders puts forward are pretty high. They rank up with the costs of morphs, which does not work given that most people can not afford them or afford better than a splicer. If I could eat instant noodles for a few months and later afford a better morph, I would be doing so.
Mon, 2015-04-20 23:31
#18
SquireNed
Here's an example of GSP from
Here's an example of GSP from Rimward:
"The morph is a hypercorp model that requires periodic GSP (Genetic Service Pack) therapy. For every three months of game time, the character must spend credits equal to 10% the cost of the morph on GSP 'upgrades.'"
Given that GSP is 10% of a morph's cost every three months, most GSP examples cited are Rusters (which are expensive, so 20k), and it's mentioned that people choose between having enough food and shelter or paying on GSP for the family, then I'd say that on average you're looking at around a ~4k credit household income for a nuclear family of four Martians on a monthly basis, with lifestyle costs being in the low-moderate range and GSP being in the moderate-high cost range.
Mon, 2015-04-20 23:55
#19
jKaiser
Gets worse if you're in an
Gets worse if you're in an alpiner or, as I had homeruled in my game, another type of more expensive morph grown on Mars with the "quality assurance package" built in. Mars is basically a company town writ large for anyone who's not really well off or living out in the red, yeah. And even if you know someone in the Movement who can get you to a genehacker, that could void your employment contracts or get you labeled any number of things once the records show you've missed the checkups and a "welfare visit" with a gene sampler exposes the tampering.
Tue, 2015-04-21 18:55
#20
Pyrite
To me, it's always seemed
To me, it's always seemed like the cost of morphs is way too low to justify the supply/demand problems. The splicer should really be at least twice as expensive as the Synth or Pod.
—
'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
Tue, 2015-04-21 19:05
#21
UnitOmega
Honestly, the Splicer is so
Honestly, the Splicer is so cheap because there's basically no effort put into it. You take x1 human genetic code, run it through a computer optimizer and set the Exowomb to shake-n-bake. When fully grown you have it install the Stack and Mesh Insert. Bam, stock Splicer. The only thing simpler is making a Flat, except nobody would want to.
It's just that Splicers are fairly common for the remainder of embodied bio-humanity. Most people in biomorphs don't need Splicers because they already have one or better. And the Hypercorps, at least, are aggressively pushing certain brands of morphs over the Splicer baseline. You can find a splicer lying around almost anywhere cheap, demand for them is so low.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Tue, 2015-04-21 19:18
#22
Pyrite
So people are spending so
So people are spending so long in indenture because they're holding out for Olympians, Mentons, or Rusters?
—
'No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.' --J.R.R. Tolkien
Tue, 2015-04-21 19:18
#23
SquireNed
UnitOmega wrote:Honestly, the
Don't forget that the limiting factor on splicers is availability, and although that normally would make them more expensive the fact that other alternatives exist that are just as good if not better keep the price reasonable (for a certain solution of reasonable).
Tue, 2015-04-21 19:47
#24
Justin In Oz
Warning - Economics/Boring
Availability and demand are what determines price.
If splicers are so cheap, there is no such thing as the Clanking Masses.
I think that indentures and the Clanking Masses are interesting and worth having in a game.
That accepted as an axiom, if splicers are so easy to produce, then their unavailability/high price is due to a cartel artificially reducing their availability and jacking up the price.
That also leaves open the possibility that indentures get paid 1/10 of the wages that their labour would earn if they were free. The low pay insures that they won't be able to buy out their contracts. I am just making this up here mind you.
Tue, 2015-04-21 19:53
#25
jKaiser
Biomorphs take a lot longer
Biomorphs take a lot longer to grow, so even if they're cheap, it's a supply/demand. I'm honestly surprised the core book didn't go into more detail about what kind of morphs are available where, price modifiers, and such. Though Transhuman did a fair bit with its morph varieties/knock off rules.
So, it's not so much that Joe and Jane Everybody are passing on splicers to wait for a ruster or olympian. They might be passing on basic pods and cases, though, since that's all that's commonly available, and they've got a six month wait till their reserved and paid for splicer is even able to be grown in the overtaxed morph clinics, or they're only able to get splicers as incentive to an indenture. Higher end morphs are like military-spec vehicles. Common for Firewall, sure, but your or I aren't likely to splurge on a Humvee.
Tue, 2015-04-21 20:17
#26
UnitOmega
Pyrite wrote:So people are
Or forced to. Even Transhuman doesn't go into a lot of detail into how payouts for indenture contracts work. Corps may only be offering Rusters or "higher quality" morphs with GSP plans.
Well, cost is an average spectrum in EP, and rarely takes into account factors like specific market availability or man-hours into a product or all other kinds of finer points of economics simulations, much to the lament of the fanbase who try and figure things out for realism.
There are a couple of things to refute your point though. A splicer is, in terms of effort, relatively cheap. Based on it's CP Cost and actual benefits, it's not worth much in a pure quality sense. Most body banks probably have one or two lying around if you wanted one, but they're not a hot ticket item. Technically, a regular Synth has much more value, it just comes with two big social drawbacks (Plus, y'know, Synth stuff).
Now, Splicers have a low production cost and a low demand. But, they still have the physical scarcity limitations of Biomorphs. It takes about 3 years to grow one, and every vat or clone tank you use for a Splicer could have been used on a higher price point morph, like a Ruster or an Exalt. And again, most humans still in Biomorphs are already at Splicer or Better.
This leaves us with the Clanking Masses. Synths are the same price point as a Splicer, and you can bang them out in a couple hours. A Case takes about an hour less, and costs less in materials, but is a piece of shit. Indentures and the otherwise economically downtrodden "forced" into Clanking Masses morphs don't have the economic power to actually, say, get morph houses to turn out more cheap splicers (even if this would start driving Splicer prices up). And remember, while a Splicer might cut it on Venus or Luna, primary population center is Mars. The bugfix version of Humanity is not usually sufficient for modern Martian conditions. You're basically forcing yourself to join the urban press or mean you'll be severely limited to environmental equipment when outside. And you're not going to hack it in places like Remembrance or Progress better either. Or you could end up paying probably nearly your Morph cost again in environmental mods. If you're going to transition out of being steel, you could at least transition to something that'll last in your new environs, right?
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog
http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
Tue, 2015-04-21 20:33
#27
jasonbrisbane
Biomorphs consume resources,
Biomorphs consume resources, such as Oxygen and water. And they need to rest.
Synthmorphs such as Cases, dont.
You simply resleeve into one and, if you take care of it, dont get shot, etc then you can live forever....
This is one reason why hypercorps want people in synths instead...
—
Regards,
Jason Brisbane