pods are supposed to have the worst of both worlds being half assed designs to be incredibly cheap to manufacture :P as for the -10 i am thinking that ism ore do with the higher quantity of meat bits not necessarily brain meatbits

I get the feeling pods have outgrown the original planned niche they had in the core book. I could see houseruling top-of-the-line pods, like shapers, to be designed with modern tech and full anticipation of ego habitation in mind. Something like the Steel and Galatea morphs, objectively better than the cheaper, common morphs, but still subject to the prejudice, of course. Though I don't know if the "upgrade" would be full cyberbrain, full biobrain or some sort of synthetic graymatter. I don't recall if there was anything stopping pods from having a brainbox or any reason you can't buy a standard cyberbrain as an aftermarket mod, though either one does a number on the "cheaper" advantage.

Pyrite wrote:

Is there some aspect of sensation or experience or expression that cyberbrains are lacking in? This seems implied by a lot of things, but other aspects of the setting seem to contradict that.

Not necessarily that you wouldn't get from pods. The most part of the difference seems to come from different morphs and different patterns; for instance, someone with heavy bioweave losing some sensation outside hands and other sensitive areas. Synthmorphs function differently, being a bit of a mindscrew. In addition, they may not be built with the same sensation (pain sucks compared to a damage readout), though stimulation to the cyberbrain may replace those. I'm potentially off canon by a bit.

Given pleasure pods, I don't think there's much of a problem with sensory perception in a pod. If anything, they might be slightly better than baseline biomorph, depending on the model. Though the mention of faces got me thinking. I don't believe that a century and a half from now we will have any problem with face or body emulation when we're getting pretty damn close to that now after only a few decades of attempts. And I wonder if that's where the -10 comes from: pods are so generic and down-to-a-science baseline that there's less to get used to when you first open your eyes and start moving. It might not feel like you but it's still flesh and blood and doesn't feel like someone else.

I honestly imagined cases looking more like Sonny from I,Robot. Or that one Bjork music video. I mean, if we have a vacsuit that can turn into a goassamer ball gown on command, I think we can rig up a convincing face. It's not that many muscles, really.

The enjoyment of the sleeved ego or AI has no bearing on the tactile senses of the pod. If you're running a pod off an AI, you need that thing to be highly responsive to feed the right information to the AI's programming. A diminished sense of touch would have diminished results elsewhere. And pods are grown from biomorph basics. There's no reason to change anything except implant the necessary cybernetics for assembly and operation. I can't imagine that implanting artificial nerves is any cheaper than just working with what grows normally, and you can probably push genetic tweaking further in pods than biomorphs, either due to planned obsolecence or by banking on the cybernetics and maintenance to handle the problems with overclocking the flesh. Besides, there have to be plenty of brothels where the client sleeves into the pleasure pod to experience other configurations, and there's no reason for a brothel to not turn to XPorn for additional income. Having a diminished sensory suite makes no sense unless you're dealing with a shit knockoff model...which admittedly, is damn likely in much of the system.

GenUGenics wrote:

I agree:

Pyrite wrote:

Is there some aspect of sensation or experience or expression that cyberbrains are lacking in? This seems implied by a lot of things, but other aspects of the setting seem to contradict that.

Unless the angst against "the clanking masses" is purely made-up hokum and the bigoted artifice of snobs, there has to be something a little diminishing, a lesser or frightening transhumanist experience, in being sleeved in something other than a biomorph. Just because a pod is employed as a warm-bodied sex worker BTW doesn't mean the sex worker enjoys the work, any more than RW arm candy is required to enjoy the ride.

A lot of the clanking masses phenomenon likely stems from the fact that clanking masses remind people a lot of TITANs and some of the less pleasant natures of transhuman development, the same way that people tend to ignore homeless people because they don't want to confront the actual unpleasant nature of society. Likewise, pods have a stigma attached to them; it's almost like showing up to a formal dinner in cargo pants and an anarchy-circle tank top, or at the very least under-dressing for social engagements. They're not part of proper transhuman society. That's even before we get into the question of things like pleasure pods, where they are associated with behavior that many consider unsavory.

Well, that's all true. Bear in mind, the books are written with an in-universe bias for the most part, from the POV of Firewall, and seem to have a disproportionate number of autonomists or autonomist-sympathizers, which skews the view toward the relatively well-off few. Most of the system isn't so privalleged, of course, and it's not hard to make comparisons to current South American countries where the rich and connected live with extreme luxury (i.e. designer morphs, personal habitats, intense political power) while the vast majority live so far below them in squalor. I don't really have answers for the crunch disparities other than there's an unseen hidden factor of availability for most morphs other than cases and basic pods. Again, a biomorph takes much, much longer than either of those to grow-- even if it's relatively cheap to do so, morph facilities can only grow so many so fast with any kind of QA, or even with none at all. Just because your lunch is cheap and consistently priced at McDonalds doesn't mean you don't have to stand in line at rush hour, or that Chez Paul down the road isn't serving foi grais for three times what you make in a week, for an analogy.

Chalk it up to proxies who know how to do their jobs and a lot of subversive skill, I guess. Most of my players prefer slice of life campaigns that aren't tied to firewall, so I typically impose a CP cost limit on morphs and have them roll networking or some other skill to see if they manage even something akin to a splicer, but that's just my game style

Oh hey, this thread started going places while I was checking out the new XCOM Long War beta.

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there has to be something a little diminishing, a lesser or frightening transhumanist experience, in being sleeved in something other than a biomorph.

They cover this hear and there, talking a lot about cyberbrains and even infomorphs, that the state of being purely digitized is unusual and can be uncomfortable to many people, and there's probably an unpleasant association with the nature of Fall-era uploading. Combine with the fact that most people in Synths are sleeved into things like Cases and regular Synthmorphs, one can assume there's a certain amount of mentality "drift" or sensational absence to the mass produced synthmorphs. You spend too long in a low-rent tin can, it eats at your comfort level. Simple stuff like not having a heart beat or lungs or eyeballs. Your capabilities are similar, but the feed back isn't the same. Some find is disconcerting.

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Likewise, pods have a stigma attached to them; it's almost like showing up to a formal dinner in cargo pants and an anarchy-circle tank top, or at the very least under-dressing for social engagements.

Strictly speaking, I think in some parts of the system showing up in a Pod is basically like showing up dressed like the [i]help[/i]. It's not just gauche or casual, it can be interpreted as a strong economic statement of "I am a lower-class serf". Pleasure pods can compound this, some people going "Oh hey look, a walking sex toy". It was only ~11 years ago Pods were all AIs ready to serve and even after they tend to be utilized by Indentures under contract.

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With metamaterials being what they are in EP, that would be child's play. (and other face stuff)

Honestly, Cases are basically built as cheap as they can, and still actually run a Transhuman Ego. This is their one real merit, you can make a bunch of them for low cost. You start upping the cost with a more complex face system with fancy smart materials? Probably gonna not be as cost competitive as a Basic Pod anymore. Would alter the whole system, and the Hypercorps probably aren't keen on major market shakeups.

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Admittedly, this does kinda draw into question why some more deliberately stylized morphs, like the Steel, have the Uncanny Valley trait, but given the politics behind that, they may not be going for human emulation.

Well, for starters, in a mechanical sense, Uncanny Valley isn't that bad. It's a -10 for all social skill tests with Humans, because you're slightly off-putting. You'll find that Social Stigma (Clanking Masses) (with a max penalty of -30) far more damning in some circles. The Steel is Uncanny because it has a shockingly good facial expression system for the user, but in terms of outward hardware the morph itself is clearly non-human. I think the idea is that because it's basically [i]too[/i] good, humans often find it unnerving to look at a completely expressive face which is just articulated metal, no skin or anything. You can fix it pretty easy by getting masked. I'd also wager that GenUGenetics is right, and that Humans of EP are very good at seeing those minute differences in the nature of the face, especially considering many of them might be used to AI pods in service roles until recently.

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Non-canonical I think, but RPPR's Know Evil campaign added a bit of fluff about how sleeving children-egos into synthmorphs is a touchy subject because they'll develop weird mental anomalies in regards to facial recognition/expression.

A fair assumption. If you're a kid case and all your family is cases and you have a blank robot face, picking up on things is hard. Synthmorphs employ a -10 penalty to Kinesics, that's rough on a kid. Plus, you'd either have to keep upsizing the body, or deal with whatever weird developmental problems you get from plugging a child ego into a full-size body.

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Could Kinesics be used by transhumans to identify whether a person sleeved in a morph is Infolife or Uplift (or associated non-human transhuman)?

I believe it can, but it's hard. But yes, most Infolife and Uplifts would have slightly different body language and response queues that a skilled person could ready. As for the stuff on Morph scarcity, the thing to consider is that most of EP is written to be a Firewall game, and so first and foremost, Morphs are specialized equipment that the Org can take decent pains to obtain for you. As a Sentinel, anyway, you have much more diverse access to bodies than most people. The second is that Firewall leans autonomist (due to structure and history), and in the AA, the morph situation is probably slightly different. They have smaller space, but also smaller population who thus clamor for less individual resources. And because they don't have monolithic corporations, their morph "marketplace" is probably much more competitive and diversified. So while their over-all production capacity is limited, they probably produce more variety as economically as possible because they're all about morpholgical freedom. Average Joe on Mars is in his corp-bought Ruster and likes it, or else.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Take smell for example - when you smell bacon frying, it smells really "good" and your mouth waters, and when you smell rotten eggs it smells "bad" - there is an instinctive aversion. If you're in a Synthmorph, those responses are completely absent - neither smell evokes any reaction whatsoever. Now imagine that for all your senses - you feel no arousal from seeing someone who "should" be very attractive, nor disgust from wading through sewage. You still have the potential for those feelings, and know they should be there... but they aren't. All those little pleasures that make life enjoyable are simply absent.

That's a really good way to put it. Considering you need to succeed a perception check to notice injury in a synthmorph, it makes a lot of sense...and now that I think about that, that alone might be why pods are preferable for some manual labor. Imagine if you fail to notice -- and your coworkers fail to notice -- some damage on your synthetic body just before you go to support some heavy, expensive machine without realizing your arm isn't responding correctly. That lack of a response could cost you and your employer a lot of money.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Pods are better, but there's still a disconnect - the reactions aren't quite right. If you're in a pleasure pod, then every sensation you feel has a frission of pleasure to it - even where there really shouldn't be.

I actually had a Changeling (Onyx Path/White Wolf's Changeling: the Lost) with something like a stronger version of that, intended to be a deconstruction of the stereotypical porn star who had been rewired so that any kind of affection, kindness, or other pleasure was instinctively sexual and arousing. Poor thing ended up being an extreme recluse because of how socially broken and awkward this made her in reality. A faulty or crudely modified pod would be a very hard sleeve if you're right.

Ah, you're right. Pain Filter. Synthmorphs can filter out their pain receptors, so that they are unhampered by wounds or physical damage. This allows them to ignore the –10 modi er from 1 wound (see Wound Effects, p. 207), but they suffer –30 on any tactile-based Perception Tests and will not even notice they have been damaged unless they succeed in a (modi ed) Perception Test. This implies that synthmorphs have to have some kind of lattice of sensors under their outer shell to provide full-body pain sense in the first place, too, though most probably only have a reasonable sense of touch beyond "contact/no contact" in places like the hands. As an employer, that's a question. Do you forbid turning pain off because doing so can cause unintended negligent damage, do you enforce it staying off so your workers don't get distracted by minor bumps and dings, or how do you come about an effective middle ground, if you even bother doing so? As for making them exotic, I'd argue against that. Exotic morphs based on the examples are the ones that fall outside of humanoid norms in terms of actual configuration. A case might be metal and polymer and feel weird or limiting, but if you instinctively go to curl up in the fetal position and cover your head with your arms, it responds like you'd expect. That's not how an arachnoid or sphere morph would behave, and that's a lot harder to get used to.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Could you expand on what you mean by "degrade"?

Psychological damage on your ego. Frayed from the completely unnatural experience of being in an entirely synthetic body.

That's a good question. I'd say yes in most situations, but staying for an extended amount of time in simulspaces that replicates reality almost 100% perfectly wouldn't be as jarring, especially if you were unaware that it was a simulspace. I'm not sure if the "sleep" time would be two hours or four hours, although for those people who have adapted themselves to synth and info bodies they wouldn't require it like people already do in the setting as written. One thing I'm confused about, and I think a bit off-topic, is how accelerated simulspaces messes with people, and how mechanically it can break the game. If it takes a week for a certain psychosurgery technique, what exactly is stopping the psychosurgeon from just using time dilation to shorten an subjective week into objective minutes or hours?

Transhuman talks a lot about how infolife works, with sleep and such not being necessary but infolifers still adhering to a split up schedule to combat boredom and accommodate sleeved folk they have to work and interact with. I can see that being a hard thing to get used to unless you've lived most of your life in a hibernoid, though. I think time acceleration itself is mostly harmless, but if you've ever woken up from a nap utterly unsure what time it is and felt off the rest of the day, I imagine the negative effects are an amplification of that. I think a lot of people are cautious about it, both because it likely requires more resources to run and because of high-profile disasters like Futura.* It also begs the question of how one oversees the process, and if the psychologist or whatever other profession is in the time-acceleration...do they charge by the subjective hour or the objective one? *In my take on it, part of the issue with Futura wasn't the time acceleration but the psychological effects of raising children entirely in simulation. That seems like a guaranteed way to force a solipsistic, even psychopathic mindset.

Weren't they sleeved in their futuras the whole time? Wouldn't that buffer against Morph Fever, even if they spend all their time in simulspace?

Which begs to question: how much of a complete central nervous system is needed for an async to feel completely at home? How much of it is brain? Pods have some form of spinal chord, and, I am assuming, potentially part of the brain stem, or at least enough of a brain stem to regulate respiratory and cardiac systems? Or does the biological CNS end at the spinal chord and go straight into a cyberbrain? Do async powers work off of the spinal chord alone? If one scooped out the little lizard brain (assuming that even existed) on top of the spinal chord and replaced the whole thing with a full cyberbrain, would asyncs get Morph Fever? Or are cyberbrains structurally similar enough to an actual human brain to manifest async powers? Could one make a better pod for asyncs by letting the CNS develop further into having a mamalian, human like up to limbic brain, and instead of letting a neocortex grow, augment it with a cybercortex like they do with smart dogs? Or are pod cyberbrains exactly that: an artificial neocortex? A lot of rambling here, I'm sorry.

I'd have to double-check, but doesn't a Brain Boxed synth take the same large penalties and additional strain damage a Pod does? Or was that to target a pod...? I distinctly recall a downside to attempting to sleeve into a partially biological morph with a Cyberbrain, but the details elude me. Based on how, for example, you can target a Pod, I would say that Morph Fever arises from the Disconnect between CNS and the Peripheral, or even the disconnect from the Ego pattern and the physical body. Watts-MacLeod lives in the neurons, it restructures the brain which is why Asyncs gain Mental Disorders. This data is part of the Ego, this is why it moves from body to body. Current Cyberbrain technology can copy these altered neural pathways, but without some part of the complete system (central or even peripheral) being organic, the Async can't actually utilize them. As, say, a pure information state, that would mean that literal parts of the Async's consciousness are not "running" properly unless placed in the right hardware (technically wetware) environment. This hardware end has to also exist in the "target". Something like "Thought Browse" for instance basically works to turn the Async into a wetware computer with hacking capability. By establishing a direct link, nerves to nerves, it can read and interpret brainwave data directly. Thus, I would wonder if Pods can be targeted not just because they say, have a tube of cloned spinal tissue, but also because at some point there are real nerve cells which the Async can interface with. Otherwise it's like the Async is trying to talk with a modern Windows computer using an old DOS box. This is kind of spinning off into an interaction of Asyncs and Cybernetics, but that's kind of relevant still, I suppose. Now I need to check if Zoosemiotics applies to xenolife or just animals derived from Terran biology.

Psi Epsilon is a different level of the Psi phenomenon anyway. It doesn't emerge from the WML strain we're familiar with. I'd say, since in Epsilon you can even target and be in a cyberbrain, that though the TITAN or ETI's advanced technological knowledge, the Epsilon level viruses are able to overcome the current emulation limitations of Transhumanity and actually allow the Async sections to proc even in a digital environment.

This is actually why I thought of my question about Zoosemiotics. And while the wording is vague, I'd wager it's intended to apply with situations with terran biology, removing negative modifiers to use Psi Sleights on animals which are non-sapient or semi-sapient. So to me, my current theory is that it may be related to the physical biology itself. Clearly, there is an interaction between biological components, and it's easiest if both the peripheral and central systems are biological, but can be done if some components are. The discussion is about to change, of course, as I have just looked into the rules. First and foremost, Asyncs experience Morph Fever in Pods, Synthmorphs or Informorph states. And while in a Pod, Sleights are possible but generate x2 strain and take a -30 penalty. The game also suggests elements of the Async's ego pattern are quantum entangled or auto-entangle when instanced, which would make digital emulation complex because they wouldn't have that affect. Additionally, all Asyncs take an extra derangement for 1 day whenever they resleeve, regardless of circumstances, given they need to adjust. I'd wager that Morph Fever does not occur in the Brain Box, but it probably has similar limitations to the Pod, though these do not seem elaborate on. It could just be that having all the right bioware components handy does it. I've always felt that normally Touch is necessary not as a kind of somatic crutch but because in general WML Asyncs are too weak to bend the laws of physics, thus if they want to move a lot of information they need the equivalent of a direct link, or at least a relatively close jump - nervous system to nervous system.

Sleeving between an uplift octomorph and a human type intelligence gets into the really odd, squick portion of eclipse phase. The neurological systems between the invertebrate distributed and vertebrate centralized are so different, there would have to be very heavy ego editing to get them to work. It'd basically be almost a delta-fork. Although, I am making major assumptions about the uplift process. Anyways, I digress. Pods seem to generally be a better choice for quality of life over any synthmorph from what I've read in the sourcebooks. You can at least modify the seams out so its passable as a biomorph at initial glance if you don't broadcast your morph type, and the person looking at you doesn't have a t-ray system. They cost slightly more than most synthmorphs, but the quality of life differences in a transhuman friendly habitat is worth it for most people, I would assume.