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Mad Scientist Psychosurgury

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Mon, 2016-12-05 10:33

Fenrir

Mad Scientist Psychosurgury

So I was looking at Psychosurgery, and it seems like all the fun uses of it would cause the psychosurgeon to be making will saves. "Everyday" psychosurgery is usually with a willing subject, but sentinels and their enemies are probably going to want to use it on unwilling subjects. Like a player wanting to use psychosurgery for Enhanced Interrigation, or to turn a foe into a double agent (who isn't even aware they are doing it). So my thoughts are: how many gms have had psychosurgeon pcs, and how often do they end up taking stress from doing very mind-rapey things to their enemies? How often do these psychosurgeons do non-mind-rapey surgery in gameplay? Does anyone else read the rules for merging non-same egos and think "This is an exhuman antagonist waiting to happen"? And as an interesting side note: given an accelerated simuspace, merging different egos would be both fast (measured in hours) and effective, given the surgeon hive-mind-helps themselves and is good (60+) at it, and that's including the downtime for the ego to recover from the massive stress and trauma that comes with it. If you gave a surgeon a simuspace and a fork of each member of a server, it would take less than a day for them to create an ego that has all of their combined skills (and has serious identity issues, hence exhuman antagonist)

Mon, 2016-12-05 13:24

CordialUltimate2 CordialUltimate2's picture

Check out the Soul Eaters.

Check out the Soul Eaters. They are exactly that. Ego merging exhumans with some existential identity horror/dillemas thrown in. Everything terrifying about psychosurgery can be assumed to exist in their arsenal of tricks. As for merging so many different Egos so fast I would simpy rule that resulting "person" is irreparably insane. You have to remember that every mind processes information in different way, has a different architecture. Using computer science comparison it would be like haphazardly jurry riging incomplete Mac, some industrial chips, few old Nokia phones with some tablet parts. Aaaaand then running on it emulator of WiiU with scripts and machine code adapted to accept windows commands, better yet with some windows drivers and code salvaged from the adolescent script kiddie. It is theoretically possible but is the result worth it? You could do that to test your psychosurgery skills (following the mad scientist theme) creating tormented forks, "for science". EDIT: Now that I reread that ^ I notice that exsurgent virus would be capable of creating such a frankensteinian monstrosity. TITANs for sure.

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Mon, 2016-12-05 14:01

Fenrir

Oh yeah that'd be a neat

Oh yeah that'd be a neat exsurgeant strain; an infected infomorph becomes the "queen" of a hive which frankenstiens up all the other egos in the hive, and then propagates itself to all the available morphs, so it can start capturing new egos to bring into the fold. "You will be assimilated" ;) As for the in-quick-concession, I do agree that you'd have to give the ego downtime to come to terms with itself before you performed the next "upgrade", but in a simulspace you only need an hour to get almost 3 days of downtime, so that's surprisingly reasonable. The rules say the new ego needs 10 days to come to terms with the new ego, but 10 days=240 hours/60accel=4 hours downtime. So the surgery takes 4 hours (assuming you don't fail, which I admit is a big if), meaning you can do it 3 times in a day with more than enough "downtime" between to recover from stress and traumas. The result would definately have some issue though, just because of the memory: Stage 1 (A+B): 75% A, 25% B Stage 2 (AB+C): 56.25% A, 18.75% B, 25% C Stage 3 (ABC+D): 42.1875%A, 14.0625%B, 18.75%C, 25%D Alternate:* Stage 1(A+B)(C+D)(D+B)(C+A): (75%A, 25%B) (75%C, 25%D) (75%D, 25%B) (75%C, 25%A) Stage 2(AB+CD)(DB+CA): (56.25%A, 18.75%B, 18.75%C, 06.25%D) (56.25%D, 18.75%B, 18.75%C, 06.25%A) Stage 3(ABCD+DBCA): (43.75%A, 18.75%B, 18.75%C, 18.75%D) *Note that in the alternate I do simultaneous surgeries using different egos, and presumably alpha-forks of the surgeon. I also assume the surgeon, being a mad scientist type, used his MoS options to increase the number of skills he transfered, instead of transfering more memories ("That's what XPs are for!") I love your metaphor for the result XD

Mon, 2016-12-05 15:03

CordialUltimate2 CordialUltimate2's picture

Transfering more skills

Transfering more skills instead of memories would be better regardless. It would ease the identity shock of new ego, especially if you are merging different egos. With your own forks that you sent to VR boarding School of Archeology or VR boot bamp you would want the memories, as the hatred of Seargant McAitorturer would be strongly assiociated with newly aquired marksmanship skills. Mechanically you are correct (at least it looks that way I didn't bother to check the numbers), but that would have to be aproved by the GM. At my table that would require heavy roleplaying, and if the GM, didn't like it he would throw at me heavy stress penalties or even worse, declare that to gain new skills I lose old ones as their associated personality is lost in continuous merging.

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Mon, 2016-12-05 17:24

Fenrir

I agree with your points.

I agree with your points. Mental illnesses should be roleplayed anyway, but especially somethi g as tramatic as this. It is an interesting thought though; as you combine a larger and larger group of egos, the memories are going to become less and less connected to the final character. This woukd cause problems of its own, but would probably help with the mpd: how can you have multiple personalities fighting for control if each personality can't remembwr who thwy are anymore? They'd probably have dissociatuve personality disorder instead...or whatever the one is that means the ego isn't sure of their own defining charactsristics, and need others to reafirm their vharactwr traits. I do fibe it interesting as this is the only way in the game to get skills without havibg to pay the rez for them: even merging the same wgo means that the new version has to "rebuy" skills gained from the fork their merging with.