swordchucks wrote:

One of the things I've hated most about EP in the past, and continue to hate in these rules is the way that "your body is disposable... but really not at all". I like the Resources Trait a lot (I play with a house-ruled version of that right now), but the fact that morphs are somehow not resources is... bizarre. Three things I'd like to see that would make this much better (in my opinion): 1. Morph traits shouldn't be lumped in with Ego traits, thus should not be part of CP. 2. Morphs should be purchased like gear, with morph traits affecting their price. 3. Certain morphs can be too expensive for PCs at the start of the game or require a trait in order to purchase or lowering of the cost via negative traits. Why go with this over the current system? a) The current system makes little or no sense in-game. Why would having a reaper morph be the equivalent of 55 points of skills? Of 12 points of aptitudes? b) The current system can reward you for taking a crappy morph, loading it down with negative traits, and then resleeving into a spare slightly less crappy morph. Even if you don't do that, a game that naturally has a transition via farcasting, etc., will offer an opportunity to shed negative traits. c) In the current system, because you spend points on Resources and Morphs out of the same pool, you're actually pushing people that are richer toward cheaper morphs. Which is really the opposite of how it should probably work.

Yeah, good points. This is why I have problems to adapt E.P. for GURPS (and I love GURPS, by the way). The Body is a shell. From the setting concept, all the Morphs are products. I think it should be something like this: * Some backgrounds have a default morph included, to represent those who did'nt die in the The Fall. Probably Flat or Splicers. * Most Morphs would be paid in "cache" (or credits, etc.), since they are products. * Maybe some exotic Morphs would require some Trait to "unlock" to the player

Went and tried to recreate my old MMO AGI, the one in the IC forum. They ended up less competent out of the gate, but hey, maybe starting chars are supposed to be less this edition. They also ended up with gear that they cannot use at all (Armor vest, smart clothes, food maker) and no way to engage in a physical combat. (Got the skills but no access to a gun drone) The gear system needs to be passed through the can again to take infomorphs into account.

RobBoyle wrote:

Because Shopping: The RPG isn't very fun. Even with cool gear like EP has. YMMV.

And yet, most of the RPGs I know have some "shopping". And is not necessarily bad. Maybe we could have options for "shopping rules", like those Optional Rules in Transhuman.

RobBoyle wrote:

MagisterCrow wrote:

Are Ultimates not going to be a PC faction anymore? They don't appear on the sidebar and I wanted to know if that was deliberate or an oversight. I know toward the end of 1e, we started seeing a lot more "potential X-Threat" talk and I remember they and Firewall had some issues, but I'm now kinda curious.

Ultimates have indeed been dropped as a PC faction. As you noted, we pushed them more in the fascist/x-threat direction, and we don't want to be encouraging people to play fascists.

Previous EP books like Rimward made a huge deal about how Ultimates had a bunch of internal factions with different interpretations about what the ideology meant. Rounding them off to "fascists we don't want people to play as" is a huge step away from "EP as an interesting setting" and toward "EP as agitprop". I can say pretty confidently that this won't stop me from playing one, and I don't think it will stop anyone else either.

Alright, let me distil my objection to No-Defaulting skills into a more cogent argument. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of thing a character can do without any formal training, by defaulting to a linked attribute (remember that a character can get up to +60 by stacking modifiers):

• Isolate a specific chemical compound
• Solve Fermat's Last Theorem
• Translate a previously unknown language
• Scratch-build a Reaper
• Disarm a bomb
• Plot an interplanetary transfer orbit
• Field-strip a plasma rifle
• Repair a submarine
• Calculate the time dilation factor for a given value of c
• Sythesize liquid thermite
• Design and install cybernetic implants
• Perform open-heart surgery
• Build a thermonuclear device
• Fly a helicopter
• Conduct an orchestra
• Disarm a security system
• Build a computer
• Reprogram the human brain

If a character can do all of those things by defaulting, why are Programming and Infosec different?

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

Implants make for most of the capability difference between morphs, so the basic structure is just better because of the notably higher DUR/DR/WT and pools. Previously if you ignored implants the Remade was tougher (as it is now) and was ~10% better at many skill checks. It really got stronger, because pools are more powerful than +5 SOM or similar. Most of the power of a morph being in the implants really helps the transhuman feel IMO, because if someone wanted to, they could make a flat into a budget Remade with the implants, and would have most of the capability, but lack the raw power of the base chassis, which seems pretty transhuman to me.

Ok, you got a point. And we don't know yet how equipment work. But I will repeat myself: If someone is [b]stronger[/b], what this mean mechanically speaking? If someone is [b]smarter[/b], what this mean mechanically speaking? If someone is [b]faster[/b], what this mean mechanically speaking? AND If Aptitudes do NOT represent ANY of that, WHY there are test based of those things, associated with those concepts? Because at least in 1st, many of the mechanical aspects of SOM involve strenght and resistance tests. The Apt was used for Damage calculation, and many real physical things. And what about someone with superhuman SOM (40) in a very weak body? Or the oposite, someone with a very low SOM with a superman-strenght body? How do you do that? At least in GURPS that's easy. ST is clearly related to a physical thing, the only real mental atribute is IQ (and, of course, the other secondary characteristics associated with, like PER or WILL). In Eclipse Phase, that's not clear. When the body end and the Ego begin in 2E of EP?

TheGrue wrote:

Alright, let me distil my objection to No-Defaulting skills into a more cogent argument. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of thing a character can do without any formal training, by defaulting to a linked attribute (remember that a character can get up to +60 by stacking modifiers): If a character can do all of those things by defaulting, why are Programming and Infosec different?

I'll reiterate something I said earlier, you've listed a lot of cases where there is actually a good case against defaulting - the problem is that many of these are field skills. This creates an issue, because while I might agree that say, somebody with no training can't perform brain surgery or building a bomb in your bathtub, because those might be covered under Field skills I would say there should be some level of base level overlap between skills (I/E the default aptitude). If you're trained in the basics of open heart surgery on a human, some of that basic biological knowledge would apply if you had to do open heart surgery on a horse. Not a lot, but defaulting is usually bad anyway. And I personally argue for Field skills because it's good for differentiation. Not just fluff, but if say, Hardware was one skill somebody could sink 80 points into being amazing at way too many tasks across different scales and specialties. So the question becomes, would you prefer an extra layer of rules to apply defaulting to all things which logically persist with no defaulting? Because me personally, I can also totally see why you can't default on stuff like program or infosec. How the heck do you understand or write code without training in it? If you got a program to translate the Programming language to you, that would basically be like an ALI with it's own skill. (Also I'd argue you can't practically accomplish a lot of those things by defaulting - a lot of those sound like they'd be pretty hard without proper tools and training, and defaulting pools are pretty low.)

UnitOmega wrote:

I'll reiterate something I said earlier, you've listed a lot of cases where there is actually a good case against defaulting - the problem is that many of these are field skills. This creates an issue, because while I might agree that say, somebody with no training can't perform brain surgery or building a bomb in your bathtub, because those might be covered under Field skills I would say there should be some level of base level overlap between skills (I/E the default aptitude). If you're trained in the basics of open heart surgery on a human, some of that basic biological knowledge would apply if you had to do open heart surgery on a horse. Not a lot, but defaulting is usually bad anyway. And I personally argue for Field skills because it's good for differentiation. Not just fluff, but if say, Hardware was one skill somebody could sink 80 points into being amazing at way too many tasks across different scales and specialties. So the question becomes, would you prefer an extra layer of rules to apply defaulting to all things which logically persist with no defaulting? Because me personally, I can also totally see why you can't default on stuff like program or infosec. How the heck do you understand or write code without training in it? If you got a program to translate the Programming language to you, that would basically be like an ALI with it's own skill. (Also I'd argue you can't practically accomplish a lot of those things by defaulting - a lot of those sound like they'd be pretty hard without proper tools and training, and defaulting pools are pretty low.)

I'm 100% behind Field skills overlapping, that's a great mechanic and it goes a long way to making Field skills less thinly sliced and more worth taking. For the sake of this discussion, I'm talking about a character who has no ranks in any related Field skill, and is just defaulting to COG. As to what I would prefer, what I would prefer is that the "No Defaulting" restriction be removed from all skills. That's the simplest fix, and also the easiest to remember. A granular way of determining which skills can be defaulted according to some arbitrary categorization might be more "realistic", but it would also be more difficult to remember on the fly - and besides which, as general game design theory I am rarely a fan of restricting player options. You may ask how a person could understand code without being trained, and you have a point. I would reply with one of the following arguments; you may take your pick as to which you find more compelling:

• Computers are ubiquitous in the transhuman future. Computer code is already a part of general K-12 education right now in the 21st century; do we have any reason to think this will go away by the time of the Fall? I submit that a transhuman whose basic education did not include some rudimentary form of programming or infosec is roughly equivalent to a modern human that was never taught to read, or do arithmetic; such a deficiency is better represented as a negative trait than a global rule about skills.
• Code is difficult to interpret without training, yes. But is it impossible? If yes, why is it impossible to interpret code without training, but possible to perform tasks on my list with the same lack of training? Is neurosurgery really more intuitive than HTML?

Regarding the difference between theoretically possible and practically achievable, this distinction is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. It is sufficient to argue my case that a character can default on Medicine: Neurosurgery and has a non-zero chance of success, yet cannot even attempt Infosec or Programming without formal training. But this leads into another argument, an argument I was holding off on until we saw the Gear chapter but I can actually get into now: how easy it is to get circumstantial bonuses. Take Joe Cyborg, for instance. Joe is a statistically average transhuman, meaning all of his aptitudes are at 15. Joe, for whatever reason, has no ranks in any Active skill, but he is very well read and has an arbitrary number of Knowledge skills at 30 (which, with his 15 COG, puts them at 45). Joe needs to prune a fork of himself to send to visit his mother on Extropia, preferably one optimized for small talk and with a dampened sense of taste. Joe doesn't have any ranks in Medicine: Psychosurgery, so he's defaulting to his COG 15. But he does have Academics: Psychology at 45, which gives him a +10 complimentary skill bonus. He can also get his neighbour, Jill Robot, to assist him for a further +10. He can spend a point of Insight or Flex for a further +20, and since there's no time pressure he can take extra time for another +20. This brings him to the maximum of +60, meaning his target number is now 75. His odds of success are about 3 in 4; if has Insight or Flex left to flip the dice, his odds improve to about 9 in 10. Joe's mother is fond of geese, and he wants his fork to bring her a gift. Extropia is too far to send a physical item, so he'll have the fork fab something on arrival. He could grab a blueprint for a sculpture of a goose off his rep networks, but Joe wants to add that personal touch and do it himself. So Joe decides to create a custom blueprint of a goose sculpture; he doesn't have any ranks in Programming, but his COG is 15. He does have Interest: Sculpture at 45, which gives a +10 complimentary skill bonus. He can again get his neighbour Jill to assist him for a further +10, spend a point of Insight or Flex for a further +20, and take extra time for another +20. This brings him to the maximum of +60, meaning his target number is now 75 - except he still can't attempt the task, because he isn't allowed to default on Programming.

It doesn't seem like it would actually be difficult to play an Ultimate in 2e, even if the book isn't listing them as a faction. I think there's probably something to be said about how in absence of an actual schism, the more moderate members of the Ultimates are still participating in the institution with the Overhumanists in a fashion that makes them complicit. If they schism, somewhere like the announced Solar Gazetteer would be a great place to describe that schism, but if I had to hazard a guess, the 'good guys' would probably not be the ones who get to keep the Ultimates name.

Honestly, "faction" seems much more strongly an RP guideline than anything now - a natural part of describing your character but lacking a concise mechanical element (Other than affecting the Blacklisted trait and some free Knowledge skill points). There's nothing really stopping you from playing the Ultimate, Exhuman or Singularity Seeker ideology inherently in the system - as opposed to 1E where factions were a major mechanical component. I mean, the game even says you can go "Factionless" and become the True Neutral of EP.

Ian Argent wrote:

If the Ultimates go "away" as a PC faction, then there's no "PC friendly" group dedicated to "ethical self-improvement." I have recently re-read the various EP1 sourcebooks (for fun), and I've seen that the Ultimates are moving towards the fascist/x-threat direction. Perhaps they can schism? I'd like to see a faction dedicated to "friendly excellence," where they want to be "the best there is" but [i]not[/i] Rule All The Lesser Beings? There were strains of this in the early presentation of the Ultimates, and then they seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Agreed. One of the reasons a friend of mine played Ultimates a lot was because of that focus on excellence and pushing the limits of his transhuman capability. While I get that the Ultimates have a [i]lot[/i] of attached strings with being fascist and their conception of gene trash, I feel like in some ways there was also that odd individuality to balance things out. Like, the interview with the Ultimate in Rimward had the guy speaking to another...not necessarily as an equal, but someone with whom at least they were friendly. I dunno, I guess I look at it and see Ultimates becoming just another band of exhumans with a good reputation, which, as stated, basically paints anyone trying to push past transhuman as 'evil.' I get transhumanity being scared of tech advancing too quick, but surely there's got to be some folks who are seeking to push the boundaries of transhumanity in all its forms and band together to give it a shot that aren't psychopaths, brinkers, or fascists.

Here's a question - if we're recommended to stick to multiples of 5 when picking attributes, why don't we just move the whole system from a d100 to a d20?

That'd break crits and possible superior success, as well as making the Flex number swapping less interesting.You'd also lose a lot of granularity with aptitude checks. There's actually a dark horse faction for hardcore self improvement-the Planetary Consortium shares the eugenic meme with the ultimates, which now is has more personal connotations than in the modern day. The difference is you'd probably have more of a Dosh-Monk warrior than an old philosophic-Monk warrior.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

That'd break crits and possible superior success, as well as making the Flex number swapping less interesting.You'd also lose a lot of granularity with aptitude checks.

Would it? A roll of 30/60 translates to 6/12 on a d20. As for crits, the odds of rolling doubles on 2d10 are 1 in 10, or 2 in 20; the same odds as rolling either a 1 or a 20 on a d20, which works out well because in d100 EP the highest roll is an automatic fail and the lowest an automatic success. As for spends, an option to flip the digits on a d100 is roughly equivalent to in terms of odds to rolling twice and taking the better result. Regarding granularity, I disagree entirely. If all modifiers are multiples of 10, if you can only buy skills in multiples of 5, and if you're strongly encouraged to also buy aptitudes only in multiples of 5...where exactly is the granularity there?

Yeah I don't disagree; I too prefer the granularity of a percentile system. The point I was trying to make is, it seems like we're losing that granularity in 2E.

No it doesn't match. There's a ~10% chance of critical success on a successful roll in EP (it can change a little bit with skill ratings like 21), and a 10% chance of critical failure on a failed roll. If you were to just use 1 and 20 as critical numbers there would be a 5% chance of critical success on a success and similar for failure. You also can't get 66 being two superior successes *and* critical success with that system. I'm also skeptical that 5e advantage and number swapping actually have the same statistical spread, but if you want to analyse it with anydice or something I'd be interested to see how different they look. IIRC dice swapping tends to produce a weird "lumpy" distribution, while (dis)advantage produces a smooth curve above or below the baseline. I see nothing recommending buying aptitudes in 10 CP chunks. In fact I think buying enough to get a critical breakpoint seems better to me. (Like getting one extra point in an aptitude to make a skill rating of 65 66 to get the double superior critical success instead of crit failure)

Quote:

Many packages come with the core skills needed to do the task, but not the support skills you'd need to get to the task. Take running a drone. You need Pilot: Whatever the hell the drone is to fly it. if it's got weapons you'll need that skill. But before that you need Interface to make a connection or keep it while someone else uses Interface to jam you. You'll need Infosec to protect the drone from getting hacked - and while battle hacking doesn't work that great against morphs it works pretty ok on drones that've been jammed.

I think we'll need to see the updated Jamming material before making that call. The 1E rules were written with the 1E skills in mind, and I'd be shocked if they didn't streamline the skills involved. We already know that Interfacing is used to operate the onboard weapons for bots and jammed vehicles ("Interface is also used to attack with non-portable weapon emplacements and weapons mounted upon bots, vehicles, or spacecraft…") so there's no need for your Hacker/Jammer to pick up Guns unless he needs to. And, I'm still lobbying hard for a single non-field "Piloting" skill. If that were the case, a drone jammer would need two core skills: Interfacing and Piloting. Add a dollop of Infosec for protection against antagonistic counter-hackers (or purchase a pair of security AIs to assist you, and things look a little nicer.

Quote:

Actually according to the setting damn near everything needs Interfacing since most equipment doesn't actually have screens or other dials. Kit relies on mesh interafaces unless it's pre-fall milspec or Jovian.

Theoretically, although it's defaultable, your muse has Interfacing 40, and nearly every device comes with a simple onboard helper AI to explain usage. According to the 2E playtest, "Use Interface to manipulate electronics, command software, forge video files, scan for wireless devices, jam frequencies, get sensor readings, control life support functions, and understand a device with which you are unfamiliar." That's stuff you could ask your muse to do for you — at skill 40 — and put up with the delay. This issue in the RAW is definitely a weird one though, and it's come up in 1E discussions as well. I'd really like to see Interface moved to INT rather than COG, spreading out the must-have skills a bit better.

I like how Medicine went to describe the different fields, such as use Medicine: Biotech to upgrade morphs and use Medicine: Pharmacology to create drugs. I very much encourage the devs to do more of that. It really helps to make sense of things.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

No it doesn't match. There's a ~10% chance of critical success on a successful roll in EP (it can change a little bit with skill ratings like 21), and a 10% chance of critical failure on a failed roll. If you were to just use 1 and 20 as critical numbers there would be a 5% chance of critical success on a success and similar for failure.

You did the math wrong; you calculated the probability of a critical out of all possible successes successes for the first, and then compared it with the probability of a critical success out of all successes AND failures for the second. Apples and oranges, my friend. Let me walk you through my math: If your skill rating is n (where n is between 1 and 98) vs a d100, and a critical success is a success where the dice show doubles, then your chance of a success being a critical success is 1+rounddown(n/11) in n. This is usually close to 10%, and at very low skill values can be even higher. Across the possible range of skill ratings, from 01 to 98, the mean probability is ~0.12 and the median probability is ~0.10 However, if your skill rating is n (where n is between 01 and 19) vs a d20, and a success is where the die shows 01, then your chance of a success being a critical success is 1 in n. Here the distribution is a bit different; across the possible range of skill ratings, from 01 to 19, the mean probability is ~0.19, and the median is 0.10 exactly. The reason the mean value is skewed so high is because at lower skill ratings there are fewer possible successes that are not 1. Check out these curves, d100 and d20. You can see the latter is quite a bit wider at the lower values, but they are not so dissimilar on the whole.

Since you bring it up Jack, has the Posthuman crew ever recorded any Actual Plays of EP?

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

[..] I'm also skeptical that 5e advantage and number swapping actually have the same statistical spread, but if you want to analyse it with anydice or something I'd be interested to see how different they look.

Thanks for mentioning anydice. I had yet to discover this tool—looks extremely useful!