Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

Yeah, that's what I get for using mental math, but the point remains that the "magic numbers" at 33 and 66 won't exist, and it won't be possible to get critical and superior results at the same time, which I suspect has pretty profound ramifications.

Note that criticals supercede superior results. If you get the former, you don't get the latter.

o11o1 wrote:

Ok, now for my real concern: I like the idea of gear packages, but I think it should be... cut apart a bit more. Perhaps each career has an A and a B pack, and you pick TWO packs, but only one has to be from your own career. That way you could try to hybridize some gear wise, or play up your secondary interests.

While I like what they've done, I too am a bit saddened about the lack of option. Perhaps instead they could create an item list of Major, Moderate and Minor item options for each career. You get a set number of Major, Moderate and Minor items off of those lists, your choice, along with all the free stuff for your campaign choice.

RobBoyle wrote:

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.

This is such a weird thing to say when Jovians are still playable. Now, I'm all for making the Jovians less ridiculously fascist, but you've already said you're not going to be making all that big changes to the setting and the Jovians as written are explicitly and literally fascist-loving authoritarian jerks that hate personal liberties. So you're basically saying that the pseudofascist Übermensch-wannabes warrior-ascetic aren't OK because you don't want to encourage playing fascists, but playing the actual, literal fascists is something you [i]do[/i] encourage.

jackgraham wrote:

Do we say to do this in the rules? Not really. I think it's a GMing style/play culture thing that comes out of years of playing and reading about lots of different social skills systems and ways of using them as GMs across many games. At any rate, it's not our intent that the system sideline low-social PCs from roleplay.

If that's your intent I would really encourage designing the system to not discourage low-social PCs from interacting socially with NPCs. EP1e's rules for interacting with NPCs were extremely bare bones - practically non-existent - but the way they were written were such that if you wanted something from an NPC, it was best accomplished by having the Faceman do all the talking while the rest of the PCs perused the scenery. Once Faceman starts talking, there's nothing in the rules that would let Jenny Average help out. At least in combat, for all that I harp on it, everyone can contribute in some manner because all else being equal, a friend with a gun is two extra attacks with a semi-auto rifle attached to a body that has its own health track. A friend with a smile can't actually contribute anything to a negotiation.

Really unhappy with this. I always saw the fascist Ultimates as a radical munority, whereas the vast majority of the movement cared more about pursuing self-perfection and testing themselves. My favorite character is an Ultimate who was a warrior-poet who believed that transhumanity was full of potential, and this was the core of the Ultimates as I read them from day one; disavowing them as pure antagonists does the setting a major disservice. And by this logic, shouldn't the Jovians be off the list as well? The average transhuman is infinitely more likely to have a pleasant interaction with an Ultimate (who, at worst, will deride them as inferior) than a Jovian (who, guaranteed, sees them as a soullless synthetic horror trying to kill everything they stand for). I can't express strongly enough how much I dislike this decision. If you're worried about fascism at the game table, then say "THE FASCISTS ARE EVIL" instead of cutting away vibrant parts of the setting that have nothing to do with fascism.

What could I say? Just look at my nametag.

Decivre wrote:

They made Exhumans playable in Transhuman. EXHUMANS!!!

Actually, Exhumans have been playable from the start. They're called "asyncs". :^^^^^^^)

mellonbread wrote:

TheGrue wrote:

Decivre wrote:

They made Exhumans playable in Transhuman. EXHUMANS!!!

Actually, Exhumans have been playable from the start. They're called "asyncs". :^^^^^^^)

No, those are exsurgents. All the memes are piling up in your brain.

I don't like the memes, but the memes like me.

So, finally went through and recreated a cluster of three interlinked PC-level NPCs from my current campaign using the EP2 chargen process. Given the importance, attributes aren't given much attention in chargen — Transhuman's attribute presets (Brawler, Dilettante, Thrill Seeker, etc) feel like a good fit for the package-based creation approach. Adding them in wouldn't even require a new step, as aptitudes are already discussed in step 5. The characters: Caleb Reis, infugee combat hacker; Miriam Wiley, social butterfly and ne'er do well; Anthony Gillotti, criminal mastermind. Generally speaking it's simpler than the Transhuman package system, because fewer packages means fewer point overlaps which means fewer re-jiggering attempts to keep hot spot skills under the cap. Contrary to my expectation, I found myself wishing I had more points for knowledge skills while I had plenty of CP and fudgeable skill points left for active skills appropriate for each character's specialties. Caleb is an infomorph hacker/bot jammer. Miriam is his partner, the extraverted face who escorts him into otherwise inaccessible places with a ghostrider module. Anthony is their patron/boss (who also holds their significant debts) — most of their work is done for him. The background/career/interest setup feels like a good mix (although attribute archetypes as mentioned above would be nice). The options included currently give about 2000+ possible combinations of different skill sets, and it feels pretty flexible. I had to juggle around some of the skills after package-picking to fit the concepts I was looking for (ditching Miriam's Interfacing skill in favor of Melee for the occasional up-close self-defense, swapping Anthony's Profession: Squad Tactics for Interest: Antiques, etc) but not too dramatically. Caleb's Piloting: Aerospace skill for drone jamming feels like it could also be useful for the occasional getaway, but we'll have to wait for vehicle rules to know for sure. Gear packages being linked to career leads to a lot of really weird problems — the 'Face' career's gear pack, for example, comes with a bunch of biomorph implants... but I'd chosen a synthmorph. The strong career/gear package connection makes sense in some ways, particularly reduction in early choices, but adding an optional gear purchasing step to replace the career package feels like it's going to be a necessity for characters to "feel right." I'll likely try to build out the full-fledged PC party members in my campaign next.

RobBoyle wrote:

Kremlin K.O.A. wrote:

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.

Gear packs are still a work in progress, but we are open to suggested alterations. Most of them will probably start with a weapon of some sort. As to infomorphs -- you will have the option of switching out gear for something of an equivalent Complexity with GM approval. I've also been toying with a package that is for infomorphs in place of their normal career gear pack, but still debating that one.

I would highly recommend going the 'separate gear list for infomorphs' option, at least for the Firewall gear. After all, Firewall handing their new Sentinel an Ecto they can't wear, a set of clothing, with armored vest, that just falls to the ground, and a food maker that sits on the table. These kinda make Firewall look like clownshoes. I would suggest replacing all four of those with a single armed drone for infomorphs. Maybe something with grippy arms as well. Let them interact with the physical world a bit.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

Ultimates: I'm a little sad to see the Transhuman-Wandering-Samurai leave the table, but I can understand the reasoning. Even when they're run as good guys they (ironically) drift into one-trick-pony territory; they're great in gunplay-heavy scenarios, but getting them to work in any other gametype is a bleedin' nightmare. It's possible, but a hell of a lot of work.

Remember that Ultimates are a full fledged faction. That means they are not a loose confederation of wandering samurai (bleh), but a nation of its own with researchers, engineers, teachers, scholars, children, entertainers and much more. In the X-risk there is a sidebar about them having a possibility of running away through the gates into the galaxy to build human civilization of their own. Could a Evil Mercenary Company #145, consisting of fascist bushido jerk-offs do that? So I currently play an Ultimate/ex-Ultimate (hard to say) Nanotech Researcher who has only passable combat skills, but was considered a fully fledged member of the Ultimates for his competence in other skills. Rimward states that Ultimates consider almost any sort of competence usefull. So you could be a Habitat Worker Ultimate. A freaking just poet-poet Ultimate. A xenoinsectology Ultimate, whatever suits you. It's a harmfull stereotype that they are all MRDR-jacked overhumanists.

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

Remember that Ultimates are a full fledged faction. That means they are not a loose confederation of wandering samurai (bleh), but a nation of its own with researchers, engineers, teachers, scholars, children, entertainers and much more.

I think this gets overlooked a lot. People obsess over the Ultimates and their fixation on warfare, but the truth is that they just have a more pragmatic approach to security; the only way to truly keep someone safe is to help them protect themselves. They treat combat skills the way we treat mandatory English and math today in public schools (they probably treat those and then some as mandatory learning, as well): as something everyone in their society should be competent at. It doesn't mean that it's everyone top skillset... but it's definitely a big one.

I wish to add my voice in support of keeping the "be the best you can be" warrior-poets in the setting. To me, the idea of doing as much as you can to keep your species from being destroyed strikes me as.... rather a sane response. I always saw the facist bits as a parasitic memeplex attempting to infect and take over the original sane goals, actually very much like how the Jovians, with their own "the system is trying to kill us, we have to do all we can to hole up and protect ourselves" mindset is likewise being attacked from within by the same parasitic ideologies. [strong]Politics is messy.[/strong] Embrace it, allow it to be a source for drama, adventure, and activism, that you can have a large scale problem that you can't just shoot. The comments made by the developers about the Ulitmates makes me think that they've been treating their own setting with a certain set of blinders on about who is who. If you, as writers, don't want players to be playing the bad guys, consider making the bad guys less bad? This applies to Ultimates, Jovians, and to some degree even Ex-humans.

swordchucks wrote:

I've been thinking about this pretty hard, and I think the best way to tackle field skills (on the active skills side) is actually to treat them like specializations wherein you can take multiple specializations. Thus, instead of Hardware: Electronics 60, you'd have Hardware 30 (Electronics +30). This does a number of good things in that it removes any need to default between the skills (if you are a generalist, you know all the fields, but if you specialize, the degree of specialization is clear). On the other hand, I don't think this works so well on the Knowledge side, though you could probably merge the existing academics into a few meta-fields and then do that, etc..

So you're thinking that the Field skills would have a lower Generalist Cap to account for that? This sounds interesting overall.

Just have them be cheaper. Like 3 points for 2 Active Skillpoints, or heck even 2 for 1. That way you can have a reasonable competence in them, everyone can buy some Groundcraft on the cheap and this flavourfull Exotic: Busking will not cost you your ability to dodge bullets. That's how I will houserule that.

Decivre wrote:

o11o1 wrote:

So you're thinking that the Field skills would have a lower Generalist Cap to account for that? This sounds interesting overall.

This I could get behind. Perhaps the field skill caps at 60, and from there you must purchase specializations for further training (with that cap, 5 specializations would equate to a maxed regular skill with single specialization).

How about field skills have the following rules: Field Skills are skills which cover a wide array of related topics. You can purchase a field skill normally at any value up to 40 as normal. Once you have a field skill at 40, you may then opt to advance into specialized versions of that skills. By dedicating 5 skill points to a field of specialization, the character gains a +10 bonus to checks of that skill when the specialization applies. You may have any number of specializations in a field skill, but no more than +40 to any one specialization at character creation. Example: A character can have Medicine 40 (Veterinary +30, Uplifts +40). This would give the character a 70 on a check to heal a wounded smartape, an 80 on a check to patch up a hominid, but only a 40 to treat a splicer. Assuming a COG of 15, this would cost a total of 60 skill points. More radical suggestion: Break up academics, interests, and professions into a series of broad categories and then do the same thing for them. For instance, Academics: Life Sciences 40 (Astrobiology +30, Biology +20) could be a thing. This would allow characters to have a certain base level in a bunch of related fields and then cheaply specialize into more narrow fields. This would somewhat relieve issues with some skills being too narrow and others too broad.

MAD Crab wrote:

Quote:

Athletics/Freefall - if you can't move well, you can't get past environmental obstacles. In micrograv, you might not be able to move at all. Explicitly the same skill, only one is used in grav, and one is used in micrograv; needlessly duplicative, as the baseline campaigns will commonly involve both environments.

Just to take a slight issue with this - Running or walking is NOT the same as being able to maneuver in zero g. They are completely different skillsets, and zero-g is not intuitive for anything with an inner ear.

Athletics covers a bunch of disparate skill types, explicitly, it's not just "running and walking":

Quote:

Athletics encompasses various types of physical activity in environments with gravity. Use Athletics to scale a wall, tread water, throw a grenade, jump a crevasse, vault a table, backflip off a ledge, or make a barrel roll with a winged morph.

And freefall is explicitly "do these things in microgravity"

Quote:

Free Fall is the companion skill to Athletics and Pilot, encompassing physical activities in microgravity environments or when free falling.

(Free fall also overlaps with Pilot: Aerospace quite a bit; basically depending if you're in a morph or a vehicle). My argument is that - for PCs who are "normally" expected to be basically competent in both grav and micrograv, separating the two at the skill level is an unnecessary granularity. If you have a need to generate a PC who is [i]not[/i] competent in one environment or the other, I proposed a negative trait; as basic exception-driven design. That's why I call it a Skill Tax; because the non-exceptional status is "you have to have both." (This is driving a lot of the complaints about the Field skills as well, incidentally, in that a lot of character concepts will need to cover multiple Fields unless you define them very broadly)

MAD Crab wrote:

Just to take a slight issue with this - Running or walking is NOT the same as being able to maneuver in zero g. They are completely different skillsets, and zero-g is not intuitive for anything with an inner ear.

I would argue that flight has more in common with micrograv movement than land-based locomotion. But I still prefer the idea that you use Free Fall when you aren't resisting gravity and Athletics when you are. It means that the skillset for space colonists is contrasted from the skillset of planetside civilians. A person who has never walked on a planet might have a very hard time of it, regardless of their agility on the ship. The same is true in converse.

TheGrue wrote:

There are 24 skills in EP 2E. 9 are linked to COG 5 are linked to REF 4 are linked to SAV 2 are linked to INT 2 are linked to SOM 1 is linked to WIL 1 is not linked to any aptitude Clearly, not all aptitudes were created equally.

I noticed this too. COG and REF are uber-aptitudes now. This is especially odd, since a couple skills that feel like they're more about fine body control (SOM), Free Fall and Infiltrate, are currently REF skills. Similarly, Kinesics could easily be an INT skill. Even more radically, perhaps the number of aptitudes could be reduced to make them more even. (Also, Psi is listed as being linked to WIL in the chart on p.14, but in the description on p.17 it's COG linked.) Overall I really like the condensed skill list, but agree with the others that there are too many Field skills, and/or that they cost too much. Either make the "Fields" much more broad, get rid of the fields entirely, and save the distinctions for specializations, and/or reduce their cost, like Knowledge skills. Similarly, many Exotic skills should probably be treated like Knowledge skills for cost.

[b]I hate my faction and I want to support it![/b] "Note that faction allegiance does not necessarily mean you are a hardcore true believer. You may have been born or raised into a faction and reluctantly stuck with it, or you may be finding yourself questioning some of the faction’s tenets. You may be a dissident, trying to actively change the faction from within. For now, your faction allegiance indicates the transhuman grouping you are most familiar with and whose goals you at least nominally support." Having a motivation of "+[Faction] Interests" seems weird when you're supposed to pick a faction even if it means you're reluctantly going along with it, being a dissident, or simply having grown up and being familiar with it.

LatwPIAT wrote:

[b]I hate my faction and I want to support it![/b] "Note that faction allegiance does not necessarily mean you are a hardcore true believer. You may have been born or raised into a faction and reluctantly stuck with it, or you may be finding yourself questioning some of the faction’s tenets. You may be a dissident, trying to actively change the faction from within. For now, your faction allegiance indicates the transhuman grouping you are most familiar with and whose goals you at least nominally support." Having a motivation of "+[Faction] Interests" seems weird when you're supposed to pick a faction even if it means you're reluctantly going along with it, being a dissident, or simply having grown up and being familiar with it.

Pursuing your faction's interests so they don't kick the shit out of you is still pursuing your faction's interests.

Hey, since equipment is back to doing The Thing that makes character generation & morph transitions suck (which of those bonuses to skills were implants? Which were morph trait bonuses? Which are ego? Now recalculate based on your new morph!) why not give various morphs specific bonuses to actions? Like you could give the larger morphs a +15 to tests of strength, or +15 to tests of endurance to the hybernoid? Just treat the morph as a special kind of equipment. Nothing to recalculate, just another fiddly bonus to remember which is OK since those didn't get dropped in this edition.

Theliel wrote:

Hey, since equipment is back to doing The Thing that makes character generation & morph transitions suck (which of those bonuses to skills were implants? Which were morph trait bonuses? Which are ego? Now recalculate based on your new morph!)

Note that unlike in 1st Edition, morphs and implants DO NOT affect your base aptitudes. That's the important distinction, because the hassle in 1st Edition was recalculating your lucidity, initiative, and other secondary traits, not skill bonuses. No one's hated skill bonuses. The closest they come to modifying the aptitude is when they grant bonuses to the check, like muscle augmentation.

Quote:

Still, COG has managed to gobble up more than it's fair share of attached skills. Especially when many of them are field skills to boot, so a character may very well have multiple instances. I get that we shouldn't be trying to "min max" our characters aptitude wise, and instead have more of their character in it, it seems like being anything other than high COG or High REF is just not very well rewarded.

I'm still holding out hope for: Interface -> INT Research -> INT Free Fall -> SOM Psi -> WIL (this one is inconsistent depending on where you look in the current play test doc.) That shift would go a loooooong way towards balancing things a bit more, though WIL is still the red headed stepchild of attributes. It would almost balance out the mix of active skills, and I think INT is really a better place for those skills anyways...

I admit that I have not gone back over the last 100+ comments. For all the parts where it tells you that you can bank a character-creation resource and assign it during play, please god change that to "your GM may allow you to..." This is one of those things where different groups will have different standards: personally, I would want to choke like out of a player who decided, at a climactic moment, "shazam, suddenly my character is a hacker, and suddenly he speaks mandarin!" I see nothing wrong with a GM wanting to have a fairly fixed party when play starts, and expecting players to, you know, *ask* if they're not clear on how valuable something's going to be. It's almost certainly been said before, but I'd like to see a few more backgrounds make the official list. On the other hand, I'm glad that "indenture" is on the new list, and it's probably a huge improvement (from a balance perspective) to take away the "Infolife buy tech skills at half CP" thing (even if we still bought things with CP). I really don't like the "feel free to move your skills around however you want!" line. Why have detailed character creation rules at all if one of the last step is "now, make any changes you fucking feel like!" On a related note, I'd love a totally-separate optional section for "advanced players, here's how you can freeform-build your character by spending points on skills." With the doubling-at-60 gone, it looks like that could be extremely simple -- something like "take 200 ranks in active skills, 100 ranks in knowledge skills, and spend 100 ranks however you want," or whatever the actual numbers are. At this point, I'm sure it's a fight I've already lost, but, if morph apt-maxes are gone, and if doubling-at-60 is gone, why not just remove the point-pools and go back to morphs geting "+10 to APT"? In the current edition, that would result in "+10 to APT-linked skills" in a very direct, math-free sense. (Yes, I know you used your ego aptitude and not your morph-modified aptitude when you bought skills, and so doubling-at-60 had nothing to do with morph bonuses. This still confused new players.) One thing I really *liked* about EP1 was that being a giant, replicant crab made you really different from a baseline human *all the time*. One thing I really hate about morph-linked pools, is that now my giant replicant crab functions like a baseline human, except that he gets 3 Moments of Awesome he can claim at random points throughout the day. That really isn't the same thing - it's a decision that could work very well in a different game, but it really undercuts the transhuman ethos, and very much is not the same thing. Speaking of fights I've already lost, having seen the morph rules, I still completely detest Flex, and really want rules to remove it from games I GM. I know nobody cares, but I hate Flex to an "I will just keep playing EP1" degree. Oh, I note that C-Rep is still one rep network that covers more-than-half the solar system, including "capitalists." Finding some way to break that into smaller networks might be a good thing. (It never made much sense to me that C-rep spends in the Jovian "Republic", Extropia and Venus.) Edit: upon reading up just a little, if the problem was recomputing derived stats, that completely mystifies me. Those are trivial to do, I have no idea how that's hard - especially since DUR, WT and DR are still morph-derived and go on the same line as INIT, LUC, TT and IR. Did people actually have that much trouble putting four numbers on a 3x5 notecard? Edit 2: The Firewall standard gear pack is good! I ran a Firewall game, and I had more than one player ask me if he could safely access the Eye if he didn't have active Anonymous Mesh Services. Just giving all Firewall characters a Utilitool, a tac-net and encryption software is probably a very good idea. On the other hand, I'd like to see better support for non-Firewall games and non-Firewall characters - one thing my group has had fun with is a party that mixed one Proxy, several Sentinels and several Useful Locals, and I'd hate to see doing that get harder (or less rewarding). Edit 3: I also oppose making "+Faction Interest" a fixed first motive. In EP1, I don't think I've ever had a player pick +Faction as a motivation voluntarily, and I don't see anything good coming from telling, for example, Extropian players that they have to be +Extropian by default (that could also easily lead to some insufferable roll-playing moments). I think downgrading that to a suggestion - possibly with the warning that "failing to contribute to your faction will lead to a loss of rep" - would be a good idea. Edit 4: I like that Survival made the skill list. I had several characters - notably a gatecrasher - "fake" it with Interest: Survival. It's also an appropriate skill for a Barsoomian nomad to have. It came up enough - "How do I represent that my character knows how to 'rough it'?" - that it probably deserves to be a skill. I'm also happy to see the networking skills as such go, as they were CP drains on non-SAV-based characters.