To the broader subject of NPC resources - I would assume generic mooks probably don't get Ego Flex - this means they will be heavily weighted to whatever their morph and gear provides them and may make them vulnerable to alternate angles. So a Fury+extras has a crapload of Vigor, but we already know you may be able to use social skills in combat - so you might be able to take advantage of their minimal moxie to try and taunt or trick them into doing something stupid and get them to waste vigor, or a Menton hacker might have a lot of insight, but if you can get your hands on him physically he'll have a pretty bad day. Some of this will have to wait until we see combat and other fiddly mechanical systems - and will probably be further helped by the NPC file release.

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I am. And it's no big deal; I attack arguments and reasoning, not people.

Well, I'll definitely tone down the snark. ;-) Nothing's worse than realizing you're treating someone you get along with well in one context poorly in another. That said, I think the interplay between simulationist/gamist/narrativist elements is an interesting one. There are pros and cons to each, and I don't know of any games that can lay claim to being "purely" one one and none of the others.

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When you can determine who is going to come out on top in any conflict solely based on who has one of three or four implants, that's a serious issue.

Are firearms and armour also serious issues, then?

They certainly can be if one player is sporting a battlesuit and an auto rail rifle while everyone else has vacsuits and stunners. But that's also part of the "gearing up" process that most teams go through on a mission. Even when they have wildly different morphs, teams in games I've run have tried to make sure that everyone's got a decent weapon or two and some armor before the shooting starts, or they're out of the way entirely. That's been true even when they couldn't afford to slap Neurachem 2 and Reflex Boosters into everyone. I am curious how the changes in Excellent Success damage and Critical Hit armor penetration will affect combat. In EP1, good rolls could easily double or triple the damage of low-end weapons; a well-timed application of Moxie could upgrade a hit to a critical, ignoring armor entirely. That made it fairly easy to spend one Moxie point to kick an NPC into the wound spiral, even if they were sporting crazy armor. In EP2, even a crit success only ignores *half* of a target's armor, and it's up to the GM to determine what combat effect the crit actually has. We haven't seen the other changes to combat rules, but it seems like this should increase the survivability of heavily armored targets.

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Precisely my point: rule tweaks are a valid solution. The remaining "combat drag" issue could be solved by limiting SPD to 2 or 3. Every problem that has been brought up regarding SPD has been literally on the level of grade-school arithmetic; I'm puzzled that anyone could think they're insurmoutable obstacles.

Well, concerns about the radical effect of SPD on character combat balance, and the wild swings in number of turns taken when player SPD levels aren't the same, aren't about math. They're about whether the differences are significant enough that they are a barrier to enjoyment of the game for a large enough group of players. One might say that these disparities make the game more realistic, because it's a dangerous world and no one ever promised that sub-optimal combat builds wouldn't be murdered in a heartbeat once the action starts. While I like that in theory, it doesn't seem to work out as well in actual gameplay. YMMV, of course. And they're definitely not insurmountable problems — moving from a flat turn multiplier to an expendable resource pool is a "rule tweak," too, albeit one with larger implications than just SPD. Whether one likes or dislikes it seems to be a bigger question than one's feelings about SPD alone.

UnitOmega wrote:

Lastly, negative trait selection seems very narrow. I even want to say it sucks, and not in the good way. I found it very hard designing a more generalist character to pick solid traits to get back CP to use on positive traits or extra skill points which would have been a breeze to arrange in 1E. The -5 to aptitude checks are good if you want to be really terrible at something, or portray kind of a broad flaw but especially with how they're phrased they can be difficult to pick ("No, this character isn't really obtuse..."). I'd like it if some of the more specific but more characterized negative traits (especially some from Transhuman) might come back right away, like Illiterate, Stalker, Dependant, Intense Relationship, Lost Fork, Trusting Heart, etc.

Agrees. Im pretty dissatisfied with the trait list as it stands. I LIKED being able to add specific character flavor with the traits, both negative and positive.

For backgrounds, I don't see anything for fall evacuee or re-instantiated. Was this missed?

eaton wrote:

I could be wrong, but it LOOKS like the backgrounds no longer include assumptions about how one spent the fall. "Enclaver" also implies some weird mad-maxy stuff going on on Earth before the fall, unless that background is intended for people who are actually on Earth post-fall?

That was what I was thinking. The backgrounds in general seem more about what you do and who you are than being focused on the Fall, as some backgrounds were before. Enclaver to me says that they lived in one of the last bastions of Earthly humanity post-fall... like the OSC of deathland.

In Transhuman, that's Fall Evacuee: Enclaver and Fall Evacuee: Underclass, however I suspect given that backgrounds no longer seem to hand out free Ego Traits (+ or -) that Re-Instantiated and it's common Edited Memories specifically isn't assumed by the game anymore. Regardless of your situation now - the skills and qualities you picked up on Earth are mostly the same and you can edit in whatever if you want to represent any time as an infugee I guess.

So. Went through another round of chargen with three more players, all of whom have played EP before, none of which went through traditional chargen in EP1. (One has played from a pregen, the other two used Transhuman's Lifepath). Some broad obeservations: Skill list reduction was all-around popular, and the elimination of "double cost for skill points over 60" was a relief. There was a little confusion around picking aptitudes so late in the chargen process; a couple players seemed to feel like it would make sense earlier, but also knew that they weren't sure exactly where they wanted to go with the attributes until they picked packages and had a mix of skills in mind. I still think Transhuman's named Aptitude presets would be a good addition — the "pick some presets and tweak as needed" approach works well for skills, and the presence of named presets for aptitudes would help folks still getting their bearings in the setting and its mechanics, IMO. Points took some time to explain, but it was made MUCH harder by the fact that everyone had prior experience with Moxie, and was thrown off by the fact that... well, there's something rather different that's also called Moxie now. After a couple rounds of explaining the differences, all three commented that a different name for the SAV/WIL would have made things much less weird. "Call the whole pile of refreshable points 'moxie', but explain it's divided into different buckets, maybe?" offered one of the more experienced players. Not sure, but it definitely took some repeated questions and explanations even after finishing chargen and starting our one-shot. Lots of horse-trading happened around gear: the career-linked gear packs left folks with idiosyncratic choices people seemed happy to trade amongst themselves for a more optimal load-out. All agreed that they were looking forward to a fuller gear-list. They were all pretty confused by the absence of "credits" as a discrete thing. They know how to work rep and favors, but did feel it was a little weird for credits to go unmentioned. I get the transition to complexity/rarity/restriction for fabbing/obtaining purposes, but unless EP2 radically changes the economy of the PC and inner system, it feels like credits are still a useful property to track for characters, beyond the fairly abstract "Resources" trait. Finally, with more emphasis on rep and favors out of the gate, and the addition of the point pools, there's a fair amount of book-keeping involved in *playing* a character now, not just rolling one up. None of it is tricky to figure out individually, but it would be smashing if the standard charsheet had two pages — one to store the (relatively) static stats, aptitudes, skills, etc. Another to store the "current status" info, like current damage/wounds/stress/trauma; current state of favor usage for each network; current number of unspent points per pool; current ammo per wielded weapon; etc. I've whipped up these scratchpads on occasion before, but it feels like it's extra critical now with so many numbers to track. All in all, everyone was pleased with the characters they produced and no one seemed to feel constrained. The power gamer was happy he could tweak and optimize things to generate his preferred "Sneaky sniping liar" archetype, for example. The hitches were almost all around ambiguous terminology or uncertainty about as-of-yet-unwritten material.

eaton wrote:

Points took some time to explain, but it was made MUCH harder by the fact that everyone had prior experience with Moxie, and was thrown off by the fact that... well, there's something rather different that's also called Moxie now. After a couple rounds of explaining the differences, all three commented that a different name for the SAV/WIL would have made things much less weird. "Call the whole pile of refreshable points 'moxie', but explain it's divided into different buckets, maybe?" offered one of the more experienced players. Not sure, but it definitely took some repeated questions and explanations even after finishing chargen and starting our one-shot.

While I get where you're coming from, I consider this simply the lag of people getting used to the new rules. Think about the matter from the long term view: calling the entire pile of buckets 'moxie' would be really unintuitive to someone who never played 1st edition, it would be holding onto a legacy term. IMO, much better to pick the answer that will be most correct two years from now, not whatever is more familiar to the current crowd.

eaton wrote:

They were all pretty confused by the absence of "credits" as a discrete thing. They know how to work rep and favors, but did feel it was a little weird for credits to go unmentioned. I get the transition to complexity/rarity/restriction for fabbing/obtaining purposes, but unless EP2 radically changes the economy of the PC and inner system, it feels like credits are still a useful property to track for characters, beyond the fairly abstract "Resources" trait.

How tightly does your group track the reserve of unspent favors for each character? Presumably a Credit system could be set up to track at a similar level of granularity, IE "I have credits to buy 2 [Minor] items." though that does get us into figuring out how easily those merge into larger items or split back up. WHile 1st edition used powers of two, I'm not convinced that 2nd edition will want exactly the same progression. ( 3 to 1 strikes me as more... suitable with the new gear list) Regarding the horse trading your players wanted to do, did it feel like each gear pack was built wrong, or just that no matter what, each player would never be happy with a single big pack? Knowing the actual horse trades your players felt compelled to make might be useful in figuring out the second draft of the gear sets.

eaton wrote:

Finally, with more emphasis on rep and favors out of the gate, and the addition of the point pools, there's a fair amount of book-keeping involved in *playing* a character now, not just rolling one up. None of it is tricky to figure out individually, but it would be smashing if the standard charsheet had two pages — one to store the (relatively) static stats, aptitudes, skills, etc. Another to store the "current status" info, like current damage/wounds/stress/trauma; current state of favor usage for each network; current number of unspent points per pool; current ammo per wielded weapon; etc. I've whipped up these scratchpads on occasion before, but it feels like it's extra critical now with so many numbers to track.

This sounds like a good idea, though it largely comes down to a layout question regarding the "default" character sheet. We'll probably want to presume little index-card sized references for the Morphs as well, but the sheet should still probably go ahead and have space for three different morphs each with their own gear / inventory section. Since it's quite likely for each morph to not even be on the same Hab. To mind, it might make sense for the Ego section of the sheet to have a dedicated "Blueprints known" area as well, distinct from "stuff i'm actually lugging around". Gear blows up, BPs tend to accumulate without getting destroyed.

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While I get where you're coming from, I consider this simply the lag of people getting used to the new rules. Think about the matter from the long term view: calling the entire pile of buckets 'moxie' would be really unintuitive to someone who never played 1st edition, it would be holding onto a legacy term. IMO, much better to pick the answer that will be most correct two years from now, not whatever is more familiar to the current crowd.

I agree, just quoting what was said by the players as they rolled through chargen. Given how much time a few of us have spent arguing around interpretation, I figured I'd try to relay with as little filtering as possible.

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How tightly does your group track the reserve of unspent favors for each character? Presumably a Credit system could be set up to track at a similar level of granularity, IE "I have credits to buy 2 [Minor] items." though that does get us into figuring out how easily those merge into larger items or split back up. WHile 1st edition used powers of two, I'm not convinced that 2nd edition will want exactly the same progression. ( 3 to 1 strikes me as more... suitable with the new gear list)

I track it semi-carefully; they tend do do more 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' wheeling and dealing than straight-up favor pulls, so other than a few times they've pulled in high level favors at critical moments in the campaign they've been fine. Given the curiousness of hypercorp and PC credit economy, I'm actually okay with the idea of credit costs being handled by a rough heuristic rather than a hard conversion, but ignoring credits entirely just feels like a weird decision. The Resources trait, to me at least, feels like a great representation of the kind of enduring assets and resources one can continue to draw on over the course of the campaign, while credits feel like the kind of easy-come-easy-go liquid cash that teams could have or use at the discretion of a Router, or somesuch.

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Regarding the horse trading your players wanted to do, did it feel like each gear pack was built wrong, or just that no matter what, each player would never be happy with a single big pack? Knowing the actual horse trades your players felt compelled to make might be useful in figuring out the second draft of the gear sets.

I don't think the packs were built incorrectly (well, generally speaking — there are some weird assumptions, like "A face/dealer will always be a biomorph," since the face/dealer package comes with a bunch of biomods that don't make sense for synths or infomorphs). More like "One character wound up with a stunner but doesn't really need one for their concept, another player ended up with a shock trooper but didn't get any guns, they have to sort it out." The weird bits, I think, come when the "career history" and the intended future direction digress a bit, bit, or when the assumptions (like 'faces will be biomorphs') collide with player choices. It's not a showstopper, but it's worth questioning things like morph-bundled-mods vs career-pack-gear. A face/dealer who chooses a Sylph and thinks of themselves as an information broker, vs a face/dealer who chooses a fury and imagines themselves an arms dealer, go in different directions and I'm not sure there's any simple way to make one gear pack that covers both without genericizing it.

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To mind, it might make sense for the Ego section of the sheet to have a dedicated "Blueprints known" area as well, distinct from "stuff i'm actually lugging around". Gear blows up, BPs tend to accumulate without getting destroyed.

Yeaaaaah, that'd be really useful. It feels like more attempts are being made in the basic economic/rep models to nudge people towards blueprints, favors, and networking rather than "Roll up to the gear store and start shopping." Pros and cons to both, I think.

One thought that came up looking through the morphs: unless Shape Adjusting and Modular Design are going to be restricted specifically to Flexbots, some synthmorphs could be converted into a Flexbot - but with a larger base size than covered by the rules.

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A Flexbot with 3+ modules is medium-sized; 5+ large; 10+ very large.

Unless anything that falls into the category of Flexbots is small by default, this would present issues should someone decide to convert something of medium size (or larger) into a Flexbot. Basically I suggest rewording this rule as such:

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A Flexbot with 3+ modules is one size larger than the largest module (I.e. Small becomes medium); 5+ two sizes; 10+ three sizes. Very large flexbots do not further increase in size.

There would of course be the unstated rules of logic and reason, (station sized flexbots would technically be possible...just not very likely).

ubik2 wrote:

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

So if are extraordinarily talented and augmented with expert level training and experience you get to 80 in general shooting skill, you specialise in kinetic weapons 90, and have expertise in pistols 100. If you want to be a Deadshot you invest in Expert trait which allows you to raise your training and experience investment over 50. The specialisations and expertise would cost 2 CP (10 skill points). Expert trait would cost somewhere between 3-4 CP (15-20 skill points) What do you think?

I'm not sure if you saw the 2 CP Positive Trait for Expert Training that allows you to start with one skill at 90. Combining this with the 1 CP Specialization, the current rules do effectively allow a skill of 100. If your intent was just to check whether other people thought using the house rule of 50 max investment, and these replacements for expertise and specialization, your costs are pretty similar. Expert Training for 2 CP and +10 to that skill for 2 CP costs a total of 4 CP. The Specialization is 1 CP. The playtest version is more beneficial to the player, since the Expert Training applies to all Guns variants, while the Specialization might be the more general Firearms instead (though that wouldn't cover a railgun pistol). Your version makes such focused expertise slightly less attractive, which probably meets your goal. If you're concerned that it's too easy to get to 100, I don't worry about it too much. In play, there's lots of modifiers, so 100 isn't a particularly magic number.

Plus the Skill Cap is 98, not 100.

ubik2 wrote:

I thought about pointing this out, but the wording on Specializations didn't make it clear to me whether that +10 bonus for your specialization would be treated like a modifier or like an alternative skill rating. If the latter, you're correct that it would be subject to the Skill Ranges limit of 98. I personally dislike this cap because it isn't a multiple of 5 and the fact that a roll fails at 99 seems sufficient, but it is the rule.

I homebrewed the 1st edition so that a score of 99 or better allowed you to only fail on a roll of 99 rather than critically fail, and I made it so that skill training cap was 80+ aptitude max. That way, natural human aptitudes could reach the 90s (the equivalent of olympic athletes and geniuses), and transhumans could go to 100+ (representing superhuman ability). ASIs had scores closer to 160, to reflect the fact that they pretty much never fail anything. In my restructure, that was the absolute cap for even NPCs.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that in some ways we're getting better mileage. I mean, we may have less points to spend to customize everything the way we want, but we've got skills merged and condensed. Also, skills over 60 no longer cost double. We need less points to get the same effect.

Decivre wrote:

ubik2 wrote:

I thought about pointing this out, but the wording on Specializations didn't make it clear to me whether that +10 bonus for your specialization would be treated like a modifier or like an alternative skill rating. If the latter, you're correct that it would be subject to the Skill Ranges limit of 98. I personally dislike this cap because it isn't a multiple of 5 and the fact that a roll fails at 99 seems sufficient, but it is the rule.

I homebrewed the 1st edition so that a score of 99 or better allowed you to only fail on a roll of 99 rather than critically fail, and I made it so that skill training cap was 80+ aptitude max. That way, natural human aptitudes could reach the 90s (the equivalent of olympic athletes and geniuses), and transhumans could go to 100+ (representing superhuman ability). ASIs had scores closer to 160, to reflect the fact that they pretty much never fail anything. In my restructure, that was the absolute cap for even NPCs.

I've run a couple of games where one or two things had effective skill ratings over 100 (for instance, the Oracle in Think Before Asking has ~120-140 in a couple of skills, and the ability to increase others to arbitrarily high values). I have a house rule I adapted from Delta Green for handling absurdly high skill ratings; treat any roll as a success, and any roll under (skill/5) as a critical success, and otherwise resolve opposed tests as normal. Thus: an ASI with an Infosec rating of 150 treats any roll as a success, and any roll under 30 as a critical success (in addition to any roll with matching digits).

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

Recently I was considering the skill system and its powergaming problem with skills easily reaching 100 effective rating.

Can you explain how getting 100 effective is a powergaming problem? It's never bothered me that my players could get 100 on a skill test, simply because what that means isn't really set in stone. On opposed rolls they still have a decent chance to fail, and on unopposed rolls I'm the one who decides what success on a roll means. Likewise, I'm not a fan of skill ratings above 100 because I feel capabilites above that level are better represented in other ways. Imo breaking things down as you describe introduces complexity but not in a constructive manner. Two things I would like to see are a standard option to take a skill check penalty in exchange for better results (off the top of my head, -20 to the roll in exchange for a Superior result on success, decided before the roll), and changing the bonus/penalty cap so that eachis capped at 60, rather than capping the end sum. I've done this in V1 and it really speeds up play, and also makes it easy to limit how much the players can fiddle with at once.