death being a condition that can be cured through resleeving is arguably one of the most important transhumanist concepts in eclipse phase. while i appreciate the theme of immortality on an intellectual level, i was wondering if the community has any thoughts on how it impacts the game as a game. death has always been a constant in the human condition, and the ways in which it both directly and indirectly influences our lives is almost all-encompassing. any good story revolves around conflict, and conflict is almost always rooted in death, with the heroes and villains either trying to deliver it, avoid it, or stop it. when death is removed as part of what it means to be human, does anything we do in game matter anymore?
for example, in a traditional roleplaying game, a campaign might culminate in an epic battle against the big bad, at the end of which the players emerge victorious after dealing the killing blow. this is a clear win for the home team, since the antagonist has been eliminated for good. in eclipse phase, killing the bad guy means absolutely nothing - he'll be back, sleeved in a shiny new morph, ready to cook up nefarious plots once again. in order to permanently kill someone, you'll have to destroy their morph, their cortical stack, and all existing backups of them, which is an almost impossible task since a backup can be stored anywhere. as a gm, i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the task of creating a story with consequences when death is no longer a part of the game. sure, there are ways to accomplish a goal without killing someone - for instance, you might put a stop to the bad guy's plan by blowing up his laboratory and depriving him of the resources he requires to put his evil plans in motion. still, this doesn't quite hit the spot for me - yeah, you've temporarily inconvenienced him, but give him a few years and he'll build a new laboratory and be fully equipped to be up to no good again. so why bother?
for those with experience running an EP game, or even just those with random thoughts - how have your games adapted to the extinction of death as a consequence?
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biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Sun, 2010-07-11 00:32
#1
kxU
biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Sun, 2010-07-11 02:43
#2
gtjormungand
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
What you really need to do is go read Peter F. Hamilton's [i]Pandora's Star[/i] and [i]Judas Unchained[/i], as well as Richard K. Morgan's [i]Altered Carbon[/i]. Those will give you a bit of understanding of the consequences of death in such a setting. There are very bad thing
Other random thoughts:
The struggles are more time/place dependent. If the BBEG has a billion backups somewhere, and he wants to come back into power to try again, he would need to reconnect with his previous organization or reclaim his resources from before. While the solar system is vast, there are limits to how many backups would work. An idea if such a BBEG has such resources is that he may have some sort of McGuffin-level artifacts that need to be retrieved. Thus, a Firewall team would be sent to actually retrieve that by an extended infiltration campaign.
Also, if the BBEG has that many backups, why would they only be backups and not working at the same time? Unless he's afraid that he'd lose to another copy, he'd have to make sure that he could trust the mechanism he has in place to reinstate himself. If there were lots of those, a mistake could have a clone get lose.
Sun, 2010-07-11 11:15
#3
BlackHat
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Although I don't have any experience actually playing EP, I think that the removal of death as the ultimate goal and ultimate penalty would lead to a lot of interesting new tactics and storylines - but would require an adjustment to the way the GM and players would naturally thing about things. I think this would help remove some of the "bash-the-door-in-and-kill-everything-that moves" mentality that a lot of role-players have. Instead of just identifying who the BBEG is, and shooting him in the face, the PCs would have to do more investigation to find out how to undo whatever plans the BBEG put into motion, so that his backup can't just pick up where he left off, whenever it gets resleeved.
Killing people would tend to just piss them off, rather than actually deter them from what they are doing. However, since backups aren't usually resleeved for a month or so (after they fail to check in with the backup service), it would be enough time for the PCs to prove that the villain was up to something bad, or undo whatever the BBEG was about to unleash on transhumanity - so killing people might sometimes be necessary or useful. Likewise, if the bad-guys manage to kill the PCs, they'll probably be out of the picture long enough for whatever they were trying to prevent to take place. They may have failed the mission, but they'll be back, and rather than becoming a campaign-ending TPK, its just one failed mission, in a long long career. In general though, it seems like murder would just be a good way to make enemies.
I also like that unlike just about every other RPG out there, EP looks like it might actually allow for recurring villains, without forcing the GM to bend over backwards to make sure the PCs fail to kill them the first time they show up.
Sun, 2010-07-11 11:57
#4
DesertFox
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Another thought is that continually being killed and being resleeved has to carry some sort of long term mental stress/damage, and this can be a useful tools for keeping the PCs away from thinking themselves as totally immortal. For example, as PC Firewall agents get resleeved more and more times because of their reckless behavior based on their belief of immortality, they slowly gain mental derangements and disorders that affect their egos for the long term.
Sun, 2010-07-11 13:07
#5
nezumi.hebereke
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
I've seen that sort of mechanic at work in other systems, and it really saps enjoyment. It's hard for most people to play a character who has been hobbled. At a point, it's easier to scrap the character and just start a new one, which not only is a painful choice, it's not very exciting.
Sun, 2010-07-11 13:18
#6
BlackHat
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Enter, Psychosurgery, which allows a mechanic where PCs can be brought back from the brink, without requiring a new character. Now, I haven't actually played with them, but the mental stress rules in RP seem to fill an important purpose in the game/setting, and don't seem too heavy handed or permanent.
Mon, 2010-07-12 08:32
#7
Byzantine Laser
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
There are more practical drawbacks to letting yourself get killed over and over, too. Unless you have your own deal worked out, there's no guarantee that your replacement morph will be anywhere as good as your current one. Or that you'll be resleeved in a timely manner. Or that you'll die somewhere where it's easy to retrieve your cortical stack. Losing your body and a few weeks of your life can be a pretty big drawback, especially when you're in the middle of an important investigation.
Wed, 2010-07-14 23:02
#8
Quincey Forder
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
more than drawbacks!
-the best Morphs are Expensive. 30,000 Creds if you are one of those moneytary dinosaurs. That's about four to five years worth of mortage
-The Omnium of the insurance would rocket even further than a L2 point if you total one Morph after the other. IF they cover you at all!
-what does it say about a man who go through Morphs like others go through underwears? it takes money (either in creds or rep), ressources and skills to make Morph. wouldn't it come out as a lack of respect for people's hard labor? that could cause some Rep like @-rep or E-rep or C-rep to drop because you look like you can't take care of the sleeve that you've been given/sold/loaned
Remember how Ortega was pissed off at Kovacs, because he was risking Riker's body while said Riker was stacked for jailtime
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Sun, 2010-07-25 23:28
#9
billy10388
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
I also think so.
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Sun, 2010-07-25 23:49
#10
Decivre
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
All resleeving has the potential to cause integration stress. Reinstantiation also carries the risk of continuity stress. I'd imagine that therapists are a very high-demand market in the world of Eclipse Phase.
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Mon, 2010-07-26 05:44
#11
Arenamontanus
Re: biting the bullet, eclipse phase style
Most people in EP have not had the time to fully come to terms with their new state. Old habits die hard, and most people instinctively try to avoid death, pain or losing things despite the availability of backups, painkillers and cornucopia machines.
Yesterday's game session involved the characters seriously considering calling in the cleaners to wipe out the habitat they were on. It was clear that this was not something they were doing lightly, despite themselves having off-site backups: it would have killed a *lot* of people for real, and of course forced Firewall to make a plausible cover story. But what if everybody would have been neatly backed up? Even then I think the characters would have hesitated. Once you start deleting every fork that is slightly flawed, sacrificing your forks ("you can send a fork to inspect the goods, it can report back an authentificated yes or no, and then we delete the fork") or treating people like software you will have started down a pretty bad ethical slope. In my game Nine Lives and the other soultrader groups are among the most horrible human fractions - everybody is an expendable (and copyable!) resource, nobody has any inherent value except as a tool.
Another interesting character in the game is dr/professor/mr Terry Ramirez, an argonaut academic who is simultaneously studying and researching a ridiculous number of disciplines. He has forked himself to have one instance at every major university, and is regularly merging forks to learn "everything". Yep, shades of Dr McNinja. As his friends warn him, the mental stress and neural damage of all that merging might not be good for him, but he doesn't listen...
As I see it, there are enough horrible fates in EP to make death look positively benign. Being locked into a torture simulation running on a solar-powered server in orbit, going mad, having one's reputation permanently destroyed, seeing one's great motivation becoming impossible to fulfil, being trapped forever alone on an exoplanet, being edited into a pleasing mindset by some nasty fraction, having one's forks turned into spare parts for equipment... there are so many possibilities. The lack of death actually enables many fates worse than death.
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