Egocasting and Equipment

Sun, 2010-08-29 20:27

#2

Dry Observer Dry Observer's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

No, I don't think you missed anything. The fact that you can't egocast equipment is, as I see it, one of the main safety measures preventing PCs from just building up a huge pile of expensive armor, weapons, vehicles and other devices and trying to overwhelm all opposition with their "stuff" rather than their wits, their skills and the tools they have available. If you want to make it easier on your PCs in their first couple of games, let Firewall supply the basics at the other end and then tell them they can use rep to pick up some other toys, based on who they have rep with and what's realistically available.

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Sat, 2010-08-28 18:04

#3

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Of course, if you are rich enough you just own the blueprints for your equipment. One rich character in my game has two security bots, Ruskin & Wilde. Whenever he arrives at an autonomist habitat he just prints them out, recycling them when he leaves (a bit trickier when he is at home in the PC, where you are not allowed to print them freely).

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Sun, 2010-08-29 20:41

#4

Dry Observer Dry Observer's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Arenamontanus wrote:
Of course, if you are rich enough you just own the blueprints for your equipment. One rich character in my game has two security bots, Ruskin & Wilde. Whenever he arrives at an autonomist habitat he just prints them out, recycling them when he leaves (a bit trickier when he is at home in the PC, where you are not allowed to print them freely).

One or two of my more interesting PCs and NPCs do something like this, but I suspect that the more advanced your tech, the greater the odds that *someone* will study your technology, either to steal it or at least to know its ins and outs. On the other hand, if you basically use off-the-shelf, run-of-the-mill tech, they'll have a good idea of what you've got up your sleeves, anyway. Unless those mundane trappings are merely a facade.

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Mon, 2010-08-30 12:00

#5

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

I'm kinda using this as the basis of the character I'm playing in a PbP game. She acts as a librarian who has blueprints for anything the group might need. She does the same thing with skills, maintaining a library of Beta Forks that have been patched with psychosurgery to have a relevant skill at 60. If the party needs a skill they are only one Merge away from possessing it. All you need to equip the party with anything they want is a Mesh connection and a single Protean Swarm.

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Tue, 2010-08-31 10:07

#6

Kumo

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

crizh wrote:
All you need to equip the party with anything they want is a Mesh connection and a single Protean Swarm.

Yes, but Swarm will not egocast with you, just like rest of equipment. That's why Reputation is so important: after (or much better, before) you egocast to a new place, you contact with proper network and maybe they are able to provide what you need. If you did it before egocasting, it may just be waiting for you.

Tue, 2010-08-31 12:27

#7

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

I completely agree. All you need is a single swarm which has a cost of High and you can create an unlimited amount of whatever you need regardless of it's cost or legality. What's really sweet about that is that you always have exactly the right tool for the job and you don't have to cart masses of gear around with you wherever you go. All you really need therefore is sufficient Rep or wealth to be able to pick one up wherever you need to go. Or the Hacking skills to subvert a Hive or CM...

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Tue, 2010-08-31 13:33

#8

Kumo

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

I'm not so sure... Proteans need to be pre-programmed to make something new. The question is: are they able to accept blueprints? If the answer is "yes", (doubt it) there is no difference between them and nanofabricators. If no, re-programming of them probably take some time, or even impossible (otherwise someone could easily change them into a killer-swarm, and there is no Difficulty Level or time given for such test).

Tue, 2010-08-31 13:46

#9

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Sorry, I wasn't specific enough. You want a Protean Swarm designed to build a General Hive. That's the only piece of physical equipment you will ever need. Everything else can be achieved with blueprints. I imagine that the blueprint of the target object is built into a Protean Swarm at the blueprint stage. Once they are actually built they can't be reprogrammed to build anything different, you could potentially program them to build sections of the hard-coded blueprint.

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Tue, 2010-08-31 15:28

#10

Kumo

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

crizh wrote:
Sorry, I wasn't specific enough. You want a Protean Swarm designed to build a General Hive.

Or a Desktop Cornucopia Machine... Such Protean Swarm should have cost [Expensive] and be illegal in some areas just like nanofabricators IMO. Besides, it's hard to get appropriate raw materials for General Hive (it's a bit complicated device, I think) or devices you want to create. Oh, and General Hives "even at their smallest size they are not really portable", so carrying one of them around may be suspicious.

Tue, 2010-08-31 17:17

#11

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

One cubic foot is a bit unwieldy. I like to build them into something else, a Dr Bot for example. Increasing the price isn't unreasonable but it is definitely a house-rule. I can't see any fluff support for making them difficult to acquire based on rare raw materials. Plenty of story reasons you might want to do that but I find it much less jarring for the players to provide social, story-based reasons for restrictions like that. edit A desktop CM has the major disadvantage of being limited to 40 liters.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 17:51

#12

Dry Observer Dry Observer's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

One of the biggest "soft" restrictions I tend to assume with any unregistered nanohive -- and yes, my favorite PCs and NPCs are exactly the kinds of people who would exploit this "loophole" -- is that any polity that discovers a large nanoswarm it doesn't know about busily building a lot of advanced equipment it doesn't know about... Well, remember -- they [i]nuke[/i] Exsurgent nanoswarms. Full out weapons of mass destruction and/or incredibly powerful, targeted beam weapons (for a concentrated target) are about the only weapons most polities really have against a serious nanoincursion, once it gets a foothold. And "just going to talk to you" could alert a TITAN force that they've been made. So if you get too far inside a major power's borders with that kind of actively functioning tech, they may vaporize you, no questions asked. Obviously, a lot of the anarchist groups will be a little less tense about this, but given an energy supply, it gets very close to smuggling a potential weapon of mass destruction into their hab. Which, yes, makes people nervous. I like to keep general hives back on a ship somewhere, if possible, except, of course, on anarchist habs. And to be blunt, my wealthiest characters usually preposition those as de facto community or rep-available resources, even in those societies. Quietly pulling out your own black tech for critical missions as needed without triggering too many alarm bells usually means you're paying, one way or another. (Also, most of those characters support a degree of economic independence for the masses, so pre-deploying some general hives dovetails with that larger goal.)

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Wed, 2010-09-01 15:52

#13

OneTrikPony OneTrikPony's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

crizh wrote:
I'm kinda using this as the basis of the character I'm playing in a PbP game. She acts as a librarian who has blueprints for anything the group might need. She does the same thing with skills, maintaining a library of Beta Forks that have been patched with psychosurgery to have a relevant skill at 60. If the party needs a skill they are only one Merge away from possessing it. All you need to equip the party with anything they want is a Mesh connection and a single Protean Swarm.

This is an interesting idea. It's like the team has it's own personal gennie or fairygodmother. Is it posible to merge the fork of one character with a different character? What is the stress value of such a merge?

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Wed, 2010-09-01 16:55

#14

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

OneTrikPony wrote:
Is it posible to merge the fork of one character with a different character? What is the stress value of such a merge?

I don't think so. You can use Psychosurgery to implant somebody else's memories but I don't think you can merge two distinct Forks. It's only really a viable strategy with a Multi-tasking Implant or Emergency Farcaster. You need to keep updating the Fork with the skill patch to keep it current. You keep it in cold-storage and Merge it with a current backup every four hours. That stops it going 'off' or diverging so far from the active Ego that you give yourself schizophrenia whenever you use it. You could certainly do it for other members of your team but they would really have to trust you a lot to let you mess about with their Ego in such an extensive fashion.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 17:29

#15

Rhyx

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Although it is said that sometimes skillsoft programs do have "vapors" that can incidentally merge with the user... So it IS possible to have a merge. The problem is I believe you are going to have some very jagged edges between the two memories and skill sets since the tech isn't good enough to make a clean copy paste. And that means hitting your players with the Psychological Stress Cannon (my motto is "never say no, just make it a point of diminishing returns"). Good news for them is that once they get more memories that aren't theirs and get accustomed to cognitive dissonance, they will stop losing points but by then they might be so integrated with the host memories that they might not be sure where they end and the skills begins. As a counter balance you might wanna trade the skill points for mental disadvantage on a 1 to 1 ratio giving them a second personality, PTSD or sharing the skill donor's own disadvantages. If it really gets too bad they might have to reload from a backup.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 17:38

#16

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Personally I would say no to two Egos merging into a singular, if only because the rules for merging suggest that if it were possible the psychological effects would be catastrophic to the resulting Ego. A fork of your own brain, after one week, is difficult to merge back into the whole without memory loss and stress damage. Without access to TITAN level technology it would probably be impossible to get a sane individual from an Ego merge. And even if successful, following the way the merging table uses memory loss the resultant Ego would suffer from almost complete amnesiac failure of their brain. Its all well and good to merge the two personalities, but if you want them to be anything more than a vegetable you are going to be hard pressed. I think the closest thing people have gotten to Ego merges in Eclipse Phase is the hive mind structure of the Neo-Synergists. If I remember right they are being addressed in Gatecrashers (and personally I can see them being Metaplot), so I would say we sit and wait to see how they are handled in there.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 21:12

#17

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

I seem to recall that Sunward touches on them in the segment about Venus. Does make me wonder what the TITANS are up to with all those Egos....

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Wed, 2010-09-01 21:15

#18

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

It does, but it is very briefly, and they are primarily an Exoplanet thing, which is why I am expecting something in Gatecrashing. The Metaplot is just because they make a fine example of possible out of control tech messing with peoples brains. The lead in is just too strong for something not to happen with them.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 21:25

#19

Quincey Forder Quincey Forder's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

isn't it how children are conceived in the world Post-Fall? by psychosurgically merging the forks of the parents into one Ego, raise the new Ego in simulspace while a morph is being grown? anyway... I have a similar connundrum with one of my players. He's making a Scum free trader/smuggler who started in life as biotechnician. He made a really nead implant that can translate pheromones into information (+10 in Kinesics test/10s in success margin on a interface test to configurate the implant) Trouble is, the kodo-name of the impant- was placed in his body, so when he egocast or simply resleeve, the implant would be lost. after much brainstorming, it was decided that he would save the blueprint of the kodo in a VPN that he would access whenever he's resleeved to have it nanoassembled and implanted in the new morph

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Wed, 2010-09-01 21:31

#20

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

If I remember right thats something some of the people on these boards came up with and ran with. I do not believe, but I may be wrong, that the Devs have really gone into how conception works Post-Fall. I was never one for the 2 Egos into 1 method of repreduction, it just didn't seem necessary. People are scared enough as it is, and the Lost project proved that you cannot force raise children in super fast simulspace. Plus, in a post scarcity world isn't part of the joys of parenthood the fact that you can spend as much time as you want with your child as he grows naturally? Sure, they might use an exowomb, but a kid growing up normally in a Splicer is still the norm in my game.

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Wed, 2010-09-01 22:39

#21

Rhyx

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Quote:
Plus, in a post scarcity world isn't part of the joys of parenthood the fact that you can spend as much time as you want with your child as he grows naturally? Sure, they might use an exowomb, but a kid growing up normally in a Splicer is still the norm in my game.

Yeah I've been wondering a lot about that and so far here's what I got: The problem is that genetics no longer mean jack squat in a world of morphs. Actually for most people their genetic makeup is back on earth rotting and being eaten by earthworms while their heads were taken away by TITAN headhunters. So it seems like in the world of Eclipse phase the question of nature versus nurture, the answer has become nurture because nature no longer really means anything. The body you have has nothing to do with your personality. Ergo reproduction is no longer the passing off of genes but of mores and in short every child born is the equivalent to an adoption. Here's when things get weird: Let's say I have an artistic temperament and me and my wife decide we want a child and so we get a little clone, choose his attributes, gender and hair color. Now if we make love the old fashion way the resulting child will have nothing to do with either of our temperaments, we will be putting for all intents and purposes a little stranger into the world because the genetic baggage isn't not ours but our morph's. That means that the qualities that will be the future of humanity has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the decisions made by some genehacker at the Skinestesia Hypercorp. So at this point other than nurture we have very little say about how human evolution develops. Then things get even weirder: Let's say I'm not satisfied by the possibility of having a son/daughter that is nothing like me. So me and my wife go and visit a Skinestesia genehack and custom make a child with abilities more similar to my own and my wife's. So now this genehacker is an intrinsic part of my procreation process because he is the link between my ego and my unborn child's morph. The ego and morph are quite literally a two step process in procreation. Either I do it the old fashion way and get a child with nothing similar to me and more along the lines of what a hypercorp wants the future to be like OR I custom make a child from scratch with the Genehack's help in order to give the future the traits I desire. Which every way you look at it, that Hypercorp has near total control over the mind and body of every child born...scared yet?

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Thu, 2010-09-02 04:26

#22

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Quote:
Plus, in a post scarcity world isn't part of the joys of parenthood the fact that you can spend as much time as you want with your child as he grows naturally? Sure, they might use an exowomb, but a kid growing up normally in a Splicer is still the norm in my game.

Which in my game also makes having children expensive as hell, something only rich people can indulge in. Living space is at premium and there are millions of infomorphs with adult minds still seeking a way to get themselves physical biomorphs with associated costs in lifesupport, living space, et cetera. These "citizenship costs" will all be billed, of course, on the proud parent/parents to be. Next in line: Educational costs for your kid for next 16-21 years, run in realtime (the Lost episode gave accelerated-time AI/VR child education a rather bad reputation... Reservedly.) and if you're doing homeschooling / childcare yourself, you're spending productive time as long-term investment with dubious returns. And so on. Even today if you calculate how much having children costs the expenses add up to outrageous, but most people do not think of this in deliberately myopic manner. In EP, IMHO, they have to face the facts.

Thu, 2010-09-02 10:03

#23

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

MirrorField wrote:
Quote:
Plus, in a post scarcity world isn't part of the joys of parenthood the fact that you can spend as much time as you want with your child as he grows naturally? Sure, they might use an exowomb, but a kid growing up normally in a Splicer is still the norm in my game.
Which in my game also makes having children expensive as hell, something only rich people can indulge in. Living space is at premium and there are millions of infomorphs with adult minds still seeking a way to get themselves physical biomorphs with associated costs in lifesupport, living space, et cetera. These "citizenship costs" will all be billed, of course, on the proud parent/parents to be. Next in line: Educational costs for your kid for next 16-21 years, run in realtime (the Lost episode gave accelerated-time AI/VR child education a rather bad reputation... Reservedly.) and if you're doing homeschooling / childcare yourself, you're spending productive time as long-term investment with dubious returns. And so on. Even today if you calculate how much having children costs the expenses add up to outrageous, but most people do not think of this in deliberately myopic manner. In EP, IMHO, they have to face the facts.

In general, I agree. Ten years after a massive population drop I imagine costs of raising a child are just too prohibitive for the majority of people. In habitats I can see a license being required to reproduce (In the same way you need one to bring an Alpha fork into the world), with proof that you are fully capable of caring for said child until it is capable of doing so for itself. In some other places, like Mars where there is still quite a lot of space, it would be much easier. Hmm... people escaping to Mars because they want to have children could be interesting. Also remember that the vast majority of people in Eclipse Phase are much more intelligent that you and I. The average BioMorph sleeved individual is, in a Game Info sense, half again as intelligent as you or I. And current demographics seem to hint that as intelligence and general education goes up population growth tends to plummet. Hell, look at Japan/Scotland as an example of what happens when your breeding population is so focused on their own lives that reproduction takes a back seat. Hell, most people can hardly afford their own Morphs, never mind care for a child and provide one for them. And what kind of educated parent would want to bring their child into a world where they would be cursed to spend their entire life as an InfoMorph. On speed enhanced education. I do not really see this being a major problem. The Lost experiment failed for a few reasons, and while one of the was that they lived in Super Speed Simulspace, the problem there was that they [b]lived[/b] in that space. If I remember right Mesh Inserts can be seeded in a child Morph, might as well get some use out of that investment. And remember that even the EP world has super advanced AI technology. Childcare would not really be a problem, that’s something you pawn off to your homes Servitor drones. And education? That’s what teleoperated schools and your kiddies personalised Growing-Up-Smart muse is for!

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Thu, 2010-09-02 12:47

#24

MirrorField MirrorField's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Quote:
If I remember right Mesh Inserts can be seeded in a child Morph, might as well get some use out of that investment.

I'd say that depends. IMHO Mesh Inserts would require minimum of 6-7 years of age and they'd also need constant attention while the person was growing up. Note that the neotenic morph is not a kid, it's a genengineered construct that looks like kid. It won't be growing up or going through puberty.

Quote:
And remember that even the EP world has super advanced AI technology. Childcare would not really be a problem, that’s something you pawn off to your homes Servitor drones. And education? That’s what teleoperated schools and your kiddies personalised Growing-Up-Smart muse is for!

Kids are smart and AI:s are dumb. It was pawning the childcare to AI:s that caused much of the problems with Lost; I'd say human contact and supervision are absolutely required. Telepresence school is still school and you have to pay for it; I don't think they're run in speed-up simulspace, unless you're paying through nose to teachers willing to ride along. A Personal muse with teaching skills (maybe with skillsoft) is probably pretty much given for all education in EP. ObNote: One might make case for Uncanny Valley being available as both ego and morph feature. Someone with UV ego feature... You could drop her into a Sylph and she'd still behave creepily; think Seven of Nine from Voyager or Della Lu just after her arrival (Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime): Totally oddball affect display, twitchy/ultra-precise movements, strange speech production...

Thu, 2010-09-02 13:50

#25

crizh

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

MirrorField][quote wrote:
It was pawning the childcare to AI:s that caused much of the problems with Lost; I'd say human contact and supervision are absolutely required.

This. I was discussing this with my wife recently and I was suggesting that EP demonstrates that Parenting is the most important skill any civilization develops. No achievement long survives a society that cannot replicate the skills and attitudes that led to that development in subsequent generations. Posthuman fiction and the possibility of the Singularity points out that eventually we will create intelligences smarter than ourselves capable of auto-evolution. What will determine our fate from that point on will be the quality of our parenting skills. Badly adjusted teenagers capable of tearing the very fabric of space time and with an axe to grind with their 'parents' is a sub-optimal outcome.

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Thu, 2010-09-02 14:11

#26

Dry Observer Dry Observer's picture

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

MirrorField wrote:
Quote:
If I remember right Mesh Inserts can be seeded in a child Morph, might as well get some use out of that investment.
I'd say that depends. IMHO Mesh Inserts would require minimum of 6-7 years of age and they'd also need constant attention while the person was growing up. Note that the neotenic morph is not a kid, it's a genengineered construct that looks like kid. It won't be growing up or going through puberty.
Quote:
And remember that even the EP world has super advanced AI technology. Childcare would not really be a problem, that’s something you pawn off to your homes Servitor drones. And education? That’s what teleoperated schools and your kiddies personalised Growing-Up-Smart muse is for!
Kids are smart and AI:s are dumb. It was pawning the childcare to AI:s that caused much of the problems with Lost; I'd say human contact and supervision are absolutely required. Telepresence school is still school and you have to pay for it; I don't think they're run in speed-up simulspace, unless you're paying through nose to teachers willing to ride along. A Personal muse with teaching skills (maybe with skillsoft) is probably pretty much given for all education in EP.

Well, AGIs are fairly intelligent, but I think one thing often overlooked with "ordinary humans" is that they come preloaded with a [i]lot[/i] of observations of the world, experience with it, and some kind of understanding and world view with which to assess things. Obviously Eclipse Phase AGIs have some of the basics down, but their lack of "common sense" and understanding of many ordinary aspects of life (at least to the level of ability they demonstrate in other fields) suggests that *many* (not all) would struggle to provide the full range of education that children might need. On the other hand, they could help, and if you spend any time in simulspace, much less sped up, then there's obviously a ton of infomorphs who could help. As to using accelerated time in simulspace, I think the biggest problem with the Lost is having them live essentially their whole lives there, with really only inadequate AIs and each other for company, and without either the socialization or the sense of physical limits you would get living in the real world. Bringing older kids in occasionally for lessons might not be such a problem, assuming their brains could handle learning a whole lot in repeated, short bursts -- a math lesson, a field trip, a wilderness outing...

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Thu, 2010-09-02 15:02

#27

Rhyx

Re: Egocasting and Equipment

Slightly off topic: personally I think the one huge problem with the Lost isn't the accelerated learning or the AGI supervision or simulspace. Anyone of these methods might have given a strange and perhaps socially maladjusted individual with symptoms like autism and them being extreme asocial introverts (namely I think that you would have ended up with a bunch of geeks with Otaku tendencies that have more empathy for AGI than people). The true killing blow to the Futura program was how some of the children began to outwardly express themselves with psychotic breaks, sociopath tendencies other derangement that were a side effect of infecting them with Wotts-McLeod.

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