Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

GMing: Rep in Isolated Scenarios

7 posts / 0 new

Last post

Fri, 2014-07-25 13:55

Shunka

GMing: Rep in Isolated Scenarios

When I have GMed EP in the past, I have usually done so in a somewhat open social sandbox; the players could easily use the mesh, contact various people, rep got a lot of use, etc. Now I am considering assembling a short adventure for a convention game of only a few hours, and am going with the more isolated setting of a bunch of out-system salvagers exploring a 'dead' habitat. This is your classic 'haunted house in space' sort of scenario, complete with the broken down car, the downed telephone lines, and lawdy if the storm hasn't made the creek flood so you can't even walk out. In this circumstance, what is the value of characters having Rep? Or even other social Traits, such as Contact or Patron? What would you consider the best way to compensate a character with these traits? In a convention setting I can just pass out characters that I feel are balanced for what I want to do, but if I package up the adventure in a nice pretty module so others can use it, their gaming groups may want to generate their own characters. I imagine this can't be a new problem! After all, this sort of scenario is sort of a chestnut for EP, and so is Gatecrashing which presents another 'isolated party' situation. How would you advise a GM to handle that if you were writing the module for use by others? Perhaps social connectivity of this sort could be used 'in advance'? A set of rolls using rep to procure additional equipment on hand [i]before[/i] entering the [s]dungeon[/s] abandoned space station?

Fri, 2014-07-25 18:30

Smokeskin

I don't think I'd worry about

I don't think I'd worry about it. Some scenarios the martial types will shine, others it is the social ones. Your "in advance" use of social skills is a clever idea though.

Fri, 2014-07-25 20:25

Shunka

Smokeskin wrote:I don't think

Smokeskin wrote:
I don't think I'd worry about it. Some scenarios the martial types will shine, others it is the social ones. Your "in advance" use of social skills is a clever idea though.

Convention games are both inherently 'one-shot' (so you can't really predicate utility on something that might be useful in another setting), and also games in which you want to makes interesting elements of the system/setting [i]shine[/i]. As such, it isn't a situation where I feel comfortable saying 'Oh, well, in another situation, that character would've been [i]great![/i]"

Fri, 2014-07-25 20:58

TheGrue

Shunka wrote:Perhaps social

Shunka wrote:
Perhaps social connectivity of this sort could be used 'in advance'? A set of rolls using rep to procure additional equipment on hand [i]before[/i] entering the [s]dungeon[/s] abandoned space station?

I think this is the best solution; equipment, software, extra augments, maps and intel flavoured to match the character's rep scores. High r-rep might get you partial schematics for the station's power grid, f- and c-rep might feed you some plot hooks about the station's history; that kind of thing. Since your characters are going to be isolated from the inner system mesh networks, I'd have networking in addition give bonuses to knowledge tests, representing stuff the character happens to know or thought to look up before departing - like say, someone with good Firewall networking might have had the foresight to read up on exsurgent virus strains. In both cases, I'd shy away from use of dice rolls and use the networking score itself as a kind of hard statistic.

—

Thermonuclear Banana Split - A not-really-weekly Eclipse Phase campaign journal.

Fri, 2014-07-25 22:46

Shunka

TheGrue wrote:I think this is

TheGrue wrote:
I think this is the best solution; equipment, software, extra augments, maps and intel flavoured to match the character's rep scores. High r-rep might get you partial schematics for the station's power grid, f- and c-rep might feed you some plot hooks about the station's history; that kind of thing.

Actually, this is something I was speculating on the other day due to a player situation. I think that perhaps it'd be good to encourage gamemasters a little more strongly to permit skill substitution on skills which otherwise seem to have 'a single use.' Networking skills are a premium example. I can't think of a time I have ever seen a player rolling Networking except to get something they wanted. But the other day I ended up letting them use it alongside a Research skill because it seemed reasonable that the knowledge was 'publicly discussed' in that network. Want to feed players 'urban legends' and 'local myth' and that sort of thing without them searching the net or using up favors? Make it a networking roll in a network where that sort of thing would get discussed. Even R-Rep can be useful in the sense of 'Okay, well...You don't understand this technology yourself, but you can recall having heard it discussed and the general consensus among most people in the field is that this is unsupportable poppycock; wishful thinking and bad research practices at best, deliberate fraud at worst.' EDIT: P.S. thanks for the input on the original question! XD

Tue, 2014-07-29 00:11

uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture

This very thing has plagued

This very thing has plagued me before! So props for generating some solutions.

—

Exhuman, and Humanitarian.

Wed, 2014-07-30 03:42

Myrmidont

I guess if there are remnant

I guess if there are remnant stored egos (or survivors) those kind of skills are handy - if the station is that isolated, then maybe the whole population (Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?) of inhabitants backed up to a server onboard, and the PCs can influence the meshed egos (once they are warmed up out of dead storage). Edit: Or, if the population was large-ish, maybe the PCs only have the processing power to 'wake up' one or two egos at a time. Then they might have to use networking to determine *who* to wake up and how favourably they will react to this intrusion.

—