I started running an Eclipse Phase campaign myself just before Christmas. I had several reservations about how complex the setting might get and players being confused by it, so I took a few steps to correct this. These seem to have worked fine. The most important of these, for a group that has never played Eclipse Phase before, is both a big one and very simple:- Ditch Firewall. Just run a normal Cyberpunk-style game using the Eclipse Phase rules and setting. This means that the PCs will be dealing with much less high-level situations in a game that resembles other RPGs more than other do. It makes for a period of adjustment that's much more forgiving that just tossing a group who doesn't know how things work against Exsurgent horrors. It also makes for a much bigger shock when the PCs finally do encounter some sort of TITAN relic. Valles-New Shanghai was the setting I chose, and I feel this will be the best place for most GMs to set such a game. My advice is, start the game over from scratch. Have the players decide on character concepts, then think up a group concept that will tie them together. Making them all Infugees whose Indentures have all been bought up by the same criminal group or corporate sub-contractor is always a good standby. Start things slow. Ever session, think of one major feature about the Eclipse Phase setting that seems weird to modern people and have that play a major part in things. The first session I constantly reminded the players about Augmented Reality and universal sousveillance. The second, I had them all make heavy use of the Reputation system. Third session I had them RPing with the Clanking Masses to drive home how the robot slaves of this setting all have human minds inside- and so on. Above all, don't be too generous and don't pull punches. The way you've been having Cornucopia Machines work is the way they could work in theory, not how they work in practice. Even an Anarchist habitat would require Rep-use to justify all the mass and rare elements those Plasma Guns required. Make the first adventures pretty simple, the complexity will all come from the setting that they're still getting to grips with. A basic "take package A to place B" road trip with someone trying to steal the package on the way works fine. When they stop struggling with the setting, then make things harder. Once you've got the campaign into full swing, once the players aren't confused by the mundane stuff and can handle Noir and Technothriller plots in the Martian slums- then it's time to have them encounter something Exsurgent. If they survive, Firewall notices them and they get recruited. Of course, there's no reason that Eclipse Phase can't be fun without involving Firewall at all, so feel free to leave them out if you find the campaign is going fine without them. Hope my first post was of help- I've only lurked before now, but felt I should give what advice I could in this thread. A new group starting with Eclipse Phase should always be supported and encouraged.

Are your players not understanding the setting/tone? Or do they just not care? Generally when a party resorts to 'kill it with fire', it's not a failure on the GM's part, but just the party really liking fire. If the party wants to smash stuff, that's perfectly fine. Firewall has their clean up crews, then there are first-in exoplanet explorers and so on. But you need to establish this is what they want. If they're failing to grasp the setting, try introducing things one bit at a time, and using cheat sheets. When I run con games, I give each player a paper listing all of their implants and abilities, and what they do. Then I run a little social encounter or something, and gradually bring them up to speed (this is a four hour thing). By the end, they're generally all dead, but they had fun and they grok the setting. Firewall is indeed a complicating factor though, because it enforces a level of difficulty which wouldn't apply to just mercenaries or adventurers.

Thanks Tantavalist, for the good advice. I was thinking of starting a campaign during the Fall itself, with the characters struggling to get off Earth, maybe racing to reach one of the few last evacuation points. Has anybody else tried this?

Prior wrote:

Thanks Tantavalist, for the good advice. I was thinking of starting a campaign during the Fall itself, with the characters struggling to get off Earth, maybe racing to reach one of the few last evacuation points. Has anybody else tried this?

There was a thread around here somewhere on the topic. It sounded pretty cool too.

hey I'm one of the players in the campaign. I just noticed this thread from the RPPR referrer logs. If this is about the event I think it is, then I will add this: One player just didn't read the rules and argues about everything always - not just EP. He also joined late in the campaign. As for the op - we have very tight mission parameters and there's seldom any real choices that have equivalent costs - it's typically "if we don't do this, things will get much much worse for us and there's no way around it" Our choices boil down to HOW we pay to accomplish our mission - mental trauma, deadly encounter or our few resources/reputation etc. In that particular op, our choice was to either make a deal with horrible criminals that would inflict heavy mental trauma on all us or we could take them down and get what we want from them in a deadly fight. There was no other way and if we failed to get what we needed from them, Firewall itself was in danger. That's not a side quest, that's mission critical. Our execution was flawed but most players in the group are not tactically oriented. With those kind of stakes and the fact that you know our ability for tactical mission planning, the results were pretty much predictable. The one time we had a well-executed tactical mission was because we had good intelligence and time to plan - we didn't have either in this case. Spooky spy shit requires good intel, time and planning more than anything else. We don't plan stuff that much but we've never had time or seldom had good intel. I think part of it is the setting in the sense that EP technology is so complex and variable that there are no shared assumptions - unlike say the real world. Since Delta Green was mentioned earlier I can use that as an example - we know how cell phones and cars work in the real world as common means of communication and transportation. We know how (in general) they can be attacked/sabotaged/bugged and from reading up on real world espionage tradecraft how real spies use cell phones and cars. Obviously this doesn't cover everything as there is innovation and unique disruptive uses of these items - like Mossad's use of C4 in cell phones to assassinate terrorists but these are rare and even with that, there are ways of picking up on that/countering them. The terrorist should have known that cells are insecure and might have been too paranoid to use it anyway. In EP though, we don't know how technology is used exactly or how it can be attacked - except to say that any kind of attack can be used against any kind of technology. Every single item can be hacked/turned against its user - you can bug everything, turn anything into a bomb, hide nanoswarms in everything. A car can be a car or an AGI or a human in a weird morph or an AR illusion. An ecto can carry a bomb in it or a disassembler swarm or a basilisk hack. Because of this, how can any player, no matter how versed they are in EP know what to expect in any given game? For example, a remote bunker on Mars could be guarded by: A dozen mercenaries in Olympian or Remade morphs - including snipers with seeker rifles that act as artillery Turrets and mines monitored by AGI systems - drones with fabbers can repair/rebuild them 3 reaper morphs in high-end camouflage systems and specialized tunnels/chutes only they can used to hit and run against foes. Hundreds of nano disassembler swarms, each keyed to different areas with different passwords - have the right passwords and walk right in but don't step over the red line. An impenetrable vault openable only by a simple mesh interface that hides a deadly basilisk hack Deadly bio or chemical weapons traps Hundreds of forked soldiers in case morphs - fabbers provide endless cannon fodder. Highly radioactive leaks Innocent civilians trapped/controlled with psychosurgery and armed with implanted bombs Since all of these are possible, the players have to rely on the GM to provide them with the knowledge they need in order to get into that bunker. No amount of EP knowledge is going to let them guess what's in store for them. TL;DR version: There is no such thing as tradecraft for EP players because EP is too complex to allow for that.

Decivre wrote:

clockworkjoe wrote:

TL;DR version: There is no such thing as tradecraft for EP players because EP is too complex to allow for that.

I disagree with this. Even if there are a multitude of manners by which a tradecraft can be done depending on region of the system, there are still tradecrafts. It's just that a 40 in Profession: Security means a lot more knowledge in 10 AF than it does today.

That requires the GM to tell you the relevant information - I mean actual player knowledge of tradecraft. To go back to Delta Green - while there are supernatural elements in most scenarios, players can go forward with traditional deductive investigation. Look at the scenario, A Victim of the Art http://web.me.com/drgonzo/Site/Welcome/Welcome_files/AVictimOfTheArt.pdf It's about a series of supernatural murders with no apparent motive. The players can get a lead on the killer by investigating the phone records of each victim and finding a common link between them. Phone records are common knowledge to pretty much everyone now so the GM shouldn't be expected to tell the players that this is an option available to them. The procedures of real life investigations and espionage are available for any player to know and after decades of procedural movies and TV shows, a GM shouldn't be expected to explain how these operations work on a basic level. However, in EP, details like that are left to the individual GM - how much information could a player get from a dead person's mesh records - how easy it is to get those records and how the laws of the local habitat/government treat those records are not immediately apparent to the players. I could easily see a GM saying that mesh records work exactly like phone records or completely different, while it being plausible in the game setting and there's no way of knowing which way it works until the GM tells me. In our case, the bad guys were hiding in a place I didn't know could exist in a scum swarm and I frequently ask about using my security ops and smuggling tricks skills to gain more information. (I don't remember if I asked about using it in this particular situation) However, we only had one possible lead on these bad guys and we followed it. Had we been told about other possible approaches, we might have taken them.

I can expect anything and everything - we've encountered pretty much everything except Jovian security forces at this point - exsurgents, oversight, criminal syndicates, super exotic foes not even mentioned in any EP book, terrorists, uplift extremists, asyncs, TITAN built death traps, transhuman built death traps and so forth. But we can only act on the information we're given and Cthulhuzord plays his cards pretty close to his chest. We can plan stuff - here's my response to the scandal and a plan for another mission we have to get done SPOILERS FOR KNOW EVIL IN THIS LINK http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php?topic=329.msg32370#msg32370

When you don’t know what to expect in the bunker, you can not forge identities or do something similar. First you need to know who ones the bunker, so you can adjust your camouflage. Without further information a player group has only two options: gather more intel and when this fails, load your guns and approach it. For planing you need to know what to expect and a sense how things work. It is pretty ok when the players do not know certain points, because there charakters do not know them (for example how some horror thing works), but a without a idea what to expect and how the adversaries will react players can be either passive or go in head first. I think the Feedback from clockworkjoe will be useful for Cthuluzord, at least as a starting point for a in deep talk.