The morph creation rules came out in the Transhuman book a little over 3 years ago. I'm wondering if those rules had got much use since release? I'm also wondering if anyone had some interesting feedback that they want to share?
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Morph Creation Rules - 3 years later
Wed, 2016-10-19 13:55
#1
DivineWrath
Morph Creation Rules - 3 years later
Wed, 2016-10-19 13:58
#2
DivineWrath
Here is some of my feedback:
Here is some of my feedback:
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House Rule: Exotic morphs don't normally get social stigma. Flexbots, Swarmanoids, Arachnoids, Novacrabs, etc are exotic morphs and they don't have social stigma (Pods) or (Clanking Masses). Therefore, I decided that any morph that counts as exotic (-30 to remorphing tests) don't get social stigma traits. Social Stigma Pods or Clanking Masses are for undesirable morphs, morphs for the lower class, not for morphs that eccentrics or specialized people pick.
In fact, one could argue that many features that make morphs exotic, costs money that could have been better spent on buying a better humanoid morph. Some of the features of a Flexbot, Modular Design and Shape Adjusting, cost as much as 5000 cr.
Morphs like Flexbots, Swarmanoids, Arachnoids, Novacrabs, etc didn't have social stigma to begin with, and they were exotic, so I figured it was safe to expand that to all exotic morphs.
Alien Morphs are an exception to this house rule. All alien morphs have social stigma Pods and Alien.
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Some morphs have a lot of extra limbs or parts to make their form possible. The Arachnoid has a need for 10 limbs (2 arms, 8 legs). Its one of those instances where I take the limit of how many augments per price category a morph have as a suggestion. If I didn't, and took the rules to the harshest limit, I might not be able to make the Arachnoid or similar morphs.
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Eidolons. When I put them through the morph creation rules, I found that I didn't need to pay for the default speed rating of 3. I did have to pay for the increased limits on aptitudes to bring them to 40.
I also found it difficult to design new Eidolons. There is not a whole lot of options for variety it seems. I found that most new Eidolon designs I tried to make closely resembled other Eidolons. It would be easy to mistake them as morph variants instead of new morphs. This might be due to the fact that they are digital morphs so DUR, armor, mobility systems, and a whole lot of physical stuff is not applicable to them. As such, they can't make themselves stand out more.
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Aptitude bonuses are really expensive. While it is cheaper to buy a morph for its aptitude bonuses then to buy aptitude bonuses directly for your ego, it still feels expensive. If you look at the Reaper, about half its costs is aptitude bonuses.
I also find it annoying that the price increases when you add enough high priced augments. What does the augments have to do with aptitude bonuses?
Wed, 2016-10-19 22:41
#3
SquireNed
At the risk of tooting my own
At the risk of tooting my own horn, Ned's Morph Overhaul has its own morph creation system, designed to create morphs that are a little more feasible for play. The Transhuman ruleset seems to be closely related to custom-designed morphs, but NMO and its morph system, the AMCS, is a little more flexible and fluid (and, in my opinion, easier, though of course it's easier for me to use because I made it).
The goal was to keep some of the trends that we see in the core game's morph design (biomorphs being expensive, synths costing more in terms of CP due to the bonuses they get), and it actually does a decent job of doing that (I recall having a spreadsheet showing that I got many of the core morphs closer to the numbers than you would in the Transhuman system). It was designed to handle both high end morphs and low end morphs, with a slight cost taper off for high end morphs, especially in terms of CP IIRC.
I think that I might also allow for some build decisions that weren't possible in Transhuman, like altering a morph's base speed. That might be more a result of me not remembering Transhuman properly, but I remember having some pretty cool building blocks when I was making morphs as a result.
That said, my system never got tested in use.
Here's a couple transcripts of morph creation using the AMCS: