The topic says it.
Changing your morph is obviously a large aspect of the game. Stimulated by a debate in another forum, I was wondering exactly how large. How important is the morph you buy at the start of the game? Do the sessions of [i]your[/i] campaign routinely start "What's the number?"? Do you generally egocast to some faraway place and leave your morph behind?
I'm asking because the way some players presented the game, it appears that what morph you choose at character creation has barely an impact on the play if every session starts "you are egocast to place x where you get [i]this[/i] shiny new morph!" Moreover, I think such a style of play would impact game balance somewhat - after all, it's easily possible for players to have an effective difference of 100 cp if one took a tricked-out 40cp morph and 30 points in morph-related advantages while another got himself a flat or infomorph and 30 points of morph-flaws, all of those counting for nothing when you're using different bodies than those you "bought" anyway.
So... how do [i]you[/i] play the game?
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How often do you resleeve?
Thu, 2011-12-15 19:58
#1
Cifer
How often do you resleeve?
Thu, 2011-12-15 23:56
#2
Tyrnis
Re: How often do you resleeve?
It really boils down to the particular style of the individual GM. Personally, I tend to favor more locally-oriented games when I GM. I want to the players to have a familiar setting and supporting cast around, so resleeving isn't something I typically expect is going to come up very often. Running a game where you're going to be egocasting to new locations on a regular basis is a perfectly valid style for EP, though.
This is just one more reason that communication between the GM and players is essential. Everybody needs to be on the same page as far as expectations for the game go, so they can develop their characters accordingly.
Tue, 2011-12-20 14:57
#3
BlackJaw
Re: How often do you resleeve?
A few of us in our game rotate through GM'ing, but I'd say we tend to egocast or otherwise resleeve two thirds of the time.
The main reason is the Local/Sight Seeing divide. If you're going to be traveling around the setting, pull jobs in Jovian space, making deals on Extropia, fighting cyber-zombie hordes in the martian quarantine zone, etc... well the setting doesn't really support rapid personal transit, so egocasting is the main deal for getting from here to there. That means new bodies.
One thing we did decide is that all the players are currently based on or around Mars. It's "home" for our game. That way when we do a Martian mission, we generally get to use our own bodies and gear. We also tend to hand wave some limited space travel when setting things "near mars" although the science doesn't support this much, it helps game play. Only one of our characters isn't actually based on Mars, and he's an AI infomorph with copies of himself all over the solar system and no physical gear of any kind, so it's not an issue. A few other characters (the Scumm merc for example) are not from Mars, but is currently living there.
Some players (me for example) take spending money or CP on our home body to be a bit of roleplaying outlet. It is the body we live in most of the time, so having it setup for our "day job" makes sense. It's also very helpful for the 30% of missions done with those bodies.
Game-play wise, a lot of the group has taken to having blueprints for a preferred (customized) synth morph. We request Firewall build one for us, or build it ourselves when we get there if there is time and resources. One player, the wealthy hypercorp exec, actually collects bodies and frequently buys interesting ones at each stop, eventually shipping them home to Mars via cargo ship if he likes them. He has almost 10 bodies at "home" now, although his original body was killed on a mission a while back and a replacement clone hasn't finished growing yet. He may be using an uplift gorrila in board meetings... or the freaky predatory morph he picked up in Extropia.
In retrospect another valid option would have been to have each player live in a different place. Firewall missions in any player's home would let that player use their home body and sort of take point on dealing with their local turf. Mission on Mars? The ruster knows what's up. Mission in Extropia? The executive knows the score. Mission around Saturn? The autonomist gear-head will show you around. This idea would work especially well if the GM makes a point of setting missions in each player's backyard regularly, and if the players took the effort (and skills) to make themselves experts in their own places.
There are other reasons, besides travel, that we resleeve a lot:
Death is an obvious one. A player killed in a mission tends to get their stack popped and plugged into spare morph (sometimes an actual Spare Morph), or ghostrider module.
Less obvious are missions where the players are forced into morphs. One mission I ran had the players waking up in OZMA built Repear morphs loaded with cortex bombs and security AIs, their own egos loaded down with psychosurgery, and following an OZMA agent into a hostile alien world via a Pandora gate. Another mission had everyone waking up as Virtual Morphs in a simspace controlled by a TITAN shard. A few missions have started with the players waking up as a backups after a failed mission (of which they have no memory) and having to deal with the fallout. At least one mission had the players body-nap NPCs so they could infiltrate a hypercorp facility.