"Robert", I tell myself, "a good forum citizen shouldn't just jump into the last page of an ongoing thread to talk about all of the things Eclipse Phase does wrong.  A good citizen should read the thread to see what topics in the game were previously discussed, and what points were previously raised.  I'll just go back to page 1 and...uh.  Uh."

So! Eclipse Phase!

Yeah, I'm not a fan.  There are a lot of areas that fundamentally show a lack of consideration about the fundamental conceits of the setting.  Like the rep economy.  A setting in which reputation is intended to strongly supplement or completely replace the conventional economy misses the point that people have reputation, and in Eclipse Phase, the notion of 'person' is really fluid.  If someone undergoes really extensive psychosurgery, shouldn't their rep tank? If rep was gained due to a history of decision-making in favor of one faction or another, and you have strong evidence that this person is not going to be making those decisions any more, shouldn't that rep dry up?  And what do you do in the cases where you're away on a mission, and some bastard steals your backup, instantiates you, cons you into making a bunch of requests to your faction, then stealing your stuff and leaving you high and dry?

And yeah, the Jovian stuff is dumb.  But it pairs perfectly with the post-human dumbness as well.  There are a lot of hilarious hijinks you can get up as Exsurgent-kun, where you just habitually alpha-fork yourself into every bit of processing space you can compromise.  Or when you take 100 on things like psychosurgery checks by spinning up a lot of storage space, doing the procedure tens of thousands of times, backing up each result, then subjecting each to horrible psychological torture until they break down entirely, then dropping the lower 80% of performers who broke the earliest (who presumably had less-than-optimal psycho-surgeries), then re-copying over the top 20%, repeating the procedures, and continuing until you've got a definite personality which has the statistically-proven least chance of having their sanity compromised by the procedure.  Then you instantiate that one fork from the pre-torture point, and heyo, it's like the hundreds of thousands of digital experiences of ultimate horror never happened.

And if you're uncomfortable with that, then hey, just step into the psychosurgery box, and you'll forget all about it!

Eclipse Phase unknowingly critiques itself incredibly strongly by having both the Jovians and the posthumans (and, lately, the Political Flavor of the Week, but that's just gaming in Current Year) as designated enemy factions.  To sneer both at the Jovians for turning away from transhuman tech, and from the posthumans doing things like what I mention above for Meddling in God's Domain, is to enshrine that one has no actual principles other than "This makes me woogy, so it's bad, and this sounds cool, so it's good."  A better Eclipse Phase would look in detail at both the problems that came from hard-line bio-conservatism, and the horrible race-to-the-bottom Age-of-EM scenarios that unrestrained habitats could fall into, and say "This shit is complicated, yo, and there's not necessarily one right answer, and what's right with Exsurgent breathing down your neck might not be right in other places and other times."  But we don't get that.

Honestly, my feeling is that Eclipse Phase feels like it took a bunch of ideas which were cool and speculative decades ago, and failed utterly to see how their analogues worked when they crashed into the real world.  But a game system that can't even manage to rebut "Maybe fascism isn't that unreasonable of a response to being invaded and having your mind, memories, and flesh stolen by the Communist Exsurgent Menace." without crying and flipping the authorial table is not the game system to answer the interesting questions that it poses.

To my mind, Eclipse Phase would be a fun system for 1-on-1 play, or storytelling.  But only because the interesting point in the game is when one player decides to go posthuman and flip the table themselves.  As has been noted, a setting where things are post-scarcity-ish and everyone can restore themselves from backup as long as horrible space virus hasn't gotten you? Not really a lot to do there.  But a setting in which you examine the rules, and decide that the only way to fight horrible space virus is to make of yourself a better horrible space virus, and fight on its terms? That sounds interesting.  (Also horribly unrelatable for any kind of normal gaming environment, and one basically necessitating a 1-protagonist story-game.  But interesting.)

And that's why I decided to write my scifi as retro futuristic. Cyberpunk, technothriller, space western, military scifi, mecha, scifi horror, etc.

In my setting, you could potentially play as a moreau who pilots a mech against Starship Troopers-inspired space bugs, a psychic spy who works against space commies on behalf of the free worlds, a sapient tachikoma fleeing slavery by working with outlaws, or any number of other concepts.

If you have a cyberbrain or a cortical stack then you can potentially survive fatal events, but immortality is not a guarantee. Even if you're a decentralized AI who lives entirely within the ansible relay network, you're going to want to curry favor with whoever owns the hardware if you don't want them to flush your data.

A thing to bear in mind is that EP is basically a ripoff (or homage, if you're feeling generous) of Altered Carbon.  The core posthumanist stuff is directly copied: Swap bodies, engineered/full-borg/weird bodies available, people backing themselves up, making copies, etc.  However, Altered Carbon is functional as a setting because they didn't try to throw Star Trek replicator technology into it.  There are still haves/have-nots, money is a real concern for people, crime is rampant and there isn't a perfect surveillance system over every inch of everywhere.  Dying is or is not a concern depending on whether one's cortical stack is destroyed by whatever killed their body, because having backups made and spare bodies lying around is just for the super-rich.  Therefore it can explore posthuman concepts without completely wrecking core plot hooks that most people will easily empathize with.

EP's hardon for robot space communism basically ruins everything.  Why should anyone care about really anything?  Build a space habitat for you and your best friends drifting out past Mars, have limitless energy and whatever you want; as long as you keep everything sealed up tight you don't really need to worry about AI monsters coming to eat your head.  Be virtual and spend the next thousand years in an orgy simulator while your mind is sitting in a toaster-sized storage unit somewhere.  By setting up a scenario where your average Joe can be set for life while never lifting a finger, and where technology is basically flawless, there's no good reason to go and risk yourself dealing with Event Horizon space madness stuff, which is supposed to be the meat of the setting.  The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The distinction is that Altered Carbon took humanity and posthuman technology and used them to show how humanity was fundamentally unchanging even in the face of literally inhuman technology, that even with miraculous new capabilities humans were still grubby animals doing grubby animal things.  Eclipse Phase took humanity and posthuman technology, claimed that humanity is completely evolved through it, then belatedly realized that you can't make a game out of an evolved humanity with no needs and tried to shoehorn in some drama at the last minute in the nonsense manner that it did.

Mind you, I think that just forking and backups is enough to nuke any kind of relatable setting.  If you can load yourself from backup, then you can load yourself in parallel, and do N things at once.  You can make a copy of yourself right after waking up in the morning and really wanting to solve a particular kind of technical problem, and whenever anyone needs that kind of problem solved, they can load you up, have you solve the problem, and then delete you, and if they're clever about the virtual environment, they can keep this backup instance of you relevant for years, perhaps decades.  Hell, you can spin up a dozen copies of yourself, have them seek out spouses and children with particular skills, be devoted and loving and everything, then mind-scan them right before you ask them for a significant favor, and in that way, you can get a number of dedicated problem-solving personalities across a load of skills.  You could spin up a hundred copies of yourself, have a hundred children, raise all of them to be slavishly dedicated to you, then purge 99 of them and use that one repeatedly-copied personality as your general-purpose useful personality.

A world with copyable personalities is not a world with any kind of familiar economic landscape; the ability to control who spins up in what bodies will be paramount, and accordingly, if you can create extra bodies (robotic, organic, or both), then you now have some very pressing marginal product questions.  And if you can copy yourself into other bodies, then the first person to start mass-occupying robotics factories (or setting up breeding camps), and then uses them to capture more factories and expand accordingly, will be a massive problem, and if you can disassemble the one rogue personality and figure out his exploits, then he can do the same to you, and he can do it a lot faster, because there are more of him.

A fork-and-instance world is not compatible with silly space communism, or even hard-edged cyberpunk capitalism.  It's a world in which everyone with access to the resleeving tech is in a MAD scenario with everyone else.  It's a war-of-all-against-all, and all it needs to kick it off is one non-genre-blinded person.

Don't forget the time compression ability of simulspace. It's hard to outsmart a bad guy that has planned even a simple heiat for 1000 years (simulated, of course). PCs can do the same, and soon the game just gets unplayable as years of game play might only be a few minutes in the physical world of EP.

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The distinction is that Altered Carbon took humanity and posthuman technology and used them to show how humanity was fundamentally unchanging even in the face of literally inhuman technology, that even with miraculous new capabilities humans were still grubby animals doing grubby animal things.  Eclipse Phase took humanity and posthuman technology, claimed that humanity is completely evolved through it, then belatedly realized that you can't make a game out of an evolved humanity with no needs and tried to shoehorn in some drama at the last minute in the nonsense manner that it did.

Yeah, that's totally the problem.

In order to make it work, you'd pretty much have to, and this is just off the top of my head, introduce some kind of external threat that is actively hunting humanity. Like the aforementioned Starship Troopers-inspired space bugs or any number of other things you could imagine. (But fighting for the survival of your species and way of life against an implacable alien threat is unthinkable to the psychotic lefties that this game seems to be aimed towards.)

That, or make the threat other (trans)human beings. Like how the Shaper/Mechanist universe has the ideological conflict between the Dune-inspired Shapers and the cyberpunk-themed Mechanists. (Quick tangent: the Shaper/Mechanist universe seems to have inspired TSR in the 90s, since both the Bug Hunters and Star*Drive settings had an ancient alien war based on similar philosophies. In the former it was the Shaper/Artificer war, and in the latter it was the Stoneburner/Glassmaker war. The Stoneburners were the weirdest since they apparently developed Lovecraft-style magic that let them summon "dimensional horrors" and shit.)

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 04:27:08 PM
A fork-and-instance world is not compatible with silly space communism, or even hard-edged cyberpunk capitalism.  It's a world in which everyone with access to the resleeving tech is in a MAD scenario with everyone else.  It's a war-of-all-against-all, and all it needs to kick it off is one non-genre-blinded person.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 04:32:32 PM
Don't forget the time compression ability of simulspace. It's hard to outsmart a bad guy that has planned even a simple heiat for 1000 years (simulated, of course). PCs can do the same, and soon the game just gets unplayable as years of game play might only be a few minutes in the physical world of EP.

And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

We must be sure to tell the EP writers that the Jovians are the clearly the winners in their setting. Second place going to other bioconservative brinkers.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 10:54:55 PM
Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

So the Jovians run social media in the eclipse phase verse?

I played it once at a convention.  I played a dolphin which was boring as hell.  The system itself was okay.. reminded me a little of BRP.
I thought the Islam in space religious stuff was insane.  Didn't care for it and would not play it again.
There are better scifi games and settings out there.

.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Kind of?  If you ban deep brain emulation but your neighboring habitat doesn't, then their society will self-destruct, but in so doing, it will dump a lot of its spores all over its neighbors, and while your infrastructure won't be up to snuff, you'll also probably be missing some important technological defenses that said spores can exploit the lack of.  Their failure may well destroy you as well, and if the ruin can spread fast enough, then it doesn't matter that it ends in sub-sentient neural attack routines dueling over a ruined world, it matters that everyone's dead and just washing your hands of the issue didn't save you.

You need the aforementioned Butlerian Jihads enforced by a strict supermajority of your society (which, I dunno, you might expect in actual Eclipse Phase given that posthuman thought research caused what they refer to as the literal Fall), or, better yet, you need to invoke the Narrative-Anthropic Principle, which states that just like all universes in which we find ourselves by necessity support human life, all universes in which we tell interesting stories support interesting drama.  And while the story of a wee little 20th-century refugee taking apart the Eclipse Phase setting might be a fun short story, it would be a crap game.  So, just assume that, as in reality, actual AI that hasn't been carefully tuned by a team of engineers for a very specific purpose is probably going to be kind of crappy generally, and will fail hilariously if you use it against actual adversarial agents, and don't make up tech that turns humans from social mammals into viruses.

Gentelmen, you have now officially ruined Eclipse Phase for me. I hope you are happy.

Heh, just kidding ofc. I have never played this game and it has seriously bugged me in some regards. Let me play a bit of amateur devils advocate/fixer here.

One, the rep mechanic. This is not a good mechanic. Its also the same mechanic as the one in Lucas Cranes Freemarket. Its facebook in the future as a currency. To fix this i would only use this for Anarchists scum collectives, all the rest of humanity uses other money like normal people. The problem is, almost all the money stayed on earth so incredibly many people are bankrupt. So, there is post scarcity and scarcity at the same time. Thats my first fix, possibly

Two, the forking and personality coping. The MAD scenario is just about what anybody would do in the first few minutes when this technology would go public, yes. To combat this, there would be forcefull personality checkes, matrioshka safety forks, system wide purges of people copying themselves, communal basilisk hacks and dead man switches installed voluntarilly, or else. Now, all of this woudnt be spoken of in regular polite company. The people who decided to go full horde mode on humanity would just be labeled something. Like, say, exhumans. Exhumans are bad wrong fun, so nobody would like them. The x-man/exhuman analogue has struck me since the beginning when reading EP. There was just no writeup in the first edition and no sourcebook. They just existed on the fringes, mutating into baddies eventually. Pretty weaksauce, its like they were a concept that was just.. made fodder.

Third, the Jovians and bioconservatives seem like they are just plain right. Everybody has lost their marbles after earth apocalypsed and now they are pulling weird crazy shit like making ones copies to die in weird ways to make money(this is in one of the stories, its funny one guy has decided to capitalise on recording and selling masochism, its a grand idea indeed). One could decide to play the factions the authors of the game as the real heroes while the rest of humanity goes looney tunes but hey, this is supposed to fun escapism.

Personally i find some things fun in this game, but it is not well conceptualised and it shows when one stops and thinks it through. Playing as intended is not how i would do it, so why just not play something else? Yeah, seems like a plan.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 05:35:58 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Kind of?  If you ban deep brain emulation but your neighboring habitat doesn't, then their society will self-destruct, but in so doing, it will dump a lot of its spores all over its neighbors, and while your infrastructure won't be up to snuff, you'll also probably be missing some important technological defenses that said spores can exploit the lack of.  Their failure may well destroy you as well, and if the ruin can spread fast enough, then it doesn't matter that it ends in sub-sentient neural attack routines dueling over a ruined world, it matters that everyone's dead and just washing your hands of the issue didn't save you.

You need the aforementioned Butlerian Jihads enforced by a strict supermajority of your society (which, I dunno, you might expect in actual Eclipse Phase given that posthuman thought research caused what they refer to as the literal Fall), or, better yet, you need to invoke the Narrative-Anthropic Principle, which states that just like all universes in which we find ourselves by necessity support human life, all universes in which we tell interesting stories support interesting drama.  And while the story of a wee little 20th-century refugee taking apart the Eclipse Phase setting might be a fun short story, it would be a crap game.  So, just assume that, as in reality, actual AI that hasn't been carefully tuned by a team of engineers for a very specific purpose is probably going to be kind of crappy generally, and will fail hilariously if you use it against actual adversarial agents, and don't make up tech that turns humans from social mammals into viruses.

Good point, to which I point you to:

Quote from: Warder on April 26, 2021, 05:42:46 PM
Two, the forking and personality coping. The MAD scenario is just about what anybody would do in the first few minutes when this technology would go public, yes. To combat this, there would be forcefull personality checkes, matrioshka safety forks, system wide purges of people copying themselves, communal basilisk hacks and dead man switches installed voluntarilly, or else. Now, all of this woudnt be spoken of in regular polite company. The people who decided to go full horde mode on humanity would just be labeled something. Like, say, exhumans. Exhumans are bad wrong fun, so nobody would like them. The x-man/exhuman analogue has struck me since the beginning when reading EP. There was just no writeup in the first edition and no sourcebook. They just existed on the fringes, mutating into baddies eventually. Pretty weaksauce, its like they were a concept that was just.. made fodder.

Yep. The only way to prevent the technology from wreaking havoc is to develop countermeasures to prevent it from destroying civilization. Like we already do with crime and computer viruses.

You know, an Eclipse Phase that dropped the whole Space Exsurgent thing, and instead had it be the outgrowth of horrible time-accelerated Darwinian action on fork-swarms endlessly devouring each other, and the surviving factions being the ones who looked at where unrestrained alpha-forking was going and had reactions ranging from "Fuck that shit." to "Fuck everything in that shit's postal code, with nuclear fire." would, I think, be an interesting setting change.  You would have "What the fuck do we do about Earth, and each other?" be the default question of the setting, and the default metaplot would be for you to slowly build rep with and do diplomacy with multiple factions, with the end goal of getting enough of a consensus to get people behind a unified plan to handle what was left behind, and a direction for the future which will hopefully prevent such horrors from coming about once again.

In stock Eclipse Phase, though, the Alien Space Bats enforce a silent cosmos, and given that horrible parallel-processing omniphagic sentience is their winning entry in enforcing their will, if you want to do anything of scope or purpose in the setting, you're going to need to put the pedal to the metal.  And if you're not, then since the setting is post-scarcity and you can literally edit your brain into not wanting inconvenient things, it's really hard to have any non-grand non-sweeping character motivations.

I bought it (Eclipse Phase) when it first came out.  Then the creators started spouting off with their nonsense, so I never even took it out of the wrapper. 

Kinda makes me want to play one of the Warhammer 40K rpg's.

The Emperor protects.

Greetings!

True contentment is found in obedience and faithfulness to the God Emperor and the Empire.

The mutants, the rebels--they must all be crushed.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

As much as the idea of fork nightmares intrigue me as villains, I still prefer using SST style space bugs. If you're designing a board game, then they can even be playable.