Quote from: Marchand on April 27, 2021, 02:51:20 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
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 answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 04:27:08 PM
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.

Which made me think... Grandfather from Traveller. At last, we have learned the Secret of the Ancients.

Capitalism requires maximizing profits. There is never "enough to go around" because that is not what is being optimized. Even wise rulers focused on longterm growth would only be so generous. Pure capitalism is basically just Feudalism again.

My problem with Eclipse Phase is that 1E is too cumbersome and that 2E doesn't do much for me. They streamlined out a bunch a crunch, but Nova Praxis for Savage Worlds ends being a more compelling mechanical system. I also like the setting better.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:15:46 PM
It's supposed to be post-apocalyptic (like only 10 years ago 98% of humanity was lost in a permanent way) but those that made it through are in an age of wonder...and hoping the things that caused the apocalypse don't come back to finish the job.

The "age of wonder" seems a fate worse then death.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 08:07:25 AM
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon's Razor.

I only glanced through EP 1E, mostly because the body-hopping is a non-starter for me. But I love some of the other concepts, and the premise of the PC's fighting rogue AI's. At least I think that's what it was? 2E actually looked worse, in terms of look and feel, so I didn't bother.

Maybe Nova Praxis is worth a look.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:28:56 AM
The EP anti-capitalism stance is much more obvious than their token bit on religion.  It's actually one of the main points of the setting (with religion being way down that list). Not sure how/why the religion part caught your attention and you missed the much larger push.

At the time the book came out I had a few friends who were on the road to becoming SJWs and I had starting having my fill of that bullshit so anything and everything political I went out of my way not to notice. Religion aspect of the rpg stood out because at the time I also had two family members who passed away one month apart. So I had a crisis of faith and seeing that bullshit about all religions but Islam somehow died out. As the religion of "peace and love" and not very progressive is somehow still around after the fall fuck that and fuck the authors of EP.

Paradoxically its the orthodox of the religious that have sustainable amount of children.

But I guess that wasn't the EP angle.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 10:17:01 PM
Paradoxically its the orthodox of the religious that have sustainable amount of children.

But I guess that wasn't the EP angle.

It's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically. Hinduism doesn't ban birth control, for example.

Affluent societies generally offer more access to birth control, less incentive to have children, and thus experience population decline.

Poverty, religion, and population growth are all correlated, but causation is more complex. Poverty by itself doesn't cause population growth. Advancements in medicine and other fields provided the catalyst necessary for those in poverty to experience a continuous population boom. But that's slowing down now. It peaked in 1962. Earth's population is headed for a decline.

You need very specific circumstances to maintain continuous growth for more than a few decades.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 11:09:07 PMIt's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically.

.....I'm not sure how this disproves my point. The orthodox religious, even when affluent, have more children.

Quote from: sureshot on April 27, 2021, 09:57:37 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:28:56 AM
The EP anti-capitalism stance is much more obvious than their token bit on religion.  It's actually one of the main points of the setting (with religion being way down that list). Not sure how/why the religion part caught your attention and you missed the much larger push.

At the time the book came out I had a few friends who were on the road to becoming SJWs and I had starting having my fill of that bullshit so anything and everything political I went out of my way not to notice. Religion aspect of the rpg stood out because at the time I also had two family members who passed away one month apart. So I had a crisis of faith and seeing that bullshit about all religions but Islam somehow died out. As the religion of "peace and love" and not very progressive is somehow still around after the fall fuck that and fuck the authors of EP.

This point is one of the reasons Nova Praxis is a better setting. Not only do the old religion exists, there are schisms about how transhumanity is understood and interpreted. Is every Fork a person or is their one Soul that is a cumulation of the experiences of backups and some forks/mergs or is blend the one-true-way? A much more compelling and believable take on religion post a fall.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 27, 2021, 09:23:08 PM
Capitalism requires maximizing profits. There is never "enough to go around" because that is not what is being optimized. Even wise rulers focused on longterm growth would only be so generous. Pure capitalism is basically just Feudalism again.

That was actually useful in helping me get inside the head of people who think like this, a group that I guess includes the authors of EP.

Anyway, I looked at EP once upon a time for doing Revelation Space Reynolds-verse, with mind uploading kicked to the kerb (it's a Bad Idea in the source material). There is even an uplifted pig in the first edition morph book. I tend to reach for BRP for most things except dungeon crawl fantasy, but BRP still lacks a good modern scifi book. In the end, I never decided if I wanted to tweak EP, or port stuff from EP over to BRP, and it fizzled.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

This sound like the arguments about the Star Trek transporter.  If you use it, do you move, or are you dead and that's a new copy of you over there.  I believe that canonically McCoy always believed that latter but did it anyway for some reason.  I'm inclined to to that point of view as well unless you could prove that the soul moves to the new location.  I believe that the soul, not the brain, is the seat of consciousness, so that would be the important part.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 28, 2021, 03:01:57 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

This sound like the arguments about the Star Trek transporter.  If you use it, do you move, or are you dead and that's a new copy of you over there.  I believe that canonically McCoy always believed that latter but did it anyway for some reason.  I'm inclined to to that point of view as well unless you could prove that the soul moves to the new location.  I believe that the soul, not the brain, is the seat of consciousness, so that would be the important part.

In the EP universe, there is no point talking about a soul. Yes, you are making copies, but they are every bit as good as the original in every way.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

I think if I were to GM something like Eclipse Phase, I'd lean heavily into the body horror and existential horror like Battle Angel Alita.

https://battleangel.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_bio-chip

One factor in Eclipse Phase is that the Fall, while wiping out most of humanity, also had the majority of its escapees flee as informorphs, leaving their bodies behind.  Accordingly, almost everyone in the setting who had strong reservations against restoring from backup is already gone.  And human nature being what it is, it makes sense to me that everyone just collectively agrees not to think about the implications of this, at least in public.  And when you combine that with psychosurgery which can indeed change people's minds on arbitrary topics, it's quite plausible that the society is not collectively screaming in horror at the implications of just that one thing.

Of course, psychosurgery is another one of those turns-people-into-viruses things, and there are some absolutely brutal shenenigans you can get up to involving compromising someone's physical body, nabbing their cortical stack, spinning up a parallelized cluster of yous and thems to edit them willy-nilly, destructively testing your creations as before, then playing back a time-compressed cliff-notes of the real-time minutes or seconds between your attack and now to the victim, and dropping them back into their body, such that from their perspective, it seems like they just had a completely spontaneous Road to Damascus moment.

---

Eclipse Phase is already a really interesting horror setting, and I think that its earnestness (when it's trying to be earnest and not just authorially wishcast) is one of its strong points.  But most people, when they think of horror settings, tend to think in terms of characters passing a bar or falling past an event horizon, and the narrative stopping.  Horror stories tend to stop when the protagonist dies of the zombie virus, succumbs to lycanthropy, goes mad from the revelation and eats their companions, and so on, such that when you see them again, they are only an antagonist.  But the nature of Eclipse Phase is strict materialism.  People are data, full-stop.  The hypothetical Exsurgent-kun PC is a person, and of the same kind and quantity as every other playable PC.  And while I myself both really like the idea of taking a character whose one and sole advantage is the ability to stare unblinkingly at the implications of the technology of transhumanity and apply it, and in so doing take apart the setting piece by piece through a variety of horrible inversions of our normal value systems like the one above, in a setting where things like that are even possible, it's hard to have any other kind of satisfying story.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 11:34:25 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 11:09:07 PMIt's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically.

.....I'm not sure how this disproves my point. The orthodox religious, even when affluent, have more children.

Do you mean all religions or just Christianity/Islam?

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 06:26:21 AM
Of course, psychosurgery is another one of those turns-people-into-viruses things, and there are some absolutely brutal shenenigans you can get up to involving compromising someone's physical body, nabbing their cortical stack, spinning up a parallelized cluster of yous and thems to edit them willy-nilly, destructively testing your creations as before, then playing back a time-compressed cliff-notes of the real-time minutes or seconds between your attack and now to the victim, and dropping them back into their body, such that from their perspective, it seems like they just had a completely spontaneous Road to Damascus moment.

That is a method that Firewall uses to recruit PCs.