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Author Topic: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?  (Read 37820 times)

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #345 on: May 10, 2021, 11:24:36 AM »
That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

I like this more. I think establishing the logic of how becoming a machine works (even in only vague babble) might also work better as of now, humans just become software without much thought into its logic.

Like why does a human dying and coming back to life cause brain damage (in the real world) while you can switch a computer on or off? Because human chemical reactions are constantly ongoing. You can't 'pause' them without causing the process to start to fail.

And these processes are extremely fine. How can you copy said processes without causing brain damage in the process? Real-world digital copies degrade not just with time, but with copies of themselves. Even what we think of a hard drive will only really be able to keep information within itself for about 20 years (in the optimal case) before it looses everything.

Digital creatures most certainly would have a lifespan even if the original copy happened optimally. And even assuming good hardware, it may only be a few hundred years better than an organic. And while that does sound like an upgrade, that assumes maintenance and part switching with great risk to mental damage.

Edit: Just an amusing thought, but magnetic tapes, have better data retention than SSDs.
« Last Edit: May 10, 2021, 11:30:32 AM by Shrieking Banshee »

Pat
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #346 on: May 10, 2021, 01:00:56 PM »
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.
I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #347 on: May 10, 2021, 01:18:24 PM »
The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss

Abyss to where? Survival? Is it really survival when you are not yourself when you get to the end? In addition, there are plenty of things that are spectacular, but also horrific. The Borg are pretty spectacular. Not sure its a place Id choose to be over death.

The Thing
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #348 on: May 10, 2021, 01:18:32 PM »
Not so much off topic as completely off the rails here. :)

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

You know, thinking about it, the whole 'all these different forms' really detracts from the 'diversity in thought and body' aspect EP is trying to sell. So here's a deranged idea: strip resleeving out of the game entirely.

(cue the barrage of wtf)

Now, obviously you're going to have to modify the setting further, adding faster intrasystem travel (so you don't spend years getting to assignments). But you can at least enjoy the benefits of gear and bases without having to lose them every time you need to farcast someplace.

But what if you want to play a synth? No problem! Play an AGI 'sleeved' into a synth body, or perhaps a 'brain in a box' cyborg (akin to a Rifts combat cyborg, probably much less badass though).

Thoughts?

I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.
What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?  Ever hear of brainwashing? Advertising? Crowd psychology? I'd say normal humans can be hacked en masse quite easily. Let's hear from an expert:



Honestly, at times it seems a lot of humans are easier to hack than a tracfone... :'(

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #349 on: May 10, 2021, 01:20:33 PM »
What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?

To disengage the hyperbole, hacking=/= influence. People are really easy to manipulate and influence, but 'hacking' implies somebody just flicking a switch and your opinion is hard-wired moreso then just influenced.

HappyDaze

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #350 on: May 10, 2021, 01:57:59 PM »
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.
I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.
I always thought that EP tried to show that ideal transhumanism was somewhere between bioconservatives and exhumans. And yes, it has always been in the implementation that they've fucked it up.

BoxCrayonTales

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #351 on: May 10, 2021, 02:26:31 PM »
There's this horror game called Lust from Beyond which explores the aftermath of a world where everyone turned into wireheads.

robertliguori

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #352 on: May 10, 2021, 02:38:58 PM »
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.
I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.

My thought was that bio-conservatism would be an ideal, with the provision that several of the problems that were raised were just in theory technical problems.  Like, the theoretical Good End for Eclipse Phase would be that the riotous Exsurgent mass of Earth was quelled, that the various habitats had moved into actual post-scarcity, and the medicine of the day had moved away from combat morphs and to medicine, so that every human who needed a body could get one (and only one), and maintain it for a long, happy, healthy lifespan. 

But the setting itself would have the Exsurgent mass, and the horrible resource scarcity of the outer habitats and the politics and mistrust of the inner habitats, and the ongoing question for the players would be how much of their self they are willing to strip away to preserve their homes and loved ones.  The mechanical implementation I'm thinking of would make it clear that being a chromed-up cyborg would absolutely be the right (and sometimes necessary) answer to solve certain kinds of problems (pirate barges reacting to resource scarcity in the way pirates do), but absolutely the wrong solution to an Exsurgent self-replicating fork-fragment, while the natural-born flat engineer with his hand tools and physical printouts of crucial restore-from-backup checksums can slowly but surely purge that virus from the habitat without any risk of being counter-hacked.

The strongest answer to Mr. Forkswarm is to make it so that nobody, not even some fancy AGI in a plot-device suit, can actually do everything.

jeff37923

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #353 on: May 10, 2021, 03:47:33 PM »

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?


Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #354 on: May 10, 2021, 04:46:27 PM »
What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?

To disengage the hyperbole, hacking=/= influence. People are really easy to manipulate and influence, but 'hacking' implies somebody just flicking a switch and your opinion is hard-wired moreso then just influenced.

if people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #355 on: May 10, 2021, 04:47:20 PM »

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?


Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

Snowman0147

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #356 on: May 10, 2021, 06:05:04 PM »

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?


Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

Now now now while he maybe crass he is actually right.  People go to ttrpgs to escape real life for a few hours.  It isn't to have people to shove politics down their throats.  Not to mention we are all agreeing that the system has major flaws so maybe a political free redo is in order?

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #357 on: May 10, 2021, 06:30:02 PM »
if people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?
Mind hacks make you a permanent slave. You can influence people, but influence ultimately, influence is not force. A mind-hack won't just get you to side with a few but enslave you to them on an intellectual level.

To say that influence=enslavement is extreme hyperbole.

jeff37923

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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #358 on: May 11, 2021, 12:13:31 AM »

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?


Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

matt?
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The Thing
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Re: Does anyone here actually PLAY eclipse phase?
« Reply #359 on: May 11, 2021, 02:56:25 AM »
if people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?
Mind hacks make you a permanent slave. You can influence people, but influence ultimately, influence is not force. A mind-hack won't just get you to side with a few but enslave you to them on an intellectual level.

To say that influence=enslavement is extreme hyperbole.

A hack might be reversible. Convincing people to join you based on their own innate ignorance, bias, prejudices, etc is harder for anyone to undo.