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sabernoir
2018-02-01, 02:07 PM
Hello Ladies and (Mostly) Gentlemen of the GiantITP forums,

It has recently been decided that I shall be running our upcoming Eclipse Phase campaign. I have a couple of questions.

1. What are the key broken rules I'll need to change (e.g. monkey hands)? I'm certain there must be a few.

2. My players want to play as radical bio-conservatives, attempting to wage war/terrorism against the rest of the system, piece by piece. How can I balance a bunch of flats against opponents who will be using biomods and synthmorphs?

3. What else should a GM new to EP know?

Sincerely,

Me

Lorsa
2018-02-01, 02:17 PM
I would love to answer you as I've played a lot of EP, but I don't have the time right now unfortunately. Feel free to send me a PM if it seems if I have forgotten you. :)

sabernoir
2018-02-01, 02:18 PM
I would love to answer you as I've played a lot of EP, but I don't have the time right now unfortunately. Feel free to send me a PM if it seems if I have forgotten you. :)

Thanks! I'll be patient.

Rhedyn
2018-02-01, 02:19 PM
Are you using the base game or FATE?

sabernoir
2018-02-01, 02:23 PM
Are you using the base game or FATE?

We will be using the base game.

icefractal
2018-02-01, 03:44 PM
If everyone is a flat (and presumably doesn't sleeve or make forks), then you have an easier time of balance than normal. Most of the really out there tactics wouldn't be possible.

As for how the PCs deal with fully tech-using opposition - not a direct fight, if they want to survive. They can still hack things, sabotage equipment, use bombs, etc. They just need to treat serious opposition as "time to GTFO".

Incidentally, I think it would be interesting to have a bio-conservative character or antagonist who cheerfully uses the /rest/ of the tech.
"Yup, just nano-fabbed a new batch of morphs for my AGI buddies to use. What? Why wouldn't I? I'm not modifying any humans."

Anonymouswizard
2018-02-01, 04:14 PM
Yeah, in terms of PC versus PC balance #2 mostly takes care of #1 (barring those edge cases such as the bioconservative born in an upgraded body).

My heavy suggestion would normally be to use Fate, otherwise there's not much to look out for left, beyond the general advice of blueprints>items. There's some stacking you can do with 'normal' technology, but it's not as bad.

As has been said, bioconservatives can easily fight with indirect means, and the less radical versions can fight directly. Even for those not willing to get Neurachem or reflex boosters, speed boosting drugs can mean you aren't completely left behind in combat (although you still have to deal with being squishier and having lower Aptitude maximums). Without drug glands they take enough time to kick in that you'd have to plan your combats, but it's still viable.

Note that most bioconservatives will use things like nanofabrication if required, and whether or not a bioconservative is against AGIs can vary (although I believe most of them are implied to be). Also not every BC faction is actually opposed to using transhuman technology (the Jovian Republic), they'll just consider themselves less than human or different (depending on the exact tech) for doing so.

So a bioconservative may believe a resleeved person is still a person and still has a soul, they just don't believe that it's the same person as the original upload. Resleeving is murder people, murder*.

* Views in this post do not necessarily match those of the poster, which boil down to 'yes, I am vain enough to leave a machine that thinks it's me to annoy my enemies after I die'.

Lorsa
2018-02-02, 04:40 AM
Hello Ladies and (Mostly) Gentlemen of the GiantITP forums,

It has recently been decided that I shall be running our upcoming Eclipse Phase campaign. I have a couple of questions.

Let's see if I can answer a few, although I am not sure I remember everything right now.



1. What are the key broken rules I'll need to change (e.g. monkey hands)? I'm certain there must be a few.

I changed the rules for using multiple hands to shoot. It's partly for balance, partly to avoid ludicrous scenes and partly to avoid one player taking too long to do actions in combat (which can be boring for the others). That is, I only allowed a character to fire one gun regardless of how many hands they have.

Another main thing I changed was the skill rez point system. Instead of using 60 as the baseline for when things start to cost double, I calculated it as "once you've spent 45 points in a skill, it starts to cost double". So if you have 15 in your aptitude (ego that is), it happens at 60, but if you have 25 it doesn't happen until you reach 70 in the skill. Similarly, I increased the maximum you can have in a skill accordingly. So at 15 aptitude you can have 100, but with 25 you can reach as high as 110.

I did this after I realized that it was actually cheaper (rez point wise) to get high skills by having low aptitudes and later raising them with augmentations. I figured you shouldn't be penalized for having high ego aptitudes and this change helped with that somewhat.

Also, in one of the books there's a positive trait called "Murder simulation addict" or something like that, which I've thrown out.

I've also made some changes to the augmentations and which can be used together etc. Some of them doesn't make sense that they'd, for example, stack if you read the text and others shouldn't work in some circumstances. One example is that the multi-tasking augmentation shouldn't work for bio-brains. The way they describe it, it creates forks of you and continually merges them together in your consciousness. However, when you read the rules, it takes a very long time for a bio-brain to merge with an ego. So to me, that never made sense and thus I only allowed multi-tasking for cyber-brains. I don't think I ever mixed Neurachem with Reflex boosters either. One changes the chemicals in your synapses whereas the other completely replaces your neural pathways (except for the brain maybe) with artificial wiring. Doesn't seem like they'd work together, but you can obviously run it any way you like.

Having hardening affect your maximum moxie is also quite severe. I changed it to giving penalties to certain social rolls instead. Moxie is the power-stat of doom and any group of PCs will quickly become hardened...



2. My players want to play as radical bio-conservatives, attempting to wage war/terrorism against the rest of the system, piece by piece. How can I balance a bunch of flats against opponents who will be using biomods and synthmorphs?

Well, how bio-conservative are they? Are they willing to "sacrifice their souls for the cause" and upgrade their bodies for the mission knowing it will damn them in their own eyes? Or are they going to stick strictly with Flats?

How to balance is always a tricky issue in EP. They can win simply with superior numbers. Also you should not forget the element of surprise. I once had a character down a Fury in the first surprise round with a Shredder. Eclipse Phase is extremely lethal (though very frivolous with resurrection). If your players stay on top of the game, they can easily win most fights. Also, moxie and more moxie.

Otherwise others have answered this question quite well. You can still use drones, or remote control shells or use explosives or whatnot.



3. What else should a GM new to EP know?

Sincerely,

Me

Well, you should know that there seem to be a few mis-matches between the rules and the setting. For example, reading the rules you can easily reach the conclusion that everyone is running around with über-morphs stacked with tons of augmentations. However, the setting is still one where humanity is trying to catch up and most people don't have access to the resources needed for that. Many are poor, lacking morphs or indentured. So keep that in mind when you build the setting.

Also, I could never figure out why it takes a year and half to build a biomorph when a healing vat can rebuild you from your head in just a week or two. Things like that doesn't make sense and you should probably take a stance or figure out an explanation before the players ask. Speaking of healing vats I figured it could restore things encoded in your DNA (such as bioware), but not necessarily cyberware or nanoware. If you got your body blown off you might have to put in those things again (depending on the mod).

I think some people already said the nanofabrication has some really weird implications for the economy, but luckily I never had any players who wanted to get into that.

Anyway, good luck!

icefractal
2018-02-03, 03:05 PM
I think some people already said the nanofabrication has some really weird implications for the economy, but luckily I never had any players who wanted to get into that.Nanofabrication has a number of important things simply not specified at all, AFAICT. It seems like it was written strictly from the perspective of using it in a legal way within the inner system, with big questions arising if the PCs ever go into Autonomist space or get their own nano set up.

Like for one, what can and can't be fabbed? And do some things require expensive raw materials to fab? Strictly by the book, the answers are: "Everything can be fabbed, even a General Hive itself", and "No, it just says it needs scrap materials you shouldn't even bother pricing". Which is not necessarily a problem, but it does make the scarcity seen in the setting seem pretty strange, and it's unclear why anything would ever cost as much / more than a General Hive, barring designer stuff.

Alternately, it would be reasonable to say there are a few things which can't be fabricated, and others which can be but require special and potentially expensive materials beyond basic scrap. But at that point, you're into homebrew territory; you'd have to figure out what those all are yourself.

Oh, and while this isn't just a fabrication problem (there are other ways to acquire them), there's really nothing stopping a PC from getting several dozen Guardian Angels or other combat drones and becoming a bigger combat presence than even the best morph and gear would achieve.

Anonymouswizard
2018-02-03, 03:49 PM
On nanofabrication:

Anything can be nanofabbed as long as a) a set of blueprints exists and b) the pieces are small enough to come out of the CM or fabber. It's also possible that nanofabricators can't change around atoms, limiting you to the elements within the scrap, but that's not something that's really going to come up in a game.

On the scarcity angle, it is rather clear from the setting information that the governments with more resources are enforcing scarcity, mainly by limiting access to nanofabrication, whereas outside of the inner system resources tend to be hard to come by and 'not having enough scrap to run the fabber' is an actual concern in automonist habs (which is why they have people who's job it is to bring in feed for the fabber from outside the hab). The only place where this starts to fall apart is Titan, which is heavily socialist and has the resources of a moon, but that might also mean that Titan is the one place in the solar system that's actually living a psuedo-post-scarcity existence.

So yes, controlling nanofab is as simple as limiting access to blueprints (hard), limiting access to feed (easier), and limiting access to the fabbers themselves (relatively easy). Note that after beaming to a habitat PCs should have to arrange fabber access and feed before printing off their gear. In a Automonist hab this will be finding a CM with an overseer willing to let you use it and enough Rep to get a friend of a friend to tell his friend to let you have access to the hab's scrap reservoirs, in a central system hab the book gives a pretty good overview.