Why do so many anons think it's shit?

It's a fun setting plagued by the anarchist wank of the authors, and the ruleset is clunky.

>>44858644
Mostly the dumbass opinion of the authors I think. Also character creation is a pain in the ass.

>>44858844
I admit the rules do seem to have a little too much going on, but the anarchist fluff doesn't seem TOO bad. The way the reputation system works in the autonomist stations isn't that dumb, at least not any dumber than most RPG economies.

>>44858644

Mechanically its janky and easy to exploit. Setting wise lots of /tg/ is pretty conservative so they dislike the anarcho political orientation of the writers.

>>44858948
I was hoping there was more to this than just shaking fists at anything that resembles SJWism and tumblrites, honestly, but I expected responses of that nature.

Janky and easy to exploit, though? Like I said, not good at examining mechanics, it's usually my players who find the broken shit and bring it to my attention, and I haven't gotten around to showing them Eclipse Phase yet.

I personally feel it's kinda ridiculous that strength is a mental stat.

>>44859917
What? Somatics is a physical stat and it covers basically everything physical, including Strength.

>>44859987
Perhaps I misunderstood the book then.

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>>44858986
It's not just the writers say mean things about republicans. It that they force it heavily into the setting regardless of what sense it make context and are openly antagonistic about it.

Plus all that creepy fetishising stuff.

>>44858986

It's very easy to make a combat monster character at the start of the game that can plow through anything the GM can come up with.

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>>44859987
>>44860211
It is kinda both in a weird way.

>>44860218
>Creepy fetishing stuff
Like scum swarms?

>>44858986
Hollow points do more damage to armored targets than armor piercing rounds.

>>44858948

Oh please. If /tg/ just hated all liberal things, why are we so hostile to /pol/, and how come plenty of old school "anarcho" games are remembered fondly, like Over The Edge?

It's just that Eclipse Phase is really douchey about its position, and the setting starts vanishing up its own asshole.

>>44858644

I prefer the Transhuman Space setting as it doesn't shove any one particular thing down your throat, actually tries to speculate how the advances of technology might (and might not) change society for better and worst, and takes place in a world where the majority of people are still humans. Even the Transhumanist stuff is shown with the potential downsides & flaws and is not widely accepted around the world/solar system; indeed, many countries and people in general prefer not going too far with human augmentation/etc. while others are actively opposed to the notion). Also, while not being religious myself, I prefer the better treatment of the world’s religions in Transhuman Space (i.e. they still exist, have plenty of followers, and remain complex/varied) than what was done in Eclipse Phase.

Ran a campaign.
>Players start strong
> No character progression in mechanic

And thats my main problem. 1000cp is way too much to start with

>>44858844
>anarchist wank of the authors
Left or right?

>>44858948
>lots of /tg/ is pretty conservative
/tg/ pretty much runs the gamut from /pol/ to /leftypol/ to tumblr SJW.

>>44863459
Hard left. Lots of identity politics too

>>44863483
Well, that's all right I suppose. I can never stomach people shoving politics I happen to agree with into their work (weirdly enough I don't really care if I disagree with it), but while I'm left I'm anti-idpol. I'll probably keep neutral on it, then.

>>44863065
>It's just that Eclipse Phase is really douchey about its position, and the setting starts vanishing up its own asshole.
Pretty much this plus the mechanics kinda sucking as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It's not even a matter of agreeing/disagreeing with the political stances, it's how they're presented. It reads more like something written by wannabe political demigogs than a setting. Like I'm at home with the psychotic fascism of the 40K settings because at no point does it feel like the authors are actually trying to convince me to live/believe that way. That's not true of EP.

>>44861130
Except for an anarchist habitat, most habitat have at least decent security forces. At some point, they will get you.

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>>44861987
There is a character questionnaire that has an white wolf level fascination with rape. Apart from that howevet most of it's just dumb joke stuff like you posted such von Statan and the Cock.

>>44863801
This. It's hard to stomach the consent 'rapture of the nerds' gushing going on. Especially if robots have already destroyed the earth in the setting.

>>44864484
That and I'm not sure they actually know very much about technology in the first place.

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>>44864484
Isn't that questionnaire made by a that guy, not the EP dev team?

>>44864573
>That and I'm not sure they actually know very much about technology in the first place.

Or science. Cough... Space/star whales ... cough.

>>44864484

To be fair that questionnaire was written by an individual on the Eclipse Phase forums who is one of the most intolerable, passive-aggressive individuals I have ever come across, and who somehow is more politically biased than the writers of the damn setting.

>>44864573

Really? I get the impression that a good chunk of the science in the setting is fairly well researched, or at the very least is theoretically possible. The more absurd stuff is either bizarre alien technology, or takes certain liberties to invoke certain things that will get people's attention when talking about the setting. Or, in other words, the rule of cool (assuming one doesn't think the idea of sun whales is dumb).

>>44863147

This

>>44863474
Everyone's tumblr SJW, anon. It's a buzzword that doesn't mean anything anymore.

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>>44863147

To play devil's advocate for a second: most humans in Eclipse Phase prefer human-looking bodies and probably don't get a lot of augmentations beyond the bare basics, unless its things they need for their jobs. Uplifts, AGIs or people that want radical augmentations or prefer non-human forms are definitely in the minority.

But I do agree, especially on the religion thing. The EP writers really should have payed fucking attention to this tidbit in Transhuman Space when it was talking about religion:

>No meme can survive centuries or millennia without being resilient enough to adapt.

While I still prefer EP over TS, mostly for its take on cosmic horror and stargates, if I had a choice of which game to run for players that either haven't played a lot of sci-fi or aren't really familiar with transhumanism, I'd definitely go for TS first. Maybe as a sort of "before the Fall" thing.

>>44865221

Though to be fair, the positions signified by said term is still very much used by some people. Not to mention recent events, such as the heads of one or more universities getting sacked, are self evidently related to such. But so long as such does not infringe upon our civil liberties I remain neutral (save for the very few actions that indeed do).

>>44863524

Really? The message i got was that IdPol really doesn't matter in the long run. If an uplifted animal or ai can boot into a human body, sooner or later it'd learn how to pass as human. So sapience is, ultimately, sapience.

>>44865310

Religions do still die out through history, though.

>>44863147
I like GURPS but Transhuman Space always came off a little dry to me. It comes adcross more like overtly long series of science article then a realised RPG setting. That's just me but

What's wrong with the EP's depiction of religioun by the way? I don't remember anything Culthultech levels retarded like people just stop believing coz reasons.

>44864573
>>44864844
It's better then most writers. They do break away from reality more then a few times but I get the impression they at read a Wikipedia entry.

>>44858644

Most people have a hard time separating system from creator sometimes, and the setting's left-leaning perspective in the writing (that is, the in-universe information takes the form of writing done by left-leaning characters primarily) is a point a lot of people get upset over.

I can see there being an argument for setting information needing to be totally objective, but I personally feel the setting is made more alive by someone giving you an opinion on what goes on in an area because it helps convey that the setting is a place that people live in etc.

From a mechanical perspective, I would say the primary weakness is the character creation process being pretty slow pointbuy and there being some pretty abusable builds to make combat monsters - but this is a game where social characters can fuck shit up a lot harder than a guy who's real good at guns, so it's not a huge problem if you know what you're doing.

>>44865310
>>44866145

Bear in mind EP takes place in the immediate aftermath of a huge social uplift and massive traumatic loss of life - which historically have always mapped to people losing faith and the ones that did keep their faith getting super into it. Look at how church attendance fucking plummeted after WW1 and WW2.

I agree that religion should stay around in different forms, but more in the form of what you might call "spirituality" rather than "organised religion" - if nothing else because the population is far smaller and more scattered. You're either going to get some message boards given over to religion or a few habs which are basically religious communes, I guess.

>>44866974
Yeah, I actually like the mechanics a lot adside from chracters creation. It's Logical and straightforwards.

>>44867080

Oh sure, I found the book a little intimidating but for the most part once I internalized the rules by listening to a few AP's, it was really easy to get going. The full-blown hacking rules I think can bog down play a little - but then, when DONT hacking rules bog down play - so I usually streamline them a little.

>>44866974
>>44867080

Character creation is by far the worst. As stated its slow. I once had a party that were monsters.

AI that has the hacking potential of 90 on security systems
2 combat junkies one Melee and ranged
Two supports.

The part was able to take on almost anything. Whilst they liked the plot they had criticism with one area. That the progression felt kinda useless, since you can make characters at their pique.

I recommend anyone who want to run a session start the CP level at either 700 or 800.

>>44867319
What about Lifepath or package creation?

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>>44866938
>I like GURPS but Transhuman Space always came off a little dry to me. It comes adcross more like overtly long series of science article then a realised RPG setting. That's just me but

That's fair enough - personally I enjoyed the style, and found it really sold the setting as something solid and alive.

>>44867737
>That's fair enough - personally I enjoyed the style, and found it really sold the setting as something solid and alive.

I agree.

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>>44867737
>you will never have an oversized teddy bear to protect you from the bad men

Future plz come faster

>>44858644
The Transhuman book goes light years into making it easier and quicker to make a character.
Also goes further into giving a more balanced look at the various factions.

Most of the beef comes from people feeling political about it, one way or another, and people reacting to those people.

That and the usual kneejerk against singularity stuff, except for the most part it takes a dump on the whole idea of that sort of thing making life better with it turning out to be largely terrifying and more complicated.

But the short advice is this: Grab the Transhuman book and that smooths a lot of things out in the mechanics, character creation, and in the in-game politics.

>>44858844
>D&D is a fun setting plagued by the Tolkien wank of the authors.
>Shadowrun is a fun setting plagued by the punk wank of the authors.
>Apocalypse World is a fun setting plagued by the apocalypse wank of the authors.

>>44858644
>shit phase
well it's right in the name, OP

>>44868348
Pretty much.

>>44868348
None of those are political though you nonce

>>44868348
gary gygax hated tolkien.

>>44868348
A theme differs from a political standing, anon.

>>44869351
>Shadowrun
>cyberpunk
>not political
hooboy

>>44860218
I saw the Jovians as basically them getting all the super conservatives together that even most republicans would balk at and then making a nation out of them. I don't think the Jovians are a rib on republicans when they do things republicans would find fucking insane.

>>44862715
Now that you mention it, I did notice that and raged for about a minute...

>>44858644
i dont know, just got the book and i like it so far. I can homebrew anything i dont like out
>>44858948
where the fuck did you get the notion that /tg/ s conservative? It has everyone from anarchists to /pol/ level facists

>>44870820
Most of the complains seem to be about weird or overly complex mechanics, absolutely impenetrable character creation, and having an obvious political agenda.

Though on the last one I disagree. It seems to give just about everyone a fair shake except the Jovians. The Consortium are jerks but not nearly as bad as megacorps in Shadowrun or something, and are safe and reliable unless you're an indenture. And the Autonomists are free and all that jazz but have the worst neighbors and their societies kinda suck.

Really the problem is that it's a system where you can switch bodies frequently, and you're encouraged to do so, but switching bodies is non-trivial mechanically and requires fiddling.

Also the percent-based rules, skill array, and gear porn lends itself to OPERATORS OPERATING OPERATIONALLY in terms of how they seem to want it to play out.

It's a fun setting but the system is just dull.

The Fate conversion looked promising but last I checked the designers didn't really seem to 'get' Fate.
Like, they went the route of "if you have an octomorph, you have the multi-limbed tag, and the non-human tag, and the biological tag..."
Instead of the fucking obvious, concise option of "if you're an octomorph, then you should note that as your 'Body' Aspect, in some unique way - like 'Old Octomorph', or 'Genemodded Octomorph' or 'Stolen Octomorph'."

>>44870910
here is the problem that i have with /tg/ when complex rules are brought up. Everyone adores DnD and pathfinder which have one of the clunkiest rules ever (graple anyone?) but when a diferent game comes up that is rule heavy its suddenly a problem. I havent played it yet, but i have a felling that the rules are not very clunky, it's just not a game that get's a pass on the clunkines

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>>44864844
REMOVE SURYA

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>>44870972
>Everyone adores DnD
>On /tg/

>>44871018
och ya, we all pretend to hate it, but at the end of the day you know the rules by heart, all your best chars were in it and best storys too

>>44858644
Terrible system, cringe-worthy setting, and creepy fan base. Good book art though.

>>44870972
Nobody adores Pathfinder, it's just that people's friends are broken by 3.5 into it being the only game those friends will fucking play, and so they gotta play along.

DnD5e is simpler than 4e and 3e and is even clunkier despite that, especially because two design ideas seem to be "natural language" and "ask your DM".

There's good rules-heavy games - DnD4e (with improved monster math and inherent bonuses) is one of them. Exalted 3e also has shitty natural language, but it's alright.

It's just that Eclipse Phase's system is overcomplicated AND bland as fuck.

A system needs to support the subject matter.

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>>44864781
Yep. Pic related.

>>44864484
That questionnaire was made by an anon I like to call That Slav. He invented a morph which he called the "Rape Ape" and once told /swg/ about how he was worried that he wouldn't be able to find a group to have a rape-filled dark side campaign with after he moved from Slavistan to the US.

>>44871018
Well, if anything, the anti dnd fags have brought more people screaming to dnd/pf that any other reason.

Fuckers do not know how to quit. They were on /gif/ the other night, screaming that nothing cool could happen in dnd and you needed to try any other system.

>>44864484
This. I'm sympathetic to transhuman politics like the duncanites or nanosocialist as depicted by THS but EP just goes full retard.

>>44858644
From the little bit that I ever got to play, it was fun but really difficult to learn. There is a ton of stuff you had to do to make a character, and gear out the ass. Add to that the trippy setting, and it has a pretty high entry barrier.

I enjoyed playing it while I could. I was an uplifted octopus firewall agent. The GM got burned running it because I was the only member of the party interested in trying to finish missions. The others played paranoid or self-centered characters.

Poker dice a shit

>>44871089
>nothing cool could happen in dnd
It's more than anything cool happening in D&D is caused by players and the GM ignoring the rules.

>>44871238
Oh fuck off already. No one cares, you have been beating your chest for months and life has gone on.

>>44858948
>lots of /tg/ is pretty conservative

Maybe for someone from the Netherlands...

>>44858644
Reposting from prior thread

Not sure where to start, there's a LOT wrong with the system. I'll try to break things down off the top of my head categorically, but mind you I could write a pretty lengthy essay on everything wrong with EP's system.

>Combat
Probably the worst offender.
1)Weapon/options balance is broken outright, and if you mention this fanboys will say "it's intentional". There's no reason to use anything but kinetic, energy has no purpose except plasma so you just end up dumping everything into kinetic then when you've got the dosh you need to dump into energy but wait character growth is shit. Throwing weapons are only useful since smuggling one is a bit easier than smuggling seekers that makes throwing obsolete, but you only get a few in and it's a rare occasion. Spray can be useful sometimes but I don't see why it's even a separate skill. WHY THE FUCK ARE BLADES AND CLUBS SEPARATE SKILLS WHEN THEY'RE THE ONLY TWO MELEE OPTIONS IN A WORLD OF GUNS.
2)Playing a Jammer breaks the game outright harder than it does Shadowrun. You can dump everything into pilot then remote but to discourage this they impose a mere -10 penalty on other actions which is stupid easy to negate or just ignore by using other actions outside of remote. They know this is an issue but don't care. What's even funnier is nesting Tachikoma style if a single morph isn't durable enough.
3)YOU ROLL TO FUCKING DODGE LASERS
I'm not even joking, most other systems might have you roll vs his cover or something instead. Sure you only take half the Fray skill against ranged weapons but what the fuck it should be melee only. It's really not hard to min-max fray and stack bonuses. WHY THE FUCK when there were so many other options for defense-roll mechanics.
4)Initiative is ungraceful as any 90's RPG, and extra passes are so stupid overpowered and easy to get it feeds into the character generation/development problem.

Whole thing breaks harder than cheesing shadowrun does

>>44872218
>>44858644
>Character Growth
The WORST OF ANY SYSTEM I'VE EVER PLAYED. You could play this for a year and your character would not be markedly different from making a new one fresh out of character generation. It's 40% equipment, 60% networking, and 0.01% actual character growth. The char gen extra cost of skills over 60, and the skill cap at 80 are completely ineffective especially with the bonus stacking.
Only benefit is that this is good for one-shot games.
Hidden downside is this wastes the settings potential as half the fucking theme is a world with immortality.
Worst is that there are a lot of useless skills so you start to see people's chargen's converge into the same fucking characters.

>Skill/stat mech
1) Distribution of governing stats is wonky at best but worse is that they're singular per skill on top of many useless skills creating a few mostly useless stats.
2) Min-max governing skill bonus is insane, and COG in particular is ridiculous.
3) Values over 100 are not hard to get, and this is a d% system so there's effectively a fixed DC you can far exceed aside from DM imposed penalties.

>Setting specific
The psionics stuff is neat but unfortunately the mechanics for psychology are... lacking. It's archaic as hell.
Hacking and all the tech stuff is boring as it is in real life unfortunately, but can be hollywood levels of overpowered even moreso than the async stuff which renders all the special psionic stuff kind of lame.

tl;dr
>combat is broke as shit and devs don't care
>your character is a walking phonebook of contacts and that's all that matters about them
>it handles like someone in the late 80's / early 90's decided to use d%, fucking Twilight 2000 box set was a more graceful system

What I find really fucking funny is Eclipse Phase's system is so bad it made me less critical of Hvt Dracones or whatever that lolcow system was when I went to skim that. It was both novel and had some really good ideas. Eclipse phase is/has neither

>>44872225
>>44872218
>>44858644
Mind you this wasn't from one game.
My opinion formed after like three campaigns.
I fucking hate Eclipse Phase.

>>44869550
He also considered killing the children of your enemies a LG act.

>>44872250
well looks like im going to have to homebrew the shit out of EP, still happy about buying it

>>44872225
>The WORST OF ANY SYSTEM I'VE EVER PLAYED. You could play this for a year and your character would not be markedly different from making a new one fresh out of character generation. It's 40% equipment, 60% networking, and 0.01% actual character growth. The char gen extra cost of skills over 60, and the skill cap at 80 are completely ineffective especially with the bonus stacking.

Is it really bad?

I mean, aren't rpgs supposed to emulate a story, like ones in works of fiction?

And in how much works of fiction characters advande drastically during the course of story ? That is, unless they didn't start as nearly useless underdogs in the first place.

I think in not too fucking many.

"Character growth" is overplayed as fuck in RPGs.

I don't say it is inherently bad, but it depends on the setting theme and feel, in some settings there is need of some growth (but not d&d like exponental power rise, ffs) in others not so much.

>>44872599
Only if they were CE.

>>44872629
Dude you replied to here:

I would add:
The setting and content and such are just fine. It fills a niche that was almost unfilled for RPGs. All my issues stem from the system itself. The books have a lot of decent fluff and ideas though, worth buying. They're all interesting to read, which is what got me into it in the first place.
Bizarrely I want to mash up some mechanics from the aforementioned Dracones, which is a wanna-be transhuman horror off kickstarter, complete crap for setting or fluff but had a handful of good homebrew mechanics ideas among crappy ones alike EP needed.

Otherwise homebrew it's missing you will find is largely crafting, which is a shame because there are a ton of skills for it. Most of the skills in the game are related, but if you want to pimp your gun then even shadowrun is a better system. Lots of core skills need to be rethought, merged, split, etc. Plenty of stuff to tweak, but ultimately you'll find the system extremely hollow.

>>44872657
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that you are immortal in the transhuman future of advanced crazy technology and there's nothing stopping your from entering a virtual world at 100x speed to go Pun-Pun in a week, aside from the DM telling you "well you don't have the XP to spend, so... not yet".
Yet there's no point to leveling stuff up anyway.
No point to earning money once you've got plasma and one tier better morph.
You call in favors. That's the most powerful thing. Yes it does work for story. What happens pretty quick though is all characters get built around building their phonebook of asspull favors. Everything else is hollow, pointless, and fruitful for a very short track.
Basically the one aspect wastes the rest of your options in what should be a rainbow because it's an RPG.
It's just poorly designed and balanced all around.

>>44872755
well systems are easy to chang, and re-work. I very like CoC but i had to homebrew a bunch of stuff out and insert a ton of things for it to even be playeble from my perspective

It's starting to look a lot like the Infinity RPG will do a better job than EP at being eclipse phase. It's even got the same 'You can get a new body' feature.

>>44872902
Is it horror based? That's EP's whole shtick.

>>44872922

I dunno? Do you concider loss of identity when an alien device starts to reprogram your mind horror?

It's leaning more 'Spy Thriller' than straight horror but EP was never good at horror in the first place.

>>44872929
>EP was never good at horror in the first place
same general problem as CoC and other horror based settings
"You see some crazy shit"
"Take san loss, apply penalty to actions"
"oh noes"

>>44872950
because people are handling san loss in CoC wrong. It should be:
1. describe what player sees
2. describe the felling of dread coming over players
3. DM rolls san loss for players
4. Tell players what effect they get
5. Players describe what is happening to them/dm takes control of player character is rules say so

Not:
"you see monster, roll san loss and check table"

>>44872755
Except that you should consider that using Networking is spamming the Mesh to get something. Without imposing yourself a negative modifier, you end up with being quite public with your actions.

>>44867319
What about starting at 0?

>>44867319
Character creation with 700 CP feels nice. This would mean 7 PP, if I remember correctly.
The combinations would be quite easily limited.
>5PP + 1PP + 1PP
>3PP + 3PP + 1PP
>3PP + 1PP + 1PP + 1PP + 1PP

Very nice idea. I'm going to use that for the next time, I think. (Together with another anons idea to double Rez output).