/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

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How to make neotenic fun

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>x risks confirms that the exsurgent virus can be removed via psychosurgery

PSYCHOSURGERY
FIXES
EVERYTHING

>>48169660
...you mean it isn't fun with ANYTHING you do?

So, I want to make a character that for one reason or another really believes that they're in a virtual reality MMO even when walking around with the party. They'll make remarks about how rolling to attack, asking people what level they are, ect.

But I don't want to go overboard on this kind of stuff and annoy people, my group is fairly relaxed with weird character ideas. Any suggestions on things I can do to keep things fresh and not feel like a one-off gimmick character?

>>48169681

It only fixes recent infectees who aren't full blown exsurgents (I/E final stage horrible mutants).

But if you have a Psychosurgery wizard on the team it's a decent way to to try and recover a buddy who has gone off the reservation without having to resort to a backup, he'll just need a shitload of therapy after.

>>48169881
Clearly they think they're in a roleplay server.

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>>48169881

Well, give them a good reason for this. Obviously they have a delusion (which could be modeled with a mental disorder like Schizophrenia if you're not afraid of your GM feeding into your delusional periods). Probably take some positive traits like a hardening or murder simulator addict.

But yeah, you probably need to come up with some reason for them to be weird like this. Have they just spent too much time deep-diving VRMMOs that they've got like a permanent "tetris effect"? Are they an AGI designed to play games or solve problems which wasn't properly conditioned to handle the "real world"? Chronic petal abuser? Are they an Async with some interesting sleights and disorders or a Firewall operative who spent too much time researching the possibility that reality is a simulation?

Best way to handle it is to make it as "real" as possible. "Gimmick" characters are basically supported by the system, but it works if you actually like, really work at why a character is that way and give it credence with traits and skills.

Also reminds me of this local homebrew, kinda

>>48169891
It also causes a shitload of stress (muh psychosurgery tho), and can infect the psychosurgeon through unspecified means. Still really helpful, but definitely not a panacea.

>>48170233

You also have to roll versus the Virus, so like, if you run into something new and fresh and you're the guy cutting your teeth on it you're gonna have a bad time, but if you're accidentally knocking over TITAN WMDs from The Fall which are well documented you might stand a better chance.

>>48169881
Two words... Lost Generation.

Anyone have that PDF of everyone's favorite Jovian waifu almost getting caught fapping to homosex porn that starred her very own crew members? It was set after the writefaggotry where she escaped from Jovian prison, I think.

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>>48171006
I didn't think anyone read that

Anyone else feel suicidal when they realize they won't live to see EP tech?

>you will never experience morphological freedom
>you will never watch a dusty Martian sunrise

>>48171150

Some of us might end up with our minds uploaded. Who knows.

A lot can happen in 60-70 years.

>>48171176

Brain uploading will be there for the ultra rich and nobody else. The Koch brothers and Saudis will live to see the Sun die with their legion of robot slaves, while we all rot.

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>>48169891
I'm two egos that work share a body, with extensive XP access to each other and protocols to ensure both distinction between us and a unified will and interlocking persona. I'm an async and simulspace designer, and he's a psychosurgeon, and this has worked out very well for the double me.

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>Morphological """Freedom"""

You all realize that's a sham, right? Once everyone can work 24 hour days without needing to sleep, you think there are going to be jobs left for baselines? 'Optional' augmentations will very quickly become obligatory for anyone who wants to survive. What people imagine as a matter of personal choice will actually be yet another Darwinian competition where everyone is obligated to make the 'optimal' choice if they want to continue existing, leading to a worse outcome for everyone.

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>>48171135
we always will. Someone should write something from the smut list that people came up with awhile back, those were all pretty good.

>tfw you once had an Eclipse Phase sex dream

>>48171275
>once

>>48171217
For a while.

So long as we don't kill ourselves somehow we'll eventually just reach utopia. Given forever, anything is possible. Even perfection.

>>48171533
When literally anyone can make x-threat weapons, there's not much of a chance for that.

>>48171135

More than you think, I'd imagine. Anything written by or for one of my favorite /tg/-derived characters is welcome. I definitely plan on using her as an NPC.

>>48171217
This is what eugenics means in Eclipse Phase. It is consumer bodies rather than sterilization. Also a reason why GSPs are so common in Consortium Space.

>>48171135
So that's (one of the) EP versions of hentai anatomy.

>>48171631
The only thing within transhuman production abilities that counts as an X threat weapon on its own is a TITAN or other seed AI, if you squint real fucking hard at the definitions you use. I doubt that creating an ascendant seed AI is within the power any single individual, and by the time it is, if ever, it probably isn't the biggest deal anymore. This is to say that what you assert in your post is wrong, and makes you look like a fool that hasn't read the books and just spouts memes.

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>>48171979
>he doesn't blow his load when a handsome man sticks his greasy unwashed finger into his access jacks

>>48171979

Really? I thought the Consortium used GSPs because they're evil.

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here's some copypasta from past threads
>Everyone on a hab probably knows each other well so they won't take kindly to you spacing Rick, even if Rick might have been secretly an exhuman
reply
>M-morty, I'm not an exhuman, okay? You got that? Exhuman is, is, it's a fi*URRP* filthy slur, used by small, petty minded, um, rigid little tyrants. Tyrants who think everyone should *URP* think like they do, Morty. It's a filthy slur and I don't, I don't wanna hear it. Anyway, it's not true in the first place. I'm a singularity seeker, Morty. I do science. I don't turn myself into a xenomorph for fun and games. I tried it once, no fun. No idea what people see in that life, Morty.

>>48171150
>killing yourself rather than have a chance at the singularity sometime in your life

Hold on anon we'll make it. And there will be AI waifus and XP porn as far as the eye can see

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>Rumor spreads of X hab being the base of Y conspiracy to produce Z WMD
>Firewall infiltrators show up and soops
>OZMA infiltrators show up because firewall is there, and they can't let the annarkiddos get Z.
>TAHI infiltrators show up because firewall and OZMA are there, and they want to be relevant too
>singularity seekers and lost and assorted independant mercs and freaks show up because the place is rumored to be the a key battlefield of the covert war
>there was nothing there originally, but now nobody can pull out for fear of breaking the deadlock that developed on the hab
>if anyone tries anything the station will degenerate into a black ops shitshow extravaganza
>any faction pulling out will be assumed to have found the item everyone is looking for and be chased across the system for it
>clarifying the problem is impossible because nobody trusts anybody and all refuse to believe that all these resources are being used for a wild goose chase
>everyone just maintains cover and continues operations
>At the climax of the campaign, as the players are surprised to finally lay hands on the Macguffin and stand triumphant over everyone else, the entire hab is instantly vaporized by RKV impacts, everyone dies, no one remembers or learns anything, the entire incident is purged from records.

>a bunch of old fucks from Bletchley Park, Jormungandr, MIND, JASON, the original Ultimates, and the like all maneuver themselves into one Structuralist server
>they reminisce about the old days, do horrifically dangerous ops, and contemplate finally dying

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>>48173131
I'll be honest the thought of immortality is actually horrifying to me. Death is a natural part of life. Without death, nothing you do matters. You have infinite time to do whatever you want. Your successes don't matter because your failures don't matter. You have infinite time to change anything to the result you want. Everyone else has infinite time to change what you have changed back. Nothing you do will be relevant in any meaningful way. What is the point of doing anything if the result will always be the same?

I'm not sure how long I could live in the singularity without actually going insane.

>>48173231
By being a prostitute and only thinking of dicks.

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and for you, kinks for androids
>remotely increase his arousal levels in inappropriate situations
>overclock her arousal sub-processor then disable input from her erogenous zones so she's unable to orgasm
>program him with an uncommon word that makes him orgasm on the spot when he hears it
>program her with a common word that stimulates her when she hears it but is unable to make her orgasm so she's constantly on edge all day
>upload a bodyjacking virus that forces his body to act like a total slut while he's conscious but helpless
>plug her exhaust valve/smother her heatsinks and make her try to orgasm before she suffers critical system failures
>invert his pleasure/pain receptors so all sex is torture and all torture is pleasure
>same as above but do it to a sexbot and remove her ability to tell people they're hurting her
>force him to wireup with other, virus laded bots until he's so infected he needs reformatting
>master/slave play, only when she's bad you remove a limb/disable the code allowing her to do something
>turn off his safety refractory period and force him to orgasm until his parts burn out and voids the warranty
>give her a hug module and then hug her

>>48173231
I feel the same way, but about death.

>>48173248
Why does she have spiders instead of hands? I never asked for this.

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>>48173231
why does having death hanging over your head make your petty, insignificant decisions meaningful? Relevant to what? You're repeating platitudes that allude to meaning and importance, but to whom? You seem to be think the assumption of a continued existence means you'll like all conditions equally, be ambivalent to pain because its not going to be lethal, and give up on all endeavors because of the prospect that you will live to see them undone if you're unwatchful.

I guess you're relying on the comfort of dying before your creations, and thinking that somehow made them meaningful, permanent, as if that change, since it outlived you, will be immortalized. Its a romantic prospect, but its shit next to actually living forever, especially with a whole universe to explore and the ability to fundamentally alter oneself. Hell, if you want a work that will last forever in glory in that situation, make it you.

Does the 30 Aptitude limit apply before or after the morph bonus?

>>48173740
After, if you have, say, COG 30 and sleeve a mentat, you're stuck at 30 unless you took Enhanced Aptitude. Equipment/mod bonuses apply after morph limit, though, so SOM 40 is incredibly easy to get, and REF 40 isn't far behind.

>>48174096
Thank you.

>>48171217
Real life isn't Pathfinder charop threads, bucko.

>>48172907
No one is evil in EP, even Jovian Junta.

>>48174533
Wrong. Everyone is evil. Only God was good, and He is dead.

>>48171217
It's states in the books somewhere that most of the capitalist economies in eclipse phase don't actually have a need for workers anymore due to AI automation. The only reason for people to work is as a distribution method for the actual scarce resource, bodies. Most of them are keeping capitalism around because of vested interest and not knowing a better system to transition to.

>>48171176
Nope.

Brain uploading techs way out, we'd have to understand not only the brain way better than we do but also understand how the rest of the body acts on the brain. Not to mention the slowdown in Moores Law we're seeing would have to be overcome before then. We'd also have to solve so many legal problems to do with identity, ownership and inheritance it would be banned for another 20-30 years just like cloning was.

And it would also almost certainly be a copy. To even do experiments on retaining the same conciousness between bodies we'd have to solve a bunch of problems we can't even touch on right now.(Like the problem of what it actually fucking is)

>>48173231
>Death is a natural part of life.
People say that but has anyone actually tried immortality?
Most of the stuff that sucks about living a long time, getting old and sick, loosing those close to you, doesn't apply in this setting. Thinking that the ability to see through long term projects and being spared the pain of lose would be as bad things seems like a failure of imagination to me

>>48174675
Except you'd still lose people, just in different ways. Partners would fall out of love with you, children would fly the coup, friends would block you over a falling out.

And people still die, getting restored from an old backup is essentially death in a lot of ways, then there's immortality blues and the inevitable possibility of suicide. Psycho surgery could go wrong and the person may fall apart in 3 years time or they may get addicted and burn out , both of these options could essentially be a living death.

Even worse, Eclipse Phase offers a lot of the classic "lonely wizard" solutions to these problems. Family member leaves, robot child. Wife leaves you, splice her beta fork with an AI. Friend is ego hunted, make your muse look and speak like him. Eventually people will just stagnate in their imperfect little worlds

>>48174761
Sure fucking up is still a risk, I'm certainly not suggesting life extension will fix the world. But the kind of stuff you're talking about still happens in the 70ish years we get currently. All living longer would do is give us more opportunities to fix things after we fuck up

>>48174806
Ecept as I said, EP encourages that lonely wizard scenario where a person just surrounds themselves with illusions of their lost past and never have reason to fix their problems.

Not to mention if we had tons if immortal people there would be very few worthwhile jobs for people which would cause a lot more existential crises and suicide among the population. We're already seeing this IRL in countries like Japan where old people are taking up all the noteworthy jobs and causing tons of social problems as a result. People like to pretend we'd be able to find jobs in creative sectors to make up but no one wants to admit if that were the case we wouldn't have all the bullshit beauracratic non jobs we have graduates working now. .

>>48174945
>Japan
Is fucked by an aging population that has to retire and spend money on expensive medical care. Guess what isn't a problem when you have functional immortality and nanotech medicine?

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>>48174571

>implying YHWH
>implying YHWH was good according to any system of morality not its own

>>48172907
That's what a lot of people think, and there's a grain of truth there, but most of it is basically like day 1 patches for a body. Everyone's trying to keep upgrading things, fixing old problems and so on. The development timetables and resources are crazy though, so a lot of glitches get through.

>>48173272
Fractal digits for super-handjobs

>>48175623
To get rid of GSP all you need is a low-level gene therapy. Actually GSP is just another tool to keep the population reliant on hypercorps services and discourage any actions that could stop getting them.

>>48175436
I feel you've missed the point, immortality would only make that worse because the top jobs would never ever become available unless you were first or second generation immortals. The Japanese don't leave those positions in real life because status is more important to their culture than in many other countries. Everyone beyond that would be stuck with the equivalent of 1000 years of a fast food job and how many people will want to live forever with no chance of ever contributing to society or improving their QoL

>>48169660
All-neotenic hab, Wizard of Oz references

>>48171185
I'll be surprised if the Saudis are still ultra rich by then.

>>48175723
We represent the loli pope guild, the loli pope guild, the loli pope guild, and in the name of the loli pope guild, get busy ye faithful!

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Brainlink with me /epg/, I need some help.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly it means to be an "employee" of a hypercorp. And no I'm not talking about being an indenture, since the books love talking about how hypercorp=evil slavers. When they're not doing that, they say that a lot of hypercorp work is independent contractors. What does that mean, vs. being a "company man"?

I ask because I'm going to run a game that begins in the Main Belt, and the players are going to be the closest thing the setting has to "shadowrunners", except they're under the umbrella of a hypercorp that's secretly working for Firewall, but the players don't know this yet. I want a simple premise with goals that they can recognize in a setting that does its best to alienate potential new players.

>>48176303
>What does that mean, vs. being a "company man"?

On the positive side, it means independence, freedom to choose your own hours, managing your own business as an independent contractor giving you the ability to do work that are in line with your own ethics and moral values. With the skills at your disposal, you're welcome basically anywhere, and are beholden to nobody. The life of an independent contractor is as close to freedom as you're going to get.

On the negative side, you have little to no security. There's no guarantee of work tomorrow, and you're competing in a marketplace where it's very easy to be undercut. You will have to fund your own training, and make time for it, (when normally you'd be spending time making money) while your company salaryman is being sent on training exercises, paid for by the company, and being paid while they do it. Downward spirals are hard to pick yourself up from, and sometimes the only way out of a dry period is to take the sort of jobs that you thought you wouldn't have to do as an independent contractor.

>>48175686
No, I'm identifying Japan's problems differently. There isn't a fixed number of jobs, so blaming old people for taking all of the (implicitly limited) jobs is missing the point. That you have old people that *retire and stop contributing to the economy* (and don't have enough young people to replace them) is the problem, because it contracts the economy. They also start sucking resources into expensive, mostly useless medical care. Immortality and medical nanotech avoids most of these problems.

>>48176455
>>48176303
I get the sense that hypercorps are a lot like a startup, where they're really quite small and outsource/independently contract a ton of stuff.

So if you work for a hypercorp directly you're probably placed reasonably high up in the corporate chain (which is pretty short typically), or have skills/information valuable enough that the company wants to get you off the market.

Basically, it's probably breddy gud

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>>48173453
>give up on all endeavors because of the prospect that you will live to see them undone if you're unwatchful.

It doesn't matter if your achievements are undone, you can always redo them. That's my point. The result will always be the same. There is no objective meaning to life regardless of if you die or live forever, there is only the meaning you can create with your time here in the universe. You are an insignificant dust on a floating rock in the infinite black vacuum of space. Your life isn't going to gain an objective meaning just because it continues forever. The only way life has any meaning at all is the meaning it has to you, and it only has meaning to you because you have a finite amount of time with which to do anything.

Every moment in your life is important and significant, to you, because you could have done something else with your limited time but your chose to do what you're doing. If you don't die, the choice itself is meaningless. Why improve yourself if there is no finite time in order to complete it? Who cares if you work to achieve and become the pinnacle of all humanity? Who cares if you are conquered and all your works destroyed? Freedom and slavery are meaningless concepts. Time is infinite. What motivation do you have to improve?

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>>48174652

Again, a lot can happen in 60-70 years, and you can't accurately predict it simply looking at the past and making some assumptions about the present. I'm not saying it will happen, but rather that nobody can say for sure it won't either. As the pic illustrates, any time prediction made in sufficient advance will turn out largely ridiculous.

And yeah, it will be a copy. It's always a copy and all theoretical forms of mind uploads only try to obfuscate that. If it's software, moving a file implies making a copy and destroying the original. There's no way around it.

So deep down there's no chance of immortality through uploading, only that a chain of copies of yourself will live on in your name.

>>48176921
There's always the potentially inevitable heat-death of the universe.

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>>48176966
>And yeah, it will be a copy. It's always a copy and all theoretical forms of mind uploads only try to obfuscate that. If it's software, moving a file implies making a copy and destroying the original. There's no way around it.


I have the same questions about teleportation.

>>48177049

Yep, same deal.

There's no travel from A to B. You're destroyed at A and someone for all intents and purpose you (but not you) is constructed at B.

>>48176921
In which anon attempts to derive an *ought* from an *is*, and unsurprisingly fails at it.

>>48176921

You talk about objective meaning when it only seems like arbitrary meaning.

A person does stuff, and improves himself/herself, their lives or the world in any way, achievements which may improve their or anyone's quality of life for any amount of time. Whether they're mortal or immortal is irrelevant, and it's arbitrary to define life as a race to achieve the most before you die.

You can be miserable for all eternity if you do nothing with your immortal life, or choose to do something and live better or improve other people's lives. Whatever you do might be undone at any point in the future, but you'll always have time to redo it. At least until you get bored and punch out.

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>>48176921
You can die at any time if you really want to.

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>>48177446
It's not a race. There is no one who achieves "the most" there is only what you achieve. You have a finite amount of time, and that makes the decision important, not the quantity of the decisions you made.

>>48177766

Still can't see how time and importance are related. If your achievements improve immortal lives, they're important.

>>48177766

Also, I thought it was evident that my use of "the most" referred mainly to quality, not quantity. Achieve the greatest things in your time, if you want a rephrase..

>>48171176
Genome editing and organ printing are the technologies to watch. Fixing the body will likely come before replacing it.

>>48178279

That may be the path to true immortality. Regeneration instead of replacement, because you may print all the organs you want, but unless you can rejuvenate the same brain, age will get to it even if the rest of your body's "fresh". I mean, a brain transplant is not an option as we'd return to the same issue.

>>48177001
Am I the only one who gets really anxious about this?
I can accept that my own mayfly existence will come to an end, that's only natural. But the thought that in a large but measurable number of years there will be no more stars is hard to wrap my head around

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>>48178926
Maybe the universe is a giant combustion engine and the origin of the big bang is a result of a contraction of a previous universe. Who the hell knows what is really happening? Some things are beyond the limits of human ability to understand.

Just look at this Hubble photo of +10,000 galaxies. There is more in the universe to experience than anyone possibly could even read about in a lifetime.

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>>48171150
Someone has to be test it all.
Are you a bad enough dude to install first-generation cybernetics?

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>>48174533
>Junta

>>48171150
Not me. One, I'm opposed to suicide on principle. Two, I've already lived to see what I dreamed of (domestic pet robots) become real.

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>>48171150
>>48179320
Yeah, maybe you will be the giant upon whose shoulders humanity transcends itself. Or if not them, a person who helps advance that ideal.

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>>48171259
>Someone should write something from the smut list that people came up with awhile back, those were all pretty good.

'Welcome to the Future' was actually based on one I wrote earlier

How many skills do you usually have at chargen? I find that most sheets give you room for 8, but that seems like a low amount, even just out the gate.

>>48179714
Er, traits, not skills.

>>48178926

That's so far off in time there's no point in worrying about it.

There's also a million ways humanity could be wiped out long before that, many of which we are so terribly powerless to stop there's no point in worrying about either.

What part of this setting isn't an X-Threat?

Is this game itself an X-Threat, in the vein of Rocco's Basilisk?

>>48178926

Nope.

At any rate, it's not going to happen in any of the lifetimes in Eclipse Phase. You're fucking delusional if you think you're going to be alive in any coherent form trillions of years, even with EP's technology.

And no, I don't consider being part of a gestalt neural network housed inside a computronium superstructure as being "alive".

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>>48180542
>Rocco's Basilisk

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>>48178926
If you're anxious about cosmic events like heat death, remember that the universe exists in the first place. There may not be a rhyme or reason behind human lives, but in the grandest scale imaginable, order prevails, and every single person alive is a part of that order, whether they recognize it or not.

>>48180564
I mean, at that point the post-post-human neural network might just solve entropy. At least in the Eclipse Phase universe.

>>48180893
>in the grandest scale imaginable, order prevails
>implying entropy doesn't increase over time

How does it feel to be one hundred percent objectively wrong?

>>48180911
And yet here we are, proving that the forces which created the universe are stronger than entropy.

>>48180935
For now, which was exactly his point.

>>48180935
>the forces which created the universe

*tips Hiranyagarbha*

>>48180960
It's also my point. I'm not saying heat death can't happen or anything like that, merely that worrying about the ultimate fate of the universe when nobody knows what came before the Big Bang might be a little silly, and that I'm erring on the side of existence, that there is a reason behind the universe existing.

>>48180911
>implying high entropy systems are disorderly

This is some meme physics

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>>48181222

This is /epg/. Everything is memes.

So what are the waifu tiers for this game?

ADRASTEIA is probably elder goddess tier, but what else is there?

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>>48182863
LUNA TIER
Himiko Hanamura

CONSORTIUM TIER
Mei Len Phan-Piper
Esme Fichte Parkreiner

JOVIAN TIER
Maritza Maria Ortega

AUTONOMIST TIER
Myra LeJean
Angela Moira Delaware

>>48182863

Theia is "LOADS E MONE" tier.

>>48180800
The only problem here is that it is not implied that /k have gathered in a horrific tent city in the Nevada Desert from whence they raid the Californias, where gun ownership is illegal and cops were all killed for being rascist

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>>48183578
>implying California won't be a billion warring city states, ruled by dictators and their armies of soldiers with cryptographically locked weapons

It's like you don't even know anything about Rationalism

>>48183154

who

>>48183659
Oh god anything but philosopher kings. Seriously though, 10,000 lunatics armed with Mosin Nagants and a pidgin understanding of Russian are a force to be feared. AVE NEX ALEA! THE KEK-KINGS SHALL BURN FOR THE CUBE!!!

>>48183906

>philosopher kings
>pidgin understanding of Russian

Y'know, one of the primary language groups on Aspis, which is basically long string of tests to become an Ultimate is actually Russian. It's the only Ultimate held hab with that language.

>>48184134
So /tg What would /K hab look like?

>>48184175
No internal empty space, everyone is sleeved into infomorphs.The entire hab is just an enormous killsat covered in weapons.

Also has an armory of weapons and synthmorphs for ground operations.

Everything is shitty and barely modified to be serviceable. Most of the informorphs don't have the necessary knowledge to actually use 90% of the weapon systems installed in the hab.

>>48184205
This does not prevent the infomorphs from firing said systems enthusiastically at anything within range, including asteroids, belters, small pets and Jovian dreadnoughts. This gusto is a major contributor to the state of the hab.

>>48184205
>>48184262

Brilliant.

>>48184205
This hab is a regular hexahedron known only as "The MurderK/ube"

Speaking of /k/ stuff, I just started working on a basic weapon overhaul for EP guns.

It's basically a stripped down set of gun creation rules based on cartridge size and barrel/weapon size. The rules aren't intended to be much more granular than the normal EP guns, which aren't really. Anyone want to see?

Is there space combat in this game? Like ship to ship battles?

>>48183791
https://docs.google.com/document/d/111__SfZWbp9RBEz2h0RYAR0Nwo84L4p-mTr4nhgNTpM/edit

>>48184926
In setting? There's some, but it's pretty rare to see real warships fighting, they're expensive and deadly enough that their use is more like DEFCON 1 stuff than conventional warfare.

In rules, not really. EP is semi-hard sci-fi and that means space combat is fairly hard to make interesting to play out.

>>48184926

Yes, it happens, maybe, but no, the game rules don't really lend to it well.

But, take heart, a Space Combat book is on the schedule for development, and not as a full hardcover sourcebook to it might get done sooner than some other projects.

>>48184825
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1icVZ0H4r-5i8SjZZR8Js-gC21YHEsGHdnLstKjjp5eY/edit?usp=sharing

This is annoying, there's not much rhyme or reason to the range tables. I guess I'll just make stuff up

>>48184825
Have you taken a look at An Ultimate's Guide to Combat?

>>48185303
>This is annoying, there's not much rhyme or reason to the range tables.
You know, half the time, a unified range table simply isn't going to work or be relevant in EP, due to wildly differing gravity and atmospheric conditions. The same gun is not going to have the same range on Venus as it does in a beehive hab or on Luna or whatever. I'm honestly not sure why EP even bothered to give hard range tables at all.

>>48186189

It did, and you divide the range of a weapon by the .x gravity of the body you're fighting on for range modifications.

I learned this because I had to figure out the gange of a sniper rifle railgun on Sedna's surface.

It is effectively LOS.

>>48186232
It's LOS except when you're in an atmosphere, where effective range is still limited to the distance where the bullet goes into transonic flight. Either that or you use a subsonic bullet and settle for much shorter ranges and less energy.

>>48186275
>I learned this because I had to figure out the range(sp) of a sniper rifle railgun on Sedna's surface.
>It is effectively LOS.

>>48186305
I was just clarifying.

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>>48184825
>Gun creation rules
Good god, why? EP already has more weapons and combat rules than it needs. The armory is already full of fat that could be trimmed, like multiple pistol types even though people only ever use the highest damage ones.

The main fix needed is to Beam Weapons, which are useless in-game but hypothetically could have several advantages over Kinetic Weapons, such as virtually zero travel time or bullet drop.

>>48186232

I remember a player was interest in some stuff I was pulling from AUGC, and got like, was speccing the cost on an Anti-Materiel rifle with like an extended barrel and wanted to know like, how that totaled out range wise, and if I remember my math right, I was like "You should take Tacnet sniper, because I think you can shoot over the horizon of Mars with that build".

>>48186361

I think the issue is that EP is not /k/ enough for people who really like their gun porn, but at the same time for people who don't really give a fuck they're just numbers on the sheet there's way too much weapon variety.

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>>48186488
The issue is that for most encounters there are a few 'optimal' choices and there's little incentive to deviate from them except for roleplaying reasons. The only way to make every weapon useful is bolting on special rule after special rule until the combat system grows like a cancer that fills an entire book of its own. Something like An Ultimate's Guide to Combat is fine if you just want one or two things out of it, like the shotgun or the power fist, but people trying to 'overhaul' the combat system usually end up writing an entire new game that needs to be bolted on to the old one.

>>48186909

Well, technically, EP's "Brand Name Weapon" rule means that GM or player with permission can futz with the standard weapons in like, anyway they like if they want. Just it's not a very widely applied rule normally.

I like AUGC for adding certain "classes" of weapons which fill some different niches in combat both for PCs and NPCs and even if they pure numbers wise are more optimal some of them are clearly like, milspec heavy weapons that even in a polite, armed society you're not going to be subtle dragging around - which goes against the name of the game as "conspiracy".

>>48186189
That's actually fairly helpful. I can generally ignore ballistic effects and just look at/make up some circular error probables for the gun itself. Mostly I'm keeping it around because I want this to be very compatible with the base EP rules, but I'm not really married to that. I'm currently using a combined barrel length/general bulk stat, so I'll probably just tie ranges to that directly.

In fact, I think there's only been a couple of times where the range brackets came up, and every single one was with a pistol. Well, except for the crasher truck vs a plasma rifle, but that wasn't a normal fight.

>>48186275
That shouldn't be super important for EP sniper rifles. Either it's a railgun which has a massive muzzle velocity, meaning it'll take a long time to go transonic, or it's not, and it's probably guided ammo, which presumably can handle the transonic barrier pretty well.

>>48186361
My goal is basically to have more variability and meaningful (or at least, meaningful looking) choices for guns. Sort of like a big gun list, but more reflective of how easy it should be to customize an EP weapon.

I have some ideas for beam weapons as well, but that's another project. I'm hoping to actually have something pretty finished.

>>48186488
Yeah this. I'm looking to have some complexity, but also to use this to generate some common weapons so it can just be ignored. Some of my players like making those choices, some don't really care. I don't want super fiddly guns with a ton of rules for shooting them though.

>>48186171
I have. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the (kinetic) gun stuff. Shotguns feel fairly fiddly because Reliable makes you throw tons of dice many of which are just discarded. A lot of the weapon changes (barrels, ammo loads) feel like a lot of math to do for a weapon which barely functions differently.

The other weapon types are cool though, but the conventional guns felt kinda lame.

>>48186909
I agree. I'm trying to limit myself to a fairly simple system to avoid that. What I have now is basically:
>Pick a cartridge (small, medium, big, huge)
>Pick a barrel/gun sized (pistol, PDW, shorter rifle, longer rifle, big ass gun)
>Pick a magazine (tying mag size to gun directly is dumb)

With an attached set of rules to say how heavier weapons are harder to conceal and require more hands to use.

Hopefully this'll make the optimum weapon more of a continuum than a binary choice.

I also want to have a bunch of fun special rules for stuff which can be dissembled really fast, specially concealed, especially good at handling recoil, etc. But I want to do that in such a way that it's totally optional and can be saved for "special" weapons for special purposes rather than being built directly in.

>>48187065
I like the brand name weapon rule, but I don't like making up some random changes for a weapon on the spot, or making a huge list like Shadowrun. It feels wrong to make a list considering how modular and customizable so much other stuff is in EP, and it's a shitload of unavoidable complexity.

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>>48173129
>Gee Rick, maybe... maybe you should go back to the Argonauts, you know? Maybe, maybe you'd be better off with them...

>>48169681
Isn't the exsurgent virus a multi vector unstoppable cthonic horror disease? As in, the ultimate "you are not meant to fix this" disease? How can mere psychosurgery fix it?

We got a release date for x-risks yet?

Also reposting a way to make psi actually a viable option, rather than something you take as an intentional character gimp.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CLp_XSm0AjxHzcKszS3C5xsmHDfieMzBblOY_zOEJeU/edit#

>>48188220

If you just have a mental infection, Psychosurgery can basically be used to try and rollback the alterations to your brain, but over a very limited time scale and only on people who aren't completely taken over (I/E, become fully infected and mutate). It's really just a method to get another go after some save-or-die tests.

>>48188653

>We got a release date for x-risks yet?

Man, where the fuck have you been? Previous thread was literally the X-Risks cover.

Hit ctrl+f, be surprised what you find.

>>48188220
Mentally mutilating someone to cut out their memories of having seen it before it's able to take control of their bodies. It's a sci-fi horror disease with a sci-fi horror solution, and only in the very early stages.

>>48188665
Occasionally checking the main website, mostly and not on /tg/. The EP forums are a fucking horrible place.

>>48188653
>Also reposting a way to make psi actually a viable option, rather than something you take as an intentional character gimp.

But psi is already good. Get level one, take all the completely broken sleights and ignore the terrible level two sleights. Then take emotion control, dominant strain and morph fever resistance.

>>48188965

You can replicate most of it with technology and save the build points. The stuff that you can't tends to be 'active' powers. Hardly broken,

>>48189008
>You can replicate most of it with technology and save the build points

It costs the same and goes away when you resleeve, unlike psi

>>48189021
Later xp, too. If you're playing like most EP players, you own the blue prints to any tech you use on a regular basis, augments included.

>>48176921
What motivation do you have to improve now, when all that awaits you regardless is decrepitude, senility, and death?
The real argument against immortality is that once death is abolished, all the fates left are worse than.

Can my character's first post-Fall memory be waking up as a screaming head? (Not actually screaming. No larynx or lungs, y'know)

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>>48186026

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>>48182863

>>48173129
>tfw you are on of the posters in this pasta

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>>48189772

>>48173183
>Implying Firewall used to be more structuralist

>>48174652
>Implying new legal problems due to a technology have even once been solved prior to the use of that technology

>>48175686
>What's a startup?

>>48176966
>Exact copies are less you than you are
I could just as easily claim that you die every time you go to sleep.

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>>48190416

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>>48191209

>>48180800
Got any more shit like this? I haven't been this entertained in 17 solid minutes.

>>48191204

Your brain doesn't die when you go to sleep, so no.

Even if that exact copy is for all intents and purposes the same person, it's not you, the original instance. And the original instance must be destroyed so the clone can replace you. There's no transition between you and your successor, so there's no real immortality. To everyone else, it's easier to assume you never died, but it's most jarring to the actual you. Your own existence ends and someone else takes over your life.

And like in the teleportation case, another problem is the destruction of the original isn't actually necessary. It's only required (and in some methods artificially forced) to maintain the illusion of a transition.

>>48191697
The brain doesn't die, but the consciousness does

>>48191697
>Another problem is the destruction of the original isn't actually necessary
That's called a feature, not a problem

>>48191759

And? The same "hardware" keeps running, and it regenerates the consciousness the next morning as part of a natural process.

>>48191781

If you acknowledge there is no transition, and that you're willingly committing suicide so that someone else can live on in your name, then no, it's not a problem.

>>48191697
If "you" is defined as the pattern of information, there's no problem whether any given instance is erased.

Pattern identity is to continuity-identity as continuity-identity is to molecular identity.

>>48191841
>And? The same "hardware" keeps running, and it regenerates the consciousness the next morning as part of a natural process.
No, that's a new consciousness

>>48191962

Who says you are only your fleeting consciousness?

>>48191922

That has other implications. The singular, unique individual that's "you" could be said to be your original brain plus the recurring consciousness it frequently generates, and their not fully understood relationship.

If "you" is merely a pattern of information with no relationship to a "hardware" base, then the individual becomes irrelevant, and "you" can have infinite parallel existences. There's no point in pursuing individual immortality as you're a collective of existences, and as long as one instance survives, "you" survive.

But let's not forget we were discussing means to achieve said immortality and the continuous preservation of the unique self. If you acknowledge you're only producing clones, arguing it doesn't matter, then that's a different story.

>>48191697
>>48191697
>Your own existence ends and someone else takes over your life.
Alright, but here's the kicker: if that guy is functionally identical to you, does it matter on any level that isn't purely philosophical? There's still a stream of continuity that binds all iterations of you together.

I mean, more than a few iterations of me have already ceased to exist so that I could live on in their name. If I'd be put in the same room with fifteen-year-old me, we'd probably fight because our views are almost completely opposite. There's no permanence to the mind any more than there is to the flesh. Your mind is constantly rewriting itself in response to what it experiences, and I doubt there's any part of your "self" that stays exactly the same over long periods of time - like a human lifespan. The only thing that makes you, you is the stream of continuity.

One detail in EP's background that I think is very well thought is the prominence of Buddhism in the transhuman age, because it really does provide some meaning and answers to many quandaries raised by transhumanist concepts and ideas. Everything is ephemeral, and bettering the state of your existence necessitates that you stop clinging to your self so damned hard.

>>48192128
I'm arguing everything is a clone, therefore "only producing clones" is what all forms of immortality do, therefore "only producing clones" is the superior form of immortality.

On the hardware side: atoms are fundamental indistinguishable. Mathematically identical, not "one is as good as another."

On the software side: sleep is often cited, but it's kinda incomplete. Up the standard to medical anesthesia, which completely terminates continuity and often retroactively erases memory, creating a gap in continuity.

>>48192319

Is there continuity? Imagine you go to the hypothetical mind uploading clinic, you lie down, get sedated and a machine scans your brain and makes a copy of all the information. There's another body on a bed next to yours, grown/built for the sole purpose of being your person. Your mental information is copied to that new brain, and you're killed. The other body wakes up and for all intents and purposes is you.

But there was never, at any point, an actual movement of anything between your body and the other one. There is no continuity of any kind, objective or subjective (because the subject was just destroyed). Anon II and Anon III and Anon IV down the line will all think they're the same person, thinking they were born in Randomtown in 19XX and possessing the same cumulative experiences and memories. But that would all be an ineludible lie, to obscure the fact four lives were lived separately, and three began in some vat/fabricator for the sole purpose of continuing the legacy of a previous person.

Ultimately, all you're doing is your loved ones and acquaintances a favour by providing a new self for them to interact with after you've died, as if it were the same. The same favour they'd be doing you once life catches up to them. Overall, it lessens the impact of other people's deaths: nobody will "die" around you, your loved ones will always be with you, in practice. But you'll never escape your own death, the end of your own existence.

>>48192319

(cont.)

I understand this whole thing is philosophically compatible with Buddhism and its concept of reincarnation and the like, but that's only putting a veil of religiosity over the whole matter.

And I understand the mind is naturally everchanging, but it's not really comparable to this hard stop in continuity and the termination of the original self. While your personality and views change to some extent as part of the natural process of life, you're always for the most part yourself. And even if that's not the case and you experienced terrible horrors and trauma, the critical point here is that you made an actual transition. It's a real transformation, not an illusion meant to make you believe there's no impassable chasm between you and that body on the other bed.

>>48192364

Again, individual immortality is not the same as a collective existence. What you propose is fine for the latter, but it's not what I'm talking about.

>>48192319
Imagine I'm kidnapped one day, taken and locked in a basement where I will be tortured for the rest of my life. I am replaced with an identical version of myself who is completely ignorant to the previous version. This version of me will live his life just as I would and my(his) family will be completely unaware of my disappearance. I consider him a person with just as much right to my family as me and wish him the best of luck in life. But all this means jack shit to me because I'm trapped in a basement being tortured for the rest of my life. I will never leave this basement for as long as I live and whatever (other)me experiences means diddly squat to me, because I'm in a basement, being tortured. This seems to matter on more than just a philosophical level.

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>>48193069
I'm not just imagining it, I have an alpha fork of you in a hellcube

>>48193249

Goddamn hellcubes

>>48193249
Point is I'm still trapped somewhere being tortured. The other versions of me could be living the most fulfilling lives possible and I wouldn't give a flying fuck cause I'm being tortured. Nothing they do affects me cause I'm being tortured somewhere and that's all that matters.

The only solace I could possibly have is that those I care about will be taken care of by an identical version of me that I wish nothing but good things for. I imagine it's what people who've left legacies behind feel, whether it be children, a company, an empire, etc. That's all fine and dandy but I would much rather just not be trapped somewhere, being tortured for the rest of my life.

>>48193483
And here we have Exhibit A on why Operation: DARK BARON needs to fire off and kill every last member of Nine Lives and delete all backups.

>>48192990
The other body wakes up possessing a full recollection of your life up to that point. That's continuity. Your memories are literally all there ultimately is to you, because a recollection of your experiences is the only thing that you really retain throughout your life. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Now, of course the sort of technology that would allow the digitalization of the mind would also allow the fabrication of memories, but that's a whole other can of shit.

>>48193598
>of your life up to that point. That's continuity. Your memories are literally all there ultimately is to you
>Now, of course the sort of technology that would allow the digitalization of the mind would also allow the fabrication of memories, but that's a whole other can of shit.
Please empirically prove that you survived the Fall and are not actually a severed head locked forever into a metal life support sphere and trapped in a VR version of the Solar System where the human race still exists in a form other than head-spheres.

>>48193483
The fact that other anons seem to only be able to see this situation through the eyes of the other versions me(anyone) and/or the eyes of family, friends and society at large honestly baffles me. There's more than just a philosophical difference here.

>>48193483
We're strictly discussing the transference of a mind to another platform while destroying the original in the process. Honestly, this sort of scenario is a good example of why it's probably the most preferable way to go about it, as opposed to forking.

>>48193645
I don't have access to means of breaking the simulation. I'll get back to you when I land a job at the LHC.

>>48193665
Point is I'm still dead. The other versions of me could be living the most fulfilling lives possible and I wouldn't give a flying fuck cause I'm dead. Nothing they do affects me cause I'm dead and that's all that matters.

The only solace I could possibly have is that those I care about will be taken care of by an identical version of me that I wish nothing but good things for. I imagine it's what people who've left legacies behind feel, whether it be children, a company, an empire, etc. That's all fine and dandy but I would much rather just be alive.

I forgot to add that in my scenario, you should replace 'being tortured alive forever' with 'being dead'.

Instead of destroying the previous instance, it is instead locked in a basement somewhere and will be tortured forever. From there, the rest of the scenario follows

>I am replaced with an identical version of myself who is completely ignorant to the previous version. This version of me will live his life just as I would and my(his) family will be completely unaware of my disappearance. I consider him a person with just as much right to my family as me and wish him the best of luck in life. But all this means jack shit to me because I'm trapped in a basement being tortured for the rest of my life. I will never leave this basement for as long as I live and whatever (other)me experiences means diddly squat to me, because I'm in a basement, being tortured. This seems to matter on more than just a philosophical level.

>The other versions of me could be living the most fulfilling lives possible and I wouldn't give a flying fuck cause I'm being tortured. Nothing they do affects me cause I'm being tortured somewhere and that's all that matters.

>>48193760
>I'm dead and that's all that matters.
That doesn't matter at all because you're fucking dead. You're fundamentally unable to experience being dead. You are, however, very much able to experience eternal torture, which means that that substituting that little bit in your scenario changes it entirely.

>>48193897
Whether dead or being tortured, what I'm clearly 'not' experiencing is the lives of my other versions. No amount of mental gymnastics will change this. I am dead or I am being eternally tortured while other versions of me are living their lives. Lives that are just as valuable as my own, but it is 'their' lives.

>>48193645
I'll do one better. I can empirically prove that the Fall never happened. Check the calendar we use. It's AD, not AF. All that talk about the Fall is only in a book.

>>48187065
The "brand name weapon" rule is GM Fiat by another name. It's not a real rule.

>>48194012
Okay, wiseguy. If you're so insistent that you don't care about the other yous lives because you're tortured or dead, then take one of them. SHIFT into one of their histories and throw that clone under the bus. After all, you should only care about yourself, right?

>>48187110
Conventional weapons are pretty lame if you just consider that they throw metal at high velocity in a forward direction.

>>48192128
>If "you" is merely a pattern of information with no relationship to a "hardware" base, then the individual becomes irrelevant, and "you" can have infinite parallel existences. There's no point in pursuing individual immortality as you're a collective of existences, and as long as one instance survives, "you" survive.
Not if you plan on reintegrating your forks

>>48193483
Doesn't matter. Pre-fork you (the you who decided to fork) lives on in both forks. Branching identity is actually pretty simple.

>>48194622
It's really all that matters to me. Sure, I live on in any version of me that's running around, but, like I said here>>48194012 I only experience one instance, that of being tortured eternally.

>>48184966

Conrad is for ___

>>48194709
At some point, the other fork becomes the primary fork. Would you want a tortured version of yourself running around or would you want to put it out of its misery? The only cases where you wouldn't are where the forks had meaningfully diverged before the incident or if a successful recovery was made afterward and the fork has since lead a meaningful existence.

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>>48195800

>>48195830

>My Novacab can't possibly be this cute!

Scum Genehackers making mongolian flipbooks - not even once.

>>48193598

Nope, that's not continuity.

Anon I's existence ended in that mind uploading clinic.
Anon II woke up with all his predecessor's mental baggage, -thinking- he has existed since that day in Randomtown in 19XX, and that he lived and experienced everything Anon I did. He'll live the section of the Anon line's chain of lives, and then eventually end up in a similar clinic, to die and give way to Anon III.

But that's just not true, there is no continued existence in Anon's line. Only the illusion the latest Anon has. Mind uploading just cannot cannot be sold as any form of personal immortality. Perhaps the preservation of the legacy of one person, but the continued existence of a single individual? Not by any means.

Imagine the scenario I presented earlier (the clinic one, not the torture-napping). You go to the clinic, lie down, get sedated and your mind copied. But then the doctor wakes you up, the other body still dormant. He tells you the copying process is complete, that your copy will live on as yourself.

But you have to die as there can only be one you. "But this is supposed to allow me to keep living!" You might rightfully protest. He pulls a gun on you, and blabbers on about all this nonsense about the "you" that's not quite you, and that it's only philosophical nitpicking to be worried about your continued existence. The other person will live on as you, and since you'll be dead he'll be the only you. "Trust me," he says, "that's all that matters. It's like going to sleep. Don't think too hard on it."

How would you feel before the trigger is pulled?

Assuming you're not scared shitless, either you'll have deluded yourself with all that pro-uploading philosophy, believing you yourself will somehow live on in a separate body and a separate brain despite the undeniable fact nothing was transported between the original and the copy. Or you won't care, and accept you need to cease to exist so that someone else can continue your legacy.

>>48196460
Except that's not how mind uploading works in EP. One can literally be conscious for the whole process. Your mind is literally being stored and transferred without ever being turned off.

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>It's an "Uploading is murder, biocons are right" episode

>>48197250
Better than a "uplifting is a crime against nature" episode.

How have you used primate uplifts in your games, /tg/ ? Hominid Supremacy When?

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>Factors appreciate transhuman humor in an abstract way, especially physical humor (puns do not translate well).
>Factors do have their own sense of humor, which seems to orient mostly around unexpected windfall at the expense of another.
This was a pretty good, maybe even cute, little detail about those exploitative fucks.

>>48198475

Factors also canonically understand and play table tennis.

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>>48198611

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>>48198638

>this is on the other end of the table

>>48198475
>(puns do not translate well).
That's true even across languages within the human species. The Japanese love their puns, and 80% of them don't even remotely scan when translated.

>>48199436
Puns are second lowest form of comedy. Right after slapstick.

>>48199436

Yeah, wordplay is hard. It's why, like, poop jokes are so common because that almost always translates.

If you're lucky, your translators give a fuck and will occasionally bust their ass to make a new joke if they can.

Even if cute, there should also be something creepy about a race of giant sentient slime mold ambush predators having their concept of humor entirely based around schadenfreude

>>48198332
>Hominid Supremacy When?
The Serravallian Age.

>>48199233
As trap making ambush predators who mostly use touch and smell I bet Factors have some interesting ideas about BDSM.

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The problem with mind uploading is that, in real life, there is no mind-body dichotomy: not even in the sense of the brain. If you physically removed a person's brain from the rest of their body and transplanted it, the result would not be the same person but with a different body. It would be an entirely different person, with a different personality and mannerisms. This is because a lot of what makes you, you is not in your brain.

Fat affects your intellect. Your heart rate, and the nerves between the heart and the brain, affect your mood. Your gonads affect your interpersonal relationships. Your whole endocrine system has huge and still not fully understood roles in your behaviour.

If someone digitised your brain, that would be no more you than if you wrote all your memories down in a book. That book is not you, and if someone memorized that book they would not become you.

>>48199770
That would be why digital mind-states have to emulate most of the nervous system too.

>>48199760

Well, they appreciate art by literally taking it inside themselves so they can touch and taste it all at once, so, y'know, there's that.

IIRC the book says the interior surface of a Factor is slightly acidic but their bioware capabilities are like, a couple decades ahead of Transhumanity so they could probably fix that.

But, also remembering notes from the Core Book Factor reproduction is like, weirdly sexual and asexual at the same time and nigh incomprehensible to us, so who the fuck knows if they can even grok BDSM.

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>>48199812

Not just the nervous system. Everything. You would need a digital pulse. You would need digital hormones. You would need digital blood sugar and digital background sensations. You would need so much that you would effectively have to run a full simulation of reality, if you would ever want to maintain even a semblance of personal continuity. And all this would fail as soon as you transfer into another biomorph and have to adapt to being a new person.

But that's okay: Eclipse Phase is very soft sci-fi. Its idea of the "ego" is has never been realistic, but in a game with psychics and portals I can't complain. The problem comes when I see self-described transhumans dreaming of this in real life. EP's thing is a classic "soul", and I don't hate fantasy elements. However, the trouble comes when self-described "transhumans" hope for this in real life.

>>48200035

aand I typed the same sentence twice in a paragraph. Going to sleep now.

>>48199770
This is essentially just a restatement of the ship of Theseus problem, except on a smaller timescale.

Basically everything involving morphs talks about how changing bodies changes people's mannerisms. Yet everyone talks about how continuity is maintained while being altered.

What seems clear is that the dominant philosophies which transhumans use have a broader and more flexible sense of personal identity than is present today. I don't think that this difference is surprising, as present day philosophy about the mind is mired by not really knowing what the mind is.

So most people who use backups, cortical stacks, and far casting accept a philosophy of mind which is extremely computationalist, allowing for someone to be truely continued by a copy. I suspect that this changed occurred due to experiencial evidence of forks.

Now not everyone believes this, and there's merit to that philosophic view point. But almost everyone who thought that got killed by TITANs a decade ago, leaving extreme computationalism as the general norm. The jovians are the exception, but they use stacks as well, though they likely have a very different opinion of what stack-instantations are.

>>48200035
Philosophic differences don't make something soft sci-fi.

>>48200605

It is not about philosophy. The way EP presents re-sleeving, with the personality being unchanged despite changing the entire body into a different body, isn't just philosophically unsettling. It is actually impossible. It requires one to suspend disbelief and ignore what makes up the personality.

>>48200716
>The way EP presents re-sleeving, with the personality being unchanged despite changing the entire body into a different body

...or, crazy thought here, most people don't like changing their personalities when they change locations, so they make sure to adjust hormones, neurotransmitter levels, etc, as part of the process of resleeving - no more technically unrealistic than the 'rewiring' that resleeving implies in the first place.

Also, it ignores the parts of Eclipse Phase where morph is acknowledged to have an effect on personality, but as above, by default it doesn't because that would be pretty annoying.

>>48200856

It also ignores that this is said to be something cyberbrains and infomorph servers do also with digital consciousnesses, and in fact why people get kind of crazy in them is when they aren't armed with tech powerful enough to do that comprehensive emulation.

And basic biomods is a hell of a thing

>>48200716
But this isn't actually the case, although sometimes the writers forget to mention it in every instance - changing the body -does- change the personality and behavior. Both the corebook and Transhuman, if I remember correctly, have paragraphs on that. But most -players- will probably forget about it.
Integration and Alienation checks are meant to simulate that to a degree, but the true differences are more long-term and subtle and are a matter of roleplaying. Still, the game doesn't ignore them, it just places more importance on memory, habits and skills, than hormones and sensations, which is not unreasonable.

>>48200716
>personality being unchanged

Factually incorrect.

Remember how male furies have aggression problems?

How Nautiloids induce mothering tendancies?

Sava picking up a smoking habit from a morph?

That unnamed guy in Firewall talking about a specific identifying trait which is maintained through resleeves, and how that's remarkable?

The opposite is true, people's personalities get messed with all the time. This is kind of true today as well.

Shit, someone in one of the short stories doesn't recognize their own alpha fork, that's how much people change.

Now, it's a really weird world that those ~500,000,000 transhumans inhabit, but it isn't one where people switch bodies without changing.

>>48199770
>>48200605
Expanding on this:
>Fat affects your intellect
Do people who get liposuction done lose continuity?

>Your heart rate, and the nerves between the heart and the brain
Is a heart transplant expensive suicide?

>Your gonads affect your interpersonal relationships
Does someone lose continuity should they get those parts removed?

They don't.

There's clearly a large amount of variation that people will accept on their personal identity, with people talking about how they changed, not how they are a completely new person with no claim to their own selves save for some memories.

ITT, some people forget Morph traits are a thing.

>>48201333
Is being gay a morph or an ego trait?

Asking for a friend

>>48201379
Could be both, actually. Your morph may be wired to to respond with attraction and arousal toward the smell of specific sex.

>>48201379
ego, and you can get a cheap toggle app

Anybody have a favorite critter from X-Risks? I feel like we really did not actually talk about it much given how anticipated it was.

>>48202538
>Not slutty machine god noises

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>>48203160
>The art for the exsurgents from Glory is a lot worse than in the original book
>The predator is fun despite looking like a combination between a shitty Doom 3 monster and a child's action figure
>There are too many stinging insects and other wild animals that do nothing but jump out and inject things with poison
>The Rortyans are less interesting than the ones Sandberg came up with in The Gate War
>Gas the Factors, Species War Now
>The Fetch is kind of a cool concept but the art is boring
>The fractal troll is probably my favorite design in the whole book. He looks like a big friendly guy.
>The freak is a neat idea and the art is nice, but the accompanying anecdote from the Sentinel is fucking stupid (seriously? he just ran at you, and you LET HIM?).
>The gut eater was probably drawn first and then designed around the art, which in turn is based on the chest chomp scene from The Thing. It's too conceptually weak to have been designed before the art was drawn.
>The headhunter looks like shit. Just use manhacks or something.
>The hollow is a Heaven Smile, complete with a tiny weak point that blows the whole thing up
>The hookbladder is a pretty generic concept with one of the better illustrations in the book
>The hunter killer looks like shit
>The leftover special is the centaurs from Fallout
>the ny’knikiin have a cool origin story but I want the mantis shrimp meme to die
>the smart mine is lame because it bypasses the normal combat rules in a really game-y way
>the stalker is dumb as hell, it's supposed to be the ultimate killing machine and its signature move is spinning some chains around itself
>the veiled leech is very obviously a bloodsucker from STALKER
>the void crawler is a fun concept with solid visual design
>the warbot looks like shit

>>48199770
People undergo HRT. It changes things, but they aren't entirely new people.

>>48200035
Not remotely true. The vast majority can be replicated at way, way lower resolution. I believe this is even mentioned in the books.

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>>48203468

Yeah, the "aggressive species want to eat us, produce nasty poisons and will still fuck up synthmorphs" is kind of extensive - but it is a threat list, so there are other kinds of Xenofauna out there they just don't get as much page coverage for obvious reasons. Like, if they weren't gribbly alien beasties with big sharp pointy teeth trying to fuck everybody's shit up - they wouldn't be worth describing in the threat index, would they?

One of my players would for sure fight you about the Hunter Killer, though.

>>48203468
>>48203701
I was honestly more annoyed/concerned by the sheer number of things that can turn you into a zombie.

>>48203160
Skitters are my favorite actually. They've got a big bag of tricks, and are a general dangerous nuisance without being a potential floating apocalypse like the SRN or Creeper.

I really like the creeper having a few more rules about what it does to people, and how it interacts with other swarms and such.

The stack eating cyberworms were nice.

It's not an enemy, but the new rules for Exsurgency were welcome.

Theia is pretty good for
>>48203294

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>>48203294

>>48200716
>The way EP presents re-sleeving, with the personality being unchanged

Except it doesn't.

>Sun Bu'er: Who's to say we are just one thing? Why is our personality not as malleable as our shells? When I sleeve a reaper, I become a killing machine. When I'm in a pleasure pod, my interests are more ... salubrious. I'm capable of both. We are multi-faceted creatures, and sometimes our exteriors just help us to shine even more.

>>48203160
Chrysacids have a nice "Thing" vibe to them.
Flesh Parties are some seriously disturbing shit. I like it.

>>48203468
But mostly I have to agree with this here. A lot of the shit like Gut Eaters could have been introduced as exsurgent symptoms. Most of the xenofauna were honestly pretty boring. The concept of evil alien parasites gets old fast when they're around every corner.

Also, how are mantis shrimp a meme?

>>48199770
I'd liken it to a powerful drug. You're not 'you' after taking LSD, but most people would agree that you're not dead either.

>>48200067
A prime example of how hormonal changes can affect brain function

>>48199770

Hence Alienation and Integration tests.

>>48203160

I dig the Fetch, with most other TITAN assets also up there.

>>48203160
I don't, really. I just use it as a monster manual, just like the Morph Recognition Guide.

>>48189065
>If you're playing like most EP players, you own the blue prints to any tech you use on a regular basis, augments included.
Assuming you have fabber access. Not always an option.

The only real limitation that asyncs have is losing their abilities when they have no biological brain. Otherwise, their sleights cost less XP than the quality version of the same abilities.

Also note that sleights are much harder to detect than implants are.

>>48199436
>That's true even across languages within the human species.
Yeah, but it's probably moreso with olfactory language.

Think about it: these guys can make such distinct analysis of smells and scents that they use it as a form of complex communication. How would you do puns in this form? Similar smells? How similar do they have to be before a factor thinks it distinct, considering that dogs can distinguish between individual blood strains from the same species?

It's likely that puns don't translate because there simply isn't an analog for their species.

>>48207511
Smell is actually a really terrible mode of complex communication due to its persistence, which makes syntax essentially impossible.

>>48207569
>Smell is actually a really terrible mode of complex communication due to its persistence, which makes syntax essentially impossible.
Not impossible. The only issue is that syntax must be nonlinear, and the smell must be distinct and complex enough to convey everything one wishes to say within a single mixed scent. Their sense of smell should be able to distinguish new smells from old, so persistence ends up being a benefit... essentially you have a conversation log free-floating in the air around you.

In simplest terms, every smell is like a super-complex kanji character, containing every verb, noun and sub-concept they might convey in one.

>>48207697
That, or they have 'timestamp' scents attached to their other communications as a sort of analog metadata.

>>48207697
>Their sense of smell should be able to distinguish new smells from old
Justify that assertion

>>48207842
>Justify that assertion
Short-term memory.

The smells might be confusing to someone just entering said conversation, but to a factor already within the conversation, memory should be adequate to know which smells are from older parts of the conversation.

>>48207697
>The only issue is that syntax must be nonlinear
The section on Factors in X-Risks talks about how Factor thought works largely with parallel rather than linear data, which is the reason why they don't really appreciate certain forms of transhuman art, such as music. It makes sense that their language would be parallelly structured as well.

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>>48173153
My next campaign for sure.

>>48207842
>Justify that assertion
We humans can distinguish new smells from old, to about a few days to a week or so. Fresh shit on the floor vs somewhere someone shat some days ago, for example, even if this is a new (And appalling) place for us. Human sense of smell is, by animal kingdom standards, apallingly poor. Factors would logically have a sense of smell several thousand times more sensitive and efficient than ours, since it is clearly one of their primary senses. Therefore, they can likely tell new vs. old scents very well.

>>48208150
How about on the scale of seconds though? Also, those are in fact different smells resulting from ongoing chemical processes, not the same smell later.

Could you use really unstable molecules? Sure, but now you have to produce energetically costly molecules instantaneously as needed and they still have to last long enough to get smelled while still decaying fast enough to enable syntax. Given the low 'speed of smell' (which in fact varies by molecule and medium), that creates quite a problem for high-throughput communication.

>>48207901
This would certainly help, but even parallel data streams are generally sorted into channels, which would be impossible with scent.

>>48207880
You still run into big problems with smell re-use and other factors excreting nearby.

>>48207569
You're thinking like a human

>>48208386
>Given the low 'speed of smell' (which in fact varies by molecule and medium), that creates quite a problem for high-throughput communication.
Absolutely not. First off, vocal language has a lot of abbreviations intended to increase the information value of words while minimizing the words used. It's absurd to assume that the Factors would not have similar "olfomes" intended to shorten ideas into simpler smells.

Second, in the same way we have names for color (as a vision-based species), it is likely that Factors have a comprehensive grasp of smells and the like, and can easily sort these smells in the same way we sort letters of the alphabet and colors. So "channels" would be easy.

>You still run into big problems with smell re-use and other factors excreting nearby.
Only assuming that Factors cannot distinguish origin, or use reference scents to demarcate reuse of previous scents.

>>48209067
A light wind would make one unable to communicate properly. It's fucking awful. Get over it.

>>48209111
>A light wind would make one unable to communicate properly.
First off that's utter bullshit. Wind does not magically carry every particle out of the sky in linear direction. Particulates always linger, and a strong sense of smell allows you to detect that.

That said, background noise does the same thing for us. We make do, I'm sure their race does as well. Quit being a pussy.

>>48200035
To be honest I'm pretty sure that using nanomachines to rewrite memories is physically implausible even before we start asking if those memories alone constitute the self.

>>48205132
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

I'm not sure what who to reply to any more, but when Factors are serious about communication they mind meld instead of using scents. Factor scents seem like more of a body language/sign language analogue for them. There's also those sealed chemical sachets they use.

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>>48211514
Am I the only one who thinks on the insects from Albion when seeing that thing?

>>48212070
>amoeba alien exosuit
>bipedal
Really?

>>48212223
The book explicitly states that they utilize human tech quite frequently nowadays. Factors do not regularly use silicon and metal outside of Transhuman interaction, including robotics.

>>48212223
>>48212289

It also might be like a synthtaur and able to transition to like, a quadruped configuration.

But mechanically, why wouldn't they use robotics to do stuff like "walk upright"? I mean, if you're going to use a robotic shell I presume you'd want to actually get some good mobility and leverage out of it.

>>48214219
>The moment you realized you shouldn't have fucked that slutty little slime mold

>>48214979
>Dat clawed tentacle that's out of its tube
I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going.

>>48213344
>Hello, Scum Tech Support. Have you tried turning it on and off again? ...Okay, well, have you tried shoving it up your arse? You have? And that seems to be the problem? Fuck you, fab a new one.

>>48215575

>People just dial the Tech Support VoIP to get berated because it's cheaper than dialing the "phone sex" line.

Wait, shit, would the transhuman future even call it phone sex? "Telephone" systems have probably been out of style for ages with everything being a hybrid of internet/cellular with mesh networking.

>>48215476
I've seen enough Starship Troopers to know where it's going: right into her brainstem.

>>48215618
It seems like the sort of term that would stick around long after actual telephones have bit the dust. I'd wager money that transhumanity is still using floppy-discs as save symbols as well.

>>48215676
>phone sex
Probably replaced by simulsex.

>>48215618
In our group, thought-activated mesh IMs are pretty much routine and can be rendered as AR text or a voice in your ear as desired. Functionally speaking, it's basically telepathy via the mesh.

>>48215698
That seems to me like it would be reserved for sex in actual simulspace. If there is a replacement term, it would probably be meshfucking.

>>48215764
What I mean is who would bother with the equivalent of phone sex when you can just have simulsex with someone? It'd be like Tinder mixed with F-list. What you look like isn't as important as what kind of sex you're looking for, your personality in the sack, and what your are and are not willing to do. Also how much time you have. There should be plenty of magical realm simulspaces as well. Fuck. It seems like there are ever more ways to spend your money on sex in the transhuman future.

>>48215867

Well, I mean, Simulspace hookups aren't like, universally applicable. Like, if it was a mutual thing (and not a prostitution thing) you might both have to pay for the system access unless you're the kind of person who owns one simulspace tools, you both need a solid connection and optimally a place to get a hardline on a headset and somewhere comfortable to sit.

There could easily be some merit to just like, doing the equivalent of face time with someone and masturbating with some AR integration.

>>48215911
>both have to pay for system access
Likely, but this is a convenient and reliable way to have sex without having to go anywhere. It seems like it would be a common expense.

>Since physical senses are overridden when a user accesses VR, most people prefer to rest their body in a safe and comfortable environment while in the simulspace. Body fitting cushions and couches help users relax and keep them from cramping up or injuring themselves if they happen to thrash around. In case of long-term virtual sojourns (for instance, during space travel), morphs are normally retained in tanks that sustain them in terms of nutrition and oxygen. Many VR entertainment and game networks offer dedicated and hardwired physical VR cafes with private pods. Visitors rent a pod and physically jack in, using either access jacks or an ultrasonic trode net that reads and transmits brain patterns when placed on the head.
EP 241

Did they decide after they wrote this that Basic Mesh Inserts are all that is needed for people with a meat brain, or what?

>>48216099

No, I think that the Mesh Insert has the ability, and I mean, if you have a meat brain but access jacks that is certainly the interface point because that's what your jacks go into, but at the same time it's clearly, like a quality thing.

There's a reason why you would want a dedicated hardwire for something like this, because it's an entire sensorium of data you have to connect to and god knows where the servers actually are running this sometimes. If you own a simulspace server I bet you could throw it on your coffee table and just lie on the couch, but if you're contracting with a network which has just the one office embassy in your habs central district and is then piped in wherever, you probably want a dedicated access point you may not be able to install in your home.

>>48209067
Absolutely yes. New old ones would (at least initially) need to evolve instead of occurring by decision.
>So "channels" would be easy.
No. There is no mechanism by which to assign a particular scent to a particular information channel, other than by having that scent only ever used in that channel. Such a mechanism would increase the complexity of the language and the scent generating organ by orders of magnitude.

>Only assuming that Factors cannot distinguish origin, or use reference scents to demarcate reuse of previous scents.

This is fundamentally impossible for diffused scent in an open environment, for reasons which I hope do not need to be explained.

>>48216332
I'm sure that the vast majority of habs have high-throughput hardwired data-links in all sleeping quarters.

>>48216497
>for reasons which I hope do not need to be explained
The same reason why free-floating cohesive nanoswarms are impossible.

>>48216713

I think that depends on how much Lifestyle you're paying for.

>>48212223
Bipedal is much more energy efficient than quadrupedal.

>>48217012
Not without bones it isn't

>>48217656
>Not without bones it isn't
>Needing bones with exoskeleton or powered armor.
Dude, the suit is doing all the work. Why do you need bones?

>>48217656
Why would the mech have bones?

If the factors were going to make any kind of walking machine, it would almost certainly be bipedal. So long as they could also make it sufficiently balanced.

>>48175723
>>48169660

I had the idea to make a cartoon hab, with tweaked morphs based on gnomes (maintenance) fuzzy animal people (security) and pixies (all things social) and so on.

It would be a big psychology experiment, a colorful environment tailored for low-stress living that people went to for psychotherapy, or just to relax and get away from transhuman stress.

Everyone had to sleeve into a neotenic, to help get in touch with their 'inner child.'

Scum fancy themselves digital archeologists.

Post pre-fall memes.

>>48212223

I'm more concerned about the total exposure of the Factor pilot.

>>48221061
Probably not, since stability will generally be more important than efficiency.

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>>48203294
>>48204035
>>48204986
>mfw /tg/ can sexualixe absolutely anything up to and including insane superintelligences responsible for the near-extinction of the human race

>>48225296
>>mfw /tg/ can sexualixe absolutely anything
Wrong. There are some things that aren't sexy to anyone in the whole wide world. You, for example.

>>48211652
Warniaks are mammals. There's an Iskai hunter on the first island who gives you a lot of info about biology of agressive creatures if you ask him.

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>>48225296
It's not like we were the first.

>>48226522
>dire
>adj.
>1. causing or involving great fear or suffering; dreadful; terrible

Fitting name.

>>48221139
Everyone should sleeve in a neotenic to save on space and resources.

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Do you think factors go on the transhuman mesh and shitpost?

>>48227309
Oh shit, it's Funky Boy.

Redline in the TQZ when?

>>48227929
Why go on the mesh and shitpost to practically incomprehensible aliens when you have access to APEX SHITPOSTING technology like a Factor Colony?

Just jump in the goo-pool.

>>48227929
see >>48169681

>>48227929
>That pic
>Players see an alien nebula and a night-shrouded planet through an oddly organic-looking viewport
>They goggle at the view
>The viewport blinks. The 'planet' swivels to look at them
>Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra, everyone roll stress tests.

>>48169587
I have an idea
>splash grenades filled with collector nanobots and tear-gas
>harvest jovian pain
>sell on mars as snake oil remedy

>>48227309
AF five, numbnuts. The next one is an enduro on rorty