>>98926633
I'd worry about fixing the shitty fluff first

>>98926688
What's so bad about it?

>>98926633
>fix
Who am I fixing it for, and what do they want out of a game?

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>>98927956
Man I can't even find the proper references online to describe how fucking retarded this setting is, but let me go from memory.

>fundementally the creators do not understand what made their setting a neat idea.
And it's writ all over the face of it. There's some neat ideas in there (generally stolen from their betters) but just drenched in the worst fucking retard takes. You can see this in a lot of places. First, starting from the players perspective. Putting their politics so fucking baldly into the game is off putting. It hurt the health and quality of the game. Same thing as the creative commons not being a boon for the game.
>Can you imagine not being able to give this shit away
So coming to the overall story. The first thing is the story is fucking retarded.
>We got luxery space communi...I mean Rep based economy because the Titans were meanies.
Yeah that's not actually how tragedy works. Jove is a good example of this. Its pretty reasonable to set up a space dictatorship after the Titans. What's not reasonable is acting like everything is okay in the decade after a 90% human death culling.

>Then into more game specific complaints
There is nothing worthwhile in the mechanical ruleset. There's a reason no one is hacking this game despite it being creative commons. The game would be better off replaced with a B/X clone that determines hit dice by size and tells you you can have as many characters as you want. Same thing with earth, earth should be the preem adventure site (the location of a singularity event and rogue ai doing rogue ai things) but instead it was carpet bombed and nuked and even worst.
>everything they want you to do is retarded in the face of a 90% death wave that may or may not return.
the exoplanet exploration, leaving earth, gay space communism, getting butthurt everyone liked the Jovians better. Theres a kernal of a good idea in there but its buried in shit.

Not sure about crunch-wise, but I do think that Eclipse Phase mainly was created to be an excuse for the writers to drop the ideas they had about futurism / transhumanism / anarchism into one giant playground than a focused attempt to build a game. Like how they present the galaxy as filled to the brim with factions and inhabited planets and things to explore and interact with, but the default expected campaign is "shadow government spook". I keep going back to the core books and it feels less like a sandbox and more like the writers dumped a toychest out onto the ground to show you its cool fidget spinner. I'm not saying it's impossible to work with at all, especially if you want to do a sandbox game, but I've found it's a harder sell for potential players unfamiliar with the setting.

>>98928258
>>98928358
I feel like the game would have been a lot better if it was a lot more focused. A game just focused on the shit they put forward for Mars alone could have been stellar. Instead it's just "this is every idea from every vaguely transhuman scifi book we like in a single thing!"

The devs own believes are incredibly stupid and it filters into the game, too. And I don't mean politically, I mean at least one of them believes that you die every night when you go to sleep and a new you wakes up in the morning.

>>98928258
I really love these political compasses for the lore of various games. I hope you share more inside their relevant threads in the future.

>>98928543
Same

I sort of feel the base premise is so nightmarish I'm not sure what else you can do with it.

Its like a ruleset based off of being a tortured puppy in a space station orbiting the last black hole 15 seconds before the heat death of the universe.
How the fuck do you have a rep based economy (or any sort of society) where everybody's brain is compromised and anything and everything can have a clone/mindfuck?

You can't have a society when trust is fundamentally compromised, and its infinitely advantageous for sociopaths.

>>98926633
Aside from the setting being the main problem and the crunch generally being fine, the main thing I'd change about EP's actual rules is to reduce the importance/viability of beaming your consciousness around and instead use spaceships and have solid rules for spaceships. It's a space scifi game where space and different locations in space are supposed to be a very important theme, so actually lean into this and use them instead of doing everything you can to avoid ever actually being in space.

>>98929117
>>98928258

https://www.scribd.com/document/1028194176/MGT2-Mindjammer
This IMHO does the whole thing much saner and better setting & crunch wise.
It's not entirely the same (you can't resleeve but just randomly deciding you want to be radically different is very cheap and easy) but it hits similar beats.

>>98929190
There is a Gurps setting with at least moderately similar premises.

But yeah, Eclipse Phase is more somebodies transhumanistic fantasy then really a setting.

I remember talking to somebody who loved the setting who thought that because humans could be influenced by advertisement, direct mind control was basically the same thing. So direct mass brainwashing by the enlightened was desirable.

>Transhumanism would be a catastrophic nightmare if it happened. Those that survived would be those who we consider demons.

>>98928258
Jove would be more reasonable if the focus was moreso on "we haven't had time to work the kinks out of the cutting edge, better stick to being roaches until we have" rather having that as a rationalisation to justify reactionary luddism (that's still justified given the Fall, it just makes them less viable as an actual practical ideology than "keep it simple stupid" which is as much a reflection of the creators' intent as anything else).

Also while I dig the Gatecrashing it flies in the fade of the harder aesthetic they were supposedly going for. They could have simply done Stalkers orbital dropping to Earth instead having the "weird wild west" without throwing a good Stargate game siloed off from the wider setting and contradicting its tone.

Firewall is nice though if only because I dig Global Frequency. Crowdsourced counter-terrorism (state and corpo included) scratches a nice 2000s SF itch for me, there's a sort of naive edgy charm to it like the blunt "benevolence" of the Authority, Miracle Man or the Cowboy Delta Green.

Basically >>98928407.

>>98929159
I disagree. While that would be nice it's not obligatory, to me as in Altered Carbon mind uploading is the central tech and furthermore thanks to the Fall there's massive survorship bias. Most minds in the solar system have already been beamcast at least once so there's a vested interest in ignoring questions of continuous identity. That and the post-Fall system being such a shitshiw that moping around simply isn't adaptive given all the other more immediate problems you have to deal with. I think this is a case of players who are uncomfortable with the idea of human insignificance not being suited for CoC. Uploads and mind copies are simply a fact given EP's premise and whole you can play counter to that there have to be disadvantages to it (that's part of the reason the Jovians are interesting, how far would they go before impracticality outweighs principle and resilience?).

>>98929256
>Uploads and mind copies are simply a fact given EP's premise
The issue is that such a humanity would be unrecognizable (and closer to grey goo with a semi-hive mind) within like 5 years of the start of the setting. The base setting premise is unsustainable.

You can play out your gray goo fantasies, but I don't think its particularly exciting.

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If anyone fancies what is a more nuanced take on the Jovians and AA I'd recommend this. TLDR is that when Earth's ecosphere tripped over into pan-catastrophe the unltra-rich fucked off to the colonies and left to poors to rot. There was a split between the CEOs etc who actually financed the construction and the tech crews who built it, hating their corporate masters as much as the browns back on Earth. The execs stayed on Mars and the techs went to the outer system to make their own hand with blackjack and hookers.

On earth criminal dynasties beat their authority into the riotous masses and took control of disaster relief and bioremediation efforts. In time Brazil became a neo-feudal ecofash superpower with a strong current of gain Catholicism ("green saints" are GM wizards revered by all and able to oppose the Families). The EU and Pan-Asia are broadly similar.

Meanwhile in space the Outers develop the anarcho-commie rep economy thing except they diverged from a shared decision / framework and have time to develop it into something more trusting and less retarded (though it eventually crumples under duress) than what the AA supposedly is in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe.

The Martians remain cunts and try to enforce property rights against Earth when the latter ascend back into space (despite the latter outnumbering them and still nursing a murderous grudge). They are wiped out.

This was all published a year before EP came out btw so it's not impossible the creators ripped a fair bit of this off.

>>98929298
Why's that? It may well be our eventual fate because space horror, given the Factors are Investor expies and their deal in Schismatrix is trading with pre-singularity civs as long as they can before running away when they inevitably ascend. At best what you describe sounds like an exaggeration or else yet another of EP's edges to be softened in the interests of making it playable. At worst it's just "I won't play CoC because we can only delay the apocalypse rather than prevent it." If that's the rub then the premise isn't for you. The fuck is the point of transhuman diaspora horror without transhuman diaspora? Just adjust factors like the mean long-term viability of existing in a profoundly non-human (non-corporeal even) shell to set how long a fuse timer you'd like and rely on the Prometheans for deus ex bullshit that allows for the creation of cognitive oases where near-baseline human minds can thrive.

>>98929159
>>98929217
>>98929298
yeah i agree with this, basically the whole setting is based on a premise that's not as interesting or cool as the autists who are extremely obsessed with it think it is.
yeah i guess the idea of transferring your mind IS interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean it becomes more interesting when it's forced everywhere and you have to do it all the time. then it just becomes tiresome and alienating.
of course no offense meant if you are that kind of autist who just wants a game about that and nothing else all the time

>>98929331
Fair enough, it's perfectly reasonable to be turned off by a given premise. Mindjammer and Transhuman Space are a good contrast as they're set in functioning civilisations rather than Mad Max gathered bands of raving survivors. Even those who can enjoy it acknowledge that it's unintuitive and a pain in the ass to run (lots of prep).

>>98929318
>Why's that?
Basic logic?

The basic TLDR is that its a setting where you can mind control others and the only defense is...more mind control.
Society is over. Those sociopathic and ruthless will naturally overtake, including with the fact they can infinitely clone themselves.

>The fuck is the point of transhuman diaspora horror without transhuman diaspora?
I don't understand the appeal of Transhuman diaspora. People think transhumanism is like your imagination, but like, in a octopus suit. When reality its closer to an octopus that can talk. Its not gonna be heckin wholesome.
EP is saying humanity is outdated, while relying on humanity is special (and ignoring 95% of actual human psychology) to make its setting last more then 10 minutes.

TLDR:
>Transhumanism is retarded.

>>98929348
Yeah, unrestricted transhumanism is horrifying. That's why it's a horror game. The authors don't think so but then they think that a rep economy is a good idea in the immediate aftermath of apocalypse so why care what they think? Nobody's ever going to be able to play an actually inhuman mind so you simply tailor the soft limits of things for playability's sake. Psionics and gates already btfo any notion of groundedness (though of course I'd ditch them) so cherry picking how far humanity can go before collapsing (at least for now) is a piss easy way to dial how far into abject horror you want to delve. If you're already fixing the fluff like making Jove more than a strawman then the rate and inevitability of humanity's dissolution just another detail among many.

>>98929383
>Yeah, unrestricted transhumanism is horrifying. That's why it's a horror game.
Its just not a very interesting premise for a game (IMO). Its so catastrophically horrible, that you have to rely on just willful ignorance and plot armor.

>Lets play a horror game where your chased by unstoppable, immortal, indestructible, hateful, all powerful demons.
>What can I do within this game to even avert it for a little bit?
>Nothing.

I mean you gotta have some hope for the horror to matter. How about a game where you actually have a chance to stop said demons. And if I want to play a game about stopping demons, there is probably a better one to use as a baseline then the one that I just made up.

>Nobody's ever going to be able to play an actually inhuman mind
Then why play a transhumanist game then?

>inevitability of humanity's dissolution
The game has already begun with that fully complete. Its just too stupid to realize that's the case. There are better games to play as badass humans shooting retarded transhumanites in the face.

>>98929422
The Prometheans are a benevolent deus ex backing Firewall and the Titanians, that's where I go for distant hope. A campaign about blackmailing / bribing the Factors for a ride out-system would be amusing too (incidentally that's how Schismatrix ends in a way though less hopelessly). Firewall routinely delays sharp decline into exhumanity, that is almost their entire purpose. They are effectively bands of CoC investigators.

Why play anything? A fantasy setting is not going to have depth comparable to real world economics but it doesn't need to, it needs to communicate the "feel" of depth as well as the premise demands. When you have exhuman monsters that's the transhuman terror, when you have human minds in octo-bodies that's the power fantasy. Adjust to your taste, nobody I know plays EP RAW.

The infogees aren't retarded, they're traumatized and desperate (very human emotions incidentally albeit expressed monstrously via the available tech and lax regulation). Beamcasting was something many did under duress. I agree that there are better games if you want to have guilt-free genocide fantasies though. I'm honestly not sure why you're even in this thread, how is it relevant to your preferences?

>>98929473
> why you're even in this thread
I like to discuss stuff.

I just dont see any appeal to the setting of EP at all. The power fantasy of just having infinite stuff as a human but pretend your humanism is faux transhumanism?

>>98929473
>when you have human minds in octo-bodies that's the power fantasy.
that's a very specific power fantasy

>>98929117
>You can't have a society when trust is fundamentally compromised, and its infinitely advantageous for sociopaths.
Nobody tell him.

>>98929217
>You have a planetwide information beaming device
>And you're using it to teach everyone long division?
>And some elective Algebra.

>>98929507
...Yeah? What did you expect? For anyone but hyperautists to actually get hard at the notion of butchering their frontal lobes? It's not the hard SF it notionally pretends to be either, just from a practical standpoint that would be near-impossible to RP and build a playable game out of. All setting trappings are ultimately subordinate to bridging imaginations for fun.

If I can accept that you (and plenty of others for that matter >>98929340) don't enjoy things that I enjoy why not accept accept that I enjoy things you don't?

>>98929526
It's the one >>98929348 rightly identifies here. The idea that it'd be (you) in a giga-tank battlebody is pretty far-fetched. Issues personal continuity aside I don't actually believe that uploading will ever be possible irl and that if it were our cognition is too bound to embodiment to be arbitrarily decanted into other forms. There's a power fantasy to recreationally being a seven-armed space gorilla and not having to relearn your every joint, same deal as Superman's implicit secondary powers so that every powerlift doesn't simply destroy what he's holding. You tune expectations according to the genre you're emulating.

>>98929547
> There's a power fantasy to recreationally being a seven-armed space gorilla and not having to relearn your every joint

I guess I just find that a weird power fantasy then.

I get Superman, or a mecha game, but why would I want to be a gorilla if we are even going that far?

Its just shapeshifting as a superpower I suppose.

>>98929547
well when you put it like that...

...it sounds even more autistic and even less cool, sorry.

>>98929651
It’s probably easier if you think of it more like the ability to live whatever lifestyle you want without the restrictions real life imposes on you physically. Like saying the ability to become a super athlete at will or to fly through the heavens. Or to surf on the sun or explore the crushing depths. Though I do think a lot of people who are especially enamored by transhumanist powers fantasies tend to express dislikes if their self image and physical lim, so I guess it’s not very appealing if you enjoy being yourself and never exactly wanted to be able to change your lifestyle like how someone might change their wardrobe.

>>98929547
> why not accept accept that I enjoy things you don't?

Fair enough. Most EP fans I have encountered where sort of gross technopheliac misanthropes.

I guess your not one of those. Sorry.

>>98929651
Why would you want to fly with your own wings? Why would you want to hear Ode to Joy with a passing synaesthesiac chorus of scent, texture and light? Why would you want to want to experience atmospheric reentry, your outer ablative layers being seared away by plasma until you've shed enough speed to unfurl your thistledown parachute membranes feeling the currents as you drift to earth? It IS weird, hence why it's not exactly the default RPG experience. If transhumanism were practical without entailing crash space and bad actors able to rape your mind it would unlock sensations that are otherwise unimaginable.

>>98929666
No need to apologise, you're entitled to your opinion. Personally genocidal murdersprees usually need a little extra spice to interest me. To each their own.

>>98929694
No worries. Funnily enough I hold irl "transhumanists" in contempt too. Separating fantasy from fact is an alarmingly rare capacity sometimes.

>>98929677
I guess my biggest joys have been related to triumphing over my own limitations, even if slowly and irregularly.

If I could do it all with a flick of a button…well that would rob me of most of my enjoyment in life.

And would put me into an environment that demands I become a button flicker in order to survive. Sounds pretty horrible and hollow to me.

>>98929716
Yeah, that's crash space. Our experiences being trivially mutable drags our psychology past its inbuild boundaries. It's one of the things EP sweeps under the rug presumably with an explanation of survivorship bias. Those who'd joywire themselves into being vegetables are probably already doing so but then the money runs out and they're repo'd. Always more infugees to replace them!

As for physical variety that isn't incompatible with personal growth goals. The joy you get from learning to play the piano is worthy but it is of a different kind to simply being able to fly under your own power. The latter is completely unknown to us no matter how satisfying the fruits of your efforts. Some would like to enjoy both.

>>98929677
You make a good point. I think being human is pretty sweet though limited in some ways (senility can go fuck itself). That doesn't mean I can't dream of exploring other ways of being while able to stay true to my fundamental self. THAT is a power fantasy.

>>98929731
>>98929716
Oh, forgot the link. Abolishing humanity doesn't take much. Potentially as little as tinkering with our innate emotional responses.

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/crash-space-tpb.pdf

>>98929735
Here's a less bleak though still unsettling take. Instead of the feedback loop of dampening inhibition and then further dampening it in the now-uninhibited state the protagonist of this finds himself forced to consciously build his identity from the ground up.

https://www.utilitarianism.com/greg-egan/Reasons-To-Be-Cheerful.pdf

I always like how Egan blends existential vertigo with humanism.

>>98929735
Im aware.

My only real hope for the future is scientific limitation. As I sure as fuck don't trust people with it.

>>98929776
Same. Doesn't look like that's the direction we're going though, does it? iirc there was an article lately about using targeted retroviruses to cause certain kinds of neurons to grow algal eyes (they use them for phototaxis, light opens channels). They can then make these structure fire with light. Fucking terrifying!

I grew up witnessing the effect that the development of social media had on people (and myself).
So if something as relatively unimportant as it fucks people in the head, then we have no hope with something like EP

>>98929694
Both sides of the argument are quite misanthropic
It's either
>Change nothing because people are assholes
>Change everything because people are assholes

>>98929776
With how many people seem to unironically want catgirls I have zero hope for this without some sort of war that then establishes a state/organization/widespreadideology/religion that devotes a large portion of itself to cockslapping down people who step out of line.

>>98929788
I just hope I have enough self control to blow my brains out when that time comes.

Im not afraid anymore. Im just despondent.

>>98929794
Ethnically or otherwise targeted plagues are becoming more feasible too. Genocide Man and Darkome are pretty neat bio-flavoured cyberpunk stories imo.

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>>98929788
Optogenetics. Lots of different approaches exist for that. The furthest along uses sound which then triggers light emission.
Might finally get us a depression treatment that isn't just "lay on a couch and vent" or "hope society implodes and reboots in a fashion that your brain is suited for".

>>98929807
I'm not disputing the benefits >>98929707 is almost entirely jacking off the joys of morphological freedom. I'm just under no illusions that we'll get any of the good without having to endure an ocean of bullshit. I remember being techoptimistic for a brief, beautiful time my early teens. A what heady days those were! Truly ignorance is bliss.

>>98929190
This is useful thank you.

Oh this guy's definitely well intended but uh.
>>98930388
You're incredibly welcome.
The full setting material is >FATE but the conversion is official and playable.
There's a supplement called the City People that's like a less weeby/weepy version of VtM cause the core of the human sphere is STUFFY goddamn people so you'll predominantly deal in schemes.
Politically it's a funny counterpoint to EP too in multiple ways

>>98928258
I think they were mad people liked the Ultimates too.

>>98929256
The main problem I have with mind uploading/body swapping in EP is that - and I may be misremembering from reading the first edition core book - is that fluff makes it out like people do it all the time and for the super wealthy who can afford a bunch of bodies or people who work for Firewall and are mindcasting around the solar system willy-nilly into whatever body's convenient and close to their goal it's like putting on a different pair of socks, the rules actually made it a pain in the ass and even if you've swapped bodies dozens of times you could still go insane if you rolled particularly badly, or still take mind damage if you rolled slightly badly.

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>>98930574
In a setting where the Mars corps, Anarchists, Exhumans, and multiple minor factions are all trying their utmost to outdo each other in Technological Horrors Beyond Our Comprehension - all of it for comic-villain shits and giggles mind you because they never actually benefit from any of it - they pick on the Ultiimates, who literally did nothing wrong, just because they don't like their philosophy. I imagine they'd wanna erase the Jovians next too for the same reason, and while they may do some things wrong, they're about the only faction that has reasonable justifications for it and can even begin to justify the means with the ends.

>>98926633
>How would you fix the crunch of Eclipse Phase?
By playing a different game.

>>98929331
It's interesting, but it isn't something that's incredibly gamable the way they want to do it.

>>98930624
Correct. And the second edition tried to fix this, but did it in an incredibly stupid way (bodies only give you varying amounts of meta points).

>>98930624
Agreed, I've never liked EP's crunch much and it wouldn't be the first setting / gameplay conflict. The main spat with >>98929159 was about the idea of de-emphasising beamcast and mind uploading. You can / should tweak it to taste but relegating it outright to an afterthought Vs conventional travel defeats a core premise of the setting imo.

>>98930828
This too. Even if you're on board it's a challenge.

>>98929306
Funnily enough his Doll books are a decent point to work forward from as well, if you're interested in how biotech would warp society at the point before we're full-on "people are software, bodies are hardware" cybercreeps, there's a bunch of interesting stuff about how genetic engineering by [/pol/bot activation keywords] eugenicist capitalist slave-owner oligarchs would fuck up society by manufacturing a low-IQ labour class.
i r8 PJMcA 8/8