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Post by rickno7 on Jun 22, 2012 20:00:36 GMT -8
I brought this up in the live chat session Friday. www.eclipsephase.com/Look at the bottom of the page. All of Eclipse Phase's text is made under Creative Commons 3.0 The art is not so that others can't use it in other books. They have official torrents of the game so that everyone that shares has a nice central set of files ensuring lots of seeds. I plan on buying the physical printings of the books, and I already seed their torrent because I support this bold strategy.
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julien
Initiate Douchebag
Posts: 49
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Post by julien on Jun 22, 2012 23:28:39 GMT -8
They even offer Hackpacks, which contain indesign files so that you can make your own layout if you want to.
Great game, even if the system could be better.
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Post by malifer on Jun 23, 2012 3:02:55 GMT -8
I would like to mention Eclipse Phase was reviewed in episodes 35 and 36 of the "Dice of Doom" podcast. diceofdoom.com/blog/topics/podcasts/It does seems like neat game and there is good discussion of it.
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Post by ayslyn on Jun 23, 2012 3:33:22 GMT -8
I own the main book. Their production quality is top notch.
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HyveMynd
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Post by HyveMynd on Jun 23, 2012 18:09:05 GMT -8
I think I own PDFs of everything Posthuman Studios has put out for Eclipse Phase. I downloaded several torrents and then realized that the company put them up and was treating DriveThru sort of like a donations cup; if you liked the products, you could kick them a few bucks by buying their products for between 5 to 10 bucks a title. I thought this was really interesting and have probably given them about $50 all told now. We'll have to wait and see if this is a viable business strategy though.
As far as the game itself, I think the setting is incredible. It's one of those games where the creators actually thought about how technology would affect people and society. Tappy always has that rant about how D&D doesn't make sense because "if you have god damn magic, why would you have splints?" which I totally agree with. Eclipse Phase is like really good sci-fi; it changes something and then extrapolates that to it logical conclusion.
Overall the system is pretty good. Yes it's percentile based, but your stats are high enough where you can actually do things, and they have a nice Margin of Success mechanic. The higher you roll while still rolling under your skill level, the better you do. This allows characters with a higher skill rating to perform better than someone with a lower skill rating. Both characters can succeed at the task, but the character with better training will just do the task better.
The problem I ran into was the amount of stuff the PCs have. It makes sense for the setting, but having the players remember all the cyber implants, bio-upgrades, and nanobot tweaks their PC had was nearly impossible. It's not really playable as a one shot, as most of the session would be reminding the players aboit all the tools they had at their disposal.
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julien
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Post by julien on Jun 24, 2012 13:53:14 GMT -8
Great overall review Hyvemynd, however I can't say I agree with your "not for one shot" point of view. I think on the contrary that the game can do very well in this area. How might you ask ? In Eclipse Phase, characters are defined by their Ego, or Mind, and by their Morph, their body. As you know they can, and they will change morphs over the course of a story. It's not mandatory, but it adds many possibilities to the game. For example you can design a game where players are agents of a corporation sent to the surface of Venus to recover some sensitive data. The surface is an incredibly harsh environnement that requires special morphs. Over the course of the one shot story, characters can explore the surface in suitable morphs, find clues and solve a mystery or recover the data... It's not a very good example I agree... Well I really prefer the campaign kind of game, but I strongly support the notion of one shots in this game. Especially if you use the horror and tech aspect of the story. But I too have found that players have trouble keeping track of all their possibilities (Muses...), so i'd advice to introduce theses slowly to them. Not all at the same time. It may seem railroady ou restrictive, but I believe in starting low and adding things along the way. May be it's because i'm a teacher, and am used to work that way with my students . Eclipse phase is a really good game, but I have trouble finding players to run a campaign (and time to be perfectly honest) so these days I run a one shot once in a while to satisfy my love for this game.
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HyveMynd
Supporter
Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
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Post by HyveMynd on Jun 24, 2012 17:10:27 GMT -8
Let me rephrase that julien, Eclipse Phase is not really suited for one shots unless you know the system and setting like the back of your hand. Where did that saying even come from, by the way?
Let me explain. I ran my group through a published adventure last year and I don't really think it was very successful. Or rather there is a lot of stuff I would have done differently in hindsight. I was psyched about the game, as I really love the attention to detail Posthuman Studios has put into it. I read the PDFs for (probably) several months and came up with a plot line and story hooks while we tried to get our schedules in order to play. All three of my players were interested in the game, but some had more free time than others and we eventually settled for a one-shot with pre-gen characters from the core book. I didn't want to "waste" my story for a one-shot in the case we would have a chance to come back to it, so I ran a printed adventure.
Everyone said that they had a good time, but after my players went home after the session, I was pretty disappointed. There were so many concepts and so much gear to explain to my players that I don't feel they got the full use of their characters. And I feel as if I cheated my players out of abilities they were entitled to, simply because I lost track of everything they had. For example, one of my players was the Venusian Negotiator, who is tricked out in a Sylph morph with Striking Looks and Enhanced Pheromones (among other things). All those implants/upgrades are designed to allow them to dominate in face-to-face negotiation, with bonuses to manipulation type rolls because of their good looks.
However, I had their initial meeting take place in a VR space. Meaning that people were virtual avatars and could look like anything they wanted to. (One of my players insisted on looking like a black cat for the entire meeting.) More importantly, it also meant that all the bells and whistles for the Venusian Negotiator character's social abilities wouldn't work. The player didn't realize this and told me afterwards that not using them hadn't lessened his fun, but it still bugs me.
The other thing we noticed is that the InfoSec skill can really dominate play. My three players went different routes with their characters; physical, mental, and social. The mental guy was a hacker and had really high skills in hacking and data retrieval skills. Whenever the characters would try to find something out, the hacker could just scour the Mesh with an InfoSec roll and pull up whatever they needed to know. Which is not a problem, but it started to detract from the other characters. With just about everything plugged into the Mesh in Eclipse Phase, there is a metric fuck-ton of things you can do with that InfoSec skill. Towards the middle, the session devolved into the one player making a bunch of skill checks to find information while the other players just kind of sat around watching him.
There are ways around this of course. Things are kept off the Mesh for security reasons, and characters have their Networking skills to crowd source goods, services, and information. But again, the GM really has to know this and be prepared for it. At one point I bluntly told the hacker player "Stop. Let someone else use some of their skills." which I felt bad about.
So basically, I love the setting and I like the system of Eclipse Phase. But you have to know everything about just about everything to run a successful one-shot with it. Plus, the GM would need to run a scenario specifically designed to "teach the players the ropes" of an Eclipse Phase character as there are a lot of moving parts. It's not like a game of Savage Worlds where a player can glance at a few phrases and get how the caracter functions. "Oh, I'm Blood Thirsty. OK, I know how to play this character." vs. "Umm... I have Basic Biomods, a Basic Mesh Insert, a Cortical Stack, Medichines, Neurachem Level 1, and @-Rep of 40... wait, what?"
Oh god. Did I just give props to Savage Worlds there? Damn it.
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Post by malifer on Jun 24, 2012 18:30:03 GMT -8
One of the concepts I find interesting is the back-up clones. It kind changes the dynamic of character death and even the character's view on death.
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julien
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Post by julien on Jun 24, 2012 23:17:14 GMT -8
Ok Hyvemynd, I now understand what you say. And I've seen similar things in my games. First the thing about infosec, I had a player who knows real world infosec very well and he understood rapidly what he could do with his basic mesh implants and muse, and I totally agree with you about the skill.
I also agree it can be quite difficult for the GM to take every little thing in this universe into account. But again I think that while you should aim for perfection, you should also reach it gradually. Usually, for one shot or campaigns, I stay one step ahead of the players.
If they know the game, or are familiar with this kind of scifi (having read Altered Carbon for example, or books by Peter F. Hamilton), I use more of the game tech and concepts than with players who don't. It's easier for me as well as for them.
The first game I ran in eclipse phase started like this : players are in a VR environment, trapped in an electronic "lifepod" around earth. They downloaded into it when the earth was lost. They lived there for many years and as the game begins, the VR environment begins to fail around them, building disappearing, people disappearing too. I ask a few rolls from them, and as they fail it, they to disappear. When the last of them lose conciousness, usually in the town church as the darkness closes on them, they all awaken in a huge room, still VR. The pod has been recovered by a joined venture of corporations who then offers them identured work to get e new body. maybe 20 or 30 years of work... While they wonder about what they can do about it, they notice a smaller booth (Imagine the room like a convention of salesman, each corporation with a booth, propaganda posters, a big smile). This is for an unknown organization (Firewall but they don't know it) who offers them a job and when the job is done a new body of their choosing (within reason). Nobody but them see the booth (VR can be usefull). The mission is to go to mars and find a missing scientist. There rusters morphs will be given to them to accomplish the mission.
This is the occasion to explore the whole ego vs morph theme, what the rusters implants can do (all same morphs for this part makes it easier to explain). Later when they find the scientist (many occasion on the way to explain things like the mesh, egocasting, combat...) the organization let them choose a new body as they are sent to Venus...
I ran the game twice, the first time as a introduction to a campaign, the second time as a oneshot convention kind of game. Players where both time happy with it as it allowed them to discover the game concepts gradually over the course of the session. And for me a controlled environnement (not really railroady because they could have done whatever they wanted, including running away in the ruster morphs, but they didn't) was much easier to run, it was easier to keep track of all the things.
But yes I agree, it is much harder to introduce players to Eclipse phase, than it is to Savage World. And in this perspective it is probably less suited to one shot games.
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