5.1 KiB
[HSF-ish] Eclipse Phase: A role-playing game of transhuman conspiracy and horror.
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Author: u/d12barnaby The Vile Offspring*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2g1f7m/hsfish_eclipse_phase_a_roleplaying_game_of/
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Score: 12
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Created: 2014-09-10T20:37:57
Post:
Although this is a game, the rulebook itself contains a very well-realized setting. With the sole exception of the Exsurgent Virus, no piece of technology is sufficiently unexplained to be considered magic. The rulebook is available for free here
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (16 minutes later)
I played this with some friends at GenCon (with myself as the gamemaster). Mechanically, it plays a lot like Call of Cthulhu, which makes a lot of sense given some of their inspirations. It's got:
- Uplifting
- Brain copies
- Effective immortality
- Robot morphs
- Existential threats
- Grey goo scenarios
And a whole bunch more. In addition to that, they put out a huge amount of content for free as PDFs (though the books are also amazing, and relatively cheap as far as these things go). In what other setting can you play as an uplifted whale? (Technically D&D lets you create one with the druid spell Awaken and then possess it with Magic Jar, but it's not the same, dammit.)
u/Escapement [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (2 hours later)
I really like a lot of Eclipse Phase, but there's problems I have with it too:
- The demographics and numbers and time-setting of the book are badly chosen and poorly thought out.
- A lot of the rules are mechanically not very good. There's a lot of unnecessarily complicated chargen considering the central game conceits. A few of the mechanical subsystems are not very well put together. The combat is unncessarily complicated for how deterministic it ends up being.
There's a lot to like in the setting and ideas, and the product itself's licensing, and the various suggested campaign elements. I suggest focusing on the awesome setting and theme elements and trying to avoid the actual rules as much as possible. Much like CoC in that respect.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (7 hours later)
Probably true. We didn't get into it deep enough to find too many problems, especially since we were running the Quick Start campaign which likely puts the system's best foot forward. I was mostly impressed by the breadth of transhumanism that they managed to cram into the source book.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (an hour later)
The concept of Mimir is also interesting. Was it a Friendly AI? Who knows? It gave us a bunch of useful things and made us work hard to get them, so maybe.Mixed it up with a different thing.
u/Integrated_Delusions [+1] The Flying Kiwi (5 hours later)
Mimir is from Nova Praxis, which is similar to, but not the same as, Eclipse Phase. Similar in that it's a sci-fi RPG, different in that there is virtually no explanation for the tech. And as I recall, everything Mimir made, it just gave to people, no effort required.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (9 hours later)
Oops.
u/None [+1] (10 hours later)
I like EP also (the writers clearly read Yudkowsky, given that the game features AI safety, existential risk, etc.) but I wouldn't call it hard SF - exhibit A: FTL transmissions are possible in the setting, though expensive, via "quantum entangled particles" (whaaaaat).
I don't like its mechanics at all (for instance, the sanity system - ADHD, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder can be caused by trauma in adults???). I'd prefer to write a freeform or dice-light RP in the setting. There's a fan made EP-to-Fate conversion that I've been meaning to look at for a while, actually.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (20 hours later)
exhibit A: FTL transmissions are possible in the setting, though expensive, via "quantum entangled particles" (whaaaaat)
This isn't that out there. The no-communication theorm is some complex stuff, and there was a stretch of time where physicists thought that maybe you could use entanglement for FTL communication. It's still not "hard" science fiction, since it's known to be false, but it's not so far from hard science fiction as FTL travel.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Yeah, I figured.
Other things that aren't hard SF: one of the major effects of the Exsurgent Virus on the setting is that psi exists, even if uncommon. If I had my druthers any work with psi in it would get thrown out the hard sci-fi airlock. Bodily. Even if there's a good "reason" for it in-story, it's something I hate to come across as a surprise in a work that otherwise almost follows established physics. Which I know is a personal pet peeve, but... yeah.