Eclipse Phase: Breaking Light

[Cynical Cat]

The whole Titanian population basically counts as National Guard, so the Marines' have their supply situation covered.

[Hotfoot]

Okay, so having talked it over with CynCat, we will be doing Eclipse Phase again next week to allow for initial continuity and familiarity with the system. And to continue torturing Havoc.

Enjoy.

[White Haven]

Eclipse Phase: Getting Havoc F-Rep Whether He Wants It Or Not.

[General Havoc]

Have I mentioned that I hate all of you lately? It bears repeating.

[White Haven]

Ah, Havoc is broadcasting hatred waves in my general direction. It must be Thursday.

[frigidmagi]

Wait how is Havoc blasting hate waves in your direction make it any different from any other day of the week?

[rhoenix]

Wait how is Havoc blasting hate waves in your direction make it any different from any other day of the week?

Volume and density, pretty much.

[Karrick]

Does this mean we could perform a double-slit experiment to test the quantum mechanical characteristics of hatred?

[rhoenix]

Does this mean we could perform a double-slit experiment to test the quantum mechanical characteristics of hatred?

I sense science that requires both forks and unsuspecting habitats. Volunteers?

[Hotfoot]

Tonight is once again time to visit the future. On that note, some notes with regards to programming, downtime, and the use of such.

Extended tests, such as research, programming, simulspace creation, and the like, assume that you are taking 8 hours out of every day to do this work over a period of weeks. You can compress this or extend it through various methods, for example:

If you can fork via the multi-tasking implant, your forks can work on the project in four-hour blocks before being re-integrated into your primary consciousness. Other forking methods are less clean, but doable. However, deviation may occur with too much time outside of your own head, and that is a bad thing.

Your average morph requires 3-4 hours of sleep a day. This means that those forks above can work while you sleep. You, however, must rest. Unless you have additional implants that let you sleep for less time or extend out how long you can operate without sleep. With some very rare exceptions, this works out to, at best, 2 hours of sleep every 48 for biologicals.

Synthetic Characters, including any robots and infomorphs, do not require sleep at all to function. You are machines, and can work around the clock.

Anything that gives you additional mesh actions will allow you to work at faster speeds as far as programming and simulspace creation goes, as well as research and investigation. However, anything that gives you additional mental actions, such as the Mental Speed nanoaugmentation, will give no bonus to programming and simulspace, but will enhance research and investigation.

To improve a program to a +10, you require two weeks of programming. That's 8 x 14 = 112 hours of overall work. Every 24 hours for a normal character with basic biomods means 24 will get you 20, so assuming breaks for conversation, food, and sleep, but little else, you can compress down two weeks worth of work into six days. Synthetics, meanwhile, can shave that down to just over four and a half. Throw in various methods of speeding yourself up or tasking out parts of the work to forks, and you're looking at roughly two days. The programming test is made at the penalty of the bonus you're trying to achieve, and no, you can't double or triple up on that for one test. The skilled programmers of the group are able to do 2 programs every 4 days or so, and the programs only degrade once every three months or so. Even assuming they do nothing but program for 90 days, that's 45 programs they can keep up to date without problem, and that's without x60 simulspace, which makes program upgrading a joke.

Between a group that has maybe 14 programs and at least four people who can program to varying degrees of skill, you can see why I cut time-compressed simulspace programming out of the loop for this.

Jailbreaking existing programs (i.e. making it so that everyone can have a copy of that sweet new program you bought), takes two months of work, which again can be compressed down by the above system, or pirated copies can be sought out depending on where you are, but that carries with it certain risks. Cleaning out a bad pirated copy will depend on how badly damaged, sabotaged, or useless it is, but it can be as little as two weeks to as much as four months. Sometimes you just get garbage.

Creating new programs from whole cloth takes even longer, and requires sub-tests involving the field you are working in. How long it will take depends on a variety of factors that you will have to discuss with me between sessions unless this is less a program and more a shell script.

The same rules apply to creating and improving simulspaces as well as Blueprints.

On the concept of Simulspace and CM Blueprints, they are like programs. If you have one and want to improve it, it will require a programming roll and time spent. However, instead of things like Infosec giving bonuses, skills relevant to the item you are modifying will matter more (and may require a separate check depending on the complexity of the device/world).

Additionally, in ALL cases of modifying programs, simulspaces, or blueprints, the cost of the item in question will factor into the difficulty of the test.

Trivial +20
Low +10
Moderate 0
High -10
Expensive -20
Each step above Expensive is an additional -10, to a maximum of -60.

[Hotfoot]

Also note that taking your time on a task action involves a +10 for every 50% increase to the duration of the task, while rushing gives you a -10 for every 10% decrease you take, up to a maximum of -60 for 60%.

[Hotfoot]

No game the 24th or 31st. I know it should be obvious, but there you go. When we come back it's likely to be one more week of Eclipse Phase, and then if we all get our characters in, hopefully Mage, where I'll be playing Eclipse Phase.

[Hotfoot]

Just to remind everyone, Monday January 7th is still on for Eclipse Phase. If there are any complications, please let me know sooner rather than later. Also, make sure you get your Mage characters to CynCat by then, or he will take no mercy on you.

[Hotfoot]

Well, with unknown entities coming at you from multiple angles in a pitch black Triad laboratory, it's time to start the new schedule. Next week, Mage. The week after that, Eclipse Phase. Unless something happens that alters that schedule, it's one we'll keep to. Ideally, I'm going to try and make sure that the weeks I'm running are NOT the weeks I'm larping right before the game, to stave off burnout, so there may be weeks were we run several sessions of Mage or Eclipse Phase back to back, but we'll sort that out as it comes.

[Karrick]

Blerg, I think I'm going to have to bail tonight. I have to be in work early and I'm already pretty tired. I was so looking forward to lasering things to death too. =\

[Hotfoot]

Well, sadly your absence was rewarded with some Trauma, fortunately only a minor one.

[White Haven]

I do find it amusing that both of the...glandless...robots are the ones who freaked the fuck out about the crazy shit.

[Cynical Cat]

I do find it amusing that both of the...glandless...robots are the ones who freaked the fuck out about the crazy shit.

That's because you don't have adrenaline turning the switch to "fight or flight" and can instead think about how fucked up this shit you've just seen is.

[White Haven]

In my defense, I passed my will save with flying colors. This may have something to do with claws being a somewhat academic concern.

[Hotfoot]

As I gear up for the madness that is five weeks of larps and conventions, I'm reviewing the combat data from Monday night, and a few things are to be noted.

1. I have been remiss in the -20 per additional target per round penalty. It's not been overly consequential yet, with everyone's amazing attack scores, but it will feature more prominently in the future. Note, this does not apply to walking fire or spray fire, or combinations thereof.

2. Thermobaric explosives (and other uniform blast weapons) do not end at the 5/10/20 meter mark, but instead continue on as normal explosives past that point. Note that fray will move you meters away from the blast, which may have consequences for your next firing round depending on how far you move.

3. Fray: It's...so far seemed sort of useless. You have to beat the attacker's roll (or crit), and you're rolling half your normal skill, and the only thing that gives you a boost is going fully defensive, which takes up an action. Cover is an attacker penalty, not a fray bonus. We'll see how it works, but suffice to say, forcing a critical success on a fray check with Moxie will likely be a major boon.

4. Explosions: Yes, it's somewhat realistic to make it -2 or -4 damage every meter past the initial point of impact, but lord is it a pain to calculate out sometimes. I'll be coming up with ideas for this one.

5. Aiming and Mental Actions: The rules are a little sketchy here, but I like the idea that faster headspace allows for more shenanigans. It may be broken, we'll see, but for now, I'm allowing it, but with one caveat: your smartlink has to be working to get the full bonus. If your smartlink is offline, you get the benefits of the quick action aim from each complex action, while still having a normal quick action for other things.

6. Movement: Good lord this bothers me. The movement systems are NOT detailed in how fast they make the character, and every human moves the same freaking speed. So here's the deal. First off, if it's not been clear, as your quick action, you can move. Walking gets you 1 meter, running gets you 5. Running gives you a -20 to hit, which can be cancelled out by gyro-mounts. Sprinting is a complex action that uses free running to get you 1 meter per degree of success to a maximum of +5 (double normal movement). Hovering/Flying follows basically the same framework. You get quick actions even in action phases where you don't get complex actions. This means you can move around even when you don't get to attack.

Now, some things have different speeds. It gets maddening. So, in order to make things easier for everyone involved, I'm going to work out a basic formula for movement. One that makes it so that some people can be faster than others, and if you want, you can get gear that lets you go faster.

Ionic drives, for example, are shown as 12/40, while other things are 4/16, and "normal" humans are 4/20, which of course translates to 3/10, 1/4, 1/5. I'm going to work on something, it may end up being not so different, but it'll be a damned chart, so help me...

I'm also working on new weapon types. If you have suggestions, feel free to make them.

[Hotfoot]

Okay, so we're gearing back up for Eclipse Phase, at least that's the plan. In order to make me not go insane, I've been working on various projects. One of which is getting movement handled better. As it stands, your "average" human moves at a rate of 4/20, which means four meters per turn at a walk, twenty meters at a run. This is modified by gravity, as you might expect. In play, this means that in a given action phase, your effective speed is 1/5, as in each pass, you can move 1 meter at a walk or 5 meters at a run. Both walking and running let you attack, but unless you've got special gear, you'll be at a penalty if you run. The only downside to walking? You can't use your normal quick action to aim, because you're walking.

If you want to move faster, you can sprint, which requires a freerunning (or piloting) check, with an extra meter added for each degree of success. Sprinting, however, is not quick action and thus precludes you doing anything else. Given that this only adds a handful of meters to a movement action and removes your ability to attack, this might be a bit lame at the moment. I'm giving it thought.

But, currently, there is no way to really increase your movement, and motive systems for robotics are hideously poorly designed in this game. They just say what they do, they don't give a speed or any sort of advantage/disadvantage for the damn things, other than that some cost more. It's maddening. Here's a post from the EP forums that goes into some more detail. The last paragraph is really the clincher here, but the rest of the data is interesting.

Lunar Flier Flight 8 40
Reaper Hopper 4 20
Swarmanoid Hopper 4 20
Creepy Hopper 4 12
Speck Hopper 1 5
Recon hopper Hopper 4 20
Flexbot Hover 8 40
Reaper Ionic 12 40
Kite Ionic 12 40
Recon flyer Microlight 4 20
Sky mote Microlight 4 20
Slitheroid Rolling 8 32
Swarmanoid Rotor 4 32
Gnat Rotor 8 40
Guardian angel Rotor 8 40
Saucer Rotor 8 40
Slitheroid Snake 4 16
Recon snake Snake 4 8
Arachnoid Thrust vector 8 40
Sundiver Thrust vector 12 60
Interceptor Thrust vector 12 200
Kite Thrust vector 8 40
Explorernaut Thrust vector 4 20
Manipulator cuff Tracked 2 8
Sentry bot Tracked 4 16
Thumper Tracked 4 20
Reaper Vectored thrust 4 20
Automech Vectored thrust 4 8
Case Walker 4 16
Synth Walker 4 20
Arachnoid Walker 4 24
Flexbot Walker 4 16
Reaper Walker 4 20
Swarmanoid Walker 2 8
Creepy Walker 4 12
Dwarf Walker 4 12
Servitor Walker 4 20
Q-morph Walker 2 4
Steel morph Walker 4 20
Steel morph (liquid silver) Walker 4 20
Scorcher Walker 2 4
Kite Walker 2 8
Spare Walker 2 8
Ku Fu Walker 4 20
Recon hopper Walker 4 20
Retriever Walker 4 20
Automech Wheeled 4 8
Dr Bot Wheeled 4 16
Servitor Wheeled 4 20
Ku Fu Wheeled 4 32
Explorernaut Wheeled 4 20
Dragonfly Winged 8 32
Speck Winged 1 5
Kite Winged 8 32
Zephyr Winged 8 40
Robomule Walker 4 20

Going through them I got the following: Flight 8/40, Hopper 4/20 except for the speck, Hover 8/40, Ionic 12/40, Microlight 4/20, Rolling 8/32, Rotor 8/42 except for swarmanoid, Snake 4/16 or 4/8, Thrust vector 4/20, 4/40, 8/40, 12/60 or 12/200 (!), Tracked 2/8, 4/16 or 4/20, vectored thrust 4/8 or 4/20, Walker 4 (except for swarmanoid and quartz at 2)/4-20, Wheeled 4/8-32, Winged 8 (except for speck)/32-40.

Madness, I know. So here's how I intend to both make this more straightforward and beneficial. First off, for robots, I'm going to take the most common movement rates for each mode, check them against the cost, and adjust accordingly. If you're spending 20,000 credits for a mode that gives the same speed as another mode that costs 5,000 credits, if there's not some sort of significant benefit already worked in, you'll go faster. Secondly, there will be speed upgrades available for the various modes, fuel upgrades for modes requiring reaction mass, and stealth upgrades (or penalties) for specific movement systems. Some, such as winged and glider, will suffer in microgravity, because they rely on gravity for their function. Additionally, the size of the robot in question will be a factor. Smaller robots can only generate so much thrust, but are generally lighter. Bigger robots, the reverse is true. What this will mean is that some systems may have tradeoffs depending on your frame.

Now, what this means for organics. Well, first off, you don't use any of the above systems, at least not normally. Still, you should have SOME variation in how quickly it is you move aside from different actions. If you've got crazy sprinter legs or are just a badass in general, you should move faster than the barely able to catch his breath supergenius. I'm working on a basic equation that will assist in this matter, but I have to make sure that most people would fall inside the 4/20 average. It will be easier to increase the second number than the first, however, I'll just put that out right here.

Still working on new weapon types and so forth. Some may appear as we play. Rest assured that I will test them before I hand them out. And by test them, I mean shoot them at you.

And by you, I mean mostly Marcao.

Maybe entirely.

We'll just have to see.

[Hotfoot]

I'm sorry, but your simulspace is currently unavailable due to server errors. We are working on a solution as quickly as possible. Subscribers will be credited for lost time.

[Hotfoot]

Is everyone's simulspace code ready?

[frigidmagi]

I may be a few minutes late, depending on if my class runs late.

[rhoenix]

Hey guys, due to errands I may be a couple minutes late.