Eclipse Phase Review.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:11 am

Did somebody seriously join this forum just to argue " powergaming = Bad" and "ROLEplaying not ROLLplaying "

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:11 am

Leress wrote:Taleran, why is Frank's review bullshit. Please elaborate.

Leress please read the entire thread before making yourself look stupid, thank you

Taleran, do you realize that right now, you're probably convincing more people NOT to play the game than Frank is?

their loss

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:13 am

Ah, yeah, I thought so...Okay, trying again.

DUDE!

TALERAN!

I'm pretty sure Frank pointed out the best choices as part of showing why the combat and background rules SUCK, not as an optimizer's guide.

You know, around here we actually dislike it when things are presented as being viable but, when taking other game features into account, AREN'T.

This forum as a whole and this board specifically is mostly concerned with mechanics and design. Can you agree that it's shitty design to have the melee-focused people be jokes compared to the people who use ranged weapons, despite melee skills costing as much as ranged skills? Do you like making characters you're excited about playing in a setting and then seeing them get killed embarrassingly easily because they brought a sword to a gunfight? Can you agree that it's kinda weird how one character's background can be pure awesome while the other hurts him?

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:17 am

Maxus wrote: This forum as a whole and this board specifically is mostly concerned with mechanics and design. Can you agree that it's shitty design to have the melee-focused people be jokes compared to the people who use ranged weapons, despite melee skills costing as much as ranged skills? Do you like making characters you're excited about playing in a setting and then seeing them get killed embarrassingly easily because they brought a sword to a gunfight? Can you agree that it's kinda weird how one character's background can be pure awesome while the other hurts him?

1. the game is based on choice and again I can think of a ton of ways melee combat can be made viable, also it depends on the situtation and the enemies, also this is where the setting comes into play

What if a paticular place you go bans person ranged weaponry?

2. Depends on the circumstances you've never had a hilariously awesome death?

3. No because background literally means how someone was brought up so obviously they have to be different

and seriously the rules in the game at their core are just like WFRP and Dark Heresy just with more customization options thats it percentile systems are easy and work

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:19 am

Leress please read the entire thread before making yourself look stupid, thank you

I have that is why I am asking that question. All I see is that you don't like the way it was written but you haven't actually refuted any of Frank's critiques.

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:23 am

Explain to me why someone who grew up in a universe like that would decide to grow up and be a sword mercenary.

Now explain why they would keep doing that without either getting killed or discouraged?

Making nonviable decisions is bad roleplaying.

Also, this is a forum primarily about the analysis and design of RPGs. If it has some entire subsystem that doesn't work, we'll pick up on that. A game with entire subsystems that will shoot you in the foot if you try to use them and/or other subsystems that break the game over your knee if you use them, or a game with terrible character creation, is a worse game than one without. A science fiction game where combat is resolved with guns needs only about a page about melee combat, titled "improvised weapons" so that nobody who wants to do cool stuff will accidentally build a melee character.

Another point, nobody threatened you with moderators. Seriously, you have to do something like post dismemberment porn for the moderation to take notice here. Roy, the only person you were threatened with, is just a jerk.

Finally, nobody was arguing about your post count. We were telling you that it does not reflect well on you to introduce yourself this way. First impressions mean a lot.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:24 am

TarkisFlux wrote:Or, as MGuy wisely put it (god, did I really just type that? you've come a long way MGuy), "lurk more", at least until you're able to retort with something more substantial than play style differences.

It wasn't Mguy, it was Mask_de_H or something close to that.

Taleran wrote:'lurk more' what do you think this is 4chan?

The only reason I focused on the first part of his post is because the second half is quite honestly bullshit

first try to scare him with his measly post count, second repeat everything everyone else who responded to my first post said, 3rd threaten with mods 4th LURK MOAR

and secondly anyone who tries to use post count as a legitimate reason for anything on the internet is a tool

Stop being an idiot. Idiocy is bad.

1) Lurk more is a phrase, it means, 'hey, maybe you should know what's going on here before you come out guns blazing' It's just faster and easier to say.

2) No one gives a flying fuck about your post count. No one is judging you based on your fucking post count. He was judging you based on your posts. You know, those things you typed. Those.

3) No one threatened you with Mods at all you rere. You should have read a thread before you started posting, and if you had, you'd know that Roy is not a fucking mod at all, and the Mods will never be after you. You will whine like a bitch and leave because you hate us if you keep being this fucking stupid, but the mods will not be involved.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:32 am

[quote="Taleran"']lurk more' what do you think this is 4chan?[/quote]

No, but I think you'd have better luck there at this rate. I could give two shits about your post count; that you have yet to post anything of even passing value from a design, content, or even intelligent idea standpoint does make me less inclined to deal with you further.

Which is a new record actually, so points for that.

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:32 am

IGTN wrote:Explain to me why someone who grew up in a universe like that would decide to grow up and be a sword mercenary.

Now explain why they would keep doing that without either getting killed or discouraged?

Making nonviable decisions is bad roleplaying.

BECAUSE ITS THEIR CHOICE

wether its a good one or bad one does not happen until you actually put it into practice

ALSO THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION, you know things that can move really fast nano concealed weaponry and cloaks that can camo you from all sense for an hour

all what you are saying shows is you haven't even bothered to look over the rules you are so easy to accept are flawed

Stop being an idiot. Idiocy is bad.

1) Lurk more is a phrase, it means, 'hey, maybe you should know what's going on here before you come out guns blazing' It's just faster and easier to say.

so you are advocating that I should have had 'more posts' before saying what I said

2) No one gives a flying fuck about your post count. No one is judging you based on your fucking post count. He was judging you based on your posts. You know, those things you typed. Those.

the first word in the post is '3', its basically saying watch it

3) No one threatened you with Mods at all you rere. You should have read a thread before you started posting, and if you had, you'd know that Roy is not a fucking mod at all, and the Mods will never be after you. You will whine like a bitch and leave because you hate us if you keep being this fucking stupid, but the mods will not be involved.

this is rich trust the guy with 'x(small number' posts to know who the mods are but when you name drop on a forum with someone who hasn't been around assumptions are made

and I did read a thread before posting, THIS ONE, it interested me so I posted here

leave? are you guys crazy if one different opinion is enough to generate this then I can't leave

the best part of the review though is on this SERIZ BUIZNEZ rules forum a good chunk of the first part is on concepts that don't need to be there THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE RULES....

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:01 am

Taleran wrote:
1) Lurk more is a phrase, it means, 'hey, maybe you should know what's going on here before you come out guns blazing' It's just faster and easier to say.
so you are advocating that I should have had 'more posts' before saying what I said

No. I am advocating that you read more posts before you post at all. I am advocating understanding the forum so well before you post that when you make your first post it is intelligent instead of retarded. I lurked here for two years before I ever made a single damn post. Then I made no more than one post every few weeks for another year. As such, when I started posting regularly, and even when I started posting, I did not have no idea what I was dealing with, I knew exactly what I was fucking dealing with.

Lurk more does not mean make more posts. It means understand the history of the discussion before posting. Your first post can totally be a criticism of Frank's review. As long as you understand the community, like by reading the entire thread about Pathfinder FAQ, which is basically exactly this thread, but sub Pathfinder for Eclipse Phase.

the first word in the post is '3', its basically saying watch it

See again, if you understood this forum you wouldn't make these retarded claims. No one here cares about post count. The first part about how you have three posts is a background statement so that you cannot accuse him of selectively choosing only your three stupid posts to review. He reviewed the content of your three posts, because the content is what matters.

this is rich trust the guy with 'x(small number' posts to know who the mods are but when you name drop on a forum with someone who hasn't been around assumptions are made

Well, since I knew who Roy was before I ever damn posted, and knew who all the Mods are. Yes. Because once again, I understood the forum before I posted. Because I want my words to be informed, rather than blithely and retardedly spewed. So I fucking lurked moar.

and I did read a thread before posting, THIS ONE, it interested me so I posted here

But you also didn't take the time to find out what this thread actually was, by for example, looking at any of the eight hundred review threads in this forum, or reading about what IMHO forum is actually for, which is of course, game design.

Because you are retarded and your words are just fanboy spew instead of intelligently considered thoughtful critique.

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:05 am

I don't like your opinion therefore its wrong

you could have typed that and saved all that time...research an internet forum what the fuck are you on about you think this place is so special that people need to invest time to read up all over the place before even posting....

. As such, when I started posting regularly

and the rest of your post is BE MORE LIKE ME I AM NOT BROWN NOSING AT ALL

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:05 am

Oh look guys, it's a troll. Let's encourage him.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:07 am

Taleran wrote: What if a paticular place you go bans person ranged weaponry?

That's called "DM Fiat" or "Throwing the melee guy a bone at the expense of everyone else because he elected to make a useless character."

Now, maybe they could go to a place where violence is banned, and in that case they can use their non-combat skills to solve things, and in situations where, were the ban not in place, they couldn't really just say "Fuck this, I'm going to shoot it instead". But when the ban is just there to say "Sorry, you can't use the superior option, no guns, no grenades, fox only, FINAL DESTINATION!" then you are a cumslut.

2. Depends on the circumstances you've never had a hilariously awesome death?

Maybe once. But I wouldn't make a habit of it, and a game that makes it happen all the time is a bad game if character creation takes more than a minute.

3. No because background literally means how someone was brought up so obviously they have to be different

Different, yes, but equal. "You were raised by dolphins. You have an acute sense of hearing like a radar, and a bonus to underwater/zero-G melee combat." and "You ran away and joined the circus. You have a bonus to balance, and to throw weapons and catch thrown weapons." for instance, are different but roughly equal.

Compare with the raised by dolphins and "You were raised in a backwater valley where nothing interesting ever happened. You have a penalty with technology, and a penalty to social rolls in big cities."

and seriously the rules in the game at their core are just like WFRP and Dark Heresy

You compared it to those systems, and I think that just goes to show how bad it is. Those games are utter shite, and I could probably make a better game in my sleep.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:09 am

For the record, Koumei actually has turned out games more fun than them, just for kicks.

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:10 am

Koumei wrote:
Taleran wrote: What if a paticular place you go bans person ranged weaponry?
That's called "DM Fiat" or "Throwing the melee guy a bone at the expense of everyone else because he elected to make a useless character."

Now, maybe they could go to a place where violence is banned, and in that case they can use their non-combat skills to solve things, and in situations where, were the ban not in place, they couldn't really just say "Fuck this, I'm going to shoot it instead". But when the ban is just there to say "Sorry, you can't use the superior option, no guns, no grenades, fox only, FINAL DESTINATION!" then you are a cumslut.

2. Depends on the circumstances you've never had a hilariously awesome death?
Maybe once. But I wouldn't make a habit of it, and a game that makes it happen all the time is a bad game if character creation takes more than a minute.

3. No because background literally means how someone was brought up so obviously they have to be different
Different, yes, but equal. "You were raised by dolphins. You have an acute sense of hearing like a radar, and a bonus to underwater/zero-G melee combat." and "You ran away and joined the circus. You have a bonus to balance, and to throw weapons and catch thrown weapons." for instance, are different but roughly equal.

Compare with the raised by dolphins and "You were raised in a backwater valley where nothing interesting ever happened. You have a penalty with technology, and a penalty to social rolls in big cities."

and seriously the rules in the game at their core are just like WFRP and Dark Heresy
You compared it to those systems, and I think that just goes to show how bad it is. Those games are utter shite, and I could probably make a better game in my sleep.

1. its more like making all your locations not exactly the same and again only 1 possible reason using melee might be relevent

2. you know this game has a block of text about throwing oneself onto grenades to save teammates due to egoforks and memory backups right?

3. why people aren't all equal

4. opinion, irrelevent (both ways I know)

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:27 am

People aren't all equal, but a party of characters in a tabletop should be. It slows the game down and can kill the mood if they have to bail out party member all the time. It also makes presenting appropriate challenges to the party tricky, considering what may give a fair fight to most of the party may just murder the underperforming guy. Every. Time.

Taleran · Post by **Taleran** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:30 am

Maxus wrote:People aren't all equal, but a party of characters in a tabletop should be. It slows the game down and can kill the mood if they have to bail out party member all the time. It also makes presenting appropriate challenges to the party tricky, considering what may give a fair fight to most of the party may just murder the underperforming guy. Every. Time.

the aspect we are talking about is one part of character creation and does not limit the player to being crap

please read the book involved and maybe stuff like this won't come up

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:42 am

Maxus wrote:For the record, Koumei actually has turned out games more fun than them, just for kicks.

And that's why we love her. Still need to find a group who wants to play Dungeon Crusade with me. You think the people in my sig would be down for it, but they have an on again-off again hateon for this place.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 5:34 am

Taleran: you really need to calm the fuck down. I personally think that Mask_De_H shouldn't have even mentioned the post count, but that is no excuse to rage angrily at everyone else with quickly thrown out posts which haven't been looked over and often don't say anything.

English might be a second language, you may have dyslexia, or your shift and period keys on your keyboard might be broken, but some of your posts I find difficult to understand because you insist on using capitals to emphasise and you don't use complete sentences with useful tools such as punctuation.

You have a couple of reasonable points:
[*]You don't have to use everything in the setting at once, but this ignores the fact that lots of groups will do so anyway. Also simply using two competing paradigms means that players may not know which paradigm will be actually used and be unable to create good characters and so be unable to roleplay.

[*]And yes, I can easily see how melee can be a situationally useful option. Most notably on small spaceships where heavy weapon fire could damage the hull and kill everyone. So Frank's assertion that everyone has one weapon skill and one huge weapon can be too simplistic for a lot of games. But that doesn't stop the fact that once the spaceship is on the planet the sword is completely useless compared to guns.

But you have some extremely stupid ideas. Such as

Taleran wrote: 3. adding in more options can't possibly add harm to a game

This is wrong. Extremely wrong. In a fantasy game adding an option of laser guns is a new option that does great harm to the game.

And if you were playing a sci-fi game where instead of having an integrated hacking subsystem which utilised the rules of the setting in a way that made sense, you instead added an option to use psychic powers but to balance it ruined verisimilitude by making hacking make no sense then an increase in options has ruined the game world and the game in general.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:06 am

Parthenon wrote:
But you have some extremely stupid ideas. Such as
Taleran wrote: 3. adding in more options can't possibly add harm to a game
This is wrong. Extremely wrong. In a fantasy game adding an option of laser guns is a new option that does great harm to the game.

And if you were playing a sci-fi game where instead of having an integrated hacking subsystem which utilised the rules of the setting in a way that made sense, you instead added an option to use psychic powers but to balance it ruined verisimilitude by making hacking make no sense then an increase in options has ruined the game world and the game in general.

Also, even if the options DO fit with the setting, if they actually, genuinely SUCK and taking one is pretty much a self-inflicted punishment...I wouldn't call that an option. If it costs the same as something else, it should provide roughly equal benefits, to keep things on an even keel.

TavishArtair · Post by **TavishArtair** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:42 am

Taleran wrote:
TavishArtair wrote:
For one, everyone has a bias, so just get over that.

For two, you will note that most soldiers nowadays specialize largely in ranged combat training with only the basics of hand to hand combat, and no one wastes their breath calling them powergamers when they kill a hundred times as many opponents as people with sharp sticks (or sharp metal sticks, whichever).

ITS A ROLE PLAYING GAME, since when does what people do all the time come into play, besides I can think of countless legitimate concerns as to why you would want to use melee weapons, beside the point I know

All the fucking time. Because it IS a role playing game.

People play fucking roles. These roles are there for a reason. Sure we make up a fantasy universe and add a bunch of other conceits, but once we do so we play from that in a way that makes sense, because roles make sense. Even crazy people make sense. There is a cause and effect in the deepest insanity... because they're fucked up they do fucked up things.

And when the rules are fucked up people do fucked up things. Like use ranged weapons in melee combat. Or use melee weapons in ranged combat, depending on which way the rules are fucked! But if the rules of the world are such that ranged weapons are supreme (which is pretty much our real world, to be honest), then fuck, you use ranged weapons.

If you think that setup is dumb, make it so that people can't use ranged weapons in melee combat and that ranged weapons don't rule all. But don't whine at someone pointing out that the rules make it so everyone wants to use ranged weapons.

Ravengm · Post by **Ravengm** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:24 am

Taleran wrote:3. adding in more options can't possibly add harm to a game

Oh lord. Really?

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 11:32 am

TavishArtair wrote:But if the rules of the world are such that ranged weapons are supreme (which is pretty much our real world, to be honest), then fuck, you use ranged weapons.

Never!

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 1:10 pm

Mask_De_H wrote:
Taleran wrote:
Kaelik wrote: Yay! A fanboy!

obviously anyone with a different opinion must be a fanboy.....
Bro, you have three posts, your first one is talking shit about a review using standard fanboy logic and your most recent is the classic "Break up posts and fail to make points rebuttal-fu" technique.

You're not going to win this. You're not going to change our minds unless you respond in a detached, rational manner and not go for knee-jerk responses and ad hominems. A word of advice before Roy sniffs out the fresh meat: cut your losses here and lurk more.

Also, he seems to think you're threatening him with a mod. I'm no mod, and people don't get modded here unless they do something over the top even by over the top standards such as post pictures of pedo dismemberment pron.

I do however smite imbeciles for being imbeciles.

On that note...

1: Learn to use the shift key. no one wants to read lowercase runon drivel that takes forever to get to the point, if it even has one

They might want to read it if you can demonstrate a six year old's ability to write in complete sentences. Of course your ideas are still bad and you should feel bad, so they'll only be responding with some variation of fuck off but regardless, that's an improvement.

2: Learn what the Paizil Fallacy is. Then don't invoke it. The Paizil Fallacy is when you attempt to dismiss facts as opinions (and therefore meaningless on the Internet) because you do not like them or do not agree with them. So named because the Paizo forums are the most notorious for this. It also comes up when you attempt to hide behind opinions as unattackable, though that would be more of the EN Fallacy. Which isn't as catchy.

3: Learn what the Stormwind Fallacy is. Then don't invoke that either. The Stormwind Fallacy is where you assume there is an inverse correlation between optimization and roleplay, therefore roleplaying means gimping yourself, and if your character is not a figurative or literal cripple you're a dirty powergamer. Not to mention that if you were really a roleplayer, then asking yourself 'What would my character do?' would quickly return something to the effect of 'Do not undertake obviously suicidal courses of action, use a goddamned ranged weapon in a futuristic world because they have even more of an edge over melee weapons than they do in present day Earth'.

Depending on your responses to this, you will either be redeemed or smited into oblivion (hint: Demonstrate some intelligence and sapience).

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 2:59 pm

Wow. Walked away for a bit and all crazy broke out. I'm going to just skate by the tirades about how RIFTS is a better setting than Mouseguard or that ROLEplaying not ROLLplaying or whatever that was supposed to be. Time I suppose for the next and probably final part of the review before we go straight to questions and answers:

Part Three: Farther than ever, and not Far Enough

Eclipse Phase is a revolutionary game, although ironically throughout you'll be hitting your head against some piece of throwback bullshit that makes you rail at the cowardice of conservatism. It's a weird feeling. Flipping through the book I actually lost count of how many times I saw something that I had told Rob we should do with Shadowrun only to be told that such an idea was “too radical” - and in EP these things feel refreshing but honestly insufficient. The use of the Singular They gets what is essentially my own email on the subject condensed into a text box. And yet the game tries to stake out such a bold vision that even that falls short of what is needed.

Transhumanism: What it Is and Is Not.

Right on page 18 the game hits its first stumbling block even as it throws out several expansive and exciting themes. Transhumanism is not about improving the human condition, it's about surpassing the human condition. The authors seem to think that there's some sort of transitional state where people who cure diseases and enhance their growth with science and crap are “merely” transhuman, while people who actually push the limits to unrecognizability are posthuman. That's a tragic misunderstanding of the entire movement. And that misunderstanding severely hampers the delivery of the entire game.

To the transhumanist, using science to overcome the limits of biology is a smooth curve whose goal is to achieve things that evolution alone cannot or will not deliver. The sharpened stick is a transhuman act, medicinal intervention is a transhuman act, and transferring one's mind into a digital storage system is a transhuman act. Since the transformation is one of technology rather than “mere” evolutionary biology, the specific point at which transhumanism crosses the barrier of actual speciation is almost wholly irrelevant. You don't stop being transhuman simply because you cross the threshold of species – indeed that's one of the defining thresholds. But even that's just a step, not the goal. The goal doesn't ever really stop, at least as far as any of us can tell from this end of the racetrack.

Eclipse Phase really misses the boat on what this means for “extinction.” A swarm of microdrones that collectively compromise an electronic sapience is not the same “species” as a hyperintelligent octopus, nor is it the same as a vat grown humanoid sensate or a Krangbot. And yet, all of these people are people, they can all share culture, and it is that culture that moves forward across generations in the transhuman model. The people of New Quebec may be dolphin uplifts in mecha suits or supercomputers in flesh suits, but they are collectively the People of New Quebec. Each of them “is” whatever they want to be, but the loss of any of them would be a loss to the social gestalt that allows them this expression.

Eclipse Phase had the opportunity to confront this paradox head on by the fact that there are very different cultures in the world. And a lot of them are very compelling. Right there on page 24 where they set out the fact that humanity is without a single governing body or ideology and that each habitat is left to control and define itself – that's fucking perfect. A Jovian and a Barsoomian aren't the same species in any meaningful fashion, they don't share the same cultural impetus or driving memes. They are separated by vastness of distance more tremendous than has ever parted humans since the dawn of time. And yet, there are threats in the solar system that are a threat to the existence of both. They have common cause because they are sapient beings and they want sapience to continue to exist. The game has a powerful metaphor available to it: Cambodian is gone. The Khmer people didn't stake a foothold into space before the fall of Earth, and now their culture, their language, their sapient existence is lost to the darkness and fading memory of time. That's what the game is about, it's about fighting for a way to exist after all of the basic commonalities that mankind has taken for granted since the first ape touched the first monolith are irretrievable.

And yet, it falls back to the same tired D&D motivators: “A bunch of humans are going to die, oh noes!” Yes, your octopus heavy water miner should care, but the game at no point makes the dominos and survival argument it needs to in order to get that across. Transhuman existence is well established, but transhuman thought is never embraced by the authors, leaving the motivation much less compelling than it should be.

The Fall: The Less Said the Better

Really only one thing needs to be said about The Fall: The Less Said About it, the Better.

And I don't just mean that the entire storyline is hopelessly tangled up with the TITANs, which are a boring and poorly utilized story, or that setting everything so closely seeming in the future serves to strain credibility around the edges. That's all true, but seriously the game is not about the Fall of Earth. Earth is neutralized and everyone lives in space habitats, the specifics of the disasters that brought that state of affairs about are at best a distraction from the story that is actually being told.

The entire game is supposed to be set just ten years after the Fall, and that's severely not enough time for the cultures to be as different and alien to one another as they are supposed to be. Literally every fucking voter remembers the great war and shit. You're only in your second post Fall election cycle. The gates are only a few months old so there aren't any gate societies, making their entire inclusion completely pointless. The “exocolonies” are like 6 months old, if you go there it's just a bunch of guys driving bulldozers around and digging foundations.

The game has 70 years of timeline, and 60 of those years are taken up with TL;DR bullshit about the time when Earth ran everything that is a fucking tangent to the story that makes no damn difference to anything. Do I give a fuck when space elevators went up on Earth? No, I don't. Earth is a smoking ruin for whatever reason, and the existence or lack of it of space elevators on old Earth is a waste of space in the already overcrowded book.

And the worst part is: there's no advantage to making any of that crap into recent history. The game world allows people to be stored digitally indefinitely before being retransfered to a body of some kind. And that specifically happens. If you wanted to play Faye from Cowboy Bebop and be totally from before the Fall, you could just do that. The Fall could have been a hundred years ago – or a thousand even. And you would still have a completely perfect excuse for having a pre-fall human pop out of a vat in a strange body at the start of the story. It's not even hard.

Sample Character Background I made up in 30 seconds wrote: Nguyen was a biochemist in Old New York, years before the Fall and he never saw it coming. What happened to him in the Fall is a mystery to him, because he is the recently recovered backup fork left in one of the safety satellites surrounding Earth. If he ever updated himself in the years leading up to the Fall, those backups have yet to be recovered. The sat containing his existence was only just recovered as salvage, and he is badly out of date as to the current state of affairs. Now that he has been given a new lease on existence, he has been handed the recovery bill. With no remaining assets to his Ego, he needs to make some credits fast.

I mean fuck, “ten years” really makes my blood boil.

Math Fail, p. 38 wrote:Before the Fall, the solar system had a population of approximately eight billion, with all but five million of these people living on Earth. The Fall wiped out almost ninety- five percent of transhumanity, and today the population of the solar system is slightly less than half a billion, with almost all of these transhumans living off the Earth.

Ugh. For those keeping track at home, that means that at least 400 million people survived from Earth, and only 5 million actual spacers exist – meaning that the cultures, clades, memes, and divisions of the spacers should be totally fucking irrelevant. This is like the entire population of the United States moving to Iceland. Your chances of even seeing someone who speaks Icelandic or has an Icelandic culture is almost nonexistent.

The population numbers and the timeline are full of fail. It essentially just turns the entire game into Battlestar Galactica by the back end. The fact of the huge first generation Earth-refugee bias in the populations of well everything drives the apathy level towards the Sol factions way too high. I mean shit, you're Vetnamese, right? Only 10 million of your people escaped the Fall, making it by far the worst and most iconic tragedy in Vietnamese history. And the New Vietnamese outnumber all the spacer civilizations together by two to one. Your culture isn't Titanian, Martian, or Jovian – it's fucking Vietnamese. New Vietnam matters more than all these hypercorps and exocolonies and brinkers and autonomists combined. And New Vietnam isn't even the tenth largest refugee civilization. And that's just a damn shame, because the habitat civs are by far the coolest part about the book.

Singularity: Don't Go There

Singularity Fiction is a troubled genre. The “Geek Rapture” has a lot of conceptual problems and delves quite explicitly in the realm of the mystical. It's inclusion in a game is so problematic that it probably should never be attempted. It's certainly never been done well, I sincerely doubt it ever will be.

And here's why: the entire point of the Singularity as a concept is that it represents a point where “progress” is so rapid as to render prediction impossible. I mean yes, some people go even farther with it, wanking off to “infinite knowledge” and the powers of gods and shit, but that kind of philosophical dribble is not even required for singularity fiction. But even at its most basic level it should be childishly simple to see why unpredictability has no place whatsoever in a game. It's problematic even in single author fiction, because the entire point is a discontinuity between one moment and another. And that makes it very easy to lose a reader. And basically assured that you will lose a coauthor in a cooperative storytelling game.

Every time the game mentions singularity anything it drives off the stupid cliff. As discussed earlier, it's worst in the Hacking section, but everything is worst in the hacking section, so that doesn't cordon off a lot of new ground.

By defining the singularity in terms of godlike intelligence and nigh infinite power and explicitly an accomplished fact, it pretty much relegates everything that anyone achieves or strives for to meaningless obscurity. Transhumanity did its thing, and you're not it. And you'll never be it. It's like playing Triceratops: Time of the Meteor. And the worst part is that the authors don't even seem to understand that. If you're going to set the game as the Left Behind series for Geek Rapture, you need to acknowledge that on some level.

I'm not saying it's an opportunity that people should avail themselves of, but it's certainly an opportunity they attempted and missed. Singularity as a setting element is frankly a bad idea, but it definitionally requires itself to be more central than they made it here if it is to be included at all.

Social Distances and Constructs

The coolest part of the whole game is the idea of social distance as distinct from spatial distance. You are in constant communication with basically everyone on your hab complex. If you walk into a wifi protected room, you are instantaneously farther away from people just a meter from the door than they are from people kilometers away.

The solar system is broken up into cultural regions, which is wholly incompatible with the timeline and demographics established elsewhere in the book, but is much more awesome than any of that TITANs shit, so let's go for it. It should have been taken even farther of course, but that's a common quirk throughout the book.

The primary thing that got missed here is that people still have “knowledge” and “language” skills and such. That's throwback thinking. Consider: you walk into a new region that is completely cut off from the outside worlds. Maybe your new region is a slowship to Pluto or is an isolation chamber that a fringe group is using to store their apocalyptic plot. Whatever. The point is, that you personally carry IMDB, all of Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, TV Tropes, PubMed, IUPAC, and a realtime translation service to every known language in the solar system with you. Even without the ability to harvest any meaningful data from the region around you, you still just ambiently have more information at your fingertips than you could actually think about in a thousand years. People shouldn't be “knowing” facts, they should be “finding” and “contextualizing” facts. The very way these people interact with the idea of knowledge is completely alien to modern human thought – and it's really exciting. But the skills just don't match up with that reality. The sample characters “know” things like Academics: Economics and Laguage: Mandarin, and that's just completely fucking irrelevant to people who carry the entire internet in an effectively instantaneously searchable format in their belt buckle or even their actual bones.

The whole thing of minds and sleeves and complete information overload pretty much demands an entire system of data management, filtering, and contextualization that just doesn't exist here. And it's a tragedy considering how much space is effectively wasted on the Mesh section anyway. Lots of sections in the culture section should be required reading for anyone making a science fiction game: the Metacelebrities segment is brilliant. But again and still, a lot of ramifications are not really addressed and the time frames are persistently not deep enough. I mean, how can Angelique Stardust have been played by over a dozen people if those events were only 7 years ago? People are immortal, really seems like that's seriously only one or two people max.

But let's get back to the organizations that are supposed to exist: The Planetary Consortium with its Martian Rusters and Hypercorps, the Outer System with its Libertarians and Utopians. These are incredibly cool, and it is a god damn shame that they were shunted into a Battlesstar Galactica format where they compromise less than 1% of the population and are apparently drowned in a sea of refugees.

-Username17