(no subject)
Jan. 4th, 2013 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonI keep looking and looking at our Eclipse Phase collection.
This is a game that makes me want to believe in it, makes me want to love it. I think that there's a bunch of exposition I need to get through about certain aspects of the hobby before I really try and tackle talking about Eclipse Phase specifically - so here goes!
Now - you might not have been a gamer, you might be only kind of a gamer, you might have once rolled the die on a drunken night in Jr. High, or you might have been going to the same D&D homebrew game every week for a decade. These are all alright things! You're fine. You're wonderful in fact. But really - I feel like you are missing a goodly portion of what the hobby has to offer.
Generally my opinion re: The Hobby is that it is a new kind of fiction that incorporates a shared set of rules and notation that is to comics & movies & TV - what scales and clefs are to music - it's a way of shorthand scripting a text that can be translated by those with the education or a gift. Sure, not every musician can read music and not everyone who can read music is a musician - but it's a way of transmitting performance through text - I think there's a lot of that in the Hobby. Generally - if you're rolling the dice you're getting together with some friends or at least like-minded enthusiasts and you're telling a story. The framework of the story is provided by the most ambitious and crazy member of the team - the one with enough time to make up worlds, languages, continents, ethnicities, cultures - the conceited, arrogant godlike one. Usually, you'll have to take turns at this. In a game like this the Setting is player-defined and the characters end up learning about things right alongside their characters. This is not the easiest distinction to make - but I guess I'd say that the most authentic person that you can play in a game like this is a traveller, a foreigner or an amnesiac - since you're not likely to be in on the joke - so to speak.
There's a whole second way of playing games though and that's to go with a framework - a premade setting. A lot of my current favorite games are built into a setting. When this works - it works because mechanical things within how the game is played reflect ideas about how the setting works. There's union - between story and the experience of playing the game. When this works - I think it's somewhat transcendent. The trick here is that you have to find a setting that you are into - that you will buy and play and where you are comfortable to exist as a person. That's not too hard - there's plenty of that. Now the next thing is to have a system of rules and metaphysics and realities and everything that mesh with the setting and make the notes within the thing sound harmoniously. A few really great games do this. I'll get to them - but I'll speak up for Shadowrun and Legend of the Five Rings as my favorite examples. Here the rules and the setting have a synergy that makes the action and the play really work together.
Eclipse Phase, as a book of settings - as a book about a world that you might want to exist in - it's very, very close to my heart. The idea of the game is that once people have moon colonies and mars colonies and are exploring the solar system at a pace - then the world is destroyed mysteriously. Then you're in a fairly hard-SF setting with decade long travel times and death by vacuum a serious danger - cool. Adding to the cool is a carrying forward of a lot of the cyberpunk game & later cultural ideas that have become popular. People are largely digitized or even purely, originally digital sentiences that can be swapped between different bodies- robots - gorillas (I love gorillas) fleshy-sex-robots, Mars-men, Sun-whales - everything. It's all about the posthumanity that comes off of the Singularty - all Vinge. It's fine, and the execution on this is pretty okay. They got smart and you can, if you want play an octopus. A space octopus. You can play a space octopus that has a digital familiar that is also a miniature owl-gnome. You can play a space-octopus with a digital familiar and your brain could be that of an uplifted Neanderthal. You can be an uplifted Neanderthal that lives in a space-octopus body who is saving up for a sun-whale body. So, right, if you're not in love with the ideas present in this game I kind of give up on caring to be friends with you.
There's a lot more to the setting than Posthuman/post-singularity stellar survival and rebuilding - which is kind of a shame. There's a goodly portion of lovecraftian horror - the space-danger that I find to be... too much. There's so much story and interest, there's aliens, there's extrasolar exploration, there's the strange new politics of the future - and then there's... A lot of talking about unspeakable horrors that drive you mad from thinking about them. I like this kind of thing just fine - but I think it's now overdone and tired. I'm not going to be all - "I hate the Weird Story!" Because I sure don't. But when it appears in Eclipse Phase it seems more like - "well shoot, with all this in there where are we gonna put the other kitchen sink?" It doesn't need the transdimensional alien horror - it can do fine with all of it's other elements and... just generally I'm bored as hell with ancient astronauts and the Monolith and... Really it seems cracked - the setting - because it's between a really novel world with new ideas and new people, really new - and then without really comprehending what a story with these kinds of people would be - they threw them some tired old versions - paranoia, strange geometries. There's a lot more that could have been done and I find that this bit of the setting is just lazy storytelling.
Now, obviously it's a game - part of the Hobby - so you can ignore the parts that don't suit you and so much suits me that - shoot - why am I complaining when I could be dice-rolling? Well, I could be dice-rolling and dice rolling and dice rolling. Eclipse Phase - it's got so many neat ideas and they're just... wasted on a really buggy, irritating system of rules. Out of the box any of the sample-characters have only a 60% chance of ever accomplishing anything using their best skills - so without a lot of campaigning your character is probably going to feel really incompetent - and especially incompetent when you realize that it's a sentient nano-swarm that's failing at things like - navigating zero-g vacuums and so on - stuff that doesn't seem hard and hey- you're a robot and... no. Nobody who made this game understands probabilities - so no - you fail at everything. The contested rolls system is even worse - you try and roll low - under your skill on a percentile dice - d100 - and if you are low, and the other person is also low then you see who rolled the higher number and they win. It seems okay except that practically this never happens. This never happens at the table that you roll your dice, note that you have succeeded and then leave your dice laying as you wait for the DM to roll and calculate. Past that the fighting system is pure dice-grind, just over-and-over-and-over again combat attacking. Should you have a sniper rifle, and should you be sort of competent at using it, a Sniper Rifle that shoots Bullets longer than your hand - should you hit a guy with it - a regular guy who is not a robot-space-octopus - that guy will probably survive 3-4 shots with your giant gun - meaning that fighting is boring, and that it goes on for a long time and again - you will never feel effective or competent. Which sucks - because this game could be great, it could go all the way - but it doesn't.
It's got some really great ideas, some pretty mediocre ones and they're all wrapped up in a system that's just garbage - so it's infuriating - because you could make your own excellent saga about a Robot-Octopus-Whale-Sun-Monster-Internet-Concensus or something - but that if you're going to do that - you're better off playing in your own sandbox than trying to play along with the guys who built this one.
This is a game that makes me want to believe in it, makes me want to love it. I think that there's a bunch of exposition I need to get through about certain aspects of the hobby before I really try and tackle talking about Eclipse Phase specifically - so here goes!
Now - you might not have been a gamer, you might be only kind of a gamer, you might have once rolled the die on a drunken night in Jr. High, or you might have been going to the same D&D homebrew game every week for a decade. These are all alright things! You're fine. You're wonderful in fact. But really - I feel like you are missing a goodly portion of what the hobby has to offer.
Generally my opinion re: The Hobby is that it is a new kind of fiction that incorporates a shared set of rules and notation that is to comics & movies & TV - what scales and clefs are to music - it's a way of shorthand scripting a text that can be translated by those with the education or a gift. Sure, not every musician can read music and not everyone who can read music is a musician - but it's a way of transmitting performance through text - I think there's a lot of that in the Hobby. Generally - if you're rolling the dice you're getting together with some friends or at least like-minded enthusiasts and you're telling a story. The framework of the story is provided by the most ambitious and crazy member of the team - the one with enough time to make up worlds, languages, continents, ethnicities, cultures - the conceited, arrogant godlike one. Usually, you'll have to take turns at this. In a game like this the Setting is player-defined and the characters end up learning about things right alongside their characters. This is not the easiest distinction to make - but I guess I'd say that the most authentic person that you can play in a game like this is a traveller, a foreigner or an amnesiac - since you're not likely to be in on the joke - so to speak.
There's a whole second way of playing games though and that's to go with a framework - a premade setting. A lot of my current favorite games are built into a setting. When this works - it works because mechanical things within how the game is played reflect ideas about how the setting works. There's union - between story and the experience of playing the game. When this works - I think it's somewhat transcendent. The trick here is that you have to find a setting that you are into - that you will buy and play and where you are comfortable to exist as a person. That's not too hard - there's plenty of that. Now the next thing is to have a system of rules and metaphysics and realities and everything that mesh with the setting and make the notes within the thing sound harmoniously. A few really great games do this. I'll get to them - but I'll speak up for Shadowrun and Legend of the Five Rings as my favorite examples. Here the rules and the setting have a synergy that makes the action and the play really work together.
Eclipse Phase, as a book of settings - as a book about a world that you might want to exist in - it's very, very close to my heart. The idea of the game is that once people have moon colonies and mars colonies and are exploring the solar system at a pace - then the world is destroyed mysteriously. Then you're in a fairly hard-SF setting with decade long travel times and death by vacuum a serious danger - cool. Adding to the cool is a carrying forward of a lot of the cyberpunk game & later cultural ideas that have become popular. People are largely digitized or even purely, originally digital sentiences that can be swapped between different bodies- robots - gorillas (I love gorillas) fleshy-sex-robots, Mars-men, Sun-whales - everything. It's all about the posthumanity that comes off of the Singularty - all Vinge. It's fine, and the execution on this is pretty okay. They got smart and you can, if you want play an octopus. A space octopus. You can play a space octopus that has a digital familiar that is also a miniature owl-gnome. You can play a space-octopus with a digital familiar and your brain could be that of an uplifted Neanderthal. You can be an uplifted Neanderthal that lives in a space-octopus body who is saving up for a sun-whale body. So, right, if you're not in love with the ideas present in this game I kind of give up on caring to be friends with you.
There's a lot more to the setting than Posthuman/post-singularity stellar survival and rebuilding - which is kind of a shame. There's a goodly portion of lovecraftian horror - the space-danger that I find to be... too much. There's so much story and interest, there's aliens, there's extrasolar exploration, there's the strange new politics of the future - and then there's... A lot of talking about unspeakable horrors that drive you mad from thinking about them. I like this kind of thing just fine - but I think it's now overdone and tired. I'm not going to be all - "I hate the Weird Story!" Because I sure don't. But when it appears in Eclipse Phase it seems more like - "well shoot, with all this in there where are we gonna put the other kitchen sink?" It doesn't need the transdimensional alien horror - it can do fine with all of it's other elements and... just generally I'm bored as hell with ancient astronauts and the Monolith and... Really it seems cracked - the setting - because it's between a really novel world with new ideas and new people, really new - and then without really comprehending what a story with these kinds of people would be - they threw them some tired old versions - paranoia, strange geometries. There's a lot more that could have been done and I find that this bit of the setting is just lazy storytelling.
Now, obviously it's a game - part of the Hobby - so you can ignore the parts that don't suit you and so much suits me that - shoot - why am I complaining when I could be dice-rolling? Well, I could be dice-rolling and dice rolling and dice rolling. Eclipse Phase - it's got so many neat ideas and they're just... wasted on a really buggy, irritating system of rules. Out of the box any of the sample-characters have only a 60% chance of ever accomplishing anything using their best skills - so without a lot of campaigning your character is probably going to feel really incompetent - and especially incompetent when you realize that it's a sentient nano-swarm that's failing at things like - navigating zero-g vacuums and so on - stuff that doesn't seem hard and hey- you're a robot and... no. Nobody who made this game understands probabilities - so no - you fail at everything. The contested rolls system is even worse - you try and roll low - under your skill on a percentile dice - d100 - and if you are low, and the other person is also low then you see who rolled the higher number and they win. It seems okay except that practically this never happens. This never happens at the table that you roll your dice, note that you have succeeded and then leave your dice laying as you wait for the DM to roll and calculate. Past that the fighting system is pure dice-grind, just over-and-over-and-over again combat attacking. Should you have a sniper rifle, and should you be sort of competent at using it, a Sniper Rifle that shoots Bullets longer than your hand - should you hit a guy with it - a regular guy who is not a robot-space-octopus - that guy will probably survive 3-4 shots with your giant gun - meaning that fighting is boring, and that it goes on for a long time and again - you will never feel effective or competent. Which sucks - because this game could be great, it could go all the way - but it doesn't.
It's got some really great ideas, some pretty mediocre ones and they're all wrapped up in a system that's just garbage - so it's infuriating - because you could make your own excellent saga about a Robot-Octopus-Whale-Sun-Monster-Internet-Concensus or something - but that if you're going to do that - you're better off playing in your own sandbox than trying to play along with the guys who built this one.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-01-05 01:46 pm (UTC)B) Actually this is a good point to talk about Oubliette! One of the reasons I like to use tropes is to be in-between those two types of games, the "totally made up world" & the "campaign setting."
no subject
Date: 2013-01-07 06:59 pm (UTC)It's one thing to have a shared story in a created setting that is built from the foundation to be just that - it's another thing entirely to be caught up in communal fan-fiction. Since the older the school the closer it came to fan-fic - the less and less appealing a game setting was.
This was probably the main thing I didn't like about the Forgotten Realms - started up as a shared setting purely for gaming - and came to be dominated by all this fiction - you had clashes between the players who wanted to do Drizzzzt homages and those who wanted to kill Drizzzzt. All fanfic.
So you want to do your own thing and break the mold and be original!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-06 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-09 03:18 am (UTC)That's not true, a good number of the sample characters start with 60% in their base skills, not including native language, and not including Morph bodies, and not including test difficulty (+/- 30).
Which is a pretty good level to start with, imo. The character is good, but still has a motivation to improve.
The contested rolls system is even worse - you try and roll low - under your skill on a percentile dice - d100 - and if you are low, and the other person is also low then you see who rolled the higher number and they win.
Roll-under, roll high. Pretty standard for contested percentile systems these days.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-09 01:01 pm (UTC)To me this reminded of nothing so much as Palladium though! Where the character abilities begin artificially low just so you can progress to a playable level.
I think about this game a lot and how I'd fix it up. First thing - I think I'd ditch percentile and go straight to D10 - round the statistics up to the next 10 - streamline the thing.
I like things about this game, a lot of things - I think about how I could make it work for me.
Though I have come to see that the fighting element of a game is a place where you and I may tend to differ.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-09 09:57 pm (UTC)Moving from percentile to d10 makes sense if the effects of the game are in ten percent increments. This is not the case with Eclipse Phase, where both Aptitudes and Skills are purchased in single point increments. Making the change to a d10 system would require a lot of work.
I'll have to have another look the combat system. :)