Design Diary

Blackmage asked on the forums:
Off the top of my head I would like to see more on morphs. They're one of the core elements of the game(as far as I have seen) but I don't think we heard or seen much of them but that the effect physical stats/skills. It be interesting to see how they work and what can morphs do. It also be nice to see an example of a morph.

One of the ideas we had from the beginning when designing Eclipse Phase was to highlight resleeving, or the ability to digitally emulate your mind, upload it into a computer, and download it into another body. This raised the question of what characteristics stayed with/were determined by the character (the "ego"), as they moved from body to body, and which stayed with/were determined by the meat (the "morph"), or metal in the case of robot bodies.

We knew we wanted a skill-based system, and it made sense that skills were copied along with the character's mind when they uploaded. At first, we considered ditching any sort of physical attributes system entirely, but that nullified the idea that certain morphs provided certain (usually physical) advantages and also sort of countered one of the central elements of transhumanism: enhancing your body.

Skill-based systems also require a mechanic for making tests when a person doesn't have a required skill. There needs to be some sort of inherent/natural ability that characters can default to when they don't have a skill. For realism, it is better if this inherent ability differs according to the skill in question. Everyone can throw a baseball with some modicum of skill, but not everyone can do a backflip as easily or perform brain surgery.

So we went with an "aptitude" system -- a set of 7 inherent abilities that everyone has, and that are part of the ego. These are functionally similar to typical RPG attributes, but conceptually different. Since aptitudes are based in your ego/mind, and not your morph, there is no "strength" or "dexterity" aptitude. Instead, we have aptitudes like Somatics, which represents your ability to use the physical characteristics of whatever morph you are in to the best of its capabilities. Instead of a "Charisma" type attribute, which often wavers between physical attractiveness and guile, we have a Savvy aptitude, which is a measure of your social perception and your ability to manipulate people.

Every skill in the game is linked to and built up from an aptitude. So your Kinesics skill, used for "reading" others' body language, is linked to your Savvy aptitude. If you lack Kinesics skill, you default to Savvy. When you buy Kinesics skill, you raise it up from your Savvy score.

Tying this back to morphs, we get back to the idea that certain morphs are designed to increase your capabilities in certain areas. This is often represented with aptitude bonuses, and sometimes skill bonuses. Aptitude bonuses are potent, however, because every aptitude bonus also boosts _all_ skills linked to that aptitude. So an Olympian morph, for example, which is designed for increased athleticism, provides a boost to your character's Somatics aptitude, and thus all Somatics-linked skills. If you switch to a Menton morph, which is gengineered for enhanced cognitive abilities, you'll lose that Somatics bonus but gain a bonus to Cognition, and all Cognition-linked skills, instead. This means that your morph has a direct impact on your skill capabilities.

Morphs also affect your character in other ways. Your character's Durability, Wound Threshold, and Death Rating are determined by morph -- essentially how much damage and wounds you can take.

Morphs are divided into two rough categories: biomorphs and synthmorphs. Biomorphs are (mostly) biological bodies, and include standard unmodified humans ("flats"), gengineered human clones of various abilities, uplifted animal bodies, and so-called "pods." Pods (from "pod people") are biological bodies force-grown grown as separate parts and assembled with a mostly cybernetic brain (this growth process being much faster than standard transhuman clone growth). Synthmorphs are essentially robots with cybernetic brains, and they come in all shapes and sizes, from androids/gynoids to spider bots and stranger things.

Almost all morphs come with a basic set of bio-mods and implants, including faster healing, longevity, immunity to most diseases, and cybernetics that provide wireless network access, augmented reality, and digital mind backups. Synthmorphs have their own unique advantages and disadvantages.

When you resleeve into a new morph, there is usually a period of adjustment you must go through in order to acclimate to your new body. There is also the chance of suffering from mental stress, either from remembering your death, losing time/continuity, or having an identity crisis with your new looks.

Here's an example of a morph listing from the core book: the bouncer. We previewed the artwork for this one earlier.

Bouncers
Bouncers are humans genetically adapted for zero-G and microgravity environments. Their legs are more
limber and their feet can grasp as well as their hands.
Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Grip Pads, Oxygen Reserve, Prehensile Feet
Aptitude Maximum: 30
Durability: 35
Wound Threshold: 7
Advantages: Limber (Level 1) trait, +5 COO, +5 SOM, +5 to one aptitude of the player’s choice
CP Cost: 40
Credit Cost: Expensive

There's a new thread about Eclipse Phase over at rpg.net. Some questions were raised about Eclipse Phase's percentile system, and I thought it'd be good to repeat/summarize my responses over here.

As we've noted elsewhere, Eclipse Phase uses a d100 roll-under mechanic, with some tweaks from traditional percentile systems. To some folks, this may seem an odd choice, and the trend is for new games to have their unique systems, to stand apart from others.

Our intent with Eclipse Phase, though, was to go for "complex setting, simple mechanics." So we opted to go with a d100 system since such mechanics are fast and easy, it's not difficult to gauge odds when the gamemaster needs to fudge numbers, most gamers know the system already, and it's super easy to each. There's a lot of heavy concepts and advanced technology in the setting that can be overwhelming to people unfamiliar with the genre, and we wanted players to be able to focus on that and not sweat the rules.

For people who prefer other systems, d100 is also very easy to convert. This is also one of the reasons we're releasing Eclipse Phase under a Creative Commons license -- to encourage people to post conversions to other systems if they choose.

Now, though we play Eclipse Phase up as being a simple system, that shouldn't be mistaken for saying it's a system that doesn't cover all of the aspects of the game. The core book is still 2/3 rules text. So it's simple in the sense that the core mechanics are easy to grasp, the same mechanics are used throughout the game, and we made efforts to keep things less complex when possible. We also ditched some rules that are common in other RPGs but to my mind are pointless bureaucracy, like gear weights and encumbrance rules. That said, it's a comprehensive system, and includes rules for everything from switching bodies to nanofabrication to rep systems to psychosurgery to hacking to mental stress. Combat is easy to grasp, but the rules also account for a wide range of factors, from sweeping fire with beam weapons to tactical networks to gravity effects on range.

While we've used Unknown Armies as an example comparable system a few times, Eclipse Phase does have some key differences from UA and gets a bit more complex. For example, we have a Margin of Success/Failure mechanic on some tests, but this is usually broken down as an Excellent Success (MoS 30+) or Severe Failure (MoF 30+). We went with this because actually doing the math to see what the MoS is on a test is kind of annoying, but it's much easier to eyeball whether you got a MoS (or MoF) that is 30 or more. So when you get an Excellent Success in combat for example, you do extra damage, reflecting the fact that you got a nice, solid hit.

There are *some* things that we leave open to GM interpretation, but these are usually things that are better handled with roleplaying or GM decision anyway, such as when exactly a fork diverges enough to become an NPC, or certain psychosurgery effects, or how long it takes to travel from Mars to Saturn, etc.

Overall, I think we did a good job of tailoring the rules to fit the game and providing a system that is fast, easy, and consistent. It may not be the system for everyone -- so if down the line you make a conversion to another game system, we'd love to see it. We plan on providing links to such material through our Resources page. 

One of the problems any space-faring sci-fi game has to deal with is how to handle space travel and space combat. Both of these can be significant glitches in an RPG setting. Space travel can mean a long delay between action, as the players must board a ship to get from one setting locale to another. Planets and space stations are not stationary objects, however, and so travel time can very between the same two places by a matter of months or more, as their orbits take them nearer to or further from each other. Add in the many different types of potential spaceship drives, and you have another complication. Some games deal with this by including charts and complex mathematics, actually requiring you to do the math to figure out how long your journey from Mars to Saturn will take.

Space combat is an even trickier beast. There are entire games built around space combat alone, and most of them are quite complex. Tracking relativistic movement in a three-dimensional environment where numerous scientific and technological factors (gravity wells, drive types, targeting systems, weapon ranges, etc) play an important role is tricky stuff. On top of this, if you’re seeking to be realistic, than space combat is likely to be a deadly affair. One missile or well-aimed laser or even a high-speed collision with some debris can mean the end of your ship–and your whole party of PCs along with it. And the role of the characters within space combat is yet another issue–quite often, unless it’s a game heavy in space combat–your character may have no role to play within the battle. It’s not unusual for the lives of an entire team of PCs to rest upon a couple of die rolls made by the one player who happens to be the pilot or gunner.

When designing Eclipse Phase, our goal was to minimize all of this fuss. We didn’t want long journeys between stations to drag out game play. We didn’t want to bog down the game with complex space combat rules. We feel spaceships should be treated as settings rather than collections of stats and that spaceship combat should be dramatic window-dressing, a plot device rather than a guillotine hanging over the character’s necks should one of them make a bad roll.

Luckily, Eclipse Phase already has the built-in aspect of mind emulation and uploading, so we have a ready alternative. Want to get from Luna to Venus? Back up your ego, trade in your body, and get securely beamed over to Venus, where you will be downloaded into a new body of your choice. Though such travel isn’t necessarily cheap or without its drawbacks, it certainly allows us to bypass some of the problems above. Likewise, if your travel plans don’t exactly require physical activity, you can perhaps get by with sending a fork of yourself, a digital partial copy that you can integrate back in later.

This isn’t to say that Eclipse Phase won’t have some details on ships and space travel/combat, but we’ll be keeping such things light. If there’s demand, we can always explore it in a supplement. In the meantime, there are easier ways to get around.

photo credit: NASA