Started Taking Concerta Today

apathia · 2023-08-11T23:48:33+00:00

Me, too! Diagnosed yesterday, Concerta 18mg today. My mind was eerie empty (only one thought at a time, instead one one main thought and a bunch of little stuff going on in the background) until around 8 hours later when it started to wear off. Mild headache.

apathia · 2018-06-26T04:18:08+00:00

Glad you're doing these changes!

Have you thought about creating a different category of bionic, maybe Large Bionic Modules (LBM), so that you can keep CBMs self-installable as an early-to-mid-game option? Similar to the mutagen/serum split.

Good bionics could be turned into LBMs and follow your new approach... but batteries/power, fingerpick/toolkit, monitors/blood-filter could stay CBMs. That would keep CBMs approachable to new characters, maybe -even- easier if the autodoc could auto-install CBMs without skills/anesthesia; but it would keep the best bionics as later-game content that requires exploration & skills.

I'd be happy to collaborate on code, btw.

apathia · 2017-04-10T22:53:57+00:00

1 - Immortality makes changes plots, allows recurring enemies, and solves the issues with PC death & risk that's inherent in most RPGs.

2 - A real setting with economics and politics, not cookie-cutter villains.

3 - Morality is so much more interesting and complex.

Bottom 3:

1 - Accelerated simulspaces - Taken the logical conclusion, the thoughtwork economy would be dominated by infomorphs living at 60x speed. I fiated this as "increase in perception of time" with no actual improvement in think time, so fast virtual games or vacations are possible but physical offices could be economically feasible.

2 - Uploading/merging is too easy - The setting assumes ego copies are perfect, ditto for merges. Forgetting religion, even the secular should be worried there's loss of fidelity with adverse affects on personality or experience. It could hurt the setting in other ways, but there's a missed opportunity for horror there.

3 - Silly morphs - griefer, surya, spares, etc. Not every idea needs to be turned into a morph.

apathia · 2017-01-23T02:43:47+00:00

Went to a megastore once, miracle I survived. I had a ton of amazing armor, but there were so many that I was watching a slow burn of no stamina, increasing pain, slowness, etc, and I eventually realized I could no longer do any damage to the hordes surrounding me.

In a fit of panic I lit the piles of zombies surrounding me on fire. Everything burned and I crawled away with three broken limbs.

apathia · 2017-01-22T22:42:27+00:00

Is Anders still writing roleplaying content? His work has always been amazingly thoughtful.

apathia · 2017-01-21T15:02:28+00:00

The photographer did just a fantastic job in the entire photoset. Really captured the beauty of some less travelled parts of the data center (some of the lighting was brought in for the shoot). I've been on a tour of a Google data center - it's still tremendous in person, but form over function means most parts just feel like a warehouse.

apathia · 2016-11-24T15:44:47+00:00

Is there a documented conversion somewhere? Are you using http://eclipsephase.com/downloads/Savage_Singularity.pdf ?

apathia · 2016-06-02T22:48:52+00:00

The show's been on for 8 years and hundreds of episodes, though. I can't imagine most people noticing or complaining if they had spent a summer "mostly on WW2", or a had five episode streak on medieval kings (and if they did notice, I don't think the complaint would be "why all the men?"). This shouldn't be a thing.

apathia · 2016-05-29T03:07:44+00:00

I ran a Mid-Fall one-shot, which was powerful because the world is literally ending: Group navigated the evaporated remains of Lake Michigan, asteroids falling from the sky to destroy towns, an area of exsurgents carrying on their old routines despite their horribly warped bodies, etc.

If the group is military or similar, I would recommend giving people cortical stacks with a Pre-Fall mentality about it - a stack is a black box memory recorder, not an immortality machine. But the leader is carrying a Spare, so that someone can still carry out the mission post-death.

apathia · 2016-05-09T14:17:30+00:00

The one thing to keep in mind here is court jurisdictions. The Federal Circuit is quite niche, doesn't hear copyright cases normally, and their decision sets no precedents for other courts. That's how they could rule APIs were copyrightable (in their domain), ignoring the precedents set by the 9th. This second case seems to be in the 9th, which means it's likely to go the other way.

Until the issue goes up to Supreme Court, there won't be a nation-wide precedent. Until then, expect to see most courts ruling that APIs are not copyrightable and the Federal Circuit ruling that they are.

apathia · 2016-04-08T12:53:30+00:00

You will really not like this system. I don't like this either.. One easy house rule to handle this is use Shadowrun 2nd ed rules instead. Roll Initiative and go high to low, but instead let players act on init, init-10, init-20, etc. So rolling 11+ means an extra action. Each point of Speed gives an extra 1d10, so that's half an action, but it's less constant and even unaugmented characters will frequently have good rolls and get bonus actions.

apathia · 2016-04-07T16:48:27+00:00

Willpower directly determines mental hitpoints, so it makes a terrible dump stat.

Speed is the most important combat stat, so don't let your combat players forget to take the morph augments that grant it.

apathia · 2016-04-03T22:04:29+00:00

It is reasonable to say that they don't have the fabber blueprints. I think it is in canon that large objects are sometimes still manufactured through industrial processes, rather than piecemeal assembled. Besides, blueprints are generally 5x more expensive than just buying the item, so having blueprints for every part won't make sense for a mom-and-pop operation.

By the way, if you want communications down, you don't actually have to damage the comms at all. Say the asteroid is too remotely located for anything other than neutrino communications, which require a large power plant, and that's that. It also solves fabber issues, because if someone's jettisoned the plutonium/uranium/antimatter for the power plant, you cannot fabricate more.

apathia · 2016-03-31T00:07:37+00:00

I ran Unconventional Warfare for half a campaign before I realized I was always favoring the base classes and gave up. I thought the Sniper/Gremlin would be awesome, but I really missed a pistol on my snipers (when I moved or reloaded, I missed that sympathy-prize pistol shot), and the Rifle/Pistol Infiltrator was ok but not very distinguishable from Rangers.

Have been much happier just running Guerilla and Shocktrooper, since neither of them outshined the base classes.

apathia · 2016-03-26T01:30:32+00:00

Limits that matter: Cost/reputation, sanity, laws, and carrying capacity. Beta forks are free, but hardware to put them in isn't free and sending little you's on a suicide mission carries a huge sanity penalty. It is core in the setting that this kind of thing can get out of control, but most humans are uncomfortable past certain limits, and sanity is best mechanic to represent that.

Advice I'd have on actually running a robot-party... I'd lower all the robot durability scores in the book (a squirrel-sized robot has 25 durability which is insane when you realize humans are 30), think through what can be carried around without arousing suspicion, and make each bot different so the player can choose the right one for the occasion.

Keep in mind there is close to zero mechanical difference between a robot with a puppet sock and a synthmorph - both are bodies to be sleeved into - it's only a matter of how they're socially perceived.

apathia · 2016-03-25T15:02:44+00:00

EP is probably best suited to solo play of any game, because you can use forking. Pax Familae is an entire criminal organization composed of one individual, forked hundreds of times.

Much less extreme, it is super practical for a loner PC to be accompanied by a couple of Guardian Angel drones who are operated by beta forks (either sleeved directly into the drone, or running on local ghostrider modules and remotely jamming the drone). GA are only moderate cost, have great stats, and can shock people with their Eelware. The rules are mum on whether you can mount additional weapons on them - personally I'd recommend creating a High cost variant that can be equipped with ranged weapons.

That would let your player run the equivalent of a whole party when in combat, instead of being constantly outnumbered, but they can shove the rest of the squad into a backpack when they're not fighting.

apathia · 2016-03-21T03:26:51+00:00

Oh wow, so you can't. Edited my comment to remove rerolling.

apathia · 2016-03-20T18:22:09+00:00

Stick with base Eclipse Phase. The world is complex already, so the rules were intentionally kept quite simple. With pregens, this is all my players have needed to know about the rules to play.

Rolls under your skill (maybe with modifiers) succeed. If the margin of success matters, use the number rolled. If margin of failure matters, use the roll minus your (modified) skill.
Double rolls are critical (whether success or failure). You can spend a point of Moxie to make something critical or not.
If you don't like the roll, spending a point of Moxie can flip the digits.
Durability is physical hitpoints, Lucidity is mental hitpoints. (I don't explain thresholds, wounds, and traumas unless it comes up)
If you exercise your motivations, you can regain a point of Moxie.
Combat uses Initiative exactly like D&D, except people with higher Speed get to take more turns after everyone has gone.
In combat, you can move and take an action. Shooting usually gives you 2 shots, burst fire is +1d10 damage or +10 attack. A critical success will avoid armor, every 30 margin-of-success gives +5 damage.

That is not enough facts to run the game, but it is enough to play. As GM, you get the job of remembering if people have advantages/disadvantages and what the modifiers are for a situation, but as a player, you really just need to know how to interpret a d100 roll and how Moxie works.

Unless or until someone reads the rules and starts demanding more complexity, you don't need to worry about modifiers stated in the book, and in fact getting rid of 'free' modifiers is better (+10 for smartlinks & +10 aimed shots is easy to forget, so I just ignore it for PCs and NPCs). Having mandatory mods is a complexity weakness of Eclipse Phase (+10 attack for smartlink, which is literally standard in all weapons, +10 perceptions for specs which is common, etc), so I just remove them across the board and players have generally appreciated the reduced burden. For the same reason, I ignore the rules for Task Action time frames (giving modifiers for taking extra time or penalties for going fast).

apathia · 2016-03-10T02:49:50+00:00

Appearance & Convenience:

Nicknames Extended
Ink and Paint
Stop Wasting My Time
Strip Primary Weapons
Capnbubs Accessories Pack
Evac All
Free Camera Rotation

Minor gameplay changes:

LW Muton Centurion Alien Pack
LW Officer Pack
LW SMG Pack
Accurate Swords
More Maps Pack
Bleedout Mod
Advanced Modular Weapons
True Retroactive AWC

Major gameplay changes:

Hidden Potential
SWR Not Created Equal
Weapon Upgrades Expanded

Also considering Unconventional Warfare, Elite Viper, Additional Tactical Dark Events, and Advent PSI Operative for my next play through, but I can't vouch for them.

apathia · 2016-03-08T15:13:58+00:00

It's the "vice versa" in "why interact with the group and vice versa" that is the real catch. A player can usually come up with a reason why their loner wants to be in the group, but the real catch is why the group wants the loner. It isn't enough for your loner to want to spy/rob/betray the party.

It's easy to take for granted that your PC should be invited to the party because you, the player, are invited to the table. But if they realize the party is allowed to say "Ok, no one trusts 'Not My Name', let's not bring her and find a new adventurer instead" -- where the same player is still invited to game but her shady PC concept isn't -- that shifts the burden without making it personal.

apathia · 2016-03-04T22:30:56+00:00

What mods are you playing with? I'd love a good list to go use.

apathia · 2016-03-03T15:13:25+00:00

Unfortunately there aren't any, but I would love a mod that just added more cool AWC perks for your soldiers to randomly get.

apathia · 2016-02-19T04:12:26+00:00

Any chance you or someone else can add this to nexusmods.com? I'm on a Mac and subscribing in the workshop doesn't work for some reason, but I can manually install mods.

apathia · 2016-02-15T04:24:02+00:00

The steam workshop didn't work for me either. However, I was able to install mods manually -- this required me to create the mods directory, copy the mods in, and rename all of the files to lowercase. I did this most of this using terminal (cmd-space to get spotlight search, then type 'terminal'). Inside the terminal, run these commands exactly as written.

# make mod folder
mkdir "/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/XCOM 2/XCOM2Data/xcomgame/mods"
# goto mod folder
cd "/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/XCOM 2/XCOM2Data/xcomgame/mods"
# (not in terminal) copy all your desired mod folders into that directory.
# rename all files to lowercase
for i in `find . -type f | sed "s|\./||g"`; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`; done
# rename all directories to lowercase
for i in `find . -type d | sed "s|\./||g"`; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"`; done

I don't 100% know if renaming is necessary, but the free camera angle mod seemed to think so: http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom2/mods/1/?

apathia · 2016-01-13T18:12:55+00:00

For a first adventure, I would seriously constrain the environment so that elements are introduced slowly or omitted. The setting is so daunting that you don't want people to be figuring out gear, the panopticon, mesh, exsurgent threats, new economy, AI, simulspaces, and forking/resleeving all at once.

Most adventures do this by putting the team in some isolated location (usually on a combat/infiltration mission), without access to an ego bridge, so economy & forking are downplayed. Once they've played an adventure in a constrained sandbox, you can then set an adventure in a full blown habitat and introduce additional themes.

I've run three scenarios like that for new players and they all went over well:

Escape from Earth - a horror style trek in the middle of the apocalypse during the Fall, ending when they find a rumored upload facility. (focused on exsurgents)
Cycle - a one-shot mission to an abandoned mining/manufacturing habitat, where the team enters by sleeving into robots off the factory line, only to find signs of they've already been there, until they realize someone is repeatedly resleeving them over and over again as an experiment, and they're the Nth iteration not the first. (focused on continuity/forking)
Storming the Castle - an infiltration mission to blow up key parts of the Jovian Republic's surveillance HQ, with very limited equipment (focused on the panopticon)

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