New Transhuman game?

[Iozz-Sothoth]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

It tries more than most, despite some shaky engineering details. If one realises that SF hardness is relative, not a binary absolute, it's on the hard side by RPG standards (not that that is saying a huge amount, obviously).

I have to admit that the longer that I've been working as a physicist, the more I tend to find that 'hard sf' is not as hard as people take it to be. (And the less I tend to care, so long as it's good sf.)

Mind you, that may be because more sf authors find the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM to be plausible and appealing than condensed matter theorists...

[mindstalk]

Originally Posted by Kai Tave

Y'know, nowhere in that description do I see evidence of "evil" A.I.'s twirling their digital mustaches and sending humans into their massive titanium human grinders as sacrifices to the robot devil. The whole thing sounds more uncontrolled than malicious; a group of A.I.'s make the jump from weak to strong, and begin a massive upgrading spree without so much concern for those around them. That's the sort of thing that can cause global panic (and subsequent warfare) by accident. Also, notice the bit where it says these A.I.'s take off with millions of uploads in tow. I doubt it's to keep them around and torture them for kicks.

That would actually be a *lot* like Newton's Wake. The Singularity involved forced uploading, creation of a Stargate style wormhole network for humans to use, and AIs permeating local space-time so as to somehow allow FTL drives without causality problems. Pretty beneficial, though IIRC the surviving humans didn't feel too grateful, what with the collapse of civilization as they'd known it and such.

[Denys]

Originally Posted by Valanti

To be fair, I don't think THS "floundered."

I wasn't talking about amount of books sold -- I was talking about it being a setting that people could easily access as gamers (not merely as sci-fi fans).

Originally Posted by Valanti

And anyway, I don't think you need a "clearly delineated light and dark" in order to have rich conflict -

Yet most every enduringly popular game setting has that.

Originally Posted by Valanti

I'm interested in "Elipse Phase," certainly, and in part because it does go in different directions from THS, but there's no need to dump on THS because of it.

Yes, I agree. There's way too many people on this thread whose gut reaction is defensive rather than welcoming; I think folks are being defensive because they perceive this game's potential success coming at the cost of THS's continued demise. (which, of course, is ridiculous).

[jsnead]

Originally Posted by Krypter

And I thought Blue Planet was the benchmark for hard-science settings, not THS.

I'm honestly completely baffled at this opinion. I worked on Blue Planet, and one of my dissatisfactions was the number of over-used cyberpunk cliches. From my PoV, both THS and EP are very good, but very different. However, while BP had very nifty aliens and some other very nice touches, it was far to close to some of the more cheesy portions of 80s cyberpunk with a big heap wild west chiches (complete with the whole western civilization vs. noble savages thing) added for extra annoyance. Perhaps it's my utter contempt for the entire genre of the Western showing, but I have a great deal of trouble seeing BP as in anything other than a fun RPG that's fairly mediocre.

Also, part of any hard SF setting is the tech. I wrote most of the tech for the original BP book, and both due to my relative inexperience at the time and some (IMHO unfortunate at least) editorial decisions, the tech doesn't hang together nearly as well as it does in THS or EP.

[jsnead]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

That would actually be a *lot* like Newton's Wake. The Singularity involved forced uploading, creation of a Stargate style wormhole network for humans to use, and AIs permeating local space-time so as to somehow allow FTL drives without causality problems. Pretty beneficial, though IIRC the surviving humans didn't feel too grateful, what with the collapse of civilization as they'd known it and such.

There's considerably more going on that this, but in many ways you are correct about EP.

[Poster #15672]

See, so far my take-away from this thread is: Don't come in here looking for more details about Eclipse Phase. You won't get any. What you'll get instead is an argument about which is more fun to play as an RPG abut the Transhuman condition: TransHuman Space or Eclipse Phase.

[Pelorus]

In a continuum which includes Star Wars and Twilight 2000 as "sci-fi", Blue Planet is definitely on the 'hard' end of the scale. It's not about whether you find something as a cliché, it's whether the items are remotely possible. As a biologist-turned-technologist, I enjoyed it. Good reading and on the right end of the scale.

I also think you did well in BP. And your enthusiasm for EP holds a decent amount of weight.

[Denys]

Originally Posted by Poster #15672

See, so far my take-away from this thread is: Don't come in here looking for more details about Eclipse Phase. You won't get any. What you'll get instead is an argument about which is more fun to play as an RPG abut the Transhuman condition: TransHuman Space or Eclipse Phase.

To be honest, John Snead coming out of the gate with "it's considerably better than THS" helped set the adversarial tone.

[Iozz-Sothoth]

Originally Posted by Pelorus

And your enthusiasm for EP holds a decent amount of weight.

Indeed. I am certainly intrigued, especially given that I now know that you've worked on two of my favourite sf games -- Blue Planet and THS.

[Pilgrim]

OK, can we please move away from the butting of heads here folks?

I would like whatever the folks at Catalyst Game Labs can share about this with us.