Eclipse Phase: a Story Path example

[Joose]

I gave the Story Path method of character creation a go last night. It might have been because I was doing it whilst watching the television, but it took a damn long time. Having said that, it probably would take less time than making a character from scratch if you were completely unfamiliar with the game. Here are my results:

The first step of the story path is to select an aptitude template. The aptitude template gives you your characters basic stats, with things like a Brawler being strong or a science type being brainy. I rolled a 2, which gives me the Dilettante template, meaning I am a jack of all trades with equal ratings of 15 across the board.

Next up is to determine my background. On the Youth Path I rolled a 1, giving me the Wholesome Youth result. I'm not sure about their use of the world Wholesome here. In this context it just means its not fractured: I didn’t change around much, so I only roll the once on the background table. This roll gives me a 57, meaning I grew up on an Orbital, so I then roll on the Orbital Childhood table which gives me a 10: Orbital worker family. I roll on the Starting Morph table and get a 10, giving me a fancy Bouncer morph. Less fancy is that this series of rolls means I started life in indenture to a hypercorp.

Next up is the Background Event table, on which I get a roll of 40. This means I grew up isolated from others and as a result im a bit introverted (lose 5 SAV). It would seem that my childhood consists of being a lonely slave in a metal tube in space. Grim.

The Character age roll gives me a result of 53 years old for the start of play. Old enough to have lived through the Fall then. I wonder what happened between my Orbital childhood and the present day?

First off, what kind of a person was I coming out of childhood. Due to my orbital childhood result earlier I roll on table 6.7: Indenture. I get a 1, so I am an Activist! I guess a lonely life of working for nothing has got me good and pissed.

Next is a roll on the Pre-Fall Life Event table, to see what happened just before the shit hit the fan. I get a 12, giving me a +1 Moxie (Moxie is kind of like luck) and a roll on the Story Event Table. The story event I get is 70: You are forced into a thankless position of heavy responsibility. Hmm. Maybe I am put in charge of allocating the dangerous jobs to my fellow indentured workers. No one would like me for that, whether I do a good job of it or not.

Then the Fall happens. I roll a 38 on the Fall table. My Ego survived the fall intact (yay!) but I was stuck in storage for years (boo!). I get a new morph on resleeving (I roll a 61: Pod Biomoph, then a 76 for a Security Pod) and thanks to the years being effectively in a coma I also get the Real World Naiveté trait.

I get a 5 on the post fall paths roll, meaning I get an even split between my factions (people I know, how much influence I have) and my focus (my area of expertise). Rolling the focus first I get a rather surprising 10: Switch Gears. This means I reroll my path. After resleeving I am no longer an indentured worker, which is nice. Rolling again gives me a 7 (Military) and then a 9 (Soldier). Those early years of activism have left me with a fighty side.

So what about the Faction then. If I am a Soldier, for whom do I Sold. I roll a 9, which gives me the Mix It Up result. So, resleeving seems to have changed my situation a whole bunch. I roll a 7, telling me I am part of a military faction (makes sense) and then a 4. A 4 on the Military faction table gives me Hypercorp. Iiiinteresting.

Rolling on the Post Fall event table gives me an 84, which means someone I respect has shown me their true colours, and they aren't pretty. For some reason this gives me a further +1 Moxie.

Almost at the end now, I roll on the Firewall even table. I get a 43, which means I have made a new home...on Portal. Wow, I have left the solar system and liked it so much I decided to stay there!

Finally, I roll on the starting credit table and get a mighty 10, making me reasonably rich with a starting pot of 50000 credits. You can roll to randomly select gear, but I suspect that may be stupid, so I would at this point probably pick some gear packages appropriate to a Gatecrashing Hypercorp Soldier.

So to sum it all up (and glue it together with a bit of story): I was born into an indentured family in a Hypercorp owned orbital and therefore was, by default, an indentured worker myself. My original morph, the one I was born in, was genespliced by the Hypercorp into a Bouncer morph to make me a more efficient worker in the Orbitals microgravity. I spent much of my youth doing a number of different jobs around the Orbital, as required of me, but I always seemed to be sent into odd corners and out of the way places. This left me resentful and with underdeveloped social skills. When I am old enough I am taken off the random odd jobs list and put in charge of dividing up the labour for the other workers. It might be due to my lack of social graces or it might just be due to the hard and dangerous work I have to give out to my colleagues but it is not a job that gets me any thanks. Still, the job means I have less of the hard work to do myself, so in that way I guess I am lucky.

Then the Fall happened. Although the majority of the horrors of that time were confined to the Earth, its effects were felt throughout humanity, and my home Orbital was no exception. Thankfully for me it was common practise for indentured workers like myself who are regularly engaging in dangerous work to have regular weekly backups taken and stored in the Hypercorps databanks. After all, they wouldn't want to lose a valuable worker, and backing up minds is cheaper than investing in decent health and safety measures. In the pre-fall days workers who lost their lives could be fairly easily replaced by cheap and shitty morphs. This all meant that when a TITAN attack hit my home orbital and the thing was destroyed, my ego lived on in the companies servers. It is many years before the corp recover the servers from the wreck of the orbital and my mind is reactivated. At first I am grateful to the corp for rescuing me, and even more so when they offer me a new, paid job and an end to my indenture. They will happily write off all my debts and put me in a well paid position as a goon in their security horses if I am willing to relocate through a recently discovered gate that will magically teleport me across the galaxy to a whole new solar system that is being colonised. It is not until long after my relocation that I discover that they were sending us through using a new experimental form of Pandora Gate controller, and my group was the first to make it through to the other side in one piece. It’s a harsh reminder of how little value the hypercorp I work for actually puts on my life.

Despite this I settle quite happily into my new home on Portal. My trusted position in the hypercorp social structure combined with my combat skills and my unusual position of being a regular Pandora gate user and my residence outside of the usual systems eventually gets me noticed by Firewall, and I am recruited by a Proxy based on Portal as a combat specialist.

Conclusions then: Its bloody good. There is a bit of luck involved in that you could get a lot of good results and end up with a character that is just strictly better than someone else who went through the same process, but on the other hand (and like they say in the book) life isn't fair. The randomness certainly makes it more likely that you will finish up with an actually character with a story rather than just a bag of stats. It could also push you into new and interesting directions that you would never have picked for yourself. I thoroughly recommend it for anyone making a new character.

If it is all a bit too random for you there is some level of flexibility in the system too. I would say you can chose, rather than roll, on some of the tables that would be really important to you. The first one for example. Also, if you roll something that is just something you definitely, absolutely do not want to play I wouldn't have a problem with you rerolling. Also, due to the random nature, occasionally you could end up with contradictory things, so again you would need a reroll.

Overall though: excellent stuff. Having seen how well this and the character creation in WHFRP works I am surprised that more RPG systems don't allow for random character generation.

[Dog Pants]

Didn't we once have a discussion about random character generation? I love it, I enjoy the risk of getting sub-par stats or a weird background to build into a personality. Other people would rather get an idea and build around that.

[Joose]

I think we might have done.

I think something like this is the ideal. You can make an Eclipse phase character the regular way, customising everything, or you can make it with the pack system and customise it a bit, or you can make it via the story system and come up with something much less under your control. Munchkins can go for option one and min-max to their hearts content, people with a clear idea of what they want to play can go for one if they have the time/experience or two if they don't, and someone who wants to try something they otherwise wouldn't or put their characters power in the hands of fate can go for number three. Characters made in all three ways can be quite happily put together into one game without there being too much of a problem too.

This is something that occurred to me is a big advantage of flexible build point systems over less flexible level based systems like D&D. In D&D a level one character cant really tag along with a bunch of tenth level characters without being at a massive disadvantage. In something like Eclipse Phase, SR or SLA just having been around for longer and having accrued more experience doesn't necessarily mean you will be better or worse than a fresh character at any specific thing. For example, if I was joining an Eclipse Phase game as a new player and the two existing players were an experienced Ultimate Merc combat guy and a Hypercorp scientist, I could make a computer hacker, or someone with good Anarchist connections, or some sort of face and still be adding useful skills to the group that they didn't previously have access to. If I were joining a D&D game and brought my level 1 barbarian into a group with a 10th level Paladin and a Mage I wouldn't be able to usefully add in any way. It does, on the other hand, mean that if you don't manage your groups composition very well you can end up with a really awesome combat guy, a really awesome science guy and a guy who is kind of OK at combat and science and feels a bit left out, right from the word go.

[Dog Pants]

Agreed, and you can apply that to MMOs too. Of course you can always just create characters at the same level as the rest of the characters, so it's not a huge advantage. And playing a character who has a 'thing' then getting min-maxed onto the sub bench by a new character is a crushing experience. So it's not all roses.

I think I'm going to have a go at that story builder just out of curiosity. Probably won't replace my current character though.