EVE online and transhumanist confusions?

I raised an issue I have with Eve online in a forum recently, in that when your guy dies, the clone replacement is not him. He's dead.

I wouldn't mind if the fiction was like Anarchy online, with some dualist mumbo jumbo where the soul herp derps over to the new clone. Or some gruesome fiction where a brain canister decapitates the person before death and flies the brain through space to the empty skulled clone, for implantation.

But as is, no, it's just the same guy, for Eve and apparently it's players.

I don't know if you're shouting at the screen right now how much it's still the same person. Let's look at the replies from the forum and if you can find yourself amongst them...

It's not really that difficult a concept; the idea of someone grabbing a mind recording and broadcasting it wirelessly isn't exactly a cutting edge sci-fi concept. Hell, the idea of forking a backup that you keep updated every so often is right in Eclipse Phase.

 There's some esoteric issues with this - exactly why does a recording of you constitute you? As I said in the thread, if someone uploaded your clone early and it stood over you, you could see it, as you felt your life drifting away - how does that constitute being you?

Not. That. Difficult. A Concept?

My gosh. It's not rocket science, after all. Just brain surgery. I like how it sort of talks down the granny glasses - unless I'm wrong somehow (funny how the responce makes me think that), it's really not the position to take.

This is a much less cut and dried situation than you're making it.

What are the terms of death? And I'm the one who decides them?

 Not to mention the 'army of me' - just upload 'yourself' to multiple clones. And the responce - I dunno, a strange theory of mind...

As far as an army of me goes: One, it's illegal. Two, some people do it to an extent, but fully cognizant duplicates of yourself don't like being sent on suicide missions, and you don't have any capacity to force them to do whatever you want, so it's a limited tactic. You could make a hundred of yourself to mine, but they'd still want a cut of the profit and if they get bored, they can just hare off. Also, they have all your intel, with all the risks that implies. Better to just work with non-duplicate individuals.

I get the idea that one might not cooperate perfectly with duplicates of oneself. But if they get bored, they'll just hare off? Am I right that this is a failure of theory of mind, or he knows his own mind and he would hare off from himself, bored with himself? Hell, people often make friends with people who are like them. What about someone who essentially IS you? I'm currently betting on a theory of mind failure as part of a 'make the situation fit the conclusion' rationalisation. If that's not too many 'ions' in a row!

Okay, so damn - it's hard to know there's such a need for philosphy or neuroscience education or whatever, until these amazing potholes show themselves!

Still, writing it as Eve fanfiction might bring traffic to it, which is a handy upside. Only prob is, I don't play Eve (I did a trial and as said, the death thing put me off worse than a corpse run). Still, people often write stories about things they haven't done! This would just be...writing about something I have done, which is something where people play a game about stuff they aren't doing! Not. That. Complicated!

Anyway, speaking of simple things, like the phantom of the opera's mask, Scott Bakker has a new web page to keep the world a front, as he plays a pipe organ deep in the underground of France. I think. With Canadians, who knows, eh?

Dungeons & Death: 4E encounters death mod (and another AD&D death idea)

It's interesting. In the local gaming store they run a D&D 4e encounters session each week, for people to drop into and try out the game. Encounters typically run from level 1 to level 3 and shortly after end. They are there to whet the appetite (and they do)

Previously what exactly happened when a PC died was kind of ... not talked about!

This time around though, actually there is a rule and...if you die, next session your down four healing surges. And that's it!

It's interesting to see an actual engagement of the scenario (a scenario one presumes is possible) and what they'd actually do with it (rather than just speculating what they'd do).

It kind of shows exactly how much death there is, rather than leaving an ambiguous mystery about the whole thing and leaving people to think their assumptions (like, maybe, that you just die and the characters gone) are true. When they aren't. But how can you prove that when you can only speculate what WOTC would do? So yeah, interesting to actually know.

AD&D

I was thinking about the last post on risk of death in AD&D. And it just didn't quite satisfy me, on reflection. The reduction in max HP just wasn't an impact. So I thought about it more and have this idea, which both combines random risk and player choice.

Survival Potions
Some monsters attacks are more vicious than others. If they reduce you to negative hitpoints, you have a 1% chance of instantly dying from the extensive wounds delivered by the attack! This is a Survival Roll! But in town you can buy Survival Potions for 500 gold. Indeed, if you have some reputation as having done good deeds, the towns folk will even let you return unused potions and receive the 500 gold back (so it's like a deposit!). If a Survival Potion is fed to a character reduced to negatives, they do not have to make the Survival Roll.

So, make your choice - lose gold! Or take a risk!

Further, for each Survival Potion used or Survival Roll made, the GM secretly rolls percentile. There is a 10% chance that the character, unbeknown to the player, gains a survival point (the GM keeps a record of this). If they have a survival point and make a survival roll and fail, the survival point is used up and they instead pass! However, the chance of failure is increased from 1% to 10% (the GM does not tell the player this unless the roll is within that range)! A character can only have one survival point at a time.

AD&D idea: Long term damage.

I look at combat in AD&D now, at the level ~5 range and...I run into the problem I've talked about before. You cannot include a statistical chance of death, without instigating a certain death sentence. But without a chance of death, the thrill that you get at level one ("OMG am I gunna die!!?!?!") is absent.

I'm considering this idea now were at higher levels: Saying that various monsters attacks are so vicious that for some of them, if they drop you to the negatives you suffer a long term loss in the maximum number of hit points you have. When you go down, you make a system shock save. If you pass, you lose 5 hitpoints off your max, for this session and one future game session. If you fail, it's for this session and two future game sessions. You can gain this penalty twice and the HP penalty stacks, but no more than that.

The reason I say game sessions instead of just weeks is because if at the start of the session the players just go 'oh, we sit around in the tavern for two weeks - there, effects gone! Then we adventure!' it sucks. It's the most weak ass way of avoiding consequences - it's just a free get out of jail card. That sort of stuff is for pure simulationists who don't care if the game is challenging for players (they only care about playing out a world, no matter how easy or hard that makes gameplay).

So the idea is that it will definately affect future sessions. It may even bring about your demise! But since it doesn't kill you in itself, it gives some wiggle room for the players to avoid death (so it's not just a statistical implementation of a death chance).

Possibly at levels 10 to 15 it might become a 10 hit point penalty. 16 to 20, a 20 hitpoint penalty.

The plausible escape: Are reloads jarring?

What'd be nice is if more games didn't rely on the reload button for death.

Far cry 2 (despite its flaws) did this really neatly where you had a buddy and if you went down, you had these great black out scenes of him carrying you and shooting enemies. It'd black in and out, making you want to see how bad things were each time (and also skipping some time in between to save you waiting as long, I suspect). After they saved you, they then had to get away themselves (they could get shot doing this) and to 'recharge' their save you had to go meet them in a safehouse.

This is just so much better than hitting reload!

To a small degree lord of the rings online does this as well, in that once an hour you can recover from being downed, so you never leave (ie, jarringly teleport to a recovery circle) where you got hurt.

A way of being beaten in the game, but without the completely story flow jarring effect of a reload.

Or; that's a question - are reloads and their effect on continuity potentially making games less fun for you?

How'd death become boring?

I also ran across this post the other day at RPG.net

Old school gaming, for me, has always been a fighter, a rogue, a wizard and a cleric exploring a chain of identifical 10'x10' rooms to find the gold. An orc, a kobold and a skeleton appear and kill the cleric. The wizard steps on a trap. Yawn.

You know, I'd pay if that takes you four hours to do that much, fair enough.

But ignoring time taken for now, what's the issue here? Is there no chance of the cleric avoiding death? Not by luck and/or by player choice? Same with the trap?

Does the cleric not count as anything tragic - a human death? If it's not a glamourous death, its nothing and boring?

I dunno about you, but I get this weird hollow feeling trying to figure the mindset behind this. It's a mindset where death means nothing while granduer and style apparently are the significant thing. All style, really, really big style. But no heart underneath, just a hollow in the middle.

Character Non Death and are you really a hero for killing?

That's the thing that bugs me about the many games where you just cannot die, you just respawn or reload. So you kill, but actually your utterly safe from being killed. Oh sure, maybe your character doesn't know that he can't die. But what's going on, eh? Aren't we supposedly playing out the ancient moral imperative that if someone threatens your life, killing them in defence is okayz?

A: The games mechanics basically determine the fiction and those mechanics say you can't die. So that's part of the fiction. And so your playing out a character who cannot die, and so you can't at all be playing out the part of someone defending their life.

or

B: What, your not playing out that ancient moral imperative? So what the you playing out? Nihilism ala carte? If your going to say it's just a game, why pick one with depictions of killing in it over tetris, for example? Maybe fiction doesn't matter to you somehow - if so, okay, it's just a game but you mustn't be able to enjoy novels, which is sad for you. Or if you do, no, I don't think you have managed to turn your sense of fiction off like a light switch when it comes to games. You aught to consider that you are enjoying the fiction, and exactly what kind of fiction it is your enjoying. I bet some would think fiction full of consensual sex would be seen as RL morally wrong, yet this type of fiction, where the guy cannot die yet regularly kills others, as something just fine.

Here I'm basically against just thoughtlessly enjoying, for extended periods, killing while immune to death. If you want to consciously think about those elements when playing, yeah, I get that. But just relaxing into it and turning off your brain - like an Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper that imparts a lesson, so to does the fiction of these games impart a lesson. Over and over, for as many hours that you play, that when your immune to death, killing is just fine.

Some will say it doesn't work that way, that somehow you have infinite free will to ignore that. I would be really interested in a scientific test where a game promotes something a bit more mundane, like eating a red icing cake type of cake over one with white icing. Don't tell the participants about it and run them through a week of gaming. Then send them into a room with actual cakes, see which ones get eaten the most.