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Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

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Wed, 2011-06-01 20:32

Prophet710 Prophet710's picture

Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

I keep thinking about limiting the attribute max for biomorphs to 30 or even 25 and keeping the 40 to synthmorphs. My rationale is this. One with the advent of superconductors, computational capacity for computers is going to far surpass the human mind. It is on the way already if you'll forgive the technological bottleneck concerning conductor size and other factors. Two, I see even genefixed flesh and bone being well, flesh and bone. Perhaps a bit stronger but not superhumanly stronger than industrial grade machines. Even with bioware implants I don't see the humany anatomy shelling out car lifting, fist-fight with terminator, think faster than supercomputer abilities. Thoughts? Keep in mind I run a pretty gritty (much more realistic than epic) campaign.

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"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

Wed, 2011-06-01 21:06

puke

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

Isn't it pretty much that way already? I mean, the only exception would be that you'd be nerfing the Remade. Thats okay, I guess -- though I would suppose that since they are entirely remade, whos to say biomechanics have not advanced at a pace equal to.. umm.. mechanics, i suppose. I mean, I dont really have a problem with the idea that if you designed a biological machine from the ground up, that it would have similar capabilities to an electronic or mechanical machine. Especially with EP technology. Most morphs are modifications of human. The only one with aptitude max of 40 is also the only one redesigned from the ground up as a mostly different organism.

Wed, 2011-06-01 21:15

Prophet710 Prophet710's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

You know man, I really didn't look at it that way. I was thinking more about augmentation and character advancement, capping the max at 25 or 30 over the course of both character creation and advancement. Hmmmm, the Remade eh? it is a pretty special morph. Hmmmm. I will have to think about that one.

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"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

Wed, 2011-06-01 21:23

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

Prophet710 wrote:
My rationale is this. One with the advent of superconductors, computational capacity for computers is going to far surpass the human mind.

Sorry, but superconductors won't make minds smarter. More energy-efficient, maybe, but electricity is still ~1/3 of light-speed. And boosting signal speed (with optronics) is still not the same thing as making anything more intelligent, more flexible or better at using new bodies.

Quote:
Two, I see even genefixed flesh and bone being well, flesh and bone. Perhaps a bit stronger but not superhumanly stronger than industrial grade machines. Even with bioware implants I don't see the humany anatomy shelling out car lifting, fist-fight with terminator, think faster than supercomputer abilities.

This I roughly agree with. Flesh and bone have evolved to solve problems in a world of flesh, bone, wood, grass and small squishy things. With plenty of trade-offs for energy balance, nutrient needs, offspring survival and growability. Nanotech enhanced biology can probably go pretty far beyond normal biology, so I wouldn't rule out some substantial improvements, but when you specialize a body and make technological tradeoffs that cannot be evolved the limits are in principle just the laws of physics and what the controlling mind can handle. I would not bother changing the remade too much (the Ultimates are fun as they are), but I do think that synths in principle can have arbitrarily high limits. It is just that those are not found in currently commercially available models.

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Wed, 2011-06-01 21:40

Prophet710 Prophet710's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

Alright I can see that point. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an engineer, but I do work with engineers. My firm specializes in semi-conductor manufacturing (with me in marketing, yeah I'm no scientist). Anyway, I was having a conversation with a few designers and engineers and the problem with computers and other semi-conductor capable devices (namely just about all electronics) is a technology bottleneck coming from the manufacturing/industrial side. Apparently miniaturization will only be able to move so far with current technological breakthroughs up to and including plating, plumbing along with raw materials, namely gold, copper and depending on the design of the tool platina or ni-cad, again depending on the options of the tool. However, with the advent of a superconducting material, that can superconduct in an environment such as room temperature or above and offer no resistance of electrons (yay textbook definition!), semi-conductors would effectively be able to jump a certain conductive barrier (again I am no scientist this is just a series of conversations) offering faster ping times in devices such as microchips, roughly resulting in faster calculations, and concerning the sophistication of current microchip design, the leap forward is theorized to be quite drastic (yes, again, not that kind of egghead so put down the torch and pitchfork). Anyway, that was the long version of the theory behind that, again keep in mind I'm no scientist.

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"And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes. And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

Wed, 2011-06-01 22:48

puke

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

I thought the morph lmits were hard caps. I didnt think advancement and augmentation could take you above the physical limitations of a given morph, and if you wanted to get better then you had to resleeve.

Wed, 2011-06-01 22:54

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

puke wrote:
I thought the morph lmits were hard caps. I didnt think advancement and augmentation could take you above the physical limitations of a given morph, and if you wanted to get better then you had to resleeve.

Some implants, gear, psi, and other factors may modify a character’s natural aptitudes. These aug- mented values may exceed a morph’s aptitude maxi- mums, as they represent external factors boosting the morph’s ability. No aptitude, however, augmented or not, may ever exceed a value of 40. Innate ability only takes a person so far—after that point, actual skill is what counts. Augmentations can push aptitudes above the limits. So a Synth with SOM 30/Max 30 who takes a Cyberlimb+ has a SOM 35. (rereading your comment, I am not sure if this is what you meant, if it wasn't, ignore)

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Wed, 2011-06-01 23:12

puke

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

That is what I meant, but my understanding was different. I thought an Ego's aptitude limit was always 30, and morph and augmentation bonuses could potentially take it up to the morph limit (which might be more or less than the Ego limit, depending on the morph). I guess I got that idea from P152, but I'm notorious for misreading things. On a related note, I sort of wonder why Reapers are the only (non-infomorph) synth morph with an apptitue cap of 40. I'm sure this has come up somewhere before, but surely someone would want a high COG morph. maybe its more of an exhuman kind of thing, but surely someone wants to sleeve a cog boosted robot shell. that same processor running the Reaper must be able to be put into non-combat shells. Also odd that the only actual COG bonus I see is biological in nature, on the Menton. Cant that be replicated on a cyberbrain? Or are you better off running as an infomorph for your full 40 COG, and then jamming your own body? I'm sure this has come up, I think I remember reading a thread about this.

Thu, 2011-06-02 00:06

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

puke wrote:
That is what I meant, but my understanding was different. I thought an Ego's aptitude limit was always 30, and morph and augmentation bonuses could potentially take it up to the morph limit (which might be more or less than the Ego limit, depending on the morph). I guess I got that idea from P152, but I'm notorious for misreading things.

An egos aptitude limit is always 30, but that is only what you can push your aptitude to before any modifiers (from morphs and whatnot.) So, on your character sheet, your base row can only ever be 30 unless you take the Exceptional Aptitude trait. You can only get higher than 30 via either morph bonuses (at which point you are capped by your morphs aptitude limit) or misc bonuses (at which point you are capped at 40)

Quote:
On a related note, I sort of wonder why Reapers are the only (non-infomorph) synth morph with an apptitue cap of 40. I'm sure this has come up somewhere before, but surely someone would want a high COG morph. maybe its more of an exhuman kind of thing, but surely someone wants to sleeve a cog boosted robot shell. that same processor running the Reaper must be able to be put into non-combat shells. Also odd that the only actual COG bonus I see is biological in nature, on the Menton. Cant that be replicated on a cyberbrain?

I think we under estimate what an aptitude of 40 is actually supposed to represent. 30 is supposed to be posthuman, so an aptitude score of 30 is what the very fringe of accepted transhumanity might be playing with. 40 is exhuman territory. The Exhuman who is literally a walking talking brain has a COG of 40. I have honestly never played a game in which I have had a character with an unmodified aptitude greater than 30, and I have multiple groups running, since the game released. Also remember that aptitudes are not just straight physical traits. They are supposed to also represent the innate ability of the ego, so COG isn't just how fast you can think, it is also how [i]well[/i] you can think. That might not be something easily boosted by physical tinkering. On COG bonuses. The Steel morph in Sunward has +5 COG. Synths and Slitheroids can both pick up +5 COG.

Quote:
Or are you better off running as an infomorph for your full 40 COG, and then jamming your own body? I'm sure this has come up, I think I remember reading a thread about this.

Sure. If you happen to be willing to spend 150CP at character creation to get 30 COG, another 20CP to push your COG limit to 40, and then another 100CP to actually get your COG to 40, it is sometimes better to just run yourself as an infomorph and jam your way to victory. But you just invested over a quarter of your CP into doing one thing very well. You also just opened yourself up to some nasty hacking action. Edit and it should be noted that any 30 aptitude maximum morph can easily enough have that increased to 40 simply by spending an extra 10k credits to buy Exceptional Aptitude. The easier option, in my mind.

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Thu, 2011-06-02 04:21

#10

petros

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

Naturally a synthmorph could be stronger, faster, with more novel senses, and more sturdy than a biomorph. I have no problem believing your basic case could defeat the toughest splicer in tests of basic strength. But when it comes to the attributes we actually have, COG, COO, INT, REF, SAV, SOM and WIL, these are solely to do with the Ego, which is just the physical structure of the individuals brain. And when in a synthmorph, this is simulated. So, in my opinion at least, giving an Ego a sudden boost in one of these attributes would involve changing the structure of the brain, and so changing the nature of the Ego in a manner akin to psychosurgery. I can buy that a particular Morphs brain chemistry, or simulated brain chemistry, could encourage certain of these attributes, or discourage others, but this would only be a trend over time. Sleeving in a flat could see the Ego who just left a remade suffer from a gradual dulling of their faculties, not a sudden drop. While sleeving in a remade would let the Ego who had heretofore been in a flat gradually become more capable, not instantly. And sleeving in any synthmorph ought to allow the person to develop to the limits of the capacity to simulate novel brain chemistries. For me, at least, I imagine that existing in a synthmorph is not easy to get used to. There has to be a reason, beyond nostalgia and vogue, that people want to be in biomorphs. So maybe the simulation is not quite spot on, but in fact uses some degree of abstraction. So I'd say that perhaps synthmorphs should be limited in some ways compared to biomorphs.

Thu, 2011-06-02 20:48

#11

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

I don't think an Ego's limited to 30, that's just the starting limit. You can improve yourself after the fact, though the generally accepted maximum is 40. 40 is also the "hard limit", surpassing which causes you to stop thinking like a "normal" transhuman.

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[img]http://img813.imageshack.us/img813/982/exhumanbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/4473/scumbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/1396/gatecrasherbar.jpg[/img] [code][@-rep +1, f-rep +2][/code]

Thu, 2011-06-02 20:56

#12

CodeBreaker CodeBreaker's picture

Re: Attribute Max'ss the difference between flesh and steel

Character advancement. Aptitudes may be raised with Rez Points at the cost of 10 RP per aptitude point. This represents the character’s improvement in their core characteristics, gained from exercise, learning, and experience. Aptitudes may not be raised above 30 (bonuses from morphs, implants, traits, or other sources do not count towards this total). The only way to get an ego aptitude score of 40 is to have the Exceptional Aptitude for that chosen aptitude. This applies both during character creation and during play. So while 40 is indeed the hard limit, I think it is also fair to say that, for almost every character, 30 is the practicle limit. No ego should have (unless by gm fiat and houseruling) more than one aptitude greater than 30.

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