Eclipse Phase conversion to GURPS (ideas?)

[Eukie]

I rather like the darkly transhuman conspiracy-horror RPG Eclipse Phase, but I've found that the system (which seems like its cobbled together from Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun) doesn't quite meet my needs for expediency, consistency, and balance. GURPS, meanwhile, mostly does.

So therefore, I'm working on converting EP to GURPS. I've started this thread in part to brag and showcase my work, and in part to ask questions about snags I've hit.

Campaign Conceits
As a necessary Campaign Conceit for GURPS:EP, you play what in EP is termed an "Ego"; that is, your disembodied intelligence. Normally, stating up an EP Ego in GURPS would give it an immense point cost. Transhuman Space: Changing Times gives a cost of 86 points for ghost-mind emulations, and by a strict reading of the rules, Egos should probably also have Duplication and a potentially infinite supply of Extra Lives. Just playing an Ego seems like it should be worth hundreds of points all by itself - which is good when comparing it to other GURPS characters, but somewhat pointless when it comes to actually playing Eclipse Phase.

So as a campaign conceit, everyone plays an Ego, and Egos cost 0 points.

Attributes
One of the really cool aspects of EP is that it tries to firmly divorce your body from your mind; you have no actual physical stats for your mind, only mental ones. Then you stick your mind in a physical body and the body is the object that has physical properties. It's pretty neat...

...and doesn't mesh well with GURPS; GURPS has, among other things, your physical strength (ST) and your physical dexterity (DX) as core attributes, and somewhat haphazard rules for switching out your attributes when switching between physical forms. This would not make a good fit, I feel, for an EP conversion, where you're supposed to let your mental aptitudes control your physical body.

So I've decided to do something a little unorthodox for a GURPS-conversion; introduce new Attributes. SOmatics, replacing ST, COordination, replacing DX, and TeNacity replacing HT. So your Ego is defined, primarily, by your SO, CO, IQ and TN instead of ST+DX+IQ+HT.

ST, DX and HT I keep as ratings for your physical body, what EP calls your "morph". This, among other things, allows me to fix one of EP's flaws, where the immense strength of strong morphs improved your ability to handle yourself physically, which meant that sleeving into an elephant made you more skilled at butterfly swimming, or more egregiously, downloading your mind into an uplifted whale brain made you more skilled at shooting guns. One of the main reasons I wanted to switch to GURPS was to have more well-defined differences between your physical form (using GURPS' detailed stats for physical capabilities, size, etc.) and mental form (using GURPS' skill list).

For example, this allows me to have your gross lifting capability be based entirely on your body's ST, while the amount of damage your can inflict with a punch can be given by looking up ST+SO-10 in the relevant table.

In EP, basline human attributes range from 5 to 20 averaging 10, with special individuals going as far as 30. The absolute maximum is 40, and player characters average 15 in all their starting attributes. For a GURPS-conversion, I decided that this meant that normal humans usually fell in the range 8-12, usually maxing out at 16 but sometimes going as far as 22. The transhuman average would be a range of 10-16 averaged around 13, usually capped at 22. The absolute maximum would be to go as far as 28 in a Primary Attribute.

This corresponds, in EP and GURPS respectively, to:
5:6
10:10
15:13
20:16
25:19
30:22
40:28

Of note is that Flats cap attributes at 16, Splicers cap at 19, and Exalts and better tend to cap at 22; Remade, Reapers and Infomorphs cap at the full 28.

Another campaign conceit would be that morphs (bodies) are bought as Gear, so characters can't buy physical advantages or disadvantages as inherent traits of their characters; Appearance, Voice, Fit, etc. would be confined to your morph, rather than your Ego. Egos only buy social and mental (dis)advantages. To get physical advantages, you have to buy the right kind of gear.

This has certain advantages with regards to how many small advantages morphs in Eclipse Phase have; the basic Splicer has stat bonuses, Fit, Less Sleep 4, Improved G-tolerance 3 (only lower gravities -50%), Regrowth, Regeneration (Slow), Extra Life (requires body -20%), Longivity and Unaging, for a total of over 108 points.

That's the body most people inhabit; making characters pay the full point-cost of such a body would, I feel, be a bit unreasonable when you consider how often people are supposed to swap back and forth between their bodies in the default Eclipse Phase campaign.

Computers
By a fairly conservative estimate (level 6 in this paper), the Complexity of a computer needed to run a full brain emulation is about 19, and would require about 1 exabyte of storage (for comparison, all the Internet traffic in 2008 was 9.9 exabytes). GURPS tends to claim Complexity 7 and 1000 GB, but I am a bit of a realism-freak.

Also, I plan to use an adaptation of the system presented here for hacking, since it fairly closely replicates the feel of the system in EP, is more realistic, and is based on SJG's Hacker, which is an incredibly fun game.

Skills
The GURPS skill list is one I'm rather happy with; it covers the vast majority of situations and has a good list of well-defined defaults. Only occasionally do I feel the need to introduce a new specialty to cover missing ground, such as Innate Attack (cephalopod ink sacs).

However, I feel that many skills need to be described in detail to explain what they can do in an Eclipse Phase context, and in GURPS sourcebook-style, why your character should or might have them; this ranges from small notes about how "Dropping" can be useful for characters sleeved in morphs capable of flight, to somewhat more extensive writeups like the one I did for Environment Suits:

Environment Suit/TL

CO/Average

Default: CO-5

This skill is absolutely vital to most Eclipse Phase characters, who live in hazardous atmospheres (Mars, Venus, Titan), underwater (Ceres, Europa, Callisto, Iapetus) or near hard vacuum (everywhere else). “Vac suits”, also called “spacesuits” became available at TL7, but most suits in GURPS: Eclipse Phase will be TL9 or TL10. The Vacc Suit specialization covers both suits for surviving the vacuum of space and the hazardous atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan. The Diving Suit specialization covers diving hardsuits, most of which will be TL9 and TL10, but the specialization is available at earlier tech levels. Infantry in GURPS: Eclipse Phase commonly use various forms of power armor and exoskeletons at TL9 and TL10, covered by the Battlesuit specialization.

----

I felt the need to write what they can do at TL8, TL9 and TL10 because I imagine EP as a nascent but fastly developing TL10 society with some experimental TL11 technologies that was very recently TL9... and TL8 within living memory, meaning that quite a lot of TL8 and TL9 technology is still around, and quite a lot of people will have been trained in the TL8 and TL9 versions of the skill. Just as there are Third Wave nations left in the Fifth Wave world of THS, the pre-Singularity was not evenly distributed in EP.

Besides, I like describing technological developments over time and geeking out over the finer details of gun technology...

Reputation Networks
This is one of those things that have been difficult for me to figure out how to implement. GURPS: Social Engineering covers in loving detail how to do economic transactions, requests for aid, and searching for information and skilled labour through social networking, and it would be easy to just make EP Rep Networks a form of Reputation.

On the other hand, the Rep Networks as described seem to have more application often far outside the realms of Requests for Aid; more like the rules from Action 1 (also described in GURPS:SocEng) for being part of an organization. But those rules require a hefty Duty, which seems unsuited to the somewhat communal, voluntary laxness of EP's Rep Networks, so I'm not really sure how to handle them.

Perhaps use the Organizational Reputation rules from Action 1/SocEng, and make the player pay the cost of not having the Duty?

----

Comments, ideas, etc.?