Posthuman technology
Posthuman technology posted in Equipment, Cybertech and Weapons forum comment posted by cobalt_phoenix| Author |
| Sounds like a place where one can get lost forever, John (and still a place to have fun while lost). |
That is the goal, but hopefully you can see where the problem with it lies (it is literally The Infinite Layers of the Abyss in terms of layout and rules). And there wouldn't be a single nation, but a massive number of them. Even if the smallest has only a couple of billion people (including the uploaded and they cyborgs), you could easily have as many nations as have existed in all of human history (including every tribe, city state, kingdom, dutchy, country, and nation, and every other type of government size you can think of). Even "small" server states would easily have millions of people in them.
But there is one other aspect that popped up with that setting which could be of good use here. Namely character immortality.
This is a problem that I realized early on. Since people could move their minds between organic bodies, robot bodies, and a virtual reality, it would allow them to be effectively immortal. The longer a character can live, the more likely it is for players to have control of characters that are far beyond first level. How do you explain to a group of players that their characters, who have been bouncing around the MB for 300 years, are only 1st level? And forget aging, since it shouldn't be a problem (cloned bodies in peak health, robots with millennia-long lifespans, and the unending time of the virtual world).
The option I was more leaning towards (don't ask for too many specifics, since this is only very rough and totally untested) is to give people the ability to basically "reset" themselves*. In this case, it would have been a rule that the more experience you gained as a character, the slower the system was able to process your thoughts/actions. It would be that your mind, when uploaded, could become too bloated with data, resulting in something like an aging effect. For cyborgs, similar issues could pop up. So, every so often, the people in this civilization would take their old memories and store them on a private computer in a compressed form. However, since these memories are now no longer directly linked to their minds, it has basically stripped them the knowledge they contained, including skills and even professions. The personality remains, and they keep at least general knowledge of their stored memories, but they can't directly access them.
Interestingly enough, though, I was going to give them an option to turn them into what would amount to a expert assistance program, so they could access it like a textbook or journal.
I'm hoping this would give them the ability to have level 1 characters, but with the ability to access a ton of data that was written by themselves, providing some interesting benefits along the way. There could also be perks and flaws that may impact access to them, too (perhaps a perk that lets them keep one extra broad skill and one specialty skill for free from their former professions). And yes, they would also be able to switch their professions. A Free Agent character could have once been a Combat Spec and a Tech Op in what amounted to their "previous lives", and they could access their experiences from then (not as direct memories, but perhaps as something like a video or text, which they can then try to apply to the situation).
With all of the various levels involved in the MB's virtual reality, that may prove helpful or not, so it could be handled as something like an Intelligence check.
Hence, immortality achieved, but without the worries of having near god-like characters running around all over the place. Of course, people can still die from something other than old age, but that is a different matter. And it isn't hard for people to store their current memories in compressed storage, too, so they can even be "rebooted" (the uploaded) or cloned (the cyborgs) fresh, and then be resurrected. They may not have the memories from when the backup point to when they died, but that may not be very long anyway.
* Since the minds of both the cyborgs and uploaded are literally governed by computers, everyone should have perfect memories. Not incorruptible, but pretty much near perfect to the point that what we call a photographic memory would be a joke. That is a major problem, since it shouldn't be hard for anyone to pass a memory check without any real issue.
Oh, and I was going to have it set so that reproduction was limited to the real world, which is why people tended to bounce between the real and virtual. Not everyone does, of course, but it wouldn't likely be uncommon for someone to have basically a dozen children that they had in basically batches, separated by a century or so of virtual time. Someone who is 600+ years old could have spent 6 30-year-long stints in the real world having kids (two at a time) and raising them through college age, and then transferring back into the virtual world between them, and that is only a fifth of their current lifetime spent doing that. They could also have the pleasure of seeing multiple generations of of their own grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren, etc, being born and raised in that same timeframe. And there is nothing to say that they need to stop at 12, and could already be saving up for a new cloned body so they could have another couple of kids.
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