By far the most common mistake new players make when starting Eclipse Phase is spending too many CP points on their starting morph, implants, gear, or additional credits. With all the options available, it can be very tempting to dump a lot of credits on things that provide bonuses to skills rather than the skills themselves. This thinking is reminiscent of the scarcity economy in which the players have been raised. While understandable, it conﬂicts with the post-scarcity economics found in the game. In addition to being an inaccurate mindset for many transhuman characters, going into the game with the hoarder mentality can have extremely negative effects on a character in
the long run. While a fully tricked-out reaper morph might be great for the ﬁrst few sessions, front-loaded characters can quickly ﬁnd themselves useless after one farcast. The leftover funds won’t be sufficient to buy much more than a case on the other side, and the weapons/gear restrictions could be such that gear essential to the character’s effectiveness is illegal or prohibitively expensive. Thus, players can ﬁnd themselves stuck in suboptimal morphs that provide penalties to even less optimal skills.
New players should make careful, long-term investments with their CP. Whereas many other RPGs encourage a materialist mindset, even to the point of giving special names to unique weapons and armor, an effective character recognizes things—including their morph—as mere things: of no more importance than their function and meant to be discarded. For those that absolutely demand the ﬁnest equipment in every instance, it would be wiser to dump CP into the skills of an identity thief instead of expensive gear: spending the rep and credits of other egos will ensure you never run out.
Try to avoid converting CP into credits if at all possible, and if you have to spend big, make sure to buy with the long-term in mind. When purchasing implants, only buy those absolutely essential for all Firewall agents (e.g. medichines) and your character concept (speed-boosting neurachem for a combat specialist, for instance). Gear should likewise be kept to a minimum. Nobody is arguing you shouldn’t purchase a vacsuit for an EVA mission, but for everything else focus on boosting skills that will allow characters to score gear and credits on the ﬂy, like Networking or Profession skills. Prioritize software and blueprints over gear in every instance. A character with a gun is armed for the moment; a character with exploit software for fabber DRM and gun blueprints is armed everywhere, all the time.
The credits and reputation by which Eclipse Phase’s markets operate fluctuate wildly from session to session, but a clever character will never go without for very long. However, the economy for customizing your character is rigid. Players only get 1,000 CP to play with during character creation, and an average of 4–7 Rez points per story arc. <span style="background-color: #ffff00;">**Rule Zero:** I tend to give 1 Rez per session as an incentive to show the fuck up, though this is still lower than many other games.</span> Conserve this ﬁnite resource by spending it on your ego rather than some cool gun.

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