Best parts of Cyberpunk

[Dean]

If making a Cyberpunk RPG from the ground up what are coolest elements of the genre that need to be given appropriate attention? The must-haves I can think of are

-Hacking as a means of gathering information or spying.
-Megacorporations, which have tons of traction and let the PC's have plausible jobs in the world.
-Body modification like cybernetic upgrades are badass.
-Gang warfare. Areas of the setting should basically be "The Purge" all the time.
-Extensive black market presence and criminal inroads in society.
-Artificial intelligence having reached human levels.

What else would make a Cyberpunk game a lot more fun if included or a lot more bullshit if left out?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Do we mean Cyberpunk as envisioned before Post-Cyberpunk or are we talking about both genres?

Regardless, I think that the biggest element that your list is missing is the issue of rebellion. I can't think of any story that people acknowledge as cyberpunk that doesn't make Rage Against the Machine the central conflict for the protagonists. Compare and contrast this to urban fantasy, superheroics, sci-fi, or pre-industrial fantasy in which you're often expected to uphold the status quo and violent, subversive rebels are viewed at best with suspicion by the good guys.

The other thing that's missing from your list is skepticism of technology's role in human actualization. Why and how we should be skeptical of technology is what delineates post-cyberpunk from classic cyberpunk, but it's a building block theme of the genre.

[Whipstitch]

"The streets find their own uses for things," is probably the single most famous passage from William Gibson's Burning Chrome, and for good reason. It is very cyberpunk for technology to be constantly be getting used for off-label purposes. The genre even borders upon anti-climax in many situations--if a new fangled crowd control weapon can be foiled by $4 worth of crap from Radioshack then you can bet some wise ass will figure that out in time for the next march on the megacorps.

[Prak]

Actually, that's a good point. Modern cops deploy fucking gas and pepperspray, and protesters are showing up with gas masks made from dollar store shit and water-soaked bandanas. So the "99% $4 answer to the 1%'s $10,000 force" is probably a really important thing to include.

[ruemere]

Good stuff of Gibsonian era:
- empowerment of individual through personal competency (street samurais, hackers, fixers)
- street level prices for magic enhancements - black clinics that fix people
- intensity of living for a moment
- orbiting rastafarians

Good stuff that came later (GitS meets Angels meets Eclipse Phase)
- replaceable bodies
- ghosts in the shells that can be copied and multiplied

Good stuff that came from Britons:
- cyphersphere as a part of reincarnation cycle
- ants that belong to cyphercrypts and reality at the same time
- AIs that are actually not godlike, and still engagingly different from humans

Good stuff that came from Stephanson:
- one person banks, one person courts
- hivemind sects
- recursively self-developing ecosystems
- dogs that eat planes
- pizza delivery mafia family

Goods stuff that came from Dick:
- Mercer and his church
- drugs that make your day
- cities covered by radioactive dust and snow
- electric sheep, biogenerated owls, snakes and humans

Good stuff that came from anime:
- Sibyl system (psycho pass)
- orbital prisons
- bounty hunters in spaceship

And many, many more.

Regards,
Ruemere

[erik]

Cyberpunk games have possibly the best setting for a proper reputation mechanic where your rep points can actually open doors for you and not have it be 4th wall breaking.

[Maxus]

Old-is-new-again is also a thing in cyberpunk. Weapons you'd think would be antiquated are surprisingly effective. Neuromancer had the ninja with his bow-and-arrow, and Snow Crash had Raven's glass-bladed harpoons and Hiro's katanas.

I've heard how a lot of bullet-proof vests are bulletproof but can't stop a knifestab. I've also heard that bashing weapons have always been a problem for about any kind of armor. Any cyberpunk game I play, I'd hope for the chance to use a warhammer or a technologically advanced battleaxe on something.

[Whipstitch]

I've also heard that bashing weapons have always been a problem for about any kind of armor.

That's a bit of misrepresentation, however. Blunt weapons perform more or less the same against many armor types because the big selling point of heavy hammer vs. similarly heavy blade is that they have less issues with deflection since there isn't a narrow edge to be easily turned about. However, if you're dealing with flexible armors that are unlikely to deflect blows then odds are you'd be better served with a blade or point--humanity's known how to set bones pretty well for a very long time but dealing with blood loss and infection had to wait until much, much later.

[Harshax]

Sovereignty was a major theme in Snow Crash. Raven's deadswitch motorcycle nuke is probably the most accessible example, but there are other examples such as China having sovereignty in certain places.

If I were to think about this in d20 degrees, sovereignty would be epic level play.

Crusties and gutterpunks are also a force to be recon with - living on the fringe of "society", they eke out their existence in the trash heaps, like the Rastafarians living in abandoned satellite in Mona Lisa Overdrive? The megacorps and governments dismiss them but they're a wildcard element in some of the best Cyberpunk stories.

I would associate them most closely with modern or near-modern tropes about Appalachian "hill-billies". Their numbers are immeasurable. They're incredibly self-reliant and they can't be confronted using conventional armies.

These are kind of no-man's lands. Where even the all-seeing eye of megacorps are blind.

I don't have much more to add to this discussion, just excited to see mention of Snow Crash. Neil Stephenson is a personal fave of mine.

[Dogbert]

Are you asking for the best part of cyberpunk, or the best parts of shadowrun? Because your list seems strictly tied to SR.

If you're talking about cyberpunk as a genre, the shopping list is:

-Megacorps: They must be ubiquitous, above the law, and they must give YOU a reason to hate them. Megacorps are evil and always out to get you in one way or another (taking your rights away, poisoning the populace, instituting a police state, etc).
-Information Culture: Everything must be wired in some way or another, this is both a relief and paranoia fuel. Big Brother is Watching You.
-Transhumanism: Bionics, genegeneering, psionics, whatever. Muggle-lity is an evolutionary dead-end, so it's up to us to elevate ourselves. Try not to have mutually opposing paths to augmentation in the same setting or you'll end up with Rifts and WSOD suffers. Also, the PCs must ALWAYS be tanshumans or you end up with Linear Fighters/Quadratic Wizards (don't give players a choice, there are no "Batmen" here).
-Social inequality: Last but not least, society must be all kinds of fucked up. If I was talking about writing a book, this one would be on top of the list, but it's a game, and players aren't supposed to be on the "have not" side of things (fuck Future Noir) unless you're playing Paranoia. Still, the players must always be aware of how fucked up society is.

I hope that helps.

[TiaC]

-Transhumanism: Bionics, genegeneering, psionics, whatever. Muggle-lity is an evolutionary dead-end, so it's up to us to elevate ourselves. Try not to have mutually opposing paths to augmentation in the same setting or you'll end up with Rifts and WSOD suffers. Also, the PCs must ALWAYS be tanshumans or you end up with Linear Fighters/Quadratic Wizards (don't give players a choice, there are no "Batmen" here).

I think there's space for a number of routes to Transhumanism in the same game.

One setting I was working with had the following routes, divided into low and high powered versions:
•Fleshcrafted/Fleshcrafters: Fleshcrafters have an instinctive understanding of biology and can modify any part of an animal down to the genetic level with a short period of contact. Fleshcrafted are the optimized humans they create. In a low-power game you play Fleshcrafted, in a high end game you are also a Fleshcrafter.
•Talents: Telepathy, Empathy, Telekinesis (inc teleportation). In a low end game you're limited to your own reserve of energy, at high levels you can draw on outside sources.
•Cyborgs: Not quite GitS level brainboxen. Low end is the sort of Six Millon Dollar Man partial cyborg, high end is a pod containing a bunch of computers and a human brain with a massively expanded consciousness controlling a squad of 'bots.

These don't really overlap, but they can all fit into the same game.

[Dean]

Are you asking for the best part of cyberpunk, or the best parts of shadowrun? Because your list seems strictly tied to SR.

It's Cyberpunk in general. While I would be stupid not to take inspiration from Shadowrun my question is to find out what a new Cyberpunk RPG made today should include.

Let me try to collate the pieces people have put forward so far.

Society from the Top Down
The year is 2100. Megacorporations have become so powerful they are sovereign nations. The families who wield influence through these empires have become modern day royalty, living in the most absurd wealth imaginable. They regularly live well into their second century thanks to their regular organ replacements, vitamin enriched diets, and access to medical procedures verging on the miraculous. The upper class are people who have risen or fallen on the tides of capitalism. A savvy whiz kid who made millions with his new tech start-up and a former investor who got pushed out of his old Megacorp would both be here. The middle class is extremely small. It is primarily composed of people with highly skilled technical positions, like Engineers, or members of Megacorp private militias which are both kept in greater comfort than the average citizen. The populace in general is poor. Every dime is squeezed out of those who live, work, and die within the Megacorp's cities and they live in conditions roughly equal to a modern day second world country. Finally there is a large community who are so poor they exist outside the bounds of Megacorporate concern. Their existence is off the grid. They live in shanties and hovels in communities that have their own laws unenforced by any corporate Police presence.

Groups
Fixers: In a world of terrible laws people need lawbreakers. A Fixer may be a hacker, a hitman, a mediator, or a streetfighter and a good one is all of those in one. A Fixer's life is dangerous but simple. Someone will come to him with some money and a job and if he takes the money he does the job. It's an informal title and everyone knows some tough guy who tells girls he's a Fixer but any good Fence will tell you the regulars he knows who get jobs done. Any district worth it's salt will always have a Fixer bar where you can see if you can get someone to listen to your problem for the paltry sum you've got to offer.
Gangs: In the Megacorp cities there is Megacorp law. Outside those cities the present countries laws are in effect. In the middle of those two spaces there exists an area where the law grows thin, both powers finding it too difficult and costly to enforce control. In "The Outskirts" a cities gangs vie for control over it's resources and people and in these places one is just as likely to go to a local boss as to the local police. Being a prominent Gang can be big business, not just from the money that can be made running drugs or goods into and out of a city but the Megacorps also use the Gangs as a way to find and recruit talent for particularly unsavory tasks they may need done.
Anarchists: A lot of people hate the system and those who turn those feelings into actions are known as Anarchists. There are Anarchist cells in every city in the world. Sometimes they will be groups of highly skilled individuals, working secretly for fear of death, to cripple the regimes that allow for Megacorp oppression. Sometimes they will groups of teenagers who give each other amateur tattoo's and have sex. Either way you should help them out.


As to Transhumanism and power sources I think there should definitely be Cybernetics, Psionics, Battlesuits, and Genetic Engineering. I also like the idea of there being lots of crazy new drugs that can be used for both worldbuilding and power sources. Some questions: Do people want to play as animal people cause that's totally possible with Genetic engineering? Should there be good religious groups or mostly creepy cults? People seem to have a desire for the homeless and super poor to be the secret good guys of the setting, what can we do to accommodate that?

[Prak]

One of the interesting things about Rifts that I don't think ever actually got examined enough that all religion had apparently become like this weird wild ass guess reconstruction stuff. Like, post-apocalypse people found comics and such and so there might be people who actually thought Superman was a god and worshiped him.


And while that specifically is more a post-apoc trope than cyberpunk, what you could do with Cyberpunk--if you wanted to emphasize a sort of mercenary, cynical, make it mine, make it work, use it for purposes unintended kind of culture, you could have people worshiping fewer gods and using more of patron saint/little gods dynamic, possibly heavily influenced by pop culture, so you have cyberdocs muttering House's name during proceedures as if he were appealing to a higher power, and other people who have shrines to Godzilla, leaving offerings that natural disasters may not befall their city.

There was a manga or a comic I read a long ass time ago that talked about this sort of thing with Shinto--specifically Shinto practitioners taking on pop culture figures like Marilyn Monroe or Godzilla as spirits to ...pray? to--but damned if I can remember which manga that was so I can go look. Best bet is either Pet Shop of Horrors or Chobits, and I have no clue.


The other thing that comes to mind is the state of religion in Transmetropolitan, where something like 600 new religions are founded in the City everyday and huge religion conventions are held with shit like Temple of Zeus complete with a giant fucking Zeus statue with a massive lightning bolt emerging from his crotch under his toga. The idea is that the people in the world of Transmet are desperate and lost and cynical and gullible, and any charlatan can come along with a good enough story and get a bunch of idiots to give him money, and sometimes people just crack and think "Zeus is talking to me... he's saying I should go fuck that woman and all my problems will go away..."

This all leads me to one of the things that I think truly is a hallmark of Cyberpunk- Dystopia. The cyberpunk milieu is an inherently dark, depressing, cynical world, where everyone outside of your immediate clique is either trying to rob you, sell you something, or kill you.

Transmet is kind of it's own cyberpunk resource. AI and Cybernetics are goddamned ubiquitous, to the point where there are drugs specifically for AIS, and drugs that connect your mind to a computer, also on a drug, so you're sharing the high, and their side-effect is turning you into a machine. Literally. Greygoo is an actual potential terrorism tool in that world, and there's a quick story from a homeless paraplegic who lost his legs when he was a cop and had to wade through grey goo to turn off the machine creating it to save the block he was panhandling on when he told the story.

On the transhumanism front, genetic mods are literally ubiquitous. The main character tells his assistants to go get an anti-cancer trait like he's telling them "I have a lot of cats, go buy some claritin." A woman pawns her daughter's doll so she can buy her daughter an anti-hunger trait. A woman uses "I just got my stomach replaced with a photosynthetic bacteria colony" to shoot down the main character asking her out, and it's an actual plausible thing she could have.

Then there's the non-obvious cybernetics, where you can get a phone implanted in your skull that overlays the numberpad on your vision in pillform.

Transmet is maybe a bit too far forward in the tech respect, but I really thinks it's going to be another case of "holy hell, how did they predict this shit?"

[Stahlseele]

I've also heard that bashing weapons have always been a problem for about any kind of armor.

That's a bit of misrepresentation, however. Blunt weapons perform more or less the same against many armor types because the big selling point of heavy hammer vs. similarly heavy blade is that they have less issues with deflection since there isn't a narrow edge to be easily turned about. However, if you're dealing with flexible armors that are unlikely to deflect blows then odds are you'd be better served with a blade or point--humanity's known how to set bones pretty well for a very long time but dealing with blood loss and infection had to wait until much, much later.

But these are both a non inssue today and especially in a cyberpunk setting.
In a weapon, the right here and right now effectiveness is always more important in an inter personal conflict than how long it will take the contenders to get back up on their feet after the brawl is over. This only enters the equation on larger scale combat, where you try to out attrition an enemy.
Blunt weapons simply transfer much more of their energy than other weapons, and even if the armor has some give to it, that still means you can bruise or at least knock back an opponent with that energy, because it has to go somewhere . .

I remember seeing a documentary once where they showed some medival combat styles with people holding their swords at the bladed parts and striking armored targets with the hilt and it being pretty damn effective.

[Username17]

Religious appropriation of modern day brands and fiction is a post apocalyptic trope. Cyberpunk generally embraces cynicism or futurism as a belief construct. So people are generally atheists or working towards some singularity geek rapture rather than worshiping the Santa on an old cola sign like they would in Fallout or Gama World.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Or, in the case of Gibson, AIs might be smart enough to co-opt religious beliefs, using them as a medium to interact with people. Les Invisibles, and all that.

[Whipstitch]

Religious appropriation of modern day brands and fiction is a post apocalyptic trope. Cyberpunk generally embraces cynicism or futurism as a belief construct. So people are generally atheists or working towards some singularity geek rapture rather than worshiping the Santa on an old cola sign like they would in Fallout or Gama World.

-Username17

Yeah, there's a lot of cross pollination between genres but even in cyberpunk where weird cults are a thing at least one POV character is still likely to be a cynical, areligious techie, since those characters are best situated to distinguish and explain to the audience the important differences between what something's ostensible purpose is and how it functions and thus what it is actually capable of doing. To use Frank's own Ends of the Matrix as an example, the average citizen thinks of wireless commlinks a groundbreaking new telecommunications device while Johnny Mnemonic also notices that it's an intense emf generator that can be used to make people shit their pants from across the street.

[Username17]

Transhumanism in Cyberpunk is an explicitly dubious process. You become more, but also less. In transcending who you are, you stop being who you were. You become post-human, but also inhuman. And so on and so on with mixed metaphors.

People in Cyberpunk self-actualize as robot dolphins or whatever the fuck, but they run the risk of losing themselves entirely and becoming a killer robot shark on a rampage that ends only in their tragic death. Characters need transhuman upgrades to keep up, but these also have to compromise their sense of self in some manner.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

In cyberpunk, you are still just a rat in a cage. But you are competing against the other rats, volunteering (or not) for experiments to gain a competitive advantage for a vanishingly small chunk of cheese, or what was once cheese, until you finally wonder whether there was any cheese at all, or if you have only been chasing the memory of cheese this entire time, a slab of rat-brain in a jar, so far removed from what you were...and all this time, the great technicians have been building a simulation, a program that thinks like a rat but that was never a rat to begin with...

[Ancient History]

...I might have taken that rat analogy too far. I might also now want to write a Cyberpunk conversion for Mouse Guard.

[TheFlatline]

Are you asking for the best part of cyberpunk, or the best parts of shadowrun? Because your list seems strictly tied to SR.

If you're talking about cyberpunk as a genre, the shopping list is:

-Megacorps: They must be ubiquitous, above the law, and they must give YOU a reason to hate them. Megacorps are evil and always out to get you in one way or another (taking your rights away, poisoning the populace, instituting a police state, etc).
-Information Culture: Everything must be wired in some way or another, this is both a relief and paranoia fuel. Big Brother is Watching You.
-Transhumanism: Bionics, genegeneering, psionics, whatever. Muggle-lity is an evolutionary dead-end, so it's up to us to elevate ourselves. Try not to have mutually opposing paths to augmentation in the same setting or you'll end up with Rifts and WSOD suffers. Also, the PCs must ALWAYS be tanshumans or you end up with Linear Fighters/Quadratic Wizards (don't give players a choice, there are no "Batmen" here).
-Social inequality: Last but not least, society must be all kinds of fucked up. If I was talking about writing a book, this one would be on top of the list, but it's a game, and players aren't supposed to be on the "have not" side of things (fuck Future Noir) unless you're playing Paranoia. Still, the players must always be aware of how fucked up society is.

I hope that helps.

You've still basically riffed Shadowrun here.

If we're approaching Cyberpunk as a sort of sci-fi noir/pulp like it originally was (read Burning Chrome and try to tell me that shit ain't straight up channeling Chandler) you're looking thematically at characters trying to find meaning in a world where all "meaning" has been commercialized. If all it takes to have Brad Pitt level good looks is a few thousand bucks and a trip to the plastic surgeon for an afternoon, then what's the value of looking that good?

That to me is one of the central themes of Cyberpunk: How do you retain your humanity when humanity is meaningless? It's been commercialized in every aspect, right down to the transhuman augmentation/replacement of the human body. Even just not bothering to get scars removed and shit is noteworthy because it's so trivial now.

In that light the vices and failings of the characters and protagonists are almost sensual in the genre. We relate to Case because he's a drug addict and probably suicidal. Hiro is a slacker who has issues with women in general. Automatic Jack just... can't... say... no... when a woman comes onto him a certain way. Molly grew up watching cowboy flicks and John Woo blood operas and defined herself in terms of cinematic badassitude. The flawed protagonist is a trope in Cyberpunk not to make things more "gritty" like you might see in Noir, but as a way to identify, in a minor key, with characters in an otherwise alien world. That we identify with these characters through vices that we might otherwise sneer at is thematically important if not essential.

[Lokathor]

Society from the Top Down
The year is 2100. Megacorporations have become so powerful they are sovereign nations.

Don't forget that you need to have a reason in your setting why the corps have military power that can stand up to the government and the government just lets it slide. It could be any number of reasons, but it needs to be there, or you'll have a giant plot hole in the script. Shadowrun goes with "government corruption and slippery slopes, then global disasters". Snow Crash goes with "encrypted monetary exchange eliminated the ability to tax people because all transactions became private, so the governments collapsed that way".

It could really be any half-way reasonable explanation, as long as it's there.

[Nath]

You can also ask the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence for their take on the matter, in the Quadriennal Intelligence Community Review 2009.

[Dogbert]

Don't forget that you need to have a reason in your setting why the corps have military power that can stand up to the government and the government just lets it slide.

Monsanto already owns Blackwater, so you don't need to bang your head on the wall trying to justify things that already exist in this day and age.

[Prak]

You could conceivably just say "Libertarians won. The government was steadily reduced in function while corporations took over more and more functions, until the government was little more than a figurehead and corporations run the show."