Cyberpsychosis, Essence, and Approaching Transhumanism

[Chamomile]

Huh, so she does. Shows how much of an impression she left, I guess.

[Thaluikhain]

Totally not going to make any comment about eyes being up here.

[shinimasu]

Maglag: Including glasses in Bayonetta's character design clearly played a significant part in the poor sales of both games because the tonal dissonance between action hero and nerd was too much for the player base to grok.

Chamomile: Wait she wore glasses?

[Chamomile]

Totally not going to make any comment about eyes being up here.

I was looking for a way to make that joke without being too obvious to be funny, but I couldn't find it.

[Stahlseele]

[Occluded Sun]

Chemistry teacher. Nerd. Next please.

Wasn't Heisenberg from Breaking Bad a chemistry teacher?

Do you really want to disrespect Heisenberg?

[Omegonthesane]

Chemistry teacher. Nerd. Next please.

Wasn't Heisenberg from Breaking Bad a chemistry teacher?

Do you really want to disrespect Heisenberg?

...he was responding to a literal picture of fucking Heisenberg. Do you not read, or do you just have a selective memory?

Money's on the latter since you still haven't disavowed your earlier statement that the US has been less free since allowing all the people in it to be free citizens instead of chattel slaves.

[Strung Nether]

The ultimate goal of humanity scores/indices, essence attributes, and suchlike and so on is to attempt to make game mechanics for existential questions brought about by augmentation. That is the Ship of Theseus problem, but for people. Lots of fiction from the 80s and 90s deals heavily into questions of self, where one asks what it means to be human, and what it means to be you rather than someone else.

i am mine, i
i can't become someone else

Now I would say that these didn't really work out. The late 80s and early 90s were not periods of great game design generally, and the specific attempts to make mechanics to address the question of how much you could change while still being recognizably yourself in some important essential way were not things you'd want to copy going forward. Whether it's Vampire, Shadowrun, Nightlife, or Cyberpunk, what the period delivered was various numeric systems in which the player got to see a number and only had to worry about a hard point of no return while spending from that number to change their character. The hammer was large, but it never created an impetus for characters to want to stay themselves in any particular way - it was just another currency of character generation and advancement.

It's important to note that games have tried self scores that regenerated (Nightlife) and ones that never did (Shadowrun). Games have tried expenditures of self that were fixed (Shadowrun) and those that were random (CP). None of the variants did what they were supposed to do, because the underlying game of blackjack where you stop being you if you "bust" is not really an effective means of provoking debates about personal continuity. The game gives you a stark and simple yes or no answer and the numbers are all things that the player can see. It's just an accounting problem, not a jumping off point for a discussion about existential non-existence and the meaning of your sense of self.

-Username17

God dammit. I just finished balancing my cyber-magic-future-post-collapse stuff around "stress" damage from mods.

And you have gone and changed my mind. Stop it.

[Username17]

God dammit. I just finished balancing my cyber-magic-future-post-collapse stuff around "stress" damage from mods.

And you have gone and changed my mind. Stop it.

Certainly the issue with Stress that I found with the Asymmetric Threat stuff was that what I wanted was to support Wizards, Cyborgs, and slightly augmented / slightly magic guys. And Stress did do all of that. You could spend your Stress points on magic powers or on metallic augmentations or a little bit of both. But... I also wanted to support characters who really only had little if any magic or cybernetics, or chaacters who had some magic or cybernetics but relied upon stealth or mundane skill or innoccuousness or whatever to contribute. And Stress does not help with that.

The meta currency that can be spent on magic or cybernetic enhancements does not particularly support characters whose concept involves leaving any amunt of that currency on the table. And attempts to let people spend that remaining meta-currency in-game as luck points (see: the Evil Hat Dresden Files game) don't have a particularly good track record.

-Username17

[LR]

Is this something that Troupe Play can help with? If Togusa is meant to be a playable character, does that necessarily mean he has to be played all the time? We could just make Pink Mohawk Cyborg an all-in archetype like Magician. The long-term course of immunosuppressants needed to deal with replacing half your body with metal is now as much a choice of your character dedicating their life to studying magic.

Then we don't worry about the low-end ware or daily life magic so much and focus on what benefits a Street Level Journalist has, such that half the team is made out of Togusas, but those characters don't have to be played *all the time*. An immediate thought is that such a character could have a lot more contacts, so that when your team goes to meet the scummy doc selling organs cooked in a bath of illegal forced-growth chemicals, it's the Investigator doing the talking rather than the Street Sam.

[Stahlseele]

I never got the immunosuppressants needed . .
I mean . . you would make the parts that actually connect and interface with the body out of titanium or whatever else non allergene and non reactive material used in chirurgically used tools and implants nowadays right?
And for the rest it simply does not matter.

Theoretically, you could argue with a stronger immune system, because it needs to take care of less meat body . .

[angelfromanotherpin]

I remember that Stress was supposed to penalize all social skills, but I can also easily buy that Hideo's zen ninja skills would turn off if he had any Stress. It's much harder to become one with nothingness when the fan in your arm keeps turning on and off.

[Omegonthesane]

I get the feeling that having a set of things you can spend your Stress on that nominally represent competencies that are dependent on having no magic or cyberware would be too immersion breaking to do directly.

I'd be inclined to have a bunch of competencies you can purchase at otherwise cut rate which you straight up can't use unless your stress capacity is "so high that this is obviously gated to the party mundane" as being enough obfuscation to avoid an immersion break, though that would then support having a PC shoot up on stress inducing drugs and a stress inducing magic sword for the one scene where the mundane absolutely must keep up with the wared up people in their field of expertise.

[Mask_De_H]

I don't remember if we did for AT, but Sentai Fthagn, our fuck-Cthulhutech heartbreaker, went with troupe play to handle Magical Girls, Evas and Investigators.

When we took this from the D&D angle, the answer for mudanes keeping up with enhanced people was to make them gadgeteers or using Chakras. So they would buy in with magic gear, but not permanent enchantments.

[EightWave]

The meta currency that can be spent on magic or cybernetic enhancements does not particularly support characters whose concept involves leaving any amount of that currency on the table.

Seems to me that one of the problems is simply that you pay for cybernetics with cash and not any kind of meta-currency. Even Shadowrun acknowledges this, since you literally trade in priorities/build points for cash to buy cyberware (which actually kind of makes cybersams idiots: why not just retire to the bahamas with that cash?).

The actual meta-currency of cybernetics is simply something you can't represent in an RPG, which is that getting your limbs chopped off and computer chips stapled to your brain is crazy. Molly Millions is a badass, but she still worked as a whore and had her spine replaced with wires so she could be a henchman. That's nuts.

[Ancient History]

Shadowrun is weird in that both magic and cyberware have two (or three) interrelated metacurrencies. Magic requires a lot of nuyen (foci are expensive, materials are expensive), Karma, and a Magic Rating, which is tied to Essence; cyberware requires a lot of nuyen, and also Essence (and sometimes Bio Index/Essence Index).

The big advantage for cyberware is it doesn't require Karma and Essence can be your default dump stat, letting you just buy upgrades in a way that is very unusual for a roleplaying game (at least, any RPG that doesn't let you just buy bonuses a la magic items in D&D 3.x), and setting an upper limit on how much. But magical characters, because they value nuyen and Essence for different reasons, cannot treat Essence as a dump stat and instead have to play a different kind of optimization game, evaluating the benefit of taking a piece of cyberware over doing X with their magic.

Which of course leads to a few interesting strategies: a mage that gets 0.01 Essence worth of cyberware still loses a full point of Magic, so you're literally in for a penny, in for a pound: if you get a little cyber, you might as well get a full point's worth because there's no further penalty until you hit your next milestone.

[EightWave]

Are Karma and nuyen really meta-currencies, though? Buying up a non-magic skill doesn't make all of your current magic worse the way losing a point of essence does when you implant some 'ware, and buying a foci doesn't make any of your current cyberware worse.

Of course buying a foci means that's nuyen you didn't spend on cyberware, but that's just allocation of fungible resources.

[Username17]

Is this something that Troupe Play can help with?

Troupe Play is an adequate means of handling characters of different narrative worth, especially when some characters can interact in parts of the narrative that others cannot. So when you're confronted with the Shadowrun problems of the Stay At Home Decker problem but you also have combat hackers, Troupe play comes to the rescue. The team might have The Major in it, who hacks and also kicks ass on missions, but it also has hackers who stay at Section 9 and do data recon, and it has guys like Saito who kick ass in the field but don't really do the hacking thing except to get their vision hacked and feel bad about it.


This guy doesn't actually fight. But there are fighters who aren't doing anything while this guy is onscreen.

So Troupe Play comes in and solves that particular dynamic. A player can play The Major, but they could also play two characters: one guy who doesn't hack and another guy who doesn't fight.

But it doesn't really solve the issue of The Major and Togusa. The Major is much more powerful and effective in the role of field operative than Togusa is. She has a lot more and better augmentations than he does, and she absolutely delivers a lot more beat downs in combat and has better investigative abilities due to having more enhanced senses. Letting Togusa's player play another character is only going to be remotely helpful if that other character is like the Chief or something - someone who can similarly lord it over The Major's player in relevant scenes by having political powers or something. But that's necessarily going to be really hard to do, and I'm just not really convinced that there's a good way to game balance people playing characters who (comparatively) suck.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Is there a thing that Togusa is better at than the Major?

If not, then Togusa's a cohort mechanically, not even a troupe PC.

[Stahlseele]

Not setting of every metal/cyber-scanner in the vincinity.
Not thinking like the Übermensch. Way more empathetic to the rest of the population.
He is basically used as their conscience and grounding anchor.

[Mask_De_H]

Not setting of every metal/cyber-scanner in the vincinity.
Not thinking like the Übermensch. Way more empathetic to the rest of the population.
He is basically used as their conscience and grounding anchor.

Nobody wants to play Ma-Ti. It's an important narrative role in an ensemble cast, but it's not fun to play when the cost is being mechanically inferior.

[Stahlseele]

Shadowrun circumvents this with magic.
The PhysAd is the more specialized magical equivalent to the StreetSam.
Without stuff that will put every security system into total war mode.

Granted, PhysAds suck, and i like that they suck because i like Samurai better, but technically, there they are, they are there for that.

No idea how, if at all, other games handle this.

But in GitS, the Major tells us exactly why she wants Togusa on the team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyqGdQEvTHI

[Omegonthesane]

So yeah, Togusa's a god damn cohort unfit to even take up a slot in troupe play. 'cause in an actual Not-Shadowrun game, the honest cop family man can be an honest cop family man demon summoning sorcerer instead of just the Major's advisor.

[hyzmarca]

Nobody wants to play Ma-Ti. It's an important narrative role in an ensemble cast, but it's not fun to play when the cost is being mechanically inferior.

Point of Order, Ma-Ti is an absurdly overpowered beastmaster/emotion controller who only appears weak because he's a good kid who isn't cynical enough to exploit his power to the fullest. In the alternate reality where is is cynical enough to exploit his power to the fullest, he solves all of his problems through cynical emotion control that is strong enough to basically be mind control. When he doesn't have enough money, he just makes a random guy want to give him all of his money so strongly that he can't resist doing it.

Dark Ma-ti is a beast in a fight who can force you to commit suicide, make your best friend kill you, or just have a legion of wild animals tear you apart and eat you.

[Username17]

So yeah, Togusa's a god damn cohort unfit to even take up a slot in troupe play. 'cause in an actual Not-Shadowrun game, the honest cop family man can be an honest cop family man demon summoning sorcerer instead of just the Major's advisor.

Sure. You can make the reasonable claim that everyone who isn't The Major is a supporting character at best, and that Togusa in particular does not have the narrative weight of a major character. Fine.

But Hiro Protagonist is a main character in his book. And Case is a main character in his. Hiro is less augmented than characters he meets, and Case is specifically less augmented than Molly. There is a desire to play characters with a range of augmentation levels and neither meta-currency augmentation limits nor Troupe play actually get us there.

Ironically, I could imagine something similar to Priorities actually getting you there. Not remotely like any of the versions attempted by any edition of Shadowrun obviously, but something where characters who started off with less magic or augmentation started off with more contacts and skills. A character who isn't running around in a full borg conversion needs to bring other things to the table. A possibility might be character classes - or at least character templates where characters would start with radically different piles in column A and column B. Something similar to the starting packages in Feng Shui.

Now a completely separate issue is that in addition to players wanting to play characters of different levels of inhumanity, people also want to have different trajectories of dehumanization. Which is to say that the player who is basically playing Gally from Gunnm or The Major from GitS is probably totally on board with sinking more resources into ever more elaborate upgrades to their body. While the player who is playing the slightly cybered guy with a lot of skills probably wants to limit their future augmentations such that their character remains recognizable. That sort of implies to me that characters should literally have different amounts of the augmentation metacurrency - like fucking Cyberpunk 2020.

-Username17