Best parts of Cyberpunk

[kzt]

A more modern take on the Soverign AAA megacorp is the citizen corporation who is treated as an individual citizen in the eyes of the government. So you don't have Ono Sendai as it's own country, but you do have the Honorable Senator Ono Sendai from the great state of Wherever.

Or you treat them like BoA or Goldman Sachs gets treated by the US DoJ and treasury. Very respectfully. The senior corp officials end up appointed to run the government (like say Henry Paulson ofGoldman and Jacob J. Lew of Citibank), and corporate crimes get secret settlements paid to the government where normal people would spend years in prison.

[Username17]

While you maximize profits by socializing costs and privatizing gains, and you do that by being a contractor rather than the government per se - many rich people seek power rather than simply bigger piles of money. Gazprom would probably make more money if it just bribed some politicians to have the Russian Navy protect their Nigerian assets - but it's just fucking cooler to outright buy parts of the Russian Navy and station them off the West African Coast themselves.

State Capture isn't just about making money or protecting yourself from the fickle winds of democracy - it's about putting a giant gold statue of your cock in front of your building. It doesn't have to make sense, people do it. Because it's awesome.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

State Capture isn't just about making money or protecting yourself from the fickle winds of democracy - it's about putting a giant gold statue of your cock in front of your building. It doesn't have to make sense, people do it. Because it's awesome.

-Username17

Why am I totally picturing North Korea and battalions of soldiers jackbooting around and around a giant golden dong that's supposedly Kim Jong Un's penis?

[TheFlatline]

So you've got the Major's rant about how if everyone on her team was wired up that they'd become predictable and they could get wiped out. And that's a cool rant, and it is excused Togusa being kind of a dead weight in that movie.

Strangely enough this musing invokes Ender's Game. Aside from the Little Doctor, one of the biggest benefits humans have over the buggers (excuse me, Formics) is that while the aliens are a hive mind, and that is awesome for coordination, humans are individuals and unpredictable and a flash of brilliance can come from any pilot/commander involved at any time instead of just one mind and one state of being.

[norms29]

In March 2006, Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA, allegedly suggested at an international conference in Amman, Jordan, that the company was ready to move towards providing security professionals up to brigade size (3,000–5,000) for humanitarian efforts and low-intensity conflicts. Citation: http://hamptonroads.com/node/84251

However they never actually did. Losing the DoS Iraq contract didn't kill the company, but it certainly put a lot of crazy ideas to bed.

hmm. ok, then.

that of course is a state of affairs that just supports my original point, that ownership of blackwater does not qualify as having " military power that can stand up to the government."

[Ice9]

Re: Some things that have been mentioned.

Magic - I don't consider it generally even part of Cyberpunk. Shadowrun is its own sub-genre.

Psychic powers though, I do. Because of PKD, perhaps. By preference, they should interact with technology instead of avoiding it - drugs that boost or suppress psychic strength, cybernetic brain enhancement, psi-training programs, etc.

Human-level AIs - Not sure that's a good thing for a game. While "can we all be replaced by machines" is an interesting dilemma, you don't have much of a game when the answer is "Yes. Your characters are worthless now."

[Shatner]

A big thing that Cyberpunk has tried to work with was the idea of conformity as a cost. And also of individuality as a cost. And yes, I know that it doesn't make sense when you say both things at the same time and it hasn't worked out well game mechanically when people try to bring that to games.

So you've got the Major's rant about how if everyone on her team was wired up that they'd become predictable and they could get wiped out. And that's a cool rant, and it is excused Togusa being kind of a dead weight in that movie. But that's just it... he was actually pretty much dead weight in that movie. At no time did anyone ever demonstrate getting their ass kicked because they were too wired and didn't have enough human left inside to be unpredictable. That never fucking happened. People lost because their tech wasn't good enough, but not even once did even a single fucking person lose anything because their tech was too good.

Ideally, you'd have some sort of thing where you can get "better" by getting state of the art stuff, but doing so also makes you "conform" which in turn means that people can spoof you. But that's really hard to do. That's so hard to do that I can't recall people actually successfully pulling that off in single author fiction.

What pretty much always happens is you get some kind of dumb uncanny valley where getting a "little" augmented fucks you out of whatever design space they gave to actual pure meat, and getting a lot augmented is pretty much that plus you get to be an awe inspiring death machine.

-Username17

Perhaps the Avatar setting? In the Last Air Bender, benders are better than non-benders. But then you have things come up (eclipses, the moon being temporarily destroyed, chi-blockers) and having a bad-ass normal on the team matters. Granted, the example of the bad-ass normal from the original series is NOT Sokka but rather Mai and Ty Lee.

In Legend of Korra you have lots of bad-ass normals who know bender-fighting martial arts, wield shocker-gloves and/or batons, and drive cars/motorcycles/planes/fucking mech suits. If Team Avatar is having to fight during a contrived no-bending allowed scenario (such as being in the spirit realm) then having a bad-ass normal around would be a good idea.

If you set up your game so that the Bender-equivalents get PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER but itty-bitty conceptual space while your non-Benders get to be a ninja macgyver then maybe it could work out.

[OgreBattle]

Perhaps the Avatar setting? In the Last Air Bender, benders are better than non-benders. But then you have things come up (eclipses, the moon being temporarily destroyed, chi-blockers) and having a bad-ass normal on the team matters. Granted, the example of the bad-ass normal from the original series is NOT Sokka but rather Mai and Ty Lee.

The strongest badass normal was Zuko.

[Shatner]

The strongest badass normal was Zuko.

The image is broken but I assume it's meant to be a picture of Zuko as the Blue Spirit. Yeah, my post isn't to say that the Avatar setting shows us how it's done, because it doesn't. Rather between the two series it does do some niche carving and role protection for a team with super-humans and normal humans. In this pick-the-good-leave-the-bad situation, you'd want to design your game precisely so the benders don't become Zuko, and are demi-gods of their respective powers while also being a better brawler and ninja than you are.

Asami does tech stuff to make solutions happen and is better at driving/mech fighting/piloting than the rest of the team. She also kicks enough ass to make her not a drag on the team even if she can't compete with the benders for raw scenery destruction. And if there ever was a situation where Team Avatar had to fight in an anti-magic zone, she'd arguably be the most effective member of the group.

EDIT: Varrick is also an example to draw inspiration from. Despite being essentially comic relief, he does pull out some tech ex machinas. Again, ninja + macgyver (basically, batman without the plot armor) seems like a good place to be assuming the members of the team who can throw cars around and bounce bullets of their cleft chin stay more-or-less to their side of the conceptual space.

[Nath]

A big thing that Cyberpunk has tried to work with was the idea of conformity as a cost. And also of individuality as a cost. And yes, I know that it doesn't make sense when you say both things at the same time and it hasn't worked out well game mechanically when people try to bring that to games.

Novels and even movies can be written as if both a character's technical prowess and social life were equally important, so that these costs apply to these different aspects. Cyberpunk is Film Noir blended with (technological) Magic: Case can hack computers with his mind but, in the end, Molly leaves him. Obviously, it is a lot more difficult to make RPG players care about their character having a shitty life and bonding with no one. Introducing a dice roll to check if characters died from drug overdose at the beginning of each session is not going to be a popular mechanic.

[Prak]

I'd actually be very amused by a cyberpunk setting that found ways to contrive role protection for mundies with stuff like "cybernetics is bulky, and prone to glitching. Not prone enough that you'll notice in a gun fight, but you really don't want you driver crammed into the front seat suddenly hitting a BSoD in a car chase".

I'm not necessarily suggesting it, but it would amuse me greatly if you needed a mundie to be the driver and face because cybernetics were bulky/glitchy/had distracting lights.

[Ancient History]

Trying to nail cyberpunk down to one theme is a hard thing, because it wasn't one thing - it was different authors, at the same time, hitting a similar aesthetic. It was a nature outgrowth of New Wave fiction, yet it had an aesthetic of its own, and it developed recognizable tropes, which is why for many people cyberpunk is equal parts alienation and a grimy future. It's not the crystal spires and togas people thought about in the 50s. It's a society where technology distances people, while serving as a bridge between them. It's the guy that can talk to people on the other side of the planet, but never leaves his one-room apartment.

Personal augmentation is cool, but as I think Frank mentioned, anything that makes you more than human also makes you less. The intimate connection with technology just further alienates you from other people, and from the person you were. Which is why the step past cyberpunk, transhumanist fiction in particular, focuses on what you become.

[Shatner]

I'd actually be very amused by a cyberpunk setting that found ways to contrive role protection for mundies with stuff like "cybernetics is bulky, and prone to glitching. Not prone enough that you'll notice in a gun fight, but you really don't want you driver crammed into the front seat suddenly hitting a BSoD in a car chase".

I'm not necessarily suggesting it, but it would amuse me greatly if you needed a mundie to be the driver and face because cybernetics were bulky/glitchy/had distracting lights.

That sort of thing is done in many settings but I think it's important to give out bonuses/additional powers to mundies and techies respectively, rather than giving out penalties to one and a lack of penalties to the other.

If you make a setting where being a cyborg makes you a bad party face (e.g. society at large distrusts cyborgs, your cranium gun scares the shit out of people you are conversing with because you have a gun pointed at them and you could shoot them with a thought, your face is a mess of tubes and scar tissue) then people will find ways around that pretty quickly (e.g. I conduct my business over the phone/internet using a fake photo).

Instead, I'd bake-in the types and let you go from there. Say that heavy cybernetics have to be incorporated during physical development so you have cyberbabies with black tubes and whirring servos like a borg nursery. And your average person is actually the end result of Gattaca-style genetic modification. As such player A is a cyborg and can punch through a wall, but because of [setting reason here] acts like a Jem'Hadar and will rage out if they're forced to engage in polite conversation. And then player B has been spliced with canine genes to be friendly and ingratiating and subconsciously aware of dominance/submission cues, allowing them to grease the wheels of conversation like a veteran schmoozer.

You have some implants the norms can pick off the shallow pool of the cyborg list and there are some gene tweaks or hypno-skills the cyborg can grab off the shallow pool of the Gattaca list, but the real conceptual-space-defining stuff is cordoned off.

Being a truly unmodified person would be weird and crippling, like being illiterate in a modern setting or having a violent allergy to WiFi.

[kzt]

that of course is a state of affairs that just supports my original point, that ownership of blackwater does not qualify as having " military power that can stand up to the government."

If you want something like that you'd need Major General Dunlap's "Violence Applications International Corporation (VAIC)" from his essays http://www.usafa.edu/df/inss/OCP/ocp11.pdf and http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.m ... lap_Jr.pdf

You'll note that he had this not exactly work out well.
"Eventually, the Pentagon’s aversion to fighting compelled the ultimate form of outsourcing: hazardous, unpopular operations were contracted out to the newly formed Violence Applications International Corporation (VAIC). For years, VAIC and its stable of retirees did the military’s dirty work, thereby allowing the armed forces the opportunity to deepen their involvement in popular domestic activities and trendy overseas enterprises. But when the Second Gulf War broke out in 2010 and the Iranian Tenth Armored Corps began crushing everything in its path, VAIC defaulted on its contract as its employees scattered. Corporate loyalty, it seems, has its limits. "

[Shatner]

Off the top of my head, I could see 3 different base types.

Gattacas: seemingly normal people who were genetically enhanced at conception to be able to compete in the grim, corporate oligarchy of the cyberpunk future. By the standards of the 21st century, this is a race of charismatic geniuses, but in the cyber punk present, they're the vanilla majority of humanity.

Cyborgs: obvious meshes of man and machine, they've had hardware installed in them since before they could speak. Usually designed for a specific purpose and sold or raised to do that purpose for the buyer that commissioned them in the first place. Like the Gammas from Brave New World mixed with the Borg.

Mentats: people with a modem in their head and a neural network integrated with their neurons. They combine the magic thinky-thinky intuition of human gray matter with the retrieval and indexing powers of computers. They can come off as kinda awkward or aspergers-y but if you want stuff hacked or data sifted, they're the best to do it by far. They don't look unusual like cyborgs but a moment of observation or a snippet of conversation gives away their true nature.

You have an ability/bonus list for each group that is divided into "public" and "private" options, with the former free to anyone who picks them and the latter reserved for characters of that type. At character creation you must pick X abilities off of your private list so that you are emblematic of your type and then you can pick Y abilities off any public list (your own or others). So, a Gattaca might have "Heightened Problem Solving" and "Olympic Physique" from their own list, then take "Communication Implant" from one list and "Retinal HUD" off the other.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah instead of Gattaca you could sort of roll with a Bioshock concept where you're a splicer. Gene therapy is cheap and ubiquitous and your "average joe" can walk up to a GeneShack and get a bunch of cocktails and purges. The benefits of being a mundie is that your system is a blank slate. You can adapt to nearly any situation with a combination of gene therapy and drugs. Maybe throw knowsofts into this too.

[Shatner]

The reason all of these concepts begin with "and when I was a fetus they stuck wires/a microchip/enhancement drugs in me" is to add a reason for why Joe Regular can't enjoy being a regular AND spend a giant pile of money to get a cranial gun and subdermal armor implants. And conversely, why Psy Borguh can't get a Wetware AI or Bonobo Splice.

It's fine to allow the stuff in the public lists to be freely available and something you can buy from your local GenetiTech franchise. But you do want core stuff on private lists for role protection and you need a robust, in-setting explanation for why the private stuff is private. It being something you're effectively born with does the trick cleanly and concisely while giving it that grungy violation of self feel that goes along with Cyberpunk. I mean, if you wanted to, as an adult you could save your pennies and get your eyes replaced with cameras, but you had no choice to be a radiation-shielded human fork lift; that decision was made in a lab somewhere at the behest of a parent or corporation.

Finally, if Joe Regulars really are normal humans than you run into the Ghost in the Shell problem Frank was talking about where it strains credibility, or at least makes creating an in-world explanation much more difficult, that you have something to add that "the living terminator" and "the embodiment of a Hans Moravec thought experiment" don't, and can't simply buy if they lack it. By making all Joe Regulars gene-modded it gives them a Source of phlebotenum so they can have nice things that the others can't without invoking spiritualist weeabo. It's the cyberpunk equivalent of making sure all your fighters can eventually transform into angel knights and not get left behind once the party hits 7th level.

[fectin]

While you maximize profits by socializing costs and privatizing gains, and you do that by being a contractor rather than the government per se - many rich people seek power rather than simply bigger piles of money. Gazprom would probably make more money if it just bribed some politicians to have the Russian Navy protect their Nigerian assets - but it's just fucking cooler to outright buy parts of the Russian Navy and station them off the West African Coast themselves.
-Username17

But bribery is also higher risk; owning the navy gives you a predictable cost for predictable performance. Renting leaves you open to wild cost and performance swings in the future. It's actually a really good metaphor for a lot of other corporate sovereignty decisions too.

Strangely enough this musing invokes Ender's Game. Aside from the Little Doctor, one of the biggest benefits humans have over the buggers (excuse me, Formics) is that while the aliens are a hive mind, and that is awesome for coordination, humans are individuals and unpredictable and a flash of brilliance can come from any pilot/commander involved at any time instead of just one mind and one state of being.

That's a slight misstatement, but is essentially a factually correct description. See e.g. Boyd's Patterns of Conflict.

[Shatner]

Yeah instead of Gattaca you could sort of roll with a Bioshock concept where you're a splicer. Gene therapy is cheap and ubiquitous and your "average joe" can walk up to a GeneShack and get a bunch of cocktails and purges. The benefits of being a mundie is that your system is a blank slate. You can adapt to nearly any situation with a combination of gene therapy and drugs. Maybe throw knowsofts into this too.

What you're mentioning here presents an interesting idea. You're going to have short-term buffs (the cyberpunk equivalent of DnD potions). And one solution to the dual problems of 1) guzzling all your buffs and ambush-murdering the BBEG in the next 20 seconds and 2) hoarding your disposable buffs forever because the future is uncertain is the following:

You have X slots for buffs. These slots can be filled by permanent buffs and temporary buffs, with the better stuff being reserved for permanent buffs (since you should be rewarded for committing to that buff). Temporary buffs can be slotted in or out with a bit of downtime (such as spending a half a day getting your designer glands flushed and filled with new chemicals and then the rest of the day taking pain killers and napping away the after-effects).

So you have two different cyborgs. One is a walking tank with most of her buff slots filled with impressive, permanent hardware. She is always ready for a fight and always capable of surviving for prolonged periods in toxic environments or a hard vacuum. The other is a private investigator who just has one or two permanent buffs, with the rest left open. Given some downtime he can be prepared for hunting a perp across the bio-chem wastelands, detecting and disrupting malevolent rogue AIs, or getting loaded up to not embarrass himself in a brawl, though he'll not be as good as the aforementioned she-hulk. And if the she-hulk needs to sneak into a military compound and communicate with uplifted dolphins, she'll have to make the best of her limited remaining slots and otherwise rely on her teammates.

That way you can have your role protection (only cyborgs can X, and Y, plus they do Z way better than anyone else) and a continuum along which different levels of normalcy-to-inhumanity exist. And all the points along that continuum are (if the buff lists are well-crafted) mechanically justified.

There should probably be a few slots reserved for permanent buffs and a few reserved for temp buffs to keep either extreme from being too powerful or too screwed.

[fectin]

Unfortunately, adventures aren't independent of characters. So if you cyber up to be permanently adapted to punching dolphins, every story from then on deals with undersea wildlife. And if one guy does that, and the other maintains open slots to deal with other environments, the other is a sucker because he will still be all undersea, all the time, he'll just have less good buffs.

[Shatner]

Unfortunately, adventures aren't independent of characters. So if you cyber up to be permanently adapted to punching dolphins, every story from then on deals with undersea wildlife. And if one guy does that, and the other maintains open slots to deal with other environments, the other is a sucker because he will still be all undersea, all the time, he'll just have less good buffs.

A fair point. Then you could do one of two things:

1) Make permanent buffs fairly generic in their usefulness and leave the really specific stuff to temporary buffs or equipment.

2) Rename permanent buffs to something like "long-term" and have them take weeks of downtime to swap out instead of a day. That way the party can finish an adventure in a partially flooded, undersea arcology wherein the P.I. had robo-gills, then retool after three months of partying and downtime. Once it's known that they're next going to have to bust heads on an orbital weapons platform that's been hijacked by terrorists, the P.I. can swap out for an internal gyroscope and radiation-cleansing lymph nodes.

[Blade]

So you've got the Major's rant about how if everyone on her team was wired up that they'd become predictable and they could get wiped out. And that's a cool rant, and it is excused Togusa being kind of a dead weight in that movie. But that's just it... he was actually pretty much dead weight in that movie. At no time did anyone ever demonstrate getting their ass kicked because they were too wired and didn't have enough human left inside to be unpredictable. That never fucking happened. People lost because their tech wasn't good enough, but not even once did even a single fucking person lose anything because their tech was too good.

That's because Major Mary Sue is augmented, and she can't have any real weakness. And she must be shown to be better than anyone else. So no matter what the in-universe explanation is, the truth is that Togusa is mostly here to make augmented people look good, and bad augmented people threatening (so that Major Sue will look even more badass when killing them).

[Username17]

The first cyberpunk book rather predates the word, obviously. A lot of people put the first as something by Philip K. Dick, but I wouldn't say you were wrong if you went a bit farther back into the Czech literature and chose RUR. In any case, ideas of synthetic humans - of artificial intelligence - have as much squatting rights in the genre as anything. The genre was ranting about replicants and robots before it even had a name for direct neural interfaces.

In any case, Cyberpunk is mostly identifiable as a critique of consumerism and capitalism. Like hipsterism, it was a fad that took pride in mocking fads. What this means most saliently is that unless you have a very Gattaca-esque point to make about inherited wealth and opportunity making a mockery of social and economic mobility that having rigid "classes" is probably a bad idea. Characters in most Cyberpunk literature feel a tremendous and continuous pressure to abandon what makes them themselves in order to embrace the new and transform into something else. Something better, or at least something more appropriate to "the times."

In something like 90% of the Cyberpunk worlds I can think of, it would be deeply corrosive if you were in any way "locked in" to the choice of whether you were a giant killer robot or not. I mean, there's a lot of "you can't go back" in Cyberpunk, but I don't think there's a lot of "you can't go forward."

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

In something like 90% of the Cyberpunk worlds I can think of, it would be deeply corrosive if you were in any way "locked in" to the choice of whether you were a giant killer robot or not. I mean, there's a lot of "you can't go back" in Cyberpunk, but I don't think there's a lot of "you can't go forward."

-Username17

Not entirely. Cyberpunk is often part Noir, and being too old to change is very Noir.
The kids these days, genemodded from conception to be cybercompatible...If I tried to install the Zipmeister 3000 in this old noggin, my newurons would fry.

[Longes]

A big thing that Cyberpunk has tried to work with was the idea of conformity as a cost. And also of individuality as a cost. And yes, I know that it doesn't make sense when you say both things at the same time and it hasn't worked out well game mechanically when people try to bring that to games.

So you've got the Major's rant about how if everyone on her team was wired up that they'd become predictable and they could get wiped out. And that's a cool rant, and it is excused Togusa being kind of a dead weight in that movie. But that's just it... he was actually pretty much dead weight in that movie. At no time did anyone ever demonstrate getting their ass kicked because they were too wired and didn't have enough human left inside to be unpredictable. That never fucking happened. People lost because their tech wasn't good enough, but not even once did even a single fucking person lose anything because their tech was too good.

Ideally, you'd have some sort of thing where you can get "better" by getting state of the art stuff, but doing so also makes you "conform" which in turn means that people can spoof you. But that's really hard to do. That's so hard to do that I can't recall people actually successfully pulling that off in single author fiction.

What pretty much always happens is you get some kind of dumb uncanny valley where getting a "little" augmented fucks you out of whatever design space they gave to actual pure meat, and getting a lot augmented is pretty much that plus you get to be an awe inspiring death machine.

-Username17

Perhaps the Avatar setting? In the Last Air Bender, benders are better than non-benders. But then you have things come up (eclipses, the moon being temporarily destroyed, chi-blockers) and having a bad-ass normal on the team matters. Granted, the example of the bad-ass normal from the original series is NOT Sokka but rather Mai and Ty Lee.

In Legend of Korra you have lots of bad-ass normals who know bender-fighting martial arts, wield shocker-gloves and/or batons, and drive cars/motorcycles/planes/fucking mech suits. If Team Avatar is having to fight during a contrived no-bending allowed scenario (such as being in the spirit realm) then having a bad-ass normal around would be a good idea.

If you set up your game so that the Bender-equivalents get PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER but itty-bitty conceptual space while your non-Benders get to be a ninja macgyver then maybe it could work out.

That's a pretty terrible setup. Shadowrun does it against magic with its Background Level places. It doesn't help the muggles be useful, it merely encourages the mages to ignore the job and go drink coffee at home. Having places where one or more of the party members are useless is not a good idea at all. Also see D&D and exciting adventures in the antimagic spheres.