Best parts of Cyberpunk

[Nath]

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).

As far as I remember, the only opponents in the first movie, where Kusanagi and Togusa have this discussion, are the guy with the invisibility cloak and the spider tank. So that's one fight Kusanagi wins and one she lose, before Batou brings in a (much) bigger gun.

"Ghost in the Shell," which span over a handful of comics, two movies and a TV serie, was rewritten a lot over two decades. The Mamoru Oshii films were actually written by another person, with little to no involvement from Masamune Shirow. The original comics could be considered as cyberpunk, with a trans-humanist conclusion in the two last chapters, while the movie used the same characters and some of the events for a full-fledged trans-humanist story.

The scene in the movie where Kusanagi tells Togusa about predictability is based off a similar scene in the comics, rewritten to be shorter and have a more trans-humanist, cryptic tone. In the comics, the actual topic is firing range performance (where Kusanagi casually mentions that Saito is just as bad as Togusa - it's only later that his eye-patch was retconed into a bad-ass sniper eye replacement).

Not that Togusa is much more useful to the team in the comics. He is primarily Dr. Watson: a convenient way for the author to provide plot exposition. By the end of the comics, he nonetheless takes on intelligence gathering duties and oversees a rookie, basically taking on Ishikiwa usual role (which is not much of a combat monster either).

The movies and the SAC series entrenched ideas that were very much absent from the original comics, especially the first chapters. Kusanagi has a boyfriend (even if it does not last), take soothers... And in the end, she fails.
She botches a mission, get on trial and must leave Section 9. Not that she really tries to defend herself or even cares at that point (when the attorney remark there is about one second between the moment she see her victim and she shot, she answers "Exactly 0,82 seconds" - that's what loss of humanity sounds like), because she's on her way to jump from the cyberpunk train onto the trans-humanist air balloon. That conclusion, on the other hand, is pretty much what established Ghost in the Shell pivotal role between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk trans-humanist.

[CatharzGodfoot]

What's the problem with metal detectors? That combined with a single starting resource pool seems to work pretty well for having viable 'badass normal' starting characters. As they get richer, they'll probably invest in some cybernetics, but they can also invest in military-grade weapons like power armor and hover tanks. Which have the advantage of providing extreme firepower when you don't need to be subtle, while allowing you to fly under the radar when you need to walk into the Huawei arcology.

[Whipstitch]

That's a flimsy thing to hang pretensions of game balance around though, particularly in a game where subverting surveillance devices is going to happen with regularity.

[Prak]

As our technology advances, metal is going to be less and less necessary. We can already make guns entirely from plastic and carbon. Most of the important stuff in your computer is plastic. Wires don't set off metal detectors. I would not be at all surprised by a future where cyborgs are more plastic than metal.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Metal detectors as in things that detect cyberware.

[OgreBattle]

I was thinking of just taking current social issues that Black Americans suffer but just applying that to White American characters in a dystopian future and calling it cyberpunk.

[Prak]

I think that might strain WSOD a bit much.

[pragma]

I was thinking of just taking current social issues that Black Americans suffer but just applying that to White American characters in a dystopian future and calling it cyberpunk.

I like this idea: I've always interpreted cyberpunk to be about extrapolating from current social and technological trends into the dystopia they suggest. So a modern cyberpunk epic could envision the megacorporations as slaves to their own big data algorithms, which make inscrutable decisions that crush individual lives. (This isn't far from the truth, credit rating programs as scary and often accidentally racist.)

[OgreBattle]

The world's first corporation was the East India Company, a product of imperialism. They sold drugs, killed folks who got in the way, and extracted wealth from nations for their own profits.

You could cyberpunk that up as Electronic Artsivision's VR MMORPG being so addictive that governments try to stop them so EA enforcers are sent to 'protect the interests of free trade' and crush opposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

[norms29]

The world's first corporation was the East India Company, a product of imperialism. They sold drugs, killed folks who got in the way, and extracted wealth from nations for their own profits.

technically the Company of Merchant Adventurers had them beat by 47 years in their home nation Britan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_of ... _New_Lands

They sold drugs, killed folks who got in the way, and extracted wealth from nations for their own profits.

You could cyberpunk that up as Electronic Artsivision's VR MMORPG being so addictive that governments try to stop them so EA enforcers are sent to 'protect the interests of free trade' and crush opposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

this might be nit picking, but is that really the best example we have if we're sticking to the cyberpunk "corporate power makes states irrelevant" concept. I mean I get that is sells corporate evil, but the fact is that EIC lobbyists ran crying to a national government to get the Royal Navy and Royal Marines to fight the war for them.

[Lokathor]

technically the Company of Merchant Adventurers had them beat by 47 years in their home nation Britan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_of ... _New_Lands

>>An adventurer is a business investor who ventures capital.

with a sword, yes, that sounds like what they do.

[Dean]

I really like the idea of Stress slots as a resource. In fact I typed about 5 paragraphs for how it would ideally work when I realized that it was almost exactly the same as Frank & K's Chakra slot solution for magic items. You have about half a dozen Stress slots which you can fill with cybernetic upgrades, gene-therapy, implants, or whatever. Being a normal human means you have every one of those slots open while being a genetically modified Super-soldier or Psychic means that some of your slots have been taken up to give you a small number of powerful but unalterable abilities. Just like Chakra slots for powerful races.

This system means no role is protected. Psions can get cranium guns and normals can get gene-spliced but by having chosen Cyborg and gotten dramatic Cybernetic powers for smaller slot investment you can always be more Cybernetic than someone adding that into their schtick later.

Permant abilities would come from your race, like having regeneration from your lizard genes. Long term abilities would take weeks of downtime to change, like a Cyborgs subdermal armor. Short term abilities can be changed between fights, like injecting yourself with Venom before going into a brawl.

[Korwin]

I was thinking of just taking current social issues that Black Americans suffer but just applying that to White American characters in a dystopian future and calling it cyberpunk.

Why would I want to play this game?
Or why would I not play an black* character?

*if an blue one is not possible.

[Schleiermacher]

Why would I want to play this game?
Or why would I not play an black* character?

Why wouldn't you?

[erik]

And this brings me to another best part of cyberpunk. It is set far enough in the future that you can write out racism as an old and discarded notion that no longer exists except maybe in backwoods places that nobody cares about that have been left behind in the 20th century. It's not a feature exclusive to cyberpunk but something I appreciate.

[Lokathor]

And this brings me to another best part of cyberpunk. It is set far enough in the future that you can write out racism as an old and discarded notion that no longer exists except maybe in backwoods places that nobody cares about that have been left behind in the 20th century. It's not a feature exclusive to cyberpunk but something I appreciate.

I would say that cyberpunk is exactly the opposite. Cyberpunk is set in a near future compared to other sorts of sci-fi stuff. It's usually only 30 to 70 years in the future. Cyberpunk is based upon our modern concerns and fears and ideas. Those concerns and ideas become strong in cyberpunk works because they're the exact sorts of things that we're facing today. If you just say "mega-corps took over, there's half as many resources as there should be so most everyone is poor, but look no more racism" then it feels very cheap. Cyberpunk, in general, is about taking society's problems of today and making them worse while also amping up the technology level.

There's room in the world for a post-racial fiction to be written during any era. You can have a 1920's casino with black people on equal footing if you want. I wouldn't say that that's a feature of near-future sci-fi though, and I probably wouldn't use it as the default.

[erik]

I think of cyberpunk as replacing outmoded prejudices with new ones and new problems. Ymmv

[Korwin]

I was thinking of just taking current social issues that Black Americans suffer but just applying that to White American characters in a dystopian future and calling it cyberpunk.

Why would I want to play this game?
Or why would I not play an black* character?

*if an blue one is not possible.

Why wouldn't you?

Looking at OgreBattle's sentence it looks like an depressing game to me...
Since I dont have an iota of an idea how bad the social issues of black americans really are (never been to the USA), I can only go from media impressions...

[Silent Wayfarer]

I just think that when you can hate on hanzers, it doesn't matter what color your flesh was, only that you kept it.

Or: black and white got together and ganged up on green.

[Nath]

Fictional stories rarely are good display of multiple social issues. The author focus on the elements that are relevant to the story. There are novelists who write 500+ pages that manage to simultaneously address racism, sexism, unemployment, parent-children relationship, the shared burden of History and the flaws of the judiciary system of a country. But there's not many of them and there are even less you would be actually willing to read. There is no screenwriter I know of who is able to do so in a 120 minutes film, but I guess you can find a few who manage to do so over a handful of TV seasons (The Wire is a good candidate, but it still doesn't go much beyond US inner cities issues).

Science-fiction is even worse at this as it has to throw new things into the mix, like how androids, rejuvenation or virtual reality affect society. Cyberpunk is possibly the worst, as one of the very defining feature of the -punk part is that the protagonists are insular outcasts, cut from the society and such issues. So yes, prejudice against African American doesn't often appear in cyberpunk.

Role Playing Games is a different way of writing. You can get thousands or tens of thousands of pages (Shadowrun line has like, over 200 books, going into the hundreds of thousands of pages; we're talking about numbers only rivaled by works like the Bible, DC Comics or Marvel) with a focus on setting rather than stories, and possibly covering an entire world with any number of different societies with different issues.