In about a month's time, I plan on starting a cyberpunk game. I plan on doing it in either the Shadowrun system (minus magic), or the HERO system. I'll have either two or three players for this -- in my mind, the ideal team size in any cyberpunk literature is two. The vast majority of stories I have read have borne this out.
So, what I need is to come up with a list of roles that any classic cyberpunk team should be fulfilling. Some of these will be mutually exclusive, but the majority will not. There's no reason that "hacker" can't also be "pilot" or "face guy", but he probably shouldn't be the "infiltration specialist" who sets up the retransmitters/cable splices inside the building's perimeters so he can get in the network.
I'm also not going to list things like "muscle", because ideally everyone should have some. So, some roles I have in mind:
Hacker
Infiltrator
Pilot / Driver
Job getter / Diplomat
Doctor / Medic
Stealth guy
Interference
Anyone have anything to add to the list? Ideally, the party should be able to fill all these roles. Hell, they could even swap roles between missions in some cases. But they need to have everything covered.[/list]
squee_nabob wrote:What is the difference between "Stealth guy" and "Infiltrator"? What does "Interference" specifically do?
Also, there is "Magic Guy" (if you have magic).
I'd guess the difference is that "stealth guy" is the one that sneaks into a facility through the air vents all Mission Impossible style. The "infiltrator" is the one that gets a job in the copy room, or starts sleeping with one of the VPs, of the corporation a month prior to the run.
The "interference" guy would be the one that screws up traffic, causes a riot, or starts a 4-alarm fire to divert attention and resources away from the real objective.
Are we talking actual Cyberpunk, where there's that nanite plague that give you super powers based on shooting microfilaments at things out of your hands and hacking them with nanites?
FrankTrollman wrote:Are we talking actual Cyberpunk, where there's that nanite plague that give you super powers based on shooting microfilaments at things out of your hands and hacking them with nanites?
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to -- a game or work of literature? I'm specifically referring to roles you'd see on a team in the cyberpunk genre as a whole, not anything specific.
Well in that case, you basically just have to go back to Cyberpunk's roots. Namely pulp detective fiction, spy thrillers, heists, and dystopian near future scifi. And then you discard all the ones that have a single protagonist and leave yourself with the genre fiction that has ensemble casts. Which mostly leaves you in turn with spy thrillers and heists, since detective fiction in turn is mostly about individual bad asses down on their luck. But you got some gems. Doc Savage, for example, has a team of super scientist bad asses for his team, and is basically the best cooperative Cyberpunk source material there is.
Failing that, you can pretty much grab a setup like The Italian Job or any episode of Mission Impossible and do that. But 20 minutes into the future, like in Max Headroom.
Caper flicks. Caper flicks, be they films or not, are absolutely the best cyberpunk material around, and they don't have to be near-future or science fiction or even set in the future. You can steal ideas from the Losers (the movie or the comic), the Fast and Furious flicks, Oceans 11 (original or remake or sequels), the last act of Pattern Recognition, anything Guy Ritchie has done ever besides Madonna music videos, the French Connection, definitely Ronin...
You could also mine Burn Notice for ideas. You've got a 3 person team already built in there, and they're all "muscle" in addition to their other qualities.
Gonna add on to my own thread with another recommendation.
Even though it was a terrible movie, Ronin was pretty good about this. For the first mission you had a hacker coordinating everybody, two street sams, and a driver/pilot. The latter might have been a street sam too, but for the entire movie he was the driver/pilot who performed the actual ambushing.
* The Burned out professional
* The purchased beauty
* The ugly man who stands out in an age of affordable beauty
* The starlet who will never get out of the sprawl
* The retired professional
* The Junkie
* The Femme Fatale (not in noir style, but in the "I can kill you eleventy different ways" style)
* The Street Rat
* The "Only Man With Honor Left"
* The contact
* The fence
Frank is right. Mining the roots of Cyberpunk is a good way to go, but realize that RPG cyberpunk and fiction is two different beasts.
Realize that *tone* is what makes Cyberpunk different. I wouldn't throw out single-protagonist CP novels, but I would focus on them for tone and mood and themes. I can suggest the book When Gravity Fails, Little Heroes (by Norman Spinrad, it's out of print but is so eerily prophetic about today's music industry that it's insane), Burning Chrome by Gibson (better for this purpose than Neuromancer et al, more potent, and more focused on style than substance), and even dip into Chandler and some of the classic Noir.
For me, Cyberpunk has always been a place where *all* style is purchasable, and ultimately disposable. Anyone can be gorgeous, anyone can be strong, anyone can be brilliant if they have the money to do it. With everything so readily available for the right price, it's not *what* you are any more that makes you different or unique, it's *how* you do it. It's the things that you can't buy in a clinic or learn from a skillsoft. It's the shunning of the cutting edge, of the purchasable style. Think of it as a cultural post-modernism brought on by a pinnacle of consumerist hedonism which has expanded into every corner of existence.
The *best* Shadowrun game I ever ran concerned a DJ who mixed music and simsense live in clubs and in albums and rode the tides of popularity up and down in society. It started out with one player, moved on to two, maxed out at four or five (with the other PCs being the main character's entourage), and went down to two. We ditched the Matrix, almost ditched magic entirely, ditched combat, ditched the genres and roles everyone is familiar with, and plunged straight headfirst into the culture of Shadowrun and of the Cyberpunk genre. I flat out told my players that spending anything more than a couple points in firearms is going to be a waste, to spend it elsewhere, and in relegating combat to "something the help does for me", we managed to finally play in what everyone agreed was a "cyberpunk" game. It was still a violent world, but it stopped feeling like a sci-fi romp and started to feel a lot more like a world. The only downside is that I kept getting a few players who kept rolling gun bunnies and then getting bored. I guess I, as a GM, should have adjusted my game, but they asked to come in, and I warned them repeatedly that combat characters would be bored.
It's something I feel 4th ed Shadowrun really missed. It has no more mood or theme. It feels like it's lost it's soul in a lot of ways. It continues in directions because that's been there for so long. It's like some of the devs don't understand *why* elements of Shadowrun are there. They just keep them in there because they've always *been* there.
Anyway I'm drifting off topic. Frank's advice is excellent. I'd only add to try to emphasize the setting. Watch Bladerunner again, not to watch the movie, but to drink in the visuals, the mood, that grimy feeling that everything's been used, recycled, and used again. Including people, hopes, dreams, beauty, and talent.
TheFlatline, I'm not opposed to any of that but most of those are backstories -- not roles you take on in a run. What I'm looking for is what people actually do during a run.
squee_nabob wrote:The TV show Leverage is a really fun example of a caper show.
Very true. And that basically revolves around the roles of hacker, hitter (muscle), grifter (social skills...really mad social skills), and thief (infiltration, B&E, stealth). Ok, and mastermind, but that doesn't work terribly well in RPGs (because it breeds player vs. player conflict AND player vs. GM conflict). So forget mastermind.
Of course, in Leverage, the characters don't usually use guns, because that typically is out-of-the-ordinary enough to ruin whatever con is being run. Yes, there are occasional exceptions. But when you're in a corporate office, pulling out an AK on the middle-manager who just stumbled onto your plot is just as bad as letting him tell the world. Putting him in a blood choke and hiding his body in the office supply cupboard is better.
Honestly, in my opinion, building an entire character around pilot/driver or doctor/medic isn't very fun. They're neat secondary skills, but they can easily be outsourced (a la DocWagon).
JesterZero wrote:
Honestly, in my opinion, building an entire character around pilot/driver or doctor/medic isn't very fun. They're neat secondary skills, but they can easily be outsourced (a la DocWagon).
My $0.02.
I ran with that once upon a time in a game I ran. It was short, only one or two "adventures".
The idea is that DocWagon is a for-profit corporation, and much like an insurance company of today, if it can get away with not covering someone's medical expenses, it won't.
So it employs "adjusters", investigators who go in after services have been rendered and investigate to see if payment can be denied. They look for intelligent, observant types that can also handle themselves in a minor/moderate tussle since many DocWagon customers are engaged in shady practices, but they also have credentials to get them into many secure areas, being a trusted name in medical services.
The story had a lot of merit, but life interfered and we never got deep into the story potentials. One straight forward story where they did what they were expected to, and one where the situation kind of blew up in their face and they had to resolve the issue on behalf of DocWagon. It was a pleasant change from standard shadowruns.
JesterZero wrote:Honestly, in my opinion, building an entire character around pilot/driver or doctor/medic isn't very fun. They're neat secondary skills, but they can easily be outsourced (a la DocWagon).
I'm not saying you should build an entire character out of these roles. I'm saying that these roles are probably going to need to be covered, either by the team or something else, in every run.
FrankTrollman wrote:Are we talking actual Cyberpunk, where there's that nanite plague that give you super powers based on shooting microfilaments at things out of your hands and hacking them with nanites?
-Username17
Cybergeneration for the win! I loved that game super hard. It's just too bad that it's out of print and relatively difficult to acquire.
Current pet peeves:
Misuse of "per se". It means "[in] itself", not "precisely". Learn English.
Malformed singular possessives. It's almost always supposed to be 's.
JesterZero wrote:Honestly, in my opinion, building an entire character around pilot/driver or doctor/medic isn't very fun. They're neat secondary skills, but they can easily be outsourced (a la DocWagon).
I'm not saying you should build an entire character out of these roles. I'm saying that these roles are probably going to need to be covered, either by the team or something else, in every run.
Ah. Well in that case, I agree with you 100%. Otherwise your badass team of combat monsters makes their daring escape from the corporate laboratory with the secret formula, explosions ripping the night apart behind them, and illuminating them waiting for the next bus to take them to meet Mr. Johnson.
FrankTrollman wrote:Are we talking actual Cyberpunk, where there's that nanite plague that give you super powers based on shooting microfilaments at things out of your hands and hacking them with nanites?
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to -- a game or work of literature? I'm specifically referring to roles you'd see on a team in the cyberpunk genre as a whole, not anything specific.
He's talking about R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk game, which was published for a long time under the name Cyberpunk 2020. The nanite plague is from a follow-up game/splat called Cybergeneration, where all the characters are superpowered teenagers empowered by a nanite plague.
Shadowrun works as a setting because cyber settings in general don't allow for punk.
I mean, in a world with cheap electronics you wouldn't have a Sprawl. Cameras would be mounted everywhere and they could see through walls and criminals would all be jail because they could never escape. I mean, you can't hack every camera between your house and the location for your run, so someone is going to find you.
Magic adds in a Continual Apocalypse factor that allows for punk. This way, you can have pockets of civility, but ever once in a while you lose Chicago or something to a Bug invasion.
In a pure cyber-punk you need the same thing. Designer plagues, wild nanite blooms, corporate wars.... whatever..... needs to keep civilization from ever truly getting its act together and installing camera and radar into the slums and distributing People Kibble and basic education to the poor.
Look at Bladerunner: masses of abandoned buildings as people ship out to colonies which basically guts society as all the smart and strong leave, corporate intrigue with pollution and human exploitation, messed-up weather from weather-smurfing gone bad, and skinjobs running wild and murdering people.
K wrote:In a pure cyber-punk you need the same thing. Designer plagues, wild nanite blooms, corporate wars.... whatever..... needs to keep civilization from ever truly getting its act together and installing camera and radar into the slums and distributing People Kibble and basic education to the poor.
I think you're giving humanity too much credit. I mean, yes, you have to come up with some explanation as to why the march of technology hasn't turned human civilization into utopia, but even today we have vocal groups of people who are opposed to civil services as basic as public libraries. We're perfectly willing to let people starve in the streets even if objectively there's more than enough to go around. You don't need crazy nanite plagues to keep society from evolving into paradise. You just need people, and we have plenty of those.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
K wrote:In a pure cyber-punk you need the same thing. Designer plagues, wild nanite blooms, corporate wars.... whatever..... needs to keep civilization from ever truly getting its act together and installing camera and radar into the slums and distributing People Kibble and basic education to the poor.
I think you're giving humanity too much credit. I mean, yes, you have to come up with some explanation as to why the march of technology hasn't turned human civilization into utopia, but even today we have vocal groups of people who are opposed to civil services as basic as public libraries. We're perfectly willing to let people starve in the streets even if objectively there's more than enough to go around. You don't need crazy nanite plagues to keep society from evolving into paradise. You just need people, and we have plenty of those.
Because in paradise, you eat kibble.
The problem isn't that society advances, the problem is that control gets better. Cameras in the slums aren't part of an advanced, wonderful paradise society, they're part of a totalitarian society.
"No, you can't burn the inn down. It's made of solid fire."
Archmage wrote:I think you're giving humanity too much credit. (...) even today we have vocal groups of people who are opposed to civil services as basic as public libraries.
Sure, but the point is, we have public libraries. As technology advances, society improves. Once the basic comforts are available for everyone, it will be a universally recognized fact that providing them for the commons is highly conducive to a good life for the high-ups, and anyone crazy enough to suggest limiting people's access to food, housing, medical aid and nondisruptive entertainment would be rightfully considered a dangerous lunatic. What, hungry homeless contagious people on my streets? No wai! With all the awesomeness readily available in a reasonably stable fantastic world, utopia is inevitable.
Last edited by Starmaker on Fri May 28, 2010 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
Starmaker wrote:Once the basic comforts are available for everyone, it will be a universally recognized fact that providing them for the commons is highly conducive to a good life for the high-ups, and anyone crazy enough to suggest limiting people's access to food, housing, medical aid and nondisruptive entertainment would be rightfully considered a dangerous lunatic.
I don't know where you live, Starmaker, but in the US, these so-called crazy people get lots of time on national news networks that at least act like they're serious people with carefully-informed opinions about how to run the country.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
K wrote:In a pure cyber-punk you need the same thing. Designer plagues, wild nanite blooms, corporate wars.... whatever..... needs to keep civilization from ever truly getting its act together and installing camera and radar into the slums and distributing People Kibble and basic education to the poor.
I think you're giving humanity too much credit. I mean, yes, you have to come up with some explanation as to why the march of technology hasn't turned human civilization into utopia, but even today we have vocal groups of people who are opposed to civil services as basic as public libraries. We're perfectly willing to let people starve in the streets even if objectively there's more than enough to go around. You don't need crazy nanite plagues to keep society from evolving into paradise. You just need people, and we have plenty of those.
The problem is that technology makes life better. Not politics, or religion, or philosophy. Tech. From vaccines that prevent super-plagues to mechanical reproduction that give us the works of the masters en mass.
Like, we were all supposed to starve to death in mass famines in the 1900s, but the Green Revolution produced enough food to shut up everyone talking about Malthusian curves.
The punk portion of cyberpunk needs life to be dark and stuff to be abandoned. Now, technology won't prevent totalitarian regimes or promote utopian paradises, or visa versa, but then neither of those regimes are punk. The various strides in quality of life gained by tech just make life better and for people to have less reasons for angst (I mean, being a wageslave in a cube farm is angsty, but it's not put a clothespin in your nose and shoot heroin angsty).
People need a reason to rebel, and adequate healthcare and iPods don't promote the revolution. Punk started in England during an economic depression when you really could throw a concert in an abandoned meat-packing plant and no one would notice. Disenfranchisement was the word of the day.
So you need an excuse for punk. And you need free spaces to be punk, because arcologies and cube farms are not punk. Like, at all.
Speaking of distopia, my spell-check has "Kafkaesque".
