Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[tzor]

Friendly AI + unique hardware sounds a lot like Aasimov's positronic brains with the three laws hard wired in.
That's not a bad thing.

But Asimov spent a lot of time tearing his three rules to shreads. In fact, the laws are one of the nicest straw men he ever wrote for himself. He also had the same fun tearing Physchohistory to shreads as well.

[Chamomile]

But the Shadowrun Imp that is specifically a spirit that takes over your magic items and torments you is Shadowrun IP. The Shadowrun Insect Spirit that captures humans and implants more of its kind into the victims like Genestealers is Shadowrun IP. The Shadowrun Shedim who are spirits that look like braided masses of worms on the astral that possess corpses and spread misery and fear is Shadowrun IP.

-Username17

A spirit that takes over your magic item to screw you up sounds like a broad enough concept that we could change the name and get away with it. Using a host body to feed your young is something that happens with real insects all the time, and making it a spirit instead of a body again seems like something we could do just by changing the name.

[fectin]

Friendly AI + unique hardware sounds a lot like Aasimov's positronic brains with the three laws hard wired in.
That's not a bad thing.

But Asimov spent a lot of time tearing his three rules to shreads. In fact, the laws are one of the nicest straw men he ever wrote for himself. He also had the same fun tearing Physchohistory to shreads as well.

Not quite. He doesn't so much tear them to shreds as examine the implications. Remember, before the three laws, robots were basically all monsters, so "what if robots were helpful?" really was new territory. Most of the robot stories are about how people anyway. There's a couple of puzzles, sometimes involving robots with altered rules, and there's a bunch about how people react to R Daneel Olivaw. Psychohistory was more about how the Foundaton came to rely on it, and the consequences, and about how science can't predict emergent events.
Either of those would make for a great game.

[Fuchs]

But if the hacker can hack, and deal with dogs and other non-tech opponents by hacking, what do you have gunbunnies for? Why have someone who can shoot well as a "role"?

I'd rather have everyone use guns, in addition to their other specialities.

[Maxus]

My take would be like this:

1) Hackers can brain hack, even on the fly.

2) But unless they've got prep time and the right equipment, about the only thing they can reliably do to people is things like 'Cause a seizure/scramble sensory input'. It's ham-handed work, but when you want to put someone down, that's note much of an issue,

3) So to do Inception-style hacking, you'd need more fine-tuned equipment. I mean, the brain's incredibly fucking complex, and it's doubtful you can whip out your PDA and edit you and your heavily-armed compatriots out of a guard's perception just like that.

4) One reason to do brain hacking would be brainwashing/programming. This should take time, but you could eventually get people to know things they didn't before. Or treat you as a friend when you show up to loot their armory.

[Fuchs]

My point is, should we have one-trick-ponies at all? Why talk about a gunbunny - DMF anyone? - if a hacker is not supposed to have other skills?

If we don't want one-trick-pnies, then there's no need to have hacking be a "dog fighting" option.

[K]

But if the hacker can hack, and deal with dogs and other non-tech opponents by hacking, what do you have gunbunnies for? Why have someone who can shoot well as a "role"?

I'd rather have everyone use guns, in addition to their other specialities.

I'm torn on this issue.

First, I think that there should be broader roles for people. I mean, even in the iconic Shadowrun novels the mages do hacking and the hackers shoot guns, so when you look at broader cyber-punk like Ghost in the Shell and realize the best gunbunny is also the best hacker on the team....

On the other hand, people need to feel special.

On the third hand, you don't want to feel gimped because someone didn't want to make a hacker.

I think that "runner" needs to just be the core of the character, and being a "runner" means that you do hacking, understand how magic works, and have some cyberware, but the specialness of your character is determined by the breadth of your concentration.

So a "mage" might have A in magic(a bunch of spells, summoning, some magic items), B in hacking(some data havens, some skillz vs bots, some secret cloud-computing resources), and C in cyber(jack, skillsofts). A gunbunny might be A in cyber(body armor, super strength and endurance, arm gatling gun), B in Hacking, and a C in magic(some summoning skills for true spirits, a minor magic item, or a magic race).

Then you just make each concentration be tiered, with higher concentration in magic getting you more and/or better stuff.

This is cyberpunk fantasy, and there is no reason that anyone needs to be just cyber or just punk or just fantasy.

[Vebyast]

But if the hacker can hack, and deal with dogs and other non-tech opponents by hacking, what do you have gunbunnies for? Why have someone who can shoot well as a "role"?

The brain hacker is most powerful against things that don't have defenses against brain hacking - dogs, non-tech opponents. The gunbunny is there for dealing with things that are resistant to brain hacking - tanks, people with hardcore ice, mindless automatons, that sort of thing. It's the whole elemental-triangle thing again.

I'd rather have everyone use guns, in addition to their other specialities.

Shooting is the default action; when you don't have anything else to do (hack it, stab it, shoot it with a really big gun), you say, "Whatever, I shoot it.", because guns are easy to use pretty effectively. [edit: K beat me to it.]

[Username17]

Not quite. He doesn't so much tear them to shreds as examine the implications. Remember, before the three laws, robots were basically all monsters, so "what if robots were helpful?" really was new territory.

Uh... no? The word "Robot" is from a Czech book where the robots are like an oppressed minority.

A spirit that takes over your magic item to screw you up sounds like a broad enough concept that we could change the name and get away with it. Using a host body to feed your young is something that happens with real insects all the time, and making it a spirit instead of a body again seems like something we could do just by changing the name.

Sure, you could change those guys around sufficiently to avoid copyright problems, but the real question is: why? What do those bring to the table that you couldn't bring elsewise? You don't get any points for making something similar enough that it requires the whole work to count as parody. If you need to fiddle heavily with the details, you need to be asking yourself whether you should be including it at all.

And having "Darkside Totems" (similar to the "Toxic" totems) is pretty cool. But Insect Spirits are not interesting inherently. The Universal Brotherhood, Bug City, and Betrayal plotline are interesting, but very specific. And since you can't use those plotlines, you might as well start over with new villains.

Most of the infiltration plotlines could be better with vampires or evil plants as the antagonists anyway.

-Username17

[K]

On an unrelated note, I think Free Spirits should be Contacts you can get favors from like a doc or a fixer, but you need the summoning skill to call them up and ask.

[fectin]

Not quite. He doesn't so much tear them to shreds as examine the implications. Remember, before the three laws, robots were basically all monsters, so "what if robots were helpful?" really was new territory.

Uh... no? The word "Robot" is from a Czech book where the robots are like an oppressed minority.

And there are a dozen or two other examples as well. That was the exception though, not the rule. Especially since Aasimov's whole purpose writing those stories was to deconstruct that trope.

... one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed by their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings? With all this in mind I began, in 1940, to write robot stories of my own – but robot stories of a new variety. Never, never, was one of my robots to turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The word "Robot" is from a Czech book where the robots are like an oppressed minority.

An oppressed minority that revolts and exterminates humankind. The Asimove robot stories were specifically about telling stories that weren't variations on the Golem of Prague or Frankenstein.

Anyway, do you think there's room for an A-T rating of various justice systems, such as you did for the military systems? I imagine A would be the most concerned with due process and civil rights, and T would be the summary execution at whim you get in terribad backwaters.

Are you happy with the current legality codes, or could they also use a revamp?

[Username17]

This is cyberpunk fantasy, and there is no reason that anyone needs to be just cyber or just punk or just fantasy.

This is an important consideration for purposes of balancing things. Modern and future settings respond well to skill based character advancement, and that in turn means that specific characters can (and should) be divided up differently. Just because you describe your character as a fantasy character doesn't mean you have all the fantasy abilities, you just have whatever fantasy abilities you actually bought because it's a skill based system. Similarly, just because you're a fantasy character doesn't mean that you don't have abilities that would be classified as cyber or punk: you could still have cyber or punk abilities just by having the appropriate skills. Again, because it's a skill based system and that is how it works.

Now there's a secondary consideration of role protection. Which is that if your character is anointed by the Inuit spirits and can summon Tupilak, that is an ability that a character defined as cyber or punk instead will never ever get. Meaning that at the very least given infinite play time, the Inuit Shaman is going to make the hacker feel small in the pants by learning the relevant cyber skills and doing both jobs about as well as the Hacker does one. That is a serious problem to consider, and there are a number of ways to tackle it. But at the core of a skill based system, the only thing you need to do to facilitate the creation of "purist" Punk or Cyber or Fantasy characters is to provide enough self-synergy in those fields that dumping all your skills into one area is a reasonable life plan. People only feel "forced" to play a mixed character archetype if trans-archetype synergy is so rewarded that focusing your character is plainly suboptimal, or if one field of endeavor actually has few enough skills in it that you can buy it all up to expert level and still have points left over that you by definition have to put into another category.

The brain hacker is most powerful against things that don't have defenses against brain hacking - dogs, non-tech opponents. The gunbunny is there for dealing with things that are resistant to brain hacking - tanks, people with hardcore ice, mindless automatons, that sort of thing. It's the whole elemental-triangle thing again.

That sort of thing. The deal is that in your triangle of Fantasy, Cyber, and Punk, each needs to have things to offer such that you want them. Also, each has to be something that your opponents want to invest in to stop you from doing your Asymmetric Threat deal to them, otherwise there isn't a rational reason for you to run into those kinds of defenses and the game becomes either less cool or more nonsense (which is less cool). So you could have a simple wheel, or a complex wheel, but if you make any of the classic elemental wheel mistakes, you're going to have elemental wheel problems. So if you have "Ghost Form", a Fantasy ability that makes you immune to attacks without a Fantasy origin, you've made the classic elemental wheel error of "universal strength", which in turn leads to the answer of "always pick rock", where you go fantasy all the time and it's just magicrun, and the cyber and punk elements "are for suckers". On the flip side, if you make hacking only work on hacking, you've made another classic wheel error of the "containable weakness", where the correct choice is to simply divest yourself of hackable computers while on a mission and then ignore the entire subsytem.

So the basic setup could be something like "punk defenses protect against punk attacks, but are weak to hacking attacks; hacking defenses protect against hacking attacks, but are weak to magic attacks; and magic defenses defend against magic attacks but are weak to punk attacks." But it can't be "magic is the only thing that can stand against magic, so if you aren't a magician you should invest in mouthwash and kneepads." Th point is that whether you are bringing the fantasy, the cyber, or the punk, you should run rampant over opponents who don't have relevant defenses.

-Username17

[Username17]

Anyway, do you think there's room for an A-T rating of various justice systems, such as you did for the military systems? I imagine A would be the most concerned with due process and civil rights, and T would be the summary execution at whim you get in terribad backwaters.

Are you happy with the current legality codes, or could they also use a revamp?

The legality codes of Shadowrun leave much to be desired. The "Law Enforcement" levels are actually OK, but a simple A-T rating system would be better. The SR law enforcement code didn't recognize a difference between a zone that was a "Z-Zone" because it was uninhabited and there was no enforcement, and a zone that was a "Z-Zone" because it had cannibal rape gangs running around. I would like the first to be an "F" and the second to be a "T".

Different regions could be rated financially as well. In a "Financial T" zone you barter and have to carry firearms in the open to keep people from taking your shit.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

How do you feel about something like the GURPS Control Rating set-up? That seemed like a simple numerical deal that would be pretty easy to understand and notate.

[Fuchs]

How about making it so that if you don't use computers you're already fucked to begin with? If the mage is not using electronics he'll be blind as a bat in darkness, easy prey for sonic attacks without adjustable dampers (or deaf if using "low tech" solutions like plugging your ears to counter sound), has trouble operating doors or any devices, can't link up with the team, is easily targeted by any sensor due to lack of counter measures etc.

[K]

For a cyberpunk fantasy character, it seems completely unfair to limit the character to just one section of the genre when the setting is actually three genres.

Making every genre attack function vs every genre defense doesn't help that issue, it just means that instead you've made hacking like it's not a role or even a flavor because you can hack everything. I think that holds for both shooting and magic.

[ckafrica]

The idea of the metahuman SURGE is probably legitimately SR IP anyway.

I definitely would not use the terms "SURGE", "UGE", or "Goblinization". But having some segment of the population spontaneously start turning into fishmen because the Stars Are Right is not SR IP. That is straight out of Mythos lore, and can of course be legitimately traced to before the 1920s as well.

My concern would be that for a project that for a project that is already paralleling SR on so many levels and is being put forward by someone(s) who has a sordid past with the SR license and that using a similar explanation for the "weirdos" might be an added source of criticism which would shift focus from the actual results. Perhaps another explanation, such as dimensional upheaval (which has been used much more commonly), might play out better.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Again re: legal systems - my first thought was that they'd be rated in terms of Justice: civil rights, evidence-based prosecution, innocent-until-proven-guilty, swift trial, face-your accuser, oversight, etc. Your examples make me think of a different metric - Effectiveness: # of officers, funding, merit-based advancement, long-term planning, and so on.

Now on some level, those metrics are connected: a law-enforcement division with a lot of resources has the elbow room to be more precise. But of course they can be thoroughly disconnected, too, with effective yet unjust law forces being a staple of dystopian fiction. One problem is how to average those into a single rating that means anything, since law-abiding citizens and Shadowrunners have different needs on the subject. Even if you make it a specifically Shadowrunner's rating, where low effectiveness counts highly, that's going to be unintuitive to people who discover that an A-rating in Law Enforcement means very few police.

I guess you also have Punishment: If you commit a crime, do you get i) a bullet in the face, ii) a cell with no key; iii) counselling and community service, iv) free rent and school? I'm not sure where that would fit in.

[Username17]

For a cyberpunk fantasy character, it seems completely unfair to limit the character to just one section of the genre when the setting is actually three genres.

I agree. Of course, mandating that any particular player has to make selections from all three seems similarly limited. You have three genres, you should take advantage of that.

Making every genre attack function vs every genre defense doesn't help that issue, it just means that instead you've made hacking like it's not a role or even a flavor because you can hack everything. I think that holds for both shooting and magic.

Mmmm... sort of. I agree that if hacking works the same on a brick wall as it does on a guard dog as it does on a set of security cameras, that your quest for game balance has left the hacking flavorless and essentially nonexistent. But you still need something for the hacker to do all the time, because you can't just tag the hacker out when you're doing the other parts like you can in a single author fiction piece. And no one wants to go get pizza while the decker goes and does his VR dive.

The basic setup, one way or the other, should be that if you are a hacker and your opponent doesn't have dedicated hacking defenses, you do really well. That is, there needs to be some thing you do to people if they don't put up hacking defenses. The system where hacking defenses stop the hacker from taking down the hacking defenses is really pointless. The enemy installation could just not have any hacking defenses to begin with and not care.

-Username17

[fectin]

Maybe brain-hacking is super bad for mages? Faraday shields mess with their ability to bend reality over, and seizures/happy gun/whatever fuck them right up. That gives you a basis for rock, paper, scissors of punk > cyber > fantasy > punk that looks like this:
Gunbunnies wear serious tinfoil. Doors and intersections dont like them, but that's an inconvenience, not a dealbreaker. They don't even care, because all their "stuff" is internal. It's harder for hackers to get to them (not impossible), and their "black ice" is aka "shooting people who try to hack my brain."
Mages can own gunbunnies. They create illusions which exist independent of perception, so the gunner spends his part of the fight in a hellish illusion. He has no counter, so his life is suck. On the other hand, spray and pray is pretty dangerous all around, and it takes the mage time to really get his hell on. Mages don't operate electronically, but Faraday shields still interfere with their communion with the local Aether. Wearing one makes it much harder for them to create their effects.
Hackers bend mages over, but gunners just shoot them. They have a seventh sense wired into their head, as well as an eighth, ninth, tenth, and so forth. They can also directly control their perceptions, so fighting illusions is a simple matter of noticing that they don't have appropriate hydromagnetic spin decays (or whatever) and editing them out. Hackers brute force interface with systems via Far-Field Induction Arrays, which also Can create a couple of high-level neural effects (damage, pacify, stun/knockout, enrage) in nearby targets. Every one of thes effects makes magic use more difficult. Hackers wear Cognitive Integration Arrays, which make them nearly immune to these high level effects, but vulnerable to normal hacking.

[Username17]

Again re: legal systems - my first thought was that they'd be rated in terms of Justice: civil rights, evidence-based prosecution, innocent-until-proven-guilty, swift trial, face-your accuser, oversight, etc. Your examples make me think of a different metric - Effectiveness: # of officers, funding, merit-based advancement, long-term planning, and so on.

Now on some level, those metrics are connected: a law-enforcement division with a lot of resources has the elbow room to be more precise. But of course they can be thoroughly disconnected, too, with effective yet unjust law forces being a staple of dystopian fiction. One problem is how to average those into a single rating that means anything, since law-abiding citizens and Shadowrunners have different needs on the subject. Even if you make it a specifically Shadowrunner's rating, where low effectiveness counts highly, that's going to be unintuitive to people who discover that an A-rating in Law Enforcement means very few police.

I guess you also have Punishment: If you commit a crime, do you get i) a bullet in the face, ii) a cell with no key; iii) counselling and community service, iv) free rent and school? I'm not sure where that would fit in.

Honestly, I only think you need a rating for how much of a threat the police are to people who intend to break laws. More effective policing gets a higher rating, regardless of what the actual punishments are. To be honest: getting five years in a Scandinavian re-education camp is pretty much indistinguishable from getting tortured to death - either way you have to end the campaign or make a new character.

So at A rating, the police will use forensic evidence to hunt you down if they think a crime has been committed. At an F rating, you can do whatever you want because there is no law. And at a T rating, the "police" are like the Taliban or something, where they are actually a threat to people who aren't apparently breaking the law.

And then discussions of how (un)just and (in)humane the laws actually are would be in the flavor text descriptions of the areas.

-Username17

[Grek]

I'd personally do it the opposite way, where punk > fantasy > cyber. Punks are highly resistant to magic (due to being less physically human) and have all sorts of wares that let them bypass magic. Mages use magic, which interferes with induction and phreaking because it screws with magnetic fields in a poorly understood and difficult to predict way. Hackers have the ability to hack wares, do preprogrammed illusions on the fly and otherwise fuck with people's heads.

[Lokathor]

Some people are willing to do a time skip when the entire party gets locked up for 10 years. Or they're interested in running a jailbreak adventure where you break out and then flee to some exotic land and take on strange new adventures as not only a shadowrunner but also an ex-con, possibly with an Inspector Zenigata type of guy after you all the time. For all that sort of stuff, you need to be sure to talk about the justice results of any place that isn't F rated. It could be a rating or a flavor text, as long as it's brought up.

Mind you, the actual process they use isn't as important to those stories as what the results are (reform colony, stone gulag, or shot in the face).

[Ganbare Gincun]

Because it's not fantasy until there are Elves. Dwarves are also super popular with women gamers.

So why are Elves so integral to fantasy, anyways? Why not replace them with another race altogether?