Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[K]

Let's ignore the hacker for a moment and take the shooter. He has the following situations:

Resident Evil-like assault on The Hive where the Red Queen is turning on crazy laser traps?
I shoot the traps, possibly with a silencer if we need stealth.

Spirit or critter or mage assault?
I shoot them, possibly with oricalchum bullets.

Shoot-out?
Did I mention I shoot?

That's a very funny piece of hyprbole, but the actual comparison to the Hacker is the "physical" character, who "physically sneaks", "physically talks", "physically picks locks", and "physically fights". And we know that isn't to narrow of a shtick, because even in most D&D campaigns that is 100% of what every character does, because interaction with the Astral and Ethereal planes in D&D is actually pretty rare.

-Username17

You've missed the point.

The correct answer for the "shooter" is supposed to be:

Inception ---> play the Face, a support role in mind-hacking.

Red Queen traps--->use stats and skills to avoid traps so they can be turned off from the access panel nearby.

Spirits----> tie up the spirit in melee so the mage can kill it.

Shooting ----> shoot!

Doing one thing as a solution to all problems makes a character and game as boring as shit, and it threatens to make adventures monotonous. Having various things to do means you can balance them against each other and you don't get tired of your character.

Magic doesn't suffer from this problem because mages are allowed wild shifts in problem-solving flavor with no explanation. Hacking does suffer because people are only going to accept a thin margin of things that hacking with do like "f-ing with minds or f-ing with machines."

They will accept hackers with larger skill-sets so that hacker riggers, hacker shamans, and hacker infiltrators will all have other solutions to problems. I mean, I don't really understand why "shoot with a gun" in an unacceptable thing for a hacker to do in combat since it adds some variety to the character. Heck, even hackers in Tron are allowed to be good with motorcycles.

You can then do cool lines like:

Guy: "Where did you learn to shoot like that? In the Army?"

Hacker: "Playstation."

Otherwise, your hacker is basically going to always sit around and his answer to every problem is "I hax it."

By the same token, mages shouldn't be able to sit around and say "I magic it."

[fectin]

It's a new game. Counterspell is a skill in SR whose effectiveness is based solely on the skill rating, not on magic, attributes, etc.

So how does Magic work in this game? Not the details, just at a high level.
That needs to be a first principle, otherwise it'll drift into brokentown. Everyone knows how punk works. We can extrapolate how hacker works from "computer hacking, and it can also affect brains". What the he'll is magic?

[Username17]

Doing one thing as a solution to all problems makes a character and game as boring as shit, and it threatens to make adventures monotonous. Having various things to do means you can balance them against each other and you don't get tired of your character.

Magic doesn't suffer from this problem because mages are allowed wild shifts in problem-solving flavor with no explanation. Hacking does suffer because people are only going to accept a thin margin of things that hacking with do like "f-ing with minds or f-ing with machines."

But pretty much everything is a machine or has a mind or both. Once you give the hacker Holograms, Brain Hacking, OS Hacking, and Data Search they have the same number of fields of endeavor as a Wizard with four schools of magic. So if we set it up:

Spell School	Does	Hacking School	Does
Thaumaturgy	Healing, Destruction	Exploits	Hacking Computers And Stuff
Astral	Manipulating Astral Space Divination	Data Search	Finding Information
Illusion	Images Mind Control	Basilisk Hacking	Stuns, Seizures, State Rading Inception
Transmutation	Transforming things into other things	Holograms	Images Biometrics Fabrication

Depending on how good you made the tricks in each category, either one could be the best. But in either case, both of them can be the source of go-to action at every stage of an adventure for the Asset that uses them.

-Username17

[fectin]

IMHO, either nerf illusions or holograms. They're really powerful, and its a shame to have them overlap so much.
I favor saying that holograms are translucent and obvious, so they still convey data but don't let you win CPF quite as readily.

[sabs]

Why do I need to hack brains? That's not necessarily the flavor of hacker I like. Why can't I be the hacker/face who does legwork, goes in posing as an it guy, or a janitor, or what have you, to get physical access to help with the run.

I'm okay with Inception idea that if I have you hooked up to 'trodes' I can hack the crap out of your brain. But, being able to use broadcast beams at your head from across the room at combat speeds, seems.. not interesting, and kind of lame.

If I wanted to be able to combat-dominate people.. I would have played a mage or a vampire.

I think "is good in combat" should be a pre-req for any runner. All runners should have enough points to get: Basic Hand to Hand, Firefight, Stealthier than a Bull in a China Shop.

[Quantumboost]

Why do I need to hack brains? That's not necessarily the flavor of hacker I like. Why can't I be the hacker/face who does legwork, goes in posing as an it guy, or a janitor, or what have you, to get physical access to help with the run.

sabs, in a skill-based game, you can take the skills that you want. If you specifically want to have the Exploits and Data Search skills without picking up Basilisk Hacking and Holograms, instead getting Con and Disguise, you can just do that. You can write down Con and Disguise instead of Basilisk Hacking and Holograms on your sheet, and it's still mechanically valid (skill groups etc. aside, if they even exist). Your character is not in fact obligated to hack brains, or even have the skills used to hack brains, at any point in time. Not wanting to personally hack brains is irrelevant to the question of whether hacking brains is something that can and should be done in the system.

[sabs]

Sure, I'm saying I don't like the flavor of combat hacking Brains.
I don't see what it brings flavor wise, other than really change how people react in your world. If Brain Hacking on the fly, while you're walking down the street is a thing that exists, then people are going to be super paranoid about it. Everyone is going to wear 'polarized glasses', have brain anti-virus software. It flavors your entire world, and it flavors it in ways that don't seem all that tasty.

[Quantumboost]

Sure, I'm saying I don't like the flavor of combat hacking Brains.
I don't see what it brings flavor wise, other than really change how people react in your world. If Brain Hacking on the fly, while you're walking down the street is a thing that exists, then people are going to be super paranoid about it. Everyone is going to wear 'polarized glasses', have brain anti-virus software. It flavors your entire world, and it flavors it in ways that don't seem all that tasty.

To you, perhaps. But it does lend itself very well to the idea of a magically-active dystopian future if you have to worry about people secretly messing with your head. And there are mechanical balance arguments that your preferences are objectively bad for the game as a game.

[Wesley Street]

What's the cost for a hacker to take control of someone's mind? If a magician righteously fails in the attempt he bleeds out his nose or worse. But if a hacker does it through pure technological means...? "Connection failed, try again."

I'm not against the idea of brain-hacks, especially if it involves full VR, a controlled setting and very expensive equipment. But if the risk is your iPad goes on the fritz and all you have to do is pull out your burner iPhone, it's too easy and boring.

[Grek]

There's a difference between making someone your brain slave on the fly (which is something that should not happen) and having a paralysis taser.

[Username17]

Why do I need to hack brains? That's not necessarily the flavor of hacker I like. Why can't I be the hacker/face who does legwork, goes in posing as an it guy, or a janitor, or what have you, to get physical access to help with the run.

Here, try it like this:

Why do I need to hack brains cast stunbolt? That's not necessarily the flavor of hacker magician I like. Why can't I be the hacker mage/face who does legwork, goes in posing as an it guy, or a janitor, or what have you, to get physical access to help with the run. ?

The answer of course, is that you can. You don't have to take Basilisk Hacking, because it's a skill based system. And even if you did take Basilisk Hacking, you might content yourself with non-combat applications like Mind Rape or Therapy. Again, because it's a skill-based system. You could choose to avoid combat applications for hacking entirely and rely upon your gun or even your friends. Because in addition to it being a skill based system, it's also a future/modern cyberpunk game where attitude and investigation are often most or all of a mission, so like in After Sundown or Leverage you could seriously go to the adventure where only one character was the "combat guy", and the other characters simply solved tasks other ways.

Combat applications of Basilisk Hacks and Holograms are in because some players want to participate in the combat minigame and don't want assault rifle chocolate in their hacker peanut butter. Same reason that direct attack spells are in the game. Some players want to play a magician who does not carry a shotgun.

IMHO, either nerf illusions or holograms. They're really powerful, and its a shame to have them overlap so much.

How powerful Illusions are is highly variable and dependent on how they work in the game. Since they are something that is "not real" even in the context of a storytelling game, they are subject to a lot of caveats. For example: in Shadowrun, Control Thoughts is almost useless, because it takes two actions to use (as opposed to a gun that is fired twice in one action), and its duration is measured in seconds.

In general, I would like the forte of Magical Illusions be invisibility. Holograms can color change you or make distracting images, but they don't actually make you transparent. The forte of Holograms I would like to be photographic realism, because they are based on actual photos instead of a human's imagination, they can be much more "realistic".

-Username17

[Wesley Street]

There's a difference between making someone your brain slave on the fly (which is something that should not happen) and having a paralysis taser.

That's not what I'm seeing posted here.

Let's flip it. How does a magician use magic to re-write the pickup schedule of a garbage drone?

The concern is that hackers "don't have enough to do in combat/are not as relevant as the street magicians and cyber-samurai". Instead of re-writing the rules for hackers so that they can do the exact same thing that magicians do but with tech, re-write the combat and tech rules so that hackers have more direct attack or meaningful support role options.

- Using Electronic Warfare skills hackers can hit an artificial limb with an EM pulse causing it to seize. Anyone with the right tech can try to do it but only hackers are effective with the technique.
- Hackers can take over cyber-eyes (which everyone should have anyway [a la GITS] as tech is so cheap) and feed misinformation or psychotropic IC.
- In a bear-in-a-cave scenario, a non-combat hacker handling tac-net or communications duty adds to all teammates' initiative rolls.

Hackin' brainwaves from afar is magic redressed. Not just from a rules standpoint but thematically as well.

Edit: typo.

[Neurosis]

Hold on.

Why is this entire project necessary? Why do we need 'NOTShadowrun' as a game? Maybe if I was more familiar with After Sunset I wouldn't have to ask this, but I'm not and I do.

Whenever I see any project that is just 'NOT X' I don't really have any interest in it, because if I wanted to play X, I would? I have no interest in Pathfinder or any of the thousands of other D&D clones because if I really wanted to play D&D, I would just play D&D. A NotX product is too much like X for me to be interested if I don't want to play X, and not enough like X for me to be interested if I want to play X.

Shadowrun wasn't just 'Not Cyberpunk' or 'Not D&D Fantasy' it actually created something new by synthesizing new genres. I don't see how this does this.

I don't know why anyone would play this rather than Shadowrun, even if this got finished. Hatred of CGL doesn't seem like adequate motivation because who cares? It's trivially easy to torrent all of the rulebooks from every edition ever and play SR to your heart's content without ever giving anyone a dime. If you actually have problems with the rules and mechanics, then those are trivially easy to alter. In fact, Frank has already done that with Ends of the Matrix.

But saying 'We don't play Shadowrun, we play NotShadowrun' just seems dumb and spiteful.

I know that going against the consensus here is an invitation to drown yourself in a sea of flames, but I really don't see the need for this project. Like everything on the Den I can see how it would be a fun intellectual exercise, hell I myself design games all day long for shits and giggles, but on the other hand it just seems cheap, tacky, and classless toward everyone who has ever made Shadowrun throughout its 20+ year history, not just assholes like Loren Coleman you all hate.

[Grek]

- Hackers can take over cyber-eyes (which everyone should have anyway [a la GITS] as tech is so cheap) and feed misinformation or psychotropic IC.

If its possible to hack cyber eyes in combat time but not meat eyes, people that expect to get into fights will refuse to replace their meat eyes with cyber eyes in the first place or, if the benefits of getting them are big enough to justify it, agree to get just one eye replaced and keep the other as a spare meat eye that is uneffected by cybering. Likewise with other cybernetic limbs.

Being immune to hacking attempts is a big enough thing that you pretty much can't balance out the meat option and cybernetic option by making cyber be heaps better but meat be unhackable. Trying to do that means that cybernetics has to be so ungodly good that the game breaks in half when you try to pit a normal person versus a cybered up person.

If hacking is going to be balanced, it has to be something that you don't opt into by buying certain powers. The default should be that you are hackable, and you have to buy up defenses in the form of programs and hacking repellant hats.

[fectin]

Hackers do two things (by the suggestions above):
1) Hack your brain (GitS or Inception style).
2) Taser you in your brain.
Only one of these things is a combat action (the second).

Separately, I suggested before that hackers could also do brain hacking in combat, but only against people who were also jacked in.

[Josh_Kablack]

Hold on.

Why is this entire project necessary? Why do we need 'NOTShadowrun' as a game? Maybe if I was more familiar with After Sunset I wouldn't have to ask this, but I'm not and I do.

Because Shadowrun is overdue for a new edition, and due to the business realities that is not going to happen anytime soon.

So having a dude who did notable amounts of freelance work on the prior edition of Shadowrun, (but who is on the outs with the current rights holders) put together his own fan project of a similar game is a reasonable answer.

See E. Gary Gygax and Dangerous Journeys.

[kzt]

Combat applications of Basilisk Hacks and Holograms are in because some players want to participate in the combat minigame and don't want assault rifle chocolate in their hacker peanut butter. Same reason that direct attack spells are in the game. Some players want to play a magician who does not carry a shotgun.

They can choose to do that. Some people want to play combat guys who don't have ranged weapons and just stab people. They can also do that.

Neither of these cases makes me think that I need to modify the game system to cater to people who want to run characters who choose clearly suboptimal solutions to a common problem.

[Vebyast]

Neither of these cases makes me think that I need to modify the game system to cater to people who want to run characters who choose clearly suboptimal solutions to a common problem.

The difference is that, unlike running around with boxing gloves or using DND3.5e Fireball, there are no logical, mathematical, or flavorful reasons for tech attacks be suboptimal. Basilisks and seizure rays are flavorful attack options that can be made logically and mechanically sound, and holograms are just plain fun and can probably be balanced.

[Manxome]

If you actually have problems with the rules and mechanics, then those are trivially easy to alter. In fact, Frank has already done that with Ends of the Matrix.

Writing ~50,000 words to overhaul one subsystem is "trivially easy"? Uh, OK...

But Frank addressed pretty much exactly this at the very beginning of the very first post of this thread:

So people have complained at me that I have enough Shadowrun material to just rewrite Shadowrun. That is actually true. So sure, let's do it. But on second thought: NO. We aren't going to make a free alternate version of Shadowrun, we're going to give it the After Sundown treatment and write new IP that happens to be a near-future neo-tribalist magic-using cyberpunk cooperative storytelling game.

So basically, Frank decided to alter the rules of Shadowrun (all of them), exactly like you suggested, except that since that's the vast majority of the work of creating an entirely stand-alone game, he's just going to go ahead and do the extra bit of work to actually make it a new game, so that it's unencumbered (both legally and creatively) and doesn't require prior familiarity with Shadowrun.


You seem to be suggesting that once a game has been created in some genre, that creating any different games in that same genre is forever a waste of time. That's...an extremely unorthodox viewpoint. Creating a game that is "kind of like X" may not be as original as creating X in the first place, but it represents the overwhelming majority of actual game creations, including (arguably) every edition of Shadowrun or D&D after the first.

[Chamomile]

Conducting all your business offline is a totally viable solution to the security problems posed by organizations like LulzSec. Corporations are not dropping their internet branches left and right. Making the benefits of having cyber parts outweigh the risks of potentially being hacked is entirely realistic and not very hard.

[TheFlatline]

Speaking of brain-hacking, it's not entirely an offensive thing. If Brain-hacking takes anything longer than, say, a minute to achieve, it's not going to be a combat alternative.

Joe Halderman wrote a book in the 70's called "All My Sins Remembered" where the main character was a Prime Operative of the government. He got personality overlays and plastiflesh to assume personalities. Under cover, he was 90% cover and 10% operative. When the shit hit the fan, he was 90% operative and 10% cover. The novel used hypnosis and a few other things, but there's no reason why you couldn't brain-hack to create alternate personalities and all kinds of crazy shit.

Hell, programmable skills are part of cyberpunk, brain-hacking could be a function of that.

My main thing is... Cyberpunk and Transhumanism are related but different genres. Cyberpunk is at the very beginning stages of transhumanism. So where along that spectrum are you going to put yourself? Brain hacking seems fairly far along that progression towards transhumanism.

[Ice9]

I'm not saying that Basilisk tactics are unworkable, but there are a couple alternate solutions to hacking in combat:

1) Rock/Paper/Scissors. Cybered up warriors beat the crap out of luddite warriors, guaranteed. Almost no amount of bears in a cave is a match for a single street samurai. So "use non-cybered warriors" is only an option if the hacker you're facing has no teammates, and isn't a cybered up warrior himself. But of course, having cyberwear means it can get hacked.

2) Drones. Hacking includes rigging. Drones are much faster than people, but ultimately predictable - to someone with cyber-eyes and a processor to calculate their moves. So sort of similar to #1, but the hacker doesn't absolutely need teammates, and non-cybered warriors don't have to suck so much against cybered warriors - just against drones.

These are both assuming you can't "set hacking = no" on your cyberwear, but I think most people are fine with that.

[TheFlatline]

Hold on.

Why is this entire project necessary? Why do we need 'NOTShadowrun' as a game? Maybe if I was more familiar with After Sunset I wouldn't have to ask this, but I'm not and I do.

Whenever I see any project that is just 'NOT X' I don't really have any interest in it, because if I wanted to play X, I would? I have no interest in Pathfinder or any of the thousands of other D&D clones because if I really wanted to play D&D, I would just play D&D. A NotX product is too much like X for me to be interested if I don't want to play X, and not enough like X for me to be interested if I want to play X.

Shadowrun is on life support and the people who are writing it have gone in a stupid, lame direction. SR is less about cyberpunk/Fantasy fusion and more about futuristic fantasy. In SR these days, technology is what you use when you aren't fortunate enough to be born with magic, because magic is preferable to tech in every way (even if it isn't mechanically superior, in-game fluff says it is).

Personally I'd prefer a no-magic cyberpunk game, or magic that's approached in a technological way (like a guy who uses nanites to replicate the effects of thaumaturgical magic or whatever).

That being said, there are a *lot* of successful derivative games out there. Saying "why bother?" means that RPGs never evolve, and you stagnate.

I mean after all, why bother playing 3rd edition, 4th, or even AD&D? You have classic D&D. The rest are all ripoffs of the red box.

[fectin]

I don't see what the problem is. You can either set hacking=no and be armored against but ultimately vulnerable to seizure rays and basilisk time bombs, XOR be vulnerable to serious i r cyberzombie brain-hacks.
That basically answers everyone's objections.

[Korwin]

Will there be an Essence stat? (since a no Magic stat seems an valid option).