Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[Grek]

All defenses should be purchased in essentially the same way. Having one of your defenses be a special snowflake that works in an entirely different way than all the rest is retarded. So I see two options there:

1] You have X character points and divide them up as you see fit between defenses against digital, physical and magical attacks. This means that, by default, your character's meat brain is vulnerable to digital attacks and can only protect themselves by obtaining defenses to prevent that from happening.

2] ALL defenses start out at a maximum value and then get decreased as you buy offensive powers. Digital defense starts out near or slightly less than 100% immunity and decreases as you purchase more and more cyberware to improve your physical attributes. Likewise with magical enhancements draining you of your vitality and digital boosts from knowsofts and so forth making you become progressively more and more shit at warding off magical curses.

[Username17]

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.

You are 100% wrong. Brain Hacking naked human brains is in all the classic cyberpunk literature. It's in Snowcrash, it's in Neuromancer, it's in TRON, it's in blah blah blah. All of it. The idea that you could keep a hacker from hacking your brain by not hooking wires into your brain is a decadent 21st century addition to the genre that is ultimately bad for game balance.

Brain hacking is a staple of the genre and exists in all cyberpunk literature. In order for computer implants to be required for brain hacking to occur, brain computer implants have to be completely ubiquitous. In short: the setting has to be so far into transhumanism that unmodified humans are rare or nonexistent. Otherwise the brain hacking wouldn't happen, and you wouldn't be being cyberpunk. If the setting posits that people mostly or even frequently have raw meat brains (like in Snowcrash or Diamond Age), then brain hacking in the setting has to work on people whose brains don't have any implants (like in Snowcrash or Diamond Age). If everyone has a cyberbrain (like in GitS), then cyberbrains can b a requirement for brain hacking (like GitS).

Since this is st near future, and posits the existence of some places that are technophobic, it has to fall into the first category.

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

I honestly don't think so. In most cyberpunk and transhumanist settings, the primary cost of cybernetic enhancement is a loss of individuality. In a game about being deniable assets pulling short cons and doing terrorist attacks against various corporations, criminal syndicates, and governments, the primary "cost" might actually be completely the opposite. Having more cybernetics makes you more distinctive and therefore easier to find with electronic recognition systems. Having more magic items could do the same for magical investigation.

If solid rules are presented for being investigated and chased by police and corporate revenge squads, rather than leaving police response to MC fiat, the creation of digital and magical "signatures" may be enough of a deterrent. You'd have to work that out such that "greedy players" don't load themselves up on awesome mods and then pay the price that the rest of the team has to deal with triad hit teams on a regular basis.

-Username17[/td][/tr]

[TheFlatline]

Yeah, you have a point, brain hacking is in many of those stories under different fig leafs. Though Neuromancer levels of brain-hacking require AI levels of computational power and you're only in danger of it if you're online and buzz an AI who wants to fuck with you instead of flatlining you.

Snow Crash's brain hacking is on a totally different, almost genetic level though. While it can be done through the computer, it's merely a medium to transmit through. You can *chant* that shit and become a neurolinguistic hacker. A hacker mindset helps, but it isn't necessary.

GITS required AI levels of intelligence (read: near alien) from what I understood to require it as well.

Point is, there's always a catch and it's always boogieman shit. If it's not, then you get sucked into the defense/offense cycle where someone builds filters and someone else gets around those defenses.

So my question is: is brain-hacking commonplace? And if so how do you keep from there literally being billions of brain-hacked zombies in a meat-body equivalent of a botnet roving the planet working for some teenager in a basement somewhere? How do you even know that you are *you* and that whatever you're doing at any given moment isn't instructions that have been loaded into you?

You know what? That's actually kind a thematically appropriate level of paranoia, in a Phillip K Dick sort of way. Cyberpunk plays with transhumanism, but one of it's underlying themes is what exactly does it mean to *be* human? What can you take out, augment, replace, replicate, and insert, and still have an actual human in front of you?

[K]

It's kind of hard to not see brainhacking as an ultimate weapon.

I mean, mages are the other ultimate weapons except they have drain costs that mean that you auto-win like 2-3 challenges and spend the rest of the time shooting with a combat shotgun(more poorly than even your stats indicate since you are fatigued).

Hacking seems like auto-winning the setting because anything good is going to be reusable at will and infinitely scalable. I mean, if you took the Snow Crash virus and started broadcasting during primetime, you'd get the situation from The Signal.

[Chamomile]

And if so how do you keep from there literally being billions of brain-hacked zombies in a meat-body equivalent of a botnet roving the planet working for some teenager in a basement somewhere? How do you even know that you are *you* and that whatever you're doing at any given moment isn't instructions that have been loaded into you?

You know what? That's actually kind a thematically appropriate level of paranoia, in a Phillip K Dick sort of way. Cyberpunk plays with transhumanism, but one of it's underlying themes is what exactly does it mean to *be* human? What can you take out, augment, replace, replicate, and insert, and still have an actual human in front of you?

We do need to make sure that the entire world isn't run by a bunch of hackers who took over and can't figure out what to do with it because the first ones to crack a system are the ones who just like cracking systems, not the ones with an agenda.

EDIT: Then again, that might make a decent twist on the setting. The cyberpunks won a long time ago. Now they are the shadowy conspiracy that controls the world, and everyone is effectively their mindslave without even knowing it. Would you kindly hack the Microsoft backlogs?

[DSMatticus]

I mean, if you took the Snow Crash virus and started broadcasting during primetime, you'd get the situation from The Signal.

I believe the idea is that simply broadcasting is not sufficient. You can broadcast any information you want, but the odds that it will affect a specific target (or even a random target in the vicinity) is zero. And this is actually fairly legitimate; if I were to start broadcasting viruses wirelessly in a busy Wi-Fi spot, nobody would get infected. I have to establish a connection, and I have to make sure the virus will execute on the target machine.

Problem #1: Establishing a Connection
You have to make a connection between two devices to get information from one to the other. So you take your brainhacking device, and you send a message to somebody's nervous system that reads like this: "Hello, I would like to connect with you. Here is my spoofed permission, which will make you think this is a valid message for you." And the brain says, "well, this seems legit," and then your device delivers its payload. Depending on the payload (how complex it is, what it asks the user to do), the transmission will take a shorter or longer time.

So sending a payload that will 'reboot' somebody or 'seizure' somebody is just a matter of asking them to execute a bunch of garbage, and you can probably do that fast. Sending a payload that makes someone think you are the awesomest thing ever and they have to do everything you say would take longer, because that's a lot more code (and brains aren't really built to read wirelessly, so it probably limits transmission speed).

Problem #2: Personalizing the Content.
The only reason viruses exist is because of the standardization between machines. That's also the only reason software exists as a commodity, but nevermind that. The point is, electronics is all very, very similar because it's built that way. We want devices to communicate with eachother; we want them to transfer applications they can execute and data they can use. Brains don't do that. They have never done that. There's no reason to believe that level of standardization exists for people's brains.

So even after establishing a connection with the person's brain, the hacker has to sit down and customize his payload for the target brain, making the process interactive. Customizing small, simple payloads (garbage-induced seizure) is easy. Customizing big, complex payloads (worship me as your deity) is super difficult if possible at all, and might require weeks of interaction and monitoring the target's natural neural activity.

Now, what does this look like in combat? The brainhacker has a special hand-held device which reads neural activity and transmits the appropriate neural hacks. He singles out somebody (probably doesn't actually point it at them, that would just be archaic), and gets a reading. If he's not in combat, he could sit there and monitor this, and get really good readings on the guy which would let him go home, take these recordings, and customize a payload for him. But he doesn't have that time, the guy is going for a gun. All he wants to do is get a reading on the guy that's enough to get a connection, and then flood his brain with garbage like some kind of neural DDoS. His own hacking device is, thankfully, wirelessly connected to his own brain, so he interprets readings and sends signals literally as fast as he can think them up. Assuming Shadowrun-like die pool set ups, with one action he rolls (mental speed attribute) + (brainhacking skill), the opponent rolls some (mental fortitude), and if the hacker wins, he's established enough of a connection that he can flood the guy's brain with garbage. Apply mental/stun/nonlethal damage, and some sort of penalty to the guy's future actions, because his brain is overloading with neural garbage and he's operating at severely reduced capacity.

[Vebyast]

It's kind of hard to not see brainhacking as an ultimate weapon.

I mean, mages are the other ultimate weapons except they have drain costs that mean that you auto-win like 2-3 challenges and spend the rest of the time shooting with a combat shotgun(more poorly than even your stats indicate since you are fatigued).

A few options, off the top of my head: introduce a technobabble equivalent of drain costs, make brainhacking dangerous.

Technobabble is the easy way out (note, technobabble from here on out): the human brain requires a huge amount of randomness to work; the simple fact that there are that many neurons cycling at less than fifty hertz and still producing intelligent thought guarantees it. Therefore, it is reasonable that interfacing with those thoughts requires a huge amount of high-quality randomness, which can only be generated so fast. Thus, there is an absolute information-theoretical limit on how much brainhacking you can do in a given amount of time, and using up your entropy pool makes you less able to do stuff like coordinate your cyber, secure your wifi, or predict where an enemy is about to shoot or dodge.

Brainhacking is dangerous: If you fail to brainhack someone, you suffer backlash. Perhaps brainhacking requires that you "synch up with" the target and being ejected messes up your payload's targeting so you get attacked instead of the subject. Perhaps the kind of thought required for brainhacking tends to mess you up like an occupational basilisk. Perhaps the interface required for combat-speed brainhacking is physically damaging to the user's brain and hackers cast out of hit points.

Hacking seems like auto-winning the setting because anything good is going to be reusable at will and infinitely scalable. I mean, if you took the Snow Crash virus and started broadcasting during primetime, you'd get the situation from The Signal.

The simple solution to the broadcast problem is to require per-brain bespoke payloads, as DSMatticus suggests. If Strong AI is absent in the setting, then these payloads probably have to be tuned by hand in realtime over a two-way connection, which makes hacking single-target-per-attack.

[Wesley Street]

Brain-hacking with some sort of drain makes sense from a balance/mechanics standpoint but doesn't that toss it into the category of technomancy? Then it's a magic/sci-fi hybrid concept rather than a pure tech approach.

The second issue is that without some sort of direct interface (be that a datajack, drugs and/or a helmet with strobes and tones) there's no way for a digital device to induce brainwave entrainment.

I get the idea of sending chunks of information from a digital device but converting that digital information to a medium a brain can understand without some sort of analog filter (like the VR strobe packets in Snowcrash) is still handwavium and not particularly tech.

[Ferret]

Focused induction fields to generate the appropriate neurological signals in the target brain is probably close enough to plausible to be acceptable for the audience, Wes.

[Username17]

I think it's time for a more complete survey of the "Essence" issue. I don't think the game needs a "Magic" attribute (first draft of After Sundown had one, and I took it out because the game worked better without one). And the game therefore doesn't need or even want something that works exactly like Shadowrun Essence. I would also go out on a limb and say that it doesn't want something that works exactly like CP2020 Humanity - both because the random nature of it was really unbalanced and because the whole thing of cyborgs having to take time off to rant at Dr. Katz before adding more cyberware was kind of stupid.

Th purpose of cyberware drawbacks are to make multiple character types possible. That is to say that in GitS you have three main characters: The Major, The Rookie, and The In-Between Guy. And you want to encourage that. Some players will want to play what is essentially a robot with a brain inside, and that should be supported. Some players will want to play a regular meat human, and that should be supported as well. And a great number of people will want to play something in between: a character who has regular meat bits and also has enhanced cybernetic bits. Similarly, Magic wants to exist on a sliding scale: where some people play gruff mundanes, other people play full Harry Dresden/Marla Mason style wizards, and still other players play characters who have a few charms and know a ritual curse or something.

And that is why solutions like "What if getting cyber made it possible to attack you with hacks?" aren't acceptable solutions, because that doesn't support intermediate states. Binary issues like that produce "in-for-a-penny" equations where people go all-meat or all-metal. And that is counter to design goals. That's also why having a Magic Attribute is probably a bad idea - its very existence makes having magic that does anything good be so expensive that no one is going to settle for dabbling. Shadowrun's Essence made there be a direct magic/augmentation tradeoff, but the real point is that the game should be supporting characters who have differing levels of augmentation and differing levels of magic - not merely characters who vary the degree to which their inhumanity is magic or tech based. It's Man meets Magic and Machine, not Man chooses a point on the Magic/Machine Slider. You are supposed to also be able to be a man.

When you look at stuff like AD Police, the cost of cybernetics is that they drive you crazy. The Marla Mason books do much the same thing with magic - using powerful objects drives you mad. That is a great literary device, and CP2020 tried to duplicate it with their humanity score (to rather poor results unfortunately). Something somwhat like that could I think be done, where having ongoing bonuses like cybereyes or personal wards made you in general less resistant to going crazy and using temporary bonuses like adrenal pumps or beast form would start a "go crazy" counter. So you could plausibly play a character like Pressbutton, but your badassery wouldn't last that long if you didn't want to go berserk with cybermadness. But I think the distinction between things that you have to rely upon sparingly lest they drive you over the edge (like reflex triggers) and things that just sit around being active all the time and lowering your threshold (like bone lacing) needs to be made.

That sort of thing would actually give space to the people who just wanted to have a modest cybrnetic enhancement or a limited reserve of charms. Because having just a little bit of boosting, they could draw upon that boosting more often and for longer periods because having a more complete mundane body would let them compensate better than the people who had titanium exoskeletons.

-Username17

[sabs]

If you go with the idea that becoming less human causes mental instability. Then you need to look at every enhancement (cyber OR magic) and decide how less human it makes you and what that does.

Do you get insanity points a la CoC?
Is the answer to: magic vs chrome that, well they both cost you from the same pool. So becoming faster than a regular human fucks with your sanity, whether you do it with Cyber, or Magic.

[fectin]

Why would anyone think that deliberately crippling transhumanism be a good idea in a game like this? That is the exact opposite of a good idea.
"Beneficial body-mods make you less human" is a terrible idea to encode in your game. It is also flat out antithetical to the source material. It's also fairly offensive; even fundamentalist evangelicals usually don't go that far.

Just remember kiddos, Grandma's artificial hip makes her less human.

[sabs]

Does Grandma's artificial hip allow her to do super-crazy gymnastics that would be impossible for someone without the hip? or move faster than the eye can see.

Do her glasses allow her to perceive the world in 3D sound vibrations?

That's a stupid Strawman and you know it.
Grandma's artificial hip doesn't make her less human, because it works exactly like a regular hip.

OH and being super-cybered making you less human is COMPLETELY part of the cyberpunk genre. Cyborgs having so much cyber they lose their humanity is so part of the trope, that it's a fucking cliche.

[Username17]

Why would anyone think that deliberately crippling transhumanism be a good idea in a game like this? That is the exact opposite of a good idea.
"Beneficial body-mods make you less human" is a terrible idea to encode in your game. It is also flat out antithetical to the source material. It's also fairly offensive; even fundamentalist evangelicals usually don't go that far.

Just remember kiddos, Grandma's artificial hip makes her less human.

You haven't read any Gibson, have you? Or CP2020 or Shadowrun, for that matter. Or watched AD Police? Or Ghost in the Shell? Or any fucking thing in the entire genre? The core question of how much of "you" can be replaced before you aren't "you" anymore is like the entire fucking point of Cyberpunk. Literally the entire point of the entire genre.

As for your grandmother's artificial hip, yes, those things really do come with heavy psychological damage. That's not even a weird conceit of the Cyberpunk genre, people get really torn up about that sort of thing. A heart transplant that is no better or different from a normal heart causes people to have significant identity issues, and it's not at all strange to think that heart transplants with factory modified super hearts would come with even more - and that's before we get into the "rush of power" issues of cranking up your super heart to 11 and going on a rampage.

You may want to work out how these forms of cybermadness/magicmadness are going to manifest, and what goal you're trying to achieve with incorporating this into game mechanics: Is it primarily supposed to add to the character's personality, or to serve as a penalty to playing overly powerful characters (i.e. a balancing mechanic)? Do you want to go all the way and attach a personality/social system to it, or is it going to be just a minor addition?

The goal is to use it as a balancing mechanic. Indeed, to push it even further to use it as a leveling mechanic, by allowing characters who accumulate more XPs to have "stronger personalities" or "more confidence" or something that allows them to push the limits more. So rank newbs might go nuts and stay that way taking a single dose of Valkyr, while a badass like Max Payne can get hopped up on several and just get kind of violent and weird for a while.

Anyway, the Player Characters:

In a multi-polar cold war scenario, it is easy to imagine that it would be in the interests of most of the major players to have there be a large talent pool of mercenaries be ambiently around, committing crime. First of all, if an individual player has a large number tasks that they need skilled covert specialists to perform, and they need plausible deniability, and they don't want the same people to do the same sorts of tasks over and over again, a "temping" service of sorts is in their interests. Having plausibly deniable covert actions performed against them is a side effect, but one which does not necessarily count as negative for the people making decisions. 9/11 was against the interests of "The United States", but the US is just a corporate entity, could you honestly say that the position of Rudy Giuliani got any worse because 9/11 happened? (note: I am emphatically not accusing members of the US government of plotting 9/11, merely using it as an example that people will be familiar with to demonstrate how a skilled politician could benefit personally from actions taken against their country by using it as a rhetorical device after the fact). So you really have to ask yourself who (from the people who had any real power) would actually be against freelance mercenary spies existing. And the answer to that, I believe, is anyone whose position in power is extremely stable. A category that is probably a null set in a sufficiently complex and destabilized world.

So basically you have a number of positions:

Assets
These are freelancers who can be called upon to do stuff by various organizations. A criminal syndicate or corporation or government "has" an Asset if they are able to contact that Asset with the presumption of being able to hire them to perform covert operations with their unique skills. And that means that a lot of Assets are "had" by several different agencies or syndicates. And this in turn gives Assets a certain amount of protection. First of all, wiping out an Asset gets rid of a potential Asset that the agency might themselves hire in the future. Secondly, the Asset is potentially possessed by several neutral third parties who would be annoyed at you breaking their things.

Agents
An Agent works directly for a specific agency or syndicate. They enjoy the power and protection that agency or syndicate can offer, and they pay the price in loyalty that the agency or syndicate demands.

So player characters might be Agents or Assets of various different groups. And in general, the groups that they are taking actions against are interested in stopping those actions, but not particularly interested in pursuing the perpetrators once they have gotten away with it. Unless the perpetrators were Agents of a hostile agency. And even then, they are only interested in capturing foreign Agents for subsequent prisoner exchange stuff.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I mean, if you took the Snow Crash virus and started broadcasting during primetime, you'd get the situation from The Signal.

I believe the idea is that simply broadcasting is not sufficient. You can broadcast any information you want, but the odds that it will affect a specific target (or even a random target in the vicinity) is zero. And this is actually fairly legitimate; if I were to start broadcasting viruses wirelessly in a busy Wi-Fi spot, nobody would get infected. I have to establish a connection, and I have to make sure the virus will execute on the target machine.

This is *so* not how the brain works that it hurts to think about.

Wanna know how the brain works? When I tell you the sky is purple, for a split second your brain believes me. Then it passes that belief through a sort of "bullshit detector" and verifies that it's false and throws the idea away.

Strong magnetic fields and extremely intense religious experiences actually disable this bullshit meter.

So if I can talk to you, flash a pattern of light into your eyes, or even just input the right physical sensations/tastes/sounds/whatever, I have instant, root level access to the brain. If I can disable your bullshit detecting areas, I can make you believe you're a dog so long as that part of you is turned off. This has, to a lesser extent, been shown in scientific studies.

It's the problem that the Matrix rips off from philosophy. Your brain receives electrical impulse signals and assumes them to be real. Period. It's a fucking trusting organ. In fact, that's the entire point of VR and cyberspace in cyberpunk: your brain literally doesn't know the difference between artificial sensory input and the real thing.

So by that trope and some basics on how the brain works, meat-bags might actually be *more* vulnerable than someone with some hardware in their noggin that functions as a permanent reality filter. Or some magic that acts as a buffer. Because otherwise, all I have to do is to tell the correct neurons to kick off and others to turn on in your brain and you think the sky is purple.

[TheFlatline]

Why would anyone think that deliberately crippling transhumanism be a good idea in a game like this? That is the exact opposite of a good idea.
"Beneficial body-mods make you less human" is a terrible idea to encode in your game. It is also flat out antithetical to the source material. It's also fairly offensive; even fundamentalist evangelicals usually don't go that far.

Just remember kiddos, Grandma's artificial hip makes her less human.

You haven't read any Gibson, have you? Or CP2020 or Shadowrun, for that matter. Or watched AD Police? Or Ghost in the Shell? Or any fucking thing in the entire genre? The core question of how much of "you" can be replaced before you aren't "you" anymore is like the entire fucking point of Cyberpunk. Literally the entire point of the entire genre.

Let's keep it going. Go read Phillip K Dick. He wrote a bunch of stories that got turned into movies. He wrote what eventually became Total Recall, he wrote Minority Report, he wrote what became Bladerunner. The dude was a schizophrenic who experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and was the godfather of Cyberpunk.

In fact, if you want to see the seeds of cyberpunk and questions posed by transhumanism, there's an excellent essay/speech Dick gave in 1978 that is worthy of digesting:

http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

In fact, as I skim through it again, PKD actually addresses the idea of brain/reality hacking, albeit through television in a slow, almost osmosis style environment. I think it's pertinent to many ideas being thrown around in the thread.

Edit: Okay PKD goes off the fucking deep end towards the end of the piece with his serendipity and cyclical, biblical history, so once that starts happening you can skim or read for fun. The dude was schizophrenic and it took him to weird places.

[Josh_Kablack]

The second issue is that without some sort of direct interface (be that a datajack, drugs and/or a helmet with strobes and tones) there's no way for a digital device to induce brainwave entrainment.

This is 2009 tech.

Combine that sort of backpack projector/camera rig with a blank wall and Pokemon episode 38 and it's probably possible to induce seizures in a notable chunk of the population right now.

From there it is a very short leap of faith to swallow that is or will soon become possible to broadcast subliminals on blank walls and not that much larger of a step to move on all the way over to Blipverts and Clockwork Orange style reprogramming with mobile devices.

[fectin]

Does Grandma's artificial hip allow her to do super-crazy gymnastics that would be impossible for someone without the hip?

Yes: walking.

Do her glasses allow her to perceive the world in 3D sound vibrations?

They let her perceive it in ways which were impossible before.

That's a stupid Strawman and you know it.

I dont think that means what you think it means. Not only is this the direct and logical result of the arguments you made, debating about Grandma at all is a red herring.

Grandma's artificial hip doesn't make her less human, because it works exactly like a regular hip.

This is either some really funky version of the naturalist fallacy, or it is on its face entirely inconsistant with cyborging making you crazy. Not to put too fine a point on it, that means it's either bullshit or concession.

OH and being super-cybered making you less human is COMPLETELY part of the cyberpunk genre. Cyborgs having so much cyber they lose their humanity is so part of the trope, that it's a fucking cliche.

Cite an example. Molly from Neuromancer is explicitly more human than everyone else. The bartender with the Russian arm isn't exactly distant. I guess you could argue that Lady Jane lost her humanity to technology, but you'd be stupid to try. You could much more easily make an argument that Hideo lost his humanity from the lack of cybernetics (to replace his eyes). The goggles from virtual light don't seem to do anything to change humanity. The Mona Lisa Overdrive character who loses her humanity is ridden by loa. Snow Crash has unmodified humans turning into drones, but that doesn't exactly support your point. Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom might work, if you pretend hard enough that humans are inherently terrified of dying vice ceasing to exist. The gargoyles from Snow Crash are distracted, but still not inhuman. The guy in the van is pretty definitely human by any definition. Heck, even the dogs are presented as fundamentally unchanged. Transmet has a whole volume about how people are always the same.

So please, explain where this trope is from.

[K]

I thought that exclusively working for an agency was basically the least punk thing you could do?

That being said, the iconic cyberpunk adventure should probably be survival-based or detective-based and revolve around sticking it to The Man. It should be things like "if we don't break into the arcology and open some vents, the go-gangers in the undercity are going to suffocate" or "some of the people coming back from the corp drug trial are going missing, and the local warlord needs someone to check it out" or something like that.

[CatharzGodfoot]

This is 2009 tech.

That's fukkin amazing.

[Username17]

So please, explain where this trope is from.

Are you fucking with us? You're fucking with us, right?
Like, you only just now noticed that Shadowrun has an Essence stat and Cyberpunk 2020 has a Humanity stat? Like really, just right now?

I thought that exclusively working for an agency was basically the least punk thing you could do?

Depends on the agency. You could be like the hero in Zodiac and work for an environmentalist group or something. An Agency or Syndicate doesn't have to be "the man".

But significant portions of the game should revolve around maintaining your Asset status and not being labeled an Agent, or worse: a Liability.

That being said, the iconic cyberpunk adventure should probably be survival-based or detective-based and revolve around sticking it to The Man. It should be things like "if we don't break into the arcology and open some vents, the go-gangers in the undercity are going to suffocate" or "some of the people coming back from the corp drug trial are going missing, and the local warlord needs someone to check it out" or something like that.

That sort of thing.

But you also have:

• Expose [Insert Dangerous Evil Plan].
• Prevent [Insert Catastrophe] Secretly.
• Assassinate [Insert Bad Guy].
• Find [Missing Person].
• Protect [Endangered Person] Until They Testify.

Which leads me to believe that you need a system for getting things into and out of the news cycle as a core mechanic. Much of the game's missions involve your employers wanting something to either get into or not get into the news. You might even want an overall Regional Terror Level, which unlike Arkham Horror can go up and down. So getting news of danger and catastrophe into the news brings the terror level up, and getting those news stories quashed gets the terror level to come down. You might even have a minigame for affecting elections and security contracts.

But bottom line: Gonzo Journalist and Rocker need to come back in as playable archetypes.

-Username17

[K]

You know, I'd actually be more supportive of brain-hacking if the Rocker was doing it.

[fectin]

Why would anyone think that deliberately crippling transhumanism be a good idea in a game like this? That is the exact opposite of a good idea.
"Beneficial body-mods make you less human" is a terrible idea to encode in your game. It is also flat out antithetical to the source material. It's also fairly offensive; even fundamentalist evangelicals usually don't go that far.

Just remember kiddos, Grandma's artificial hip makes her less human.

You haven't read any Gibson, have you? Or CP2020 or Shadowrun, for that matter. Or watched AD Police? Or Ghost in the Shell? Or any fucking thing in the entire genre? The core question of how much of "you" can be replaced before you aren't "you" anymore is like the entire fucking point of Cyberpunk. Literally the entire point of the entire genre.

Let's keep it going. Go read Phillip K Dick. He wrote a bunch of stories that got turned into movies. He wrote what eventually became Total Recall, he wrote Minority Report, he wrote what became Bladerunner. The dude was a schizophrenic who experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and was the godfather of Cyberpunk.

In fact, if you want to see the seeds of cyberpunk and questions posed by transhumanism, there's an excellent essay/speech Dick gave in 1978 that is worthy of digesting:

http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

In fact, as I skim through it again, PKD actually addresses the idea of brain/reality hacking, albeit through television in a slow, almost osmosis style environment. I think it's pertinent to many ideas being thrown around in the thread.

Edit: Okay PKD goes off the fucking deep end towards the end of the piece with his serendipity and cyclical, biblical history, so once that starts happening you can skim or read for fun. The dude was schizophrenic and it took him to weird places.

PKD is an amazing author. But his conclusions are basically always either that everyone is human or that no-one is human (or more rarely, about something else entirely).
I really recommend sticking to his stories though, not his philosophy.

[fectin]

This is 2009 tech.

That's fukkin amazing.

TMS is a thing right now. There are multiple competing companies building the equipment, and you can seriously just get it done by prescription.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcrani ... timulation

The TED talk is just taking advantage of good sensors and your brain's unfathomably awesome plasticity. It's really cool (really, really cool), but it's still just training your brain to use a new pathway, not actually 'reading' it.

I had a friend in college who had serious depression, that finally got fixed by an intracranial neurostim. That literally means he had wires in his head to make him happy (he was not exactly less human afterwards, by the way).

Now, actual science doesn't need to have anything to do with this. But the gross brain hacking effects are something you can do today, and it's not at all unreasonable to assume that with user-specific data and fine control, we could eventually do just about anything. (Though, saying you can 'gain root access to the brain' by flashing lights in someone's eyes is about as ridiculous as saying you can reprogram an FPGA by hitting the escape key a lot. )

Edit: apologies for the double post

[Chamomile]

Regardless of whether or not robot parts eroding your humanity because shut up is traditionally a part of the cyberpunk genre, the question of whether it should be is still a valid one. A lot of humans are capable of doing things today thanks to modern medicine that they couldn't do before, including being stronger, faster, and longer lived. It doesn't seem to cause any of our modern athletes to freak out. How often do people with prosthetic limbs have weird identity issues? Is it a common thing, or just something that's been known to happen on occasion?

The question of "how much can you swap out of this human and still call it human" is one that I, personally, answer with "a whole freakin' ton of parts." Seriously, replace that guy's arm with a roboarm? He's not even in a gray area. He's not even close to a gray area. Swap out all of his limbs? I don't see any reason why he'd act fundamentally differently from before. Swap out the reproductive organs? That'll definitely have significant effects on his personality, but are eunuchs not human? The only point where you can start to reasonably argue that they're less human in terms of personality and motivation is when you start screwing with their brain.