Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[Juton]

Togusa is actually cybered, he has a cyber brain and he got hacked by the laughing man when he went undercover. He just never went full cyborg (ie human brain in a robot body). Batou is a full cyborg, human brain in a robot body.

(Un)Fortunately you'll never really see a situation like GitS at the gaming table, games try to balance the capabilities of the group, most gamers wouldn't swallow being Togusa or Batou when their buddy gets to play someone like the Major.

If you like the idea of allowing a player to run a character that is less powerful in combat but not completely redundant than you're going to have to protect the roll of the expert. Don't let spells or technology give a sizeable bonus to most non-combat skills and don't let those powers obsolete the uses of those skills. In 3.5 the Rogue becomes obsolete by level 3 because pretty much everything that makes him special can be done by spell casters.

[Chamomile]

If cyber-parts, magic powers, and mundane skills are bought with the same pool of points, then a trained gunman and an untrained gunman with a targeting system would be pretty much mechanically identical. Yes, this means that given infinite playtime everyone will eventually converge. Similarly, given infinite playtime in D&D, eventually everyone will max out every single class.

[Orion]

The trouble is that traditionally the skill caps for mundanes were such that you could max out one area of expertise (face, sniper, pilot, whatever) with a fraction of the points a starting character got, at which point you would be pushed to look at magic or cyber.

It's one thing if at the limited of infinite character points everyone is a sniping expert with a targeting system, but if you can do that as a starting character than "human sniper" is not actually a supported character.

[Grek]

I'm pretty strongly in favour of the balancing mechanic where having more magic or more cyber makes you easier to spot by security and have less rights. Making it so that military grade cyborgs get stopped by airport security and draw extra police attention when they do stuff is a perfectly good balancing mechanism to me.

If we do go that direction, though, a few things need to be assumed in the setting:

-Non-magical, low-tech methods of detecting magic in people/objects exist and are available to anyone that cares. The guards at the airport can tell if you are a mage or not, and will ask that you keep your magical sword in cargo if they let you bring it with you at all.
-Both cyberware and bioware are simple to test for by any interested party. Again, airport security can tell if you're wared up or not, and will refuse to let you on the plane/into the building/whatever if you're deemed to be too dangerous by the local laws and regulations.
-The ease of tracking down magic is based on the degree of magic used. Mages that haven't casted anything recently are very difficult to track down, while mages that just blew a hole in a bank are obvious for several city blocks.
-Cyberware is always modular. You can take off your gun leg and turn it over to security or have it smuggled into the country by your contacts as is appropriate to the situation.
-The recent use of bioware can be tested for. If you activate your adrenal enhancer, your blood will be full of chemicals that will show up on a drug test. Likewise if you juice up without having bioware to do it.

[Chamomile]

That's a design decision though. Basically, at start should you be able to take on corps? You can be comparatively pathetic and still be able to get a lot done in criminal circles, which is a fine place to start for first level (or whatever), especially once the power curve is further lengthened by the presence of cyborg ninjas and wizards.

Going with Frank's guide, we need six basic character archetypes. I'm thinking, Cyber-Hacker, Cyber-Ninja, Fantasy-Blaster, Fantasy-Summoner, Punk-Face, Punk-Sneak. On that last one, a lack of cyber parts could actually be an advantage, if cyber parts and magic are, for whatever fluff reason, easier to trace than an unaugmented human. Punk-Face is by virtue of cyber-parts making you look like a death-bot and possibly registering as inhuman and magic making you all weird and ethereal.

[fectin]

Why are exclusive roles better than synergistic roles?

[Blasted]

What's a punk-face when he's at home?

[Chamomile]

What's a punk-face when he's at home?

Um. A guy with connections. Probably has a nice house. Maybe one a penthouse sort of thing. Cool car. Posh office job. Or maybe he's a hacker, cheap apartment with a bunch of cheap electronic platforms he can use for a dangerous hack and then set on fire immediately afterwards.

[kzt]

It makes some sense to have people with military cyber/bio be detectable at close range, but it also makes total sense for there to be versions that are totally not detectable for spies or commandos. That would seem like a pay extra points to have this model deal.

Oh detection must be ONLY at close range, as making your soldiers able to be detected on the battlefield by some sort of wide area sensor targeting their combat ware would be highly dumb.

[Chamomile]

It makes some sense to have people with military cyber/bio be detectable at close range, but it also makes total sense for there to be versions that are totally not detectable for spies or commandos. That would seem like a pay extra points to have this model deal.

Oh detection must be ONLY at close range, as making your soldiers able to be detected on the battlefield by some sort of wide area sensor targeting their combat ware would be highly dumb.

That, or cybered soldiers aren't used in major military operations for exactly this reason.

[Blasted]

Of course, the cyber soldier super elite covert branch is a dominant trope of this genre.
And it's hard to do the shadowrun style against-the-corporates adventure if the corp can just detect you whenever.

[Chamomile]

Those are both very good points, so yeah, either the signs given off by the cyber stuff are too faint to be detected at any distance greater than ~20 feet or the stuff used to detect it is just really, really expensive to run, so much so that not even megacorps can afford to run them long enough to get a signal out very far.

[Grek]

Under the model I posted above, characters with an extreme amount of cyber have two options: Trade out their hardcore stuff for their street legal set whenever they need to be covert, or act as a distraction somewhere else with as much crazy attention grabbing shit as they can get.

For magic detection/cyber detection, the most you that needs to happen so it is socially akward enough to be balancing is to make it show up with one of those metal detector wands security guards get. If you can wave one of those on someone and have it show what sort of cyborging they've got going on, then you're good.

Spies pretty much don't get wares or magic. Allowing people to pay extra to avoid the social downsides is probably acceptable, given that the mundane skills version costs the same as the hidden cyber or hidden magic version. They're functionally the same, so they should have the same costs. But at that point there's really not much of a reason to allow people to buy the same thing three different ways.

[Chamomile]

But at that point there's really not much of a reason to allow people to buy the same thing three different ways.

Yeah, that's just it, cyber should ultimately be better at killing things and hacking things. Mundane should be better at social things and covert things. Magic should be better at...I actually forgot what magic is supposed to be good at, but I think you get the gist of it.

[Grek]

Obvious cyberware should give you more killing power per point spent. You're paying for the difference by taking on a disadvantage in stealth and social penalties resulting from being half killbot. Covert cyber (of the sort that doesn't give you any stealth or social penalties), if we allow it at all, should not give you an advantage over spending the same number of points on a mundane skill. Because once you take away the disadvantage, it is a mundane skill, just with chrome paint attached. Cyberware that is only somewhat covert should only be somewhat cheaper than the mundane version, in proportion with the degree of stealth/social penalty that you'd be getting.

[Chamomile]

Covert cyber (of the sort that doesn't give you any stealth or social penalties), if we allow it at all, should not give you an advantage over spending the same number of points on a mundane skill. Because once you take away the disadvantage, it is a mundane skill, just with chrome paint attached.

Then fully covert cyberware shouldn't exist. No point in having two ways to build the same character. If we're going to have all abilities be interchangeable and have fantasy, cyber, or punk be a purely fluff decision, we should come out and say it instead of writing the same system three times with a different coat of paint.

[K]

You can't make cyberware have various degrees of obviousness because then you will have players making the wrong kinds of characters for the adventures they are expected to do.

I mean, cyberpunk is about stealth runs of various sorts. Letting people not make stealth characters is bad.

[Username17]

I think you've hit on a genius idea, and sort of circulated upthread - Magic and Metal move you away from (in Mage terms) a form of Arcane - the rating of how 'forgettable' you are, and maybe a measure of your ability to not leave a paper trail. Cyber ware means you need permits, software patches, spare parts, chrome polishing compounds, Magic means delivery of chicken feet, bat guano and your subscription to 'Mana Monthly'. Taking the 'middle path' leads to you being more easily able to escape notice. Could apply to long term hunts for you as well as modifiers to passing by unoticed in public - sort of 'social stealth'

That's probably the core of it. Giving people less rights and less social stealth as their Inhumanity (needs better name) rises, is the core issue. You're still going to want a health-based cap to put some limits on the pink mohawk crowd. Your health cap can even rise as the character becomes more powerful over all. So if "some random dude" becomes a vampire, they become an NPC. But if a higher "level" PC like Spike is a vampire, he can stay a vampire and a PC at the same time. He still doesn't have any rights though, because the laws in most areas are set up based on the limitations of Average Joes to control the impulses of the Hemophagic Virus. This means that some of the more out-there options like translating your neural net into a military vehicle or playing a dragon have a "you must be at least this tall to ride" limit. So if you're playing a low level campaign, none of the players are allowed to play Full Conversion Borgs, Yuggothians, or Loa Zombies. If you go for a really high-end campaign, the gloves are off and you can make a RIFTS-style party if you want.

This also has the result that AIs live in the two places where people are happy with them: subhuman and superhuman. An AI that is roughly the level of a human doesn't fit in the Inhumanity allowance and either goes insane or comes apart. But if you dedicate enough hardware to an AI to make it count as a high level character, you can have one that is totally awesome and capable of staying coherent and not going on a rampage. This lets you have machine gods like the MCP running on powerful networked super computers in the basement of some corporation.

As to what actually happens when you run out your personal limit of augmentation pushing, that should vary. It's thematic for pushing the limits of demonic possession to make you go nuts (at least temporarily), an it's thematic for pushing the limits of adrenal pumps to make your heart give out (or otherwise have your bod shut down). There should be a fairly long list of potential catastrophes that befall people who overstep the limits. Of course, having people turn up the go-juice until they collapse is awesome, and be a thing that PCs actually do sometimes. That indicates to me that the time you can go at full Hulk-mode before you shut down should be either be variable or have a lead time (as in: you cross the line and now you're going to shut down in three turns, rather than immediately when you hit the cap). Or both. Probably both.

So if we assume that in the game, Major doesn't have enough points for social skills, then Togusa has a unique role on the team. So let's assume that our default "un-cybered" character is a Face. What does that tell us about how cyber needs to work?

There can't be any cyberware that boosts social skills, or even Faces will cyber up. Combat cyberware is irrelevant to being a face so we probably don't even need a special mechanic to discourage Togusa's player from loading him up with it--he has no incentive to do so. The more character points it costs to be a specialized Face, the less of a problem there is.

Characters are going to benefit from having multi-spectra vision and subcutaneous bullet resistant fibers whatever their nominal role is. While you can (and probably should) legislate that magic spells never make you better at talking and convincing people of stuff, you'd still benefit from having an anti-bullet forcefield. Having less modifications pretty much has to give you a genuine advantage, or it's always going to be advantageous to augment the face - at the very least by augmenting survivability.

But your point on making the investigation and socializing abilities big is well taken. Legwork is very much not like weapon skills, in that it is much more amenable to be being split up. If you make 5 different weapon skills, you haven't added any real capabilities to characters. You've just said that they have to be like a unit in WH40K, where they have a specific gun that they always fire when they are shooting people. But shooting people doesn't really change much (in terms of goals accomplished or stories told) when you're using an assault rifle vs. a hunting rifle. On the flip side, if you add a skill in News Management, you've actually added capabilities to the players if they invest in them. Because otherwise there probably wasn't going to be a minigame where the players could change what the leading stories were in the news cycle, and now that there's a News Management skill they can.

Or to put it in reductionist terms: if you split the "Firearms" skill into Longarms and Pistols, then characters only lose. If they take both skills, they have the same abilities and spent more skill points. If they take only one of the skills they have a more limited weapon choice when shooting people and spent the same number of skill points. On the other hand, if you split "Diplomacy" into Etiquette and Politics, then characters actually gain. Before the introduction of the Politics skill, there wasn't a political minigame to interact with, meaning that characters who just buy Etiquette get pretty much the capabilities they would have had with Diplomacy, but characters who spend points in Politics get the ability to do stuff that was not otherwise going to be covered by the game.

Available character archetypes should indeed include "Gonzo Journalist", "Rocker", "Political Activist", and "Private Investigator". Because those are really common archetypes in cyberpunk and urban fantasy source material. So having a bunch of social minigames that you can buy yourself into is a very real possibility.

The trouble is that traditionally the skill caps for mundanes were such that you could max out one area of expertise (face, sniper, pilot, whatever) with a fraction of the points a starting character got, at which point you would be pushed to look at magic or cyber.

It's one thing if at the limited of infinite character points everyone is a sniping expert with a targeting system, but if you can do that as a starting character than "human sniper" is not actually a supported character.

If you like the idea of allowing a player to run a character that is less powerful in combat but not completely redundant than you're going to have to protect the roll of the expert. Don't let spells or technology give a sizeable bonus to most non-combat skills and don't let those powers obsolete the uses of those skills. In 3.5 the Rogue becomes obsolete by level 3 because pretty much everything that makes him special can be done by spell casters.

That might actually be avoidable, depending on what the targeting system actually does. If rather than increasing your skill generically it literally lets you take "Aim Actions" faster, it wouldn't be the end of the world if you could be a fully accredited sniper with or without one at chargen. Then your uncybered sniper can still snipe at full effect. The character with the targeter can setup sniping in less time. The character with the gyrostabilizer can snipe from a moving train. But the uncybered sniper can still drop his rifle in the river and pass for a bystander on mm-radar scans.

Cyber already makes you a little "out there" in the source material. Perhaps if heavy magic use does the same? When you're used to negotiating contracts with demonic princes and arcane fires burn in your eyes, your average person has trouble relating to you and vice versa.

Pretty much. As long as we don't have Tailored Pheromones or Presence in the system, the whole "augmented people are kind of creepy" trope works pretty well. There can still be "mind control" in the form of domination and possession as well as brain hacking. If those types of things generally work on one person at a time, are considered horrendously immoral, and are extremely temporary it still leaves a very real place for the un- or less- modified characters.

A solution could be to make normal skills very powerful at high level. Not magic, just able to give a baseline hollywood powers. Enough endurance make them John McLane, enough martial arts make them Jackie Chan, enough hacking make them Hardisson from Leverage. Achieving that level of competence can't be done with skillsoft: it takes time, dedication and money, all of which cybered-up mercs spent learning to use their chrome and street mages spent for enchantment, occult training and time-consuming rituals.

That's a very good place to start. If having a higher badassery score also let you maintain a higher level of covert mods without impinging on your ability to pass for normal, the game can scale up pretty well. Togusa keeps up with the party and keeps his role as the "norm" who can talk to normal people, even though he gets cyberbrain modification. Or to put it another way: as things scale up to the point that your resident pink mohawk characters are Hulk and scarlet Witch, your face gets to be Captain American and doesn't actually go obsolete.

I'm pretty strongly in favour of the balancing mechanic where having more magic or more cyber makes you easier to spot by security and have less rights. Making it so that military grade cyborgs get stopped by airport security and draw extra police attention when they do stuff is a perfectly good balancing mechanism to me.

If we do go that direction, though, a few things need to be assumed in the setting:

-Non-magical, low-tech methods of detecting magic in people/objects exist and are available to anyone that cares. The guards at the airport can tell if you are a mage or not, and will ask that you keep your magical sword in cargo if they let you bring it with you at all.
-Both cyberware and bioware are simple to test for by any interested party. Again, airport security can tell if you're wared up or not, and will refuse to let you on the plane/into the building/whatever if you're deemed to be too dangerous by the local laws and regulations.

The distinction between "Cyber" and "Bio" for ware doesn't have to exist. Implants ma be organic or partially organic and have that not be a big deal.

But yes, you need to be able to detect magic use with something other than shaking a powerful wizard at the problem. It could be as simple as there being an easily accessible magic detecting charm that can be produced in sufficient numbers that guards at airports can pass divining rods around. Or it could be a magic-physics answer like in After Sundown where sorcery has some demonstrable real-world effect (like how sorcery in After Sundown darkens clear water in the area). But it has to be something. Otherwise being magical doesn't really have a drawback from an anonymity standpoint.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

But yes, you need to be able to detect magic use with something other than shaking a powerful wizard at the problem.

Another possibility is that you just don't need a powerful wizard, if you make detecting magic an entry-level skill/spell.

[Chamomile]

But yes, you need to be able to detect magic use with something other than shaking a powerful wizard at the problem.

Another possibility is that you just don't need a powerful wizard, if you make detecting magic an entry-level skill/spell.

This game will not be complete in my eyes until there are wizard interns.

[DSMatticus]

That indicates to me that the time you can go at full Hulk-mode before you shut down should be either be variable or have a lead time (as in: you cross the line and now you're going to shut down in three turns, rather than immediately when you hit the cap). Or both. Probably both.

Just throwing an idea out here, but you get X turns of hulk-mode for free, but you shut down when you leave hulk-mode. In addition to the X turns of hulk-mode, you can tempt fate and keep running, but every turn you run is some sort of check, and if that check fails your heart blows/mind loses to the demons/etc, etc and you actually gain 'inhumanity' or whatever you want to call it. You can push your luck and literally run the adrenal gland until you feel your heart explode and you have to get a new one and are less human. Alternatively, instead of a check every round, the DM could make a secret roll behind the curtain and you could just keep running the adrenal pump into the DM steps in and says, "your heart explodes." I feel like the first one is mechanically better, but the second one will play more to the psychologically of gambling and get people to do it. Flipping a coin (playing an individual game of chance every round) vs playing the price is right (trying to use as many rounds as possible without going over an unknown number).

[CatharzGodfoot]

But yes, you need to be able to detect magic use with something other than shaking a powerful wizard at the problem. It could be as simple as there being an easily accessible magic detecting charm that can be produced in sufficient numbers that guards at airports can pass divining rods around. Or it could be a magic-physics answer like in After Sundown where sorcery has some demonstrable real-world effect (like how sorcery in After Sundown darkens clear water in the area). But it has to be something. Otherwise being magical doesn't really have a drawback from an anonymity standpoint.

I'm for making sorcerers create strange electric fields, observable with EEGs and SQuIDs at all times. When powerful magic is created, compasses start spinning and ferrous materials levitate. It also contains a bit of magic Vs technology. Hope your wizard uses hardened cyberware!

[fectin]

So, if cyberware and not-cyberware are each good at different things, but cyber is both expensive and penalized, why would you ever take cyberware?

[RadiantPhoenix]

The Nasuverse has using magecraft increase your core body temperature; there's a guy who uses this to identify and assassinate rival mages.

[Ice9]

The trouble is that traditionally the skill caps for mundanes were such that you could max out one area of expertise (face, sniper, pilot, whatever) with a fraction of the points a starting character got, at which point you would be pushed to look at magic or cyber.

This. However, just bumping the skill cap won't work, because you want "secret agent" types that are good at lots of skills, not hyper-specialized on one skill. So what about this:

1) You split your points between skills, cyberwear, magic, and whatever else.
2) The number of points in skills increases the skill cap. So for example, if you spend 50 points on skills, you get a cap of 10, so you can have 5 skills at 10. If you spend 90 points, you get a cap of 15, so you can have 6 skills at 15.

Depending on how granular you want to get, you can either just have # of skills at rank N, or you can assign individual points from a pool. But the key part is that if you want to be the ultimate sniper, you have to pay more points than you're using on sniper alone - presumably, enough that it limits your ability to cyber/magic up.