Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jul 01, 2011 10:30 pm

fectin wrote: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?

Cyber is not expensive; it is cheaper (in both build points and money) to obtain your skills via cyberware than it is to acquire them the old fashioned way.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jul 02, 2011 12:44 am

Grek wrote:
fectin wrote: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?
Cyber is not expensive; it is cheaper (in both build points and money) to obtain your skills via cyberware than it is to acquire them the old fashioned way.

Okay. Assuming that's true, cyberware is always the right answer, and this is instructing Mister Cavern to be a dick to every player that didn't gimp himself. That's also less than stellar.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Jul 02, 2011 2:30 am

No, the rules for "Evading the Cops", "Getting an Audience" and "Creating a Coverup" would give you penalties for having cyber. Cyberware is the right option when you value power over stealth, and the wrong option when you don't. Sometimes, you'd rather go in, do your business in 5 minutes, get out before the cops show up and then flee the country. Sometimes you want to fake your way into being allowed in "legitimately" and do what you need without anyone knowing you did anything at all.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sat Jul 02, 2011 4:59 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote: 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!

The Jim Butcher approach. Done with a little more care it might work well. Particularly in a high-tech world where a powerful magician can't use anything with a cpu in it. Like the smartcard that is his government ID or a cell phone. ....

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sat Jul 02, 2011 7:42 am

kzt wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote: 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!
The Jim Butcher approach. Done with a little more care it might work well. Particularly in a high-tech world where a powerful magician can't use anything with a cpu in it. Like the smartcard that is his government ID or a cell phone. ....

The same coin means it's probably really easy to Magic-EMP most stuff. Which means protected devices include a Faraday Cage device to help counter that.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 8:11 am

Maxus wrote:
kzt wrote: The Jim Butcher approach. Done with a little more care it might work well. Particularly in a high-tech world where a powerful magician can't use anything with a cpu in it. Like the smartcard that is his government ID or a cell phone. ....
The same coin means it's probably really easy to Magic-EMP most stuff. Which means protected devices include a Faraday Cage device to help counter that.

Not necessarily. The same effect that causes the magician to screw up stuff could be said to make it hard for him to affect technology with magic. so a taser is unlikely to work on the mage, but he can't do much about the laser cannon a km away that is about to turn him into edible modern art.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 1:54 pm

kzt wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote: 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!
The Jim Butcher approach. Done with a little more care it might work well. Particularly in a high-tech world where a powerful magician can't use anything with a cpu in it. Like the smartcard that is his government ID or a cell phone. ....

The Jim Butcher approach wouldn´t work at all if you want to do cyberpunk fantasy. If you wanted to do some sort of Arcanum-style Czberpunk VS. Fantasy, that would be acceptable. But the goal is to make a Cyberpunk Fantasy setting, which means that you need to have wizard runes displayed on liquid crystal displays and stuff.

The only thing you really need is to have the inhumanity from Cyber and Magic to stack. If they were separate tracks, every character would be required by law to get a little cyber and magic before they started to specialize.

-Username17

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 2:22 pm

fectin wrote: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?

Magic and Cyberware are both good at different things. So even if the costs and penalties of one were vastly higher than the other, you´d still want to do it if the different thing it did was really useful.

But even within that context, there isn´t really a suggestion on the table to make cyber penalized in a way that magic is not. The Inhumanity (still needs a better name) goes up with both, and you get classified as a legal non-person whether you are non=human because you full of titanium or because you are full of magic power.

The question of how to go about balancing the monetary costs of getting robotics put into your body is a good one. I´m not sure I have ever seen someone do a satisfactory answer to that.

-Username17

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 2:37 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The Inhumanity (still needs a better name)

Instability?
Alienation?

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 3:31 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:The Inhumanity (still needs a better name)
Instability?
Alienation?

Otherness?

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 4:24 pm

Distance.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 4:50 pm

That all still comes back to persecuting people who try to transcend human limits. That is not an overall theme of cyberpunk. Now, obviously you can put whatever you want in your game, but hopefully you have a reason for doing so. The only two reasons I can think of are fun and thematics; i.e. you either believe that it's more fun to play paraiahs, or you want to make a game about playing social outcasts, or you want a game that conveys that anything unnatural is bad. Those are all cogent reasons, but don't sound like fun games.
I assume it can't be purely for balance, because you've made your opinions quite clear on how well fluff balances mechanics.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 5:15 pm

It's not gonna be fluff, but mechanics. There'll be a lookup table where your Distance determines your chance of being spotted or remembered in a crowd and the number of detectives assigned to look for you.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 5:46 pm

That seems remarkably similar to balancing "ninja powers" with "samurai periodically try to kill you," then defending it by saying that there's a lookup table for how many samurai come after you, based on your ninja level.

I shouldnt even have thrown that point in, really, because unfun and bad thematics should be enough.

K · Post by K » Sun Jul 03, 2011 8:31 pm

Stress.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Jul 03, 2011 8:47 pm

If I were hardcoding how much people hate you into a game, I'd make some kind of periodic roll every week or so. If the roll fails, someone important dislikes you enough to try and do something nasty to you. This is in addition to whatever important person's server room you were going to raid for the nuclear missile abort codes in the first place. Also, if you're classed as inhuman, corps might be more willing to use lethal force on you, since there's probably a good deal less paperwork/coverup involved in killing someone most people don't recognize as a person in the first place.

Almaz · Post by **Almaz** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 1:58 am

Orion wrote:It's not gonna be fluff, but mechanics. There'll be a lookup table where your Distance determines your chance of being spotted or remembered in a crowd and the number of detectives assigned to look for you.

It isn't even the number of detectives assigned to pursue you. It's how obvious, to a detective's inspection, that this was done by someone with cyberware, and what kind of cyberware they might be looking for. Or what kind of astral signatures might be left by a magician. Essentially, what we're looking at is a system where everyone is playing a Ninja, and starts with a certain number of points in Leaving No Trace, and every secret ninja art they possess removes a point from that, and where if they buy off all of them they aren't ninja anymore, they're walking targets.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 04, 2011 6:29 am

Chamomile wrote:If I were hardcoding how much people hate you into a game, I'd make some kind of periodic roll every week or so. If the roll fails, someone important dislikes you enough to try and do something nasty to you. This is in addition to whatever important person's server room you were going to raid for the nuclear missile abort codes in the first place. Also, if you're classed as inhuman, corps might be more willing to use lethal force on you, since there's probably a good deal less paperwork/coverup involved in killing someone most people don't recognize as a person in the first place.

Is being attacked more often even a real disadvantage? I mean, it's another opportunity for XP and wealth when you greyhawk your enemy's gear.

In the real world it's a disadvantage, but in an RPG you usually expect cyber-ninja attacks every week regardless of what you do.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 6:53 am

"Oh, look, if you cyber/magic up, you get even more time in the spotlight! Win-win!"

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 8:04 am

Why would you give out kill xp in a sneakypants game? Thats a stupid complaint.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 04, 2011 8:18 am

Draco_Argentum wrote:Why would you give out kill xp in a sneakypants game? Thats a stupid complaint.

It's obviously not a sneakypants game because you are letting people not be sneaky. Hell, you are daring them to not be sneaky by letting them trade sneaky for raw power.

Therefore, it must be a combat/adventure game, and kill XP is the model for that. The only question is whether you want to further reward not being sneaky.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 8:23 am

You should be getting XP on a per mission basis, not on a per kill basis. Stealth is one way that you can contribute to the mission, and the things that cyber and magic give you are others. Trading one for the other is perfectly valid and an actual disadvantage.

That said, rolling for how many random ninja attacks the characters get per month due to being abhuman is stupid and shouldn't happen.

K · Post by K » Mon Jul 04, 2011 8:59 am

Grek wrote:You should be getting XP on a per mission basis, not on a per kill basis. Stealth is one way that you can contribute to the mission, and the things that cyber and magic give you are others. Trading one for the other is perfectly valid and an actual disadvantage.

It really isn't.

What happens is some players get sneaky and some get powerful, and then whenever someone comes up with a sneaky plan like "we slip across the border as refugees" or "then we walk into the arcology as janitors," the powerful characters are like "well, we can't do that, so it looks like we need to blow our way in or fight the guards."

Then the sneaky characters suck in combat because they spent character resources on being sneaky.

Sneaky is an all or nothing proposition. It's not useful for one character to be sneaky and the rest to not be equally sneaky. It's exactly the same as "everyone needs defenses to everything" and "hacking/magicking can't be a solo adventure."

Letting one guy be sneaky means the sneaky guy has a solo adventure for half an hour and everyone else plays Smash Bros.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:03 am

Well, if the sneaky character can pull it off by himself when the Combat-Machines go in loud and proud, he, at least, has a good Distraction going for him . .

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:14 am

K wrote:Stress.

I think that is the winner.

Stress fulfills all the criteria and it´s easy to say. It also explains why you could become more hard core and become better at "stress management".

fuchs wrote:That all still comes back to persecuting people who try to transcend human limits.

So? You´re trying to make variable levels of transcending human limits be viable inside the same party. That means that you have to in some sense persecute the players who transcend human limits more, because otherwise transcending human limits more would be better and balance within the party would be shot between the more augmented and less augmented character.

That´s just an inescapable hard coded reality. Now we can quote various settings like how in Ghost in the Shell the Major decided rationally that she needed someone less augmented on the team for some abstract reason involving unpredictability back and forth at each other, but the bottom line is that giving a proportionate advantage to people who have less augmentation is a game balance necessity and it wouldn´t even matter if there was no genre support for the concept, you´d still have to do it.

The fact that there is genre support for the concept is just one more reason that your complaints are going to be ignored.

-Username17