Ice9 wrote:I don't see any contradiction here. "Non-magic guy with a lance on a horse" is a valuable member of a D&D party at low levels (quite possibly the strongest one), and then eventually becomes obsolete.
There is a difference. Magic in D&D is all advantage and no disadvantage. The only reason why non magic works at low levels is that at low levels magic is expensive and weak. A strong man can easily compete with a weak man and a magic sword since his strength bonuses can equal that of the magic augmentation.
You don't see that in this genre. It's gautlets of ogre strength + girdle of storm giant strength on day one. You could use a watered down approach but that would be a disencentive to play the game. They don't want to work up from a pager, to a simple cell phone to one with text messages to a 'droid. They want the 'droid on day one. And I don't blame them.
Here's a possible solution: rejigger the elemental triangle so that faces fall naturally into one of the categories. We do this by splitting "hacking" into "tech hacking" and "brain hacking", and giving brain hacking to the faces and tech hacking to the cyborgs. This also works to offset magic's flexibility by giving other people two primary abilities (brainhacking+being the face, killbot+tech hacking).
Unaugmented Human
Kills: Wizards, because their brains are too open to Things that Man is Not Meant to Know and they get brainhacked. Defends against: Other Unaugmented Humans, because what one brainhacker does another can undo. Gets killed by: Augmented Humans, because you can't brainhack a bullet. Out of combat: Talking to people is much easier when you can detect lies, charm people, and implant false memories.
Augmented Human
Kills: Unaugmented Humans, because you can't brainhack a bullet. Defends against: Other Augmented Humans, because when your eyes have been hacked you have a hard time shooting stuff. Gets killed by: Wizards, because Deflect Bullets, well, deflects bullets, and because Lightning Bolts do a number on cybernetics. Out of combat: Opens doors, shepherds drones, talks to AIs, cracks corporate databases, that sort of thing.
Wizard
Kills: Augmented Humans, because Deflect Bullets, well, deflects bullets, and because Lightning Bolts do a number on cybernetics. Defends against: Other Wizards, because counterspell works pretty well. Gets killed by: Unaugmented humans, because magic opens your brain up to Things that Man is Not Meant to Know and you get brainhacked. Out of combat: Healing, flying the party over chasms, Create Food and Water for wastelands, Telekinesis, secure communications, scrying.
Last edited by Vebyast on Sat Jul 09, 2011 10:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:There are two things you can learn from the Gaming Den:
1) Good design practices.
2) How to be a zookeeper for hyper-intelligent shit-flinging apes.
Another idea I had a long time ago for SR was that everyone is a mage. Literally, everyone has the innate ability to learn to use magic.
However there is this huge mechanical cost to learn how actually do stuff, so all the pieces on the platter called "mage" in SR have to be bought ala carte. Exactly if this extends to special cost for learning individual spells I'm unsure of, or if you have to buy a group to use spells etc I'm unclear on, but the general idea should be clear.
Anyhow, the counter is that cybering up increasingly interferes with your ability to use magic and also increases your ability to resist magic. However, magic is commonly used for lots other then just killing people, so it's not an unmixed benefit.
If you do the points correctly (yeah, easy to say...) you'll end up with "normal", who is actually a very skilled guy with some magic, a full on magician, who is essentially just a magician with limited non-magic skills, a somewhat cybered magician, and a full out heavily cybered guy.
It's an incredibly interesting look at what is essentially today's cybercombat. The package spread in an obscure manner, utilized multiple zero-day exploits, was encrypted to hell and back, and would shut it's payload off if the proper network configuration wasn't realized.
It also worked the API so that DLL and other library calls could be made from "files" stored only in memory.
It was also modular, easily upgraded, and only launched the specific modules it needed to infect that computer.
Oh... and it also involved the theft of legitimate driver signatures from hardware manufacturers to make it seem more legit.
Fascinating stuff...
Last edited by TheFlatline on Tue Jul 12, 2011 12:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
tzor wrote:You don't see that in this genre. It's gautlets of ogre strength + girdle of storm giant strength on day one. You could use a watered down approach but that would be a disencentive to play the game. They don't want to work up from a pager, to a simple cell phone to one with text messages to a 'droid. They want the 'droid on day one. And I don't blame them.
That's not really incompatible with unaugmented human being viable at low point levels. There just needs to be a point cost for ability to use cyberwear/magic. So for example, if having enough Stress capacity to go full droid costs 100 points, and people start with 150 points, then the unaugmented guy has 3x as many points for skills, resulting in more skills at a higher cap (see previous suggestion for "more skill points = higher cap").
Now the only question is "how does having significantly better skills compare to a droid body". There are a few options:
1) The droid body is better where applicable, so the skills guy picks a role that cyberwear doesn't help, like being the face.
2) The droid body is better in certain ways, worse in others. For example, you could say maxed out combat skill actually gives you more +attack and +damage than cybering up. However, the attack is based on predicting the foe, and the damage is precision-based. So skill guy is better against light-medium armored humanoids, cyber guy is better against drones/critters/heavy armor.
3) The droid body is worse than specialized skills, but can have components swapped out to do different roles. So a skill specialist will be stronger in a given field, but cyberwear can be good at any field. I don't particularly recommend this one, but it's an option.
The hope would be that Magic would be strong against something other than Magic and Hacking would be strong against something other than Hacking. The first step in making a functioning wheel is to make it a wheel that turns. If you make the various spokes self referential you end up with winners and losers - which is why people make "Magic Run" jokes and consign the Decker to be an NPC. In Rock, Paper, Scissors each wheel spoke is balanced because it beats another thing and loses to another thing. If you introduced "The Bird" where it needed someone else to flip the bird in order to be overcome, the game would be unbalanced. People would just flip the bird at each other all the time.
So ultimately I think that hackers should be good at stopping hackers and magicians should be good at stopping magicians. So you get the equivalent of counterspells but not the equivalent of Immunity to Normal Weapons. So the enemy has a wizard, therefore you want to hack them or something. The elemental superiority wheel needs work, as before it can really be nailed down the grand list of supported archetypes needs to be there. So it's probably as good a time as any to start thinking of what the sample characters should be.
For starters, there should be at least two samples of each offshoot human type, to prevent them from getting too stereotyped by the players.
One of the demihumans of each branch should go Disgaea-style where they buy up a bunch of their mutant powers. So one of the elves would load up on fairy juice and fly around and turn invisible and shit. One of the demihumans of each type should take pretty much the basic package and go off in some other direction entirely with the rest of their Stress.
That lays down a minimum of 10 demihumans. 2 Deep Ones, 2 Dwarves, 2 Elves, 2 Ogres, 2 Asura. If I end up finding an African demihuman type that I want to fold in, it goes up to 12.
The number of humans should be larger than the number of demihumans, because otherwise you end up portraying mundane humans as the minority, which is not the case. So that's another 11, minimum.
The four man party equivalent should probably be "Enforcer, Face, Hacker, Mage" with the different categories getting love in the form of different characters using different Stress combinations to pull them off. So one Enforcer might be a cyber-ogre with superior size, strength, speed, and resilience. Another enforcer might be a human juicer like unto Bane from Batman.
Once that is blocked out, the different methodologies should themselves be blocked out such that there are more roles than expected players - giving each team some assessable strengths and weaknesses.
So with 23 archetypes to write up, I should probably set some of them down:
Subordinate to the wheel turning, I think what you said is that each spoke needs to be basically balanced against itself (eg any magician is basically equal to any other magician). Does it matter how it's balanced (rocket launcher tag and padded sumo are both balanced), and does each spoke need to be balanced the same way? That question is just about how each spoke reacts with other folks within the same spoke.
fectin wrote:Subordinate to the wheel turning, I think what you said is that each spoke needs to be basically balanced against itself (eg any magician is basically equal to any other magician). Does it matter how it's balanced (rocket launcher tag and padded sumo are both balanced), and does each spoke need to be balanced the same way? That question is just about how each spoke reacts with other folks within the same spoke.
I think if they are balanced by Padded Sumo it is better, because the difference between being good against something and being balanced against something is more apparent than if they were at RLT and you happened to win initiative.
In short, with RLT balance it ends up looking like your high initiative character is a hammer and everything else is a nail.
* Street Sam
* Bodyguard? (is this just a variant of Street Sam)
* Rapper/Rocker/Entertainer
* Con Artist
* Hacker
* Infiltration/Scout
* Information Broker
* Artisan/Crafter (Mechanics, Armorers, Weaponsmiths, Talismongers)
* Logician
* Pilot (Rigger)
Frankly I would prefer if "street samurai" was specifically NOT an included archetype. First of all that exact phrase is associated with both Shadowrun and with the Japanese-themed 90s cyberpunk aesthetic which might not be what we're shooting for.
But even if you can break the association by renaming it with the same content...is that content that we want? As far as I can tell, Street Samurai just meant "someone with cyber who is good at violence." In other words, it's the Fighter problem. I'd rather have writeups like Assassin, Terrorist, Bounty Hunter, and Ex-Cop that not only imply skill at violence but secondary skills and a motive for using that violence.
Orion wrote:Frankly I would prefer if "street samurai" was specifically NOT an included archetype. First of all that exact phrase is associated with both Shadowrun and with the Japanese-themed 90s cyberpunk aesthetic which might not be what we're shooting for.
But even if you can break the association by renaming it with the same content...is that content that we want? As far as I can tell, Street Samurai just meant "someone with cyber who is good at violence." In other words, it's the Fighter problem. I'd rather have writeups like Assassin, Terrorist, Bounty Hunter, and Ex-Cop that not only imply skill at violence but secondary skills and a motive for using that violence.
Technically, if we're going back to our genre roots, street sammies originated in characters like Molly, and even Hiro Protagonist. A more appropriate name would be cyber-ronin. They have a code of honor/conduct, they take pride in their work, and they cruise around looking for appropriate jobs. Well, Molly did. Hiro was the Deliverator.
Which incidentally, I'd love to see as a character concept.
Here's an idea for virgins (metahumans without cyber): They can use augmentations like linear frames, exoskeletons, and gargoyle suits (from Snow Crash). They aren't as good as cyber, probably are more expensive in the long run to power/maintain, but you can take them off, or change out a linear frame for a gargoyle sensor package without having to go to the chop shop or suffer stress.
So in a pinch you can punch through a door or play mother hen to your team with a gargoyle sensor suite, but you can also take that shit off and go talk to the Mr Who without looking like a Cylon Centurian.
I'll add another archetype that has always been incredibly useful and popular whenever I've introduced it (WoD, Shadowrun, whatever):
Mother (As in I'm here to clean up your mess)- Forensics expert, with a sub-specialty of destroying physical and magical forensics. The hacker can take care of your data trail, but when you got shot and bled all over the elevator, that's a lot of DNA that needs to be destroyed or at least altered. Mother will clean up after you.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Tue Jul 12, 2011 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
So in other words, using high tech equipment causes Stress whether it's implanted or not, and implants with similar functionality are actually *less* stressful than worn gear? I like it.
So, what does a low Stress actually do for you? My thoughts on the matter are that you should subtract your Stress from your hacking checks, hacking soak/hacking HP, socialization checks, nonchalance checks and perception checks. You get a low stress if you want to talk to people, smuggle things, be exceptionally observant or hack things. Having high stress makes you bad at hacking, bad at relating to people, easier to brainhack and bad at noticing things.
Brainhacking and relating to people makes sense. Being bad at hacking because half of your brain is a computer does not make much sense to me, much less being bad at noticing things because you have bionic eyes.
Orion wrote:So in other words, using high tech equipment causes Stress whether it's implanted or not, and implants with similar functionality are actually *less* stressful than worn gear? I like it.
That's not what I originally had in mind, but that works pretty well. The trade off is that using worn gear instead of implants is that you can take it off.
I'm not even sure that you need much penalty for Stress beyond a "you must be this tall to ride" requirement for cyberware / magic. If you spent a good chunk of your CP having enough capacity for a superconductor nervous system, then you are already at a penalty to being the Face, compared to the guy who spent all his CP on skills and thus has a better rating than you. The only thing to watch out for is that cyberwear/magic can't be helpful for every field, there have to be some areas it does jack for.
Now having an appropriately calibrated penalty for using any cyberwear/magic could be helpful, so as to divide the pure unaugmented archetype from the lightly augmented one. But I'm not sure it needs to scale up significantly.
Chamomile wrote:Being bad at hacking because half of your brain is a computer does not make much sense to me, much less being bad at noticing things because you have bionic eyes.
If we go with the EotM model where modern hacking involves hooking your brain up to a DNI that then takes over part of your brain to run hacking functions, then it makes perfect sense some portion of that capacity to be used up by hooking up that unused brainspace to cybernetics, or replacing it with a machine.
Cyber eyes can give you telescopic vision, infrared tracking, give you a HUD and all sorts of other things that aren't just direct bonuses to your perception check. And you can make sense of that fluff wise by saying that cyber eyes require that you get an implant in your visual cortex to process the data, or interface weirdly with the brain, or whatever and have that be the explaination for why they make you better at perception in some ways, but worse at it in others.
E:
If you spent a good chunk of your CP having enough capacity for a superconductor nervous system, then you are already at a penalty to being the Face, compared to the guy who spent all his CP on skills and thus has a better rating than you.
Eventually, you'll run out of Face related stuff to buy, and then be forced to branch out into cyberware. So having low Stress can't just make you a good face, or you'll only have a small window where being an unaugmented guy is worth while. Making it so that low Stress gives bonuses to a large number of different things, instead of just a single narrow concept is a good thing.
Last edited by Grek on Tue Jul 12, 2011 10:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Eventually, you'll run out of Face related stuff to buy, and then be forced to branch out into cyberware. So having low Stress can't just make you a good face, or you'll only have a small window where being an unaugmented guy is worth while.
It depends on what you consider a small window. I think a lot of people were on board with "unaugmented humans are a viable option at low-mid levels, but eventually you will get some cyber/magic."
As far as running out of Face stuff to buy, that's why you have the skill cap scale by your total points in skills. So for example, even if it only takes 10 points to have Deception at rank 10, you can't get to rank 10 unless you spent 100 points on skills. That alone would guarantee that you don't "run out" of Face stuff during character creation, and potentially never (eventually, the gain of going from skill 18 to 20 might be less than what cyberwear or magic would get you in another field, but see above re: window of opportunity).
Grek wrote:
Cyber eyes can give you telescopic vision, infrared tracking, give you a HUD and all sorts of other things that aren't just direct bonuses to your perception check. And you can make sense of that fluff wise by saying that cyber eyes require that you get an implant in your visual cortex to process the data, or interface weirdly with the brain, or whatever and have that be the explaination for why they make you better at perception in some ways, but worse at it in others.
Either that, or you could go the route of information overload from Snow Crash:
You get your head cut off by some dude with a sword because your cybereyes are kindly showing you the velocity, estimated force of impact, metallurgy composition of the blade, estimated blood splatter patterns, the wikipedia entry on the history of swords, tempering, samurai swords, and sword-related-first-aid-trauma, along with Bob's Sword Shack's latest Friday afternoon sword sale.
What do the metatype demographics look like at the micro level? Is stuff hereditary? if I'm a dwarf, how likely is it that my little brother is an elf?
Josh_Kablack wrote:Three, ala Ghost in the Shell, hacking is straight up mind control, and there is no meaningful difference between flesh minds and machine minds. Forget about augmented reality, you are hacking biofeedback and mesmeric vibrations. Being networked means that you are constantly getting pings from the Google AI and your Facebook friends and they'll notice and investigate if you suddenly start acting weird, but being offline means that nobody notices induced behavior changes until they meet you in person. This option meets your criteria nicely, but might mean having to spell out some meaningful distinction from magical compulsions
Or perhaps magic can not do mind control at all, which would make for a nice change. Heck, perhaps magic can not do fine control, period. Summonings, walls of fire, perhaps emotion manipulation on a "fire up the crowd" level, those would all be fine. But not mind control, fine needles of light or telekinetic force less coarse than a body slam.
Been reading some tech-related articles and there's several real-world internet technologies that deserve a look, both because they pertain to the themes of a cyberpunk setting, and also in that they show you the conceptual thinking of some of the fringes of the internet.
Bitcoins-
Bitcoins are a distributed, online-only currency that has seen some use in anonymous and even illicit activities. Benefits are super-fast transactions and an open database of all transactions ever made using bitcoin currency to validate transactions and prevent fraud.
In theory, bitcoins are awarded every time a large block of arbitrarily difficult "proof of work" problems/data are successfully translated. As time goes on, the amount of time to "mine" a block of bitcoins has increased, and it now takes around 60 days of computing time running 24/7 to earn a block of 50 bitcoins. To give you an idea of an "exchange rate", in June on some bitcoin exchanges you could get upwards of 30 dollars a bitcoin. It seems to me that 15 or so is a decent average. In the real world you have to consider power costs which in certain states using certain hardware combinations you lose money dedicating your computer to mining 24/7. However, mining crews have assembled to distribute this work and create a more efficient turnover, working for "shares" of a bitcoin award.
This sets up an odd economy, and the value of bitcoins is not stable. It requires a continually growing segment of users to avoid inflation/hyperinflation and the perception of the value of a bitcoin is groundless. It doesn't mean anything other than X number of computer cycles, where X slowly increases over time as more bitcoins are generated.
Also, while all users are more or less anonymous, the actual transactions aren't. There are no details of the transaction, but the two transactor accounts are recorded and listed, to be seen by anyone.
Still, using other services which are discussed below, it's possible to have an underground economy, which is what Bitcoin has established, among other things.
Tor Project
Tor takes an onion-layer approach to anonymity. It uses volunteer server nodes to receive traffic, encrypt it, and bounce it around multiple routers, which each in turn encrypts data between nodes. The final exit node of the Tor cloud then decrypts and forwards the plain traffic to the target site, acting as the liaison between the user and the target site. The idea is that once in the Tor network, data all looks identical. As more people use Tor, it becomes more and more difficult to isolate traffic from any one user to any one destination.
Interestingly enough, Tor was originally a US Navy project, and is still used by the US Navy for clandestine reasons. It's open-sourced and free for everyone to use because users in the world provide Tor with it's best cover.
There are a few vulnerabilities to the Tor network- Your computer-to-Tor connection is vulnerable unless you encrypt that end, and the exit node is random and anonymous, and could be used as part of a man-in-the-middle attack. Therefore, while it's difficult to target an individual using Tor, you could, say, intercept all traffic heading to Google and sort through that. There are a few other vulnerabilities in low-latency onion layer encryption methods too that I won't go into here.
Towards that end, Tor suggests using HTTPS for *all* possible communications, and even then it's possible that SSL certifications could be forged, stolen, or manipulated on the exit host end. Extra security, such as PGP for text based encryption, is an option, but you're moving away from low-latency, and a simpler solution would be to use new circuits through the Tor network. Since it's a full-mesh topology (every node can talk directly to every other node), the odds of getting the same exit node are not great.
Still, using Tor is not anonymous in the general stream of traffic. Your ISP provider can tell you're using Tor, just not what you're using it for. Thus, statistical usage from a global threat (someone who can monitor entrance and exit traffic) could, in theory, figure out where your end-destination was by pattern recognition.
Finally, using a normal computer or terminal leaves lots of fingerprints- both on your own computer, and in the data you generate. Most modern document formats store loads of metadata in the document that you never see. Take an empty Word document. It's about 15k in size, which seems small, but is actually a huge amount of data. To put in comparison that's about the size of most modern malware vulnerabilities. That empty word document can contain hundreds of lines of code and identification metadata.
Thus, for the truly paranoid, it becomes necessary to abandon the trappings of a normal computer OS to achieve anonymity with a level of amnesia- or the quality of leaving no trace on the computer once you're done using it. That leads us to Tails.
Tails
Tails is a liveCD or liveUSB image running Debian. What this means is you burn a CD, or create a bootable USB, and you load 100% of your operating system off of this CD. No files are stored on the hard drive. In fact, you can run the system fine *without* a hard drive. This is not unique to Tails: all "liveOS" implementations can do this. I use WindowsPE constantly to clean viruses and malware out of severely infected computers for example.
What makes Tails notable is that it is built from the ground up to use and maximize Tor. All traffic is, by default, routed through Tor. Tools are offered to default to HTTPS whenever possible, and utilities are provided to strip metadata out of documents. When you shut off the computer, the only files were stored in RAM, and thus are lost unless you specifically save the files to another USB stick or some other alternative.
Due to how Tor creates circuits through the cloud to deliver data back and forth, Tails developers have suggested to reboot your computer and reload Tails every time you need a partition between "identities". For example, for the truly paranoid, enough forensics could remain between writing an email, starting a blog, and generating a document that you send out, that the three could in theory be traced back to the same originating point. If you wished to avoid this, a simple reboot of the system between the actions would create a decent barrier to this kind of data mining.
Silk Road Market
Simply put, Silk Road is an underground marketplace, fueled by Bitcoins, that runs over the Tor network. Anyone can post anything for sale, and it's been noted according to wikipedia to be a particularly adept illegal drug marketplace.
Due to how Tor functions, and the anonymity of Bitcoin (you know someone sent 500 bitcoins to someone else, but who the hell knows what for), it's made Silk Road a very appealing black marketplace.
So what?
Anonymity in an age of deep data mining and usage trends is a core concept of cyberpunk. SR4 destroyed this idea through the simple handwaving that encryption is easily defeated without providing an alternative.
However, nobody *wants* encryption to be completely, easily blown through. NSA and other government agencies walk a balance between wanting unbreakable encryption and wanting the bad guys to use weak encryption. However, complete show-stoppers are not desirable.
With that in mind, hacking against corporations and governments becomes possible. Using encryption clouds and read-only OS implementations on a run becomes common sense. It may be easier to hitch into the wireless network on site, but it's safer to use the onion cloud, and maybe route back through a compromised terminal.
Also, a digital black market is another cyberpunk trope. Only it's not so futuristic any more.
Finally, SR4 dropped the bomb on certified credsticks: Nobody used them any more and their existence raised eyebrows. In a digital cash society, anonymity is still desired and solutions like bitcoin *will* spring up. They may be crushed or fizzle out and die, but alternatives will always exist in the shadows.
There was a researcher who set up a Tor server and used it to unlock diplomatic cables between embassies. It's actually not secure at all. As far as I can tell, it was a scam created by the Navy to get security-minded people like criminals and governments to send data in a way that the Navy could intercept.
Bitcoins also looks like a scam on it's face as well, but just a more mundane cash grab.
