Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[TheFlatline]

Yeah I read about the Tor attack. I wasn't intending to sound like an ad for these things. They were mainly there for concepts of what a data network might look like at some point down the road. The onion cloud is only as secure as the people in charge of it and it's nodes ultimately. Though I could easily see small hacker groups opening and offering similar services in a cyberpunk setting.

Also, bitcoins struck me as an elaborate ponzi scheme personally. People are making (some) money right now, but at some point in the future you're going to face serious amounts of inflation since new currency can be "mined".

Still, if you got in early, generated a thousand bitcoins for relatively low effort, you could turn a significant profit on the current exchange. Hackers have also hit bitcoin exchanges and there's been a few other security leaks.

My overall point though I guess is that a "black market currency" is entirely appropriate, especially in a resource-starved environment. With energy being in short supply relatively speaking, CPU cycles become valuable again similar to the old mainframe days. In fact, in some power-starved locales, mainframes might be appealing again, so as not to waste CPU cycles.

[fectin]

Also, bitcoins struck me as an elaborate ponzi scheme personally. People are making (some) money right now, but at some point in the future you're going to face serious amounts of inflation since new currency can be "mined".

Still, if you got in early, generated a thousand bitcoins for relatively low effort, you could turn a significant profit on the current exchange. Hackers have also hit bitcoin exchanges and there's been a few other security leaks.

In point of fact, thats not entirely true. More bitcoins get generated, but it's not linear. There is a fixed total amount of bitcoins which could ever exist. The number which do exist decays logarithmicaly upwards towards that number over time.
Currently, Wikipedia suggests it's around 30% complete, and will not hit 90% for another two decades (reading off a rough graph). Assuming demand stays constant (bad assumption) that says the expected inflation is less than 6% average over that time. That's not stellar, but isn't terrible either. The trend so far though has been wider adoption, meaning increased demand, which has driven deflation outpacing the natural inflation. Since that inflation is much higher than 6% now (average, remember) it seems more likely that deflation will be the real problem.

The early adopter benefits are touted as an advantage.

[Stahlseele]

Bigger Problem is people stealing from other people . .
You can't trace it back. You can't find it either.

[fectin]

Bigger Problem is people stealing from other people . .
You can't trace it back. You can't find it either.

It's worse than that. You can find it just fine. You just can't undo it. Each unit of currency is (sort of) a record of every transaction ever. So to unwind a transaction, you would need to destroy every unit of currency out there.
It's more complicated, but I don't know enough to explain it better.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Bitcoins is dumb, but the IDEA of purely virtual currency which is backed not by any nation-state but by an ideological union of libertarian hackers - who, unlike actual bitcoiners, are fictional and thus can be competent and scary - fits cyberpunk.

[name_here]

We could go with it being, like Bitcoin, not backed by anything in particular but instead being a money-changing service for people who want to go from somewhere to somewhere else where having the first place's currency can get you shot and using $piders is too traceable because you just blew up the capital while sleeping with the president's daughter.

Holding name: Cash 2.0

[Vebyast]

Side note - there was a huge discussion over on MPSIMS about bitcoin, if any of you want to figure out how the tech would feel in a game.

We could go with it being, like Bitcoin, not backed by anything in particular but instead being a money-changing service for people who want to go from somewhere to somewhere else where having the first place's currency can get you shot and using $piders is too traceable because you just blew up the capital while sleeping with the president's daughter.

Kind of like a cross between tor and bitcoin - anonymity network where, instead of exchanging packets, you exchange cashy money. Probably a good idea to have anyway, since we want lots of underworld moneylaundering.

[Stahlseele]

And it could be financed by adding a little exchange fee to every single transaction too . . doesn't need to be much, but if everybody uses it . . 6 billion transactions per day is still enough to make some profit from . .

[RiotGearEpsilon]

At which point what we have is less Bitcoins, and more like a love-child of Wikileaks and a Swiss Bank Account.

[Endovior]

Regarding the whole 'what do unaugmented humans do better then everyone else' thing...

I propose that any unused Stress you have floating around basically works like Shadowrun Edge... it's a floating luck pool that you can spend points out of to be awesome and avoid calamity. Call it Focus or something; it here applies more as a question of being a strong enough expert in your fields to apply your skills in complex real-world situations beyond the scope of the programmer's hard-coded instructions or the ritualist's previously-stated intent. Spending a point of Focus is basically equivalent to either doubling your skill pool beforehand or rerolling the dice after the fact... with the caveat that only your 'real' skill is susceptible to being affected by Focus. If you only have skills because they're programmed in, or because you're in some kind of mystic trance that grants you skill bonuses or whatever... when that fails you, even to the point of critical failure or whatever, that's an unavoidable mishap... but the unaugmented have a big fat pool of Focus that they can spend on averting critical failure, and totally real skill pools to which Focus fully applies, and consequentially, they can temporarily produce big pools in dangerous combat situations; their sheer aura of badass compensating for their lack of augmentation. More notably, since Cyber/Magic simply doesn't give out any bonuses to the social field, the only way to truly max out your social skills is to be a high-level character with an empty stress pool, so you can maximally apply your Focus to maxed-out skill pools. If you want to specifically protect the role of unaugmented guy, then you can state that if your system is completely 'clean', your Focus replenishes at double rate or some such. This shouldn't be specifically necessary, since Focus should be important enough on it's own that everyone will want more of it, and miss it when it's gone... but if you really want the unaugmented guy to be fully playable at the highest levels, that's probably a good way to do it.

Under this system, even at high levels, James Bond can still just be James Bond... he doesn't need a magic gun, or cybernetic implants, or whatever... he just runs on pure aura of badass, and he's got enough Focus floating around that he can last out the whole of any combat, while throwing down a dice pool comparable to the Terminator... and if things should go against him, he can use his Focus to soak, too... an acceptable alternative to being covered in titanium or surrounded by magic forcefields. Of course, this DOES rely on having a really granular Stress track; since Focus is going to be a key resource that the unaugmented guy spends hand over fist; but that's a fairly straightforward mechanical issue that can be addressed early on in the development phase.

This isn't a question of augmentation making you less human or whatever... it's a question of augmentation making you less smart. If I want to be a hacker, I could spend years studying programming languages, operating systems, cognitive neuroscience, and a host of other fields to give me optimal and wide-reaching talents at hacking both mind and metal... or, I could just drop several thousand credits, buy the Hackastack 9000 and have a surgeon slot that into my brain. The latter option superficially gives me the same talent as the former training... but with the downside that I don't actually know how to hack; I'm just pointing my software at the appropriate obstacle and pushing the 'hack' button, and letting the nerve staple I've implanted in my brain run the show while I occasionally point out directions. When things go wrong, the real hacker will notice and have time to figure something else out. The guy running the Hackastack will get an error message, and have nothing else to try but hitting the hack button again... and if he sits there long pushing the same button over and over again, he's a tasty tasty target for some nasty IC. This applies for whatever artificial skills you've installed in yourself... simply put, there's no substitute for real training and real experience. If the whole of your useful brain capacity is filled up with apps, and you're just sitting there pushing buttons, you can't improvise; you've got no Focus to spare for critical thinking, all you can do is keep pushing those buttons and hoping that all those systems you don't understand will carry the day. This applies, to a lesser extent, even to gross cybernetics... the current state of the technology being rather crude, as they've not managed to fully optimize the brain pathways yet. Accordingly, simply having a cybernetic arm is something that takes up a nontrivial amount of your moment-to-moment concentration... even if it's not much better then a flesh-and-blood arm, it uses up more of your brain's available processing power. Admittedly, this doesn't fully explain why stuff like titanium bone-reinforcements or dermal armor costs Stress... but that's a minor point, and I'll handwave that one away by saying 'it feels unnatural and distracting', and call that a significant enough factor to produce Stress (as in, it's really quite an obnoxious sensation having all that metal in you, and many of the people who've had the procedure done find themselves regretting it, as they're plagued with unscratchable itches beneath the skin and whatnot).

It's much the same thing with magic; using magic to augment your skills is specifically a matter of having 'faith'; of believing that something works irrespective of any evidence to the contrary. When your magic fails you, you can't even try to reason out what it was that went wrong; since there's no reason why any of that magic stuff works in the first place. All you can do is hope harder and struggle on. The more of your brain you've allowed your magic to eat, the less rational you are... to the point that if you've got no free Stress and a mind full of magic, you're so used to automatically believing in whatever stray thought enters your head that you're easy to possess or brainhack, and you've got no spare faculties for calmly sitting back and evaluating the weaknesses of your methodology.


Thoughts?

[TheFlatline]

Bitcoins is dumb, but the IDEA of purely virtual currency which is backed not by any nation-state but by an ideological union of libertarian hackers - who, unlike actual bitcoiners, are fictional and thus can be competent and scary - fits cyberpunk.

That's my point. These concepts are out there, which means we can push even further into the future with the ideas.

[fectin]

...

Thoughts?

Cool idea, overall. I especially like your point on how it makes James Bond workable. I have three counterpoints though:
1. That means that most folks on the street could nova and kill the party. Joe Wageslave doesn't like the way that cybered-up troll is looking at him? Joe blows all his stress points and punches the troll's heart out.

2. I don't like the part about not being able to spend points on augmented attributes. I think there's plenty of balance from not being able to spend as many points if you're stressed out.

3. I liked the way it was balancing already. It already seemed good (especially with having to buy up your stress vs buying up your skills), and I don't think this meshes well with that balance point.

[Endovior]

For the purposes of my idea, I'm operating under Frank's existing assumption... specifically, that you can't straight-up buy Stress, it's a factor of your power level or whatever. Accordingly...

1: Wageslaves are not badass. Being of low power level, they have minimal Stress capacity, and being noncombatants, they have minimal relevant combat skills to multiply. They shouldn't be able to nova anyone, though a trained but unaugmented wageslave should be able to do better work then an unskilled cyborg slavedrone if he's sufficiently motivated.

2: As presented, Focus applies only to your skills, not your attributes. Even if that wasn't the case, though, I'd still be against letting the augmented double their augmented pools; they've got notably higher pools to begin with, so letting them double those big pools would totally blow the unaugmented out of the water. Since the whole point of this feature is to help role-protect 'unaugmented guy', that's an unacceptable option. Quite frankly, skills you 'know' are more expensive then off-the-shelf skillslots you can install... what you're buying with that extra cost is the ability to multiply the skill with Focus. The fact that having a slot in your skull that you can plug skillchips into causes Stress is not a sufficient drawback to allow you to get double the skill at lower cost... that'd just encourage the players to go one or two points below max stress so they can maximally nova their enemies. Totally not a desired outcome, here. That said, if you're cybered-up AND actually trained at a given skill, then provided you're not so heavily borged that you're borderline-crazy, you're sane enough to put your training to good use. But there's no analogous way to improvise when using a skill that you don't actually know; both programming and magic are hard-coded, and you don't actually get to act when using them... you've got a program or a spell acting for you instead, and you're just assuming that it knows what it's doing. Accordingly, skill multiplication should remain the area where unaugmented guy shines. He doesn't really have any others, so we can at least give him this.

3: Again, I'm going off the idea that Stress increases directly proportional to power level, or at the same ratio as total xp spent or whatever. Even if it wasn't, though, and everyone had to buy Stress equally, I think that it's probably more balanced if everyone cares about Stress, but for different reasons, then if the nonaugmented are playing a totally different game then the augmented. In the latter case, you need to be extra-careful to balance the two equations, while in the former, the option pools are more similar.

[zeruslord]

I asked this a page or two back, and it seems to have gotten missed in the shuffle.

How hereditary are metatypes? While this doesn't really change the overall feel of the world, it will make a big difference in the sort of metatype-based organizations there are (metatype-specific nations will really only hold together if the child of two dwarves is a dwarf, etc.)

[Username17]

I asked this a page or two back, and it seems to have gotten missed in the shuffle.

How hereditary are metatypes? While this doesn't really change the overall feel of the world, it will make a big difference in the sort of metatype-based organizations there are (metatype-specific nations will really only hold together if the child of two dwarves is a dwarf, etc.)

Demitypes should be strongly but not exclusively hereditary. So i you have one Dwarven parent, you have a 40% chance of being a Dwarf (either immediately or by puberty). If you have two Dwarven parents, you should have a 90% chance of being a Dwarf.

So if your father is a Dwarf and your mother is an Asura, you have a 40% chance of being a Dwarf, a 40% chance of being an Asura, and a 20% chance of being any other demitype - which itself would have a strong normal human bias (say: 16% humans with only 4% spit between the other types). So there is a chance that you get an Ogre baby from a union of Asura and Dwarf - and it's a statistically real chance. And out of seven billion people in the world, it would totally happen. But it would still be rare enough that the father might doubt paternity over it.

-Username17

[Grek]

If we assume that all types of demihumanity are a recessive traits encoded on the same gene or genes, we can extrapolate from those numbers that being from a region with a high rate of Asura babies being born (like India) means that you have about a 40% chance of being a carrier for the Asura gene and that a random sapling of babies born to pairs of non-demihumans in India will have 16% of them be Asuras, 48% being carriers and 0.36% of them being pure human.

If we go on to assume that there's an unusually high rate of demihuman -> human mutations (say 15%) and a fairly negligable lower rate of the reverse happening, then you get a stable 13% of people in India becoming Asura, 40% being carriers and 46% being completely human. If we go on to assume that each of the other metatypes has a 2.5% rate of incidence, then you have about 1% of the population being elves, 1% being dwarves, 1% being deep ones and 1% being ogres, making for 17 demihumans in total for every 100 people in the population.

[Username17]

I do not think that simple recessiveness gives the numbers we want. For one thing, if it as recessive, every child of two Asura would be an Asura, and that's boring.

What we want is "multifactorial", and then w can have whatever demographic numbers we want and not deal with the specific genetic loci at all.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

every child of two Asura would be an Asura, and that's boring.

Agreed on it being boring, but we can still have our nice simple recessive genes if we want. The "unusually high rate of demihuman -> human mutations" is because small mutations are aggressively weeded out by the geneware the designers built in. They couldn't make their stuff as robust as they wanted, so instead the entire package cancels itself if it's too damaged. The population demographics aren't quite as free as they would be otherwise, but it's probably an easier solution to explain in two sentences.

[A Man In Black]

Regarding the whole 'what do unaugmented humans do better then everyone else' thing...

I propose that any unused Stress you have floating around basically works like Shadowrun Edge... it's a floating luck pool that you can spend points out of to be awesome and avoid calamity. Call it Focus or something; it here applies more as a question of being a strong enough expert in your fields to apply your skills in complex real-world situations beyond the scope of the programmer's hard-coded instructions or the ritualist's previously-stated intent.

Wait a goddamned minute here.

This stat is going to measure how human people consider you, how much weird shit you can tolerate in your body, it's going to be a power level scalar, it's going to restrict or penalize all or some of your social skills if you max it, and now it's also a free-floating pool of action points that you can apply to pretty much everything?

This is too much. How much am I going to have to recalculate if I just buy a cyberarm for my character?

[Username17]

I do not thin it is particularly helpful for Stress to directly penalize Edge. I could see an indirect penalty, where using Edge gave you temporary Stress, thus putting a cap on how often a cyborg could call upon their Edge. I am unsure if that is necessary. Depends on how the Investigation/Obscurement minigame works out.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Something else IT related that fits Cyberpunk

DNS Fracture. Right now the US government is getting more aggressive about using DNS to control the internet. They're currently trying to extradite a guy from the UK for running a filesharing site that is probably legal in the UK. Their grounds for jurisdiction? It had a .com address and those are US based.

In the real world the EU is likely to get sick of US meddling and make their own DNS system. In a cyberpunk future all the major international players have their own DNS. Balkanised internet content for all.

[name_here]

I'd think it's more likely that in this cyberpunk future people on different continents will not have access to other continents' internet because a deep one with a pair of wirecuttters went to town on the transoceanic cables

[sabs]

transoceanic cables what?
Dude.. Satellites

We've got super-matrix wireless pipes of full 3d glory. We're not using transoceanic cables for jack.

[name_here]

Satellite connections are incredibly shitty. Getting satellite internet to entire continents is simply not happening.

EDIT: of course, Sat-phones probably will still exist. GPS might be pretty patchy but functional, since with the collapse of the US government there's no one to replace failing satellites in the original constellations (Potential MacGuffin: blueprints for them so new ones can be sent up) and no one can afford to construct new sets or knows the inter-satellite communication protocols.

[sabs]

Satellite connections in 2012 Real World are incredibly shitty.

In 2080 what ever, they're incredibly good. People are transferring petabytes/second of information across wireless connections. Stop thinking in 2012 technology. The cyberpunk folks look at our technology, like we look at the telegraph.