Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[name_here]

Okay, the central facet of satellite communication is that it is done to things in orbit. Specifically, it is most reliably done to things in geo-sync. Since we've firmly established in the other thread that the only nonmagical FTL comms come in pairs and are hideously expensive and may need periodic replacement, that means lightspeed lag matters. Furthermore, boosting them into geo-sync will be expensive and difficult, although not so difficult as today. So there's not going to be many satellites. Also, they're always going to be a bit screwy because that thing where computers talk back and forth to do things doesn't work with satellites because geosync, so since a bunch of packets simply don't arrive and it would take an excessively long time to figure out which ones, tell the sending computer, get them resent, and repeat until done, you need a lot more capacity than ground wireless links.

Now here's where the issue comes in: Although future satellites will be able to handle modern internet traffic in bulk, they will not be able to handle future internet traffic in bulk. Because as capacity expands, people will make larger files because they can. So you'll have petabytes of data transferred wirelessly, and that won't be enough.

End result: It will be possible to talk to someone in the CSA from the Papal States, but streaming high-def full VR is right out.

Maybe we should spin off a communications technology thread, since such discussions could go on for a while and are important to cyberpunk.

[Stahlseele]

Would, at least on an inter-continental basis, take care of the couch potato decker, right?

[name_here]

It could. Hacking tends to require excessively large levels of communication, and we can just say only high-bandwidth connections can support the types of hacking that advances in security systems have not rendered moot.

[sabs]

But the VR room, with people from all over the globe inteacting is fairly common trope for Cyberpunk.

And the Couch potato decker suffers issues in that there are some things he just can't get to. Ever. And he's at home, and traceable. That seems like a bad plan. No hacker is so good, he can't get traced with enough time.

We want a Board of Director meeting for Royal Dutch Shell being handled in VR. Because that's cool. We actually want world communications to be good and reliable. I'm sure there's tons of pay walls, and funky DNS issues. But fundementally, Sony Entertainment, wants to be able to sell the next great Pop sensation all over the world. Corporations are global, they want Global access. It is in their interests to make sure that Hunday.kr, and Hunday.us and Hunday.zb can all talk to each other meaningfully.

[Endovior]

From Wikipedia:
As of 2006, overseas satellite links accounted for only 1 percent of international traffic, while the remainder was carried by undersea cable. The reliability of submarine cables is high, especially when (as noted above), multiple paths are available in the event of a cable break. Also, the total carrying capacity of submarine cables is in the terabits per second while satellites typically offer only megabits per second and display higher latency. However, a typical multi-terabit, transoceanic submarine cable system costs several hundred million dollars to construct.

So in other words, you basically can't get the sort of high-density signal you need for proper VR from a satellite. There's seriously a difference of six orders of magnitude. Advanced technology might reduce that a little, but if the cables have all been broken, then there's objectively less signal going between places, which means you can't have realtime VR contact between the US and France.

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

Well, do you have some other idea for protecting the role of unaugmented guy? If there's nothing at all that unaugmented guy does better then any sort of augmented guy, then everyone will basically be required by law to spend as much of their Stress as they think they can get away with.

For that matter, though... how exactly is what you just said different from what I just said? If spending Focus causes temporary Stress, then having Permanent Stress that reduces the pool of Temporary Stress you have available with which to use Focus is almost exactly identical to Permanent Stress reducing your pool of Focus; with the slight difference that it keeps James Bond playing the same game as, say, a Juicer. They both essentially have a big and basically empty Stress pool that fills up really quick in combat as they quickly accumulate Temporary Stress; the only difference is what they're using to fill that pool... also, James Bond won't do more then pass out if he overspends his Focus, but the Juicer's heart might explode.

[Username17]

But the VR room, with people from all over the globe inteacting is fairly common trope for Cyberpunk.

Agreed. I think it is important that we have Seele high command. But, couldn't those be magical sendings?

-Username17

[Username17]

Well, do you have some other idea for protecting the role of unaugmented guy? If there's nothing at all that unaugmented guy does better then any sort of augmented guy, then everyone will basically be required by law to spend as much of their Stress as they think they can get away with.

For starters, having no stress makes him better at "social" and "covert" actions.

For that matter, though... how exactly is what you just said different from what I just said? If spending Focus causes temporary Stress, then having Permanent Stress that reduces the pool of Temporary Stress you have available with which to use Focus is almost exactly identical to Permanent Stress reducing your pool of Focus;

No. Having Permanent Stress reduce your Edge pool reduces the number of times you can use Edge in an adventure. Having Edge spending rack up Temporary Stress reduces the amount of Edge you can spend in a single encounter, but leaves the number of Edge that can be spent over the adventure the same.

-Username17

[sabs]

But the VR room, with people from all over the globe inteacting is fairly common trope for Cyberpunk.

Agreed. I think it is important that we have Seele high command. But, couldn't those be magical sendings?

-Username17

It totally can. If that's the way you want to go. That does open up a whole new hacker subtype. The magical hacker So that's always nice.

So the concept is that AAA's maybe global in reach, but they are local in force projection. AAA's cannot have cyberbully gangs in Minsk, ready to show up inside the LA Security Node, because an alarm has gone off. This leads to much higher employment of skilled individuals.

AAA's use Magic for Long Range high-Def communications. If magic can do that, why aren't I using that all the time? Does it require specially prepared ceremonial spaces? Is it expensive, if so, how expensive. Is there any force-projection viability, or is it strictly 3D teleconferencing?

[Stahlseele]

Well, if we have really strong lasers that can be used as weapons, we also have really strong lasers that can be used for communications.
with fixed positions in orbit, all you need is a receiver and transmitter capable of going the distance. granted, the sattelite may have problems with generating the kind of energy needed for these kinds of lasers . .

[Grek]

Two-way magical sendings require that you prepare for the call by having your mages create a matched pair of sympathically charged items per call, mail them to the places where the CEOs are doing their calls from and then have a trained mage expend these items to establish the link. Doing all that is presumably expensive enough that day to day international communication is done over satellite links using less bandwith intensive options like phonecalls and video chat.

[Endovior]

Well, do you have some other idea for protecting the role of unaugmented guy? If there's nothing at all that unaugmented guy does better then any sort of augmented guy, then everyone will basically be required by law to spend as much of their Stress as they think they can get away with.

For starters, having no stress makes him better at "social" and "covert" actions.

Okay... what else? We don't want to have characters that can't do anything awesome outside of social/sneaky activities... that's like requiring that someone in the group play a Bard in D&D. Since combat is going to be a big part of the game, if nonaugmented guy can't contribute usefully to combat, he fails as a role... just like, for the same reason, we can't altogether deny stealth to the cyborg or the wizard. If unaugmented guy is the only one who has any decent access to the social and stealth fields, then unaugmented guy isn't playing the same game as the wizards and robots; they're going around playing technomagical rampage vikings while he's playing sneaky shadow politics, and there's no reason to have them both at the same table. And that's a basic failure of game design.

For that matter, though... how exactly is what you just said different from what I just said? If spending Focus causes temporary Stress, then having Permanent Stress that reduces the pool of Temporary Stress you have available with which to use Focus is almost exactly identical to Permanent Stress reducing your pool of Focus;

No. Having Permanent Stress reduce your Edge pool reduces the number of times you can use Edge in an adventure. Having Edge spending rack up Temporary Stress reduces the amount of Edge you can spend in a single encounter, but leaves the number of Edge that can be spent over the adventure the same.

-Username17

That's not the design I was advocating for. Whatever you call it, Edge should refresh more often then per adventure; it's the basic resource that James Bond uses to be awesome, and he's awesome at least five or six times a scene, not five or six times a movie. If it turns out that it works best to simply unify Edge with Temporary Stress, then that works, too... but that's still not notably different from my original proposal. As a sidenote, this potentially carries with it the extra benefit of not allowing Juicers to double-up on their awesome by taking drugs to max out their temporary stress while at the same time going nova on their Edge.

[RadiantPhoenix]

But the VR room, with people from all over the globe inteacting is fairly common trope for Cyberpunk.

Agreed. I think it is important that we have Seele high command. But, couldn't those be magical sendings?

-Username17

SEELE high command... Weren't those meetings, "SOUND ONLY," in Evangelion?

[Username17]

We don't want to have characters that can't do anything awesome outside of social/sneaky activities... that's like requiring that someone in the group play a Bard in D&D. Since combat is going to be a big part of the game, if nonaugmented guy can't contribute usefully to combat, he fails as a role... just like, for the same reason, we can't altogether deny stealth to the cyborg or the wizard.

Why? It's a game about covert operatives performing missions to undermine powerful syndicates. Why should combat be any bigger or more important than sneaking or slander?

Consider Leverage: it's a five man team, and one character is particularly good in a fight (Eliot). Consider Mission Impossible: it's a 4 man team, of which one is good in a fight, two are mediocre, and the fourth is Cinnamon. Consider Ocean's 11: there are eleven characters on the team, and how many can fight? Maybe two or three?

Combat is a role people can have. But I don't think it's an indispensable role, nor do I think every character has to be good at it. You're not crawling through dungeons. It's a skill based game, you can simply choose to not take combat skills.

-Username17

[Endovior]

I am sincerely surprised that I'm having to argue this point with you; I could've sworn I read you arguing the opposite side of this earlier.

'Stealth' can't be a protected role in a game about covert operations, because everyone needs to have some stealth in order to not fail at covert operations. If having the ability to do combat (which you seem to imply means you must have magic or cyber) means failing at stealth, then the group will simply choose to fail at stealth, and the game becomes technomagical rampage vikings, not any sort of covert operations. If the group's continuing survival relies on having at least one guy be sneaky and social for them, they'll do that... but again, that's basically the one guy being forced to play the Bard to let everyone else be awesome while he sits out on basically everything they do. And that's not okay.

Similarly, 'Combat' can't be a role that certain archetypes are totally excluded from, mostly because it takes an awfully long time to resolve. If the unaugmented guy is a guy you need to have on your team, you need to have something for him to do in combat, because otherwise your system has just mandated that, when playing your game, one of the guys at the table has to spend a nontrivial amount of time sitting there doing nothing and not having fun. This is a basic failure of game design that can easily be averted early on, and therefore should be. I'm not even proposing anything terribly radical, here... if the numbers line up such that James Bond can use his maxed-out Edge pool to be just as useful in combat as a wizard or a cyborg (though perhaps against different targets, in a rock-paper-scissors wheel pattern or some such), then you've got a good system in which no one has to lose out automatically in the archetype-choosing phase of character creation. There should not be archetypes that you encourage players to pick that will lead to them being useless. Heck, it's not even hard to let people contribute usefully to combat... if Edge multiplies your skills, and unaugmented guy always has more Edge then everyone else, then unaugmented guy doesn't need to take much combat skill to be at least minimally useful, and he can be pretty damn effective if he maxes them out. Why is this a bad thing? Why would you want to piss on the very concept of James Bond in an espionage-centric game?

Yes, this is a skill-centric game, and people might choose for whatever reason to take no combat skills. If they do that, that's fine; they're declaring in advance that they don't want to play the combat part of the game, and that's fine. But if you are saying that people without cybernetics or magic can't play the combat part of the game, then you need to put that in a big bold disclaimer all over the character creation part of the system, because that is a non-intuitive trap you've just introduced. If Edge is a big equalizer that lets a skilled combatant compete reasonably well without needing to be cybered or magical, then this problem goes away. Is there any especially good game balance reason why an unaugmented pure-strain human soldier is a character concept that must immediately fail completely?

[Username17]

'Stealth' can't be a protected role in a game about covert operations, because everyone needs to have some stealth in order to not fail at covert operations.

Agreed. Everyone needs to be able to sneak. However, not everyone needs to be able to be the nondescript person who pays for the storage unit in cash in order to create an investigative dead end.

Similarly, 'Combat' can't be a role that certain archetypes are totally excluded from, mostly because it takes an awfully long time to resolve.

That depends on how you decide to resolve combats, doesn't it? If combats can be as fast as Arkham Horror combats, then not being part of them is not a big deal.

I'm certainly open to the idea of a combat minigame that everyone is expected to participate in, but it's not necessary, nor is its inclusion a foregone conclusion.

-Username17

[sabs]

If the unaugmented guy gets to compete equally in combat. Why did the augmented guy augment? (other than cause he wanted to look cool)

He's paying for it with Stress..
Stress says he's less edgy, Stress says he's more noticeable. What is he getting in return for Stress?

I spent 35% of my CGP (Character Generation Points) on having Augmentations of some flavor. Why is that better than just spending them on skills, and letting my superawesomesauce edge from low stress equal me out for everything?

I'm all for James Bond, but James Bond doesn't go up against Combat Mages, and Cyborgs.

[Endovior]

'Stealth' can't be a protected role in a game about covert operations, because everyone needs to have some stealth in order to not fail at covert operations.

Agreed. Everyone needs to be able to sneak. However, not everyone needs to be able to be the nondescript person who pays for the storage unit in cash in order to create an investigative dead end.

Agreed. 'Nondescript' =/= 'Stealthy'.

Similarly, 'Combat' can't be a role that certain archetypes are totally excluded from, mostly because it takes an awfully long time to resolve.

That depends on how you decide to resolve combats, doesn't it? If combats can be as fast as Arkham Horror combats, then not being part of them is not a big deal.

I'm certainly open to the idea of a combat minigame that everyone is expected to participate in, but it's not necessary, nor is its inclusion a foregone conclusion.

-Username17

I am unfamiliar with any full RPG that makes combat so simple. You can't have specific rules for dermal armor, laser targeting systems, and adrenal pumps within a combat system as simple as Arkham Horror unless all those things start boiling down to mere +1 bonuses. And if they do, then people will actually not care about your system, because they want more granularity then that. You don't need a combat system as complicated as Shadowrun with it's rotating cycle of multiple actions per round that can make seconds of in-game time explode into like half an hour of real-world time; that is too much, and can actually get boring. But if you've got a combat system where a couple of quick rolls determine victory or defeat, then there's a very real possibility that the players will find themselves defeated and possibly slain in a couple of quick rolls, and that's no fun either.

Also, I don't think you can actually get away with not including combat at all. You can't just say that the players will automatically lose if they choose to fight ever, and that all problems must be solved by stealth and cunning; someone will want to, at the very least, sneak up on a guard and slit his throat or something. And that process explodes up to a combat system which might dictate that the players should be really careful and judicious about when they choose to engage in combat... but not 'no combat system'.

If the unaugmented guy gets to compete equally in combat. Why did the augmented guy augment? (other than cause he wanted to look cool)

He's paying for it with Stress..
Stress says he's less edgy, Stress says he's more noticeable. What is he getting in return for Stress?

I spent 35% of my CGP (Character Generation Points) on having Augmentations of some flavor. Why is that better than just spending them on skills, and letting my superawesomesauce edge from low stress equal me out for everything?

I'm all for James Bond, but James Bond doesn't go up against Combat Mages, and Cyborgs.

Maybe he should. The whole idea of a rock-paper-scissors thing was suggested earlier... what if James Bond's role is to sneak up on and assassinate the Combat Mage, so the Street Samurai can go in and chaingun the rest of the guards without worrying about being fried by lightning bolts?

[sabs]

Then we're not saying James Bond is good at combat. We're saying he's good at surprise burst damage

I'm okay with that. Hell, he might not even be assassinating the Combat Mage with combat. Because well, combat mage in combat seems.. dangerous.

[Username17]

Being goo at hiding in plain sight is being good at burst damage and assassination.

-Username17

[Endovior]

Frankly, I'm not saying that James Bond's combat role should be standing toe-to-toe with Gandalf and the Terminator shooting it out; that's stupid. He should be sneaking around the fringes of such a fight, looking for opportunities. In terms of raw numbers, even with his Edge, James Bond can't actually outshoot a Terminator in a straight-up fight; the Terminator has larger combat pools and huge soak, so when James Bond runs out of Edge in a fight like that (which doesn't take long), he dies quickly... where the Terminator can literally keep going all day. James Bond's specialty is in adding circumstantial modifiers like 'surprise', 'ambush', and 'sneak attack'. Accordingly, if there's any squishy combatants out there that he can get the better of somehow... then murdering them in the face is his role.

Codifying this in a combat wheel would mean that Mages are bad at counterstealth, and that Cyborgs are good at it; presumably because it's hard for magic to detect normals with no magic or tech stuff going on, while Cyborgs can have infravision or something that flags the sneaky guy without too much trouble.

[sabs]

Cyborgs have an attention coprocessor being monitored by an agent with pattern recognition software. So it would be an opposed roll of some kind. Agent+programs vs James Bond skills.

[fectin]

This:

Similarly, 'Combat' can't be a role that certain archetypes are totally excluded from, mostly because it takes an awfully long time to resolve.

That depends on how you decide to resolve combats, doesn't it? If combats can be as fast as Arkham Horror combats, then not being part of them is not a big deal.

I'm certainly open to the idea of a combat minigame that everyone is expected to participate in, but it's not necessary, nor is its inclusion a foregone conclusion.

-Username17

...is not the same as "no combat system". Frank is saying that participation in combat may not be mandatory.

I tend to think that this is not a rules issue at all; it's a table issue. Talk with your players first about what kind of game you want to run, specifically including how much the combat minigame will come out, and it's not a problem.

[Endovior]

This:

Similarly, 'Combat' can't be a role that certain archetypes are totally excluded from, mostly because it takes an awfully long time to resolve.

That depends on how you decide to resolve combats, doesn't it? If combats can be as fast as Arkham Horror combats, then not being part of them is not a big deal.

I'm certainly open to the idea of a combat minigame that everyone is expected to participate in, but it's not necessary, nor is its inclusion a foregone conclusion.

-Username17

...is not the same as "no combat system". Frank is saying that participation in combat may not be mandatory.

I tend to think that this is not a rules issue at all; it's a table issue. Talk with your players first about what kind of game you want to run, specifically including how much the combat minigame will come out, and it's not a problem.

That... is not my point. My point is, irregardless of whether or not you wind up having any combat in any given game, the combat rules that you do wind up having need to be both fair and inclusive, because some groups will wind up involving themselves in combat, and some people will make nonaugmented characters and try to participate in combat with them, and there needs to be viable options on the table for those people to take besides 'cower in the corner while the real men on your team handle the fighting'.

[RadiantPhoenix]

irregardless

regardless

[Stahlseele]

which is something that i do not understand . .
why would people try and do that anyway?
if i can't swim, i don't jump into deep water.
if i can't fly, i don't jump off of high places.
if i can't fight, i don't expose myself to harm.
if i can't magic, then i don't try to sling spells.