Seerow wrote:So now you're going back to Cyber/Hacker/Mage (roles) as your triage rather than Mundane/Cyber/Magic(Power Sources)?
Well, in that model, "cyber" is a power source. So is hacking and magic for that matter. Your "roles" are things like Fighter and Thief. So as a BnE specialist, you might do that by being a hacker, but you also might do that with sorcery or by being a demolitions expert. As an Enforcer, you might get that way by being cybered up and good with a chain saw, but you also might get that way by being jazzed up on magic.
The key things to throw down are that:
- Everyone needs to be able to sneak. Being stealthy is not a role, because hiding is a thing everyone needs to be able to do. Being innocuous enough to tail people is a thing someone can have in their role, and enhanced stealth through actual invisibility or camera spoofing can be a role, but participation in the stealth mini-game is a given.
- Ditto on "phone a friend". Everyone has contacts, everyone gets to participate in the rumor mill minigame at the start of the adventure. Everyone gets to buy gear in the middle and end of the adventure.
I'm a bit up in the air as to exactly what roles I'm putting in there, but since it's skill based, I am seriously considering making like 25 and having people select 3 or more for their character.
Vebyast wrote:fectin wrote:Are @men supposed to be summoners or enforcers? Before, I had thought that they were big bruisers.
I think they're a kind of specialist. @men can carry out "suicide" missions at the cost of money rather than their life, they can customize themselves to the mission to a greater degree than any other single character, and so on.
The @Man hops into a machine and pokemon fights with it. He can maintain multiple potential body jump points and in any case suffers only a modest setback when the specific robot he is explodes. The analogous character is the warlock or golem smith that maintains a single high quality pet at a time. The Puppeteer orders a swarm of devices around, and is analogous to the imp farmer or voodoo zombie master that has a swarm of low-quality pets.
In either case the tradeoff of quality for quantity is much the same. Quantity is less stealthy and less able to overcome competent opposition at a single point. But quantity is also able to guard more territory and is able to attack more areas at once. Zombies excel at plant the bomb missions (both sides) and golems excel at rescure the hostage missions (both sides).
RGE wrote:It seems to me that one of the most obvious routes for any underclass to take is to smash and ruin as many critical labor-saving devices as possible, in order to create work for them to be paid to do.
Certainly the neo-Luddites would get a lot of traction. "Smash the Looms!" makes a lot more sense when the world is literally running out of cotton to spin. The thing is: that might not really
work. Because while the depression we are having right now in 2011 is one where the limit is that not enough
money is being spent on making things (and thus you actually could get out of the problem by
blowing up all the factories, forcing the companies to spend their money on rebuilding them and employing everyone in the process), the 2075 depression doesn't work like that. Since it's an actual materials limited economic crisis, it probably works like medieval economics where if you break anything you have less total goods in the economy and everyone suffers. But on the flip side, you might force people to use less manpower efficient rebuilding techniques - in effect transferring wealth from corporate profits to private citizens.
The real issue is that the amount of money in the system doesn't much matter - there simply isn't enough plastic to make all the stuff you could make and distribute.
-Username17