The Gaming Den

You also need a rating for what level of restriction is in place. You could have an area with A police that seriously don't even care about murder, only about contracts enforcement, or you could have A grade police in an area where chewing gum is a crime. Either way, you don't want to cross them, but what that means is wildly different.
Basically, the Traveller rating system.

Because if you do, people make fun of you, like we all make fun of Talislanta.

I make up new settings a lot, mainly fantasy. Speaking from experience, if you don't have Elves just to be different, you usually end up with Elves with a slightly different name.

Chamomile wrote:I make up new settings a lot, mainly fantasy. Speaking from experience, if you don't have Elves just to be different, you usually end up with Elves with a slightly different name.

You mean 'humans with magical powers'?

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Because it's not fantasy until there are Elves. Dwarves are also super popular with women gamers.

So why are Elves so integral to fantasy, anyways? Why not replace them with another race altogether?

I'm going to have to agree here. Elves have been done to death. Calssical celtic fae or fairies might be a better starting point.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Chamomile wrote:I make up new settings a lot, mainly fantasy. Speaking from experience, if you don't have Elves just to be different, you usually end up with Elves with a slightly different name.

You mean 'humans with magical powers'?

Typically also with what amounts to a CON or STR penalty for balance purposes, yeah.

Chamomile wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Chamomile wrote:I make up new settings a lot, mainly fantasy. Speaking from experience, if you don't have Elves just to be different, you usually end up with Elves with a slightly different name.

You mean 'humans with magical powers'?

Typically also with what amounts to a CON or STR penalty for balance purposes, yeah.

Yeah, well, wizards and witches are just about the most basic fantasy trope.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

Chamomile wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:
You mean 'humans with magical powers'?

Typically also with what amounts to a CON or STR penalty for balance purposes, yeah.

Yeah, well, wizards and witches are just about the most basic fantasy trope.

So unless someone's got an actual, solid idea of an alternative magic archetype, I suggest we go with Elves, because making a magically powerful, physically weak race that isn't Elves generally ends up as Elves That Kind Of Suck.

Chamomile wrote: So unless someone's got an actual, solid idea of an alternative magic archetype, I suggest we go with Elves, because making a magically powerful, physically weak race that isn't Elves generally ends up as Elves That Kind Of Suck.

Vs everyone smart playing elves because they are mechanically better then the other options?

kzt wrote:

Chamomile wrote: So unless someone's got an actual, solid idea of an alternative magic archetype, I suggest we go with Elves, because making a magically powerful, physically weak race that isn't Elves generally ends up as Elves That Kind Of Suck.

Vs everyone smart playing elves because they are mechanically better then the other options?

I must have missed something. How is "good at fantasy, bad at cyber and punk" a broken PC race?

Reply about hacking without time to read prior two pages:

Okay, let's go full-on Inception style dream-within-a-dream brainhacking and let's mesh that with combat utility mind control

A Rough Why and How:

In the world of NAME HERE there is no longer any difference between a machine brain and an organic one. We have organic machines and we have humans who have replaced most of their organs with reinforced steel and data cables. The trick of direct neural interfacing was discovered decades ago, and the trick of broadcasting neural interfacing via wireless terminals wasn't long after that. While everyone is broadcasting low-grade TECHNOBABBLE fields all the time, this doesn't mean that they are broadcasting their thoughts, so the best a hacker can glean is their mood, emotional state.and basic health - nothing a skilled psychiatrist couldn't deduce from body language and a med-scan. However, with the right equipment, a hacker can broadcast an artificial TECHNOBABBLE field at someone and attain a degree of control over their nervous system. This sort of cyber-zombie control can be useful in combat despite the crude and limited responses it can induce (seizures, triggering or overriding a panic response, imitation sedation, etc). However the main drawback to this sort of control is that it is not merely crude, but incredibly obvious to the network as a whole. The immediate state-transition between a projected TECHNOBABBLE field and a person's (or other subject's) inherent TECHNOBABBLE field is so noisy as to be instantly recognizable to the network monitor AIs and anyone in a OTHERTECHNOBABBLE link with the victim, and such friends and systems will initiate a reboot protocol, meaning that in a fully modern network environment, cyberzombie control rarely lasts a full minute.

However, there is a longer-term, more in-depth and subtler method of brainhacking available. During deep REM sleep, a person's physical signs are steady and there emotional state can change rapidly due to dreams - which are not visible to the network monitor AIs. This led to an enterprising sleep researcher developing the method of Dreamhacking. So long as the subject remains in REM sleep, shifts in their TECHNOBABBLE field are not flagged as abnormal. Furthermore, if a subject in REM sleep is hooked up to field broadcast equipment, it becomes possible for a receiver to experience their dreams - and thereby extract knowledge from them. And if multiple subjects are all hooked into broadcast and reception equipment during REM sleep, it becomes possible for them to share and influence each other's dreams.

*******

So you have combat-level mind control options, that get better against non-networked and oldtech opponents, you have the option to take the whole team into a dreamscape hack ala Inception, but you still need to kidnap the target and physically get them into a dream projector harness to get into the dreamscape.

FrankTrollman wrote: That's not "how it works" in Inception, or in Snowcrash, or in TRON, or in Lawnmower Man, or in The Matrix, or in Fringe, and it's not hand so on and so on. The idea of computer hacking that affects human brains directly is quintessential Cyberpunk. There is absolutely no reason why divesting yourself of computers should make your brain immune to enemy hacking in Cyberpunk fiction. And when it is fundamentally important to the game that the Hacker character be able to do something when the enemy is a bunch of primitives or monsters, the claim that it is somehow an axiom that hackers have to stick their thumb into their ass when the enemy turns their computer off is wrong on every level.

To be fair here, Luddites that spurn technology, or at least mistrust it enough to take unusual precautions is another quintessential staple of Cyberpunk. Paranoia is a vital staple as well, and if brain hacking becomes possible, people will go out of their way to prevent said hacking from happening.

I can totally see someone installing the biological equivalent of a Faraday cage in their skull to filter out the ability for people to hack their heads. Instead of a ground however, you'd have to have some kind of energy sink, like an LED or a battery that you charge or something similar to that.

Also, if we're going to have hackers go on runs and not sit in a van or apartment 10 miles away and only interact digitally, we need to ditch the hacker as some kind of 90 pound dweeb weakling who lives in his mother's basement. Social engineering dovetails perfectly with hacking, and the most successful hackers in an on-site situation might also very well be the face. It's easier to simply bullshit someone into giving you their password instead of trying to brute force crack it, and you don't even need to be particularly charismatic. You just need to know how to manipulate people well enough.

I'm all for the mom's basement hacker still existing, it's a trope after all in Cyberpunk, but at the same time, it might be wise to push the traditional hacker stereotypes from a PC perspective.

Edit: In fact, after having skimmed the thread, it seems like we're dividing things up into a triad of archetypes: punks, fantasy, and technological gizmo/hacker types.

Why not associate and fold smaller support roles into optional paths for the three archetypes so that the hacker always has "something else" he can do like social engineering or gizmo support, or the sammy is an infiltration specialist, or the mage is the pointman/coordinator.

tzor wrote:

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Because it's not fantasy until there are Elves. Dwarves are also super popular with women gamers.

So why are Elves so integral to fantasy, anyways? Why not replace them with another race altogether?

I'm going to have to agree here. Elves have been done to death. Calssical celtic fae or fairies might be a better starting point.

Chamomile wrote:I make up new settings a lot, mainly fantasy. Speaking from experience, if you don't have Elves just to be different, you usually end up with Elves with a slightly different name.

Seelie:

Unseelie:

Fae:

You see the problem, I trust.

I must have missed something. How is "good at fantasy, bad at cyber and punk" a broken PC race?

Actually it could work decently well, you just have to make sure the race is mechanically balanced. Honestly, I like idea of having three fae races, one for each aspect of the game, Fantasy Seelie, Cyber Gunbunny Unseelie, and Punk Goblins.

Backstory bullshit:

In the year 2037, the wards around Lemuria failed, revealing the once mythical city to the all seeing eye of modern surveillance statlites. The nations of the world rushed to the newly discovered island, bringing them into contact with the Lemurian people and the ancient magic that they had wielded for so long. That magic, working in ways in explicable to modern science, was analyzed and, in time, began to unravel.

One of the first discoveries made by science was the induction ansible, a device that could transmit light and other forms of electromagnetism across vast distances without interacting with the intervening space. The Lemurians had little regard for such things, only using such enchantments to light their homes and entertain their children with light shows, but the modern world, now able to reproduce the magical devices in a lab, quickly adopted them for use in computing, communications and espionage.

The rapid advancement in technology brought about by the adoption of ansibles allowed for vastly increased processing, memmory and rendering abilities in computing, overcoming the technical requirements that had long hindered the field of artifical intelligence. Induction also allowed direct interface between human brains and computer systems, at first by way of cybernetic implants but later with reverse engineered designs that allowed devices to detect distant emissions as well as send them.

Unable to restore the wards around the city or drive off the now fascinated international community, Lemuria was dragged into the world economy and the global discourse, at first reluctantly but eventually at their own accord. And so the world learned of other nations alike to Lemuria, of Atlantis, of Xanadu, of Themiskyra and long lost R'lyeh, some following Lemuria into the modern age while others retreated still further into their isolation.

As far as fairies go: We're progressing human society along certain grimdark and fantastic lines, why not the fairie races? Look how much of a dick The Gentleman from "Dr. Strange & Mr. Norrell" was once exposed to the Regency. Imagine him exposed to script kiddies and body mod enthusiasts. No reason for there to be shitty elves.

FrankTrollman wrote: Meaning that at the very least given infinite play time, the Inuit Shaman is going to make the hacker feel small in the pants by learning the relevant cyber skills and doing both jobs about as well as the Hacker does one. That is a serious problem to consider, and there are a number of ways to tackle it.

I've never understood why SR caps skills but not magic. Is there a sensible reason that I've missed?

FrankTrollman wrote:

K wrote:For a cyberpunk fantasy character, it seems completely unfair to limit the character to just one section of the genre when the setting is actually three genres.

I agree. Of course, mandating that any particular player has to make selections from all three seems similarly limited. You have three genres, you should take advantage of that.

K wrote:Making every genre attack function vs every genre defense doesn't help that issue, it just means that instead you've made hacking like it's not a role or even a flavor because you can hack everything. I think that holds for both shooting and magic.

Mmmm... sort of. I agree that if hacking works the same on a brick wall as it does on a guard dog as it does on a set of security cameras, that your quest for game balance has left the hacking flavorless and essentially nonexistent. But you still need something for the hacker to do all the time, because you can't just tag the hacker out when you're doing the other parts like you can in a single author fiction piece. And no one wants to go get pizza while the decker goes and does his VR dive.

The basic setup, one way or the other, should be that if you are a hacker and your opponent doesn't have dedicated hacking defenses, you do really well. That is, there needs to be some thing you do to people if they don't put up hacking defenses. The system where hacking defenses stop the hacker from taking down the hacking defenses is really pointless. The enemy installation could just not have any hacking defenses to begin with and not care.

-Username17

Now that I've had some sleep, I'll take another stab at my point.

Ok, we agree that people should have something to do. The options are to either force people to diversify so they always have a decent option OR make their one option work all of the time.

Let's ignore the hacker for a moment and take the shooter. He has the following situations:

Hacking like Inception?
I shoot dream constructs as part of a team.

Resident Evil-like assault on The Hive where the Red Queen is turning on crazy laser traps?[/i]
I shoot the traps, possibly with a silencer if we need stealth.

Spirit or critter or mage assault?
I shoot them, possibly with oricalchum bullets.

Shoot-out?
Did I mention I shoot?

Now, we can see that the shooter has suddenly become super stupid and you are proposing that we do the same to the other two archetypes (hacker and mage).

The balance point should be that having the right flavor should turn impossible things into hard or even medium difficulty things. Doing a deep brain-hack should make you glad you brought a hacker because otherwise it'd be really hard and bringing a mage should make you more comfortable taking on spirits. Having secondary and even tertiary skills insures that you are contributing (I mean, I've yet to find a protagonist hacker in cyberpunk that was deeply uncomfortable with a gun or a street sam phobic to the idea that he'd be able to pick a lock).

Players choices are rendered meaningful not only because of the things they do, but also the things they can't do. For example, a party that is less comfortable with combat would want to use more stealth or hacking, while a party light on hacking would want to compensate for that weakness by using EMP pulses.

If you aren't forced to adapt your plans to the current situation and your skills, then what meaningful choices are being made?

Also, making hacking work really well on things that don't hack means that PCs need hacking defense because enemies will be hacking too, meaning PCs are already going to need multi-color defenses(magic defenses, shooting defenses, and any other mini-game defenses). At that point, PC might as well have many kinds of attacks as well and just play "like vs. like" or "paper/rock/scissors."

In short, in cyberpunk fantasy, the people who only do one thing are the NPCs designed to be steamrolled.

Grek wrote:I'd personally do it the opposite way, where punk > fantasy > cyber. Punks are highly resistant to magic (due to being less physically human) and have all sorts of wares that let them bypass magic. Mages use magic, which interferes with induction and phreaking because it screws with magnetic fields in a poorly understood and difficult to predict way. Hackers have the ability to hack wares, do preprogrammed illusions on the fly and otherwise fuck with people's heads.

That would certainly be a possibility. The important thing is that every character type be able to shine if they are not being countered. And it is important to note that a simple RPS triangle is probably going to be a bad metaphor, because everyone is required by law to do at least a little bit of a "punk", but characters are not required to have any amount of fantasy or cyber.

Each character has hands and feet and a physical presence and a functioning brain. And that means that they can solve physical world problems and be subject to physical world constraints even if they are otherwise engaged in fantasy or cyber skills primarily or even exclusively. To an extent, it's a lot like it was two settings: Cyberpunk and Fantasypunk.

GG wrote:So why are Elves so integral to fantasy, anyways? Why not replace them with another race altogether?

Because whatever it is that is magical gets called an elf, even if it has a different name. "Elf" is the generic name for a magical being. Those guys in Hellboy 2? People call them Elves. The Goblin King in Labyrinth? People call him an elf too. The Mbari in Babylon 5? Elves. Vulcans? Elves. Tinkerbelle? Elf. The Leprechaun? Elf.

You're going to have some race that is the most magical or wise or foresty or something, and it's going to be called an Elf by your actual players whatever it's supposed to be called. It's even worse than that, because if you just have Dwarves and Gandharvas, the players will call both of them "Elves" and then it will be a confusing clusterfuck. The only solution is to literally have humans be the smallest, most magical, most cerebral, most environmentally friendly, and most pointy-eared of all the races in the setting, or to actually fucking name something specific an "Elf".

celebrity omnipath wrote:That's a bit VtM. Primarily it's the bit that people don't liek about VtM (well me and atleast one other person didn't). The "scrying uses the Research Skill, so I just became a private detective instead" problem that someone was complaining about in the thread of gamesfail.

It's one of the things that you have to write into your setting as an actual in-game thing that people talk about and notice. You can't just throw it in and walk away like in Vampire. At the very least, you should go like After Sundown, where each sorcery gives two different potential attribute + skill dicepools to choose from. But you'd also want to write it into the fluff that things actually work like that.

So you'd have Northwestern Forge Magic, where among other things you use your Armorer skill to cast Transmutation spells. And then characters who are Northwestern Forge Mages literally go practice bolting metal bits together in order to get better at transforming people into stone. On the other hand, you have Lakota Shamanism, where your Astral magic is based on Survival, and those characters go on camping trips to the forest to get visions so that in the future they become better at seeing through walls.

The issue isn't that variable skill assignments don't make sense, it's that whatever your skill assignments for spellcasting actually are, you need to back that up in the game fluff or the game won't make any sense.

Josh wrote:So you have combat-level mind control options, that get better against non-networked and oldtech opponents, you have the option to take the whole team into a dreamscape hack ala Inception, but you still need to kidnap the target and physically get them into a dream projector harness to get into the dreamscape.

Sounds good. I think in a world that has guns that shoot real bullets your combat mind control can take the form of holograms and induced seizures for the most part and be plenty good enough to make an unopposed hacker something to be feared.

-Username17

I wonder if magic even needs to be a real thing? There is no reason why you can't make all your fantasy elements be backed up by tech. I mean, there is a reason why MMOs have traditionally been fantasies.

So under that model, the Astral is the uncontrolled regions of the Matrix, elves are a genehack used in high fashion that got torrented to the public, Coyote is a rogue AI that teaches outcasts to build their own high-tech from cast-off junk, turning people to stone is reprogramming their personal nantites to form complex hydrocarbons, and the magic nation of Tir Na Nog is just an ordinary Irish separatist movement that uses holograms and biomechanical dragons to intimidate the poorly-educated peasantry.

The social collapse that heralds the punk parts of the setting could be in part because of runaway technologies being used as solutions for the various environmental problems. I mean, there is no reason why a bunch of Cthulu fanboys wouldn't genehack themselves into fishmen who use biotech as the foundation of a green society as a response to the water shortage crisis and their incredible strangeness and alienness is a result of rewiring the brain to enjoying having sex with fishwomen.

K wrote:turning people to stone is reprogramming their personal nantites to form complex hydrocarbons

It would make a lot of sense if magic and hacking simply use incompatible tech. Nanotech is small enough that normal computers can't talk it it and vice versa. Math-wise, nanocomputers behave fundamentally differently than larger computers (millions of incredibly tiny workers rather than six or twelve huge workers). Physics-wise, nanoscale constructions are much smaller than the radio wavelengths that hackers use to communicate, so hackers and nano wouldn't be able to communicate without expensive and inefficient bridges. And, of course, neither communicate very well with bullets.

Cyber > Magic is easier to design than Guns > Magic. Once you design your gunbunny, you'll need to be incredibly self-disciplined as you flesh out the spell lists and flesh out and flesh out not to accidentally write a killer app that shuts down gunners.

On the other hand, you can seriously give the hacker a "dispel magic" program which greatly reduces the risk. (A Street Sam can't have a dispel magic ability because then he becomes an adept).

Orion wrote:(A Street Sam can't have a dispel magic ability because then he becomes an adept).

Is there a real reason they can't learn some sort of spell resistance? The whole "you have to be a mage to stop a mage" in SR is kind of annoying.

It's definitional. If you have magic resistance, you have at least magic power: magic resistance.

It's a new game. Counterspell is a skill in SR whose effectiveness is based solely on the skill rating, not on magic, attributes, etc.

K wrote:Let's ignore the hacker for a moment and take the shooter. He has the following situations:

Resident Evil-like assault on The Hive where the Red Queen is turning on crazy laser traps?
I shoot the traps, possibly with a silencer if we need stealth.

Spirit or critter or mage assault?
I shoot them, possibly with oricalchum bullets.

Shoot-out?
Did I mention I shoot?

That's a very funny piece of hyprbole, but the actual comparison to the Hacker is the "physical" character, who "physically sneaks", "physically talks", "physically picks locks", and "physically fights". And we know that isn't to narrow of a shtick, because even in most D&D campaigns that is 100% of what every character does, because interaction with the Astral and Ethereal planes in D&D is actually pretty rare.

-Username17