Cyberpsychosis, Essence, and Approaching Transhumanism

[OgreBattle]

How does cyber psychosis make life more violent than say, real world America today

[Stahlseele]

You are more likely to use violence if you are (rightfully) convinced that you can dish it out and take it better than any 20 other people combined.
It's a short jump to sociopathy when you start to believe the only one that matters is your super tough and strong self . .

[maglag]

You are more likely to use violence if you are (rightfully) convinced that you can dish it out and take it better than any 20 other people combined.
It's a short jump to sociopathy when you start to believe the only one that matters is your super tough and strong self . .

In the other hand in futuristic world if you go in a rampage, you'll hit the news pretty instantly and the feds will happily deploy 200 cyber cops/drones/riot bots to put you down, then say goodbye to your fancy expensive cybernetics.

However super cyborg rampage would be lot more likely to happen in liberated lawless areas where the cyber feds don't give a shit as long as you don't attack one of their interests.

[Iduno]

How does cyber psychosis make life more violent than say, real world America today

Well, it makes you a sociopath. Depending on your character you either shoot everyone that looks at you because you don't value their lives as much as your privacy (and the punishment is visited upon future you, which is a different person you also don't value), or you start Facebook.

[hyzmarca]

That is certainly an essential question. But I don't think Humanity or Essence mechanics were ever really supposed to act as meaningful controls on power growth. They were total failures whatever you wanted doing, but I'm pretty sure they were intended to introduce genre conceits of dehumanization rather than to serve any specific game balance function. Loss of humanity isn't supposed to be a game balance tradeoff, it's supposed to be a thing that happens to your character and acts as a prompt for storytelling and roleplaying and shit. That it didn't really work that way is unfortunate, but that's what it was always supposed to be for in all the horror and cyberpunk games that tried to make it work.

-Username17

-Username17

I think the core issue is that enforcing a narrative on your players is either unnecessary because they want to play that narratives and would do so without enforcement or unworkable because they don't want to play that narrative and will fight against your mechanics one way or the other.

[Username17]

I think the core issue is that enforcing a narrative on your players is either unnecessary because they want to play that narratives and would do so without enforcement or unworkable because they don't want to play that narrative and will fight against your mechanics one way or the other.

I don't think that's true. Or at least, I don't think that's true in all cases.

People want mechanical support for a typical D&D party to be a Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric. It hurts their feelings that the Fighter doesn't pull their weight at level 7 and the Rogue doesn't pull their weight at level 14. If the rules supported the 4 member party, people would be happier with it.

People want to make in-genre decisions and not get punished for it. Which means that there should be mechanical underpinnings to making "typical" choices during character development, mission planning, and combat. If your setting says that vampires should want to drink each other's blood, you shouldn't make all the mechanical incentives be to avoid vampire blood and drink pig's blood from the butcher instead. If your setting says that adepts should be martial arts masters, you probably shouldn't be charging them extra for melee powers and giving them a discount on social powers.

You can definitely go too far, and people do want to have the option of playing against type and people don't want their entire character arc to be rigidly scripted (see: Promethean). But yes people want mechanical support - or at least no mechanical hindrance to playing characters and stories that are supposed to be typical for the setting.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

It's pretty much impossible not to 'enforce' a narrative on your players. Any rules link between two things is some kind of statement about the narrative relationship between those things. The necromancer spell list is an enforced narrative - the narrative that people who have spooky zombie magic also tend to have spooky jumpscare magic and spooky death ray magic.

The problem with things like Shadowrun's essence is that they don't actually do anything. The only mechanics involved are that it's a resource bar that gets spent on cool shit, which means the narrative implication of spending a lot of essence is that... there's not much room left in your body to fit cool shit? The game has a transhumanist quandary bar, but didn't hook it up to any actual transhumanist quandaries.

Hooking it up to flat social penalties makes staying human possibly kind of viable, but honestly social cyborgs sound awesome. You could have someone with a Deus Ex-ian 'social enhancer' who experiences every social interaction like something out of an AR dating sim and it's turned them into a borderline sociopath. Everything is gamified in an attempt to present complicated information in a user-friendly way, so when they push people's buttons and levers just right they get to watch their points go up and that's addictive to them in the way clickers, idlers, and freemium games are to people today. Yeah, yeah, transhumanism has weird philosophical implications for the self, but the real horror is what technology does to society - Facebook isn't even installed in your brain, and there's a good chance that when the smoke clears and mankind's last survivors look back and ask where it all went so wrong, they'll blame Zuckerberg.

[Whipstitch]

People want to make in-genre decisions and not get punished for it. Which means that there should be mechanical underpinnings to making "typical" choices during character development, mission planning, and combat.

-Username17

The saddest thing is that oftentimes it really is just a matter of removing obstacles and letting people go about their business. I've seen many a SR fan waste a lot of time and energy trying to figure out ways to encourage people to use different types of guns when in reality all you usually have to do is quit fucking charging them so god damn much for having different kinds of gun skills.

[kzt]

The saddest thing is that oftentimes it really is just a matter of removing obstacles and letting people go about their business. I've seen many a SR fan waste a lot of time and energy trying to figure out ways to encourage people to use different types of guns when in reality all you usually have to do is quit fucking charging them so god damn much for having different kinds of gun skills.

People who don't actually shoot much get all wrapped around the axle with gun features, which is what the ridiculous gun books cater too. From a game granularity and mechanics (damage/to hit) level there shouldn't be any difference between an AK and an AR, or between a Glock and a Beretta, or a M2HB and a KPV. There should be significant and obvious mechanical differences between a pistol and a rifle, or between a rifle and a heavy machine gun.

[Whipstitch]

It's definitely far fussier than it needs to be and assigning DV by weapon category instead of make and model is a quick and easy house rule given how similar most things are to begin with. The fiddliest things I'd care about keeping are smartlinks and a standard "This gun sucks" penalty you can slap onto the janky shit particularly broke squatters are packing. The broken shit would be de facto NPC only gear and an excuse to take a few dice away from the local gangers but that's fine and potentially useful so long as you don't waste entire pages on such things.

[hyzmarca]

I think the core issue is that enforcing a narrative on your players is either unnecessary because they want to play that narratives and would do so without enforcement or unworkable because they don't want to play that narrative and will fight against your mechanics one way or the other.

I don't think that's true. Or at least, I don't think that's true in all cases.

People want mechanical support for a typical D&D party to be a Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric. It hurts their feelings that the Fighter doesn't pull their weight at level 7 and the Rogue doesn't pull their weight at level 14. If the rules supported the 4 member party, people would be happier with it.

People want to make in-genre decisions and not get punished for it. Which means that there should be mechanical underpinnings to making "typical" choices during character development, mission planning, and combat. If your setting says that vampires should want to drink each other's blood, you shouldn't make all the mechanical incentives be to avoid vampire blood and drink pig's blood from the butcher instead. If your setting says that adepts should be martial arts masters, you probably shouldn't be charging them extra for melee powers and giving them a discount on social powers.

You can definitely go too far, and people do want to have the option of playing against type and people don't want their entire character arc to be rigidly scripted (see: Promethean). But yes people want mechanical support - or at least no mechanical hindrance to playing characters and stories that are supposed to be typical for the setting.

-Username17

I'm more refering to humanity mechanics, specifically. And in general to "the genre says that the protagonists suck in life-crippling ways that would make them unplayable at the tabletop."

Heavily augmented characters losing touch with their humanity is pretty staple for the cyberpunk genre, even in works where everyone is expected to be heavily augmented. But if you make a mechanic where everyone who is heavily augmented inevitably goes insane and becomes unplayable, then players will either avoid augmentations or min-max it , neither of which is in genre.

This overlaps with the "fighters suck" issue, in that the game mechanics punish the player for doing what he's supposed to do.

This is especially true when mental health problems are being mechanically enforced, because those mechanics are almost universally heavy handed, terrible, and pulled out of a bad pop-psychology article or an episode of Jerry Springer.

[Iduno]

If you want to stack penalties for you could start them off small stuff with no real mechanical issues (you're becoming emotionally detached, and can no longer cry or get angry), then move to things the players will care about.

If you want to avoid punishing one archetype vs another, you could have a similar system in place for magic. You learn too much about the cosmos, or feel like you are above mere mortals, or whatever other reason people start to lose touch.

Either slots (can be used to power magic or keep you alive with cyborg parts) or some open-ended power in exchange for risking your humanity with unknown results could work that way. Shadowrun's essence as a hard max would take a bit more work to work with mages as well, but is mechanically uninteresting.

The why is somewhat more interesting. There are certainly players who want to tell the story of a character who gains power to protect someone, but the person they become changes them to the point that whoever they were protecting stops recognizing them. Making that mechanically satisfying is something you probably want to do. Doing that without making players feel like they're being punished for trying to advance their characters is important, though.

[jt]

The thing some FATE branches do where becoming less human means lowering your refresh sort of works. (Refresh determines how easy it is to use a meta-currency that gives you bonuses for being in-character. When you have less of it, the things that define your character matter less.)

Or, you could have a system where certain events remind you that you're human, augmentations make you immune to some of those events (you can no longer feel the rain on your skin), and you have a big box on your character sheet where you put how many days it's been since something reminded you that you're human. And this has no mechanical effect, but the game insists you track it, and it's a big box so the number is always staring at you.

[maglag]

You know, Order of the Stick touches this topic in some interesting ways with the main villain Xykon the lich.

Like in one of the prequel paid books, we find out that back when he was a meatbag, Xykon quite enjoyed small pleasures of the body like having a good cup of coffee (or even a bad one).

But after turning into a lich, he not only no longer needs to eat nor drink, he cannot eat or drink. After a hard day of murder and tourture, he can no longer relax with a cup of coffee.

Similarly not needing to sleep means he needs to find something extra to do his days/night with. Which granted wouldn't be much of a problem if the Internet is a thing. But could lead to becoming easily distracted like happened to protagonist Roy when he died and went to paradise, since when you no longer need to pause to eat and sleep, it's suddenly quite easy to completely lose track of time and spend full days doing just one thing.

Either way, unable to enjoy rest nor food/drink, Xykon finds the only things left that he can enjoy are even more murder, torture and power increases, leading him to become one of the story's main villains.

[Occluded Sun]

It occurs to me that the first Robocop movie is a profound subversion of the concept of 'cybernetic psychosis'.

Really, the concept exists in games only because of the feeling that characters must pay a price for power. If cyberaugmentation is superior to normal existence, it must also have balancing negatives.

Reality isn't balanced. And in many ways, Robocop is simply better than he used to be. He lost so much, but the point is that he didn't make the choices involved. What if he had? If you freely chose to give up so much of what people believe is essential to humanity, would you actually miss any of it?

[Username17]

Really, the concept exists in games only because of the feeling that characters must pay a price for power.

Well, it's a major trope in the emulated genre. Like, A.D. Police Files literally has an episode where a woman gets a cybernetic uterus and begins murdering prostitutes. You are free to think that genre trope is retarded - and there are obviously works in the genre that don't use it. But it's a real trope and people trying to make game mechanics to incorporate it aren't doing it because of game balance or fairness, but because they are attempting to simulate a portion of the genre that they feel is important.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

That was a great episode, too.

Anyway, what led into creating this thread - many weeks ago now - the first draft of augmentation rules for Space Madness! are up for review, if anyone wants to give me some feedback.

Noticeably absent: I'm not pursuing any humanity/cyberpsychosis rules. Part of this is because of equipment limitations - PCs only have three equipment slots, so I don't think over-indulging in augmentation is going to be an issue - and part of it is because I'm consciously working to avoid Call of Cthulhu/World of Darkness style Sanity Checks/Derangements; and I don't want to fuck about with social penalties. But I think these are workable and easily understandable.

[Stahlseele]

@Frank
The Tongue Biting Man is well done too in that regard.

@Occluded Sun
Staying with Shadowrun stuff because it's the only stuff i know in this regard:
Sleep Regulator < = i'd be all over that!
Only needing 2 to 4 hours of sleep every 24 hours?
Willfully entering the good kind of restorative sleep?
YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU!

Otherwise:
There are so many people who would exchange their eyes in a second if they could. Not only the (colour)blind people either.

This all comes, of course, with the caveat that the replacement has to be AT LEAST as good as the original part. Even if they come with drawbacks like needing to recharge them every day or so. As long as wireless charging is a thing that already exists and is not dangerous to people, you could just place the charging pad under your pilow and charge up while you sleep and your eyes are turned off anyway for example. Same for ears actually.
I am so fucking sensitive to noise and light when i sleep, i wish i could just turn both of those off untill i have to get up again.

[Zaranthan]

"Good evening, I'm Connie Smith. Our lead story tonight: a house fire in the East District has claimed two lives despite the efforts of firefighters AND working smoke detectors. The victims had switched off their cyberears to go to sleep and did not hear the alarms, nor their neighbors banging on the door. A New You, Inc. has declined to comment on the incident."

Say what you want about the glorious future, but the transition is going to be littered with such events. The price of progress, I suppose.

[Chamomile]

Sure, in the same way that the news loves to report on self-driving car wrecks despite the fact that they are per capita far rarer than regular car wrecks. People won't actually be dying at a higher rate, but some of the background radiation of accidental deaths will now be caused by scary new technology and this get more media attention than it deserves.

[hyzmarca]

Really, the concept exists in games only because of the feeling that characters must pay a price for power.

Well, it's a major trope in the emulated genre. Like, A.D. Police Files literally has an episode where a woman gets a cybernetic uterus and begins murdering prostitutes. You are free to think that genre trope is retarded - and there are obviously works in the genre that don't use it. But it's a real trope and people trying to make game mechanics to incorporate it aren't doing it because of game balance or fairness, but because they are attempting to simulate a portion of the genre that they feel is important.

-Username17

That's less her cybervagina making her insane and more her boyfriend being a jerk making her jealous, though. The only reason she started killing people is that she caught her boyfriend cheating because he liked real vaginas better than cybernetic ones. I don't think that qualifies as cyberpsychosis so much as an excessive focus on career leading to romantic frustration later in life, and frustration leading to serial murder as a form of catharsis.

[Trill]

"Good evening, I'm Connie Smith. Our lead story tonight: a house fire in the East District has claimed two lives despite the efforts of firefighters AND working smoke detectors. The victims had switched off their cyberears to go to sleep and did not hear the alarms, nor their neighbors banging on the door. A New You, Inc. has declined to comment on the incident."

Say what you want about the glorious future, but the transition is going to be littered with such events. The price of progress, I suppose.

"Good Evening, I'm Jon Grould. Our lead story tonight: A New You, Inc. has reacted to last weeks fire casualties and is urging customers with A New You "Ear-Excellence"® Ear replacements to upgrade their devices. The software update is designed to automatically let through warning sirens even at deaf mode. Customers with older hardware may get their update at their local A New You clinic."

Corps aren't stupid (at least the old ones aren't). You have this happen, you do a patch and distribute it. Not only do you show the customers that you care (keeping them with you), but you also can push other stuff in the patches and get people to upgrade their ware (for a small fee of course)

[Zaranthan]

I hoped my last sentence was conveying that I didn't think this was a real obstacle to progress. Just that the road between "we can give deaf people some sort of audio sensation again" and "remember when people were scared of cyberears" isn't a ten minute walk. Your cybernetic future will have a long, LONG road of scared people being preyed upon by fearmongers (at least it will if it's supposed to seem familiar to people the way the world of Shadowrun is), and a good worldbuilder will spend some time writing up exactly how that predation played out in their world. Because it will shape the way the public views augmentations for decades afterward.

Unless you set your world several centuries beyond the point where somebody had their brain put into a 99% cybernetic body, people are still going to be a bit scuffy about prosthetics. Even if there's no actual metaphysical effect of doing so, other people are going to be prejudiced assholes, and that's going to at least give the augmented folk a bit of pause when it comes to interacting with the unaugmented folk.

[RobbyPants]

Just that the road between "we can give deaf people some sort of audio sensation again" and "remember when people were scared of cyberears" isn't a ten minute walk.

I totally read this as "cyberbears, couldn't figure out how that fit in context, and thought it was metal as fuck, anyway.

[Stahlseele]

There are people today getting rudimentary cybernetic eyes and implanted Hearing devices are a thing that exists as well . .
Other people get experimental prosthetic limbs that give a rudimentary sensory input when touching things.
As soon as the problems are worked out and they become actually BETTER than the fleshy bits, you can bet your left kidney people are going to want to have those installed . . if it does not turn out we have a specific limit on those things as well beyond our capability to make the replacement parts and to keep them running without too much of a hassle . .

hell, there are even self made idiots who implant magnets and rfid chips into their bodies to make themselves have an easier life or something . .