[Shadowrun/Cyberpunk] What's with the technomancer hate?

[Longes]

So, I've got into roleplaying and cyberpunk community only recently, but one thing I've noticed is that a lot of people hate technomancers (Shadowrun specifically) and techno-mysticism (in general). Why? I'm pretty sure Gibbson had something like it in most of his books - Wintermute's reality merge in Neuromancer, that little girl in Count Zero. There was linguistical mind-hacking in Snow Crash, if I'm not mistaken. From my personal background, a lot of russian cyberpunk flirted with ideas of technomancy (Divers in the "Labirinth of Reflectionsions"). So, why do people hate on those things in RPGs?

[Username17]

Some people don't want magic peanut butter in their techno chocolate. Obviously, very few of those people play Shadowrun. For Shadowrun specifically, the first version of Technomancers was very dumb and a lot of grognards will not ever forgive that shit.

To give you a small glimpse of how bad this shit was, the original Technomancers were called "Otaku," which is a Japanese word meaning "obsessive nerd." And only children could be Otaku, because the original Fading was the loss of powers that Otaku underwent when they grew to adulthood. And they were given the unique ability to trade physical stat maximums for mental stat maximums. And they had social penalties for interacting outside the maxtrix. And they started with like no equipment. All this is an edition where the primary complaint about Deckers was that they did too much of their work from home and had little incentive to actually interact directly with the other characters on the mission.

So these guys took all the normal problems of Deckers, cranked them up to eleven, and then mandated that the character be a physically and socially deficient child. In a game about professional superspies, they were specifically required to be nerdy and annoying children. Also, the mechanics were terrible and hard to parse.

There's another issue, where Shadowrun in fact has Magic in it, and the Technomancers don't follow the rules of that Magic. So there's a little bit of a "Why are you bringing in a Battletoad, we're playing fucking Harry Potter" vibe going on.

And to top it all off, when Technomancers were updated to 4th edition, and had their "Otaku" bullshit taken away, they came in with a whole X-Men vibe plus a big mystery plotline about why they existed and what they were up to. And the people who wrote that plotline don't work there anymore and Shadowrun got sold to another company and that big mystery has never been resolved and basically can't be. So the answer to any question along the lines of "Why are you putting in an extra phlebtonium source?" or "What the fuck is going on?" are going to be answered with "I don't know, we never actually decided." And that's not a satisfying answer, to say the least.

-Username17

[Blade]

Also SR4 was released with Technomancers in the rules and a Technomancer archetype, and a few months later the website was updated to say "oh guys, it's better if your players don't know the technomancers".

So when Emergence came out, the big reveal that "there are people who can control the Matrix with their brain (and they're not Otakus)" fell flat.

And with just the core book, Technomancers were ultra-specialized hackers who were extremely good at something in the Matrix, but pretty poor anywhere else compared to other archetypes. (And most of the time, their sprites (the spirit equivalent) were better than them, but that's just a consequence of the spirit rules in SR4 being shit).
And when the Matrix book came out, Technomancers suddenly had options that could make a well built technomancer unstoppable in the Matrix and as dangerous (if not more) as a streetsam in combat.

So I think that it's really the execution that people have problem with.

[Concise Locket]

Cyberpunk RPG players are notorious for missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on the greater themes of loss of personal identity, privatization of government, and post-humanism they would rather focus on how cool it is to stand around sporting mirrored sunglasses, leather coats, and fuchsia mohawks and chat about "consensual hallucinations of neon origami" on Zach Morris cellphone bricks. Technomancy, full-conversion GitS:SAC cyborgs, and demystified telecommunications technology are a threat to that despite being the natural evolution of the Gibson/Sterling era.

They're the genre equivalent of the kids whose best years were in high school.

[Longes]

Also SR4 was released with Technomancers in the rules and a Technomancer archetype, and a few months later the website was updated to say "oh guys, it's better if your players don't know the technomancers".

So when Emergence came out, the big reveal that "there are people who can control the Matrix with their brain (and they're not Otakus)" fell flat.

And with just the core book, Technomancers were ultra-specialized hackers who were extremely good at something in the Matrix, but pretty poor anywhere else compared to other archetypes. (And most of the time, their sprites (the spirit equivalent) were better than them, but that's just a consequence of the spirit rules in SR4 being shit).
And when the Matrix book came out, Technomancers suddenly had options that could make a well built technomancer unstoppable in the Matrix and as dangerous (if not more) as a streetsam in combat.

So I think that it's really the execution that people have problem with.

It's kind of hard impossible to build a Technomancer who is "as dangerous (if not more) as a streetsam in combat". I mean, they are bitching Remote Control riggers, but that's it.

Cyberpunk RPG players are notorious for missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on the greater themes of loss of personal identity, privatization of government, and post-humanism they would rather focus on how cool it is to stand around sporting mirrored sunglasses, leather coats, and fuchsia mohawks and chat about "consensual hallucinations of neon origami" on Zach Morris cellphone bricks. Technomancy, full-conversion GitS:SAC cyborgs, and demystified telecommunications technology are a threat to that despite being the natural evolution of the Gibson/Sterling era.

They're the genre equivalent of the kids whose best years were in high school.

That... makes a surprising ammount of sense.

[Blade]

It's kind of hard impossible to build a Technomancer who is "as dangerous (if not more) as a streetsam in combat". I mean, they are bitching Remote Control riggers, but that's it.

Not really at chargen. But with some karma, the right echos and a few machine sprites, you can get many IP with very large dice pools and nice options.

[Ancient History]

With the right mods, you can turn your handguns into drones. Then you can put machine spirites in the drone-guns. And things tend to snowball from there.

[Krusk]

Cyberpunk RPG players are notorious for missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on the greater themes of loss of personal identity, privatization of government, and post-humanism they would rather focus on how cool it is to stand around sporting mirrored sunglasses, leather coats, and fuchsia mohawks and chat about "consensual hallucinations of neon origami" on Zach Morris cellphone bricks. .

I was asked to leave a cyberpunk for profit design team because of this almost word for word. I think it fell apart, but we had licensing, and permission from the publisher and art and everything to go at it.

That's honestly the bulk of it.

[JonSetanta]

With the right mods, you can turn your handguns into drones. Then you can put machine spirites in the drone-guns. And things tend to snowball from there.

[/i]

[Rawbeard]

People who dislike/despise Technomancers, calling them silly most of the time, tend also be people who react to the idea of brainhacking like a werewolf to a silver bullet... in his brain. They will tell you the whole Deus/brainfuck/crash thing would have never happened, because it's silly and impossible and the military would have shut that down anyway on day one.

On the other hand a dragon eating an entire city on live TV is information easily supressed world wide. Huh.

And I think those people are in charge of SR.

Anyway, is someone still around who remembers what the original technomancer plotline was?

[Longes]

Since we go into cyberpunk's decay in general, I believe it has something to do with Huxley's dystopia vs. Orwell's dystopia and reality. Cyberpunk is Orwellian - the Big Brother is watching, the culture is built around slavery (to the corps), the truth is hidden in the Area 51s, and people are kept in check by the power of arms. Yet reality is very much like Huxley's - there is too much junk information, the entertaiment is cheap and readily available and people are lazy. Our dystopia is in the iPhones and cat videos, not in the CCTV.

[Username17]

Anyway, is someone still around who remembers what the original technomancer plotline was?

No. It was never written.

Rob and Peter put out the Emergence idea as part of a three (iirc) part storyline that was supposed to bud off into another thing. So you could call is a four parter and you wouldn't be wrong. The first book was System Failure, which was basically wrapping up SR3 and laying the groundwork for a big tech overhaul going into SR4 - but also laying the groundwork for the idea that something strange was going on in the Matrix. Then Emergence came out and they revealed that the new strange thing in the Matrix was manifesting as people getting computer powers and the new X-Men facing fear and backlashes. And then the loose ends of that were supposed to get taken to the next level and/or wrapped up in a book that never got written to lay the groundwork for the "Horizon Plot" book that also never got written.

Now, Emergence fell flat primarily because it came out after the SR4 core book. So the whole "Technomancers are hated X-Men" thing was really left fieldish. People were already playing Technomancers and didn't know that they were supposed to be hated and feared or keeping their powers secret or fucking any of that shit. If that plotline had been written into the main book, it would have gone over much better.

But the bottom line is that the developers had solicited ideas for where to go from Emergence but had not selected which ones to go with when FanPro collapsed over unrelated issues. So not only is there no second shoe to drop from the Emergence plotline, but it was cut early enough in development that you can't even reconstruct what it was going to be.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

As implied above, I do think it's hard to overstate how ill equipped technomancers were to win hearts and minds in play. Like Riggers and Hackers they interact primarily with the most broken parts of the rules set but in a manner that is if anything even more resource intensive and unforgiving. The gap in power between a "properly" built TM and the corebook example is intense and as a GM I'd just rather not deal with it even though I'm the sort of person who's pretty alright with Frank's brainhacking scheme. Point buy schemes are tricky enough to herd players through without having a character type whose sole purpose is to bad touch the most fragile bits.

Cyberpunk RPG players are notorious for missing the forest for the trees. Instead of focusing on the greater themes of loss of personal identity, privatization of government, and post-humanism they would rather focus on how cool it is to stand around sporting mirrored sunglasses, leather coats, and fuchsia mohawks and chat about "consensual hallucinations of neon origami" on Zach Morris cellphone bricks. Technomancy, full-conversion GitS:SAC cyborgs, and demystified telecommunications technology are a threat to that despite being the natural evolution of the Gibson/Sterling era.

They're the genre equivalent of the kids whose best years were in high school.

Minor Diamond Age spoiler alert:

It's rather fitting that way back in '95 Neal Stephenson wrote a book whose first order of business was to have the resident cyberpunk character summarily executed before moving on with his own version of the future.

[Rawbeard]

Well, shit.

[Nath]

Rob and Peter put out the Emergence idea as part of a three (iirc) part storyline that was supposed to bud off into another thing. So you could call is a four parter and you wouldn't be wrong. The first book was System Failure, which was basically wrapping up SR3 and laying the groundwork for a big tech overhaul going into SR4 - but also laying the groundwork for the idea that something strange was going on in the Matrix. Then Emergence came out and they revealed that the new strange thing in the Matrix was manifesting as people getting computer powers and the new X-Men facing fear and backlashes. And then the loose ends of that were supposed to get taken to the next level and/or wrapped up in a book that never got written to lay the groundwork for the "Horizon Plot" book that also never got written. [...]

But the bottom line is that the developers had solicited ideas for where to go from Emergence but had not selected which ones to go with when FanPro collapsed over unrelated issues. So not only is there no second shoe to drop from the Emergence plotline, but it was cut early enough in development that you can't even reconstruct what it was going to be.

The switch from FanPro to Catalyst happened as early as 2007 (only the fourth edition very first books were actual FanPro releases, followed by a period during which CGL released books decided and drafted under FanPro). Peter Peter Taylor remained in charge (at least nominally) for some time after the change. As far as I know, Ghost Cartels was still developed by Rob Boyle and Peter Taylor.

So the lack of continuation for Emergence storyline is not only the result of FanPro shutting down. The tempo plot also stole the attention in the timeframe, before people started to leave with their ideas over unrelated issues. I guess Peter Taylor and folks thought they would have the time to develop their multiple idea (common mistake in media with story arcs).

Well, obviously, if it hadn't been for FanPro's demise, CGL wouldn't have taken the franchise over and Jason Hardy wouldn't have replaced Peter Taylor. With a different line developer, the artifacts, Colombia War and great dragons feud may not have become the central points of late 4th edition, and the Emergence follow-up may have been developed instead (well, it sorta was, technomancers getting a backseat in The Twilight Horizon, but it doesn't address their nature or origin). So in a way, yes, FanPro collapse triggered a chain of events with that result.

[sabs]

I would have been happier with technomancers if they had been mancers. If they had been magical, and if the resonance realms were actually magical realms that were being opened up by the Matrix becoming a 'thing' with spirits. If Sprites were emergent spirits of this new realm being created by the combination of magic and technology. That would have been kinda cool.

Instead, they're all "nuh-huh.. it's not magic. it's resonance. THey're not magical, they've got a special receptor that lets them feel the matrix in their skin." It's just all stupid bullshit that sucks. In cyberpunk, that has no magic, the idea that some people developed esp like abilities dealing with the matrix is okay. But in Shadowrun? Where there IS magic? That shit's just stupid.

If you then consider that technomancers are both really able to make a Hacker feel small in the pants, and at the sametime, feel like they're getting fucked by the hacker, because he can actually do EVERYTHING in the matrix, with just some software changes. It's just a nightmare. They bad touch the worse system in the game, and they do it in a way that it's really simple to make a stupidly broken character. Unfortunately the character can be stupidly broken by being crazy over powered, and having dicepools in the 20's. Or Stupidbly broken, where he can't accomplish most of the basic matrix actions at all. It's a nightmare of epic proportions. And, of course it's all being brought to us by the people who thought that carnivorous trees in the high mountains of Columbia was a good idea.

[Ancient History]

... and Jason Hardy wouldn't have replaced Peter Taylor.

Minor nitpick: this is not actually what went down. After Synner left, John Dunn was line dev for a bit, and then we were without a lead developer for something like a year, with Randall Bills in nominal charge and individual products developed by assistant developers; that's why books like Runner's Companion were such a mess. Jason Hardy wasn't even on the regular development team when he was tapped to step in as line dev. Which brings us to point number two:

With a different line developer, the artifacts, Colombia War and great dragons feud may not have become the central points of late 4th edition

Jason's early line development consisted entirely of books that were already written or the process of already being written. He didn't do anything to direct the development of the plot (or the schedule), which was part of the problem - books like War! and the Dawn of the Artifact adventures had already been scheduled (and in some cases were in the process of being written), he just didn't exhibit any quality control over the writing and plotting. Then came Spy Games and Artifacts Unbound...ye gods, that was a stinker...and well, it's all history.

One of the ideas behind technomancers is that they were the result of magic in the syntax of the Sixth Age; I think the only reason they were made incompatible with adepts and magicians is because it was already recognized that magic in SR was overpowered, and fans did not take well to the Leonardo character from Black Madonna for example. Of course, other ideas were out there too - I think Jay Levine wanted them to be the result of an impinging dimension of mathematics overlapping the world in a parallel Awakening, and I threw some stuff into Emergence about how maybe technomancers had been around in one form or another for a while and inspired some ESP shenanigans.

But what it boils down to is that a lot of the plots we wanted to pursue left with Rob Boyle and, later, Peter Taylor. Horizon, for example, never went anywhere. We knew even as we were writing it that Emergence was too late in coming out, but that's the hand we (the writers) were dealt at the time and as one of my first assignments I was happy for the work. You can even see in Ghost Cartels at the end a plot that Syn wanted to pursue, the whole "Gaia Rising" plot that died on the vine when he left...the thing is, you really do need stable leadership, or at least some kind of storyline bible, if you're going to do drawn-out plots over multiple books with appropriate build-up and tie-ins and release.

But, y'know, fans have their own opinions. Some of the books I thought were out most terrible (Runner's Companion, Seattle 2072, and Unwired) were loved by fans, some of the books I thought were our best (Street Magic, Vice) were met with "mehs." Such is life.

For "magical computer characters" in general, I think a large part of the problem is that the technology ages so quickly that many of the fictional magical computer characters become laughably obsolete quickly as well - can you imagine a VR5 character in 2013 with her old-fashioned modem and VR rig? Or a Tron-line character fighting demons called Bit and Byte? Stupider stuff happened.

[TheFlatline]

I actually didn't mind the *raw* concept of Otaku- the idea that there were some people who could plug into the matrix directly without a deck. The kid thing and the fading thing and the other stuff was kind of stupid though.

I might have ran with it as something like a branch on the tree of humanoid evolution. For whatever genetic or Awakened reason, these folks can process raw computer data like it was simsense. You could have gone all mentat/Dune with that if you wanted, or actual cyborg transhumanists who don't suffer cyber psychosis, and eventually could drift from augmented human to cyborg to full android while maintaining their sapient self-consciousness. Or for a darker tone, who needs to fuck with AI and all the issues they bring, when you can find an Otaku, graft a few dozen datajacks into their nervous system, and use their ability to process raw computer data to work directly in the mainframe. I can see some mega using racks of humans hardwired into the network and some creepy dark transhuman shit.

Anyway, I never understood why Technomancers were put into the core book to begin with. The core book is for archetypes, the splat books are for the funky variants of the archetypes.

That being said, SR4's technomancer is, in concept, fine with me on the Transhuman front. SR can only stick to the beginnings of transhumanism for so long before it burns out. As much as I'm sick of the magic immortal elf cock sucking that goes on in the metaplot, where everything comes down to immortal elf X wanting super magical artifact Y because Magic Wins Motherfuckers, I *like* the idea of seeing the beginnings of technology and magic mixing in really, really fucking weird ways that goes off on it's own tangent.

[Username17]

I can see some mega using racks of humans hardwired into the network and some creepy dark transhuman shit.

That was the storyline at the back of the original Virtual Realities for first edition. That was a rocking piece of fiction. Basically The Matrix, but first, and also better.

-Username17

[vagrant]

Most of the people I see bitching about TMs in SR are grognards, really. Arseholes who started playing in 1989 and think variable TNs and a skillweb are the best thing since sliced fucking bread.

Newer players (I started playing SR at the tail-end of SR3, only a year or so before SR4 came out), in my experience, just lump TMs in the 'weird magic shit' box like spirits and dragons and fireballs. I personally dig the archetype, because I like weird magic shit and I like the conceptual basis of human+ that it espouses.

It might be because I have a personal beef with the magic-fellation that a lot storylines have covered, too. A core SR image for me has always been some puffed-up dragon who gets shot down by a pair of fighter jets, or even a sniper with an anti-material rifle, which 'Spirits win lolololol' puts a dampner on. But the concept itself is pretty awesome, and I think the distinction between Resonance and Magic (fluff-wise) is interesting enough to plumb into instead of dismissing it with a 'It's still pretty much magic.' Well, fucking obviously, but magic has enough goodies already.

[Fuchs]

What I find stupid is the idea that TMs would be identified easily enough to actually be hunted in an age where everyone carries a small commlink and can have that built into their head.

The whole "hacking without a cumbersome cyberdeck" shtick was already open for everyone.

[silva]

I liked when "technomancer" was just a jargon used by hi-nose/proud deckers about themselves. Im a grognard, I think.

[OgreBattle]

and chat about "consensual hallucinations of neon origami" on Zach Morris cellphone bricks.

That line made me go on a google journey of Saved by the Bell. They're doing a reunion.

[Dragon Instincts]

My personal problem with technomancers was, that my GM introduced them as some "cool" Neo-wannabes. I therefore assumed that they were only implemented to get the Matrix fans into SR.

Then I read Gibson's books and noticed the technomantic ideas in them. I realized that technomancy could be done in a more mature way.

After that, I watched Serial Experiments Lain. That was the moment I started to really dig technomancy. Lain has to be the greatest show ever.

[TheFlatline]

I can see some mega using racks of humans hardwired into the network and some creepy dark transhuman shit.

That was the storyline at the back of the original Virtual Realities for first edition. That was a rocking piece of fiction. Basically The Matrix, but first, and also better.

-Username17

Ah I came in after that. But it's nice to see that some of those transhuman ideas were being explored. I could totally rock that. I'll have to dig that book up and read the fiction.