[OSSR]GURPS: Cyberpunk

[Ancient History]

GURPS CYBERPUNK
High-Tech Low-Life Roleplaying

FrankT:

That little tag on the front is not a joke, this book totally got Steve Jackson V&. The FBI has no sense of humor that they are aware of even now, and back in 1990 they seriously didn't know the difference between a cyberterrorist plot and a role playing game supplement.

And then there was GURPS Cyberpunk.
"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers who had entered the genre in the 1980s. "Cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two general distinguishing features. First, its writers had a compelling interest in information technology, an interest closely akin to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel. And second, these writers were "punks," with all the distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly college- educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the US and Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. But, except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were not programmers or hardware experts; they considered themselves artists (as, indeed, did Professor Rucker). However, these writers all owned computers, and took an intense and public interest in the social ramifications of the information industry.
The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global generation that had grown up in a world of computers, multinational networks, and cable television. Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical, and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their generational peers. As that generation matured and increased in strength and influence, so did the cyberpunks. As science-fiction writers went, they were doing fairly well for themselves. By the late 1980s, their work had attracted attention from gaming companies, including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gamingsystem.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven in the marketplace. The first gamescompany out of the gate, with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement- ofcopyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. Talsorian. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation system left a lot to be desired. Commercially, however, the game did very well.
The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful Shadowrun by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves, trolls, wizards, and dragons -- all highly ideologically- incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction.

AncientH:

The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents would not let anyone else into the building. Their search warrant, when produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside. They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents. The employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and jeans.
Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and nuts). The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board. The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address directories, mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and gaming books.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of any crime. No charges were filed. Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.

From Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, which is legally available free because Sterling kept the electronic rights and wanted people to actually read it.



It was 1990, and the United States law enforcement initiated a massive effort to take down hackers. The technology involved seems incredibly ancient to modern days, the laws antiquated and draconian, the police and Feds having a Hollywood sense of what hacking was and could do, acting like big cowboys. So yes, they were stupid and ignorant and as part of a series of raids on hackers and suspected hackers the Secret Service managed to bust in to a roleplaying game company and steal their stuff under the belief that it was real.

The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he confronted Tim Foley (still in Austin at that time) and demanded his book back. But there was trouble. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent to astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times, by several agents. Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, smallscale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, largescale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown. No mention was made of the real reason for the search. According to their search warrant, the raiders had expected to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's bulletin board system. But that warrant was sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use only when lives are demonstrably in danger. The raiders' true motives were not discovered until the Jackson searchwarrant was unsealed by his lawyers, many months later. The Secret Service, and the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, said absolutely nothing to Steve Jackson about any threat to the police 911 System. They said nothing about the Atlanta Three, nothing about Phrack or Knight Lightning, nothing about Terminus.
Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement considered too dangerous to see print.
This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an ever-widening public audience. It was not the truth of the case; but as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again and again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the mysterious Hacker Crackdown. The Secret Service had seized a computer to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book.

FrankT:

GURPS as a whole is thoroughly a product of the late 80s. If game design of the 70s was best described as “trying to get house rules together to make D&D work at all”, the 80s were all about trying to make game systems “perfect” so that they could be used in any context. That might sound like a really stupid idea – and it was – but back when I was in grade school this idea was cutting edge. And no system, not even HERO, took the idea of universality as far as GURPS did. There are books about how to make GURPS do fantasy, how to make it do science fiction, how to make it do pulp, how to make it do time traveling circus people, it does it all. Except for the fact that this is still a really dumb idea, in that a resolution system that handles a 9mm pistol in a gritty police procedural can't handle a 9mm pistol in a two fisted pulp detective story, because despite the fact that those are literally the same item they are structurally different and the expectations of what they should do are totally not reconcilable. The promise of GURPS was truly something that could never really be achieved, and it was basically a bad idea for the same reason that d20 Modern was a bad idea.

But in the 80s, that wasn't known or understood. It seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time it seemed like something GURPS-like was the ultimate goal of game design. And everything good and bad about GURPS is why we thought that was a thing we could do at the time, and why we don't think so any more.

AncientH:

The ideal of a universal system is still among gamers, because at the core of the hobby remains a simulationist mindset—we do want to adventure in the worlds of Conan, Elric of Melnibone, the Lord of the Rings, Neuromancer, Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, the Dresden Files, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayers, &c. GURPS is only one of a handful of systems that stepped in to meet this need – others include Masterbook and Basic Roleplaying, which provided a single system on which multiple settings could be hung. In a large part, this paved the way for contemporary systems like d20 and World of Darkness. Even GURPS finally caved in a little, providing a default setting based on the Alternate Earth/Time Travel books for GURPS 4e.

FrankT:

Steve Jackson (that's US Steve Jackson for you Fighting Fantasy fans) put a lot more effort into this sort of thing than, for example, Kevin Siembieda. So this book has playtesters and consultants. It wouldn't really surprise me if getting hacking consultation from “The Legion of Doom” was what got the FBI interested in the first place. But the point here is that Steve Jackson cares about his product and he's willing to spend money and time to improve it within his paradigm – and it shows in the credits.

Unsolicited Comments: United States Secret Service

And of course... there is also that.

AncientH:

The Steve Jackson Games staff offers our somewhat bemused thanks to the United States Secret Service for their diligent "reality checking" of GURPS Cyberpunk. It happened like this…

On March 1 the SJ Games offices, and the home of the GURPS Cyberpunk writer, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. A large amount of equipment was seized, including four computers, two laser printers, some loose hard disks and a great deal of assorted hardware. One of the computers was the one running the Illuminati BBS.

The only computers taken were those with GURPS Cyberpunk files; other systems were left in place. In their diligent search for evidence, the agents also cut off locks, forced open footlockers, tore up dozens of boxes in the warehouse, and bent two of our letter openers attempting to pick the lock on a file cabinet.

The next day, accompanied by an attorney, I personally visited the Austin offices of the Secret Service. We had been promised that we could make copies of our files. As it turned out, we were only allowed to copy a few files, and only from one system. Still missing were all the current text files and hard copy for this book, as well as the files for the Illuminnati BBS with their extensive playtest comments.

In the course of that visit, it became clear that the investigating agents considered GURPS Cyberpunk to be "a handbook lor computer crime." They seemed to make no distinction between a discussion of futuristic credit fraud, using equipment that doesn't exist, and modern real-life credit card abuse. A repeated comment by the agents was "This is real."

Now I'll freely admit that this book is the most realistic cyberpunk game yet released. It has a lot of background information to put the genre in context. But it won't make you into a console cowboy in one easy lesson any more than GURPS Fantasy will teach you swordplay. Sadly the distinction appeared lost on the investigators.

Over the next few weeks, the Secret Service repeatedly assured our attorney that complete copies of our files would be returned "tomorrow." But these promises weren't kept; this book was reconstructed from old backups, playtest copies, notes and memories.

On March 26, almost four weeks alter the raid, some (but not all) of the files were returned. It was June 21 nearly four months later, when we got most (but not all) of our hardware back. The Secret Service still has one of our hard disks, all Loyd's personal equipment and files, the printouts of GURPS Cyberpunk, and several other things.

GURPS may be old-school, but they were a quality production – they brought in a million dollars of revenue in 1990. While GURPS may not have been the most innovative in terms of game book design, they were as top of the line as anything put out by TSR or White Wolf – and usually with a much more readable layout and more complete table of contents.

Introduction

FrankT:

The book opens with a bit on how you personally can get tech support with GURPS. This being 1990, your choices are to send written letters to their offices in Texas, or by dialing up to their 14.4 baud modem in the 512 area code. High tech!

AncientH:

I don’t think GURPS invented the sidebar, but given the modular nature of GURPS products (GURPS Cyberpunk + GURPS Fantasy + GURPS Vikings? Sure, why the fuck not? The priests of Wotan need you berserkers, before the giant hackers of Jotunheim break in to the digital heaven of Valhalla!) it makes sense that the first one in the book is basically a plug for the rest of GURPS products. More often though, sidebars in GURPS books tend to actually be useful as opposed to just fluff-pieces…depending on the writer.

FrankT:

The second introduction (there are four, crammed into two pages with side bars, underbars, and maple bars) is the “What is Cyberpunk?” section. Fascinatingly, it doesn't bother with a “What is Roleplaying?” section. The assumption here is I guess that this is not your first GURPS product and they don't have to tell you what Roleplaying is. Personally, I don't need to be told what roleplaying is, but sometimes it's nice to know what roleplaying means to the authors. To see if we are remotely on the same page. Ah well.

This is the days before wikipedia, and so it is that the author blithely informs us that William Gibson was the first person to use the word “Cyberpunk” in his book Neuromancer in 1984. This is of course, totally wrong, as today anyone can spend 30 seconds on Google and find that Bruce Bethke's short story “Cyberpunk” was published in 1983. But in the days of card catalogs and library research in actual libraries, this kind of confusion was commonplace.

More anachronisms are in store for you, however. The dark cyberpunk future apparently predicts that life will be cheap because there might be as many as twenty million people in sprawls like New York (population 22 million) or Tokyo (population 32 million). I know it's been twenty three years, but that particular bleak vision of the future is now a long time passed.

AncientH:

It really is hard to remember the time back when Japan ruled the future.

FrankT:

Introduction 3 is a shortened version of their ordeal in getting this book published. What with the fact that apparently some treasury agents thought this book was an actual how-to guide to commit modern day credit card fraud. This is only a tiny glimpse down that particular rabbit hole, and it doesn't ever get less crazy. The more information you get about this, the more retarded and venal the US government looks.

AncientH:

Some of the other books GURPS suggests include GURPS Ultra-Tech, GURPS Supers, GURPS Autoduel (wow, taste the 80s), and GURPS Humanx, which is devoted to a setting of books by Alan Dean Foster before he started just whoring himself out for money by writing the novelizations to the Transformers movies.

FrankT:

The final introduction in the introduction is a bit pimping other books in the GURPS series, noting that you can probably use stuff written up in other GURPS books in your GURPS CYBERPUNK campaign. What with them having been written for the same system and that being the entire point of GURPS. Also, the author notes that he is such a decadent futurist that he can be reached via e-mail. Holy fuck!

AncientH:

Loyd “Mentor” Blankenship is a large part of the reason the book was confiscated by the SS, but don’t hold that against him. He would later go on to write The Conscience of a Hacker, GURPS China, and other stuff like that.

Probably the weirdest thing about cyberpunk is that by 1990 it wasn’t exactly dead, but it had run its course as avant garde literature but hadn’t started to really filter into movies yet. William Gibson finished up the Sprawl Trilogy in ’88, and the nail in the coffin that was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash would be out in ’92. Lawnmower Man and Sneakers wouldn’t be out until ’92, Johnny Mnemonic and Hackers wouldn’t be out ‘til ’95…this was a game for people that had grown up on Blade Runner (1982), War Games (1983), and The Terminator (1984). “High tech and low life” sums it up nicely.

[John Magnum]

I have so much affection for GURPS. They really do care about getting people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about to write supplements for them, so at least there's that.

[Red_Rob]

Well I guess this is appropriate with it being The Year of Cyberpunk and everything.

Man, Blade Runner really defined the look of Cyberpunk for a long time. When you look at how Alien's run-down sci-fi was the template for a lot of 80's stuff and Black Hawk Down basically set the tone for the CoD:MW/Battlefield 2 era, Ridley Scott really seems to have an eye for defining a genre in visuals.

I still remember reading Neuromancer and later excitedly telling my gaming group about how I read a book by this guy who had totally ripped off Shadowrun. He even called the currency New Yen, I mean please! In my defence I was 14 at the time.

Can't wait to see what the far future looked like to RPG designers in 1990. I mean, I still have my Shadowrun 2nd Ed. stuff somewhere, but this is different. It's real, man!

[echoVanguard]

GURPS Cyberpunk + GURPS Fantasy + GURPS Vikings? Sure, why the fuck not? The priests of Wotan need you berserkers, before the giant hackers of Jotunheim break in to the digital heaven of Valhalla!

I would play the hell out of this. I vote AH starts a thread for this in The Trenches right the heck now.

echo

[Ancient History]

Chapter 1: Character

FrankT:

Chapter 1 jumps right in to explain how the entire GURPS movement was ultimately misguided. I'm not sure that's their intent, but in retrospect there aren't a lot of other ways to interpret this chapter.

Basically, GURPS attempted to put everything on a unified point system. If you had magic powers, that was assigned a point cost, if you had a cybernetic arm that was assigned a point cost as well. But this fundamental conceit doesn't actually make any sense outside a couple of narrow genres. In 4-color superheroics, The Shoveler has a shovel, and he shovels well. Other characters don't have a fucking shovel, and when you're translating it to a game it's reasonable to simply declare that The Shoveler pays some points for his shovel and he has one, while other characters spend their points on something else and are bereft of shovels. In a pre-modern society, one could plausibly claim that since even nails are hand crafted items, that a character's ownership of a saddle or a paring knife could be intrinsic enough to be convertible in some cosmic sense to having more skills or something. But in a modern or near future economy? No fucking way.

The chapter basically hits two walls simultaneously. The first is that in the cyberpunk future, people have access to velcro, motorcycles, hand guns, forklifts, and cameras. The existence of modern and near-future tech makes the “power level” of Viking thanes and dabbling necromancers pale in comparison. Shadowrun ran into the same issue, which is why magic in that system is so much more brutally powerful than it is in Earthdawn. Simply put, cyberpunk characters really aren't on the same power scale as Roman legionaries or prehistoric hunter gatherers or whatever you wanted to play from another setting. The book admits this front and center (indicating that they actually did some playtesting), and presents a model where a Cyberpunk character built on only fifty percent more points than a standard GURPS hero is a low end “Swimming With Sharks” character. The other issue of course, is that living in an advanced economy with mass production and the home shopping network, it's totally impractical to try to do point based accounting for physical, purchasable objects. The book gives three ways to handle buying high tech toys (character points, cash, or a combination), and basically admits that you have to break the game balance paradigm or break the simulation, because that dog won't hunt.

AncientH:

To be fair, GURPS was also one of the most cognizant of its own flaws and issues—at least to a degree. This is why they really pushed Tech Levels and stuff for a while in their products, because they recognized that there’s a significant difference in “normal” or “average” given any particular setting. Now, this didn’t stop them from putting out GURPS Discworld or even GURPS Vampire the Masquerade (dibs on that for an OSSR, btw), but it made it so that if your dude got a vibrosword in the Viking Age, he really was king of the fucking hill.

GURPS Cyberpunk offers players a chance to create characters not generally seen in other, more traditional genres. It's a very tough world. Even the heroes of cyberpunk are sharp-edged rogues who follow their own codes and ignore society's. And the villains routinely do things that would horrify an Orc, or turn the stomach of the average Stellar Death Commando.

The problem with cyberpunk as a genre is that over all there really aren’t heroes, though there may be villains. Instead of heroes you have protagonists, and those guys may be on a mission but they have a whole heapin’ helping of motivations and introspections as to what they fuck they’re doing and why. This isn’t quite as novel as it sounds – Michael Moorcock’s Elric or Larry Niven’s Louis Wu are people that adventure generally because they’re bored or blackmailed into doing it, and Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser actively work to steal shit half the time – but it’s a different perspective when the PCs are the ones doing the mind-raping for fun and profit.



“Cyberpunk” worlds are categorized as TL8+ - the point at which implants become commonplace and usable, but we’re a far way from the singularity yet.

FrankT:

The character chapter is 23 pages long, and it has a lot of sidebars. It's like reading a fully illuminated Torah. Many of the sidebars talk about things which frankly do not seem like they need to be in this chapter. Like the costs for sex change procedures, that seems like something that might be better placed in the section that actually talks about getting procedures done. I'm not even sure that's the weirdest or most out-of-place side bar.

AncientH:

GURPS likes to front-load a lot of rules and mechanics, with each individual book a bit of a core-rulebook-in-miniature in some respects – so Chapter 1 is all the options for building your character in the campaign, with various options and suggestions. Because all of this shit uses the same system, it’s tremendously more coherent than any d20 product, but also vastly more complicated.

FrankT:

The book rattles off various character concepts you might have for a cyberpunk genre game. This is... puzzling, but fairly par for the course in GURPS land. How might a “Maverick Cop”, a “Corporate Bodyguard”, a “Mafia Lieutenant”, and a “Drifter” meaningfully adventure together? Who fucking cares! This is GURPS, and figuring out to get characters with wildly different backgrounds and life goals to work together in a story is 1) kind of the point, and 2) your fucking problem. GURPS is basically They Fight Crime! at the best of times, and the suggested character archetypes here don't really change that.

AncientH:

On the bright side, GURPS never tries to really pidgeonhole you into any one character concept; all of their archetypes are just ideas derived from the cyberpunk fiction and media of the day—and they’re not shy about calling out their sources either, pointing the readers to Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling, and all the rest. Remember, GURPS was about providing rules for you to play the characters from your favorite settings, not inventing bullshit settings that were expies of those in popular fiction (that would come later, sortof).

The most bizarre suggestion is the Cyberprep—the antithesis to the cyberpunk character, recalling a cultural distinction lost on anyone under the age of thirty or so. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, the preppies were the fresh-faced kids that dressed nicely in sweaters or polo shirts and khakis…sort of an upscale business casual, but generally more colorful…always very clean, proper, neat. Absolutely the opposite from the “punks” with their ripped jeans and hair and piercings.


Honour Among Punks

FrankT:

The lists of suggested advantages and disadvantages make it clear that you're reading something that was written in the late eighties or early nineties. You can be asked to pay points for having an unusual background. Or you can get points for having a terminal disease that will force you to stop playing your character when the story is over. Modern game balance concepts simply don't apply here. The point accounting doesn't make any particular claims to giving balanced results, which makes you wonder why you're being asked to do it in the first place. And then you remember that even fucking with the points at all is totally optional on the grounds that it “doesn't make sense”.

AncientH:

Unusual Background was more strange and bullshit than it seems, because it was basically a catch-all excuse for playing a Javanese Navajo or Half-Vampire God of Thunder or something—any character concept that made people blink and cross their eyes a little, take your damn background and they’d shrug and welcome you to the table (in theory).

This also helped popularize the term netrunner.



No, not that Netrunner. Netrunner is derived from Gibson’s Neuromancer but not directly stolen from it, and first appeared in R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2013, which the Netrunner card game eventually derived from.

And it was good.

FrankT:

Oh goodness, the Jobs table. It's like reading stereo instructions for an Estonian consumer product.

AncientH:

I blame the influence of Traveller. You’ll see a lot of tables like that in old sci-fi RPG products. Even Shadowrun had quite elaborate tables regarding laws and Matrix ratings for different countries and jurisdictions.

Keeping in mind that “cyberpunk” was less of a cohesive literary movement than a bunch of people from New Wave fiction doing their own thing at the same time, GURPS Cyberpunk also borrows liberally (left, right, and center) from every other bit of vaguely-relevant science fiction out there. Case in point, “Electronic Addiction” is taken pretty much wholesale from Larry Niven’s Known Universe series (google: “tasp”), and they point this out.

A bunch of forgotten cyberpunk tropes are encased forever in this section to: the Reporter, for example, used to be a very big archetype in most cyberpunk-inspired games…though off-hand I can’t think of many actual reporters in cyberpunk fiction. Rockers were big too. Huge. Cyberdecks are here, and Cyberdeck Operation is a separate skill from Computer Hacking because GURPS is incredibly granular and weird when it comes to skills.

Here’s the thing about skills in GURPS: it’s an open-ended point-buy system with the cost dependent on the difficulty of the skill (Harder skills cost more), and the skill rating itself is dependent on your prerequisite or default. So for example, if you have an IQ attribute of 10, and a skill defaults to IQ – 4, then your default score is (10 – 4) 6. If you buy up 2 ranks in that skill, that makes your rating 8. If some other asshole has a higher starting IQ (11, say), then they can get the same rating by spending less points. This makes high attributes a very big deal, because someone with a supra-genius intellect can buy up a passel of skills at a high rating for less than a guy with an average intellect can buy up a single skill.

Then of course, it gets complicated, because some skills default to other skills. And skills can have TL ratings. You have Computer Programming (TL6)? Well, you may be the shit with punch-cards but you’re going to have a hell of a time even getting “Hello, World” on a TL8 computer.

[John Magnum]

I know that in GURPS 4 they massively increased the costs for an individual point of IQ and DX, specifically because so many skills were powered by them. I assume that wasn't the case back in the 90s, and you needed to care about far fewer skills for cranking your attribute to be more cost-effective than cranking the skills.

[Whipstitch]

I'd imagine they were rather hamstrung by the fact that their system was ostensibly universal yet acknowledging such discrepancies would also require making tough decisions about the values of various stats in different settings. I mean, FFS, in a Game of Thrones Khal Drogo drops a funny line about questions for wise men with skinny arms. You know, because being built like Jason Momoa probably would work pretty well when your culture chooses its leaders Iron Age style. Meanwhile at the ranch, tons of people have seen Star Trek movies without ever realizing that Vulcans are way stronger than humans because that doesn't count for jack shit in a setting where people routinely use teleporters, magnets and projected energy to move anything inconvenient.

[talozin]

Edison Carter, the dude from "Max Headroom" was a reporter. He's the only one I can think of in anything vaguely cyberpunk related, but then, I wasn't super into cyberpunk to start with, even when it was a thing.

[phlapjackage]

There was that reporter in Snow Crash that got killed by Raven at the Meltdowns concert..what were the reporters called? Gargoyles?

[Grek]

Yeah, Gargoyles. But they're not really your standard reporter either.

[Username17]

I know that in GURPS 4 they massively increased the costs for an individual point of IQ and DX, specifically because so many skills were powered by them. I assume that wasn't the case back in the 90s, and you needed to care about far fewer skills for cranking your attribute to be more cost-effective than cranking the skills.

Basically, the book comes out and says that characters might be tempted to simply screw all this skills and equipment shit and just take their giant pile of points and buy their attributes to super heroic levels. It then tells you that you might want to just blanket ban from doing that.

What's really fascinating about GURPS is that they did enough playtesting of it to realize what the fundamental problems were. And then they did it anyway, and told the reader what the problems were.

Edison Carter, the dude from "Max Headroom" was a reporter. He's the only one I can think of in anything vaguely cyberpunk related, but then, I wasn't super into cyberpunk to start with, even when it was a thing.

There's also Spider Jerusalem, of course. But the bottom line I think is that "exposing the bad guys" is such an iconic mission in Cyberpunk, that "getting the scoop" is a primary motivation for a lot of protagonists whether they are nominally reporters or not. Sangamon Taylor is an environmental activist, but his goal for most of the book is to do the investigation, get the scoop, and give it to a reporter. And for cooperative storytelling adventures, the lady reporter sidekick of the protagonist would be elevated to a main character in the ensemble cast.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

What's really fascinating about GURPS is that they did enough playtesting of it to realize what the fundamental problems were. And then they did it anyway, and told the reader what the problems were.

Since most RPGs I have played have crippling fundamental problems which the creators are not aware of and do not bother to tell you about, I have to say that this is a sound endorsement of GURPS no matter how much it shouldn't be.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 2: Cyberwear

“As man learns more about his body and his mind, and computers grow smaller and more sophisticated, the union of man and computer is inevitable.”
-GURPS CYBERPUNK

FrankT:

First off, yes they misspell “Cyberware” in this book. It was the late eighties, and people didn't have access to easy online spell checkers, and cyberware didn't have any kind of wikipedia page at all. I mean, it's moderately humorous to look back on, because “Cyberwear” is of course also a thing. But this 13 page chapter is not about fashion accessories, it's about computers you can implant in your body.

AncientH:

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.
This is cyberpunk.

From Bruce Sterling’s Cyperpunk in the 90s.

A good chunk of this chapter is borrowed/adapted from GURPS Ultra-Tech, because that is a perfectly good book and there’s no need to waste space and effort crafting additional rules. Big things that players might notice is a general lack of Essence/Cyberpsychosis nonsense – the limit to what you can stuff in your meat body is pretty much determined by your wallet, not any mystical limit to what your brain/spirit can take. Most of the cyberware is referred to using older terms like “cybernetics” and “bionics.”

FrankT:

Prices for all implants are given in dollars and game points. Neither are in any way satisfactory. This is probably the manner in which this book's attempt to be about Cyberpunk in general really lets it down. We're talking about a setting that takes place somewhere between 1999 and 2150, and a major conceit of many Cyberpunk stories is one of near total economic or political collapse. How much are these “dollars” supposed to be worth? Prices are weird but not terribly high, so I'm guessing these are 1989 dollars. Though how you would have access to 1989 dollars if you're living in the shattered remnants of America under the iron boot of the Orbital Corporation, I do not know. The authors partially acknowledge this point by pointing out that cybernetics are massively more or less common in different Cyberpunk settings, and the GM can feel free to adjust prices accordingly. Although I think it is equally important to note that the supply of dollars is something which is even more variable between Cyberpunk settings. Honestly, I think they would have been better served to list all prices in tacos or cans of beer.

AncientH:

Just to give an idea of what Frank’s talking about, the cost for Full Cyborg Body without any thrills is $250,000 + cost of various limbs.



By another comparison, I estimate that you could use GURPS Cyberpunk to build the Six-Million Dollar Man for about half a million, give or take couple thousand on the extras.

FrankT:

The actual list hits most of the high notes. You can get a full robot body or a cybernetic hand. You can get personal armor or retractable claws. You can get a super malleable face to pinch and prod into disguises or a hidden poison sac. There are of course things you'd want that are not on this list, but it's more complete than most games. Unfortunately, the actual rules for these things are not particularly good:

The more expensive claws are 6" to 8" long, and emerge from the knuckles rather than the fingertips. They change the wearer's damage to thrust/impaling or swing/cutting damage. Karate bonuses, if any, add to final damage. Armorplast versions are not detectable by metal detectors.
Halve cash and point cost if only one hand is fitted with claws. Toe claws are available for the same cost, with the same effect — a (barefoot) kick is -2 to hit but does the damage listed above +1; if a character has both finger talons and toe claws he adds +2 to Climbing when climbing barefoot and without gloves. Claws normally take one round to deploy, unless the cyborg has Fast-Draw (Claws) skill.

Everything about those game mechanics makes me sad. That is way too fiddly and bullshit for what is in essence just a reasonably concealable combat knife.

It's also worth noting that the points costs and the dollar costs don't add up. Like, at all. The previous chapter told us that each point got us $5,000 worth of cybernetics, but this chapter tells us that $10,000 is equivalent to 1 point in the armor description, or 4 points in the Weapon Link description. But it also gives examples of items that cost eight thousand dollars, but forty points. So the point/dollar exchange rate is somewhere between 1:$500 and 1:$10,000. Excluding of course, the always hilarious Cortex Bomb, which has a negative correlation between dollars and points (for reasons that are at least explicable).

AncientH:

RPG writers tend to beg, borrow, and steal implants, powers, and other upgrades from each other, so over time there’s a tendency where books full of cyberimplants cover a lot of the same default ground—bone lacing (Wolverine), claws (Wolverine), cybereyes ($6M), cyberears ($6M), prosthetic limbs, armor (Robocop), built-in weapons (Robocop), onboard computer (too many to list, but let’s use Robocop and Johnny Mnemonic as baselines), various other sensory upgrades (radar, sonar), head-radios and head-cellular phones (pre-App Age), chip slots (mainly taken from Neuromancer but based on older tech), poison reservoirs (why do RPGs love poison?), &c.

So, a lot of this gear will be eerily familiar to players of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2013/2020. And runs into the same problems, like skill chips.

FrankT:

Some of the available items are a bit on the strange side. No Mr. Stud Implants here, but you can get mirror skin to reflect laser weapons. That one is so weird and specific that it's kind of jarring. For that to make sense, you'd have to be in a world with a lot of combat lasers that happened to all use the same couple of frequencies. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have included it, but it seems like an odd choice. Like it was actually written for a space opera setting and just ported in. Since a bunch of these items are apparently reprints from other books given over to science fiction of various flavors, that seems likely.

And of course, the technology looked clunky and out of date almost immediately, but that was par for the course in the late eighties. Still, this book only charges you $5,000 for a one pound wireless internet transmitter. Which while ludicrous, is substantially less ludicrous that the implantable tape decks and shit you got in Cyberpunk 2020.

At very high tech levels (beyond the average cyberpunk world) a whole computer could be implanted in a human brain… or even a cyberspace deck.

AncientH:

Yeah…this is the future where if the Traveller kids were building your cyborg, you’d need to calculate the number of heat sinks needed for your brain. Aside from the few oddballs Frank mentions however, there’s not a great deal of outside-the-box thinking here—in 1990 the idea that you could record memories on a chip and plug it into your brain was believable science fiction, the idea that you could wirelessly send little programs for buying shit over the internet was completely alien to most people’s thinking. Cyberpunk is the future for people that dreamed of flying cars and got iPods, after all.

FrankT:

Nothing costs “essence” or “humanity” or anything. This is of course “realistic”, because the very notion that you lose part of your sole because you got a prosthetic leg is both ridiculous and offensive. But it's also fairly integral to the genre. I'm not really sure you can tell stories inspired by Bladerunner if being turned partially into a machine does not in any mechanical sense make you less of a man. Even “attitude chips” that people slot in you to change your behavior don't make you less human. The concept isn't really discussed, which seems like a major oversight in something that is attempting to be all kinds of cyberpunk to everyone.

I don't even see a sidebar in here about how losing humanity is stupid bullshit, they just don't even address it.

AncientH:

There’s not a lot of sidebars in this chapter generally, because this setting in particular isn’t designed explicitly to interact with magic, superhuman regeneration, or any of the other stuff that tends to get in the way of things. This can lead to some weird stuff, but that was mostly handled in other books like GURPS Technomancer and GURPS Cthulhupunk. I know Steven Kenson of Shadowrun fame did an article or two for Pyramid (the GURPS magazine which went online in the late 90s or so) called Zauberpunk which is all about spellchips (spells in GURPS Magic are skills, a spellchip is a skill chip with an encoded spell) and scrollchips and little things like that. I can’t call him out on it, because many years later I did something not terribly different.

[Chamomile]

This is of course “realistic”, because the very notion that you lose part of your sole because you got a prosthetic leg is both ridiculous and offensive.

Was that intentional?

[Vebyast]

Prices are weird but not terribly high, so I'm guessing these are 1989 dollars.

Weren't GURPS "dollars" a metagame thing like character points? No fixed relation to whatever currency is in-game, just arbitrarily valuable units of economic exchange used only for out-of-game stuff. I could be remembering that from a different edition or a rationalization, though.

you lose part of your sole because you got a prosthetic leg

I see what you did there.

Edit: Dang, ninja'd.

[Username17]

The original sentence was going to be "you lose part of your soul because you got a prosthetic arm", and then when I saw I had misspelled it, I fixed "arm" to "leg".

I apologize for using "that" for "than" though, that's a typo I did not catch.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

Well I guess this is appropriate with it being The Year of Cyberpunk and everything.

... You know what I've never got. Why would the evil mega corps leave all that oil just floating on the ocean? I mean, I get the smog and shit, that's just a by-product of industry, but oil slicks? doesn't that seem a little counter productive. I mean a corporation is all about making money and wasting such a valuable commodity seems a little stupid. You could argue that they probably have monopolies and can set whatever price they want. But it's still more profitable to sell all of the oil and therefore to safely pump it from the depths because they want all of it.

[Prak]

GURPS Cyberpunk + GURPS Fantasy + GURPS Vikings? Sure, why the fuck not? The priests of Wotan need you berserkers, before the giant hackers of Jotunheim break in to the digital heaven of Valhalla!

I would play the hell out of this. I vote AH starts a thread for this in The Trenches right the heck now.

echo

Ditto. I have an elf barbarian/berserk/fremzied berserker ripe for system translation.

[Username17]

Well I guess this is appropriate with it being The Year of Cyberpunk and everything.

... You know what I've never got. Why would the evil mega corps leave all that oil just floating on the ocean? I mean, I get the smog and shit, that's just a by-product of industry, but oil slicks? doesn't that seem a little counter productive. I mean a corporation is all about making money and wasting such a valuable commodity seems a little stupid. You could argue that they probably have monopolies and can set whatever price they want. But it's still more profitable to sell all of the oil and therefore to safely pump it from the depths because they want all of it.

Cost of extraction. There are hydrocarbons everywhere, the question is really how much energy you have to spend to separate those hydrocarbons from whatever they are sitting in. Companies would rather pump crude oil right out of the ground than to pump twice as material to get half as much actual oil out of tar sand. They'll do it out of those tar sands, but they'd rather pump from somewhere where the oil concentrations are higher.

Now the ocean is big. Like, really big. Puget sound is 110 cubic kilometers, and pumping all that to get at one lousy tanker worth of oil just isn't worth it.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

But if there are slicks on the ocean, then obviously they're either already pumping there or just dumping oil into the oceans because evil. And again, if you're already pumping oil out of the oceans then it's far more economical to do so in such a way that you lose very little oil, preferably none.

[Ancient History]

Were you alive for any of the real life ocean-based oil spills? Exxon Valdez? The BP nightmare in the Gulf a couple years back?

[darkmaster]

Yes, Exxon Valdez happened after pumping, because the boat ran aground, and the BP spill was largely caused by subpar concrete in the well, and yeah that was caused by negligence, but I'm pretty sure actual millions of barrels of oil cost BP far more than any cost cutting measures saved them even before any reparations so, again, smart evil corporations do what they can to avoid losing billions of monies in waste.

[Ancient History]

You have an absurdly rose-tinted vision of evil corporations. Massive oil spills and other ecological accidents happen precisely because the officers of corporations do cut corners and use subpar materials and in general fuck about with avoiding the safe and correct way to do things. And that's not even counting shenanigans like blowing up a rival's oil rigs or somebody going all Hackers and causing a ship to collapse for the lulz.

[darkmaster]

Just because you're evil doesn't mean you can't have good business sense.

Outside attacks do make more sense, however, though you would imagine security would be fairly high making successful attacks somewhat rare, even the basis for one-off campaigns.

[Whipstitch]

It's an exaggeration but it's not really that crazy, since oftentimes we're talking about malfeasance rather than true incompetence. Remember, regardless of what the US courts say, corporations aren't actual persons that can look after their own long-term best interests. Ensuring the long term health of the company is nice and all, but corporations are run by mortal businessmen who would really like to cash out and retire with their sack full of money and secure futures for their children sometime before they die. Even if you can tell what's the best for the company beyond your retirement--which, might I add, makes you a god damned genie, since these thing aren't often all that obvious--you may still have incentive to goose things in the short term, get promoted and keep the dream of someday making that Forbes cover alive. So, yeah, the idea of a bunch of dudes playing it fast and loose because they feel they are gambling with house money is more banal than evil, but then, isn't everything?