Cyberpsychosis, Essence, and Approaching Transhumanism

[Ancient History]

One of the major hallmarks of cyberpunk games like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 is that both promote the modification, augmentation, and replacement of the human body with implants, prostheses, and other enhancements, but they also place rather hard limits or penalties on "excessive" use. This gets really weird from a game design standpoint because augmentations are a natural money/resource sink and either a major game changer or the only way to keep up, depending on how the game is being run - Shadowrun has the added wrinkle of throwing magic in the mix, which Cyberpunk 2020 normally does not (with the exception of Nightlife and a few other oddball supplements).

Contrast this with games like GURPS and Eclipse Phase, which have way fewer hard limits on what characters can do, provided they have the imagination and resources to achieve their aims - these are games which embrace the approaching transhumanism angle in the manner of New Wave science fiction, looking more at what characters can be rather than setting artificial or "human" restraints on augmentation. Both ask the question "what does it mean to be human?" but from different angles, I think, with one afraid to toe up to the line, and the other looking back and wondering where the line was.

Other games are...a crapshoot. Dungeons & Dragons and World of Darkness all have various quasi-augmentations, usually surgical or magical or both in nature, and the rules for all of them are completely arbitrary and random. There's cyberware in Demon Hunter X and the Technomancer's Toybox and various other Mage supplements and they're all completely and utterly different. (Note to self: need to do Demon Hunter X OSSR) D&D has bunches of grafts and implanted kalashtar stones and some class that turns you into a star metal golem and another that lets you implant gems in your body and...it's all idiosyncratic, is my point. No coherent vision of what how to address the subject, beyond the fact that some designers obviously think it's cool and others are horrified you're getting transhumanism in their game of magical elves and vampires and shit.

I'm not sure where the median is for this, but from a design standpoint I think there are issues of both overall tone of the game and playability to consider: you don't want more augmentation than your game can handle at the level of play you want, so there will be some constraint on the system, but you also want the level of augmentation to make sense for the setting of the game and the kind of characters you're playing.

Which has me thinking of something like a magic item slot/blue magic approach (at least for fantasy augmentations, not sci fi rpgs). It's something you'd have to work into the game fairly early on and the exact justification would depend on the setting, I'd personally be cool with chakra energy centers as powering certain augmentations, and you only have X chakras to a max of X augmentations. Obviously that's just the start for that kind of system, but it's a hard limit that has some justification to it - and there's plenty of ways to make it more complicated if need be.

[maglag]

Contrast this with games like GURPS and Eclipse Phase, which have way fewer hard limits on what characters can do, provided they have the imagination and resources to achieve their aims - these are games which embrace the approaching transhumanism angle in the manner of New Wave science fiction, looking more at what characters can be rather than setting artificial or "human" restraints on augmentation. Both ask the question "what does it mean to be human?" but from different angles, I think, with one afraid to toe up to the line, and the other looking back and wondering where the line was.

I believe the question you need to ask there is not "what does it mean to be human" but rather "If you make a copy of something, does it still count as the original?". Because in Eclipse Phase your character is not augmenting themselves, they're making a copy of their memory and pasting it into a new body. While killing the original character.

[OgreBattle]

D&D's a level based system so being able to increase your STR/DEX etc. with augments that don't level you up is wonky and augments that give you template levels are even wonkier

points buy seems the way to go for this sort of fiction

[Username17]

The ultimate goal of humanity scores/indices, essence attributes, and suchlike and so on is to attempt to make game mechanics for existential questions brought about by augmentation. That is the Ship of Theseus problem, but for people. Lots of fiction from the 80s and 90s deals heavily into questions of self, where one asks what it means to be human, and what it means to be you rather than someone else.

i am mine, i
i can't become someone else

Now I would say that these didn't really work out. The late 80s and early 90s were not periods of great game design generally, and the specific attempts to make mechanics to address the question of how much you could change while still being recognizably yourself in some important essential way were not things you'd want to copy going forward. Whether it's Vampire, Shadowrun, Nightlife, or Cyberpunk, what the period delivered was various numeric systems in which the player got to see a number and only had to worry about a hard point of no return while spending from that number to change their character. The hammer was large, but it never created an impetus for characters to want to stay themselves in any particular way - it was just another currency of character generation and advancement.

It's important to note that games have tried self scores that regenerated (Nightlife) and ones that never did (Shadowrun). Games have tried expenditures of self that were fixed (Shadowrun) and those that were random (CP). None of the variants did what they were supposed to do, because the underlying game of blackjack where you stop being you if you "bust" is not really an effective means of provoking debates about personal continuity. The game gives you a stark and simple yes or no answer and the numbers are all things that the player can see. It's just an accounting problem, not a jumping off point for a discussion about existential non-existence and the meaning of your sense of self.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

I vaguely recall the Asymmetric Threat design threads wanting to make a niche for "the party member who doesn't have any of the many things you can have to be Better Than You that also add Stress, and therefore is best at 'party face' tasks which would be penalised by Stress".

Am I remembering the model and (whether or not so) is that any more likely to facilitate any Ship of Theseus silliness? Honestly if no one has managed it ever the question soon becomes whether or not gamifying the Ship of Theseus is even desirable.

[OgreBattle]

Comixology just had a sale of all of Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita and Ghost in the Shell manga, both great reads for transhumanism.

In Battle Angel Alita there's people who replace their brains with chips because the society they were raised in does not consider their 'self' to be tied to anything physical but rather who they are in the world.

[Grek]

Stress

Dodges the question entirely by making it a legal ("At what point do the cops stop treating you like a cyborg and stop treating you like a killer robot?") and medical ("At what point does your literally head explode, Scanners style, from channeling too much magic?") rather than an existential question. That way you can have players legitimately draw the line differently from society and derive character development from the ensuing conflicts over their own humanity.

[Iduno]

If you want the line to be variable (one person thinks any amount of wires shoved into your brain makes you less than human vs the person who thinks any amount of humanity left still makes you human), you need an in-game cause for different value to be the breaking point.

That means randomness. Maybe a cyberpsychosis roll with a difficulty based on how much stuff you have wired into you, and with a margin of failure determining how much it affects you. The downside being that character advancement through augmentation can change your character for the worse, leaving someone with a character they don't want halfway through a campaign because of a "bad" roll. Making it clear that your character arc will be determined by the rolls, and making it possible to seek help from a psychiatrist/psychologist in-game to mitigate the problems (especially with a low margin of failure) would help. There are always players who want the benefits without the downsides, but if they get mad and leave, he game may be better off without them.

Hopefully that would give results that everyone (in and out of game) knows someone who got one minor implant and couldn't cope, but they also know someone who looks like robocop and is fine.

Where you want to set those numbers, and if you want some sort of willpower affecting how much you can take, or a jadedness stat that mitigates impacts are all things that would have to be tested.

[K]

The esessential question is "how do you control the power-growth in a fun way?"

Augments and magic items are just power growth. If you have a slot system, then you want to fill all slots all the the time. If you have a money system, you want more money. If you have an allocation system, then you want to alocate all your points.

Perhaps the most fun option might be to close options as other options open up. The cyber-zombie who gets more tech might lose the ability to make social actions as they gain internal grappling hooks.

Of course, this is dependant on the options being lost being meaningful losses. For example, since social actions are completely optional parts of most games, losing then for more magic/borg/equipment power is the only rational choice. That's not a working system.

[Stahlseele]

Neither is a system where you have the choice between character advancement with a risk and character advancement without a risk.

[Josh_Kablack]

The esessential question is "how do you control the power-growth in a fun way?"

Random thought: if this is a grandfather's axe situation, it would be more fun to change the binary fail consequence of a identity system from "pass in your character sheet" to "hand your character sheet to the player on your left".

[Stahlseele]

The esessential question is "how do you control the power-growth in a fun way?"

Random thought: if this is a grandfather's axe situation, it would be more fun to change the binary fail consequence of a identity system from "pass in your character sheet" to "hand your character sheet to the player on your left".

No, that is stupid and does not solve anything.

[Josh_Kablack]

Next random, and likely stupid idea: echo-chamber interaction penalties

You have a vaguely shadowrun sort of setup with multiple axes: amount of cyberware, mana pool, degree of kung-fu mastery, etc. Each of these is an independent variable that counts up. There is no absolute limit, but you take penalties for how divergent your score is from the same-axis score of each character you are interacting with. For example: a pair of cyber 20 'borgs interact with each other fine, but are at -20 when interacting with cyber 0 luddites, and at -40 when interacting with Cyber 0, Mana 20 wizards.

This requires that the "interaction" penalty applies to a meaningful part of the game, that all characters are required to participate in -- so you can't just slap it on social rolls in an engine like 3e D&D.

[Trill]

So face characters should have medium amounts in each of them?

[Foxwarrior]

Those interaction penalties stimulate my verisimilitude sense pleasantly.

[Stahlseele]

@Josh a better approach already, but how does it work with magic and other invisible augmentations?

[Foxwarrior]

I imagine the penalty being related to how wizards just don't "get" how cyborgs think and vice-versa, not that everybody except cyborgs inherently hates the look of cyborgs.

[Username17]

If you want the line to be variable (one person thinks any amount of wires shoved into your brain makes you less than human vs the person who thinks any amount of humanity left still makes you human), you need an in-game cause for different value to be the breaking point.

Sure. One of the easiest ways to do that is to simply not have a "breaking point." Cybernetic augmentation can count up instead of down, and never has to specifically stop. Batou can have a rating of 10 and the Major can have a rating of 25, and when Major goes out-there ghost-hybrid and starts body jumping and shit she can have a rating of 45. And possibly using something like what Josh was talking about or just having things that kick in at different parts of the scale, you could just gradually get more and more dissociated from the normal human experience as things progress.

The esessential question is "how do you control the power-growth in a fun way?"

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

[RadiantPhoenix]

Next random, and likely stupid idea: echo-chamber interaction penalties

You have a vaguely shadowrun sort of setup with multiple axes: amount of cyberware, mana pool, degree of kung-fu mastery, etc. Each of these is an independent variable that counts up. There is no absolute limit, but you take penalties for how divergent your score is from the same-axis score of each character you are interacting with. For example: a pair of cyber 20 'borgs interact with each other fine, but are at -20 when interacting with cyber 0 luddites, and at -40 when interacting with Cyber 0, Mana 20 wizards.

This requires that the "interaction" penalty applies to a meaningful part of the game, that all characters are required to participate in -- so you can't just slap it on social rolls in an engine like 3e D&D.

It's not clear to me that the bolded part here is correct. A character whose social interaction penalty is large enough that they can barely communicate with baseliners clearly is alienated from baseline humanity, even if their contribution to the team is unimpeded because they're a walking tank whose job is to kill people.

It's not even unbalanced, either, it's just "character classes X, Y, and Z are bad at minigame C, but character class W is not bad at minigame C, so you should have a member of that class do it."

Also, only sort of related to that particular tangent, I think it might be cool if different augmentation tracks applied penalties to slightly different things. While we can easily imagine cybers moving more and more of their communication to mind-to-mind digital chat channels until they no longer bother to have voices, and kung fu masters who speak in ever more profound koans until nobody can figure them out, and wizards who scorn the tongues of mortals for the language of magic, it might add something to the experience if there were other forms of interaction penalties as well, and how you were alienated from other paths could make different people weight advancement along different paths differently in different ways.

[Dean]

What's sad is there's a lot of hugely popular fiction with transhumanist elements in it just waiting to shine that are instead totally ignored by the creators and community. Lets take Halo as an example: In Halo humanity needs to defend itself from an alien menace and creates Spartans. As the wars wage on more and more Spartans are made. A Spartan is born human but by the end it's a 7 foot tall 300lb mutant full of cybernetics and neural computer ports. Can you imagine what a women who was meant to be 5'3 looks like under that armor as a 7 foot roided up monster with metal under every inch of her flesh. Can you imagine how alien she must look even to herself? She had a mother, she's was a young girl once who wanted to grow into a woman and now she's a thing made of steel and bone and wire and that decision was made for her when she was just a child. Even if she felt resolved to her life those truths would still affect her. They've created a setting where more people every year must be made completely alien in order to save humanity from the aliens. That's cool.

Of course if you ask Bungie or any fan what a John-117 looks like without the armor the answer will be "a super tall blonde handsome ripped white dude". Which is the dullest answer possible and ignores logic and reason and biology just to make sure peoples power fantasies don't even have a hint of anything challenging or interesting in it.

The 40k universe has the exact same phenomenon in it. Where somehow people imagine that this guy....

...is somehow normal looking without that armor. Just a guy who's unusually big. Definitely not a completely gross mutant who's every physical proportion would be freakishly bizarre after he was injected with drugs to make him grow a foot taller than Andre the Giant, having his ribs cracked open, being on a lifetime of steroids, and having hundreds of major surgeries. No. Again the entire canon is that they're just big tall handsome white dudes with some cool cybernetics that don't bother anyone in any way.

Basically I think one good way to make people ask transhumanist questions would be use the transhuman elements of the fiction people already know. There is tons and tons of material in lots of sci-fi, cyberpunk, and superhero fictions that could raise extremely interesting questions about what being a human is if someone ever shined a light on it instead of completely ignoring it. So just by putting your looking glass on that material I think you'll get the "I never thought about that" reaction you want when posing transhumanist questions rather than designing an entire setting around being weird and transhumanist. A strong grounded base reality helps in asking people existential questions.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I thought 40k was pretty damn clear that as a space marine you got 2 hearts and other fucked up shit and there was a chance that you got messed up mutations.

That is not a setting that embraces transhumanism, the Necrons uploaded their consciousness' and basically are stuck in eternal torment to the point they'd rather be biological again.

[maglag]

I thought 40k was pretty damn clear that as a space marine you got 2 hearts and other fucked up shit and there was a chance that you got messed up mutations.

That is not a setting that embraces transhumanism, the Necrons uploaded their consciousness' and basically are stuck in eternal torment to the point they'd rather be biological again.

Yeah, the spech merinaztion proccess is highly risky and most candidates that undergo it end up dead or degenerate into crazed mutants. The "tall handsome white dudes with some cool cybernetics" are the lucky ones. And even those need constant brainwashing, indoctrination and discipline or turn to violent renegades or chaos worship. Plus the bit where they're rendered sterile so they're a dead end and you always need normal humies to make more sphech merines.

[Chamomile]

Space marines have a couple of weird organs on the inside, but externally they're just super tall pretty people. I definitely think this is a missed opportunity. When I first heard about the sixteen-ish extra organs a space marine has, it was the first and to my recollection only time I thought of them as interesting in any way except as fulfilling the role of "elite heavy infantry" on a list of potential antagonists in the setting.

I imagined the black carapace as a subdermal interface that poked through in places, allowing it to connect directly to the power armor they wore, resulting in strange, bony protrusions from the skin. I imagined their jaws widened in order to make room for the acidic saliva glands, and their teeth and inner skin visibly toughened to resist corrosion from their own spit. I imagined their front teeth - the tearing teeth, as opposed to grinding molars at the back - as razor sharp to allow them to more easily consume the brains of fallen enemies to absorb their memories and knowledge, and I imagined them having existential crises as to who they really were, especially upon their first consumption of another's brain.

None of this actually happened. They just have a laundry list of weird abilities that affect their outward appearance not at all, and which most writers forget they even have.

[Dean]

I thought 40k was pretty damn clear that as a space marine you got 2 hearts and other fucked up shit

And absolutely no part of that stops every single portrayal being exclusively aryan ubermensch fantasies. The extra heart and rib expansions and surgeries for extra glands in your mouth and massive amounts of drug fueled body alterations would make you totally inhuman looking. No one would be an 8 foot tall Dolph Lungdren. But that's the fantasy of the people writing it so that's what everyone ends up as, with some lip service that dozens of background people died trying to become that thing to make the Dolph Lungdrens you end up with seem even more cool.

You have the entire internet at your disposal. Feel free to find me a picture of a Spartan without armor or a Space Marine without armor that isn't exactly what I'm saying. They all just make them 8 foot tall Ryan Gosling's despite the logical conclusion of every element of their canon being that they would all be mutated monstrosities who might function as super-soldiers but would be hard to recognize as human. It sucks that they do that because exploring the transhuman elements of the story would also be more interesting, particularly in these narratives where humans need to beat the alien "other" and have to do so by becoming "other" themselves.

[Kaelik]

Counterpoint:



but I'm just messing with you.