Got my set and book. Good system, but thematically I'm having trouble getting sucked in. In fact, I have this odd feeling that something is turning me off. Something isn't sitting right. I keep stopping reading the adventure.
Partly, it is the 6 point body text font which is a huge mistake for GMs reference and prep in an adventure, but thats my only presentation complaint.
Something else is bugging me though. Rep-detect officers are about retiring homocidal and defective/problematic models (e.g. n-8). All models have the potential to be problems (Wallace's big secret no matter the model anyways..as they can have their own emotional response in addition to reps being innately narcissistic.
There are groups of people who are organized to hate or always-give-a-pass to reps. This rpg really plays up for rep sympathy and youre a crap person if you think otherwise.
It smacks too much of today's popular extremism news trends. Every criminal/shoplifter/murderer is misunderstood, drow/orcs arent really evil, and every policeman is a bigot, etc.
Am I not seeing this correctly? Help me understand how I'm supposed to enjoy a game that feels like a mirror of the worst un-fun current news tripe and just more cop-trauma rather than cop-drama.
We played it at a recent convention and the themes were presented accurate to the rpg. Now Im prepping to run for my group. I get that youre supposed to be conflicted, but this seems a bit cliche, depressing, and I worry about redundancy during multiple adventures on the 'fun' factor. Inflicting real-world ptsd on my players seems like a pretty miserable way to spend my gaming time.
How is it that Cyberpunk and Judge Dredd can be fun themes and this seem so icky?
I'm very confused by this because it seems like you're complaining about exactly the themes that permeate the original movie.
Did you think it was a movie about a hero cop doing the right thing or something? Because like, it wasn't. It's noir. He's a killer essentially working for a corporation killing
rogue slaves who are basically humans, and he's probably one too. It was never a "cop drama", it was absolutely "cop trauma".
I mean "today's news"? Buddy, this was the approach in 1982. If 1982 is too modern for you, I'm not sure what to tell you.
This seems a lot like someone buying Dungeon Crawl Classics and complaining about the "death funnel" lol. What did you expect?
With Judge Dredd and Cyberpunk they're very different things. Judge Dredd judges aren't meant to be good people, they're just brutal enforcers in a society that's basically collapsed, and sometimes they make the hellish world a slightly better place (the PC ones anyway). The criminals they deal are generally not people fighting for a better tomorrow, or rogue slaves or the like, but rather people preying on those even weaker than them. I mean, in Judge Dredd if you had a Blade Runner situation, Dredd would find a way to shut down the people making the replicants, whether that was busting into the boardroom and judging them, or by causing their factory to "accidentally" explode due to the gunfight he decided to have in it or whatever. And he would be distinctly vexed by having to shoot the replicants. Not that it'd stop him, but that stoic face would be frowning just smidge more than usual.
And that's the thing - just like the original Blade Runner, you
should feel pretty dirty doing that job. You're not "doing the right thing". You're cleaning up the mess of hugely amoral (or even evil) corporations making megabucks selling slaves. How would that ever be clean?
Cyberpunk the norm is that you play the criminals (edgerunners), doing crimes, so that's a whole other thing.