Reinventing the Cyberpunk genre!

[tecnowraith]

Sounds like you just described White Wolf's Trinity setting....maybe crossed with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Yeah I know but Trinity by all means was not meant to be cyberpunkish. It Scifi opera than anything else. And still the way they treated psionic powers was in a way limited. I liked the setting but the game had its flaws.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

It doesn't have to actually be "psionics" to play like psionics.

If the net gets so pervasive everything is connected in some manner or another (by everythign i mean everything like cartons of milk, ammunition and emergency brakes ) . It might be possible to do all sorts of tricks that look like psychic mumbo-jumbo but are actually controlling the various doodads.

Folks also under develop futuristic equipment all the time. Computers could disapear to a contact lense monitor, with a pin head sized speaker in your ear. things can get so little they effectively vanish.

Cyperpunk is about the impact of technology on human society and individuals not simply cybernetic mercenary burgulars and evil megacorps.

What would the world be like if every child has a tracking chip installed at birth? Do normal folks even know this is happening?

What if every ad you saw and heard was specially tailored to you (or at least what folks thought you wanted)?

What if you could instantly be in contact with anyone you know?

Would public databases about everyone linked to visual data that could be tapped into by anyone at any moment produce a global village or a global prison? Do you really want your mom to be able to contact you anywhere anytime? Do you want that alluring woman you meet in the bar to be able to call up what your 1st girlfriend had to say about you after you broke up back in junior high?

 

[Janx]

JamesDJarvis is on the right track. And we're almost there now. Consider:

instant contact? Cellphones. People expect to be able to call anybody, any time. If the phone rings, they answer it. Even when they're driving? Do we really need this "reachability"?

Girlfriend dating history and comments? Sites already exist that do this. Heck, the girls fill it out to HELP their ex-boyfriends on their next girlfriend in many cases.

Smaller tech? Yeah, that's pretty obvious. Go check out the cell phones in the beginning of the X-Files series or other early '90s shows. Wow. Computer industry is always chasing smaller, faster, cheaper.

Chips in kids? Right now, you can chip your dog or cat for pretty cheap. Wave a scanner over it and we got your dog in the national pet registry. RFID technology is little chip stickers on groceries and such. Walk out the door, and the scanners debit your bank account for the stuff you left with. No reason that stuff can't be implanted into people. heck, that whole fingerprinting kids so if they get kidnapped thing just builds the fed a really nice database on its citizens, before they commit a crime.

The obvious stuff for tech is stuff the munchkins like. Make me better, smarter faster. Better eyes, stronger arms, etc. Those only really impact the individual, which is fun for combat. But the core of cyberpunk genre is the technology that changes society. Cellphone implants, video screen eyeballs, stuff that changes the way people interact, or the way it can be misused to hurt society, not just an individual. Addiction is a theme as well, and chat rooms, power gizmos, can be addicted to (maybe not as severly physically, but emotionally).

Enough rambling, gotta go work.

Janx

 

[Soel]

I think the feeling of what was considered cyberpunk is also what made it so great. Society becoming modular, almost entirely. Unlike VirgilCaine, I still think corporations are the best BBEG/campaign based villains ( just watched a documentary called The Corporation, which offers incredible insight into what exactly constitutes a corporation and what they're capable of. Essential for anyone who is a consumer.)

Maybe you should take a look at some of the examples of cyberpunk that are a little different:
Tetsuo the Iron Man (Japanese film from Shinya Tsukamoto; very surreal, explores the theme of man into machine.)

Max Headroom (tv series from the 80's, hard to find, but dealt with media, and it's effect on the changing society.)

Underground (early 90's rpg from Mayfair Games that would make for an excellent study for this subject.)

 

[shadow]

Cyberpunk being outdated? I don't think so! If anything, this world is moving closer to the world of the cyberpunk genre than we may think!

The internet has become extremely pervasive. Every company, university, government, institution has it's own web page. And the internet has really changed in the last ten years. I remember when the internet consisted mainly of ACSII text (14.4 modems were too slow to download large graphic files). Now you can download music, games, and movies with ease.

Cell phones have become ubiquitous. I remember when cell phones were the tools of rich businessmen. Now everyone has a cell phone! God forbid that we not be able to get ahold of someone anywhere anytime!

Corporations are no longer seen as the villains? Just read the newspaper! Look at all the corporate scandals! Remember Enron? What about WorldCom? Plus look at all the criticism aimed at Halliburton. (I don't mean to get political. Regardless of whether Halliburton is corrupt or not, many people do view it as evil!)

Granted we don't have cyberlimbs and direct neural connections to the internet yet, but it seems that we are moving closer to the brave new world of the cyberpunk genre than we may care to think.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

another point folks always seem to miss when discussing sci-fi : it uses society and science known now to discuss how the people and problems of now may deal with things. We are already a generation (at least) after the recognizable early cyperpunk ficitional works were first published. The world has changed, tools have changed and even the people have changed since those works were first concieved.

For example- My work used to be full of projects that would take a large number of disks to archive and ship to a customer and this was an annoying and time consuming part of my work and not as reliable as I'd have liked. Now i can go weeks with projects that are often hundreds of times larger then my old ones were and I seldom if ever have need for a disk i have to come into physical contact with becasue modern networks are reliable and fast.

 

[twofalls]

Check out Trans-Human Space by GUPRS. Awesome setting, and quite cyberpunk. Uses a mix of hard and soft Sci-Fi to deliver a gritty and ugly future where mankind has colonized the solar system but can't escape it.

Edit: Spelling

 

[tecnowraith]

Im sorry but any scifi that goes into space that think itself cyberpunk is not true cyberpunk IMO. Cyberpunk to me has always dealt with streets, the cyberspace the tech and megacorps. But as I said before is why have we not seen that many cyberpunk RPG in the past? And the ones that was made and released have not done so well in the market even with so many movies like the Matrix triology and video games like Deus Ex have come and gone.

 

[Seeten]

Cyberpunk is still cool, and still played by the people who played it 20 years ago. Its just that we all work for those monolithic corporations now.

And it was a niche to begin with. There is/was an mmorpg that was cyberpunk to a T, but I forget the name. It was by a german company. (Not The Matrix Online) It did poorly, of course.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

As a computer guy, I'd like to see a matrix/grid/net presentation that is somewhat plausible and realistic. From an rpg design standpoint, i'd like the implementation to be one that doesn't drag the game down for hours while the decker does a run that takes 6 seconds game world time

I think everyone who's ever played in the cyberpunk genre wants that, but it's a lot easier said the done.

The main difficulty is that it's assumed that people want the "netrunner" to be a viable, stand-alone archetype, like the "samurai" or "face." The problem that arises when trying to simplify hacking as above is that it kicks the legs out from under the netrunner archetype. A few simplified rolls and -- bam -- you've got the information ... there's not much to that.

One thing a few games have tried to do to solve the problem is creating a way to do "Matrix over-watch." It's a good idea, but I haven't seen it work very well, so far.

It may simply be that the netrunner just isn't all that viable a PC choice. (Let's face it ... while Case was a really cool character in a novel, and he'd remain really cool in a low-combat, RP-intensive RPG, he would suck in any of the typical sorts of adventures people run and expect in the cyberpunk genre.) Maybe it should simply be that the netrunner should be a skill sub-set, folded into -- or in addition to -- another archetype. (Like the face who runs the 'face, or the samurai who does demolitions.) Or maybe the netrunner should simply be a specialized NPC, like the fence or armorer. (That's how I handled it in my long-running Shadowrun campaign.)