Reynard
aka Ian Eller
People should certainly be polite, but words also have meaning.
Genre Discussion: Cyberpunk
- Thread starter Reynard
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Ryujin
Legend
"Sakuku." I'm admittedly biased, though, as I know the author and like his style.
MGibster
Legend
Cyberpunk 2020 had Protect & Serve which was a book dedicated to running campaigns with the PCs as law enforcement officers. There are a lot of different cyberpunk stories to tell and corporate employees, cops, street rats, hackers, gangers, hire killers, organized criminals, etc., etc. all fit in. Though sometimes it's not so easy trying to force them all into a single campaign.
The Bladerunner RPG has a mechanic were the PCs can earn either Promotion points or Humanity based on their actions during the game. If the bladerunner does the job their hired to do, retire replicants, solve cases, etc., etc., their chances of getting a promotion increases giving them better access to perks. Humanity is gained by demonstrating empathy, often times in direct contradiction of what your boss wants you to do. Maybe you let that replicant go because you know they mean no harm instead of retiring them. You can use Humanity points to increase your skills.
I toyed around with the idea of how Humanity might be used in CP2020. For the most part, in CP2020 Humanity is just a way to keep track of how much cyberware you can slap on your PC without going cyberpsycho, but I think it could be so much more. But what if you could gain Humanity by showing a bit more empathy. Maybe your character takes a job helping the local garden club fight off a gang who is trying to muscle in? It doesn't earn them much money, but instead they get a little Humanity and maybe gain a new contact.
Ryujin
Legend
I can tell you, from experience, that playing a Fixer doesn't land as well as it should in a campaign where you're working for corps.
Our Retired Cop character's player didn't understand that a plasterboard wall doesn't stop a shotgun blast nearly as well as a reinforced door. He also was 100% meat and didn't wear armour. If "Gone in 60 Seconds" was a Cyberpunk story...
payn
Glory to Marik
My last CP game was a bit of a crapshow because the GM saw it as another reskin of D&D, but we had fun for a time. One player was a 19 year old hacker who grew up more or less on the streets. She learned the ins and outs of tech and was our hacker. My PC was an ex corp security officer. I fashioned him after Ray Donovan. Sort of realized one day that he was useful in only one way to his corpo bosses and was never going to climb the ladder. So, he left.
The two formed a detective agency of sorts. More or less folks willing to do jobs of a myriad of varieties. We envisioned it like wanting to do jobs for people on the streets because it felt good, but having a hard time resisting doing jobs for corpos because it paid well. We came up with a name and a theme song and everything.
The GM...well had other ideas. Despite telling us the game was a sandbox we could explore how we saw fit, it was not intended to be that. Or, I should say it was a sandbox as long as we saw fit to become our own street gang and put the other gangs out of business. Well, the setting made it pretty clear the gangs did a lot of nasty stuff like drug and human trafficking, and we were not interested in becoming the best at that kind of thing.
MGibster
Legend
CP2020 could be somewhat difficult to fit every role into a group. Back in the 90s, I think I only saw someone play a Media once, and I'm not ever sure about that. Last time I ran a campaign, I told every play they were orphaned during the Orbital War. They spent a few years together as children in a state run orphanage, and an old friend contacts them telling them there's a problem. Except by the time they go to see him he's already dead. Now the PCs gotta figure out what's happening.
chuckdee
Hero
I agree that it could (and should) be a whole lot more. I mean you're the same at almost 0 as you are at 0 empathy in CP, which just seems wrong, which was why the Pendragon virtue system seemed like it would work, but I'm having problems distilling the aspects of humanity vs inhumanity, and how the themes of cyberpunk fit into that. We see a great example of it in Edgerunners as the slow spiral happens - there's nothing so subtle about how CP handles it, and I wanted to change that.
MGibster
Legend
Once your character's Empathy drops to 0 in CP2020 that's it, the player loses control of the character due to cyberpsychosis. At the base, Humanity is equal to a character's Empathy score multiplied by 10. i.e. If you have a 5 Empathy your Humanity is 50. When you lose Humanity due to installed cyberware, it affects your Empathy but all fractions are rounded down. If your 50 Humanity character installs a Mr. Studd implant and loses 11 Humanity their new Empathy is 3.9, rounded down to 3. i.e. If your Humanity is 9 you Empathy is 0 and your character is a goner.
chuckdee
Hero
I know that... what I was saying is that the progression means nothing. There are no penalties as your humanity falls other than what you choose to roleplay.
MGibster
Legend
You're absolutely correct. The only penalty was skills connected to Empathy were more difficult to roll successfully. But then most people who made low Empathy characters didn't tend to put a lot of points in those skills anyway. Edgerunners was the first time I saw anyone do something interesting with Humanity loss and cyberpsychosis in Cyberpunk. Though there was a great article in Interface back around 1991 or 1992 about how attributes like Cool, Empathy, and Attractiveness might influence how a character behaves and interacts with others. i.e. Someone with low Cool and Empathy is the type of person who has difficulty managing their emotions and controlling what they say.
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