Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8227498" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think I'm getting it across still.A fundamental part of cyberpunk is that the people at the very top are the worst monsters. They often have pleasant facades, but behind that, they're horror-shows of assorted kinds. If they have higher Humanity and therefore EMP, they're demonstrably not the worst monsters. That's the flaw I'm getting at.Yes. And it sorta does this a bit by suggesting branded names of weapons and so on (though not many), but cyberpunk, as a genre, is about particularities of tech and weapons and so on. Never generalities. Gibson's stuff is a particular examplar of this. Cyberpunks continually seek an edge - the gun that's made of weird material so evades a kind of scanner, the gun which holds two more rounds than you'd expect, the cyberclaws which aren't just steel but have a monocrystal edge so they can shred armour, the rifle with a special kind firing mechanism so that it remains accurate even when firing rapidly, and so on. The differences that might seem small on the surface, but when your back is against the wall, can make the difference. It's fine, even in-setting for food and so on to be generic, but the tools of a cyberpunk themselves should be specific - specific brands, specific customizations, peculiar mechanisms and so on. Cyberpunk 2020 totally got this and the Chromebooks exemplify it. Shadowrun got it pretty well but not quite as well. Red pushes it aside because really, it means you need books to cover it, to make it work. But have you ever met people like that? Or even seen interviews with them or read books by people who survived such a lifestyle? They aren't interested in low-money, hard-work, high-risk stuff, they're interested in high-risk, high-reward stuff. It's a big part of the genre. What SR and Red basically has is a straight job in terms of money and effort, just with massive risk. It's not right for the genre. And ironically Red's lifepath stuff doesn't really make sense for the sort of no-hope gutterpunks who would kill a man for 500EB, because PCs are too competent.And it doesn't have to be that way. The only reason it is, is they expect the PCs to carefully scrimp and save, never waste money, and so on to get gear and equipment, because I guess, they came to this from games like D&D and Traveller, rather than really thinking about the fiction, the vibe, the genre they were deriving from (as was the fashion at the time).And yeah even in Red as you illustrate that means stealing cars is a better option (and surely still a thrill, c.f. Gone In 60 Seconds), and even if you write an adventure where it's all about the risk and thrill, if you stick to the reward scheme they suggest, players aren't dumb, they can do math. They can work out that picking up and selling the guns from the thugs who came to kill them just made them more money than the actual mission, and that was just the guns. If they chop a few cyberlimbs and steal a couple of cars, they're even further ahead. And thus that becomes the de facto focus of the game (esp. if one of the party members is a Fixer or other person who can make more money moving this stuff...).I think if I run a cyberpunk game of any kind again, I'm going to offer a lot more cash for missions etc., but also stress the difficulty of obtaining stuff a lot more, and that you may end up paying way over the odds for things (again, it helps if things are specific, because people want specific things more than general things), and I'm thinking there should be actual mechanical benefits to blowing all your cash on parties and booze and so on. Like maybe there's some kind of "stress" meter or something or "willpower" which lets you get better rolls but needs to be refilled by this kind of thing.</blockquote>

Verification