I'm about to start a
Cyberpunk Red campaign this week, and in an early chapter on character generation, "Soul and the New Machine," we've given these three things that make a character a cyberpunk:
- Style Over Substance: It doesn't matter how well you do something, as long as you look good doing it.
- Attitude is Everything: It's truth. Think dangerous; be dangerous. Think weak; be weak.
- Live on the Edge: The Edge is that nebulous zone where risk-takers and high rollers go.
I started playing Cyberpunk way back when 2020 was part of the game title and the actual year was nearly 30 years in the future. For the most part, looking cool and stylish wasn't the primary motivation for most of our characters. And looking at the adventures from back then, most of them are more concerned about bigger issues rather than style. Even the recent anime
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix aren't characters obsessing over style or how cool they look, they're obsessing over performance and doing whatever it is to get the edge necessary to survive. For me, style over substance is not what Cyberpunk is about at all.
This isn't to say none of our characters in Cyberpunk didn't care about style at all. One player I knew in the early 1990s created a Fixer whose main weapon was a pistol that looked like Han Solo's blaster and every round was a tracer. And fashion could be important as how you dressed would make a difference in how you were treated by different groups. Don't dress like street trash in a Corpo environment and don't dress in a Corpo at a dive bar in the combat zone.
Another old example I can think of is White Wolf's
Vampire the Masqurade which was supposed to be about personal horror, but for a lot of us at least, it was more like superpowered weirdos in trench coats and katanas kicking butts and taking names. I don't think that's what White Wolf was going for originally.
Are there any games you can think of where there's a disconnect between the audience and the creators?