What are the Differences between High-Fantasy and Futuristic/Cyberpunk Games?

[Jürgen Hubert]

I like how SR4 handles this. By making everything wireless, the hackers can travel alongside the rest of the group. They also got rid of the complex Matrix maps that the hacker (and only the hacker) would navigate.

Did you play SR1? You don't know what a "complex Matrix map" is unless you have played SR1...

 

[GlassJaw]

Did you play SR1? You don't know what a "complex Matrix map" is unless you have played SR1...

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Some of those Matrix grids looked like the Tomb of Horrors.

 

[Rykion]

In Shadowrun 3rd Ed. my group generally decided that most important info and security systems weren't accessible via the Matrix. This forces the Decker/Hacker to go in with the team and find a safe place to access the systems. It helps keep them part of the team. In S3 it was quite easy to make a Decker that was great at hacking and very good in combat at the same time.

 

[iwatt]

In Shadowrun 3rd Ed. my group generally decided that most important info and security systems weren't accessible via the Matrix. This forces the Decker/Hacker to go in with the team and find a safe place to access the systems. It helps keep them part of the team. In S3 it was quite easy to make a Decker that was great at hacking and very good in combat at the same time.

Any tips for running hacker scenarios at the same time the rest of the party is doing there thing?

 

[DarkKestral]

I never really thought of SR character development as *entirely* static but I can see how it could come across as such. Your physical abilities might not do much increasing ut your skills should be able to. It's just that your characters will get a steady curve of increase as opposed to the stop/go hitch of a level based system. It's harder to tell when you've 'gotten better'. Of course, my groups tend to get 'better' not based on what their numbers say but rather based on who they know and what they do. They gather black mail material, they buy their contacts drinks and turn them into buddies... that sort of thing. Power in a cyberpunk game is rarely associated with how good you are with a gun or how much you can benchpress.

I'm not saying it's static. Just that it's far, far less than what could be expected in most fantasy games, because +1 to various rolls tend not to accrue very quickly. You might get a +1 in a very limited non-combat skill fairly easily, but a +3 to a common combat related roll is often hard to get cheaply.

I agree that character 'power' tends to grow more along the lines of reputation and contacts rather than pure combat ability, and I like that.

 

[tylermalan]

Basically some sort of armour hidden under the skin, a sort of kevlarweave or even plates designed to be concealed under the dermis, hence subdermal (although they call it Subcutaneous Body Armor). Not sure why it's a problem in D20 Modern.

Here it is from the SRD.

Personally I would have thought this...

Real sci-fi stuff that shouldn't really be in a cyberpunk game. Although saying that I have no objections to PCs having it game balance wise since you'd need to be naked for it to work and it only lasts 10 rounds, hardly enough time to even sneak in the girls locker room.

Still you probably want to stick with PL 6 stuff to start with.

Do they go over PLs in the source books?

 

[tylermalan]

Naw. You asked for a laundry list of problems - ya got one. A newbie DnD GM wouldn't have thought of scrying as a problem either ya know. (And I personally don't think of it as one either - but then most of my societies are still primitive enough to use lead paint....)

I guess... but I still feel overwhelmed!

 

[tylermalan]

Um, I'd have to disagree with this. It is rather like saying, "You've got wizards in D&D that aren't built for melee combat - make sure they get in melee combat!" If you are not going to allow people to take advantage of their strengths, and are in the meantime going to prey upon their weaknesses, you'll hear cries of "Foul!" PCs are supposed to reap benefits from doign their jobs right, after all.

The guy who works the computer matrix will present some challenges. He works in a whole separate universe from the guys with the guns. If you've got a bunch of physical PCs, and one hacker, you'll tend to find that one hacker taking up an inordinate amount of GM-time, dealing with him alone in his virtual world. The rest of the party tends to sit around bored out of their skulls while he does his work.

So, I don't have the futuristic or cyber-whatever books yet. How does hacking work (not looking for lots of detailed rules, just a general idea)?

 

[Rykion]

Any tips for running hacker scenarios at the same time the rest of the party is doing there thing?

The only real tip I have is to keep moving the action between the hacking and the rest of the group. The group fights or sneaks their way in, and then finds a safe place for the Decker to do his thing. Empty offices or a security station, after the guards have been neutralized, were the usual places to plug in. The Decker then worked on disabling the security, opening doors, and watching the team's back via the camera system while still plugged in. We always allowed communications between the team meatside and the Decker in the Matrix/corporate mainframe. That way the team can call out for help disabling some system, and the Decker can warn them of the security team he sees in the camera sneaking up behind them. That allows the game to move between the computer and real worlds with only a few minutes of down time for each. It also makes the group work like a cohesive team rather than having two completely different games going. When the Decker is working outside the run itself, we usually ran it with a few quick rolls to keep the game moving.

 

[jollyninja]

In shadowrun, the computer hacker or "decker" enters what is called "the matrix" and it's kind of like the movies except that everyone knows they are in it. He has to deal with security programs that can fry his brain, concealing himself from other users and other nasty possibilities. essentially if the guys who made the movies were not at one time players of the game, i'd be surprised.

The matrix is just a huge computer network and breaking into it requires a specific set of skills that few have axcess to. What it ammounts to is some computer skill rolls contested by the security programs that are protecting the information you are attempting to access. In game it's described as a 3d environment. low level security programs may look like the security guards and I seem to recall from a SR novel, one being described as looking like a dragon to the decker, another as simply a feeling that gnawed at his mind like the thing you keep seeing in your peripheral vision but when you try to focus on it, it's not there.

essentially, it's like devoting a great deal of on screen time to R2-D2 turning off the death star's trash compactor in episode 4 and saving the group. Not all that interesting to anyone but R2-D2 storywise but if he didn't do it, the plot would have kind of fell off the tracks. In any good cyberpunk game, you need a guy who can do stuff like that somehow connected to the group but playing it up to much makes it turn into the movie swordfish, without a topless halle berry.