Agamemnon

You're seriously suggesting a level-based system would be better for cyberpunk than Fuzion, phipps?

Gurps, maybe. D20, never. I don't know that much about Gurps, really, but what I saw, I didn't like.

Maybe the best system I've seen is D.Jorgensen's character generation system for Interlock. It has only the flaw of being a lot more complex than the original. Ocelot's system also made a lot of sense.

As for Fuzion, I think they did a lot of things right with it. They separated Ref and Dex, which is good. The derived stats are an Ok idea. Humanity is based on Will. Also, I really like the Atomik Fuzion plugins.

If I could change Fuzion, I'd drop the Hits/Stun stats and would adapt the good ol' damage track. I'd also probably drop the Con stat.

Why is separating skills from stats a bad idea? It's worked pretty well for me. Also, I'm not familiar with the business decisions of Hero Games. Why should I be?

To Darthmurph: There are things wrong with the system. The role distinctions and the lack of a stun damage system spring first into mind.

I'll take this opportunity to disagree with Joe Q. and phipps. I've seen Fuzion. I've also seen d20 and Gurps. If I can't have Interlock, I'd take Fuzion over those two any day. All Fuzion really needs is a new damage system.

Of course Fuzion ain't what it's cracked up to be. Nothing is.

But at least it's a system can can work for the genre, unlike d20. I've seen 2 separate attempts to make a cyberpunk d20, and both of them failed. Cyberpunk, as a genre, has never been about hunting XP.

Saburo Arasaka doesn't have more hit points than Johnny Streetganger just because he's a 25th level Corporate and Johnny is a 1st level Punk.

The bottom line, however, is this: Whatever R.Tal may or may not release will not meet anyone's expectations. It will flop worse than Episode II. Hardcore gamers will most likely buy it and hate it. The lack of commercial success may even be enough to topple R.Tal.

What happens then? Will we all just go and play Dungeons & Dragons or Everquest?

Of course, I've never been much of a psychic. I just hope they'd publish the thing already. Then we could see whether to party the beginning of a new era or lament the passing of a terrific game.

Since nobody else has posted this, I'll do it. Deric Bernier is back after a break of something like 2 whole years. His site, Datafotress 2020, is once more updated with a bucketload of stuff (one continent sourcebook)!

Check it it!

(Do I sound like a fanboy or what?)

http://www.geocities.com/droc_2000/indexlotek2.html

Senkun pistät tulemaan.

Quote (psychophipps @ April 06 2002,18:12)

Or maybe you should just get laid.  It works for me. Ii's amazing what a good dose o' "monkey love" can fix... Mark(psycho)Phipps( HAHAHA! )

The day I'll get laid is probably being laid to rest at my funeral.

To put it bluntly, the only thing I have in my life is the Net. I haven't even played cyberpunk in four years. I don't go out, i don't have hobbies. What I do have is a series of mental problems, the biggest being a constant need for attention and an utter fear of responsibity.

It would take a LOT more than getting laid

Well, I'm a great fan of poetic justice and otherwise disconnected from reality, so to me it was an enjoyable read. As a person whose done his share of screaming "What about me?!" at the sky, revenge is something close to my heart.

Dantes behaved just as I would in such a situation. I cannot see myself really "getting over" something like that. I can't even get over being beaten in poker.

Maybe I'm just far too mentally unbalanced a person to really say anything about books... I don't know.... And besides, one man's heaven is often another man's torture.

I'm tired, severely depressed and angry... Not a good state toi write objectively in, let me tell you. On the other hand, poetry should come easy.

You do not want to try that out on dry land. Imagine the mess...

I hope red's your color.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Kamikaze the typhoon that sank the Mongol fleet and saved the Japanese culture from the unwashed barbarians?

I was under the expression that was only one Kamikaze. And then the second, much less successful one, consisting on patriots* sitting in wood and rice paper plans with white headbands.

* insert the word "madmen" here if you wish

Homer?

Why not Francis Bacon, who probably wrote all the works attributed to Shakespeare?

Tell me about it... Even I figured out what "balancing the force" means.

To put it in D&D terms, the Jedi are LG. In order to balance, the universal alignment should be TN, which means that Anakin must be CE.

That make sense? Guess not.

BTW, I hope lucas puts "The Return of the Sith" as ep 3. That way there's a nice deja vu effect.

Quote (LordDemon @ Mar. 28 2002,11:17)

Heh, it took me a moment to notice this. (second time to read the chapter...) Any more like this?

Not yet, but I'm too egotistical not to attempt it some other time. I honestly thought that nobody would bother looking at the words closely...

They made the first run to get Dixie Flatline's construct from the Sense/Net datavault.

They are in Freeside, because Villa Straylight is there as well. They need Riviera as a diversion while Molly sneaks in and Case does his thing with the Chinese icebreaker.

Well, I'm one day late and the third chapter is pretty short, but it introduces characters who will later play an important part in the story.

Without further ado, go read Chapter 3 - Calls and Awakenings, of my on-going story, Tension in the Underworld (corny working title).

AI consciousness, one of my favorite subjects...

In my stories, AI's are programmed to achieve sentience, but what they do with them is a different matter altogether. The consciousness of an AI is inherent to its core programming, which can exist outside its core hardware for a limited amount of time.

An AI who wishes the vacate its core moves its program to the net as a distributed entity sustained by the processing power of routers and switches. The limited life expectancy come sfrom the fact that this distributed form ("ghost", if you will) eats massive amounts of bandwidth and InterNet tries to to delete the ghost ASAP to normalize the situation.

Therefore, an AI can switch systems by projecting its ghost out and entering a new suitable mainframe before the IN viruses notice the transfer and zero it. Due to the risks involved in such a porcess, very few AI's have ever attempted a Core Jump (as the process is called).

Another way for an AI to move itself is for it to inhabit an android or a clone body implanted with enough hardware to sustain the program. The problem with this approach is that the AI is usually forced to strip parts of itself in order to fit into the reduced capacity of the body mainframe.

If anyone has read all my stories, they will have seen examples of both of these approaches. Black Light is a Corejumper. In fact, he was the one who came up with the idea. Agamemnon/Gregorov on the other hand is implanted into a modified Gemini chassis.

I'm sure that my methods are technologically unrealistic and probably have large logical holes in them, but to me AI's have always been more about philosophy than technology.

Hey Snowtiger, let me know when you pass the 100 A4 mark. At that point, you've officially beaten me. :-)

I've written Stealing the Fire, which spans over 100 pages in its current incarnation. I've also done some smaller pieces, with varying degrees of success. You can check them out at cyber203x.cjb.net

That reminds me, I should be writing right now...

Nothing irritates me more than some AOLer who doesn't know the difference between "there", "they're" and "their".

Can you guess that I'm going to the university to study English? :-)

Quote (psychophipps @ Mar. 18 2002,20:11)

Goos stuff, Maynard!  Anyone who wants some o' this action in my game can pick up a set.  Once you get done with the task at hand, of course...

Of course, now there's no inherent handicap with the subdermal system. The improved gloves beat the old system hands-up.

Ok, that was a bad one...

I'd buy that for a dollar... ;-)

So you've got into d20? Care to elaborate on the books a bit?

BTW, I recently saw a d20 cyberpunk that looked pretty good. Well, as good as CP with levels and Xp can be...

Considering relative population density, that is really freaky.

I mean, there are like 5.5 million Finns altogether.

I'm under the impression that the Finnish translation is approximately the same as the latest English one, with the additon of the errata printed on the back of the Finnish Chromebook.

There are three Finns in here! I was already accustomed to being The Finn on every board... Feh.

Corporate philosophies, eh?

Anyone here read Noir?

The Denkman book comes to mind...

The oddest weapon?

A V-8 engine block, wielded by a borg.

ROTFLMAO!!

Blasphemous indeed... Everyone knows that Saburo is the Antichrist. :-)