Companero

Has anyone played a game about the actual fighting?

I've got a game running at the moment in which a character is a boxer. The actual matches have presented some interesting questions about how to handle them and what to know how other people would handle them.

One of the first cyberpunk stories I ever read was a Peter Hamilton story about a sport built around remote controlled bioroid drones (naturally with a horror movie twist). It had this great ambience of small techie teams travelling round in this semi-legitimate world, which I think is how most sports start out before they get popular (just like any art medium or cultural movement).

With full conversions, the whole thing stops being feats of athletic prowess, and becomes mechanical engineering.

That said, that fusion of man and machine is sorta the basis of Formula One...

I have this recurring idea for a campaign in which the players are the road crew for a gladiatorial circuit in which the fighting is as stylised as the Roman version (with different combat archetypes based on different styles from around the gang culture). I think there's a lot of potential there, with a little prep work.

http://vfte.cyberpunk.co.uk/index.php?showforum=16

If you change time settings from "last 30 days" to "show all" there are loads and loads of corporations with office locations and game ideas to use!

Also, welcome to the forum!

Casablanka/BladeRunner/GitS

Well... that's a great Appendix N to have for a setting. There's lots of Edge there and it almost all comes down to corruption. Co-opted government departments. Paramilitary special police forces. Underground hacker collectives... less random street violence...

In the normal CP2020 setting, that "Frontier of the EU" thing seems to have special promise. Lots of places for doing unregulated research, for using European infrastructure without European laws, exiles from Fortress Europe and training camps and proxy violence and and and...

The entire setting as written in this thread felt about 10-20% too functional when it was originally created and I get that feeling even more so now.

I mean, a bunch of successful, locally owned corporations that act in an essentially sane way? That's almost utopian by the global standards of today, let alone the CPverse!

I kinda think the same with the rest of the setting. I think you can keep the basic structure and ideas you spoke about in that conversation with Cal Phoenix three or four posts up the thread, but it needs some kind of edge.

It'll be interesting to go back through this and see how obsolete it all feels, technologically .

Is there anything that definitely feels like it ought to be changed?

Happy Birthday!

To be fair, barely anyone posted about cp2020 either, on account of the forums being almost dead.

...because half the posters drowned in their own bile, the grumpy fucks.

I can accept that it would be interesting, but it would make Carthage a real putz for spending all those years studying when he could have just worked and saved until he could buy any skill.

Something like that basically happened at the beginning of the 19th century, as skilled workers who spent their lives training in an apprenticeship system were - almost overnight - made obsolete by unskilled factory workers. Entire regional economies (or subcontinental, in the case of the Indian textiles industry) were destroyed. Every country in Europe experienced major social chaos as unemployed artisan labourers fought for their rights in the streets (the Luddites and the French "Saboteurs" who threw their Sabot shoes into the factories machines to destroy them being the most famous examples...). And since the systems of government that worked for an artisan economy no longer worked for an industrial economy, almost every country that experienced industrial development became involved in a major war during the period 1848-1872. Austrian aristocrats, Southern plantation-owners, Shogunate bureaucrats - they all got stamped on. New forms of government - industrial democracy, the technocratic Japanese imperial state, the "Free Soil" ideology of the newly formed Republican Party - were invented. Society was radically changed at all levels.

What makes a Cyberpunk story different from a Techno-Thriller is that a Cyberpunk story deals with the disruption caused by new technology hitting the street...

...Which is all a long winded way of saying that "Carthage isn't a putz, just someone on the wrong side of technological change" and that his sudden obsolescence is a super-interesting story. Afterall, most of the years he spent studying were probably before the chipware was available. The question facing every CP2020 character is "can I adapt fast enough to all this shit going on around me, and what will I lose in the process?"

To be fair, the social consequences and plot hooks that come out of a world where Wilbur could match Carthage are super interesting. You could build a pretty compelling campaign world around it, although it would be very different in scope to usual 2020.

To be fair "under-estimating the competence of a drug dealer with a military past just because he looks useless" is not that dissimilar from "under-estimating the competence of hardened veterans of the best trained army in North Africa forged in 20 years of warfare just because they're poorly equipped Africans," in relative terms .

They probably want to set a precedent. Everything Gomiville said about barriers for entry and technical skill is correct.

3D printers - especially the ones dealing with plastic - have drastically dropped in price over the last year or two and they're going to continue to do so, given how many consumer goods companies are experimenting with them. The regulators have a vision of 5-10 years from now when the 3d printer is as ubiquitous as the paper printer, when the capabilities are much higher and when the plans for these things are far more advanced. They'll have interfaces and systems equivalent to something like Steam or XBox live, simple enough to allow kids to print toys and you'll be able to buy the material in the supermarket.

Also, there are hordes of enthusiasts with a deep and effective knowledge of firearms design - some of whom on this site - and you have to imagine that the collective ability of those people to refine and improve a design like the Liberator - or simply replace it with something better - is pretty massive. The US Army's expeditionary labs have been showing off some of the potential for this stuff lately.

If you can't imagine why that kind of thing spooks governments...

...and they'd better be spooked because a change in the means of production this big always comes with massive social and legal chaos and the realignment of ruling powers. Frankly, the abilities of people to easily print crappy guns is nothing compared to what this stuff does to the worldwide system of export and outsourcing...

After the UK began to industrialise in the 19th century, the US, Prussia, Belgium, Russia, Japan, Mexico and Egypt were the main nations which followed, or *tried* to follow. As a direct result, every single one of those countries experienced a major realignment of their internal power structures leading to a major internal or external war. There's the potential for the ruling structures of today to get stamped on just as permanently as the Austrian magnates, Southern slave-holding aristocrats or the Japanese shoguns were 150 year ago...

...from tiny plastic acorns...

The War Profiteer thing is full of opportunities because it brings in so many different plot hooks and antagonists, and there are so many classic stories to draw from. You're going to be dealing with organised criminals, intelligence services, border police forces, logistical weirdness...

Serbia began the Yugoslav war with no fuel and an enormous amount of guns. Croatia had very little equipment but access to fuel. During the war their mafia/intelligence services were actively exchanging guns for fuel while the armies were actively trying to genocide each other. That kind of story has so much potential - it brings in national loyalties, criminal loyalties, stealth action, moral questions, investigation... trucks in the night, low flying aircraft, weird cyberpunk stealth tech...

In the immortal words of the Mountain Goats

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania

Trucks loaded down with weapons

Crossing over every night

Moon yellow and bright

There is a shortage in the blood supply

But there is no shortage of blood

The way I feel about you baby can't explain it

You got the best of my love

The War at Home

 

China will be one of the opposing forces fighting against the United States and its allies. Most of the Major war zones are outside of the continental United States. The there is war time hysteria along the coasts, in many cases, life outside of the corporate zones remains unchanged. Many believe that the war hysteria is being hyped by the government to silence opposition at home and finally rein in the remaining free-states. The threat at home can be real or imagined.

One of the lovely, paranoid things about a CP war is that the conflict at home would be pursued in large part by freelancers with lots of plausible deniability. The Opposition might just pay fixers to pay fixers to create disruption through freelancers - either the obvious stuff about blow up bridges and sabotage refineries - or more insidious stuff:

A fixer might simply draw up a list of obvious social fault lines - any fault line, class, racial, religious, whatever - in a city and set about breaking them open to cause chaos on the home front. He might not even be aware of who he ultimately works for. A dude comes to him and says "the elf-transhumans have been getting more than their share of the rations through cut-outs" and manipulates him into attacking that community, creating tensions and chaos... all of which strikes at the social fabric of the nation.

What's nice about that is it creates a neat investigative game with lots of smoke and mirrors - the guys carrying out the racially motivated murders don't realise that they're being manipulated by a guy whose been told that doing so will disrupt an enemy fifth column, by another guy working for a dude working for the enemy. The players work their way up the chain and maybe contribute to the chaos themselves - there are so many different factions in the CP world.

Every single major booster-gang and nomad tribe acts as a "nation" within the nation, and suspect. Paranoid security forces will start to view them as fifth columnists, and opposition agents will try to spark those fears to create chaos and try to trigger conflicts inside the enemy state.

====================

I dunno if this is specifically right for your group, but something i've been playing around with for CP military games is the idea of the players as a "counter disruption team", sorta inspired by the Sniper episode in gig 2 of GitS SAC.

The basic idea is that a CP battlefield is pretty fluid and fought to a large extent by drones and irregulars (on both sides!). On any given battlefield you're going to have your forward air/drone controllers, your hackers/riggers, your spotters and "dickers", your snipers (robotic or otherwise), your hidden car bomb factories and your 3d printer stations...

The Counter-Disruption Team would be a small, mobile 4-5 person team with lots of local autonomy of action tasked with finding and destroying those disruptive threats before they can do too much to slow down or divert the main operation. Conveniently, this mission would involve flexibly dealing with lots of different threats in a lots of different environments, which seems good for PCs!

Happy Birthday!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooOOOOOOOOoooo

800meg zip files FTW .

That game description raised some questions for me, but I didn't want to derail this thread so I've started a new one here:

http://vfte.cyberpunk.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=8419

Ricco, the new hotel security chief, called them on their juristically misstep and they replied by putting a bullet in each one of his legs!

(From the Cotton Kingdoms 2047 thread)

I've had an interesting few sessions in my ongoing campaign, in which a player allowed her character to be arrested (entirely unexpectedly, to me at least) by some people who really had no reason to treat her with any kind of respect or dignity at all. Normally, having to spend three sessions dealing with a situation in which one of the players is in prison with little way of communicating with the other players would be problem enough, without wondering about the relationship between PC powerlessness and fun (whatever that is, in game). We negotiated that situation pretty well and had some fun sessions, but I've been thinking a lot about the issues raised there.

And apparently the Cotton Kingdoms crew have had some similar issues with police violence!

So - there are situations in which awful things happen to powerless PCs and those situations have major OOC implications and effects. They get arrested and interrogated or Alabama cops kneecap them or or or or.

It's really been my experience that most players hate it when stuff like that happens. I'm really curious to know how Ricco's player reacted OOC to that event, because I know these things can derail games and destroy gaming groups - afterall, if the game ceases to be fun, there's no point playing it!

There's a few issues here:

One is trust - the Cotton Kingdoms players have played 100s of sessions together and presumably trust each other not to be dicks. My own campaign has a mere 30 sessions behind it, but again, I've taken the time to talk to people about this stuff (because it does come up in virtually any "modern" or "science fiction" genre in which players are criminals or spies or similar).

Another is consent - I know that in my case, the player at most risk from the situation had said right at the beginning of the campaign that she didn't want to find her character in situations in which awful things happened to her and gave her no chance to respond, and that basically determined how I ran those sessions. The whole Lines and Veils idea comes into this, I feel. I do feel that any campaign that's going to cover deeper emotional material than simply kicking in doors and killing non-human archetypes should probably start with a conversation about what people aren't comfortable with (and i'm saying this as someone who tends to run quite "light" games, even in Cyberpunk).

There's some GMing questions about "realism" and "threat" and so on (relating to games, realism means "internally consistent", at least to me).

And there's a thing about "fun" and what that means. I heard a conversation lately about a game called Grey Ranks - all about child soldiers in the failed Warsaw Uprising, which always ends with the emotional and probably physical destruction of the PCs in horrible circumstances - and how it was "compelling" rather than strictly "fun", but I think those are related things.

I'm pretty certain that CP2020 players are more likely than most gaming demographics to have run into situations where awful shit happens to powerless players. I'm curious about what you guys think about the OOC implications of this stuff!

Yeah. Because I don't tend to use military gear in my games anyway - and have settings where there aren't really superpowers any more and no-one can afford giant tank fleets - I haven't really thought about that use (it's what the Cold War designers wanted to use it for, for sure...).

I kinda imagine it as being researched as a drone killer, being applied to long barrelled autocannons and the like to provide long ranged firepower to light units and defend them from Predators, full borgs and helicopters. I imagine an ETC autocannon could coincidentally rip giant holes in light armoured vehicles. You'd see them mounted on the back of fast technicals.

Not that'd i'd use them much in game. Who wants to add up that much damage... If I want a game about tanks shooting each other with ETC cannons Tomorrow's War will do me fine!

Yeah - the question here isn't "what are the most optimal or realistic gun laws" but "what specific atmosphere/power level/culture do I want my game to be about." The gun laws and their enforcement in game should work to fulfill those aims because more than most elements of the setting, they define play from character creation to session to session.

One thing issue specific to the Cyberpunk genre as opposed to "modern" games is what happens to gun laws if effective non-lethal self defence weapons (like the brain scrambler things in the When Gravity Fails sourcebook, or cheap electrolasers in Transhuman Space etc etc) begin to become available to the public. That could have some really radical effects on the gun control laws, varying wildly from setting to setting.

Years ago I read the famous T. Harry Williams biography of Huey Long and got the impression that a Southern landscape of political militias, authoritarian state governments and inbred dynastic families would make a wild Cyberpunk setting, because any of those elements could be made strange by the simple application of some high technology. A modern version of the southern Democratic Bourbon hegemony with (very quiet but effective) transhuman upgrades to the leadership would be a frightening enemy.

I think there's also lots of scope for juxtaposing a desolate, obsolete, almost ancient landscape (because presumably nothing here has been repaired since the 2020s) with the presumably hi-tech forces of the Alabama security state. Drones hovering over Lovecraftian bayou swamps...

From the director of District 9 comes Matt Damon wearing a linear frame!

It looks surprisingly old school cyberpunk, for better or worse! Not even in a literary way but in a game way. I mean, the main character is covered in cyberware which would seriously inhibit his sex life/ability to lie down at all, just like a player character...

There was a conversation about this, but it's buried in one of the IU discussion threads and frankly I don't want to spend the time looking for it. It was literally years ago, at any rate. I seem to remember shooting down the idea back then, for some reason.

I'm opposed to it for a basically irrational dislike of rolling more than 1 dice at once for basic skill rolls, but I do remember there being some rational considerations to bear in mind if you do adopt 2d6 (which would be perfectly reasonable!).

1 ) Because of the maths that Gomiville pointed out, the DV numbers won't work as well as they used to (if you look at the DV scale it's surprisingly carefully calibrated). The difficulty steps are basically designed to open up possibilities to augmented players, so that certain steps simply aren't available to characters without high skills or cybernetics. This will be thrown off a little.

Here, Hound laid out an idea for a 2D10 dice mechanic system. Notice how he changed the DVs to make it work, and how they suddenly look much less obvious and intuitive:

http://vfte.cyberpunk.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=6081&hl=

2 ) Because of the generally higher results (and the possibility of higher results) it emphasises the dice a little more than stats and skill. Not by much, same as above.

I don't personally like it for my own games (or at least I do like the D10), but I suspect it would work OK. I know that Spyke - writer of several supplements - simply took out Crits and so on because he thought they came up too often. That solution sounds far easier than remaking the entire dice mechanic.

When changing rules it's always far better to take something out than put something in, IMO!

EDIT: The older conversation was much shorter than I remembered and begins halfway down page 3 of this thread:

http://vfte.cyberpunk.co.uk/index.php?show...=6612&st=30

If you've got any comments about stuff in that thread i'd suggest quoting it and responding to it here because otherwise it'll get lost in an off-topic, necromantic thread.