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Ultiville
Jan 14, 2005

The law protects no one unless it binds everyone, binds no one unless it protects everyone.

Count Chocula posted:

There's an amazing Discworld book, Going Postal, that somehow does cyberpunk with semaphore towers.

It turns out most humans are not as good at things as Pratchett was.

That said, you could probably do something pretty cyberpunk in Eberron if you wanted.

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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I mean, I love either 'A fantasy world that averted medieval stasis and moved on to other eras while retaining fantasy' or 'Oh poo poo how do we modern or sci-fi characters deal with these terrible demons and sudden influxes of magic' so I get the appeal of that aspect of Shadowrun.

Plus, an RPG with a fairly focused pitch (being corporate espionage agents and mercenaries who engage in a very specific and well-known sort of espionage for hire) goes a long way. Just a bit of a shame about the crazy rules.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 3 hours!
My opinion of Shadowrun's setting is probably more favourable than it should be, because I received it mostly through Nigel D. Findley novels. Let Nigel D. Findley never be forgotten.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I liked the stupid SNES game where I shot a dragon in the face for stealing my memories and being a jerk.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Night10194 posted:

I liked the stupid SNES game where I shot a dragon in the face for stealing my memories and being a jerk.

Me too! Technically, the Genesis game was better in nearly every way, but for some reason the SNES version will always have a place in my heart.

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD


So, Shadowrun in-universe history. There’s a lot, so I’m just going to get right into it. We’re starting off with the legal shenanigans that let mere corporations become Megacorps, so today’s update might be a touch dry.

Shadowrun is an alt-history, branching off ours around the late 80s early 90s. However, the big split happens in in 1999, with what becomes known as the Seretech Decision. On January 8th, the Teamster’s union in New Yorkrejected the final offer given to them by the government and go on strike. Everything shuts down. Most importantly? No fresh food coming into the city.

Now, the supermarkets are still stocked, and the government does it’s best to get things moving again, but tensions start to mount as the strike drags on and out. Three months later, violence has broken out, food riots. The city’s in panic, and somehow, in the confusion, the mob surrounds a truck belonging to Seretech Medical Research. The truck’s hauling hazardous biomaterial, which the armed guards on the truck announce, but the mob doesn’t believe them, or back down. Thinking that the truck must be carrying food, they attack. A running battle leads back to the Seretech research facility, and the security force there opens fire on the crowd. Twenty Seretech security agents die, and two hundred civilians.
Immediately, Seretech is being slammed with criminal negligence charges, lawsuits, on the city, state, and federal level. It goes all the way to the supreme court, where Seretech defends themselves by claiming that if they hadn’t protected the truck, the situation would have been incalculably worse, a plague compounding a starvation-induced riot. The supreme court agrees, upholding the corp’s right to maintain an armed force for protection of its personnel and property.

In effect, corporations now have the right to maintain a private army.

Meanwhile, across the nation in California, the Shiawase Corporation had a problem. They’d built an aluminum production facility, but the operation costs for it had skyrocketed, the electrical bill soaring over five hundred percent in just six months. Seeking a solution, Shiawase approached the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC) for permission to build a small nuclear reactor on their land, enough to power the aluminum plant. Their proposal was immediately denied, nuclear power was a touchy subject, and unless the power plant was providing energy for the community, or being used in research, they didn’t want something so hazardous being constructed. Shiawase fires back that the NRC is overreaching: Their plant fulfills all the safety requirements, provides power enough for their factory, and not only did the NRC’s decision affect the electrical market, but the aluminum market, too. Things get elevated to the supreme court (again) in the year 2000.


Shiawase Corporate Iconography

The NRC were very confident in their ability to win the case: A 1942 decision (Wickard v. Filburn) had established that the government had the right to regulate activities that would have an impact on trade. Shiawase, shockingly, crushed the NRC, Wickard v. Filburn had been primarily about preventing overproduction, and in this case, electricity and aluminum both were failing to meet demand. Shiawase was allowed to build their nuclear plant, what’s more, the regulations that the NRC had imposed on them where put under review. One demand stood out: Local police forces had to be permanently involved in plant security, a rider that had snuck in in an attempt to undermine the Seretech Decision that had been made a year earlier. Disgruntled, the Supreme Court struck down the ruling, and reaffirmed the Seretech Decision: Corporations had the right to employ their own security teams to protect their holdings.

The plant was completed late the same year, amidst a storm of controversy due to the supreme court decision: anti-nuclear activist protests were very common. Terrafirst!, an ecoterrorist organization, sent in a paramilitary strike team armed with a large amount of high explosives and military-grade weapons and armor, with the goal of staging a detonation that would breach the reactor and contaminate the area with nuclear material. The strike team managed to penetrate the containment zone before being found and fatally neutralized by Shiawase security teams. Terrafirst! claimed later that they had been set up, the whole attack staged by Shiawase, but any proof they could offer was destroyed in a bomb blast at their California headquarters

Shiawase and the NRC headed back to court, the NRC claiming that the attack proved criminal negligence, Shiawase claiming that not only could their security team have defended against an attacking force five times the size of the Terrafirst! ecoterrorists, but it was NRC regulations that had forced them to build the power plant outside the main aluminum factory compound in the first place, as well as a host of other minor security holes opened up by the regulations.

The Shiawase lawyers made a grand stand before the courts: The laws, they claimed, were preventing the adequate level of security for a nuclear plant. They cited precedent that when a regulation or a law resulted in a threat to security, health, morals or the welfare of the people, the government should no longer retain such permission. Shiawase demanded one of two things: Either that all nuclear reactors in the united states be shut down, as they were not being properly protected, or that they give their owners complete freedom to fulfill the security requirements. This was the first time the notion of corporate extraterritoriality would be introduced: The idea that law would be enforced differently on corporate soil.

The courts found in favor of Shiawase. In addition to nuclear power plants, chemicals, waste processing, armaments and services related to national security, water and food supplies, and hospitals were included in the ruling, all falling under the banner of security, health, morals and welfare. The government no longer had any say in the running of those industries, as long as the product remained the same, working hours, security procedures and measures, and use of equipment or process were now free of any sort of regulations. Corporate sovereignty on their own land was assured.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
So presumably int his alternate universe the supreme court is staffed entirely by adorable dogs like in John Oliver's deepest fantasies?

Also Terrafirst! sounds like goddamn morons. "We'll prove that nuclear reactors are unsafe by explosively making a nuclear reactor unsafe!"

Kurieg fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Feb 6, 2017

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD
Well, again: They claim they didn't do it, and that they have proof, it's just that the proof exploded.


The bombing of Terrafirst! headquarters is considered by in-universe historians to probably be the first Shadowrun, though nobody can prove it.

AnEdgelord
Dec 12, 2016

Kurieg posted:

So presumably int his alternate universe the supreme court is staffed entirely by adorable dogs like in John Oliver's deepest fantasies?

Also Terrafirst! sounds like goddamn morons. "We'll prove that nuclear reactors are unsafe by explosively making a nuclear reactor unsafe!"

Well they only seem like idiots if one doesn't entertain the entirely plausible (and mentioned in the background) scenario that they were convenient fall guys for Shiawase

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Yeah, still, lots of bullshit happened in the backstory of shadowrun to ensure that Corporations have ludicrous amounts of power. "Let's transport this horrifically virulent hazardous waste through a riot, yes, this is a good idea."

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Kurieg posted:

Yeah, still, lots of bullshit happened in the backstory of shadowrun to ensure that Corporations have ludicrous amounts of power. "Let's transport this horrifically virulent hazardous waste through a riot, yes, this is a good idea."

This is before the 2012 supernatural-turns-real thing, right? You'd figure that would cause all the chaos needed for corporate states to establish themselves.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Shadowrun appears to exist in an alternate reality where everything runs off of a simple function
Is Dunkelhaizneifnguaneirughwhatever around? If so, everything works out for the best, if not then everything is terrible forever.

Meaning there's like 3 months where the world was A-ok.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Night10194 posted:

I mean, I love either 'A fantasy world that averted medieval stasis and moved on to other eras while retaining fantasy' or 'Oh poo poo how do we modern or sci-fi characters deal with these terrible demons and sudden influxes of magic' so I get the appeal of that aspect of Shadowrun.

Plus, an RPG with a fairly focused pitch (being corporate espionage agents and mercenaries who engage in a very specific and well-known sort of espionage for hire) goes a long way. Just a bit of a shame about the crazy rules.

Although it has its problems, especially for the first two seasons, that's a big part of why I like the Legend of Korra.

The setting advances to roughly the twenties while maintaining all the supernatural stuff from earlier and adapting it to the new era. It's neat.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


To get the Shadowrun setting, you have to accept the fact that literally everyone in the backstory and almost everyone in the current time is stupid, corrupt, evil, or some combination of the three.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Alien Rope Burn posted:

In general in CP2020 you're usually running around as troubleshooters, it's presumed, but it doesn't have a focused design, it's true. A lot of the roles lead themselves to specific setups - like, corporate, rockerboy, or media work as the center of a campaign, but not as much as a random element thrown in.

Cyberpunk depends on the game being run. Some parties are going to be more diverse than others. I believe in many of the adventures as written, they had a heavier emphasis on the troubleshooter or street mercenary gameplay. Looking at the sample characters in Hardwired sourcebook for their campaign, the party consists of a Private Investigator, a Pirate (Nomad) character, two Solos, and a Crystaljock (a type of hacker). In the Arasaka-centered adventure in the first corpbook, it's recommended that the group have two Solos, a Tech with security skills, and a Netrunner. The Lazarus Group (a private military corporation) adventure in Corpbook II says about group composition that "it might seem a bit limited to have all the characters be Solos, but this is a military organization and a military operation" and only recommends them have a certain skill set, while the Militech adventure in the same book is bit more diverse since the characters are trying to get some Nomads off the land that will be used for a test run, so the group is recommend to be comprised of Corporates, Solos, and Techs employed directly by Militech. Meanwhile, you have the IEC adventure and the adventures out of the third Corpbook which are largely opened to everyone as long as they have good eyes and decent combat skills.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Jodorowsky is amazingly stupid, but also amazingly captivated by the idea that he's a genius, which means that he puts all of his creativity and energy into his remarkably dumb ideas. The end result is always something that's completely retarded, but also completely original, because no one else would put that much energy into idiocy.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Night10194 posted:

I mean, I love either 'A fantasy world that averted medieval stasis and moved on to other eras while retaining fantasy' or 'Oh poo poo how do we modern or sci-fi characters deal with these terrible demons and sudden influxes of magic' so I get the appeal of that aspect of Shadowrun.

Plus, an RPG with a fairly focused pitch (being corporate espionage agents and mercenaries who engage in a very specific and well-known sort of espionage for hire) goes a long way. Just a bit of a shame about the crazy rules.
I think the Iron Kingdoms setting manages to be entering an early-modern era kind of deal while clearly being rooted in a D&D-ish environment. The details are different of course.

My main experience with Shadowrun is having incredibly tedious attempts to join con games which were insanely boring and did not actually even attempt to teach the rules, or whatever, because they were all about arguing about what kind of bullets to put in your super smart gun. And it's like, that's cool? I guess?

As for other cyberpunk game settings, I wonder where and how the whole "humanity" mechanic ended up evolving, because that's this weird tone shift that seems to either be present or absent in the works. By this I mean the idea of you literally losing your soul/moral compass as you aug up.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Feb 6, 2017

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Nessus posted:

As for other cyberpunk game settings, I wonder where and how the whole "humanity" mechanic ended up evolving, because that's this weird tone shift that seems to either be present or absent in the works. By this I mean the idea of you literally losing your soul/moral compass as you aug up.
Cyberpunk 2020 was the big progenitor of it in a mechanical sense. Lots of works before it have analyzed the connection between the machine and the meat and the soul, sure, but Cyberpunk 2020 was one of the big movers and shakers in the cyberpunk creative scene. So where'd it come from? Simple.

Game balance and player restraint.

The main reason cyberpsychosis exists is game balance, pure and simple. I made a joke a while back about how Cyberpunk 2020 is a game where you play someone horrendously ugly and slow with the compassion of a saint getting transformed into a beautiful Terminator with zero personality but it's true. The idea behind it in 2020 is that the more crude and inhuman the augmentations, the more of a disassociation there was between the owner and the aug. It's really easy to become Gunsforhands Jones, Professional Solo but it limits your ability to get more upgrades and in that nature it inhibits your character progression. If you could just become a walking pile of guns and knives with all the stat bonuses, you bet your rear end the players would just jump on that. The use of Empathy as a Humanity stat was instituted to prevent the game from just becoming Tetsuo: The Iron Man from the word go, requiring the players to have to be choosy, have to spend extra money on sleeker, better tech that interfaced more organically with the owner. Instead of cutting your head off and putting your brain in a TV, you could get delicate nodes plugged into your meat for more money but less Humanity loss and more future options down the line to interface with it.

However. There is a fine line between providing restraints and guidelines and telling the players what they can or can't do. Because if you tell players they can't do something, hoo buddy. Problem was 2020 hewed more on the line of "you can't do that" more than it provided a framework of restraints plus it engaged in a pretty cardinal design sin that I'm not a fan of: it told players how to behave and how their characters felt. I personally hate that poo poo and I'm not the only one. Henceforth it became common to munchkin as much Empathy as you could onto your character along with as much Reflexes because they were the only two important stats. Everything else could be obtained with chrome, augs and implants. You need the Empathy to become a Terminator but you need the Reflexes to carry your combat abilities up until you start outright becoming a death god thanks to the implants stacking. Everything else was ultimately expendable and irrelevant and replaced with technology by players who were playing the game to Win, not to tell stories or engage with the world.

Shadowrun did this to a certain extent until it very wisely backed off and made cyberpsychosis an optional thing that could happen but that was only if you were predisposed to mental issues in later editions. Shadowrun instead decided to open the gates more to different types of tech, different grades of implants, things that gave you bonuses to getting certain types of augs and so on and so forth. It's no less crunchy but the thing is, it doesn't tell you what your character feels and the only limitation is "you can't use magic well and hit 0 essence and you die". The price is still a factor, the dings it does to your Essence is still a factor (because unlike 2020, Essence doesn't come back unless you can afford it) but you also have stricter yet looser restrictions by giving you a hard wall you can go up against.

Now, here's where things get interesting. Essence doesn't exist at all in the Shadowrun SNES game. You can get chromed to hell and back but still sling spells like the best of them. Why? Well a videogame is a fundamentally different beast from a TTRPG and it really doesn't need the same restrictions. You play a videogame to beat it. Any attempts to tell you how your character feels or acts just doesn't work most of the time. It's expected you're going to brush and bristle against the rules to do what you can to win, so the limits of the TTRPG don't apply. They were only put in place as an attempt to keep players from getting too powerful and running roughshod over GMs and in the end all they did was prove to be kind of arbitrary bullshit that the players decided to gently caress with anyway.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




Kurieg posted:

So presumably int his alternate universe the supreme court is staffed entirely by adorable dogs like in John Oliver's deepest fantasies?

Also Terrafirst! sounds like goddamn morons. "We'll prove that nuclear reactors are unsafe by explosively making a nuclear reactor unsafe!"

As my SR5 GM put it on Skype this week as he was pulling together lore for the SR: Vladivostok campaign he's going to run for us:

quote:

Man reading SR history is like reading a disabled child's view on geopolitics

PurpleXVI posted:

Jodorowsky is amazingly stupid, but also amazingly captivated by the idea that he's a genius, which means that he puts all of his creativity and energy into his remarkably dumb ideas. The end result is always something that's completely retarded, but also completely original, because no one else would put that much energy into idiocy.

I saw that documentary a month ago or something and its both an interesting but also incredibly self masturbatory at the same time. As fascination as the descent into madness was it became tiring after a while to hear everybody jerk off over it constantly with barely any measure of critique.
Also made the mistake of seeing it without subtitles. :doh:

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Cooked Auto posted:

As my SR5 GM put it on Skype this week as he was pulling together lore for the SR: Vladivostok campaign he's going to run for us:
This is true for most RPG settings which involve significant alternate histories, at least in my experience. The best ones I can think of were in GURPS worldbooks and were in several cases, I think, informed by either "We're avoiding these frequent tropes" or "This is explicitly a semi-plausible environment in our alternate Earths setting for HIGH VIKING ADVENTURE or GLOBAL WUXIA DRAMA."

The best of these was of course the space opera/optimist future world with multiple interstellar colonies and oh just recently the first meaningful war in centuries, which happened to be the Muslim-dominant one.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
Another issue with CP2020 later on is that they decided to introduce full cyborgs like in rad anime, but by the rules as presented up to that point, that'd be a quick route to go boomer cyberpsychosis. So they added therapy you could get to reduce humanity costs, which meant you could reduce the old humanity costs to something trivial (like, one third or one fourth) and that completely shifted the cost of cyberware from humanity to money for those that could pay for it.

The Sin of Onan
Oct 11, 2012

And below,
watched by eyes of steel
we dreamt
So I know how much this thread likes Beast: the Primordial. The PDF Beast addon for Mortal Remains, a completely different book in the Hunter line that's basically about how Hunters deal with the minor splats of the World of Darkness, just dropped. It is called Hunter: Tooth and Nail. It's pretty short and contains a lot of weird and dumb stuff, so I was thinking I'd do my first F&F on it. Any objections? I should probably say that I'm not a game designer, so I probably won't be able to do mechanical critique half as well as a lot of you.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
There were two separate therapy rules, too, IIRC- the one for the full borgs, and then one introduced in the Euro sourcebook trivialized it even more: Roll the humanity loss from the original implant again, subtract new value from old and your new value is the difference. (Which could lead to 0 loss.)

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Halloween Jack posted:

As dumb as the premise is, they did some interesting things with it, and AFAIK didn't try to hew too closely to Tolkienesque stereotypes. Like there's a secretive and exclusive elven ethno-state, but no equivalent for orks and trolls who often comprise an inner-city underclass.
And also dwarves are there.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Ugh, you all had a big cyberpunk RPG discussion while I was asleep and I missed it. :(

The Sin of Onan posted:

So I know how much this thread likes Beast: the Primordial. The PDF Beast addon for Mortal Remains, a completely different book in the Hunter line that's basically about how Hunters deal with the minor splats of the World of Darkness, just dropped. It is called Hunter: Tooth and Nail. It's pretty short and contains a lot of weird and dumb stuff, so I was thinking I'd do my first F&F on it. Any objections? I should probably say that I'm not a game designer, so I probably won't be able to do mechanical critique half as well as a lot of you.

:justpost:

You do know that most of us aren't designers, right? At least, I don't think most of us are. I know I'm not, but that doesn't stop me from pointing out bad mechanics or fluff. You don't have to be a chef to know when the food tastes bad. ;)

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

I'm the incredibly cyberpunk wood frame windows :allears:

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Another issue with CP2020 later on is that they decided to introduce full cyborgs like in rad anime, but by the rules as presented up to that point, that'd be a quick route to go boomer cyberpsychosis. So they added therapy you could get to reduce humanity costs, which meant you could reduce the old humanity costs to something trivial (like, one third or one fourth) and that completely shifted the cost of cyberware from humanity to money for those that could pay for it.

And then in 3.0, they either had stuff that supplanted cyberware like Edgerunner gear or had full-conversion bodies that had all the therapy paid beforehand by belong to Corpore Metal society, so humanity cost, while still there if you wanted to use cyberware (but there was little need to), was superfluous.

I know Mike Pondsmith had some ideas regarding Corpore Metal that never showed up in the published stuff. Supposedly, super-cyberpsychotic, corp war criminal Adam Smasher was supposed to return from getting a nuke blown-up underneath him in Corp War: Stormfront, but, now because he was in Corpore Metal and around other full-conversion cyborgs and in a more suitable cyberbody, he had mellowed out considerably.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

So should I bring up CyberGeneration, or not, or...

Serf
May 5, 2011


Cyberpsychosis always struck me as a really dumb idea, but I understand that it has to exist as a game balance mechanic. At least Shadowrun has a good in-universe reason for why you can't get too cybered up.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 3 hours!
I recently started reading and watching the Ghost in the Shell manga and Stand Alone Complex anime. Besides the depth of the political aspect, I was surprised at the importance of infowarfare to the plot and the characters' tactics. Shadowrun really doesn't handle that well, and AFAIK neither does CP2020.

It's funny. I grew up hearing that CP2020 wasn't true cyberpunk because it wasn't properly Gibsonian, it was based on GitS and Bubble Gum Crisis and other animes with lotsa guns. But those anime are actually pretty smart. (And CP2020 has an official supplement for When Gravity Fails for gently caress's sake.)

That Old Tree posted:

Me too! Technically, the Genesis game was better in nearly every way, but for some reason the SNES version will always have a place in my heart.
The Genesis one has arguably poorer graphics and a sandboxy structure that leaves you at loose ends a lot of the time, with a central plot that a lot of people never get around to playing. The SNES game is simultaneously more and less faithful to the source material, with a focused linear plot (that lets you be a mage and a decker and a street samurai rolled into one).

Kurieg posted:

Yeah, still, lots of bullshit happened in the backstory of shadowrun to ensure that Corporations have ludicrous amounts of power. "Let's transport this horrifically virulent hazardous waste through a riot, yes, this is a good idea."

wiegieman posted:

To get the Shadowrun setting, you have to accept the fact that literally everyone in the backstory and almost everyone in the current time is stupid, corrupt, evil, or some combination of the three.
I live in the United States in the year 2017, I don't know what you're complaining about.

Zereth posted:

And also dwarves are there.
Yeah, dwarves are just kinda there.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
I suppose one could try using a 'space' attribute on cyberwear, and/or power consumption, which simply places a physical rather than mental or metaphysical limit on how much cyber you can have. Obviously players would aim for becoming larger than human, literal tank people--but that would limit the capacity to do covert shadow running, and also the power consumption thing would have to become an issue.

There's also certain degrees of legality ('must look humanish and fit through doors') and while players would totally try to find ways around that, it lets the GM gate 'the good stuff' for a while as a goal to achieve.

I never read the GitS manga but SAC was great, a beautiful, smartly-written, incredibly expensive failure. I'm told they took a lot of the author's kinky nonsense out of the anime, though Major Kusanagi still had to wear combat garters. Speaking of literal tank people, the episode about the disabled engineer who put himself into an experimental military tank was pretty amazing and an example of where 'runner' gear just fails against real military hardware.

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

As others have observed, CP 2020 required having a GM that had an idea of what kind of campaign he was going to run. Classes like Cop or Nomad are basically campaign-dependent, because if the campaign wasn't "you are members of the PD" or "you belong to a Nomad gang" then you were playing a worse Solo that maybe had a narrative benny if the GM was generous. Then you had Rockerboys and Media, which basically demand that a campaign be centered around them or otherwise be left with nothing to do.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

Halloween Jack posted:

My opinion of Shadowrun's setting is probably more favourable than it should be, because I received it mostly through Nigel D. Findley novels. Let Nigel D. Findley never be forgotten.

2XS is probably the best RPG tie in novel ever written.

Edit:
The Essence system in SR is miles better than the Empathy system in CP. Then SR had to add the Stress system and god did that that get annoying fast. Of the two I prefer Shadowrun by far because it is all eeeevil corp shenanigans and you're basically playing a crook or a merc trying to survive in this insane hellhole of a future and Oh poo poo! Is that a hellhound chewing on my foot!?

Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Feb 6, 2017

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Rifts World Book 8: Japan Part 8: Lonely grizzled wanderers looking to challenge warlord please use rear door



Ronin are masterless samurai. These only occur when a daimyo is slain, we are told, since the new daimyo won’t hire any of the old guy’s guys and nobody else wants a samurai who let his boss die so they go rogue until they maybe get lucky and overcome discrimination against the unemployed to find a new home. Also, ronin occasionally quit for various reasons, the ole ‘can’t obey a tyrant’ being the most popular. Now, we were told earlier that the New Empire has eight total daimyo. So like, killing one would be a big deal and put a substantial part of their armed forces out of work. If that happens at all often there must be a lot of ronin around.


lone wolves for nixon

Sometimes they get work as mercenaries to do things the daimyo don’t want to admit to doing but need somebody to do anyway, and other principalities in the region care a lot less about all of this crap so they might seek their fortune elsewhere.

Alignment-wise they discard their high principles once they get laid off apparently as the majority are unprincipled, anarchist or evil. They get the same skills as the true-sams but have a 50% chance of being able to gain new technological skills as they loosen their anti-tech stance. They basically get all the stuff that the regular samurai get, including the groovy swords, but they have no steady income or shelter and they tend to not like guns much even after stepping out of their comfort zone.

All in all they aren’t at too great a disadvantage--they lack the social support an employed samurai would have but they aren’t mechanically penalized in any significant way.

Alien Rope Burn: I have to say I legit like the ronin art probably the most of any art piece in the book, because it’s one of the few that looks like a post-apocalypse survivor character. While it makes some sense with the premise, the fact that Japan is all just remarkably clean feudal citizens and cyberpunk guys is relatively dull visually. It doesn’t hurt that it’s one of a few pieces in the book by “rk” Post, a great artist probably best known for his work on Planescape and Magic: the Gathering.

The Mystic Ninja is next up.

Rifts Japan posted:


In medieval Japan, before the Great Cataclysm, the ninja clans came into being as a direct response to the military society of the shogun and the samurai.



Yes, the ninja, the magical People’s avenger. :words: continue about how the samurai of old existed as much to keep the peasants in line as anything (with their principled alignments) and the ninja were peasants who developed combat skills that could be hidden under the noses of their sworded masters. The truth is that historically we know very, very little about actual ‘ninja’ but some of them at least were samurai-class and they more or less faded from existence once the Sengoku era ended (1603) leaving few traces behind. The mythological history is more fun for an RPG however, so we’ll go with that, and here we have another pre-rifts mystical tradition that Japan has carefully preserved when all other nations somehow lost their occult heritage.

Rifts ninja are split into the genin-chunin-jonin hierarchy and care only about completing their mission--killing is not required, but certainly not forbidden as long as it is in line with the work. Being captured does not require suicide unless the mission would otherwise be fully compromised; most ninja have false identities and move freely among the eta and others who work below polite society’s radar. The game also advises allowing a ninja player to conceal their actual OCC from the rest of the group and pretend to be a monk or ronin or something, party secrets always work well right. Or they can be openly ninjish, being all black-clad and face covered. I like that second one better because it’s so ridiculous--’hey weren’t there seven of you?’ ‘look in the corner’ ‘oh, right, i should move that gardenia’. Of course, either way the ninja player is going to have a secret mission that might cause party conflict. :sigh: Failing to do their mission means ninja vengeance, which is surprisingly harsher than samurai get for going ronin--the samurai just gets walking papers, the ninja gets hunted down.


see? intra-party conflict

In return for accepting the shuriken, ninja get some powers of course. They can temporarily convert themselves to mega-damage, though their punches and kicks still do SDC. Three minutes per level, costs 35 PPE. They...also get to choose powers from the Art of Stealth every three levels. These are explained at the end of the book. The Art of Escape allows the ninja PC to learn self-dislocation of joints to squeeze into and out of things they have no business doing, plus knowing about knot-tying like good ninja scouts, and concealing small things. In 1D4 rounds they can escape from handcuffs, locked chains, ropes, or zipties automatically with no roll. Straightjackets and such take 1D4 rounds and a successful skill roll starting from 46%. This art also lets characters escape melee holds in one action and joint locks in a full round.

Mystic ninja are also psionic because of course they are. They get bio-regeneration and induce sleep, and gets one power from the physical category per level starting from 2, plus psi-sword at level 6. It’s not clear from the text if it starts out at full level 6 damage or not, I’d assume yes.

Since samurai get the way of the horse and the bow, the ninja get their own version. Their riding skill is identical, but they use a special shortbow and lose their bonuses to strike and halve rate of fire when shooting while moving or off-balance, they can’t even roll under skill like the samurai to keep it. They get some dodging, -3 to arrows and -6 to bullets and lasers. They shoot arrows a bit more slowly, two at level one and a more stately progression after that.

They also get two false identities they can assume, and it doesn’t specify which nation these are in--a lot of the assumptions here seem to suggest the ninja would be operating in the New Empire exclusively but I don’t see why they would, the government would want them going after enemies. They start out with 1D4x10+PE in PPE, which has a decent chance of leaving them without enough to do their mega-damage transform at first level and they’re specifically barred from using ley lines and other methods for bonus energy which the samurai are not.

Of course, since samurai get their fancy arts, ninja need some of that action and so we get tai-jutsu. This adds some bonuses to attributes, and gives hand-to-hand attacks that do some minimal damage, SDC of course. Death blow! makes a return, and the stat raises are comparable to the samurai bonii and give more impact to gaining levels than usual for martial characters. Of course only Asian fighters can have such power.



For the rest of CG stuff, ninja can be of any alignment, PP of 14 or higher is required which severely limits the non-cheaters who can qualify for this class, and it offers a fairly wide selection of skills--including the forbidden tech/medical/science skills that the New Empire is supposed to reject, though they “stick to ancient weapons” because magical ninja honor I guess.

They get rubber-soled tabi boots though, two pairs. Technology!! Also a bunch of disguises (I’m envisioning a selection of hilarious mustaches, even for the women), one (1) set of nondescript peasantish clothing, and a black or camo-colored ninja outfit. Weapons-wise they get 12 shuriken, two ancient weapons, a vibro-blade and 1D4 ‘Ninja emergency kits’ to be detailed later. The mystic ninja is flexible enough to use technology to some degree though they don’t rely on it heavily--it would start sticking out. Like, for instance, rubber-soled shoes. 2D6x100 starting credits means they won’t be loading up on too many hi-tech toys to start with.

Now we get an extended section on ninja equipment. This is just a listing of mundane versions of all the stuff ninja are supposed to get in their semi-plausible historical versions. Uniform, ‘emergency kits’ with smoke bombs and survival stuff, hang glider, climbing claws and spikes, still more heavily specialized climbing tools, caltrops. Most notable is the mundane eggshell bomb--save vs non-lethal poison (16 or higher) or be at -6 for an unspecified duration. A lot of creatures and people in armor will be immune to this, but not the samurai who are specifically not in a sealed suit. At 35 credits, you can just chuck these things around pretty freely.

Ninja gimmick clothing gets its own special section to tell us about how they can have concealed SDC armor, concealed pockets, concealed tools, expanding belts, fake stage blood packs (for whatever reason), reversible clothes, and shoe bomb compartments. This looks like a reprint from Ninjas & Superspies but it’s been too long for me to say for sure.

The ninja couldn’t stand up to the samurai in a fair fight and that seems as it should be. Given the psychic and magical powers at work in the world, I’m not sure their stealth abilities are all they’re cracked up to be if they’re just minor conversions of N&S material, and they probably are. With the suggestion of fermenting conflict with the ninja’s secret mission and the tedium that is having to run separate stealth missions for one player, I can’t recommend people play these. As a flavor element they were unavoidable.

Alien Rope Burn: Some are and some aren’t. Thankfully, it’s not a conversion of the ninja class in Ninjas & Superspies, which hilariously nerfed them into the Earth’s mantle in the revised edition. For example, they don’t get Prowl (i.e. stealth) automatically, and can only take it as a secondary skill with no bonuses! So in case you were wondering, the superspies win.

So we have samurai, ninja and ronin--three of the most recognizable stereotypes down. The ronin comes closest to not being essentialized mythologized crap and still gets the major combat stuff of the samurai, so it’s kind of the best of the bunch.

Next we’ll get into even more wildly ahistorical classes!

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 3 hours!

SirPhoebos posted:

As others have observed, CP 2020 required having a GM that had an idea of what kind of campaign he was going to run. Classes like Cop or Nomad are basically campaign-dependent, because if the campaign wasn't "you are members of the PD" or "you belong to a Nomad gang" then you were playing a worse Solo that maybe had a narrative benny if the GM was generous. Then you had Rockerboys and Media, which basically demand that a campaign be centered around them or otherwise be left with nothing to do.
CP2020's classes seem like they would be a good fit for some of the rules-lite, narrative cyberpunk games I've seen come out in the past few years--done in a style where the characters are rarely or never "on a run" together, and a system that doesn't keep track of things like combat rounds.The PCs are some kind of power clique, so the Media and Rockerboy are doing propaganda ops, the Cop and Nomad are making the right grassroots connections and digging up information, the Corporate and Fixer are getting the team the poo poo they need, and only the Netrunner and Solo are actually infiltrating places and killing people. poo poo, you could do it in John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

occamsnailfile posted:

They get rubber-soled tabi boots though, two pairs. Technology!! Also a bunch of disguises (I’m envisioning a selection of hilarious mustaches, even for the women), one (1) set of nondescript peasantish clothing, and a black or camo-colored ninja outfit. Weapons-wise they get 12 shuriken, two ancient weapons, a vibro-blade and 1D4 ‘Ninja emergency kits’ to be detailed later. The mystic ninja is flexible enough to use technology to some degree though they don’t rely on it heavily--it would start sticking out. Like, for instance, rubber-soled shoes. 2D6x100 starting credits means they won’t be loading up on too many hi-tech toys to start with.
I don't know why but I can't stop laughing at the whole idea of the standard-issue Ninja Gear Kit.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Evil Mastermind posted:

I don't know why but I can't stop laughing at the whole idea of the standard-issue Ninja Gear Kit.

A long time ago in a silly-ish superheroes game we had an antagonist group called the Exploding Dragon clan. They exploded when defeated, see. The way their training went, they were allowed to create an Amazon wishlist full of ninja stuff and when they graduated they could order it and don their official Exploding Dragon (TM) kit.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It feels like rather than balancing out the fact that cybernetics give meaningful gameplay advantages a game would be better off assuming the protagonists have a baseline of powerful cybernetics or fully prosthetic bodies, balancing the various specialties they could have with their hardware against one another, and then leaving the explorations of the deep disconnect between sense of self and artificial body, the commodification of an agent's actual physical form, and other cyberpunk themes to the plot rather than directly enforcing them with soul-loss.

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Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Night10194 posted:

It feels like rather than balancing out the fact that cybernetics give meaningful gameplay advantages a game would be better off assuming the protagonists have a baseline of powerful cybernetics or fully prosthetic bodies, balancing the various specialties they could have with their hardware against one another, and then leaving the explorations of the deep disconnect between sense of self and artificial body, the commodification of an agent's actual physical form, and other cyberpunk themes to the plot rather than directly enforcing them with soul-loss.

So.... Ghost in the Shell?

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