Cyberpunk Japan

And this is why this archetype tends to produce insufferable shits.

By having fun, not being an edgelord (though that can work for the kid from the poorer areas with a rig built from scratch who's got deep in with crime at a young age) and by keeping the kid not too worldly outside their area of expertise, but not a useless idiot.

Also by having the best console.

It could work so many ways I could be here for an hour describing all the ones that come to mind.

I don't because it's a lewdgame and I wouldn't allow a character that young.

Just make a standard issue child prodigy. John Connor was 10 in Terminator 2 and no-one minded that.
I'll be honest, I'd prefer to do a child mage if this was shadowrun. I just love the idea of some dweeb who is going through wizard puberty while simultaneously going through real puberty.

If we're talking Japan, you don't have to worry. Gun laws there are absurdly strict, so as long as you aren't going up against the yaks or the government, you shouldn't have to worry.
I think a wannabe edgelord could be kinda fun. The only thing more hilarious than someone with a fedora and trench coat is someone with a fedora, trench coat, and acne.

user, please. It's cyberpunk. It's a trench coat, cyber goggles and a katana. Depending on the teenager, they could also be a chuuni, which means fingerless gloves, an eyepatch, a wig and lots of sperging about their secret magical powers and the secret organization that wants to hunt them down (which may happen less or more if they have actual secret psychic powers and an actual secret organization trying to hunt them down).

To the guy who posted the GURPS Shadowrun conversion at the end of the previous thread:
A lot of the point costs on that are wrong, and a lot of things are statted very oddly (Elves are vegetarians?)

The kid is one of those annoying retro people. He wants to look like someone from an old noir film.
He also practices tap dancing because historical records weren't very clear as to where noir ended and where old hollywood musicals began.

A: this isn't shadowrun general
B: not him, but there's been some flip floping on that in Shadowrun. I don't think they're vegetarians now, but they deffo used to be.

Shit, I /JUST/ noticed that. I feel real stupid right now, sorry about that.

>Good luck explaining a fucking GUNSHOT WOUND to the nurse.
Dystopian future. Gunshot wound? Back of the queue.

>"I... fell off my bike?"

This is Cyberpunk. Advances in 3d printing have made gun control laws unenforceable. Also the Megacorps have a nasty habit of using the Black Market as a dumping ground for overstock military hardware they can't get rid of any other way.

>3d printing
>Cyberpunk
I don't think so

You say "viable" but if the teen hacker is a genius without a fault, then a lot of interesting complications get washed out. Not saying he can't be a genius (obviously is if he's doing the hacking and such). Just saying complications ought to be thrown in.

.I'm not saying a session has to be devoted to how Takeshi-kun takes his mock-up college entrance exams, but if the archetype is all about juggling a two-face "normal" school life and a teen cyberpunk criminal lifestyle, it feels a bit drab if you aren't actually juggling half of the load. Background should be relevant, and all.

Sleeping in class all the time and getting high marks is also sure to draw the suspicion of the teachers, too.

Teachers in Japan are also the student counselors and are given a lot of responsibility over their homeroom students. Tardy to school? Have to go to the teacher's room and get the teacher's stamp on your attendance slip - and a scolding. Sleeping in class? The other teachers will talk to the homeroom teacher about their concerns and that teacher's going to bring it up with the student and parents. Maybe the homeroom teacher's a real bro - or maybe he's one of the other party members, who recruited the student in the first place?

This is all making me really want to try this set-up. Going to have to look up the systems in the OP.

A: garage guns exist. The fact that your tools are way more expensive than a hacksaw and a drill doesn't make yours any different.
B: Since when was 3d printing cyberpunk? Name one cyberpunk setting that uses it! And no, not the Peripheral, that's a novel, not a setting.

>Insufferable
You've been listening to the Arcology podcast haven't you?

Not even that, /dev/grrl is bad enough that I've seriously considered making a run about hunting down and killing her entire team.

>Some of you are okay, don't go to NeoNet tomorrow.

I FUCKING HATE THAT ARM GOD DAMNIT

> Name one cyberpunk setting that uses it!
Interface Zero

>Interface Zero
>Cyberpunk
But it's not

Cyberpunk 2020 doesn't have 3d printing, but in the Hardwired supplement, there are auto-lathes that can make guns and machinery pieces from downloaded blueprints. All you need is the raw materials.

Making guns isn't that difficult. There are gunsmiths making fake Colt 1911 in the jungles of the Philippines and fake AK's in the mountains of Pakistan using primitive tools. In my opinion, the main difficulty will be to get ammunition for the said guns. You can surely make lead bullets at home, but they completely suck against modern body armor and will foul guns barrels very quickly. Making effective AP rounds requires heavy machinery to make the projectile and the copper jacket. Also, if guns are banned so will ammo. Where will you get the casings, the primers, the powder? Even with caseless ammunition there is a high chance that the chemical components needed to make the propellant will be forbidden. In that sense, I think that making home made laser weapons would maybe be easier than making firearms in a cyberpunk/sci-fi setting with strict gun control.

Even the yakuza doesn't use a lot of guns because of draconic punishments that go with gun crimes. Guns are mostly kept as status symbol and only used as last ditch or during high-profile assassinations. Most daily conflicts are solved using hand-to-hand combat.

I ran a kid hacker in a supers game. He woukd fight crime from about 4 pm until 10 at night by hacking into warbots, controlled by one of the big bads. The rest of the party started to catch on... things like "jimmy?! Take out the trash right now!"..."did you do your homework?" ..." go play outside, all you ever do is play on your computer." And other such random things being said by the robots.

I tried, but party was too edgy for it to work out.

Simplest would probably be a all-teenager party, but clearly only some archetypes are even thinkable as a side job for an highschooler.

Still, a nomad, a racketeer, a netrunner, maybe a "rocker" wannabe, it's possible in classic cyberpunk if you don't want to have the usual fare of cinematic 80's violence.

Meh. It's cyberpunk. They probably do with guns what they did in Akira with bikes, at they very least.

Unless you want Japan to be corporation 1984 with the corps committing all violence.

No one said the little bastard had to be a flawless paragon of human virtue. Even without getting teachers' interference involved, this kid is going to have problems making friends, and not just because people who are that smart at that impressionable an age can have problems relating to their peers. How do you tell your only friend that no, they can't use your house for the study group this weekend because it's maintenance day and your dad is going to be breaking down, cleaning and reassembling guns all day? Or that you can't stand the latest hot idol unit because they represent the corporate overlords wielding the power of mass media to brainwash the populace into compliance? From the perspective of their peers, this kid is destined to be viewed as a social retard who just happens to get good grades. But making that work is a contract between the GM and the player.

His name is Yojiro Yakusoba. He's obviously a shaman, because being an at home decker is boring and too easy. He's probably a kid of a family of shrine priests, that gives him a neat flavor and explanation to his shamanistic powers.

Youth is purity but also rebellion, and playing off this probably gives a richer, more believable character. He's going to be a good kid on a bad path. Something happened in his path that soured his relationship to society. His family lost their temple and his onee-san goblinized and got discriminated until she committed suicide out of shame (seems like a pretty japanese thing to do). These two happenings made his family lose their roots. His mother is clinically depressed and lives in some sort of nursery home while his dad is a raging alcoholic during the evenings. This gives him ample opportunity to be a runner without going for a cliche orphan background.

As a runner he is naive and goes for causes he feels are "just". He'll likely target people discriminate against goblinoids and just generally being a cool warrior of justice. At the same time his naivety will trip him off (leaving witnesses, hesitating to pull the trigger, etc).

He also has to juggle his school life, where he's in constant trouble with teachers, class reps and upperclassmen because of his terrible grades, tendency to sleep during classes and his "wrong attitude" (hard to stay respectful to "normies" when you are a runner. Remember he can't overtly use his powers to fix these troubles!).

He'll also attract "love interests" who try to "fix him". These are actually trouble magnets though, since they might accidentally out him or in other ways try to hinder his raison d'etre as a runner.

Based on all this, his personality is probably going to be mix of humbleness, naivete, kindness and childish stubbornness. Once he has tasted a mix of success and defeat, he'll probably mature into a person with a very strong willpower and center of balance.

Runners straight up work for the Corps. I will never understand the 'I hate the man!' shadowrunner archetype.

>leaving witnesses

Get your hacker to give them brain bleach and forget the last few hours.

Shadowrun for some reason really implied that it's the go to archtype with their whole emphasis on Neo-Anarchism (Which is a pretty damn dumb ideology if you ask me. It's more or less hating authority for the sake of it).

Paid body double is an interesting avenue, particularly with respect to minimising the amount of hassle that relates to describing a fully realised school life. The average runner makes SUBSTANTIAL $$$ compared to a regular citizen, and so your child runner could actually have someone fleshgrafted to look like him paid to act their way through school and give him the cliffnotes on school "We learned about integration, I'm starting to think that Sarah likes you but your friends are still obsessing over their perception that you like Anna, also Hide's mum is sick. Probably real sick since it came up at school of all places." for every day that their services are needed.

In this way, you never feel obligated to do a shitty school arc, you can just do it when its convenient to the plot. And you don't need to worry about pulling your punches when it comes to putting them out of action.

I know. I'm just saying it's moronic, considering the entire game is about doing their dirty work for them so they won't get blamed.

Consequently, the only kind of SR game I actually want to play is nobledark do gooder hooders loaded with stick and shock and awesome plans.

>the only kind of SR game I actually want to play is nobledark do gooder hooders loaded with stick and shock and awesome plans.
That sounds absolutely terrible. I can never get down with commie do-gooder-ness, nor can I get behind the idea of going non-lethal.

Runners work for whoever pays them. Corps pay top nuyen, but they're almost never the only game in town. And cash isn't the only capital out there. If you help set up a telecommunications network and security perimeter for a squatter camp of urban farmers, they can keep you in fresh tomatoes, green beans and chicken for the rest of your life. A corp might put money in your pocket, but hooding for the right people can earn you a lot of social capital and make you plenty of useful friends (and keep a few innocent civilians whose only crime was being born poor from being abused).

And your kind of game, I assure you, sounds equally terrible to me.

Shouldn't you be redistributing the wealth, crushing the bourgeoisie, and advocating for the proletariat?

Meh. Communism's not my thing.

Don't tell me you're an honest to god anarchist. Please don't user, my heart can't take it.

What? That's just crazy. People can't be expected to do the right thing, that's the entire problem with SR's libertarian hellhole.

I'm not seeing a problem. I mean a kid who does runs is already going to be a delinquent, and if not he's going to become one, or constantly have an internal struggle about it.

win/win/win situation.

If this is about how to integrate the kid in the party, that's never hard. Some other PC is a relative/friend/mentor and the others connect via that PC.

I always thought the point was to start early and mid-game like this with the PCs being disposable nobodies, but then towards the late-game they should start to get ambitions of their own. Run a corp or kill them all in a blaze of glory. Even restructure society so this future can't happen again.

That's just asking to make the school nurse a valuable cooperating asset/NPC, or a do-gooder investigator who'll try to get behind the PC's mask which again means delicious non-combat conflict
That's edgy but I can't say I disagree

Then what are you, user?

>but then towards the late-game they should start to get ambitions of their own
Typically that's how it goes, yeah. The issue with Shadowrun in general though is that it doesn't really encourage ambition and initiative, so you typically have player's whose sole purpose for being there is the paycheck at the end of the run.

There's also nothing worse than a bunch of whiteknight do gooders in a cyberpunk world.

>nor can I get behind the idea of going non-lethal.
Do you just hate all life, or what?

>High school student by day, Shadowrunner by night.

this never happens in other cyberpunk setting. nope. never ever.

If someone's throwing lead at me, I'm going to throw lead back. No point in letting someone who has intent to kill me live, as all morals go out the door once the bullets start flying.

But it doesn't because no respectable cyberpunk setting has a public school system.

Nah, he just really wants the electric chair when his team gets brought down.

But wait, there can't be consequences in cyberpunk.

Socially and economically liberal with an authoritarian bent.

Ah jeeze. I'm rolling pure fascism here. It's great.

And yes, murder is certainly what's going to get them the electric chair. Not the insane amounts of kidnapping, extortion, domestic terrorism, etc. In the words of a great man, "Do you think this is the only illegal thing I have to do today?"

Well fucking duh, dude.

>The issue with Shadowrun in general though is that it doesn't really encourage ambition and initiative, so you typically have player's whose sole purpose for being there is the paycheck at the end of the run.
I never played the game but I always imagined it to go something along the lines of 12 sessions of "quest accepted, kill monster reciev gold" and at some point the players should go "there has to be more to life" and at that point SR2.0 goes into effect and corps want to kill you for dreaming of a world outside the prison.

>There's also nothing worse than a bunch of whiteknight do gooders in a cyberpunk world.
I always suspected this to be the express ticket to death.
Start neutral-corp aligned - grow up to be strong and independent
Start weak and independent - grow up to be burnt meat

Also, I'm going to bed, you really need to practice your trolling.

Better to fight for what's right than be their pawn.

you must be new at cyberpunk. of course there are public schools for those whose parents do not work for a big corp. and they are living hell.

>I never played the game but I always imagined it to go something along the lines of 12 sessions of "quest accepted, kill monster reciev gold" and at some point the players should go "there has to be more to life" and at that point SR2.0 goes into effect and corps want to kill you for dreaming of a world outside the prison
Yeah, something like that.

You don't even have to be corp aligned, but trying to be a do gooder and take the moral highground in a cyberpunk setting is a fast track to nowhere. Being white knight neighbourhood watch without turning in to the neighbourhood militia is a good way to get smashed. It's a balancing act of how much morally questionable stuff you have to throw around to accomplish what you see as the greater good.

Practice my trolling?
I wasn't pretending to be retarded, commie.

This entire post is lol

>Parents who work for a big corp always putting their children through school
Someone doesn't know that dirty proles exist.

I'd go for more "corps at each other's throats while everyone else scrabbles in the dirt"

Yeah, think we're on the same page, just coming from slightly different angles. Cheers!

Using the money to fund terrorist activities. Think very tiny iran-contra.

>Cyberpunk

kill yourself

Yes, if you are working for one of the big players your child is expected to go through their indoctrina... errr... private school system facilities. No exceptions - if you don't want to be seen as a weirdo whose career path has hit a wall at neckbreak speed.

I can see that as part of a character concept. You're a prodigy, mathematical and programming genius, but you began to see the "social order" teachings for what they were, and began to look for alternatives.

TETSUOOOOOO

yeah that works too although I have been more thinking of the corporate career of parents who DONT send their kids to EvilCorp School for Higher Learning.