As the world slips closer into the hands of the corporations, there's a distinct lack of good, straight up cyberpunk TTRPGS. Shadowrun has the while magic angle, and net runner, GURPS, Savage worlds, etc have problems mechanically. So, I say let's make our own.
Does anyone have any ideas for base mechanics? Roll and keep, successes, etc?
And the base setting, do we want one mega Corp, three, or several? What kind of tech?
Don't know if you were in yesterday's cyberpunk thread, but there were a lot of suggestions there. I already made my own homebrew version of CP2020.
So d10 is my vote, I guess.
I'm actually working on a game that fits this brief at the moment. It'll have a magic system, but an optional one. I'm starting from Shadowrun (or rather, the more reasonable informally defined version of Shadowrun that I use in my campaign) and developing from there.
For a base mechanic, I'm still fond of Shadowrun's big pile of dice system. As I see it, you're doing a dystopian future setting, therefore you want a system where guns are lethal rather than dealing HP damage, therefore you want a bell curve for your probabilities so that a good situation results in low risk and a bad situation results in high risk, therefore you want to roll a lot of dice (a single d20 or d100 is much less consistent).
For base setting, it's important to realise that there is only one corporation with many names. There is only The Man, who owns everything. Names change, even CEOs change, but the status quo exists to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. You might think that you have the choice to prefer Pepsi and Coke, but The Man wins regardless of which of those you choose. You never had the choice to prefer neither.
As for the tech, it like everything else should feed into the theme of "the rich-poor divide". The rich get the best health care, transport, protection, education. The poor do not. For cyberpunk, that means that the rich get implants that improve their ability to continue to out-compete the poor. The stuff the players get hold of is riddled with flaws. It requires maintenance or special nutritional supplements that the players do not have. It needs to connect to a network that the players do not have access to. It needs to be custom grown to match the host's biology, but it was stolen from a lab. You're not Adam Jensen, you're Molly Millions, and the tremors are bad today. Doctors aren't free, time to do a job and score some cash.
>Does anyone have any ideas for base mechanics? Roll and keep, successes, etc?
Honestly don't see anything wrong with basic d20 mechanics found in D&D or Pathfinder: ability scores, classes, ect. Just needs an entirely new set of classes, weapons, and equipment. Race could be thrown out entirely, or consist of just human and android/replicant/whatever you call an intelligent robot.
Hacker shouldn't be a class, but a skill, and one with realistic limitations. No quick-hacking robots mid-fight.
Add a system for bionic augmentations: getting them put in, what they can do, drawbacks, and how much they cost.
>And the base setting, do we want one mega Corp, three, or several?
Honestly never liked the idea of mega corps that much, though there is basis for that in reality it seems kind of oversimplified. If the real world is any implication the politics of the future are going to be dictated by governments, corporations, and criminal organizations from all over the world.
In other words, several mega corps with governments and mafias/cartels/yakuzas still playing significant roles.
>What kind of tech?
I'm a fan of near-future tech. Firearms still rule the day and most of the stuff available today is still in use, but newer models are introduced and the first clumsy laser weapons are just starting to hit the market. Energy weapons are big, expensive, and heavy though, usually mounted on vehicles that can support the power consumption. Coilguns are in a similar situation.
Bionic prosthesis are now commonly available and in the higher-end models actually better than organic limbs.
Robotics should basically be the shit you see in videos from Boston Dynamics, but refined to the point of it being very useful and commonly used. No mechas, but robots of some sort are used in construction, manufacturing, service industry, military, and private security applications. Pic related.
What about hacking? Should it be more device based, so everyone can do it, or a dedicated role with a variety of skills and equipment needed?
AI on the brink of beating or having just recently beat the Turing Test is always fun. Bipedal androids with advanced, human-like AI could be rare or common, and most likely would be shaking up a whole mess of social and moral issues wherever they are found.
Skills + equipment.
Definitely , a magic hacking tool just isn't any fun, and not that realistic. It would be cool to base the mechanics around skills that correlate to real hacking techniques.
Netrunner doesn't have an RPG op.
[spoilers]yet[/spoilers]
Interface Zero 2.0
Savage Worlds a best
>net runner, GURPS, Savage worlds, etc have problems mechanically
>So, I say let's make our own.
It'll have a hell of a lot more mechanical issues.
Basically this.
Why do you think so? Something inherent in trying to accurately portray the setting, or just Veeky Forums bullshit?
Thinking of CP2020, dunno why I wrote netrunner
>have problems mechanically
What problematic mechanics are you trying avoid? Specifically.
Massive dice pools, while good for averages, are unweildy.
The hacking. I haven't found a version that feels right, but that's fairly subjective I know. I like the Mr. Robot style of hacking more than the matrix personally, but I'm probably in the minority.
Too many skills to choose from. There should be enough to specialize in your role, but you don't need 30+.
Combat should be scary, even if you're a razor girl. No amount of armor should make you shrug off bullets, only reduce their effectiveness. I like SR's focus on initiative passes in this regard though, to gain the edge that way
Interface Zero handles all of these except the hacking pretty fine. Why don't you like Savage Worlds?
Asking Veeky Forums about how to make the best system is doomed for failure. First, half of the posters are shitposters who don't even play TTRPGs. Secondly, 1/4 of all posters are GURPS, Savage Worlds and D20 cancerous fanboys who worship their favorite system blindly and tell you that everything else is shit. Finally, the last 1/4 is composed to one half of grognards who love granularity and to one half of freeform/narrative gamers who hate granularity. Good luck finding a consensus.
Pleas for the love of immersion do firearms right.
Ill even help with info.
What does doing firearms right mean
That's really really hard to explain. I'm posting here;
It would be easier if you asked me specific questions or told me your ideas and I could help.
See this reads like you want a really simulationist system where melee isn't viable at all.
Cyberpunk is 80s action movies, not a round of ARMA 2.
It means something different to everybody. That's why everybody says there's no system that does it right.
Instead of working up from rules and settings, I suggest that for every system you put in your OP, you make a short list of what exactly about that setting doesn't work, and then work from there.
If you don't keep in mind what you don't like about the other systems, you'll end up making the same mistakes.
>And the base setting, do we want one mega Corp, three, or several? What kind of tech?
One thing Cyberpunk settings often miss is that they always put some form of evil leadership at the top of said corps, either a board of directors or a single President/CEO or whatever with their evil agenda.
In reality, corporations work more like computers, only their program is executed by people and not by an electronic CPU.
A large corporation is an optimizing machine, designed to optimize for profit. Everyone from the lowliest janitor and straight up to the CEO and the Board of Directors is replaceable, and their personal opinions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, they can refuse to cooperate, but faulty parts are replaced with working ones (or, if there's enough faulty parts, the machine dies completely). Large, successful corporations are also very reliable, they've had time to select the best parts that work just they way the machine needs and if some part breaks, even an important one, the machine can still work.
In effect, corporations are human-powered AIs.
I like that feeling in my cyberpunk, that nobody is inherently evil, most people are even good, everyone is just doing their job and looking out for number one, and all their effort combined lead to something that is much worse than the sum of its parts.
One thing I've thought about since watching Incorporated (everyone in this thread should check it out) is the general lack of cybernetics. It's been a staple of the genre, but if you look to where technology is today, we're more likely to have viable clone limbs and genetic modifications for big changes in the near future. Cybernetics in the classic sense would be limited to small implants, like a smart phone type device, or pain inhibitor. If you want more strength or speed, it's more likely you'll take a regular regiment of drugs (so if you can't afford your nootropics this month, your stats than might start to go back down to normal) than take a risk on invasive surgery with parts that need regular professional maintenance.
Why even have a visible corporation? Most big companies belong to holdings and trusts anyway and those are absolutely unknown.
Hmmm... The .22 killed the most living things is probably a legend. There is virtually no evidence of it.
>One thing I've thought about since watching Incorporated (everyone in this thread should check it out) is the general lack of cybernetics. It's been a staple of the genre, but if you look to where technology is today, we're more likely to have viable clone limbs and genetic modifications for big changes in the near future.
This has been in writing since 1984, where Neuromancer had one memorable cyber limb - Ratz's grubby pink Russian dealy.
>The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. `You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.' Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw.
Contrast with Hideo.
>And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.
>Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death.
>base mechanic
Cards for core resolution shit. You play one from your hand the GM puts one down. Either of you can play from the deck instead of your hand. Add the total, and if it's too high one bad thing happens, but if it's too low another bad thing happens. Face cards mirror the opposite card. Two face cards mean you just draw two from the deck.
Game should have mechanical doodads inspired by *World game moves or 4e powers so there's always a bit of a prompt on what the high/low fail states are.
Most of the game should be written at the operational level. Combat should be a one turn affair if at all possible, but should have K.O.s/forced fleeing/raised alarms as possible outcomes.
>Base Setting
Combination of Snow Crash and American Desert. Cult compounds made of half-buried schoolbusses and armies of mutated Jesus clones are neat.
I don't have enough (read: any) experience with FFG's RPGs to know if this is necessarily a bad thing, but I'd still like there to be an option
> It would be cool to base the mechanics around skills that correlate to real hacking techniques.
I doubt this is going to be much fun, either.
Hacking should step out of the 'hacker only' mentality, but not by eviscerating the hacker as an archetype. Everyone should be able to use a computer, pda, or hacking tool for temporary shenanigans of some sort, based on their relevant skills - which means spreading out beyond having a 'computer' or 'hacking' skill that does it all.
Then you can have (for example) the combat archetype hacking enemy cybereyes, stealth archetypes taking out security cameras, face types skimming social data from targets while they work - "on the fly" temporary kludging, vs the hacker's slower but more long term / secure / perfectly forged hacks, plus team enabling, protection, and cutting off the online opposition.
40kRPG is a bit of a mess but that's mostly down to the original system being a mess and FFG being reluctant to piss off long term fans with serious mechanical overhaul.
FFG's Star Wars RPG is some of the finest design I've ever seen.
I would like to see a Cyberpunk RPG with a distinctly military setting. While having gangs of Wetworkers prowling the streets of major cities is cool, it doesn't seem like a very likely angle as there would be no way in hell any police force would allow something like Shadowrunners to exist. I'd much rather expect to see drugged up, cybernetic, super mercenaries fighting wars in 3rd world countries ala MGS instead.
In fact, does anyone know of an official or unofficial Metal Gear RPG?
>rugged up, cybernetic, super mercenaries fighting wars in 3rd world countries
It's not quite the same, but your PCs in Underground were these, but they've come back to America.
>GURPS, Savage worlds, etc have problems mechanically
>There are no good systems, except for all these who I just will say have problems mechanically
I play ShadowFATE and GURPS Cyberpunk all the time pal.
I like the idea of cybernetics being cheaper, since cloned organs and limbs would need to be custom-made and installed whereas you could get a robot arm installed at a seedy chop shop. So while the rich would have all sorts of functional (and sometimes cosmetic) vat-gorown parts, street thugs would be more likely to get patched up with robot parts.
I'd imagine it would also attach a certain social stigma to cybernetics. Sort of like how tattoos were a few decades ago, cybernetics are seen as vulgar and would be frowned upon in certain social situations (like a fancy party or corporate meeting).
As for explaining how medicine wouldn't outpace cybernetics entirely, you could always claim that it's the post-antibiotic age and superbacteria cause amputation/limb replacement to become big again.
Then we get to the classic "thief" problem: how are you supposed to play a thief if everyone knows how to pick locks and disarm traps?
I think that, much like the thief, "hacker" is a prevalent enough archetype that many players would want to base their characters on it. So while I agree that not knowing how to send an email in 21XX is unrealistic, I think that the game should allow a good deal of specialization in the field of computers - especially with the huge variety of interesting things you can do by hacking a world built on data.
Then play Ops & Tactics. This much detail is way too much for a cyberpunk game unless every player is a /k/ommando.
I had the idea to make a game set in a cyberpunk Africa where US and EU mercenaries fight each other over resources for some shady Chinese and Australian corporations. The aesthetic would be close to Elysium.
Already done in both CP2020 and Shadowrun, see "Desert Wars" at al.
If you're looking for some more African inspiration, check out Computer Village in Nigeria. It's a huge outdoor market for electronics.
Cyberpunk 2020 is more located to North Africa and the Middle East. There are some talks about Kenia, but without going too much in details. I'd locate the action somewhere between Mauritania, down to west coast, then inside the continent (Congo), to South Africa.
There's also the biggest electronic dump site located in Ghana.
While it's not been explored all that much yet, FFG's Android universe has Africa as an emerging power after a fairly tumultuous time - Kampala as a site for the construction of a second space elevator.
That pure air!
Android seems to have a cool background. Someone should totally make a TTRPG of it.
Supposedly it's in the works as a secret project. Africa as an economic powerhouse also shows up in Interface Zero. In both cases it's a very foolish assumption with no basis in reality. (black) Africa will never be a major economic power because the human potential of its inhabitants is extremely low.
But South Africa would make a great cyberpunk setting: overpopulation, disease, high-tech, megacorporations, supercrime, gangs, racial tensions, foreign meddling.
It does have cool background, but FFG seems content to leave it as a collection of board games and fiction
>based shorty-short scouts
I think that's a Portuguese.
Africa has always been sought after by the economic powers of the world because of the vast natural resources available. That's why a lot of the countries are so fucked up; different groups under the control of various entities are vying for power in exchange for natural resources. I make an agreement with Kony to fund him so that when his rebels take over (region/territory), he grants me exclusive, or at least first, rights to the resources in the territory, like say diamonds, gold, uranium, silver, and whatever else. Someone else who wants those same resources funds someone else to put him out of power, and the citizens in the middle just get shit on continually.
If you look at the modern state of Africa, especially South Africa, there's a lot of cyberpunk style happenings.
Here's a bit of a weird idea, but why not have some elements of the hacker type class rolled into face?
A lot of modern hacking is done just by convincing people to give you information.
SMBC is topical, as always.
What he said. Social engineering has largely replaced brute force hacking for anything other than blunt DDOS attacks. The SOX compliant password may be the single most commonly written-down piece of "secure" knowledge in the history of man.
>The SOX compliant password
The what now?
Look up Industrial Divinities for near future autonomous robots that look so mundane and plausible that they roll back over to cool again.
archive-scans.blogspot.com
Was the background civilian material for the Steel Battalion videogame that had fantastic Vertical Tanks and an insane controller that was needed to play it.
Here's one but it seems to be more of a one shot experience of the Fantasy Realism of MGS where ideals are translated into flesh and despite the inherent silliness the stakes are high for the characters involved.
press.invincible.ink
There's Ops and Tactics if you want the bullet ridden framework of d20 modern inhabited by squatters composed of GTA, Gunsmith Cats and Riding Bean.
Any good cyberpunk wargames?
Underground had detailed world building cribbed generously from Frank Miller's 'Hard Boiled' and 'Martha Washington' series it was a pleasure to read.
Didn't like the mechanics for it aside from the idea that players actions could have a quantified affect on their community in a neat metagame of shifting standards of living.
In a package where you were supposed to play veteran super soldiers in the midst of Los Angeles gang sprawl.
'Marshal Law' was a very strong influence as well with enhanced meatheads attempting to relive their four color comic programming in a cyberpunk world without a Comics Code to guide it.
en.wikipedia.org
Here's where I got the physical books. The graphic design is atrocious and sometimes painful to read. Looks like the budget got pulled on the later supplements and they went with black and white instead of glossy color without bothering to change the layout in response.
Sarbanes-Oxley has some somewhat vague language about best security practices. It identifies weak passwords as a security threat, but isn't very explicit about what constitutes a strong password. The IT security industry has come up with some staples, which most every company that handles financials (read: fucking everyone) has adopted a handful of.
>At least one capital letter
>At least one digit
>At least one special character
>Minimum of eight characters long
>No / minimal repeating characters
>Password must be a unique instance from your last (3/5/8) passwords
>Password must cycle at maximum every 90 days
This runs contrary to normal behavior and cognition, so everybody just writes the fucking things down -- this being the single greatest security vulnerability of a password. This is where human engineering comes in. If you can gain access to someone's work cuboid or - even better - day planner, you might just have an executive level golden ticket into any network with single-factor verification.
Ironically, if we moved to long-chain nonsense phrases (eg: MyGrandmotherBowlsOnWednesdays), we'd have an easier time remembering them and they'd be orders of magnitude more secure WITHOUT the whole nobody-remembers-it bit.
Yes, but as Schneier pointed out rainbow tables for all English languagr whole word combinations already exist, so the combo passphrase would have to be a truly random alphanumeric, unlike your example.