Cyberpunk

For me the feel is deeply rooted in the fact that it is always at least metaphorically raining. A world of broken promises. And not big promises. The punk side sees to the understanding that the big promises weren't for real people.

No, these broken promises are small but everywhere. Those 4 points that were supposed to get your license reinstated got "lost" in processing. The only Ultracola vending machine near your Block is always, and I mean always, out of Cherry-Ultra. Your last box of matches have faulty starters. New adware found its way around your cybereye filters.

It's the little things that sell the dystopia.

> For me the feel is deeply rooted in the fact that it is always at least metaphorically raining.
Cyberpunk: The Crow

>the street finds its own uses for things
This, basically.

The Crow was pretty influential on me in my identity forming years. And it does do a great job of having an unseemly underbelly.

Cyberpunk is any combination of "High tech" and "Low culture" this can be a story about gangsters using drones to commit petty theft in the modern day or a story set thousands of years in the future about AI stoners doing nanotech drugs on a colony in alpha centuari and anything in between, some people get hung up on window dressing and say anything lacking in sufficient neon lighting isn't cyberpunk.

I bust out the soundtrack and/or the score every few months.

I feel there's a need for cyberpunk protagonists to be damaged by the world they live in. They wouldn't exist if not for the intrusion of aspects of technology into their life; whether it's the electronic allure of cyberspace, cyborg prostheses or dehumanising, cut-throat corporate jockeying for power or class inequality.

I always just emphasized how loud the city was in my cyberpunk games like gas stations selling ear plugs like at a firing range just to go into certain parts of the city and not get your ear drums blasted. I think it's important to teach the players that everything has a price, cybernetic enhancements, a roof over your head, bullets to protect that roof, money and the hum of machines should be like puppet strings attached to everything the players interact with.

Cyberpunk was a genre unique to the time it was written, as it was in reaction to the utopian science fiction prevelent at that time. To really grasp the essence of it,myou have to take the "everything gets more advanced, but average folks are even more marginalized, and those of the lower classes are nuisances at best." You are beneath notice, you are pushing back against a boot that comes down on you with indifference at best and active malice at worst. You are a "punk" an outcast, outlaw, or otherwise outsider. You scrape out an existence in the shadow of the chromed towers that tower above you. Grit, smoke, filth, and junk are scenery. The outdated castoffs and remnants of failed projects, suspiciously new tech acquired or manufactured by illegal or shady means are available for sale. Success in this world comes with the risk of attracting attention of the corporate gestalts which own the streets you walk, be it to use you, monitor you, or exterminate you. Transhumanism is a common element, particularly in the japanese derived works. "At what point do you stop being human, what is it to be human? Where does the tech end and the man begin, or was there ever a man." Another really key aspect is a hard science fiction technological progression. Nothing extremely fantastic, but extrapolated from the potential (real or imagined) of current technology. In the originating works, some glaring oversights can be seen. Wireless communication of all forms being the biggest. The timeframe of their creation was also before the downfall of communist russia, so that threat loomed as a spectre of dread on the horizon. Even if you do manage to make it, in this world, it could all come to a sudden end, beyond your control. Cover it all in neon, chrome, drugs, and media to distract from that looming threat and the increasing inequality between the common man and the great and mighty.

cont: Also essential is a sense of claustrophobia and urgency. The city surrounding on all sides, closing in, driving you forward with an urgency born of necessity and greed. Keep moving, keep running. A lack of organic matter is also a key element. Everything available is synthetic, natural matter is uncommon, or reprocessed into a form so far from its origination as to be unrecognizable. The actual cyberpunk works never took place in the 80s, but in some unspecified futuristic time period that felt like "next week" rather than "centuries away." There is a jaded ennui to the man in the street, an expectation that things won't get better, but they can live a relatively trouble free life. That is one of the elements that defines the punk aspect in the secondary sense, breaking from that routine with an active rejection of mentality. Never settle. The 80s serve as zeitgeist, the psychology and ethos of the decade underlying the character motivations. That, as best I can describe it, is the "feel" of cyberpunk.

It is so good for setting up mood for any creative endeavor I have. Regardless of how tonally "off" it might seem.

Now here a question, what is the best cyberpunk game system. I don't want ot do shadowrun

Shadowrun doesn't scratch the itch for me. Cyberpunk 2020 is. Dated. I haven't found much else that seemed like it. Corporation is a game in the same territory..Haven't had a chance to play it though. I'm not sure what else is out there.

This, and have its entities solve their everyday problems with futuristic, albeit borderline surrealistic, solutions.

The entities should express or at least indicate their own agenda, but never identify themselves as being part of a greater, common entity (e.g. citizens in a city don't primarily identify themselves as citizens). Everyone looks out for themselves.

Sci fi without space ships or aliens

>Cyberpunk 2020 is. Dated.
Let me guess. You find it dated because there's a fucking fax machine in one of the supplememnts? No one gives a shit about little details like how many phone numbers can your phone store, or how many Mhz does what item has, when you have stuff like orbital travel, full-body cloning, cyberware, nanomachines, fusion power, etc.

>polysaccharides
Those are a thing, though. They're sugar chains.

My first idea was to make it about amazing tech.
But then a friend of mine whom played it for some time told me it should be all about problems people face, mostly money and the lack of everything. Imagine living in a very poor country and having very little recourses, imagine your life being worthless and the sky ever gray, last birds died in 2009 so no fun and games. Story should not be a Rambo movie, life is too cheap for that in CP2020 and no plot armor can save you.

"Ya' gott be everywhere and no where chombatta, any short than that and you get iced and used as some rich guys spare parts, that is if you are lucky."

Read some Cyber Punk litterature, there are a lot of comics if you hate books. Also there are a lot of movies if you hate reading.

There is no best system, only personal preferences.

My favorite system is Cyberpunk 2020, mainly because it's a good combination between simplicity and crunch.

CP2020 is well themed, it fits into that feel of cheap life and having to know people in order to survive, sadly many people use it for games where people are criminals missing entirely the point of the game.

I really liked the idea of the waifu bot, buying and selling something like love, it really defines cyberpunk's desperate corporatism

I agree, a good cyberpunk story should be about "high-tech meets lowlife".

Look at the most amazing cutting-edge technology being research, and then think about how low life scumbags would use it. Hell most of that "darkweb" shit today cyberpunk counts.

Cyberpunk can all have grand far out Dune stuff megacorporations, mad scientists, out of control AIs, Rouge Cyborgs, psychic teenagers, totalitarian governments, futuristic religious. It's just has to come across as still rather base regardless, and from "Street view".

A good example would be the movie looper. I won't call it a good movie or really cyberpunk ( because well Internet) but the concept as something as amazing as time travel, being simply to dispose of bodies by the mob is the sort of contrast that defines the genre.

Get some inspiration. Here's a short list:

Movies:
Blade Runner
Renaissance
Dredd
A Scanner Darkly
Robocop
Johnny Mnemonic
Strange Days
Hardware
Total Recall
The Running Man
The Matrix
Nemesis
Automata

Anime:
Ghost in the Shell
Cyber City Oedo 808
A.D. Police Files / Bubblegum Crisis
Armitage III
Serial Experiment Lain
Ergo Proxy
Appleseed

Books: William Gibson (Sprawl Trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive ; Burning Chrome ; Idoru), Bruce Sterling (Islands in the Net), Neil Stevenson (Snow Crash ; The Diamond Age), Walther Jon Williams (Hardwired), Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon ; Thirteen), John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar), Georg Alec Effinger (When Gravity Fails)

I absolutely agree. Too many people just want to play cyber-operators, blast away corporate goons with huge guns, and cuddle in cyberspace with their VR waifus.

For visual inspiration go to this thread:

Yeah god forbid people want to play a game to have fun.

It is not about saying you can't fun. The point was the system was not made for that. There is no way you would be able to mess with a big corp and live a day. Point is you are a lowlife scraping bottom for some creds to survive, fancy shit as VR waifus is too expensive for you.

That's my biggest gripe as someone who enjoys cyberpunk. It's a game. If a rocket happens to hit a school bus and you have to hide like a bug, that's the game. Explosions, gunfight, all that shit happens. Nothing I hate more than a game where the DM gets mad because you kill people efficiently, as though murder isn't a part of everyday cyberpunk life. I've come to the conclusion that any DM that gets pissy over that really shouldn't be allowed to run games.

Holy shit, people who are good at what they do shouldn't get paid.
Get out of here, you shit. It's all about that one score. Plus, you can still be super rich and slum it up.

How did you derive that from my comment ?

>implying PC's don't take debts

I'm in a shit mood and out of alcohol, o offense. Lemme expand.

Corporations are huge, large and not entirely legal. Trouble is, getting the attention of anyone higher than a branch manager would involve hitting multiple cities at once, cutting profit by a lot. At best...you get a washed up elite soldier hunting you, and not even well. A full team is reserved for active situations.

Makes perfect sense, still that one guy is a potential TPK. All he needs is a sniper when they eventually enter the warzone.

>A full team is reserved for active situations.
Or scratching the paint on the wrong guy's car.

It's not about killing people (people die a lot in cyberpunk - life is cheap), it's about the cyberpunk genre turning into "Cowadooty with cyberware" 100% of the time.

Yeah.
From a player perspective, walking with an npc and them dropping from a sniper shot is horrifying, and cyberpunk as hell. Double when nobody notices.
Because that's not efficient. I'm talking Wick, not Rambo.
No, no no no. A car like that would be in a garage. That would be more 'finding his mistress'.

>COD with cyberware

Well as someone who actually follows the plot of COD, that figures.

BlacOps 2 and Advanced Warfare were decent enough.

BlaOps 3 was literally about Cybernetics enhanced soldiers entering the memories of dead people to batte an out of control AI. Or something.

Infinite warfare going into space just the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to sci-fi bullshit. The fact that they packaged Cod4 with it speaks volumes.

Also
youtube.com/watch?v=VqfWPEjs1DE

This BO 3 trailer was great
youtube.com/watch?v=Bfr053KdD6w

John Wick, the most overrated action hero, with aimbot function.

Bitch more.

>COD and John Wick fanboy
Shit taste detector indicates 100%.

Polysaccharides are sugars, you see them most notably in starchy food like bread

Polysaccharides - it's word of Greek origin. Learn some chemistry, dude.

It's a first novel, and the cool bits are, like, really cool

Why would I care what you think?

I feel like cyberpunk is harder to do these days because I feel like we're already living in this grimey and shitty corporate-managed world and that we can already see the two possible ends of it approaching and growing (either left-wing populism wins and capitalism is put to rest forever or we get fascist boots on our face until they inevitably burn themselves and the rest of the planet out). That's just my opinion though, and I still enjoy stuff like Blade Runner and what not.

One of the stories I shared with Pondsmith was far more mundane but it helped me to get to the heart of what Cyberpunk means to him. We met at Gamelab in Barcelona and a couple of weeks earlier, right before E3, my phone had died. I had to buy a replacement in the airport before the flight out to Los Angeles and anyone who has been on the verge of a long trip and finds themselves suddenly without their most-treasured gadget can no doubt sympathise. Without it, I didn’t have access to maps, hotel details, contact numbers and emails for appointments, or even the boarding pass for my flight. It’s only when I’m suddenly without a phone that I realise how much I need it.

I mentioned this to Pondsmith as we were talking about anxieties around reliance on technology and I used my former phone as a convenient example.

“But what did you do?” He asked.

“I bought a new phone. I had to.”

“That’s cyberpunk. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about the ubiquity of the tech. If augmentations are rare, if they make the people who have them special, that’s not cyberpunk. It has to be street level. It has to be everywhere and available to almost everyone.”

I agree. People can be dirt poor, live in shacks and eat from whatever they can find in trash bins, but they still have access to cheap tech. It won't be the hottest and best stuff, but cheap Indo-Chinese gear and stuff like that.

Burner everything is a great way to get that across. One-time-use guns bought at a corner automated printer-fabricator. Cheap VR goggles with just enough juice in them to last the run of the Rollerball Championship match, pretuned and everything. A 3-pack (and a great deal) on Auto-Sutures, great for GSWs and Stabbings. Medigel sold separately.

It is harder because the stories focus on the disenfranchised. The "punks" are not the majority. It is important to remember that you have to strp outside the middling comfort zones to really do it justice. Most of what we see as the modern "we live in a cyberpunk world and it isn't what we thought" is more that for the most part we are the boring dregs. We aren't corporate folks living in glass and titanium towers. We aren't the punks on the street fighting to make the world better, at least in our little pocket. No, we're just the everyday folks who are datapoints for corporate earnings.

This is how I MAX-TAC youtube.com/watch?v=TCPLpykL4Rc

This is how I bosozoku: m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1AAa9U3XI4

I like small but bizarre cases that would otherwise go completely unnoticed. Like investigating a worried mother's missing child, only to realize that her child is the same age as her and no relation. He used to be a child actor whom a corporation modeled a VR kid after as a toy to keep your kids entertained. The project was scrapped and a partially erased hard drive was used in a brain aug the "mother" received, which left her obsessing over her missing child. Just small shit that shows how little the corporations care about the individual and lets the player wonder how many incidents just fall through the cracks unnoticed.

No, sweetie. I find it dated because the rules are clunky as shit.

Kill yourself, commie

Yes, it's a straightforward game, not some narrative bullshit game with bennies that favorize metagaming and buzzwords for pussies.

You seem butthurt. You okay buddy? Wanna talk about it?

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're trolling, honey.

...

The Sprawl, a PbtA system, is the good shit.

Tell me more of the sprawl.

Cyberpunk... the essence of the genre as Gibson wrote it anyway, is about the collision of man and technology. About the way quick and easy access to entirely too much information can stiffle knowledge, about the way prosthetics become BETTER then meat and become a crutch... when computers write code faster, solve problems faster, and build new and better machines smaller and faster than people. When the machine eclipses man.

You could say, in that regard, that while it lacks the typical trappings of Cyberpunk, Gataca still qualifies as Cyberpunk.

Of course, it's up to each individual how important the classic aesthetic is to a cyberpunk work. For me, it's essential but your mileage may vary. For Gibson, not so much. Spook Country was written not in some far flung Bladerunner looking future, but in roughly the present day.

That's really all there is to it, punk girls, corporations, and cybernetics

Bump

>PbtA
>good

Fuck why can't we have a medium-to-low crunch GAMIST Cyberpunk system that isn't complete garbage.

Are there even any good Netrunning systems?
I'm like one step away from just saying fuck it and implementing a netrunning reskin of Vancian magic.

Wait for Genesys, if you can deal with special dice. Edge of the Empire is already basically a Cyberpunk RPG.

Roll a few hacking rolls and narrate all the Matrix wank.

There's no good reason for hacking to be an entire combat system to itself. It's shitty game design.

What's a GAMIST system?

GURPS. Not even as a meme.

Use issue 3/21 of Pyramid. If you want it to be slightly more realistic, make unique types of ICE that require a specialized Breach program. If you don't like GURPS, it's easy to transfer the system into any that has skills of different levels and opposed rolls.

>Vancian netrunning
That sounds like a pretty damn good solution imo.
Invasive programs must be "prepared" by being programmed or at least change the source code around. (divination stuff can be one-time queries to big-time semi-locked down databases)
Heuristic detection systems would prevent re-use of the same virus over and over again without changing it so there's your limits per day. (Corps probably don't mind sharing these through a common database like how competitors in Vegas still share their blacklists of card counters and cheats)
They can be limited by time to use them, "reagents" like direct interfaces rather than just wireless and burner decks (or setting hacking device du jour).

I mean the common complaint about Vancian stuff is that it doesn't feel like magic but more like a science. Fits really neatly into this kind of futuristic hacking in my mind.

High tech, low life. Think of all the super tech we thought we'd have in the 60's, but take away the optimism and add the basest of human desires without morality.

Sounds pretty good

A game that doesn't concern itself with simulationism or narrativism but the player-challenging game experience at the table.
Games made for people who play them rather than read about them or jerk off on CharOp boards basically.

I was half-joking but that does sound pretty cool.

Gamist systems absolutely promote CharOp wank.

>jerk off on CharOp boards
I thought that was the definition of gamist systems? That and acting as flypaper for the absolute worst kind of players.

Nah, outside of D&D 3.5E and 4E it's mainly simulationist attempts at ones like Shadowrun, M&M and GURPS that gets off on CharOp boards.

cyberpunk as a fantasy genre was killed when it became reality

There's an article on how Magic is implimented in Genesys out now, looks kinda good - gives me some hope that they're likely to do it okay.

The other bit of hope for that is that Genesys has been confirmed for getting the Android setting book everyone knew it was going to have, so they have a reason to make hacking not suck balls as well - obviously it won't be quite as in-depth as Android Netrunner, but it's likely to be alright - though ICE and "Icebreakers" with net avatars that look like swordsmen and shit are guaranteed, so sorry if you don't like that

>hurr we live in that time
You sound exactly like whiny punk brats from the 80s.
Call me when the Chinese Social Credit system is enacted around the world.

>Call me when the Chinese Social Credit system is enacted around the world
It is in America.

Nothing that can't be refluffed.

Never had an employer check your social media? Never had a credit check? Never had a potential romantic partner look up your exes? Had political advertising targeted at you? Worked in an environment with performance management software?

I mean, I guess not - that's an advantage of being generic, you can refluff it to hell and back - though the Android universe is grounded enough that things like DDoS and SYN attacks are regular tactics, they just have pics like this

>social media
>credit
I'll take "things cuckolded faggots do" for $400, Alex.

This sounds just some random marketing description. Can you just give me the names of gamist games?

I think the use of Threat/Advantage tables will let them have a hacking system with a good level of varied outcomes while still being relatively quick to run.

There's a bunch of rules for hacking encounters in one of the Star Wars books which they may steal some ideas from.

Chinese Social Credit systems aren't designed to be pissant things like not using social media or upholding an image by not saying the wrong things.
It means if you buy foreign media, associate with people who have a low social credit score, read the wrong political manifestos or be associated with something rightly or wrongly it can lead to you not being able to hire an apartment, get a bank account, be treated as a real citizen, get a job with the government and so on.
It's also meant to have the reinforcing effect of other people avoiding hiring you or even being around you based on your social credit score.