Does Veeky Forums like cyborgs?

Does Veeky Forums like cyborgs?

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Is this a Golgom plot?

I think it depends on the type of cyborg. I'll use Transhuman Space lingo since it's the most developed.

At one extreme you have cybershells, where all that's left of the human is their neural imprint: memories and personality. Then you're subject to all the ethical issues of uploading. If it's destructive, did you murder someone? Is it still the same person? If it's not destructive, then who's the real original person? What about XOXing (copies of the software, possibly illicit)? Is it reprogrammed?

Then you have Doctor Who's cybermen: a robot body operated by a brain in a jar. This doesn't feel totally practical to me, because the fragile meat brain will require a lot of biological infrastructure to support it (20% of your metabolism goes towards your brain).

Then you have various General Grievous cyborgs (some versions of Cybermen are like this). There's a whole spectrum of cyborgs that are a mix of biological and robotic parts, from Robocop who's nearly a brain in a jar to Steve Austin who has only a few robotic implants and limbs.

Then there are various brain-computer hybrids. Either AI assistants or implants that actually integrate with and replace/enhance/add capabilities.

At the other extreme is the necromorph bioshell. That's a body whose brain has been removed and replaced with an AI. A little like a brain in a jar, only in reverse. IMO distasteful but occasionally necessary-- even vat-grown human bodies which never had a brain are creepy IMO. (Even worse: a still-working brain that's been entirely overridden by an AI implant. You're either trapped in a VR world while your body does Gygax only knows what, or you're helplessly observing as the AI operates your body.)

IMO the common thread here is simple: consent. Nearly every abuse of these technologies involves them being imposed upon people by force. Take away the force and make it voluntary, and most of the ethical questions disappear.

yea

>robot body operated by a brain in a jar.
Also known as "Total conversion" cyborgs.

OK so now, there's Rule of Cool (do I like them in game)

I'd say that all of the types are fine in a game setting, so long as your system is flexible enough to accommodate all the options. As a GM, you have to manage carefully the balance questions that come in, because if you think itemization was a problem in Pathfinder, wait until you see what you can do in an ultratech game with a big chunk of money. In Shadowrun, I was often able to nuyen-pinch and use workarounds and Build/Repair skills to buy my way into nigh-invincibility. You're on a very different power curve.

Add to that the problems if you're doing SR or eclipse phase or 40kRPG, where you have to balance against psychic powers that have a totally different power curve and advancement scheme.

In terms of verisimilitude, the GM mainly has to think through the consequences. In a supers game, you have a genre convention that a given technology/origin story/power source is semi-unique. There's niche protection. The world looks like ours because the tech is limited to unique one-off prototypes owned by PCs and important NPCs and doesn't make its way into daily life. None of that applies in normal sci fi.

So your enemy NPCs will have access to this tech, too. Obviously. But ordinary NPC civilians and criminals will have access to it, too. So that gun hidden in your robotic arm... why doesn't everyone do this? Or at least criminals? Odds are that detection tech is common, and/or the penalties are harsh for having it, and/or lots of people have them.

Point being that cybernetics very quickly stop being unique superpowers in a hard sci fi world because advanced tech proliferates too quickly. In the 90s, thermal night vision goggles were military tech. Then you could buy them commercially. Now you can make them pretty cheaply with stuff you can buy at Adafruit. The same goes for digital spread-spectrum radio communications, satellite radio, "supercomputers", genetic engineering labs, and CNC.

Good point. I forgot that term... except that IMO there's a grey area past that where you convert the brain, up to and including replacing the meat and just leaving the neural patterns emulated in software. But good point.

I think cyborgs are super.

Especially this week.

>Copy upload

As has been covered by twilight zone and SOMA, it's basically murder - the original does not become the new.

So how do you treat this in a game?

The old school cyberpunk approach used by Shadowrun and others is to have adventures in VR worlds. The problem is that "cybernetics as astral projection" tends to split up the gaming group, or create situations where one specialist character is wildly overpowered and the others are along for the ride. I'm not a fan of this approach, even where it's realistic.

The next is hardware-based cybernetics and augmented reality. Robot arms and brain implants, etc. Essentially superpowers with a cybernetic rationale. Those are easiest to deal with as long as the money-to-power curve is managed, and certainly look the coolest. Your players get cool powers on their character sheet. The group stays together. You can still have a degree of niche protection.

The real frontier is the philosophical questions that come with transhumanism. Is a recorded personality really that person? What about copies? Which one is "real" and if they both are, then who controls the bank account and gets to bang the Mrs? How intelligent does an AI have to be to have rights, and what rights should it have, and for that matter what rights do we have? That's much more cerebral and IMO too many games (like THS) start circling the drain by putting too much focus on the debate and not enough on the story. It's ok to raise a question in the context of a game, but not to raise ALL of them or make the debate itself the central problem. You're trying to build and communicate a world, have characters interact in a fun way, and tell a story. So you bring it up from time to time for intellectual stimulation but keep the action and plot going.

IMO the best place to run a game is to minimize VR, keep the focus on the cyber-as-superpowers, and raise but not obsess about the philosophical issues.