[Remember Tomorrow] "Alcohol roared through Cowboy's heart"

[Ron Edwards]

At GenCon 2011, Gregor Hutton was very intent upon getting a copy of Remember Tomorrow to me. I wasn't enthusiastic about it, as you can see from this thread three years ago: [Remember Tomorrow] Mitsubishi and a smashed tank of fish. I never did manage to process the rules from reading; something about the presentation kept fuzzing my brain out. I was also burnt out from endless genre-skinning of Universalis pretending to be games.

Besides, I have a "thing" about cyberpunk which makes me almost impossible to tolerate in conversations about it. I manage to get my thing across in Differences between Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020 and [Venus 2141] The future has goo all over it without being too awful, and upon re-reading those threads, I think they're crucial to understanding what I'm trying to say in this one, so check them out.

And yet Gregor seemed so pleased by making sure I had it ... what did he have in mind?

In total coincidence, I happened to re-read Hardwired a couple of months ago, for the first time in a decade or more. No reason, nothing to do with role-playing, and deviating from my recent concentration on 70s politics in reading matter. I merely picked it off the shelf and read it, marveling at its blend of tropes which have all vanished or been transformed. I wonder how it would read to someone who hadn't originally read it in the 80s - it seemed so intense back then, so politically cynical, and so gritty, but now I found so many details effective but also hilarious, and some not too effective any more. The quote in the thread title is repeated a lot in the text and refers to the main character's sensations as he pilots a triangular jet-fighter via his jacked-in senses.

One thing I reflected on was how much love and romance lay at the heart of classic cyberpunk - at least in Gibson, Shirley, Williams, and their imitators, not so much in Jeter and Sterling.

In the past few weeks, Tim, Nathan, and I have been playing Remember Tomorrow, and this game is Hardwired. Granted, the book is referenced in the game, but I mean, play actually produces the things which made that book what it is. It's both retro and deeply affecting, gaudy and earnest, "so past all that" regarding the 60s but with undimmed "fight the man" as its core value. I would also reference the original Robocop film, but it's been so obscured by the sequels, the TV show, and the remake that I fear miscommunicating in talking about that more.

I hope to illustrate here what I hadn't understood from reading the game.

You start with each person making up one character with a goal and one faction, so for us, that meant three of each.

Nathan made up Yasmin Xu, a hacker who owed money to a zaibatsu; I made up Vitor Nyugen, an iron-hearted corporation man who hated his indentured servitude; and Tim made up Tycho (hitmen don't have surnames), whose goal was to indict his boss. The starting characters all begin in held status by their creators, remember that term.

Our factions, in order of the same creators, were Pontiac, a sprawling R+D industrial megacorp; Biscuit, a sex-and-entertainment service provider; and Albacore Associates, a global power-broker club. Factions go "in the middle" and are never held. You don't have to link them to characters, but some is inevitable, so in our case, Vitor's employer was Pontiac whom he wanted to escape, and Yasmin wanted to steal big from Pontiac to pay off the zaibatsu.

Characters and factions both have positive and negative features that change all the time and serve as useful springboards for role-playing them in a particular moment.

There are lots more NPCs in play from the start, mentioned in goals and otherwise added by name, six at my count just at the start. They don't have any mechanics values or formal positive/negative features. More such characters and factions get added all the time, sometimes rather unconstructed, meaning someone appears and does something consequential that's not explained.

All right, now for the character holding thing. During play, I scribbled a diagram for what you can do on your turn.

At first, there's no one in the orange-box category (i.e. characters in the middle, not currently held), so it's mainly playing your characters cutting deals and factions coercing them and screwing them over. That's fine; you basically either develop your relationship with a faction, or provide adversity to someone else.

But: on your turn, you can also make up characters and factions, either de novo or "upgrading" ones that are currently merely names. Once this happens, you get interconnected factions and more-or-less a community of vested interests surrounding either characters or factions. Here are some ways it worked out for us:

i) Godaikan was already mentioned in Tycho's goal and later became a faction
ii) The zaibatsu in Yasmin's goal didn't get named as a faction and remained merely a shadowy presence throughout play
iii) Steacy & Stacey were named as personalities (a personality) within Biscuit and later upgraded into a character (two characters?)
iv) Pink Cadillac, a rogue AI from Biscuit, was invented de novo

Now character holding becomes a big deal, because you can switch out with a charater in the middle at the end of your turn. So ownership switches up a lot among the "guy" boxes, and now, choosing to play a faction initiating a face-off becomes mechanically relevant.

When the number of held characters is N+1, you have to pick up whoever it is in the middle when you "un-hold" your current guy. When there's more than that, the process becomes "who do I want to see developed."

Note that you can't run a face-off between your currently-held guy and a faction. So if you want to see that, then develop the hell out of both and hope someone either runs the faction against that character eventually, or release the character and run the faction against it yourself. So you don't get that kind of showdown without someone else at the table buying into it. By contrast, if some interpersonal conflict outweighs character-faction conflict in your mind, you can initiate it via your held character - quite genius, that.

I mentioned character goals earlier, and it's hard to summarize the rules because the text is a bit scattered about it. Suffice to say that a character is eligible to leave play upon completing a goal, but only under certain mechanical circumstances, and that if they don't apply, then you make a new goal. Also, you can change your existing goal whenever you want.

Factions have an Influence value which can be decreased in face-offs against them, and so they can be "brought down" if that's what you want or like. Unsurprisingly, destroying a faction is a frequent character goal, although it doesn't have to be.

Exactly which potential conflicts and arcs get revving is entirely up to the events of play, reliant upon these types of criss-crossing, contingent decisions - which is totally my speed in game design and play. Some of it fades away or simply hovers as Color, like the zaibatsu mentioned in Yasmin's goal or the interesting exec that Vitor ended up working for before he rebelled.

The overall effect is that characters and factions fade in and out, with some getting more detailed and some getting more spotlighted. Basically, the more you set up a character, the more someone else wants to develop and finish it.

Here's a diagram of our starting array of factions and characters, after a little bit of play established some actions and events. You can see how disconnected it is - the whole Pontiac situation has nothing to do with all the stuff involving Tycho. Some of the events are total mysteries too, such as why Stacey & Steacy betrayed Tycho to Godaikan.

The diagram at the end of our second session shows how much has happened: Pontiac has been brought to zero Influence, Vitor and Yasmin have "ridden into the sunset" (although not together), and the rest of the diagram is much more detailed. Stacey & Steacy and Pink Cadillac are now fully-built characters, making it look as if this has turned out mainly to be about Biscuit, with Tycho as a catalyst rather than central character, even though it started from his point of view.

The neat thing is that the climax of the Pontiac story came about with a bit of influence by Pink Cadillac as it reveled in its new-found freedom, so there's just a touch enough of consequential overlap to call the whole thing a "novel." I love effects like this when they emerge so strongly from material that's developed in play rather than being front-loaded into scenario creation. (it's not in the diagram because it lasted only one scene and involved a bunch of different arrows)

OK, revel in that for a second: the man with the iron (soulless) heart whose drive for ambition has transformed into a drive for justice, finding emotional comfort and renewed sense of purpose in meeting an escaped sensuality-porn AI, nothing but heart (soul) seeking love with another real human being. It didn't last, but it kicked him into the climax of his story and defined the truly motivated starting point of the program's. See what I mean about excess and sentimentality? Cyberpunk has a very gooey center sometimes.

The clunkiest design feature concerns the character goals and the Ready-Willing-Able mechanic, which I'm a bit too tired to go into detail about, so this paragraph is mainly for Gregor. It receives a lot of attention in the text but frankly distracts, especially since you can complete goals without R+W+A, and since when you do it, you sidestep ordinary resolution regarding the goal. I found that latter feature to be very anticlimactic. I would have been happier to have the option either to declare a character "done" upon the completion of his or her current goal through the ordinary resolution system, or to write a new goal.

Table-talk suggested that both Mia Kovac and Tobin might be candidates for upgrading, and if we keep playing, they still might. But now that Pontiac and the two characters most invested in it are gone, the current array of important stuff will probably lead to more NPCs and upgrades within or at least about Albacore, Godaikan, and Biscuit.

This is a very fine distillation and recombination of features from Universalis, Spione, Trollbabe, and the Kicker mechanic from Sorcerer. It generates really strong story arcs without the arc being built into the design in a timed way (that in and of itself is not a bad thing but it's neat to see design that doesn't use it, too).

The genre love is especially funb ecause it's not genre trope fetishizing, which is quite a trick because such fetishizing in-fiction is part of the genre.

I think the game needs a rewrite with diagrams, some repackaging, and the Sorcerer & Sword genre treatment, not so much explaining but demonstrating and inspiring. A person should walk away from the text knowing what "transmaniacon" means, filled with classic Sartre nausea at the very idea of owning and selling technology, wondering if the nearby Starbucks wouldn't be better off as a smoking crater.

Whoops, a little TMI there for you. Anyway, this game deserves play and love.

Best, Ron

[ndpaoletta]

Great writeup!

Thankfully, the core of the game is robust enough that it got us through many mechanical stumblings without negatively impacting the actual fictional stuff going on. This text is dense, man!

To what Ron called out: We originally read the rules as saying "Once you have Ready, Willing and Able checked off, then you're eligible to make an Exit by achieving your goal." So, Yasmin had all three checked off, then (when Ron was playing her) I framed a Face-Off scene with Pontiac, and he burned all of her PCons AND rolled really well, and I rolled poorly for Pontiac. So her Scene Goal was to achieve her character goal, in the fiction; and then Ron used extra successes to bump down Pontiac's Influence.

Then we looked at the rules again and it looks like the actual rule is "Once you have Ready, Willing and Able checked off, then you immediately make an Exit by achieving your goal, and roll 3 dice to reduce Influence". So, on my turn, Vitor also had all 3 checked, and we just narrated how he was finally able to break his contract and do his part in exposing Pontiac's terrible political influence, and I rolled and reduced Pontiac's influence down to 0 (so Pontiac Exited as well).

Both were effectively the same in outcome, but Ron's scene was tense and dramatic because of the face-off situation, and mine felt de riguer.

So, did we interpret the rules correctly the first time, or the second time? Or neither?

One thought: I think I understand the logic of the Exit being something that shouldn't be subject to chance (because it's a big character moment), but I might play it in the future as "once you've checked all three, you're next scene will be your final one, where you're going to get your goal either way, but it's your last chance to effect others mechanically so we still play it out. If it's a Deal scene, roll 3 dice to reduce Influence instead of them gaining one; if it's a face-off scene, play it normally but your Scene Goal is to gain your goal, and if you're the loser you still get it." 

[Tim C Koppang]

I'm not sure I have too much to add right now (although ideas may occur to me as I think about the game in more detail). I will say that I think Gregor's use of fluid character ownership, while used by other games, fits the genre of cyberpunk really well. I'm not as well-read in the genre as I could be, but I do know that themes of identity, individual purpose, and the nature of reality are common. By allowing (perhaps even forcing) the players to move the ownership of characters around the table, the game creates a sort of distance between player and character. That distance in turn, at least for me, makes the characters seem less important and more easily subject to the brutal whims of the world around them.

In my previous games of Remember Tomorrow, there wasn't really time to shift too many characters around the table. Like 3:16, I think Remember Tomorrow is deceptive in that it presents itself as a game that is perfect for one-shots, but in reality shines in longer term play.

[Tim C Koppang]

Oh! Also... I have to admit that your diagrams are pretty damn helpful, Ron. So there.

[Gregor Hutton]

Thank you so much for the write up and the diagrams.

It's the latter on Exits. They're not scenes, or trigger for scenes, but the narrated outcome of achieving a Goal (or INF reaching 8, or a Parameter hitting 0, etc.), with Damaging Factions as a mechanical consequence of achieving a Goal. I guess the text could say "When a PC achieves their Goal then their player immediately narrates it..." (p.17) and "Whoever activates the Exit narrates the PC or Faction leaving the Episode's fiction and its effects as part of the narration at the end of the current scene." (p.32)

I always figured that the only people who really understood the book were Joe Prince, Malcolm Craig and Per Fisher! So I'm happy that the list is now doubled.

The point about held characters is really useful and something I find difficult to convey. A frustration some people have with the game is when the other players have no interest in a held character. My solution was to offer every player the chance to drop their character at the end of their turn, rather than have the game force the other players at the table to interact with a character that doesn't interest them on their turns.

[Gregor Hutton]

Oh, and for your diagram the softly hidden scene type in the game is the Colour Scene (p.27). At the time I didn't want to make it an explicit scene type of its own as I worried that they would become used "too often". I now think that was foolish. I saw it as an option for when you tried to have a conflict and it didn't work (based on some play testing where that was really needed), or when it made more sense (either in the fiction, or in a player's judgement) to have no conflict.

In any case, a subset (at least) to a Face Off, or an option on its own, is a Colour Scene, where everyone in the scene just picks one thing for themselves (no Goal ticks).