sketch for an anime-cyberpunk style game

[Cadriel]

A lot of this is just the thoughts that I had during a long walk I took today; it's nowhere near ready for even the most basic testing.  The design owes a great deal to Sorcerer and The Pool.

Okay.  Now, what I'm working toward is a directly Narrativist game, in the Edwardsian sense.  So if any of the mechanics don't seem to jive with that style of play, I'd like to know about it early.

The game centers around the question "What does it mean to be human in an increasingly technological society?" - essentially, set out for the metaphysical, moral, and ethical impact of our increasing reliance on and relationship with technology.  Toward this end, it's set in a future somewhat remniscent of the anime film Ghost in the Shell, though it certainly will wind up borrowing some more Western cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk elements.

Characters are designed with several talents, a technological point-of-contact (for lack of a better term), a dehumanization, and a turning point.  It's worth noting that all these traits are binary, and have no particular ratings.  I'll cover them one by one.

-Talents.  Broadly, a few things that the character is capable of doing - broad sketches of capabilities, regardless of their source.  Essentially, talents have an impact in the system that I'll talk about momentarily.  (I'm actually questioning whether Talents have any actual place in this system, for reasons that will become clear.)

-Technological point-of-contact.  Sorta like a super-talent; this is loosely defined as any technological device by which the character is directly and immediately affected, usually in terms of capabilities being enhanced.  There is only one per character, and the sky's the limit.

-Dehumanization.  Some aspect of the technological point-of-contact makes the character less human than he or she was before.  This is reflected by some physiological or psychological disability.

-Turning point.  Not unlike a Kicker, but not necessarily an event.  A turning point means that there is some unbalanced element of the character's life that requires resolution, and will have a large place in the game to come.

Anyway, the resolution system works as follows:  in any tense conflict situation, a player who wishes to affect a direct change in the balance of forces can pick up any number of six-sided dice and roll them.  A 1 is a -, and is counted against the player's character.  A 6 is a +, and is counted for the PC.  One + and one - cancel each other out.  Other results are not important.  The more dice rolled, the more investment the player is putting into the roll.  In either situation, lots of Director Stance is called for, since this is the player contesting for the upper hand.  When someone's not trying to get an advantage in a tense situation, Drama rules the day.

The role of Talents, as it stands, is to allow the player to reroll a die showing a 1; when Dehumanization is a factor in the scene, it forces the player to reroll a 6.  One of the things I'm very shaky about is, the system really has nothing whatsoever to do with skills - would replacing Talents with Passions, as I am seriously considering, be going too far in the almost avant-garde direction?  I like the idea of having some Resource that allows for players to improve their chances of getting an advantage in the scene, and I like the idea of tying it to the character; I just want to make sure it'll reinforce the right idea.

If I use Passions, I could see character "advancement" (actually growth) using the Turning Points rather like Kickers:  when one is resolved, either retire the character or rewrite Passions.  If it's Talents, I see this being...less logical.

I would appreciate any feedback I can get; it's just a rough sketch for now, and can stand a lot of improvement.

-Wayne

[Andrew Martin]

-Dehumanization.  Some aspect of the technological point-of-contact makes the character less human than he or she was before. This is reflected by some physiological or psychological disability.

Perhaps you could example on what you mean by less human by using technology? Common technology in use now includes glasses/spectacles to correct vision, hip replacements, appendix and other organ removals, heart/lung transplants, and so on. Do these things/events make people less human?

[Cadriel]

Perhaps you could example on what you mean by less human by using technology? Common technology in use now includes glasses/spectacles to correct vision, hip replacements, appendix and other organ removals, heart/lung transplants, and so on. Do these things/events make people less human?

Andrew:

This will be explained in much, much more detail in the future; sorry if I didn't give a clear enough understanding of why.

The theme of the game is that, as we become more reliant on our tools, they become a part of us and our worldview.  Dehumanization is the negative feedback from high-technological extensions of man (such as cybernetics or neural-computer uplinks).  They are either literally integrated physically, making the user in some striking way unnatural and less "human" or they alter the user's mental state, which I think of as stuff like psychological disorders of the sort where the subject has difficulty integrating into normal society.

We've begun to see the latter: people becoming so heavily involved in their devices that they simply withdraw, or develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or something similar.  The former is an option for those who want to seem physically more "mechanical"; while your stereotypical cyberpunk "chromed-up" character would fit under this category, he would also be considered a hideous freak for being so.  Other variants can exist bound by player creativity.

Does what I'm trying to accomplish make more sense now?

-Wayne

[szilard]

The role of Talents, as it stands, is to allow the player to reroll a die showing a 1; when Dehumanization is a factor in the scene, it forces the player to reroll a 6. One of the things I'm very shaky about is, the system really has nothing whatsoever to do with skills - would replacing Talents with Passions, as I am seriously considering, be going too far in the almost avant-garde direction? I like the idea of having some Resource that allows for players to improve their chances of getting an advantage in the scene, and I like the idea of tying it to the character; I just want to make sure it'll reinforce the right idea.

Replacing Talents with Passions, would be fine, imo, as long as you have a basic set of skills for the character (even if it is summed up in one word, as in Sorceror) and you make it explicit that most things involving your skills don't require die rolls.

Stuart

[Cadriel]

Replacing Talents with Passions, would be fine, imo, as long as you have a basic set of skills for the character (even if it is summed up in one word, as in Sorceror) and you make it explicit that most things involving your skills don't require die rolls.

Stuart

Okay - I'll be sure to keep that in mind; perhaps keeping an overall list of talents, for Karma resolution, maybe even with distinct RPG-looking numbers to make people used to Sim-looking game designs comfortable.  But the essentially "gamble gaining or losing an edge in a hotly contested situation" resolution system itself seems functional, right?

-Wayne

[szilard]

Okay - I'll be sure to keep that in mind; perhaps keeping an overall list of talents, for Karma resolution, maybe even with distinct RPG-looking numbers to make people used to Sim-looking game designs comfortable.  But the essentially "gamble gaining or losing an edge in a hotly contested situation" resolution system itself seems functional, right?

-Wayne

I think so.

I'm still not 100% on what the resultant number of (+/-)s mean. Presumably it is some sort of "advantage" - is resolution, then, primarily Karma-based with this notion of fortune-based advantage tacked on?

Frex, say Sam the Street Samurai is walking around a nasty hood. A bunch of local gangers decide to have some fun with him. There's general consensus that Sam could potentially win this fight, but it isn't going to be easy and he isn't likely to come away unscathed. That's a good candidate for a roll to determine the margin by which he wins the fight or if he gets really unlucky... On the other hand, if it was just one drunk ganger who mistook Sam for some guy who'd pissed him off earlier, Sam could deal with him without rolling.

This what you were thinking, or no?

Stuart

[Cadriel]

I think so.

I'm still not 100% on what the resultant number of (+/-)s mean. Presumably it is some sort of "advantage" - is resolution, then, primarily Karma-based with this notion of fortune-based advantage tacked on?

Frex, say Sam the Street Samurai is walking around a nasty hood. A bunch of local gangers decide to have some fun with him. There's general consensus that Sam could potentially win this fight, but it isn't going to be easy and he isn't likely to come away unscathed. That's a good candidate for a roll to determine the margin by which he wins the fight or if he gets really unlucky... On the other hand, if it was just one drunk ganger who mistook Sam for some guy who'd pissed him off earlier, Sam could deal with him without rolling.

This what you were thinking, or no?

Stuart

Well, the roll wouldn't determine whether he won the fight.  Let's say Sam's player rolls five dice:  two are 6s, one is a 1.  That's an overall score of one +.  Sam has, somehow, gained the upper hand in the situation; his player can decide that this means anything he wants.  Likewise, let's say the roll turns out 1, 1, and 6 as the relevant dice - an overall -.  Now it is up to Sam's player (and the GM, if desired) to see that the situation turns against Sam.  In both cases, a roll denotes not a "see whether the character is lucky," but an attempt to force the status quo one way or another.  If it turns bad for Sam, he could still get out, or even win in some way that left him at an overall disadvantage.

When the situation at hand does not call for one of a pair of relatively evenly matched opponents in any situation to get the upper hand, Drama and/or Karma rules the day, depending on whether or not a character's Talents come into play.  Fortune is for when players want to shake things up in a situation that is particularly intense, more or less.

-Wayne

[scobie]

Sorry to drag back to this topic, but I am writing up a thesis on technology at the moment so I am kind of obsessed by the issue.

One of the key themes of early cpunk was the kind of simplistic humanist idea that using technology somehow degraded the person, made them less human.   As this was pointed out, it tended to ignore existing technologies people used and focus on a fear of the new.  In game terms it made a great and often pointless balancing mechanic to stop people just buying, stealing or ripping off (literally) all the chrome they could get their grubby hands on.

I think that the literature has long since gotten over this and academic writers on cyborgs (Donna Harraway) and posthumanism have challenged a lot of the assumptions.   Still, the posthuman condition is not necessarily a happy one.

Anyway, to get to the point.  I think the issue of humanity and technology is a vital thematic hinge, especially if it can be fleshed out in different directions from the old human/machine dichotomy.  Anime/manga have played with this a bit (think Gunm, Ghost in the Shell) and you don't have to start with characters which are born human to have fun with this.

Not yet sure how these develops in game mechanics, but there could be lots of fun using a game to ask questions about what it is to be human, how identity is shaped by networks and all that existential cyberfun.

Scobie

[scobie]

Perhaps the Unknown Armies sanity meter might be a good starting point?

[gizem]

was the name of the cyberpunk game I designed which tried to deal with the "what it means to be human" question. It can be found in the free rpgs section of the forge resource library, if you are interested. There was some discussion about it on this very forum, but it was a long time ago.

I by no means believe that technology makes us less human, and I also disagree that cyberpunk writers are technophobic. I would say that cyberpunk attitude is an acceptance of the human situation at the end of the 20th century and a balanced assessment of the value of technology, not so much technophobia or technophilia per se.

Best Regards,
Gizem Forta

[scobie]

Thx, will check it out.

Didn't mean to suggest that cpunk authors were technophobic themselves but the themes certainly bear on the writing, especially in the late 80s material reflecting the whole technological ambivalence thing.  Cpunk RPGs on the other hand often absorb a lot of this uncritically and I think it gets reflected in game mechanics that simplify the human/machine dichotomy to a point where its not very useful and actually harms development of good stories.

While we're on the topic, had a look at some of my archived cpunk rpg material the other day (won't mention the system) and the racism was pretty appalling.  The whole 'anxiety over America's economic potency manifested as fear of asians' shebang was there - thought I was looking at Sax Rohmer for a minute!

Scobie