This is an alternate setting inspired by SS in the Valley (aside from The Farm, probably the only true horror game I've ever read). I wonder if this is a way to approach those issues ...

Characters: You play Agents, working to ensure the population continue to have the world pulled over their eyes.
Inspirations: The Animatrix (especially Beyond and A Detective Story, The Matrix trilogy, Dark City, The Truman Show.

Town Creation:

CURIOSITY - either about inconsistencies in the world or odd phenomena

... leads to ...

DISCOVERY - that the world is not all that it seems

... leads to ...

EMOTION - joy or fear seem to be 2 typical responses

... leads to ...

SHARING - your new knowledge with others

... leads to ...

THEORISING - about the true nature of the world

... leads to ...

REBELLION - which seems to take two forms: escape attempts or resistance.  Resistance involves fighting, spreading the word and hacking.  It is usually accompanied of adopting another name or identity.

... leads to ...

POWER - in the form of being able to manipulate the code of the Matrix

... leads to ...

TRANSCENDENCE - which can take many forms: freedom, escape, public exposure, a systems crash, reprogramming an entire area, harvest failure.

Damage:
Talking (d4)
Physical - fighting and chases (d6)
Guns - (d8)
Code - (d10)

Ceremony:
Three in authority.
Body swapping.
Recoding.
Explaining the truth.
Calling by name.
Torture.
Bullet time.

That's all I got.

Hey, I like it.  It would work with only slight modifications for running a Mage-inspired "Technocrats in the Vineyard" game, too which is something I've thinking about for a while. I particularly like the way you have Power and Transcendance at the top.  Neo is a Sorcerer, obviously. 

I think it shows the power of this game, that it makes rebellious folks like RPGers want to play authority figures.

Oh, wow.  I really like this concept.  I'd actually never before thought about playing the Agents, but now this makes me want to.

After posting it, I started critiquing it - thinking, "Well, aren't Agents just programmes? Won't they just want to enforce the will of the ... whatever, Matrix, Architect, Supreme AI? I mean, they don't exactly have free will."

Then I thought, this is where this variant starts to really get interesting to me:

1. Agents do have disagreements about how to do the job.
2. In these movies, AIs develop different personalities  - with complex motivations & even emotions like empathy.
3. Human players playing 'bots supressing humans ... well, in me that'd create this immense pressure to rebel at some point.
4. For the first time ever, I could see how a game set in the Matrix universe could be interesting.
5. Players would probably sympathise with the objectives of both the Agents & the Humans in this setting.

Danny, I'm not too familiar with the mythology of the Technocracy. What are the parallels?

hix wrote:
4. For the first time ever, I could see how a game set in the Matrix universe could be interesting.

What about "Deja Vu" as a Ceremony Raise?

hix wrote:
Danny, I'm not too familiar with the mythology of the Technocracy. What are the parallels?

Deja-vu – yep, that’s kind of what I was implying with Re-coding. But you’ve phrased it better.

There's still some odd spaces in this setting. Which just proves to me that DitV does what it does. Porting it to another time & place makes me appreciate its construction a lot better. So, questions:

I’m not sure what demonic influence equates to. Maybe it’s like “Reality, breaking through” or ‘the most evidence you’ve seen that the Matrix is breaking down’.

I’m also not sure what people want from the Agents. Mostly it’d be – to be left alone. This would have a completely different vibe to a DitV game. People wouldn’t want to talk to you or honour you. They’d see your characters as powerful representatives of the government. You’d probably have to torture and interrogate people ALL THE TIME to find out information. Looked at that way, the section of The Matrix from where the Agents enter Neo’s workplace to when Neo wakes up clutching his stomach is probably part of a typical game.

And all this is based around dealing with 'townsfolk' who are hooked into the Matrix.  I haven’t even thought about you’d handle confrontations with ‘real hackers’ from Zion.

Would demons be hackers from Zion?
Would agents have relationships with people?
How would it handle agents possessing people?

Very interesting setting idea. I'm looking forward to watching this thread.

I don't know why but for some reason it feels wrong to have demons = 'hackers from Zion'. At the moment I'm tending towards Vincent's POV from an earlier thread, that they = 'bad luck and things going wrong'.

Agents seem to have relationships with people in the movies.  Agent Smith has relationships with Cipher, Morpheus and Neo/Anderson. He also has a relationship with The Matrix ("I hate this place."). While most of the relationships are negative, some people are helping him/betraying humanity.

How about having the demons be legacy code/obsolete programs from previous iterations of the matrix?  As the structures of the present matrix break down, old things seep back in through the cracks to cause chaos... 

This is interesting, but what I do not quite get yet is what would make this a Dogs game. Agents clearly have the mandate to judge, and in their guise as super government agents, would even be welcomed in crisis situations like the start of the first movie. But what I do not get is what would make the Agent´s judgments difficult, and what inhibits them from escalating to guns the first chance they get? As discussed so far, the only difficulty would be getting the information out of the humans, which presents no moral problems to the Agents, just the players. But hey, isn´t that just like Dogs? Characters have absolute moral authority so that the players get to make all the hard calls? Well, no, if you ask me. Dogs are still human, helping their human community members cope with their all too-human weaknesses.

I guess you could introduce restrictions like "must keep up the production; every human battery is valuable" - but I would, personally, find it hard to play with such mentality.

It would be nice to have an actually playable game set in the Matrix, but I need to have answers to these questions before pitching it to our group. Other groups may vary.

Cheers,
+ Mikael

I agree with Mikael!

At the risk of provoking John Harper again, clearly Neo and Trinity and them are the Dogs, and the agents are the sorcerers and/or possessed people.

It's a curious thing. In Dogs straight, the PCs are the protagonists, and the PCs have authority. As people try to adapt Dogs' rules to setups where protagonism and authority are at odds, they tend to keep "the PCs have authority," over "the PCs are the protagonists." I suspect that it's because they don't know what makes a protagonist, but they do understand authority, so the authority is what they think matters.

-Vincent

That's a great point Vincent, and there's a corollary: who's a possible protagonist will vary between play groups. 

I suspect part of the reason people find the Dogs and the Faith so compelling and provocative is that these ideas tap right into the intellectual history of the UK and the USA -- the story of virtuous pioneers making a new home among dangers and temptations.  So, even if you're distinctly unsympathetic to the Faith as it's presented, it's still prettty easy to fall into the Dogs mindset. 

I HAVE BEEN PROVOKED!

Sadly... I agree with V and Mikael in this case. No wrath here. Move along.

Hey there! Excuse the delay in replying; real life threw me a curveball this week. Hopefully this doesn't qualify as resurrecting a dead thread quite yet.

Mikael & Vincent, I had a long think about your points - and I may have to agree to disagree with you. My take on this really boils down to 3 things:

First off, I still think this setting is useful for exploring the issue of playing characters who's aims you don't empathise with. It seems more fit for one-offs & thought experiments rather than long-term play. Second and third, to play it there needs to be a radical shift in perspective towards the Agents and you have to accept Agents have autonomy. Both are pretty significant adjustments to how we normally interpret the movies from the Hackers side.

[QUOTE="Everspinner"]But what I do not get is what would make the Agent´s judgments difficult, and what inhibits them from escalating to guns the first  chance they get?

Dogs are still human, helping their human community members cope with their all too-human weaknesses. I guess you could introduce restrictions like "must keep up the production; every human battery is valuable" - but I would, personally, find it hard to play with such mentality.

Mikael, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you. I think we're in agreement that the question isn't whether there's anything so difficult about the situation for the characters - the question is: is it difficult for the players? When I combined that with Vincent's comment (in another thread) about how the protagonists in DitV 'fight against injustice',  I came up with this:

Let's assume the Agents are benevolent. Despite the war against the humans, the Machines kept people alive. They didn't wipe them out when they easily could have. Now the movies present this as symbiosis - co-dependence on each other for survival.

What if it's altruism (or respect for the creatures that created you)? From the Machines' POV, say there's a billion people hooked up to the Matrix and that the Earth has been completely ecologically ravaged. Freeing people from the Matrix then equals letting them starve to death. So, maybe there are agents who don't agree with 'enslaving' humanity but prefer to keep them alive than sentence them to death.

I'd be prepared to accept that logic on behalf of the thought experiment, but I can understand that not everybody would.

Additionally, a protagonist is someone who makes meaningful decisions. To play an Agent who's a protagonist means you can’t be constrained by have to always make the same decision: KILL HACKERS.

So, Agents need authority. Protagonist Agents need to be able to let things slide and find lateral solutions to the central problem of how to maintain the integrity of the Matrix. That means their players have to have free reign to find other ways to solve the problem: by being hardline anti-human, questioning, showing compassion, rebelling, whatever. The group is allowed to enforce the Matrix’s will how they wish

That's all I got. Does any of that work to create an environment where Agents can be protagonists? Is this a case where everyone's mileage varies or am I missing the point?

In other news:

Those last few comments gave me a better understanding of how to make a Hackers game of The Matrix playable.

Breaking things down into small towns/missions, having to figure out how to achieve your goals - that all works a lot better for me than trying to fit players actions into the broader story of Neo & Trinity. I'm not sure what the progression of town creation would be in such a ‘hacker’ oriented version and I'm not sure the DitV rules are the best thing to emulate it (given that they do what they do, so well) - but this thread has opened my mind.