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Nessus posted:
The concept seems very dated in this age of hearing aids, insulin pumps, and mechanized prosthetics. In the 90s there's the notion that we're going to have a Ship of Theseus problem replacing parts of our bodies. But then it happened and they're basically braces. It's like the quaint panic about people dying if a locomotive hits 50MPH. Because humans aren't built for that kind of speed.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:17
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moths posted:The concept seems very dated in this age of hearing aids, insulin pumps, and mechanized prosthetics. 
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Aug 18, 2023 15:33
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Gort posted:Shadowrun's got this problem in spades. Like every second picture in the book is cool elves with katanas, and that kind of character sucks because elves have no strength and melee in general is bad. This is not a problem remotely unique to Shadowrun. Actual game design is rare in this industry and treated with outright hostility by its largest developer now.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:34
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moths posted:The concept seems very dated in this age of hearing aids, insulin pumps, and mechanized prosthetics. edit: I am aware most games don't hit this theme properly.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:36
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Terrible Opinions posted:The alienation comes from being forced to change your body and replaced parts by a coercive system, not from prosthesis being scary in and of itself. Replacing your arm with a normal human arm because you had an terrible accident isn't especially bad, but getting it replaced with a spring-loaded murder chainsaw is fundamentally changing a part of yourself to be for violence. That should be alienating. In Cyberpunk a lot of it is also stuff that you can adapt to if you get therapy or just, don't live like an rear end in a top hat (you will at least stabilize) but of course we're talking about PCs, not ordinary people.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:39
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Yeah the thing I really enjoyed in Cyberpunk RED was that it's very clear about the cause of cyberpsychosis isn't because somehow replacing parts of your body makes you flip out and kill people but because as it turns out slowly replacing more and more of your body and rewiring your brain for labor and/or murder combined with PTSD, and stimulant and drug addiction are not super great for your mental health and that maybe the solution to the problem might be therapy and not, y'know, sending kill squads to put them down like dogs.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:54
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I think the worst example of cyberware alienation came from 3rd edition Shadowrun where they decided cyberware cost essence because of neural plasticity despite A) that not being how that works, and B) still charging essence for implants with no neural connections like bone lacing.
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Aug 18, 2023 15:56
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Kwyndig posted:I think the worst example of cyberware alienation came from 3rd edition Shadowrun where they decided cyberware cost essence because of neural plasticity despite A) that not being how that works, and B) still charging essence for implants with no neural connections like bone lacing.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:00
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Splicer posted:Followup question: are there any good cyberpunk ttRPGs that do work like I described? I was trying to hack ORE to do this once upon a time, because at least via the Reign rules you can totally get a limb utterly ruined, including a specific Maim action to screw someone even harder on that front. ORE's health boxes on various hit locations also provided a ready justification for limits on cybering up - you only have, say, 5 hit boxes on this body part, and each piece of chrome "hardens" some number of boxes, also changing how those hit boxes heal. Cyber limbs would automatically harden all boxes on that limb but still provide space to allow other crap to be installed in them. Stuff like that. Like many projects, it turned out to be overambitious and fell by the wayside, especially as the next shiny game system caught my eye. I still think ORE might work alright for it, but I don't want to do the crunchy fiddling myself much anymore to work it out.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:05
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Any time you took a serious injury as a mage you had to make a test or lose a point of essence. It was a balancing mechanic I was not in favor of. I don't know if 6th Ed still does that, I've avoided 6th because it's an incomplete pile of garbage.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:06
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Nessus posted:I didn't like it but I thought they were consistent that replacing parts of your body with machinery weakened your midichlorian count or what-not. (Did losing body parts and not replacing them do so too?) As I recall the game was extremely unclear and/or inconsistent about essence if you just naturally lose a limb. If you do nothing do you lose essence? If you get a cyberarm you lose essence then? What changed between before you stuck it on? If you remove it again you don't get your essence back so like is it just if you ever jam a little metal onto your body your soul leaks out? Edit: Kwyndig posted:Any time you took a serious injury as a mage you had to make a test or lose a point of essence. It was a balancing mechanic I was not in favor of. I don't know if 6th Ed still does that, I've avoided 6th because it's an incomplete pile of garbage. Oh I never heard that bit.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:06
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The underlying "MAGIC" and "TECHNOLOGY" conflict is also stale as poo poo and was stale when they made Mage: the Ascension, but I guess it hung on for a lot. Is there a patient zero for that particular trope? I mostly remember the storyline of Visionaries (knights of the magical light) e: to note, Mage: the Ascension was, for its many, many flaws, always clear that science and technology were a valid path of magiqueck or what-not, as opposed to "oho, you think you can have a FLUSH TOILET in your magick temple?"
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Aug 18, 2023 16:16
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Glagha posted:As complicated a game as Shadowrun is I don't believe there's any actual rules for dismemberment by damage, but I could be wrong. I'm like 95% certain there's no crit blows your arm off rule though. Of course that's all without getting into the can of worms that is getting a prosthetic without any superhuman augmentation RAW costs you essence which means you'll lose access to magic or lose your mind if you do it too much which is... Not great. Yeah that is my recollection of 3rd and 4th. And I think the reason is what you say. If you did that to a character, it would have an essence cost, which would either make them less effective or have no change. In SR, you pretty badly needed to min-max because if you didn't, you died. If you were a mage/adept: your magic is truncated by your Essence. Start with 6 and that arm takes away 1 or .8, you now have 1 less essence which means you are so much weaker now and can never recover. You would be suing your doctor for malpractice if they did this. If you were a street sam: your cyberware and bioware is determined by your Essence, but you probably don't have much room anyway. You probably have 1.5 essence left, to give yourself a 2.25 bio factor or whatever it was called, and if that essence suddenly drops, you're dead. In previous editions, you'd go crazy as a cyberpsycho I think, and in newer editions they had cyberzombies but they were ridiculously expensive and rare. If you were a rigger: you don't need as much cyberware, but a vehicle control rig still cost a lot of essence. Maybe not as much as Wired Reflexes 3, but a lot. Sure, you might have that space to spare but you also are either safely ensconced in your vehicle or you're a drone rigger and you're away from the direct combat anyway. And a VCR is attached to your central nervous system so it's up to the GM to say if it "occupies a slot" in your arm in the same way a gun would, and even then you already have it installed so are you using the optional rules that removed cyberware occupied the "removed hole" in your essence? At best, it doesn't matter and at worst it's complicated. Shadowrun is not the game if you want anything cyberpunk. It's only the game if you want Shadowrun.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:21
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Vanadium posted:Why can't he just keep using whatever old version of InDesign still supports PostScript fonts? If Crane and Friends are using one of the versions of ID released in about the past decade, they don't have a choice but to update, since it's all subscription-based garbage these days. Either he updates and loses the PS support, or he has to switch to another program which will also likely gently caress up the layouts. Buying a license back in '03 for the ITC Bodoni font in PS wouldn't entitle you to a new OT version unless the foundry was uncharacteristically generous, so effort and money are the primary problems he's going to have. That said, even if the standard is a 1:1 changeover, you still run the risk of a given foundry having a very slightly different version of a typeface. While having a letter be a fraction of a faction of an inch off from where you expect it is a big deal to they kind of obsessive weirdos who become graphic designers, it's an annoying and ugly problem, not at the level of burning the house down with everything you've ever cared about inside it, as we're seeing here. If you're not a big stupid rear end in a top hat when you set up your text flows, re-rag isn't as big a deal as he's acting. Also, like, OT fonts were the way to go during the time he's referencing, so I don't know why this is coming as a surprise to him. The PS standard was created back in the 80s and OpenType has been the big dog for the 17 years he's dropping. Guy is really angsty he can't listen to his enormous eight-track collection.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:26
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I'm seeing people talk about conversion being incomplete and other people about font licenses not allowing conversions and I really do not envy the burning wheel people for this mess.
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I agree with that point, Shadowrun has always been it's own thing. It's cyberpunk adjacent but unless your GM ignores the magic rules you ignoring the magic rules is done at your peril. You at least need to understand how spirits and spell targeting work, for your own protection. You can separate out the fantastical elements but the game suffers without them, basically being a more fiddly Cyberpunk RED with dice pools.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:30
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Does Shadowrun do levels or XP spend or checks or what, in order to do character skill progression? I mean in both of these cases the core idea is to present being a cyborg as having downsides that are more quantifiable than either philosophical arguments about human nature, or abstractable "you have to like, pay for maintenance." Even if you are not going for an indie-narrative narrow-focus game you would think that there are other ways to implement this.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:39
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grassy gnoll posted:Also, like, OT fonts were the way to go during the time he's referencing, so I don't know why this is coming as a surprise to him. The PS standard was created back in the 80s and OpenType has been the big dog for the 17 years he's dropping. Guy is really angsty he can't listen to his enormous eight-track collection. There were absolutely still articles up until relatively recently saying PS is good for high-quality print applications. And Crane has always aimed for producing a very high quality physical product for BW.
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Aug 18, 2023 16:40
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Kestral posted:If you've followed the development of Burning Wheel long enough, you will know why the idea of re-flowing something like 1200 pages of dense, painstakingly-formatted InDesign documents fills BWHQ with soul-searing horror. After the stories we've heard over the years, I completely understand why this would break them, especially since it's a passion project rather than something they do for income. I believe that it would be a ton of work, and I believe that it’s a bit goofy to allow your soul to be seared without at least taking a week to scope out the problem. I also believe that Luke Crane is legitimately incapable of doing anything other than throwing up his hands, given how he’s reacted to setbacks like “hey did you know you asked a sexual harasser to contribute to your anthology?”
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Aug 18, 2023 16:57
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Nessus posted:Does Shadowrun do levels or XP spend or checks or what, in order to do character skill progression? So the technical answer is it has karma which is character points to spend on upgrades. In practice there's extremely little character skill progression because the game's written guidelines for distributing karma make it so that it's extremely unlikely you'll ever spend points on anything you care about outside of character creation. I forget the exact numbers but it basically worked out to if you're a street samurai and your whole thing is you have a katana and you slice people up with it and you wanted to say improve your skill with swords beyond what you started with it'd take you like 20 karma and you might get 1 a session so good luck. The only things you can afford at the rate you get karma if you ever want to do any character progression within the timeframe of an actual campaign and gain something before the heat death of the universe is to buy secondary skills. This is fine for like, picking up new tricks for your character, but really bad for making your character any better at the thing they do and SR extremely incentivizes specialization. If your thing is Magic, or Guns, or Swords you better sink every resource you have into it at the start because it's never getting better than that. Kinda like from a previous post where you get very little money and everything good costs basically an exorbitant amount of money even outside of the game's rules for lifestyle upkeep and paying to keep a roof over your head. If you're going to get cool augmentations you're getting them at character creation when the game is like "here's 900k nuyen stock up" and you better spend it because you're never ever seeing that kind of money again. The game clashes with itself because it wants to do the gritty cyberpunk thing where you're barely making ends meet selling your soul to faceless, soulless suits and fighting for what little freedom you have, but on the other hand it also wants you to be a cybered up super assassin or a literal fuckin wizard, and doesn't quite put in the effort to try to make those ends meet.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:14
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So basically there isn't much PC progression, it sounds like, other than maybe cyberware or learning some new spells or something? No wonder they had such a huge convention presence for it, even if I tapped out after an hour of the chargen process which had been 80% someone else choosing their ammunition.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:18
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Jimbozig posted:There were absolutely still articles up until relatively recently saying PS is good for high-quality print applications. And Crane has always aimed for producing a very high quality physical product for BW. PostScript in general is still fine. Adobe's changes (the ones that it seems literally everyone is making) only apply to ancient fonts that only the biggest font manufacturers made decades ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/microsoft-adobe-and-others-have-dropped-support-for-old-postscript-fonts/
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Aug 18, 2023 17:20
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Glagha posted:My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over. In 2E, the attribute bonuses were additive. 3E and beyond, they tracked them separately, instead of just hand waving it. Cyberarms cost a ton of nuyen and essence for how little you received for them. Especially when alot of players just wanted them for flavor. There were dismemberment rules in 2E, but they took then out for 3E and later because it took characters out of the fight. Getting hurt is cool for the story, but makes it kinda suck for the game. Nessus posted:Does Shadowrun do levels or XP spend or checks or what, in order to do character skill progression? They award Karma, which are points you spend to increase your abilities. The cost is imported directly from previous editions, with no thoughts on how it affected different characters. Want to roll an extra die when you fire your favorite gun? 14 karma points. Want a new spell that's essentially a new super power and uses all of your existing skills? 5 Karma points. Since there were so many other things that gave you bonuses (or removed penalties) to using a gun, getting better at shooting was kind of a waste. This was compounded by later editions focusing on QUALITIES. Fix broken rules by buying a positive quality that lets you use a more workable set of rules. Never mind that you're as skill a hacker as a surgeon, if you don't take this quality to it takes the entire fight to do anything meaningful while hacking. The whole thing was just a giant turd and then they released 6th edition without even flinching at it.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:42
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This shows the profound cognitive appeal of the concept, I suppose, since it sure isn't just D&D brand awareness.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:46
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I love Shadowrun, but the game as presented is borderline unplayable. The best game I ever ran of it I gave up all pretense of street level cyberpunk and made the characters all James Bond style super-agents. It let me actually utilize all the sourcebooks, location guides, military hardware, high level threats etc.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:21
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All of my best TTRPG memories are of playing Shadowrun. 8/10, I advise never playing it
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Aug 18, 2023 18:24
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I finally got my new built-in bookshelves, set up and stable, and got all the books into them, which was several small ordeals.  
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Aug 18, 2023 18:49
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Bucnasti posted:I love Shadowrun, but the game as presented is borderline unplayable. Which is ironic, because the GM decided that anyone with access to a television feed (since the Desert Wars are televised) could use it to coordinate artillery strikes. We all got blown to smithereens without a real fight. It was the closest thing to a literal "cow from space" I ever encountered in actual play. It was also the most extreme example of how Shadowrun encourages you to spend much, much more time creating characters than playing them.
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Aug 18, 2023 19:01
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Terrible Opinions posted:The alienation should come from being forced to change your body and replaced parts by a coercive system, not from prosthesis being scary in and of itself. Replacing your arm with a normal human arm because you had an terrible accident isn't especially bad, but getting it replaced with a spring-loaded murder chainsaw is fundamentally changing a part of yourself to be for violence. That should be alienating. An implementation that hits the theme would need to acknowledge capitalist alienation. The issue is not being transformed into a scary robot man. The issue is transforming into a machine to make money. To make number go up. The human being has been consumed by the capitalist machinery they have been forced to engage with. This is cybernetics in the original meaning of systems and feedback instead of chrome robot arms.
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Aug 18, 2023 19:19
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I can't believe no one's mentioned Hardwired Island (or I missed it), the goonmade cyberpunk game where the downside of prosthetics is not that you're a disgusting inhuman creature for having a synthetic eye or cool shotgun leg, but because it's the far off future of 2020 where every little thing is licensed from a techbro so now you're paying a subscription fee to not have scoliosis.
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Aug 18, 2023 19:22
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Halloween Jack posted:It was also the most extreme example of how Shadowrun encourages you to spend much, much more time creating characters than playing them. I think that's the real secret of Shadowrun's (and several other games of that time) success. Everyone wants to make cool characters, so everyone wants to buy every loving goofy gear book, even if they never play the game.
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Aug 18, 2023 19:41
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Thanlis posted:I believe that it would be a ton of work, and I believe that it’s a bit goofy to allow your soul to be seared without at least taking a week to scope out the problem. I also believe that Luke Crane is legitimately incapable of doing anything other than throwing up his hands, given how he’s reacted to setbacks like “hey did you know you asked a sexual harasser to contribute to your anthology?” This speaks more to your lack of familiarity with BWHQ than it does to the actual situation. Which I suppose is understandable, given the mythology TradGames has constructed around them.
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Aug 18, 2023 20:15
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Glagha posted:My issue with Shadowrun other than that the system is clunky as hell is that in every edition I've tried cyber arms are just bad. If you wanna be a cybered up badass the mechanically useful version is a bunch of stuff like wired reflexes and muscle replacement which are cool and all but aren't a cool robot arm. Cyber arm strength is super limited because they insist on being realistic about it where you can't throw a car with your robot arms because you don't have a cyber spine so it's got some complicated average strength system because it's Shadowrun. You can put a gun in your arm but why bother because it costs a ton of money and essence to get a gun that's no better than a regular gun and is in fact worse because it's super limited on type. I feel like if you make a game at least partially about cyborgs getting into gunfights and you make your cyber arms overpriced junk you hosed up. Start over. I don't disagree but I think the real problem is elsewhere. The reason for having a cyberarm - the reason I once played a mage with one - is that cyberarms are kickin' rad. Yeah, I had a shotgun in mine. Why? Because sooner or later someone was going to think "hah hah I have protection from magic and so I will just walk up to the mage and scrag him," and then I will shotgun that guy in the face! But Shadowrun wants you to to encounter challenges that may well kill the PCs, and that pushes hard against doing things that are cool unless they are also mechanically optimal.
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Aug 18, 2023 20:23
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That Old Tree posted:I can't believe no one's mentioned Hardwired Island (or I missed it), the goonmade cyberpunk game where the downside of prosthetics is not that you're a disgusting inhuman creature for having a synthetic eye or cool shotgun leg, but because it's the far off future of 2020 where every little thing is licensed from a techbro so now you're paying a subscription fee to not have scoliosis. The issue is mostly what are you trying to get across if you have some kind of cybernetic balancing factor. Maybe you DON'T, or it's some sort of sanity-check mechanism so people don't completely rebuild themselves between missions of the week. Or maybe that's normal in the setting and everyone does it! Maybe your crew shares limbs and cyberguns and perhaps this represents some kind of deeper integration, the group-chat growing to encompass a multi-body entity. I can't think of a game which just flat out goes 'yeah this rules' other than Eclipse Phase, and that game also has problems. I own a copy of the PBTA 'Sprawl' or something like that but it didn't really grab my brain hooks.
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Aug 18, 2023 20:34
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Halloween Jack posted:The last Shadowrun game I played with my high school group was a one-shot set in the Desert Wars. We had access to all the gear with no worries about being able to conceal your gun or whatever, so we went all out. Not only did we create a bunch of cybered-up killing machines, we set up defenses around our vehicle with land mines all around. My character in particular had all the cyberware and gear that lets you act as an artillery spotter, which I bet was very rarely used by anyone playing Shadowrun. So your GM was an rear end in a top hat who wasted your group's time for no reason except maybe to be a smartass?
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Aug 18, 2023 20:47
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drrockso20 posted:So your GM was an rear end in a top hat who wasted your group's time for no reason except maybe to be a smartass?
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Aug 18, 2023 21:04
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Shotguns in prosthetic arms are cool and make for rad fight choreography in anime, but few games really emphasize concealability or rapidly changing to some weapon in a way where being able to have a shotgun in your arm is all that much better than just carrying a shotgun, or even whatever other, bigger weapon you can just carry with you. "Remember, switching to the shotgun in your arm is always faster than reloading", but not that many TTRPGs care about decreasing reload speed by 0.8 seconds or whatever.
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Aug 18, 2023 21:04
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The last Shadowrun game I played was a one-shot in college where we played a group of mercs hired by our real-world college to retrieve the library books stolen by our rival college in the 19th century. The only thing I remember doing in it was having my elven hacker social-engineer my way into the rivals' IT core by playing "clueless student whose 'Internet is broken'", but later someone blew up a helicopter with a crit on an RPG. A+++ Shadowrun, feel no need to ever play it again
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Aug 18, 2023 21:08
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That Old Tree posted:I can't believe no one's mentioned Hardwired Island (or I missed it), the goonmade cyberpunk game where the downside of prosthetics is not that you're a disgusting inhuman creature for having a synthetic eye or cool shotgun leg, but because it's the far off future of 2020 where every little thing is licensed from a techbro so now you're paying a subscription fee to not have scoliosis. When I was talking about cyberarms, I was thinking about that game. Specifically the double threat of how modifications to make you cool or to express your gender or to become a catgirl/catboy/catchild are free and only stuff that has a mechanical effect in games costs anything, and that cost is typically perpetual for things like (anti-rejection drugs) and not completed at character creation. The oppressive feeling of Burden is so much more interesting than the near-complete lack of progression in SR, where everything is so expensive, rare, or difficult after character creation. You rarely if ever get to make any changes such to the point that it might be more appropriate to theme them as RIFTS Juicers or people who are Running Out Of Time or whatever. I've bought and read HWI, but have not played (and probably won't but only because ttrpgs are probably behind me) but it's rad as all get out and not just because 
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Aug 18, 2023 21:12
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Another kudo to Hard Wired Island, the game that probably has the most realistic cyberware in that its main downside is making your crippling debt even more crippling. Plus needing to jailbreak your arm to stop it from playing the manufacturer's jingle every morning.
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Aug 18, 2023 21:14
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LatwPIAT posted:Shotguns in prosthetic arms are cool and make for rad fight choreography in anime, but It's for taking out the paranoid boss crime executive who only meets with naked people in the sauna.
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Aug 18, 2023 21:22
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