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Already digging this new vibe.
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Sep 10, 2019 02:04
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Selachian posted:Catching up from a couple pages back, but what amuses me about the Mustard Mafia excerpt is how much contempt Smolensk lavishes on the idea that a PC might think to pick a pocket or cut a purse in the crowd. As if pickpockets haven't been making a living since, probably, the invention of the pocket. Holy poo poo, did you get a copy of some of the other XXVc books? Like "No Humans Allowed"? I used to have that book and it was great but I sold it during some desperate times and all the copies are super-expensive now.
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Sep 25, 2019 17:02
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Flail Snail posted:I'm still trying to understand Death's arms. Yeah, it looks like another species' Grim Reaper taking a soul.
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Sep 26, 2019 16:39
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PurpleXVI posted:Mildly entertained that this Buck Rogers RPG which isn't even supposed to specifically call out to weird transhumanism has what feels like a more interesting repetoire of near-humans than Eclipse Phase. That aforementioned "No Humans Allowed" is literally a proto-Eclipse Phase bestiary of gennies. There's a slew of variants of the gennies already mentioned, such as the Barney Terrines, an alternate supersoldier take designed by a rival genetics branch that explains the origin of a space pirate metacharacter in XXVc, allowing you create your own Black Barney; the Terrine Mark II, which can best be described as Terrine Terminators, since they're human-looking infiltrators genetically engineered from the Terrine shark-bat-cat hybrid base; the Devastator, another RAM supersoldier project that's more like a weaponize Worker gennie, except they come off as bootleg WH40K Space Marines that degenerate rapidly (that's a feature, not a bug). You also get a "monster manual" of various nasties that staff RAM facilities, some hosed-up post-apocalypse poo poo on Earth like the oversized ratwurst and coyo-dogs, or something that someone threw together and dumped as a cheap bioweapon.
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Sep 27, 2019 05:08
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Night10194 posted:I want to know more about totally sweet rocket pistols. How directly are they just Gyrojets? Or are they actual rocket launcher pistols, like WH40K's bolters never dared to be? Rocket pistols and rifles are totally rocket launcher pistols, but there's a big catch that can be easily and totally exploited if you've ever played the SSI games!
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Sep 27, 2019 05:14
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Maxwell Lord posted:I do have No Humans Allowed and I'll probably do that after the box set. But yeah it's a great bestiary (released fairly late in the line's life, with a lot of stuff reprinted from adventures and supplements.) That was literally the first XXVc book I bought, even before the box set. I loved that book SO much that I mourn that I sold it for five bucks in desperation to a friend who has since moved to another city.
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Sep 27, 2019 05:15
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Bieeanshee posted:A catch in the tabletop game, or the SSI game? Because I played the unholy Hell out of Countdown. Really just the Gold Box SSI games: one of the best pieces of equipment your party members can get are ECM modules. They don't really say what they do, they just seem like some flavor thing in the SSI games. In the tabletop, they, along with chaff grenades, are meant to reduce the effectiveness of rocket weapons' targeting, like it increases THAC0 of any armor attached to it when rocket pistols and rifles are used against it (I will be corrected, probably). It makes sense in how the game could keep you on your toes tactically: lasers were accurate but damage effected by anti-laser aerosol grenades; rocket small arms were powerful but disrupted by chaff and ECM; projectile weapons like bolters and needlers weren't affected by either, but had lower damage. But, they don't do this in the SSI games, probably because the engine couldn't do variable THAC0 for various weapons. Instead, anyone with an ECM module cannot be targeted by a rocket pistol or rifle! So, what would happen is you'd run into classes of enemies like RAM Marines (pay attention, this will be important later) who would be armed exclusively with rocket guns who would be forced into melee combat, so you could deal with large groups of enemies by funneling them into a chokepoint, like an airlock, set up a melee line, and start grenading, use heavy weapons and sniping the mass behind the first line of enemies. Occasionally, you'd have an officer or specialist armed with something else that could pose a threat to your team, but you'd try to get that guy in the first turn and then mop up the rest. No NPC was ever equipped with an ECM module, so these fights tended to be one-sided, although the Combat Robots had them built-in, which could cause some trouble, but you would be likely using a splash damage weapon like grenades and rocket launchers against them. Now, that's just an exploit, but not the biggest exploit: remember those RAM Marines? You only found them on boarding assaults on RAM ships. So, you could deal with the biggest RAM warship by getting into boarding like faking surrender, murder their RAM Marine contingent, then either capture the bridge or engines and salvage the captured ship. Along with all the looted gear from the enemies in tactical combay, you could get serious credits to outfit your team and ship.
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Sep 27, 2019 15:45
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Midjack posted:What kind of monster kills Buck Rogers over a gun??? That Colt M1911 he carries does almost as much damage as a Rocket Pistol but doesn't flake out when it runs into ECM.
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Sep 28, 2019 19:33
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Snorb posted:My take on the monosword in Buck Rogers XXVc is that it's just a crystalline blade, and the laser emitter in there just gives it color, like some kind of futuristic neon lighted sculpture you could get at, say, Hot Topic. Except for the "it's a three-foot long monomolecular razor blade with a handle and a cool scabbard" part Yeah, especially since the concept is largely recycled in Cyberpunk 2020: the blade is so transparent that a laser or LED is needed to help the user know where the loving thing is when being handled. 
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Oct 5, 2019 13:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:Mage and Demon are both the Matrix, but in vastly different ways, which is fun. Mage is very proto-The Matrix, that I still wonder if Virtual Adepts were something the Wachowskis used as inspiration.
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Oct 5, 2019 20:00
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EthanSteele posted:This makes sense cos it's just connected to the sum of all medical knowledge NeoWebMD or whatever. Its good! Considering that Caro was doing field medicine in Libya by watching YouTube videos, it's not that farfetched.
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Oct 7, 2019 21:16
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Midjack posted:Can't really do that in tabletop very well though. idk that's how TORG handled hacking the GodNet.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:39
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Ronwayne posted:Nice. Do you have a post written up elsewhere with your thoughts on the uh, "transhuman" stuff IRL? All I know if the funnier stuff like the robot devil and and THE BIG YUD Oh hell, is this something topical? 'Cuz, along with J.K. Rowling, Richard Morgan of "Altered Carbon" fame (and basically the uncredited writer of Eclipse Phase, since a lot of the game's concepts came from his novel series) outed himself as a transphobe, claiming to be a "bio-materialist" or some poo poo.
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Dec 22, 2019 03:30
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and the general "You can be anything you want so long as it doesn't violate gendernorms circa 1955 in a white american suburb" tone of it.
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Nessus posted:This sounds almost like a recreation of Rodriguez's core premise for the character of Machete, and it makes me think Machete would be an excellent Warhammer character. You don't say? https://twitter.com/officialDannyT/status/1024001165174829056?s=20
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Apr 19, 2020 00:47
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Leraika posted:The forelimb on that pony flying a plane is somehow very frightening to me. Remember, hoofs aren't hands, they're FINGERS.
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Apr 23, 2020 06:18
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PurpleXVI posted:If anything you'd figure that someone like Fabius Bile would figure out how to male female CSM's even if just to make the Imperium shriek in perfectly masculine terror at the thought of getting owned by some strong, scary women. I mean, I can buy the whole "Space Marines have to be men because the geneseed came from the God-Emperor", but geneseeds frequently mutate, so it's possible that a geneseed could mutate to the point where it could only be used by women (or it turns the male Neophytes into female Space Marines, because of how powerful they are in remodelling the human body).
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Apr 26, 2020 17:19
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Cooked Auto posted:Under SMGs we can find another oddity, namely the Ksp m/45, otherwise known as the Swedish K. The Carl Gustav isn't that much of an oddity when you start thinking about it
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Jun 12, 2020 21:45
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Snorb posted:They're the starter weapon in the PC version of Countdown to Doomsday; the Genesis version starts each character out with laser pistols. That said, I think the needle gun is the better weapon; sure, it only does 1d3 damage, but the Genesis version gives it six shots/round, warriors can specialize in them, nothing in the game is immune to them, and grenades/ECM doesn't foul them. The SSI Buck Rogers games also had grade qualities, similar to the Elven- and Dwarven-made weapons in D&D games, where they gave a bonus to damage and to-hit. This made stuff like the Luna-made needle gun a fearsome weapon, doing something like 1d3+4 damage per shot and guaranteeing multiple hits against most opponents.
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Jun 16, 2020 05:52
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JcDent posted:
A question is why would it be 5.56mm? First, it's hundreds of years into a post-apocalyptic future and you'd expect things might change a bit to where subcalibers might no longer be effective weapons or be hard-to-produce. Secondly, Switzerland, where the Hellvetics descended from, don't use 5.56mm NATO, they use 5.6mm Gewehrpatrone 90, which is 5.56mm NATO, but it's Swiss-made.
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Aug 6, 2020 03:16
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Everyone posted:Well, gently caress that noise with a rusty chainsaw. I despise Flaws/etc. that abrogate free will - especially ones that abrogates one's will to choose to, well, not be a lovely person. I was thinking about how to do this like a Fate-style trait, like a character receives bennies or fate points or what have you if they flirt or hit on someone and maybe get a bonus if the target character actually reciprocates.
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Aug 16, 2020 00:05
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Tibalt posted:Something visceral and terrifying in the duck call being used on you. It was the most effective scene in the recent Predators movies, in my opinion. The bear from Annihilation would like to tear off you jaw then continue the conversation in your voice.
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Aug 20, 2020 04:04
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Ah, the Old World of Darkness, where you can squeeze some giggling about Doctor Who into the same chapter as "yes it's the antagonist from Big Trouble in Little China. Do not cross him!" Wouldn't be the only game that openly ripped off Big Trouble In Little China...  (Tim Bradstreet also got Geoffrey Lewis from Night Of The Comet in there, too!)
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Sep 2, 2020 02:30
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Bieeanshee posted:Huer.DOS gets mentioned like, once in an early mission briefing. I think Huer.DOS has a character portrait so it has to be more than once.
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Sep 22, 2020 07:08
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Tsilkani posted:Everyone seems to have an edition of Shadowrun that works best for them, and no-one agrees on which one that is. For me it's 4th. Yeah, 4th has it's problems with min-maxing and how karma could insta-win, but it's still the best version to me, because it breaks down the hacker experience to a couple of dice rolls to hack some IoT gizmo instead of the hacker doing their own minigame while everyone else plays X-Box or goes for food.
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Oct 18, 2020 00:52
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Midjack posted:Technically “Burning Chrome,” but that short story was a prototype of Neuromancer anyway. Nah, (spoiler for some triggering content) Molly paid for her enhancements early in her career largely through working in a puppet parlor. It's where she eventually gets into crime, because she came to during a session and murdered someone with her claws.
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Oct 19, 2020 04:08
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Yeah, as time goes on, more and more guns and stuff is more genericized and homogenized. See the explosion of the AR-15 in the last decade, both domestically and globally. Or how ubiquitous the Glock magazine has become. There was maybe a difference of a couple bullets and a caliber, but they all look the same. The stat lines I had for my heartbreaker looked like this...  Generic name, but each with a class, the major differences being their traits. I developed some brand name guns to put aside along this with some old favorites, like the M1911 and the MP7, where they perform slightly differently from these stats, but would be something that could be conceivably be something to come across.
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Oct 21, 2020 21:17
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MuscaDomestica posted:One of the few good things that 6e Shadowrun did was get rid of the lowered mental attribute maximums for Orcs and Trolls. Near the end of 5e they mentioned the lowered numbers were because of systematic racism and not because the two groups were less intelligent. It was something that definitely pissed me off when I started thinking about it. Like, why would Orc and Troll magic users be penalized in astral combat for a societal oppression? Or what about Orcs and Trolls who goblinized late in life as opposed to being born that way?
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Oct 22, 2020 02:54
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The Lone Badger posted:That's partly because they were rocketed from hand-illuminated vellum to totally networked cyberpunk overnight due to Plot Magic and still haven't fully adjusted. Yeah, it's kind of implied in the original TORG that the reason the French resistance is largely running rings around them on the God Net and street manufacturing is that they have the foundations of how this stuff largely runs, while the Cyberpapacy was uplifted and is playing catch-up.
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Oct 23, 2020 02:51
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Everyone posted:See, that statement might get you in trouble with the Church in the CP. You're giving an answer to "How does this thing work" when the thing is a "miracle of God" so you aren't supposed to even consider the question if you're a real believer. I mean, in the Cyberpapacy, thoughts and prayers have tangible results, so just praying for GodNet to fix itself is a legit tech support move.
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Oct 23, 2020 06:00
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LatwPIAT posted:Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the airdomes: Honestly, this stuff brings up something that's been coming up in modern cyberpunk, especially in William Gibson's more recent work, that the future is not evenly distributed. Elysium is probably the biggest example, with the super-rich living in splendor on an orbital habitat, while the rest of humanity subsides in giant slums on Earth. But stuff like these domes or these outdoor bubble tables that have come up due to the pandemic make the distinction even more clearer by putting it within arms' reach of the hazard: the poor, the ill, and the downtrodden kept away from the financially-secure not by hundreds of thousands of miles, but by a few millimeters of polyvinyl and polycarbonate, enjoying the view as if they were in the undersea observatory.  
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Oct 24, 2020 21:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:Not having read the book, but this seems like a good addition to any RPG. Or really any game. Or thing. gently caress yeah let's have pintle-mounted machine gun motorcycles in Sense and Sensibility. That'll loving show you, Mr Willoughby, you cad, leaving Marianne like that. *kapew kapew kapew VROOM* More likely than you think...  
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Nov 3, 2020 20:05
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FMguru posted:My favorite 40K setting quirk is that the Imperium has ruled 90% of the galaxy for 10,000 years, despite supposedly being in a constant death struggle against chaos, xenos, its own schismatic nature, and its own ramshackle incompetence. Chaos doesn't seem like much of a threat when it's had ten thousand years of constant raging against the Imperium and the Imperium still stands while Chaos is confined to a couple of of hot spots (Eye of Terror, etc.) that they can never seem to break out of. Orks have been WAAGHing all over the place since the start of time and they're still just a couple of green dots on the map. Haven't the Tyranids taken a good chunk of the galaxy?
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Nov 9, 2020 04:35
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I just realized the CLASSIFIED one is modern Genestealer Cults. Wait, seriously? I thought they were just some Syndicate looking dudes.
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Nov 12, 2020 19:56
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Since it's been brought up again, I do believe there was a redesign effort made for XXVc. I recall talking to Mike Pondsmith at a GEN CON in the early '90s about it and he said he was a bit disappointed in the art direction the game took, so it sounds like it was taken out of his hands to make it more pulpy. He described wanting a cover that looked more '80s/'90s sci-fi technothriller, with Buck in a spacesuit, helmet off, standing in front of a space plane that looked like an SR-71.Maxwell Lord posted:But we’re not done yet. I may give my scanner a brief rest, And when we do finally reconvene, it will be with one simple restriction: God yes, it still remains one of my favorite supplements for any game.
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Nov 25, 2020 23:31
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Pussy Cartel posted:The whole issue where the sort of game you play is largely dependent on the sorts of characters the players make is something that I think stems from what was an older school of game design. Cyberpunk feels more like a game that was designed to be a toolbox that can be used to create any kind of classic cyberpunk archetype, leaving it up to the GM and players to figure out the kind of campaign they want. The idea of making a game have a particular tonal consistency and specifically steering character concepts toward it feels to me like something that only started to come in vogue later, in the 90s and 00s. Yeah, I got gifted a copy of Cyberpunk Red over Thanksgiving and I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it. I feel there's way too much old stuff that won't come up in game and makes it feel like I'm reading a Kevin Siembedia RIFTS book. The book feels like it's 200 pages too long. I'll hold my tongue on the Special Abilities but I disappointed already that they got rid of Nomad's "Family" special ability and a lot of role abilities feel like they're tripping on each others.
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Nov 28, 2020 18:10
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Midjack posted:That sounds like a concession for people who want to adapt their existing libraries of 2020 with the new rules. Possibly also an attempt to boost interest in the old books, which RTG still sells on their website. Guess what? Outside of lore and stuff, a lot of it is incompatible now. Like they complete redid the weapons so that they're genericized in a bad way. They turned them into D&D "Longsword +1" with a brand name for roleplaying purposes and no longer have an unique stat line.
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Nov 29, 2020 01:10
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SkyeAuroline posted:The art throughout the book (what I've read is it at least) has been giving me that feeling. Painted-over photobashes everywhere, with more attention paid to matching the components than to making it look cohesive and good. That's a big problem I have with Cyberpunk RED: the art is really inconsistent. There's a lot of art that got borrowed from concept art from CD Projekt Red's game, which is why there's a lot of photobashes everywhere, because concept artist do that to get ideas out and presentable quickly for the art director, marketing, whoever. And there's fill-in art taken from other sources. For as much poo poo as Cyberpunk V3.0 gets, at least Dollpunk was a consistent look for that book. Tibalt posted:I think the issue is that Cyberpunk (and other cyberpunk RPGs like Shadowrun) carry the baggage from 80s concepts of the dehumanization of the body, and science fiction/society in general have moved on from that. Like, the way the human body is treated in The Matrix is still technologically dehumanizing, but not in the same way. The way Altered Carbon handles the treatment of the body as a tool versus the human connection of body to self. Hell, even Questionable Content had a storyline about a resleeved AI that feels something similar to body dimorphism. My favorite bit is when CP2020 introduced full-body cyborgs, because R. Talsorian Games were anime nerds and every cyberpunk anime and manga at the time like Appleseed, Ghost In The Shell, or Battle Angel Alita, featured some degree of full-body cyborgs as commonplace. They had to largely retcon their own Humanity mechanics to make them playable. Also, looking that they offer 1500eb for selling yourself out for cyber is just loving lol. The going rate should be six million dollars, after all. Pussy Cartel posted:The devs have said that full-body conversions will be coming in a future book, which means even this half-assed attempt at balance is going to get tossed in short order. I was turned on to a conversation on Twitter about Humanity in Cyberpunk RED before I got the book and Cyberpunk RED basically combined Humanity Cost with Sanity checks from Call Of Cthulhu. So, not only does replacing your body with augmentations affect it, but so does witnessing horrific events. It looked badly implemented. SkyeAuroline posted:There's also the HWI route that applies just fine here - sure, get cybered up! Can you afford the monthly payments to the corp that's got you in a "rent-to-own" program (these suck irl, by the way)? Can you find and afford antirejection drugs and the specialty diet that "fuels" them better, or the pile of batteries to do it without that method? What socioeconomic effects does it carry and how does that weigh on you? I just gotta say that Hard Wired Island needs to come out soon to wash the bad taste of Cyberpunk RED from my mouth. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 05:15
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By popular demand posted:I don't get why they didn't just did away with the system in favour of an explanation that some people have a bad psychological reactions to cybernetics and the media blew it completely out of proportion? It happened to weed and absinth and even psychotherapy and many other basically harmless things that someone has a vast interest in demonizing. Again, Hard Wired Island pulls something similar: "Cyberpsychosis" is an ever-present illusionary "disease" that's hyped up by the corporations and pseudo-psychologists as an excuse to get rid of people who got augmentation to help with their personal productivity after they are no longer profitable and become a liability to the company. "Oh, Mx. Smith, you failed the company's annual psychological exam. Because we believe you to be a risk to your co-workers, we're going to terminate your employment and escort you from the premise. Do not hesitate or we'll have to call the cyberpsycho squad to deal with you."
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Dec 3, 2020 07:16
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JcDent posted:Those are all medical necessities. Being to punch through a wall, however... It's a thin line between medical necessity and augmentation. For instance, I could easily screw on some brass knuckles onto a prosthetic arm or a procedure that alleviates lower spinal paralysis by "rerouting" nerve impulses through fiber optics or wirelessly could be modded to provide superhuman reflexes and performed on a healthy specimen. I'm recalling that Johnny's mnemonic implant in the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic is identify as an implant that treats dyslexia, so who knows if it's a repurposed implant or a disguised one.
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Dec 3, 2020 22:11
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 00:44 |
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Night10194 posted:If you can think of a cheaper way to irresponsibly dispose of my death robots than tossing them out the back and letting them run with gangs until an expensive anti-robot police force has to be founded to kill them, please let me know. Most of the time, "faulty robot rampage" is the cover story of the big bad corporation GENOM 'accidentally' assassinating some undercover journalist or creating a diversion for some corporate espionage, with the AD Police and Knight Sabers destroying the evidence stopping the rampage.
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Dec 4, 2020 18:57
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