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Random point, but my favorite detail that I always forget is that Crafty is described as "tall for a human"...and is like 6'5. Google states that the average female height in modern day Hong Kong is 5'3. Every conversation with her as a dwarf is her looming over you. As a troll, you're probably the only person in Heoi who's close to her height.
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Dec 30, 2022 15:18
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Shadowrun has always been shaky on how much or how you should roleplay having very low Essence. Until I think SR5 they never even made it a mechanical thing, and even then it was connected to one of the most hated mechanics in SR5: limits. The actual best look into it was in the SR2e book Cybertechnology, and even then, they didn't actually present it as low Essence somehow "draining away your humanity." Instead it was a (very cool, I should add) look into how turning yourself into a weapon would negatively effect your mental state in far more interesting and realistic ways. Things like "my cybereyes made things too crisp, too clean. It made me disassociate myself from my own life and see it like a movie. And that's what I wanted." Or "the wired reflexes meant I had to forever keep my back to walls, because they're reflexes, and for the rest of my life I'm going to be terrified that an innocent person or even a friend will approach me from behind and I'm going to hurt them without wanting to." This kinda thing is way more interesting then just "sorry you have a prosthetic; you lose 10 Human Points," and a whole lot less lovely to people who have actual need of prosthetics to boot. It's also in its own way a whole lot MORE grim; the risk isn't that getting a metal arm makes you somehow less of a person, the risk is that you can no longer do normal things with that arm because it's always jacked to a thousand and now you try to playfully punch someone and you break their shoulder. The risk of getting the cool headware isn't that your brain is rewired into something robotic and evil, the risk is that constantly hearing and responding to voices in your head makes everyone around think of you as a crazy or dangerous person, and now you have even less human contact in your already lonely existence.
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Mar 6, 2023 17:57
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:The way I see it, having particularly *high* Essence should have a similar effect, as you become increasingly untethered from material reality and closer to kaleidoscopic lights and mesmerizing flows beyond it. Go low enough and you're a human spirit trapped inside a fetish of machinery and rotting flesh!
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Mar 11, 2023 07:39
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The money tightness is appropriate given both genre and game themes. It also makes money *matter more*. Now, losing out on some pay or giving up money for "moral" reasons is a lot more painful.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:10
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Mindopali posted:I'm throwing a furtive look at the thread every now and then in the hopes of getting my dose of Asian Cyberpunk Fantasy. Get the game and play along!
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Aug 19, 2023 09:19
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MJ12 posted:The megacorps drilled into the Akashic Records, the font of all knowledge, to get more bandwidth and cloud storage space, and this is why everything is now better if you turn its wi-fi on. paragon1 posted:There was more human sacrifice and breaching weird new forms of metaplane but yeah basically. I really wish they had made this as cool as it should've been.
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Sep 14, 2023 05:28
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Shadowrun Hong Kong honestly is the best parts of Shadowrun running on all cylinders, and it's the little touches like the Shadowlands BBS or the "vampire queen" being some luckless accountant that makes it so good.
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Sep 26, 2023 05:31
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By all appearances, Paradox bought them, realized "wait what the gently caress do we do with a company that makes licensed games, we don't do that at all," and answered their question by culling the team completely, pushing the unfinished game out, and calling the whole thing a loss.
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Oct 13, 2023 09:35
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I always just accepted this as a divorce between gameplay and story. The intention seems pretty clear cut that Racter is meant to have maybe 1 or less essence remaining, and thus why it's meant to be a big shock moment to discover it, as, at that level of Essence, he should have significantly more side effects then he's presenting. It's meant to be a "wait, how are you not affected by that? EVERYONE is affected by it!"wiegieman posted:Having low Essence is dehumanizing, but that's because low Essence is a sign that you have packed yourself full of dehumanizing things to make yourself into a better person-shaped gun. I forget if I already mentioned it in this thread (and if I did, too bad, you get to read it again), but the gold star on writing that is in the 2e book simply titled Cyberwear, which gives a first person account of what it means to be ware'd up to the gills. Rather then being presented as "well he lost Humanity Points so he's just weird now," it's very much written in the light of "what would it mean for your day to day life, to try and live with this 'ware?" and how dehumanizing it is not because you're made of metal, but because you've removed your ability to interact with other people. He can't wrestle or play with his old buddies anymore because his cyber-arms are too strong and he unthinkingly hurts them. He always keeps his back to the wall, not because he's paranoid of someone attacking him, but out of fear of losing control of his own wired reflexes when someone accidentally triggers them. He talks about how most cyber samurai, so alienated from other people, end up getting headware not to call in for jobs or do super secret plans, but to call Matrix girlfriends or even just regularly visited sexlines, because that's the only meaningful human interaction they really have left. When he first gets his cybereyes, they're not configured right...and he doesn't get them fixed immediately, because the artificiality of them is so everpresent that they cause him to disassociate, making him feel like his whole life is now just a video he's watching, and he wants that disassociation between himself and his actions. It's also the book that introduced cyberzombies - with him undergoing the procedure in question - presented in the same way you would a horror movie. It's meant to be horrifying that he's turned himself wholely into a weapon, to the point where he's now remote controlled, his soul desperately trying to die and not being allowed to do so. Which makes cyberzombies one of the exceptionally rare things in media that calls back to the actual horror of the zombie myth. The horror was not that zombies are scary and eat brains. The horror is that not even death can save you from slavery.
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Oct 22, 2023 05:39
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Oh, slight note, got the name wrong. It's Cybertechnology, not Cyberware. Funny enough, the book was at the time...somewhat poorly recieved. People complained it spent too much time with narrative writing, not enough time...alas, getting to the "cool ware." Nerds. What can you do.
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Oct 22, 2023 07:10
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Adjacent to a lot of this, one of the problems with the Essence system (and Cyberpunk's humanity system, and...etc, etc, etc) is that research increasingly shows that the human brain is actually fantastic at handling prosthetics and similar. As it turns out, the brain has two things it needs to accept body parts: the ability to see it as a tool, and your ability to have psychological "ownership" of it. And we're really, really good at both! We don't yet know what the actual limit of our ability to rebuild ourselves is, but most current science points to alienation being caused by prosthetics or similar simply not providing the brain with enough information. I mean, we don't have CYBERARMS or CYBERLEGS or whatever, but all current science and studies lean hard into "actually, after a brief period of therapy to ensure psychological ownership (which would be substantially easier if the limb in question already looked like the previous one), our body would have no problems at loving all in adapting to it." Now, the far more "exotic" stuff like Wired Reflexes, we have no clue how the body would handle that - that kind of thing is purely the subject of fantasy. But replacing body parts? The science says there's no reason to expect human beings to undergo LOSS OF HUMANITY over a new arm.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:51
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It's worth noting if we think back to Glory that her good ending pushes really strongly towards it not even being specifically her cyberware that made her like she was, it was the immense and horrific trauma she went through - and that she can, and is, healing from that, by helping others who might also feel as used and broken as she can. And, of course, the LP isn't finishedyet. Harebrained isn't done thinking and talking about how Essence actually works and how cyberware might effect someone.
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Oct 24, 2023 03:57
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I think there's three htings going on here basically. First, Essence as a balance mechanic between magic and cyberware. Sure! Essence as purely a balance mechanic is fine. "More tech = less magic the end" is a position that hypothetically most people would likely be fine with. The problem is... ...Second, Essence as an in-universe indicator of things. This is where it starts to get bad, and a lot of cyberpunk makes the same mistake, because it sorta boils down to "pacemakers and prosthetics make you less human." That's a really lovely thing to say, and also boy, you certainly are, uh, treading real close to real life arguements of eugenics! It's essentially a declaration that having prosthetics is something inherently dehumanizing. On top of being just a frankly lovely as hell thing to believe, it's scientifically bullshit - the human brain is in fact incredible at adapting to a whole lot of things, prosthetics included, which honestly makes sense because the whole drat point of our big wrinkly brains is that they can adapt to unexpected stimuli and/or organize and sort that into categories that allow it to become expected and normalized stimuli. Which finally leads us to the Third thing, which is that this is a bullshit and terrible way to represent a theme of tech being dehumanizing. We know tech can be dehumanizing. We had a whole-rear end industrial revolution to teach us real fast just how dehumanizing technological advancements could be. The Luddite movement didn't hate technology because they thought progress was bad, they were smashing the machines that were destroying their industry and leaving them to starve in the gutters while their children lost their hands to those same machines. Cyberpunk as a genre has long suffered from largely being popularized just before the "end of history," which means this punk genre has somehow never read a single word of actual revolutionary theory. As a result you get frankly stupid ideas such as "what if COMPUTER...made you LESS PERSON" like the world's most insipid boomer meme spread across Facebook. It also leads to real dumb ideas like "the real trend setters are going to be ancap murderers who take the tech to UPGRADE THEIR DEATH SKILLS" when we all know the actual front runners of that kind of tech are going to be trans folk and furries. There are solutions! You can focus on how tech is dehumanizing by specifically looking at how it removes you from the human experience not because COMPUTER BAD but because you're intentionally dehumanizing yourself so you can get a slightly better paycheck at your job where you murder people. You can focus on how this tech really is not obtainable purely on your own, sorry bizarro libertarians who make up a more sizable number of tabletop gaming nerds then you'd think, and so every bit of 'ware comes with either either a leash to a sponsor of some sort, or comes with a connection to the community that chipped in and helped you buy it. You can focus on how this tech is both company owned and largely pushed onto people per terms of employment, and thus you had no choice but to "upgrade" yourself, except now your new ears needs constant updates, and if the company that made it so decides they can start charging you regular fees for "updates and upgrades" and, should you not pay, they can just turn it off and utterly remove your hearing, a thing that has in fact happened in the real world that we live in. And as for magic, well, again, you don't have to make Essence any sort of connection to your base humanity. And also, make magic way more weird and stop presenting it as a matter of holistic wholeness and soul connectivity, so that 'ware cutting you off from magic stops having such grotesque connotations. Dragonfall actually did this fairly well with Dietrich - his connection to his mentor spirit is going to loving kill him and pushes him into increasingly more dangerous stunts. You get the idea.
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Oct 25, 2023 08:22
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I enjoy how Gaichu here initally tries to balance his realization for just how far the fascist corporate stooges he was with would go in not giving a poo poo about civilians, and then immediately after tells you a story about publicly assassinating innocent people with pride in a job well done. Also his complaint with the Red Samurai isn't even that they are what they are - it's that he's now better at being a killer then they were.
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Dec 3, 2023 11:03
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By popular demand posted:Are ghouls able to eat cooked flesh though? Nope, has to be raw. I guess cooking it somehow causes the Essence to leak out? Frankly having a ghoul on your team just makes clean up that much easier. No more corpses left behind! And a particularly bloody mission means Gaichu has food for days!
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Dec 4, 2023 17:45
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Gaichu must be brought to all social events, and this one's a real winner for him. There are no right or wrong options here, incidentally. Except for taking our boring brother, because he's boring. I mentioned that Hong Kong wasn't done talking about Essence, and we have another big winner here with Ambrose. Ambrose by his own admition has near nothing left of his Essence...and yet, Ambrose is anything but emotionally unavailable and cold. While I don't think Ambrose was intentionally set to be a character discussion on Essence, I think he still serves as one - and serves as a very important note on how much community matters. And speaking of community, that also brings us to Reliable Matthew. I was pretty surprised first time I played that the game pushed that yes, he is talking these drugs for medicinal reasons, and trying to hold them away from him is distinctly the morally wrong option, akin to trying to shake him down for a few bills. Ambrose makes it clear that he's not getting Matthew his BTLs as a drug dealer - he's doing it as friend and doctor. Pretty big difference from how they were treated in the original core game!
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Dec 9, 2023 22:33
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Villiers is a very fun character because, in a setting of evil wizards, murderous otherworldly spirits, megalomaniac AIs, brutal augmented fascists, and literal dragons, he's sincerely just A Really lovely Finance Dude. And he's super successful at it!
ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 04:33
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FoolyCharged posted:I have to love the way you can just enthusiastically tell everyone at the convention that you punched that guy. Taz is just so proud of herself. I love how everyone you say it to is like, hell yeah you did!
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Mar 29, 2024 14:45
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Gun Jam posted:This entire mission could have been an email titled "I'm sorry". That's the funniest part of this entire run to me. All of this, because Izz didn't even consider just asking normally, but leapt straight to "obviously we have to take it by force."
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May 13, 2024 22:42
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:28 |
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For me, it works in part because Izz is otherwise such a serious character. She had so much childhood trauma that she literally locked those memories away digitally. She's antisocial in part because she's a giant nerd, but also in part because she grew up in Nightmare Town to the most poverty stricken immigrants and likely just...stopped bothered trying to get to know people given the rate if disappearance of kids. You've already been to her previous home, which was ALSO filled with antisocial nerds, except they were the kind who were so full of themselves that they tried to hire a ghoul assassin and then renege on the deal. In most adventures she's the deadpan serious one (albeit in a fun way, as opposed to Duncan being the straight man in a boring way). It's kinda fitting she ends up with the most goofball personal quest. EDIT: It also gives you a fun look at other Runners. The completely non-tech dude who's just there to kidnap someone with the Ol' Chloroform Rag. The three runners who are legitimately just there to enjoy the show. The guy in the elevator who did something not all that dissimilar to something you yourself likely did in Dragonfall, but now you get to see the consequences that would have on the neighborhood. Also you get to punch a big piece of poo poo nepo baby in the face and everyone in the con actually applaudes and cheers you on for it. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 17:59 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 17:57
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