Sure and those are great concepts, as we'e discussed. But how do you implement these things in a story or game?
If you checked the links, you'll see some of the images were the main characters from Streets of Fire kissing in the rain, Molly and Case making love in a coffin motel, the sacrifice of your humanity in pursuit of revenge while augmented police hunted you down, and the tragedy that implies.
These concepts, romance and tragedy, are too easily drowned 'midst the gadgets, the tech, the heists. The challenge is to design poignancy into the game - but it is a challenge often failed as players go off gleefully power tripping.
Which is fine, but also a waste.
This quote was interesting to me: "Interestingly, I suspect that this is why Shadowrun has survived -- because it's not a first generation RPG trying to model cyberpunk genre fiction, it's a second-generation game modeling what worked in a first generation game. It's modeling the emergent play from Cyberpunk which was so successful and easy for people to latch onto. "
Now, if Shadowrun does well because it takes these tropes and runs with them, but the purer Cyberpunk 2020 has faded, what does that say about CDPR's goals? How can they revitalize the setting in a world already near-dystopic, with killer robots, cyberlimbs, corporate influenced elections and mercenary armies?
This I found fairly interesting as well, from further in the rpg.net thread, jsnead, author:
"Also, there's a degree to which we are actually living in a cyberpunk future from the PoV of people in the 80s - the USSR went broke, in the 90s there were US catalogs devoted to selling old Soviet surplus goods, ubiquitous surveillance is the norm, killer robots are regularly used in combat, and (in the US at least) Citizens United came close to allowing large corporations to buy politicians, and the ice caps continue to melt. Cyberpunk was all about fear of a dystopian future - it works less well in a semi-dystopian present that looks like a cyberpunk novel. I don't know what something would be that would catch the modern mood as well, but it wouldn't be cyberpunk."
I don't really disagree here.
These threads are quite live, by the way, being posted in a just last week. Possibly relevant, as Shadowrun Returns and Online are active, with 2077 coming.
Oh, lastly, one thing worth addressing: the failure of Empathy as designed when applied by power gamers. Now, lots of PCs use it as meant - Rockers, Medtechs, Cops..all need it for Human Perception and the like.
But for many Roles - Solos, Nomads and any Role heavily cyborged, you buy up Empathy quite high to get more cyber. Which I, as a Ref, have no problem with IS you RP a once very empathic person having lost that.* But another solution whcih I plan to employ next game I run, is to make Empathy easier to acquire with therapy and drugs...for lots of money, of course.
This is in the source books, but rarely made use of. I hope it encourages more human play.
*For a very empathic psychopath, check out James Woods' character in Bestseller - he understands quite well how people feel, it just doesn't generally affect him.
