Some times I get weird ideas while writing articles for iWriter.

So, when your runners are putting together their headquarters and safehouses, do you ever make them go to the sixth-world equivalent of Lowes and make them pick out a toilet? I never thought there would be so much to consider when selecting toilets until I had to write product descriptions for them.
And you can sure bet that the sixth-world equivalent of Lowes is going to save your selections and create a customer profile for you.

You have to pick out a height for your toilet. That's something to consider if you're going to have dwarves and trolls using it.
How is your toilet bowl shaped? Elongated toilets provide the best comfort, but round and narrow elongated toilets are better for small bathrooms where space is limited.
Is the toilet wheelchair accessible? VR-jumped hackers have to poop too.
What kind of valve does your toilet use? That says a lot about the kind of plumbing your building uses.
What about special features? Heated seat? Bidet? Smart valves with flush power precision calculated according to the mass of the waste for optimal water usage? Wireless enabled?

Once you know what kinds of toilets runners are using, you can start to put together a picture of their bathroom. And you can combine that data with the runner's spending habits and demographic information to create a profile.
Then you can radiate out from your store location, analyzing nearby areas, and find the buildings that most closely match the runner's profile...


Anybody else got any weird ideas?

Quote from: Cave Bear;915769Some times I get weird ideas while writing articles for iWriter.

So, when your runners are putting together their headquarters and safehouses, do you ever make them go to the sixth-world equivalent of Lowes and make them pick out a toilet? I never thought there would be so much to consider when selecting toilets until I had to write product descriptions for them.
And you can sure bet that the sixth-world equivalent of Lowes is going to save your selections and create a customer profile for you.

You have to pick out a height for your toilet. That's something to consider if you're going to have dwarves and trolls using it.
How is your toilet bowl shaped? Elongated toilets provide the best comfort, but round and narrow elongated toilets are better for small bathrooms where space is limited.
Is the toilet wheelchair accessible? VR-jumped hackers have to poop too.
What kind of valve does your toilet use? That says a lot about the kind of plumbing your building uses.
What about special features? Heated seat? Bidet? Smart valves with flush power precision calculated according to the mass of the waste for optimal water usage? Wireless enabled?

Once you know what kinds of toilets runners are using, you can start to put together a picture of their bathroom. And you can combine that data with the runner's spending habits and demographic information to create a profile.
Then you can radiate out from your store location, analyzing nearby areas, and find the buildings that most closely match the runner's profile...


Anybody else got any weird ideas?

This is actually one area where technology could vastly outstrip the capability of the Cyberpunk genre to realistically deal with.  Big Data, Big Surveillance, Internet of Things, etc. you almost have to posit some type of Fall of Civilization for there to be any chance for the disaffected to exist, let alone rebel.  Universal Identification, banning of cash, all software delivered only as cloud services - absolute lack of privacy is a possibility, and with it, the inability for any type of personal crime to exist.

It's interesting to note both Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun settings do put forth such a Fall, and many of the settings of the original Mirrorshade writers do as well as they develop their alt-history.

Assuming there are still shadows in which to hide, then looking for Cyberpunks by mining for their Big Data echo would definitely be a valid tactic.  Shadowrun, for example, has, in various versions, systems for doing Matrix searches based on the amount of data, specific nature of the search, etc...  those rules can be used to look for the PCs the same way the PCs use them.

One Shadowrun Decker player I had who was fairly successful spent quite a hefty chunk of cash on constantly acquiring and cycling multiple false identities that were used only for consumer purchases.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915771This is actually one area where technology could vastly outstrip the capability of the Cyberpunk genre to realistically deal with.  Big Data, Big Surveillance, Internet of Things, etc. you almost have to posit some type of Fall of Civilization for there to be any chance for the disaffected to exist, let alone rebel.  Universal Identification, banning of cash, all software delivered only as cloud services - absolute lack of privacy is a possibility, and with it, the inability for any type of personal crime to exist.

It's interesting to note both Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun settings do put forth such a Fall, and many of the settings of the original Mirrorshade writers do as well as they develop their alt-history.

True. I suppose only wage slaves would actually buy their toilets from a Lowes.
Shadowrunners would probably buy their toilets from some guy with a truck that they can trust.

Quote from: Cave Bear;915772True. I suppose only wage slaves would actually buy their toilets from a Lowes.
Shadowrunners would probably buy their toilets from some guy with a truck that they can trust.

Ironically, the one thing that's always in the 'Runner's or 'Punk's favor are the rich and powerful.  In a near-future city where water rationing exists, most people are going to have restricted flow toilets, for example.  Someone with money could get a permit for a normal or high-flow toilet/pulsing water-massage bidet, but that might carry with it some stigma, so they get it the old-fashioned way, good ol' black market.

You could argue that there will always be the shadows, because of simple human corruption.  Even the most authoritarian/totalitarian regime imaginable will create off the books exceptions for themselves.  It might be a lot more difficult for a criminal to access or exploit this off the books system in an age of Big Data, but that's why they're PCs.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915773Ironically, the one thing that's always in the 'Runner's or 'Punk's favor are the rich and powerful.  In a near-future city where water rationing exists, most people are going to have restricted flow toilets, for example.  Someone with money could get a permit for a normal or high-flow toilet/pulsing water-massage bidet, but that might carry with it some stigma, so they get it the old-fashioned way, good ol' black market.

You could argue that there will always be the shadows, because of simple human corruption.  Even the most authoritarian/totalitarian regime imaginable will create off the books exceptions for themselves.  It might be a lot more difficult for a criminal to access or exploit this off the books system in an age of Big Data, but that's why they're PCs.

Well, damn.
Now I have an idea for an adventure.

Quote from: Cave Bear;915774Well, damn.
Now I have an idea for an adventure.

Well, then I've earned my existence for today.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915771This is actually one area where technology could vastly outstrip the capability of the Cyberpunk genre to realistically deal with.  Big Data, Big Surveillance, Internet of Things, etc. you almost have to posit some type of Fall of Civilization for there to be any chance for the disaffected to exist, let alone rebel.  Universal Identification, banning of cash, all software delivered only as cloud services - absolute lack of privacy is a possibility, and with it, the inability for any type of personal crime to exist.

It's interesting to note both Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun settings do put forth such a Fall, and many of the settings of the original Mirrorshade writers do as well as they develop their alt-history.

Assuming there are still shadows in which to hide, then looking for Cyberpunks by mining for their Big Data echo would definitely be a valid tactic.  Shadowrun, for example, has, in various versions, systems for doing Matrix searches based on the amount of data, specific nature of the search, etc...  those rules can be used to look for the PCs the same way the PCs use them.

One Shadowrun Decker player I had who was fairly successful spent quite a hefty chunk of cash on constantly acquiring and cycling multiple false identities that were used only for consumer purchases.

Don't buy it.  Every authoritarian system has promised the end of criminality, and all have failed.  There were, last I checked, more surveillance cameras in Great Britain than there are people... much less people to watch all of them.  That is today, and crime is still a problem.

I much prefer the dystopian idea of... what was that film? Where the criminals are using their crime to get their fifeteen minutes of fame...  currently seems more feasible than one where the panopticon makes crime impossible.


Also: Consider the explicit premise of shadowrun (and the vaguely implied premise of Cyberpunk...), that the ones doing the hiring are also the ones with their hands on teh levers of power.  Much easier to commit crimes on behalf of the government than it is freelance, yo.

I've assumed there was a gentlemen's agreement regarding runners. Since all the corps hired from the same pool of deniable and disposable assets, they would focus their ire on their rival corp, not the mercs and mooks that company used.

It's already possible to track you using wi-fi.  I don't mean track your devices.  I mean track you.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi-surveillance/497132/
As people move through a space with a Wi-Fi signal, their bodies affect it, absorbing some waves and reflecting others in various directions. By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.

Several recent experiments have focused on using Wi-Fi signals to identify people, either based on their body shape or the specific way they tend to move. Earlier this month, a group of computer-science researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China posted a paper to an online archive of scientific research, detailing a system that can accurately identify humans as they walk through a door nine times out of ten.

Quote from: Spinachcat;915836I've assumed there was a gentlemen's agreement regarding runners. Since all the corps hired from the same pool of deniable and disposable assets, they would focus their ire on their rival corp, not the mercs and mooks that company used.

True. If a AAA Mega wants to move heaven and earth to find you, they probably will.  Being known for executing Shadowrunners isn't too good for the bottom line when you need one.  Still, in order to hold another corp accountable, you need to know which it is...or who within your own corp is trying to destroy you.  Sometimes the Cost Benefit Analysis comes down on the side of finding the Runners, perhaps before they manage to sell the data they stole.

Also some corps may have their own company-funded deniable assets, don't use freelancers, and the rep they want to project is "Take a job against us and we will end you."

What a sobering conversation.

Ant Man, Dark Knight, Spectre... by coincidence I've watched a lot of movies lately that awkwardly try to tackle the real possibility that one of the classic human stories, heroic resistance to a stronger faction, is becoming impossible in the modern world. Each of them has an unsatisfying conclusion where the game-changing surveillance/infiltration technology or innovation is only stymied for a while at best.

It reminds me of how the full likely potential of genetic engineering, cybernetics and AI in tandem is rarely explored in speculative fiction because of how awkwardly inhuman the results are likely to be, both for the individual hero and the setting.

Maybe the dominance of fantasy over sci fi has something to do with how un-fun for storytelling our true future is starting to look.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915773Ironically, the one thing that's always in the 'Runner's or 'Punk's favor are the rich and powerful.  In a near-future city where water rationing exists, most people are going to have restricted flow toilets, for example.  Someone with money could get a permit for a normal or high-flow toilet/pulsing water-massage bidet, but that might carry with it some stigma, so they get it the old-fashioned way, good ol' black market.

"Chummer, have you ever had to deal with Renraku Water and Power?  My pal Bodice was all excited because she scored one of those high-power toilets for some dipshit troll who wanted one off-the-books.  She had just made the handoff and was on her way towards the door with her shiny new credstick, when BAM!  Floodlights come on, helicopters, guys come bashing through the windows on ropes.  Said they were with Renraku Water and Power and were authorized to detain both of them for violation of the Water Rationing Act.  Bodice fired off a few flashbangs, the place erupted into a firefight.  The troll client got gakked immediately, Bodice took out three of the RWP troops and lit the warehouse on fire to escape.  She left town for a few months to let the heat die down.  All over a damn TOILET.  Watch yourselves, folks."

I feel I should point out that "big corporations run everything and are totalitarian fascists" is not actually a common trope of cyberpunk literature.  It's not entirely an invention of cyberpunk RPGs (remember, Shadowrun was written by a couple of Seattle anti-corporate anarchist types); it's explicitly there in Walter Jon Williams' books and Bruce Sterling injects a little of it, but it's incorrect to say that it's a general trope.  It's not there in any of Gibson's Sprawl Series, for instance.

Quote from: yosemitemike;915837It's already possible to track you using wi-fi.  I don't mean track your devices.  I mean track you.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi-surveillance/497132/

Thank you. That was terrifying.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915842Being known for executing Shadowrunners isn't too good for the bottom line when you need one.

In my games (plus my nightmare WTF won't it get finished current RPG project), I explain that away with "enemy of my enemy is my ally" kinda code. So if a MegaCorp hunts out runners outside of the job, then that MegaCorp gets all the city's runners turning against them. Almost like both the runners and the Corps have a yakuza style / mafia style code of "honor" that gets severely punished by the collective if broken. Maybe it even covers the MegaCorp's families, aka you can gak a CEO, but if you gak that CEO's family then you are permanently sanctioned.

I need to think more about this and codify it into the setting.

Certainly, the abilities of modern day surveillance are a major concern for cyberpunk & scifi setting design.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915842Also some corps may have their own company-funded deniable assets, don't use freelancers, and the rep they want to project is "Take a job against us and we will end you."

I am stealing that...because that corp would actually be daring all the young punks and up-and-coming gangers. It's like the gunfighters in the Old West - the "best" shooter was constantly challenged by upstarts and its only a matter of time before "do you feel lucky punk?" results in "yeah, I do - blam!"

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;915850Maybe the dominance of fantasy over sci fi has something to do with how un-fun for storytelling our true future is starting to look.

Absolutely.

I had a similar thought when watching the recent Marvel movies and recent action movies. Its one of the reasons my next espionage game will be Cold City. The tech jump in espionage makes me feel the "old days" are far more gameable.

Quote from: Thornhammer;915879"Chummer, have you ever had to deal with Renraku Water and Power?

Great story! That would make a fun adventure...all that death and intrigue over a toilet.

I imagine Shadowrunners pretty much have to go through the black market for every single mundane shopping trip. Any legitimate goods wageslaves might buy from the company score is going to be buzzing with RFID chips and wifi enabling and heavily tracked.
Even if the megacorps don't use that as leverage against runners, rival runners and enemies surely will.

I mean, if you buy some new furniture, like a table, that says a lot about you doesn't it? It says how big your dining room is. How many people you have sitting with you. The kind of company you keep. If you have some kind of smart table with a screen on top and wireless enabling you are potentially setting yourself up for some trouble unless you get that thing jailbroken right away. Shadowrunners would probably be better off digging a shipping pallet and some cinder blocks out of the garbage and using that for a table.