Quote from: Ratman_tf;827841The simplistic way to state it is: Put in more non-combat stuff. But then it's not automatically going to be meaningful stuff unless the player has to make some choices, and those choices should have some amount of conflict (in this case, not meaning combat) to make the choices meaningful to the character.

Am I making sense? I've been working on reducing this idea down to a pithy sentence or two, but not making much headway.

Yes. When designing Red Shetland I considered exactly this. Rules to govern the interaction side of the game. Of which there was lots. But the rules themselve at that point had no real interaction mechanics. As noted elsewhere, there was not even an intelligence stat. Nor was there a charisma equivalent.

Very quickly I realized the game did not need these mechanics. But the game did need mention that there was no INT or CHA stat, no romance/seduction skill, no political intrigue rules, because that was all on the player and the GM. If you want it in the game. Go out and find it.

And the players did.

This is one reason why BX combined with Keep on the Borderlands is still one of my go-to examples of rules + module because it shows that there is more to the game than just a kill fest. Heres a town and here is all these people with their own little stories you can make of what you will.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;827789Here's my problem: as far as the game itself goes, the sources don't matter.  You can take the sources and apply any rpg system you want with some effort.  Quyite simply, the game books themselves didn't deliver any of the shit he says they wanted to.  It was book after book of gear, bling, and ultraviolent encounters.  It doesn't mean it was a bad game, or that any of us are playing it wrong, but it does mean he shouldn't get on his fucking high horse and gripe about people playing the game as it was presented.

That's the follow-on from my original thought regarding drift between what the designer intends or wants and then what happens at the table -- as I said, the next step for a good game is to follow what the players at tables are doing.  

If Game Designer A wants his game to be like Star Wars, but instead everybody plays it like samurai in space, then follow-on supplements focusing on the samurai in space is not a bad thing.  It's a good thing.  I can name a couple games off of the top of my head where either a) the designer didn't listen to the fans and kept heading where he wanted, and the game died, or b) the game absolutely got the read off of the fans right, shifted directions, and became a hit.

My formula is, a) look at what the core rulebook says it should do; b) look at what the core rulebook actually does, by creating rules; c) look at what people then use those rules for at their tables.  There's usually a big drift between a, b, and c for a lot of games.

QuoteOk. Let's see if I can compose this thought of mine.

There's this paradigm of D&D being a string of combats broken up by talking in bad english accents. Now, the reason I think 4th edition was as popular as it was, is because combat is easy. Kill these monsters before they kill you is pretty freaking easy to do. Clear goals, clear stakes, all that shit.
4th ed put the emphasis on player choices into the combat itself. Now you could twirl over a bad guy or shuffle 3 squares and make an attack, whatever. There was a ton of choice in the tactical presentation.
But those aren't the only kinds of choices. If you make a character who is sub-optimal for combat, but most, if not all, of the interaction with the game is combat, then you're going to have a bad time. So 4th made everyone capable in combat, and that was to the detriment of the game, because now combat was even more emphasised as the way to interact with the game.

Now, I don't think putting in mechanics for kissing under streetlights would make things better. I think putting in choices that matter to the character would. As in, you need to know what the character is about, and then have opportunites for the player to make choices based on that character's... character.
The simplistic way to state it is: Put in more non-combat stuff. But then it's not automatically going to be meaningful stuff unless the player has to make some choices, and those choices should have some amount of conflict (in this case, not meaning combat) to make the choices meaningful to the character.

Am I making sense? I've been working on reducing this idea down to a pithy sentence or two, but not making much headway.

Yes, very much.

My contention with the premise I quoted is that there is little or next to nothing that indicates that the game “wanted” to model any of the things the OP in the TBP thread says it did. I’m looking through my pdf copy of the game, and even when giving examples of style and mood, they’re [edit: almost] all about violence. There is ONE sidebar in the “Running Cyberpunk” section that I’ve seen mention doomed romance, etc. Listing sources doesn’t convince me either that there was any intent of modeling romance and what not, because 1) most of those sources are not necessarily about that and 2) Pondsmith doesn’t give any indication in the book that he was focusing on those elements within the sources.

My reading of the core book  seems to indicate that Pondsmith’s primary concern was to model violence, but in a much more gritty way, not in the cyber-tanked manner that emerged.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;827837STG mechanics are about narrative control -- either determining who has it or specifying what they can do with it.

Genre emulation mechanics are about bringing some specific element of the source material into the game.

Some genre emulation mechanics are also narrative control mechanics, but not all of them. For example, you might have a rule that guns never have to be reloaded during a firefight. Or you might have an "aim for the bushes" mechanic that prevents a character from taking more than 1d6 falling damage if they spend an action to aim for something soft.

Thanks. I can live with that delineation. Seems to me that genre emulation can straddle the story-game/rpg 'divide'.

Now, imagine an alternate history where instead of Chainmail, we got sophisticated rules for modeling relationships (maybe something like The Sims). What would all the RPG descendants look like, and what would these discussions look like?

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;827884Now, imagine an alternate history where instead of Chainmail, we got sophisticated rules for modeling relationships (maybe something like The Sims). What would all the RPG descendants look like, and what would these discussions look like?

"Was the designer of Cyberpunk trying to create a more combat - heavy, wargame - like game? Perhaps that was the intent, for the players to engage in deadly, quick action, rather than focus on the role - playing of intimacies?"

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;827805It sure as fuck isnt kissing under the rain or fucking in a coffin hotel.

God damn, you are so hung up on that one thing.

Quote from: Gabriel2;827893God damn, you are so hung up on that one thing.

That's the one thing I was criticizing in the OP. The assertion of what this game "wanted to model." Not my fault if the topic has drifted to something else.

Once you take that premise apart, most of the argument falls down with it, and Pondsmith's problem with the emergent play can probably be fixed with tweaks to what exists and some guidance, rather than rebuilt from the ground up with a different paradigm.

Other than that, if you have a point to make about the topic go ahead.

I think that divergence between how the designers envisioned people playing a game and what people actually sitting around the table do with that game is usually a healthy sign rather than the opposite.

If a game totally fails at what it set out to do then I suppose that's a problem. But if it also does x, y and z and people enjoy that as much or more than the original intent, I don't see any problem.

Most games that have had real staying power (D&D, CoC, & etc) have supported multiple play styles. Cyberpunk certainly did, at least with my group back in the day.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;827884Now, imagine an alternate history where instead of Chainmail, we got sophisticated rules for modeling relationships (maybe something like The Sims). What would all the RPG descendants look like, and what would these discussions look like?

Wargames.

Because nearly right out the gate players took D&D and started running romances despite there being no real indicator you even could. They took what was there and ran with it. By many accounts they ran far with it. Big sweeping romances? Generational families?

So by that token players would have taken a romantic themed OD&D and somehow turned it into a wargame.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;827789Here's my problem: as far as the game itself goes, the sources don't matter.  You can take the sources and apply any rpg system you want with some effort.  Quyite simply, the game books themselves didn't deliver any of the shit he says they wanted to.  It was book after book of gear, bling, and ultraviolent encounters.  It doesn't mean it was a bad game, or that any of us are playing it wrong, but it does mean he shouldn't get on his fucking high horse and gripe about people playing the game as it was presented.

I'm not disagreeing with you. This is chicken/egg for me. Before Cyberpunk ever landed, I had already read everything in genre up to that point. I knew exactly what the game was implied to be about. It didn't any rules for "kissing in a coffin" (our characters just fucked in them. C'mon we had the Midnight Lady and Donkey-Kong implants!!! or whatever they were called) - at any rate, I already knew the conventions. So it was almost impossible for me to NOT use them in my games, at least at first. Some of my games were very themed - like wars, space, Euro-assassin rings. Organized crime. Sometimes all of the above.

That said - a lot of those books were based on non-science-fiction genre noir and action-movies. Being that I lived internationally, in Japan and other parts thereabout, I was very familiar with the alienation and technoshock that Mike was trying to imply.

If people didn't have those points of reference, it would be difficult to emulate them in the game with any degree of accuracy. He *shouldn't* be angry at the people that are not "doing it right". He should understand that there are no RPG's that can have a One True Way.

But having said that - for someone that does generally understand those intents and is a good GM, I'm of the opinion that using those things will make the game better.

Quote from: tenbones;827915C'mon we had the Midnight Lady and Donkey-Kong implants!!! or whatever they were called)

I'm in the office. Lets see if I can get this quote from memory.

"The Mr. Stud Sexual Implant, all night every night and she'll never know."

Or something like that. It was some of those things that cracked us up when we first read the book. Something I'm surprised hasn't been talked about more are the roles and the text around them. Then again, did anyone ever play a Rocker or Media?

Quote from: Certified;827917I'm in the office. Lets see if I can get this quote from memory.

"The Mr. Stud Sexual Implant, all night every night and she'll never know."

Or something like that. It was some of those things that cracked us up when we first read the book. Something I'm surprised hasn't been talked about more are the roles and the text around them. Then again, did anyone ever play a Rocker or Media?

Oh man! that's it! Mr. Stud!

So for my games - there was this odd emergent thing. At first everyone wanted to be a Solo. Then slowly, but surely, they started to drift into other roles. One of my most trigger-happy, gun-bunny players, eventually settled on Med-Techs and Medias as his favorite. He'd load up on Video Editing as a skill and he'd film people, usually wealthy people, and then cut the video to make them look like they're doing horrible things. But he'd stack his editing skills so high it was virtually impossible to detect them as fake. Then he'd send in the fast-talking Rocker (he was the Rabble-rouser alternate role) and the one lone Solo to blackmail the mark.

His Med-tech was just a full-on Body-banker. He'd find people that were "undesireable" and wouldn't be noticed if they disappeared... and then tazer them, dismember them, and bank the parts. Yeah... the dude was twisted.

Quote from: tenbones;827921Oh man! that's it! Mr. Stud!

So for my games - there was this odd emergent thing. At first everyone wanted to be a Solo. Then slowly, but surely, they started to drift into other roles. One of my most trigger-happy, gun-bunny players, eventually settled on Med-Techs and Medias as his favorite. He'd load up on Video Editing as a skill and he'd film people, usually wealthy people, and then cut the video to make them look like they're doing horrible things. But he'd stack his editing skills so high it was virtually impossible to detect them as fake. Then he'd send in the fast-talking Rocker (he was the Rabble-rouser alternate role) and the one lone Solo to blackmail the mark.

His Med-tech was just a full-on Body-banker. He'd find people that were "undesireable" and wouldn't be noticed if they disappeared... and then tazer them, dismember them, and bank the parts. Yeah... the dude was twisted.

Nice

I think the longest running character I ever had was a Cop with a terrible Authority role. I think his arc mostly centered around trying to prove he should be on C-SWAT and ending up in the hospital. This climaxed with a botched leg replacement and a freak out at the station, only to be taken out by the team he wanted to be a member of.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;827882My reading of the core book  seems to indicate that Pondsmith's primary concern was to model violence, but in a much more gritty way, not in the cyber-tanked manner that emerged.

Yeah, that's  good way to put it.
Combat is an easy road to go down. Making stats for guns and armor and bad guys is a seductive way to pump out supplements. And I'm saying this as a guy who likes guns and armor and bad guys. But it can easily become an arms race.