People have been "playing RPGs in a way that their writer didn't want" the first time Gary Gygax sold a copy of Brown Box OD&D to somebody he didn't know personally.

No, scratch that.  People have been "playing RPGs in a way that their writer didn't want" since Dave Arneson's BLACKMOOR players decided that going on crawls into the Blackmoor dungeons was more interesting than fighting the Egg of Coot.

No, scratch THAT.  People have been "playing RPGs in a way that their writer didn't want" since Dave Wesley's very first BRAUNSTEIN game when he "thought the results were chaotic and the experiment a failure."

Le plus ca change...

This is one of the reasons Shadowrun overtook Cyberpunk.

Shadowrun had a focus right out the bat. You play "Shadowrunners", it's even in the title of the game.

Shadowrun's various playerguides for each edition talked heavily about doing alternate campaigns such as Doc Wagon employee's, Celebrities, Gang members, and Lone Star...

But Shadowrun didn't get bogged down in trying to emulate every kind of cyberpunk story out there. It took the most simple and gameable aspect of Cyberpunk stories (Bad Ass Mercs for Hire) and framed the setting around that.

I've had tons of great Shadowrun campaigns which have had drama involving characters being lost to Cybermancy, bought out by corporations, conflicts of honor and all that...but it was more due to my players and what I emphazied while GMing..

My PC's had fun just roleplaying their characters moving from Detroit to Seattle in order to avoid Heat, and getting settled in...which neighborhood to live in, which cover businesses to acquire..How to handle family relations..

They didn't need special rules for any of this. The base Shadowrun rules only handled hurting people in interesting ways, and breaking into facilities.. the rest was on RP.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;828063After I ran out of Gibson stuff to read, I tried Snowcrash but hated it because Stephenson is a horrible hack of a writer. So I tried to track other works by some of the authors in the Mirrorshades anthology and was able to read some of John Shirley's early stuff. The Eclipse (Song of Youth) trilogy was good, but I found City Come A'walking more interesting because it had many of the genre's tropes before Gibson even hit the map.

I was also able to get my hands on a copy of Tom Maddox's Halo, which I thought was excellent. I have Wetware in my library, but I'm missing the previous books. Shockwave Rider is also on the pile to read as well as "The Stars My Destination", who someone once said had some elements that Cyberpunk later cribbed.

Other than that, Blade Runner, BGC, Black Magic M-66, New Rose Hotel, Strange Days, Nemesis and Hardware (with an Iggy Pop voice cameo) on the movie side also scratched my itch for the genre.

Funny thing is that I got into the genre because of the RPG.

I was into RPGs before Cyberpunk books were popular. Always have liked William Gibson and Philip K. Dick novels, Bruce Sterling, meh ... just Ok. The Matrix was really good, and Lana and Andy Wachowski continue to produce really interesting Sci-Fi and future tech movies, one of their more impressive recent ones starring Mila Kunis, ...Jupiter Ascending, which was an impressively good experience to watch and totally fits in with general cyberpunk or the transhumanist future experience that cyberpunk never quite manages to describe, or accurately capture. Bladerunner remains one of my all time favorite Science Fiction stories and also shares many, many, concepts with the cyberpunk genre.

The Cyberpunk I like best were the crossing of Noir and Technology and have always particularly enjoyed reading Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald, which were called hard-boiled mysteries, but these were really just Cyberpunk for the 20's and 30's and 40's, and often featured very sophisticated stories which included the effects of new technologies, combined with people and fragile emotional entanglements.

Same is true of some of the pulp fiction of the 40's, 50's and 60's which included Doc Savage, The Mac Bolan - Executioner series written by Don Pendleton and a host of other writers over the years as well as John D. McDonald with his Travis McGee series.

When I lived in Florida, I chose to live just a few blocks from the Marina in Fort Lauderdale where John D. McDonald lived on His sail boat just like his favorite character, and alter ego, Travis Mcgee did. I did this on purpose, and it brought a very interesting mix of people into my life.


William Gibson nailed it though. The effects of high-technology development on a society and on social development. I first read Neuromancer in 1984, and it was a hot property when it was released featuring an eclectic mix of mystery, cybernetics, genetics, information technology, and Turing A.I. development all set amidst the humble lives of a few characters who were caught by this environment, and must figure out a way to live, fin opportunities to be happy, and to grow, in spite the oppressive corporations, governments, and corrupt individuals all around them.

There was just one RPG that initially caught my attention for this and that was Shadowrun, Which I first played in 1993. This lost my interest though, because FASA insisted on trying to be like other RPGs, and introducing Magic and humanoid creatures that were not genetically modified or created humans but instead creatures straight from fantasy RPGs. This totally ruined the immersion for me, and I dropped trying to run a Cyberpunk game and didn't try running a Cyberpunk game again again until Spycraft was released in 2002.

The latest reboot of Shadowrun looks much better, and has been written so it is easy to leave the stupid fantasy RPG elements out, and Shadowrun 5th Edition would probably be my goto pick for running a Cyberpunk game, with just a bit of tweaking Spycraft 2.0 works good for this too.

Also, Thanks for the tip on Tom Maddox, I'll look up his books!

Quote from: Orphan81;880482This is one of the reasons Shadowrun overtook Cyberpunk.

Shadowrun had a focus right out the bat. You play "Shadowrunners", it's even in the title of the game.

As the guy who wrote the quote in the original post, the only thing I would change about it is to make a very important point about the central activity of an RPG overpowering designer intent.  That central activity is your hook, and a strong hook gets people playing.  It will over power designer intent, for the better.

D&D's hook is the mines of Moria.  Nearly everybody's read Tolkien and nearly everybody remembers that scene.  Even if you don't make it through the whole trilogy, you've seen the descent into the dungeons of Moria.  Shadowrun's hook is the Sense/Net run from Neuromancer, the Nakitomi heist from Die Hard, or the just about anything from the movie Heat.

If you want to explain what you do in any of those games, you pop in those movies or recommend those books, and *poof.*  If you need an idea for what to do in the game, you write up another Moria or another Nakitomi building and go.  If you want to do something different you can, but the ease of those central activities means that the average person can just fucking roll with it.

If I were a betting man, I'd say one of the successes of Exalted 1e was coming out at roughly the same time as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, where fans could say, "That scene, you know the one, that's what this game is about."  I know that when I used to want to sell people on Exalted, I whipped out the first five minutes of Samurai Seven, where the main guy flies into an army of mecha and just decimates them.

Get a strong central activity that can be repeated without being repetitious, allow for other activities, and then roll: That's the strength of a good RPG.  It's also why I think I like Blades in the Dark so much.

Quote from: GameDaddy;880494There was just one RPG that initially caught my attention for this and that was Shadowrun, Which I first played in 1993. This lost my interest though, because FASA insisted on trying to be like other RPGs, and introducing Magic and humanoid creatures that were not genetically modified or created humans but instead creatures straight from fantasy RPGs. This totally ruined the immersion for me, and I dropped trying to run a Cyberpunk game and didn't try running a Cyberpunk game again again until Spycraft was released in 2002.

The latest reboot of Shadowrun looks much better, and has been written so it is easy to leave the stupid fantasy RPG elements out, and Shadowrun 5th Edition would probably be my goto pick for running a Cyberpunk game, with just a bit of tweaking Spycraft 2.0 works good for this too.

Uh? Wha? Shadowrun had the fantasy elements from the get-go. I've got 1st Ed. Elves, Dragons, Magic, Gods, and all. Some were definitely metagene awakenings. Others were not. Never saw any that were lab created that I can recall outside the first novels which introduced real elves by book two or thee. In fact the RPG "mostly metagene expression triggered by the return of magic" version is pretty much the only version of Shadowrun I know. And like you I prefer that version. Magic was around but it was so downplayed at times.

Fasa handled the game so oddly sometimes. Not sure if that helped or hindered. But with their marketing juggernaut who would know.

Quote from: Orphan81;880482They didn't need special rules for any of this. The base Shadowrun rules only handled hurting people in interesting ways, and breaking into facilities.. the rest was on RP.

Roleplayers don't need mechanics to model, love, hate, betrayal, etc... Story gamers do.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;880499Get a strong central activity that can be repeated without being repetitious, allow for other activities, and then roll: That's the strength of a good RPG.

Certainly it helps for a game to give a clear sense of what player characters will be doing. But there have been some successful multi-genre games, like GURPS or (initially) Torg; are these games necessarily fighting an uphill battle, or are they mostly aimed at people who already roleplay, or something else?

Quote from: rawma;880522Certainly it helps for a game to give a clear sense of what player characters will be doing. But there have been some successful multi-genre games, like GURPS or (initially) Torg; are these games necessarily fighting an uphill battle, or are they mostly aimed at people who already roleplay, or something else?

I think having a strong central activity is anathema to those games, as they aim to be universal and generic (at least in GURPS case, don't know Torg).

I wonder how the idea of a strong central activity would fit in Vampire: the Masquerade. Or, which central activity would make Vampire achieve it's goal of personal horror (instead of "supers by night" as most tables play it).

Quote from: Itachi;880525I wonder how the idea of a strong central activity would fit in Vampire: the Masquerade. Or, which central activity would make Vampire achieve it's goal of personal horror (instead of "supers by night" as most tables play it).

In Bram Stoker's book, Dracula has to feed and abide by various restrictions of vampires (crates with his native earth to sleep in, acting only at night, aversion to garlic and crosses), and has to deal with Harker and others to arrange matters, but feeding on Lucy brings vampire hunters led by Van Helsing down on him. So, I imagine the central activity would be committing heinous acts that degrade their humanity but continuing to operate at the edge of human society (at least) and dealing with the effective opposition they inevitably attract. It seems to fit the OOC bennie mechanics that have been discussed lately in the context of the 2d20 Conan game -- the PC vampires gain power from atrocities but degrade their more human skills, and the atrocities also power up the vampire hunters (GM bennies). Possible end games: GM bennies outstrip the PC bennies and the vampire hunters succeed; PC bennies rule but the vampires lose their humanity, and the vampire apocalypse happens; or the vampires manage an uneasy balance by policing their own.

But Bram Stoker is a little too vampire hunters as PCs, so Lestat would probably be a better base but seems less personal horror and more supers with fangs to me (long time since I read it, though).

Quote from: rawma;880522Certainly it helps for a game to give a clear sense of what player characters will be doing. But there have been some successful multi-genre games, like GURPS or (initially) Torg; are these games necessarily fighting an uphill battle, or are they mostly aimed at people who already roleplay, or something else?

Savage Worlds is a universal system, but it has a definitive focus on being "Fast, Furious, Fun" no matter what setting you're going with. Even then, the individual setting books themselves provide focus right out the gate... "Deadlands" Cowboy Monster Hunters, "Rippers" Victorian Monsterhunters, "Necessary Evil" Supervillain world saviors..

Universal systems tend to trade on their setting offerings. GURPS I wouldn't actually call newbie friendly, it does seem more for those already in the RPG scene as it doesn't really have any strong setting offerings...quite the contrary, it's offering is "We have a book to model anything you need, go hogwild mixing and matching and creating your own game!"

By contrast, Savage Worlds you can offer up Deadlands as the buy in..

Quote from: Future Villain Band;880499a whole bunch of stuff

I don't disagree... If anything one of the biggest problems with Tabletop RPGs is overhead.... The quicker you can explain the premise or give an example of what the game actually is....the stronger the appeal in getting people to play and keep playing...

Tekumel has a ton of overhead...Dungeons and Dragons doesn't explicitly for the reasons you said...."It's Lord of the Rings" or any number of videogame RPG's these days...

Of course that doesn't mean more complex buy in can't be done...but it does mean most likely that one is limiting their audience... Going further with your example of Cyberpunk2020 with design vs intent...It makes me wonder if the design was meant to make it easy buy in and less overhead, even if the Intent was to play Cyberpunk drama rather than Cyberpunk action..

As for Exalted... I had just turned 20 when 1st edition came out...Tons of Weebo Anime fans like me ate that shit up....Those of us who grew up on Final Fantasy Videogames, Lodoss War Anime, and other eastern offerings...My generation was really the youngest who got to grow up on it while it was becoming mainstream... Your generation did the favor of actually creating it for us....something we didn't know we wanted until it was put before us...

I remember being in the Hobby Shop and my buddy reading over the just released copy...I forget entirely what I was there to buy...but I walked out with Exalted, and spent the rest of the day reading as much as I could...so I could run it literally the next day. It was lightning in the bottle.

It makes me wonder if Vampire: the Masquerade was the same thing...a bunch of nerds (They may call themselves Goths or Alt culture or whatever, but they were fuckin' nerds) who had consumed 80s vampire movies and books, and the music scene....desperately wanting something to play which spoke to it...when suddenly 'Bam!' there it is.

Quote from: Orphan81;880548As for Exalted... I had just turned 20 when 1st edition came out...Tons of Weebo Anime fans like me ate that shit up....Those of us who grew up on Final Fantasy Videogames, Lodoss War Anime, and other eastern offerings...My generation was really the youngest who got to grow up on it while it was becoming mainstream... Your generation did the favor of actually creating it for us....something we didn't know we wanted until it was put before us...

I remember being in the Hobby Shop and my buddy reading over the just released copy...I forget entirely what I was there to buy...but I walked out with Exalted, and spent the rest of the day reading as much as I could...so I could run it literally the next day. It was lightning in the bottle.

It makes me wonder if Vampire: the Masquerade was the same thing...a bunch of nerds (They may call themselves Goths or Alt culture or whatever, but they were fuckin' nerds) who had consumed 80s vampire movies and books, and the music scene....desperately wanting something to play which spoke to it...when suddenly 'Bam!' there it is.

It was very much like that. I remember when Exalted was first released. I was at Origins in, I want to say 2001, and was invited into a release party playtest round. White Wolf had released a Free Introductory Kit, which was a softcover 24 page guide to the World of Tellurian. It was a player oriented narrative style storytelling RPG with a simple task resolution system. The quickplay guide had eight pages for World description, Ten pages for character generation, and six pages for Task Resolution. Everything you really needed to play was in that little book, and It, and a map of Tellurian was used,  to run a full exalted campaign in 2003.
The artwork was really good for the game, and for the next five years I regularly saw Exalted Solars Larping and Cosplay, at gaming shows.

With Vampire, it was very similar. There was a bunch of movies that all came out at once about Vampires, i.e. Lost Boys, The Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, From Dusk till Dawn, Vampires, The Innocent Blood, Hunger, and with over thirty new movie releases in the late 80's and early 90's.

Tthis was capped with the release of Underworld in 2003, which was directly inspired from LARP Storylines generated by the White Wolf Vampire RPG, so much so, that White Wolf successfully sued Len Wiseman and the Production company that created Underworld and they all came to an agreement or settlement agreement where White Wolf earned some royalties and got some creative credits from the Underworld franchise of movies.

While I never played it, I'm pretty sure Vampire used a similar dice pool mechanic to Exalted, and that Exalted was the spinoff game, after the popularity of Vampire and Lycan games began to subside.

This series is still popular and the sixth movie of the franchise, Underworld: Next Generation is scheduled to be released this year on October 14th, and will probably be the last of the series that Kate Beckinsale will star in as she recently separated  from Len Wiseman.

She's single, and working, and was spotted last month at Sundance stepping out and promoting the release of Love & Friendship a movie based on one of Jane Austin's Victorian romance and fiction stories.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;880499As the guy who wrote the quote in the original post, the only thing I would change about it is to make a very important point about the central activity of an RPG overpowering designer intent.  That central activity is your hook, and a strong hook gets people playing.  It will over power designer intent, for the better.

It's actually very cyberpunk when what the players want overpowers designer's intent:).
The street finds its own use for things.

QuoteGet a strong central activity that can be repeated without being repetitious, allow for other activities, and then roll: That's the strength of a good RPG.  It's also why I think I like Blades in the Dark so much.

I would say no.
The central activities are, to me, the same ones in every game.
"Explore the setting.
Achieve my goals.
Make friends."
Enemies aren't something I ever make purposefully, but then dealing with them gets to be a goal;).

That said, I would also, and without contradicting, say yes. It's just a "yes, but".
Which is to say, I gave the same advice to a GM. "Find a central activity, or even better, several ones, that you enjoy and can offer variations when running. When you're not sure what should happen, odds are, this is what happens, unless you're totally sure it's not a good idea right now".
For many GMs, that activity is running a dungeoncrawl. For others, it's making a shadowrun. For others, it's chasing celebrity status. For others, it's running an organisation, often with trading or criminal purposes. For other GMs, that bread and butter is building and maintaining relationships with NPCs. And then there are those that simply give you a new setting exposition, all the while thinking what happens next.
And of course, there are those who have as a default activity "ninjas attack, deal with it".

And of course, some GMs change the default activity between games. But that's not a rule, though some games have obvious central activities:).

Quote from: CRKrueg+er;880520Roleplayers don't need mechanics to model, love, hate, betrayal, etc... Story gamers do.

While entertaining, no:D.
Immersionist roleplayers don't need mechanics, when playing in a familiar genre.
Non-immersionist roleplayers can benefit from mechanics, and so can immersionist roleplayers when playing in a genre they're not intimately familiar with - and even more, when running said genre.
Mechanics-as-guidelines are actually something rather useful for the Referee, IME;).

I'd certainly say that somehow, Shadowrun caught the spirit of cyberpunk better than Cyberpunk did.  It had a much worse system, though.

Quote from: RPGPundit;881213I'd certainly say that somehow, Shadowrun caught the spirit of cyberpunk better than Cyberpunk did.  It had a much worse system, though.

Some times a deeply flawed system is a feature not a bug.  I have a friend who claims white wolf, specificly vampire, was a terrible system but a great game.  It was great (at least at his table) because the flaws in the system meant the players and the DM had to bring a lot to the game.  It also ment the rules weren't strong enough to argue about so you didn't, and you didn't spend a tone of time looking things up in the books.    

Didn't play cyberpunk and only played shadow run once before that group moved on to something else.  But since the conversation is about how mechanics affect play I though I would try to broaden our definition of mechanics.  

I am sure this conversation has been had on here before but number of people is a huge factor for determining level of stealth and wanton destruction.  One or two can do infiltration.  Three is an elete strike team, precession violence.  5 is the wrecking crew (the name of our posse in vampire) 6 or more you should play Amber cause it's going to be all inter party conflict any way.  I am painting with a big brush here your mileage may vary.

Also flavour text is a great mechanic.  

As for the hook. For us in vampire the hook was the crow as much as anything.  Also walking in the cold rain after dark in Canadian November was a great warm up.  (Also a hidden mechanic). Come to think of it we only play WW in the winter.  

I like the hook suggestion, that helps me understand why I was having trouble getting my players keen on Amber, none of them have read the books.

Quote from: RPGPundit;881213I'd certainly say that somehow, Shadowrun caught the spirit of cyberpunk better than Cyberpunk did.  It had a much worse system, though.

I don't know about that. It doesn't capture the spirit of City Come A'Walking, Islands in the Net, Halo, 400 Boyz, Eclipse, or even the gestalt of the sprawl series. Neuromancer, which does have a climatic run at the end, is not about the run, nor does all of the action resemble a run.