Quote from: Ratman_tf;827934Yeah, 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.

One of the comments I got after publishing Fractured Kingdom was that the reader lost interest after he saw there were weights for the gear, guns armor, etc. The way the reader interpreted that entry is that the game was more concerned about combat and tactical play than the narrative. Weight/encumbrance rules being an indicator of that style of play. This is something that has stuck with me as that's not the style of play I wanted to encourage but this small detail sent the reader's mind in that direction. I guess what I'm saying is, it's surprising what details can be important to readers  and small details can have a huge impact on how they interpret the material.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;827934Yeah, 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.

Actually, I should amend that a little and also say that along with that there's a lot of concern with the style and mood of the setting, but as a background to the violence.

Quote from: Certified;827937One of the comments I got after publishing Fractured Kingdom was that the reader lost interest after he saw there were weights for the gear, guns armor, etc. The way the reader interpreted that entry is that the game was more concerned about combat and tactical play than the narrative. Weight/encumbrance rules being an indicator of that style of play.

I think that's similar to when I look at 'horror' RPGs and find they have a HUGE section of gun porn... differentiating the picayune details of dozens of weapons. Some Players, seeing that section in the core book, are going to take that as a cue to focus on guns for solving their problems and get all caught up in the trivia. Meanwhile, IMO, guns in horror oughtta be false comfort... they make a character feel safe up till the moment when, in hubris, he faces the monster and finds that bullets won't kill it.

Also, while watching Streets of Fire for the first time the other night (because of this discussion) I noticed there was one quick reference to some custom weapons early on... and after that the whole thing could have played out with weapon rules delineating nothing more than generic 'pistol', 'rifle', 'shotgun', 'switchblade', 'sledgehammer' and 'fists'.

Quote from: Certified;827923Nice

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.

Yeah you could get a lot of mileage out of that.

I've done things that I think everyone has done before too - Trauma Team campaigns. I've seen people do the same in Shadowrun.

Quote from: Simlasa;827958I think that's similar to when I look at 'horror' RPGs and find they have a HUGE section of gun porn... differentiating the picayune details of dozens of weapons. Some Players, seeing that section in the core book, are going to take that as a cue to focus on guns for solving their problems and get all caught up in the trivia. Meanwhile, IMO, guns in horror oughtta be false comfort... they make a character feel safe up till the moment when, in hubris, he faces the monster and finds that bullets won't kill it.

Also, while watching Streets of Fire for the first time the other night (because of this discussion) I noticed there was one quick reference to some custom weapons early on... and after that the whole thing could have played out with weapon rules delineating nothing more than generic 'pistol', 'rifle', 'shotgun', 'switchblade', 'sledgehammer' and 'fists'.

I find this gets in the way of my Hunter: The Vigil games. Especially with the Armory Books. I love those books but it oftens sends my players down "the wrong path" where they believe everything can/should be solved with MAGNUM FORCE... it inevitably turns the PC's into the actual monsters once they start racking up the bystander bodycount....

Quote from: Certified;827937One of the comments I got after publishing Fractured Kingdom was that the reader lost interest after he saw there were weights for the gear, guns armor, etc. The way the reader interpreted that entry is that the game was more concerned about combat and tactical play than the narrative. Weight/encumbrance rules being an indicator of that style of play. This is something that has stuck with me as that's not the style of play I wanted to encourage but this small detail sent the reader's mind in that direction. I guess what I'm saying is, it's surprising what details can be important to readers  and small details can have a huge impact on how they interpret the material.

I think there's a place for detailed stats and systems like encumbrance.
The film, Alien is a narrative. We don't need to know how much a flamethrower weighs, or what the physical strength stat of the xenomorph is, because it's going to do what the narrative requires of it. They only have to be concerned if it's 'realistic', as in the flamethrower didn't shoot radioactive bees or some crazy crap.
But if Alien were an RPG scenario, then there is no predetermined narrative, and the weight of the flamethrower or the strength stat of the xenomorph are necessary, to allow the GM to judge what happens if the characters want to carry 15 flamethrowers, or if the xenomorph attacks a character. Because while the film had a specific narrative, an RPG doesn't. The scenario might end up with all the characters dead, or all the characters alive. They might manage to kill the xeno within the first 15 minutes, or take multiple sessions of running around to resolve things.
We need to fill in the small details because RPG scenarios require them to allow the group to resolve situations.

I think a big part of the problem is that a lot has been written and said about running combats, and relativley little on making satisfying and fun scenarios, whether they involve lots of combat or none at all. The topic seems to trail off into vague suggestions because there's no hard values to number crunch. And worse, the discussion about scenario structure seems to be talked about on blogs and articles, and not in the rulebooks or adventures themselves. For example, Keep on the Borderlands can be a boring hack fest or an interesting environment for the group to interact with, depending on how that group runs it. And I think more discussion, in the rulebooks themselves on how to make those scenarios interesting, would be a very good idea.

Quote from: Simlasa;827958Also, while watching Streets of Fire for the first time the other night (because of this discussion) I noticed there was one quick reference to some custom weapons early on... and after that the whole thing could have played out with weapon rules delineating nothing more than generic 'pistol', 'rifle', 'shotgun', 'switchblade', 'sledgehammer' and 'fists'.

Also, no one dies in Streets of Fire! 'Questions of Honour' are meaningful in SoF because almost everyone has honour - everyone except the racist cops in the brown uniforms (they take a bribe then pull the bus anyway - putting them beyond the pale). Even the bad-guy bikers seem to have some kind of honour code.

That sort of thing seems totally, utterly absent from Cyberpunk, both game and genre. It extols shooting your enemy in the back while he's having a drink.

Quote from: S'mon;828022That sort of thing seems totally, utterly absent from Cyberpunk, both game and genre. It extols shooting your enemy in the back while he's having a drink.

After Gibson and Sterling I never did read much good cyberpunk so I'm not really sure what goes in the genre beyond general corporatist dystopia and rainy street scenes. It does seem like 'Future Noir' to me.  
Most of my influences for when I ran such games were out of movies like Liquid Sky, Metropolis and Bladerunner... a bit of Judge Dredd... various 'new wave' music videos... and Max Headroom. Mostly stuff where guns and fancy gear didn't feature all that much. I hadn't watched much anime at the time except for Speed Racer.

Quote from: tenbones;827959Yeah you could get a lot of mileage out of that.

I've done things that I think everyone has done before too - Trauma Team campaigns. I've seen people do the same in Shadowrun.

That would more or less be me. I played a Rigger who ran a road rescue and repair business in Shadowrun. I also did frequent run-gone-very-bad rescue service.

Quote from: Simlasa;828044After Gibson and Sterling I never did read much good cyberpunk so I'm not really sure what goes in the genre beyond general corporatist dystopia and rainy street scenes. It does seem like 'Future Noir' to me.  

After 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.

One of the few cyberpunk books I read was Arachne by Lisa Mason (Though I recall it having the title Spinner? Probably misremembering) Came out around the same time as Shadowrun and 2nd ed Cyberpunk. Was interesting for featuring an Aztec themed sector in one chapter.

There's some awesome 80s cyberpunk Manga/anime - Ghost in the Shell in particular.

I'm not a huge cyberpunk buff, but I did really like Babylon AD (the film with Vin Diesel) as a post-80's cyberpunk story.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;828158I'm not a huge cyberpunk buff, but I did really like Babylon AD (the film with Vin Diesel) as a post-80's cyberpunk story.

I want to say that was based on like the second or third book in a series.

I take issues with the idea that RPGs are supposed to "model" anything.