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The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

I think corporation is doing a lot of heavy lifting, with the flawed assumption that corps in the cyberfuture can be 1:1 compared with corps today. When in reality in most cyberpunk fiction corporations have taken on traits and practices from government and military organizations.

Right now feckless short term thinking while eroding as many governmental barriers as possible suits corporations, but that only really works so long as there still some degree of government to do a lot of the heavy lifting to organise society so companies can profit from it.

But once meddling government has fully been done away with, corporations might see fit to build up government and institutional expertise within themselves for the sake of holding onto power.

When writing these things one should always be trying to think ahead of our current society and considering different interpretations about what a "government" or a "corporation" is to fit their world.
 
Reveen said:
I think corporation is doing a lot of heavy lifting, with the flawed assumption that corps in the cyberfuture can be 1:1 compared with corps today. When in reality in most cyberpunk fiction corporations have taken on traits and practices from government and military organizations.

Right now feckless short term thinking while eroding as many governmental barriers as possible suits corporations, but that only really works so long as there still some degree of government to do a lot of the heavy lifting to organise society so companies can profit from it.

But once meddling government has fully been done away with, corporations might see fit to build up government and institutional expertise within themselves for the sake of holding onto power.

When writing these things one should always be trying to think ahead of our current society and considering different interpretations about what a "government" or a "corporation" is to fit their world.
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But that's the thing, the extensive use of private contractors entrusted with high-level secrets and etc, etc is... not that unusual for a corporation, but really fucks with their ability to be an even half-functional government.
 
thor2006 said:
Shadowrunners are most likely the deniable , expendable wet works specialists and mercenaries subcontracted external help of the corporations/big rich.
Like in real life competency and security of the corporation/target varies from place to place and time to time.
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Funny because I talked about how Omega Dawn could be more effective at getting of Shadowrun era is by forcing all corporate Black Ops to them so they can use them as exclusive assets against enemies of the corps. Like the Lynx in Armored Core 4
 
The Laurent said:
But that's the thing, the extensive use of private contractors entrusted with high-level secrets and etc, etc is... not that unusual for a corporation, but really fucks with their ability to be an even half-functional government.
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The fact that their ersatz government doesn't need to work to the benefit of all of society means that they might be able to get away with half-functional, and I'm sure they only really start to become a competant government actually capable of doing things when you get to the central oligarchy where the corp actually sees value in providing plumbing and health care to people.

We also have to keep in mind that the corporations' territory being a mess of mismanagement and graft isn't necessarily incompetence. It could just as easily be the system working as intended. Breakages and inefficiencies in our current system often just work out in the favor of companies because the fallout introduces new avenues for profit and cost cutting. In the cyberpunk future you might get corps deliberately skimping on safety for a public fission reactor because they also own the privatized nuclear cleanup company and want to scuttle an underprofiting plant. While at the same time the plants at the corporate arcology are held to a laser precise standard of safety and effiency.

I imagine that the corporate divisions that are actually serious business would be stuff like espionage and/or crimes committed against oligarchs (so corp CIA and FBI), central banks, information infrastructure, secret service for executives and shareholders. Anything that effects the lives and well being of the right people corporations may be perfectly happy to tackle with well funded, competent institutions.

EDIT: Also, any situation that's being handled by stuff like Shadowrunners might not fall under these, even if it's something really really important involving key assets and privileged information, because there might be power struggles within the corp that might make it more beneficial to tolerate a wet and sloppy approach rather than just sending in the Men in Black to authority the problem. away.
 
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The Laurent said:
I think the problem is that, like, we know IRL at least that excessive reliance on contractors and wetwork and etc can erode state war-making capacity or lead to a devolution of their ability to actually keep all the balls going up.

It feels like the extent to which the tail wags the dog could be something to be explored, but it would have a very different 'vibe' then a lot of the "shadowrunner/etc" positions tend to focus on narratively.
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Well, the practical effect of this tends to be state incapacity to actually stop bizarre shenanigans from happening and a general increase in the degree to which society just starts looking like a giant rotating lava lamp of crazystupid. Much as we are now seeing in Russia with the Wagner coup.

For an RPG setting, that just means that there's more for the cyberpunk ninja PC team to do before actual authorities show up to stop them, because the actual authorities are a broken force that very much picks their battles.
 
Simon_Jester said:
In real life companies don't do that kind of stuff, at least not in the developed world, because everyone knows it would end badly with the FBI kicking in doors, arresting at least the middle manager cutouts involved, oh and arresting the wetwork specialists too. Elon Musk would be happy to have assassins on payroll, but he'd never get away with that in practice for any length of time before the system came down like a ton of bricks
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Didn't Wizards of the Coast hire Pinkertons to retrieve children's playing cards?

Companies do use goons all the time. I'm
Zap Rowsdower said:
Ultimately what it resulted in I think was writing the megacorporations as acting not as megacorporations, but as actual strong governments unto themselves fighting a shadow war for control of territory.
This is not how actual powerful corporations act - government-like behavior imposes expenses they'd prefer to minimize - but to writers for whom strong governments are the primary example of a centralized power, its an understandable mistake.
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Yes state and corporate power are usually in some type of symbiosis because why would a corpo want to take care of public infrastructure
 
Konradleijon said:
Didn't Wizards of the Coast hire Pinkertons to retrieve children's playing cards?

Companies do use goons all the time.
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Corporations use goons, but outside very specific conditions (e.g. historic strikebreaking), they also tend to observe pretty tight restrictions on what those goons can do.

Breaking and entering on the property of someone important or well-funded? Bad idea. Casually smashing into people's houses and beating people up? The corp that wants that done gets the cops to do it under color of law. Gunfights in public? Oh hell no.

The point isn't that corporations can't or don't employ people willing to use violence. It's that open, routine escalation to violence in corporate disputes is not tolerated by the state, because the state prefers to maintain something close to a monopoly on force.. Most corporations tacitly support this status quo, because the advantages they'd gain from being able to hire mercenaries to blow up their competitor's storefronts don't offset the disadvantage of having to worry about their own storefronts being blown up.

That's one major difference between a 'standard' cyberpunk setting and real life- the cyberpunk setting often sees a partial collapse of the state monopoly on force, resulting in much more open warfare between the megacorporations than we see in real life even between corporations that are antagonistic.
 
I mean, that's the sort of unrealism that I'm okay with. The game is meant to be fun after all.
 
Queshire said:
I mean, that's the sort of unrealism that I'm okay with. The game is meant to be fun after all.
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Oh, I'm not objecting to it. Really, I'm not sure that it's unrealistic, considering how much more powerful the megacorps have become than governments in cyberpunk settings and the sort of shit that real life companies got up to in the Gilded Age. Just that I don't think you can draw an equivalence between WOTC sending some Pinkertons to vaguely menace a guy and the shit that happens in Shadowrun. The 2070s version of WOTC would have had that dude liquidated and/or his house burgled, and be hiring deniable mercenaries to shoot up the Paizo offices.
 
I feel like 'cyberpunk' style megacorps run the gamit. Some of them are just states with different hats. They provide corpo scrip for currency, enforce their laws with goons, and own territory which they war with other states over. Some of them are more like real life corporations, in that they exist beneath a state's aegis, but have often pressed the regulatory capture button so hard that the dif between them and their parent state can be tough to spot.

It rarely matters as far as the genre stories goes. The corp's defining attribute is that no legal force may prevail against it, whether that be because none exists, or because it has been thoroughly coopted is immaterial. The point is that the only thing that can check the corp's power is dedicated individuals, and then only rarely and with the greatest possible effort. It's not about the details, it is about the vibe. You could run a game where 'the corp' was 'the regime' without huge alterations, the genre is about 1 super capable person vs what amounts to soldats from noir, or the illuminati, or choose your favorite conspiracy.

The Agents from the Matrix aren't technically a megacorp, but in spirit they totally are, and Neo is the runner-est runner who ever ran.
 
Queshire said:
I mean, that's the sort of unrealism that I'm okay with. The game is meant to be fun after all.
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Oh absolutely!

I agree.

What I was getting at is that it kind of is realistic that a cyberpunk setting would have that kind of situation, where casual use of private goons to commit, basically, terrorism and serious crimes against rival corporations becomes a lot more practical. Precisely because in a cyberpunk setting the corporations have basically broken down the legal system until it can no longer control their behavior at all. They're like dogs chasing cars; they've broken down the hegemon that made the existing order safe and maximally profitable, and they're probably worse off for it.

But still big and powerful and threatening because in the short term, hey, they have goons who will casually commit terrorism and break laws to fuck you up if you make them angry.
 
I mean in my headcanon for cyberpunk megacorporations they always snatch up a lot of the institutions and personnel of the collapsing state. So beneath the layer of contractors and freelancers the cons actually have functional institutions for their narrow base of "citizens".

Long-term corporate greed erodes this because leaving 80% of the population in ancap nightmare means your consumer base and your talent pool erode long term. So the cons constantly have to downsize their institutions because profits keep sinking.
 
Cyberpunk fiction is just kind of mindless extrapolation of 80s/90s privatization to "everything will be run by megacorps someday" without thinking about obvious counterpoints like "corporations want the slaves they don't want to pay for the slave-catcher, and the state is the perfect patsy for that role" or "states can be used to spend money that isn't yours to subsidize you or regulate your opponents" . Or that the more enlightened capitalists might even realize that the state solves collective problems like "no capitalist wants to pay to educate the laborforce, but every capitalist wants an educated laborforce".

There also might be some internalized capitalism there, in that cyberpunk authors might assume that megacorps while evil are genuinely more efficient and that obviously a privatized megacorp state will outcompete conventional state... its not like states themselves aren't implicitly 'more efficiency at the price of some evil' tradeoffs. Of course the truth is that capitalism has the appearance of success. Every corporation looks like they're doing fine until they implode, and capitalism as a whole consists of whichever corporations are currently doing fine and haven't imploded yet. The same could be said of nations I suppose.
 
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The Narrator said:
Yes, but not to conduct an armed attack on the offices of their competitors to steal or sabotage their next product in development, which is the kind of thing that megacorps hire shadowrunners to do.
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I will say that by and large it's not 'the megacorp' that's hiring shadowrunners, it's an individual with incentives inside the megacorp hiring shadowrunners.

So, for example, you get some exec in charge of the Coke 2.0 launch. He's been doing a pretty mediocre job, and overpromised to his bosses to land the assignment in the first place. If the launch fails, he's fucked, and if it goes well he gets a profit share. So he hires shadowrunners to sabotage the Pepsi Neue launch, to delay it so his own launch isn't competing with a superior product. The 'megacorp' isn't hiring the runners, and doesn't even know this is taking place, but it has created an environment where this behaviour is incentivised.

Second example, a Senior VP position is open and being decided upon, so one of the candidates (who's kind of shit, but very ruthless) hires shadowrunners to ruin their main competitor's projects and cause massive damage to that whole division, so the competitor is out of the running. Obviously the corp wouldn't want this to happen, they're the one being damaged, but perverse incentives strike again.

When the actual top brass of the megacorp wants something done, they'll almost always use their own security or special forces for it.
 
Possibly an overly broad question: for a more "updated" story set in a cyberpunk setting, what sort of aesthetics would be assigned to the megacorps?

As in, a lot of the 80s/90s cyberpunk megacorps (not all, but a significant number, and almost always among the most prominent ones) are clearly Japanese. Shadowrun not only had the obvious examples of Renraku and Shiawase (and Fuchi, I think), the default currency of the setting was "nu-yen". As far as I can tell, this was either deliberately evoking or blindly aping the parts of Gibson's Neuromancer where Japanese corps were also all-powerful and ubiquitous.

What do you (general you) think would replace these megacorp origins if you were to update the setting? Certainly a large number of megacorps will be US-based (or North American in general, since a lot of stories assume Canada and Mexico will be assimilated into the US for some reason), due to the writers largely being US-based. Would there be more European companies, like Shadowrun's Saeder-Krupp? Of those European companies, do you think a lot of them will be German, or would there be some from, say, Spain or the UK? Something from China or India, perhaps?

This was mostly an idle question from wondering if there were examples of cyberpunk megacorps from South Asia. I'm not familiar with any examples of cyberpunk settings in general other than Shadowrun, although I obviously know there are plenty more (eg the titular Cyberpunk).
 
I have a number of Korean and American megacorps in my setting. Hyundai-Aramco. Samsung Heavy Industries. I still have some American Megacorps (Morton Salt, Oil & Gas Division, Mattel Aeronautics, etc). But Korea is a manufacturing giant in today's world, and I think their precense is extremely undervalued in most games.
 
theorion said:
I have a number of Korean and American megacorps in my setting. Hyundai-Aramco. Samsung Heavy Industries. I still have some American Megacorps (Morton Salt, Oil & Gas Division, Mattel Aeronautics, etc). But Korea is a manufacturing giant in today's world, and I think their precense is extremely undervalued in most games.
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Korea is the closest thing to a cyberpunk setting today so they are the best place to draw inspiration from. Of course the aesthetic is not that much different from the classical Japanese look as far as the buildings and cities go.

Also, those are some very disturbing companies to contemplate. Did Saudi Arabia buy Hyundai or the other way around? I am not sure which is more disturbing. And when did Barbie join the MIC?
 
the most terrifying megacorp in my homebrew is basically Apple-Disney. extreme information control, obsession with Good Design, every media and PR skill imaginable. smaller physical footprint then other megacorps but it makes it easy for them to pivot
 
Adloquium said:
Possibly an overly broad question: for a more "updated" story set in a cyberpunk setting, what sort of aesthetics would be assigned to the megacorps?

As in, a lot of the 80s/90s cyberpunk megacorps (not all, but a significant number, and almost always among the most prominent ones) are clearly Japanese. Shadowrun not only had the obvious examples of Renraku and Shiawase (and Fuchi, I think), the default currency of the setting was "nu-yen". As far as I can tell, this was either deliberately evoking or blindly aping the parts of Gibson's Neuromancer where Japanese corps were also all-powerful and ubiquitous.

What do you (general you) think would replace these megacorp origins if you were to update the setting? Certainly a large number of megacorps will be US-based (or North American in general, since a lot of stories assume Canada and Mexico will be assimilated into the US for some reason), due to the writers largely being US-based. Would there be more European companies, like Shadowrun's Saeder-Krupp? Of those European companies, do you think a lot of them will be German, or would there be some from, say, Spain or the UK? Something from China or India, perhaps?

This was mostly an idle question from wondering if there were examples of cyberpunk megacorps from South Asia. I'm not familiar with any examples of cyberpunk settings in general other than Shadowrun, although I obviously know there are plenty more (eg the titular Cyberpunk).
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Tesla. Facebook. Probably that Oceangate guy as well now.

The Megacorps would build vanity projects that no one needs, no one understands and fails a lot of the time, but it doesn't because they have enough money and power that no one can do anything about it.
 
Yeah, the megacorps of old were Japanese because in the 80s it looked like they were going to dominate the economy forever, which... isn't true anymore.
So you can extend the current trends and have your megacorps be Californinan tech giants.
Or you can say "well the trends of american tech companies might not hold forever" and do like an old french comicbook did and have the center of the economic world of 2080 be La Havana because the US have collapsed on themselves in a puritan theocracy.
 
Google Disney (aka Goosney (thank you LRR for that joke)) would make more sense to me.
Possibly with Amazon Apple (Appzon?) as a not really rival as both have different monopolies.
One owns and controls all knowledge.
The other has taken over hardware and distribution that people use to access that knowledge.
 
Axslashel said:
Korea is the closest thing to a cyberpunk setting today so they are the best place to draw inspiration from. Of course the aesthetic is not that much different from the classical Japanese look as far as the buildings and cities go.

Also, those are some very disturbing companies to contemplate. Did Saudi Arabia buy Hyundai or the other way around? I am not sure which is more disturbing. And when did Barbie join the MIC?
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Hyundai bought out Saudi Aramco. Lockheed Martin acquired Mattel and took the name for PR-related reasons.
 
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