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The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

That's more an artifact of capitalism than industry itself >: V

The Luddites didn't smash up shit because "technology bad" but because the value produced by industry wasn't being returned to them.
 
Blaming industrialization for our current situation just seems like lazy baby with the bathwater thinking to me on the level of "all politicians are corrupt therefore you shouldn't vote". It wasn't inevitable. We very much had a chance to right course with the technology we had in the mid century. We could have pushed more nuclear and hydroelectric while renewables get better. Maybe we could have created electric cars that don't blow up much earlier.

But we didn't. That failure isn't on the entire long sweep of technological history. It's specifically on post-war western society. We could have done a lot to mitigate climate change, but we got distracted by shiny cars and allowed the automotive industry, O&G and military industrial complex took the reins instead.

And thinking space travel is a waste of time because we're fucking up earth is straight up just ass-backwards thinking. Like fuck conization and exoplanets. There's resources out there that if we unlock them would make many industrial processes that harm the planet unnecessary. The big hurdle right now is getting enough infrastructure into space that we don't need to use up earth resources to get up there in the first place. And every time we collectively go "no I decided that technology is evil, sucking moss off rocks will save me from my spiritual ennui" then we make that goal even further off.

That mentality only works if you assume that the great collapse and return to Eden will be permanent and no one will dare tempt the gods with their dirty science ever again. Because the next civilization is just going to keep doing the same shit with the resources they have. It's on the onus on our civilisation right now to make that unnecessary.

EDIT: Like one of the big things that will happen is mass instability on earth due to dwindling supplies of available water. And there's hella water OUT FUCKING THERE IN FUCKING SPACE.
 
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As much as the process of industrialisation was horrendous (it really fucking was, all those cute little pubs in the English countryside become a lot more uncomfortable to think about when you realise that they're called things like 'the royalty' in reference to the royalty payments given to armed thugs who turfed peasants out of their homes as part of enclosure programs), I'll take the technologically enforced global society over the mirage of 'clean air and pretty plants and small communities', thank you.

Like, in addition to the points made above, small communities fucking suck. Small communities mean local tyrants and cliques enforcing hidebound, conservative, small-minded attitudes, without the option to appeal to larger government to try and enforce equal treatment. It means anybody with mental or physical disabilities who can't make themselves likeable to their neighbours, even on the bad days, is just shit out of luck for getting any kind of help, without national services offering help by professionals who do it for an impersonal paycheque.

People talk about small communities and imagine the ideal of mutual aid networks and idyllic communes, and forget all the circular firing squad/crab bucket memes we have about our existing small communities. My parents lived the commune life, they're a lovely dream for a while but there is always enough friction to drive a steady trickle of people out, and it was no different back in the 'good old days', people just didn't have the option to leave so they swallowed the bile and stayed put. Hell, I lived the small town life! It was godawful. We got Social Services called on us over harmless weirdness like 'being a minority faith' and 'going shopping without a shirt because it was high summer' and 'walking barefoot'. The family up the road from us turned out to be literal murderers who locked a disabled fellow up in their shed and tortured him to death over the course of six weeks.

Yes, fine, the big government systems are decrepit and callous and oppressive. I still say they're better than the alternative, because I've seen the kind of petty cruelty and small-minded bigotry that comes with the alternative.
 
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Wait did I already do an incredibly tenuous link via Wizard's Ravnican material to MTG and New Phyrexia's weaponised anti-sexuality?

I can't remember.

I feel like I did, but I can't be sure!
 
Jenny said:
doesn't look like you did in this thread
go nuts!
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Ah fuck now I have to not only remember where I put this down, but what I wrote....

... basically, the religious state assumes the generative function in the most literal way possible with White's final control of the glistening oil, suborns Green, Blue, and Black to the task (religious order dictated by women tames virility, science, and politics respectively), and then starts fucking the multiverse with a huge cock made of robot tree. It's extremely unsubtle and very funny, because what this is means is that Elesh Norn didn't just nationalise girlfriends (and make them killbots who inseminate ecosystems with doomjizz that makes more girlfriends), she became the national girlfriend, and then started pegging reality.

It's the FemCel dream.

Don't just step on the cute boy, step on his entire plane!
 
Jenny said:
That does lead me to wonder about the inverse (heightening the tone of a notionally silly campaign), because my first RPG started very comedic, but we kinda slid into a more dramatic tone. (TBF, that was at the suggestion/instigation of multiple players, myself among them, and we never quite lost the comedy shenanigans, but I do wonder how @Iron Wolf (our GM) actually felt about it).
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Relevant comic - 'Class Clown'

"Thus ends the tale of Slap-Happy Jack (Slappy for short), the Firbolg Barbarian who started life as a lowly orphan, raised by a roving pack of wild clowns. Let it never be said that he was a one-off joke character made by that one friend who likes to piss off the DM. Nay! When the chips were down and the temple was crumbling, he laid down his life for that which is more precious than even the finest of banana cream pies...the love of his friends."
 
Gonna opine that space travel is very important and lynchpin of any modern society, especially satellite emplacement.

There is a reason China is developing its BeiDou Navigation Satellite System for use in multiple industries on a priority basis. They saw the economic benefits the Global Positioning System has given the United States since the '80s. Farmers here use GPS to plan the best use of their land, an application of great interest to Chinese agriculture. GPS allows delivery services and drivers in general to navigate more efficiently to their stops and destinations, respectively. Financial institution require GPS to timestamp transactions. Shipping companies rely on GPS to track their ships to port and ships are guided to port by those systems in the first place. GPS boosted the US economy by $1.4 trillion, with most of the growth happening within the last decade. The military application of GPS, which should be obvious, particularly for missile technology, which is another outgrowth of spaceflight technology. China wants a piece of that action.

Also remember that I'm mainly talking about just one critical technology enabled by spaceflight, GPS, which any kind of modern economy supporting millions of consumers depends upon. And I'm not even listing how all the essential application of GPS, like, say, how the technology is absolutely necessary for our traffic management and financial systems to work due to timestamping.

But I think it's fair to say that manned spaceflight might be not be worth the investment put into it in the short term, at least, though unmanned spaceflight has been paying dividends for awhile and could yield even more if we can develop autonomous robotic systems capable making spot decisions and executing tasks on their own, which would have useful applications in speculative industries such as mining the Moon, asteroids, comets, and other planets. Or be useful for building space-based solar radiation management systems for geoengineering projects such as a solar sunshade, which could be necessary if the climate crisis continues unabated, which looking real likely recently.


This is partly why I like settings such Eclipse Phase and Transhuman Space where autonomous robotic systems laid the foundation for human exploration, exploitation, and expansion throughout the solar system because the games take into account how these systems are robust against the harsh of extraplanetary environments and how the technology could enable unmanned spaceflight endeavors to pave the way for manned ones, though admittedly I'm interested in how transhumanists in the setting modify themselves to survive off Earth, at times becoming machines themselves.
 
Nuts! said:

Relevant comic - 'Class Clown'

"Thus ends the tale of Slap-Happy Jack (Slappy for short), the Firbolg Barbarian who started life as a lowly orphan, raised by a roving pack of wild clowns. Let it never be said that he was a one-off joke character made by that one friend who likes to piss off the DM. Nay! When the chips were down and the temple was crumbling, he laid down his life for that which is more precious than even the finest of banana cream pies...the love of his friends."
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If you want the reverse version, there's a great story about an NPC ogre who wanted to be a dwarf.
 
MrCogmor said:
Vampires can sort of work as a dramatic metaphor for the parasitism and inhumanity of wealthy aristocrats or capitalists where they become monstrous and powerful from living at the expense of others.
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Bram Stoker's Dracula pretty much explicitly embodies this, though I also feel like it's not by accident that the story is premised around the idea of Dracula as a rich foreign (specifically Romanian) nobleman who specifically takes interest in Mina, a white English woman from a wealthy family. Mina is also personally characterised as chaste and virtuous compared to her friend Lucy, who is entertaining multiple potential suitors to her hand. Mina embodies traditional Victorian morals and the idealised Victorian idea of female behaviour, whereas Lucy is bold by the standards of the time. I don't think it is entirely accidental that Lucy is Dracula's first victim and ultimately dies whereas the more chaste Mina survives to the end of the story and ends up happily married.

MrCogmor said:
Cyberpunk cybernetics can have the dramatic metaphor of people becoming more of a utilitarian robot and being pushed to sacrifice more of themselves towards service and survival.
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That particular metaphor has origins in the idea of cybernetics or other forms of body modification as being something of an analogue to the exploitation and dehumanisation of people by capitalism but tbh I personally have a lot of misgivings about that trope from a queer and trans perspective. I also would argue it very much has ableist implications. Is someone with a prosthetic limb less human than someone without prosthetics? If an elderly person gets a titanium hip replacement after an injury, do they move down a few rungs in the ladder of humanity and risk turning into heartless automatons? Do I personally lose humanity for taking HRT or getting gender-affirming procedures?

I feel like "body modification makes you less human" is a trope that is very exclusionary of those who are queer and/or disabled.

The idea of "losing humanity" in a game that I found much more interesting was in Vampire the Masquerade because vampirism was fundamentally a form of death (your body actually, physically dies when you become a vampire) and from that point on you become effectively an immortal living corpse with a thirst for blood. In this conception: you are no longer human and the sheer nature of your existence forces you to commit morally-questionable acts for your survival. The morality of vampirism in VtM isn't about the morals of being a vampire to start with, but rather how one behaves as a vampire. Because vampirism is treated as effectively a potential death of the self. In other words: in the course of adjusting to (un)life as a vampire, there's a strong chance that you lose or forget the person you once were and instead become a ruthless predator only faintly reminiscent the person you were in life.

I much prefer this kind of narrative because the idea of "loss of self" isn't something imposed because of voluntary body modification but instead is entirely controlled by one's personal actions and choices.
 
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Madam Carstein said:
That particular metaphor has origins in the idea of cybernetics or other forms of body modification as being something of an analogue to the exploitation and dehumanisation of people by capitalism but tbh I personally have a lot of misgivings about that trope from a queer and trans perspective. I also would argue it very much has ableist implications. Is someone with a prosthetic limb less human than someone without prosthetics? If an elderly person gets a titanium hip replacement after an injury, do they move down a few rungs in the ladder of humanity and risk turning into heartless automatons? Do I personally lose humanity for taking HRT or getting gender-affirming procedures?

I feel like "body modification makes you less human" is a trope that is very exclusionary of those who are queer and/or disabled.

I much prefer this kind of narrative because the idea of "loss of self" isn't something imposed because of voluntary body modification but instead is entirely controlled by one's personal actions and choices.
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The real reason for "Humanity Loss" in Cyberpunk 2020, I read many years ago in an interview with Mike Pondsmith (the creator) was that during playtesting some the players took on so much cyberware that he needed a way to get them to slow down for game balance purposes. I am absolutely certain (though here I don't have a primary source) that the "essence loss" in Shadowrun has the same origin -- to discourage powergamers, and have different character types be able to contribute to the party.

That said, you are completely right about the unfortunate implications for real world communities.
 
Madam Carstein said:
Bram Stoker's Dracula pretty much explicitly embodies this, though I also feel like it's not by accident that the story is premised around the idea of Dracula as a rich foreign (specifically Romanian) nobleman who specifically takes interest in Mina, a white English woman from a wealthy family. Mina is also personally characterised as chaste and virtuous compared to her friend Lucy, who is entertaining multiple potential suitors to her hand. Mina embodies traditional Victorian morals and the idealised Victorian idea of female behaviour, whereas Lucy is bold by the standards of the time. I don't think it is entirely accidental that Lucy is Dracula's first victim and ultimately dies whereas the more chase Mina survives to the end of the story and ends up happily married.
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Let's be even more explicit -- Mina is the Final Girl. Same principle as Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street.
 
Konradleijon said:
The real reason for "Humanity Loss" in Cyberpunk 2020, I read many years ago in an interview with Mike Pondsmith (the creator) was that during playtesting some the players took on so much cyberware that he needed a way to get them to slow down for game balance purposes. I am absolutely certain (though here I don't have a primary source) that the "essence loss" in Shadowrun has the same origin -- to discourage powergamers, and have different character types be able to contribute to the party.

That said, you are completely right about the unfortunate implications for real world communities.
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Yeah same reason for Shadowrun though Shadowrun also needs it so that you cant be a magic Cyborg which is already insanely powerful

Mages are already unbalanced enough they dont need to also be the Street Sam
 
Madam Carstein said:
That particular metaphor has origins in the idea of cybernetics or other forms of body modification as being something of an analogue to the exploitation and dehumanisation of people by capitalism but tbh I personally have a lot of misgivings about that trope from a queer and trans perspective. I also would argue it very much has ableist implications. Is someone with a prosthetic limb less human than someone without prosthetics? If an elderly person gets a titanium hip replacement after an injury, do they move down a few rungs in the ladder of humanity and risk turning into heartless automatons? Do I personally lose humanity for taking HRT or getting gender-affirming procedures?

I feel like "body modification makes you less human" is a trope that is very exclusionary of those who are queer and/or disabled.
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The problem in RPGs is that the loss of humanity or essence is often as much a game balance issue as it is a social commentary statement. This leads to things like how the recent Shadowrun books talk about how your essence is essentially how well your soul vibes with your body which is why you can actually regain essence now via cosmetic surgery which helps you match your physical body with your identity such as, e.g., gender-affirming surgery (which I suspect has its own bag of worms regarding genderqueer people who aren't undergoing medical transition but I'm not qualified to talk about that except to note it's a possible thing that exists).

Except.

Except.

There is a massive carve-out, an in-universe carve-out, even, which says that you can't use this to except augmentations which improve your mechanical characteristics. You can regain essence that you lost due to drug abuse or living in shitty conditions and suffering trauma or bad medical care by getting cosmetic surgery to look more like your own identity, even if that identity is something like "I should have been a weird chimera but I was born a human" except for the unfortunate guys whose inner identity is "I am really fucking huge" (maybe they were born an elf but feel in their soul that they should have been born a troll) and who should be able to just get 30 kilos of vat-grown muscles to bulk up and affirm their identity but can't.

Because essence is used as a game balance tool to keep people from easily having magical superpowers and jacked cyborg parts at the same time (unless you're a vampire, but that's another funny can of worms), its in-universe implications are downstream from the fact that it exists to force you to consider what cyborg bits, if any, your character wants to get.
 
IIRC, at least part of the idea behind Cyber Psychosis/losing humanity in Cyberpunk is the part where you're actively changing your body to the extremes, or intentionally chopping off parts of yourself for such things. Medical-grade cybernetics (which function mechanically identically to normal fleshy human bits) don't incur any loss of humanity, so it's perfectly fine for things like "I lost my arm in an accident and got a replacement" or "I was born with non-functional legs and decided to have them replaced with prosthetics". There's no cost to that, it's fine to get yourself a hip replacement or a pacemaker, it doesn't reduce your humanity.

It's another thing entirely when you go "Well I'm replacing my arm anyways, so I want it to have built in sticky-fingers for climbing walls, and a multitool function, and also a giant retractable blade", or alternatively if you look at your perfectly functional normal human arm and decide to saw it off to get those features. These are, in fact, not normal functions of the human body, and generally not something a perfectly normal sane human is going to want or need. Even then unless you go really nuts like "gimme a mount for six spider arms" or the aforementioned blade arms, the humanity costs for a lot of things are fairly trivial, it just adds up when you're wholesale replacing and upgrading your body beyond the human norms, presumably the idea being that it's harder to identify with normal humans when you're so far above them. We already see the same thing psychologically in say, billionaires where normal people don't compute to them and lives are a statistic, now imagine how that goes when they can get their entire body replaced with cybernetics that make them actually superior to your Average Joe, able to rip a man in half with their bare hands, deflect bullets with their skin, and constantly live with a different time perception where almost everyone else is simply slower than they are.

At least, from my understanding that's the in-game explanations for it. I've no doubt that humanity loss and all that is also meant as a balancing mechanic to keep players from just borging up with every fancy piece of tech they want.
 
Are y'all familiar with the phrase "The blade itself incites to deeds of violence" from the Odyssey?

Imagine giving a kid a gun, bad idea. Yeah, now imagine giving a teenager super reflexes and program Kung Fu in his head, just like that student who bullies David in Edgerunners. And now imagine giving vets suffering PTSD access to their sword arms and super strength, even worse idea. The fact that David HAD to turn himself into a cyborg monster just to survive and save his loved ones gets into the whole theme of why California capitalism sucks.

It's one thing getting a cyber arm to replace a missing one, it's another to completely replace it just so you can get some sick mantis blades. I wouldn't replace my arms for sick mantis blades. I'd do it for gorilla arms but that's not the point I'm trying to make.
 
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McFluffles said:
IIRC, at least part of the idea behind Cyber Psychosis/losing humanity in Cyberpunk is the part where you're actively changing your body to the extremes, or intentionally chopping off parts of yourself for such things. Medical-grade cybernetics (which function mechanically identically to normal fleshy human bits) don't incur any loss of humanity, so it's perfectly fine for things like "I lost my arm in an accident and got a replacement" or "I was born with non-functional legs and decided to have them replaced with prosthetics". There's no cost to that, it's fine to get yourself a hip replacement or a pacemaker, it doesn't reduce your humanity.

It's another thing entirely when you go "Well I'm replacing my arm anyways, so I want it to have built in sticky-fingers for climbing walls, and a multitool function, and also a giant retractable blade", or alternatively if you look at your perfectly functional normal human arm and decide to saw it off to get those features. These are, in fact, not normal functions of the human body, and generally not something a perfectly normal sane human is going to want or need. Even then unless you go really nuts like "gimme a mount for six spider arms" or the aforementioned blade arms, the humanity costs for a lot of things are fairly trivial, it just adds up when you're wholesale replacing and upgrading your body beyond the human norms, presumably the idea being that it's harder to identify with normal humans when you're so far above them. We already see the same thing psychologically in say, billionaires where normal people don't compute to them and lives are a statistic, now imagine how that goes when they can get their entire body replaced with cybernetics that make them actually superior to your Average Joe, able to rip a man in half with their bare hands, deflect bullets with their skin, and constantly live with a different time perception where almost everyone else is simply slower than they are.

At least, from my understanding that's the in-game explanations for it. I've no doubt that humanity loss and all that is also meant as a balancing mechanic to keep players from just borging up with every fancy piece of tech they want.
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The funny-depressing thing is that CPRED (and the Edgerunners handbook) are actually ironically harsher about cyberpsychosis and empathy loss than Cyberpunk 2020, which hid an obscure note that you could regain humanity via therapy with no cap in the early books and gave things like European clinics which you could stack with the Chromebook 2 iteration of therapy to get like, a 75% reduction in humanity cost.

CPRED then made most ware mid to add insult to injury. It is legitimately an entirely viable option to just play zero-cyberware John Wick in RED/2077 whereas even in Shadowrun 6 (let alone SR5 or 4) the no-ware no-magic mundane is unplayably dire.
 
Cyberpsychosis and similar ideas are silly in general when it's just about the cyber limbs and shit. But I do think there's a case for validity with the deeper, more exotic neural tech.

The Sandevistan in Edgerunners is a perfectly example. I can definately see slamming your body and perception of time back and forth into turbo speed and making people explode like water balloons. It's not just losing too much of God's hallowed meat turning you into the Joker, you're literally putting the human parts of you through stresses and processes that we don't even expert from astronauts.

Eventually the biotech must catch up to the Cybertech or else were basically a bunch of test monkeys being launched in progressively more powerful rockets.
 
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I have heard philosophers argue that a brain in a vat would develop severe mental problems, not because a prosthetic is inherently evil or anything but because you have an innate sense of what your body is supposed to be like. This is one of the reasons amputees are hypothesized to have phantom limbs. The loss of a limb doesn't make you go psychotic, of course, but I could buy that for much more invasive technology it could be an issue for mental stability. Your body isn't getting the right sensory feedback; it's subtly different and the limbs just don't work the same. You have senses you didn't use to.

This would be less of an issue if a PC used well-tested technology, didn't do everything all at once, minimized invasiveness, and only went for options that were basically already integrated into their mental self-image despite their body not matching. PCs never do this. They want the cool experimental technology, get loads of it at once, and get the most complicated shit possible because "it has good stats" and "it seemed neat." It doesn't surprise me that someone in that situation would have issues with mental stability.

EDIT: Oh, and the surgeries are usually done by a shady back-alley doctor.
 
Citrakayah said:
This would be less of an issue if a PC used well-tested technology, didn't do everything all at once, minimized invasiveness, and only went for options that were basically already integrated into their mental self-image despite their body not matching. PCs never do this. They want the cool experimental technology, get loads of it at once, and get the most complicated shit possible because "it has good stats" and "it seemed neat." It doesn't surprise me that someone in that situation would have issues with mental stability.
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Yeah, that's also something of note when it comes to cybernetics! MJ12 mentioned it, and therapy to reduce or even remove humanity loss is totally a thing in setting; theoretically you could, over the course of years, borg up completely with all the bells and whistles you want by just going one replacement part at a time, taking the time needed to get used to "my body now works differently than it has all my life", and all that.

But that's not what player characters do, especially in a place like Night City. You're getting new cybernetics because "yo that's Preem I want it" and spending all the money you made from your last gig getting some back-alley ripperdoc to install it, then running off to play with your new toy in the next gig within he next couple days because whoops you just spent what would have been this month's food and rent expenses. And so it goes in a spiral of shoving more and more things in your body to get bigger, better, and stronger, never taking the time to actually adapt to the changes you're making to your body. You're making yourself Superman in his World of Cardboard, except you haven't had years or decades to get used to living in that cardboard world, and most certainly don't have Clark Kent's moral upbringing and standards to keep you from potentially lashing out and breaking things... or people.

And that's not even getting into the more exotic stuff like sticking skill chips straight into your brain, or a kerenzikov or Sandevistan, or god forbid going full Hackerman ™️ and getting an advanced Cyberdeck so you can hack things on sight or break into computers (and people) with your mind. Just the ability to do these things can psychologically change a person, no matter how much you want to tell yourself "nah I'm different".
 
MJ12 Commando said:
CPRED then made most ware mid to add insult to injury. It is legitimately an entirely viable option to just play zero-cyberware John Wick in RED/2077 whereas even in Shadowrun 6 (let alone SR5 or 4) the no-ware no-magic mundane is unplayably dire.
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I can't believe Mike Pondsmith looked at Megalo Box and said "Joe Yabuki can 100% fist fight a cyborg abomination like Adam Smasher and win." That's rad.
 
Shadowrun also has shit like adepts, which is technically magic but also a lower rung of magic than literally casting spells and I'm willing to call an adept doing kung-fu shit to be closer to baseline than an Adam Jensen doing the same.

Shadowrun does do the magic going only to the born special people though. I feel like it'd be more fun with adepts specifically if it was more like Dragonball where anyone could learn to harness chi even if most people don't break the lower power levels. Then the baseline question would be moot because adept techniques would just become baked into the paramilitary badass repertoire. Like if you can't do a kaio-ken then you won't qualify for most special forces.

When it comes to the cyber vs magic I'm perfectly willing to accept the limitation as unproblematic if it's literally just because magic comes from biology like the force. Magic = meat, less meat = less capacity for magic. If you lose too much of the spirit-meat your life force goes kaput.

The problems come in when the setting inevitably spiritualizes it and treats the essence as the true, inherent self and therefore the augmented person as less than. Then things go rotten.
 
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