Your cyberpunk games are dangerous (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Your cyberpunk games are dangerous (2015)

boingboing.net

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GURPS Cyberpunk is still available as a PDF and interestingly, is still the best generic cyberpunk toolkit ever printed.

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-classic-cyberpunk

It was translated to Portuguese by Devir in the early nineties, and I distinctly remember a sidebar discussion on whether separate wide-area networks would eventually join to become "the Net." It was the first time I saw the word Internet.

I've become increasingly interested in collecting RPGs this past year and I've noticed that Portugeuse seems to be one of the next biggest translation targets, though mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal. No idea why, just something that's become apparent.

> mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal.

In Brazil and Portugal, Portuguese is the highly dominant language, but Portugal only has about 11M people and Brazil has about 207M. More people means more creative output (generally)

people just don't understand how big brazil is. the area is only a half million sq mi smaller than the continental us or china.

1 Russia 6.6 million square miles 2 United States 3.8 million square miles 3 Canada 3.8 million square miles 4 China 3.7 million square miles 5 Brazil 3.3 million square miles 6 Australia 2.9 million square miles

Creative output as well as revenue stream. A saturated 11m market of Europeans (that have a birthrate lower than 2) is nothing to a thirsty 207m that is mostly young people. Especially with games that are cheap to play (pen, paper, book) instead of a CPC6128.

But Portugal is a pretty developed nation, which also usually equates to greater creative output.

Ancient Greece is an interesting counterexample to this. A few thousand artists, poets, playwrights , mathematicians and philosophers managed to create the foundations of western civilization, arguably more cultural output than subsequent civilizations that had 100x or 1,000x the population.

Knowing that, it’s easy to see why the fascination with that time period has been so widespread and long-lasting.

How does it compare to Cyberpunk 2020? I wanna run a cyberpunk campaign for my friends next year and wanted to understand which ruleset and setting is most fun. We already play a lot of DnD.

GURPS for me is the quintessential cyberpunk role playing experience. Its gritty realism suits the genre way better, in my opinion, than systems like Cyberpunk 2020. The bionics / cybernetics systems and point based character creation really opens things up for creating the kind of character you want versus being stuck in an archetype that the genre defines. GURPS is an amazing toolbox for simulating a lot of gritty and deadly combat. A lot of people don't like that you can calculate what you need to roll in order to shoot a person in their left eye as you drive past at night on your motorcycle and prefer a more abstract system. In that case, I'd move towards the Apocalypse World system. It's a much more modern role playing experience without a lot of the issues that GURPS or D&D style games face.

http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/games/title/The_Sprawl

GURPS is way to crunchy (numbers focused) for me, personally, but I'm seconding the Sprawl recommendation.

Hack The Planet is another great modern cyberpunk RPG, based on the Forged in the Dark rule set.

I like my RPGs crunchy enough to not be a barrier to role playing or abstract enough to not be a barrier to role playing. I feel like I've never been limited in what I can do or what I can create in GURPS. Games like D&D are the worst of both worlds for me. Not abstract enough to do what you want, and not crunchy enough to have rules for all you want to do. To me D&D is more like playing a board game than a role playing game.

You could look into Pathfinder, it's very crunchy with lots of options so it should fit.

On the other hand, how you experience D&D depends heavily on the GM. If social solutions to problems are not rewarded, players may feel like playing a board game. Same for GMs that railroad the story too much.

Seems interesting. Why can't I find it on boardgamegeek.com?

The game, or one like it, is on RPG Geek: https://rpggeek.com/rpgfamily/335/cyberpunk

Its sold directly from Steve Jackson, who is still in business and still making (very good) games.

“increment on May 11, 2015 [-]

Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990. I understand why you gag at that, but, I can imagine much, much worse outcomes than we got.”

How fast things change.

Still true.

No it isn't

It is - compare the internet to the AppStore or the Play Store. The internet could've easily been something like that - a walled garden accessible only through proprietary clients, where you could only publish content through prescribed channels. Sure, people would've created open alternatives, but just like is the case with the AppStore alternatives today, those alternatives would languish for want of an audience.

You don't need a commercial aggregator to deal with the problem of an audience. You just need a well-known aggregator.

The mobile phone is seems like a good analogue of the walled garden model and unsurprisingly computers like Macs and Chromebooks show some of their roots there.

It could have been AOL. The underlying power of the internet remains the ability to use it for virtually any application.

I was only responding in kind to the above poster who provided no context for their answer...

And context does matter, because in some places the internet is basically Facebook, which is certainly not open

I don't want to go back to an archipelego of incompatible networks; at one point we were struggling to cross the WWW, BBS, CompuServ and AOL divides.

It's different than the modern era of different and incompatible messenger software; at least Discord and Slack route packets on the same network.

>Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990.

Yes, but not from how it was in 1999.

I still think the internet was a net good.

> After a gradual dawning of awareness, he asks the computer, “Is this a game… or is it real?” With the aplomb of a delusional college student wandering the steam tunnels, imaginary sword in hand, the computer replies, “What’s the difference?”

Hmmm, I have never met this perspective. An AI might be limited in perceiving reality in addition to being much stronger intellectually. A dangerous mix I would say. Imagine “See”, but with AI instead of the blind people.

A binary AI would probably have to settle for an either/or situation. The result and therefore difference between a choice of reality and game, when picking from the core duality, will always be either reality or a game. A quantum AI would be able to view both equally (and be able to grasp all the intermediate states (that we call stable)) and therefore not be able to distinguish between what we call "real" and what aspects of reality we call "imaginary". Our quantum brain that we force into a binary perspective by applying logic is able to see the whole spectrum, but we choose not to use it except for a few parts. What is the difference between real and imaginary? In mathematics we have the real numbers and the imaginary numbers, which arise out of a necessity solely due to the existence of real numbers in the first place. We seem to have no problem accepting both as true and working with both. Each part of the real/imaginary number spectrum allow us to describe reality in different ways - or perspectives, if you will. We even call them real and imaginary and don't deny imaginary numbers their very real existence. So what's the difference, really?

I don't quite understand why a "binary AI" wouldn't be able to give you a probability on how much it thinks it's in reality (ie, an intermediate state).

I don't think quantum AI has that much more advantages either and the human brain doesn't really qualify as "quantum" either in my books.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519956

I'm surprised they left out the "made for tv" movie Mazes and Monsters that starred Tom Hanks. The movie paralleled the story of James Dallas Egbert III, the missing college student.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters

>This misunderstanding arose only five months after TSR obtained widespread notoriety in a similar confusion surrounding the disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III in East Lansing, Michigan. A private detective hired to find Egbert had learned that the young man played TSR’s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—at the time virtually unknown to mainstream America—and hypothesized that Egbert had come to believe the game was real. Famously, this led to calls for a search of the college steam tunnels, where presumably Egbert would be found wandering in a deluded stupor, questing for monsters and treasure.

Tom Hanks starred in a 1982 made for TV movie called, "Mazes and Monsters" that used virtually this exact plot. In the 80s there was a massive hysteria about Dungeons & Dragons being linked to "devil worship" and other madness (yes really). It was so bad that TSR pulled Demons and Devils from the (then) new edition of the Monster Manual (and related books) in an attempt to quell the furor.

Spoiler: In the movie the character played by Hanks actually does go crazy and end up lost in the tunnels. He is eventually found but he has forever lost his mind, driven insane by the evil game.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/

Great article. The Steve Jackson raid is the stuff of legend, and confusion. This article definitely clears up the fog of war regarding the ordeal.

misleading title :(

More revisionist history from millenials who weren't there to know that things like GURPS and Legion of Doom and other things mentioned in this article were unknown at the time, even to other "hackers" and BBSs and usenet. Journalists decided to write about them and hail them as heros years later, changing what was pop culture to the cyberpunk world of those days to whatever they see as nostalgic and romantic and interesting. And for the record, no one who was actually IN the cybperpunk world in the 1980s (including the year 1990) actually used the term "cyberpunk", regardless of whether it was coined or not. Once the term was out there, it was definitely not a cool word and anyone who used it or labeled themselves that way was not at all a cyberpunk.

As an older person deeply involved in the BBS communities of the 1980s and someone who played both Car Wars and GURPS I can tell you that these things were very well known among many of us.

No. Maybe they were unknown to you, but not some of us. I first heard about the Phrack raids a week or so afterward, when certain of my peers in college began destroying floppies in a fit of paranoia.

_Free_The_Atlanta_Three_

Games are dangerous? What bs.

I miss a time when people read articles before commenting on them. Just skimming the introduction could have told you that the title is not a reflection of an argument forwarded by the article.

What time was that? Humans have always taken shortcuts.

Skimming is a good enough shortcut to take to not sound like a fool.

The idea that "human society/culture/habbit was always the same in X aspect" is as ludicrous as "human society/culture/habbit is always changing in X aspect".

For as long as any of us can remember, the average person has tried to avoid wasting their time on potentially fruitless pursuits with no joy in the journey.

Shortcuts is not just "skip the useless parts", but also cheat, lose subtlety, lower quality (as in "take shortcuts"), and so on.

In this case "read[ing] articles before commenting on them" is not "wasting their time on potentially fruitless pursuits with no joy in the journey", it's the very basic prerequisite for responding to an article.

And yes, there was a time when this happened less. In the mobile and social era, people are skimming more, jumping around from text to text more, and do focused reading of articles and books less -- this has been studied and written about several times (e.g. here's a high level article from a book author on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog... ).

I miss the time when headlines could give you a rough approximation of the content of the article rather than just designed to catch clicks based on knee-jerk responses.

A headline should be a one sentence summary of the article.

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