Cyberpunk / Shadowrun 'Lifepath' generator Options

[arcady]

http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html

'Beta' version. :P

Pick and age and sex, or go for full random, and click and you get a character backstory complete with name, family, and all sorts of trouble.

For Shadowrun, choose the 'fantasy punk' radio button first.

It started as just a name generator for my own Cyberpunk setting, but quickly grew into something vastly more.

Presently I've been adding support for other subgenres / settings of Cyberpunk and of those Shadowrun is the one I've come furthest along with - with only a few minor problems left to work out.

Least functional at present is Transhuman, as I still need to remove gender and romance creation for things like gender-neutral Cybershells. :P

[pragma]

I have had no luck with the program under Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4. None of the menu items or activation buttons (I assume there are some) display. However, the descriptions of the buttons which appear in the center do show up from time to time.

Sounds like a cool idea though.

[arcady]

You've probably got an older version of Flash installed.

Check to see if you're on flash player 7 at macromedia.com

I built it in flash for three reasons:

1. It's cross platform portable and faster than things like Java.
2. It compresses about 1mb of code down to at present 73kb's - half of which is the two images.
3. It's what I know - which is a very important reason. :)


EDIT: Put in Flash version detection. Tested it on Firefox on my PC, IE on my PC, and Safari on my Mac. It's a little 'footprint big' on IE (vertically about 10-15 pixels larger than the screen), but fully functional.

[Aku]

the only thing i can think of is that it seems that the proportion of homo/bi sexuals is rather disproportonate to what i would consider norms.

Oh, one other thing, though it's less of a problem if you figure SR ignores/abolished age of consent laws, but i saw quite a few lines like:

10-14: blah blah, he was 26, could you resist him?

maybe yo could add in an age limite to anything that's described as a teen/choldhood event?

[Kagetenshi]

Consider the mindset of those who would voluntarily enter into a career of Shadowrunning. I don't consider lines like that improbable at all—hell, they happen today.

Though I do find it amusing (if not impossible) that I can be a 51-year-old human female on good terms with my 80-year-old mother but distant from my 14-year-old brother. Incidentally, race for relatives would be good.

Oh, and my parents apparently got back together, as they split up when I was 11 and then again at 14.

Woah. Shapeshifter families putting contracts out on me? I guess I'd better stay away from the woods ;)

Very entertaining, though not necessarily useful in a serious game except for inspiration… so I guess it is useful. Serious bug, though, I can't get the pop-up extra info thingy to go away, resulting in a lot of blocked text (I ended up copying it off and pasting it into a text file to read it). This is with Safari 2.0.

Another note: I got the thing to go away, but I'm not sure how. Either way, still a bug.

~J

[Backgammon]

Hilarious! Great work!

[Aku]

i think the pop up is just REALLY slow to load off.

[FrostyNSO]

This thing is bitchun. Keep up the good work.

added: Seems like everyone that gets rolled up has been molested or pimped out at some point, though.

[sanctusmortis]

[arcady]

There's a 1 in 30 chance that age boundaries get crossed.

When they do, the age of the NPC is determined randomly.

The 14 year old sibling could also be from one's father and someone other than one's mother. :P


Sexuality is based on the idea that hetre and bi is about even, and homo about 1/3rd of each of those (or 1/6 of the total). That said, there is a chance that teens will date outside their sexuality, and an even greater chance that children will get a crush that is not based on their sexuality.

popups work on the notion that rolling over the same item again takes them away, but rolling over another item changes to that item. Rolling over the button at top removes any popup, and there are spaces above and below popup-triggers that remove them (so if youmove the mouse to the area of the horizontal bar above the list of genres any popup goes away. likewise the ten pixels of height above the 'what is a bioroid' and another ten pixels of space below the last genre radio.

I will put a little [X] above the popups - that's a bit clearer to understand. The present triggers are just 'chance' things.


I didn't give race of relatives as I assumed it would be the same as the character - is that not true for Shadowrun? What't the rough chance it might be different?

[Kagetenshi]

I don't remember what if any rough odds are given, but it's definitely possible to have a child of a different race than its parents and/or siblings, or indeed different from anyone else in their immediate ancestry.

~J

[arcady]

One of the books also listed odds for how many people are elves, humans, orks, dwarves, or trolls - but I don't recall which.

As a result, I went for something like 6% for all the nonhumans save for Orks, which I put at 20%.

Soon as I find where I read that info years back, I'll be adjusting that. :P

If anyone knows, toss me a page number, I've got most everything put out before Fasa sold it away save for the 2E rulebook itself (which I lost years ago, not sure if I sold it or if it was in my 'rare books' box that went missing).


On sexuality, I set bi and hetro at near the same on the theory that many hetero people are bis that have had it socially conditioned away, and that future changes might remove social pressures over that and leave a more 'natural curve'.

That's a bit of a left-wing theory, but it has right wing adherants too. They hammered it into me when I was in high school in the 80s during sex-ed. No idea if it's true or not though. I might look into a bit though and tweak the numbers.

Off the top of my head, I remember I set homosexual at 12 percent, and then split the remainder so that one got 43 and the other 45 - but I'm at a relative's right now and don't have the code in front of me.



A lot of the backgrounds are ultra violent or nasty. I keep reading that Shadowrun characters are criminals, and so I made the backgrounds into the kinds of things that would lead a person into choosing a criminal life when they might otherwise be able to make a less 'deviant' living.

So they do or have done to them a lot of bad things, and the list of bad things is three times as long in the Shadowrun / gamer-punk options than in the others.

Though the chance for trouble is the same - the kinds of trouble are much worse. Likewise the chance for fortune is the same, but the fortunes are often twisted - involving getting something great by hurting somebody.

[Kagetenshi]

[Ryu]

Nice - my contacts will be fleshed out that much faster.

Firefox 1.0.4 with Flash 7 is working just fine btw.

[Sicarius]

I thought it was pretty cool. But can anyone honestly say that a restraining order would do much to keep an angry 'runner away from a Fixer or Johnson?

[Nikoli]

Or why an 8 yr old contact is a fixer who gives out her number?

[arcady]

Restraining orders are like that...

It's kind of like telling a Dragon 'shame on you' and spanking his nose...

Doesn't mean people don't try.

Sometimes the results are a little funny. But I can see explainations for an 8 year old fixer. I've seen kids younger than that dealing hard drugs. I've even known people as young as six to use mob tactics to assault and mug adults - or perform gun hits.

I've had a good laugh at some of the things in the generator though. Some of which has led to bug fixes, others of which had been made a little rarer but still there as 'features'.

Over time, I'll be tweaking it to get it more and more inline with the desired goal.

[Velocity]

This is bloody fantastic. :D It's a great launching pad for NPCs, a sort of 'one-button inspiration' tool. I also love the fact that you've addressed sexuality, a sorely under- and misrepresented topic in most games. Tweaking with the actual percentages is (IMHO) a waste of time though, as these things are notoriously hard to quantify & adjudicate IRL. Regardless, I'm just glad it occured to someone that sexuality is at least as significant a contributing factor to identity as, say, race (in the fantastical sense) or ethnicity.

Good on ya, I'll be using this tool a lot. :notworthy:

[hermit]

[arcady]

Have they said anything about non human lifespans? At present they're all fairly young as it's only been a few decades since they were all humans - so unless they've said something we've only got speculation.

[Kagetenshi]

Humans average 55, Orks average 35-40, Trolls average 50, Dwarves theoretically reach 100+, Elves there are conflicting reports but generally accepted longer than Dwarves.

SR3, page 47. Note that A) these are all worldwide numbers, developed countries are likely to be higher across the board, and B) Shadowrunners tend to have bucketloads of contraindicators of long lifespan—more so than people in the countries pulling down the worldwide average.

~J

[hermit]

Also, more hairstyles, and please, no balding women en masse! I got three balding women in a row ... it's not like EVERYONE lives in Glow City!

And add a bit of SR flavour clothing. Like add "Zoé", "Mortimer of London" and the other ingame labels to clothing adjectives (so we get stuff like "Mortimer of London" "Leotards", hehe).

And finally, more options, simply. With CP2020, this irked me most about the tables, there were too few different things that could hapen. Also, tie in some well-known SR background events in (Night of Rage, Dunkelzahn death riots, SURGE, ect.).

And make it possible a character can turn out a mage. Also, maybe add a "magical encounters" type event.

Just suggestions, really. If you need events, just ask on DS, you'll get more stuff than you could ever handls that way. :grinbig:

[hermit]

Okay, oddness ...

[Sicarius]

[hermit]

Another observation: "X" was/is most important not always holds a person featured in the yearly events or family.