So, I've been reading an essay on cyberpunk:

http://www.talsorian.com/cp_cinema_7.shtml

...Yeah I had a GM harsh on "big ticket" gear. Dynamo Jo (#8 for those keeping score) simply gave up ever buying another vehicle and for the most part only used inexpensive drones. If she really needed a car or plane she just went out and "borrowed" one. If it got trashed, which usually happened in the course of a mission (the most expensive being a turboprop airliner during a job in Amazonia), it was no big deal, someone else's insurance would pay for it.

Form another game (Champions) My heroine Amber (#9...wow a twofer!) had her power focus taken away. This lasted for quite a few sessions. Without it she had no access to her superpowers and had to rely on her skills, resourcefulness, and "good looks". The funny thing is, I actually began to enjoy playing her without her powers, and discovered she was still a very viable and effective character. In a way I was somewhat disappointed when she eventually got it back, however the experience made her a much stronger character both in personality and in the way she dealt with situations.

I agree....to an extent. However if your player just saved up two million nuyen on a 10k per mission budget to get his super uber omega deck, and you take it away from him with a snap of a finger....it's going to be nothing but frustration. Remember, it's a game, and sometimes you might want the players to keep the fruits of their labors, otherwise it'll feel like all that money was for nothing and quit. I just got level two cultured pheromones on my combat decker for some good fast talking skills, if I had those taken away i'd have a massive headache.

Take things away, sure. Guns, ammo, vehicals, burn a house to the ground. But don't over do it. On the flip side, if they do something and they lose it or let it get damaged, thats their problem.

Many of the times, players will suggest having things happen to their own characters. They will basically burn everything and fake a death leaving them with very little and a fresh start.

I can't tell you how many characters I've given a dagger to in D&D, a hold out to in SR or CP:2020, an unarmed combat skill to, extra firearms skills (one SR3 character has all of them at 5 or more) to above and beyond their standard gear... just on the off chance my GM will take away my toys.

It's only ever happened once, and that was in a two player game I co-GMed, specifically because MFB and I wanted to see if it was the goodies or the characters that kicked all the ass. We had our characters get captured from a family barbecue of all things, disarmed, and dropped off on the far side of the continent in their easy-summer-living flip flops and tee shirts (not even armored clothing).

Just once, and it was my own idea, in my 17 or so years of gaming. I still buy every D&D character a dagger, though, and all the rest of it. My Shadowrun guys still have a few points in Unarmed, my CP:2020 guys still always have a disposable hold out handy. Everyone I've got knows at least three different ways to fight, not just uber-specializing in his favorite SMG. "Just in case."

And for those curious, right about the time MFB's adept and my sammie finished kicking to death six or eight troll gangers (while we were handcuffed and still recovering from Stun damage from our diceless, off-camera, capture), we decided it really was us that kicked ass, not just our high budget goodies.

Well, a back-up weapon in any RPG system with any GM is just a good idea. You never know when the module will have something that destroys your primary weapon or tool written into it. It's rare but it happens. Like, for example, when in "In Search Of The Unknown" your level 1 mage is using a staff and decides to use it to probe the acid pool which destroys the staff. You'll feel a lot better if he also had a dagger after he uses up his 1 level 1 spell than if he's now going to have to throw punches when cornered.

For D&D, the backup of choice is the Adamantine dagger. It'll hurt most things (bypassing hardness) and cuts lock hasps like butter.

Forcing players to carry backup weapons and take proficiencies in clubs is exactly why the Rust Monster was invented.

Nothing lasts forever and many things used on an adventure will probably be lost on that adventure. The whole "We were captured but all of out equipment is in a convenient storage area nearby" is painfull cliche. "We were captured and all of out equipment has been sent to a forensics lab on the other side of the country" is far more realistic.

Two points:

Take peoples stuff away from in D&D is a recipe for disaster. It doesn't even matter for sorcerers, Druids Clerics are inconvenienced for the 4.2 nanoseconds until they find/improvise a holy symbol then they are right back to shape shifting into bears and being better than anyone else, Wizards cry because they don't have a spell book, but thats recoverable and they can still cast whatever spells they had memorized, then they go back to being awesome.

However classes like warriors and rogues are totally defined by their weapons and gear. At level 7-8ish a warrior needs to be able to cut through the wall of stone that the BBEG summoned to trap him and without Excalibur he just can't do it. (He's even more screwed when the BBEG busts out force cage, then 'Excalibur' has to be an artifact )

Point two:

Taking peoples gear away from then in games like SR where classes are not totally gear dependant is cool, if they can get it back - a hacker needs a commlink, but if he just boosts something of the trolls they beat up, and it has some crappy programs, he's back in business.

It's easy to say 'easy come, easy go'. Unfortunately, most people forget the 'easy come' part first. I don't mind destroying, stealing or otherwise subverting primary weapons and tools, however I tend to leave expensive toys around for the party to pick up as well. My one party very nearly just inherited a fully outfitted Ares Dragon! They'll have to make do with the combat armor of the people inside.

My problem, and I'd love to hear solutions, is how to deal with mages. You can steal the street sam's guns, the decker's deck, the rigger's vehicles and the adept's swords, but you can't steal the mage's spells. Sure, you can put him in a high background-count area, but that's temporary and he knows it. Even if they have crazy powerful foci, they know that if they lose it they can still kick major butt. So, without permanently pooching the character, how do you eliminate or reduce the mage's ability to cast when tossing him in with the rest of a weaponless party?

nuke thier foci?

Give him stun damage to deal with for a while. Give him/her an artifact that taints their magic. They might think that it's good for them, but in fact will be bad. A cursed foci, that gives you 3 magic rating or weapon focus .. but also gives you a +1 +2 tn.

You're pretty much screwed because mages run off karma and street sammies run off Nuyen. You cannot really take someone's karma away from them temporarily ;P So the correct plan might be to forceably tank them up on slow release drugs via nanites so they cannot deal with their stun damage.

In Harlequin; Counterstroke, they had some kind of drug that made it really hard for the mages to concentrate, and made them do other stuff, you could always use that.

Magic isn't equipment. Magic is innate ability. Taking it away should be about as difficult as taking away the max-strength Giant melee adept's ability to punch tanks to death. And this is why magic costs a hell of a lot at chargen.

That being said, if PCs are in such a position injecting the mage with a very small disposable anchor designed to zap him with a with a Deadly+6 Force 12 Death Touch if he should cast any spell.

I guess it may be a difference of viewpoint—to me it still feels conceptually different from taking away a Rigger's RCD or a Street Houhei's PAC and hardened armor, but I guess I can see how you might consider it similar since it effectively deprives them of certain capabilities until they get new stuff (where the stuff happens to be an antidote instead of the actual equipment itself).

~J

After a few runs my characters are usually designed with many layers of redundancy designed to allways give them a fallback for when Bad Things happen to them. His armoured Mercades gets blown to hell and they track him back to his primary residance and blow that up then he retreats to a rat infested apartment in Redmond with a small arsinal hidden inside. If that gets discovered he falls back to another bolt hole and so on until his last line of defense is a smuggling compartment in his cyberarm carrying a holdout pistol, a clean comlink, SIN and a certified credstick that he uses to skip town.

Cthulhudreams and Venenum, good ideas. Somehow either reducing their ability to concentrate or their ability to resist drain, perhaps through some sort of implant or as the subject of a sustained spell or whatnot would be a reasonably effective method of doing that. Hmm... I'll have to put that in my evil GM toolbox.

...this is why every Adept needs Unarmed Combat & Killing Hands. Like a Monk from that other game hard to take these away without geeking the character first.

I think that the next game I run will be based on "easy come, easy go" with "Lonestar has the attention span of a lemming," so the runners can, in fact, blast away with the panther one day, and face minimal Star attention the next when they only have pistols.

You'd then actually be playing the game as the fiction describe[s/d] it—insert a bunch of stuff about how the Halloweeners operate in Downtown and major highways are essentially abandoned to go-gangs after dark.

~J

I agree with others who have posted that GMs should not forget the "easy come" part of "easy come, easy go". They should get windfalls as often as they have their doss burned down; they should nab other people's comms as often as they lose theirs.

As far as taking away their toys goes, that tends to favor the PCs such as adepts, sammies, and mages, who don't need their toys, while making things frustratingly difficult for types such as riggers or deckers. Although it can be worse in a way for mages, who have every right to be pissed if they lose the karma they have invested in their foci, not due to bad luck but due to GM fiat. At least the rigger can steal a new drone. The mage who finds a new focus still has to spend Karma to bond it and is out what he spent on the old one.

Genre tropes don't always translate well from novels or the screen to a collaborative roleplaying game. If you are writing it, you know the "hero" will prevail in the end, and you can sit down for hours pondering what clever trick he will use to counteract his weaknesses. In a game, the player might not have a clue what to do on that particular night, and from his point of view, the GM took away his stuff for no reason, then his character got beat up or killed in a blatantly unfair fight. I distrust a lot of the attempts to add "atmosphere" or, even worse, a theme to a game. Too often, it only results in railroading and GM dickery.

May I suggest "Easier come, easy go, Lone Star has the Attention Span of the Liberty City P.D.". The players will be frustrated by a complete lack of progress. Let them advance, don't take away anything they purchased with Karma or Essense. Feel free to disable them temporarily, but don't take them away. And a good way to handle things would be to let players "bind" an item to their character with a nominal expense of Karma, say 4-6 points. IE, designate something as "GM, Hands Off!"

IE: the decker will almost certainly bind his commlink with Karma, the Sammy might bind his trusted 'old faithful' shotgun, the mage's Foci will be bound by default (in fact, by de jure default), the Rigger might want to make sure his doss never burns down or gets found, etcetera.

An important note: Binding may or may not represent an explicit binding of a single object. The Samurai's gun may get lost or broken, but it may be so common that he can find another one just by kicking a random trash can and finding one that pops out. But I woulden't do this too often.

And remember, easier come than go. The players should make progress, and not get stuck at a zero-sum level. Also, I do heartily endorse the "Lone Star has the attention span of the LCPD." You might want to make getting away scott-free literally as easy as driving into a pay-and-spray (or having rutherenium on your car). Lone Star is overworked, underpaid, and frequently get shot at. If they can think of a valid reason to ignore something, they will, including "we can't find 'em!"

I think that the quoted opening text forgets something important: why do they start these fancy toys?
Because they start as badasses:
Snake Plissken? Longcoat-badass.
Case? Matrix-badass
Johnny? Err... An encrypted cephalomemory isn't what I call a big toy.
Road Warrior? Post-apocalyptic badass.

So it wouldn't make much sense to have them start with just a rusty knife. But if they always had their infinity+1 sword, there wouldn't be any drama: it'd be Ryan "Mary Sue" Mercury saves the world and gets the brown-nippled girl without any problem on the way. This is acceptable for epic movies, or mindless action blockbusters, but it isn't for cyberpunk movies.

It's only about balance. Further proof: Burning Chrome, where the narrator compares himself to a streetpunk out to get a switchblade and getting a nuclear bomb... And doesn't lose this toy.

Remember the spirit of cyberpunk is self-destructive. It starts in a bad place and ends in a worse place, with it possibly looking up in the middle. If the PCs aren't naturally self destructive, the GM simply needs to add that necessary component.

Guys, remember what this thread is about. It's about playing Cyberpunk. Go reread the first post.

Now if YOU like to play a non-tragic version of cyberpunk (which means it's no longer strictly cyberpunk) or you don't play cyberpunk at all, that's fine. But then why are you bothering to read this thread?

Now I don't believe that the PLAYERS need to end up in a worse place, but cyberpunk settings (as opposed to Shadowrun settings) need to continue ending at least as dirty, grungy and depressing as they started.

We're on a shadowrun forum. And...

Every group has a balance where the obstacles and losses equal challenging and fun.
Taking away toys is part of that balancing equation. Sometimes it is predictable, sometimes inexplicable. As long as it is 'fair' for the group's enjoyment level, it is a valuable commodity for drama and theme.

When I started playing with Snow fox and her crew they were all very expeirenced gamers and I learned from them. except for an occassional special item, like a power focus or a beloved car, they tended to have types of weapons and gear but not special "just this one" type stuff. Big into role playing they were big on having the right tools for the right job, so some of them could look corporate when they needed to and tough when they needed to. Not the case of street punks walking into a corp office with a mini-gun under their arms.

So my characters usually had an smg and also very capable with unarmed or cyber implant weapons.

Have to agree with ShadowDragon and the like.

Why is it that just because the game takes place in a cyberpunk setting that some people believe that everything that happens must be dictated by the 'classic' cyberpunk stories? Why do people insist upon confusing setting with narrative themes? Just because the heroes in a story were crippled because of a plot device or things turned out worse than they started in the end because the author of a story people read was exploring a particular theme doesn't mean that EVERY single individual in that setting has the exact same experience, and certainly doesn't mean players should be subjected to the same stuff as a matter of course.

It's been mentioned that people are forgetting the 'easy come' part of the 'easy come, easy go', but not only are you forgetting i, but the idea that it's first. Take the Snake Pliskin example, he got given alot of toys and then lost them, not he had his toys taken away and found new ones. From a game perspective 'the player' sunk his points into skills and attributes and the GM said "The Johnson gives you a bunch of gear for free" - and then he lost it all. Things like that or even simply taking away a characters stuff, temporarily, as a plot device every now and then is one thing, but that's very different to someone building a character and then being punished for not sinking his points into skills, attributes or even magic.

Which then brings us to the next point, crippling mages and such by blowing their karma. Karma is meant to be a REWARD, for things like roleplaying and clever plans and things like that, the stuff you try to encourage. Taking it away abitrarily is just a ridiculous notion. Nuyen and gear is easy to fudge, you can always have the payoff cover everything or that seemingly worthless item turn out to be extremely valuable (like the guns in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), but Karma is intrinsically different and I find it hard to believe a players would put up with a GM who essentially takes it away from them, and then 'generously' offers some of it back as a reward for good roleplaying.

If a GM starts taking away big toys for the purpose of 'authentic cyberpunk themes' all that will happen is the players will expect it and will build characters for whom the removal of toys becomes a none issue, and then the act becomes completely redundant and you don't get explore your 'authentic cyberpunk themes' anyway, but have successfully changed the game and made it less cyberpunk than it ever was. Congratulations.

I call 'purist drivel'.

Cyberpunk has plenty of setting based elements (or themes even) that are independant from the narrative themes of most cyberpunk stories. Elements of a cyberpunk setting include things like the rise in power of corporate entities and technology and the generally negative and oppressive effect this has on humanity juxtaposed with the increase of a supposedly anarchic fringe culture, which usually turns out to be just as much a part of the system as anything else - usually set in the near future and dystopian. That to me is cyberpunk.

The narrative themes, like the "wanting, getting, and losing, an endless search for a Heaven that can't quite be achieved" that started this thread, or the point of view of the characters or the previously mentioned self destructive protangonists who end up worse than they started, though common to cyberpunk, are hardly the defining element of and certainly not exclusive to cyberpunk. As much as you want to believe that these aspects define cyberpunk "as much if not more so" than the setting itself - if that were the case, I'm going to need to get the local video store to relabel half it's westerns and samurai movies as cyberpunk.

Exactly. Plus, games can have settings, but not narrative themes, because they are not stories narrated by the GM, but dynamic adventures which include the plot and setting presented by the GM, the actions and reactions of the players running their characters, and the truly random element added by dice.

A GM who truly wants cyberpunk or some other "theme" in his game should tell that to the players up front, so that they can make appropriate characters, and help you have that kind of game. So many times, I see all kinds of railroading and other dickery advocated as a way to force a "theme" on a game, when all is really needed is for the GM to sit down with the players before the game starts, explain a few things, and ask for their cooperation.


I strongly disagree, though, that "the heroes never win" is a theme in all of cyberpunk. In fact, usually they do win, even if they don't come out of it unscarred, and even if, a lot of the time, it is a pyrrhic victory. Remember that Case, the decker from Neuromancer, gets mentioned in one of the later books, by someone telling Molly that he's settled down somewhere with a wife and kids.

In some ways, Shadowrun can be darker than cyberpunk novels and movies. You don't have any guarantees that you will beat the main villain in the end, or even survive to meet him. The cold, hard, unforgiving dice can kill you at any moment, and you are as likely to have a pathetic demise as you are to go down in a blaze of glory.

I think there are times when the themes of the game can be at odds with the mechanics. For example, look at everything in D&D ever.

Money is essentially an advancement mechanic, like Karma although more susceptible to in-game stuff. (Pick pockets can lift your cool gear-- its harder to steal knowledge.) A character with a million nuyen worth of gear is more powerful in game terms than the same character with no gear. This difference is noticeable in those characters which aren't gear-dependent; its crucial in those characters that are.

So its understandable for players to be defensive about losing their character's gear, especially if they have (as we all have, I'm sure) played with GMs that were either casual or malicious with gear destruction. The point of gear deprivation is not to punish characters or to say "Oh, you want to play a rigger. Well, you're ska-rooooooooooooooo'd!" Its to add thematic and tactical elements that will hopefully enrich the game.

The phrase "thematic and tactical elements" is important because while Case or Snake or Dutch losing all their gear is a plot device, our characters are playing a game with certain (unforgiving) mechanics. When Dutch fights the Predator, what happens is what's best for the narrative. In the game, the narrative is story influenced and at times solely determined by the dice.

Which is not to say I think characters shouldn't lose all their gear, only its a trickier proposition in a game than it is in a story. I like to play fast and loose with gear, and my characters tend to think of external things as disposable, but I have known players that would rather retire a character than face losing a particular item. It can also be a large pain in the ass from a bookkeeping perspective (moreso in D&D, where every f'n thing you do can have a gear modifier).

From a purely mechanical standpoint though, there are times when gear-based characters should be deprived of their gear. That's the rationale behind Specialization. You get more dice with a particular item because you might not always have that item. (If you always have it, then Specialization is just free dice.) A character specialized in the Predator IV gets captured and when he escapes takes a Colt Manhunter from a guard. He is penalized in this instance to balance all the other times he's gotten bonus dice with his chosen weapon.

i don't think it's actually necessary for a character to ever lose their gear, in terms of thematics. it can work, and it can be fun, but the important thing is loss, not loss of any specific thing. Case's loss of Linda Lee had as much of an impact as any other loss he suffered. a GM who only takes away his players' toys may, on some level, be missing the point as badly as a GM who never does. or they might both have it dead on. it's at least as much about how you do it as it is about what you do.