Traditionally, Middle and Upper classes have been vetted to take leadership roles. They also tend to have more education, which contributes to the capacity to organise things.

It doesn't matter what the leaders were like, though, because the statement was that being kept starving makes it less likely for you to revolt. This statement still applies when you have a potential leader, if there is no will to revolt in the population then it doesn't matter what the leader is. If the serfs of Russia were starving then it's evidence against the statement.

Revolutions always need support of the populace (at least the locals), or else they will become isolated and destroyed through any number of means. Just ask Ernesto Guevara what happened when he failed to take this into account in Bolivia. Wait, you can't because he's dead.

Rest assured, unlike many Americans I have not failed to realize this.



I won't even begin to go into the fallacies here.

I completely agree on the notion that Congo (both the Republic and the DRC, but especially the latter) and Rwanda do not exist as nations in the sense in which the US is a nation.
Darfur, of course, doesn't either, as it is part of the failed state of Sudan (sorry for the nitpick).

However, i'd be really careful with the whole line of thought regarding ethnic tensions as reasons for those conflicts.
They aren't.
They are a result of those conflicts, they are instrumentalized to ensure alliance to local rulers, but they do not cause the collapse of states locked in an economy of civil war.
What causes these conflicts is, as usual, greed.
BTW, tensions are most likely when you have just two ethnic groups- ethnically highly fragmented societies will be much more stable, as it is harder to rally up opposing factions.
Also, note that there are several failed states with war economies who have decolonialized themselves over 150 years ago and who often do not have any sizeable minorities left or where the local population has completely merged with the descendants of former colonizers.

And yes, the best way to solve Africa's problems would be to leave it alone, finally giving the local population the chance to build up (or better : rebuild and then develop) an infrastructure of their own, cutting off the foreign demand for the ressources people down there are killed for.
As this possibly endangers the economical position of places such as the EU and the US, it's not likely to happen, however.
Especially if people believe dumbasses as Bono that increasing development aid (read : bribes for the cleptocracies and subventions for European and American goods to destroy any possible local industry that actually produces something instead of extracting ressources) would be a good thing to do if you want to help Africa.




Phew, i'm relieved that change in North Korea is imminent.
Also, good to know that the famines caused by Stalin's and Mao's agrarian policies led to their overthrow.

Honestly, people who are literally about to starve simply aren't in the shape to fight succesfully.

You need at least a level of poverty where your survival is assured to think about political change.
Most people will place survival before freedom.
Revolution is most easy to start in a halfway-developed, but not oversaturated society.

And yes, effective organization does have a positive effect on the outcome, that should be self-evident, shouldn't it?

it isn't assanine to say it's up to the GM. ultimately the GM sets the tone. Players can help though by how they handle their charatcers with role playing. Attention to characters clothes, personal habits language, contacts, socializing.

For exampel a player can discribe her chaacter going out for the night clubbing, she wears
1) my tres chic outfit
2) good lcothes
3) day glow spandex minidress
4) leather biker pants and the red tank that shows off my shoulder tat's

each gives a different image with escalating levels of 'grit'

and then there is whatever is stuck under the fingernails at the end of the day....

sure, does the player even care about grooming.?To use your example
1) what?
2) clean
3) painted neat colors
4) french manicure
5) engine grease and something

Good call. I will stick with Grit being in the details and in the flavor.

The opposite is true, actually. The one thing which has consistently produced peace is a good economy based upon international trade. There is a reason why no Western country has gone to war with another in 55 years, and that reason is the economy. It simply isn't worth the cost.

When the best and most efficient means of gaining resources is to shoot people and take their stuff, you're going to have ambitious charismatic individuals building their own armies. Its easy because getting paid 50 cents a day to get shot at is better than getting 5 cents a month selling goatmilk out of your hut.

If you look at places like South Africa, which remained stable despite extreme ethnic strife and outright racial warfare, they remained stable because they had good economies with a Starbucks on every corner and a McDonald's in every neighborhood (And while the Black McDonald's and the White McDonalds were segregated, everybody did have McDonalds.

What places like the Congo the Rwanda need is sweatshops, lots of sweatshops owned by major Western corporations churning out designer goods and paying young children pennies per day. Because, fuck, being paid pennies per day to work in a sweatshop is better than starving to death and better than being shot, and better than selling oneself into sexual slavery in the HIV capital of the world. It's really the only middle ground, and it will end conflict be creating an actual stable economy.


People who are literally about to starve to death are in the perfect shape to fight, because if you shoot a bunch of government soldiers you can steal their rations and have a good meal. The reason this didn't happen in China, North Korea, or Russia is that the leaders of these countries weren't total morons. They had effective police and military forces. If would have been impossible for any individual to build a large army of desperate people and desperate people acting alone were likely to be captured and executed.
To effectivly build an opposition army, you need areas with both little government oversight and a desperate population from which to recruit. If you have one but not the other you are doomed to failure.

That's true, but "Norman Angell, published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,� in which he argued that war had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors lose far more than they gain." (The great illusion being that conquest pays). And he was essentially right.

But the book came out in 1913....

It was written in a period when theeuropeans still felt war was an acceptable extension of politics. Jure the famous socialist said much the same thing, until he was assassinated, These writers had a belief ahead of their time. You shoot each other up. someone loses, someone wins. the loser pays a fine and loses a province and the winner collects said largess. that weas why WW1 became such a mess, they were expecting it to be over by xmas and when it didn't, they didn't know how to stop.

You also have the belief in Europe that a quick violent war can be over fast enough to not cause a problem. look at Hitler's drive into europe, he wanterd it over with the fall of France, and the soviets going into Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50's and 60's.

Since they still were able to exploit non-industrialized peoples there was still a belief that war was ok- hense the continued precense in Africa, the philipines and ultimately Japan going into China.

Economic stability certainly does also stabilize a society and greatly decreases the chance of state failure, but the main reason for the lasting peace in Western Europe is the fact that it has been united for over 50 years by a common enemy in form of the Soviet Union and its vassals and has built/was integrated into up strong international institutions (EU, NATO) during that time that carry over till today.
Compared to the situation before both world wars, we see that the very same countries also had strong economic interdependencies, but that didn't stop them from attacking each other, as they where in both cases divided into several, confronting aliances, creating a perception of mutual threat that lead to a classic security dilemma.

One might also argue the comparability of stable, sovereign states with working government institutions who regard war as a means to an end with chronically unstable countries where institutions are nothing but a method of personal enrichment and where war has become an end in itself.

WWII and the situation in the DR Congo are fundamentally different on many levels, i would abstain from comparing them.



What i wrote, yes.
Except for that no one is buying your goatmilk because a humanitarian aid organization is kind enough to hand out milk powder for free, so the choice is between getting paid 50 cent a day to get shot at and not getting paid at all.



South Africa also managed to emerge out of the end of apartheid with an intact government and functioning institutions.
But having a good economic base did help indeed.

In fact, the only problem with South Africa is a large part of the military and security officers who held up the apartheid regime are now working as mercenaries throughout the continent.
But that's not South Africa's problem, that's something places like Liberia or Sierra Leone had to worry about.



That's a possible solution, and one that is not unlikely now that China thinks about outsourcing some of its sweatshops to Africa to circumvent European trade regulations on Chinese goods and undercutting the rising wages in their domestic free trade zones.
American and especially European policy towards Africa, on the other hand, has been to keep sub-Saharan regimes dependent on development aid and at the same time force subventioned excess production into African markets to a) get rid of said excess production and b) prevent the buildup of an African economy that does not depend on selling natural ressources, but finished goods.

Reverting this would be the best way of developing Africa, of course.

What i meant was ending the current kind of economic relations, where importing from Africa comes down to financially supporting the warlords and cleptocrats and exporting goods to Africa results in their domestic manufacturers of clothing, agriculture etc. going bankrupt.

Hitler and the General Staff didn't expect France to collapse. They were essentially trying to position the German army for the next phase of the war, which hopefully would collapse the French government in 1941. That's part of why they didn't have plans for how to invade Britain. NOBODY expect the disaster that was Maurice Gamelin's "leadership". The French army of 1918 would have stopped the Germans instead of imploding, as long as it wasn't lead by Maurice Gamelin.

The Germans might have been surp[rised by the collapse of France but the other side of it was that the French army was not prepared to fight a war of maneuver. The whole national policy was designed to fight another trench war, with the maginot being even bigger, tougher trenchs.

When the breakthrough came, Churchill was shocked to learn that the french had no strategic reserve. it had entered no one's plan that the war would maneuver. They were falling into the classic flaw of fighting the previous war. I'd question the 1918 army, that was post mutinys and it was pretty fragile. Maybe 1916 army though, the one that held Verdun might have stood for a while, but without a strategic plan, it was doomed.

Hitler's plans for Britain were so nebulous because no one expected Britain to hang in when it's army was destroyed and allies gone. After Dunkirk the only fulled outfitted divisions in the UKwere Canadians who had missed the retreat. As Manchester wrote, no sane leader would have thought of fighting on with such long odds, thankfully for the world Britain didn't have a sane leader, they had Churchill! (misquoted from The Last Lion)

but we are drifting WAY off topic.

Looking through the three pages and their divergences, I would summarize that make wounds more painful, increase the disparity between rich and poor, and increase the dirtiness of operations so that they are not simple morality plays.

I think an aspect in grit is that its that bad taste in your mouth at the end of the day. It's not about using a sledgehammer for the effect, but that lingering dirtiness. That of having cash in your pocket, but having that feeling that it's enough for a hedonistic lifestyle, but not enough to ignore the cries of your neighbours.

Much of this depends on your players. Using myself as an example, when I first began the game, I dove in with the zeal I had for DnD or the many other rpgs I had participated in. Until I started realizing one key difference...

In most of the games I play, all opponents I faced were decidedly evil, or decidedly inhuman. Both allowed merciless slaughter and near gleeful lewting. Then we come to SR, where sure, some of the corps you ran against might be evil, and some of the security types you ran against might be evil, but for the most part they were no more evil than 'we the player group' was. I started considering the bodycounts our earlier forays into the game produced, with video-game like glee. Then I started thinking about it in context of 'real life'. I compared Shadowrunning (as it was being played) to something akin to Bankrobbing (in real life), in this case, our runners, the 'robbers' were basically storming the bank and killing all the guards. We fled, and killed any cops that got in our way.

I started feeling in some ways that SR should be more like a 'White Wolf Storyteller' kinda game, less focused on combat than it actually is. Or at least, the SR games I was involved in. So grittier, for me, became just realizing that my potential foes were normal dudes, not orcs, not evil cultists, not nameless henchman #21, etc, and realizing that there SHOULD be consequences for gunning down and mortally wounding these guys that more or less were just doing their jobs.

So, like I said in the beginning of this thread, it comes down to players. If your players don't care about gritty, or have the same interpretation the Gm does, adding stuff like 'homeless kids caught between a gang war and ghouls' won't make a difference. If your group is gun-happy, approaching SR like an action-hero kinda movie in the lines of the Matrix, Art of War, anything by John Woo, etc, they may not even notice efforts to change the feel. If your players are decidedly in the 'video game' mentality of things, where they see threats more or less as 'bags of lewt and xp walking on legs', its going to be hard to break them of that.

My thoughts on adding grit, or darkness to the scene?

1)Move away from Shiny. We look at all the books that have come out lately from SR, and you'll see that alot of stuff is shiny, and smooth, and perfect. In some cases it almost appears "Star Warsy Coruscant" in city design. Especially now with the AR/VR stuff, everything can look as sparkly as it wants to be, almost Matrix-y in its slickness. In a way, SR now reminds me a bit like a Vegas Strip, (heck a vegas strip club, even) than Blade Runner.

2)Add darkness to magic. Magic addiction. In a way this would also help describe why there aren't that many mages running around. Either they keep to lower levels of ability, or they risk running god-complexes and burning out like a meth-fueled crazyhead. To be fair, maybe this wouldn't apply to players, but to NPCs. So when your party faces a NPC magetype with sufficient power, you're actually SCARED, cause chances are they're also a meth'ed out crazydude who's 2 steps away from incinerating this whole garage, just cause.

3)In a way, I think there's too much material available on describing what the 'good life' looks like. Again, I kinda see it like Vegas. Concentrated glitz and glamor, that is more or less easy to obtain. To make it grittier, you'd need to create the sense that you actually had to WORK to be able to leave the shit-hole of 'reality' behind. Even a semblance of a good life (even if fake) sorta takes away the impact of just how crappy the lives people in SR live. Don't get me wrong, the idea that you can go home and plug into a virtual world where you can fark anyone you want, and don't need direct human contact, is a powerful message. But is more of a powerful 'sad' message, than a powerful 'dark/gritty' message. In this case, dark/gritty would be: You go home after a mind-numbing day at the corp. And guess what, you can't escape. You've got access to the stuff we have nowadays. You want entertainment? K, you've got the TV, or your computer. But 2D, no immersion, sorry. You stay home most of the time, mostly due to safety. There's some crazy shit out there, some of which may even eat you, better to stay home, eat your soy-crap meal, jerk off to some 2D porno, and go to bed, than risk going clubbing or for a drink.

4)Break the monolithic supercorp nature of corps. Having big, readily identifiable 'big brother' groups or evil-corp-agencies makes things a little too easy on some levels. That, or take the corps to Genom (Bubblegum Crisis) kinda levels. "Whats the best way to figure out the abilities of our new miltech weapon? Hell, lets send it into the streets to blow up buildings and chew up the AD Police. "

4a)Get rid of extraterritoriality of corps, and shift it more to "We need to hide our shit the old fashioned way. Behind walls of legal trickery, blackmail, murder, scapegoats". To me this is more of a mindset (for the players) of "We need to be mindful of the choices (and enemies) we make". The Mob isn't extraterritorial, but you screw with it and it can send guys down to whack you wherever you are. The idea that you can mess with a corps ability to chase you down cause you hop through a couple other corp zones, seems kinda silly to me. Its like the idea of playing freeze tag, but with hundreds of 'safe bases'. Whats more of a challenge a run that you can skip trace by ducking through another corps parking lot, then another corps shopping mall, or the idea of I need to hope they get tired and give up before they catch me?

I may not have worded this one quite the way I wanted to. My point is, that in a way, the extraterritory nature of things makes it easier for PCs to pull crap. You don't have to fight your way to the airport and hop a plane to..I dunno Cuba..or anything dramatic like that. You just need to duck into another corps parking lot to potentially break trail. I'm also not a big fan of playing the corps off the 'cops' which in this case, are another corp. In games I've seen (and acted) as if playing Lone Star off Ares security, or whoever, is such an easy no moral consequence issue. Something I can do cause they're 'both corps'. But then if I switched in, Lonestar for Cops and lets say Crips/Bloods for "other corp" suddenly I'm more concerned with the outcome. Cause now I've pissed off two major groups. Ones that in real life I have a healthy degree of respect/fear for/of. SR Corps? I could care less. If I treat them and view them as corps, honestly I don't care, cause its fictional. But if I start thinking in terms of "How _Should_ my character be viewing playing these two off each other?" it gets more interesting.

One of the things that always strikes me in conversations and debates like this is that essentially it comes down to "it's up to your players" and "this is how we do it." Grit is entirely subjective, it seems. I've seen some descriptions of grit that I don't particularly care for in this thread, but also in others, such as the "real life photos" thread. In the end, I'm reminded of a discussion we had years ago on Bulldrek, that essentially came down to the same as this one. A lot of people didn't want their game smothered in misery and hopelessness, which is what the common denominator is of everything that's suggested in this thread. Despair, self-deception, ugliness, selfishness, misery, exploitation, domination; all these things make up "grit," but you or your players might not want to have a world quite that sickening. You might want to actually be able to make a difference. I don't know. I'm rambling.

That's always been an insane element of the game. Losing that doesn't impact much other then making the cops a lot more formidable.

So does adding Grit to shadowrun make it easier to swallow?

If you want to add true grit to game, all you really need is Rooster Cogburn. A great deal of soul-crushing hopelessness is just counterproductive.

Addressing the initial post, there are a few things GMs and players can do to add grit to stuff...

Like Snow Fox wrote, a lot has to do with color descriptions. This has nothing to do with mechanics. If I describe my MP-5 as something I stole off a dead drug dealer, held together with chewing gum and duct tape, and it makes a funny noise every tenth shot or so, that's a lot more gritty than one I bought new off the rack at Ares Guns & Stuff, even though they're both mechanically identical.

Another major point is offer less in the way of resources, and make it feel like it's at more risk. Mission Impossible, they have access to gunships and armored cars and it's just a business expense. James Bond never had to worry about where his wheels are coming from. On the flip side, if they lose that gear, they don't care, but you're pretty sure the heroes are going to survive and end up, at minimum, no worse off than they were when they started. Grit means you're paid, well, grit, and the nice stuff you do have (including yourself) get trashed. This doesn't mean you can't fly a gunship or own an armored car, it just means it didn't come 'easy' or legally. If you want these things in a gritty game, just steal 'em. It's a lot more fun to, as you're wrapping up your job that pays a measly $5k and legging it from security guards, to spot the Ares Dragon with its rotors spun up, waiting to transport some bigwig to his island resort and nab the chopper than it is to get paid $100k and buy that same chopper for yourself.

Another way to make it more gritty is to increase the avalibility of all items at chargen. If it is hard for the PC to get a Streetline Special, then that MP5-TX that the corp guard is using will be that much more menacing. If someone has already stated this, my bad.

That lowers the powerlevel of the game, but doesn't add more grit to the setting.

And makes looting said guard's body, after you killing handed or manabolted him, and taking his stuff, much more attractive. And most non-corp NPCs will have much worse gear then, and offer less of a threat to the newly enhanced MP-toting runner.

(And of course, messes with the balance between awakened and mundane characters. Making it more attractive to play awakened characters is not really making the game grittier, quite the contrary.)

Spend a little less time on shadowrunning, and more time on everyday life. However, in everyday life, a strung out gang will hijack your monorail and start assaulting and mugging the passengers. You go down to the stuffer shack and some wacko is threatening to set the cashier on fire. Maybe the runners bump into that critter that's been eating the squatters on your block this week. Your little sister has a cram addiction and her dealer is coming to you for the money she owes.

In many games, Shadowrunning is the dangerous part of the game. You go on the shadowrun and you might not come back alive. But if you do, then you can spend your cash on drugs and hookers or use Build/Repair skills or heal, and then you do it again. If a GM has players that become lax in their paranoia when they've finished a run, that's the best time to get them with the grit.

It's already quite gritty if your PC don't have any better thing to spend their money on that drugs and hookers. Too many PC spend it on gear or even save it in hope of retirement! If they spend everything on drugs and hookers it means they fully understand that they'll probably be dead in a year or so!

This is probably the best advice I've seen all thread.

Wait, drugs don't count as gear?