What is the difference between a Cyberpunk Run/Szenario/Adventure and a Pink Mohawk one ?


with a Pink Punk Dance
Medicineman

I don't see them being vastly different in approaches

Both rate Form or Style, over function. Both are overt as opposed to covert..

I think the difference comes in the extremes,

Cyberpunk would use cyber-grapple hands to swing from one roof to the next to infiltrate a skyrise

Pink-Mo' would take a jaw load of Kamikaze and then take a running jump into a Wingsuit assisted dive to crash into the plate glass of the party on the 20th floor then fight his way up.

both valid, both cool, just one more slightly "mental" than the other

To me Cyberpunk isn't a playstyle. You can have Pink Mohawk and Black Trenchcoat Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk is more about how the world is. Pink Mohawk/Black Trenchcoat is more about how runners act in that world.

It's true that Cyberpunk makes it easier to play Pink Mohawk than technothriller or, to some extent post-cyberpunk. Often in a cyberpunk setting, the police will be having a hard time fighting the (numerous and violents) criminals, which is less the case in post-cyberpunk and technothriller.
Also, the hypermediatisation of the Cyberpunk society makes it possible for Style Over Substance to actually give an edge to Pink Mohawk runners. Corporate guards might not shoot runners because "they're so impressive they've got to be main characters, while I'm just a mook. If I try anything, I'll get killed in an instant" and cops might care more about making a good show than about actually catching the runners.

On the nose. There is room for Pink Mohawk and Black Trenchcoat to exist on the same team, let alone the same game.

Unless, of course, the Pink Mohawks put the Black Trenchcoats in danger because of their antics, then they are just a Liability and need to be taken out back and quietly disposed of.

If the Black Trenchcoats are ever in danger due to the Pink Mohawks antics, then they are not Black Trenchcoats.

If played right, not a liability but bait and a distraction.

In response to the OP, to me it's not Cyberpunk vs. Pink Mowhawk. Cyberpunk can be Black Trenchcoat or Pink Mowhawk, the difference being like having a simple little injector needle built into your index finger to poke someone with poison vs. having a Ruger Super Warhawk built into your lower arm to open up and blast someone's head off.

Association is a killer, so you have to always pay attention to what the Pink Mohawks do, because they WILL be associated with you (at the very least in the minds of those who hire you). So... if they become a liability, they will not be so for long.

Or they'll make you into paste when you try to turn on them.

Pink Mohawk doesn't mean stupid or ineffective, just an emphasis on style and a flair for breaking societal norms.

True - But Black Trenchcoats are generally not stupid enough to be obvious about what is going to happen either.
Problematic Pink Mohawk gets in his car, and then sees a bright white light... case closed.

I want to do that.

Your pink mohawks must be built different than mine. Generally an exploding car isn't going to phase most of them, given that they are usually cybered to the nines, loaded up on recreational combat drugs, and wearing full armor just to see if the cops will notice.

Which his why you don't whack them when they are trying to make a point. They don't wear all that crap in the toilet, nor when they are sleeping. It is not difficult to actually kill a character, especially if you plan it. No matter HOW tough they think they are. There is always something that they are not protected against.

To me it's not so much about character style decisions, but a type of player who often lacks attention to detail and wants to get things done by physically overpowering adversaries. To make a playable game, the GM can handwave away a lot of the failure to do good legwork, indiscreet behaviors, high body counts, collateral damage, and demolished buildings, while making sure that the team always faces challenging combat scenes.

Cyberpunk is Escape from New York, pink mohawk is Escape from LA.

Both the Escape films are solidly Pink Mohawk. The plans are goddamn terrible, the outfits are over-the-top, and everything is from-the-gut. No-one is particularly professional.

Black Trenchcoat should be used here, not "cyberpunk", though, because most written cyberpunk, most filmed cyberpunk, and most cyberpunk games trend strongly towards "pink mohawk". Black Trenchcoat, i.e. always professional, always prepared, always thinking it through and having a reliable, sensible, plan which hopefully involves zero explosions and zero excitement (but plenty of tension!) is a technothriller thing, much more than a cyberpunk thing in a broader sense.

Mission Impossible 1-4 are Black Trenchcoat. The only cyberpunk film I can think of which is Black Trenchcoat is, arguably, Ghost in the Shell (the movie much more than the comics).



This exists in both directions, too, because a GM with seriously Black Trenchcoat players is going to need to prepare his world and it's mechanical details in far, far more depth than one who has more Mohawk-y ones. Trenchcoat players are going to want to be able to find out and prepare for absolutely everything.

It's only a problem when there's a mismatch between GM and players, in my experience, or when you have one or two Trenchcoats in a Mohawk party. Mohawks who aren't wankers rapidly adapt to Trenchcoat-style play in my experience, as it just involves not doing stuff, but the same doesn't really apply the other way around.

It's interesting to note that you sometimes see the same separation in other TT RPGs - the ultra-preparers vs. the seat-of-the-pantsers.

In my experience, crazy players are crazy players, regardless of what style they make characters as.

The first "black trenchcoat" character I ever encountered was a modified Elven Hitman: a very professional shooter who dabbled in demolitions. He played up the professional angle, was very serious during negotiations and planning, that sort of thing. It lasted until the first combat, when the enemy troll shrugged off his shots. So, he decided to throw a satchel charge at the troll, to take it out.

Of course, he threw all his explosives at once. Which, IIRC, was about 25 kilos worth.

The resulting explosion nearly wiped the party, destroyed the ground floor of the building, and nearly collapsed it onto their heads.

Moral of the story: Pink Mohawk vs Black Trenchcoat != Crazy vs Professional. You can have either one in either mode, it's about player choices and not genre conventions.

There is a particular sound the universe makes when the fine line twixt' the two is crossed, it sounds like "Awww Frag it...!"

Indeed... Crazy is Crazy, no matter the flavor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrqW_BZu5Xk



Hough!
Medicineman

cyberpunk and pink mohawk - mirrorshades

Black Trenchcoat*
vs
Pink Mohawk

Black Trenchcoat
vs
Pink Mohawk

Black Trenchcoat
vs
Pink Mohawk*

*But no Cyberpunk.

I wouldn't say that's wrong, exactly, but whilst HEAT is definitely Black Trenchcoat, I really wouldn't say Blade Runner or Psycho-pass is. In fact, Blade Runner definitely isn't. Deckard is actively unprofessional, and criticized for it, doesn't plan, takes tons of needless risks, thinks with his gut, and so on. He's not Mohawk either, but he isn't Trenchcoat. Psycho-pass has total Black Trenchcoat visual sensibilities, but again, the characters aren't particularly professional, rational, well-prepared or the like, despite the whole "repress your emotions" deal.

I've not seen Black Lagoon, so can't really comment on that, but the original Dominion: Tank Police seems like pretty perfect cyberpunk Pink Mohawk (on both the cop and badguy sides) in the anime realm.

I swear, the Mission Impossible movie series though, very Trenchcoat. Tons of calm, careful, ultra-elaborate plans based on ultra-specific knowledge obtained by careful research, tons of legwork, people trying to stay professional despite emotional torment*, and so on. MI:4 has lots of good examples, not least the shit with the mirrors.

I was thinking about this whole deal and I remembered the first time I was aware of the dichotomy - long before it had a name. In CP2020, I had an ultra-professional, sensible, non-descript-appearance character with solid skills, who had great stealth gear, silenced weapons, stun weapons (to avoid casualties), B&E gear, rappelling gear, and who always carefully scoped out anywhere we were running against. The next player had a 6'6" mountain of muscle and steel, in showy Edgerunner gear, with two plasma-enhanced Desert Eagles, with extended clips and barrels and gold-plated (!!!!!), and lots of visible cyberwear. His only real skills were killing people with guns and killing people with fists/feet.

In our first adventure, I carefully researched and cased the place, we got ready to go in via an entrance with only one guard, and I was going to stun him and prevent the alarm being raised. As I snuck into position, gold-guns got bored, shot the guy (with a massive muzzle-flash and report), and we ended up having to fight our way through every inch of the building. Next time I built a maniac too, and we had a lot more fun!

I think that's one thing a lot of people mistake about the pink mohawk style of play--just because it's flashy and over the top doesn't mean it's stupid. Sure, some pink mohawk players have more bravado than sense, but other times the balls-out crazy just masks a brilliant and devious plan.

I could mention some of my old group's exploits in Hong Kong--especially the time we dosed the entire downtown business district with time-released hallucinogens in order to rob a bank owned by Lowfwyr--but I post that one too often. Instead, I'll tell you about what happened during the game I GM'ed last Friday:

The team had been hired to sneak onto the NYU Campus and sabotage a server cluster that was being used for a corporate research project that had been farmed out to the university. This was a zero-presence run, meaning they had to make it look like an accident and leave no evidence of intentional sabotage.

The group is pretty stealthy--especially Tokala, the fox shifter infiltration specialist--so I figured they'd be able to sneak their way past security without too much trouble. They had other ideas.

The Johnson didn't know where the server was located, only that it was housed somewhere on the NYU campus and that it was completely isolated from all the university's networks. The group started by disguising themselves and wandering about campus getting the layout and looking for any hints about the project or the server's location.

The college had a lot of green space, and the occasional wild animal wasn't unheard of, so the fox shifter decided to wander around in his animal form, so that the faculty and students would be used to seeing a fox on the grounds and wouldn't think much of it when the time came to hit the server.

After a few days of reconnaissance, during which Tokala made a temporary den on site in a drainage culvert, the team managed to put together enough info to pinpoint the server's location--in a secure sub-basement level of the computer science building. That's when they came up with the plan that completely floored me.

The team's face disguised himself as a student, and snuck Tokala into the comp sci building stuffed in a backpack. The hacker's flyspy drones had mapped out the unsecure areas of the building pretty well, including the air vents, so after being dropped off in a bathroom the fox made his way into the air ducts with a flyspy leading the way. Tokala had left his gear behind so he could pass as a regular animal, so when they came to the vertical shaft leading down I expected some sweating as he figured out how to lower himself quietly down to the lower floors without his gecko gloves or rappelling harness.

That's when Tokala's player announced he wasn't trying to be stealthy. His plan was to scrabble down the ~10 ft shaft as noisily as possible, making people believe the wild fox that had been spotted on campus recently had gotten itself stuck in the air vents--probably trying to get out of the cold fall weather and tracking the scent of soy Doritos.

The fox made his way down to the sub-basement where the sever was located, tripping sensors and alarms with giddy abandon, and found himself in a maintenance closet. The hacker managed to delay the alarm signal so they could control when security showed up. After determining that the server room was protected by a card reader, Tokala headed back to the maintenance room and--after checking to make sure there weren't any cameras--shifted into human form and pried open one of the lockers. Inside he found a janitor's uniform, a keycard, and a fifth of cheap bourbon. Tokala put on the coveralls, splashed the bourbon on his face so he'd smell like a drunk, grabbed a mop and bucket and made his way to the server room...

...when campus security got the alarm signal, they sent a couple of guards to go check it out. What the guards found was a freaked out fox hiding between the server racks and yipping angrily at them. One of the guards fired his taser at the fox, which ducked back into the racks making the shot hit one of the servers instead. Seeing the plume of grey white smoke now issuing from the wounded device, the guards decided to secure the area and call in animal control to deal with the situation.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team stood by in their truck--technically a work vehicle from the team's front business as paracritter exterminators--which the hacker had disguised as an official Department of Animal Control vehicle by pulling the appropriate logos from images captured by Manhattan's omnipresent surveillance network and programming it into the ruthenium polymer paintjob. The hacker had also gained control of the local com network, so that any calls made to animal control would be re-routed to them instead. Calculating the appropriate response time, the team circled the block while Tokala continued to chew on cables, piss on the racks, and sing the song of his people at the hapless security guards.

Eventually, the team showed up, and made a good show of attempting to "capture" Tokala--somehow managing to smash just about every piece of delicate equipment in the room while trying to subdue the feral animal. Afterward, the hacker scrubbed any trace of their interference from the school networks, and they called up Mr. Johnson to pick up their payday.

In summary, the infiltration specialist went in as loudly and obviously as possible, set off *all* the alarms, and intentionally started a fight with security--while the rest of the team waltzed in the front door and proceeded to help him smash the severs to bits.

Of course, this wasn't sabotage--just an unfortunate accident--and those responsible were just a stray canine and some bumbling dipshits from animal control--not a shadowy team of professional criminals. That the department of animal control denies sending anyone over or even receiving the call isn't suspicious--they're just covering their asses and trying to avoid litigation.

So you see, going Pink Mohawk doesn't mean your players are reckless hoop-brains lacking the patience and impulse control to do the necessary legwork and formulate a plan. Sometimes going in fast, loud, and crazy is the plan--and a damn good one.

I love it!

I'm GMing now, but in my player days this was often my favoured approach....set up the situation, if possible, to work in our favour. The GM I had at the time would tend to then often cause things to spin far beyond what we'd planned (i.e. no plan works perfectly), but overall it was a lot of fun.

Pink Mohawk vs Black Trenchcoat basically mirrors the dynamic of action movies in the '80s vs action movies now.

Back in the '80s, action heroes were dudes like Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and Stallone. Dudes with huge muscles who cracked wise, rode motorcycles and solved their problems through a combination of giant automatic weapons and karate. They would mow dudes down by the score, take no damage, and generally law enforcement was absent or incompetent.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and our action heroes are very different. The guys are a lot smaller and more lithe, their plans are a bit more involved than "Point machine guns at the front door", and generally they come from ex-military special forces or ex-law enforcement or ex-super slick hitman or whatever. Think Jack Reacher and John Wick. They dress in tactical gear, with vests and mag pouches and they use assault carbines and room sweeping tactics and stuff like that. Contrast this with Arnold in the movie Commando, whose MO is to basically bust in the place and mow everyone down.

Pink Mohawk shadowrun characters are more like your "classic" cyberpunk fiction characters. They're loners and outcasts who live on the margins of society, have obvious cyberware, automatic weapons and dress like the background characters of Blade Runner or the biker gang members from Road Warrior. RP-wise, they tend not to have ex-special ops backgrounds and are more anti-corp political activists.

Black Trenchcoat characters are like the dude from the Deus Ex game, all raspy-voiced, dark-secret-having ex-special forces dudes that show up to runs decked out in full assault gear and like "Never stay in one place too long and always have a plan to kill everyone you meet" kind of attitudes.

Now this isn't to say Black Trenchcoat and Pink Mohawk can't get along. Not every run has to come down to an argument between PM wanting to pile everyone in the GMC Bulldog and ram through the front door while pumping Maria Mercurial out the speakers, and BT wanting to cut the wires, go in the backdoor and take out the guards with silenced weapons full of gel rounds while communicating on subvocal mics. The two are mainly an aesthetic, and there's no reason they can't collaborate effectively.

My last SR game, I played an Ork ex-Spetsnaz sniper who liked to wear tailored suits in his off time and was looking for the runner team that kidnapped his wife, and his best friend on the team was the hacktivist Elf (who literally had a pink mohawk), who used the rating 1 fake ID "Roy Texas" while committing crimes, had a Super Warhawk with "This Machine Kills Facists" engraved on it, and frequently wore a t-shirt with the date of the Night of Rage painted on it.

This thread has got me thinking about an old idea of mine again: "Pink Trenchcoat".

All the total pro silent assassin lethal operator bullshit, but taken to the point where they could literally walk around in a neon pink trenchcoat and still manage to get away with it all if they wanted.

Which isn't to say that the trenchcoat aspects have to be at all visible most of the time - they just have to exist underneath all the cloaks and daggers (and Invisibility/Physical Mask spells), and be flaunted whenever and wherever reasonably possible. You could have a character who is a ghost that is never seen except by those they kill, so long as when they do make the kill, they shed their ruthenium stealth suit to reveal themselves first, just because they can.

Alternately, you could make the "trenchcoat" elements of the character integral to your protecting/hiding your identity, in the style of Batman or the like. A guy who dresses like a bat to instill fear in his enemies? That's totally Pink Mohawk. And yet it's also an extra layer of protection, because the persona of the outfit takes on a life of its own. A character who wears rainbow spray-painted heavy milspec armor and has a habit of entering buildings through walls rather than doors can still be a ghostly phantom that no one can trace, so long as people are looking for "Rainbow Death" rather than the guy wearing the suit.

Now, granted, pulling that sort of thing off isn't going to be easy, and it's also likely to change the sorts of jobs you get and how exactly you go about doing business. But there's nothing preventing you from rising to that challenge, if that's how you want to play.

~Umi

@Umidori : You might be interested in the "Style Over Substance" link in my sig, especially the "Your Style" and "Using Style" chapters. It's not exactly the same as your "pink trenchcoat" concept, but there are many common themes.

I'll take a look when I get the chance.

More and more, this makes me want to revive my World Famous Mysterious Luchador character concept, where his real identity is completely unknown, but his Luchador persona is a justice-loving crime fighter extraordinaire.

...so basically Batman, but with more Latin flair, machismo, and suplexing.

~Umi

And the Masks... Oh the masks... So Interchangeable, and so colorful.

which make really good Foci as well.

...I am so jealous of not having thought of that myself, and am so shamelessly going to steal it wholesale.

~Umi

LuchadorRun™


Could see this set in Tenochtitlan (Formerly Mexico City) with the Lucha Runners battling Azzie oppressors.

..All Minotaur-runner team.. (Luchador Toros)

Oni could be fun.

"Nice mask."
"It ain't a mask."

Combat Pixies are always hilarious as well. Get suplexed into the floor by a tiny burly man with dainty butterfly wings.

~Umi

Now you've got me flashing back to The Tooth Fairy, Umidori.