Quote from: thedungeondelver;676086Oh oh oh, every fucking word of Cyberpunk:2020.  And Shadowrun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w

especially Shadowrun.

And just so we've covered anything, any game that has characters ramming 3mm mini-DIN connectors into the sides of their heads to interface with computers ('cause yeah the human brain - so much faster than a sixteen-core cheap-enough-to-be-disposable hobby board with a touchscreen running Android...), and pits them against "neo Soviets" or "Japanese Megacorp private cops" or that constant chestnut of all Gibson's bastard children of the RPG hobby, the US broken up into tiny nation states that would make the most jaded randroid cackle with glee.  I think that pretty much handles the "cyberpunk" game genre.

The truth, it burns!

I still totally dig Cyberpunk 2020, though.  I think I would have to do some major overhauls to the technology if I were to run a game again.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;676375I don't remember if I liked any RPG that had characters in the book drawn with mullets?  I know now I won't even touch such a book.

Mullets & Montages: The 80's Role-Playing Game

Hey, I guess everyone knows the first CP game is set in 2013... anyway, CP rightly gets lampooned, but I would like to send some love out to Tears of Envy's Cyberpunk 1984 project, which has some great images up.

Also, cyberpunk juice. I used to drink that stuff, god knows what was in it.

Quote from: smiorgan;676636Hey, I guess everyone knows the first CP game is set in 2013... anyway, CP rightly gets lampooned, but I would like to send some love out to Tears of Envy's Cyberpunk 1984 project, which has some great images up.

Also, cyberpunk juice. I used to drink that stuff, god knows what was in it.

CP/M isn't making a comeback, is it?  Oh I hope not.

Quote from: Koltar;676548NO - The Assassination and Rebellion /NEW Era stuff was all CRAP!!!

Thank Goodness GURPS: Traveller put things back to the way they mostly should be.

- Ed C.

They may have been crap, but they were still a different setting time within that big old OTU.

re cyberpunk 1984:

I vividly remember the 80ies as if it was yesterday. Neon looked tacky even back then. Never understood the whole androgynous-look thing. If anybody can explain, I greatly appreciate.
Also never udnerstood why it is night all the time, either.

Somebody upthread remarked how the future of Dark Conspiracy is more scary than CP, and I agree. The whole "combat zone" never made any sense at all. The genre in gaming imploded under the weight of its contradictions is my guess.

Ultimately, there were other 80ies elements in style that have aged much, much better, namely starship models for movies. CGI is not there yet, not by a stretch.

Torg. Make no mistake, it's a big pile of awesome, and it anticipated the pulp renaissance by a decade. But...

Nippon Tech doesn't work anymore. The technological advancement is woefully slow, the stark Japanese slant feels very dated, and ninjas are now cliched rather than serving as automatic injection of cool.

The timeline is all messed up... in Torg, the Possibility Wars were the impetus for a re-united Germany, the EU does not exist, Africa looks, well, different. In short, Torg veers sharply into alt-history territory. And it doesn't quite work as a a straight alt history, because the setting is already an alt-history setting. So it becomes a period piece, which is a strange thing for such a mashup.

Aysle is a straight up pastiche of 90s style epic high fantasy. It couldn't be any more dated if it were called World of Elriclance.

Space Gods is 90s style space opera, done lazily.

Tharkold reads like a Clive Barker/Aliens/Terminator love letter.

Ororsh fares better, as it does action-horror pretty well, plus the mix of period horror with modern splatter-cthulhu stuff. The Cyberpapacy... that will never stop being cool.

In short, Torg is still awesome, but it could never be revised, it needs to be redone.

It's already been said several times, but I read this and immediately thought of Cyberpunk. Mobile phones kill that game for me. Modern information technology is just so far beyond anything the game envisages, or more importantly anything its fundamental plot structures can cope with.

The '90s conspiracy games too, even though of course the conspiracies are in a sense as credible now as they ever were, they feel '90s. Well, semi-as credible. Ubiquitous mobile phones do for those a bit too.

Covering up anything after every bystander has filmed it on their phone and half of them have uploaded it would not be easy.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;676565I've done it. It's essentially the same as these discussions about information on the internet: you actually have too much information, the time taken to wade through it to find what you need may be crucial time. For example, terrorists are able to carry out their acts in London, perhaps the most surveilled city in the world - because by the time the security forces find the guys, they've already committed their act. On the flipside, the British police shot an innocent man they thought was a terrorist... essentially because of mistaken identity, the guy was in the same block of flats as some genuine suspects, and

   A surveillance officer admitted in a witness statement that he was unable to positively identify Mr de Menezes as a suspect because the officer had been relieving himself when the Brazilian left the block of flats where he lived. [...]

One firearms officer is quoted as saying: "The current strategy around the address was as follows: no subject coming out of the address would be allowed to run and that an interception should take place as soon as possible away from the address trying not to compromise it."

But the report shows that there was a failure in the surveillance operation and officers wrongly believed Mr de Menezes could have been one of two suspects.

"Someone just left the building, was it the guy? We're too far, we can't see closely enough."
"I dunno, I was taking a piss."

There's still plenty of room for action-adventure scenarios in today's world, since though surveillance is ubiquitous, you still have to find the useful needle in the information haystack, which takes time - time in which the subjects can make and carry out their espionage, sabotage, assassination or terrorist plans. Whether the PCs are the officers or the subjects, that time gives you a lot of room for adventure.

I've done it myself, but it can be a lot more work.

That said, with respect to the Cyberpunk rpg (moving on from your point, and returning to mine of my last post) I never thought that credible or true to the fiction anyway. Even when it was current it felt like fantasy to me, nothing like anything by Gibson or Sterling (arguably a bit like Williams' Hardwired, which of course was later a supplement but is in some senses a part-post apocalypse setting).

Vampire the Masquerade for me. Looking back when I played it was certainly a very teenager angst game and I could not imagine playing it now.

I have no idea how the game or system evolved but it always seemed to me with the entire WoD that there was too much supernatural going on for any of it to be secret...

By the way, there is new Cyberpunk video RPG game coming out with new paper system too I believe.

"Dragonlance" seems so dated to me. Fantasy dates as quickly as any other genre. The whole thing just screams "80s schlock fantasy". Goldmoon is like a Darryl Hannah pixie dream girl character, Riverwind is a Noble 80s Indian Savage a la Dances With Wolves, it's just all so cliched.

Quote from: elfandghost;676681Vampire the Masquerade for me. Looking back when I played it was certainly a very teenager angst game and I could not imagine playing it now.

I have no idea how the game or system evolved but it always seemed to me with the entire WoD that there was too much supernatural going on for any of it to be secret...

By the way, there is new Cyberpunk video RPG game coming out with new paper system too I believe.

I always thought with WoD that each game worked well on its own (save maybe Werewolf, I could never buy them not being obvious), but terribly when you combined it all into one overstuffed world

Quote from: D-503;676690I always thought with WoD that each game worked well on its own (save maybe Werewolf, I could never buy them not being obvious), but terribly when you combined it all into one overstuffed world

As I understand and I could be dead wrong: Vampire and the other games weren't originally intended to be one big world. They were separate continuities set in the same "Gothpunk" genre but no more connected than say, any random two westerns. The leeches in Werewolf weren't the "Cainites" from Vampire, etc. Perhaps similar but more simplified (and usually built using that core monster's powers just reskinned so they were more mechanically balanced over all).

But combining the games became a popular fan thing. Some of the writers did mention that it wasn't a good idea since the "splats" weren't balanced against each other (and WWGS general lack of mechanical soundness made that aspect worse) but the idea of combined world of darkness was too persistent and become, more or less, official in later edition including published cross over modules.

Hell, the whole multiple creature (splat) per shared world thing has become a White Wolfism trade mark. It seems to be a successful model for selling books even though its cumbersome at times. For instance, I think Exalted works much better as separate game lines per Exalted group, sharing the same  general backdrop adjusted for each one. I don't see that happening though. Their fanbase is really in love with splat structure.

I dunno, I have mixed feeling about this topic probably because so much of what I like is considered retro or dated. The whole thing is really a matter of taste and fashion. Entertainment is entertainment and what you like don't like isn't or doesn't have to be based on what's current or even plausible. One persons classic is another person's tired cliche. And if there's still people into Star Trek and Dungeon crawls then there's going to be people into cyberpunk, literary or rpg, well after 2020. And trends come and go. A few years, bionics and chrome or conspiracies might be popular again (maybe in a slightly altered format). All it takes is for some one to do something provocative or "awesome" with it, that catches allot of geek attention.

Seems almost mean spirited to mock sci fi game writers, for instance, for not being psychics and accurately predicting the future. And its not like in 10 or 20 years, someone will be talking about what popular now and rolling their eyes over it, wondering how anyone ever got into that cheesy old fashioned crap :-D

Quote from: Nexus;676704Seems almost mean spirited to mock sci fi game writers, for instance, for not being psychics and accurately predicting the future.

On a more general tangent.

It's always amusing examining the predictions made by sci-fi writers, prognosticators/futurists, "prophets", stock market analysts, economic pundits, etc ..., and seeing how much they get it right or wrong.

It's even more amusing seeing whether their track record at getting things right, is no better than flipping a coin (or worse).