So 2020 is here. It is now the game of the Dark Present. Back when I first started playing this game, it seemed so far away, so impossibly the future...
This is actually the second time this has happenned. True fans of the game recognize we hit this first back in 2013, which was when the first edition of the game was set. But far more people recognize 2020 as the true edition of the game. Of course now we have Cyberpunk Red, and between it, and the hype from the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game, a whole new wave of fans are rushing to join us. Be gracious hosts my friends, new lie if being breathed into the game, and new faces have that old pulse going strong again.
Regardless which edition you play, Original, 2020, Cybergeneration, V3, or Red, or even homebrew systems and settings, this game has withstood the test of time. It is the original, the truest, the most pure, game of it's genre. This game in fact helped cement the term cyberpunk as a genre in and of itself. It's origins are strong, taking direct inspiration from the foundations of the genre, across all mediums. Literature, Cinema, Anime, Comics, Manga, Music.... with this game, with this franchise, you have been able to perfectly replicate that theme, that feeling, that atmosphere, that drew you to the worlds of dark tomorrow.
And now we are here. It's uncanny how much of the book prophesied what has come to pass. It didn't get everything right, we aren't traveling in flying minivans, and we cannot download out consciousness into the net... yet. We have lived to see some miraculous things. Bionic prosthetics are becoming a reality. Technology is improving quality of life faster than we can keep up with it. We don't have cyberdecks, but we do carry around cellphones with the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips 24/7. Sadly, we are also living in a dystopia, under the thumb of a nightmare political hellscape, at the mercy of the corrupt and the ignorant, kowtowing to the corporate overlords and the living at the military industrial complex.
Of course there is light at the end of the tunnel, we are cyberpunks, we fight for a better world, or at least a better future. We fight for those who can't fight for themselves. We fight the corporations putting wealth before humanity. We fight the bigots and the ignorant who can't see past there own experiences. We fight the system that seeks to crush any resistance to maintain the status quo. We fight for progress, we fight for change.
And we also play our silly little game. Because in our games, we can at least pretend that things are getting better, even in the face of darkness.
To all the fans of Datafortress 2020, thank you for riding alongside me all these years. Here is to the future. That neon street hasn't come to an end, we just hit an intersection with the present. As long as there is a tomorrow, this game will have a place.
Tabletop Wisdom000
Monday, January 13, 2020
Sunday, January 12, 2020
On running Horror...
Horror games are difficult to run. This was a post I wrote on RPGNET back in 2008, but it's still might have something worth sharing in here...
The truth is, that the reason horror games don't work most of the time, is that systems designed for horror games, simply by definition, do not allow a gm to create horror. A horror game is premised around making the characters afraid. We fear what we don't understand. If you are running Cthulhu, or dungeons and dragons, or vampire, or dark metropolis, or whatever..... you can't scare the players, because they know what to expect the second they look through the rule book. Monsters are statted out, and any player who has played in that system more than a week will have a pretty good grasp of what to expect from the system, and thus be impervious to actual fear.
You want to run a horror campaign, you have to hit the players with something unknown.
If you actually want to play a horror game, don't play Cthulhu, play a system that doesn't have rules for supernatural elements at all. Play it for several sessions so that the players get comfortable with the world, and feel they have a grasp on what is going on. Then, out of nowhere, start introducing the unknown... doesn't have to be anything actually supernatural, but if you give players the idea it is, then they will be caught completely off guard.
That's the first part of the illusion..... the second part is..... don't show them the monster. Seriously.... this is the basic premise of all the best horror movies. Once you put a face on something, no matter how horrific, it becomes less frightening because you can now relate to it. You can't talk about how the mere sight of the horror drives men mad, and then show them a picture of Cthulhu, because while hideous, it's simply not that scary....
Let that unknown fear build and build, until the climax, then and only then can you show them what they are up against...... because you will only have a brief period of time before the "shock" wears off, and they stop reacting like people in a movie theater watching, and start thinking like players again, thinking in terms of strategy and tactics... that's simply the mindset that these games instill. You don't have to railroad the players, and in fact doing so completely removes the effect. You also don't need to attack the players directly.... just create the suggestion that at any moment something terrifying is going to happen. You have to create suspense.
Case in point. I have been running Cyberpunk 2020 since 1989.... at no point have I EVER allowed super powers, magic, psionics, or the supernatural to corrupt my game. My players know this, they understand this, and they respect it.
A few years ago, during a nomad campaign, the characters were sent in as part of the crew to rebuild Chicago, which had laid waste by a plague and left to rot... They were told of strange happenings around the sears tower, other nomads talking of it as if it were cursed, people disappearing from the area, and that anyone who dared enter was never seen again. They talk of odd lights, and eerie noises.....
The characters were offered generous reward to go into the tower and clear it so reconstruction could begin.
As the characters went in, it was described how immediately the quality of air changed, as they began to explore each level, things got progressively weirder the higher up they went... (I will fully admit that I used the oldest trick in the book, and we played in the dark, flashlights used only for necessity like rolling dice, trips to the bathroom, etc..)
They began hearing a distant whistling, they noticed small things, like dried blood smeared on the walls, and all the wires in the building had been removed, taken out of walls, ceilings, and from electronic devices, etc... As they went up higher they noticed all these little fetishes made in the shape of a man made out of wire, hanging from the ceiling, in doorways, etc...
Higher up still they would come across walls or mounds made entirely from rodent skulls. The blood on the walls was no longer just smeared but some kind of crazy gibberish writing...
They get up to the fiftieth floor, just as the sun is setting, they start coming down a long hallway that runs from one side of the building to the other, with a fierce wind blowing through, in the middle of the hallway, silhouetted by the sun behind it, seemingly suspended in mid air, is what looks like a huge body, arms and legs spread out wide, bloated, little things, that look like worms seems to be moving all over it , and the whole hallway is filled with a loud eerie wailing...
The players themselves, not just the characters, as so afraid and nervous, that they spend a full hour peeking at this thing from around the corner, one of them shoots it and the "body" shakes in mid-air and the wind and howling increase....
Finally one of the players can't take it anymore and rushes it, only to find that the "body" itself is nothing more than a huge version of one of the wire fetishes, supported by fine wire holding it in place... The "fetish" itself was creating the wailing, as wind whipped over and through the wires that made up its body
Things continued like this, with the entire situation getting weirder and weirder... till one of the NPC's that was with them disappears.... then another.....
They hear screams and watch from a window as one of the NPC's is thrown with incredible force from the building from the floor above, screaming his head off as he flies towards the ground only to dissapear in the fog that has crept in around the city...
They ever so slowly go up to the next floor, only to find another, smaller fetish, similarly suspended in a hallway.... immediately they think it to be harmless and continue towards it, only for it to start moving and shaking on its own.... again the players themselves are surprised and actually scared and begin shooting the fetish.... this time it bleeds and screams.... they unload on it... they get up to it, and realize, its the other NPC, wrapped in wire, and suspended in place...
At his point one of the players, demands I turns the lights on or he is going home.... when I do he is sitting in the chair visibly shaking....
That moment.... that very precise moment..... is what I consider my absolute crowning achievement in running a game. To illicit a real world player response to the game and what is happening to his character. I have never been able to top it, and my players still talk about it to this day as the best single session they have ever taken part in, I have heard from strangers who game how my players bragged on me about that session...
I am not saying this because I am wanting to toot my own horn, though I know it sounds like I am. I am saying that to achieve that effect, you have to hit the players with something they simply had no way of expecting. The essence of horror is the unexpected, the unknown.... And in games where the players know they are in a horror setting, that is almost impossible.
Just like your villain can't make a character fear for his life by holding a knife to a PC's throat using 2nd edition D&D rules (because the player knows that the villain can't do enough damage in a single round to kill them), you can't scare the players in a game where they know what to expect. Just like once you have seen one Freddy Kruger movie (if that sort of thing scares you) then even if you were scared the first time, you will never be scared by it again because you know what is going to happen.
The key to a horror game is creating fear, not just for the characters, but for the players themselves. If you go to a horror movie, and it doesn't scare you, it has failed at its purpose... not saying it isn't a good movie, just that it didn't accomplish what it was supposed to do. The same is true for running a horror game, the desired outcome should be to instill fear.
And in the end, it doesn't have to have any supernatural or superhuman elements at all..... it just matters that the players don't know that. The sears tower thing turned out to just be bat-shit crazy survivors of the plague, which were still scary at the time, but nothing supernatural about them, even though my players during the game were POSITIVE that they were dealing with something beyond the pale...
The truth is, that the reason horror games don't work most of the time, is that systems designed for horror games, simply by definition, do not allow a gm to create horror. A horror game is premised around making the characters afraid. We fear what we don't understand. If you are running Cthulhu, or dungeons and dragons, or vampire, or dark metropolis, or whatever..... you can't scare the players, because they know what to expect the second they look through the rule book. Monsters are statted out, and any player who has played in that system more than a week will have a pretty good grasp of what to expect from the system, and thus be impervious to actual fear.
You want to run a horror campaign, you have to hit the players with something unknown.
If you actually want to play a horror game, don't play Cthulhu, play a system that doesn't have rules for supernatural elements at all. Play it for several sessions so that the players get comfortable with the world, and feel they have a grasp on what is going on. Then, out of nowhere, start introducing the unknown... doesn't have to be anything actually supernatural, but if you give players the idea it is, then they will be caught completely off guard.
That's the first part of the illusion..... the second part is..... don't show them the monster. Seriously.... this is the basic premise of all the best horror movies. Once you put a face on something, no matter how horrific, it becomes less frightening because you can now relate to it. You can't talk about how the mere sight of the horror drives men mad, and then show them a picture of Cthulhu, because while hideous, it's simply not that scary....
Let that unknown fear build and build, until the climax, then and only then can you show them what they are up against...... because you will only have a brief period of time before the "shock" wears off, and they stop reacting like people in a movie theater watching, and start thinking like players again, thinking in terms of strategy and tactics... that's simply the mindset that these games instill. You don't have to railroad the players, and in fact doing so completely removes the effect. You also don't need to attack the players directly.... just create the suggestion that at any moment something terrifying is going to happen. You have to create suspense.
Case in point. I have been running Cyberpunk 2020 since 1989.... at no point have I EVER allowed super powers, magic, psionics, or the supernatural to corrupt my game. My players know this, they understand this, and they respect it.
A few years ago, during a nomad campaign, the characters were sent in as part of the crew to rebuild Chicago, which had laid waste by a plague and left to rot... They were told of strange happenings around the sears tower, other nomads talking of it as if it were cursed, people disappearing from the area, and that anyone who dared enter was never seen again. They talk of odd lights, and eerie noises.....
The characters were offered generous reward to go into the tower and clear it so reconstruction could begin.
As the characters went in, it was described how immediately the quality of air changed, as they began to explore each level, things got progressively weirder the higher up they went... (I will fully admit that I used the oldest trick in the book, and we played in the dark, flashlights used only for necessity like rolling dice, trips to the bathroom, etc..)
They began hearing a distant whistling, they noticed small things, like dried blood smeared on the walls, and all the wires in the building had been removed, taken out of walls, ceilings, and from electronic devices, etc... As they went up higher they noticed all these little fetishes made in the shape of a man made out of wire, hanging from the ceiling, in doorways, etc...
Higher up still they would come across walls or mounds made entirely from rodent skulls. The blood on the walls was no longer just smeared but some kind of crazy gibberish writing...
They get up to the fiftieth floor, just as the sun is setting, they start coming down a long hallway that runs from one side of the building to the other, with a fierce wind blowing through, in the middle of the hallway, silhouetted by the sun behind it, seemingly suspended in mid air, is what looks like a huge body, arms and legs spread out wide, bloated, little things, that look like worms seems to be moving all over it , and the whole hallway is filled with a loud eerie wailing...
The players themselves, not just the characters, as so afraid and nervous, that they spend a full hour peeking at this thing from around the corner, one of them shoots it and the "body" shakes in mid-air and the wind and howling increase....
Finally one of the players can't take it anymore and rushes it, only to find that the "body" itself is nothing more than a huge version of one of the wire fetishes, supported by fine wire holding it in place... The "fetish" itself was creating the wailing, as wind whipped over and through the wires that made up its body
Things continued like this, with the entire situation getting weirder and weirder... till one of the NPC's that was with them disappears.... then another.....
They hear screams and watch from a window as one of the NPC's is thrown with incredible force from the building from the floor above, screaming his head off as he flies towards the ground only to dissapear in the fog that has crept in around the city...
They ever so slowly go up to the next floor, only to find another, smaller fetish, similarly suspended in a hallway.... immediately they think it to be harmless and continue towards it, only for it to start moving and shaking on its own.... again the players themselves are surprised and actually scared and begin shooting the fetish.... this time it bleeds and screams.... they unload on it... they get up to it, and realize, its the other NPC, wrapped in wire, and suspended in place...
At his point one of the players, demands I turns the lights on or he is going home.... when I do he is sitting in the chair visibly shaking....
That moment.... that very precise moment..... is what I consider my absolute crowning achievement in running a game. To illicit a real world player response to the game and what is happening to his character. I have never been able to top it, and my players still talk about it to this day as the best single session they have ever taken part in, I have heard from strangers who game how my players bragged on me about that session...
I am not saying this because I am wanting to toot my own horn, though I know it sounds like I am. I am saying that to achieve that effect, you have to hit the players with something they simply had no way of expecting. The essence of horror is the unexpected, the unknown.... And in games where the players know they are in a horror setting, that is almost impossible.
Just like your villain can't make a character fear for his life by holding a knife to a PC's throat using 2nd edition D&D rules (because the player knows that the villain can't do enough damage in a single round to kill them), you can't scare the players in a game where they know what to expect. Just like once you have seen one Freddy Kruger movie (if that sort of thing scares you) then even if you were scared the first time, you will never be scared by it again because you know what is going to happen.
The key to a horror game is creating fear, not just for the characters, but for the players themselves. If you go to a horror movie, and it doesn't scare you, it has failed at its purpose... not saying it isn't a good movie, just that it didn't accomplish what it was supposed to do. The same is true for running a horror game, the desired outcome should be to instill fear.
And in the end, it doesn't have to have any supernatural or superhuman elements at all..... it just matters that the players don't know that. The sears tower thing turned out to just be bat-shit crazy survivors of the plague, which were still scary at the time, but nothing supernatural about them, even though my players during the game were POSITIVE that they were dealing with something beyond the pale...
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