I’ve played a few sci-fi and cyberpunk campaigns in my time, and DM’d some too, and I certainly enjoyed them, but I think there are some aspects of sci-fi as a genre – and Cyberpunk particularly – that encourage[1] a kind of criminal nihilistic campaigning which I don’t generally find enjoyable[2], particularly when I’m DMing. Other recent commentators on cyberpunk probably think this is because I am a bleeding-heart liberal, but this is not the reason at all. I don’t like it when I’m DMing because
- Nihilistic campaigns tend to deviate significantly from the plot, and DMing without preparation is a much more varied practice – with greater rewards sometimes but also a lot of the time it falls flat
- It’s really hard to set a challenge for the PCs when they can just arm up to face it, they don’t care about dying or the solution would inevitably put them into conflict with the law
- It’s really hard to interfere with PCs actions coherently, because in any sci-fi future the power of the state is so overwhelming that the one consistent thing criminal PCs can expect is that they will die horribly and probably before they even know what happened; but there’s no reward in doing this, so you have to contort your story to enable them to escape and still be challenged
Here are 2 examples of the type of nihilism I mean, from my DMing experience:
- The PCs were meant to bust a drug deal, and I set up a complex trap for them which would put them into a seriously challenging combat. This was a low law-level world in Traveller, so they simply scraped up all their money and bought a suit of combat armour. The battle ended when the main fighter just stepped into the middle of the room, in full view of all the gang, and gunned them all down while their bullets bounced off.
- The PCs wanted to negotiate with a local crime boss, and his goons were hanging out the front of the disused apartment complex waiting to cause trouble. The characters, unafraid of dying, just marched up and demanded admittance. Of course I should have just denied them, but then the adventure was killed dead; so I tried to engage them in some kind of diplomacy-style intimidation effort. The players ignored it and just started a firefight in the middle of the street.
This kind of stuff is fun when it happens occasionally[3] but when the players start to do this too much, not only does DMing become a bit boring but one gets the felling that the main pleasure the players are deriving is from bucking the DM’s plans (which they must consistently be, since the main way they wouldn’t buck your plans in most sci-fi worlds is by being eviscerated from orbit). So why do I think this nihilism-drift happens?
- Guns and money. There is a mechanic in sci-fi gaming – and particularly in cyberpunk, but also quite blatantly in Traveller – in which guns are easy to come by, and so is capital advantage. In fantasy role-playing you have to work long and hard up a chain of increasingly powerful bad guys[4] to get your +3 vorpal sword; in a lot of sci-fi games, you just need a PC in your group who has a rich mummy, and a jaunt to the bad side of town/Mexico/low law-level planet. And when players rock up to their law level 3 planet and you won’t sell them Battle Dress they always seem to get pissy. This is because they, like you, expect consistency in the game, and a consistent feature of much of the sci-fi genre is dirty guns done dirt cheap
- Crime as necessity: Fantasy role-playing games have a much more odious property than this, because they have genocide as a good outcome. But this isn’t nihilistic because the people you slaughter are chaotic evil, right, which is the definition of anarchic badness. On the other hand, in sci-fi games committing criminal acts is either part of the genre (Cyberpunk) or a necessity in some places. It’s just like the problem of illegal dope – you just want a small high, but to get it you have to associate with shady people. In time the criminality sticks, or the players spend a lot of time pushing the grey line. This is fine – it’s nice that we can play criminals in our fantasy worlds and don’t have to in real life – but I have noticed that it tends to lead to a kind of fatalism about the necessity of crime. Once you’ve committed a few frauds, gang-banged some lowly perps, and hacked someone’s computer, why not mug a passer-by? And, especially, once you’ve run into trouble with the law, all bets are off. A lot of cop-killing and gratuitous stuff happens as the law enforcement pressure increases. Morally not an issue, I suppose, since it’s only a game, but it’s at this point – the “hung for a sheep not a lamb” part where players realise there’s no going back – that force starts to rise up the list of solutions to common problems, and the main solution to this – killing them as chastisement – falls into my definition of bad DMing. [5]
- Isolation and neo-piracy: There’s a strong sense of cultural and social isolation in the underbelly of cyberpunk, and a strong sense of physical isolation in Space Opera campaigns, which encourages people to think of their PCs as a law unto themselves. Space Opera often has a strong feeling of semi-legal privateering about it, kind of the 17th Century in space. Again, this is fun to play and offers lots of opportunities for adventure; but it also encourages people to go native/ go AWOL/ go psycho/ go pirate. And this can spoil the fun. Fantasy role-playing tends to remove this sense of isolation by setting the characters as heroes in a religious and cultural context, or giving them an alignment they pay dearly for straying outside of. No such luck with sci-fi.
I am a big fan of morally grey settings – this blog is named after one – but I think they are easier with constraints on them in order to keep some basic structure in the role-playing. Fantasy role-playing has a lot, built in through levelling and monster power and alignment and scarcity; but, short of constantly chastising the PCs through the use of heavy weaponry (which is no fun) it’s much more difficult to maintain these constraints in a lot of sci-fi settings, and especially in cyberpunk. And unless your idea of fun DMing is “this week will be a bigger battle than last week”, the relentless pursuit of heavier firepower and more money begins to look a bit boring after a while[6]. Which is why I am leery of DMing cyberpunk campaigns.
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fn1: Note the use of the word encourage here, as opposed to other words like require or support or valorise.
fn2: Although recently I played in a Traveller campaign where I was the one encouraging the nihilistic criminal enterprise. Oh look! A kettle!
fn3: I still maintain that my nihilistic criminal suggestion from footnote 2 would have been more interesting – and have delivered a lot more virgins – than the campaign written in the book
fn4: Quite improbably, obviously, but because it’s part of the genre style no-one really cares
fn5: Serenity is an example of a story in which this happens, but it’s an adventure or a short campaign only, and there are quite a few moments in Serenity where Mal has a brilliant idea that 99% of players would completely fail to think of. Instead, they would decide to arm up and face down the next fleet to come their way, which gets really difficult to DM in a way that’s fun. This makes it hard to have the kind of over-arching mystery-story campaigns – like Serenity – in reality, because the PCs spend too much time finding blunt, brutal “solutions” to the elegant problems you set them. Though if you can carry this off, the feeling at the end of the campaign is truly awesome.
fn6: Actually, this sounds quite a bit like a lot of peoples’ fantasy RPG campaigns, doesn’t it? Especially, dare I say it, old-school campaigns…
Compromise and Conceit 
June 29, 2009 at 2:13 am
I don’t think you’ve explained at all well why it is you think the cyberpunk genre in particular (or sci-fi in general) has these flaws. As far as I can tell they are common to more or less any type of game. D&D can very easily become a game about getting heavier firepower and more money, for example.
Player attitude is the key here. I was recently reading a Monte Cook interview in which he said that the GM in a given game is responsible for everything except player buy-in. It’s part of the social contract of gaming that the players have to be willing to make the game work by, e.g., not just turning the whole thing into a nihilistic race for bigger guns.
This comment in particular interests me:
It’s really hard to interfere with PCs actions coherently, because in any sci-fi future the power of the state is so overwhelming that the one consistent thing criminal PCs can expect is that they will die horribly and probably before they even know what happened; but there’s no reward in doing this, so you have to contort your story to enable them to escape and still be challenged.
I have to ask: why on earth would you not have criminal PCs die horribly if they transgress the law in an obvious way? Punishing idiotic behaviour is precisely the sort of thing that will force the players to learn how to achieve their goals in cleverer and more subtle ways. And that will result in a much better game for all concerned – which is the “reward”. Letting players off the hook is the worst thing you can do; it encourages the bad behaviour.
It helps if you think of the players like pigeons in a Skinner box, I find.
June 29, 2009 at 1:32 pm
If the genre requires cheap and ready access to high-grade weapons and the crime bosses the PCs run into don’t have it, then the criminals are stupid. GMs have no one to blame for stupid NPCs but themselves.
June 29, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Well done Joshua, you just proved my point. The solution to PCs arming up is … get a bigger gun. None of this happens if the PCs can’t just march out and buy themselves a massive level boost. This sort of arms race stifles creativity.
Overall though you missed my point, which is not that the PCs can get bigger guns than the NPCs. It’s that the genre encourages this kind of thing as the solution to all their problems, instead of their attempting to find more creative approaches.
June 29, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I agree about buy-in, and my thinking is that this buy-in (god I hate that term) is harder to get in cyberpunk, because the genre encourages the players to consider criminal methods more than other genres. For example, it’s common for players to assume in AD&D that they won’t do certain things – if they decide to break some unwritten laws about what to do, they will come to this agreement with the DM: “let’s run an Evil Campaign”. It’s distinctive from the normal campaign.
I’m not saying that this agreement is impossible in Cyberpunk and sci-fi, just that it can be harder to gain and maintain.
As for the paragraph you comment on above – I consider it a failure to “have” to kill PCs, be it a failure of system, genre, or DM. PCs dying in tough battles is one thing, but a group of players who consistently bring this on themselves, or a world where it’s too easy, is in my view a failure. I don’t DM in order to chastise anyone, but to help them achive what they want to achieve in a suitably challenged way. Obviously this is just a matter of DM preference. Ideally a DM should be able to get players to go along with basic principles of cooperation without having to either a) spell them out or b) kill transgressors. The structure of the cyberpunk genre makes this more difficult, because of the temptations to heavy crime followed by sudden death. I would think it were strange if this problem didn’t exist – the genre wouldn’t be well reflected in the game if this didn’t happen.
Which isn’t to say that cyberpunk isn’t fun to play and DM. It has its own challenges too which make it rewarding when it works. But that aspect of the cyberpunk genre is a challenge, and I think many campaigns have fallen afoul of it.
June 29, 2009 at 9:11 pm
The examples you give aren’t the genres fault, even remotely
Example 1:
There is absolutely no reason why the GM couldn’t have thought of a scenario that made using that armor impractical. If the PCs have plausible access to a thing, then GM should be able to anticipate whatever that thing is. IF a piece of armor ruins a scenario, either go with it and improvise, or plan the scenario better. Also, the GM could’ve controlled access to the information about the toughness of the foes before the players got there. Also, how did the PCs manage to buy this armor so fast? How is it they know about a source of weapons that a bunch of drug dealers don’t? If they did something clever and creative to get them that armor, then fine, they deserve to be rewarded, if they didn’t, then why wasn’t it anticipated?
Your “arms-race” excuse is simply incorrect. The GM ALWAYS has the option to invent technologies or situations that go WAY beyond anything the characters can overcome by main force and so force the characters into thinking–it happens all the time in Star Trek. If a bunch of salaried rubes at Paramount can do it every week then the guy who managed to invent the whole amazing Compromise and Conceit campaign can do it.
Example 2:
If ALL your players are unafraid of dying, this doesn’t have to do with the genre, this has to do with their attachment to their characters and the players desire to play continuously that night/day.
If a player has a character s/he likes and so would like to see the character prosper and level up so s/he can do more and different interesting things, then no “genre convention” is going to make them indifferent to seeing their character die and having to roll a new one.
And, if the player is having fun and likes playing the game, they are going to fear dying because then they have to spend several hours NOT playing the game.
So either the PCs didn’t like their characters–so let them die–they didn’t like playing–so kill them all and be done with it and do something else–OR they sensed the GM would not let them die and took advantage of it.
If players are not genuinely afraid that they their characters will die, then they have no incentive to be creative and that’s the bottom line. It has nothing to do with the cyberpunk genre.
June 29, 2009 at 9:56 pm
The examples are probably related to my being a novice gm at the time. But if I keep chastising the players (as Noisms recommends), or if I play with the ferocious arms-race style that Joshua recommends, isn’t that going to just reduce the players’ attachment to their characters and increase their recklessness? re: example 1, I can’t remember why the characters got the armour, but this is the thing in a low law-level world, you have to argue with your players very persuasively to stop them getting the stuff (which, incidentally, I also hate doing – “but it’s law level 3!” “Nonetheless, you can’t buy battle dress” “But it’s tech level 15” “nonetheless…”; vs., in AD&D, “this town doesn’t stock healing potions” “okay”).
Compare these two scenarios:
1. the cops are way better armed than you, and they can kill you at the drop of a hat, and you live in the shadows in a world with easy access to guns; so you arm up as fast as you can
2. the cops are 0 or 1st level grunts without magic weapons, and within about 3 adventures you can slaughter them, but you don’t, you focus on plundering tombs and saving damsels
The first is cyberpunk; the second is standard AD&D, where you can overpower the city guard within about 1 level of starting, but you don’t. I remember my players didn’t take on city guards even when we still used the rule that fighters got their level in attacks against 0 lvl creatures (remember that?!) And these were the same players! (Maybe they were just weird…). Except one time, when I was playing, we said “let’s play an evil campaign”, and then we did all the things that those players had taken as the default setting in the sci-fi games, out on the fringes of space…
My nihilistic plan in the Traveller campaign I was playing recently was definitely a consequence of the isolation (my 2nd point) and our superior tech (my 1st point). We had been sent to an isolated star cluster to establish jump points for the Imperium, with no guarantee we would ever come back and no way we could be easily chased (due to the isolation). So I suggested we sell the tech to one of the local powers, and lead them on a trading mission (using the same jump-point-setting techniques we were expected to use) to the Imperium. If we were successful we’d be fabulously wealthy, massively powerful and generally revered, though there might be some social disruption for the locals. This is pure nihilism, subverting the entire precept of the campaign so you can get money and chicks even though you are betraying your own side and probably opening a big rent in the isolated society you went to. Something about the isolation just made me suggest it, and half the other players were on board…
I think I need to post about approaches to death. It’s kind of fundamental…
July 9, 2009 at 7:05 am
Sorry this is late, just got around to reading your reply.
You’re right, of course, that dying is a sort of failure – and in a fair game, it is the player’s failure, not that of the GM or the system or anything else.
I don’t see this as a problem, because in game playing failure is inherent. Whether you’re playing Snakes & Ladders, cricket, boxing, or D&D, there has to be some chance of failure or else it stops being a game. I’m not sure what it becomes – in an RPG’s case, improvised group story telling? – and it may be all well and good, but it isn’t a game.
Please understand I’m not talking about killing transgressors in the sense that I’ll kill people off who ruin the plot or mess the game up. I’m talking about killing people off for doing things that would naturally get them killed within the logic of the game world.
July 9, 2009 at 8:34 am
Agreed. My theory is that the logic of the cyberpunk game world is more likely to lead players to the types of things which would get them killed, and it’s harder to negotiate that game world in a way that is internally consistent without either becoming nihilistic outlaws or getting killed. Imagine for example that you were those Kingsnorth climate activists who raided that train (peacefully). In an AD&D-type world you’d get away with it; maybe in Shadowrun the escape would be believable; in Cyberpunk you should, just like in the real world, be more likely to get caught and then spend the rest of your life in jail. It ups the criminal ante, or restricts choices, when your chief “enemy” is an omnipotent state. And one of the main choices that seems to remain is to get into an arms race which ultimately the DM has to restrain him/herself from entering, because the DM always wins an arms race.
As i said, it can be done, but it requires greater delicacy. And it increases the risk of a systemic failure, in which PCs die too easily because it’s so easy for them to trigger bad consequences.
Also this comment function sux.
July 11, 2009 at 10:41 am
I think there’s a way of stopping wordpress doing its silly nested comment thing. (Which would be okay if it went on for longer than three bloody comments!)
Your example’s interesting because I think that’s one of those situations where the players could get away with such a thing in a Cyberpunk game if they got clever with disguises and escape routes. Obviously it’s up to the GM and the dice as to whether they’re clever enough.
That’s another nice “moralistic” Cyberpunk campaign seed actually – militant protestors. As a rule I despise protestors but that wouldn’t stop it being a fun and interesting game.
I can’t remember if “protestor” is spelt with an ‘o’ or an ‘e’ at the end.
July 11, 2009 at 11:06 am
I fixed it I think. Threaded comments are soooo 1990s.
The players can definitely get away with the example if they’re clever, but all these kinds of limitations make the game harder to play in a balanced way. Mistakes are more readily punished, etc.
I don’t know why people despise protesters – sure it’s boring and a bit silly, but we’d still be working 12 hour days without them. And if our govts had listened to them there would be 180 more British soldiers alive today. 360 if you include the objections to an Afghan campaign which is clearly going into the ditch. That doesn’t seem like something particularly despicable to me.
But the protester campaign you describe is actually a really good example of building in “soft” constraints which make Cyberpunk functional. The PCs could start off as pacifist and the state would respond in a not-so-heavy-handed way, but as the state increased its viciousness, they could arm up a little [or vice versa, depending on one’s perspective], and at every stage they would have to have some kind of debate about the consequences. Why don’t protesters take pikes to demonstrations where they know police will have horses? Because they don’t want to, and for all their posturing the police know that the demonstrators don’t want to – or they’d come in armoured cars. It’s a constraint which limits the arms race element of things, but very definitely (and visibly) represents the asymmetrical power of the state vs. the people in the shadows. And there’d be all sorts of potential side adventures – agents provocateur, nasty reps from other groups, terrorist fractions, “rogue elements” in the police, constant trigger points to encourage the PCs to arm up… of course, you’d have to come up with a mechanic for handling the political debates, because nobody would ever want to do them in detail [shudder]. And in a cyberpunk world there could be some really nasty underlying political conspiracy too…
This is exactly what I think is missing in a basic cyberpunk game, these kinds of inbuilt constraints on the pace at which arms are accrued and used. Obviously our demonstrators would be from the petty bourgeoisie, so well resourced and able to buy nasty stuff on the black market. But they don’t because it’s explicitly not part of their ethos. However, as time passes, these constraints would loosen, essentially meaning that the process of arming-up would be gradual. And if you put in a mechanic for maintaining public popularity, that mechanic could act as a restraint on police willingness to respond with excessive force – exactly the types of constraints missing in a standard cyberpunk game.
July 12, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Well let’s not get started on Iraq and Afghanistan because I can tell we wouldn’t see eye to eye. 😉 My complaint isn’t with protestors in say Iran or 1830s Britain, where there is/was something to protest about. But protesting in Britain in 2009 is pretty much universally a way for people to feel self-righteous and convince themselves they’re doing something worthwhile without actually doing anything worthwhile whatsoever. An example: a lot of my friends were out on the streets of Liverpool protesting at the election of two BNP MEPs; if any of them and people like them had actually bothered to vote in that election then maybe the results would have been different!
You’re right about the soft constraints: the simplest one of all, and the one which I always use, is that walking around wearing armour and carrying guns is asking for trouble and no intelligent person would do it. Which works remarkably well!
July 12, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Surely regardless of your opinion on the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war, you accept that a war is worth demonstrating about? I agree totally about the strange propensity of people to notice after they didn’t vote that they have something to protest about. My partner worked with a Muslim woman who didn’t vote, and then was shocked that the BNP got in. Hmmm…
These soft constraints are exactly what is not there in cyberpunk, at least outside of the corporate areas of the city. Hence the trend to nihilism. Maybe the best way to control the cyberpunk game is to set up these sub-genres with their own inherent constraints.
July 13, 2009 at 3:15 am
To be honest I think it’s in the nature of governments that once a war is underway no amount of protesting (short of a 1917 Russia style revolution) is going to stop it. So to be honest, no, I don’t think protesting serves much purpose except to make people feel better – it allows you to convince yourself that you are divorced from the cause of thousands of deaths. “Not in my name,” etc. Which, okay, is a valid human impulse but at root a rather narcissistic one.
I think the soft constraints are there in cyberpunk even outside of the corporate areas of the city – just maybe not in the very depths of the ghetto. I suppose the conclusion we have to draw is that the genre is flexible enough to incorporate different understandings about what it consists of!
July 15, 2009 at 12:00 am
I think the Vietnam war might stand as evidence against that claim, and the demonstrations against the Iraq war happened before it started so it was hardly too late for people to listen. I think your argument has a might-makes-right element to it which might be effective but isn’t right; and doesn’t bear up under recent historical analysis. I think you’ll also find that the million or so British people who marched against the war mostly did so to stop the war, not out of narcissism. Such an accusation is actually pretty mean-spirited. But now we’re going way off track.
July 21, 2009 at 6:38 am
Might doesn’t make right but might counts for a lot. You have to be pragmatic about these things. The Vietnam War is a case in point: protests are commonly cited as the reason for US failure, but in fact that reason for the defeat was simply that the US couldn’t win – its military was tactically superior to the North Vietnamese but not strategically so. The defeat was primarily because of a failure to understand the terms under which the North Vietnamese were fighting.
The demonstrations prior to the Iraq war are another case in point – they had little or no impact, and thanks to both tactical and strategic superiority of the allies over the militants, the war has been a success (eventually).
It may be mean-spirited to dismiss the marchers as narcissistic but it’s what I believe. I don’t have a lot of time for moral outrage when it’s paraded around in public like that. It’s hypocrisy. Those people are just like the pharisees of Jesus’ time: obsessed with presenting an image of righteousness to the world (“look at me and how passionate I am about peace!”), when what’s really important is how one acts and what one believes.
Protests were a key part of the civil rights movement, don’t get me wrong. But I think the difference between repressed groups challenging for their rights and holier-than-thou types proclaiming their morality from the rooftops is fairly clear.
July 26, 2009 at 5:12 pm
[That was me, ‘noisms’, by the way.]
February 11, 2011 at 3:35 pm
[…] just the right grittiness to make the play style more interesting. I think it comes with the challenges of Nihilism I’ve previously expressed concern about in “punky” and hi-tech settings, but the […]
July 16, 2011 at 12:00 am
My two cents, here: http://blackcampbell.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/some-thoughts-on-nihilism-in-rpg-settings/