We see a bunch of talk about #cyberpunk #ttrpg systems & how games miss some of the more economic & socio-political systems that are critical to the genre. Sometimes I think we left too much about those systems as subtext, so figured it might be fun to talk about systems

When we designed @identeco, we perceived of a world where the veil had been removed & the corporate state openly ran the world. Their entire concept was to keep the populace mollified & unwilling to rise up.

Revolutions require 3.5% in the streets, indicating that probably 40% sympathetic to your cause. This doesn’t seem like much, but today, that would mean just over 11.5 mil people. In our world, The 12-day War in 2031 is the closest the U.S. comes & it starts the corp take over.

People in power will do anything to maintain that power. So now, America is a set of corp-run city states, governed by the largest corps in the metro. They own, pay for & control all aspects of society. All in the aim of maintaining their power and suppressing revolutions.

The entire conceit of the corporate ruling class is just to give up just enough money & power to keep it under that 3.5% threshold.

As for the players/characters in the game, this game was not designed for the players to merely take money from the corps in order to do their black bag missions (though it is *an* option) but for them to be some of the only ones who realize the system is fucked. And fight.

Why do we have have backgrounds & classes that are part of the system? Even when we believe that we are working within bad systems to improve it, we can still be complicit. The LEO & Operative begin the game, at the very minimum complicit with or acting to maintain systems.

Characters with the CORP background begin their lives complicit in the systems that have been in place in @identeco for the preceding 50 years. The players can choose to run their characters having realized they're complicit in those systems & working to fight against them.

This is also why we have character creation begin with background (CORP, FRINGER, GROUNDER) & that choice restricts or allows certain classes, in addition to guiding how the player thinks about that class or how they might play it.

Are all the corporations faceless evil? No, they aren't. No one is the villain in their own story. Many of them feel what they do is for the betterment of mankind, many of them do good things. You can see examples of that here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016YGYXVK/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_3BO8EbWVXJ4WT

But at the end of the day, it is ALL about them maintaining their power in order to accomplish their own agendas. Bearing in mind those agendas will not always be evil per se. But maintaining that power means they will do things that harm the underclasses.

We thought and wrote extensively about these systems and how it relates to the players and the world at large.

Anyway, go take a glance

http://playidenteco.com 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/270049/IDENTECO-Core-Rule-Book

#indiedev #indiegame #ttrpg #rpg #cyberpunk #punk #gaming #amwriting #analog