Bugbears: Cyberpunk. Corps and the Law.

I don’t just discuss fantasy rpgs here. No, no, I also sometimes complain.

Today’s complaint, which I hope to eventually grow into constructive criticism as opposed to just me bitching, is about Cyberpunk.

Wikipedia defines Cyberpunk as..

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on "a combination of low life and high tech"^[1] featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.^[2]

Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, J.G. Ballard, Philip Jose Farmer, and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. Released in 1984, William Gibson’s influential debut novel Neuromancer would help solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker.

Now I bring this up because a person bugbear of mine is the Megacorp. Not because I have a problem with the idea of a large corporation, or even a problem with the idea of an abusive mercantile entity. No, no, my problem with it is the too-cool-for-school approach most Cyberpunk games, and indeed almost the entire cyberpunk genre takes towards it.

We’re all familiar with the common tale of Cyberpunk. Everyone’s dirt poor. Everyone’s oppressed and put upon. The wealthy elites loom above all in their palatial wonderment achieved by robbing the plucky small populace of their hard labor and blah blah blah.

This is where my problem comes from? Why? Because I have a business degree. Despite what the tattooed barrista at the coffee shop who wasted his time on a PoliSci degree has told you, economies are not zero sum games. Aside from genuine thieves, very few people get rich by specifically disenfranchising others.

Now. Let’s start our examination of Cyberpunk stuff by examining frequent bugbears. The megacorp's association with law enforcement.

Shadowrun, like most cyberpunk series, predisposes that the corporations (with their ‘armies of lawyers’) are kingdoms onto their own, who flout a weak and meaningless law and who resolve their disputes through things like back alley assassination, blackmail and the like.

The first question I ask myself with this, is.. Why?

We’re told mega-corporations are essentially defacto voluntarily joined nation states that operate on a mercantile basis. Within their walls, their laws and regulations reign, and all law enforcement outside of those walls is a privately run subsidiary of the dreaded corps. Firstly, any country stupid enough to pass law enforcement off to entirely privately run agencies has abandoned its right to call itself a country unless that privately own agency is the King's guard and the King runs the country. Secondly, no mega-corporation run by a sane human being would want this arrangement.

One of the first things were taught in Contract law is the importance of the well maintained market place, and that requires clear non-arbitrary laws. That is, a market place where contracts are upheld. One of the functions of Government, some have argued the only function, is to operate as a neutral and disinterested arbiter of contract disputes via the law.

Cyberpunk wants its cake and wants to eat it too. It wants the ‘evils of privatization’ with privately run police forces, but doesn’t seem to recognize that the companies who don’t run these PPFs (Private Police Forces) are beholden by default to those who do, and that you can’t really have a real civil justice department when you’ve got dozens of clearly non-neutral actors running around. Why would I trust a tort ruling based on evidence discovered by a PPF owned by a company who is my competitor, what happens if two PPFs both collect evidence. Who represents the final say? Who’ll enforce my warranty on those parts that I SpookCorp bought from FireAntCorp? Do I need to invade them like a freaking Viking overlord to get my $600.00 back on shipping?

And if we try to say the police and justice departments still exist, then the PPFs are just security firms, and don’t really have justifiable authority to operate in ways that flout the law of the country they’re in. See. Governments are really, really freaking pissy when people start muscling in on their ‘job’ of being the final authority and the guy in charge.  

A true cynic could argue that a successful government is just like a crime family made big, with taxes for military and police being a giant protection racket. I don’t hold to that, but the rationale that the bigger bunch doesn’t want people ‘muscling on their turf’ still comes into play.

Now, not all cyberpunk buys into that. Robocop is cyberpunk, and OCP clearly has legal troubles despite apparently owning the police. I’m not sure how the hell that works, but I reason it might be because they only own Detroit’s police department. And well, Detroit.

You see, there are people who think that passing a law magically changes human nature, but in reality, you need police for that nasty ‘enforcement of the law thing.’ Libertarians sometimes say that all laws are ultimately enforced by violence, and get tut-tutted, but in reality, they’re quite on the level with it.

In the real world, let’s say I’m the head of FireAntCorp, we’re a smoke and fire factory who somehow commands the power of a zaibatsu and produces all sorts of products.  I get into a tort issue. See, I was supposed to ship two hundred crates of FireAntCorp brand Fire Ants to SuckerCo. But, because I’m an evil corporation what corporates, I decided to only ship one hundred and seventy five and stick it to him for the extra twenty five. So he files a civil court case against me for replacement of damages.

We here at FireAntCorp tell him to go pound. He goes to a court. Our mutual armies of lawyers do their thing. Let’s assume his are better than mine. We lose. I decide to not pay him, why should I? I command FireAntPPF.

So, SuckerCO sends nice people to collect. I tell them to go pound. SuckerCO goes to the government about how I’m violating a court decision to pay him, and they can’t just take it out of a bank (let’s assume all the banks belong to me, for some strange senseless cyberpunk reason). The government sends nice people. I tell them to go pound.

They send NOT NICE people. People with arms, with the aim to take the court decided moneys and rebuke me rather strictly for my lack of compliance. And if I decide to fight back, I graduate from a bad business partner to an insurrectionist, and my punishment goes up from probably some fines and some minor jail time, to potentially the gallows.  Why? Because if they don’t inflict an appropriate punishment on me for flouting their authority, then their decision making process, their supposed authority and their entire reason for existence gets thrown into the can.

If I can just ignore a court decision they don’t like, then those court decisions are meaningless.  Now, I could bribe them, or hold things up in court, or a thousand other dickbag maneuvers, but those for the most part (bribery aside) are legal. That is to say, something decided on as part of that whole neutral playing field of rules thing.     

If I’m SuckerCO, I want a stable legal system. Even if I’m FireAntCorp, I want one. Because I can’t bribe everyone, but I can hire specialists (well paid ones) to find me loopholes or exceptions to protect me. This means business is predictable, and therefore we don’t need to worry about one another shivving the other or not being able to get paid.  

Most Cyberpunk Corporations you see, have just made themselves into over glorified crime families. Except that the reason why businessmen are rich and die in expensive mansions at the age of 80+ and most crime bosses are middle class at best and die in crappy McMansions at around fifty, is because legit businessmen don’t need to exert force personally to assure they get paid every time they try to sell something, and don’t generally need to worry about getting shot gunned if someone thought the deal was bad.

Unless you’re in Russia.

The Problem of Loot

Treasure used to be why adventurers did their thing. OSR games like ACKs try to reclaim this. See, back in 1e, your xp was linked almost directly to how much gold you were able to drag out of the specific necrotic hellhole you and your compatriots decided to go to. That's why you were adventurers. You dealt with kobolds, goblins and type VI demons because they had shiny gold, that you wanted to procure and spend on wenches, ale and strongholds.

This mercenary aspect faded away as time went on.

Folks like the RPG Pundit over at this link think that this is partially because of a change over to a more story or 'novel' approach to RPGs.

I kind of agree. I mean, 1e D&D gave the referee the express title of 'Dungeon Master' whereas modern games use a softer Games Master, or even Storyteller. A series of adventures in D&D was referred to as a "Campaign," Pathfinder RPG seems to prefer 'Chronicle.' However, the change from mercenary adventurers to story heroes, resulted in a problem.

That problem was loot.

See. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. When you want to procure it to spend on fortresses, nights with friendly company, buying off your father's house's mortgage or paying off gambling debts, that money is a pretty good motivator. The money is the end. Its what you're doing the stuff for.

In a story based campaign though, and most modern systems, money is a means. The hero in 1e who found 10,000gp in a chest had 'won' his adventure and would fill his pockets and run back home to spend it. The hero in pathfinder who finds 10,000gp likely spends it immediately on some item to use against the big bad, or to craft. These sound similar, but there's a major difference.

In 1e and OSR, you couldn't spend money on magic items, or stat boosters, or the like. Once you graduated past a certain point, money became something you horded up, or something you turned into businesses or castles, or the like. When you have 85k in the kitty, and a few beers and a night's company cost 100gp, you start thinking bigger and start buying land and saying 'to hell with spinning wheels.' ACKs actually made pissing your money away on stuff like lavish parties or fun trips a game mechanic for building up the xp of successor characters, making the point that gold is either used for something useful, or for xp even clearer.

Meanwhile, modern Pathfinder and D&D are mired by wealth by level. The idea that you should only be so rich at a certain level, because being able to buy magic items, devices, and the like results in you having a gear advantage over others. This causes problems because now things like truly impressive treasure hordes risk severely imbalacing the game.

In OSR if your party of adventurers took down a dragon and came to town with 250k each to their name, they'd either be parted with it by a collection of conmen, fritter it away, or discover that they had to find a good place to hide it. Or they'd retire.

So, our problem these days boils down to the fact that players want money, cool treasure and they want it in sufficient piles to justify their effforts, with the unfortunate irony that people don't seem to appreciate the glittering gold and precious baubles for what they are unless they can spend them to buy an upgrade to their magic armor.

We've got 17th level adventurers with zero liquidity these days. Its kind of weird. The OSR valued money above all else, modern adventuring seems to have no value for it at all unless its buying new weapons/armor/spells. On one hand, we have heroes who are only interested in the mercenary, and on the other we have ones who are walking poor except for having pants on that could bankrupt a small country.

I honestly have no idea how to 'fix' this though.

Old Farts Demanding Swords: Opportunity Costs

Economics is a big deal in world building. You don’t necessarily  need charts with commodities, and arbitrage rates and what tax percentage is demanded in Elfyland or Dwarvyland, but you do need to understand some basics. See, Economics, is one of the most truly human of all fields.

Now, let’s get started, and this may be boring. If you find it that way, I apologize.

Let’s posit we have two nations. A and B. And that each of these nations produce two products. They produce Widgets and Gimbles. Widgets are a time honored economic commodity, you see.

Nation A Produces 10 Widgets and 5 Gimbles every month with their 30 man workforce. Half of their workforce works on either, so 15 widget makers and 15 gimble makers.

Nation B Produces 2 Widgets and 4 Gimbles every month with their 20 man workforce. Their labor distribution is similar.

Nation A’s widget makers are more efficient then nation B’s. Each worker in A, per month can make 2/3rds of a Widget and 1/3rd of a gimble.

Nation B’s widget makers make 2/10ths of a widget and 4/10^th of a gimble, per month.

Even though nation A is cranking out more gimbles and widgets then B, they’re less efficient (marginally) at making gimbles then B is, and they are monumentally better at making widgets. Therefore, they would gain more by selling B their widgets (and focusing production on them) and leaving their native gimble production to the way side (and benefiting from the efficiency of B in producing them) to benefit from trade.

Whenever A is making a gimble, its losing out on widget production it could be doing. This is an example of Opportunity Cost.

Opportunity Cost represents the value of a course of action when making a decision. For example, the choice by A to fucs on gimbles would represent a net loss in Widget production. That’s a cost. That’s something that gets weighed when a decision is made. Everyone does this. You probably did it a few times just today. You made that choice when you chose to keep reading this post instead of flipping on a Youtube video or going outside.

A high level character has this opportunity cost issue as well. A character at high levels has higher demands on his time, and his actions have a larger weight. Remember, decisions that matter, means player input matters.

An archmage might be able to blast through an orc tribe effortlessly in half an afternoon, but while he’s doing that he isn’t performing necessary spell research, attacking a higher level threat, defending the king from people trying to assassinate him, wooing his hot elf sorceress companion or managing his garden of magical man-eating rutabegas.

Trying to propose it as some sort of ‘cold war’ scenario between high level people is wrongheaded. The reason why Manshoon doesn’t crush every 7^th level band of adventurers isn’t because he’s worried Elminister would do the same to 7^th level evil parties. He’s Neutral Evil. He doesn’t give a shit about some random bunch of  7^th level jerks. It’s because he has better stuff to do. And that. That ladies and gentlemen is why you need world building to solve this high level problem.

If all that occupies Karzog the unspeakable is conquering the kingdom run by a fifth level fighter, and his opposition is a party of 6^th level yobbos, then there should be no reason stopping him from finding them and eradicating them.

Alternatively, if Karzog has other problems to deal with, then it balances out. If Karzog can’t go flitting about for fear that his lieutenant will take over his base while he’s on gallivant, or that he won’t be able to plumb the mysteries of the amber throne (which is why he wants to conquer the kingdom, for the money), or that he is simply too lazy, there’s more of a reason for him to be a ‘don’t bother me, I have men for this!’ homebody until the proverbial excrement hits the fan.

Notice I made reasons that don’t involve some fear of a bigger scarier wizard somewhere. He just has better stuff to do, then go traipsing around for people causing trouble to his plans, who are literally the reason he has minions. He’s too old, too rich, and too magical to be bothered. Now if the players cause significant problems, he should definitely come out to punch them, but it’s unlikely they’d be causing problems of that level, until they can at least weather a nose-bloodying from the guy.

As a DM, it’s important to make this point early. High level people are doing things. They have stuff to do. Things to accomplish, and demands on their time and resources. This is important to teach early on, because it lets you teach them more thoroughly to the players when the players get to high level.

Let’s say our players are 17^th level. They are movers. They are shakers. They are bad asses. Their foe has a plot to conquer a kingdom they rather like, and is moving on multiple angles. They heard a rumor about a magic sword he wants that some orc tribe has (it might be a feint or but is really dangerous if real), and they heard about how he’s going to be unleashing an atropal from the cage of ages, and that he’s been feeding information to a potential protégé working with the cult of fire ants. That’s three problems. Three problems that require expenditure of time, blood and treasure. Now the protégé is probably easy enough to smash, and the orc tribe is positively inconsequential, but going after either of those means that the players aren’t stopping that atropal from being unleashed. The resources they’d need to expend to blast the orcs out of existence are stuff they’d really like to have in their quivers fighting the big guys.

So the players do what high level folks do. They delegate. They take eight thousand gold out of the kitty and find a bunch of adventurers who are willing to grab a sword for them from a tribe of orcs. Maybe they send their followers or pay sixteen thousand to a rougher bunch to deal with that cleric.

Could they handle both? Hell yes.

Are the orcs with the sword, the protégé cleric and the atropal all significant terrible dangers to the world? Yes!

Do they have the time do take care of all of them at the same time? No!

And so three groups take care of the problems. Three equally meritorious problems.

If the players in this scenario are the guys grabbing the sword, that doesn’t mean that their actions are meaningless just because they aren’t stopping an atropal, far from it, that sword might be freaking vital to the enemy plan.

If the players are the guys stopping the protégé they’re stopping an evil cleric and freeing the land from the tyranny of fire ant based religion.

Their heroism isn’t diminished because there’s a bigger fish. And if the players at low level see why their small contribution is so important, they’ll likely not feel like the guys at the kid’s table, they’ll have buy-in, they’re part of the group saving the world. They don’t feel like they’re the only guys doing anything and the high level guys are just playing cryptic grab ass.

And this means that if later in the campaign the heroes who took down the atropal are themselves taken down, the heroes feel like there’s a progression for them to step up into. The apprentice adventurer grows to become the patron.

And then, at last it makes sense to the players why some bearded jerk giving out jobs might unload on them if they got tetchy at him, because it’s what they would do if some ingrate adventurers decided to try to throw down on them.