Law, what is it good for

[SheikhJahbooty]

Sorry if this post sounds negative. I'm going through some stuff. Skip the italics paragraph if you don't care about my horrible condition.

Kidney stone that won't pass, horrifying agony, drugs that take away pain but make me feel different sorts of bad, American, meaning medical insurance that I'm sure will try to weasel out of paying any cent they possibly can and I can't afford the bill that I expect to see for the surgery to remove the stone.

I was tinkering with the idea of doing a communist cyberpunk thingie myself.

First thing's first, a lot of the stuff on Kuma's list are redundant. Sultanate, for example. It's just a kingdom. It is in fact the Arabic word for kingdom. Shahy (the Farsi word for Kingdom) isn't on the list. I meet more Christian Arabs than Christian Iranians. There's a reason that WangGuo (Chinese for kingdom) isn't on the list. It would be silly and redundant. We also wouldn't make a list that has Theocracy, Papacy, and Caliphate.

And some of the items aren't even governmental systems. The big one being Communism. So you're going to do a communist cyberpunk game? Everyone will be hippies living on communes? Oh that sounds nice. See the problem? Communism isn't a government. Capitalism isn't on the list. Communism is an economic system. Ideally, according to the communist manifesto, it should hinge upon "to each according to his needs." and "from each according to his abilities."

While the Soviet Union and Red China didn't exactly measure up to this ideal, there might be some hippy communes or kibbutzes that do.

This is not to discourage Kumakami. I just want to make clear how much he will have to do to impress me on this front. Just adding communism to Cyberpunk doesn't make it any different from Mike Pondsmith adding a Giri stat to Cyberpunk v3.0.

Obviously Cyberpunk is outdated and needs to revamped to be relevant to people who don't spike their hair and wear chrome mirrorshades (i.e. everyone, unless you're still living in the 80s). So I'd really like to see something cool and relevant to the people today.

The things people were concerned with in the 80s were different. Megacorporations? The only thing I'm afraid of from a megacorporation is that it will declare bankruptcy, demand a huge government bailout, and still close their doors because they gave all the money to their executives. 20 to 30 years after the 80s we've realized that corporations, when unregulated by the government do not rule everything; their opportunistic fumbling wrecks everything.

Celebrity is different today. We have youtube celebrities. People don't form gangs based on what music they like. They form ad hoc associations based on what internet memes they've been infected with. (I wish there was a cure for the Boxxy meme.)

Consumerism was everywhere in the 80s, but right here in this thread, someone has considered its demise. It's not surprising, people can order hand made crafts off Etsy. People can download music and movies off of their P2P networks, and burn them to CDs and DVDs (spool of 100 for less than $20).

The reason I was thinking about doing a communist cyberpunk game, or setting document at least, is because of the movie, Kin Dza Dza (I think its from the 70s, Soviet Union, sci-fi, comedy of errors, about how everyone in space sucks). I thought, "Oh goodness, the whole world's like this now. This is what the people of today are afraid of, that everyone is some jerk trying to rip us off (get us in some predatory lending scheme, predatory, like a shark, a loan shark), and that our government officials will be too gullible to not get involved in some stupid war or not support a business that is failing because nobody wants their products. We're afraid of a world full of petty dictators each screaming about how such and such thing is evil and such and such thing is good and often in direct conflict with each other or even their own holy books, and each petty dictator will find a way to make your life miserable."

I mean, an economically exhausted nation giving money to failing businesses who don't even make their products in your nation (I'm looking at American car manufacturers) is the same thing as the Soviet state economy keeping the shoe factory open to keep the workers at work even though everyone has three pairs of shoes but nothing to eat.

That was as far as I got because I felt like I needed a big bad guy, not just, you know, little bureaucrats each getting in your way or refusing to do their job because you offend their sensibilities in some way. I need a reason for the characters to be hard core, punk rock style rebels. The first thing that comes to mind is to put in some overarching fascist state, but we've all seen the movie Brazil.

And Brazil doesn't make a lot of sense with modern computers, let alone futuristic ones. The little netbook I'm writing this on can use encryption that the government (heck nobody) can routinely crack. Any serious subversive effort against business or government would be impossible or at least hellishly difficult to stop. We've already seen this with torrents. The RIAA and its ilk overseas aren't even trying anymore on that front. They keep failing to shut down Pirate Bay but if you type anything plus the word torrent into Google, you're more likely to find a live torrent of what you're looking for than if you went to Pirate Bay. Good luck shutting Google down.

So... well... maybe we should start a thread about how to make cyberpunk good again.

[misterecho]

I created the above mentioned thread

[Endy]

Thank you for this. If nothing else it will give me a few ideas as jumping-off points.

[disco soup]

Respectfully nitpicking: Capitalism, Communism and Socialism are not government types, but economy types. Conceivably, most any government type may utilize any of those three systems.

[misterecho]

Respectful nitpicking is greatly appreciated here on 1km1kt

[kumakami]

[SheikhJahbooty]

This will be my last post to this thread unless it morphs into something like “How do we make government's relevant to the PCs in a Traveller campaign?” (Seriously, how many times have we rolled up a world or even whole star system and it told us what type of government ruled the system and it never, absolutely never has come up any time I have ever played Traveller.) or something like, “Making up a totally fictitious world for a spy game and everyone post all the different types of governments you can think of.” or something like, “Finally found a group to play Kromosome for the Amazing Engine, and was interested in how different nations handle property rights.” You know, some RPG reason to discuss this stuff, because it's kind of silly to me to have to point out that a kibbutz is a commune, thus communist, but it is obviously run differently than the Soviet Union. The two are both communist, but have vastly different governing structures.

Who is more communist? Libya, in which the state owns all the land and determines it's use, or France, in which a large portion of the population works for the government in some way, and every citizen can at any time quit his job and the government will continue to provide him with medical care and income for food and housing?

Who is more capitalist? America, where I can be sued for firing an employee for a frivolous reason, or Denmark, where I, as a capitalist, have the right to do what I damn well please with my business, my property? Before you answer, remember that in Denmark, they have national health care, and people can go on the dole, so they need not participate in the capitalist economy, but in America, nobody ever has a right to medical care and you will have no income or medical insurance if you lose your job. Every resident ultimately must participate in the capitalist economy. (After a few months of unemployment check you become homeless unless you have savings or generous friends or family. It happened to a couple of friends of mine in this recession. They are now squatters living in an abandoned building.)

Remember that corporations (financial entities) are granted more or less rights and are demanded of more or less responsibilities based one time and place. In some countries all property must be owned by actual living people, never by corporations. In some places, certain types of property must be owned by citizens. It is not unusual for a nation to deny non-citizens the right to own land, meaning in order to own part of that country, you must be a citizen. In America, at one time, corporate charters were revoked for illegal business practices. It was only after the civil war that corporations could find a patsy to take the blame for their dirty dealings and still stay in business.

So property rights, how much a government owns and the people own, how much foreigners can own versus citizens, what will cause a government to take away a corporate charter, what you can do with your capital, anti-trust laws, housing laws, employee laws, it's a messy way to define a government.

Let's look at a very easy way to define a government. We'll look at who chooses what the government does.

1. One person – Autocracy
2. Small group of people – Oligarchy
3. Small group of people chosen by most of the people – Republic
4. Most of the people most of the time (all democracies and republics deny votes to people below a certain age and that age is different from country to country, and even in a true and total democracy, there will be some people with authority to make decisions in crises.) – Democracy
5. Whoever happens to be around and cares – Anarchy
6. Your friend, the computer – Cybercracy (Am I the only one who remembers that in the 1979 Buck Rogers their government and courts were run by computerized overlords including the loveable Dr. Theopolis?)

Everything else is just details.

A monarchy or kingdom or sultanate or wanguo or whatever you want to call it is just an autocracy that was inherited from the last autocract. Otherwise we tend to call them dictators.

What Kumakami keeps trying to say communism is, is an oligarchy where that oligarchy has sole authority over the means of production in the community. Any encyclopedia will disagree with this. A state controlled economy can be run by a dictator (Castro), a small group (the Soviet Socialist Party), by all the people (a hippy commune), or by our friend, the computer.

A plutocracy can similarly be a town run by a privately owned business (an autocracy). It can be a nation where only people above a certain level of wealth have any say in politics (an oligarchy), or it can be a corporate system where anyone can buy a vote, or more than one vote. Theoretically, (talking about designing game worlds) a nation might levy a citizen tax. If you can't pay it, you don't get a vote. A very common form of plutocracy in the past was a government where only property owners were considered citizens (Timocracy). Originally, America was this way.

Oligarchies, democracies and republics (or representative democracies) can limit the rights of citizenship in a number of ways, not just by wealth, so if a nation has a state controlled economy, and everyone is supposed to have the same access to wealth (communism) you can still have a disenfranchised class, perhaps based on religion (you could create a fantasy or futuristic religion that tends to get the shaft a lot, like Judaism, or the communists could be atheists, like Marx, and discriminate against anyone who remains loyal to any religion), region (colonies and recently annexed or conquered territories always get the shaft), family history (being descended from capitalists might be worthy of discrimination, and the tutsi / hutu thing was whether or not your ancestors were in or out of favor among the previous colonial powers), ethnicity (some ethnic groups in Russia still get no respect), accent (how many brain surgeons and physicist have southern accents, or pikey accents in England), obvious physical differences (like skin color or the shape of one's eyes, in many places people can share the same culture and language, the same ethnicity, and have different skin colors, in Jamaica members of the same family can have different social standing based on the differing shades of their skin), educational level (a theocracy might be ruled by an oligarchy, a council of scholars, or a democracy might demand that one can pass a test before being allowed to register to vote as was done in America at one time), occupation (militocracy, syndicracy), etc.

And remember that in republics, what disqualifies you from holding political office may not disqualify you from being a citizen. Americans are citizens at 18, and can vote, but must be 35 (iirc) to be the president. Catholics can obviously be American citizens; nobody would argue with that, but many people seriously considered that because JFK was Catholic, he shouldn't be president.

Fantasy governments might limit political power to people capable of certain athletics, people who have completed certain professional requirements (military service, for example), people with super powers, magic ability, psionics, etc.

One important note is that anarchy always becomes another form of government rather quickly unless the individual people have enough power to seriously screw up how things work. So fantasy settings seldom really have a lack of recognized authority. There's usually some tribal warlord or group of elders, or a social stricture to allow someone older to make the decisions. Anarchism failed in Spain because there is no way informal authority can compete with fascist authority in raising and organizing a military force. But Anarchism may be the way of the future. Exercising large-scale political power in the modern world is increasingly fragile and complex. A dozen men with construction tools and normal transportation technology mounted a very successful attack on America's business capitol and the building that houses our military command. Imagine what might happen when people live in a world with space ships, or people can perform genetic engineering in a clinic. It might just become impossible to have a government larger and more long lasting than how a few hundred people have decided to do things that year. Corey Doctorow postulated a type of anarchy called an ad-hocracy, because it kind of forms ad hoc and can dissolve in an equally subtle and un-noteworthy manner. People cannot be forced into any particular governmental system in an ad-hocracy because every individual could potentially gain the skills and resources to create a contagious bio-weapon capable of wiping out a whole army overnight.

Now that I've taken up all this space discussing variations in government, and even some possibilities not seen in this world but that could easily be seen in the worlds we create, let me answer the thread topic. “What is it good for?” Unless you are playing a game in which the PCs are rewarded for interacting with the government, or they are penalized for ignoring it, then it's good for nothing. If I land on a planet to buy and sell cargo, I don't need to know who makes the laws. If the planet is a religious Muslim or Mormon or whatever planet and that means selling my shipment of Xexedian wine to them would be illegal, that makes a difference to my character and to me as a player, not whether that law was passed through the sultan's decree or the consensus of the scholars or through democratic vote. If the GM does insist on making up that the government is by the sultan or elders or a senate or popular vote, then the GM had better make sure the PCs can use that information to change the laws, either appealing to the sultan, gaining audience before a senate or starting pirate broadcasts to change the way people vote.

[Rob Lang]

Superb post, there Sheikh. Thanks for sharing! I am sure that whole post could be made into a superb infographic of some kind.

I think specifying the government simply is important because it acts as flavour and drives motivation of people on the planet. Although the characters may not interact with the government directly, the decisions that the government makes and the manner in which it operates will affect those the PCs interact with.

I do like your general point that you should not include anything in a setting that PCs will never interact with - I think government is one of those things because it sets a modus operandi for the society as a whole.

[Kinslayer]

Descriptions of government serve much the same role as alignment: they are shorthand descriptions of assumptions and behaviours.

If I describe Formour as a kingdom, for example, there is almost certainly either a king &/or queen, but other feudal baggage gets brought along. I can thus describe an encounter about having to avoid the local baron's knights without the players batting an eye. If I try to do the same thing in the Isle of Stratos--described as a democracy (with even minor issues debated in public forum rather than using strong representation)--then the players will wonder what's up? The knights and noblemen would be out of place there. Similarly, if I describe a nation as being a theocracy, a religious character is expected to colour the land. Or a severe oligarchic communist state will automatically summon images of Stalin's Soviet Union.

It's not perfect. That's what the rest of a nation's write-up is for: to explain how Formour isn't a true classical feodality, or how the Bizzannite Empire is more of a confederacy than the Heldanic Confederation ever will be.