Help finding old RPG that was here on 1km1kt

[Kinslayer]

I always thought that the core premise of that movie was a bit off. He could not access the data himself. Indeed, that would have been counter to the very point. His cybernetics were in essence just a surgically implanted flash drive. It would have been much simpler and cheaper (though less scifantastic) to have some coke mule shove a flash drive up their rectum to transport it.

[kumakami]

[misterecho]

Also, we can transfer Gigabytes of data securely, over networks. So why try to transport it physically?

[Kinslayer]

To give the pc's something to do?

That brings up an interesting point for me. Sci-fi settings inherently depend on a whole bunch of very smart people to invent the fantastic gadgetry we want to use in our games. However, far too many depend on no one being smart enough to point out logical problems in said setting. Ultimately, I know, it boils down to the author being one person, and thus unable to think of everything.

I'd like a setting that has been thoroughly savaged by the sort of jaded nit-picker gamer of which I am a member. That is, cybernetics is really, really cool, but power armour does pretty much the same thing, and avoids much of the problems. Using remote drones avoids even more. An anarchic society of extraterritorial nation-corps makes for interesting reading and interesting gaming. But it would be horrible to live in such a world. And what stops a defence contractor--or better yet, a foreign power--from steamrolling over all of the coffee-shops-as-countries and reinstituting a new de facto government?

[Thought]

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Both the Dixie Flatline and I have a few things to say about brain uploading. For one, I'm against it - from that point on the storied memories/computer are a different entity from me. So if I die, I'm still dead, but something with a lot of my knowledge continues on. As Woody Allen said "I do not wish to gain immortality through my work. I want immortality through not dying".

As to the less extreme of simply brain couriers, its a classic case of writers (and most of society) seeing what a revolution telecommunications brings. When the story was written, 1981, the net had a few hundred military & university subscribers at best. Transferring a few hundred megabytes (in the story, not gigabytes as in the movie!) probably would have been faster via driving across town. 16MB hard drives wouldn't be available to the public until 1982. Also, using a physical courier means the data can be moved between two units that are not attached to the net for security reasons. (also, for those interested, you can find the full text of the story )

Depending on how you look at it, the end of the "Wild West" in the USA is about telecommunications. It used to be possible to swoop in, rob a bank, ride out, and make it to the next town before the warning go out - and do it again. Tele -graphs and -phones made this kind of activity impossible. Coupled with the photograph, compiled data-banks of known criminals with their finger-prints, and a more organized effort to share enforcement duties... Our first great communication based paradigm shift 100 years before the net.

I would also have to agree with Kinslayer's notion about giving the PCs something to do. There are a huge number of movies and TV episodes that would be pretty boring if the characters just did the sensible thing and used their telephones to call in the qualified experts and police.

Palladium Book's Rifts offers a couple of reasons why a cyborg is better than a power armor. Chief amongst them - a pilot needs to get out of his protective armor sometime, while a borg is his armor. Pilots can be battered around in their cockpits, and vehicles can be stolen. Of course, Rifts runs on the Rule of Cool rather than any form of real science.

As to why defense contractors don't take over... ruling the world is a lot less fun then you would think. Better that you rake in the cash due to the unending need for war material than set yourself up as the one on top and suffer from every revolutionary and dissident.

Taking a quick return to the original concept of memory back-ups - do we have everything on 1km1t.net backed up on a server or two somewhere? I recently discovered a service called that is a combination virtual hard drive and file sharing system. We could get a free 10gb account, and have both a back-up and an alternate way of distributing the games.

[kumakami]

to quickly weigh in on there Cyberpunk jab.... the reason the defense contractor don't weigh in is...they do! there a subsidiary of the coffee-shops-as-countries. Most forget that in those worlds we deal with Pan-opolies not Monopolies!

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

The - the reason why bad governments are referred to as "Banana Republics". Monopolization, bribes to avoid taxes, convincing the CIA to overthrow an elected government, their own shipping fleet - all the power of a government without that pesky democracy to get in the way.

[Kinslayer]

Chainsaw Aardvark, that is a very good point about the Wild West, and not one I had ever before considered. It is definitely food for thought for any Steampunkish setting inspired by the Victorian Era/Wild West (the same timeframe on different continents, really).

I shall never again refer to a leftist government as a 'banana republic'. Thank you.

In my prior post, I was referencing the extraterritoriality of government--fragmented syndocracy, really--as found in Stephenson's Snow Crash or The Diamond Age. Nothing in those books (that I recall, at least) suggested what would happen if a large and ruthless company, say Wal-Mart or Nestlé, were to start a military annexation of neighbouring territories/corporations. Again, it is an example of a sci-fi setting element that works wonderfully in the original work, but completely falls apart on logical examination.

Perhaps the quintessential examples of what I am talking about are in FTL starships and batteries for energy weapons. Even distantly approaching the speed of light relativistic effects turn your 0.6C speed garbage scows into planet-killers. Likewise, any storage medium capable of containing enough juice for interesting blasters is likely more dangerous as an explosive device itself.

Are their games that address these concerns. I know that Icar takes at least somewhat of a 'what would real people do' approach, but do any other games?